The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Far below on the stadium’s sand court, which was cluttered with broken columns and parts of tumbled walls, more than fifty eidola milled. Guards stood watch at either end, lording over exit and entry.

  Sebastian motioned to Rhys. They crouched low and descended towards the front of the highest balcony. The obfuscation pattern hummed in Sebastian’s thoughts.

  They concealed themselves behind the remains of an archway that had once framed steps leading down to the middle balcony. The steps were crumbling, and the archway stood in fractured pieces large enough to conceal half a dozen men.

  Sebastian turned to Rhys as they pressed into the shadows. “Something’s not right. There are too many eidola down there. The most Bahman ever encountered here was twenty and five.”

  Rhys nodded his agreement. “And not enough guards.”

  “No, that’s because they’re all outside...” Sebastian grimaced as the thought occurred to him, “surrounding us.”

  “You think this is a trap set by that Corwin fellow?”

  “I think Dore thought we’d consider fifty eidola irresistible bait.” He shook his head decisively. “Whatever Madden has waiting for us down there, Corwin couldn’t have known.”

  “Well enough. A toad can be a frog in the night,” by which he meant, all truths reveal themselves eventually.

  Sebastian turned him another marveling look. “Who’s been teaching you Kandori proverbs?”

  Rhys gave a noncommittal shrug. “You pick them up here and there.” He nodded towards the eidola. “So what do you want to do about them, my prince?”

  Sebastian let out a slow exhale. “I think we have to see where this rabbit hole leads us.”

  Even if Dore Madden is at the other end?

  In spite of the ill foreboding it brought to his stomach, Sebastian told himself firmly, Especially if Dore’s at the other end.

  “At worst, we use all of Bahman’s new arrows,” Sebastian murmured. “At best, I can get a first-strand tracer pattern to stick to one of those creatures, and we’ll be able to follow them across the node—which has to be down there somewhere.”

  “How close do you need to be to cast that pattern?”

  Sebastian angled him a telling look. “A good deal closer than this.”

  To go any closer, however, meant moving into the danger zone—especially if Dore was expecting them. Sebastian would need to work the pattern of Ean’s variant trait to be certain they didn’t walk into one of Dore’s vicious wards.

  Ean could compartment his thoughts to wield many fifth-strand patterns at once, but every time Sebastian worked the fifth, he felt like he was wrestling against the obdurate rotation of the world.

  Or, as Dareios had explained to him once, ‘When you work the fifth, you're not merely drawing upon the elemental energy of the realm, you're pulling on the entire fabric of existence and reshaping it to your will. Balance hangs on the other end of that fabric.’

  It was one of the least comforting things Dareios had ever said to him.

  Sebastian murmured to Rhys, “Stay close. I won’t be able to conceal us from here on down.”

  “The better to see our enemies coming, my prince,” Rhys rumbled.

  With an acknowledging glance, Sebastian drew his sword, turned through the archway and headed down the crumbling steps beyond. He summoned Ean’s pattern, and the gloomy night instantly brightened, illuminated now to his enhanced eyes by inverteré patterns with Dore’s particular signature.

  Sebastian inwardly swore.

  A shout from afar roused a prickling in Sebastian’s flesh just as Saldarians flooded into the stands like roaches out of the woodwork.

  Sebastian spared a glance over his shoulder for the captain. “Whatever happens, don’t leave these steps. They’re the only safe route down!”

  He looked back to his own footsteps just in time to take a running leap over a gaping hole where the flooring had crumbled away. He soared across the length of darkness, landed on a lower step and continued his rushing descent.

  As Rhys landed behind him, Sebastian called, “New plan! Get to the coliseum floor, cast our net and get out across the node!”

  “I hope slaying demons is somewhere in that plan!” Rhys called back.

  Sebastian jumped another hole. “As many as we can!”

  By the time they reached the lowest tier of the stadium, Saldarians were descending on Sebastian and Rhys from every direction. Sebastian dropped Ean’s pattern—he knew well enough now where Dore’s wards waited—and speared a compulsion pattern at the men closing in. Eight soldiers tumbled into stone benches, smashing faces and heads, breaking bones.

  Dozens more had flooded the stairwell leading up from the coliseum floor—the only safe channel through Dore’s wards. Bearing a grim foreknowledge of the consequences, Sebastian threw a spear of the fourth at them.

  A bolt comprising the concentrated energy of thought blasted into the body of mercenaries. Men flew every which way. Stone exploded. A shattering concussion blasted outwards.

  Sebastian shielded himself and Rhys with the fifth.

  Even as men went flying into Dore’s wards, the prince pushed the second strand beneath his and the captain’s feet and propelled them across the massive crater his explosion had created in the bleachers.

  Ten gaping rows later, they landed in a tumble. Sebastian bounced down four steps and slammed up against the wall bordering the coliseum floor. Rhys tumbled into a stone bench with a gruff exhalation.

  Higher in the stadium, men were screaming.

  As Sebastian slowly found his feet, his eyes beheld a Saldarian whose lower half lay within the circle of one of Dore’s wards. The mercenary’s boots had charred to ash, and the flesh of his legs was searing away even as Sebastian watched. Billowing clouds of oily smoke rose with the man’s screams. He clawed at the nearest bleachers but couldn’t free himself from the pattern. It seemed to be dragging him inexorably into itself while burning him alive.

  Sebastian forced a swallow and looked away. He had no interest in seeing what was happening to the others.

  On the stadium floor, the eidola were storming about and making a clattering bawl. Their guards were trying rather futilely to corral them again.

  A roll of thunder sounded in the distance.

  Rhys joined Sebastian’s side. “Time to test some arrows?”

  “You read my mind, Captain.”

  Rhys knelt for cover behind the low wall and threaded his bow. Sebastian slung himself over the edge and fell fifty feet in a whisper of the second strand.

  His ears were still ringing from his blast of the fourth, while his conscience ached over the continuing screams from the Saldarians above him, who probably deserved to die but perhaps not in so gruesome a fashion as Dore’s wards would mete out.

  The instant he landed, every eidola head turned his way.

  Then they rushed him.

  The first of Rhys’s arrows caught the closest in the throat. It tumbled head over heels to be trampled by its brethren. Then three others staggered, grabbing their heads. Then six more pitched to their knees.

  It’s working! Dareios’s new matrix was radiating Ean’s pattern of unworking, making a vibrating tuning fork of Rhys’s arrow to disrupt every eidola within reach of its wave.

  Sebastian aimed a grim smile towards the captain high on the wall.

  More arrows flew from Rhys’s position above, forging a widening path of shuddering, staggering demons.

  Saldarians came storming in from both ends of the sand court.

  Sebastian threw compulsion to hold them off, then summoned three separate patterns. The first strand pattern was one Dareios had isolated. It formed a base that would cling to the eidola. A second strand pattern would track the creature by drawing upon the magnetism of the Pattern of the World. Finally, a fourth strand pattern would radiate the eidola’s position back to him on elae’s currents of thought.

  He had to weave all three patterns together into a matrix to have
any hope of getting them to stick to the eidola, and for that, he had to concentrate.

  Concentration came in short supply.

  Rhys, bless him, kept firing off arrows fast enough to keep the eidola away from Sebastian. He’d just finalized the matrix in his thoughts when he felt a shift.

  The currents pulsed.

  And Dore Madden appeared on the sand court not twenty feet from where Sebastian was standing.

  “To the node!” the wielder screamed frantically. His amplified voice resounded on the currents of the fourth while he waved his arms in wild circles.

  Thunder sounded again, closer this time.

  Only...the rumble continued.

  Not thunder then.

  The eidola still on their feet bolted towards Dore. So did the Saldarians.

  The wielder blasted the men back, shouting obscenities, while waving his eidola on, screaming for them to run faster. Sebastian had never seen Dore so frantic.

  The rumble in the distance grew into a roar. The air began to tremble.

  As the last of the eidola fled across the node Dore was holding open, Sebastian threw his matrix.

  Dore must’ve felt the pattern as it affixed to the eidola running past him, for he turned a wild look about.

  His gaze found Sebastian.

  The prince saw a dark recognition spark in the wielder’s eyes.

  Sebastian had a repertoire of patterns at his disposal. He came bearing weapons that would kill eidola on contact and wore an enchanted cuirass that would prevent anyone’s blade from marking him, but he still felt a jolt when Madden’s gaze fell upon him.

  Things might’ve gone very differently, if not for the thunder rolling towards them.

  Dore tore his black gaze from Sebastian’s face and threw himself across the node.

  The Saldarians scattered.

  A heartbeat later, Rhys loomed at Sebastian’s side, breathless and wearing a wary scowl, clearly interpreting the roaring to mean they were in trouble.

  As if Dore Madden actually turning his back on Sebastian hadn’t proven that readily enough.

  Sebastian watched with horrified eyes as elae’s tides withdrew like the sea rolling back before a tsunami.

  Rhys looked uneasily towards the thunder. “What is it?”

  Sebastian had just enough time to formulate a curse before the wave hit them.

  He threw himself onto the captain, even as he threw up a shield of the fifth.

  The forward edge of the blast caught and tumbled them in a whirlwind of ash and pelting rock. Buoyed by Sebastian’s shield, they hit hard against something harder, something that would’ve been their deaths if not for Sebastian’s buffer of the fifth.

  Even so, pain speared down Sebastian’s spine, but he held onto his shield and equally to Rhys while alternately praying and cursing as the explosion continued tearing across them.

  He knew within seconds that the power was destroying his shield. No, disintegrating it. Eating it.

  Dread clawed at his thoughts. If he lost the shield....

  Sebastian clenched his jaw and pushed everything he had into holding the fifth. It felt like trying to drag the very planet to a screaming halt in its motion through the heavens.

  But he held it, held it, held it...

  Until he didn’t.

  Forty

  “The hierarchy of decision resides with the god of that universe.”

  –Third Law of Shadow

  Darshan stepped out of Shadow onto the rain-swept roof of his tower in Tambarré. He perceived the planet slowly spinning towards night, though Tambarré’s slice of the globe hovered within the threshold hour when the hard veil between night and day thinned and the two commingled dangerously.

  After parting with Ean and Pelas on the hillside below the sa’reyth, Darshan had taken Kjieran to the Solvayre to revisit the lands of his birth. He’d strolled the hills, walked the mountains, even ridden a horse to reach Kjieran’s homestead.

  He’d let Kjieran watch through his eyes to see again these places that meant so much to him, to be reassured that they still stood, and to receive his vow that one day Kjieran would again walk these lands as his own man, though Darshan didn’t yet know how he would fulfill this promise.

  Their idyll had taken more time than he realized, for as he stepped into a rain-swept Tambarré, his eyes saw through mist and cloud to the shifting heavens, and he discovered that nearly a moon had passed.

  Above him, clouds hung in ragged strips from the ceiling of a storm, while at his feet, dark pools shimmered among the jagged tiles where he and Pelas had once battled over their broken troth.

  Darshan might’ve mended those contusions, restored the integrity of his tower, but at the time, the disarray had suited his contention with Pelas. Now the broken stones only echoed a lonely harmonic of Chaos.

  He reconstituted the tiles with a thought and moved on.

  The currents washing the acropolis told the tale of another broken troth, another pattern of consequence of his own making. It formed a turbulent eddy within the well he created in the mortal tapestry.

  He paused at the rim of the stairwell as strains of pain and abandonment, confusion, torment and loss washed over him, disharmonic emotions darkening elae’s currents.

  A shadow of confusion marred his brow.

  He’d broken his bond with his Marquiin, but still he perceived their pain.

  But I released them, Kjieran. I set them free. He had expected to find them rejoicing, not languishing in emotional distress.

  You couldn’t have known they would react this way, my lord. Kjieran offered a compassionate mental touch.

  No. Darshan clenched his jaw. I should have known. I should’ve predicted this reaction from my own Marquiin.

  He continued purposefully down the steps into his tower, dragging the currents in a turbulent wake.

  I was too focused on the past—I saw what they felt when I bound them; I recalled too closely your own horror in that moment. I failed to observe them newly in the now. I didn’t concern myself with how my Marquiin might’ve changed through close association with my mind, or how breaking my bond would affect them. There is no excuse for this, Kjieran.

  Kjieran remained silent, perhaps granting him the right to repent his own errors of judgment.

  As he strode the passages of his temple residence, Darshan sensed the presence of another immortal and so made his own presence known. Within heartbeats, the other immortal had vanished. A wise decision.

  He found his acolytes standing beside the double doors leading into his private chambers. One acolyte was dark, the other fair. They were radiating apprehension but also joy. Darshan found this, too, confusing.

  He slowed his approach and looked them over sternly. “I released you from your oaths to me.” His voice carried back to his ears, deep and resonant in the silent passageway.

  “Yes, my lord,” they said in unison, and the darker of the two added bravely as he stared at his toes, “But we chose to stay...in case you returned and...had need of us.”

  “You chose...to...stay,” he repeated slowly. He studied them with a deep frown. “I told you that nothing of the Prophet remained here. Why have you?”

  Their colorless eyes darted to each other, then quickly returned to their toes.

  Darshan perceived tumbled thoughts—images of a dark-haired man, the immortal he’d perceived earlier; flashes of fury and indignation on Darshan’s behalf; a mountain of laundry tended with care while cursing the interloper, and above all else, vindication upon Darshan’s return.

  He knew his acolytes’ answer before the fair one spoke.

  “We hoped we might serve you, my lord.”

  You...the man’s thoughts dared to whisper, implying with or without the appellation of the Prophet.

  Wondering at this odd turn, Darshan cast the fifth into the doors and strode on into his apartments. And drew up short.

  He’d never seen his residence so filthy, so degraded. Even his patterns we
re caked in muck.

  “He wouldn’t let us clean, my lord,” the trailing acolyte said with evident frustration. “We did our best to set things to rights each time he went out.”

  “But it only angered him,” the blond added, radiating contrition.

  Darshan turned to face them. His thoughts seeded a growing storm, but he only cupped each of their faces tenderly. “Did he harm you?”

  He hadn’t meant for the words to sound so terrifying, but he could see his anger reflecting in their wide, colorless eyes.

  They mutely shook their heads.

  He let his emotion bleed away into the currents, waited until the tide had smoothed. The Adepts watched him with large eyes and their chests rising and falling fast.

  He found their names in their own thoughts but decided to ask for them instead. Forevermore, he would take nothing from these two men but what they offered to him willingly.

  “What should I call you?”

  Elation flooded the currents.

  “Cian, my lord,” said the dark one.

  “Riede,” answered the fair.

  “Cian, Reide.” Darshan nodded to both of them. “I accept your offer of service with gratitude.”

  He returned his gaze to his apartments and adjoining bed chamber. Clothing lay strewn, goblets and dishes unwashed. The linens were trailing off the bed and what remained there was obviously soiled.

  It would take days to clean the space. A waste when he wanted his new assistants on other tasks. So he wrapped both men in a protective shield and sent a pulse of deyjiin through the room—nothing too dramatic.

  Blinding violet light blazed. His assistants shielded their eyes with both arms. Deyjiin’s consumptive energy scoured walls and floor, disintegrated metal and evaporated organic matter. When the light died, nothing remained in his apartments except the long marble table and the frame of his bed.

  Darshan turned back to his acolytes. They stood open-mouthed.

  “Have you clothes?”

  They dropped confused looks to the togas they were wearing. “You mean...other than these, my lord?” Cian asked.

  “I mean garments not reminiscent of the Prophet.”

  Both men shook their heads.