The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (44 page)

Trell frowned and shook his head. “Why would he do that? It baffles me why this man has taken an interest in my welfare. Vaile said it was good luck to have the blessing of the Mage.”  He cast Alyneri a rueful grin. “I’m still not sure if I agree with her.”

A sudden surge of inexplicable jealously pricked Alyneri upon hearing of the woman named Vaile who’d had the blessing of Trell’s company and was obviously a friend. Then she chastised herself for such ridiculous insecurities.

“The Mage is the reason I’m heading to Rethynnea,” Trell added then.

She
arched brows inquiringly.

“As I was preparing to leave the sa’reyth, Balaji—one of the Sundragons—presented Gendaia to me.”  The horse nickered upon hearing her name, and Trell leaned to rub her neck. “The Mage gave her to me as a gift, along with new clothes and a fortune in Agasi silver.” 
He turned Alyneri an unreadable look. “Balaji also gave me a letter to take to the Mage’s contact in the Cairs. I’d already decided to go to Xanthe—not for any reason I can explain, I think it just seemed as good as place as any to start looking for my past—but the Mage made sure I headed to Rethynnea by requesting that I deliver his message.”

“Trell, he must’ve known who you were.”

“Undoubtedly.” He grunted and shook his head. “Balaji asked me once what I thought the Mage did for the Emir. At the time I understood him to imply that the Mage had many talents. Now I think he hinted at something else entirely.”

Alyneri shook her head, not understanding.

“I don’t think the Mage serves the Emir. I think it’s the other way around.”

Alyneri’s stomach fluttered anxiously at this idea.

“Everything changed when the Mage appeared,” Trell remarked, pensive now. He gazed unseeing at the road ahead. “The entire balance of a six-year war shifted within months of his arrival.”

Alyneri hugged her cloak closer, feeling a sudden chill. It wasn’t hard to imagine the Fifth Vestal as having a grand plan that encompassed entire kingdoms—certainly all the stories spoke of him as some evil mastermind. But until that moment, she’d never thought of herself as being somehow involved in his plans.

“Do you think the Emir knows the Mage’s true identity?” she asked in a small voice.

Trell gave her a telling look
. “Without question, and I think it’s safe to say the Mage means for me to have a role in his game.”

Alyneri gave him an uneasy look. The zanthyr’s loyalties notwithstanding, she merely hoped that the Fifth Vestal meant well, for certainly nothing of the sort was ever attributed to him. The idea that the wielder had intentions for Trell frightened her. “Why do think that?” 

“He mentioned me in one of his journals. Ean and I both.”  Trell exhaled heavily and shook his head. “But I needn’t disturb you with these thoughts, my lady,” he added with a smile to lighten the mood. “Things will be as they will. We can only walk the path ahead of us and see where it leads.”

Strangely enough, even with all the fears now growing inside her, Alyneri realized that she would willingly walk that path, so long as Trell walked it with her.

***

The royal cousin Fynnlar val Lorian knew Fate was punishing him. It remained a mystery which one of his many misdemeanors had finally drawn Cephrael’s loathsome and merciless eye, but Fynn was certain that even the most egregious of them should not have required
this
penance.

He sat nursing his wine in the company of
Seth nach Davvies
, Third Vestal of Alorin;
Rhys val Kincaide
, Captain of the King’s Own Guard; and Björn van Gelderan’s personal zanthyr. Since the night Creighton’s Shade claimed Ean and all of the others vanished, Fynn felt he’d been somehow transported to purgatory. That Seth put himself in charge only rubbed salt in the wound. Fynn would rather have taken orders from the zanthyr than get bossed around by an overgrown pigeon with an ego complex. Not that he actually
did
anything Seth told him to do. He just felt irritated about it on principle.

Which didn’t mean he was doing nothing about the fact that Tanis and Alyneri had vanished, or that Franco Rohre and Creighton’s Shade had dragged Ean across a node that Carian, Gwynnleth and Raine later vanished upon, or that the Temple of the Vestals had been magically disintegrated overnight… However, there wasn’t much he
could
do.

Too, it galled him that he hadn’t been there to see it all himself—that he’d only the word of two immortals on what had happened at all. That the zanthyr and Seth were in agreement on the facts didn’t exactly prove their verisimilitude, but he was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, under the circumstances. 

As if any of them cared what he thought.

“…no information of any kind,” Rhys was saying when Fynn tuned back into the conversation. They’d all gathered that day to pool their recent discoveries and any progress on the tasks assigned to each of them, but so far the soup of news was pretty damn thin. The Captain finished, “
Cayal
and
Dorin
have now inquired in every store along three miles of the Thoroughfare and only the one barmaid remembered seeing anything of Tanis.”

“The boy cannot simply vanish,” Seth grumbled. For some reason he’d taken Tanis’s disappearance as a personal affront.

“Pretty much looks like that’s what he did,” Fynn pointed out. He was tired of the same argument day after day, and he could be drinking at the Villa D’Antoinette right now.

Seth shot him a fiery glare. “You don’t seem overly concerned about the welfare of your companion, Fynnlar val Lorian. Perhaps you were complicit in his disappearance. A traitor in our midst would certainly explain some things.”

The royal cousin belched gratuitously. “Phaedor already told us what happened to the lad,” he pointed out. Not that Fynn believed the zanthyr outright, but it was always convenient to blame things on him.

Seth glowered at Fynn and then shifted his gaze and glowered instead at Phaedor, who stood like a shadow leaning against the wall, coolly disinterested, as if he couldn’t be bothered even to yawn. When it became clear to Seth that Phaedor wasn’t going to speak simply because he glared at him, the avieth demanded, “Well?”

“Well what?” replied the shadow that was the zanthyr. Only his green eyes glowed from beneath his raven curls, bright among the darkness that hovered around him.

“What news of the boy?” Seth snapped.

“If I had any news of Tanis, Vestal, I would’ve told you already.”

“You’re the one who claims some kind of connection to the boy,” Rhys pointed out—he always sided with Seth if it pitted him against the zanthyr.

Phaedor flipped his dagger and caught it by the point. “Tanis lives.”

“How very new and insightful,” Seth noted blackly.

Fynn often wondered…if the zanthyr didn’t intend to give them any information or be helpful in any way, why did he bother coming to the meetings? Then he realized it was probably because he wanted to keep an eye on the rest of them.
Shadow take the insufferable creature!

“What do you hope to hear from me, Vestal?” Phaedor meanwhile remarked. “I have already told you Tanis won’t be found until he’s ready.”

“You imply he’s purposefully hiding from us,” Rhys growled, “that the lad went off willingly.”

The zanthyr arched a raven brow and spun his dagger by its point on his middle fingertip. It whirled like a top, deadly and straight.

“I just can’t believe that of him,” Rhys complained. “What would make him wander off in the middle of the city and never return?”

“Finally, a question worthy of consideration,” the zanthyr remarked.

Fynn regarded him sourly. He really had no question about who actually led their motley group—Fynn would be the first to admit this, so long as he didn’t have to admit it out loud. He could deny it all he wanted, but he knew that as soon as the zanthyr declared something to be done, they would all spring to action. Fynn just wished the pretense of it all could be put behind them so he could get back to the Villa D’Antoinette and Ghislain’s excellent wine.

Except…he’d been spending
so much time at the Villa D’Antoinette of late that Ghislain was starting to drop not so subtle hints about his playing Kings with her. As no game with Ghislain could ever end pleasantly, and since Fynn was attached both to his coin and his pride, he had long ago vowed to never—
ever
—become involved with Ghislain D’Launier over a Kings board. Which left him in an uncomfortable limbo with none of his prospects looking exactly desirable.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Seth meanwhile demanded of Phaedor.

As if Seth hadn’t spoken at all, the zanthyr said, “Tanis is beyond your reach, Captain. You would better serve your prince by searching for his brother.”

Rhys gave him a belligerent look. Despite Fynn’s insistence, the obstinate man refused to believe Trell was alive. Not that Fynn cared what Rhys thought.

Fynn had his own people working to find Trell, and he was fairly sure that if
they
couldn’t find any trace of him, the Captain certainly wasn’t going to. Fynn also felt certain that that damnable Carian vran Lea knew perfectly well where Trell was hiding. If only Carian hadn’t taken it upon himself to permanently vacate the realm, Fynn would’ve happily strangled it out of him.

“No,” Rhys muttered, looking uncertain and sounding completely lost. “We need to stay here in case her Grace or the boy turn up.”

“An effective use of your time,” the zanthyr remarked darkly.

Seth glowered at him. “Well, what would
you
have us do?”

But the zanthyr steadfastly refused to advise them—as usual. Fynn half expected he would blame it on Balance—if he ever deigned to explain himself at all—or some other such obscure excuse that none of them might understand anyway.

As if in response to this thought, the zanthyr shifted his emerald eyes to Fynn, and the decidedly knowing look in his piercing gaze made Fynn sprout gooseflesh from head to toe.
Belloth take the bloody creature!
he thought as he suppressed a shudder, violently wishing he could be anywhere else—or at least that the zanthyr might be. 

Surly at Phaedor’s insolent mistreatment of him, Seth turned to Fynn and demanded, “What about you, Fynnlar val Lorian? What of your task?”

Feeling slightly sick to his stomach—mainly from contemplating the zanthyr reading his mind and what this might mean to his immediate future—Fynn drank the last of his wine and pushed out of his chair. “I’ve already requisitioned two Nodefinders and the Guild Master of Rethynnea to look at the node.” He walked to pour himself more wine from the sideboard. “I’m not going to chase down another one willing to brave those crumbling ruins just to so he can tell us again that the bloody thing can’t be traveled.”

The Temple of the Vestals
was all but destroyed, and all of Rethynnea was up in arms over it. Of course, none but those in this room had any idea what had caused it, and the zanthyr had made Fynn swear an oath to silence on the matter. Even his reluctant oath wasn’t enough for the creature, though—which fact would’ve rankled if it wasn’t so justified. Phaedor had done something while Fynn gave his oath—worked some kind of pattern on him. He could feel it sitting there any time he put attention on the thought, and if he so much as conceived of the idea of telling someone else, he got the abominable sensation of live worms squirming in his stomach. Fynn didn’t dare push it further to see how much worse the feeling became. He liked his wine inside his body.

“But it
can
be traveled!” Seth retaliated. “I
saw
them cross it! I almost had Gwynnleth—”

“Raine was all about how that node had been tampered with,” Fynn cut in. He turned back to Seth as he poured more wine. “Whatever Franco did to the node, he obviously constructed it to self-destruct or something once they were across. If the Guild Master of Rethynnea himself says it can’t be traveled,
it can’t be traveled,
Seth
.
”

Seth turned and glowered at the zanthyr as if he was somehow to blame, whereupon Fynn noted that the zanthyr’s eyes were still fixed unerringly on himself.

“I’ll be at the Villa D’Antoinette,” the royal cousin grumbled, finally deciding that he’d rather endure Ghislain’s ridicule than spend another moment as the focus of the zanthyr’s omniscient gaze.

***

Alyneri and Trell reached Rethynnea in the early afternoon. Their route brought them down into the city from the surrounding hills, and they soon joined the thronging crowds along the Avenue of the Gods, which overlooked the city from its high and winding vantage. Alyneri gazed wondrously at the many temples they passed on the long boulevard. She’d always wanted to visit the Temple of the Vestals, and might’ve had the chance to do so if not for that untimely meeting with Sandrine du Préc. As they were passing the black marble temple of the Wind God Azerjaiman, Alyneri straightened in her saddle in anticipation of finally seeing the temple—and gasped.

A great giant seemed to have stepped down and crushed the vast structure that had been the Temple of the Vestals, leaving only shards of crumbling white marble, piles of sand and shattered glass. A constant crowd of people ogled the destruction. Some of them had ventured up onto the edge of the rubble to look down upon the lower levels within, but most stayed prudently distant, letting their eyes and whispers do the exploring instead.