The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Mithaiya was going to heartily disappoint him.

  She was nearing an enclosed courtyard when shouting from the Emir’s chambers reached her ears. Mithaiya sprinted—

  And ran right through a wall of deyjiin. It sizzled against her shields and itched her skin as she passed through it.

  She spun and flung up a hand to halt the guards following her—they wouldn’t make it through that barrier with life still in their veins. The moment her back was turned, a bolt of deyjiin struck her shield.

  Mithaiya turned slowly, and her eyes found the creature standing on a balcony across the court.

  Had it been a Malorin’athgul such as Darshan daring to attack her, she might perhaps have forgiven the offense, but a subhuman creature birthed from the depths of a vile mind? This audacity could not be tolerated.

  Behind her, the guards retreated to take a different path to their liege.

  Mithaiya knew a simmering anger.

  Her siblings cast out of time, these eidola sent to destroy a fair-minded leader, the outrageous sacrifice of lives down on the field of battle—and all of it a tiresome distraction from their more important role in T’khendar, where the real struggle was ongoing. Radov’s compounding atrocities made a molten core of Mithaiya’s fury.

  She reached for the ethereal thread binding the eidola Lucid to life, but either the aspect of deyjiin in its veins or some other artifice prevented her finding its life-thread as she’d found the others. The creature threw another bolt of deyjiin at her, which Mithaiya simply sidestepped.

  Then she took a running leap, grabbed the balcony railing and swung herself over. She landed facing the creature.

  It made a rattlesnake clatter deep in its throat and swung its blade for her head.

  Mithaiya stepped inside its guard, wrenched the sword from its fingers and closed her other hand around its throat.

  It rattled a futile protest. She slammed it through the plaster with her hand still clenching its throat, brought her nose close to its own deep within the wall and warned whatever mind was running the thing, I AM COMING FOR YOU.

  Then she found its core and burned it to a cinder. The body crumbled to ash in her hand.

  Mithaiya spun and ran on. The shouting had fallen silent, the sounds of battle stilled. Not a good sign.

  She found the doors to the Emir’s chambers askew and inside—to her relief—the Emir, surrounded by a dozen breathless guards. Twice as many others carpeted the floor. It had been a near thing.

  “They fled!” A wide-eyed captain pointed through broken doors to the shattered balcony.

  Her warning clearly had reached someone.

  Mithaiya met the Emir’s gaze. “Farid and the king are safe.”

  Zafir gasped a prayerful oath and dropped to his knees.

  Mithaiya charged after the retreating eidola.

  She could feel them ahead of her, black eels slithering through the tapestry. She launched herself off the tower balcony and flew across the city roofs and alleys, over the heads of the running and the wounded, above the yard where soldiers amassed with weapons bristling, to land in a sonic boom of the fifth upon the outer wall.

  Soldiers staggered. Arrows flew askew. The force of her arrival blasted aside a boulder that had been about to hit the wall, and it dug a great, splintered trench through earth and army.

  Mithaiya leapt atop a merlon and stood for a moment there, encased in the fifth, with fury burning in her gaze and the wind tearing at her long black hair. All around her, swords clashed, arrows rained, catapults exploded fiery destruction against the walls. Men swarmed like maddened ants across the Khalim Plains, tearing each other limb from limb.

  Verily, the desert god Huhktu was beating a doleful count upon his drums of skin and bones that day while his sister Inithiya gathered the souls of the dying. Mithaiya fancied she could see the Akkadian death gods walking that battlefield with a snaking line of spirits trailing behind them.

  And beyond the oily smoke that stained the skies and the taste of blood that tainted the air, darkness was spreading through the mortal tapestry as the threads of hundreds of lives were abruptly knotted off. Elae’s usually crystalline currents washed around Mithaiya in a ruddy frenzy, muddied by too many waters of the first dumping into them at once.

  Arrows pelted off her fifth strand shield. Mithaiya could feel Balance blustering as wind through the tapestry. Without her siblings there to weight it, the mortal fabric had become a luffing sail.

  Down on the field of battle, a score of black-skinned eidola were clambering over the living and the dead to escape her wrath.

  With immortal eyes capable of seeing through compound elements, Mithaiya watched through smoke and ash as the abominations fled. One by one, she found the threads binding each eidola to life and then, in a singular pulse of will, seared them from the aether.

  She knew the moment it was finally done, all of them erased, for the tapestry heaved a tremulous sigh.

  She hadn’t seen such creatures since Warlocks walked the Realms of Light. But these eidola had not been formed of the aether of Shadow but sculpted out of living men by a grimly twisted intellect. Perhaps the same intellect who had fashioned a pattern capable of banishing her siblings. Any mind capable of creating a pattern such as that one was surely a mind who ought to have known better.

  Woe to the men who had done this thing.

  In the absence of her brothers and sister, it fell to Mithaiya to weight the entire mortal tapestry. Ramu would not have agreed with the way she intended to do it. Balaji would frown upon her decision.

  Mithaiya didn’t care. Neither of them were there to make the choice.

  She searched the fourth strand currents for a specific mortal mind, and finding it, commanded, SIGNAL THE RETREAT.

  She didn’t wait for compliance. No mortal could refuse her commands. She stepped off the wall and plummeted down hundreds of feet, landing on the back of a Nadoriin who had been about to slay one of the Emir’s Converted. The former sank deeply into the earth, crushed beneath her. The latter stumbled back with a muted curse.

  And well he should swear by her name. The sun that formed her essence was casting its rays in every direction. She saw the light beaming from her own eyes, scribing new patterns of shadow and light wherever she turned. Already the heat radiating from her skin was melting through the armor of the Nadoriin crushed beneath her. The smoke of his charring flesh was steaming up around her boots.

  Horns sounded, signaling the retreat. The Converted spun a look between herself and his escape.

  “Go,” she murmured.

  The soldier scrambled to his feet and raced away.

  Gathering her power beneath her intent, Mithaiya turned the sun of her attention towards the enemy. She’d seen enough of this war to last several mortal lifetimes, and her patience for it had thoroughly expired.

  The men of M’Nador would not claim the oasis from the Seventeen Tribes that day. Nor any day thereafter.

  One

  “He who commands space commands reality.”

  –The First Law of Shadow

  Timelessness. To keep the count of Time’s ephemeral meter was to mark the ever-shifting landscape of shadows across a world, the omnipresent whisper of growing things, the rhythmic exhalation of living breath. It was the meticulous observation of change of position in space—

  But truly, how meager must a mind be to even care?

  He hadn’t realized how much time had passed until he looked with new eyes upon Alorin’s mortal tapestry. It had certainly changed. So disparate was its pattern from the one he’d known that he wondered for a marveling instant if he’d returned to the right realm.

  Had he not been, well...himself, he might’ve retraced his steps. But he kept no company with error, and he’d been to that mountain many times to view the tapestry—albeit what must’ve been several millennia ago now. Still, he knew those icy reaches as intimately as any world of his own creation, even with the storm raging around him.
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br />   It blustered among the crags, spitting snow to mingle with the shadowed whirlwind of his own essence, while in the valley below the mountains, ice crystals dissolved into a steady rain that doused the lowland hills.

  He felt a profound kinship to the storm. This amassing of conflicting elemental forces at once germane and incongruous to each other; this raging, chaotic amalgam of water, temperature and light; ever evolving, ultimately transient, yet fundamentally omnipresent in the world. Refreshing to experience a storm not of his own making.

  But philosophizing on the storm—while entertaining on some level—wasn’t revealing the answers he sought from Alorin’s mortal tapestry. Yet...the careful observer perceived the storm as a microcosm of the tapestry’s chaos.

  Order in chaos. That was Cephrael’s motto, woven through the mortal tapestry in a constantly shifting pattern. An infinitely vast pattern of individually-determined threads, lengthening, entwining, binding and dividing into whorls and spirals, arabesques and endless knots, forming a living maze of choices and action...

  Yet when all was said and done, still just a carpet for Cephrael’s wall.

  He’d known the tapestry would change during his absence—change in the Realms of Light was the only constant—but he hadn’t expected to see such a plethora of threads missing from the whole.

  They’d once shown in vibrant metallic hues—rose, gold, bronze and silver—as dazzling as if spun of precious metals. The tapestry looked dull and barren without them. A part of him desired to retrace the folded eons to see again and compare the patterns, then to now. Perhaps one day he could, if all went according to plan.

  But what had happened to those threads? How had they become so few? And how had the golden strands become the least of them, when once they’d held dominion over all?

  He admitted this was an unexpected complication.

  Unanticipated, rather, for he expected only what he caused himself to become.

  And yet...

  Behind him, a pillar of darkness coalesced within the swirling snow. The cyclone moved towards him, with the wind tearing and buffeting it into tortured shapes; ice met deyjiin in a revel of improbable designs.

  The whirlwind merged with his own ghost-dark formlessness...and the other Warlock greeted him in the way of Warlocks.

  “Baelfeir.”

  “Vleydis.” Baelfeir matched Vleydis’s starpoints in mutual recognition and thereafter perceived Vleydis as the other Warlock perceived himself: a tall, winged creature, faintly human in form, with a sharply beaked mouth and raven eyes. “I bid you welcome.”

  “And to you, my lord, on the momentous day of your return to Alorin.”

  Baelfeir looked the other over curiously. “I perceive a disharmony in the chord of your salutation. Did you imagine I would have difficulty regaining this realm?”

  The essence of Vleydis flinched faintly. “I would not presume to doubt you, my lord.”

  “Yet you did, without presumption.”

  When Vleydis offered no answer to this, Baelfeir studied him via their shared starpoints.

  It might’ve been a single day in Shadow since their universes had hosted one another, or it might’ve been thousands of years by Alorin’s accounting—time held little meaning to immortals, and to Baelfeir less than most—but whatever the count of millennia during which Vleydis had been incarcerated in Alorin, time’s passage had clearly influenced him in unanticipated ways.

  “I perceive an uncommon hesitation in your composition, my old friend. Surely you haven’t been so long within the starpoints of this realm that it has changed you?”

  The other Warlock seemed hesitant. “I cannot say, for I have no basis of comparison.” He met Baelfeir’s gaze, then looked away again. “But I perceive time in ways I never did before I...”

  “Faded?” Baelfeir offered the concept the other seemed to be searching for.

  The shadowed planes of Vleydis’s face altered, reminiscent of a wince. “You cannot know the sense of it.” His smoke-form rippled as if with a discomfiting memory. “I became...achromatic, starved of energy. For untold years I couldn’t form a prism, couldn’t coalesce.”

  Baelfeir’s gaze flicked to him. “You are right. I do not know the sense of it.”

  “Such was my oblivion when Shailabanáchtran summoned me back to consciousness.”

  “Shailabanáchtran.” The name across Baelfeir’s lips hinted of dark, wry humor.

  “I have been keeping association with the Malorin’athgul since my resurrection. His view of compulsion casts a shadow of yours, my lord, yet it is not the same shadow.”

  “Shailabanáchtran is not a Warlock, for all he feigns to understand us.”

  “But he follows in your footsteps,” Vleydis noted with an undertone of caution, “tracing the history of the Quorum of the Sixth Truth. He’s pieced together much.”

  Baelfeir smiled dangerously. But never quite enough.

  This then was the root of Vleydis’s hesitation—some form of indenture to the Malorin’athgul in exchange for his resurrection from oblivion. Another unanticipated consequence.

  But one must expect multiple variables when a plan is left to unfold across the eons. It would be a tedious contest indeed if he knew the outcome of every shot long before any arrows were loosed.

  Shailabanáchtran had opened a portal into the cityworld of Illume Belliel, giving the Warlocks access to the Realms of Light and ending millennia of exile. The Malorin’athgul was expecting them to show immense gratitude and remain in the cityworld, or perhaps to seek entertainment on other worlds—Baelfeir had read as much in the other’s insinuations—rather than seek Alorin for their entertainments.

  But Baelfeir had agreed to no such terms. And he didn’t need Shailabanáchtran’s aid—or his permission—to find Alorin’s fabric.

  Thinking newly on these facts and the light they shed, Baelfeir moved himself and Vleydis from the snowy ridge to the lowland hills, where the rain was tapping a sullen dirge upon a villa and its surrounding estate.

  Lining the circle of the villa’s drive, coaches waited to disgorge their occupants in orderly fashion beneath a porticoed entrance. The arriving guests paid no notice to the two dark forms atop the near hill; they appeared but twilight shadows in the mist.

  Vleydis’s iridescent black eyes noted the fête and the guests already milling behind the villa’s bright windows.

  “Ah.” His simple exhalation yet spoke volumes.

  Baelfeir gave a quiet laugh. “By this I assume you’ve come for some other purpose than joining in my fun tonight.”

  “I fear you would no longer find me an apt companion, my lord.”

  Baelfeir angled him a stare, as surprised by this confession as by the truth it suggested.

  He watched the villa in silence for a long while after this, ruminating on new information, moving pieces around on the game board of his thoughts. He’d known the game would change during his absence, but he admitted a certain thrill in discovering it had shifted so far beyond his own expectations.

  “Alorin hasn’t known your aspect for eons, my lord,” Vleydis observed carefully—critically? Baelfeir couldn’t quite discern the wavelength of the other Warlock’s thoughts. “I cannot but wonder if this new generation will, in fact, welcome your return.”

  “You wonder at that?” His lips formed a smile of malevolent grace. “They’ll welcome whatever I decide for them to.”

  “I thought you said you’d tired of that game.”

  “Perhaps I have.” Baelfeir looked the other Warlock over, made curious by his curious questioning. In his infirmity, had Vleydis been reduced to such lowly measure as to become Shailabanáchtran’s spy?

  Smoke shifted around Vleydis’s shifting thoughts, sparks of tumult flaring within those shadowed depths. Baelfeir could no longer be certain of the other Warlock’s loyalties.

  Intriguing.

  Before the villa, the orderly movement of carriages in their shuttling cycle reminded Baelfeir of the
clockwork motion of a massive timepiece, Life’s pocket-watch left open to the rain.

  Change...it was the only constant in the Realms of Light. He should’ve realized that Vleydis, too, would change if rendered helpless to Time’s will.

  The other Warlock turned his violet-dark eyes to him. “You puzzle at what you behold in me, but I’m merely wondering if this realm will change you, too, my lord. It is not the same world you left so many millennia ago.”

  “I would be supremely disappointed if it was.”

  “But has the pattern taken the shape you intended?” Vleydis’s starpoints vibrated with insistence and confusion, ringing a painful dissonance of conflict. “So many countless centuries—timeless for you, though not for me.”

  Baelfeir perceived a cacophony of torment layered beneath this truth.

  “Some of what you set into motion has certainly manifested, but the rest?” Vleydis was practically begging for an answer. “My lord...has it come to fruition?” By which he was clearly asking, has my sacrifice been worthwhile? “Is it enough?”

  Enough. Baelfeir almost laughed at this offhand use of the word.

  What was enough? A glimpse, a taste, a satisfying meal? Or claimed he a glutton’s abandon? How could one ever claim he had created enough?

  Creation was purpose unto itself. Enough could never define it.

  Vleydis looked back to the clockwork coaches and made an effort to quash whatever confluence of emotions had overcome him. The smoke of his essence swirled and reformed, assuming the shape of regret.

  Yes, the time he’d spent in this realm had certainly changed him.

  Vleydis bowed his head, reminiscent of a child called to heel. “Before we parted last, you spoke to me of a certain personage, asked me to keep a lookout for news of him through the centuries.”

  Baelfeir sharpened his attention on the other Warlock. “Indeed.”