Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  A storm would clear the piazza quickly, but real storms took time to summon. The wind on the other hand…

  Elae could be wielded countless ways to create wind—changing the density or temperature of the air to result in higher or lower pressure, adjusting the balance of atmospheric forces, restructuring molecular adhesion—but a fifth-strand Adept need only think, blow.

  And blow it did.

  A gale force wind scoured the piazza, ripping cloths from tables, overturning chairs, sending everyone running for cover. A marauding giant could not have done a better job of sweeping humanity from the space. Even Shail was momentarily caught in the charge.

  Pelas used the moment to release his shield around Nadia and was rewarded with the sight of her Praetorians spiriting her away.

  Until Shail threw up a wall of deyjiin in front of them.

  The Praetorians veered back while the wind raged around them and Adepts ran like panicked mice. The gusting wind snared an unfortunate fellow off his feet and tumbled him headlong into Shail’s wall. The ash of his passing swirled out the other side, raising even greater alarm among the witnesses.

  The Praetorians turned and rushed Nadia and the Endoge parallel to the shimmering wall, but Shail threw up three more walls in rapid succession, boxing them within.

  “Do you see, Pelas?” Shail made his voice heard above the raging wind, but his patronizing smile needed no amplification. “Whatever you possess, I can take away.” The walls of the cube began pushing inwards. All of humanity fled.

  Pelas hissed an oath and released the wind. He would need the full focus of his attention if he meant to combat his brother—

  Abruptly Shail’s deyjiin walls vanished.

  The Praetorians hoisted Nadia and ran.

  Shail spun, snarling, and lifted his hand—

  The world went still. Silent. Frozen.

  Whatever working Shail had intended was ripped out of his hands as a toy from a disobedient child.

  Apprehension strung a tight thread through Pelas. He slowly turned to face the cause of this new shift in the fabric. His skin was alive with needles of warning.

  The fountains had gone glassy beneath a suddenly cloudy sky. The air felt electric in his lungs.

  Across the piazza, Darshan was approaching.

  Shail growled a muted curse.

  ***

  Darshanvenkhátraman crossed the piazza with the tapestry undulating beneath his steps and his gaze fixed on his perplexing middle brother. An hour ago, Socotra Isio had asked him about their relationship and he’d hesitated in answering her. After what he’d done to Pelas, he could hardly name himself a friend.

  In the near distance, he observed his two brothers facing off—Pelas’s wind, Shail’s targeted compulsion, the currents boiling between them and chaos spreading in the streets.

  In previous times, he would’ve let them resolve their own differences, at best standing firm on the side of Shail’s contention. Now all Darshan could think of was how Shail had given Pelas over to revenants. Such an unconscionable act seemed a far greater indignity to him than any ill he’d ever himself worked against Pelas…but he wondered if Pelas would think the same.

  Darshan ripped away Shail’s deyjiin box, allowing the little princess to escape. Then he cast his own intent broadly to encourage the rest of the mortals out of the space. He preferred to school his brothers in private, and Shail would only make bystanders into distractions.

  With the piazza cleared and the world stilled beneath his slicing gaze, Darshan halted at an angle to his brothers, the better to regard them both. Shail stood immersed in a cloud of acrimony, Pelas in silence, but his expression made a window of his thoughts, and his thoughts were…surprising.

  For a moment as their eyes met, Darshan saw Pelas as Pelas saw himself—artist and explorer, seeker of experiences new and exhilarating; a creative soul more than a devouring one. For eons, Pelas had infuriated him with his dilettante disregard for their purpose. Now, a part of Darshan wondered if Pelas had had the right of it all along.

  By Chaos born, but that was the foulest tasting crow he’d ever tried to swallow.

  The three Malorin’athgul stood deep in the well their presence had created in the mortal tapestry, enveloped by Darshan’s imposed silence, warily gauging one another’s intent. The electric air held a potent charge. The currents had gone flat and now seethed with friction. Around them, the fabric grew thinner.

  Pelas regarded him curiously. “This is a new look for you.”

  “Yes, I seem to be hearing that a lot.” Darshan shifted his attention to Shail. “You and I have much to discuss, Shailabanáchtran.”

  Shail’s stare was void-black, his stance taut; clearly he was itching to attack either or both of them. “You’re meddling where you don’t belong, Darshan.”

  Darshan arched a brow. “You encouraged me out into the world.”

  “I warned you against it.”

  “Ensuring by the very nature of your warning that I would do the opposite.” Darshan spun his scepter in his hand and then gripped it tightly, contemplatively, holding Shail firmly beneath the point of his gaze. “But I don’t think you expected me to see what I’ve seen.”

  Shail growled, “I expect you to stay in your sandbox and play with your toys!”

  “With Dore Madden as my keeper?” Darshan looked him over sardonically. “Yes, your expectations are all too clear.”

  Shail’s anger pulsed on the currents. “I won’t warn you again, Darshan.”

  “Warn me? Against the carefully constructed trap you have waiting for me, as surely as you had revenants waiting for our brother?” The disapprobation in his tone could’ve sheared granite. He started towards Shail with the currents clinging to him, dragging threads of consequence, tilling the tapestry. “Or do you reference the deceit you’ve been spinning these many centuries? What exactly won’t you warn me against that I don’t already know?”

  Power flared as Shail’s answer.

  Lightning splintered the sky. The air itself exploded.

  Darshan threw up a shield—

  —that startlingly merged with another’s.

  He spun his head to find Pelas suddenly at his side, hand extended, holding a shield of protection around them both. Their combined shield sizzled beneath Shail’s continuing bombardment.

  Pelas searched his gaze wonderingly. “Darshan, what…?” but surprise clearly stole the words off his tongue.

  Darshan regarded his brother with an ever-tightening gaze. “After all I’ve done to you…you come to my aid?”

  Pelas gripped his shoulder, the first time in decades when his touch hadn’t been connected to a blow, and asking via the intimacy of their bond, Do you know me not at all? His brow furrowed deeply. You would have my forgiveness if you but asked!

  Darshan looked back to Shail. Whatever reckoning he owed his middle brother would not happen there that day. “Go, Pelas.” He moved away from him. “Go do whatever it is you’re doing here.”

  “Until this moment, I thought I was stopping you.”

  Leave this place, Pelas, Darshan drew the dome of his shield with him, or Shail will make a target of you to punish me.

  Pelas cast him a fleeting thought and went.

  Darshan turned his attention away from his middle brother and strode purposefully towards Shail. Power rained chaotically around him, Shail’s formless hate eating through the world’s canvas. Darshan tightened his gaze on his youngest brother.

  Shailabanáchtran, cease this tantrum.

  To emphasize this behest, he drew upon his own power in equal proportion to Shail’s and sent a magnetic pulse flaring back through the bombardment. Each molecule of Darshan’s energy bonded with one of Shail’s.

  To the naked eye, a shimmering darkness overcame the raining light.

  Then Darshan seared both powers from the aether. A violent flash of light and sound shattered every window in the surrounding buildings. Daylight returned, grey beneath the clouds
of a storm now churning above them.

  Shail looked at him through the sound of raining glass. His lips twitched with an acerbic smile. “Always so peremptory, brother.” He spun his sword and started towards Darshan. “That’s ever been your problem, you know. You think all of existence should account to you.”

  “Did you not say we were gods, Shailabanáchtran? He who can unmake creation is evidently senior to it.”

  Shail gave a trenchant smile. “You cannot unmake me.”

  “That remains to be seen, since I haven’t tried.”

  “And would you?” Shail twisted injury into a hateful stare. “All these years, I’ve done your bidding, come when you summoned, listened to your incessant sermonizing…but Pelas—Pelas does none of these! Yet upon his forked words you turn against me!”

  “You’ve called my hand through your own actions, Shailabanáchtran.”

  “Brother,” Shail’s sneering tone sent the currents flooding away from him. “I see the way you look at Pelas. He could betray you endlessly and you would still seek his love.”

  This comment gave Darshan pause, only because he wondered if it might be true.

  Shail’s ire was stirring the storm into action. Wind scoured the empty piazza, splaying eager droplets of rain. “Everything I’ve done has been in pursuit of our purpose!” he shouted. “How can you imagine anything else of me?”

  Lightning pulsed in the darkness above, highlighting Shail’s expression of malcontent. “You’ve become deluded, brother.” He pointed his sword at Darshan while rain pelted them both, his gaze as black and unforgiving as the storm clouds above. “You ally with an enemy and name him friend.”

  And he attacked.

  Darshan stepped forth to engage him.

  Thunder sounded as their weapons clashed, and the storm amplified the story of their battle to the distant masses—faces behind broken windows, mortal toys hovering in shadowed doorways, unwelcome guests on a playground they’d claimed for themselves.

  Lightning repeatedly struck the pavement around their battling forms, each time tainting the air with stone dust and the tang of ozone. The wind whipped their hair into their eyes and tore at their clothing. The currents became as molten rock.

  Shail rode fury’s relentless wave, giving Darshan no opening to take the offensive. He plunged spears of compulsion towards Darshan’s mind like berserkers stabbing an enemy king, and he tore at Darshan’s shields with malice’s fanged and venomous teeth.

  Darshan held an impregnable shield and spun his staff to block his brother’s advances, coldly considering how best to contain him. Brute force would not overwhelm Shail. He would need to be more cunning than that.

  He pulsed the fifth to force them apart and simultaneously threw a net of deyjiin.

  Shail skidded backwards across the slick pavement and only just caught the net on his blade. He paused there, breathing hard, glaring blackly at Darshan while he held his sword with both hands to support the dangling net of power.

  Then he slung it back at Darshan.

  Darshan dodged left—

  And tumbled through a silver-limned portal Shail had summoned out of his line of sight.

  ***

  Shailabanáchtran, Maker of Storms, closed his portal and lifted his face to the rain. When he lowered his gaze again, gone was the persona of injured hate projecting envy and resentment with every exhale. In its place spread a mocking smile.

  They all just make it so easy.

  He sheathed his blade with finality. The storm he allowed to rage on, the better to commemorate the day the Balance shifted forever in the Realms of Light.

  Sixty-three

  “Bravery is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.”

  –Gydryn val Lorian, King of Dannym

  Trell slung dripping hair from his eyes and watched from the shadows of a boulder as his men slipped one by one over the edge of the aqueduct and vanished into the deeper shadows of a vertical scar splitting the mountainside above him. He’d just completed the descent down that fissure with his body nearly numb from the aqueduct’s icy water, but between his pounding heart and the exertion required by the descent, his flesh now felt as steamy as his breath.

  A hundred feet below his hidden vantage, torches glowed on Khor Taran’s walls, and lamplight made a patchwork of the structure’s towers. A circle of deeper darkness wreathed the silent fortress, while the River Taran drew a silvery thread across the far distant valley.

  Trell didn’t expect any part of that night’s effort to come easily. The aqueduct had posed their first challenge. It waters were swift, and its slick sides had offered but one slim chance of escape. Yet Trell had felt more excitement than apprehension while riding that current, for he had Loukas n’Abraxis at his side, and together they’d accomplished many impossible things.

  While he waited for his men to join him, Trell stared through the mist of his steaming breath and assessed the fortress they would soon be invading.

  Even now, Rolan was leading fifty men beneath the first stars of night in a mad rush to create both deception and diversion, and hopefully to draw most of five hundred men down to the plains to investigate a nonexistent army.

  Raegus was waiting in the hills for the Nadoriin to raise the inevitable alarm, whereupon he would attack from the north to split the forces remaining inside the walls. And Tannour…it was left to him to eliminate the wielder from the equation altogether.

  Trell and Loukas, Rolan, Raegus and Tannour. They were all gearwheels independently turning in the many parts of Trell’s clockwork plan, their actions separate yet interconnected, each one intrinsic to an outcome for the others. And of course, everything depended upon Trell first finding his father’s men, freeing them from whatever compulsion held their will in thrall, and then somehow fighting his way out of the fortress with a thousand men in tow.

  Risk upon risk, if-this-then-that; their gambit carried chance across a fluctuating equation whose factors were always shifting. But instead of focusing on Chance’s diminishing remainder, Trell preferred to think of Fortune’s rising potential. If they could successfully get into the fortress, find his father’s men, free them, and arm them…then their force would become over a thousand strong.

  Everything depended on his men playing their positions brilliantly, yet this was no more than the First Lord was expecting of him…trusting in him to somehow end the war.

  For some reason, this realization made Trell feel connected in a way that he found oddly heartening. All of the Mage’s Players were allied in this vast motion, entire sections of the pattern shifting and changing, yet somehow still acting in concert, working together—whether or not they even realized it—to weave a new design into the tapestry. And in so doing, changing the world.

  The very idea of it made his skin tingle…though, it could’ve also been the wind, which was not exactly being kind to any of them.

  “Trell…” Loukas’s whisper reached him. “The men are ready.”

  Trell joined the others where they’d gathered in the shadows at the base of the fissure. “Nine men on the upper walls that I saw,” he told them in hushed tones as they all gathered close in the deep darkness. Their faces were but slashes of charcoal on black canvas, their eyes like agates. “Once we’re inside the walls, you know your roles.”

  “Your will, A’dal,” they whispered so softly that the wind carried none of their words.

  Trell gathered his resolve and searched their gazes in the darkness. “We’re about to forge a new reality against chance and reason. In this endeavor, what we see is what will become. Let no one divert you from our goal. Let nothing shift your mind. Hold our objective firmly in your thoughts. We’re going to carve a new truth out of impossibility.” He pressed his fist to his heart.

  They mirrored him as one.

  For the space of an inhaled breath, Trell hovered in the moment before the dice roll, that instant where infinite possibility and failure were interwoven, chance held in perfect bala
nce.

  Then he set off, casting those cubes a-tumbling, and led his men from the safety of shadows to see how their dice would land.

  ***

  Tannour Valeri walked the Blind Path wrapped in shadows, himself a shadow, seeing nothing, yet seeing all. The air gave shape to his blinded vision, forming itself around objects, predicating orientation upon spaces instead of solids, cohesiveness rather than separateness. He perceived the distances between bouncing waves—sound, light, heat, motion—and they provided context to his understanding. He saw not with human eyes, nor heard with human ears, but with countless other sensory channels honed to interpret a version of the material world without solidity.

  Air carried him. Air bound him. He sacrificed worldly vision to use this gift, but he’d never needed his eyes when communing with Air. Air showed him all.

  From the hillside above Khor Taran, he perceived the fortress breathing; the activity of daily life pumped circulation through every cavity and hall, down the bones of passages and deep into the bowels. Air’s bellows filled every room to Tannour’s view as sand poured into a honeycomb, outlining shape. He knew every space where air laid claim, and the number of men inhabiting each.

  He might’ve told Trell immediately where to find his father’s soldiers—oddly, they were fewer than expected—but Trell was somewhere in the aqueduct higher on the mountain above him, beyond his purview, and in any case, freeing the Dannish soldiers was not his mission.

  He should’ve focused on his mission then, but pieces of his mind remained with Trell. Communing with Air always brought a certain detachment—

  Detachment? Is that how he was thinking of it now? That dissolution of self, of substance…the dispersal into the aether which had so frightened him upon his first attempt that it had taken him weeks to recover his mind? Detachment, is it now?

  —but thinking of Trell grounded him as a flagpole grounds a pennant. Ver’alir might flurry his fabric, rip at him, shred his form, but it could never tear him fully free—not with Trell tethering him.