The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (113 page)

“Two guards, right passage,” Isabel murmured, a bare whisper, and Ean drew up short and pressed back against the cold stones just shy of the intersecting hallway.

The guards’ boots fell soft, but Ean was also keen to them in subtle ways, his perception sharpened to a fine point with
elae
infusing his pattern. The guards stepped past the prince, and their duller senses noticed Ean’s presence too late. He had them just as they began to turn. The first fell without ever drawing his sword, the second but a heartbeat later.

Isabel knelt and placed a hand on the first one’s face, finding the truthreader’s hold. Three breaths, and she moved to the second man. Frowning then, she sat back on her heels. “A foul craft pervades this place, Ean. These men know nothing about your friends and too much about a host of tortured others.” 

Ean felt her controlled anger filtering across the bond. He had never seen her display aught but compassion, and the power roused by her fury startled him. It hinted at a role in Björn’s game which Ean would not have imagined of her.

“The patterns of warding are inconsistent,” he said by way of mutual discord, his own unease over the entire endeavor growing ever more potent. “Layered…as if worked at different times by different men.” 

Isabel rose. “Lead us on, my lord,” she said, but her voice had become as steel.

They moved off down the passage again, yet now Ean couldn’t find his focus. Instinct told him something was very wrong, but he couldn’t see the thread that was missing from the whole. He gazed into a room of shadows trying to discern one from the next.

“Ean,” Isabel warned in a low voice. Then: “
Ean!
”

Too late he heard her. He stepped into a pinwheel chamber of intersecting hallways
, and Saldarians flooded in.

Ean swung to block a
sweeping sword borne by a giant cornstalk of a man. Their blades met and scraped, but Ean was the better swordsman and the man fell back in blood. Two others came on to take his place, however, and the prince swore as he realized more men were arriving still. He was too conscious of Isabel in harm’s way, and as a third troop came in from the left and Ean swung furiously to deflect a host of blades, he cursed even that single moment of unawareness. He was so immediately outnumbered that he reached in desperation for the fifth—

Suddenly
Isabel was at his side spinning her Merdanti staff. Two men fell to left and right while Ean fended off the blades of three attackers. Another cried out from behind as Isabel cast him into a wall, where he collapsed. Two others immediately joined him in motionless silence.

Ean spared a startled glance for
her, narrowly dodging a blade in the doing. In that moment, he saw her cast a man spinning with one end of her staff and then strike another across the back, sending him flying. Ean recognized the
cortata
in her movements and cursed himself for not calling upon it sooner.

But he amended this error at once
. The
cortata
brought clarity, and the lifeforce renewed and revitalized him. He worked meticulously through the mass of Saldarians then, clearing the way. When at last he lowered his dripping blade, two-dozen men lay in varying states of demise. Some sprawled unconscious, many labored with their final breaths. But there had been others who’d gotten away.

Himself breathing hard, Ean looked to
Isabel. She was kneeling beside one of the fallen with her hand across his face, reading him before he passed. Ean couldn’t recall if he’d known before this night that she could work the fourth strand as easily as she worked the first and second. No wonder Rhakar and Ramu hadn’t feared for them in this action! It wasn’t one wielder storming the castle. It was two.

Isabel’s lips pursed in a thin line, and she rose and
settled her staff two-handed before her toes.

Ean frowned at her stance. “What is it?”

Just then a distant horn sounded. The alarm raised.

Isabel turned her blindfolded gaze to Ean.
“Go. Find him.”

Ean felt an immediate
and extreme protest at the idea of leaving her side. 

“We cannot do what must be done here
if we stay together,” she reasoned, knowing too well his mind. “You feel it too, Ean—the pervasive sense of wrongness in this place. It is the call of Balance seeking to be righted.” 

Ean made to protest, but she pushed three fingers across his lips. “Cephrael calls you to arms, my love. Can you not hear his war cry?
”

As much as he wanted to argue with her, he knew she
guided him true. That throbbing
wrongness
had been accosting him ever since he set foot upon this path. But if he failed in whatever was to come…  Conflict raged across his features.

“Love of my heart,” Isabel
murmured as the horn blew again, “you know the way.” She took up her staff and spun it before her as if readying to strike
him
if he did not leave at once.

Ean rather imagined she would do it, too.
He gave her one last look and ran.

***

As Ean’s running steps faded, Isabel walked among the bodies at her feet. The long hem of her dress brushed the limbs of the dead as if paying final respects, the echo of a sweeping evergreen bough as conducted in the ancient and sacred Rite for the Departed.

Elae
fueled Isabel’s vision, as ever it had, revealing a shimmering world of iridescence. She saw walls and men illuminated not by light but by the varied, pastel-hued strands of the lifeforce. The otherwise dim hallways appeared to her in a golden sheen, the sputtering lamps glowing luminous as the moon. Only the men at her feet were diminished, some by the blackness of their souls, others by death’s encroaching shadow.

Stepping carefully among the fallen, Isabel came upon one whose life-pattern still shone brightly. Here was a man who could be saved—the threads of his life rewoven to serve a higher purpose. Kneeling at his side, Isabel placed her palm to his chest in the Healer’s way.
Elae
surged through her and into him, channeling along his life-pattern in obeisance of her will.

A moment later, his eyes flew open and he gasped, “My lady!”

“Dorn,” Isabel murmured. “We have work to do.” She extended her hand to help him to his feet, and they set off together.

***

The prince rushed through Tyr’kharta toward the upper levels of the castle where he sensed the wielder waiting.

He had the man in his sights
now. His life-pattern appeared as a strangely wavering image among the first-strand pattern Ean worked, a ghostly apparition barely glimpsed, a seeming mirage.

Ean understood what Rhakar
had meant when he’d spoken of the man, for the fourth strand of
elae
bound the wielder so completely that Ean could barely see
him
at all. Yet there was no missing his presence on the currents—
elae
snarled and eddied around him so that he stood out like a beacon to even an untrained eye. All this Ean gleaned from the currents alone, without ever laying eyes upon the man in the flesh.

The prince
kept the
cortata
close now, spinning into and out of its pattern each time he met, clashed with and ultimately dispatched those unfortunate enough to cross his path. As his awareness spanned ahead and around, setting patterns to falling apart like cobwebs in his passing, Ean realized he’d done this before—
that he’d many times progressed through an enemy’s stronghold in just this manne
r.

Too, the
more he allowed Arion’s knowledge to emerge, the wider the trench of its path to restoration, the faster the flow of memory.

It was
doing
that restored his knowledge,
need
that brought it forth, and working the patterns themselves that gave Ean certainty. By the time he reached the towering double doors leading into Tyr’kharta’s grand hall, Ean no longer had to think about what he was doing. He had regained a wielder’s instincts.

The prince slowed
before the tall doors and scanned for patterns, his senses on full alert. This was where his talent boosted him far beyond the skill of other Adepts, for he need not rely on the currents to hint at what lay in wait. Ean could
see
the patterns themselves hovering in the aether as clearly as a Nodefinder would gaze upon the nodes.

Ean unworked the three wards he found upon the doors, and while these were
dispersing, he cast his awareness beyond them, into the hall. Patterns layered through it, thick as cobwebs in a cave. This much he could tell, though Ean would have to enter before he could see each pattern fully.

He sensed the man he sought inside
. Pinning him with his awareness like a marker on a map, Ean spun out another first-strand pattern around the man to tell him what it could.

The action spurred a sudden memory.

As he stood facing the tall doors, with the still-unraveling patterns swirling around him, the prince was transported to a different hall where fires raged, where the First Lord went to confront a band of deserters and Ean/Arion stood to battle a traitor of a different color, and—

Ean realized that he’d done
this
before, too…this study of his enemy from beyond closed doors, studying his pattern to better know his opponent. He recalled something else as well, and the knowledge shook him to the core.

Arion Tavestra did not die on Tiern’aval.

Yet if not there, where?

Ean pushed away this startling realization and the many questions it raised out of necessity, but he suspected its mystery would haunt him for days to come.

The last of the wards on the doors dissolved. Ean pulled them open and stalked through, entering a vast, vaulted hall dimly lit by high chandeliers. Now he could see the patterns spider-webbing the chamber, heavy iron traps for the wolf who walked the powerful strands of the fourth and fifth. There were smaller snares, too, for rabbits of the first and foxes of the second. Even the third would be caught by broad nets set to plunge with the slightest tremble of its gossamer strand. As Rhakar had warned, this wielder had been busy.

Ean wondered if the wielder had somehow protected himself from these many snares, or if he truly intended to meet only in hand to hand combat—for Raine’s truth, neither of them could wield the lifeforce with so many patterns in place. In either event, the prince knew the man was unprepared for him. Walking further within, he plucked at the closest isolated pattern as if a harp string and started it unraveling.

“Ean val Lorian…” the voice floated to him from out of a void of darkness, from the deep shadows that collected in pools down the length of the chamber and along the wall of high, stained-glass windows. “The Lord Captain assured me you would come. I must admit some disappointment to find you possessed of such foolish notions of nobility.”

That voice…!

It had to be illusion. Ean moved into the chamber, deeply sensitive to the patterns fluttering in his wake. He treated them as fragile moths and was careful not to disturb their integrity by working
elae
, for though beautiful in their intricate construction, each was poison to the touch. “Who are you?” Ean kept the
cortata
hovering close within his consciousness. “Show yourself.”

Işak moved from the shadows into a circle of light. Tall and broad of shoulder and with dark hair, he stood so similar to Ean in build that they might’ve been brothers; but unlike the prince, he moved with a slight limp, and a velvet mask concealed his face.

“You’re very like your brother with these grand notions of honor,” Işak remarked as he moved further into the light. “I recently encountered the illustrious Trell val Lorian, back from the dead as it were. That is, before he was taken to M’Nador to face Radov’s wrath for not having the decency to die the first time—
Oh
…you didn’t know.” Işak smiled at the look of shock on Ean’s face. “Yes, your dear brother was first among the men I captured.”

For all the shock of this pronouncement, Ean barely registered what the man was saying, for his
voice
… He knew it must be some kind of illusion, although extraordinarily well crafted. He cast his awareness toward the patterns floating around the room, searching for any that would hold such a deceptive illusion in place, but found none.

Returning his attention to the wielder’s life-pattern then—its light barely discernable beneath a mass of corrupted, intertwining strands of the fourth—Ean perceived something of the man himself that awakened strange feelings.

What’s happening here?

Ean forced himself to focus. He chose an isolated fourth-strand ward and started it unraveling, giving his mind something to do beyond worrying over perceptions that made no sense.

Işak meanwhile stopped in the center of the circle of light and drew forth a black-bladed weapon. “Merdanti, yes,” he observed, noting the prince’s gaze. “It appears that yours is not. Pity.” He toyed with his sword in a display of skill while remarking, “I had hoped for a fair battle. The Captain said you could hold your own with a blade.”