The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (107 page)

Bethamin’s battering will lashed him repeatedly, as if to expurgate his defiance. Kjieran gripped his medallion and clenched his teeth. Holding onto himself with a will he’d never imagined possible, he pointed his fingers toward the barrel and gathered
elae
to him.

The process was laboriously slow and as painful as trying to breathe under water. All the while, the Prophet’s whip cracked against Kjieran’s consciousness, bringing stinging tears of pain and betrayal, commanding contrition—all of these intermingled with Bethamin’s own immeasurable fury.

Kjieran summoned
elae
. A part of his shattered mind wondered if his goddess was not somehow helping him…

And then, with a surge of elation, he held
the lifeforce in his grasp. Just the tiniest tendril, but it was enough.

He cast a spark of the fourth strand toward the absinthe-soaked canvas and then fell to his knees as it arced through the air…

Searing heat buffeted him as the entire pyre erupted.

With the explosion still echoing against the surrounding cliffs, Kjieran dragged himself to his feet and across the clearing toward Gydryn’s inert body. He dropped to his knees at the king’s side.

“Sire,” Kjieran gasped even as Bethamin’s infuriated will bombarded him.

The king blinked open bloodshot eyes. His life, too, was in Epiphany’s hands.

Gydryn seemed only then to recognize Kjieran, for his eyes widened and his lips formed a dry whisper too faint to be heard above the roaring flames.

Kjieran took a water flask from his belt and held it to the king’s cracked lips, letting a trickle of liquid moisten them. The king drank what he offered, but his eyes never left Kjieran’s.

Bethamin’s presence filled Kjieran’s mind, and Kjieran knew the Prophet would have him any second. Already each moment seemed twice as removed from the end of his path as the one that had come before. He felt as if the Prophet was hauling him backwards, away from the death he so desperately sought. Time grew frighteningly short.

Holding the king’s questioning gaze, Kjieran looked down at the bulging muscles of his blackened chest. Just a circle of pale flesh remained where Raine’s amulet lay. Stronger even than Bethamin’s fury was Kjieran’s desire to confess.

Tears streamed down his face as Kjieran pushed fingers into the king’s shoulder, eliciting a gasp of pain. He stared hard into Gydryn’s eyes, not daring to speak, as he scrawled instead across his own ravaged chest,

he sees what I see

The king’s eyes widened.

“Sire,” Kjieran managed a pitiful rasp, barely able to summon the will to form the words again, “Your son…Trell lives. The princes’ deaths…it was
Radov
—”

Abruptly Kjieran screamed, assaulted by the fury and violence of the Prophet’s piercing contention.

Kjieran yanked Raine’s amulet free of his neck and shoved it into Gydryn’s hand.

Then, with a last cry of despair, he tore himself away.

Bethamin filled him as he fled in a staggering gait, his mind only moments from domination.

Reaching the pyre, Kjieran took a running leap and flung himself high into the flames. The Prophet thundered and raged, and Kjieran became the voice of his fury as he let out a howl that pierced the sky. His dark hair exploded in flames. The flesh of his face charred and blackened and peeled away, revealing an ebon skull beneath.

Only when he reached the top and fiercest part of the pyre did he collapse. As he succumbed then to the flames, to the guilt and grief and fear, the Prophet abandoned his impotent fury and grew silent…still.

Time seemed to ebb and wane. What few remaining living parts Kjieran possessed soon boiled away, leaving him in silent agony unable even to cry out, pinned to that petrified flesh in darkness.

He couldn’t know if it would work, and as he lay in blind agony, he understood a new level of terror. For this was his last hope. If his plan failed, his blackened body would emerge from the charred pyre of dying flames seemingly unscathed but for the utter corruption of his soul.

Kjieran desperately wished that Bethamin would leave him to his despair and his grief, that he might meet his end in peace and be spared finally from the Prophet’s lustful desires. But the man’s presence remained, hovering within his consciousness, drinking in his desolate thoughts.

At last the pyre shuddered beneath Kjieran, and his ravaged body tumbled into the deep well of coals. A geyser of fiery cinders and smoke erupted to join the billowing clouds already darkening the sky, and new flames sprouted where others had ebbed. As the heat of the fire’s core latched onto Kjieran’s mutated flesh, its hunger at last proved superior to Dore’s working.

Kjieran thought he’d traveled the gamut of pain’s many forms, yet he realized in that moment that he’d barely begun to explore them. As he opened his mouth in a soundless scream, his jaw dissolved to cinders. He tried to flail his arms, but his stone hands melted into lava. Only then, as Dore’s very pattern caught the flame, did Kjieran finally fade from consciousness.

His life ebbed as his spirit withdrew from the world of men. Death hovered with shadowed, gossamer wings. Kjieran stared into the void of unmaking, desperate for the oblivion it offered. And then…

A flicker in the darkness.

Into the void, a spark erupted. The goddess of Kjieran’s dream pierced the descending veil of death, appearing as a too-brilliant form with wings of shimmering light. She descended to claim him before he slid into the void of unmaking, and he heard her voice as music, as light itself might speak if it could manifest in sound.

What troubles you
, Kjieran?
asked the butterfly that was a goddess.

“
I fear I will lose myself forever
,” Kjieran wept into the void, knowing his spirit yet hovered close to the shadows—so close that their kiss was a chilling caress, the promise of unmaking a dreadful temptation.

Would you bind yourself to me and know rebirth
?

“I am bound to another already,”
Kjieran’s soul cried, destitute by this truth. He turned his awareness toward the hovering shadows, for he sought the embrace of unmaking over the eternal knowledge of all that he’d lost.

But the goddess flamed before him, and her light drew his spirit back.
This was done against your will
, she told him in the way of spirits, her shimmering form shifting so rapidly that Kjieran saw multiple shapes coalesce and dissolve again.
Such bindings are never strong
.

Kjieran’s soul trembled as he confessed his deepest fear,
“But the working was bound with the fifth.”

The goddess shimmered and blazed.
The fifth cannot bind your soul once the body is gone.
She glowed so brightly that he could barely look upon her.
But I can…should you wish it.

Yes,
he knew that she could, for she was the lifeforce of the fourth strand and that of creation, and the kinetic energy of the second strand and even the wildly variant aspects of the third—she was every strand but the fifth. She was Life.

She
was
elae. 

“
My lady
,” Kjieran’s soul gasped into the void, which had become saturated now with light,
“I would bind myself to you a thousand times and again.”

Her shimmering wings enfolded his battered spirit, and Kjieran became blinded by brilliance. By a flooding warmth. By the sudden acute awareness of the millions of souls who had bound themselves to her and been reborn.

Finally then did he feel the bond with Bethamin dissolving—even the fifth-strand pattern seared away. The Prophet’s anguished wail faded to a whisper and was gone.

The last thing Kjieran knew was the bliss of Epiphany’s final blessing.

Then let it be so, Kjieran van Stone.

***

Gydryn val Lorian lay dying.

As he labored over each indrawn breath, he clutched the amulet Kjieran had given him and marveled at the mighty forces of fate that had brought them together for their mutual ends. He’d watched as Kjieran’s black-robed figure climbed the flaming pyre and collapsed atop its peak, watched as the man’s shredded garments were consumed in smoke and flame. He had prayed for him, whispering the Rite for the Departed as the sun fell toward the horizon and smoke billowed upwards to pollute the sky.

Gydryn expected his time approached as well. As the day lengthened and waned, he faded in and out of consciousness. Sometimes he dreamed. At one point, he thought he saw dark riders atop the far ridge, their silk garments swirling and twisting upon the winds. He’d felt a glimmer of hope stir in his exhausted soul, but then he’d looked a second time and realized they were only shadows cast by the falling sun.

His dulled senses spent some time pondering the mystery of the words Kjieran had scrawled upon his chest and wondered on the news the once-truthreader had delivered of his sons; but in the end, thought itself became too difficult. Gydryn abandoned it, letting his attention wander as his life waned.

He must’ve drifted off, for when he opened his eyes with a sudden sense of alarm, he noted that the sun had fallen behind the hills and a shadow lay upon him.

The shadow of a man.

Gydryn blinked away the abrasive sand and lifted his gaze. Piercing brown eyes stared down at him beneath a black and silver turban. The Khurd pulled his scarf free to reveal the angular features of a man in his prime and a strong jaw shadowed by a close-cut beard.

“Prince Farid!” Another dark-eyed Khurd rushed up to join the first, but the latter drew up short as his gaze befell the king. “Is
that
—?” The man cut off his own question, his heavy black brows arched in surprise.

The prince stared down at the king, and there was little of amity in his inscrutable gaze. He spun in a swirl of black silk. “Take him.”

Hands reached for Gydryn, the world spun crazily, and the dying king fled into the darkness of oblivion.

“All was going as planned until
they showed up.”

- The Adept truthreader Cristien Tagliaferro,

on the Paladin Knights invading the Citadel of Tiern’aval

“Enough.”
Ean doubled over. He rested hands on his knees and looked up under his brows at Markal, who stood across the field.

They worked that day in a high meadow overlooking Niyadbakir and its majestic mountains. A storm was rising in the south; charcoal clouds had amassed against the mountains’ jagged emerald reaches, and the mottled sky between was becoming a battleground. The storm clouds advanced into the sun’s dominion, only to be broken apart by powerful shafts of arrow-light piercing down to the valley. Three silvering waterfalls cascaded beneath one such strip of light, the falls’ streaming from the high ridge to disappear into the emerald canopy.

And Ean was tired.

Tired of this training, tired of Markal’s unrelenting condescension and their inevitably contentious relationship…tired of trying to remember the life and education of a name he hadn’t claimed for centuries.

“I don’t see why we keep having to do this,” the prince complained. The statement encapsulated his entire outlook at the moment.

“That has ever been your problem,” Markal growled.

Ean straightened with a frustrated sigh. “We’ve been at this since dawn. I’ve made you do a hundred different things. Surely I’ve proven I can work compulsion patterns.”

Markal rested both hands on his staff and gave Ean a nightmare of a frown. “As ever, you utterly fail to grasp the point of the lesson.
Patterning is most effective at the level of thought,
” he quoted the referenced law. “But we are not merely working with the Sixth Law, Ean val Lorian. We are also working with the Ninth Esoteric.”

“Which is about as comprehensible as Cyrenaic hieroglyphs!” Ean snapped with a hand flung to the valley at large.

“
Pure concept always overwhelms linear translation
,” Markal stated, as if the Esoteric would somehow become clarified in repeating it for the tenth time. Then he added critically, “If the Esoterics were so simplistic a child could understand them, they would not be considered Esoterics.”  

“And the mouse said to the tiger, come hither and I shall tickle your ear,” Ean muttered, which he felt was just as helpful a statement.

Markal arched a mordant black brow. “If you are so obtuse as to only comprehend
simple
concepts, Ean val Lorian, go back to your arithmetic and the abacus and leave Patterning to those with the wits to apply its laws properly.”  

Ean glare
d sootily at him, for there was really nothing he could say to that. After a moment of staring fractiously at each other, the prince grumbled, “Did we
ever
get along?”

Markal arched brows and turned his back on him. “Have you ever done as you were instructed?”