The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (24 page)

“Come, little spy.” Pelas found an abandoned corner wherein to call his doorway, and moments later they were emerging from darkness onto a jungle track. What sky could be seen between breaks in the high green canopy was a brilliant orange-red, but night had already claimed domain among the trees.

“Where are we, sir?” Tanis asked, not liking the myriad foreign and frightening sounds accosting them from the jungle’s depths.

“Bemoth,” Pelas answered. He looked around wearing a smile. “Is this not a fantastic forest, little spy? Can you hear all of the animals making their twilight calls? It is a most impressive display of life.”

Tanis found this remark utterly baffling. “But I thought you said everyone only headed toward death.”

“Oh indeed, indeed,” he agreed, “yet there is something fascinating to me about the forests and the jungles, the way such creatures carry out their doomed lives entrenched upon a pattern they cannot comprehend, always flying toward the light but never reaching their freedom before the ice claims them.”

Tanis felt that sometimes Pelas’s philosophies were as indecipherable as Master O’reith’s.

Pelas placed an icy hand on the lad’s shoulder. “Come, we are just in time to make a grand entrance.”

Tanis went with him, but he asked as they walked along the trail, “Sir, why didn’t you just use your power to kill those men?”

Pelas cast him a discerning look. “I cannot use my power indiscriminately. My brothers and I are all agreed upon this point. If I destroyed those men with my power, others would find their bodies. Soon come the Empress’s Red Guard to investigate, and the next thing we know all of Agasan is looking for us. That’s why we had to leave Rethynnea so quickly.”

Tanis arched brows in surprise
. “What? Why?”

Pelas shook his head, his eyes suddenly piercing and dark. “My brother Rinokh...” he muttered. “He is ever careless. He was fine so long as he played his games in the deserts of Avatar, but to bring him in among the cities…Shail should have known better than to involve him. Except…I wonder…” but he didn’t finish this thought, only frowned heavily instead. Tanis could tell the wheels of his intelligent mind were spinning, for the boy caught flashes of images, forceful thoughts full of fire and fury. But the images made no sense to him.

“What did he do?” Tanis prodded after a moment’s pause wherein the noise of the jungle seemed to increase in inverse proportion to the volume of their own conversation. “Your brother Rinokh, I mean.”

Pelas cast him an irritable look. “Worked our power—and destroyed most of the Temple of the Vestals in Rethynnea in the process.”

Tanis’s heart fluttered at this news. The pirate Carian vran Lea had been investigating a node in the Temple of the Vestals, and Raine D’Lacourte had been preparing a small army for some kind of confrontation. The lad couldn’t help wondering if maybe Rinokh was the one who’d nearly killed Prince Ean at their villa…what then had happened at the Temple to make Rinokh work his power again? Had the prince awoken?

“I don’t know how they stopped it,” Pelas went on musingly, heedless of Tanis’s spiraling thoughts. “I can’t imagine Rinokh used any kind of control in releasing his working to begin with, which means there is someone else in this world who can manage our power.” He turned Tanis a dark eye and noted, “My brother Shail is looking into that mystery.”

Tanis gulped a swallow, for he knew of a few too many people who might work the same power, starting with the zanthyr. He was almost certain that whatever had happened at the Temple of the Vestals, the zanthyr and Raine had been involved, and possibly the pirate and Prince Ean also. Tanis so wished he could have any news of his friends, and once again came that crushing sense of guilt for abandoning them.

Followed by the sense of duty, which was a shallow comfort.

They emerged from the jungle at last and gained a stone-paved path that meandered across a wide lawn, splitting and rejoining to form some sort of pattern too vast to be observed while walking upon it. The flames of the sky were dying into the dense, dark blue of early evening, and the weather was fair if more humid than in the Cairs. After they headed up a flight of wide stone stairs marking the end of the lawn, Tanis turned to look behind him and saw the pattern of the path in its fullness. He didn’t recognize it, but it looked pretty.

Turning back, he faced a massive mansion. It crowned the hill before them, reached by way of four sets of long stairs. Tanis wondered why Pelas couldn’t have found somewhere closer to land them and decided he must’ve wanted the walk again.

He just couldn’t understand the man.

When they finally reached a long patio that ran along one side of the manse, people were just beginning to filter outside to enjoy the night air. They all wore expensive clothes. Surpassing them all in splendor, Pelas approached as if he’d just been out for a walk and headed on inside. “Quickly now, little spy,” he whispered in Tanis’s ear as they were joining the party-goers, “give me a name—any name but your own.”

“Tad,” Tanis said, thinking immediately of his friend, which only then made him wonder how Tad was faring and what was happening back in Dannym. It seemed like they’d been gone so long now.

“Ah, Signore di Nostri!” A diminutive woman who was just then approaching addressed Pelas with a smile. “We are so fortunate that you grace us tonight. Did you just arrive?”

“Lady Gartelt,” Pelas replied, taking her hand and kissing it with a slight bow. “We were just enjoying the gardens. May I present my associate, Tad. A truthreader I am sponsoring.”

“You are always so benevolent.” She barely spared a glance for Tanis but gave Pelas a generously appreciative look instead.

“Your words as ever fill my heart with gladness, my lady. And how fares your Queen?”

“Troubled, my lord. I’m sure you know of the many Healers who have gone missing. Her Majesty counts nine vanished in recent moons. The queen has closed the holy city of Jeune to all but those upon Crown business.”

“Dreadful,” Pelas clucked.

Tanis’s astonishment at the man’s duplicity was surpassed only by his admiration for the perfection of its delivery.

“And where is our host this evening, lovely Mian?” Pelas inquired.

“Oh,” Mian said, looking off with a frown. “Niko is somewhere about. Shall I find him for you?”

“No, no—trouble yourself not. We are happy wanderers this evening.”

“Well,” she said, looking him up and down rather unsubtly, “if you think of any way I can help…”

“Of course, you will be the first one I call upon.”

Mian smiled, curtsied, and departed without another glance at Tanis.

For once, Tanis appreciated Master O’reith’s making him memorize long lists of tedious names. “Sir,” Tanis murmured as Mian was departing, “was that really Mian Gartelt of the Fifty Companions?”

Pelas frowned after the Healer. “Just so.”

“But…?”  He didn’t understand why nothing had happened to Pelas, why his thoughts remained quiet. “But isn’t she a Healer?”

Still gazing after Mian, Pelas arched a solitary ebon brow. “Indeed.”

“Then…?”

He turned Tanis an unreadable look, just the slight tightening around his eyes to indicate his displeasure. “She has Dore Madden’s taint upon her,” he observed, and moved off again.

Tanis walked attentively at Pelas’s side as the man idled among the partygoers. He knew many people, most of whom addressed him in return as Signore di Nostri. But whether they were old acquaintances or new ones, Pelas always greeted them with perfect grace.

It surprised Tanis to notice how immediately everyone who met Pelas took to him. People shared the most intimate and privileged things with him—even people he’d only just met—and Tanis watched men and women both cross the room just to say hello. Throughout, Pelas’s manner remained impeccable, courteous and refined, and Tanis grew ever more wary of him.

Pelas had power. It was subtle, hidden, but terribly potent. People uniformly were attracted to him, and something in his presence drew forth their deepest confessions. Tanis saw this part of him as a harmonic of his darker nature, and he understood how these traits were two sides of the same coin. But it frightened him to wonder if Pelas had worked some power upon him in the café that fateful afternoon…if indeed that’s why Tanis had been compelled to follow him. What if it wasn’t duty that drove him at all, but merely a subtle form of compulsion?

But it couldn’t be
, he told himself,
for Pelas would’ve expected you to come if he’d worked compulsion upon you—and why would he?
Yet the idea had lodged spiny tendrils into Tanis’s head, and he couldn’t quite weed it out.

They’d finally made their way across the largest of the rooms when Tanis began hearing music and laughter. Pelas heard it too, and he gave Tanis a bright smile, whispered, “Dancers!” with a wink and pulled Tanis eagerly toward the music.

They exited into a stone-paved court to the rhythmic beat of bells and tambourines, to the plucking of sitars and the plaintive melody of reed pipes. And to a contingent of veiled dancers spinning and undulating upon a circular dais. Tanis gaped at the women, who seemed practically naked to the northern boy, what with their cropped, bejeweled vests and low-slung skirts hung with tassels and fringe, navels sporting jewels or pierced with silver chains. And the way they moved…Tanis stood entranced, his eyes very wide.

Pelas cast him an amused look. “I don’t imagine you’d see many dancers of this fashion in Dannym.”

“No sir,” Tanis whispered without removing his eyes from one girl in sheer red silk whose belly was just then undulating like a snake.

They watched the dancers until two men flipped onto the dais and began a complicated saber dance. Tanis appreciated their skill, but he didn’t find them nearly as interesting as the women. Pelas laughed at his disappointed look and motioned them on, giving the lad a frosty but consoling pat on the shoulder.

They followed along a patio lined with tall statues, each pair demarking a staircase leading down to the gardens. Pelas admired the sculptures as they passed, his gaze rapt, a slight smile curling the sharp corners of his mouth.

“Sir,” Tanis remarked as Pelas was inspecting a statue of a maiden being seduced by a fawn, “it looks like you’re kind of enjoying yourself.”

Pelas cast him an amused eye. “Does it?”  He ran his fingers lightly across the woman’s marble leg. “I suppose it could be said that I enjoy the experiences of this place. Darshan says joy is an illusion, but I am often willing to be deceived by beauty.”

Tanis gave him a curious look. “Is that not a choice, sir?”

Pelas turned to him looking surprised. “I’m…not sure. It is certainly an interesting idea.”  He was about to say more when his eyes narrowed and he hissed an expletive. He grabbed Tanis close into the loop of one arm and swept his other hand through the air. Tanis saw the world subtly darken even as a chilling veil descended. Tanis knew this sensation. The last time he’d felt it he’d been in the zanthyr’s protection.

They remained perfectly still. Three men soon emerged from the mansion to halt just feet from where Pelas concealed them. The first man boasted a tall frame, blonde and handsome. The man beside him stood even taller and broader still. Silk cording bound his long ebony hair, and he wore three red-gold bangles in each ear. The third, white-haired man looked emaciated, and his thoughts were riotous.

“I must be certain of success before I will act,” said the man with the long black hair. His voice was close enough to Pelas’s in timbre and inflection that Tanis could only assume he was one of Pelas’s brothers.    

“To be sure,” the white-haired man agreed. He licked his lips and looked furtively around. Then he murmured, “The Prophet is fully in support of our plan.”

“Be that as it may,
I
must be assured of it.”

“We understand your requirements, Lord Abanachtran,” the blonde man said. “We will keep you apprised of our progress.”

“And what of the other matter?” demanded the white-haired man. A sort of gruesome excitement glinted in the dark pools that were his eyes.

The Lord Abanachtran looked him over critically. “It suits our purposes to aid you in apprehending this Ean val Lorian. Send your emissary to
the Karakurt
in Rethynnea. I believe your man will find her at his
complete
disposal.” With that, he cast the both of them a piercing eye and departed. The two remaining men exchanged a look and then separated as if reluctant to be seen with one another.

Only when they were all well away did Pelas release his spell.

Tanis rubbed his arms ardently and relaxed his clenched teeth while Pelas stared after his brother looking stormy. “My younger brother, Shail,” he muttered. “He has his sticky fingers in far too many pies. Come, my little spy.” He touched Tanis gently upon the shoulder. “I mislike the taste of the air now.”

Tanis could sense his tension, and he wished he better understood what had just happened, or why Shail made Pelas so uneasy. Not that the Lord Abanachtran didn’t strike an imposing figure, and certainly he wore menace like a cloak.

“I think it is time we took our leave,” Pelas remarked as they headed back into the crowded hall. “Stay close to me, lad.”