The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (31 page)

As Raine was passing another wagon, its door opened and a man stepped out, already in the middle of a stretch. “You’re up…early…” Balearic noted through a yawn.

Raine lifted his gaze to the pirate-turned-gypsy, studying him as the latter scratched his beard and then tugged down his waistcoat over an untucked shirt.

“Yes, good morning to you.” He turned and gazed eastward once more. The horizon had become a glowing line against shadow-black sand, the heavens just above pale gold but quickly moving through to the deepest blue, the stars fading beneath the powerful coming of dawn.

Raine had been many days in T’khendar so far, helping in the gypsy camp as they moved west, but much remained unclear about Björn’s realm and those who dwelled there. They were due to reach the city of Renato the following afternoon, and while Raine wouldn’t be sorry to say farewell to the Wyndlass Desert, he’d had little chance to speak with Balearic since their rescue, and he still had a host of questions for the gypsy.

“Nine years, you said,” Raine noted as Balearic descended the steps of his wagon and joined him in observing the sunrise. “That’s how long you’ve lived here.”

“Aye, my lord.”

“Then you know what they say in Alorin. You know the stories of this place…of my oath-brother.”

“Aye,” the gypsy admitted.

Raine settled him an inquiring look.

Balearic shrugged. “You can’t believe everything you hear, your Excellency. Fortune bite me, but you can’t believe half of what you see, either.” He headed over to his fire pit and stirred the coals back to life. Raine followed him. “I wasn’t exactly in a position to care much about ancient history when I expatriated here,” Balearic admitted as he squatted to put kindling on the burgeoning fire. “What vran Lea said was true—I had half the Agasi imperial navy after me. No matter what I did, my pirating days were over. I figured I’d make a new start in a place nobody knew me, somewhere even the Empress’s long arm couldn’t reach.” Getting the fire back to life, Balearic settled an iron kettle on a hook over the flames and sat back, draping elbows over knees.

Raine sat down beside him. “And?”

Balearic cast a thoughtful look out of the corner of his eye. “Things are a bit unusual here, as you might imagine. In a lot of ways, life goes on the same, but in just as many ways it’s completely different.” He gave Raine an uncertain smile. “To tell you the truth, my lord, people here somewhat blame you and the other Vestals.”

Raine drew back in surprise. “They blame
us?
”

“Through no fault of the First Lord’s,” Balearic was quick to declare. “No doubt he’d be the first to come to your defense, just because he’s that way about things, but you know, in Alorin they’re like to blame those who aren’t there to defend themselves, and I suppose it’s no different here.”

Raine reflected it was an interesting concept to imagine himself the villain for a change.

“No offense, your Excellency,” Balearic continued, his gaze fixed on stoking the fire, “but there’s as some…well, they might’ve left you out in the Wyndlass to find your own way, if you know what I mean. I can’t say for certain if Carian hadn’t been with you if I would’ve made the trek myself.”

“I see,” Raine said, regarding him quietly.

“Lots of us know the rumors circulating about the First Lord back in Alorin,” Balearic continued, “and the people here don’t like them overmuch.”

Raine fixed his gaze upon the gypsy. “You’re sworn to him?”

“I suppose of a fashion,” Balearic admitted, “but not in the way you’re likely thinking—nothing like an oath or any sort of magic—but people are loyal to the First Lord and the Lady.”

“He’s your ruler,” Raine said equitably but with deep concern in his gaze. “It only follows.”

“Oh no, the First Lord doesn’t rule here,” Balearic returned at once. “T’khendar is a realm of Free Cities, like Xanthe. The Governors are in charge of the cities, and they just report to the Guilds.”

Raine leaned back in surprise. “Björn doesn’t rule?”

“Like I said,” Balearic replied, shooting him a telling look. “Folks have a lot of wrong ideas back in Alorin.”

Raine considered him for a moment and then observed, “You are quite forthcoming for a man of your background, Monsieur de Palma.”

“Well…the General said we should be as truthful with you as we dared,” Balearic returned, pushing at the fire with a long stick and not looking at him, “and well…you’re as like to get ill stares from folks as you are to be greeted fairly. It’s only right you should understand.”

“I appreciate your candor—more than you know,” Raine told him. “Who is the General you speak of?”

“General
Ramuhárikhamáth
. He’s the one who took note of you in the Wyndlass.”

“Ah…” Raine arched brows.
So Bjorn maintains his allies in their same roles. But what of his other two generals?
Arion Tavestra
is certainly dead…and Markal?

Raine had been seeking Markal Morrelaine for centuries. The idea of perhaps finding him in T’khendar brought a sudden sense of hope. Then he laughed at himself, for what point in questioning Markal when Björn himself stood to answer? It seemed a bitter irony, after all this time.

“So you came here and you listened to different stories,” Raine posed to Balearic then, “but you were a cynical man, if I’m not misreading you, Monsieur de Palma. What changed your mind?”

Balearic pitched his stick onto the flames and clasped hands before him. He gave Raine an uncertain look. “People talk, like I said, but here they tell different stories. I suppose we’re all wont to think the worst of others, my lord, but…well, there was something of these stories that just rang with truth to me.” He gazed off over the fire and added quietly and with a sudden faraway look, “And then there was the Lady. One can’t see her but know she represents goodness in all its forms.”

Raine looked at him in confusion. “What lady?”

“The Lady Isabel.”

Isabel!

Raine gaped at Balearic while the earth disintegrated beneath him, the heavens slowed in their turning, and reality came to an abrupt and staggering collision with the impossible. He knew he couldn’t have heard the man correctly, that he must’ve been mistaken, yet Balearic’s description of her—now that Raine had put a name to the Lady—could refer to no other woman.

“Isabel,” he whispered, his face ashen.
Isabel.
He pushed two fingers to pinch the bridge of his nose and tried to breathe around the tightness in his chest.

Isabel!

“I see you know her then.” 

Raine staggered beneath the weight of his shock. He felt as though his entire understanding of the world and everyone in it had suddenly been turned inside out and the flesh of assumption stripped away to reveal the bleeding truth beneath.

Forcibly drawing himself back from the fringes of sure despair, Raine managed a painful swallow. “Has she been here the whole time?” he asked, a rough whisper. “Since the beginning?” He could hear the desperation in his own voice.

Balearic regarded him solemnly. “Far as I know, my lord, she’s been here since Tiern’aval fell.”

Raine sank his head into his hands and a growl of despair escaped him.
Dear Epiphany
. “All this time…all this time…we thought—”

Balearic suddenly understood why Raine was so shocked. “Well, you didn’t think
he’d
killed her!” he exclaimed, horrified. “Not the Lady, his own sister! Even
I
know the First Lord would sacrifice the realm he created with his own blood and tears before he would see harm come to the Lady Isabel!”

Raine gave him a tormented look. “She was the High Mage of the Citadel, Balearic!” he growled heatedly, so overcome that his emotions got the better of him. “You know
that
story, certainly.”

“Oh aye, I know it,” the man said with a hard, uncompromising glint in his blue eyes. “But there’s lots said of the Hundred Mages and their fate that isn’t fact—why, the Lady’s not the only one as survived when all were said to have perished. There’s the governors of the cities too—Governors Paledyne, Tempest, val Kess, d’Norio and Ranner—all Mages once, and I hear Markal Morrelaine returned several moons ago, and others besides, I’m told.”

These names sent Raine reeling. He grabbed Balearic’s arm as much to keep himself grounded as with his shock. “
Alive?
” he gasped. “They’re all alive? They’re all
here?
”

“You shouldn’t believe the stories, my lord,” Balearic said reprovingly.

“We saw the Mages’
heads
, man!” Raine exclaimed in exasperation and dismay. “Malachai paraded them right before us!”

Balearic picked up another stick to poke at the fire and posed quietly, “Did you count them?”

Raine stared at him. “
Count
them?” The effrontery of the remark roused furious indignation, but then Raine saw the point of his question. Something within the obvious truth of it restored some semblance of order to his thoughts, and he suddenly deflated. “No,” he admitted then, exhaling a heavy sigh, “I suppose we did not
count
them.” 

“Wasn’t a hundred, that’s sure as silver,” Balearic grumbled.

Raine pushed a hand through his hair. Thunderstruck and thoroughly confused, he wanted more than ever before to strangle the living life out of Björn van Gelderan. “Then why?” he asked more of himself than Balearic, a fervent plea whispered into the rising dawn, as if beseeching the sun for answers that no one else would provide. “
By Cephrael’s Great Book,
” Raine hissed exasperatedly, “if everything we know is a bloody lie, what
did
happen there?”

“The events that took place at the Battle of the Citadel are a closely guarded secret,” Balearic offered, even though Raine wasn’t expecting him to answer the question. “People don’t even whisper about that night—not even the ones who lived through it. Someone comes along thinking to be smart, trying to make connections, conjecturing…the next thing he knows he’s got a Shade asking questions at his door.”  He shoved his stick into the fire, sending sparks heavenward. “Ain’t nobody wants that kind of attention.”

Raine gave him a stricken look and silence fell upon them, a long stretch where only the fire crackled and the kettle boiled its low hum. Finally, Raine said quietly, “So far there has not been a single thing about this place that fits with anything I remembered or knew to be true.”

“Aye,” Balearic commiserated with a long sigh. “T’khendar will do that to you.”  Then he shook his head and muttered under his breath, “Thinking he’d let the Lady fall into harm…” he clicked his tongue, conveying his disappointment, and added, “ye just don’t know him at all.”

No,
Raine agreed, teeth clenched in frustration.
I clearly do not.

‘If you want answers in Niyadbakir, you must face first the veils of your own failure.’
  Björn’s words—warning or prophecy? Raine was starting to believe that either way, the endeavor might prove more difficult than he imagined.

***

Franco Rohre stepped off the node into the glaring morning of the Wyndlass Desert and was immediately assaulted by searing heat and the unforgiving brightness of the endless sands. In the near distance, within the shadow of jutting basalt cliffs, Franco saw a splash of color and knew he’d found the Great Master.

He set off toward the green canvas tent wondering why anyone in his right mind would purposefully create a desert. If you had the skill to birth a world from the womb of another realm, why not give it a temperate climate and cloak the hills in foliage? What was there to admire about a bloody furnace of stone and sand?

Dagmar was reclining in a hammock chair beneath the shelter of his canvas tent, whose sides were open to the breeze—not that the boiling wind did anything but cause a man to simultaneously bake and perspire. The Second Vestal smiled as Franco trudged up, his shirt already soaked with sweat. “Ah, Franco,” he greeted, twining hands behind his head, “welcome to the Wyndlass.”

“Thank you, my Lord. I’ve always wanted to visit.”

The Vestal chuckled. “It has been so long since I suffered from the heat that I forgot how unpleasant it can be. Here, sit, have some
siri
,” and he waved nebulously toward the other hammock and a table where a pitcher of
siri
beaded with sweat. Franco willingly accepted the drink but forewent the hammock; the idea of anything else touching his body was somehow abhorrent.

“I can teach you the patterns my oath-brother taught me so long ago, Franco,” Dagmar suggested with a twinkle in his eye. “That is, if you dare to work the fifth.”

“No thank you, my lord,” Franco returned. “I’ll take my chances with the heat.”

Dagmar grinned. “I don’t blame you. The fifth is not a strand to be taken lightly, and working its patterns—especially when they are new—can feel much akin to baking in this desert.” He swung his feet over the side of his hammock and went to pour himself more
siri
.