Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  This truth smoldered in her gaze.

  “No doubt you’re wondering why I’ve invaded your sanctuary.” He lifted his eyes towards a collection of tents, now becoming shadows on the high hill above them. He gleaned much about that place from sharing the space of her mind.

  He shifted his gaze back to hers. “I want to speak with your First Lord. You will take me to him.” He gave the faintest nudge upon his mental hooks for emphasis.

  She gasped. Then she ground her teeth and glared up at him. “Remove your claws. I will do as you ask.”

  Darshan chuckled. “You doing as I ask, little dove, is an inescapable eventuality. My claws shall remain as they are to ensure your willing and swift compliance.”

  Defiance fulminated in Mithaiya’s gaze. The air around them wavered as if with heat. Lines of radiating power extended now for hundreds of paces; her will balanced against his, her power vibrating synchronously against his own.

  Power pulsed–flared, pulsed–flared, each time extending farther, rippling deeper into the fabric of the realm. The distant trees began shaking in rhythm with their battling wills.

  Darshan admitted an intense enjoyment in this collision.

  Holding her was like holding a star in his arms…a star begging to be unmade. Singing harmonics thrummed though him, electrifying his form, intensifying every sense. This was no carnal desire; this was a need so intrinsic it blazed from his very core.

  Whatever else Pelas might say about them, there was no denying they had been made to destroy. Holding this creature of light in his arms, she who represented the diametric opposite of himself, Darshan felt an exhilaration so heady he could barely control himself.

  Her expression shifted to dismay. Her gaze flicked to the alternately standing and flattening grass, the pulsating land, the trembling trees. She looked back to him entreatingly.

  He perceived the fear in her thoughts, the concern in her heart.

  She said with a terrible, breathless fear, “We will tear the world apart.”

  His smile offered a certain irony. “Then you would be wise to take me quickly where I’ve requested.”

  Mithaiya’s brow furrowed. She stared a moment longer at him. Then she lowered her gaze. A curtain of ebony hair draped her downcast eyes from his view. “Very well,” she whispered.

  It must’ve cost her much to submit to him. He couldn’t read it in the mental space they shared—the magnetosphere of her mind he well perceived, but her thoughts were protected within her inner atmosphere.

  She lifted him a glance, searching of permission.

  He nodded her to lead away.

  His mental claws were dug deep into her energy. His fingers, he kept firmly around her arm. In this manner they crossed the hill beneath the night, a moving epicenter of pulsating waves.

  The node was not close.

  Pain colored the ripples of her power. Sometimes she stumbled, gasped…but he kept her on her feet, and she led him without resistance.

  He sensed the node as one might perceive a distant window in a wall by the light shining through it.

  She stopped before the node and looked up at him, her moonlit features washed in regret. Doubtless she loathed bringing him before the one she served so loyally, especially knowing nothing of his intentions. But the trees were shaking around them as if with a hurricane wind, and the ground was rolling beneath their feet. She had little choice but to obey.

  Mithaiya drew in a shuddering breath, and with his hand clasped firmly around her arm, she called her power and drew him across the node—

  Furnace heat blasted Darshan.

  Brilliance blinded him.

  A raging solar wind ripped the drachwyr from his fingers as it tore him off his feet. He flew, tumbled, bounced across a lake of near-boiling sand.

  He reached for his power, only to gasp at the thinness of its tides. There, in the wash of that creative furnace, deyjiin found little purchase. Still, he managed enough to anchor his shell and protect it from the worst of the heat.

  Slowly, he regained his feet. Straightening, he looked around. She’d brought him to a planet circling a blazing sun, virtually airless, with an atmosphere more magnetic than gaseous. He felt the pull of the planetary core fighting against the star’s voracious gravity; these opposed forces made lead weights of his bones.

  Darshan lifted his gaze to the monstrous star looming on the planet’s horizon, consuming most of the sky. Reddish-black storms exploded on the sun’s boiling surface.

  In the nearer distance, the drachwyr had shimmered into her dragon form, gilded scales backlit by the sun’s fiery halo. She turned her lengthy head to him, and with a righteous glare, opened her muzzle in soundless fury.

  Another sun boiled within her maw.

  The strong solar wind was burning holes in his shield. Darshan felt an urgency uncharacteristic and rare. His shell could endure much punishment, but he hadn’t made it to long withstand these conditions.

  He collected his power in gasping gulps—as much as he could rapidly gather, for its tides were so languid—and tore the fabric of existence. He threw himself into Shadow’s dark and icy waters just as the sun’s searing winds tore his shield to shreds. It was the closest he’d ever known of desperation.

  ***

  Mithaiya’s body tumbled haplessly on the solar wind, yet those boiling tides of elemental creation freed her from Darshan’s claws of power.

  The moment she felt herself free of him, she exploded into the form. Her human body was as elementally intrinsic to the Realms of Light as Darshan’s true form was to Chaos.

  He had damaged her with his power. This she understood. How badly, she couldn’t yet say. But as light congealed into form, she found that she couldn’t lift her wings.

  Pain racked her. The solar winds blasted that desolate place with their furnace heat, but she still felt cold inside. His power had hollowed a dark place into her core. It would take time to fill it again with light.

  Her anger and indignation took the first strides in this direction.

  As her form at last solidified and some meager strength returned, Mithaiya turned her head to glare furiously at him.

  How dare he invade her home and make demands of her! How dare he expect her to betray her oaths! How dare he require anything of her!

  She roared a soundless cry of blistering rebuke and watched him stumble back, an arm raised against the burning light.

  Then he tore the fabric of existence and threw himself into the safety of Shadow.

  And good riddance.

  Suddenly exhausted, Mithaiya settled her snout onto the boiling sands. She could barely think for the pain coursing through her.

  Well…Balaji often said that thought was overrated. Or was it Náiir who said that?

  By the light, but her mind felt numb. Her thoughts had frozen into foreign shapes.

  As she settled to rest, her large pupils narrowed to mere slits among crystals of variegated blue, their mirrored lenses reflecting the boiling corona that loomed so massively in the otherwise black sky.

  The solar wind embraced her, caressed her as a mother comforting an ailing child.

  Mithaiya’s gilded lids slowly closed, and she willingly submitted to her mother star’s ministrations.

  Part Two

  “If you must resort to force to win, you’ve already lost the game.”

  –The Fifth Vestal Björn van Gelderan

  Forty-one

  “Stories travel farthest on the wings of impossibility.”

  –The desert parable, The Eagle and the Wren

  Trell clenched his jaw as his grey eyes inspected the serpentine path of the Taran River, which wove in and out of view towards the great volcanic peak of Mount Attarak in the east. Behind him, the dark clouds of a storm were moving in, trailing a striated curtain of rain. The flood from that downpour had yet to reach the valley below him, but it was only a matter of time—and not much of that. The Converted Commander Raegus n’Harnalt’s men were work
ing feverishly to construct a cable ferry and cross the Taran before rising water levels and the storm stranded them on the wrong side of the river.

  Trell had only just met up with Raegus’s company in the middle of this effort, and the Converted commander had done his best to greet him amid the urgent rush. “By the Seventeen, but you’re a welcome sight, Trell of the Tides!” He’d taken Trell by the arm and promptly explained what he needed from him.

  Trell had managed to give the Emir’s written missive to Raegus as the commander was all but shoving him back on his horse, but they’d had no chance to read it together or speak of the truths it contained.

  A hard uphill climb later, Trell found himself atop the mountain, pinned between mystery and the storm. He turned his head away from the rising wind and murmured to soothe Gendaia, who was shifting uneasily beneath him. Eastward, between his cliff-side vantage and the snowcapped volcano lay miles of forested mountains concealing deep ravines, ancient ruined cities and the moldering bones of Cyrene kings. If he squinted, he could just make out a hulking stone fortress that could only be Khor Taran, the fist at the end of the mountain’s arm.

  Verily, the fortress loomed there, taunting him, goading—gloating even—smug in its certainty that Trell would never free the men being held behind its walls, sure that his meager forces could never threaten its impregnability.

  But that was his first problem—they weren’t his forces to command, not until this company completed their initial mission to free the region from Saldarian marauders, the undoubted work of whom currently lay all around him. Everywhere Trell looked in the hillside town, the doors of stone cottages hung open, gates sprawled unhinged, vegetable gardens lay trampled.

  Raegus had tasked him to inspect the hillside town, something the commander himself had intended to do before the coming storm made crossing the river a more pressing concern. “Look for survivors!” Raegus had called to Trell as two of his men were dragging him away to help with another matter. “Look for anything to point us in the direction of those responsible!” From the frustration in the commander’s voice, Trell had gotten the idea that this wasn’t the first such town Raegus’s company had come across.

  The glaring light of afternoon shed long shadows across the town’s steep and narrow streets, all with an imposing view of Mount Attarak, but it failed to illuminate any rationale for the town’s abandonment. The only living thing Trell had encountered was a lone chicken clucking its way across the road.

  “Trell!” the Avataren Loukas n’Abraxis ducked beneath the low lintel of a cottage door and strode back up the hill towards where Trell sat his horse. Loukas held a length of black wood in his hand. “I found something.”

  Learning that Loukas was traveling with Raegus’s company had been a welcome surprise. In fact, Trell could hardly think of anyone he’d have been happier to reunite with. Though not Converted—Loukas was one of the Emir’s hired consultants—he, Ware and Graeme had been Trell’s closest confidants at the Cry. The Avataren had been the first man Raegus had called that day to accompany Trell on his investigation of the town.

  Like many Avatarens, Loukas had a fey look about him. His slender frame and angular features, drawn sharply beneath a shock of auburn hair, made him seem rather a porcelain doll, more suited for velvet court chairs than the dust and blood-filled roads of war. The Converted joked relentlessly at his expense—all the more for he was nearly useless with a blade—but Trell had never encountered a finer combat engineer.

  Reaching Trell and their horses, Loukas leaned elbows across his saddle and held out the broken end of a black quarrel to Trell. “What do you make of this?”

  Trell took the bolt and looked over the shaft and fletching. His gaze tightened.

  The last time he’d seen a quarrel of that make, the bolts had been showering down from a high ridge in the Kutsamak. That had been just minutes before he’d sent Alyneri off with an ailing Fynnlar to seek safety at the First Lord’s sa’reyth…moments before he’d fought and then faltered beneath a wielder’s compulsion…instants before he’d come face to face with his brother Sebastian, both knowing and not knowing his countenance in the same heartbreaking moment.

  Trell handed the broken bolt back to Loukas and cast a tight gaze out across the abandoned town again. “It’s a Saldarian quarrel.”

  “Ah…well, at least our suspicions are confirmed.” Loukas remounted and turned another look around, his green eyes speculative. “We suspected Saldarians were taking these people, we just can’t figure out where they’re taking them, or why—”

  “For nothing constructive, that’s the path proving true.” The Converted soldier Tannour Valeri of Vest trotted his horse around a corner and over to them. He wore the cloth of his scarf wrapped about his ebony hair and shoulders in the fashion of his eastern homeland rather than the turbans favored by the Seventeen Tribes. This amounted to everything Trell knew about the Vestian.

  Tannour’s pale blue eyes tightened on Loukas, a narrowing that accentuated both their almond shape and the darker rim of blue limning their edges. “May I see the bolt, Loukas?”

  Loukas wordlessly handed it over to Tannour. Trell wondered what history lay between them, for any time they came into contact with one another, the air became uncomfortably charged.

  Tannour examined the broken bolt. “This is the fifth of such towns we’ve found, Trell—did our A’dal tell you?”

  Trell shook his head. “As you saw as we were leaving, he was pressed for time.”

  “Five towns, not a single inhabitant remaining—alive or dead. No trace of where they’ve gone, no tracks leading away from the towns, certainly no evidence to indicate an entire populace’s departure, and never a quarrel or blade left behind. We’re chasing ghosts through the Taran Forest while the trees laugh at our folly.” He tossed the bolt indifferently back to Loukas. “It’s shades of foretelling up and down the path.”

  Trell looked bemusedly to his friend.

  Loukas explained, “He means it bodes badly for what has happened as well as what’s to come. You’ll have to excuse Tannour, Trell. He can’t but speak in Vestian parlance.”

  Tannour snapped off a brusque reply in his native Vestian—one of the few languages Trell didn’t speak—and spun his horse away and down the hill.

  Loukas stared after him. “He says he’ll go search the east gate.” But if told from the Avataren’s strained expression, this was clearly not all Tannour had said.

  The wind chased down the street in pursuit of the Vestian, a herald of the storm’s imminent arrival. Trell pushed a hand to hold his hair back from his eyes and pondered the mystery of their surroundings. Tannour had spoken the right of it; the town had clearly been abandoned in a rush, yet there was little evidence of their departure outside the town walls. Were the Saldarians flying the townspeople off on winged horses? “Has Raegus any sense of where these people are being taken, or for what purpose?”

  “East. That’s all we know.” Loukas glanced to the sky and the rapidly advancing clouds and pulled up the hood of his cloak.

  “East.” Trell looked back across the valley towards the distant, stony outcropping that was Khor Taran. It was supposedly a Nadori fortress, not a stronghold for Saldarian mercenaries…so why did he have such a sneaking feeling that Khor Taran was where they would find both the townspeople and his father’s men?

  Wishful thinking…

  “What are you thinking?” Loukas’s tone drew Trell’s attention back to him. The Avataren narrowed his gaze suspiciously. “I know that look.”

  Trell blinked. “I have a look?”

  “You have a hundred of them if you have one, Trell of the Tides. One to represent each of the thoughts you never voice to the rest of us. It took me two years to learn the language of your looks.”

  Trell cracked a smile and turned away again. “I was thinking…wondering, if we might find our missing townspeople at Khor Taran,” and he nodded towards the fortress.

  Loukas followed
his gaze, whereupon his green eyes narrowed with speculation. “What’s at Khor Taran for you besides missing townspeople?”

  Trell’s smile widened culpably as he looked back to his friend. It had been a long time since he’d spent time with someone who intuited his mind so readily—that is, someone other than Alyneri. “I’ve missed you, Loukas.”

  Loukas actually might’ve blushed a little. “Trell…” he fingered his reins, his expression becoming pensive, “whatever the Emir sent you here to do, you know the entire company would follow you without a whisper of protest—”

  The clatter of hooves on cobblestones drew both their gazes higher up the street just as a Basi rider came storming around the corner, both rider and horse mud-spattered. Trell recognized the scout, Saran, with whom he’d worked on several campaigns for the Emir.

  Saran seemed to bring the wind with him, for it gusted past him and continued on down the street, ripping at Trell’s cloak and setting the doors and shutters of the abandoned homes to squealing on their hinges.

  “A’dal—I mean,” Saran corrected himself, “Ama-Kai’alil, the water is rising in the Taran. Raegus, our A’dal, needs you all back.” His words held urgency’s sharp bite, and indeed, as evidence of such need, the first drops of rain began falling.

  Trell exchanged a look with Loukas and then told Saran, “We’ll return at once.”

  “And by Jai’Gar’s will, in all haste.” The scout spun his horse around, heeled the animal back into a canter and sped away.

  Loukas quickly rounded up Tannour while Trell collected the other two men who’d accompanied him, and then they were all following Saran’s example.

  The way beyond the town carved a leaf-strewn tunnel through the trees. Tangled limbs towered over their heads. Churned mud lay beneath their horses’ hooves. The forest at first offered an oppressive silence, but then the pattering rain reached them and rapidly grew into a downpour.

  The wind shook the limbs overhead, raining leaves and debris. The damp scent of moss and earth clung to the air and cloyed in their lungs, while a prickling sense of things gone awry only grew more emphatic beneath the rumbling thunder. The trail was steep and soon became slick. The horses slid often. Gendaia snorted her indignation continuously as Trell guided her down the mountainside.