The Sixth Strand
Page 5
“They speak,” the redhead offered breathlessly, “of his...power over...”
“Frail minds,” the contessa quipped brusquely.
The stranger gave a low chuckle and shifted the force of his attention to her. “Frail indeed, Contessa.”
She felt his gaze fall upon her as palpably as the sun reappearing from behind a cloud. As the focus of his direct interest, she somehow could no longer withhold her interest in return. Her eyes lifted to his as though propelled. Breath fled her lungs, draining all vitality save for a thrumming apprehension that tingled her skin.
His sparkling sapphire eyes assessed her. From the resulting curve of his lips, he approved of what he saw; yet the hunger in his gaze seemed to have little to do with admiring her figure. He released the redhead’s hand with eyes now only for the contessa.
She stared at him while her breath quickened, wondering if she could possibly be misconstruing the meaning implied in his gaze. The entire night had begun to assume a dreamlike quality...and not an altogether pleasant sort of dream.
A smile hitched one corner of his mouth. He extended his hand to her.
She had no idea why she accepted it.
The room spun.
Suddenly she was dancing in his arms. The whole ballroom was dancing, lords and ladies twirling in clouds of taffeta and tulle. The ceiling was a blur of crystal lights, the nighttime windows awash with color. She saw a thousand dancers reflected in the mirrored walls. They all danced with him.
Across the room, the Lord Abanachtran stood as a lighthouse in the storm, staring at her—no, at the stranger that was spinning her recklessly across the ballroom floor. For a moment, the Lord Abanachtran’s stare anchored the contessa, and she became aware of herself in a way she’d forgotten. She felt suddenly ashamed to be dancing so wantonly with a foreign lord.
The Lord Abanachtran’s dark gaze speared through the sea of dancers, separating them in twain, and he strode into the parting between the dancing waters, intent upon reaching them.
But the stranger holding the contessa laughed and spun her around, and the dancers closed upon each other again in crashing waves of colorful silk, drowning the Lord Abanachtran in their midst.
The stranger pulled the contessa closer then, and she laughed in his arms. Why did she laugh? Everything was wonderful.
Everything was horribly awry.
He pressed his mouth against her ear. “Ah, look. They’re in love.” He spun her to see the couple of his interest, a man and woman dancing close, their eyes locked raptly upon each other.
The woman was the redhead from the line. The man was the contessa’s own lord husband.
The stranger twirled her out of view of the pair and bound her close in his strong arms. His probing gaze invited her to become closer still.
She struggled against this invitation, fought to assert her own will, but she couldn’t put shape to her thoughts. Her mind was formless mush. All she knew was the heartbreak of seeing that look in her lord husband’s eyes, aimed at another.
“Contessa...” The stranger breathed a lustful entreaty against her ear.
Suddenly he had her pinned naked between his muscular arms, up against a wall. The chamber was dark, save for flickering candles. A bedchamber. He stood stripped to the waist, the finest specimen of a man she’d ever seen.
She closed her eyes to the spinning world, but still she saw her lord husband—imagined or real, she couldn’t decide. Was anything real in this horrible dream? But her lord was kissing the other woman now, and nothing had ever felt more real than his betrayal.
“Nature inclines you to fidelity,” the stranger murmured between the kisses he was planting down her neck, his breath cool but his hand so hot upon her breasts. Or was her bare flesh so hot beneath his hand? She couldn’t separate the liquid sensation of his touch any more than she could separate her desire from her fear.
He sealed his mouth hotly upon hers. His tongue probed to draw hers out while his hand slipped lower...indecently low...deliciously low. “Will you defy your nature for me, Contessa?”
She broke free of his mouth to suck in a shuddering breath. His hand was probing her so intimately, his thumb now stroking lavish circles...
Was this really happening or was it just a nightmarish dream? Did she even know which answer she wanted when all she really seemed to want was—
“Yes!” she gasped.
“Yes...what, Contessa?”
The answer thrust itself into her mind even as she prayed he would soon do to her body. “Yes, Lord Baelfeir,” she wept.
And reality shattered.
***
Bea huddled in a corner while the millstone of her life flew off its axis, gouging a haggard path through the world, uprooting everything once fixed, casting the pillars of stability awry.
The stately waltz had devolved into a frenzy. Many had abandoned the dance to engage in steamier pursuits. Two of her father’s servants were fornicating with each other, blocking access to the doorway, while just past them, the villa guards were engaged in a violent contest of blades. Across the room, the stranger had a countess pinned against the wall with her skirts pushed high. She was crying out his name as he drove himself into her. No one seemed to notice.
Bea’s mother and father had left with the Lord Abanachtran—left her, their precious jewel, without a second glance. Bea watched, sickened, as her father’s Chamberlain slowly disrobed and handed his clothing to another man, piece by piece.
In the loggia, two boys who had always been the closest of friends lay on the ground with knives twitching in their chests, shedding their heart-blood onto her mother’s marble tiles. Their fathers stood nearby; they’d sipped their wine as the boys battled, making no move to stop them, doing nothing even now as their firstborn sons expired.
Bea couldn’t see the illusion cast upon the partygoers—if illusion it was, this perversion of nature—but she could feel the fourth strand churning in tumultuous waves.
On and on the musicians played, the dancers danced, all of them wearing plaster smiles hardened into a permanent reflection of horror.
Bea’s haunted gaze strayed to the two boys dying on the patio.
They were lying in a growing pool of blood, their hands reaching for each other as though restored in death to the sanity stolen in life...the sanity he had stolen.
Bea envied them their escape.
Two
“There is no higher purpose guiding existence in this
universe. Only the conscience and minds of men.”
–Isabel van Gelderan, Epiphany’s Prophet
Franco Rohre clutched at the mental anchor that held him to the node on T’khendar’s world grid. Everywhere he looked, he saw red: the red of flames consuming the aetheric substance of the world; the red of corrosive clouds that were the result of degenerating magnetic leylines; the red haze of his own bloodshot eyes, the result of too many days engaged in fighting forces no mortal mind was built to withstand.
Almost...there... Dagmar’s thought came faintly, yet it brought slicing pain to Franco’s overtaxed awareness. Stars and inky blackness clouded his vision. His head swam.
Franco! Hold that anchor! Isabel’s mental voice jolted him back to alertness. He realized his anchor had started to slip and fixed a firmer hold upon it.
Franco fought a battle against the kinetic fury of a world in peril. Energy ripped past him with lightning force, threatening to tear him off his anchor, continuously scouring his consciousness. T’khendar’s Pattern of the World was a feral creature trapped while wildfire consumed everything around it; it didn’t recognize that the Adepts braving the flames to break its bonds were fighting to set it free.
To effectively accomplish what they were doing—
First of all, no one should be doing what they were doing.
—he really ought to have had three anchors into three different nodes. Triangulation was the only stable way of holding a position on the Pattern of the World.
Theoretically.
The three Nodefinders from Eltanin were elsewhere on the grid, doing much the same as Franco, Dagmar and Isabel.
While Dagmar inched towards his goal, Franco had to hold the anchor on his own node. He also had to keep his mind connected to both Isabel and Dagmar, so that when the time came, they could all close the circuit and charge the grid.
But holding a degraded node open...
Franco likened the experience to trying to keep the sea from claiming a sinking carrack by holding onto its anchor chain. From a dinghy. In a hurricane.
Franco, focus please. Isabel’s presence remained a quiet but potent support. She held the second triangulation point while Dagmar strove to reach the third. She knew what Franco was enduring. She was enduring the same.
But focusing meant staying in the moment. Focusing meant recognizing how obscenely dangerous and foolhardy was their undertaking. Focusing meant feeling pain radiating from the backs of his eyes all the way down to the soft bed of his feet. Focusing meant being terrified.
And it meant doing all of that, hour after unending hour, until his brain had become a formless mash, his skin had sloughed into char, and his eyes were bleeding.
At least...you’re not...having to...make...the climb. Dagmar’s voice floated to him as though from a distant mountain peak, echoic of a breathless, obdurate determination.
The Great Master was scaling the worst of the degraded leylines to reach the final nodepoint while fighting the current the entire way. Franco compared this to trying to climb a near vertical scree slope. Beneath a waterfall. In a flood.
How the Great Master could maintain his sense of humor after doing this for months on end...
Isabel. Dagmar’s call that time was both warning and acknowledgement. He’d made it.
Franco braced himself. This activity mainly involved clenching his jaw and offering a fast, fervent prayer.
Then the blast hit.
The tsunami wave of power that suddenly came charging through the Pattern made the torrential hurricane he’d been enduring for untold hours feel like a balmy drizzle. The current ripped Franco off his feet and spun him on its winds. But his anchor held, and while it held, the power could only pound and tumble him in fury.
He clung to his anchor, nearly horizontal in the kinetic wind, eyes squeezed shut to the screaming light but still blinded by it, his tortured mind on fire, gasping for breath until even that became impossible and everything went white-hot...
It was expected that they would lose consciousness. In fact, that was more or less the point. You held on until you blacked out, each time hoping that you’d held to consciousness long enough for the current to recharge the node.
They all had fail-safes—an ethereal chain bonded to their life pattern, and a material chain of Merdanti links bonded to a leather belt around their waists—that would haul them off the Pattern the moment they lost consciousness.
This would save their lives, but it would also mean all of their toil would be for naught if one of them lost consciousness before the node was restored.
This was the first fear Franco always awoke to: had he held on long enough?
The second fear was: had he survived it?
Since he was thinking at all, he decided he must have managed at least the second of those.
Rebuilding the pattern of a world was not something mortals were supposed to live through. Each time he did it, Franco feared that the gods would claim him simply for the impudence of thinking he could.
Lying on his cot, Franco considered moving but then decided against it, citing immense wisdom in inaction. He wasn’t ready yet to test any part of his body with the monumental undertaking of movement. After defying the will of the gods, it was no wonder he woke up hurting everywhere.
But he did wonder where he was, because this certainly wasn’t his tent.
Tall beams supporting doubled canvas—you could barely hear the ever-present, howling wind—and tapestries concealing the bare walls imparted a sense of luxury to the otherwise sparse accommodations. He was lying between soft sheets without even a speck of sand grinding his flesh, surrounded by wall-to-wall carpets and a faint breeze carrying the hint of citrus.
Isabel’s tent then.
The First Lord had wanted to raise a pavilion for his sister out of the desert bedrock, but Isabel had forbidden him to waste his effort for her comfort. She could sleep in a tent like everyone else, she’d said.
Well...not precisely like everyone else. Hers was far more luxurious than Franco’s, for instance. In his tent, sand found its way through the seams into every bloody crease and crevice. Isabel’s tent even muted the constant wind. Franco appreciated having slept soundly for once.
While he laid there trying to breathe as shallowly as possible to avoid rousing the beast that was his overtaxed system, his thoughts strayed—as ever they did these days—to Alshiba.
How well he remembered being tossed onto the node with Niko’s dagger in his gut while Mir’s goons dragged Alshiba away. He vaguely recalled arriving in Björn’s palace in T’khendar and partly remembered Isabel working to Heal him from the dagger—not to mention the lingering effects of Mir’s vicious amusements—while the First Lord removed Mir’s compulsion; subsequently, Franco had spilled out Niko’s entire plan to Björn.
Oh, when Franco got his hands on Mir Arkadhi...
And yet, the Eltanin Seat appeared to be an ally—as bitter a reality as that was to swallow—for the First Lord had told him that ‘Mir would keep Alshiba safe.’
If that statement had come from anyone else, Franco would’ve rejected it outright; but if the First Lord trusted the Eltanin Seat with Alshiba’s life, then Franco was missing something important.
So during the early days of his recovery from Mir’s torture and Niko’s dagger, Franco ruminated on the First Lord’s declaration, trying to reconcile this fact with his own experience.
And it had eventually occurred to him—like one of those hateful truths you circle for days without actually ever advancing on, until suddenly the moment comes when you have to stop chewing the inside of your cheek and do something about it—that if Mir had needed Björn to know something important, such as everything Niko was doing in T’khendar, his entire plan spelled out in detail—Mir could’ve only ensured Björn got this message by entrusting it to the Vestal’s sworn man: Franco.
Because Mir couldn’t send such a message safely through Illume Belliel, not with Niko dogging his steps, not with all of the cityworld on the alert for Björn van Gelderan’s spies...no, Mir couldn’t pass along such a message unless he’d done it exactly the way he had: by making the message itself a torment, a taunt, something to hound Franco’s conscience and eat away at his resolve. That he could do right in front of Niko, with the blasted man watching and laughing the entire time.
Of course, Mir would’ve known that Björn would instantly recognize that Franco had been truthbound. He knew that Björn himself, if not his sister or Raine, could easily undo his fourth strand knots. So he’d given his clever report for the First Lord while making a torment out of it for Franco, a fool out of Niko, and taking his own dark amusement in the bargain.
Franco absolutely loathed Mir Arkadhi.
Eventually he got tired of envisioning ways of mutilating Mir and mustered the fortitude to get up off his cot—the most comfortable damned cot he’d ever slept on—and dress himself. This went as might be expected, with perhaps more muted cursing than might be expected, even though, in all, he felt far less like a mangled scrap of meat than he usually
did.
No sooner had he donned his boots than he felt an uncommon urge to see the First Lord, so he cloaked himself against the storm, wound a scarf around his head in the desert fashion, and ducked out of the tent to brave the whirling sand.
Handrails and guide ropes latticed the campsite to aid movement through the constant scouring storm, but Franco didn’t need the rails just then, for though the wind still howled at the night, the sands merely flurried. He followed a path of glowing lamps, murky in the choked air, to reach the portal at the edge of camp.
A black basalt archway three times the height of a man demarked the place of crossing. Franco bent against the wind, dug his boots into the mounding dune and strove through—
—and emerged into the silent night atop the mountainous overlook where the First Lord had raised his command center from the volcanic rock. They called the place Khanjar, so named because it resembled the hooked dagger favored by the desert tribes.
Franco unwrapped his head scarf and shook out the sand from his clothing with echoes of the wind still screaming in his ears. Then he took a deep breath of clear air and looked around.
A thick stripe of stars made a band through the heavens, perpendicular to the line of mountains he was standing on. Behind him, the obsidian pavilion and its adjoining buildings gleamed darkly, blocking his view to the north; while to the west, a gibbous moon hung in still silence, as if loath to intrude on anyone’s much-deserved sleep.
The pavilion was quiet, with the perennial denizens of the First Lord’s command center for once at rest. Or perhaps they always slept between the hours of four and five in the morning and Franco was just never there to witness this miracle.
He was just feeling the first vestiges of hope that even the First Lord had found his bed, when his surveying gaze noted a shadowed form at the far end of the overlook. He gave a disappointed sigh and headed over.
A low obsidian wall edged the mountaintop. Franco followed its undulating path to the far end of the ridge, where a spire of bedrock formed the hook in Khanjar’s blade.