The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Trell turned to Lazar. “Can we reach the fortress without marching the men through this?”

  Lazar shook his head.

  Whereupon Trell exhaled decisively. He spun Gendaia and cantered to the top of the rise and down, towards the men crowding the other side of the hill. The column of his army extended around the next bend, nearly a mile distant.

  The moment they saw Trell appear, the men immediately got to their feet. Trell watched the wave of his arrival ripple through the ranks as men stopped whatever they’d been doing and stood to attention.

  The warlord surely hoped to dishearten and divide them with his display. Trell would use it to unite them instead. It was application of the Ninth Law of Patterning, one of many Alyneri was teaching him: Do not counter force with force; channel it.

  “Men!” Trell heard his voice echoing off the rugged peaks as it charged through the pass. He knew his words would carry to many, and be carried by many others, until all had heard his message. “What you are about to see beyond this rise...let it anger you as it has angered me! Let it harden your resolve as it has hardened mine. Let it show you the face of our enemy, that we should have no regrets in doing what must be done! Men, let what you are about to see strengthen your conviction to carry forward on our path, as it has surely strengthened mine! We do a goddess’s work! Let no man turn us from it!”

  The horns sounded, and the rumble of reforming ranks echoed back to Trell in acknowledgement. He spun Gendaia around to the sound of a thousand men rousing the march in his wake.

  Naiadithine’s work, yes, he thought as he trotted back to his commanders, but even more importantly, Cephrael’s. He hadn’t really recognized it himself until Mithaiya had made the point, but this truth became a spyglass that had suddenly brought other distant truths into focus for him.

  Whoever this warlord thought was coming after him, he had no idea who he was really dealing with.

  But Trell intended to show him. Very acutely, and very soon.

  Four

  “Wielding is one percent theory and

  ninety-nine percent obstinate persistence.”

  –The Maestro Markal Morrelaine

  Isabel, I remember. I remember everything.

  The words echoed in Ean’s mind as he swept cinnamon hair from his face and squinted out across the sea. Sunlight was angling down between variegated clouds to illuminate a patchwork of glorious hues in the water. The waves in the bay shifted from mercuric, to aquamarine, to the truest azure blue before diving back into the darker hue that spanned the horizon.

  Ean wasn’t sure how many hours had passed since he’d sent Isabel that message, laden with remorse, choked with admiration. He’d sent it while riding the high of rekindling his bond with Tanis. He knew she’d received his message. What he didn’t know was why she wasn’t responding.

  Mind, she had every right to be wroth with him, for he’d treated her insensitively...even callously. Now he wanted only to find her and apologize, to make things right between them if he could. But he wouldn’t intrude on her thoughts. He had no right to presume that intimacy between them anymore, though in his heart he wanted to rush to T’khendar and repair things with her.

  At the same time, he couldn’t conceive of parting with Tanis. He would’ve endured the revenants of Wylde all over again, dying all over again, to have his bond with his son restored.

  Besides, heading back onto the field without any idea what position he was meant to play would be foolish.

  The pattern of consequence he’d seen in Tambarré had dead-ended, leaving him becalmed in the eddies of the tapestry. Nothing he’d done since leaving the Prophet’s city had created a new future for those tendrils and whorls. It was clear to him from everything that had happened that Balance had been leading him—how else to reunite with Tanis in Shadow of all places, or to gain Darshan’s benevolent binding? Unfortunately, that leading inclination had been conspicuously silent ever since Shail tossed him into Shadow.

  Ean was determined to be a Player in the game, but it seemed for all intents and purposes that the game...Raine’s truth, it seemed like the game didn’t want him anymore.

  “I don’t think success lies in that direction, Ean.”

  The prince shifted his gaze to Darshan. The Malorin’athgul had constructed a low-slung chair for himself out of the aether of Shadow and was reclining with a foot crossed over one knee, watching Ean with fingers steepled beneath his darkly potent stare.

  Ean exhaled heavily. “You’d be more helpful if you offered a little more assistance and a lot less critique.”

  “I’m observing the mechanics of your working. Tearing the fabric of the realm is not to be entered into lightly, and I have never tried teaching the mechanics to another. I’m not sure your mortal mind is capable of it.”

  Ean held out a hand at him. “Case in point.”

  “Encouragement,” Tanis said from where he was reclining against a rock with hands behind his head and his gaze on the clouds. He was practicing something Shadow-related, which he’d tried explaining but had lost Ean somewhere around ‘self-propelling systems.’

  Tanis turned his head to look at Darshan. “You need to say encouraging things. The success of wielding is based on confidence in oneself.”

  “Encouragement.” Darshan brooded on this. He shifted his gaze back to Ean, and his eyes hinted of humor. “I find this concept unfamiliar.”

  Ean shook his head, but inside he was smiling. To see Arion’s grown son—and his step-son, via his this-lifetime binding with Isabel—chastising Darshanvenkhátraman on his behalf, and to see Darshan receiving it with humor...Ean could hardly put words to the emotion he felt. Proud didn’t begin to encompass it.

  Tanis had grown so far beyond his expectations. He saw Arion every time he looked at the lad, who stood shoulder to shoulder with himself now. Tanis had inherited more than Arion’s striking features and insouciant grin. He had Arion’s confidence—a certainty in his talent that compelled Ean’s admiration.

  Focusing back on the task at hand, the prince reviewed his last attempt to open a portal into Alorin. He had all of Arion’s memories available to him now, but Arion had never tried to tear the fabric of the world using deyjiin—he’d never even conceived of it being possible.

  A waxing frustration drew a furrow between Ean’s brows. He frowned at Darshan. “I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.”

  “Let us try again,” Darshan proposed with an eye on Tanis, “and I’ll attempt to discern it from the working.”

  Tanis gave him a thumbs-up.

  Ean framed Absolute Being—what they referred to as starpoints in Shadow—with four points of energy. This part came easily to him. Then he sought Alorin’s fabric within the space he’d framed. A thread of connection bound him to the realm of his birth, and it was this thread that he followed to find the fabric.

  Darshan’s binding enabled this last. Without their connection, Ean wouldn’t have even been able to perceive the lifeforce amid the vast nothingness of Shadow. Now he drew elae through Darshan and followed his own life-thread of connection back to where it transcended Alorin’s aether and vanished. There, his awareness met up against a wall that blocked further perception.

  This was the wall he intended to tear open.

  Ean understood better now why you couldn’t use Shadow to go somewhere you’d never been before: because you had to know where you were going first—that is, KNOW, in the sense of the First Law—in order to arrive anywhere.

  Shadow wasn’t a place but a dimension beyond the boundaries of time. Traveling through this dimension could deliver you anywhere, but only if you already knew where you wanted to go.

  Trying to establish that KNOW for himself, Ean conceived of Alorin as if he was standing in the realm, picturing the sky, the land, the feeling of the world—

  It must be a specific place, Ean, Darshan advised.

  Ean refocused his thoughts on Isabel’s garden at the Agasi imperial palace, specifically t
he gazebo called Epiphany’s Altar.

  DO NOT OPEN ONTO A NODE. THERE IS TOO MUCH ENERGY FOCUSED THERE.

  Ean turned a grimace at Darshan. “Do you think you could be a little less...ubiquitous in my head?”

  Darshan lifted an apologetic hand. “Your pardon, Ean. I am permeating so as to understand. Do you want me to—”

  “No, I get it.”

  He changed his focus to the pavilion where Arion and Isabel had spent so many nights together, and where more recently he’d spoken with Nadia and secured Pelas’s agreement to teach him to wield deyjiin.

  Then he sought Alorin’s fabric once more.

  The action was similar to seeking another’s awareness along a bond. He followed a channel of some kind, some...connection he maintained with the realm through existence or thought—he couldn’t quite discern it. Arion would’ve had a fantastic time trying to extrapolate backwards through the experience.

  Finding the place of contact where his awareness met the wall of Alorin’s aetheric energy, Ean framed a second set of starpoints using Absolute Being, this time within Alorin’s fabric. The two frames touched like mirror images of each other, one in Shadow, one in the wall of Alorin’s energy.

  Holding both frames in place, Ean spun elae and deyjiin into a single thread—actually, more like a rushing torrent than a thread—and channeled that beam into the framed starpoints, along with his intention.

  That time he felt something...parting. The wall of Alorin’s fabric sliced open to reveal a slip of color, the slightest sliver of—

  The fabric snapped back together.

  Ean blew out his breath. He shoved palms to his eyes, then pushed his hands back through his hair. “Well?” He turned to Darshan in frustration. “What am I doing wrong?”

  Darshan concentrated upon him, mentally reviewing what he’d observed. “It seems to be something within your intent.”

  Ean shook his head. “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “The mechanics of your actions all appear correct, Ean.” Darshan tapped a finger on the arm of his chair. “Part of the problem in trying to aid you is that I can only observe the shape of your intent but not all of the collected thought that comprises it. That is, I am unable to discern if the conceptual structure of your intent is adequate to tear the fabric.”

  “It might have something to do with solidity,” Tanis suggested with his gaze still on the clouds. He seemed to be moving them around somehow.

  “How—” Ean was about to ask Tanis how he knew the intricacies of his working at all, but then he remembered that they were actually in Tanis’s world, so of course he would perceive what Ean was doing.

  “Solidity,” Ean mused. Of course. The energy of a wall is comparatively motionless. The particles have very little space to move. For practical purposes, it’s dead energy; but the energy in the realm’s fabric is living. It’s in motion—magnetic, kinetic, gravitic; all kinds of energies form its equilibrium. It would fight his efforts to alter it.

  Ean gazed appreciatively at Tanis. “I should’ve thought of that.”

  “You did,” Tanis said, shooting him a smile. “How else do you think I learned about it?”

  “I should’ve liked to have met this Arion Tavestra,” Darshan remarked. “He seems quite learned on the physics of your world.”

  Ean rolled his eyes.

  The Malorin’athgul winked at him. “Again, Ean.”

  Ean framed his starpoints and refocused on Alorin, but within his intent that time he took into account the realm’s shifting fabric. It was the difference between lifting something heavy from a firm base and something heavy from an unstable base. Instead of exerting pressure in two directions, his intent had to exert pressure in every direction, out to a specific degree of opening, and then hold that pressure as a constant long enough for someone to pass through.

  And this time, when the fabric parted, it stayed open.

  Ean mentally grappled to maintain the right constant pressure as he widened the tear into a doorway. Beyond, he saw the curling wood of the pavilion, golden in the long sunlight of late afternoon, and seated inside...

  Ean quickly released his hold, and the portal snapped shut.

  “Was that Nadia?” Tanis was sitting up, staring at him.

  Ean smiled. “I think it might’ve been.”

  “That was well done, Ean.”

  Ean looked to Darshan, feeling a welling appreciation. He shook his head and offered on the bond as well as in words, “Thank you.”

  Darshan waved off his gratitude. “It’s been intriguing to observe the process.”

  Tanis meanwhile had assumed a thoughtful expression. “But it’s...” he looked back to Ean. “It’s not time to return yet...is it?”

  Ean exhaled a slow breath. “I wish I knew.”

  Tanis leaned back against the rock, frowning slightly. “My mother says we must take our respite when the opportunity presents itself, that those are the moments when Cephrael isn’t requiring greatness of us. Do you think that’s true?”

  All the uncertainty and regret Ean felt over Isabel bubbled to the surface of his thoughts, but he put admiration into his expression as he replied, “I think your mother is far wiser than I ever gave her credit for.”

  Tanis shifted his gaze to Darshan. “If you’re finished practicing for a while, sir, I’d like to show Ean something.”

  “Perhaps a break would be beneficial.” Darshan pushed to his feet. “Rafael has been mentally nudging me with shameless persistence to attend him. For a being birthed of immortality, he is absurdly impatient.”

  “Warlocks are accustomed to having their way instantaneously, sir,” Tanis said with smile.

  “Yes, that is evident.”

  “So you’re heading off to visit our eminent Warlock Prince?” Ean asked Darshan.

  Tanis gave Ean a pained look. “Please don’t let Rafael hear you calling him that. You can already drown in the vast sea of his preeminence.”

  “Well said, young Tanis.” Darshan bowed a farewell to them both. “Seek me in Rafael’s universe if you desire my company anew, Ean.”

  They both watched him until he’d descended beyond the edge of the hill. Then Tanis turned Ean a grin full of excitement.

  “All right, you.” Ean grinned in return. “What’s this great mystery you’ve got in store for me?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you.” Tanis sent a bridge unfurling across the sea.

  Ean had come to understand that the bridges of Shadow were both metaphorical and actual—as much as anything in Shadow could be actual—and were a favored means among Warlocks of easing another through the connection between incongruous worlds.

  Heading off behind the lad, Ean couldn’t keep the smile from his face. There he was following a boy who’d been a trusted confidant since their first real interaction. Their friendship had shifted through prince and truthreader, into father and son briefly, to finally settle as bond-brothers—the relationship they were both most comfortable with. But no matter how they thought of one another, that they’d found each other at all was a miracle for which Ean had no words.

  And to see how Tanis had grown in their relative two years apart, morphing from a long-legged youth into a younger version of Arion with a knight’s honed frame...in another year, when the scruff he was already sporting filled in, anyone would be hard-pressed to say whether Ean or Tanis was the older of the pair.

  As the prince walked the bridge with his truthreader at his side, passing through the world of Tanis’s own making, the sea fell away and the cloud-streaked sky faded to star-studded heavens.

  “So, I have a question for you.” Ean hooked a strand of cinnamon hair behind one ear and looked to the lad. “Do you think people in Alorin have starpoints?”

  Tanis considered this. “Well...in framing Absolute Being—”

  “I don’t mean academically. I mean in living—in their very existence. We can’t exist in Shadow without starpoints, correct?”

&nb
sp; “It’s truer to say nothing exists for us in Shadow until we frame space with starpoints.”

  “Then how does anything exist in Alorin without them?”

  Tanis pondered this for a time. Then he flashed a grin. “I don’t know. It’s something to think about.”

  Ean arched brows. “Isn’t it though?” He pushed hands in his pockets and gazed into the starscape. “I’ve been exploring the idea. That’s happening to me more and more of late. I’ll wonder about something and can’t get the idea from my head until I’ve thoroughly dissected it.”

  He thought of his many memories of writing those journals that Tanis had read...of his detailed drawings so littered with notes and equations, of long essays in which he’d tried to force countless inchoate ideas into form.

  Once, Ean would’ve classified those memories as Arion’s, but since Tanis had helped him recover the last of himself, Ean no longer felt a need to separate the man he’d once been from the man he was now.

  “I suspect that’s how those journals of mine originated,” Ean added pensively, glancing at him, “that is, with ideas that wouldn’t leave me.”

  Tanis turned a thoughtful gaze back to the bridge. A violet-rose nebula was growing larger in the distance, giving dimension to the endless infinity of space. He exhaled a slow breath. “It looked like afternoon there.”

  Ean guessed immediately where Tanis’s thoughts had taken him—a fairly simple deduction even without their bond to guide him.

  “Who was the man with her?” Tanis turned his colorless eyes to Ean, and the prince saw more than a hint of speculation in them. “That man in the black mask, sitting beside Nadia. Did you know him?”

  “Caspar. A Marquiin she rescued from Darshan’s temple in Tambarré.”

  “Nadia rescued a Marquiin?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Tanis frowned at him. “You somehow failed to mention it. As did Pelas, when last we talked.”

  Ean grinned sheepishly. “Nadia bonded with Caspar to save him from Bethamin’s Fire. He’s devoted to her, and she’s devoted to you. Now you know everything important about the matter.”