Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  His sword was slipping from his fingers.

  Ean collected all of the energy of Shail’s working in one mental arm, and all of his own energy, an exact duplication of Shail’s working, into the circle of his other. Then, with a singular focused effort, he channeled the full force of this combined power into his blade.

  His fingers gripped with sudden strength.

  His arm brought the weapon to bear upon Shail, and a laser of power lanced through the air.

  The Malorin’athgul dodged in a whirl of silk.

  The windows behind him shattered.

  Shail turned among the sound of falling glass and leveled Ean a severe stare. Then he slowly reached over his shoulder and drew his Merdanti blade. “So I see you’re not without some skill.” He strode back across the shattered spray. “But how much?”

  Abruptly he cast a bolt of deyjiin at Ean. The prince deflected it off his blade, and the marble floor disintegrated into a puff of chalk.

  Shail began stalking him. “I see you’ve accomplished the level of ability of any Maritus student.” He tossed another pattern at Ean, wickedly fast.

  Ean spun out of its path and threw a mental dagger to shred it in passing. He knew Shail was testing him, determining how much of an adversary he would prove this time around.

  This time around…

  Ean watched the Malorin’athgul circling him, his malice making waves upon the currents, utterly delighted at the prospect of killing Ean a fourth time…and a deep-rooted anger sparked inside the prince—anger at all of the times this immortal had gloried in his death, at the cruel and calculating acts he’d worked against Isabel, and the heartless hold he’d waged over the Hundred Mages.

  Perhaps Balance had thrown them together—it certainly appeared that way—but while Shail was viewing their encounter as a foregone conclusion, Ean didn’t have to agree with his assessment.

  Shail spun his weapon in a figure-eight and grinned. “How would you like to die this time?”

  Determination and disquiet formed the woof and warp of Ean’s outlook as he watched the man circling him. He raised his blade and made a shield woven of every strand of elae. “Let’s meet the Demon Lord together.”

  Shail gave a low laugh. “Oh, Prince of Dannym…you have no idea what you’re asking.” He launched at him.

  Their blades clashed with sound and light. Broken glass shivered across the floor. The curtains shredded themselves on the shattered windows. Shail beat Ean back in a fast, precise attack—every stroke accompanied by harpoons of the fifth.

  The prince felt them skidding across his shields, seeking any notch in which to catch and haul. Chains of compulsion linked each harpoon to Shail’s will, so that if even one found its mark, Ean would be caught.

  The prince compartmented his mind to keep equal attention on his shields and Shail’s flashing blade, and portioned off a third section to devise some way out of there. If the man had killed him three times, it followed that he knew all of Arion’s tricks. Ean’s best hope would be inventing some new ones.

  They crossed the floor embroiled in their clashing dance, with the lifeforce thrumming and the very air shivering around them. Sentient Merdanti blades sang while the currents whipped an agonized accompaniment. Shail nearly landed a fatal blow, but Ean managed to yank himself out of reach with a lasso of the fifth. His feet scraped broken glass into a shivering wake as he came to a skidding halt.

  Shail pointed his weapon with rancor blackening his gaze. “At least prove yourself worthy of my interest. Provide some challenge for me.” He crossed ten paces in a breath and swung for Ean’s head.

  The prince locked blades in a geyser of sparks, elae and deyjiin singing discord onto the currents. Shail forced both blades back towards Ean’s throat and brought his face close enough for the prince to see the sparks reflecting in his eyes. He held Ean there beneath the razor edge of his malice while his compulsion pelted Ean’s shields.

  Ean finally managed to shove him off and moved into their predator’s circle again, holding his blade low. As he walked, he recalled to mind every pattern Pelas and Darshan had ever thrown at him. These he fashioned into a matrix—inelegant, haphazard, but functional—and into it he threw as much power as he could summon.

  Shail was still sneering at him when he released his working.

  The air flashed—split, fractured.

  The currents seethed.

  Shail flung up his own shields, even as the working flung him backwards in a wild spray of shattered glass. For a moment he vanished beneath glittering dust, the roiling currents and a collision of exploding patterns.

  Ean chased after Shail, spearing his awareness towards the Malorin’athgul. In the space of a thought, he latched onto his mind—with all of the compulsion Shail had poured onto Ean, he’d laid a fast track back to his own awareness, a practical map guiding Ean through his shields.

  When Arion had found the same opening, he’d used it to attempt to unwork Shail. Ean intended something very different.

  Before Shail regained his shields, the prince poured his awareness into the Malorin’athgul’s mind and reached for Absolute Being. In effect, he was embracing Shail’s mind and bringing it within the confines of his own space where he could do anything he wanted with it.

  Shail roared. He launched towards Ean with his blade glowing violet.

  They collided in a thunderous clash that shattered every crystal left on the chandeliers and sent plaster raining down on them. Blinded by dust as much as Shail’s barrage, Ean could only trust to his compartmented mind to keep the immortal’s sword from scoring a killing blow while he continued expanding his hold on Absolute Being, kept reaching outwards to surround Shail’s mind entirely with his own. It was a dizzying effort, trying to embrace a star, yet if he could expand his awareness to fully contain it—

  A hand suddenly clamped around Ean’s throat.

  Ean jerked back to awareness to find his own hands at his sides and Shail’s eyes inches away, boring into his.

  Shade and darkness! What had just happened?

  The Malorin’athgul’s fury radiated through Ean in punishing waves. He managed the barest wheezing inhale. His entire body had gone numb.

  The part of his mind that still held to lucidity recognized that Shail had somehow overtaken Absolute Being and was holding him captive now—exactly what Ean had been trying to do.

  Thirteen hells! He’d fallen entirely within the Malorin’athgul’s control! But how?

  Shail’s iron hand tightened around Ean’s throat. He pulled the prince’s body closer and pressed his lips to Ean’s ear. An icy breath heralded ominous words. “Let me show you how I remember your end…”

  Light seared Ean’s consciousness. A barrage of images lanced agony across his mind. Stars whirled, streaks of shattering light, color broken into fragments, fragments into razor shards…

  The world spun…or they were spinning, sealed together in mind and deed.

  Time had fractured.

  The only thing not spinning was the dagger clutched between them.

  On the other side of their shared grip, Arion’s features were twisted with effort, making his face almost unrecognizable between the pulsating light and the centrifugal force pulling against his flesh.

  Shail’s long hair whipped and spit around them, electrified with static by the kinetic wind, every end a stinging lash. And like Ean in the now, Shail then had Arion pinned within the space of Absolute Being.

  “There is only submission now.” Shail forced the thought into Arion’s mind—Ean’s mind—both of their minds reeling beneath that thrumming demand, separated by the centuries, yet bound to the same moment. “You will become my pawn—the magnificent Arion Tavestra, my puppet-wielder, Bringer of the End of Days…”

  Arion wrestled for control of the dagger. His jaw was clenched and his hair clung damply to his brow. Arion’s blue eyes held anguish and outrage…and in the deepest shadows of his gaze, abject apology.

  There w
as no denying that look, no denying what Arion intended. Even Shail recognized it for what it was.

  “No!”

  Arion plunged the dagger into his own heart…

  Abruptly the spinning kaleidoscope vanished, replaced by a hazy battleground clogged with the detritus of broken patterns. Ean sucked in a rasping inhale, but only the barest slip of air scraped down his throat, teasing his burning lungs with the memory of breath.

  Blackness became indistinct blotches that finally resolved into Shail’s face, close before his own. So many malicious thoughts glimmered behind those cruel eyes. Had Ean seen Darshan’s indifference there, he would’ve been grateful for it.

  Shailabanáchtran clasped both hands around Ean’s throat and lifted him off his feet. His body hung agonizingly between iron palms, legs dangling, his neck and shoulders screaming, his breath wheezing painfully and fast.

  “Do you still want to meet the Demon Lord, Prince of Dannym?” Ean thought he could see the glint of deyjiin behind the immortal’s dark eyes…or perhaps it was just his fading eyesight, blighted by breathlessness and the storm of power stirring a hurricane through his thoughts.

  He couldn’t have drawn enough breath to speak, even had Shail wanted an answer. But he didn’t, in fact, for he threw Ean forcefully and cruelly aside, a toy flung by an angry child.

  The prince flew sideways through blinding stars—

  And across the boundary of a silver-limned doorway. It winked shut with a singular finality, leaving Ean falling…falling…endlessly falling through a darkness so vast that all awareness fled from it.

  Sixty-two

  “What he’s forgotten about elae would fill a hundred tomes.”

  –The Fourth Vestal Raine D’Lacourte, on Björn van Gelderan

  Pelasommáyurek stepped onto a terrace of the Sormitáge’s sprawling Theoretical Sciences building, following a thread in the tapestry that kept changing before his eyes.

  Everything he’d learned in his recent research about the mortal tapestry warned against attempting to directly alter its weaving; such efforts usually resulted in unanticipated and unfortunate outcomes. The tapestry wove itself into a pattern only it understood. Trying to preempt the shape of that pattern would only cast the threads spiraling in new directions, forming whorls of consequence between the moment of misdirection and the eventual point at which the pattern restored itself to its original path of intent.

  Who was weaving this infinite pattern? Was it some divinity? Or was the tapestry’s design merely a product of choice and action, predictable only to the degree that choice and action could be predicted, and able to be influenced to the same extent?

  One might as easily ask how fixed was the course of a river, and what would be the ramifications of redirecting it. Many speculated, but no one knew.

  Pelas would’ve liked to have spent an evening, or a hundred of them, discussing the mortal tapestry with Socotra, now that he’d gained a new understanding of it. He still hoped one day to do so. But some things were already clear. That Shail had learned about the mortal tapestry seemed an obvious truth. That he would be using the tapestry to shape events to his will went without saying. But had Shail learned to read the tapestry to determine their own influence? This was the gauntlet Phaedor had thrown at Pelas’s feet—a skill the zanthyr had already mastered over millennia of studying the pattern. But Pelas hadn’t an infinity of time to answer that challenge himself.

  In that very moment, the influence of a Malorin’athgul is what he thought he was seeing on Nadia’s path. It appeared to him as a warping—not of the thread itself, so much as the space around the thread, or…even a hollowness where substance should’ve been. He wasn’t sure he’d have noticed anything had he not been monitoring Nadia’s path so closely.

  But was the warping a product of his own influence, or a result of one of his brothers? And would he ever be able to spot something so insubstantial on a thread that wasn’t as intimate and familiar to him?

  He’d just reached an arcade connecting two wings of the building when the thread shifted again. Pelas came to a halt. At first, he thought the warping had vanished from Nadia’s thread, but when he prudently broadened his view, he saw instead that the warping effect had expanded and was now influencing an entire section of the tapestry.

  He hadn’t taken any action.

  So who had?

  A chime must’ve rung, for students began flooding out of the building at both ends of the walkway. Pelas moved closer to a column while mentally studying the tapestry’s pattern, searching for…

  Then he saw it.

  In the same moment, the currents went berserk.

  Pelas shoved through the flood of students and finally drew up on the wide steps leading down to the piazza, blinking against the bright afternoon sun and searching for a familiar head among the hundreds milling there.

  How long did he have? Minutes? A collection of seconds?

  At last spotting a figure veiled in white, he anchored time behind him and rushed towards her, slowing time so greatly that he might’ve run circles many times around each person he passed on his way to Nadia’s side. Pelas reached her and released his time-anchor in the same instant. “Princess.” He touched her arm.

  Nadia gasped. The Marquiin beside her jumped. Her Praetorians reached for their swords.

  Pelas took Nadia by the elbow. “Princess, you must leave here at once.”

  A dozen concerns flashed through Nadia’s colorless gaze. She nodded significantly to her Praetorians and moved off beneath Pelas’s prodding. He started them walking fast—faster than Nadia would’ve liked, if told from her round-eyed gaze and the way her stride didn’t quite keep up with his—but not as fast as he needed. With her came Caspar and the Sormitáge’s Endoge.

  Nadia made a hasty but unnecessary introduction as they all rushed off. “Immanuel…I—I assume you know Lord Liam?”

  Pelas nodded to him. “Your Excellency.”

  The Endoge looked bewildered.

  “His Excellency and I were about to adjourn elsewhere for a more private conversation.”

  “An excellent idea, Your Highness.”

  Nadia took Pelas’s arm with a rough whisper. “What’s happening?”

  Seconds had become instants. It wasn’t going to be enough—

  The last grain of falling sand bounded down.

  The fabric shifted.

  Shail spoke mirthfully into Pelas’s mind, Why are you heading off so hastily, brother?

  Pelas grabbed Nadia and spun her behind his body. At the same time he threw up a silver-violet dome of deyjiin around them all.

  Collective oaths hissed out of the Praetorians. They drew up short and looked accusingly at him. Caspar looked alarmed. “Who is it? Is it—”

  “No.” Pelas turned a dark look to the Marquiin. “My younger brother. You will find even less to appreciate in him.”

  “Shail?” Nadia threw back her veil and stared around the piazza. “Is Sinárr with him?”

  Pelas could protect Nadia and her guard. It was the rest of the people crowding the piazza who worried him. Shail wouldn’t hesitate to harm them for no better reason than because it would aggravate Pelas. Verily, the greater the chaos, the greater Shail’s amusement.

  Pelas couldn’t yet see his brother, but he sensed he was close. The tapestry was practically sinking beneath their collective weight.

  Shailabanáchtran. Pelas greeted him tightly as he searched for his brother among the crowd. So thoughtful of you to pay us a visit. I still have to thank you properly for the experience you gave me. I made many new friends.

  Enjoyed it, did you? Shail seemed inordinately pleased about something, which probably meant he’d just completed some vindictive coup. I’m sure the revenants will love having you back.

  Pelas finally saw his brother coming towards him through the distant crowd. To the world, he remained invisible, but Pelas easily saw through Shail’s shield of deyjiin.

  He released his hold
on the Praetorians’ swords and turned a severe look to their commander. “Let no one leave this dome.”

  Lieutenant di Corvi’s glare said clearly, As if we could!

  Pelas cloaked himself in night and stepped through the curtain of deyjiin.

  A crowd of onlookers had gathered around it. If even one got too curious and touched that shimmering curtain, it would be the last thing they did; but Pelas knew no better way of keeping Nadia safe while he confronted his brother.

  He started off across the piazza on a collision course for Shail, uncomfortably aware of the tapestry rippling beneath his feet. I’m surprised you’re not still licking wounds, Shailabanáchtran, considering your many recent disappointments.

  Shail gave him a sinuous smile, hidden to all but Pelas’s eyes. You’ve simply given me another chance to school you, brother—fulfill that penchant of yours for bloody punishment.

  Shail walked with his Merdanti blade held low. The currents seethed as a river of asps beneath his every step. When will you see that there is nothing you care for that I cannot take away? Your truthreader paramour; the Princess Heir—soon I shall claim her again…perhaps more properly this time.

  Pelas clenched his jaw. Shail only wanted Nadia because she was important to him. For the same reason, she would never be safe from his brother’s malice.

  Shail was walking invisibly past the tables of a piazza café when he gave Pelas a particularly devious smile. The fourth-strand currents flared—a layered compulsion, cast wide—and fighting broke out in his wake.

  Diners overturned their tables attacking others of their own party. Dishes and glasses became weapons, chairs bludgeons. Further chaos erupted in an expanding wave as people fled the sudden confusion.

  Give me the princess, Pelas. Shail came on, smiling darkly. I want to revel in the look on your face when you hand her over to me again—beaten again, bested again, my own little dancing marionette brother.

  Pelas tightened his grip on his blade and looked quickly around the wide piazza. Somehow he had to clear the place of people or they would all become weapons to be used against him. Moreover, he was certain that whatever chaos Shail caused there, it would only feed into the efforts of his larger plan. His brother was nothing if not calculating.