The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  “Neither will I,” Björn replied resolutely.

  Malachai held her brother at the point of his stare for longer than any of them were comfortable with, but finally the Dane’s chin fell to his chest and he exhaled a shuddering breath. The currents calmed.

  Markal growled a muted curse.

  “By the witchlight of the Dísir, man,” Anglar said breathlessly. He clapped a hand on Malachai’s shoulder. “I thought you were going to unmake us all there for a moment.” Concern shadowed his brow as he looked upon the Dane. “Has it...passed now?”

  Still staring at his toes, Malachai’s lips parted in a mirthless smile. “Has it passed...” He lifted his sunken eyes to Anglar, blackly bitter. “You must think me mad.” Then he dragged a slicing gaze across all of them. “Is that what you think of me?”

  “Anglar, get him some wine,” Markal muttered.

  Anglar went to do so.

  “Wine, wine—I don’t need wine!” Malachai spun a storm in place. “I need answers! I need to know what’s to be done about it!”

  “Why do you think we’ve gathered here?” Markal cast a mordant glare at him. What he did not say—for which Isabel was grateful, since Markal wasn’t known for his tact—was, That’s why we didn’t want you here.

  Yet Malachai had every right to be involved, and would’ve been invited if not for the recent infirmity that propelled him into unprovoked fits of rage.

  Infirmity. It seemed a callous appellation for the tragedy that had befallen him.

  Malachi had been their talisman, the focal point of the entire working as her brother and his Council of Nine built T’khendar out of Alorin’s aether. So much power channeled through a single mind...even a very talented fifth-strand mind... It wasn’t just deyjiin that had overwritten Malachai’s reason but the incomprehensible force of ten powerful wielders intent upon a god’s work.

  The effort had changed Malachai in ways none of them understood. He shouldn’t have been able to wield deyjiin—not without a binding to an immortal. Yet wielding it he was, even unto his own dissolution.

  And it was dissolving him. Isabel studied his life pattern daily, and every day she found it more irreparably frayed.

  Channeling elae into his pattern helped him recover some strength, some sense of himself, but it was a stopgap, for the power eating through his life pattern soon consumed again what lifeforce she’d invested.

  Even her brother had been unable to help. This affliction of deyjiin from which Malachai suffered...there was nothing for Björn to unwork. No fell pattern—mor’alir or inverteré—had claimed their friend, just a solid dousing of death. Malachai had been drenched in that acid long enough for the corrosive power to seep inside his pores, his very bones, and now no amount of elae could wash it off.

  As ever, Time was their greatest enemy.

  She and her brother needed time to unravel what had happened to Malachai; time to understand why deyjiin was roaming rampant in T’khendar, consuming elae as fast as they could generate it; time to sway the Council of Realms to leniency; time to build their fledgling realm into one that could sustain life.

  But the hourglass had been turned, the countdown begun. They’d answered Cephrael’s calling with T’khendar’s creation, but now a tsunami of consequence was tumbling towards them.

  They had to act while they still could, and they had to act fast.

  Anglar put a goblet in Malachai’s hand and wrapped the man’s trembling fingers around it. The latter stared into the wine, unseeing. “Any good thing...” Malachai’s voice came out choked and brittle, “any beautiful thing, and just because they can’t do it themselves—”

  “They’re afraid of what we’ve done,” her brother agreed, trying to mollify him, “afraid of what we’ve shown them we can do.”

  Malachai speared a look at him. “And well they should be.”

  Anglar was passing out wine to the others. Markal leaned an arm on the back of one chair and drank his. They were all too electrified to sit. Only her brother managed it, and even he was churning the currents.

  Isabel couldn’t recall the last time any of them had found their beds, even for a few hours. They were subsisting on elae and determination now. Little else.

  “What will the Paladin Knights do?” Markal was staring hard into his goblet as if it was a scrying pool.

  “Twist off the nodes.” Björn let his head rest against the back of his chair. “Choke the ley lines, as they did with the welds to Shadow millennia ago.”

  “T’khendar would become a dead realm.” Anglar scrubbed at his eyes. Then he turned an anguished look around at the rest of them. “We can’t let that happen.”

  “No,” Malachai snarled.

  Her brother idly traced a pattern with his forefinger on the arm of his chair. “Twisting the nodes is the right course of action, but better we do it than them. Keep the nodes under our control.”

  “Maintain the ghost of a connection,” Markal said, jumping to the answer her brother had already seen.

  Björn glanced to him by way of acknowledgement of this necessity.

  Anglar sank down on the edge of a table and hung his goblet beneath his hands. “We have to seal off T’khendar to protect Alorin, don’t we?”

  Björn exhaled slowly. “It is...the only way.”

  “How long will it take?” Malachai asked.

  “How long do we have?” Markal countered. “The Council still has to vote on the declaration, but the knights will be coming after us, without a doubt. They’ll storm into Alorin first, but they will find their way to T’khendar. They’ve the collective skill to do it—and damn us all if the other Vestals won’t help them.”

  “Björn,” Anglar called her brother’s gaze to his, “how long do you think it will take us? Tell me truly.”

  Björn shook his head. “Too long.”

  “Then we need a diversion.” Malachai straightened, looked around at the others. “Something the Paladin Knights cannot ignore—something Illume Belliel can’t ignore.”

  “What madness are you talking now, man?” Anglar fell back in his chair. “What could we possibly do to divert the Council of Realms’ attention away from what we’ve already done?”

  Malachai hovered on the edge of hope—Isabel could see it in his face, the glimmer of possibility. Then he sagged. “I...don’t know.”

  The rage that had been upon him earlier was fading fast and draining his strength along with it. The goblet trembled in his hand, and—

  Anglar jumped to catch it out of the air, while Markal caught Malachai around the waist just as his knees buckled.

  Isabel went quickly to them. “I’ll take him.” She slipped her arm around Malachai’s form. The man had always been whip-thin; now she felt only his bones. “Come sit down, Malachai. Let me tend to you.”

  He laid his head against hers as she walked him towards a sofa. She had to push elae into his life pattern just to keep him upright. “It isn’t fair, my lady.”

  “I know.”

  “We did a miraculous thing.”

  “One day they’ll see that.” She helped him sit on a sofa. He groaned as she lifted his feet onto the long cushion.

  “But the slanderous things they’re saying...horrible things...” The dark light of deyjiin had left his brown eyes. Now they were merely shadowed, bereft. “They’re calling us blasphemers...traitors...”

  Isabel laid a hand on his shoulder. “We know the truth.”

  “Nay, Isabel.” He rolled his head from side to side. “What is the truth? Is it what we know...or what they will say about us for evermore?” He held her gaze until he forced her to look away, subject to his point.

  Malachai closed his eyes then, but pain still creased his brow. His thoughts grew very dark. “History will know us by their lies, Isabel.”

  Isabel perceived a terrible portent in these words. Her Seer’s senses cried out in alarm. Malachai didn’t say the rest of what he was thinking, but Isabel heard it all the same. They’r
e already calling me a villain. Perhaps I should become one.

  ***

  Isabel woke to the howling wind flapping the canvas of her tent. She pressed palms to her eyes and curled onto her side.

  More and more of late, she found herself dreaming of Malachai, torturing herself with memories of his decline. Ean wasn’t the only one haunted by dreams of the past.

  This had been one of the better dreams, all told, when some semblance of the man she’d known had still been present; when she’d still had hope of saving him—in the very least, of giving him back into the Returning.

  To have watched the madness slowly claiming Malachai and be so helpless to stop his decline, and then to have witnessed what that madness drove him to do and again be unable to stop him, lest everything they’d worked for be undone, lest his terrible sacrifice be for nothing...

  Theirs had not actually been a choice between saving T’khendar or Adept society as they knew it, but it had certainly felt like it at the time. Every time she heard of more Adept deaths, prey to Malachai’s war...it was a blade plunging over and again into her heart. They’d all been so overtaxed and their resources so thin. Time and all the realms had been against them.

  Isabel wasn’t certain why her sleeping consciousness kept dredging up memories from the worst years of her long existence...but she had her suspicions.

  Sand hissed against the walls of her tent, and a sudden gust of wind stretched the canvas taut, straining against the poles. The inclement weather was simply T’khendar’s response to the kinetic storm raging through its pattern, as a body sends fluid to cleanse and support healing. She would’ve been much more concerned if the world lay still. In fact, every morning when she woke, her first fear was of hearing only silence.

  Isabel swung her legs off the bed, but then sat there, gripping her mattress while dizziness made a flail of her head in a grand showing.

  The patterns tattooed on her body were glowing, tingling. She sensed a magnetic affinity between them and Chaos. That magnetism was creating a growing battle in her own system, one that only intensified as the tear in T’khendar’s fabric widened.

  In every waking moment, Isabel felt Pelas’s patterns pulling her consciousness towards the tear. That rent hung perpetually in her awareness now, a growing contusion, as though she was herself plunging the blade and watching the world-wound darken, helplessly bound to the power sundering it. Phaedor’s binding helped ameliorate the effects of deyjiin constantly deluging her system, but it was a stopgap at best.

  Isabel forced herself up off the bed.

  The patterns on her skin cast the only light into the room, but it was light enough to see by. A standing mirror in one corner of her tent showed a slender form wreathed in a silver nimbus. The mirror was the only comfort she’d asked her brother to provide for her, there on the edge of the unraveling world. He’d known why she’d wanted it. Bless him for not making her speak the words.

  Isabel moved to the mirror and studied the patterns scribed into her flesh. The lines were so thin now, they’d appear barely more than faint tracings if not for the light they emitted. She removed her thin silk shift and studied Pelas’s work.

  He had drawn arabesques on her chest. These were delicate, yet their design was far from innocent. Likewise the bands that circled her upper arms.

  The large pattern covering her back was...difficult to describe. Intricate. Alien.

  The fat one binding her thigh reminded her of a garter whose lace resembled a bramble, yet with symmetry, continuity. She saw the relationship between it and the others, but she couldn’t determine its purpose.

  These patterns held a truth neither she nor her brother had yet been able to decipher. So with her mind she studied them, tried to understand them, but she only found fear of them in her heart.

  Fear of what Chaos patterns had been engendered to do. Fear of what they were doing to her...

  Tears came unbidden to her eyes. Isabel wiped them brusquely away.

  This is the path you chose, she reminded herself, and she had every intention of continuing to walk it. She’d known to some degree what she was getting into when she strode unarmed into Darshan’s intent. She trusted her path...but she’d never been so afraid of it.

  Moving slowly through her dizziness, she dressed in the robes worn by the desert tribes—the best thing, really, for sandstorms—varying garments of tightly spun silk worn in light, voluminous layers. She’d just donned her cloak and was wrapping her headscarf around her shoulders when the room tipped and spun. She grabbed the bedpost to steady herself until things settled.

  Isabel knew she ought to contact her brother. To still be so drained after a night of rest didn’t bode well. He would want her to call him.

  She wasn’t going to call him.

  Isabel finished wrapping her scarf around her head and made her way out of her tent to brave the storm and the day ahead. She wasn’t doing herself any favors by spending so much time on the Pattern of the World, but with the drachwyr missing and their resources so limited...they were all doing more than reason had any right to demand of them.

  It was still dark, early, cold. The wind grabbed at her clothing, scraping sand across the silk. She clutched her scarf more tightly across her face and started through camp, using the guide ropes to balance against the wind. Globes lit the way through the sand-fog of the storm, overburdened, much like their hopes.

  She might’ve used the fifth to protect herself from the elements, but elae felt thick in her thoughts, a symptom of her exhaustion.

  And Isabel was tired. Fatigue made her limbs sluggish and her thoughts woolen. Doubtless the fatigue was drawing out those dark memories of loss as well.

  She knew friends were nearby, and her brother was only ever a thought away, but on that dark morning on the desert’s edge, with the wind howling and the sand scouring everything to barren bone...with the tattered pattern of her brother’s realm unraveling around her, and the rent opening ever wider unto Chaos and dragging her consciousness with it...Isabel had never felt so alone.

  She missed Arion desperately. Three hundred years had barely closed the wound over his loss.

  And that is entirely your fault.

  It was true. She knew it. Her brother had cautioned her, warned her...pled with her. Arion is gone, he’d told her, over and over, emphasizing the last word, trying to impress the truth upon her. This is an actuality you have to face. Still...she’d hoped.

  But for all of Ean’s brave devotion, for all she saw shadows of the man she’d bound herself to, Ean wasn’t Arion. It was cruel and unjust of her even to want him to be.

  Before his Return, the only battles Ean had fought were on the sparring ground or waged with sails against wind and sea. He’d known little of the holocaust that had so decimated their race; even less of his own abilities; and nothing of the game. Yet the game had claimed him for its own, as it always did, regardless of his preparedness.

  He’d endured an arduous climb out of that trench of ignorance. And he’d been hunted—hounded by factions with immortal understanding and immortal hatreds. He’d made mistakes. He’d felt emotions; he’d doubted himself, doubted his path, doubted her...perhaps rightfully so...yet he’d persisted throughout to finally regain what he’d lost.

  There was some vindication in this at least.

  She found so much to admire in Ean val Lorian. She saw in him so many hints of the man she’d loved...but he wasn’t the man she remembered. How could he be? A man’s personality derived from his education and experience as much as divine grace, and Arion had spent decades at the Sormitáge—and many more beneath her brother’s tutelage. He’d climbed a ladder of success to reach his pinnacle, not the fraying rope of desperation Ean had been forced to cling to. Arion had acted with certainty and precision. He’d been her anchor as much as she’d been his.

  Ean will become an anchor for you one day.

  He would. She believed this in her heart...if they both lived long enough. If Cephra
el allowed them happiness together after making so many exorbitant mistakes.

  She’d received only fractured glimpses of Ean’s mind since their altercation in dreamscape, where he’d all but sworn off anything more to do with her and the game. She couldn’t fault him for such feelings. If he’d treated her as inconsequentially as she’d treated him—always pushing him to his limit while privately clutching to the frail hope that the man she fell in love with would reappear...

  How terribly she’d misused him. Epiphany knew he had every right to be upset.

  She took painful solace in knowing Ean was on his path and succeeding alone where she had failed him. Only a few days before, he’d reached out to her with the exhilarated confession, Isabel, I remember. I remember everything!

  The words both elated her and felt like a dagger in her heart, for they were proof that he’d been better off on his own than walking his path with her. She hated that this thought choked her happiness for him with guilt.

  Perhaps when she Returned, she would be different, and the scales between them would at last find balance.

  ...If she returned.

  By Cephrael’s Great Book! Isabel mentally shook herself, as though scolding a naughty child. There were some depths to which she could not let herself descend!

  But with deyjiin coursing perpetually through the patterns scribed on her body, she worried that if she didn’t honestly confront the possibility of her own demise, she would end up like Malachai: with the best of intentions, but utterly, unconscionably mad.

  As Isabel pushed through the flaps into the dining tent, three men sat around the end of a long table, huddled over steaming cups. One was dark-haired, one auburn and the other fair. From the shadows under their eyes, it was either very early for them or very late.

  She remembered how they’d looked on the day of their arrival—bright-eyed, clean-shaven, with their hair shorn in the manner of the Paladin Knights. Now they wore heavy beards and squinted as if against the blowing sand, even when indoors.