Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  Tanis returned his attention to the swirling energies. He watched them embrace and separate, even as he and Sinárr were so often doing. Interestingly, this was not the way deyjiin appeared in Alorin, where it became destructive, unbalanced. But in Shadow, the two energies were exhibiting an obvious sympathetic attraction.

  Was he seeing elae and deyjiin in their truest forms, or some other expression of their innate properties?

  Either way, the vacuum of Shadow proved that the two energies—his and Sinárr’s—weren’t inherently antithetical, merely…opposing. He watched, intrigued, as the undulating tendrils of each energy reached out, swirled together as if to combine, and then sped away, alternately attracted and repulsed.

  The lad’s eyes widened. His mind leapt to a sudden understanding.

  They’re magnetizing and repelling.

  Revitalized of hope by this realization, Tanis thought again of himself and Sinárr, of their opposing, innate energies that attracted them to each other and then pushed them apart, and of the resonance that built up between them when they were grounded in close proximity.

  He considered how Sinárr’s starpoints framed space, and added to this the understanding that Shadow held no energy in its vast expanse; the energy only existed within the space that a Warlock had framed. Whereupon, putting all of these facts together, Tanis saw...

  He saw.

  His eyes flew to Sinárr’s, and he cast forth the thought, Bind me to you.

  Needing no prodding to do something he’d wanted all along, Sinárr growled lustfully and wrapped his power around Tanis. Bands of cold energy enveloped the lad’s mind. Suddenly he was spinning and bobbing within an enveloping cocoon, all concentration momentarily lost to the disorienting concert of binding threads.

  No…not threads. Bands—sheets of energy enfolding, twirling him as if he was the spool around which they wound, until he felt them constricting tightly, binding thought within their space.

  Tanis recognized immediately that the Warlock’s binding was not compulsion, it was simply control. Sinárr now framed the context of Tanis’s awareness and could shape it how he would, as he willed.

  Tanis still held elae within this cocoon, but only because Sinárr allowed it. The lad knew that he existed now at the whim of this immortal, that his every thought might be directed at his command; indeed, he hardly felt that he existed anymore at all. It was as though Sinárr had absorbed him into his own consciousness.

  And he knew unequivocally that this would be his state of existence from that moment to the end of his days unless he could find a way to equally bind Sinárr to him.

  Panic began fluttering at the horror of this possibility, distracting Tanis from his task; yet the lad ultimately still held hope. Sinárr’s mind remained open to him, and while the Warlock was undeniably thrilled to have Tanis finally bound to him, he was also waiting patiently to see what Tanis would do with it. Tanis himself still held elae. In all, Sinárr had only done what Tanis had asked of him.

  With a grave effort of concentration, Tanis pushed off the sense of peril that had accompanied Sinárr’s binding and focused instead on the idea that had spurred him to request it.

  ‘You gamble everything on a guess….’

  Sinárr had never spoken anything more true.

  In their first foray into Shadow together, Sinárr had told him that to create anything, it was necessary first to frame space. Tanis knew that he would need to find Sinárr’s starpoints if he meant to work any kind of binding on the Warlock. Accordingly, he sought an awareness of those points, as he’d done earlier, but the binding Sinárr had laid on his mind resisted his attempts to penetrate it.

  ‘When embracing Absolute Being, a wielder permeates…’

  His father had filled an entire journal on Absolute Being. With Arion’s teachings guiding him, Tanis imagined himself becoming porous. Instead of attempting to penetrate, he let his mind permeate the cocoon of power. He became it wholly, until he knew every aspect of its construction…and then he expanded through it.

  Beyond it. Into the open space of Sinárr’s universe.

  Excitement hummed through the lad.

  Free now of Sinárr’s mental binding, yet still very aware of its existence, Tanis sought Sinárr’s starpoints. Instantly he regained them and assumed the observation point from which Sinárr himself observed his own universe; Tanis now held a bird’s eye view from the edge of space.

  Or to put things in his father’s preferred analogy: he had a view of the entire game board.

  From this broad context of Absolute Being, Tanis looked down on himself and the Warlock, but rather than seeing their fleshly bodies, he saw them as terminals of energy linked by a conduit formed of threads of power—Sinárr’s binding.

  An exultant grin split the lad’s face, for he found what he’d been seeking—finally.

  And he’d been right.

  When Sinárr had woven the link between himself and Tanis, he’d forged the bond and willed that it would endure. Thus, within the energy Sinárr himself had made, he’d forged a link of the third strand.

  Time.

  Tanis knew how to work his own binding now.

  First, he permeated Sinárr’s starpoints and duplicated them with his own energy, essentially creating his own points in the same space. In Alorin, two energies couldn’t occupy the same space, but Shadow wasn’t subject to the same physical laws as those that bound the Realms of Light.

  Holding his starpoints in coincidence with Sinárr’s own, Tanis wove the fourth strand through the conduit Sinárr had created and bound the Warlock’s mind, even as Sinárr had bound his.

  And the working stuck.

  Sinárr’s eyes widened. What is this you do? He searched the lad’s gaze while mentally resisting his binding.

  Tanis grinned at him. I’m keeping our accord. Now stop resisting me.

  Sinárr’s jaw dropped open. I did not think it could be done!

  Tanis smiled drily. That was apparent.

  He continued on then, weaving his binding into and through the one that Sinárr had initially forged. Having permeated the latter, he knew its construction wholly and was able to easily mirror that construction using elae.

  This was not the unbreakable reweaving of life patterns that Tanis had worked with Pelas, though his binding with Sinárr would also endure, because he and Sinárr had both willed permanence into the pattern using the third strand.

  Whereupon it struck Tanis all over again: the third strand is Time!

  The lad shook his head, marveling at this truth. The monumental fact that he was forging a mutual binding with a Warlock of Shadow seemed a somehow miniscule feat compared to the excitement of proving his own theory correct.

  As Tanis laid the last binding band of his working, he felt the pattern become complete. It was a sudden recognition, a sort of knowingness that a pattern had been made into an integral whole. In its own way, forging a unique pattern into being was giving life to something new, for as soon as the final strand of the pattern connected to its beginning, energy started channeling through it to achieve the effect the wielder had intended.

  The moment the pattern was whole, it woke in both Tanis and Sinárr’s awarenesses. Suddenly Tanis and Sinárr were occupying the same mental space as equals. The lad could conceive deyjiin as the Warlock did: malleable and ready for shaping.

  Deyjiin felt cool while elae felt warm; the former held a sort of roundness…the way lard made a soup taste creamier. Deyjiin had less form than elae—mist to elae’s water—but it would be an electrified mist full of charged particles. Whereas elae might be channeled voluminously to fill an eternity of space, Tanis got the sense that each individual particle of deyjiin might itself expand to an infinity.

  Tanis.

  He heard his name on multiple wavelengths and focused his gaze back on Sinárr.

  The Warlock looked utterly fascinated. Do you see? Do you feel this?

  Tanis had been so distracted by the sensati
on of deyjiin that he hadn’t noticed the power building up around them. Now he assumed Sinárr’s perspective and saw what he was seeing: themselves as two terminals of differing potential, each holding itself apart from the other—and generating power between them.

  Suddenly they no longer stood on the marble bridge. They no longer stood anywhere. Tanis sensed they were now floating in the void, with Sinárr’s universe moved …elsewhere. The Warlock was moving them through the raw energy their bond was generating, diving down through a mist of charged particles that Tanis perceived easily yet couldn’t actually see. It was…odd…and at the same time exhilarating.

  Did you know this would happen, Tanis?

  Tanis smiled—or at least, he thought he was smiling. Perhaps it was simply the thought of smiling, conveyed in an instant. I suspected.

  Sinárr shifted them with a thought. Suddenly they stood within the starry universe with nothing beneath their feet, yet with a sense of orientation. The Warlock was standing with his arms lifted and nebular clouds of voluminous power surrounding him.

  “I don’t know if you can yet perceive this energy on the level I have seen.” Sinárr dropped his arms and looked at Tanis. “The particles are bonded.”

  Tanis felt heady. “As we are bonded?”

  “Much in that way, yes. The particles display a symbiotic affinity—even, one might say, akin to the affinity that exists between you and me.”

  Tanis grinned. “Intriguing.”

  Sinárr’s eyes narrowed. “You are not at all surprised. How did you know?” How could you know when I did not?

  “It’s because of this.” Tanis took Sinárr’s hand in his own. This sealed their connection and forced their energies to magnetize and repel and the resonance to build exponentially. A standing wave of energy started blasting around them in a circular flow.

  Ironic that he’d been so apprehensive of this sensation before he understood it, so fearful of the feeling of attraction. The resonance had been showing him the solution all along.

  He lifted his gaze to the swirling power, grateful to have hold of Sinárr’s hand to ground him amid such intensity. It wasn’t that they produced more energy through their physical contact; Tanis could simply perceive the energy more clearly now.

  “When you place two energy-producing terminals of differing potential in proximity but hold them apart, a flow will occur between them. It became apparent to me what was happening when I realized that Shadow had no energy of its own, only the energy you created and placed into the space you framed. It followed then that your starpoints were of differing potentials and that’s how they were generating energy.”

  Sinárr shook his head. “Incredible. I’ve never encountered a mortal who works Shadow so innately.”

  Tanis smiled and moved slightly away—it was hard to breathe when they stood so close together. He lifted a contemplative gaze to the stars. “I suspected that the third strand was extant here, but what I didn’t realize was that you created it—” he turned a look back to Sinárr, “you generate the third strand of elae when you decide things shall have permanence.”

  Sinárr arched brows. “I worked elae.” He sounded dubious.

  Tanis grinned. “Be as skeptical as you like, Sinárr, but we’re mutually bound. How else can you explain it?”

  “Mutually bound.” A possessive sort of fascination burned in Sinárr’s gaze. “And you’ve done what you promised—more than you promised, for this is not simply a connection to Alorin, I feel elae through your awareness. It is…warm.”

  “As deyjiin feels cool in my mind.”

  Sinárr placed a hand on Tanis’s shoulder, causing again that heady resonance which he craved and the lad endured, and lifted his gaze to the clouds of static power that were continuing to accumulate around them. “This energy between us is unique. I’ve never seen its like.”

  Reeling a little, yet exhilarated also, Tanis focused his gaze back on Sinárr. “I think there’s just one thing left to do.”

  The Warlock looked inquiringly to him. “Which is?”

  Tanis smiled. “To see what we can create with it.”

  Thirty-eight

  “It’s not work to him. It’s a form of art.”

  –Dagmar Ranneskjöld, Second Vestal of Alorin, on Björn van Gelderan and the game

  Ean walked the streets of Tambarré as dawn was lighting a fire in the eastern sky. Golden rays flamed the clouds, turning the heavens into a riot of dark violet and rose. With the break of day, the city was rousing—shopkeepers unlatching shutters, flower-sellers opening their stalls; the souks were quickly coming alive, likewise the city streets.

  That dream where he’d confronted the Enemy and witnessed Arion’s death had convinced Ean that learning the truth of Arion’s ruin was the only way he’d ever regain all of his talent…the only way he’d ever feel whole; but sitting around waiting for Epiphany or Fate to bestow the knowledge upon him in a divinely inspired dream or a fragmented moment…it seemed as likely as a donkey winning a horserace.

  In Tyr’kharta, it was action that had restored Arion’s knowledge to him. Likewise in Tal’Afaq, and even at Ivarnen. During those times, Ean had assumed it was Isabel’s faith in him that had allowed him to pierce the veil of memory, but now he saw it had simply been necessity driving action…action fueling necessity.

  Necessity was certainly pushing him now. He felt the sting of its whip with every step he took upon this course of intent, which seemed to have nothing directly to do with their game and yet somehow everything to do with it.

  He was nervously trusting to that whispering voice, trusting even more to the pattern of cause and consequence he’d glimpsed the night before. By sticking to his choices, he was also trusting his instincts. They would either lead him to doom or deliverance, but he’d committed himself to their course as Arion had always done—with an unwavering determination to walk the path to its end.

  Or so he kept telling himself. At the moment, unwavering determination was feeling a lot like misgiving.

  As Ean observed yet another sunrise, the prince reflected that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept…or at least the last time he’d slept more than a few hours. Lately, his waking moments of dullness often felt more restful than his sleeping nights—that is, when sleep came at all—but exhaustion was admittedly taking its toll. The days had started blurring together in an ever-lengthening haze; his mind often felt woolly, his thinking muddled. He repeatedly drew upon elae’s first strand to stay alert.

  Fortunately, his feet seemed to know where to go. He walked an uninterrupted path of purpose beneath the al-qasr’s arching gates—as the whisper promised, the guards manning the mighty portal merely looked past him, unseeing—until he reached the base of the stairs leading up the side of the acropolis. There, Ean lifted his gaze towards the crowning temples at the summit. Somewhere among those impressive structures, Darshan would be waiting.

  That whispering voice—so polite, so compelling—leaned again to advise, Hurry now and you could be standing over him before he wakes. The first moment he learns of you will be as you’re holding your blade to his neck.

  Before him, a thousand limestone steps notched the mountain, stone waterfalls cascading through terraced gardens. Ean was deliberating which way to go when the doors of a nearby domed structure opened and a procession of acolytes emerged.

  Quickly! Over there.

  Ean followed the voice’s direction and ducked into a cellar stairwell. He watched from cool cement shadows as the acolytes went by, each one carrying a deep basket filled with bread, fruit or vegetables. Ean perceived the silvery imprint of patterns as the procession passed. He couldn’t tell if the patterns lay upon each man, the baskets or the food, but he had no time to investigate the mystery, for that whisper urged him on.

  As he climbed the stairs, trusting the whisper’s instructions to keep him away from undue notice, Ean watched acolytes with downcast eyes scurrying between temples and along terraces like mi
st fleeing the dawn. They appeared even more fervent to avoid anyone’s notice than Ean was.

  Bethamin’s Ascendants—notable for their shaven and tattooed heads as much as the befouling trails they left on the currents—led streams of cowed adjuncts and scribes, or moved together in smoggy processionals. Occasionally during Ean’s long climb, the morning sun would dim as a grey cloud passed—the silk-shrouded forms of the Prophet’s Marquiin, all of them radiating death.

  As the whisper promised, Ean moved unnoticed through this inclement populace, but he grew increasingly ill at ease, mostly from observing the patterns that clouded the currents in a perpetual overcast.

  When he’d unworked the pattern binding the Marquiin to the Prophet all those months ago, he’d been newly Awakened and hardly understood what he was seeing. Now, he saw too keenly: every person had patterns wrapped about them. Thorny, twisted patterns, they drew the darkest versions of elae, mutating what might’ve been used for good into some vile intent.

  The patterns that enwrapped the Marquiin were fourth-strand compulsion woven through with deyjiin—corruptive and corrosive. Ean knew instinctively that those Adepts would die from this slow poison. Almost worse were the patterns tattooed on the Ascendants. Those he couldn’t even decipher.

  The closer Ean came to the summit, the more destabilized he felt by the currents washing down from the high temples. They carried a rotten stench, like the slimiest bog, rank with dying things.

  In Tal’Afaq, the currents had been riotous from the pulsating metamorphosis of men transforming into monsters; Ean had plowed through those thrashing waves on a course of righteous indignation. But this…this was like swimming a sea of excrement, thick with the sludge of debased acts.

  Ean couldn’t imagine living there—he couldn’t imagine anyone sleeping there—and especially not truthreaders, who were innately sensitive to the currents of thought. What a hellish nightmare they must’ve been enduring, even the ones who’d been spared Bethamin’s corruptive Fire.