The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Yet those hours he spent listening to the wielder weeping in despair, unable himself to feel anything about it, made for one of the longest days of captivity of his life.

  ***

  “If you’re certain that’s what you want, Viernan.” Dore’s tone implied he thought it an opportunity wasted.

  The wielder sat behind a massive desk with his too-big boots propped on one corner, looking like an emaciated child playing dress-up in his father’s clothing. Dore didn’t say, I went to considerable trouble for you, and this is how you repay me, but Viernan perceived it in his scowl.

  Something had happened in Tambarré.

  Dore wouldn’t tell Viernan any details, but he’d been more crossly insensate than usual and in recent days had taken up what appeared to be more or less permanent residence at Ivarnen, much to Viernan’s displeasure.

  Viernan raked a mordant gaze across the wielder. “What I want is for our business to be concluded.” His tone made it clear that he wasn’t talking about the business closest to hand.

  Dore’s lips puckered. “All things in their time, Viernan.”

  “As far as I can tell, all of the preparations have been made.” Verily, the Sundragon could have shown up that very instant and fallen easily into their hands.

  Dore dropped his feet to the floor and sat forward. “There are other preparations still ongoing.” He shuffled some papers around on the desk, trying to look busily important, but if Dore had read even a single one of those pages, Viernan would eat his keffiyeh.

  Other preparations...

  Viernan clenched his jaw. Other preparations surely referenced some ulterior objective Dore was trying to arrange in concert with the trap for Mithaiya, but Viernan had no intention of performing in that symphony ever again.

  “As to the prince,” he said stiffly, referencing the more immediate problem to hand, “I’ll call you when I’m ready.”

  Dore looked him over with dark rumination. “As you wish.”

  Viernan turned on his heel and strode through the lower passages of Ivarnen. The air belowground was oppressive, stale save for when he whisked past an adjoining hallway leading deeper into the bowels of the fortress and caught a whiff of the sickly-sweet stench of death.

  Ivarnen’s catacombs were narrow, paved in rounded stones worn smooth by the years. Hanging lamps cast a pale, flameless light on the uneven walls but failed to properly illuminate the bricks of the barrel-vaulted ceiling. The place had probably felt ancient long before the kings of Cyrene found their way to power.

  Viernan walked with Fate dogging his every step.

  ‘...If it was Cephrael returned me to your doorstep, Viernan, you can be certain He had his reasons...’

  And returned to his doorstep, Trell val Lorian had—again. Inconceivably, even irreconcilably—and certain Viernan was that the gods were having their way with him. He was certain, too, that the pieces on this game board were divinely baited snares he assuredly wasn’t stepping into anew.

  A moon ago he’d have been gloating, celebrating. He might’ve even shared a glass of absinthe with his prince. But now he saw more clearly of the underhanded machinations of the gods. He was like a raedan to the threads They held upon the world, observing Their ethereal puppet strings outlined in blazing color.

  The hallways grew wider as he moved from Ivarnen’s labyrinthine catacombs into passages lit by muted daylight. He eventually reached a gallery bathed in the golden glow of late afternoon, and a view of the estuary seen through a long row of arched windows. At the far end of the room, a man sat on a couch with his back to Viernan.

  The Consul paused, suddenly pinioned by emotions both foreign and fierce. For a moment, they consumed him. Hatred boiled in toxic combination with rage, and he wanted nothing else but to draw a violent lash across the room, to summon every force he could muster and raze it all to ash and the waiting prince along with it.

  But he mastered these djinn furies, brought them to heel with harsh words bespeaking harsher realities.

  Would the prince ever really know what he’d done for him? Doubtless he wouldn’t think it mercy, but it was. It was.

  Viernan warded the room. Then he slowly crossed the marble floor with the black silk of his robes whispering around his footsteps towards fate.

  The prince turned his head as Viernan approached. Unruly waves of sun-streaked dark hair topped an angular face—a man’s face now, both in structure and in the wisdom revealed in his gaze. Trell val Lorian had always been wise beyond his years, though Viernan suspected that wisdom hadn’t done His Highness any favors.

  The prince stood as Viernan neared. It seemed an odd courtesy.

  “Ah...” a knowing half-smile teased on Trell’s lips, “the plot thickens.” He nodded to Viernan. “Consul.”

  “Prince Trell.”

  Trell glanced down at his rumpled tunic and leather breeches. “If I’d known it was you, I would’ve dressed for the occasion.” He gave Viernan a sharp smile.

  In that unexpected moment, Viernan saw in Trell val Lorian the culmination of all the destruction this family had wrought upon his plans—the mutiny of the Dannish troops, Taliah’s death at Darroyhan, the loss of Khor Taran, the desolation at Raku, his tragic, ruined prince...

  Perhaps it was misplaced, the censorious blame he’d flung across the val Lorians. Perhaps it had always been misplaced, but it was too late to disentangle all those knotted rationales. They were woof and warp woven to form the image of Trell that Viernan held so firmly in mind.

  To see him in a new light, the entire tapestry of thought would have to be thrown out, and Viernan didn’t have the energy for that. So he appeased the moment by turning the damned thing to face the wall and pushed resolutely on.

  A humorless smile curled his lip. “We are both prisoners here.” He motioned Trell to retake his seat and chose his on the sofa opposite.

  The prince studied him intently as he sat. Viernan could see the cogs and wheels of his intelligence turning rapidly.

  Viernan poured bourbon from a decanter on the table into two glasses and offered one to the prince.

  Trell took it slowly, his grey gaze speculative. “What are we toasting?”

  Viernan’s eyes tightened. “Severed ties.”

  “Obscure...but I’ll go with it.” Trell clinked his glass against Viernan’s and downed the drink. He pressed the back of one hand to his mouth, then motioned to the decanter. “Do you mind if—”

  “By all means.” Viernan sat back on the sofa while Trell poured himself another glass. “What happened in Darroyhan?”

  Trell looked up beneath his brows.

  “Reports are inconsistent. No one could say exactly what happened to my daughter.”

  The prince slowly set down the decanter. “She threw herself on a zanthyr’s blade.”

  Viernan felt a smoldering fury. “Why would she have done that?”

  “You’d have to ask Taliah.” He shot back the bourbon and poured a third.

  Viernan eyed him quizzically.

  Trell looked up as he was pouring. “You and I both know I’m not leaving this room alive. Whatever you and that wielder have planned for me, I’d rather not be sober for it.” He saluted Viernan with his glass, then drank deeply of its contents.

  Viernan considered him, studied the currents of elae surrounding him. The prince both believed what he said and rejected it at the same time. Curious. He watched Trell circumspectly.

  “You no longer think Cephrael is watching over you?”

  Trell held his gaze, quite sober despite the copious amount of drink he was imbibing. “On the contrary, Consul, I’ve never believed anything so strongly.” He drained half his glass and added with a grim smile, “But we never know when the gods are finished with us, do we?”

  Viernan couldn’t help the sneer that claimed his lip. “Run out of saving angels? No more drachwyr waiting in the wings? No zanthyrs to orchestrate a daring escape?”

  “You forgot gods delivering me t
o safer shores.” Trell downed the rest of his drink and poured a fourth.

  This urgency to paralyze his senses was the only indication that the prince feared the coming events, the only hint that he suspected what Viernan had in store for him.

  Yet Trell would never understand the horror Viernan was ultimately sparing him. He wished the prince might’ve heard Dore’s diatribe about the necessity to leash the strong. Then, perhaps, he might’ve recognized the mercy in his decision.

  Viernan held Trell’s gaze with his own dark one and sipped his bourbon. “You understand, of course...Khor Taran, Darroyhan...these offenses cannot go unpunished.”

  “Yes, I think that goes without saying.” Trell swirled his drink, looking contemplative. “Who put me in the cell with the dying wielder? You, or Madden?”

  “I did.”

  Trell nodded as if this confirmed his own suspicions. He sank back against the sofa and studied Viernan while Viernan studied him. After a time, the prince seemed to make some new connection through their consequential stares, for he dropped a smile to the glass he held in his lap.

  “Of all things...” he shook his head, “that’s really surprising.”

  Viernan’s gaze smoldered. “Very well, I will bite. What is so surprising, Prince of Dannym?”

  Trell lifted his eyes to meet Viernan’s again. “You found faith.”

  Viernan’s expression darkened, for this intimate truth was one he’d barely claimed for himself. Hearing it from the mouth of a man he’d called an enemy for so long—Huhktu’s bones, his self-restraint only went so far.

  He stood and stared down at the prince. “Then you know I am sincere when I say, this faith you have in Cephrael...hold to it, for there is nothing more I can do.”

  With that, Viernan dropped his wards and cast a calling on the fourth.

  Trell set his glass on the table and stood. “Thank you for the bourbon.”

  Viernan exhaled resignedly. “Even poisoned tea would not have helped you.” He walked towards the windows, yearning to be elsewhere.

  “I can feel it, you know.”

  Viernan looked back to him.

  “The compulsion he has on me.” Trell doused his glass one last time. He was starting to look slightly unsteady. “I can’t remember it, but I can tell that he’s already been at me. I know I wouldn’t be able to lift a finger to harm myself or anyone here. I can’t even make myself think about escaping. Your messages have been pretty clear. His take a lot of working through.” He took up the drink and stared at the amber fluid. “He has a twisted sense of irony, your friend Madden.”

  Viernan looked back to the view. “You have no idea, Trell.”

  “I have some.” He pushed a lock of hair back from his face. “A glimpse of what lies in store. Enough to know this is your way of showing me mercy.”

  Viernan spied him circumspectly again. “I cannot decide if it is truly deserved.”

  Trell cracked a smile. “But it’s not for my sake that you’re doing it, Viernan.” He shot back the bourbon and set the glass down.

  Viernan’s expression darkened again. The prince was far too intuitive for his own bloody good.

  Whereupon Dore marched into the room, trailing two Marquiin. He waggled a finger at the prince. “Take him.”

  They fanned out to either side of Trell. He posed no resistance when they took his arms. There was no man so docile as one Dore Madden had sunk his claws into.

  “Do it here, Dore.” Viernan turned from the window to face the other wielder. He no more wanted to watch this horror than experience it himself, but he trusted Dore Madden about as much as a zanthyr and perhaps a shade more than Thrace Weyland.

  Dore glowered at him.

  Yes, Dore had surely made other plans for Prince Trell val Lorian, despite their arrangement. The moment Trell left Viernan’s sight was the moment that the arrangement would go by the wayside.

  “Viernan, be reasonable,” Dore protested. “It is much better done—”

  “Where I can see you do it!” Viernan snapped. “Now get on with it. Or do you fear your compulsion and two Marquiin inadequate to hold the prisoner?”

  Dore riffled all over. He moved closer to Trell and took his unresisting jaw with a bony hand, looked him up and down. The hairs on the back of Viernan’s neck roused in disgust—the better looking, the stronger the man, the more Dore lusted to break him down.

  “This is a tragic misuse of potential, Viernan,” Dore whined while practically salivating over the prince. “I’ve long said to you that being too craven and prideful to eliminate the val Lorians was a mistake you’d regret.” He turned an agate stare over his shoulder while still gripping Trell’s jaw. “Dignity and pride, these are poisons of the spirit that dilute the First Law—long have I told you this. But now...” he looked back to Trell and ran his pink tongue along his bottom lip, “now we have a chance to truly profit from your mistakes...”

  Viernan well knew the only one likely to profit from using Trell val Lorian was Dore, whereas Viernan would profit from the prince’s sacrifice, and perhaps others would also.

  “...to make huge strides against our enemies, Viernan,” Dore was grousing meanwhile, “if only you could regurgitate some courage out of that cowardly gullet of yours.”

  Viernan spied him coldly. He might’ve been there as Dore’s honored guest, much against his will, but he wasn’t completely powerless.

  The moment Dore began working his pattern of changing on the prince, Viernan would use the tumult caused in the currents to cover his own small working of the fifth—a meaningless pattern in itself, but it would prove a card of calling on elae’s currents.

  He exhaled soured patience. “Now, Dore Madden, or I recall my prince’s navy from the north and to Belloth’s hells with your plot with Morwyk.”

  Dore cursed profusely at him.

  ***

  Trell stood locked in the cage of his own mind. He knew what was coming—had known it since he saw the dying wielder and realized the reason he’d been put there to watch him die.

  He wanted to fight them, but he couldn’t make his arms move to action. He wanted to roar in outrage, but the emotion wouldn’t rouse its listless head from its paws. He ached to defy the horror soon to be worked upon him, but the ache merely compounded in his chest, dragging its limp weight onto his lungs, making it impossible to breathe.

  So he stood immobile between the two men, whose faces were tightly shrouded in grey silk, breathing shallowly, hamstrung by compulsion and ragged with the tension of it all, his expression as twisted as the reins on his mind.

  The wielder was furious. He snarled a stream of invective at hal’Jaitar before taking Trell’s face roughly between his bony fingers again. They felt like pincers around his jaw.

  Madden’s eyes were so sunken and shadowed by his brow that even up close it was difficult to tell their color.

  “I would have made you glorious—even more glorious than your brother, my Işak’getirmek.” Madden licked his spidery lips with contemplation, while those agate eyes bore into Trell’s, hateful and gleaming. “Now you will be fodder for their defeat. Or...perhaps find your use in mockery, evidence of the futility of their efforts. We shall see...” he looked Trell over again while still painfully, angrily gripping his face. “We shall see.”

  Trell understood why hal’Jaitar was orchestrating this fate for him. The wielder thought it a mercy, thought that a golem halflife was preferable to becoming Dore Madden’s puppet.

  He could almost find agreement in it, almost see a route towards gratitude—of a fashion—but there was no real choice in either option, no lesser of two evils, only a path that would’ve made his bones tremble had he been able to feel the fear.

  Not feeling it made his mind scream.

  Then the wielder took Trell’s head firmly between his hands and mumbled incomprehensible words. All the fires of heaven and hell descended upon him, and very soon, his voice was screaming, too.

  Forty-nine
/>
  “You build a prison of your decisions

  and throw away the key.”

  –Phaedor, to his sister Vaile

  The zanthyr Vaile crouched on a snow-bitten rock at the mountain’s summit. An icy wind wailed a dirge as it swirled through the peaks and down the long haul of a silent glacier. Vaile’s raven hair danced in wild designs to the wind’s haunting melody, but her body remained motionless, still as the stone frozen beneath the ice, watching. She would not again be taken by surprise.

  Vaile still couldn’t believe that Darshanvenkhátraman had waltzed right into the First Lord’s sa’reyth without either herself or Mithaiya being the wiser. And what had followed was even harder to comprehend—the drachwyr banished through an act of treason and Mithaiya left alone to anchor the tapestry?

  Now Mithaiya had gone to chase down the culprits while Vaile stayed to defend the sa’reyth, but with the First Lord always in T’khendar, Vaile’s only news now came from the Nodefinders in the adjoining valley, or what she could glean from her brothers’ minds during their infrequent conversations.

  She’d never felt so disconnected from the game, so isolated in her role as protector. Information flowed in on a trickle, and the waters were never sweet.

  Vaile should’ve been the one hunting down the wielder to be punished, the one scouring the tapestry for signs of his thread, the one claiming retribution on the part of Balance and the First Lord’s game. Such was supposed to be her role.

  But she’d exhausted herself into unconsciousness trying to escape Darshan’s doughy net, and she still hadn’t regained her strength from that encounter. How could she be expected to, with a dark nebula churning at her core? She wondered if she would ever reclaim the strength she’d once possessed.

  Well...you wanted it this way, didn’t you?

  Did she? Rarely in these times did she know what she really wanted. She wasn’t sure she wanted anything at all, save to see him...

  But the words were shy children afraid to escape the safety of their mother’s skirts. Even the tears burning the backs of her eyes couldn’t make them take shape.