The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Carian hitched up his britches. “If D’Varre’s got Vita and Kardashian at the guild hall in Rethynnea, then I know exactly where he’ll be holding them. We break them out, then I use the Guild’s weld to weigh anchor and make for the sa’reyth.”

  Fynn looked him over dubiously. “That simple, huh?”

  Carian flung his floating hair out of his eyes. “What’s wrong with simple?”

  “Only that nothing’s ever simple with you.”

  “Not because of anything I do, mate. It’s everyone else who wants to complicate things unnecessarily. Take those blokes in Ren. If they’d just handed over the emerald like I asked them to, they wouldn’t have ended up stranded in the middle of the Köhentaal moors.” Carian angled him a devilish smile. “I offered them the easy way. They chose the hard way. What could I do but oblige them?”

  “Yeah, you’re the very essence of accommodating,” Fynn muttered.

  An hour later, the ravine still looked the same—dark rocks studding hillsides and canyon floor with equal indifference. Fynn wondered if there was some notation on the itinerant boulders that only Nodefinders could see, indicating where to go to find the path you wanted to take through the world’s pattern.

  He puffed his perilously floating hair out of his eyes. “How long do we have to traipse through this godforsaken place?”

  Carian jerked his chin ahead of them. “Just beyond the next curve in the canyon.”

  The next curve turned out to be over a mile distant, such that Fynn was seriously considering his options by the time the pirate stopped them in a place that looked exquisitely identical to every other place they’d traversed thus far.

  Carian extended his elbow, and a toothy smile. “Shall we, your lordship?”

  Fynn sighed dramatically. “You are not even close to the first choice on my dance ticket.” He looped arms with the pirate—

  A force hauled him off his feet and through the aether at such speed that his jowls were jiggling and his eyes were a blur and his stomach was thrust against his spine in a way he knew would not have pleasant ramifications when the god of frenzied flight shoved them indifferently off his lightning bolt at the other end.

  Fynn wasn’t sure how long it took Carian to navigate to their destination—it was hard to track time with your brain compacted to the size of a pea—but eventually the current spit them out in a wide corridor, beneath a painted ceiling that Fynn recognized somewhat uneasily.

  As soon as he was sure his stomach wasn’t going to evacuate itself all over his boots, Fynn yanked his arm free of Carian’s and hissed, “You brought us here?”

  “Simple, just like I said.” The pirate cast an inscrutable gaze around the hallway. “Keep your royal nappies out of sight. I’ll be back before you can say lava’nreit. When you see my signal, run.”

  “Wait, what sig—”

  But the pirate had already vanished.

  Lavan’reit shmahvanreet, Fynn inwardly muttered. He speared a spectacular frown down the empty corridor.

  Lavan’reit was Tiern’aval spelled backwards. The pirates of Jamaii made all kinds of jokes and mean-spirited riddles out of the word. You’d think they were thrilled the island had vanished into the sea—or wherever in Belloth’s thirteen hells it had up and wandered to.

  Fynn was trying to decide whether to go in search of some wine or stay there and wait for Carian when he heard voices coming down the hall. He quickly concealed himself behind a plinth supporting the bust of the current master of the Espial’s Guild, one Gustave D’Varre.

  On the bright side, the rotund man’s plaster bust was busty enough to hide Fynn’s body completely if he turned sideways and winced a little.

  As the voices came closer and he recognized them, Fynn winced a lot.

  ***

  If the Pattern of the World was analogous to a lover who teased and taunted, always leaving you wanting more, the Seam would be a mistress who ravaged you repeatedly, taking her pleasure out of your hide until all that was left of you was a withered, flaccid husk barely capable of speech.

  Not that Carian was complaining.

  Mithaiya had left him like that countless times...although, not as many times as he’d left her in the same condition, he wagered.

  But navigating the Seam wasn’t as easy as it sounded—not that anyone made it sound easy; even Cassius wasn’t so arrogant as to boast of such—mostly because the current was really fast, really strong, and really unpredictable. You had to have an anchor bored into granite before you opened yourself to the stream or you’d be five kingdoms away before you knew what had happened.

  You couldn’t navigate the Seam the same way you navigated any other part of the grid. The Seam wasn’t one current but thousands. Carian had learned that the key to traveling it was to have two anchors in place before you jumped into the current—one close and one far. That way, the induction would just propel you between your anchors.

  Of course, putting out two anchors on the Pattern when you couldn’t actually be on the Pattern posed its own challenge. Carian had managed it, but it hadn’t been easy.

  After depositing Fynnlar in Rethynnea, Carian hopped a node that took him to Tregarion. He appeared inside the walls of the Veneisean Tivaricum beneath charcoal skies. Puddles dotted the yard, offering stark reflections of the tumultuous heavens.

  The lack of activity in the bailey indicated Her Majesty’s soldiers were likely appeasing their midday appetites indoors, probably to avoid getting mud spattered on the immaculate lace frilling the neckline of their ornately-enameled cuirasses.

  Carian couldn’t take a lace-wearing solider seriously, no matter how good he was with a sword.

  Since he had the place to himself for the moment, Carian pulled out his tabac pouch and rolled himself a smoke while he waited.

  One positive aspect of being wanted for piracy in nine kingdoms was that there was no shortage of people who would chase you. The last time he’d visited Queen Indora’s elite prison, he’d had Trell val Lorian in tow—though he’d only suspected the prince’s identity at the time—and they’d enjoyed a rollick with the Tivaricum’s Lord Commander, in and around meeting up with Kardashian, who happened to be Carian’s second cousin on his mother’s side, though the thief claimed no relation for the sake of reputation—his or Kardashian’s, Carian couldn’t quite decide.

  But whether or not he claimed the vran Lea name, the thief was family. Carian wasn’t about to let him dance the hempen jig while that porker D’Varre salivated over his corpse, or worse, Demetrio Consuevé, who was an insult to the strand no matter which of six ways to Sunday you sliced him.

  But a niggling feeling told Carian that more lay behind Devangshu and Kardashian’s kidnappings than vengeance. Consuevé’s idea of vengeance involved steel, blood and big holes in parts of the body that were never meant to know daylight. If Consuevé had been in charge, Kardashian and Vita would’ve already been dead.

  And D’Varre might have his knickers in a wad about his stolen Vestal Codex, but despite his having the girth of a small nation, you’d need tweezers and a magnifying glass to find his balls.

  Carian took a long drag on his smoke. No, this whole thing was clearly about him specifically.

  He knew the way to T’khendar.

  He knew the location of the First Lord’s sa’reyth.

  He knew how to find Franco Rohre.

  He knew a whole swarm of secrets that Consuevé would’ve given his left testicle to pin under his thumb.

  So...since this was about as obvious a trap as the sun setting in the west, Carian had immediately set his mind towards figuring out a way to spring his friends without himself getting snared. Thus, his trip to Veneisea’s Tivaricum.

  He’d just rolled his second smoke when three soldiers filed out of the keep, looking slightly disheveled, generally waterlogged and rubbing their overstuffed bellies. It took them a good three minutes of complaining about the weather before they noticed Carian leaning against the wall.

>   Whereupon, they headed towards him en masse.

  A soldier with a gnomonic nose—it might’ve told the time in three kingdoms by the shadow it cast—led the charge. The soldier on the left marched behind his own unfortunate chin, which resembled a horse’s ball sack. The third of their phalanx came stalking over digging something out of his ear.

  Carian straightened off the wall. “Hey you—Sundial.” He blew smoke towards the trio’s leader. “Go tell the Lord Commander that his favorite former prisoner is paying him a visit. He’ll want to see me and catch up on old times.”

  Sundial looked Carian up and down. He appeared unimpressed by the pirate’s clothing but paid due respect to his cutlasses, if told by the furrow that suddenly crunched his slender eyebrows together in a show of supercilious disregard. “Who are you and what are you doing here?” he demanded in their flowery language, which always made Carian’s nose twitch like a feather was tickling it.

  “It’s a courtesy call, savvy?” Carian took a long drag on his smoke. “We go way back, your LC and me.” His gaze switched to the soldier with the impressive chin. “Ho there, Nutface, you’ll wanna keep that toy saber of yours in its sheath, if you know what I mean.” The man’s hand was looking a little itchy for the hilt of his sword.

  Nutface stuttered with pique at the same time that Sundial drew up with an indignant, “LC?”

  “What about you then, Earwax?” Carian asked the soldier who’d been digging at his ear. Of the three of them, he looked the least likely to be a moron. “You wanna be the hero of the day, or make this the day you say your last goodbyes?”

  Earwax angled him a look. “Is this a trick question?”

  “There’s a bright lad. Run along and find your LC then.”

  Earwax jogged off.

  Nutface and Sundial stood watching Carian suspiciously while they waited. Carian blew smoke rings at them.

  After a passage of time in which Carian could’ve traveled to Dheanainn and back again, the Lord Commander emerged from the keep, trailing a dozen soldiers who actually looked like they knew their way around a blade.

  Carian took one last pull on his smoke and flicked it off into the mud. Then he marched out of the shadow of Sundial’s nose to spear a grin at the Lord Commander. “Ahoy, Your Imminence!”

  The Lord Commander drew up short.

  Carian could practically see the thoughts marching across the man’s expression as it changed from shock through uncertainty into outrage. He flung a finger at Carian. “Seize that pirate!”

  Carian spun on his heel and shoved through Nutface and Sundial, sending them sprawling. He took aim on the gatehouse but led a chase around a horse corral and two other buildings in the bailey first, with the Lord Commander shouting the while and more soldiers joining in at every turn.

  Which was entirely the point.

  ***

  Fynnlar had always considered a balanced diet to be a glass of white wine in one hand and red in the other. This is where he fundamentally differed from Carian vran Lea, who thrived on a steady diet of near-death experiences and grew ill-humored and morose if someone wasn’t trying to murderously slay him every hour or so.

  But Fynn had women and children who were depending on him to keep losing money to Ghislain d’Launier. He couldn’t just up and off himself on some heroic quest. He had mouths to feed.

  He was wincing behind D’Varre’s bust, brooding over the fact that none of those mouths were offering him much in return, save a slight amelioration to a conscience he wasn’t supposed to have possessed, when the very likeness of the bust currently shielding him came waddling down the hallway.

  Balls of Belloth, but the man looked even more corpulent now than when he’d sold out Fynn’s company to those Saldarians in the Kutsamak. Oh, if Fynn had only had his sword, he would’ve speared the fat man on sight! Alas, he had but a small dagger, and it would hardly make a dent in D’Varre’s blubber.

  The guildmaster was walking beside a miscreant—a rakish man wearing a waist-length coat and lean pants cut in the style of Rimaldi. He could only be Demetrio Consuevé.

  Consuevé walked like a man who knew how to wield the rapier and daggers stuck through his well-worn belt, and the way his hands kept caressing their hilts gave Fynn the impression that the rapscallion was fain to use them.

  “...not a prison, Consuevé,” Guildmaster D’Varre was whining in a voice far too high for a man of his considerable girth. “I would be more comfortable if we turned them over to the authorities.”

  Consuevé twirled the point of his oiled moustache. “I am the authorities, D’Varre. You do as you’re told and the Vestal will see you rewarded—Belloth’s foul testicles, man, we’ve been over this a thousand times. You mewl like a bloody infant! I’m already doing the work of capturing these renegades for you. Do I have to change your nappies too?”

  Indignation rippled through D’Varre. “You needn’t be so crude, Consuevé.”

  Consuevé snorted. “You’ll interrogate members of your own guild as a light snack, but my language offends you?” He gave D’Varre a once-over accompanied by a sneer. “Never mind that you got nothing out of either of them.”

  “Vita, I admit, is proving more resilient than I’d expected.” D’Varre looked highly disgruntled about this. “He has yet to admit to stealing the Codex, much less to knowing the location of the rebellion’s headquarters. The other is a hardened criminal if ever I saw one. My interrogator spent three hours with him and never got him even to admit his name.” The guild master heaved a massive sigh. “Our personnel are not trained for such distasteful enterprises.”

  Consuevé eyed him circumspectly. “Be that as it may...when vran Lea shows up—and he will show up, mark my words—I want him apprehended and brought directly to me. To me, D’Varre. You think your personnel can handle that?”

  “My personnel are better trained than the riffraff you call your entourage,” D’Varre grumbled.

  “You can call them Paladin Knights for all I care, so long as they catch vran Lea—”

  Suddenly an enraged outcry pierced the passage along with the thunder of running feet.

  Fynn risked a glance around the bust to see dozens of soldiers in the livery of the Veneisean Tivaricum coming towards them out of nowhere down the corridor.

  He bolted out of his hiding place, only to realize as he was storming past a startled Consuevé that this had to be Carian’s signal and he’d fallen right for it.

  Now there was nothing to do but keep in front of the mass of angry soldiers, as they hardly seemed of a mind to notice that the man they were chasing wasn’t their quarry.

  The soldiers bowled over Consuevé and D’Varre in pursuit of Fynn, who careened around a corner and blasted headlong down an arcade. In the adjacent gallery, a caravan was amassing, ostensibly in preparation to cross the guild’s weld. All eyes lifted in wonder as Fynn raced by.

  He cut across the open and darted into a tunnel connecting two courtyards. He could hear D’Varre shouting for his own men from far behind him.

  Fynn figured Carian needed five minutes to release Kardashian and Vita, which meant Fynn was going to have to keep these mad-as-hornet Veneiseans occupied for at least that long.

  Only...he was hardly dressed for exercise, and he’d been on meager rations for weeks—what with Cassius’s disastrous taste in wine, and being already in an enervated state from the enormous strain of engaging in repartee with a score of women who owed him their livelihoods but still wouldn’t sleep with him—such that by the time he’d crossed the second courtyard and was storming his way down the maze of interior corridors, Fynn was beginning to feel a bit lightheaded and a lot affronted by the entire affair.

  Why should he be the damned hare?

  So it was that as he turned a corner and saw D’Varre’s men running towards him from the other end of the hall, he decided he’d had enough.

  A handy door stood open. Fynn grabbed the jam and slung himself around it into what appeared to be a
spacious office. On a far cabinet, a decanter of red wine beckoned.

  “Bless you.” Fynn jogged over and hugged the decanter to his chest. “It’s like you were calling to me, weren’t you, dearest?”

  He was pouring a glass when the storm of Veneiseans met the storm of D’Varre’s guards out in the passage, and a heated argument ensued in two languages. Men from both parties barged inside, brandishing swords, but they paused when they saw Fynn leaning against the cabinet with wine in hand.

  “Who—” sputtered one of the Veneiseans, red-faced, “but who are you? You are not ze pirate!”

  Fynn was draining his glass when Consuevé pushed inside, followed by the walking cabbage that called himself D’Varre.

  “What the hell is all this?” Consuevé had his rapier out and his moustache on high alert. “Who’re you?”

  Behind him, D’Varre blanched. “Lord...Fynnlar?”

  Fynn glowered at him. “Yeah, you should be loosing it in your britches, you double-crossing porker.”

  D’Varre stammered, “I thought...I mean, I heard—”

  “That the crew of Saldarians you sold us out to had gotten the better of us? Is that what you heard, you piggy bastard?” He downed a big gulp of wine, glaring at D’Varre the while.

  Fynn’s hand was shaking a little as he lowered the goblet again, telltale of the fury that had risen up, courtesy of the memory of those bloody hours in the Kutsamak as much as from what he’d endured to survive them—not the least of which was a legacy of immensely disturbing dreams about zanthyrs.

  “What’s he blabbering about, D’Varre?” Consuevé demanded.

  An august personage in gilded armor pushed into the room. “What is the meaning of this?” He turned a pinioning stare around at all of them. “Where is the pirate?”

  “Pirate?” Consuevé spun to face the newcomer at the same time that D’Varre was dabbing a kerchief at his neck and murmuring, “Nothing, it’s nothing,” in response to Consuevé’s question.

  “Who’s this prick, D’Varre?” Fynn nodded towards Consuevé, even though he knew the answer well enough. “What rat are you in bed with this time?”