Cephrael's Hand: A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book One Read online

  “Because the Lord Captain demanded it,” she returned with no small measure of irritation. “What he thinks I can do, I vow I don’t know. The man is dead. I pointed this fact out to the captain, but his ears hear only the orders of his superior, said orders becoming instantly etched into that stone he calls a brain. Don’t ask the man to think for himself—Epiphany help us if he should ever have to solve a problem on his own!”

  Tanis gathered much more from this diatribe than one might imagine, being used to gleaning important facts from among his lady’s vitriolic outpourings. “Why would he wake you to attend a man if he’s already dead? Only a raedan Truthreader could glean such knowledge, and even then he’s unlikely to garner much unless death just claimed the man.”

  “That is entirely the point I tried to impress upon the captain, Tanis.” Alyneri sniffed with annoyance. “Apparently Vitriam is closeted with His Majesty, and I suppose that van Stone character had nothing to offer either. Had His Majesty found the resolve to acquire the services of more than two Truthreaders in the last ten years, perhaps the captain would’ve had someone else knowledgeable on hand to advise him. As it is, the King’s Guard is desperate to identify the dead man. Perhaps you will be of some assistance to them, Tanis, for I vow this entire episode will result in nothing on my part but several hours of sleep that I shall never recover.”

  There wasn’t time for any more questioning, for just then they reached the Rose Door. It was mostly hidden behind a sway of roses hanging from a trellis sagging dispiritedly away from the stone wall.

  Alyneri stopped before the heavy iron door wrought with the image of its namesake and allowed the captain and his men to catch up. “There you are, my Lord Captain,” she said with upraised hand. “Instant access to the tunnels and the specific…uh, room you mentioned.”

  Rhys gave her a reproachful look, which Tanis was hard-pressed to decipher save that the captain had found something displeasing about her statement.

  Her Grace evidently understood the look, however, for she cast him in return an affronted glare that might’ve splintered granite if aimed correctly. “Well, are we going to stand here all night, Captain, or did you want me to have a look at your dead body?”

  Rhys grunted and barged past her, yanking the door open on hinges that shrieked in protest. Tanis cringed, Alyneri glared, and Rhys hunched his shoulders as if in grave effort to control his temper before ducking beneath the portal.

  Inside, crystalline sconces lit a stone stairwell. The strange lamps gave off a gleam very unlike oil or tallow or wax or any substance Tanis had ever seen. He noticed several of the captain’s men spit on the stone and grind their boots over the mark, and he wondered what they knew about this place that he didn’t. An odd but familiar feeling beset him, one that always seemed to herald ill things to come, much like the feeling he got about that constellation in the sky.

  Her Grace, of course, ignored all of them and merely pushed past Rhys and headed down. Grumbling something unintelligible save for its uncomplimentary tone, the captain followed.

  The stairwell wound what seemed interminably down, but eventually they reached the end, whereupon Rhys pushed past Her Grace and headed off down a long tunnel equally lit by the odd lamps. Tanis would’ve liked to get a closer look at them, but as it was, he was barely keeping pace with Her Grace, who easily walked as fast as the towering captain and looked several times as if she meant to overtake him—and would have, had the captain not stretched his long legs to new lengths that he might retain his lead.

  At last they came in view of a pair of towering iron doors that looked older than the bedrock. Intricate arabesques covered them. Rhys turned a corner past the doors, and there he stopped. The dead man lay sprawled upon the floor, but more immediately baffling to Tanis was the gaping hole in the tunnel ceiling above him.

  The hole spanned nearly the width of the corridor, a circular expanse that had seared cleanly through stone and earth, vanishing upwards into darkness.

  “What could make a hole like that?” one of the soldiers murmured behind Tanis, while another asked, “How far up does it go?”

  Within the hole, what should’ve been rough was as smooth as glass, and the deep earth held an unusual, iridescent cast.

  “It wasn’t cut, that’s for certain,” a third soldier observed, a man Tanis knew and liked. The fair-haired Lieutenant Bastian val Renly seemed a good-natured man whom Tanis had spoken to on occasion and who always had something encouraging to say. “It’s like the stone just…melted.”

  “Magic,” the first soldier whispered, and upon Bastian’s sharp glance, he pressed, “What else could have made such a hole, Lieutenant?”

  Bastian turned a troubled gaze upward. “Yes,” he mused, “but what magic?”

  “All right, enough of that,” Rhys grumbled. He looked to Alyneri and directed her attention to the dead man lying before them.

  Tanis scrunched his face up trying to imagine what could’ve happened to the man to make him so…grey.

  “Well? What do you think, Duchess?” Rhys asked Alyneri.

  Alyneri pushed her pale braid off her shoulder and crossed arms beneath her breasts. “I think he’s dead.”

  Now that they were well in the light, Tanis noticed that she was wearing her least-favorite dress, one that she only wore on visits to the country.

  Rhys meanwhile seemed to be harboring ill wishes toward Her Grace, if told from the vein that pulsed along his neck. “Yes, but how did he die?”

  “It would seem,” Alyneri began, placing a finger to her lips in thoughtful fashion, “that the air left his lungs and did not return. That, I believe, is a defining aspect of death.”

  Rhys glared so hard Tanis feared the strain upon his bulging eyes. “Can’t you work some Adept hocus-pocus and figure out what killed him? I mean—look at him! What turns a man such a color?”

  “He is quite grey,” Alyneri agreed. “But as I told you back in my rooms, Captain, I am a Healer, not an auger. I deal with the living. I cannot tell you how this man expired any more than I can tell you who he is, for I have never before laid eyes upon him.”

  Rhys looked as if he needed something to punch. He wasn’t ready to give up, though, no matter Alyneri’s defiance. “You didn’t even touch him,” he insisted. “How do you know that you can’t learn—”

  “Because, my Lord Captain,” Alyneri cut in coolly, “I am a trained Healer. Being that you are not, you will have to trust me when I declare I have nothing to offer you in this matter.”

  “Your Grace,” Bastian inquired then, “have you any idea as to how the man came to be lying here? Did he fall down that hole? Can you tell us anything of his condition in that regard?”

  “He clearly did not fall to his death, for his bones lie unbroken.”

  Rhys rested a hand on his sword hilt and paced a small square. Suddenly he spun and looked at Tanis. “You, lad. You’re training to be a ‘reader. Do your Truthhold thing and see what you can discover of him.”

  “Touch him not, Tanis,” Alyneri advised. She was staring at the dead man with a calculating look. Tanis was relieved, for the last thing he wanted to do was get closer to the corpse. He looked like something the savage Shi’ma had got a hold of with their potions and herbs, only they’d shriveled his whole body instead of merely his head. “What of Kjieran van Stone?” Alyneri posed. “Have you not asked him, my Lord Captain?”

  The captain glowered even harder. “That bloody man’s been missing for months.”

  “Missing?”

  “Fully vanished, your Grace,” Bastain val Renly added, “to put it bluntly.”

  “How does one of the king’s only two Truthreaders simply vanish? Someone saw him leave, surely.”

  Rhys glared at her while the lieutenant answered, “Kjieran could’ve thrown himself from the walls into the surf for all we can explain his absence, your Grace.”

  Alyneri waved a hand dismissively. “Fine, I’ll leave such matters to your capable hands. In
the mean, let me recommend that no one touch this body until someone else qualified has a chance to study him,” and she added under her breath, “not that I know who that could be.” She looked to Rhys then. “One thing I can tell you for certain, Captain, is that no natural force, be it physical or chemical, could have so destroyed a body.”

  “Magic,” that self-same soldier repeated his earlier pronouncement, whereupon Bastian echoed grimly, “But what magic?”

  All eyes lifted then, gazing upward into the dark hole that seemed to have bored through stone and earth like a smelting iron through butter. If the man had not fallen down it, had someone—or some thing—gone up? How had the hole come to be there? And where did it lead?

  The sound of boots fast striking the stone drew everyone’s gaze into the tunnel behind, and the men in the rear cleared way as a blue-cloaked palace guard rushed up. “My Lord Captain!” The man managed a breathless greeting as Rhys turned to receive him. “My lord, two sentries just returned from the—” he looked around at present company and lowered his voice. “From off the moors, sir. You’ll want to hear their report.”

  Rhys arched brows. “Indeed.” He turned to Bastian. “Lieutenant, ensure that no one can get within bowshot of this passageway and then join me.” He left promptly with the Palace Guard and two of his own men.

  Bastian turned to Alyneri. “Your Grace, if I may prevail upon you to linger one moment longer that I might have a word...”

  Alyneri had been frowning at the dead man, but she turned to Bastian and gave him a polite nod. “Certainly, Lieutenant.” It was always clear when Her Grace candidly approved of someone, like the lieutenant, in stark comparison to her opinion of the Lord Captain Rhys val Kincaide.

  Tanis was contemplating his chances of staying below to talk with the lieutenant as well—for he was more than a little curious about those iron doors and what lay behind them, and he still wondered why the men had made the sign against the evil eye, and what was burning in the lamps—but Alyneri was having none of that.

  “Tanis, why are you loitering around?” She crossed her arms and arched a pale brow at him, drumming the fingers of one hand upon her arm. “The night’s not getting any younger.”

  His curious aspirations thus thwarted, Tanis made haste to collect the forgotten coneflowers.

  Four

  ‘The mysteries of a woman’s heart cannot be measured. They are as the expanse of time and space: endless and unknowable.’

  – The Espial Franco Rohre, while posing as a minstrel in the Veneisean court

  “What do you mean their trail just vanished?” his Royal Majesty, Gydryn val Lorian, King of Dannym, demanded of the soldier before him, who cringed under the piercing gaze of his monarch.

  Errodan val Lorian, Queen of Dannym and the Shoring Isles, stood watching the exchange with her back pressed stiffly against the velvet-paneled wall, arms crossed, fingers thrumming steadily, as if this tiniest of gestures could disperse the intense emotions that stormed in her heart. She saw the limning of the horizon through the long wall of glass-paned doors; saw the paling of the leaden sky. Ean was meant to be with her when dawn came. Instead, she stood alone.

  Alone in a roomful of strangers, she thought. Yet she knew each man who sat in the chambers of the king by more than mere name and ranking. She knew their families, their histories; once she would’ve known their private pleasures and their secret crimes, so trusted she was with her husband’s confidences—and so adept were her own spies at gathering information about the king’s Privy Council. But now Errodan stood as the outsider, allowed in this room on this evening by the king’s grace alone.

  Errodan drew in a slow breath to still her nerves, to calm the fearful thoughts that beat at her like frightened birds. They’d called her after midnight with the news, and she’d arrived in Gydryn’s private chambers just as the first of what was to become a succession of soldiers was making his report.

  Each report had been attended by as small a number of ears as possible, necessarily including those of the king’s Truthreader, Vitriam o’Reith, who’d pronounced each man’s report the honest truth. Yet Errodan wondered if the old man still had his wits about him. Most of the time he sat in silence with his Truthreader’s colorless eyes glazed over, as if spending his off moments in another dimension altogether, and he seemed less and less connected as the night drew on into morning.

  Besides the Truthreader, only three men attended the king in his private chambers: Rhys val Kincaide, Captain of the King’s Own Guard and his lieutenant, Bastian val Renly, and Morin d’Hain, head of Dannym’s intelligence network.

  Errodan knew little of Morin. The youngest man ever appointed to Gydryn’s Privy Council, by far the youngest to hold the position of Master of Spies, he’d been named in Errodan’s absence, but so far she approved of what she saw.

  Which was well and good, because secrecy was vital. Gydryn had many enemies who hungered for the crown, and if it became known that Ean had been taken…well, rumors were as destructive as battering rams when adroitly wielded.

  “Get up, get up,” the king said, waving irritably at the soldier before him, who had nearly prostrated himself with his remorse—whether or not he’d had a hand in losing the prince himself, most of the king’s men felt this loss as personally as their monarch did. Too, Gydryn was a formidable presence, with his broad frame, mane of raven hair, and beard barely etched with silver.

  The soldier got back to his feet and stood there looking contrite. He was one of two who’d followed a trail away from the battle site, but they’d also traveled the furthest from the scene and were therefore the last to arrive back at the palace and present their findings to the king. “We’ve been waiting all night for your report, man,” Gydryn grumbled. “Just explain yourself.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” the solider managed. “Kalyn and myself,” and he looked behind him to the closed double doors, beyond which, ostensibly, the other soldier waited, “we were among the first on the scene, assigned to Lieutenant Posten’s company. We’d been riding to the rendezvous at the cliffs where His Highness put ashore—”

  “His Majesty knows all of this, soldier,” Morin cut in. “He was asking you about His Highness’s trail.”

  The soldier glanced at Morin d’Hain and looked unnerved by his presence. “Um, yes, milord. Well, the uh, lieutenant, he assigned us—”

  “Soldier, we’ve already heard from the lieutenant,” Morin interrupted again. “Please tell His Majesty about the prince’s trail.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, Kalyn and myself, we headed east after helping release Her Majesty’s men,” and he cast a tentative look toward Errodan. “We, uh…we found the trail not too far beyond the clearing where the battle took place. We followed the trail for about three klicks, and then it just…ended.”

  “Ended how?” Morin asked.

  The soldier gave him an apprehensive look. “I mean, milord, the uh…hoof prints just ended as if they up and rode into the air.”

  “A clean line of dirt, as if brushed away?” Rhys asked.

  “No, my Lord Captain. These was grasslands, and ’til that point the meadow had been rightly trampled. Wasn’t no way to take two dozen horses across it with the rains we had recently and not leave a goodly path of mud. No, this was grass all stamped on like and then grass that wasn’t touched, like they just up and road into the clouds—”

  “Yes, so you mentioned,” Morin pointed out.

  “Sorry, milord. I do tend to repeat myself.”

  Gydryn shifted in his chair. Errodan tried once again to calm her racing heart and fend off the thoughts of doom and disaster that badgered her. “What is your explanation for the vanished trail?” asked the king.

  The soldier’s eyes widened considerably. “Your Majesty, I don’t…well I mean, I thought—”

  “Yes, you thought…” demanded the king impatiently.

  The soldier visibly swallowed. He looked around at the others in the room. “Well, don’t we all think
the same thing? I mean…I dunno what the others said, milords, but I saw it with my own eyes and if it wasn’t…” He licked his lips. “Well, if it wasn’t magic as obscured their trail, Sire, I don’t know what could have done it.” The statement thus made, he cringed as if expecting a rebuke but met only silence.

  Indeed, Errodan reflected, what could any of them say? Every solider who’d reported that night spoke of arcane events—darkhounds feasting on traitors dressed in the livery of the palace guard, a man with a silver face they imaged to be a Shade, magic that bound them to another’s will—yet there was so little evidence to corroborate their stories. For all she knew, the soldiers mightn’t have met Ean and Creighton at all and simply tied each other up—the latter of which, in fact, had actually occurred, if any of them were to be believed.

  After a tense silence, Morin asked, “Soldier, when you were at the scene of the battle, did you see any bodies?”

  “Bodies, milord?”

  “As in dead people,” The Lord Captain Rhys muttered.

  “Uh, no, milord. But there was a lot of blood.”

  “Blood,” repeated Morin. “You’re certain it was blood?”

  “Well, uh…no. I didn’t exactly taste it, milord. We found Her Majesty’s men in a big clearing that was pretty well torn up from a battle. They were all tied up with nobody near.” He scratched his head. “Right strange, you know, finding them there like that.”

  “And the blood?” prodded Morin.

  “Well, like I said, it was dark and the field was muddy and wet. Whatever it was, if it wasn’t blood, it was right sticky and the air sure smelled like blood after a battle.” He looked uncertainly at the others. “Was there no blood?”