The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (103 page)

Finding that he was well concealed from the flow of bodies, he pulled the stinking 
keffiyeh
off of his head and faced the bare wall with a frown. Knowing the trace-seal that would open the door and the motions to do so were not one and the same. It took more than a dozen attempts to make the pattern work, but Kjieran finally heard a click, and the stone panel slid ajar. He slipped silently through the parting and emerged onto the highest landing of a vast atrium. Five floors fanned beneath him, their stone-railed walkways gained by way of a hidden staircase whose location he’d failed to learn.

Even a few days ago, this might’ve proven an insurmountable barrier, but there was naught left in Kjieran’s veins to fear from a fall, and little left to lose. The
other
who now resided within him pushed him to act.

Standing in the shadow of the wall, Kjieran waited until all of the lower balconies were empty of eyes and then swung himself over the railing.

The downward plunge came faster than he’d anticipated. His robes whipped up around his head, and he landed blind, tripping over his own feet into a tumbling roll. He banged against a wall with a thud he was sure the entire building must’ve heard. He scrambled to untangle himself from his robes and sought the shadows, both amazed and horrified that no bones had broken.

Unsure where to go from there, Kjieran concealed himself until he saw two armed men approaching. He stepped from the shadows as soon as they had passed, grabbed both from behind and slammed their heads together with a dull thud. They slumped in his arms.

Kjieran dragged them into the shadows and read them, ruthlessly dredging their unprotected minds for the knowledge he sought. It took some searching, but he gained Trell’s location, as well as an understanding of the labyrinthine passageways that would take him and his prince to freedom. His working left the men less than alive, their brains as slush. The truthreader in him recoiled at this truth, while the
other
delighted in it, but Kjieran had buried any thought of mercy in a far and fallow field. He left them where they lay.

Finding the dungeons easily then, Kjieran made his way deep among their twisting passages, avoiding when he could, allowing the
other
to kill when he must. He finally gained Trell’s cell by way of a narrow spiral of stone steps that ended before a single door. Kjieran looked with frustration at the iron panel and the two keys required to unlock the bolts. The
other
arched a brow in contempt. Three kicks later, he’d so damaged the panel and its bolts that his fourth kick sent the door slamming against the inside wall with a scream of metal hinges.

Kjieran had endured so much to reach that moment—Dore’s working, the Prophet impaling his consciousness, the slow devouring of his ravaged body, the corruption of his spirit—yet none of it had prepared him for the sight of Trell. A sickly pit opened in his stomach, and he rushed across the room to where his prince was nailed to the wall. He took Trell’s hanging head in his stone fingers—
oh so carefully!
as if handling a delicate butterfly—and found that he lived.

His relief was as boundless as his fury. With vengeance blackening his gaze, Kjieran seized the six-inch spike that impaled Trell’s right hand and yanked it from the stone, flinging it across the room so violently that it chipped the rock on the other side of the cell. Five other spikes followed in its blistering wake, and the prince collapsed into his arms.

Teeth clenched, Kjieran supported Trell’s unconscious form as he lowered him to the floor and looked him over. The villains had taken great care with this terrible act to ensure it produced the gravest punishment with the least risk of life. No vital arteries had been severed, no bones broken, only Trell’s arms rendered useless. They’d healed the worst of the wounds around the spikes, that they might bring enduring pain, but now those wounds had been reopened, and the humour seeped from Trell’s arms to mingle with Kjieran’s tears. Nor were these his only wounds. He’d been brutally beaten. The bruising on his bare chest showed that someone had healed these wounds as well, though surely with no kind intent.

The prince stirred, and his eyes fluttered open and gazed up at Kjieran. They were bloodshot and bespoke of unreasoning pain.

“Your highness,” Kjieran murmured wretchedly.

It took a moment, but then Trell seemed to focus on him. “I…know your face… but I don’t…know you.”

“I’m Kjieran van Stone, your Highness,” Kjieran confessed with grief and guilt thick in this throat. “I am sworn in your father’s service. I was there when Raine D’Lacourte truth-bound you—would that Cephrael had closed his eye that abject night! We have none of us forgiven ourselves for what became of you.”

Trell closed his eyes and managed the barest shake of his head. “I was upon my path,” he murmured weakly. “No one could have prevented it.”

Kjieran gazed at him with misery and wonder both warring for purchase. Where had he been these many years? The question burned so desperately upon Kjieran’s tongue that it escaped him before he could quench its flame.

“The Akkad,” Trell gasped. A wave of pain shuddered through him and he shut his eyes again. “The Emir… took me in, treated me as his own son. I led…a band of Converted—”

“How
touching
,” came a sudden voice from the doorway.

Kjieran spun his head to see hal’Jaitar standing in the threshold. The
other
within him reared to fight—

And Trell screamed. His body went rigid.

“
Do not!
” hal’Jaitar hissed even as four others appeared in the room: the wielder from the alley along with two of the thugs who’d gutted Kjieran, and a crimson-gowned woman with long, raven hair. “Taliah has the prince’s pattern,” hal’Jaitar warned, and his gaze shifted from where Trell writhed in breathless agony to the woman in crimson silk, who stood with her dark gaze fixed on Trell. “She can kill him with a thought.” 

Agonized, Kjieran quelled the rearing
other.
He would not risk the prince’s life, and now that he knew the woman’s name, he knew also that hal’Jaitar’s claim was no bluff. This then was the Adept who had overseen Trell’s torture and subsequent healing, for Viernan’s daughter, Taliah hal’Jaitar, was a Healer by birth. Her abusive use of her talent, however, was as loathsome and unforgivable as Bethamin’s scourge upon
elae’s
fourth-strand children.

“Quite the conundrum, isn’t it?” Hal’Jaitar posed, watching Kjieran as a viper might regard a threatening hawk. “Call forth your master’s power, and you
may
destroy us with it…but is your strike faster than mine? Faster than Kedar’s?” and here his dark eyes indicated the wielder Kjieran had last seen in the alley. “Faster than Taliah’s when she has hold of the prince’s pattern already? Care to wager on it,
Truthreader
?” and the contempt in his tone was thick.

Slowly, Kjieran stood. He felt himself stranded on a tiny skiff swamped by a hurricane sea. Everything was going incalculably, inconceivably
wrong
.  

Viernan must’ve interpreted the abject look on Kjieran’s face, for he moved farther into the cell wearing an expression of triumphant condescension. “Did you really think you’d fooled us?” His dark eyes speared Kjieran. “Kedar’s men gutted you like a pig, but you bled not a single drop. And in the Guild Hall…did you imagine
I
would not recognize
deyjiin? I
who lived through the Adept Wars, who witnessed with mine own eyes the foul power birthed in the hands of Malachai’s Shades?” 

He settled Kjieran a derisive sneer. “
I
have known your every move since Dore Madden brought you forth from Tambarré. Your little interlude with that wretched Marquiin, the lengthy sea excursions to scour the flesh from your bones—there is
nothing
I don’t know of your activities, Kjieran van Stone!” 

Trell moaned beside Kjieran, and the truthreader felt his entire world slipping away—the seas were closing above his head now, the light of hope growing ever more distant.

“What I don’t yet understand is
how
,” hal’Jaitar continued. He spared another slicing look for Kjieran, accusatory and fierce. “You haven’t appeared on the currents since you arrived. How then are you striding the fair hallways of Tal’Shira when as far as
elae
is concerned, you don’t exist?”

Kjieran gazed at him in broken fury, desperate to help his prince but clearly caught between hal’Jaitar’s pincers with the man’s scorpion tail poised to strike. “What do you want from me, Consul?”

“I want
answers!
” 

Kjieran turned an agonized look at Trell. “Then make her release him. Heal him!
Now
.” 

“You will tell me what I want to know,” hal’Jaitar returned in dark humor, “or Taliah will boil his blood in his veins. Have you ever seen a man when he’s been boiled, Kjieran van Stone?” As if in demonstration, Trell screamed again, and his body went rigid.

“
STOP!
” Kjieran raged, and the vicious
other
launched out of his control. Cold power erupted out of Kjieran, unleashed by the
other’s
fury. Hal’Jaitar threw up his hands with a dreadful grimace, casting a shield of protection over himself and the others as
deyjiin
ripped through the room, thunder without sound.

Trell screamed even more terribly than before, while the
other
launched Kjieran’s body toward hal’Jaitar with hands as claws—

A sword caught Kjieran across the side of the head, dropping him hard to the stones. The room shuddered, and stone dust showered down. Shocked silence descended with the dust, and Kjieran pushed up to elbows to find the black-robed Kedar holding a Merdanti blade over him.

Hal’Jaitar wore an expression of black excoriation. “Fight us now and everyone dies,” he growled, chest heaving. “Is that what you want?”

Kjieran slowly got back to his feet. The blade had only stunned him, but Trell still writhed on the earthen floor, and he could not bear it. “Make her
stop,” he managed in a voice like gravel, and his desolate gaze bespoke his willingness to destroy all of them to save Trell even a heartbeat more of suffering.  

Hal’Jaitar considered him with a frown, and then a glare. “Taliah,” he finally said.

Taliah shifted her eyes to him in agitation. A moment later Trell stilled and exhaled a shuddering breath.

“
Heal
him,” Kjieran snarled. He was the wild, cornered wolf, and no one doubted he would chew off his own paw to see his will be done.

“Healing takes time,” hal’Jaitar snapped, but he flashed a brusque look at Taliah to see it done. Then he settled Kjieran a piercing glare. “Now…explain.”

Though his plan had gone horribly awry, Kjieran was committed to salvaging
something
of his sworn liege and his son…something of himself. So he forced back the fear and the
other
, which were both fighting for his attention, and he confessed, “Dore Madden has long sought the pattern Björn van Gelderan used to create his Shades. In pursuit of this truth, he designed a Pattern of Changing, merging the fifth and the first to create…” and here he paused, swallowed sickly, “…what I am becoming.”

Hal’Jaitar eyed him narrowly. “Which is what?”

Kjieran lifted colorless eyes to meet his gaze, feeling naught but empty desolation where his soul had once resonated. “A weapon.”

Hal’Jaitar broke into a low chuckle, one that grew in volume and spirit until his cold laughter resounded in the stone chamber. “
Dore Madden!
” he cried with arms thrown high. “Your insanities have borne incredible fruit!”

Abruptly he swung and paced away, eying a grieving Kjieran over his shoulder as he observed, “There were rumors, of course. Whispers of how that lunatic was creating some sort of weapon for the Prophet. We never imagined the weapon would be alive.”  He looked Kjieran up and down and added, “Then again, one must use the term loosely.”

Kjieran bowed his head, gritted his teeth and tried desperately to hold back a crushing wave of despair. Hal’Jaitar had outwitted him at every turn. Had he ever stood a chance? 

“But this does not explain
you
, Kjieran van Stone,” the wielder meanwhile remarked. “How is it you live and walk and breathe?”

“T’were better you asked Dore Madden to confess such sins, for I understand them but little. I know only that…only that…”
Dear Epiphany
,
it was so hard to say, “…that my spirit is somehow now…bound…to the Prophet.”

“Miraculous.” Hal’Jaitar exchanged a telling look with his wielder, Kedar.

Trell groaned, then stirred, and Kjieran looked to him as the prince pushed up on his hands. The gruesome and bloody holes in his arms were now covered by regrown flesh. Taliah was skilled indeed to heal him without touch.

Hal’Jaitar pinned his gaze on the prince, who returned his stare in kind. “I’m still waiting for Fate to come and rescue you, prince of Dannym.”