The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  He cracked a smile. “When Tannour returns.”

  “Balé. Never met a natural man who could function on so little sleep as you, save Valeri himself, and there’s not much natural about him.”

  Something in Rolan’s comment brought Jasper’s report back to mind, and the phrase the lieutenant had overheard:‘...at least you can bleed...’

  Jasper hadn’t understood it, but Trell kenned it well. On Darroyhan, he’d seen black-skinned demons who didn’t bleed, and later, he’d learned much about eidola from Balaji and Náiir—enough to know what kind of enemy he would be facing in the warlord...enough to understand that he and Tannour were the only two men among their company capable of defeating him.

  Which was why he’d finally submitted to Gideon’s protests, if not to his rationale.

  Trell felt a tingling an instant before a dark figure materialized in front of them.

  Rolan took a startled step back, his hand going for his weapon. Then he realized who was standing there. “By Ha’viv’s ill eye,” he hissed, glaring at Tannour as he released his scimitar, “can’t you walk like a natural man?”

  Tannour unwound the silk headscarf enshrouding his head and face and shook out his hair. “Nice to see you too, Lamodaar.”

  Trell felt relief filling in the space that tension had just vacated. “I was beginning to worry.” Indeed, the nagging fear that Tannour would become trapped by one of the patterns warding against elae’s fifth strand, which were apparently all about the fortress, had kept Trell on edge ever since the Vestian left. He wouldn’t have sent him at all had the need not been dire. It had been a tense four hours.

  Tannour must’ve read of Trell’s thoughts, for he sprouted a half-smile and shook his head. “I told you, I’m not of this fifth strand as you keep claiming, A’dal.”

  “So it would seem.”

  Tannour chuckled. “I see I haven’t convinced you in the slightest. In any case, those patterns you mentioned weren’t interested in me, though I vow they were voraciously seeking someone.” He spoke with his usual cavalier disregard, but the silence in his gaze betrayed a wary disquiet.

  Trell decided not to pursue it at that moment. “Well, that at least is good news. I’m fain to be wrong.”

  Rolan looked between the two of them. “How is this good news?”

  Rewrapping his scarf about his head in the fashion of the Vestian nobility rather than a Sorceresy assassin, Tannour explained, “If I’ve nothing to fear from the patterns, there’s nothing to stop us moving forward with the plan.”

  “Which part of the plan was this?”

  “Keep up, Lamodaar. The part where the A’dal and I take out the warlord so the rest of you can kick up your heels and drink yourselves senseless.”

  Rolan’s gaze assumed a steely cast. “I recall nothing of that part of the plan.”

  “That’s because you weren’t paying attention.”

  The Nadoriin grunted. “And I thought you were insufferable before you got your powers back.” He shifted his narrowed gaze to Trell. “You know why he never sleeps, A’dal? It’s because he knows any one of us would garrote him at the first opportunity.”

  “That would be the only way one of you would mark me,” Tannour quipped.

  Rolan looked to the heavens as if praying to the gods for patience.

  “Rolan,” Trell summoned the Nadoriin’s gaze back to him, “let Raegus and the others know we’re moving forward. By dawn, Lazar’s men must be on alert, the others assembled, and Gideon’s honor guard ready to march—and all of it done quietly, as we discussed.”

  “Your will, A’dal.” Rolan pressed a fist to his heart and left them without a glance at Tannour.

  “He loves me.” Tannour sent a shadowy smile chasing after Rolan. “He just can’t admit it yet.”

  Trell motioned to Tannour to walk with him, and they started off along the edge of camp. “You were gone a long time,” Trell remarked, though his eyes were asking, Are you sure you’re all right?

  “It’s a big fortress,” Tannour replied, while his gaze answered, I’m not so fragile as that.

  To which Trell’s flickering smile conceded, Fair enough. “What were you able to learn? Did you find the node chamber?”

  “Possibly.” A flash of something—unease, perhaps—hinted in his hesitation. “There is a subterranean chamber that many passages connect into. The whole place is guarded by those patterns you spoke of. Rather elaborate décor, too.”

  Trell decided not to read too deeply into this description. “How many men?”

  “None guarding the chamber, but I perceived about two hundred on the fortress premises. It’s difficult to know if the warlord has more men guarding your father’s soldiers. With so many bodies accumulated in one place, they all appear as a mass to my perception. There are many hundreds split between two chambers. I couldn’t discern if both chambers hold your father’s men, or if one chamber might contain the missing villagers, as we suspected.”

  Trell sensed an unusual restlessness in Tannour, but the Vestian continued before Trell could inquire as to it, “The fortress is large, A’dal. Deceptively so, with many levels belowground warded with dark patterns. In four hours, I still wasn’t able to search all of it.”

  “You fear the warlord is hiding more men?”

  Tannour nodded. “It’s impossible to know how many we’ll be up against.”

  Trell again caught a strain of hesitation in his tone. He stopped them walking and turned to face him. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  The ghost of a smile touched Tannour’s lips. “So our A’dal must also speak the language of Air, to know my mind as you seem to.”

  “Whatever it is, I would hear it.”

  Tannour turned a frown off into the night. “If only I could put voice to a feeling that has no sensation, a song without music, a poem of no words.”

  Trell considered him with a frown. Not knowing what to say, he started them walking again.

  They passed a pair of sentries—Lazar’s men, silent but vigilant. Trell nodded to them. They nodded back.

  The hilltop curved around to the north. Trell veered down onto the moor, trading the glow of torches and campfires for the vast, starlit expanse of a moonless night. Above them, seven stars winked hello. “This feeling you can’t explain,” Trell said, glancing to Tannour, “what is it telling you?”

  Abruptly, Tannour took Trell’s arm and stopped him. “Don’t go. Let me face whatever awaits you there.”

  Trell met his concerned gaze with a softer one. “You know why I can’t do that.”

  “A’dal, I truly don’t.”

  They’d reached a rocky promontory where the hillside fell steeply away. Trell settled onto a rock. “What has you so disturbed?”

  Tannour expelled a heated breath. “The entire fort was...fethe, but it was too like the fortress I knew as home for the better part of my adolescence—Addras, a nightmare place, one of Ba’alen’s thirteen hells. I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.”

  Trell tried to imagine what kind of place could give a man like Tannour Valeri nightmares. “Is this feeling because of the warlord?”

  “No, though he was just as you described.”

  “Because of the patterns then?”

  Tannour walked to the edge of the rock and stared off. “Less the patterns than their intent.” He stood for a time studying the starscape, arms crossed as if to bind his tension within. The he turned suddenly to look over his shoulder. “Imagine the wind in color, Trell...every whispering current a different rainbow thread. A man walks through a room and stirs the threads to life. They swirl around him, taste of him and move on, carrying the flavor of his passing.”

  “It sounds like you’re describing the currents of elae.”

  “Let us use your vernacular then. The currents in this fortress...Trell, they’re filthy, grime-ridden. Their color is drowned by char and ash, poisoned—no, not just poisoned.” He looked gravely at Trell. “Poisonous. Perhaps
not to you or me—though I wouldn’t swear upon anything about that place appearing true. Every avenue shows the path running false—but certainly poisonous to someone. And the patterns are everywhere. New patterns, old patterns, waiting death scribed into the stones, worked into the fabric of the rock, destructive malice layered throughout the walls.”

  “But you can see them,” Trell clarified, “help us avoid them?”

  “I don’t even understand them.” Tannour turned heatedly to face him. “How can I possibly protect you when all I can see is something malignant sitting there?”

  Trell looked him over quietly, trying to read the meaning between the tension in Tannour’s stance and the unease behind his gaze. “Is that what’s troubling you? Protecting me?”

  Tannour gave a derisive exhale. “You make it sound a simple thing.”

  Trell dropped a soft smile to his hands, admitting a truth in this. “The way I see it, Tannour,” Trell observed softly, “there is no path forward, save through that fortress. Whether fighting at your side or surrendering to the warlord—either way, I could be signing my own death warrant.”

  “That’s right,” Tannour said. “So don’t go.”

  Trell met his gaze. “If I don’t go, we all fail. And Gideon will die.”

  Tannour took a step towards him. “A’dal, this wielder who fashioned those patterns...whether or not he ever trained in the Sorceresy’s halls, that man walks mor’alir, the Path of Shadows, a sadistic path that delights in pain—and that’s the least of its darkness,” he added caustically. “If your conclusions are true—and so far, they have been—then this man wants you for himself. You, A’dal. Not the nameless commander of an enemy army but Trell Val Lorian, Prince of Dannym. You, personally.”

  “Yes.” Trell had already reached that conclusion.

  Tannour stared at him, clearly imploring him to understand. “A’dal, he’s mor’alir. You claim to have known an Adept that walked this path, but do you truly know what that means? If he gets his hands on you...”

  “You and I will have to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

  Tannour leveled him a charged stare of protest.

  Trell replied with the ghost of a smile. “I’ll admit, this choice feels wrong and right at the same time, but reward has ever been married with risk.”

  “But to risk yourself needlessly when others could do the job, and when so many are depending on you—”

  Trell raised a hand to pause him. “I submit your argument is sound, were the facts as you see them.”

  He rose and walked to the edge to stand beside Tannour. A foot beyond their feet, the hillside fell away into tumbled rock and uneven moorland. Matching shoulders with the Vestian, Trell faced the night and its lording constellation, humbly, as if standing before the Mage himself.

  “This conflict of ours, Tannour...” he offered quietly, keen to the listening stars, “it’s but a small battle, one of many being played out on a much larger field. Call it the war for Balance, if you like. It’s a game waged between immortals. They’ve chosen their mortal champions, and now it’s up to those Players to carry through to conclude the game.” He turned a telling look to Tannour.

  The Vestian’s brows lifted. “You’re one of them.”

  Trell nodded. “The Players have pieces aplenty who may think they’re in charge, but pieces have no influence over the canvas of the game. The game turns, and they roll with it, bouncing from place to place, perhaps knocking another Player’s piece out of position without ever knowing it, or perhaps just serving as distraction, flotsam impeding the movements of opposing Players.”

  He returned his gaze to the stars. “Players, however...they have agency. Their actions shift the balance of the game, and their choices change the tapestry’s design.”

  “That’s why you have to go.” Understanding threaded Tannour’s exhalation.

  Trell looked to him gravely. “As fierce and courageous as all of you are, still it’s unlikely that you can do much to change the pattern of this game—and we need to change the pattern, Tannour.”

  Tannour gave a slow exhale. “The lady dragon said we were upon Cephrael’s game. I thought she spoke metaphorically, but now I’m thinking she meant every word.”

  “We’re up against a new Player who we know next to nothing about. This task needs my involvement, Tannour. And I need you.”

  Tannour looked at him, his gaze unreadable.

  Trell still perceived a strong unwillingness in the Vestian. He studied him closely, trying to pinpoint the source of the other’s unease. “What is it?” He bent his head to capture Tannour’s gaze. “It’s not the warlord troubling you, not the patterns themselves...is it the wielder?”

  Tannour exhaled a forceful breath and leaned back against an outcropping of rock, radiating conflict. His gaze shifted from Trell to the constellation and back again. Then he roughly unwound the scarf from his head, tossed it aside, and started unbuckling the straps of his vest. His eyes found Trell’s.

  “What I’m about to tell you, I’ve told only one other living soul.”

  Trell read that to mean Loukas n’Abraxis.

  Tannour let his vest fall with a heavy clunk of daggers and other concealed weapons. “I’m not even sure how much I’ll be able to say.”

  Deft fingers unworked the lacings of his jacket and tunic beneath, and then he was shoving out of his sleeves to stand bare-chested before Trell.

  Tattoos covered Tannour’s muscular form, luminous as dark mercury. He held out his arms and turned a slow circle for Trell’s inspection.

  Three lines of incomprehensible script traced down his neck. The chain of an endless knot encircled the line of his collarbone. A stiletto formed of tangled thorns plunged between the muscles of his chest, and the design on his back could’ve been wings as easily as the curved blades of a dual-headed axe. His body was a canvas of intricate designs that seemed alive in the starlight.

  Thin lines of script, like tiny chains, connected each tattoo to the next, tracing up from the patterned cuffs that banded his wrists, along the inside of his arms, around his ribs, down each side of his taut stomach and encircling his hips, so that the patterns seemed to comprise a metal shirt exquisitely sculpted to his form.

  “It’s not the wielder.” Tannour’s voice was strained. “It’s these. They’re the record of my training, and the chains of my imprisonment.”

  Trell moved closer. The tattoos were expertly, beautifully inked, yet he could tell from Tannour’s clenched jaw—if not from the banked fury in his gaze—that nothing beautiful resulted from their intent.

  “Patterns of binding?” Trell asked quietly.

  “Among other evils.” Tannour turned his back to Trell again. “See the space at the base of my spine?”

  A half circle of bare flesh showed above the waistband of his pants, connected to the rest by the thin chains of script.

  “As a final test, the Sorceresy binds its operatives with a kill. Usually it’s someone important to you, someone whose death severs you forever from the sixth path.”

  “The sixth path?”

  “Om’ram,” he said tightly, turning back to face Trell, “the path of affinity that binds us all. When you perform the kill, the final tattoo fills itself in. Your armor—and your fate—is sealed.”

  “But yours isn’t finished.” Trell met Tannour’s gaze. “The man you refused to kill?”

  Tannour nodded. “I wasn’t meant to know any of this, mind you. The Sorceresy ever proves the path false and lays misdirection at every turn when they bother telling you anything at all, but my masters couldn’t resist the opportunity to perform my final binding through a particular death: a former operative of theirs who’d betrayed them, and who was also important to me, though I didn’t know it until I stood before him about to cut his throat. He told me that with what I was about to do, they would own me forever. He warned me what would happen if I carried out my assignment, and also if I didn’t.”

  “And you beli
eved him?”

  “He was my uncle.” Tannour pulled his chin-length hair back from his face with both hands, muscles flexing, tattoos a shifting kaleidoscope of dark starlight. “When I failed to do their bidding, they...”

  He strained to speak the words, but finally dropped his hands and bowed his head. “Even now,” he admitted hoarsely, “I can’t speak of what they did...or what it did to me.”

  “Tannour...”

  Tannour’s gaze flashed to him. “It has something to do with these.” He opened the inside of his wrists to show Trell the tattooed cuffs. “When I failed them—when I defied them—I lost everything.”

  Somehow, Trell sensed that everything included far more than just his power. “But your talent has been restored...hasn’t it?”

  Tannour clenched his jaw. “It’s complicated.” He looked away, clearly fighting his emotions. Dark strands of the night seemed to enwrap him, binding him with silence and stillness, resonating accusation, echoic of loss. Finally, he confessed in a gruff whisper, “If I had all of my gifts available to me, A’dal, I wouldn’t hesitate in taking on this wielder...”

  “But you don’t?”

  Abruptly Tannour spun away and stalked three paces before spinning back to face Trell. “I do, but this—these,” and he motioned to his tattoos, “I’m their piece, A’dal. Don’t you see? I walk a labyrinth every time I use my gifts—my gifts! Not theirs! Yet they’ve usurped them as surely as if they’d invested me with the talent to begin with!” These last words came out in an acid hiss.

  Tannour continued his tight pacing. “Any misstep and they could have me again. Or worse, I could lose again the abilities I’ve regained. Fethe, I don’t even know what I might do that would trigger it! You and I could be in the middle of—” but he bit off these words and turned away from Trell, making fists of his hands at his sides.

  In the charged silence that followed, Trell walked a quick path to understanding. “I see your dilemma.” He slowly approached and placed a hand on Tannour’s bare shoulder, drawing a sharp intake of breath.