Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  Ean thought about Kjieran van Stone. What courage the man had possessed, walking into this hellhole! He wondered where Kjieran was now—had Raine’s working helped him survive Bethamin’s Fire? What had become of that brave soul?

  The whisper in Ean’s head led him to another staircase that angled steeply upwards. On he climbed, baking in the sun’s rising heat. A thousand stairs seemed too kind an estimate—they certainly were not kind to his legs. His body ached with exhaustion, his lungs felt raw, and his injured thigh burned. Every one of the thousand times he put his weight on that leg, he cursed Sheih and her mor’alir dagger.

  The sun was a painfully bright disk hovering directly in front of his eyes when Ean at last reached the summit. He headed for the shade of a grove of eucalyptus trees and sank down behind one of their wide trunks, reaching for his water flask while he caught his breath.

  The whisper urged him to hurry.

  He was starting to loathe that whisper; even starting to wonder if it was his own mind playing tricks on him—or perhaps more germane to his current condition, if he was losing his wits from lack of sleep. Nonetheless, the whisper’s gnawing insistence soon pushed him on again. Ean leaned against the tree and pocketed his flask while he assessed the lay of the Prophet’s domain.

  Three main temples dominated the acropolis. The largest, central temple was multi-tiered, with many open-air galleries; its highest levels must’ve offered a commanding view—perhaps all the way to the coast. The temple closest to Ean loomed nearly as large but not as airy, more closely resembling a ziggurat. Its central chamber hosted tall, leaded windows.

  Further along the acropolis on its eastern edge, an arcade of arches separated the first two temples from a third. A crenellated tower on the edge of this temple overlooked terraced gardens, which both surrounded and cascaded down the eastern end of the acropolis. The latter temple seemed cloistered, private. Ean felt sure that he was looking upon the Prophet’s personal dwelling.

  He made his fourth-strand pattern more solid and started off.

  This way… Ean followed the whisper’s direction to the north side of the acropolis and a path—more goat track than trail—that twined among the orchards growing there.

  Thalma’s fortuitous eye had traveled with him thus far that morning, but as Ean was passing beneath the largest central temple, Lady Luck turned her gaze towards more interesting fare, and he came upon an apricot orchard flooded with workers. The whisper urged him to ignore them, that they would ignore him in return, but Ean doubted he could fool so many people at once.

  Exhaustion clung to him as sweat, and a dull fogginess permeated his thoughts. As he stood staring at the workers uneasily, Ean realized he would have to find another way inside.

  High above him, a strip of road hugged the acropolis’s stony edge. Unlike the crowded orchard, no one was walking that road. Likewise open and empty lay the promenade of arches leading to the Prophet’s residence. Both routes would offer less natural cover, but under the circumstances, they seemed more inviting options.

  Ean backtracked and made his way up a footpath to the road, much in defiance of that whispering voice. But he’d begun feeling like the whisper boded of a madness associated with fatigue, and he worried over giving it any more sway. The whisper was practically shouting at him by the time he reached the road, but he clenched his teeth and shoved its warnings aside—

  That’s when he felt the pattern.

  Too late. He sensed it as he was stepping through it. His foot came down on the road, and alarm bells rang from one end of the acropolis to the other.

  The whisper swore at him.

  Equally swearing at his own lack of foresight—was he not walking in Dore Madden’s own domain?—Ean summoned a shield of the fifth and made a desperate dash for the Prophet’s residence. Dore’s creatures would likely soon be hunting for him, but perhaps not within the Prophet’s own chambers, or at least not right away.

  As he ran, the prince drew more strongly on the first strand to restore his energies and powered his running steps with the second. In moments, he was plunging into the Prophet’s temple.

  This way…

  The Prophet’s residence was far larger inside than it appeared from without, with multiple galleries opening onto each other and numerous chambers that all looked the same. Ean would’ve been quickly lost without the whisper guiding him.

  Elsewhere on the acropolis, men and Marquiin moved rapidly about—Ean could sense the motion of many upon the currents—but the deep chambers of the Prophet’s residence possessed a deathly quiet. Even the alarms hardly disturbed the mausoleum silence.

  You see…he won’t even know you’re coming.

  Ean had decided that he must be hallucinating…except that the whisper did seem to know its way around the temple. Indeed, a small voice in the back of Ean’s mind warned that this whisper knew too much, but the two ideas wouldn’t quite connect.

  Though the whisper urged him to hurry, Ean paused at the atrium floor and searched for patterns and traps, but Dore Madden clearly held no sway there in the Prophet’s inner sanctum.

  The longer he studied the currents, in fact, the more puzzled Ean became. Elsewhere on the acropolis, the currents had been either choppy with friction or sluggish from the excrement of vile patterns. He’d expected the currents to grow more riotous the closer he got to Darshan, but there he stood inside the Prophet’s primary domain, and the currents were strangely…neutral. Ean had no idea what to make of it.

  COME NOW.

  The voice, no longer a whisper, speared Ean’s consciousness as a cold stiletto of command. He went without a second thought.

  When next he became aware of where he was, he was standing in a large hall, facing a wall of arches open to the morning breeze and with no idea of how he’d gotten there. A vast gallery spread away to his left, its tall ceilings supported by columns inscribed with patterns unreadable to him.

  And walking towards him between two columns…

  Ean startled to full awareness with a mental jerk, like the snapping of fingers rouses a dazed man. He stood at first utterly bemused, and then, as understanding dawned, his entire body came alive with painful needles of dread.

  Compulsion.

  Now he understood that uncanny whisper, the quiet directions, the urgency. Darshan had been compelling him all the way from the Lower City—even since that very moment when their minds had touched as Ean had been destroying the eidola.

  He saw the truth so easily now! Yet while Darshan had been cradling him within the thrall of his will, Ean had suspected nothing. He hadn’t been capable of suspecting anything; his mind had simply slipped around illogic like water over a rock. And the most frightening part of all was seeing that the Malorin’athgul had compelled his activity through naught but a tenuous connection from miles away!

  Ean managed a dry swallow and started walking backwards, retreating from Darshan’s advance. Forgotten were his thoughts of vengeance for Isabel, or for his loyal men made into eidola. Ean forgot everything before the man approaching him.

  “Ean val Lorian…” Darshan’s voice enwrapped Ean, darkly liquid and formless, but infused with intent, “we meet at last.” He came towards Ean wearing an open robe of black silk, and carried a dark scepter, angled low. He must’ve stood nearly seven feet tall.

  His features had that statuesque quality common to the fifth-strand immortal races, but harder, broader, with a squared chin and sharply defined cheekbones. Wavy ebony hair fell long down his back, and his gaze was very, very dark. “I have long wanted to meet the man who claims the lives of my eidola with such disregard.”

  Ean continued his retreat, but for his every step backwards, Darshan seemed to advance two. The prince instinctively made his shield of the fifth more solid, yet he wondered at the same time why he was bothering to shield himself at all. The fifth-strand currents rolled before Darshan as off the prow of a ship. Giant waves engulfed Ean and passed on, leaving him shaken.

 
; By Cephrael’s Great Book! How had he gotten himself into this? More importantly, how in Tiern’aval are you going to get out of it?

  All this time, he’d held an idea in the back of his mind that Isabel should’ve just taken care of Darshan when they’d met at Ivarnen and saved him the trouble; but the man in the flesh commanded so much more power than Ean had imagined.

  Isabel had been right to caution him. He would need every scrap of power he could muster—every possible understanding of his gifts—if he meant to fight this immortal. At the moment, he was woefully ill-prepared.

  “Have you nothing to say?” Darshan spun his scepter at his side. He was barely ten paces from Ean now.

  A frantic need to escape kept hauling at Ean, ropes of desperation yanking him in every direction except the one aligned with Darshan’s approach. Yet he stood rooted.

  Shade and darkness!

  That time he perceived the compulsion that was forcing him to remain in place—verily, the Malorin’athgul had lassoed him like a steer—but he didn’t know how to counteract the working. He could see no patterns, which meant that Darshan was working his compulsion innately.

  No, not just innately. As though it was its own strand of the lifeforce.

  Darshan stopped about five paces away, his gaze unremitting. Ean realized the man was truly expecting a response to his question.

  The prince’s skull felt full of wool, his thoughts muddled. He sensed Darshan’s mental hand still clutched around his mind, and beneath all else, like the constant clanging of a distant bell, instinct screaming in warning.

  Ean did his best to gather his wits under these conditions. “Why did you bring me here?”

  Darshan cradled his scepter in muscled arms. “It seems to me you brought yourself here, Prince of Dannym.”

  “At your behest…” Ean mentally tried to pry his consciousness out of Darshan’s mental fist, but succeeded only in minor resistance, “by your compulsion. But to what end?”

  Darshan twirled his scepter and starting walking a circle around Ean. “Many moons ago, you severed my connection with one of my Marquiin.” An arctic gaze swept Ean, scouring him in a chilling inspection. “Tell me how.”

  “I unworked the pattern binding him to you—” Ean choked. The words had come without thought to shape them, commanded off a tongue no longer under his control.

  As he walked, Darshan clasped hands behind his back and held his scepter between them. He had the manner of a man used to his will going unquestioned. “You unworked the pattern.” He cast Ean a sidelong look. “Do you mean to say you unmade it?”

  “You could call it that.” Ean stared at him with his jaw clenched, turning his head as Darshan continued his slow circling. Somehow he had to get free of his mental binding, but first he had to figure out how the man was crafting it.

  Hands behind his back, Darshan tapped his scepter against his palm. The slightest tightening of his gaze indicated the speculative nature of his thoughts. “You do on this plane what we do in Chaos?”

  What was it in his tone? Not disbelief, surely, for Ean could no more lie to him than he could prevent him stealing the words off his tongue.

  “This craft is innate to you?”

  “Yes.”

  Darshan arched a brow. “What other tricks come innately to you?”

  Ean clenched his jaw, but still the answer ran headlong into the spear of Darshan’s will. “I can see patterns.”

  Darshan continued his slow circle, scepter tapping in time with his steps. “All kinds of patterns?” He turned him a sudden, piercing stare. “My patterns?”

  Ean ground his teeth. “Patterns of elae.” Fighting the compulsion only made him ill and did nothing to stop the words from leaving his mouth. It felt like the answer that time had been ripped out of his gut with a longshoreman’s hook.

  It seemed the pinnacle of irony that Arion had always been writing his brilliant ideas in those damned journals for posterity, and not a one of them lay to hand for Ean’s use now.

  So be brilliant again.

  It couldn’t have been Isabel actually speaking to him, not with Darshan crouching so predatorily over his mind, but her imagined voice encouraged him all the same. Ean forced himself to stop thinking about the shark with its teeth sunken into the back of his skull and tried to come up with some useful ideas for escape.

  If you can’t see the pattern, what can you do?

  Well…whether or not he could see the pattern, if elae was being channeled through it, then at least a trace of the pattern should be found on the currents.

  Find its path. Follow it.

  He’d done it before when he’d intuited the pattern of his own talent to give to Sebastian. But how had he done it? The moment had been so instinctive…

  Darshan completed his circle and arrived in front of Ean once more, still twirling his scepter at his side. Ean noted the stone and realized the scepter was Merdanti.

  “I’ve never heard of an Adept with abilities such as yours.” The statement held a leading edge, demanding explanation; likewise the sharp skepticism in Darshan’s gaze.

  Ean’s tongue again offered an answer without consulting him first. “They’re common only to Adepts of the fifth.”

  “The fifth.” Darshan looked him over critically. “A fabled strand.”

  Ean stared defiantly back at him. “As fabled as you and me.”

  Darshan arched a brow at this.

  Ean held the Malorin’athgul’s gaze, but mentally the prince was splitting his mind, portioning off a segment for his own uninterrupted use. He only hoped Darshan wouldn’t miss the small bit he was claiming for himself.

  Arion had been expert at this mental segmentation. He’d had to be to manage so many simultaneous workings—sometimes as many as a dozen different patterns at once, all of them layered with form. Arion had learned to compartment his mind into five lesser minds, or twenty smaller still; yet with a talent such as his, he could accomplish with one twentieth of his mind what baffled the full abilities of most.

  Darshan was twirling his scepter in one hand like a waterwheel turning the millstone of his thoughts. “Who else shares your skills?”

  This question hit Ean with a pang of dismay. He sealed his lips and clenched his jaw. He would not—would not—would not—

  “Björn van Gelderan.”

  Damn you to thirteen hells! Ean wasn’t sure in that moment if he was cursing himself or the Malorin’athgul.

  “Björn van Gelderan…” Darshan’s gaze narrowed. He twirled his staff, spinning…spinning. It seemed now more like a deadly scythe. “Often of late I’ve heard this wielder’s name.”

  Ean finally finished closing off his mind and dove into elae’s current stream, seeking the fourth strand, where compulsion patterns would flow.

  “I’ve heard this Björn named betrayer, traitor, villain and Vestal. But others closer to me name him as my enemy.” Darshan clasped hands behind his back again. “Tell me what you know of him.”

  Ean urged his mind to swim faster, even as he heard himself replying, “I know he will stop you.”

  Darshan’s head assumed the slightest tilt. “From doing what, pray, does he hope to stop me?”

  The words ground themselves out between Ean’s clenched teeth, despite his every effort to resist saying them. “From unmaking our world.”

  “From unmaking your world…” the words came out with the low rumble of thunder warning on the horizon. Darshan started circling again and angled a dangerous stare in Ean’s direction. “And how does your Vestal plan to achieve this laughable improbability?”

  Ean’s heroic effort to stop himself from answering this question endangered his carefully compartmentalized portion of thought. He realized he couldn’t both resist the compulsion and seek the pattern of its causation; he likely wouldn’t be able to resist the compulsion for long, in any case. Yet giving in to it was agonizing—there he stood offering up the secrets of the entire game! “The First Lord began preparing fo
r you by creating the realm of T’khendar…”

  To Ean’s utter mortification, the entire story poured off his tongue, every treasonous word accompanied by the crystalline sound of his will shattering. He bled a hopeless dismay.

  And then…Cephrael must’ve turned His fateful gaze away, for Ean reached the end of the fourth-strand tributary current he’d been following, and—

  He mentally recoiled. Immediately he shielded his mind’s eye from the origin point of that stream, for it lay concealed within the exploding furnace of a star—verily, he could barely look at the blinding light that was Darshan’s mind, for it seared too deeply into his own, searing thought itself into cinders.

  Ean’s head started throbbing, his mind’s eye blistered, but he forced himself to trudge the last few steps up that stream…

  And found the pattern.

  It shimmered along the photosphere of a demigod’s mind, an ephemeral outline against the solar storm. One glimpse and Ean had absorbed it, duplicated it; in a heartbeat he understood its conceptual makeup.

  By his next breath, he’d unmade it.

  Darshan swung him a violent stare.

  Ean met his gaze for one instant, during which a deeply unsettling understanding dawned for both of them.

  Then the prince was summoning a shield of the fifth to protect his body and the fourth to protect his thoughts and was sprinting for the daylight at the gallery’s edge.

  Darshan growled an oath. Thunder without sound boomed through the chamber. The force blasted Ean off his feet, but his shield absorbed the worst of it. He righted himself with the fifth, found his footing upon landing and kept running.

  Until a net sizzled into being directly before him.

  Too close, he careened headlong into it. His shield exploded. Light blinded him. Searing pain charged through his head, and the repelling force of the collision flung him backwards.

  Ean hit the floor with a painful exhale and slid on his back across the marble tiles. He frantically summoned his shields again. It took almost a dozen beats of his pulsing heart to hold them firmly in place, and many more before he could assure himself that all of his parts were still working properly.