The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Pelas watched his brother’s steps as Darshan descended the stony path in front of him. “If Isabel can help you, and I—” Pelas pushed a hand through his hair, “Darshan, I believe that she can. Why didn’t you come to T’khendar with us?”

  The path turned to follow a rushing stream, which tumbled down the hillside to funnel into a shaded pool a hundred paces or so below. Pelas followed the line of his brother’s attention and saw Kjieran crouching by the rocks.

  When Darshan looked back to him, devastation shadowed his gaze. “When I bound Kjieran to me, it was because I wanted to share eternity with him.”

  Pelas read the meaning in his brother’s eyes, heard both the strains of harmony and disharmony which this truth represented to him. Darshan didn’t need to say he’d sought Kjieran on some level to replace his bond with Pelas, any more than Pelas needed to tell Darshan that such a truth in part resided in his desire to bind with Tanis.

  They’d been birthed together, the four of them, to provide the balance to creation. Yet within their brotherhood, Darshan and Pelas somehow also balanced Shail and Rinokh.

  Darshan had once said to Pelas that they were too alike. Pelas had been unwilling to see that truth at the time, but now he better understood the congruity they provided each other.

  Perceiving these understandings forming in Pelas’s thoughts, Darshan exhaled a slow sigh and looked back to Kjieran. “Unlike when you and Tanis bound yourselves to each other, it didn’t occur to me at the time that Kjieran might not want to share eternity with me.”

  That’s when Pelas finally understood—though he found this truth the most shocking thus far. “You—” it was so out of character for his brother that he could barely form the words, “you want to earn his love?”

  Darshan looked to him sharply. “I would like to be deserving of it.”

  Pelas barely breathed out, “By Chaos born, Darshan.”

  It took a long moment to rein in his disbelief. Finally, once it had found its rhythm with the pace of undeniable truth, Pelas took his brother’s hand and stared at it, thinking of the symbolism of joined hands, blood oaths and bindings, and how these rituals were representations of a connection he and Darshan had known since the beginning of their existence.

  Then he lifted his eyes to meet his brother’s gaze. He saw conflict there, and sincerity, and above all else, love for the bright being standing by the pool below.

  Pelas exhaled a slow breath. “In all of our millennia...I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more.”

  The ghost of a smile teased on Darshan’s lips. He slipped a hand around Pelas’s head and pressed a kiss roughly to his temple. Then he murmured tightly against his brow, “I never thought Kjieran could forgive me, until I received your forgiveness...and dared thereafter to imagine it possible.”

  They stood like that for a space out of time, listening to the resonance of their congruity chiming in the vast distances between the stars. Then Darshan stepped back and looked Pelas over. “But you sought me out for counsel, not to counsel me.”

  Pelas smiled wonderingly. Then he summoned to mind the reasons he’d called him. “There are things you need to know.”

  He told him what he’d witnessed in T’khendar, of the imminent danger of Rinokh degrading the realm’s fabric; and he told him of Alorin’s welds and what he and Tanis were setting out to do.

  “You know our eldest,” Pelas said in the last. “How ossified his mind has become, how obstinate his will. If he penetrates T’khendar, he won’t stop until he’s unmade all of the Realms of Light.”

  Pelas studied Darshan’s thoughts as much as the frown he was presenting. He gripped his arm. “They need you, brother. You could stop Rinokh—perhaps you alone in this universe can.”

  Darshan heard these words behind a deep and contemplative gaze. Then he started off down the path again. “And then there is Shailabanáchtran.”

  That was all that needed to be said for each of them to understand the complexity of the problem that their youngest brother posed. Eldest and youngest, eating away at the structure of the realm from varied ends, with Darshan and Pelas at the interior.

  Darshan eyed him darkly upon this thought. “Yes, there is an ironic symmetry at work here.” He continued down the path pensively. “I concede we were never meant to know these worlds. And in this, I concede we must repair the damage we’ve wrought upon them, but I have the detritus of my own massacres to administer and repair ere I can assist in correcting others.’”

  Pelas wasn’t sure what cleaning up this detritus entailed, but he understood Darshan’s need to make right what wrongs he could. Would that he could see a way to repair more of his own.

  This didn’t solve their immediate problems, however.

  “No,” his brother agreed, easily lifting this thought from their shared canvas. He ruminated on this as they continued their descent down the hill and offered after a time, “Ean sees the future.”

  Pelas could sense that he intended this truth to be of help, though he couldn’t immediately see what it had to do with him.

  “He calls them patterns of consequence. One such hovers prominently at the forefront of his thoughts in nearly every waking moment. I have seen it, inspected it, sought also to understand it.”

  The path dropped away before them. Darshan stepped from boulder to boulder three times in alternating descent. Pelas stepped over the ledge and landed in a light crouch. Straightening at his brother’s side, they headed off again.

  Darshan murmured, “You told me you were learning to read the mortal tapestry.”

  “Yes.” Pelas was wondering where his brother was heading with all of this.

  “This is where I’m heading, Pelas.” Darshan impressed upon his mind the pattern of consequence he’d been speaking of, such that it became indelible in Pelas’s memory also. “If you can find this pattern represented in the mortal tapestry, it may lead you to a view of the future such as only you or I can see.”

  Only you or I...

  Darshan was telling him that Ean’s pattern of consequence could possibly lead them to understand what Shail was really doing, which would allow them to finally leap ahead of him.

  Pelas gazed admiringly at his older brother. “I will search for it at once.”

  Back in the living realm where his dragon body flew, Pelas sensed he was getting closer to the storm and knew his time with Darshan was growing short. In return for the pattern Darshan had shown him, Pelas offered the image of Rinokh’s storm.

  His brother’s gaze immediately darkened.

  Pelas studied him quietly. “Darshan...why do you think our Maker hid these worlds from us?”

  Darshan focused back upon Pelas. “You said to me because He wanted them to persist.”

  “I thought that originally, but now...having seen the actual effects of our unmaking,” he frowned at the memory, “now I’m beginning to think otherwise.”

  Pelas took Darshan’s hand and placed it across his heart, pressed beneath his own. He willed him to feel what he felt, to see not only what he’d seen but how dramatically the seeing had reshaped his intent.

  “Brother...I think He hid these worlds from us so we wouldn’t feel guilt in carrying out our purpose. Because seeing all of this...” he pressed his lips together and shook his head, “I don’t know that I could ever choose that path again.”

  Darshan’s expression grew clouded. After a moment, he exhaled a long, slow breath. “You’ve given me much to think upon, Pelas.”

  “I hope so.” Pelas embraced him, adding low at his ear, “But don’t think too long upon it. We might have all the time in the world, but the world doesn’t.”

  Thirty

  “There is nothing wrong with a man that death can’t cure.”

  –Stefan val Tryst, Duke of Morwyk

  Huddled in his tent, the spy clamped a hand over the ring he’d just donned and focused his thoughts into a spear towards the mind on the other end of the bonded line. Master...


  He waited a full ten minutes before his master answered him, sounding terse and irritable. What is it now?

  Master you asked me to alert you when the prince reached the fortress.

  And?

  The Saldarian mercenaries we sent to capture him failed.

  What’s this? The warlord told me nothing of this failure.

  Which fact the spy found unsurprising. The warlord knew better than to give his master bad news.

  Even so, their efforts fell short. The prince’s army is now encamped around the fortress. The warlord gave him an ultimatum he could not refuse. He’ll be surrendering at dawn.

  Surrendering? The spy could have hung a cloak on his master’s dubiety. A prince of the val Lorian line—surrendering? Dark, dubious mirth floated to him. You’re being played for a fool.

  It is common knowledge in the camp, master. I can only report what I’ve observed—

  His master cut him off sharply, You can report the truth to me or nothing at all!

  The reprimand pierced through the spy’s mind like a spear laced with fire. He barely stifled a cry. I don’t know what else the prince is planning, master, he mentally whimpered. I’m not privy to his circles. I know only what is common knowledge among the men.

  Then what use are you to me? The daggers of his master’s irritation stabbed the spy’s mind. He wiped tears from his eyes and found blood on his fingers.

  Inhaling shakily, he kept his thoughts closely quartered—he knew better than to answer a rhetorical question from a man like this master.

  Still, when the mind at the other end of the bonded line seemed to have wandered afield of their conversation, the spy asked timidly, What is your will, master?

  A ponderous silence ensued, reminiscent of a building thunderstorm.

  Finally, he replied, Inform the warlord to have the shipment ready, and tell him that whatever games he’s playing with these Converted, they had best not impede his business with me—or he and I will have more than words to exchange. I will handle this myself, lest I suffocate from the miasma of your incompetence.

  He severed the connection abruptly.

  The spy exhaled a tremulous breath, tugged the ring off his finger and hid it away where none would find it. Then he grabbed a small dagger and pushed out of his sleeping quarters and into the dark night beyond.

  “Where be you going?” snarled the old man who was sitting before the tent’s outer flaps, sewing a boot. He was the master of the spy’s days as much as the others were masters of his nights.

  The spy held up his dagger. “To do what no man can do for me.”

  The old man spied him suspiciously with one wrinkled eye shut, the other pushed wide. “There be latrines for that business.”

  “I’ll dig my own for the grace of privacy, thank you.” He pushed past the old man and headed into the night.

  His mind was still bleeding from the spear of his master’s skepticism, yet, looking around as he walked through the camp, the spy saw nothing to disabuse him of the information he’d reported. Most of the prince’s men were asleep, with only the usual number on watch. No one was making any unusual preparations.

  The spy darted between two tents and off across a wide expanse of long grass towards the trees. He nodded to the sentries standing watch halfway between the forest and the camp, waggled his dagger meaningfully, and upped his speed to the trees.

  He maneuvered through the forest on a path he’d memorized the day before, counting steps and turns, trusting to his memory rather than what meager starlight bled through the forest canopy.

  As he saw the gnarled trunk of a specific elm tree, he gripped the hilt of his little dagger and focused on the mind at the other end of the bonded line. I’m coming. Send the man for me.

  He crouched in the shadow of the elm for many minutes until a dark form stepped out of the tree. Then he straightened quickly.

  The Nodefinder grabbed his arm and dragged him across the leis.

  A breath of disorientation resolved through a lump in the spy’s stomach into the stormy insides of the fortress’s node chamber.

  Carved obsidian skulls encircled every inch of the five-sided columns, which thrust upwards to impale the chamber’s groin-vaulted ceiling. The shadow-eels that concealed the arches undulated, seething with malice. As always, the spy shuddered upon seeing them.

  He swallowed and looked to the Nodefinder. “Where is he?”

  The man scrubbed at a bulbous nose, red with sores. “Am I his keeper?” He slunk off, shoulders hunched against the deadly shadows swirling among the vaults of the ceiling.

  After a lengthy search—made the more so for the lack of a single man who could or would tell him where the warlord was—the spy found his quarry stalking the ramparts, shouting curses.

  A clump of guards stood at the edge of a bastion, muttering amongst themselves, clearly unwilling to take up their watch positions on that portion of the wall.

  “What’s his problem?” the spy asked the closest of them.

  The Saldarian adjusted his helmet to sit better on his greasy head. “You wanna know, go ask him.”

  The spy gave him a black look and pushed past the knot of soldiers.

  “Your life,” one of them called after him.

  “Ten says he ain’t gonna see the dawn,” another said.

  “I wouldn’t waste a farthing on that bet.”

  The spy could feel their eyes on his back as he walked a patchwork of light and darkness from torch to torch. No light yet shone in the east, but the stars were beginning to fade. The spy had to be back before dawn.

  The warlord stalked a predatory section of the wall, turning abruptly shy of the torchlight at each end, tracing the boundaries of an invisible cage.

  He wore only his cloak of finger and toe bones—a macabre contraption that clattered eerily with every motion, reminiscent of graveyard ward posts and a shaman’s staff—over his Merdanti black flesh. His words, shouted to the heavens on a rasping voice, echoed with a viper’s rattle.

  Only a madman berated the stars, but the spy was used to dealing with madmen. They were chockablock to the chin in his line of work.

  He paused just inside the torchlight, the better for the warlord to recognize him. The man had a tendency to strike at anything coming towards him, for he conceived of all as foes.

  “Raliax,” the spy called into the night.

  Occasionally the warlord would still answer to his name, mostly in lucid moments when the madness of his transformation wasn’t upon him too viciously. Sometimes the name alone would recall him to a place faintly resembling rationality, if not entirely to the fields of reason.

  The warlord spun at the address, cloak of bones riling. Wholly black eyes looked over the spy. He felt them examining his composite parts, separating blood, water and bone, seeing not a man but a living organism quite alien to his own composition.

  “What do you want?” Raliax spun away in a riffling of bones, muttering again.

  “The wielder is coming. You’re to have his shipment ready.”

  “Ready. Ready?” He speared a black glare over his shoulder. “Ready-ready-ready-ready. Ready, master! Oh-oh-oh, ready, are we? Are we ready?”

  Abruptly he stood nose to nose with the spy.

  The latter drew back with a sharp intake of breath.

  “Reeeaaaaaddddyyyyyy,” Raliax hissed, black eyes boring into the spy’s beneath the hairless protrusion of his brow. Starlight glimmered off his lumpy bald head. He was hardly recognizable as the man he’d once been. “He didn’t ask if I was ready. No asking, just the taking. The taking...the dying.”

  Even being in the same room with an eidola made a man acutely aware of his own mortality, of what a fragile grace death could be when compared to the living hell of conscription to a golem halflife.

  But standing close enough to a macabre thing separated from living breath, without heartbeat or blood in its veins, yet obviously animated by some dark energy, speaking and moving as though st
ill alive...these were not moments a man easily set aside in the vast storehouse of his experience. The spy often had nightmares about the creature standing before him—most often that he’d become one.

  “What’s done is done.” He shoved the warlord out of his face, suppressing a shudder. The spy’s protesting muscles felt like they were shoving off a granite wall. “Quit your infernal moping. Your heart was rotted long before he raised you from the dead. No one cares.”

  Looking up sullenly beneath his shadowed brow, the warlord snarl-rattled, “I care.”

  “He’ll make you suffer worse if you anger him. Our master thinks the prince’s plans to surrender are a ruse. You must take preventive steps.”

  “No-no-no-no-no-no!” The warlord thrummed a ratcheting protest. “Let him defy me and they all die. Die on my walls. Die below. Die above. Die in blood. Die-die-die!” He spun into another bout of pacing, shouting curses interspersed with Trell val Lorian and dieprinceydie.

  The spy exhaled with exaggerated patience. “Raliax!”

  The name that time brought instant silence and a brimstone stare.

  The spy held to his patience and courage in equal portions. “The wielder is coming here,” he said slowly, as if to a child. “He wants the villagers prepared for travel. Have you done that?”

  Raliax stalked towards him in footfalls of heavy stone. He stopped an inch from the spy’s nose. “I could tear your arms from your body, rip your legs off at the knees, and bite through your bones.”

  The spy held the warlord’s black-eyed gaze, though he felt quivery inside. “If the prince’s army interferes with the wielder’s shipment,” he managed, sounding more calm than he felt, “he’ll have you on his table, Merdanti flesh or no.”

  The warlord drew back at this. He appeared suddenly quite lucid, which was somehow more disturbing to witness.

  His lips spread in a grim, grotesque smile of black-ridged bone. “The saintly Trell val Lorian will not risk five hundred souls for pride or honor.” He sounded very much the Saldarian leader he’d once been, suddenly. “I don’t need the likes of you to advise me in matters of war. The prince will come, and I will have my reckoning.”