The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  The prince had taken the bait, as he’d known he would. He’d been a self-righteous goody-two-shoes from the get-go, just like his know-best brother Sebastian. Neither one of them could ever resist being the fecking hero. If being relegated to this bloodless halflife had any silver lining, it was the chance to lay waste to the pristine Trell val Lorian once and for all.

  With the patience of the dead, Raliax watched the lone figure striding up the hill. He only imagined his heart was beating fast, imagined that he felt the vitality that coursed through his veins when battle was nigh, imagined the dark, victorious ecstasy he would experience at the kill.

  These were pale memories. He’d tried to keep their color from fading at first by chopping off the hands or feet of his prisoners—he knew firsthand that they’d hardly miss them, where they were going. The wielder had gotten all pissy about getting maimed and imperfect specimens, though, and Raliax’s experiment hadn’t much worked anyway, since the memories kept on fading, no matter how many finger and toe bones he tied to his cloak.

  He’d kept doing it all the same, because, first of all, feck them. Secondly, he needed something to pass the time, and thirdly, it pissed off the wielder, who he hated even more than the val Lorians.

  Raliax felt it the final insult to live without living, to be alive yet feel nothing, and to have even what few memories he’d retained from the life he’d once led bleed out until they were but faded sketches on sun-bleached parchment.

  All the world had become a frost-bound monochrome except Trell val Lorian. Him, Raliax saw in color. He might thank him for that, right before he cleaved him from breastbone to groin. Or maybe after, because feck him, too.

  His black eyes scanned the honor guard the prince had left behind on the hill. Near five hundred men just standing there waiting to be butchered. The image of their blood staining the grass brought glorious color to his thoughts.

  He growl-clattered to the man beside him, his lieutenant, and the least incompetent asshole out of all of the sub-moronic asses the wielder had sent to serve him, “What’s happening in the camp, Dickweed?”

  That wasn’t his real name. Raliax had never bothered to find out if a moron like Dickweed even had a real name. His slut of a mother had probably belched him out in a groaning squat into the mud and left him mewling in his own afterbirth while she stumbled her flea-bitten arse off to find the next cock to suck.

  Dickweed was holding a spyglass to his eye. The damned things didn’t work for Raliax anymore. His dead eyes had one focal point. It was bloody impossible to see anything up close. It was a good thing he didn’t piss anymore, cause he’d have had to find his own cock by feel alone, and he couldn’t feel anything either.

  “Nothing,” muttered Dickweed. The moron barely ever raised his voice above a mutter.

  Raliax made a show of exhaling a ponderous sigh, though he’d long ago forgotten what it felt like to draw breath. “Could you possibly be more specific?”

  “Didn’t see nobody. Camp’s empty, fires cold. They’re all asleep, I’d say.”

  “In your qualified opinion, you’d say,” Raliax quipped drolly, even though derision was wasted on these morons. Gods damn it, he didn’t even get the pleasure of sarcasm anymore. He hated that fecking wielder with a passion.

  It didn’t surprise him that the rest of the prince’s men were still abed. The Northmen had done nothing since arriving save to clear the moors of gorse, drink by their tents and shoot targets all day long. Clearly the prince had no plan of assault.

  Oh, they’d burned a sweet little message, which he’d much enjoyed. He hoped the prince had enjoyed the ones he’d sent. Obviously they had created the desired effect, for here the prince walked to face his due.

  Raliax had even dressed up for the occasion, wearing bleached bone armor and a mask formed from a puma’s skull and rib bones. He was so looking forward to seeing the prince’s face when he doffed his mask in the big reveal.

  He had men lined up to take the prince in hand the moment he reached the top of the wall, and he had pitch hot and ready to use on the entire contingent of Dannish prisoners, which he’d crowded into the yard, the better for their prince to bear witness to their slaughter. Oh, what a grand day it was going to be!

  According to his scouts and the spy both, Trell val Lorian commanded near a thousand men. With five hundred standing an honor guard to Death at the base of his walls, that meant the other five hundred were snoring in their tents. It would make much faster work of things to eliminate the honor guard while they were still on the hill, even though that hadn’t been his original plan. Raliax decided it was worth the risk to raze them where they stood.

  Below him, the prince had reached the platform.

  Raliax snap-clattered to Dickweed, “Launch the first attack.”

  ***

  Tannour floated as mist in the dawn, each particle of his form married with one of Air’s, his corporeal self spread in communion among the trees.

  Above, the sky glowed rose-gold. But beneath the forest canopy, a murky half-light sketched the grey-tinged outlines of foliage and tall trees. Morning’s damp breath still clung to everything, the air pregnant with a fragile moisture that would vanish when sunlight finally pierced down.

  Though his perception reached far on Air’s shifting tides, Tannour remained alert and watchful of motion beside a particular elm tree.

  ‘He’ll cross first to prepare the way. Then he’ll bring the attack...’

  Trell’s words were a lantern in Tannour’s thoughts, a bright flame around which he focused his awareness and his intent, preventing his dissolution into the usual disconnectedness he experienced during communion. He couldn’t afford even an instant’s unawareness that morning. An instant was all they would have.

  Air brought him the quiet breath and heartbeats of nearly two hundred Converted hiding among the trees. Back at camp, he distantly perceived Lazar’s men and the rest of Trell’s Converted standing a vigilant watch, concealed among the tents and wagons.

  They’d all been in place since an hour before the dawn, slipping away unnoticed, or concealing themselves from view, while all eyes at the fortress would be focused on the honor guard forming up ranks on the hillside.

  They’d be chagrined indeed if the attack didn’t come as the A’dal expected, but Trell had a sense for these things...an almost uncanny ability to assume the enemy’s point of view. Tannour could literally stand in his opponent’s shoes but would still fall short of Trell’s talent for anticipating the enemy’s next move.

  And this move Trell had predicted the moment he realized a leis lay close to their camp.

  Air shifted almost imperceptibly—as a window sliding soundlessly open, causing less a ripple outward than a falling inward as Air moved in to fill a new space—and a man stepped out of the elm tree.

  Tannour maintained communion. Concealed in the trees, the Converted held their breath.

  The Nodefinder looked about, turning his bulbous red nose this way and that. Then he stepped back to the tree, as a man pressing himself against a door frame, and the elm disgorged a host of Saldarians, running four abreast.

  They jogged out of the tree with hands on their swords, mail chinking softly. The exodus from the tree continued for some time. Lazar’s men would have their hands full.

  The A’dal had debated this choice with Lazar and Raegus. Tannour could have stopped the Nodefinder from ever bringing the Saldarians across the leis, but they needed the battle at camp to serve as both distraction and vital misdirection, and they needed the fortress relatively unprotected.

  Besides, Lazar and his wolfish crew were hungry enough to eat the warlord’s men two at a time.

  As soon as the last of the Saldarians had moved off into the night, Tannour materialized behind the Nodefinder, posing a dark figure bound sightlessly in black silk. He inserted a skorpjun dagger between the man’s ribs before he could take his next breath.

  The Nodefinder went rigid in Tannour’s embrac
e.

  From that point forward, he would only breathe with Tannour’s permission. No man presumed even to think for himself with the needle-tip of a skorpjun dagger caressing his heart.

  Tannour wrapped an arm around the Nodefinder’s chest and pulled him close, whispering intimately, “You will soon meet the Ghost Kings, brother. Choose wisely your last moments.” He tapped his dagger just so, and the Nodefinder’s entire body started fibrillating.

  Tannour whistled.

  An army of Converted materialized out of the trees.

  “You’re going to take us into the fortress now,” Tannour said quietly into the Nodefinder’s ear. The man was already sweating badly and sucking in his breath in little frenzied gasps. “You and me first, then the rest. If anything untoward happens to any of us, you’ll suffer for it. Is this clear?”

  The Nodefinder nodded fervently through a hiccupping inhale.

  “Move then—but carefully, brother. We wouldn’t want this dagger accidentally killing you.”

  The Nodefinder whimpered. He turned slowly, not even trying to pull away from Tannour—none of them ever tried to pull away; they knew Death had its hand around their heart—and opened the leis with his next shuffling step, bringing Tannour across the Pattern of the World with him.

  Immediately the patterns warding the node chamber assaulted Tannour’s senses. It was like opening a door into a storm. Yet Air told him the chamber was empty.

  Tannour whispered in the Nodefinder’s ear, “Now the rest.”

  A heartbeat later, Converted started pouring into the room.

  ***

  “Hello, princey!” the warlord shouted from atop the wall to the figure standing below. “Get on the platform and we’ll haul you up!”

  The prince wore helmet and armor beneath his royal blue cloak. The same style of armor that Raliax had burned a hundred or two villagers inside as his first amiable greeting for Trell val Lorian.

  Sadly, despite Raliax’s hospitable welcome, the latter didn’t seem too inclined to step on the platform he’d lowered down for him.

  “Where are my father’s men?” the prince called back, his voice slightly muffled by his helmet. “Our accord goes both ways!”

  “Yes, yes. I’m a man of my word.” He snickered to himself as he straightened away from the crenel. A man of his word, yes...and the word was dieprinceydie. He turned to Dickweed. “Tell them to make some noise.”

  Dickweed walked to the other side of the wall and called down to the men guarding the Dannish prisoners, “Make some noise!”

  The guards started yelling halfheartedly.

  Raliax ground the ridged stone gums that had once held teeth. He stalked to the other side of the wall, shoved Dickweed aside and shouted to the prisoners crammed shoulder to shoulder below, “Men of Dannym! Your prince has come for you! Let him know your gratitude!”

  At first the bedraggled men appeared confused, then highly suspicious, but soon optimism won out—as it usually did with fools—and a cheer rose up. Tentative at first, it spread quickly through the assembled prisoners, such that the fortress walls soon resounded with the infernally obnoxious tones of hope.

  If he conceived of it as a final salute from those who were about to die, it had a rather rousing cacophony to it.

  Raliax thrust his head over the wall again. “Well, Prince of Dannym?”

  The prince was staring up at him with arms crossed. “Open the gates. Set them free.”

  He would set them free all right. They wouldn’t even be burdened with the effort of breathing. “My patience grows thin,” he shouted down. “Get on the platform, Your Highness!”

  The prince stared up at him a moment longer. Then he stepped onto the platform.

  Raliax signaled to his waiting men, and they starting hauling on the ropes.

  Watching the prince rising slowly towards him, Raliax could barely contain his glee.

  ***

  By the Seventeen, the prince was right!

  Lazar hal’Hamaadi stood concealed behind a supply wagon at the far north edge of camp, watching in wonder as men who could only be Saldarians slunk out of the trees, silently crossed the moat of empty grass separating forest from camp, and began filtering in among the tents.

  He wouldn’t have believed for a moment that five hundred men were still abed while half their number was standing an honor guard to their prince, who himself was surrendering to a madman’s fancy, but Trell had once again proven that he’d had the right of it.

  Those days spent lazing about the camp had presented their enemy the façade of an indolent and badly run corps, and the warlord was clearly capitalizing on their perceived ineptitude by attacking while the prince’s back was turned. Exactly what Trell said the man would do.

  For the first time, Lazar began to see the warlord as Trell had long viewed him—as a stepping stone to their ultimate goal: Tal’Shira.

  Lazar watched the Saldarians with a steely eye. These prowling coyotes thought they’d find chickens snoozing in their coops. In fact, Lazar and his men were the cougars stalking the coyotes, and the coops held empty air.

  Wearing a predatory smile, Lazar raised a hand and signaled the attack.

  ***

  When the platform lifting the prince was more than halfway up the wall, Raliax signaled to the guards down at the gates, and they hauled on the chains to raise the portcullis—the better to perpetuate the ruse of freeing the prince’s men.

  It amused him to imagine the five hundred bedraggled and half-starved soldiers salivating for their freedom. His dead eyes practically watered with mirth at envisioning their red-rimmed gazes all agog for the rising portcullis, thinking their prince had secured their rescue—only to realize, when he gave the order, that the only walk they’d be taking was across the dead moors to Huhktu’s sepulchral gates.

  Fecking hell, a part of him even envied them.

  He was merciful, giving them an end, wasn’t he? They ought to bloody see that. He could’ve handed their asses over to the damned wielder. But he hadn’t, had he?

  No, because nobody deserved that.

  Not even Trell val Lorian?

  He considered this option while masticating his blackened gums. But no, he would keep to the plan, because the fecking wielder wanted the prince, and feck him to bloody thirteen hells! He wasn’t giving him what he wanted.

  The platform reached the top of the wall.

  Grinning behind his mask, Raliax motioned to his men to grab the prince, but the slippery bastard jumped onto a merlon and out of their reach.

  In the yard, the soldiers started cheering.

  The prince looked quickly around. Raliax supposed he saw the vats of steaming pitch atop the walls. He would’ve had to have been a fool indeed not to see what was coming.

  A smiling Raliax motioned to his nearby guards to surround the prince.

  “You have me,” the latter growled as the men closed in, his cloak hanging limply at his heels, his helmeted face in shadow. “Now honor our contract. Release my father’s men.”

  The sound of distant horns turned all eyes to the Northmen’s camp. Raliax couldn’t see the details well enough to tell how much carnage had resulted already, but he surmised the chaos from the droop in the prince’s shoulders.

  Ah, the wound was deep. Now to rub some salt in it. Raliax shouted to the men down at the gates, “Loose the barricade!”

  A score of guards rushed out beneath the portcullis.

  “Traitorous bastard!” the prince thundered. He stared, clearly horrified, as Raliax’s men started loosing the various bars and ropes that would send the entire barricade tumbling down the hill on the prince’s honor guard, who wouldn’t have time to clear away before it took them.

  It seemed a fitting time for the coup de grâce, their moment of sweet reunion. Raliax doffed his mask and gave the prince his best courtly bow, straightening with a triumphant grin.

  Yet the chagrin he’d expected to see on the prince’s face failed to register.
In fact, the man failed to register any recognition of him at all, save a slight wince of disgust. He didn’t even seem appropriately shocked by his blackened flesh, almost as if he’d been...expecting...

  Raliax felt something ill turn inside him.

  “Grab him!” he shouted in sudden panic.

  The prince threw his helmet into the face of the nearest guard and sprinted away atop the wall.

  Whereupon Raliax saw what had been plainly before his dead eyes all along.

  That man was not Trell val Lorian.

  Fecking val Lorians!

  Fury infused his dead husk of a shell. He took off in thunderous chase, shouting in a clattering snarl, “SLAY THE PRETENDER!”

  ***

  Loukas watched from afar as the fortress barricade broke apart.

  At first, separate sections began wavering like a banner in a tentative wind, but within heartbeats, the entire structure was coming apart at the seams.

  Barrels bearing spearheads, iron rods, maces and other instruments of pain came toppling, tumbling down the hillside, spewing death as they bounced and rolled, gaining speed every second. Behind them bounded boulders, logs studded with spikes, and wagon wheels sporting lengthy stilettos.

  Upon seeing such an avalanche of death bounding towards them, even the bravest force should have broken and fled for their lives, but Gideon’s honor guard stood their ground.

  Loukas said a fervent prayer to Fiera.

  That men could possess such faith—in him as much as in their A’dal—to simply stand there, trusting to Loukas’s directions and Trell’s orders...the enormity of it choked him.

  ‘This is a man who favors a wild broadsword charge,’ Trell had explained as he’d given Loukas his orders. ‘He has no intention of forcing a siege, or of fighting behind the barricade. He’s going to use it against us...’

  And use it, the warlord had. If Trell’s army had rushed the barricade, as most armies would’ve been expected to do, they would’ve had no room to maneuver when the barricade was loosed. Their entire force would’ve been routed and crushed. But holding position where they had, beneath the first separation of drift...