The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (98 page)

Kjieran never knew why he called for the Prophet. Perhaps in his agonized condition, in the confusion of waiting for a death that had disavowed him, he sought companionship during the hours that should’ve been his last…so he sought the only living soul his agonized mind could reach.

My lord…

In moments, the Prophet’s awareness opened to him.

Kjieran
…Kjieran what has happened?

Kjieran had barely recalled the brutal memory for the Prophet’s inspection before he was drawn within his consciousness. The world took a different shape, and Bethamin was suddenly kneeling at his side. His hands—strangely warm—lifted Kjieran’s shoulders, and the Prophet cradled Kjieran’s head in his lap.

“I do not understand,” Bethamin said, his dark eyes uncommonly vivid, his tone sharp. “What has happened?” 

Kjieran tried to focus, but it was so hard when confusion clung to every thought. A jumble of images bounced across the bond. He saw the Prophet react, saw his gaze tighten, his dark eyes turn ever colder. “
WHO DARES ATTEMPT HARM YOU!
” 

Kjieran felt the blast of Bethamin’s righteous anger shuddering through him, a thunderous rage that shook marble dust from the massive stones of his mental chamber.  “Hal’Jaitar,” Kjieran whispered.

There was no reason he should feel weak, he knew, for they communed now out of time, wholly in the Prophet’s mind. But some residual awareness of his body made it hard for him to find strength or will, his very real disorientation causing a lack of mental clarity and focus.

The Prophet pushed a strand of raven hair from Kjieran’s forehead. It seemed impossible, but Kjieran thought he sensed concern in the man’s manner, in the reverberation of his thoughts—something more than mere indignation. Could it be that the Prophet actually
cared
about him? Kjieran had thought such emotion entirely beyond his ken. 

The Prophet’s hold upon him was strong, the bond growing, thickening like the stalk of some noxious weed. Kjieran knew before Bethamin asked what his next question would be. “Why did you not call upon me for aid?”  His tone was dangerous and dark, full of injury and accusation.

Kjieran held the Prophet’s gaze feeling wretched and distraught. He braved only the truth. “To my great shame, my lord, I sought to know what would happen…to know if my body could still be injured. I regret that my human soul is so frail, my will so weak…I regret that I sought to know such things.”

The Prophet trailed his fingers down Kjieran’s face, pressed his thumb hard upon his chin to part his lips. Anger rolled off him in waves, the storm of his thoughts amassing chill clouds of power. “This Viernan hal’Jaitar, Radov’s wielder,” he said in a low voice, his dark eyes veritably exploding with fury, “I will make him suffer for this.”

Kjieran closed his eyes and let the Prophet’s anger wash over him. Somehow it felt…cleansing. The part of him that was still himself shuddered in this knowledge, for he saw that he was changing,
becoming
…but in that moment of heartbroken misery, he could not prevent it—did not even want to. In that moment, Bethamin owned him wholly.

He opened his eyes to find the Prophet’s face close, his mass of braids a curtain enclosing them both, his large eyes dark and desiring.

Abandoning the whispered warnings of his shattered soul, Kjieran reached for him.

He regained consciousness with a gasp.

Sunset flamed the sky above him, the bloody clouds an unwanted reminder of the copulation he’d just so willingly embraced.

I made love to a monster
.

The knowledge sickened him.

As he regained awareness of where he was, of what had been done in that abandoned alley…he suddenly clutched his chest.

But the tiny medallion was still there, safe around his neck. It seemed the brutes had merely meant to punish and kill him, not to rob him of what little he owned.
I shall remember this one grace when I exact the Prophet’s vengeance upon you, hal’Jaitar,
Kjieran thought
.
Yet upon hearing himself even think such a thing, he shuddered, for he saw that this had not been his thought at all, but the expression of some…
other
. The
other
that he was becoming.

Suddenly awareness descended upon him—the terrible knowledge of what had been taken from him, the horrors that had already been exacted against him…and what was yet to be.

He’d sought the Prophet in his last moments and consummated their bond!

Though it was only in thought and not in physical deed, yet it seemed no less real for lack of the Prophet’s seed upon his loins or their mark upon the tides of
elae
.

He’d sought comfort in the Prophet, had accepted his love, and had returned to life less human because of it. Something
else
had come back with him, and like Dore’s Pattern of Changing, it would slowly overtake all that Kjieran was, a parasite gradually absorbing its host until it was all and him the host, nothing. Kjieran loathed the thing he was becoming, loathed himself that he had been so weak as to seek solace in the arms of such a man as Bethamin of Myacene. Kjieran lay in shock while the world spun crazily, and then his shoulders began to shake.

He wept there in the alley then for all he had lost.

Eventually his tearless sobs abated. Eventually he realized he had to get up and continue on, for even the grace of death had turned its back on him. Desolate, Kjieran rolled onto his back and stared at the fletching on the bolts protruding from his chest. It seemed another man’s hand that reached up, and with a strong tug, ripped them free. He cast the shafts clattering against the wall.

Pressing both hands to support his ruptured abdomen, Kjieran sat up and assessed the damage. His gut was a shambles, ripped from hip to hip. More horrifying still was that it seemed the wound of a rotten fish, bloodless, with all of his vital organs hanging dark and unhealthy within the cavity, long dead. His body had become as inanimate clay just waiting to be molded, waiting for the fell magic to spread into its dull substance, to fashion it into Dore’s Merdanti blade. 

Pushing one arm across his ravaged belly, Kjieran struggled to his feet. Night had fallen, and the streets were dark. Seeming a beggar in ripped and soiled clothes, he made his slow way back to the palace.

It took a great effort to hold
elae
and drape himself in shadows. The lifeforce kept slipping out of his grasp, seeping out of the holes in his chest and gut. No longer a vessel for
elae
, his body was a sieve. Yet he took some comfort that he might call the lifeforce at all, and strangely did not despair in how little of it he could control.

Still, it was slow going. He dared not let a soul see him return—never mind the questions he would get from the guards, he did not want hal’Jaitar knowing yet that he lived—and he could not keep the obscuring pattern solid for long. He moved then in spurts, one street, one alley, one tunnel at a time.

When he finally reached his rooms, Kjieran found that they’d been ransacked. He locked the door nonetheless, and after some searching, uncovered his little box of needle and thread from a pile of clothing dumped beside his chest of drawers. He ripped off his tunic and let his britches fall around his feet. Taking the black thread in hand, Kjieran began stitching himself back together.

While upon this task, he planned.

Some
thing
had come back with him from that foray into the Prophet’s mind, a new awareness birthed in their sex. It was a cold and heartless entity, and the innocent truthreader in Kjieran had shied from it at first. But as he slowly pierced his dead flesh and tied off each knot, pierced and tied with painstaking care, he could not keep from glancing every so often to where the thing crouched in the corner of his mind, a wild and volatile creature.

But one that might be at his command, if he was brave enough to compel it.

Oh,
he knew it would attempt to control him as well, that they might wrestle over every choice and action, but he also somehow knew that so long as
elae
was with him, he might still be the victor…might use it to his own ends.

The beast had consumed the last of his innocence. He would make that sacrifice worth something.

So while Kjieran sewed his flesh back together, he talked to the beast, timidly at first, but then with growing surety. When at last he tied off the final knot of his sutures and snapped the hanging thread, he had formed something of a plan. It was dangerous, and he never would have attempted it before he’d lain down with the Prophet, but he saw now how little he had left to lose.

Rather than clutch what tiny remaining treasure he held and huddle in cowardice and despair, Kjieran now understood he would only be worthy of this lingering piece of himself if he succeeded in saving his king.

Standing then, straightening with his resolve, Kjieran walked to the carved wooden screens that acted as doors between his room and the night. He hadn’t realized until that moment that he’d been operating in darkness, but the moon was high now and it cast a glimmering reflection on the wavering sea.

Thinking upon his act with the Prophet, Kjieran wondered if he would ever reach the furthest level of Hell, or if in truth, Hell had no end. Every time it seemed he could cast his nets no lower, still they snared some new atrocity to subjugate and torment him. Hours ago he’d been ready for death, sure he would at any moment stare upon its misshapen face. Now death seemed impossibly out of reach, an impotent phantom with naught but moonlight for substance.

All the better, for he had things to do.

It was hours before he found his bed that night, hours spent outlining his plan, examining scenarios, exploring contingencies. Finally there was but one remaining act before lying down to sleep.

Kjieran took off his amulet.

“Partaking of Alorin’s tender flesh has roused in them an insatia
ble hunger for worlds they were never meant to know.”

- Jayachándranáptra, Rival of the Sun

Trell pitched
to his knees on the marble floor. The hood was ripped from his head, and he inhaled free air for the first time since departing camp in the Kutsamak. There was something to be said for the Saldarians’ treatment of prisoners; it was hard to plan any sort of escape with your hands and legs bound in iron and stinking burlap over your head, the rough cloth slit just enough to prevent smothering.

As his eyes adjusted to the light, Trell looked around the long, rectangular room whose
walls were decorated in elaborately carved soapstone panels. High windows let in the afternoon light, long shafts of which fell in perfect symmetry to cast illumination on four carved marble lions. Each animal held a paw upraised, jaws open in soundless roars.

“Unshackle him.”

Trell looked over his shoulder to see a man entering through a set of double doors at the near end of the room. He wore robes of ebon silk, and his head was bound in the Nadori
keffiyeh
and black-corded
agal
. As he approached, Trell noted that he wore eight Sormitáge rings, one on each of his fingers. Trell had no question of his identity.

The Saldarian guard released the iron cuffs, and Trell gingerly massaged his wrists as he got to his feet.

“Leave us,” commanded the wielder.

“But my lord—”

“I said
leave us!
”

The Saldarian ducked his head and stalked off. Trell watched him go with a shadow of a smile. How fearful did they think him if they imagined he’d take on Viernan hal’Jaitar with naught but his bare hands?

Hal’Jaitar must’ve reached the same conclusion, for he looked to Trell with one eyebrow raised. “It seems you made quite the impression, Prince of Dannym.” The wielder stopped beside one of two sofas, velvet-covered and low-backed, with a table in between. Four glasses and a silver teapot sat on the table, and a faint tendril of steam emitted from the pot’s curving spout. Hal’Jaitar indicated the sofa across from him with an open hand. “Won’t you join me?”

Still rubbing his wrists, Trell walked slowly to the sofa with his body aching from bruises old and new. The trip east had been rough, and his treatment just shy of brutal. He was fairly sure one of his ribs had been fractured. Every breath was painful, every motion an effort of will, but he’d be damned if he’d let Viernan hal’Jaitar see him hurting.

As Trell was slowly lowering himself down, the wielder leaned back in his seat and crossed one knee, settling hands in his lap. “Let us assume we know each other,” he said with his piercing dark eyes pinned on Trell. There was naught of amity in his gaze, belying his mild tone. “Imagine we have met again after many years abroad. What then might you tell me of your travels?”

“You mean, since you sen
t men to assassinate me and set fire to my ship? Since then?”

Viernan’s expression darkened. “So you do remember. They told me you claimed no knowledge of your past.”