The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Not yet...Loukas watched with bated breath, his chest constricted and his nails cutting into his palms. Hold just a bit longer...

  They couldn’t have heard his desperate thought, but they had been listening when he’d given them directions, for the men held. Not a single one broke formation, despite the downpour of death tumbling towards them.

  Loukas was nearly seeing stars from the anxiety when the downpour finally split into the lines of drift he’d predicted.

  He blew out his breath in a fervent oath.

  Then he did a little dance on his hilltop, which thankfully none of Lazar’s men in the camp observed, occupied as they were with giving the Saldarians a proper ass-whipping.

  The moment the barricade split, Gideon’s men shifted formation to avoid those deadly cascades. They didn’t all make it between the downspouts in time. A tumbling cart caught half a dozen men beneath its charge. Others were ripped off the fringes and pulled into the downward fray. A spear flying off a wagon wheel caught a soldier through the leg. But these casualties aside, Gideon’s men avoided the worst of the destruction.

  No one would have believed it—Loukas himself wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t watched it with his own eyes. Once again, Trell had demanded the impossible, and Loukas had somehow pulled through to make his orders reality.

  The cascading barricade was expanding now into further lines of drift, covering the entire hillside, but well below Gideon’s honor guard. The first of the men were almost to the top of the hill, and nothing now stood in their path. Even the fortress portcullis stood open to receive them.

  Loukas pressed incredulous hands to his temples and searched the heavens, uttering a half-whispered prayer. He almost expected Cephrael’s Hand to still be watching, but the constellation had vanished with the dawn. Perhaps it had seen enough to know the day would prove fortuitous after all.

  Loukas grabbed his sword and rushed back to camp.

  ***

  Gideon val Mallonwey sprinted atop the wall, launching himself from merlon to merlon while that demon shouted obscenities in his wake. Thank all the gods in the known that Trell had told him what to expect when he met the creature, else seeing the ghoulish thing in the flesh might’ve really thrown him.

  His brief survey of the fortress yard had shown His Majesty’s men bedraggled and chained and surrounded by at least a hundred heavily armed Saldarians. The soldiers wouldn’t be able to defend themselves should things go sour. Not in their condition, not without weapons.

  To his left, the barricade broke apart and started tumbling down the hill, making a riotous roar, but it would still be many minutes before his honor guard could arrive, even assuming the Avataren engineer knew his business and all went according to plan.

  But he couldn’t worry about that. His duty was to buy them time. Of primary importance was keeping that portcullis up.

  Gideon eyeballed the closest vat of pitch. As he sprinted towards it, he reached behind his back and drew the short sword he’d concealed beneath his cloak. Down in the yard, His Majesty’s men were shouting.

  No...cheering.

  They thought him their prince. Well, that morning he would have to be. Gideon just hoped he could be daring enough to uphold the illusion until Trell actually arrived.

  An arrow whizzed past his ear. Another ripped through his cloak. A third hit the stones a shoe’s length in front of him and pelted away. Gideon leaped another crenel and flung a glare towards the archers on the opposite wall. If only those arrows had been on fire. That would’ve been immensely helpful.

  ‘Maximum havoc, Gideon, as fast as possible...’

  Trell’s order throbbed in his skull as Gideon leapt off a merlon, throwing himself into the nearest guard. They both tumbled into the supports holding the vat of pitch, which dislodged from its platform above the fire and tipped over, spilling everywhere. It instantly caught the fire’s flame.

  Gideon climbed back on the wall while the guards were shouting and pushing to get out of the way of the burning pitch.

  He dodged more arrows as he ran for the next vat. The warlord was shouting somewhere behind him, trying to rouse his men to take action against Gideon. Save for the archers safely on the opposite wall, the guards were sluggish to comply. They thought he was Trell val Lorian, graced of Sundragons and gods, and wanted nothing to do with him. His prince’s reputation was proving better protection than any shield.

  Saldarians. The only thing more important than coin to them was their own self-preservation.

  Well enough. Gideon would accept a boon from any quarter.

  A change in the shouting from the yard drew his eye as he ran along the wall. Skirmishes were breaking out between His Majesty’s men and the guards. It didn’t take much to rouse the brave soldiers of Dannym to action—only their prince dashing along the ramparts, and the hope of rescue rising with the dawn.

  ‘Unsettle him, Gideon. Make him think he’s lost the upper hand. Buy us the time we need...’

  The fortress portcullis and gates lay just ahead—still open, thank Epiphany. Gideon ran faster.

  ***

  Raliax stood watching the man who wasn’t the prince boldly running atop his walls, while on the hillside below, the entire host of five hundred men had somehow miraculously avoided being bowled over by the barricade’s avalanche and were now rushing his fortress. Yet the only thought he could focus on was, Where is fecking Trell val Lorian?

  If that insufferable snot had anticipated being double-crossed at the fortress, which seemed apparent, and if he’d also surmised the real purpose behind the barricade—obviously—then had he also anticipated Raliax’s raid on his camp?

  And if so...if so, was he turning the tables back on Raliax right that moment? Was he coming for him using the same bloody-damn node?

  Abruptly, Raliax saw blood—Trell val Lorian’s blood, preferably all over his black stone hands. Hell, he was going to fecking bathe in it!

  The prisoners in revolt in the yard, the small army rushing his fortress, the fire spreading atop his walls, even the wielder due to arrive at any moment to pick up more sacrificial slaves—Raliax had eyes for none of these.

  Only for Trell val Lorian.

  He took a running leap off the rampart wall and fell like a stone into the rioting prisoners, crushing a few into the broken earth of his landing. Then he tore through the melee, shoving bodies to left and right, even mowing down a few of his own men, until he’d cleared the yard and was thundering down the fortress passages. His rapid footsteps pounded a rhythmic Trell-val-Lor-ian-Trell-val-Lor-ian.

  ***

  Trell knew almost the instant he stepped into the node chamber that things were awry.

  It was a feeling—perhaps that same feeling Tannour had tried to describe—that reality itself was changing, shifting, morphing with every heartbeat.

  He’d long had a sense that this choice was both right and wrong. Now he had the perception of dual threads unwinding at different speeds, one a tight line binding to something unseen, the other unspooling out of control. He couldn’t decide which thread felt true and which felt false. Neither properly accounted for the strange unease that gripped him.

  Tannour had the Saldarian Nodefinder pinioned by way of a curved blade thrust deep between his ribs. The man looked to be dangerously hyperventilating, but Trell assumed that Tannour knew his business. The Converted were filtering in behind them, silent as ghosts, quickly filling in the large obsidian-tiled chamber. Long lines of patterns in a language unknown were the only disruptions to the chamber’s otherwise glass-smooth surface.

  Trell’s game was one of estimation.

  How many men should he leave in camp to defend against the warlord’s ‘surprise’ attack?

  How many men were needed to take the fortress? How many to secure his father’s men?

  How many to trick the warlord into thinking he had Trell fooled, while in fact, Trell was fooling him?

  Had he correctly estimated any of it?
>
  That feeling pulsating from the walls would have him rethink every choice he’d ever made. It was like the chamber sang with uncertainty, trapping Trell’s thoughts in the web of its wavelength.

  He looked around, seeking explanation for the feeling.

  Five columns supported the pentagonal room. All five sides of each column were covered in obsidian skulls. The floor was a spotless ebony mirror. Above, shadows as dense as smoke consumed the groin-vaulted ceiling. The entire place looked like Death’s antechamber.

  The men were still pouring in when Tannour suddenly stiffened. He turned his silk-shrouded head slowly to left and right. Cephrael alone knew how he saw anything at all. “Something’s off.”

  Trell gripped his sword hilt tightly. “I know. I sense it, too.” He looked quickly to his men as the last of them crossed the node and said, low and tight, “Secure the fortress! Go!”

  The Converted began rushing out through a pair of tall iron doors.

  Trell returned his gaze to the black-shrouded form that was Tannour and the man he clutched close in a deadly embrace. “Is it Gideon? Has something happened to him?” He sought any rationale to account for the pervasive feeling of wrongness suddenly haranguing him. “Can you sense the captain?”

  Tannour shook his head. “I only know that there’s battle—”

  Abruptly the shadows directly above them started swirling like black eels. Other shadows lengthened towards them from elsewhere, sending undulating tentacles of gossamer smoke threading down from on high.

  The last of Trell’s men cleared the room.

  The nodefinder stammered, wide-eyed, “G-g-g-et of-f-ff the n-n—”

  Trell and Tannour bolted to the side, the latter dragging the Nodefinder with him.

  An instant later, a man appeared in the exact spot they’d just vacated.

  The swirling shadows on the ceiling became a hurricane sea.

  The newcomer wore a knee-length coat cut in the Agasi style but far too large for his cadaverous frame. His pure white hair was swept back from a wide forehead, the flesh of which was stretched so tightly across the bone as to be almost nonexistent. His eyes were dark pools beneath a jutting brow.

  Tannour released the Nodefinder and stepped between the stranger and Trell.

  On the far side of the chamber, the iron doors burst inward with such force that the upper hinges ripped off the wall in a tortured scream of metal. A black creature bolted through the parting.

  “Looks like the gang’s all here,” Trell observed.

  So many shadows were falling from the ceiling that the walls appeared to be seething. An unsettling duality of rightness and wrongness beset Trell, along with the certainty that both conditions occupied equal agency in that place.

  Time held its breath in pause as Players and pieces assessed one another.

  Then the warlord bolted across the room, shouting, “HE’S MIIIIIIINNNNNNEEEEE!”

  Something wickedly dark sparked in the wielder’s eyes.

  The floor rippled.

  ***

  Gideon wrenched his sword from the gut of the Saldarian he’d just run through and sidestepped as the mercenary slumped to his knees. On the other side of a locked iron gate, the fortress yard was in chaos. Gideon had managed to spill two vats of pitch along the ramparts, and now even the archers were either trying to help douse the flames or running scared. Without the warlord to direct them, the Saldarians had been easily scattered.

  Emboldened by Gideon’s mad dash atop the walls, some of the men of Dannym had stolen blades from their captors, while others were holding the remaining Saldarians back by sheer force of bodies, even using their chains as defensive weapons and all the better if they broke in the doing.

  A large host of Saldarians was making for the iron gate, beyond which Gideon was holding off the watch guard—six men, all told—with his short sword and another he’d stolen off an early opponent. Still on the wrong side of those locked gates, His Majesty’s soldiers were making a barricade of their bodies to hold back the Saldarian press.

  They all seemed to understand what Gideon knew too well—they must keep the portcullis behind Gideon open at all costs, and that meant keeping their hundred or so Saldarian guards occupied and away from the fortress entrance.

  Would that battles might be won by valor alone.

  But the men of Dannym were overmatched, underfed, weakened from weeks of incarceration in despairing conditions, while their Saldarian opponents suffered shortages neither of weapons nor cruelty. Already several mercenary processions were cutting deep wedges through the mass of prisoners.

  Soldiers of Dannym, make haste! Gideon thought as he blocked another sword from taking off his head. Somehow he kept his back to the chains that raised and lowered the portcullis, despite the many blades coming at him.

  He could hear the war cry of his approaching honor guard, but he couldn’t yet see them over the lip of the hill. By the gods, men—hurry!

  ***

  Tannour knew the wielder walked mor’alir the instant the latter stepped off the node. Air spoke of patterns surrounding him like a massive web, layered and sticky, with the wielder a dark carnivore lurking at the web’s funneled core. Air showed Tannour how the wielder instantly reached out with his mind, seeking patterns of his own construction, and energized a further webwork of traps.

  Tannour stepped between the wielder and Trell.

  He’d never encountered a man who felt more like death warmed over. Even his instructors at the Sorceresy hadn’t emanated such pervasive evil. He supposed there was a difference between teaching the path of mor’alir and actually walking it. This man appeared to have been walking it for so long, even the Ghost Kings had turned their backs on him.

  Then the doors ripped inward off their hinges and that black monstrosity that called himself a warlord barreled through the opening.

  “Looks like the gang’s all here,” Trell quipped drily.

  Tannour had no idea how the A’dal managed to keep his humor with evil pouring upon them like the desert sun, but he was grateful for the bit of light the A’dal cast among that preponderance of shadows.

  In an instant caught out of time, they observed one another through whatever lens they used to assess their enemy’s weaknesses.

  Then the warlord gave an inhuman, ratcheting scream and stormed across the node chamber.

  The floor rippled beneath him. The warlord stumbled, recovered, and launched himself off the crest of a stone wave towards the wielder.

  Patterns flared around the latter. He swatted the air as though batting away a moth, and the warlord flew sideways to slam across a column. Skulls sheered away in a deadly spray of volcanic glass.

  The warlord’s stone body hit the floor and dredged a furrow through the tiles until he flung up against a wide step in a tangle of limbs.

  Air showed Tannour that the wielder now stood in a vortex of swirling power. Tannour summoned his own and bound himself to Air, just a breath shy of communing.

  The wielder all but ignored him. He fixed his gaze instead on the prince. “Trell val Lorian, I presume.” Something darkly proprietary threaded his tone. “At last we meet.”

  Air showed Tannour threads of connection from the wielder to...elsewhere.

  A violent foreboding roused inside him, and an even stronger instinct of protection, possession—Trell was his tether, not some malevolent man’s property.

  Air responded instantly to his intent, raising its hackles, readying itself.

  Across the room, the warlord was digging out of a mound of earth and obsidian tiles. “Feck you, Dore Madden,” he spat in a disturbing rattlesnake croak. He shoved a massive piece of rock off his legs and stood up with his shoulders hunched, a bull readying to charge. “You ain’t taking him.”

  The wielder turned a black stare on the creature. “Go and ready my shipment.”

  Incredibly, the warlord spun around in compliance, yet his cursing seemed to indicate a level of disagreement with the a
ct.

  Tannour perceived a black line of connection from the wielder to the warlord, surmised what the wielder was doing with it, and making scissors of his own power, snapped the line.

  The wielder’s skull-like face swung to him.

  “What the feck?” The warlord looked at his stone arms in wonder, then threw back his head with ratcheting laughter. “It’s gone! You can’t compel me anymore, you fecking lunatic!”

  “Tannour,” Trell said in a tense whisper from behind him, “I can’t move.”

  ***

  Across the province of Abu’dhan, the Balance was shifting.

  Two Players faced each other on the field, and the weight of their connection was changing the tapestry’s design—not merely for those fighting in the fortress of the warlord called Raliax, or even for those battling in the camp belonging to Trell val Lorian, but along every thread stitched to the two Players.

  Threads shivered with intent. Some split and reached for new connections. Some combined.

  The tapestry began weaving a new pattern of consequence.

  ***

  Gideon val Mallonwey was down to one leg—the right one bleeding from an arrow lodged deep in the muscle—and one arm—the left hanging uselessly at his side—but he only needed one arm to swing his blade at the three men still opposing him, and he only needed one leg to stand upright.

  It had all happened so fast. Had it been even ten minutes since he’d jumped to the top of the wall? Necessity to buy time for the others made time into Gideon’s enemy. The constant apprehension of expecting his men to arrive any second drew every second into minutes. Pain made each minute an eternity.

  When at last he heard his men’s thundering footsteps, such a wave of relief overcame him that for a moment his throat constricted and his breath wouldn’t come.

  He watched the men of Dannym come streaming into the fortress, choked by emotions too numerous to list, and fell back against the chains of the portcullis to give them room to rush past. In moments, they had the interior iron gate open and were swarming into the yard.

  Gideon fell back against the wall, feeling faint, swimming in a bloody ocean of pain...but he’d done it. They’d done it. Just as Trell had described.