The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (105 page)

Gydryn gazed toward the sunset with the unwelcome suspicion that hal’Jaitar intended for this one to become his last.
Oh,
he trusted his men beyond question and knew their skills, but he also knew hal’Jaitar—and Raine’s truth, he’d made it easy for the man to act against him, hadn’t he? Practically serving himself up for the feast as a regretful, if necessary, diversion. Yet if his life was forfeit in the salvage of his kingdom, so be it. No one man stood greater than the people he led; his life was no less important than those already sacrificed. 

“Daniel,” the king murmured to the knight riding closest beside him.

“Sire?” 

“If something should happen,” he began, glancing sideways at the knight, “if we should become…separated, you are to rally the men, make north in all haste for the Pass of Ryohim and then head west to Nahavand.”

Daniel looked understandably troubled by this order. “Sire…surely you don’t expect—”

“What I expect is for you to follow my instructions,” the king growled.

Daniel gazed upon him with trepidation. “Your will be done, majesty,” he murmured.

The king looked back to the road, his silhouette framed in the dying glow of sunset, only the muscles of his jaw breaking the stillness of his form…clenching and unclenching.

***

Swathed in the black robes and
keffiyeh
of the Nadori cavalry, Kjieran van Stone sat on his horse in the late afternoon sun, head bowed, while Radov and hal’Jaitar played at being allies with his king.

He felt…numb. Betrayed. As if all the promises ever made him had been lies, his entire lifetime a foul trick. The Prophet’s doctrines now seemed frighteningly true. What hope was there in this life? One merely walked a rigid path towards death, and all the joy to be found upon it was illusion.

Hal’Jaitar held all the cards in their game of Trumps, fully embodying the role of the hated Sorcerer, and Kjieran’s hand was reduced to a single knight. Only Raine’s amulet and Kjieran’s battered will stood between them now, and he feared the latter would soon be claimed by the Prophet. Kjieran shook his head bitterly and clenched his teeth.

He felt Bethamin’s bond at all times now, even when he knew the man wasn’t looking in on his thoughts. Beneath his robes, his flesh was nearly consumed. The explosion of
deyjiin
back in Trell’s cell had somehow catalyzed the process of changing, and now Kjieran’s head and a pale circle on his chest, where Raine’s amulet once again lay, stood as the last bastion against Dore’s pestilential pattern. The denouement of his entire path—his life’s greatest effort—was nigh.

Kjieran stared hotly at the pommel of his saddle, thinking of his last conversation with the wielder, Kedar, who had detailed hal’Jaitar’s demands as he’d watched Kjieran dressing in the robes worn by a hundred other men.

“We’ve set a little surprise for your precious king,” the Bemothi claimed, his dark eyes sharp upon Kjieran’s strange and unsettling new form. “When the attack begins, you are to find him and be sure he does not live to see the dawn.”

Because Kjieran had given him a traitorous glare, Kedar added, “My master has assured me that your king will die either way, but if you are not seen to be the one taking his life,
Truthreader
, he will make your prince pay dearly.”

Kjieran had no doubt Trell would be paying dearly no matter what actions he personally took, but he dared not rouse the wielder’s suspicions by further defiance. So he had merely nodded and done as Kedar ordered him, eventually finding himself upon a westbound horse.

They set off as the sun was sinking below the rim of the world. Kjieran rode among the tallest of the Nadoriin, some of them veritably giants. These base men laughed and joked in the desert tongue, sharing lewd commentary of shocking acts that were abrasive to Kjieran’s ears. He had never before been grateful for
elae’s
increasingly distant whisper, but it was an admitted relief not to have to listen to their thoughts as well as their crude words. The desert heat faded with the dying light, and night swept in upon the tide of a rising wind as the long procession of horses and men snaked through the dunes.

And somewhere between Tal’Shira and midnight, Kjieran hardened his resolve. It would be his last effort to save his king, his final act towards salvation. Honor rooted him to this purpose. Will kept him upon its path. Faith drove him forward through seemingly insurmountable opposition and made him never think of turning back.

But of hope…he had none.

***

The night wore on. A moon just shy of full shone down upon the desert as Gydryn and his knights made their way deeper into the Sand Sea. They followed an ancient road that was waging a vigilant war against the ever-shifting dunes, each claiming the space of the other. The steady plodding of horses, the jangling of harnesses, the occasional squeak of leather or the chink of mail—these were the only sounds as the men passed quietly beneath the desert night.

Above, the sky was dizzy with stars. The luminous moon cast enough silvery light to illumine the hills and shadow the valleys, making a monochrome patchwork of the broad expanse of dunes. The repetitive percussion of the moving column, the torches’ wavering flame, and the ever-lengthening night lulled the men into a trance-like daze, neither asleep nor fully aware. Only the scouts remained wakeful as they ranged far afield of the main column.

Thus they were the first to die.

The attack came without warning. One moment the blanket of night lay in quiet slumber. The next it was awash with assassins hollering a startling tongue-trill as their horses careened down the dunes. They descended on the column from all sides and scattered the troops amid blood and steel. Gydryn’s section was immediately cut off from Radov’s. The Dannish knights hurried to surround their king, while the cavalry fanned out to meet the marauders with flashing scimitars and angry shouts.

Gydryn’s knights fought hard and strong and their superior training proved true. Yet as the lines were broken and men became scattered and their torches extinguished in the sand, Gydryn found it increasingly difficult to tell Nadoriin from marauder—the assassins were dressed as darkly as Radov’s cavalry in swathes of black linen.

Gydryn spared a glance toward the front of the column to see how Radov fared and—
gone!
The king stood in his stirrups to get a clearer view, but his eyes did not lie. The dead lay as dark petals among the fallen torches, many still burning in the sand, but the prince and his remaining men had vanished.

Suddenly the marauders broke the line of Gydryn’s knights, and the king could spare no more thought for Radov. He drew his sword and took the first man through the heart. The man tumbled from his mount, joining the morass of dead and dying in the sand. Another marauder broke through, and Gydryn fought him off with three powerful strokes. His knights managed to close the breech then, and in the momentary respite, the king spared another glance westward, seeking Radov and his missing Nadoriin. Had they been chased off, scattered,
captured
? What had become of them?

“Sire!” one of his knights called, and the king swung round to face a second wave of assassins storming over the dunes with tongues trilling in that ear-piercing call—
scores
more. The sight brought a sinking feeling, a flash of debilitating dread, but then he hardened his determination.

“Fan out!” Gydryn shouted. They could ill afford to become trapped and surrounded by these assassins, for there would be no quarter to be found among them. Then Gydryn was raising his blade and taking down a descending marauder. The man’s cantering horse careened close enough to smell the beast on the wind of his passing. The assassin toppled from his mount, which in turn spun away to ram into another rider. Both animals neighed in shrill protest, and the second man shouted as he fell. Gydryn speared him through and turned to meet his next attacker.

Thus did the battle proceed.

The king lost sight of his knights, lost count of the marauders he’d met and battled and dispatched as the melee ranged far afield of the road. His hands and vambraces were soon blood-drenched, his sword slick. The acrid tang of the humour filled his nostrils, mingling with the baser odors of death, of excrement and the sweat of men and horse. In the moonlight, the fighting men seemed a choppy sea, mercuric blades flashing as waves, and there was no relief in sight.

The king treated each marauder he met as though theirs was the whole conflict—in that moment, there was only the assassin and himself, and their fierce contest. When the man fell, violently or unremarkably, sometimes clutching upon the king as he sank into death, often staggering away to find his solitary end, Gydryn thought of him as one more dark stone in the battle jar. A vessel that was barely a quarter full.

He’d just claimed another assassin’s life and was awash in the warmth of the man’s blood when the barbarian stormed him.

***

Kjieran was riding far in the rear of the slow-moving column when the attack began. He heard them first, those trilling tongues in a high-pitched death cry, and then they poured over the distant dunes as ants descending upon a feast. Kjieran spotted his king, safe within the circle of his knights, and was taking up his reins to rush to his side  when two blades descended, their points hovering before his eyes.

Kjieran recoiled. 

“We got orders to see you make no mischief,” said the giant riding on his left. He held his weapon near Kjieran’s unprotected neck.

“And I have orders as well,” Kjieran returned heatedly.

“Yeah, Kedar said you’d say that,” the other giant remarked. “Said we weren’t to let you free no matter what you claimed. Said he’d be watching.”

The man’s blade prevented Kjieran from spinning around to see if indeed the wielder observed them, but even had he been free to move, the night easily protected those who sought anonymity.

Before him, the king’s men were holding off the marauder’s onslaught with the help of Radov’s Nadoriin, but for how long? Kjieran ground his teeth at hal’Jaitar’s artfulness, at his deft and cunning manipulation. Had he
ever
intended for Kjieran to harm the king? Kjieran realized that hal’Jaitar had likely only ever meant to distract him, to keep him occupied and out of his way—
so that his own men disguised as marauders could do the deed instead
. Kjieran cursed himself for not seeing the truth sooner. A man like hal’Jaitar would never trust someone outside of his circle with such an important act of treason.

Kjieran watched the wielder’s elaborate deception playing out with teeth clenched and his heart weighing dreadfully in his chest. After a battle such as this, with few witnesses to speak against him, hal’Jaitar might assign blame for King Gydryn’s death to whomever he chose.

In that moment, Kjieran remembered his dream and an admonishment from the goddess who’d found him at last.

“This is your path, Kjieran,”
she’d told him as he gazed in dreamscape upon her ethereal, ever-shifting form, observing a dazzling metamorphosis occurring before his eyes.
“It was always meant to be you who walked it. If you cannot find the will to see it to its end, to where it merges with the greater pattern, then all of the branches that would’ve grown from that joining will never be.”

As Kjieran recalled the goddess Epiphany’s admonishment, given equally as warning and encouragement, something changed inside him. A renewed purpose surged forth, fueled by desperation—and the
other
reared to fight.

Kjieran’s hands flashed. He grabbed the giants’ swords by their blades and wrenched them free. Then he flipped the weapons to catch the hilts and drove the blades in killing blows, taking one soldier through the heart and another through the neck. They toppled, and Kjieran spurred his horse through the opening their deaths provided.

Another wave of marauders poured shrilly over the far hills as Kjieran sped toward his king in a blaze of sand, his powerful horse dodging and sliding around fighting pairs as they reached the battle’s fringe. Kjieran sought to keep the king in sight, but swords and men kept intruding across his line of vision.

And then the sand exploded in front of him and a figure appeared. Kjieran’s horse reared with a whinny of protest, and he fell from his saddle. Landing on his neck and shoulders, he flipped backwards and onto his stomach, momentarily dazed. A hand grabbed him by the collar of his robes and yanked him up, and Kjieran focused again on Kedar’s black gaze.

“
Foolish
,” he snarled.

Kjieran felt
elae
pouring into him and both wondered and despaired that it had no effect. His ebon hand grabbed Kedar by the neck, stone-hard fingers closing around living flesh. Kedar retaliated with the fourth, a blast of raw energy that sent nearby men tumbling like leaves and Kjieran staggering back. The
other
drew deeply upon the Prophet’s dark power, and Kjieran raised his hands to wield it—

Suddenly the Prophet’s violent presence flooded into Kjieran’s mind in a tidal wave of fury. Kjieran gasped and fell to his knees, pushing hands to his exploding head. In the next moment, he lay prostrated before his master.