The Dagger of Adendigaeth (A Pattern of Shadow & Light) (8 page)

- Aristotle of Cyrene, cir. 101aF

The man
dressed in black sat in the chair of his small room staring at his hands. He had nice hands. His fingers were long and straight—good for picking up tiny things—and his nails had a nice shape, even after enduring so much for so long.

His hands were the only part of himself he still recognized.

Too many years in the salt mines of N’ghorra had left him twisted and bent. His left leg had been broken once when scaffolding had collapsed upon him, and it hadn’t healed correctly. There were no Healers in N’ghorra, no whores either, unless you considered the
bacchasi,
but he preferred his hand over young boys when such urges came to him in the night. His face—once handsome—now sported a long scar from jaw to cheekbone. It flamed when the weather turned hot. The man who’d given him that scar lost an eye in the exchange, so the man in black considered he’d won that fight. He had other scars, too, related to other stories, but the scars that ran the deepest were the ones that couldn’t be seen.

Scars of treachery. Scars of betrayal. Scars of abandonment and rejection from those who neither loved nor cared any longer. These were the scars that rooted the deepest, cleaving muscle and bone, twisting his memories into abominable, unbearable things. 

He hadn’t always been full of regret. He remembered being different once. He’d still had a name then—before bondage and the salt mines had taken it from him. He remembered standing for something, believing in something so strongly that it drove him to survive one of the most hellish places in the living realm.

That was before Dore Madden found him. Now he couldn’t remember those convictions that had once given him strength.

Now the salt mines of N’ghorra were his fondest memories.

Dore Madden.

The name was a curse to him, but a curse that bound him more securely than the chains of N’ghorra ever had. Dore had found him and bound him with the fifth before they’d even left the mines—‘ensuring his cooperation’ the man liked to claim. That working still haunted his dreams, a nightmare from which there was no escape. No binding of the fifth was ever gentle, but to be bound to a lunatic like Dore Madden meant to feel the touch of his mind intimately, and this…this was a torment the man in black would not wish upon his worst enemy.

He’d come to accept his fate the way one accepts any torture over time, eventually becoming inured to the crawling sense in his skull, to the man’s howling insanity, to his perverted desires and compulsions laid so deep as to scald his very bones.

He liked to think that if Dore had found him before N’ghorra, his pride would’ve led him to take his own life before serving such depravity. But the salt mines changed a man, stripped him of everything, even his will to live. When there was no hope in life, there was no reason to care what you did on your way toward death.

It had been a very, very long time since the man in black remembered what hope felt like.

So he sat in his chair, bound beneath patterns of compulsion like heavy webs smothering body and soul, and he gazed at his hands and tried not to think about the constant feeling of worms crawling inside his skull or the twisted acts Dore might require of him next.

Sometimes he would sit for days on end waiting on the wielder’s pleasure. Dore had ordered him to stay in his chair, and no matter how intensely he concentrated, no matter how desperately he tried, he could not move from the chair until the wielder gave him leave.

Beneath his hands on the table was a length of string tied into elaborate knots. When Dore allowed it, and even sometimes when he didn’t, the man in black would lose himself in their construction. He could sit for hours in utter silence while his deft fingers wove those knots. It had always been a habit of his, for as long as he could remember.  

He’d lost track of how many hours he’d been sitting there when Dore finally entered looking uncharacteristically gleeful, which never boded well for anyone. “It is done,” the wielder announced as he walked into the room. “The Prophet has agreed to send you in search of the prince.”

“Good,” said the man in black. It wouldn’t do to let Dore know how desperately he wanted this, how he would agree to most anything if it meant escaping Dore’s constant oversight. People were
things
to Dore Madden. Possessions. He was tired of being a lunatic’s favorite toy.

“We will leave soon for Bemoth,” Dore told him. “
Niko van Amstel
has called all of the Fifty Companions to his estate—those of us left alive, that is,” he corrected with that wild look that came into his eyes at the least mention of anyone or anything connected to Björn van Gelderan. There was no one Dore Madden feared as much as he feared the Fifth Vestal—this, the man in black knew as intimately as he knew Dore’s own mind. The Prophet Bethamin, in all of his malfeasance, engendered but a pale shadow of discomfort next to Dore’s deep-rooted terror of Björn van Gelderan. 

“Niko has contacts throughout the realm,” Dore continued, unaware that the man in black saw the shadows of his deepest secrets, the horrors that writhed within his own soul each night. “He will help us to discover the whereabouts of this northern prince.” 

“Good,” was all the man in black said. With Dore Madden, the less said the better.

In the silence that followed, the man in black could feel Dore’s hot gaze scouring him, could feel the wielder testing the strength of the patterns binding him to his will. It made his skin crawl, even after so long, but he didn’t let it show. It was never prudent to let Dore Madden know anything about you—not if it could be helped. “You’re ready for this?” Dore asked after a moment. “No hesitation?”

The man in black lifted his eyes to Dore. “Why should I hesitate? You have instructed me well enough.”

Dore smiled. He always looked hideous when he smiled. “Ah, my star pupil.”  He came and took the man’s face in his hands, smoothing back his black hair, caressing the scar that he hated so. “You will show them all what brilliant work I have done. It is the dawn of a new era, and you will be the one to usher in the light. That’s why I have decided to name you
Işak’getirmek
, Light-bringer.”

The man in black closed his eyes as the worms of Dore’s binding writhed eternally in his skull. At lea
st now he had a name.

“Be wary the treasure you
pluck is not attached

to the toe of a dragon.”

- An old Kandori saying

Trell frowned
at the river. His storm-grey eyes were both slightly accusing and deeply searching, as if expecting the murky waters to hold explanation if not remorse. Gendaia was still lame, and Trell inexplicably blamed the river—or more specifically, the River Goddess
Naiadithine
.

Though he had no proof of her complicity in his horse’s condition, instinct told him there was more to this confluence of events than mere chance. That Gendaia went lame during a shallow river fording—while neither impossible nor unheard of—was yet suspicious beyond measure where he and the Water Goddess were both involved. What chance then that Gendaia’s injury prevented him from leaving only days before a mysterious girl rode the river’s swollen waves to be deposited at his feet?

Okay, not exactly deposited.
He’d put himself in harm’s way to save her life, but that only strengthened his feeling of providence surrounding the matter.

Not that he didn’t owe Naiadithine a great deal—more than he could ever repay even if it meant the offering of his life, for the goddess had saved him several times over, and Gendaia too. So he knew he owed her his trust—providing she did have a hand in maiming Gendaia, for which there was no proof but Trell’s instinct—but he still couldn’t bring himself to forgive her.

Take from me what you will, my goddess,
he thought, leveling a heated look at the chill waters,
but leave my horse out of it.

Trell pushed fingers through his unruly black hair and then shoved hands into pockets as he turned to wander upriver. The dervish of his thoughts whirled endlessly, each leaf upon the twisting wind representative of a different mystery. Naiadithine’s latest intervention in his life was just one among several strange events.

First, what to make of Yara’s response?

As Trell had staggered into the farmhouse on that morning several days ago, drenched and muddied and with the cold weight of the unconscious lass in his arms, the old woman had turned from the fire, rocked back on her heels and remarked in astonishment, “It’s
her!
”

Trell had been too preoccupied to register this pronouncement at the time—being so focused on getting the girl inside—and in the rush that followed there’d been little opportunity for questions. But since then he’d had plenty of time to consider it.

Stranger still, Yara had refused to let him help get the lass cleaned up, though it was quite a chore for the old woman to manage on her own. She’d mumbled some absurdity about it not being proper for Trell to see the girl disrobed—never mind that he’d practically stripped her down already to bandage her head and arm—but Yara was having none of his protests. Trell boiled six kettles of water and refilled the tub twice before Yara deemed the lass clean enough for mending and called him in to help her.

He remembered that moment with vivid clarity.

Walking into the bedroom to see the girl lying upon his bed with her long flaxen hair spread damply across the pillow…Yara was tending her broken arm as he came around to look down upon her face. Even maimed and bruised and with one eye swollen shut, even with that great ugly gash in her head, there was something…familiar about her.

It struck a memory.

The flash of an image—a young girl stood upon the seashore bundled in a violet cloak as much as in silence, the wind whipping her flaxen hair as Trell watched from the stern of a skiff rowing laboriously out to sea… There were others on the shore, many others, but Trell saw only the young girl’s face among the haze of others, round-eyed and full of sorrow.

That briefest snatch of memory, yet he felt tied to her still, the nameless girl on a wintry beach. It was a tenuous link forged by a rope so frayed it was by miracle alone that it still held true. Nor could he say why he felt tied to her, only that he did.

Looking down upon the girl in his bed, Trell realized there was a chance this might be the same girl as had watched him forlornly across windswept tides, for beneath the bruises her likeness was similar. But Trell knew it was too much to hope for, so he let the idea fade.   

“You going to keep standing there gaping like a brainless carp,” Yara had grumbled, “or did you have a mind to help me save her life?”  

Trell had jumped to help then, and together they’d reset her broken bone, splinted the arm and bandaged her wounds. Only once did the girl resurface, and then it was just to offer a brief glimpse of lovely amber eyes—however unfocused. The lass had retreated to unconsciousness the moment Yara set needle to the gash in her temple, which Trell supposed was just as well.

When all was said and done, Trell and Yara had returned to the kitchen where Yara prepared
czai
tea for them. As they sat together at the scrubbed wooden table, Trell had time to consider the moment of his arrival and had asked, “Do you know this girl, Yara?”

“
Pshaw
,” she said, dismissing his question as utter folly in that way women have of indicating with a simple wordless utterance how perfectly foolish men are in general.

But Trell was not to be put off. “Why did you say, ‘it’s her’ when I walked in?”

“What?” she protested, settling him a doleful eye. “I never said such a thing.”

He arched a dubious brow. “You certainly did.”

“Certain are you of quite a few things you aught not to be, Ama-Kai’alil,” she returned. She’d taken to calling him Man of the Tides since they spoke almost exclusively in the desert tongue, and in that language, the moniker was easier than using his name.

With the image of the young girl on the beach still vivid in mind, Trell captured Yara’s dark-eyed gaze and pressed, “
Do
you know this girl, Yara?”

Returning his stare indignantly, she lifted her chin and ascertained, “I have never laid eyes on her before.”

It wasn’t the answer he’d hoped for, but Trell admitted it was all he was likely to get. The wily old woman only ever explained what it suited her for a man to know, and that wasn’t a great deal—as the episode with
Carian vran Lea
had proved.

But her affected indignation was hardly reassuring, and the memory was but one of the leaves circling his mind.

Trell scratched at his dark beard, which was growing unkempt and itchy and probably needed shaving off. A wind off the river teased Trell’s hair into his eyes and the next curious leaf swept before his mind’s eye…another day, another mystery… 

It was a day or so after her rescue, and the girl lay in a fevered sleep. She had not resurfaced since that initial foray into consciousness, so they remained in mystery about who she was and whence she’d come—save, lately, the river—or at least Trell had no idea. Yara merely said she didn’t, which Trell believed less and less as time progressed.