Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4)

by McPhail, Melissa

  Darshan veiled off his mind and left the prince standing once again in his own mental space. Without Darshan’s sun, Ean felt colder and unexpectedly hollow. Older preconceptions were cascading away now, caught by a constant current of revelation. Ean looked to him and swallowed. “Words are proving inadequate for everything I want to say.”

  The ghost of a smile touched Darshan’s lips. Then he stepped out the window and walked across the open air towards a tower across the street.

  Ean had done the same thing a thousand times with elae. He didn’t yet have the same confidence with deyjiin. He retrieved his sword and belted it on while alternately watching Darshan striding through the empty air and staring down into street far below. Then he called to the Malorin’athgul, “You’re sure about this?”

  “What applies to one applies to all, Prince of Dannym.” Darshan’s voice floated back to him.

  “‘What applies to one applies to all.’” The prince muttered the Second Law under his breath. Well, here goes nothing. He focused his intent…

  A fateful step later he was walking across solidified air. His wielder’s self-respect refused to admit the relief he felt each time his boots found purchase beneath his will, but his heart did a little triumphant dance in the privacy of his chest.

  Reaching the next tower, Ean clambered around the sloped roof towards Darshan with his mind hard at work trying to sort what felt like a mountain of assumptions into new categories of truth. “If you could manipulate the fabric of this world so easily, why did we walk all that way through the desert?”

  The Malorin’athgul was staring out over the endless sands with the wind blowing his hair back from his face, looking much the god surveying his domain. “I didn’t want to call the revenants’ attention to us. In your condition, you couldn’t have withstood an attack.”

  Ean halted near him and found a stable footing. “And now?”

  Darshan nodded towards a dark line rimming the horizon. “They’re nearly here. Soon we will see what you can withstand.”

  Ean squinted at it. “That doesn’t look so promising.”

  Darshan gave him a somewhat unnerving smile. “Certainly not of any experience either of us stands to appreciate.”

  Ean frowned at him. “You don’t seem too worried about it.”

  The Malorin’athgul’s eyebrow inched upwards, arch in its aspect. “In the countless millennia of my existence, do you imagine revenants are the worst things I’ve faced?”

  “Well, when you put it like that…” Ean threw himself down on the edge of the roof to await the revenant apocalypse. The sun, once again, was shining directly in his eyes.

  But now he could do something about it.

  He focused his intention on the air overhead and made it solid…except somehow it remained transparent. So he tried making it opaque…but it still didn’t stop the light from blinding him. He tried giving it property—color—but then the particles wouldn’t solidify.

  In Alorin, he could’ve used the elemental fifth to solve the problem a number of ways, but this wasn’t elae’s fifth strand; deyjiin was formless energy without any inherent aspect or quality.

  Ean latched onto this simplicity and tried creating something whole cloth—a parasol—out of the formless aether, but while the energy itself would congeal into a semblance of form, the fabric of the world would not shift to accept the thing he was trying to shape. He couldn’t make it solidify, and felt instead a tugging resistance, like the realm’s fabric was trying to snap itself back.

  “It resists your efforts.” At Darshan’s comment, the prince looked to where the Malorin’athgul stood staring out at the desert. “Shadow has—not necessarily different laws from Alorin,” he said without turning, “but Shadow’s are often higher-order laws. Your Alorin is a realm of solid energy. But nothing you or I could make here would be solid enough to provide shade.”

  “Or hold off revenants,” Ean murmured, catching the thought.

  Darshan cast him a sidelong eye. “Even though we’ve duplicated the starpoints of this world and can reach its energy, we remain within the compartment of a Warlock’s framed space and are subject to its laws—the Warlock’s laws. Until I can find and coincide the exterior-most starpoints—the maze beyond this maze, if you will—we’ll remain bound by the rules the Warlock established for his world.”

  Beyond them, the dark line was spreading rapidly across the sand.

  “In my temple in Tambarré,” Darshan said, “you told me of your First Lord, this Björn van Gelderan, who claimed my brothers and I could not unmake your world from within.”

  Ean warily watched the revenants overtaking the horizon. “And?”

  Darshan shrugged. “It is evidence of this same law in application in Alorin. Within the realm, we are bound by its rules. In Shadow, the most powerful Warlocks are those who are capable of not merely duplicating others’ starpoints but coinciding them, such that they can become the god of any universe.”

  “That’s what you intend to do when you find the starpoints of the outermost sphere of these worlds?”

  “Yes. Then I may tear the fabric and return us to Alorin’s space.”

  In Ean’s estimation, that couldn’t happen soon enough.

  He observed the dark horizon creeping ever closer and felt a chill, despite the heat of wind and sun. The creatures were spearing across the desert like a flock of birds, with a chevron out and in front of the mass of others—the first wave.

  “About that…” Ean rubbed the back of his neck, “any estimate on when you think you’ll have those starpoints in hand? An hour? A year? I’d like to have an idea of how long I’m going to be golem food.”

  Darshan clasped hands behind his back and turned his face into the wind. “Pain is a transient inconvenience.”

  “Oh, thank you for that wisdom. I’ll try to take solace in it while I’m being eternally devoured by soulless entities.”

  A smile flickered on Darshan’s lips. “Shail expected you would die here, Ean. He expected I would want you to, even as I expected Pelas to slay your Isabel.” He turned seriously to him. “I never imagined Pelas was capable of resisting my compulsion; it never occurred to me that he might release her. If anything true can be said of all of us equally, it is that we constantly underestimate each other.”

  Darshan returned his penetrating gaze to their oncoming enemy. Much of the desert now wore a cloak of darkness. “Come, Prince of Dannym.” His gaze flicked to Ean and away again. “Let’s see where this game is leading us.”

  He stepped off the building.

  Ean watched Darshan’s form streaking down towards the earth, far, far…far below, until he landed in a voluminous eruption of dirt and dust. The prince shook his head. One thing he could say with certainty about Darshanvenkhátraman—he wasn’t short on courage.

  Ean took a deep breath and leaped off after him.

  While he was falling, the prince tried to focus on gravitating deyjiin to slow and cushion his descent. But it was a long way down, and he had an unfortunate span of wind-filled, teary-eyed falling to not think about the last time he’d experienced a similar downward rush.

  He landed on a cushion of power amid a violent explosion of earth—what had appeared as a puff to him from high above was closer to a forty-foot geyser. Ean coughed his way out of the dust clouds with his eyes tearing and his throat burning.

  He found Darshan waiting for him at what passed for a street corner in that alien city. The prince looked down at his own dusty and disheveled appearance and then up at the Malorin’athgul, with his raven hair and burnished gold coat so pristine, and waved vaguely at him. “Does nothing stick to you, or…?”

  “This is all illusion, Prince of Dannym—or hadn’t you realized that yet?” He flashed a dark smile and started off down the street.

  Ean called after him, “Just so you know, that whole ‘Shadow is killing you’ thing felt pretty real to me.” He jogged to catch up.

  Darshan led a fast route
towards their enemy. Ean was speculating on how long just the two of them would last against the oncoming horde when Darshan extended his Merdanti staff horizontally before him. Ean felt the click of a thought, and lightning flames of deyjiin speared out both ends of the staff.

  Where power struck stone—or whatever material formed those oddly reflective buildings—the structure instantly vaporized. Walls began to disintegrate, the towers themselves to waver, their foundations to simply dissolve.

  Ean placed a hand on Darshan’s shoulder, gaining his gaze—and realizing again as their eyes met that he was bound to this immortal, the knowledge flooding him with a still-unsettled anticipation—and requested, mind to mind, Let me see how you’re doing this.

  The Malorin’athgul obligingly shared his awareness, and the prince studied the flow of power through Darshan’s thoughts, observing how he sculpted deyjiin to his intent. Darshan in turn looped a thread of power around Ean, keeping him within a protective sphere while he strode along. He held his staff before him in his left hand, while his right hand pushed tidal forces around in massive waves, shoving the toppling structures hither and yon, leaving piles of monolithic stone blocks and rubble several stories high in his wake.

  He razed the city in this fashion, walking an uninterrupted pace. The roaring in Ean’s ears was rivaled only by the depth of the obscuring dust clouds that soon surrounded them; but Darshan walked them effortlessly through this, encased in his bubble of deyjiin—yet a fourth compartmented working he managed in concert with the other three: the flames of deyjiin erasing the foundations, the thrashing waves of power, and Ean, held protectively close.

  They halted at the city’s edge. When the tsunami of dust finally settled and Darshan lowered his protective dome, at least a dozen blocks of city had been destroyed and their broken materials repurposed into the towering walls of a rubble maze.

  The prince turned rather abused eyes out across the desert. The creatures were close enough now that he could see them as separate entities instead of a solid swath of darkness. Their numbers were beyond counting.

  “Maybe this is my mortality talking,” or the fact that I’ve nearly died already too many times in this life and don’t relish the idea of experiencing it again, “but these don’t look like such great odds to me.”

  Darshan eyed him sidelong. “Balance bends to my will.”

  “Balance…but this is Shadow.”

  “All of the cosmos bows to Balance, even as all of creation bows to the laws of energy—what you Adepts call your Laws of Patterning.” When Ean merely stared wordlessly at him, Darshan remarked, “You appear surprised by my understanding.”

  Ean shook his head. “I’m…you…” It took quite a bit for him to formulate words, and longer still to speak them without an undertone of reprimand. “You formed a religion that persecutes Adepts and corrupted truthreaders into walking nightmares of themselves—and all along you knew elae’s Laws?”

  Darshan looked back to the desert. “Those are just games, Prince of Dannym.”

  “Games.” Ean’s voice held an accusing edge. “Destroying Adepts was a game to you?”

  Darshan settled him an arresting stare. “As defeating me and my brothers is a game to your Björn van Gelderan.”

  Ean exhaled a measured breath, for he recognized the truth in the parallel Darshan had drawn. “The game of being the Prophet Bethamin…” he grasped critically for Darshan’s point of view, “the game of Balance…” He lifted him a look. “The game of unmaking?”

  “Existence holds no value without a game, Ean. Immortals understand this better than most.”

  Then the first wave of revenants was upon them, and they’d no more time for talk.

  Darshan stepped forward swinging his long Merdanti staff and took seven of the golems down with one blow. Ean swung for the next one—

  And they were suddenly in the thick of it, surrounded on all sides by eidola-like creatures with empty black eyes. Darkness crowded Ean’s vision. The too-bright sun bore down from on high.

  Darshan dragged Ean into the stream of his own thoughts, unifying their action. The prince suddenly saw through two perspectives—no, three, for Darshan was holding that world’s starpoints and viewing the battle from above as well as through his body’s eyes. Ean found the view both disorienting and really bloody fascinating, although he admitted a certain disheartenment at seeing how many revenants there truly were.

  Whenever any of them got too close, the press too intense, Darshan would explode deyjiin through the ranks to blast the creatures back. This gave them room to fight but also made the revenants incrementally stronger.

  And so it went—the constant press, dark weapons flashing, deyjiin exploding, carcasses of dead things piling up in mounds, the air thick with an alien hunger, Ean’s lungs burning with another sort of need—on and on and on.

  And the revenants kept coming. By the thousands.

  Seventy

  “There is no glory to behold in war. The glory is all moonshine, dust, a trick of the light reflecting off sharp blades and dull reason.”

  –Farid al Abdul-Basir, Prince of the Akkad

  The Nadori Regiment Commander Nassar abin’Ahram stood in the grey light before dawn watching a line of black-cloaked men treading a sinuous path through the tents, heading his way. Beyond them, down in the valley, Prince Radov’s army camp spread as a rash across the smooth desert sands, with one bulging conglomeration of pustules that was the Ruling Prince’s compound lording over the high ground in the center.

  May Jai’Gar forgive my insolence. Nassar pressed his palms together and glanced to the smoke-colored heavens. He should not think of his own prince so derogatorily, but he couldn’t watch the army camp amassing on the Khalim Plains and not recall the horror that had overtaken those lands two years prior. An ashen death, as if the Demon Lord of old had walked there, claiming each man with an effacing touch that drained the life from his very bones.

  The ashes of those men still painted the plains in great strokes of charcoal and grey. Erasing winds would whip the dunes and blow in new sands to make a fresh coat upon the old, but even the great sandstorms that left villages buried in their wake couldn’t cleanse that ashen field.

  The ghosts of the men who’d died that night still roamed there too. Inithiya hadn’t claimed their spirits—no one knew why. Rumor said if you braved a sandstorm upon the Khalim Plains, you would see those meandering ghosts outlined in sand, their bodies continuously whispering into dust, then as on the day death claimed them.

  And now Radov was leading M’Nador’s fine soldiers across those scarred lands to make ghosts of thousands more.

  May Inanna bless their swords, perhaps the dawn would see a different end than what had come before. Their prince had certainly seemed to think so when he’d addressed the war council the night before. He’d spoken lengthily if…ineloquently on their superior position, their brilliant plan and their infallible secret weapons. Much to Nassar’s dismay, he did not ask the favor of the gods upon these declarations, so Nassar imagined They probably would not bestow it.

  This saddened him, because no matter which side claimed to have Inanna’s favor, many men would die. Inithiya and Huhktu would soon be busy ferrying the dead, and this was not an outcome that Nassar, nor any who sought peace, favored.

  He wondered at their prince’s logic. He was risking M’Nador’s entire army to claim a single stronghold. It was one the Council of Princes coveted, yes; but if Radov regained the oasis at the cost of the army, how would he hold it when the Emir’s forces attacked anew? Did he really imagine the Council of Princes would let him keep his throne if he threw away the kingdom just to reclaim a few palaces?

  It is never that simple.

  Nassar knew this. The oasis was the foothold on the Kutsamak, a mineral and gem-rich swath of inhospitable earth. But even with a toe lodged firmly in Raku, they would not long hold the Kutsamak without an army.

  There has always been war in the Kutsamak.


  Nassar exhaled a long sigh. This was true; the Kutsamak knew feuding like the rivers knew water. If the denizens of that unpropitious landscape had spent more time irrigating and less time attacking each other with farm utensils the entire mountain range would be an oasis. Nassar supposed the only real difference between war between tribes and war between nations was the count of the dead.

  The procession of men coming towards him was close enough now that he could see the patterns stitched into the fabric of their black robes. Nassar wondered if there was some deeper meaning in the fact that wielders always wore black.

  The first wielder reached him, pressed his palms together and bowed. “Peace be upon you.” He was not Nadori—possibly Avataren. All Nassar knew about him or any of the nine men was that they were Shamshir’im.

  Nassar mimicked the wielder’s motion and murmured the traditional reply.

  “I am Torqin. You’re the al-Amir of Ramala?”

  “I am Nassar abin’Ahram. The space has been prepared for you per the consul’s specifications.”

  “As good as your word.” Torqin cast a meaningful look behind him at the other black-robed men. “The consul said as much of you.”

  Nassar would’ve preferred that Viernan hal’Jaitar said nothing of him at all. Verily, hal’Jaitar was the leader of the unscrupulous Shamshir’im, who imagined themselves above princely law—even above the gods. Nassar would that Viernan hal’Jaitar had never even learned his name.

  He took them to the bunker his men had dug into the mountainside and covered with muslin dyed in shades of ochre, russet and ash. One could barely differentiate the bunker from the surrounding hillside when standing right on top of it, much less from the top of the escarpment…or the skies. At least, that was the outcome Viernan hal’Jaitar was hoping for—some concealment for his wielders while battling the Sundragons that day. Doubtless they would work their own patterns of protection, but magic sometimes failed. Camouflage was more dependable.