Kingdom Blades (A Pattern of Shadow & Light 4) Read online

  Two

  “There is no turning back upon the road to truth. One must walk it to the bloody end.”

  –Morin d’Hain, Spymaster of Dannym

  Across the Middle Kingdoms of Alorin, Old Night had staked her claim. She’d drawn a blanket of clouds over the northeastern province of Saldaria and its sleeping city of Tambarré and now stood a jealous watch, that the nimble Dawn might not disturb these lands too quickly. She ruled the dark with a hag’s churlish mood, and the dreams she delivered to Tambarré’s sleeping occupants held the sharp tang of her festering resentment.

  When the world had been young and the mountains new, Night would come bearing gifts. She would sprinkle the firmament with stars and limn all things in moonsilver. Lovers would dally sweet and long beneath her auspicious gaze. Men became bold, and women more beautiful; babes grew stronger, children taller, and old men found peaceful rest. Bravery, hope, courage, faith—all such treasures were easily found by those who wished for them. The sleeping dreamed of whatever they most desired.

  But as the ages turned, Night saw her gifts misused, her blessings twisted to bring harm, her sweet, candied dreams feeding envy and greed. Over the centuries, Old Night beheld too many disappointments: innocence sacrificed, lovers lost; men spilling one another’s blood for want of dirt or bits of metal, battling armies taking advantage of her dark veils to advance vengeful atrocities.

  Old Night couldn’t recall when compassion had left her. It had run away with the jealous moon one night and never returned. In its absence, she’d become distempered, inconstant, vengeful. No longer did she convey ephemeral dreams of sweetness and hope, for men would only twist their fragile constructs into violent shapes. Now she gave them dreams of wrath, for this darkness was all they cared for.

  Darshanvenkhátraman, Destroyer of Hope, was no less prey to Old Night’s foul temper than the rest of Tambarré’s sleeping occupants. As she spread ill across her demesne, Darshan writhed on the bed of his temple chambers, caught in the throes of a torment, part memory, part dream…

  *—*

  “Kjieran…Kjieran what has happened?” Darshan gathered his acolyte into his arms.

  Kjieran pushed a jumble of confused images across the bond, each of them blood-tinged and desperate. His thoughts sought oblivion.

  As Darshan pieced together what had happened, his fury surpassed the bounds of reason. “WHO DARES ATTEMPT TO HARM YOU?”

  “Hal’Jaitar,” Kjieran whispered.

  Hal’Jaitar. Hal’Jaitar. Always this wielder’s name spoken in association with his acolyte’s pain.

  Darshan pushed a strand of raven hair from Kjieran’s forehead, wearing a look of outrage. Their bond had grown thick in the intervening weeks, its stalk dug deep; sprawling roots bound the fibers of both of their beings. To lose Kjieran now would be to lose a part of himself.

  The emotions that gripped Darshan were stronger than any he’d experienced in the Void. Unmaking had never engendered such urgency as this need to ensure Kjieran’s safety and protection.

  He held his acolyte’s head with one hand while stroking his hair with the other. “Why did you not call upon me for aid?” The terrible foreboding of losing Kjieran made his tone dangerous and dark, full of injury and accusation when all he really felt was concern.

  Kjieran opened his eyes as his lord held him, and in the meeting of their gazes offered a desperate submission that aroused Darshan to new heights. Kjieran reached for him…

  —the dream shifted—

  “KJIERAN, I DEMAND YOU CEASE UPON THIS COURSE!”

  Darshan roared through the magical binding that joined him with his acolyte, yet Kjieran continued to defy him. The truthreader stumbled through the desert sands, refusing to respond. As he neared a pyre constructed of jumbled tents, Kjieran extended his hand and gathered elae to him. Darshan felt the snap of Kjieran’s intent as it formed, and the pyre erupted into flame. He tried then to claim control of Kjieran’s body, but the acolyte threw himself onto the pyre in spite of this.

  Darshan’s rage thundered like a tidal wave across the bond. Kjieran became the voice of his fury, howling a cry that pierced the sky.

  As Kjieran’s eidola body began to burn, Darshan felt his connection with Kjieran thinning. The pattern of binding became a frayed rope lashing two skiffs together in a storm. Such a feeling beset him as he’d never experienced. Later he would come to know it as desperation.

  Then the binding rope snapped, and Darshan felt Kjieran falling away. They were men stranded in separate lifeboats in a storm-swept sea. Darshan watched helplessly as the waves drew him and Kjieran in opposite directions. He could do nothing but fume in silence—

  “Why do you plague me with this memory?” In the dream, Darshan shifted irritably in a low-slung chair and looked to Kjieran, who was kneeling at his feet.

  They were in the highest level of the Prophet’s residence on the Tambarré acropolis. To Darshan’s left, an arcade of arches framed the Iverness Mountains and their jagged line of snowy peaks, while to his right, high clouds were casting lonesome shadows across the southern plains. Beyond his shaded temple, the day seemed too bright.

  Yet…the day was actually night and Darshan’s body was asleep. He knew this the way one knows things in dreams.

  The Kjieran dreams were coming regularly now. Each time they began with the same vivid memory of Kjieran’s final moments. Invariably they left Darshan feeling betrayed anew and kept the wound of Kjieran’s treason freshly bloodied.

  Always Darshan would wake from the instant of Kjieran’s demise into a dream within a dream, where Kjieran’s ghost waited to torment him. Sometimes Darshan saw his acolyte’s face clearly; other times it was frustratingly obscured. Just then, Kjieran’s dark hair had fallen forward, shadowing his eyes.

  “Perhaps…” Kjieran whispered, “perhaps it’s because you haven’t yet learned its lesson, my lord?”

  Darshan assessed him critically. “What lesson is there to be learned from betrayal?”

  Kjieran braved a glance up at him. “Why else would you be forcing yourself to remember a moment repeatedly, my lord, save to discover some new meaning in its recollection?”

  Darshan grunted. “That assumes you’re here as some construct of mine, but immortals do not dream.”

  Kjieran’s colorless eyes dropped again. “If this is no dream, my lord…what is it?”

  Darshan’s gaze tightened. “I suspect it is a haunting.”

  Kjieran’s brow furrowed. “Why would I be haunting you?”

  “I suspect you’d know that better than me.”

  “But I don’t know!” Kjieran’s eyes flew back to Darshan’s. “I only know that I’m here with you. Surely this proves it is but a dream—for in a dream, I’m but a construct and might only know what you know.”

  Darshan regarded him, darkly desirous. “If this were a dream of my construction, Kjieran van Stone, you and I would be doing other than talking.”

  A faint flush came to Kjieran’s features.

  Darshan reflected that at least this iteration of Kjieran wasn’t saturated with fear, but it bothered him, not knowing whence came these ‘dreams.’ Were they actually a construct of his own imagination, or the product of some magic worked upon him by his brothers? Or, as they more clearly seemed, communion with a spirit who had not moved on?

  The latter idea proposed the most confusion.

  When Dore Madden had first given him the binding patterns to work on Kjieran van Stone, he’d told Darshan of the Adept Returning. Dore had described the frail human bodies as vessels holding an immortal being, one whose essence remained the same through an endless succession of shells.

  Darshan had thought the concept utter folly—one more of a thousand-again illusory tales that humanity had invented for purposes unfathomable to him; yet Shail similarly claimed that Ean val Lorian, the prince who had become so troublesome to them, was in fact a Returned Adept from an earlier age.

  Whether or not he believed Dore
and Shail—neither of whom could be trusted—Kjieran’s presence in his dreams begged the question: if Kjieran had not been unmade in death, as all things were wont at the fringes of Chaos…where did his essence go? Certainly Darshan had intended for their binding to be eternal when he’d forged the working. Had he succeeded in binding Kjieran’s soul to him, independently of any body that soul was meant to fill?

  The mystery troubled him deeply, for it had numerous unsettling ramifications.

  Of course it bothers you, brother. If these ‘creatures’ called Mankind are immortal beings, it proves they were meant to endure. Pelas’s unwelcome voice intruded on his dream, his thoughts…his haunting? Perhaps Kjieran and Pelas were both haunting him.

  Darshan pushed from his chair. “Walk with me, Kjieran.”

  Kjieran stood with eyes still downcast and set off with his lord.

  Darshan clasped hands behind his back and strolled towards the band of daylight that brightened the world beyond the temple’s arcade. He wondered at the odd attachment he had to Kjieran; how even after treason and betrayal, he still desired the Adept’s companionship. Just thinking of Kjieran drew a cord of tension through Darshan. Pelas had a name for the sensation.

  “It’s called love, my lord,” Kjieran said quietly.

  Darshan cast him a sidelong eye. What did it prove that this specter of Kjieran so clearly knew his thoughts? Unfortunately little—ghost or dream, either could explain it. “Love…” he arched a critical brow, “is an illusion.”

  “Call it what you will, or call it nothing; still you cannot deny the experience of it, my lord.”

  “Experience.” Darshan’s eyes tightened. “That’s Pelas’s word.”

  But could his brother Pelas have gained the know-how to impose dreams upon his consciousness, even while convinced that his power was gone, even locked away in a tower halfway around the world? Pelas had tricks that defied Darshan’s understanding.

  He swept Kjieran with his gaze, seeking shades of Pelas in his acolyte’s manner. “I don’t recall the living Kjieran as ever being so bold.”

  Kjieran’s brow constricted as he thought this over. “If I’m the construct of a dream, my lord, then you’re dreaming me in this guise. Perhaps this is how you would’ve wanted me to be. Then again,” he said, arching brows resignedly, “a ghost would have no fear of boldness, for what has a ghost to lose?”

  *—*

  A fervent banging on the outer door dragged Darshan from the dream.

  He roused to find the three acolytes he’d taken to his bed last night still sleeping among the tangled sheets and that incessant banging reverberating like a gong through his chambers. He aimed thought as a spear and stilled the man beyond the door. The banging ceased.

  Daylight was flooding the room, too bright for an early sun. He’d slept longer than he meant to, the ill dream holding him hostage even as Kjieran’s memory did. How could he still feel such connection to a man who had betrayed him so thoroughly?

  Like Pelas has betrayed you?

  The thought came from elsewhere than his own mind, he was certain, for it held a strain of guilt that was an emotion foreign to him. Pelas had earned his fate with his idylls and dilettante ramblings about the realm…with his blatant defiance of purpose. Darshan had been forced to obscure his brother’s power for his own good.

  “…My lord?” an Ascendant’s voice floated diffidently to him from beyond the heavy doors. “The Advisor says they’re waiting for you to depart for Tal’Shira by the Sea.”

  Yes…

  Darshan threw off the sheets and shook out his mass of braids as he headed off to wash and dress. His mind was already traveling ahead to the moment he would stand over Viernan hal’Jaitar and determine his guilt or innocence.

  ***

  The Adept wielder Viernan hal’Jaitar, Consul to M’Nador’s Ruling Prince, stood in the shade of a cloistered walkway bordering the plaza known as the Court of Fifty-Two Arches. Before him, three score Talien Knights stood in formation, sweltering in the midday sun while they awaited the arrival of Prince Radov’s esteemed guests.

  Esteemed guests…

  Hal’Jaitar snorted dubiously. He couldn’t decide which man he held in less esteem—the lunatic Dore Madden, or that lunatic he served, the Prophet Bethamin.

  The Prophet sought followers and minions, looked mistrustfully upon allies, and considered no man his equal. It grated on hal’Jaitar that he had no other recourse but to enter into yet another pact with the Prophet Bethamin. He despised the truths that had driven him to such desperate measures—incredible truths…incomprehensible truths.

  Gydryn val Lorian had gotten the better of him.

  Even in the silence of his thoughts, this admission rang discordant bells of impossibility. Gydryn had taken the point—by Cephrael’s Great Book, he’d taken the whole bloody match! And the reports only grew more inconceivable as the days progressed. Another scout arrived each hour, it seemed, to report the same news: the Dannish soldiers were abandoning their positions, disappearing from the lines.

  How did an entire regiment of soldiers simply vanish overnight as if swallowed by the desert sands? Even when the departing troops left a trail, it invariably wound into the stony mountains where a convoy of trolls could pass unnoticed.

  Hal’Jaitar ground his teeth.

  His men had trained the Dannish soldiers to blend in, cover their tracks and leave no trace; the Akkad and M’Nador’s war was one of ambush and subterfuge, not mile-long lines of soldiers marching towards well-organized death. Now the Northmen were putting their newfound skills to mutinous use. It was galling to imagine an entire army skulking somewhere among the immensity of M’Nador, plotting mutinous departure, or worse, overthrow.

  Hal’Jaitar had sent his Shamshir’im to the four corners of the princedom in an effort to head off future desertions. They’d intercepted a company of mutineers and were holding them now at the Fortress of Khor Taran in the region of Abu’Dhan. If nothing else, those soldiers would provide some leverage over Dannym’s unruly king when they found him…if they found him…if he was still alive.

  But Viernan suspected that somehow, against all odds, Gydryn val Lorian was. The val Lorians were far too resilient—they just refused to bloody die!

  How had Gydryn val Lorian managed such a coup?

  Within the shadows of his black keffiyeh, the consul’s right eye twitched. Either Dannym’s king had come to Tal’Shira with this plan already formed, or he possessed more cunning than hal’Jaitar had given him credit for.

  The currents flashed with a surge of the second strand, and the Prophet’s entourage appeared in the nodecourt.

  First came a procession of Ascendants and their sepulchrally veiled Marquiin—once truthreaders, now golem things so corrupted by the Prophet’s power that elae brooked no part in them—followed by a diamond configuration of four figures in hooded black cloaks, with Dore Madden at their center. Then came the Prophet himself.

  Standing nearly seven feet tall, Bethamin towered over the assembly. A glistening tunic of thin gold disks draped the upper half of his chest, while the bronzed flesh of his muscular midriff disappeared beneath a skirt of leather and gold mail. Hundreds of long braids bound in gold bands tumbled down his back.

  Radov’s Talien Knights stomped out to welcome the Prophet. Representatives of the Council of Princes followed on their heels, and a formal reception commenced.

  Despite having no love lost between them, Viernan held a healthy respect for the Prophet’s power and preferred to maintain his distance—preferably a few kingdoms distance. Through their limited interactions, he’d learned much about the man—

  Man…the consul’s upper lip rose in a sneer. Whatever dark life inhabited the Prophet Bethamin, man had no part in it.

  Viernan found a pleasing justice in letting the Prophet solve the problem of populating their war in the face of Dannym’s withdrawal. Over the years, Radov had courageously done Bethamin’s dirtier work by eliminating the
val Lorians—inasmuch as none of them had actually been successfully eliminated, at least all were out of the way—so Bethamin’s lackey, Stefan val Tryst, the Duke of Morwyk, could make his play for the Eagle Throne. Yes…’twas only fitting to let the Prophet bear some of the war’s weight out of his coffers. Huhktu knew M’Nador’s were bleeding for the effort.

  After much pomp and circumstance that no one seemed to appreciate except the officials conducting it, the ceremony concluded and the honor guard marched off. As the procession passed hal’Jaitar, the Prophet turned his head and settled his gaze unerringly on Viernan.

  He got the unsettling impression that the Prophet’s attention had been fixed unwaveringly upon him the entire time.

  The question was…why?

  Upon conclusion of the banquet in Bethamin’s honor, hal’Jaitar joined his prince and the Prophet in the Dome of the Blossoming Lotus. As Viernan arrived, palace servants were pulling the chains to lower the outer ‘petals’ of the dome to open the carved soapstone screens that formed the circular inner walls. A cooling breeze off the sea soon came venting in.

  The Prophet chose a seat on one of the long, curving couches. Radov already held a glass of absinthe and was orating loudly on the necessity of reclaiming Raku.

  Viernan speared an assessing gaze around the room, taking note of Bethamin’s Marquiin, and Dore’s four hooded creatures standing like ghouls near the doors. Then he made his way down the wide steps to the central circle, where Radov was speaking.

  “Ah, Viernan, finally.” The Ruling Prince held out his glass by way of acknowledging Viernan’s arrival. “Tell them the troubles we’re enduring—” Abruptly he swung a half-circle and flung out a finger at the Prophet. “You promised us weapons and soldiers but sent us Saldarian trash—mercenaries who prefer drink over duty and augment their pay in stolen maidenhoods. By Huhktu’s bones, they’re pillaging before the battle’s even been fought!”

  Hal’Jaitar was impressed that his prince had managed to so accurately capture and repeat the sentiment expressed by his councilors, when the prince personally knew only indifference to the issue anymore.