The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (6 page)

“Know you a zanthyr’s blade, boy?” Pelas observed, turning the dagger from side to side as he regarded Tanis with brows lifted. “You are not entirely the innocent you make us believe. Who sent you to spy upon me?”

Despite it being cold enough now to see his breath on the air, Tanis was fueled by an unexpected resurgence of determination. “You’re a w-wielder,” he challenged through chattering teeth, “can you not f-find out yourself?”  

Pelas pinned him with a predatory stare and shook his head to the negative. “Guess again.”  

The name came to him then without understanding, without knowing whence it had come or how he’d first learned it, perhaps a word remembered from a whispered conversation, or plucked from the thoughts of one companion whose fears spoke too loudly. “My m-mistake,” Tanis stammered. “M-malorin’athgul, I mean.”

Pelas’s fiery eyes widened, and Tanis knew he’d guessed rightly. The man gave him an acknowledging nod…and a look of approval. But there was nothing safe about his admiration; rather it seemed the hungry sort of look a wolf gave its intended prey.

Tanis felt his insides tremble.
What in Tiern’aval was a Malorin’athgul?

Abruptly Pelas grabbed Tanis by the hair and pressed his dagger to the lad’s neck. The blade felt cool, the smooth stone impossibly sharp, and yet this was something familiar to him. Tanis didn’t fear the blade, though he feared the man who wielded it.

“Pelas, the ‘ealer cannae last much longer,” one of the Fhorgs remarked from across the way. He had a hand to her wrist, and he dropped her arm as he looked to his master.

“
Duikhan nas
, Pelas,” the blue-eyed Fhorg protested, thus far the only one of them to come to Tanis’s defense. “The li’l truthreader is fresh, the witch ain’t, and Darshan said—”

Pelas hissed something in a fiery tongue and spun away from Tanis only to snare the outspoken Fhorg into the deadly circle of his arm instead. He jammed the dagger precariously beneath the Wildling’s jawbone, drawing blood. “I am
tired
of hearing what my brother says,” he murmured with venom aplenty. “Darshan is not my keeper, no matter what he may think. You’ll do what
I
say and be grateful for the chance to serve.”

“I serve Darshan,” the Fhorg snarled, but his blue eyes kept darting towards Pelas’s dagger.

“My brother will find a tongueless spy of much less value, I assure you.”

The Fhorg glared, a last act of defiance, but it was clear who would win this fight. “To die is to serve thee best, my master,” he intoned in flat hatred.

Pelas released him with a shove, and the Fhorg only just righted himself before pitching chest-first onto the bloody floor. “You might try at least sounding sincere, Riod,” Pelas remarked as he walked over to the captive Healer. “Darshan has such enduring admiration for courage in the face of one’s enemies, does he not?”

Even Tanis could hear the sarcasm dripping from his tone.

“Rouse her,” Pelas ordered.

The Fhorg closest to the woman jerked her head up by the hair and slapped her face fiercely. She gasped as her eyes popped open.

“Now then,” Pelas said, fixing her with an assessing look, “where can I find the pattern, Camilla?”

The Healer named Camilla closed her eyes as if to shut out the horror of the moment. “…For the…thousandth…time,” she whispered, the words finding their excruciating way across a threshold all but blockaded by pain, “…there is…no such pattern. These creatures are…lying to yo—”

The Fhorg closest to her punched her in the mouth, and she cried out even as her head snapped back.

“We’ve been over this, Camilla,” Pelas said, frowning at her. He paced before her with hands behind his back. “These Fhorgs have no reason to lie to me, while you have every reason to do so.”

Weeping now, the Healer named Camilla looked at Pelas and begged, “…ask…the boy.”

“The boy?”  Pelas looked at her strangely. “Why would I care for the opinion of a spy?”

Tanis watched in horror as Camilla’s eyes rolled back in her head.

“Rouse her,” Pelas said irritably.

One of the Fhorgs pitched a bucket of water in her face, and she jerked awake with a start only to hang her head this time. “
Please
…” she wept then, barely audible. “
Please
…I don’t know…
ask
him.”

Pelas looked at Tanis again. He seemed genuinely puzzled. “Did you come here to save her?”

“I…don’t even know her,” Tanis gasped, for he was enduring his own sort of torment from the rope binding his wrists.

Pelas turned to Riod. “What does she mean, ‘ask the boy’?” 

“Like I said, Pelas, ‘e’s a truthreader. ‘e cannae lie t’ye and ‘e knows when yer telling the truth.”

Pelas fixed Tanis with an unsettling look. “I’ve heard that, of course,” he mused, “but none of the Prophet’s Marquiin have ever known what
I
was thinking. I doubt very much their veracity.”  He considered Tanis for a moment, and the boy cringed beneath his inspection. It was nearly too much to bear, holding his gaze, knowing the vicious beast that lurked behind it. “Still…it
would
be a useful skill if it exists. Very well. Let’s give it a try. Ask me something, little spy.”

Tanis scrambled to form a coherent thought. “Are you…are you going to let her go if she tells you what you want to know?” he sent a desperate glance toward Camilla, but her head was lolling.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Pelas said. The he decided, “Probably not. But that was too easy. Ask again.”

Tanis sucked in his breath and managed, “How many people have you murdered?”

“I’ve lost count, and this is becoming tedious. Prove your value to me or she dies as painful a death as my entertainment dictates.”

In desperation, Tanis racked his brain for a real question, and when he posed it, he put all of the force of his truthreader’s fourth-strand compulsion behind it. “What do you intend to do when you find the pattern you’re looking for?”

Pelas’s eyebrows rose. “Now that
is
interesting,” he murmured, and Tanis knew he’d felt the compulsion. “When I find the pattern,” Pelas replied slowly then, “my brothers and I shall use it to unmake the world.”

Even as he gazed in horror at the man, Tanis knew he’d spoken the truth.

“How very interesting…” Pelas remarked, eyeing Tanis with new appreciation. Abruptly he spun back to the Healer. “Where can I find the pattern, Camilla?”

Head bowed, she whispered, “I…don’t…know.”

Pelas looked to Tanis. “So
Truthreader
, is she telling the truth? Does she know this pattern for which I search?”

Tanis had never been more horrified than in hearing himself answer, “She knows the pattern you’re looking for, but she doesn’t know how to show it to you, and…and she wouldn’t show it to you even if she knew how.”  He dropped his gaze miserably then, hating himself in every way in that moment, but most of all, hating his inability to lie to this treacherous man.

Pelas’s eyes lit with his smile. “Interesting.”  He lifted the knife to caress Camilla’s face. “Let’s see if we can help you change your mind, shall we?”  Then he drove the blade into the flesh of her shoulder.

Camilla’s head flew up and she screamed even as Tanis yelled, “
Stop!
”  He’d never felt such desperation and horror combined into one overwhelming urge.

Pelas drew the blade down through the meat of Camilla’s shoulder, severing muscle from bone. Camilla screamed and screamed, and blood poured from her arm across Pelas’s hand, steaming where it touched his flesh.

Tanis screamed repeatedly as well, but Pelas never so much as spared a glance in his direction, so intent he was upon his craft.

Over the next half-hour, Tanis screamed until his throat was shredded and raw, until he cried himself into gasping hiccups. He pleaded and protested and shouted anything he could think of to distract the man, but Pelas could not be bothered once embarked upon his work.

Finally, when the Healer’s upper arm was all but gone, Pelas set down his dagger. “Rouse her,” he ordered. He took up his torch and began studying the blood upon the floor. One Fhorg set to waking Camilla while the others joined Pelas in peering at the pool.

Tanis was sitting on his heels crying when a jumble of images accosted him. He’d been doing his best to protect his mind from the twisted thoughts that Pelas constantly spouted, and at first he cringed away from this new assault. But as he saw them better, he realized these new images didn’t belong to Pelas.

Tanis lifted his head and found the Healer staring at him.

The moment their eyes met, he understood.

Help me! Please!

Camilla was shouting her thoughts so loudly that Tanis worried Pelas would somehow hear her. Suddenly a torrent of images came to him, visions of Camilla as a girl, studying to be a Healer, kissing a dark-haired boy with a wide smile, giving birth—

Tears came unbidden to the boy’s eyes, and he dropped his head and squeezed them shut, but the images didn’t fade. Camilla was giving him her last confession, recalling all of the memories of her life as though to make him the receptacle for all that she was, placing her life’s knowledge within his memory to carry forward, willing him to end her pain. 

Tanis couldn’t take any more—he couldn’t bear to harbor her suffering knowing the loving life she’d led, knowing of the children and husband who would mourn her.

DO something, Tanis!

Tanis knew he had to try.

Somewhere in the last hour, Tanis’s arms had gone so numb he could barely move them. He suspected the silken cord with the vicious bite would not easily yield to the steel of men, but he had a different sort of weapon beneath his sleeve.
Merdanti. If
he could get to the dagger.

In his favor was the preoccupation of his captors with studying the bloody floor. The difficulty came in removing the dagger from its casing through the thick wool of his jacket with fingers that had lost circulation. So he spent precious moments flexing his fingers working some blood back into them. Of course with the return of feeling came the return of the pain, but Tanis sucked in his breath, clenched his teeth and endured it. Once he managed to push his sleeve out of the way, his fingers found the dagger and slowly—so slowly that he agonized over every passing moment—maneuvered the dagger into his hand.

Tanis kept his eyes pinned on the others as he moved the blade into the right position to saw through the rope. For a harrowing moment he nearly dropped the weapon, the smooth stone slipping through his numb fingers only to be desperately caught and held tight as his heart raced, but at last, he got the blade around into position again. To his immense relief, the moment Phaedor’s dagger touched the
goracrosta
, it sliced through like a knife parting cream.

Just like that, Tanis was free.

He fixed his gaze on Camilla and kept his hands hidden behind him as he moved slowly to his feet. Then, knowing he couldn’t think about it or he’d never be able to do it, Tanis ran to her. His legs were stiff under him, and he slipped as he sprinted across the slippery floor, in the end slamming into Camilla, who couldn’t help but scream as he clung to her damaged body and brought the dagger down deep into her heart.

In the next instant, Tanis felt himself ripped off the girl and went flying through the air. He crashed against a table and toppled backwards over it, landing hard on the floor. Before he even found his breath someone snatched him up by his hair. Tanis shrieked and grabbed onto the hand that was hauling him to his feet.

The lad brought up his head to see blue eyes staring at him, and then a fist hit his eye and his head snapped back. Stars flared, and pain blackened the edges of his sight, making him feel sick.

“Again,” Pelas said.

Another fist took him in the mouth, bringing a fiery spill of blood.

“Again.”

His abdomen became a pit of agony.

After the fifth time, Tanis blacked out.

When he regained consciousness, the first thing Tanis saw were the dead, staring eyes of Camilla, whose body lay in a pool of blood just inches away. Even hurting as he was, even waking to such macabre conditions, Tanis did not regret his decision to help her. He hadn’t been able to save the boy Piper back in Acacia from Bethamin’s corruptive touch, but he had been able to help Camilla find peace. He wasn’t sure why he thought of the doomed young truthreader in that moment, but somehow the two experiences seemed related.

As awareness fully returned to him, Tanis heard Pelas talking to one of the Fhorgs and was just grateful to no longer be the subject of the man’s grim attentions. The position he was in didn’t do much to alleviate the pain that throbbed through his body, but he dreaded doing anything to remind Pelas he was alive. Lying still then, Tanis took stock of his situation. His hands were bound again, although this time it seemed they’d used regular rope. His right eye was swollen shut, and his bottom lip had swelled to the size of a slug. His belly felt like someone had cut half of it out and left the other to sicken, and his entire right side was a dull throbbing ache.