Cassius took a draw on his siqaret, considering Carian the while. “But your offer is laughable.” He blew out pale smoke. “Even charity has its cost.”
“No good deed goes unpunished.” Fynn fell into an armchair and rolled his head around on the cushioned back. “That’s why I try to stay away from them—except on Tuesdays.”
Alyneri seated herself across from Cassius. “How did you and Lord Fynnlar meet?” She had the sneaking suspicion that Fynn had once been one of Cassius’s ‘guests.’
“Your instincts guide you well, Your Grace.” Cassius drew deeply of his siqaret. “Fynnlar and I go way back—how long ago was it now that you first came to me?”
Fynn harrumphed. “Can anyone really remember past last week?”
Alyneri smiled. “Last week seems a generous estimate for you, my lord.”
“You support my point exactly, Your Grace.”
Cassius took another draw. “Seven years and several ventures later, here we are.” His colorless eyes observed Fynnlar as if knowing intimately of his measure, “two peas in a lucrative pod.”
“You and I have different ideas of lucrative,” Fynn grumbled.
Alyneri clasped fingers around her knee. “I’m so interested in hearing about Lord Fynnlar’s business dealings. None of us knew he’d ever held any sort of gainful employment.”
Carian snorted.
Cassius still had Fynn pinned beneath his gaze. Now he added a meaningful smile. “There is a side to Lord Fynnlar that most people never see.”
The royal cousin squirmed in his chair. “You needn’t get personal, now.”
Cassius looked to Alyneri. “You might be surprised to learn of the many dear ladies our Fynnlar has aided—”
“Shouldn’t we get to the reason we came all this way?” Fynn protested shrilly.
Cassius cast him a smile, predatory in its aspect. “I suppose, if we must. Before we proceed any further into our negotiations, produce for me the items I required of you, Fynnlar.” He waved his siqaret absently. “I confess my doubt that you’ve met my stipulations, but let us see the evidence.”
Fynn sat up and opened his satchel, muttering ungraciously about people who use the royal we. From its depths he pulled a bundle wrapped in velvet, which he set on the low table between himself and Cassius. “Behold, objet d’art de votre désir.”
Cassius arched a dubious brow and unwrapped the bundle. Inside lay an ostrich feather dyed a most eye-offending shade of chartreuse. He sat back with a hand to his brow. “No, no, the color is terrible—wrong, beyond wrong!”
“You said you wanted Castelvetrano Green.” Fynn turned Alyneri a sulky glare. “The damnable color can only be distilled from the ink of an octopus found off the shores of Tal Verran, in the middle of the Fire Sea. Do you know how much I had to pay for that bloody feather?”
Alyneri looked to Cassius. “The realm is imperiled and you’re concerned about a feather for your hat?”
“Ah, Your Grace…” his sigh could only have been more patronizing if it had been offered along with a spoonful of honey, “the world is always entertaining the next new crisis once people have become bored with the last new crisis, but a hat is never fashionable without the right feather.”
He regarded said feather like a housekeeper eyeing a dead mouse. “I suppose this will have to suit.” He dropped it on the velvet and sat back again. “And my next requirement? Where is this painting by a blind man of the blind man’s parrot who is now dead?”
Fynn pulled a rolled canvas from his satchel and tossed it out to unfurl across the table.
Alyneri stared bemusedly at the oddly misshapen image painted there. “The blind man is dead?”
“No, Your Grace, the parrot.” Cassius gave her a faintly chiding look. “How could a parrot paint a painting of itself?”
“But it hardly looks like a parrot.”
Cassius shook his head at her. “Let us not be so alacritous to judge others. How do we know what the blind man sees?” He waved with his siqaret. “This will suit, Fynnlar. And the breed of rare, exotic animal? I don’t suppose you have one of those hidden in your bag?”
“I brought you Alyneri.”
Alyneri turned Fynn a disbelieving look.
Carian chuckled. Cassius’s lips spread in a delighted and not altogether auspicious smile—at least as far as Alyneri was concered.
That’s when the servant rushed up with a goblet and a wine bottle on a silver tray.
Fynn grabbed the goods and glared at him. “What took you so long, man? Did you press the grapes yourself?” He drank half the contents of the goblet in one go. Then he fell back in his chair again. “Oh, don’t stare at me like that, Your Grace. I could’ve spent thousands hunting down a damned llama that pisses gold thread—and gone to exorbitant trouble to acquire it—but you know he wouldn’t have accepted it in the end.”
Cassius waved with his siqaret. “I cannot be seen to accept gifts from Fynnlar val Lorian. The man is a known associate of pirates.” He nodded to his servant, and the man promptly removed the feather and the painting. Alyneri almost expected the manservant to take her in hand as well.
“I’m confused.” She met her host’s gaze. “You don’t care about the feather and the painting…or you do?”
Cassius winked at her. “It’s the thought that counts.”
“It’s the aggravation that counts,” Fynn grumbled. “So?” He eyed their host disagreeably.
“So…” Cassius pushed to his feet and gazed down at him. “I shall consider your request. In the meantime, my staff will show you to your rooms so you can prepare for dinner, which I believe tonight is—” he looked to another of his hovering servants.
The man bowed slightly. “The lamb, sir.”
“The lamb.” Cassius smiled at Alyneri as he said this, making her wonder if he was making some obscure reference to herself. Then he swept up his hat from its chair and donned it as he took his leave.
Alyneri called after him, “Just how long will you be ‘considering’ our request?”
Cassius turned his head and looked her over appreciatively. “Not one instant past the point I tire of your intelligent company, Your Grace.” Then he smiled a very bright, very predatory smile and departed.
Fynn growled an oath and fell back in his chair. “Well, you’ve gone and done it now, Your Grace.” He rolled his head around as if it pained him. “I said butter him up—not make him like you. Now we’ll all be stuck here til bloody Samhain.”
Alyneri blinked. “I beg your pardon?” Samhain was half a year away yet.
Fynn waved with his goblet. “Don’t you see where we are? He lives in the middle of bloody nowhere.”
“It ain’t as bad as all that.” Carian had stretched himself out on the couch and had his smoke propped between his lips, slowly becoming a pillar of ash. He mumbled around it, “You can find the node on the world grid. You just can’t find the grid again once you’ve crossed the node.”
Fynn held up a hand to him as if this proved his point.
Alyneri looked bemusedly between the two of them. “What am I missing?”
Fynn drank his wine and glared off in the direction Cassius had gone.
Carian tucked his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. “What you’re missing, Princess, is that Cassius lives on the end of a one-way road as far as the nodes are concerned. We crossed it the moment we passed beneath his walls. Now we’re his guests until he decides our business is concluded and returns us to the grid.”
Alyneri thought she must’ve heard him incorrectly; yet at the same time, it made sense out of the many odd personages ‘taking advantage’ of Cassius’s hospitality.
Carian opened one eye to peer at her and then closed it again. “Y’might as well make yourself at home. As keen as he clearly is for your company, we could be here a good long while.”
Fifty-three
“Freedom cannot be lasting without vigilance and the indomitable will to fight back.”
<
br /> –Jayachándranáptra, Rival of the Sun
“Isabel.” Sebastian val Lorian crossed the black stone terrace in Dreamscape to take Isabel’s hands in his own. “How are you? I’ve been trying to reach you—”
“I haven’t been sleeping much lately. I hope you don’t mind my intruding on your dreams instead.”
“On the contrary, it’s a great relief to me.” Sebastian noticed how pale she looked beneath the sere desert sun—even a dreamed one. “Ehsan and Dareios were also going to try to reach you in their dreams tonight.”
A faint smile hinted on her lips. “Yes, I received their callings. For a moment it seemed as if half of Kandori was banging on my bedchamber door, wanting admittance.”
Beyond the obsidian pavilion where they stood, the same violent storm that always haunted their Dreamscape meetings was darkening the southern horizon. The black band of clouds flashed violently with lightning, while above this dark turbulence, fiery veins split the firmament into a fragile webbing, lines of blood through a fractured blue sky.
Sebastian couldn’t tear his eyes away from the unsettling scene. “Is that what’s been occupying your days?”
Isabel followed his gaze back over his shoulder. Her eyes tightened. “The Malorin’athgul Rinokh is seeking a way into the Realms of Light.”
“One creature is causing all of that?”
“He attacks T’khendar directly from Chaos, where his power is greatest. We give thanks that he is alone in this effort.”
The longer Sebastian stared, the greater grew his horror. Isabel cupped his face and turned his eyes to hers. “They were created to unmake worlds, Sebastian. This is the battle we of T’khendar fight…but it needn’t be yours.”
Suddenly they stood upon a marble terrace overlooking an immense white city. Across the surrounding valley, a ridge of imposing mountains reared upwards to scrape the sky. Countless waterfalls fell from those heights, their lengthy white trains vanishing into mist among the undulating canopy of trees.
Isabel now wore a corseted gown in the deepest cobalt beneath a silk over-robe, its layers as light and airy as gossamer. A steady breeze caught and lifted the gown into floating streams behind her. With her chestnut hair bound in a net of sapphires, she seemed a lady painted of an artist’s imagination, ethereal and fey. Sebastian had hardly noticed what she’d been wearing before. Now he couldn’t look away.
Isabel looked down at herself with a wry expression somewhere between apology and humor. “If you’d seen what I’ve really been wearing these many weeks, you might forgive my dreaming about soft silk.”
He shook his head. “My brother doesn’t realize what he’s missing out on, that’s all.” His brother…but he’d long stopped asking her about Ean.
“Isabel,” he searched her gaze, “what I saw back there…”
She gave a resigned exhale. “We expected this would happen, Sebastian, yet now that the moment is nigh…” A brief weariness took the place of her words. She started them walking beside the railing, and her thoughts became pensive in the Dreamscape aether, honey-thick and opaque to his understanding. “When my brother and his Council of Nine first built this world, they were idealists. They swore they were planning for as many outcomes as possible, but if you spoke to them, if you saw the potent light dancing in their eyes, you knew they believed everything would go exactly as they intended.” Her brow furrowed faintly. “Now, those who survived know better.”
“Perhaps a more cautious outlook will prove fortuitous in the end.”
“Or catastrophic.” She gave him a troubled look. “A wielder is limited by what he can envision, Sebastian. This is the all-important Fifth Law. If the tragedies that shadow our past make us too afraid to envision an impossible future, our enemies will eat us alive—for they do not suffer the same losses or know the same defeats.”
She stopped at the railing and looked out over the world her brother and his Council had made—a beautiful world, by Sebastian’s estimation. “This is why I almost wish that Ean remembered nothing. Even if it meant also not remembering me.”
“Ean would be lost without you.”
She turned to face him. “Yet he’s been as hindered by me as by his memories.”
“His memories…” Sebastian thought surely he must’ve misunderstood her. “You’d have him play the game knowing nothing? Without even the Laws of Patterning to guide him?”
“What Ean most needs, he knows innately.” She challenged his protest with an arched brow. “The Fifth Law is almost self-defeating. While the Laws help us codify and understand this power we call elae, at the same time, to some degree they restrict our viewpoints about what we can do with it. We say the limit to a wielder’s ability is what he can envision—the sky is the limit, yes. But is it?” She looked him up and down. “What the Laws of Patterning tell us, we believe—there is Balance in all things, elae has five strands. But in the East, in Avatar and Vest, kingdoms where the Sobra hasn’t yet found a foothold, they work Alorin’s lifeforce beneath entirely different rules. Not all of the things their Adepts can do are explainable within our known Laws.”
Sebastian recalled too late that he was arguing doctrine with the High Mage of the Citadel. He gave her an apologetic grin. “Point taken, my lady.”
Isabel dropped her gaze. “Forgive me.” She reached for his hand and held it more tightly than he expected. “Our world is coming apart at the seams. With my brother gone, I fear it’s taking a toll on my disposition.”
“Your point is a good one, Isabel.”
She squeezed his hand. “But I might’ve made it more gently.” She looped her arm through his and started them walking again. “Tell me of your news. I could well use a cheerful thought to buoy my demeanor.” She cast a rueful smile off across the city. “Doubtless Dagmar and Raine would appreciate it, too.”
Sebastian worried for her, but he knew she sought no sympathy, only his ear to listen, his arm to escort her. At the most, his shoulder to lean on. “As I told you earlier, we got a letter from Ean detailing everything that happened to him in Tambarré, but more importantly, the letter confirmed that our matrix can sever the eidola’s link with its master. We’ve been testing arrows as an initial means of delivering these disruptor patterns to the creatures, and now we think we’ve isolated the order for proper crystallization.”
Patterns locked within a matrix interacted similarly to elements in crystals—within a pattern’s structure, molecules of energy formed into specific bonded shapes, much as chemical elements bonded during the process of crystallization. Hence the borrowed use of the word by Patternists.
“How have you tested them?”
“Well, that’s just it…” Sebastian scratched at his head.
He’d been arguing back and forth with himself about that very point. They’d tested the arrows on Merdanti stone, but they couldn’t really know if they’d nailed the disruptor sequence until they tested them on actual eidola. Without Ean to aid them in that effort, Sebastian felt that task should fall to him, but Ehsan and Dareios both argued strongly against it, since seeking out eidola would necessarily place him in the same arena as Dore Madden.
Sebastian didn’t relish confronting a man who still haunted his dreams almost nightly, but would he ever be able to rest easy knowing Dore was alive and possibly—probably—plotting against him and his brother?
He realized Isabel was still waiting for his reply and grimaced slightly. “I guess you could say I haven’t sought to fill Ean’s shoes on the testing field. But perhaps I should?”
He’d hoped the open tone of his inquiry would encourage her to offer her oracular talents on their behalf, but it had the opposite effect.
“Prophecy cannot be a sounding board for your decisions, Sebastian. The paths are too jumbled now, all of our threads too closely intertwined.” She stopped walking and turned to him with a grave determination steadying her. “Yet even were they as far distant as the seas from each other, I wouldn’t do as you ask.”
Disheartened by her refusal but trying to understand, Sebastian pressed, “Not even for Ean?”
Her gaze tightened. “I haven’t consciously sought to know Ean’s path in this life.” She looked away from him. “Only once did I do this for Arion, and it’s an act I’ll grieve to the end of my days.”
Sebastian felt her sorrow as though his own, her feelings open—or perhaps betrayed—by the closeness of their minds in Dreamscape. “Why, Isabel?”
She cast him a look, critical with self-rebuke. Then she started them walking again, tugging on his arm, both apology and entreaty. Her tone, when she spoke again, told only of sorrow.
“Our paths aren’t set in stone, Sebastian, yet there is a sort of predictability that comes into play once we’ve made a certain choice. Even without a gift for prophecy, if a man looks far enough along a potential line of consequence proceeding from any one decision, he can predict a whole series of ramifications deriving from that choice. One’s path is predicated on decision. If the person changes his or her mind at a pivotal juncture, that path of consequence ceases to exist and a new one branches out.”
She searched his gaze, assessing his understanding. “While our paths aren’t predestined, our viewpoints shape us so deeply that in many cases our paths almost seem inevitable. When I looked down Arion’s path, much against my better judgment, I saw that certain viewpoints were guiding him to make specific choices. Unfortunately, these were not viewpoints he was likely to change. Thus the instant I saw where his path was leading, I knew also that his death was inevitable.”
Sebastian’s feet dragged him to a halt. “Shade and darkness, Isabel.”
“He fought with me the entire way, of course.” A melancholy smile hinted on her lips. “He believed he could somehow still change what I’d seen. Even my brother tried to outmaneuver my foretelling. But I knew…I knew that to alter the outcome, Arion would’ve had to change who he was—compromise who he was—and that was something he would never do.”
Sebastian could hardly fathom the emotional toll of such an experience. He could say nothing to comfort her, knowing the path her foretelling had stitched in the tapestry, the path his brother was still walking.
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