The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  The patio off Sebastian’s rooms offered a glorious view of it all each morning, with the sunlight spearing between the snowy Dhahari peaks, painting everything rose-hued and illuminating the colors of the autumn land, so rich with the coming harvest.

  Yet all Sebastian saw that morning as he stared out over the valley, occasionally sipping his tea, was ghostly fog and hundreds of black-skinned bodies pinned into the perpetual twilight of the undead.

  ‘...As your paths are interwoven, so accordingly are the workings of the wielders Dore Madden and Viernan hal’Jaitar, the Duke of Morwyk and your father...’

  Rhakar’s words had wakened a sense of necessity in Sebastian—to finish Isabel’s assignment, to take his place on the First Lord’s field, to find his path—yet these urges fought against a visceral need to stop Dore Madden.

  But they could keep picking away at the edges of the wielder’s army for months and never make enough headway to halt its growth. Dore seemed to have an unending supply of victims and could make more eidola faster than Sebastian could give them reprieve.

  Of course, he and Dareios were working on this problem constantly. Their latest batch of arrows would use second strand resonance patterns to disrupt the eidola’s connection to Darshan. The arrows would make a tuning fork out of every creature they struck, resonating Ean’s matrix into others around them. One arrow might disrupt as many as a score or more of eidola—at least, that was their hope. Would that Sebastian could find a pattern to so easily dispatch Dore.

  Sebastian sipped his tea and scowled into the morning.

  It troubled him to think that his urgency to wipe Dore off the face of the earth might stem just from his own personal hatred of the man. Was he carving out justice on behalf of countless innocent victims, or were his forays into the ruins of Kyrrh an attempt to exact revenge for deeply personal wrongs?

  Or...more troubling still, did his efforts march forth from darker motivations, shadowed gouges in his soul where lurked the memories he refused to consciously recall...the ones that woke him every night, shaking and sweating, in the dark hours before the dawn?

  While the need to end Dore plagued him, this very desire stood at war with his perceived duty to his family, his father, and their kingdom.

  He found the idea of returning to Dannym unimaginable, despite Ehsan’s encouragement, but he saw that an eventual reunion with his father was inevitable. Honor and duty demanded it.

  Yet the idea of facing his father, of confessing to all he’d been through, the things Dore had done to him, what he’d forced him to do in turn...Sebastian shuddered to recall those days, much less confess their truth to anyone.

  As if this wasn’t conflict enough, both of these needs seemed in opposition to Isabel’s task and Sebastian’s commitment to her brother’s game.

  “Like buzzards circling, the troubles in your mind.” Ehsan kissed his bare back between his shoulder blades, then slid her arms around his chest and pressed herself close. “Let the birds feed and cast your mind to fairer pastures.”

  “I cannot, Ehsan.”

  “Do not lie to me, Prince of Dannym. You will not. This is a very different truth from cannot.”

  He turned in her arms and wrapped her with his. “I would deny you nothing.”

  Her right eyebrow assumed a perfect triangle of dubiety. “You would deny me while denying me.” She kissed him gently and withdrew.

  He watched her through the open doors as she began the lengthy process of donning her underskirt and midriff baring choli, both in a brilliant aqua green.

  She made great ceremony of every motion—holding up the choli shirt to examine its beads and embroidery, thus baring her breasts for his admiration, the sweeping of the lengthy silk sari to wrap and wrap and wrap again about her hourglass hips and flat stomach—all the while studiously ignoring his desirous gaze.

  Sebastian leaned against the terrace railing, his tea forgotten. “You’re making quite a pleasurable torment for me.”

  “One must distract you somehow.”

  “I assure you, Princess, you have me well distracted.”

  Ehsan eyed him amusedly. “Men. So predictable.” She draped the trailing length of the aqua and yellow sari across one shoulder and positioned it just so. Then she walked to her chest of jewels. “Speak to me, Sebastian. You run mad circles alone, whereas together we may find an exit.”

  Sebastian set down his tea and pushed hands in his pajama pockets. The morning air was making gooseflesh of his bare chest and arms, but he preferred the clean, bracing cold of those mountain mornings to the sweating heat of his dreams.

  “I just don’t know what path I’m meant to follow.”

  Ehsan frowned slightly. “There is no path you’re meant to follow. The tapestry has no will of its own. Asking the tapestry to decide your path is asking Chaos to align itself to Order. It cannot be done. The future cannot sculpt itself.”

  “If I’m supposed to be a Player, I must have some path, Ehsan.”

  She shook her head as she hooked a wide collar of sparkling citrines around her neck. “Players forge their own paths through the tapestry. You must decide what course of action you intend to take. Then events will realign beneath your intent, the pattern reweaving based on your choices. This is the way you sculpt the future. The First Law is the First Law for a reason.”

  A smile tugged at Sebastian’s mouth. “I must’ve done something miraculous to deserve you in my life, Princess.”

  Ehsan plucked a handful of bangles out of her treasure chest of jewels. “I haven’t yet decided if you truly deserve me, Prince of Dannym.” She gave him an arch look, though there was much of adoration behind it.

  Sebastian watched her donning the rest of her jewelry while a hum of other ideas sang in his thoughts. After a time, he said, “I can’t help wondering why Dore is building an army of these creatures. What is its purpose? Is it because the Prophet ordered him to do it?”

  “Why does that seem unlikely to you?”

  Sebastian frowned. “Because Darshan doesn’t need an army in order to destroy this world.”

  Ehsan began drawing her curtain of dark hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her bangles jingled with every motion of her arms. “Could the army be Dore Madden’s creation beneath his Prophet’s sanction? You know Dore better than most. What motivates him?”

  Pain. Agony. Misery. Making strong men weak.

  Sebastian shook his head. “Every vilest thing you can imagine.”

  Ehsan secured the elegant knot of her hair with a jeweled pin. “Yet an army bespeaks a singular motivation, does it not?”

  Sebastian studied her while exhaling a contemplative breath. “Conquering.”

  But conquering who? Dore more or less despised everyone. The only man he hated with a daggered vengeance was Björn van Gelderan, but there was no way in seventeen hells Dore would pit himself directly against the Fifth Vestal.

  Then another thought occurred to him.

  With a sudden sharp tingle of certainty, all of Sebastian’s circling thoughts aligned to a single vector. “I need to see your brother.” He made for his wardrobe.

  Ehsan stood watching him while he threw on a dark blue kameez and matching shalwar and hunted around for his beaded khussa slippers. He was halfway to the door before he realized he’d forgotten something important and hurried back to kiss her goodbye.

  She caught him beneath the chin to check his haste and make him meet her gaze. When he did, she said with quiet intent, “The right answer does not always point to the right action, Prince of Dannym.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, Princess.”

  She nodded and kissed him once more.

  Sebastian headed off to find Dareios.

  He discovered the truthreader at work in one of his labs—as ever, embroiled upon a project that had clearly begun long before the sun or anyone else raised their slumbering heads. Dareios was wearing heavy rubber gloves that flared around his elbows, and he stood bent over a metal
-clad worktable, intent upon soldering a fat gold chain.

  At the table’s far end, Bahman was slouched in a metal chair with his bare feet propped on the countertop and containers of all sorts scattered on the floor around him. The wildcat Babar was asleep on a shelf above him, having dislodged its orderly containers in the process of getting settled. Neither stirred as Sebastian entered.

  “Ah, sobh bekheir, Sebastian,” Dareios greeted without looking up. Dawn’s roseate light filled the room, bestowing a warm glow upon the Kandori prince. Either that, or the light was somehow coming from the necklace he was soldering. “Have you come to test the new kinetic resonance arrows?”

  “I’d love to—”

  “Outstanding. I shall wake Bahman. In his enthusiasm, he was up all night forging them.”

  “No, I mean—”

  Dareios looked up under his triangular eyebrows. “No, don’t wake Bahman, or no, you haven’t come to test the arrows?”

  Sebastian rounded the worktable to stand in front of him. “I’m thrilled about the arrows, but—”

  “Don’t touch the table.”

  Sebastian froze his hand an inch from the metal.

  Dareios pointed with his soldering wand to the table’s end, where Bahman’s bare feet were resting on the counter. “Bahman is grounding the line, you see? But...” and here he smiled and picked up the gold linked chain he’d been adjusting, “this little trinket is ready for testing.”

  He extended the necklace towards Sebastian. “Care to do the honors, Prince of Dannym?”

  Sebastian took the wide-linked chain with an appropriate degree of wariness. When Dareios’s genius ideas backfired, they usually packed a punch.

  “Dareios,” he said, eyeing the necklace suspiciously, “I think we need to put our attention towards who Dore might be making that eidola army for.”

  “We shall apply our mutual intelligence to the mystery as soon as we complete the project of the morning: don the necklace, if you will, Sebastian, and move away from the table.”

  Sebastian obediently moved away from the table. “You know I’ve been laboring over what to do about Dore,” he said while hooking the chain behind his neck. “It occurred to me this morning—”

  Suddenly a force spun him in a circle on his feet. He whipped his eyes back to Dareios as soon as he arrived back as he’d started. “What was—”

  Dareios was holding a wand. He flicked it.

  Sebastian skidded four paces to the left and stopped abruptly, wavering like a grounded javelin. “Dareios, wh—”

  Dareios whipped his wand to the right, and Sebastian flew across the room. He hauled up just shy of slamming into the wall.

  With his body now hovering in some kind of field, Sebastian turned his head and growled, “Dareios...”

  Whereupon the truthreader remitted with an upward flick of the wand. The force holding Sebastian vanished. The prince tugged his tunic straight and turned to face Dareios.

  Who was frowning. “The flux is out of scale again.”

  “Probably a complication of the surface differential,” Bahman murmured, still appearing to be asleep.

  “Yes, so you said last night,” the truthreader groused.

  “There’s this thing called natural law, Dareios.”

  “Pshaw! A child’s primer.”

  Bahman murmured sleepily, “Even elae has to contend with the gravitic vector field.”

  “It still should’ve exhibited a stronger propulsive affinity.”

  Bahman yawned. “Maybe check the peripheral output pattern.”

  Dareios nodded slowly, considering the idea. “Yes, that must be it. Thank you, Bahman. Brilliantly concluded, as usual.”

  “I’ll put it on your tab.”

  Sebastian handed the necklace back to Dareios. “Dare I ask what this is for?”

  “Who it is for, is my niece Persephone, and what it is for is to corral my great-nephew Sarosh, her son, who is becoming a nine-year-old terror.” Dareios laid the necklace and the matching wand in a velvet-lined case and put it on a shelf. “One magic wand, soon to be completed. Now...” he turned to Sebastian, “you were saying something about Dore?”

  “What about Dore?” asked an entering Rhys.

  Across the room, the wildcat Babar awoke with a hiss.

  Rhys speared his pale blue eyes towards the cat. “One day, kitty, you and I are going to have it out.”

  Babar hissed again.

  The captain bared his teeth.

  Babar flattened her ears and yowled.

  “I wouldn’t encourage her, Captain.” Dareios bent to attend to some switches beneath his worktable. “She clearly likes you, and her flirtation can be painful and quite unhealthy for the legs.”

  Rhys eyed the cat skeptically. Babar licked her paw, claws extended.

  Dareios threw a switch, and a hum Sebastian hadn’t realized he’d been hearing suddenly ceased.

  Bahman slung his feet off the table without bothering to open his eyes.

  Dareios straightened. “There we are, safe from terror of electrocution, if not from nine-year-olds with kinetic variant wands.”

  Sebastian tilted his head. “I thought the necklace was for your nephew and the wand for his mother.”

  Dareios traced the line of a triangular eyebrow. “Have you met my great-nephew Sarosh?”

  Sebastian chuckled. “Point taken.”

  “Shall we retire to sunnier quarters?” Dareios motioned them all towards a sundrenched terrace that beckoned from beyond the arched doors. “Captain, will you break your fast with us?”

  “With gratitude, Prince Dareios.”

  Bahman roused from his chair to follow them.

  When Sebastian reached the breakfast table, Babar was somehow already sitting in Rhys’s chair.

  The captain drew up short and turned a look from the chair back to the workroom, then back to the cat. She growled at him meaningfully.

  Dareios shooed the wildcat away and pulled out the chair for the captain. Then he took his own seat with his usual graceful aplomb. “Now...” he looked to Sebastian as he settled, “what’s on your mind, Sebastian?”

  Sebastian sank into his chair. “I’ve been thinking about Isabel’s mandate.”

  “Haven’t we all,” Bahman muttered.

  The three of them had been focused on little else since Isabel had given them the order in Ivarnen.

  Sebastian reached for the pot of tea. “At Ivarnen, Isabel told me to tell Ean that he had to find a way to unmake entire companies of eidola in one blow, and to tell you she said to use inverteré patterns if you must.”

  “So I well recall.” Dareios was regarding him inquisitively.

  “I’ve assumed all along that this eidola army Dore’s been making is the army Isabel was warning us about.” Sebastian set down the tea pot and focused on Dareios. “But what if her caution had nothing at all to do with Dore’s activities?”

  Dareios sank back in his chair. “I see where you’re heading.”

  “Please clarify it for me, my prince,” Rhys said.

  Sebastian looked to him. “There are levels of Players in the First Lord’s game, Rhys—at least, in my observation. The efforts of powerful Players like Ean are addressed to larger issues than wars between mortal kings, or a wielder waging his own mad agenda—even a wielder who can wreak as much havoc as Dore Madden. I’ve held off moving against Dore because of his close connection to Darshan, especially after Ean’s letter.”

  Rhys looked between them. “What about Prince Ean’s letter?”

  Dareios explained, “From everything Ean described about his interaction with Darshan in Tambarré, it appeared to us that Darshan lay upon Ean’s path, and Dore Madden by extension.”

  Sebastian shook his head. “But it occurred to me this morning that Dore’s and Darshan’s purposes might not be aligned.” He looked meaningfully between the men seated around the table. “And I’m beginning to think now that Isabel’s directive wasn’t to us. It was to Ean.
And Ean is operating at a very different level of the game.”

  Dareios nodded, clearly taking his meaning.

  Rhys scrubbed at his beard. “I’m still not sure I’m following you, my prince.”

  Sebastian picked up his cup of tea, feeling its warmth in his hands while his body felt both energized and chilled. “I think Isabel needed us to help solve the problem of how mortal men can fight eidola, but whatever her Sight showed her...I don’t think that vision had anything to do with the army Dore is raising in Tambarré. We assumed it was, but I think we were wrong.”

  Dareios gave a slow exhalation. “My sister is going to flay me.”

  Sebastian shifted his gaze back to the truthreader. “What choice do I have, Dareios?”

  The truthreader opened palms to the sky. “Not doing it?”

  Sebastian gave him a look.

  “What am I missing here?” Rhys asked.

  Dareios supplied, “Prince Sebastian has been debating with his conscience as to whether stopping Dore Madden is his responsibility or that of another Player in the game, namely Ean’s.”

  Rhys made a face. “Seems awfully convoluted, this game of your First Lord’s. In my day, your king just pointed you towards your enemy and shouted attack.”

  “Yes, well...” Dareios eyed Sebastian with a pained expression, “that is essentially what your prince has decided he must do.”

  Bahman arched brows. “Ehsan’s not going to like that.”

  “Insightful as usual, Bahman.” Dareios contemplated Sebastian with a look of strained grace. “I wish I didn’t see your logic so clearly.”

  “I wish I saw it clearer,” Rhys muttered.

  Sebastian said, “Dore is making this army for a purpose, Rhys.”

  “And moving it for a purpose,” Bahman pointed out, meeting Sebastian’s gaze. “As soon as they’re out of conversion, Dore spirits the eidola somewhere else. As many as we’ve killed in our recent raids, I’ll wager he has ten times that number stashed elsewhere.”

  “I agree it’s out of character,” Sebastian said. “He kept the ones he made at Tal’Afaq and Ivarnen in the catacombs beneath the fortresses. Tambarré has a plethora of such chambers. Why isn’t he keeping these new eidola in Tambarré? Is he moving them to the next staging point for his plans, or for some other reason?”