The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  It wasn’t lost on him that Ean had voiced the same.

  Seeing the first of Dore’s warding patterns hanging like a lantern in the middle of the broken road, Sebastian turned off into an alley of weeds that wound eastward between high walls. The pathway spared them the sight of the worst of the unwitting dead, if not the smell of them.

  Their first time in the city, lost in the fog with only the currents and a distant glow for a guide, they’d inadvertently followed the same path that all the other intruders had walked. These were looters and brigands mainly, though Sebastian suspected innocents had also fallen to Dore’s wards; those thrust from Tambarré’s polite society: the old and sick, the maimed, the deformed and the unwanted. Hearing that the Prophet’s Ascendants were tending to the infirm, they came to Kyrrh seeking aid. Their bodies now littered those broken streets like the refuse clogging the gutters of Lower Tambarré.

  The cloying stench of rotting bodies ought to have been enough to convince anyone trying to reach the quarantine area to turn around and seek fairer pastures, yet as Sebastian and Rhys stepped out of the alley, the prince saw new faces strewn along the boulevard of the dead.

  Dore’s patterns traced a lantern path down this wide road, which had somehow retained most of its paving stones through the ages and thus drew the unwary like lambs to the slaughter. As Sebastian steered Rhys safely around each pattern, staying well clear of its radiating power, he tried not to stare at the corpses of those who’d been ensnared by Dore’s wards.

  Near one pattern, five men were lying in crumbling piles with their eyes rotted out. Further beyond, the staggered forms of a dozen men had been burned to a crisp lengthwise along the left side of their bodies. Sebastian got the unsettling sense that the pattern had forced the right half to watch as the left charred to ash.

  Further down the boulevard, more bodies formed an uneven line at the end of a lengthy train of blood, as if they’d been trying to outrun whatever was bleeding them. Every one of their hands was missing.

  It continued in this vein.

  Dore was changing the patterns regularly, because each time Sebastian had come, new maladies were claiming the dead. It was like a weekly show of the gruesome and macabre, where no two performances were ever the same.

  Sebastian felt certain that Dore was using the boulevard to test the efficacy of new patterns he was developing. Every few days, Dore’s goons would clear the boulevard of the dead so their bodies couldn’t hint to the location of the wards.

  Sebastian tried not to think about the likelihood of him and Rhys surviving that place if he hadn’t had Ean’s ability to see patterns.

  They reached a wide set of steps descending through the city and headed down, relieved to leave behind the zone of death. The fog bound the night to silence, so that the sound of their footsteps failed to travel, absorbed instead into the pervading sense of rot that permeated the place.

  Just before they reached the first of three roads that terraced the long staircase, a wavering glow alerted Sebastian to a patrol coming. He motioned Rhys to one side, and they pressed themselves into the shadow of a moss-eaten wall.

  The sentries stopped roughly ten paces away. The fog reshaped itself around them, sculpting murky silhouettes.

  “Hold up that lantern,” growled the taller of the pair in the Saldarian dialect.

  The other lifted the lantern indifferently. “Did you see something?”

  The first opened the lantern and leaned in to light his smoke in its flame. He exhaled into the swirling mist and said after a moment’s pause, “I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  The other closed and lowered the lantern. “You’re disgusting.”

  “Tell me you didn’t think of doing her.”

  “I didn’t think of doing her.” He shook his head and started off again. “Stick to sheep, you perverted jade.”

  “Naw...all tied up that way, just waiting to be turned...” The first man made a fast licking sound. “Tell me you didn’t think of it.”

  “I didn’t think of it.”

  “But you did see her laid out, just ripe for the taking...” Their voices faded as the fog closed around them.

  Clenching his jaw, Sebastian headed across the road and down the next flight of steps, towards the quarantine’s eldritch glow. By the time they reached the stairway base, they’d emerged into clear air beneath an eerily lit overcast.

  From what Sebastian could tell, Dore had organized this ‘plague’ into zones. Victims were carted in to the east, administered poisons that mimicked sickness, ‘Healed’ with the pattern to turn them into eidola, and then left there for the agonizing days it took their bodies to die and the conversion to occur. Fully converted eidola were relocated to the west side of the ruins, presumably to await transport elsewhere.

  Sebastian and Rhys always went east, to spare as many as they could from the horrors of a captive halflife. Bahman and his crew went west, where they could test the effectiveness of Dareios’ latest weapons on newly minted eidola.

  For Bahman, the work was scientific, the impartial testing of deadly patterns on creatures who had lost all semblance of their humanity. For Sebastian and especially Rhys—who’d seen his own men sacrificed to that same fate—it was personal, a mission of mercy. They alone could stomach the work in the east.

  The glowing overcast seemed close enough to touch as Sebastian stepped among the bones of a building and walked to its crumbling edge, which provided an expansive view of the hillside of terraced ruins.

  One level down, torches stood at every doorway, lighting a patchwork grid for the Prophet’s Ascendants, who moved between the roofless houses tending to the ‘sick.’ At intervals along the winding lanes, large braziers burned sage and rosemary to mask the stench of death.

  “Stay close to me,” Sebastian said low to the captain.

  “I’ll have Your Highness’s back, as always.”

  Sebastian cast Rhys a sidelong glance, half gratitude and half warning, planted his hand on the low wall and slung himself over.

  He fell twenty steps in a whisper of the second strand and landed in a silent crouch. He waited there while the captain descended via the collapsed wall. Together, they slipped across a weedy courtyard and hugged the shadows of a plinth whose statue had long been repurposed, probably in some patrician’s riad.

  They waited there while an Ascendant passed by. All around them, low moaning filled the night, perpetual as a river’s rushing flow.

  Sebastian pulled a dagger from the selection at his thigh. Rhys drew his sword. Then they stole across the street and into the closest house.

  The stench brought bile rising up in Sebastian’s throat. He forced a swallow and slipped down a hallway towards a light at the end, while Rhys took up a position just inside the house, out of sight but with a clear view of the street.

  Inside the room at the end of the hall, Sebastian found half a dozen victims lying spread-eagle on the earth, wrists and ankles bound to stakes. In the wavering lamplight, their naked bodies showed a patchwork of oozing sores and scabby, necrotic flesh.

  Sebastian had seen enough victims to have learned the process—how first the hands and feet turned black, then the outer flesh blistered, rotted and sloughed away—the longest step in the process, requiring victims be bound, lest they take their own lives—eventually revealing ropy muscle turned to stone beneath.

  These people were fairly well along. They had already lost the ability to speak, but their vocal chords still resonated their pain in a unified keening, as the cry of a wounded hound.

  If there had been any way to save them...

  But there wasn’t, not this far into conversion. Sebastian swallowed around his conflict of conscience, gripped his dagger and started on his work.

  The farther along in the process, the harder his job. The enchanted muscle became fibrous and difficult to part. In fact, he’d learned that due to the various enchantments at work, it was easier to kill them after they’d become eidola th
an during the half-life of conversion. But to leave so many languishing in torment....

  The first blade Sebastian brought down into the chest of a man sank midway and lodged there. He had to force it all the way into the heart by leaning his whole weight on it, and then he had to put a boot to the man’s shoulder to rip the blade out again.

  He tried a different dagger on the next victim, a new combination of patterns. It went in easier but stuck thereafter. Sebastian had to stand on the woman’s chest and use both hands to free it. He was sweating by the time he moved to the third victim. Breathing hard by the fourth.

  And so it went. Room after room. House after house.

  If the lay of things allowed Rhys to help Sebastian while also keeping an eye on the street, he would do so. Otherwise, he stood steadfast guard over his prince’s work.

  Eventually they cleared the row of houses and took refuge in an alley that sloped steeply down to the next street. Sebastian crouched beside the wall and laid his head against the stones while his heart slowed.

  The physical work wasn’t as draining as the mental tasks involved—regularly monitoring the currents for danger, the constant working of Ean’s fifth-strand pattern—both of which made Sebastian’s head feel full of chaff after only a few hours.

  He rolled his head around on the wall. “How many?”

  Rhys was standing watch over the alley, immobile save for his roving gaze. “Fifty-two.”

  “Fifty-two.” Sebastian clunked his head dispiritedly against the stones. If he thought of it as fifty-two tormented souls freed, it was a fine number. If he thought of it as fifty-two out of hundreds of eidola soldiers, the number hardly scratched the surface. “What’s he going to do with this army?” He lifted a weary gaze to Rhys. “Have you wondered about that?”

  “Constantly, my prince.”

  Sebastian pushed himself off. “We’ve got to do better than fifty-two.”

  They headed down the alley to reach the next street. To their left, Ascendants prowled busily from house to house, but the houses to his right lay silent beneath the fog, ostensibly already visited for the night. Sebastian waited for the Ascendants to head inside their respective houses of interest, then darted across the street and into the closest dwelling.

  Down a short hallway, a large room hosted a score of poor villagers lying on makeshift cots beneath a broken roof. Their moans and isolated weeping stabbed at Sebastian’s heart. Some villagers had bald patches on their scalps. Others lay with bleeding sores on their feet in place of missing toenails. Their hands were uniformly black.

  Sebastian paused in the doorway. A man rolled his head to stare at him through eyes weeping blood. His cheeks were sunken, his lips crusted with sores. “Plague,” he managed hoarsely in the desert tongue. “Stay...back.”

  A little girl lay on the cot next to him. She reached small black fingers and clasped the man’s hand. He closed his own black fingers fumblingly around hers.

  Sebastian fell back from the room and into the corridor wall, his heart pounding. “Gods forgive me,” he groaned, “I can’t do it.”

  Rhys laid a hand on his shoulder. “Death is as merciful now as at any time, my prince.”

  Sebastian met his grim gaze with a desperate look. “They could still be saved, Rhys.”

  “But they won’t be—except by you.”

  Feeling sick, Sebastian pressed fists to his eyes and grappled with the accusations of his conscience.

  Too easily he might’ve found reason to leave without doing the act. They couldn’t keep killing off the ranks of Dore’s army—even piecemeal—without garnering attention from some quarter. The eidola further along often died before the conversion was complete, and Sebastian counted on this fact to hide his activities. But these people were being monitored by Ascendants. Someone would notice. If only his purpose might’ve been fueled less by honor and more by self-preservation.

  Dear Epiphany, I pray give me strength to do what must be done. I am sending these souls to you. I beg you grace my blade, that their deaths are quick.

  Sebastian gave a determined exhale, dropped his hands to his sides and strode back into the room...yet his feet halted abruptly just beyond the opening, frozen once more. He stood locked in place, emotionally overcome by the faces of the men, women and children whose lives he was about to take.

  He felt Rhys approach behind him.

  Sebastian swallowed. “These deaths won’t go unnoticed.”

  Rhys bent and selected a blade from among the seven sheathed on Sebastian’s thigh. “Then we’d better be quick.”

  They set to it.

  Rhys started at one end of the room, Sebastian at the other. They saved the corner with the little girl and her father until the last. Blessedly, no one else was conscious, and the work was fast, if grim.

  Finally, only the little girl and her father remained. Sebastian stood over the child, feeling choked, gripping a bloody dagger in a white-knuckled fist, unable to move.

  She opened her eyes and saw him standing over her, and used her black hands to push herself unsteadily up to sitting.

  Sebastian, in all of his hatred of Dore Madden, had never felt more vehement fury than seeing the evil that man had done to this poor child.

  Her brown eyes were very large, and her head seemed too big for the frail body supporting it as she lifted those eyes to Sebastian. She asked him in the desert tongue, “Am I going to die?”

  Sebastian’s heart felt like it was breaking. He bent a knee beside her, then lifted his eyes to Rhys, who was standing resolutely over her father, having just ended his life.

  Her lower lip trembled. She asked in a tiny, wavering voice, “Will you do it, please?” Then she threw her arms around his neck. “Please. It hurts so much...”

  She must’ve been holding to him as tightly as she could, but he barely felt her weight.

  Sebastian drew in a shuddering breath. He cupped her head gently but held it firmly against his chest and positioned his dagger at the base of her skull. Then, closing his eyes, he shoved—hard.

  She sagged in his arms.

  Sebastian laid her down on the cot, jaw clenched, his throat tight. He withdrew his dagger and slowly straightened above her. She looked peaceful in death. He took ill consolation in it.

  Rhys met his gaze gravely. “That’s—”

  A peal of bells rang a clamorous warning, which was soon compounded by shouting and the sounds of running feet.

  The captain grunted. “Looks like they noticed us.”

  Sebastian slung his bow off his shoulder and headed out of the room. He nocked an arrow to bow and paused just inside the broken bricks where an exterior door had once stood. A squad of Saldarians came charging around the corner, heading uphill. Ascendants had started rushing from house to house.

  Sebastian was angry enough to kill all of them with a thought, but he lowered his bow and said tightly instead, “Out the back.”

  No matter how much Sebastian wanted to destroy everything and everyone inhabiting that place, his agreement with Dareios—and Ehsan—was that they would get in and out without stirring up trouble. As Ehsan had so irrefutably yet infuriatingly pointed out to him, ‘Even a giant is no match for an anthill.’

  That night, the ants were scouring the hill for them.

  They fled through the ruined city beneath the ghostly, glowing fog, with Rhys guarding their backs and Sebastian working the fifth the entire way. By the time they’d climbed back into the fog bank, Sebastian’s head was throbbing and his vision was blurring at the edges, but it was either work the fifth constantly or run headfirst into one of Dore’s wards.

  As the top of the steps came into view, Sebastian saw the Saldarian squad that had passed them earlier. They were standing with a dozen eidola, who were chattering angrily. The bells were still clanging a ubiquitous peal, which really wasn’t helping Sebastian’s head.

  He took aim on the outermost eidola without breaking stride. His arrow slammed into the creature’s temple
, and it tumbled sidelong even as his next arrow was taking the eidola beside it through the throat. The Saldarians finally noticed the creatures were being picked off one by one when the fourth eidola fell face-first in the dirt at their feet.

  Sebastian downed three more creatures before the boiling mass of angry Saldarians reached them. Rhys went barreling up the steps while the Saldarians were still coming down and scattered their line.

  The remaining eidola stalked towards Sebastian en masse, apparently expecting him to cower from the terrible dynamism of their intimidating stares.

  Sebastian jumped onto a wall and shot two more of the creatures through their eyes. That deflated their pomp somewhat. He was lining up on the next one when two of them got smart and jumped up on the wall after him.

  Sebastian put an arrow into the first one’s chest, then ran atop the wall, drawing the other in chase. He leapt the skeletal ruins to reach the edge of the house, where he launched himself across an alley onto the adjacent building. His feet landed on crumbling stones, making him stumble. The eidola chasing him took a running leap and caught Sebastian around the legs. They both tumbled down outside the ruins.

  Sebastian shielded himself in the fifth. He rolled the instant he hit the grass and bounded roughly over the stones of a collapsed wall that would’ve broken bones aplenty without his shield.

  The creature clambered after him. Sebastian drew a dagger from the sheath at his thigh and stabbed it into the eidola’s gut.

  Suddenly three more eidola were rushing him out of the gloom. Sebastian somersaulted beneath their blades and flung one dagger as he rose, taking an eidola beneath the chin. He swiped another dagger through the closest eidola’s leg. It fell to one knee, whereupon he stabbed it in the side of its skull, just to be certain the blade had done its work.

  A third eidola slashed at him. Sebastian rolled sideways, then launched up inside its guard to slam his shoulder into its chest and a dagger into its throat. He spun off the creature as it was collapsing and kicked another one in the head with some help from the second strand.