The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (106 page)

“YOU BETRAY ME, KJIERAN!”

“
No, my lord!” Kjieran shuddered beneath the force of Bethamin’s wrath.

“WHAT THEN IS THIS YOU DO?”

Kjieran’s chest constricted, sending shards of pain coursing through his body as his ribs shattered beneath the crushing force of Bethamin’s displeasure.

“I would have vengeance in his death!” Kjieran gasped. For once, he did not regret knowing
elae’s
warmth no more
,
for lies came easily to him.  

Kjieran wrenched his neck to look up at his lord after offering this desperate plea, but the Prophet’s face was as stone. Anger rolled off of him in waves, and Kjieran let out another anguished cry as a force pressed him down, down…flat against the stones. He knew that back in life, his real body was being similarly crushed—even Dore’s pattern offered flimsy protection against the Prophet’s consumptive power.

Kjieran whimpered in agonized entreaty, “My lord—I would have him…
suffer
…” 

The vigor of Bethamin’s disapproval abated slightly, and the Prophet’s voice floated to him across space and time, distant and yet too near as their minds melded within the pattern of binding. “I must be able to trust you, Kjieran.”

Then you should not have destroyed and corrupted me with your touch!

“My lord…” Kjieran drew in a great shuddering breath. The delicate bones of his cheek were still forced painfully against the cold stones of Bethamin’s mental chamber. “You granted me the freedom to carry out your will. Do you deny it to me now?”

“This is what you claim to have been doing?” the Prophet returned dubiously, his favor relentlessly withdrawn. “I know your mind, Kjieran—your thoughts crossed freely to me upon the bond. You meant to save this king from a certain end.”

“Yes, my lord.” Kjieran said brokenly. A part of him was genuinely contrite—that portion of his soul which felt Bethamin’s wrath as a shattering loss and wanted only to please him, to regain his favor. Yet a much smaller, yet still determined, part railed against this subjugation, knowing it meant eternal bondage. It was from this place that he found the courage to reply weakly, “I crafted a dramatic deception…the better to draw out the king’s pain.”

“I did not think such vengeance within your ken, Kjieran.”

“I admit that I have changed in becoming your weapon, my lord,” Kjieran managed. Then he added in a threadbare voice, “How could I not?” There was no need to point out that if the Prophet had wanted to keep him pure, he shouldn’t have let Dore Madden at him, for this was evident, and Bethamin was no fool. Kjieran drew in courage with his breath and whispered, “What you saw, my lord, was me claiming my right to take this king’s life while defying the right of any other to do so. Gydryn val Lorian must be—” Kjieran stumbled over the words, lest his true intentions come through too desperately, “burned, my lord. He must be
punished
.”

The crushing weight of Bethamin’s anger at last withdrew. Trembling, Kjieran pushed unsteadily to hands and knees.

“Look at me, Kjieran.”

He sat back on his heels and lifted his colorless eyes to meet the Prophet’s scalding gaze, which licked over him like flames, leaving traces of heat everywhere it touched. The fury was absent from Bethamin’s dark eyes now, but other terrible emotions took its place, and Kjieran trembled at the thoughts that had birthed them.

The Prophet cupped his chin and bade him move to his feet. “You gave yourself to me freely,” he murmured, dark eyes hot upon Kjieran, a flood of confusing emotions crossing the bond to accost him with their sharp hunger, “so I give you this in return.”

And he fastened a kiss upon Kjieran’s mouth.

In the waking world, Kjieran’s eyes flew open. He emitted a silent scream as Bethamin’s power flooded into him, filled him, spilled out of him, his master’s corruptive seed overflowing into the fragile, virgin world.

When blackness cleared from his vision, Kjieran found himself on hands and knees. A host of armed men surrounded him with Kedar centermost among them. They all watched him uneasily, swords leveled, their stance showing a readiness to act at the least provocation.

In a single motion, Kjieran rose. The men took a reflexive step backwards in a sudden jangle of shifting mail. Kjieran settled his colorless eyes on Kedar. He suspected from the man’s infuriated glare that the wielder was working some kind of pattern meant to contain him.

No one could contain him.

Kjieran felt swollen with Bethamin’s power. He’d never before been entrusted with its discretionary use, but now he inherently understood how to wield it with the Prophet’s blessing kiss.

Somewhere beyond these men, Kjieran’s king was fighting, possibly dying. Kjieran reached out and found his king’s precious life pattern and isolated it in his mind to protect Gydryn. Then he fastened a merciless gaze on Kedar. His colorless eyes blackened at the edges with the violet-dark sparkle of
deyjiin,
and he opened his mouth to release the flood of Bethamin’s wrath upon the world.

***

The marauder who descended on Gydryn was a beast of a man. Standing a full head taller than the king, he wielded his scimitar as a barbarian wields a club, beating and bashing with ferocity. He moved lightning quick for all he lacked finesse, making up in strength what he lacked in technique, and the king foundered beneath the brute’s onslaught.

The barbarian drove the king back with a barrage of over-handed blows, casting him forth as flotsam before the storm, and all the while more marauders poured down singing their sharp trill, until the night became saturated with the sound. Horses flew wildly past carrying screaming riders who ran down anything in their path; scimitars flashed in the night, men screamed and blood-mist stained the air. It was chaos.

Just when Gydryn thought he might be gaining the upper hand on the giant, a rider flew behind him with a shrieking trill, and his razor-edged blade pierced the king’s hauberk. Gydryn staggered and gasped in pain, and the giant’s blade took him through his left side. Before he could turn to defend himself, the man’s blade took the king again in his right shoulder.

Gydryn fell to his knees. The shock of the grievous wounds rapidly overtook his senses. Emotions surged through him confusingly, thoughts that couldn’t fully form amid a fog of pain. Some part of him recognized the danger in this disconnectedness but could do nothing to change it. Gydryn blinked as the giant came and towered over him, his hulking features grey in the pitiless moonlight. He lifted his blade and—

Exploded into ash.

Gydryn shoved an arm across his face and spun away, choking. When he raised his head, blinking the blackened remains of flesh and bone from his stinging eyes, he beheld a gruesome scene.

In every direction, men were…
evaporating
.

Coughing a bloody froth that tasted of bitter acid and char, the king collapsed onto his side, staring but not understanding as the battling men became strangely shadowed and then dissolved in tumbles of billowing ash, their desiccated forms simply unable to hold shape any longer. Weapons clattered dully into the sand as their owners met an unimaginable end. What horses had not been claimed fled the scene with equine screams, sensitive to whatever evil power was at work.

Gydryn inhaled a painful breath and pushed up on one elbow to gain vision of the larger field. He searched for anything that would explain what he’d just witnessed, sought any signs of life, but even the bodies of the dead had been disintegrated. No evidence of the battle remained save a field littered with swords.

Until
—he saw him then. A dark figure rounded a distant dune, his cloak floating on the rising wind. Gydryn watched the figure slowly close the distance between them, a long walk across sands blackened with the slag of hundreds of men and horse. 

The figure reached him and in one motion bent and scooped up the king’s weakened form into arms of stone. “My king,” he pronounced wretchedly, his voice the whisper of wind beneath the dark strands of his hair.

Gydryn could barely draw breath for the pain that consumed his damaged body in that moment; certainly not enough to form a reply. He sagged in the man’s arms, gasping, but when the man began to run, the torture was too much. The king passed out.

When he came to, he sat upon a cantering horse with the hooded man’s ebon-black arm wrapped solidly about his chest, strong as any band of iron. And dawn was upon them.

The king sought words, sought coherent thought to form into such, but the shapes wouldn’t come to his tongue. He felt a choking weight in a mouth too dry with the dust of the dead. Gydryn’s gaze dimmed again, and he tumbled once more into darkness.

He finally regained consciousness in the heat of the deep afternoon as the cloaked stranger was half-carrying, half-dragging him up a steep dune. The scalding sun blinded him, and the burning sand scoured his wounds, eliciting a moan that hardly sounded his own. At last the man slung him down on the side of the dune and stalked away. Gydryn would’ve bartered his soul for but a trickle of water. Pain seemed to come from everywhere at once, seeping out of his very pores to taint his breath.

He followed the stranger with his eyes as the man descended into the bosom of the dunes toward a vast collection of striped tents, and one by one began ripping them down.

***

Kjieran dropped the king on the side of the dune and set off toward the host of tents that had been erected for the parley. With every step, he sunk to his knees. The sun was a blistering inferno above him. It drew forth heat from the scalding sand, baked the air, and roused a furnace wind. Yet Kjieran’s struggle with the elements could not compare to the ravaging fury berating his consciousness.

The Prophet knew
. And no dissembling would assuage his fury.

Kjieran didn’t know how much Bethamin had gleaned of his true intentions, but he knew Kjieran had deceived him. Now the man fought to gain control over Kjieran, body and mind.

Kjieran fought back with everything that he was.

The Prophet repeatedly threw bands of compulsion across the bond, but thanks to Raine’s amulet and Kjieran’s vigilance upon his thoughts, Bethamin couldn’t take over Kjieran completely. The compulsion fell short in the waters of Kjieran’s consciousness, yet each attempt struck those waters hurricane force, the power of his fury as sleet sheeting across freezing seas. It numbed thought and turned every action into a sluggish battle for control.

Kjieran gritted his teeth and pressed forward. Every thought—every ounce of will he could muster—he focused upon completing one action at a time. He managed each with a snarl of defiance broken by gruesome cries of pain, for his mind was fractured by the patterns that sought to bind him, by the throbbing rage of the man who sought to own him, and by his own conflicted emotions—loyalties and betrayals as a bewildering jumble of purposes whose details were rapidly losing shape.

Kjieran’s head felt an exploding sun, so he focused on putting one blackened foot before the other—one hand and then the next grasped the striped cloth canvas and tore the tents down with inhuman strength, until he’d gathered the entire structure into a massive, billowing tower of wood and canvas.

YOU WILL STOP THIS, KJIERAN!

Bethamin’s will impaled Kjieran’s mind, a violent rape of his determinism. He staggered beneath the onslaught and fell to his knees and he screamed. Compulsion drew forth unwilling emotions as a needle drew blood, and Kjieran writhed in the sand, his body shaking and twitching. In that moment, he could do naught but gaze upwards at the blinding sun, knowing only the piercing agony of Bethamin’s disfavor and the intensity of his unrelenting determination.

But the Prophet’s attempt to claim him failed, and as the force of his working faded, Kjieran regained himself. Trembling, he attempted to push to hands and knees but just as quickly collapsed again with a sharp gasp.

All of his ribs had broken.

Several minutes passed before he found the will to move. When he did, pain blazed violently. Yet he welcomed its heat, for it was a cruel, if potent, reminder that part of him could still be harmed, that some portion of him yet walked
elae’s
path.

Kjieran lifted his gaze far across the clearing and focused on the supply tent. Grunting with the effort, he lifted himself from the sand and staggered toward the tents with determination as his only fuel. 

With the Prophet casting damnations at him all the while from the other end of their hateful bond, Kjieran dragged a single barrel from the supply tent and heaved the cask atop the towering pile of canvas and wood. The barrel split upon landing.

Kjieran stumbled back in a faltering, drunkard’s slog and assessed the pyre. A clear fluid spewed from the split barrel. Absinthe. Drunk in quantity by Radov’s troops, it had been stocked for the parley’s concluding feast. Kjieran would put the volatile spirit to better use.

KJIERAN I DEMAND YOU CEASE UPON THIS COURSE!

Bethamin sought to drag him into his own mind once more, but Kjieran resisted fiercely. Should he fall beneath the Prophet’s will this time, there would be no return to consciousness.