The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Stefan sipped from his glass. “Can you succeed where others have failed? This is what I must know.”

  Her smile turned liquid. “All things may be achieved for the right price.”

  The first of his needs, he wasn’t sure even the Karakurt could manage. His own men had proven wholly inadequate to the task—especially the now-departed Lord Brantley, Earl of Pent, in whose study he was currently standing.

  “What is it you seek, Lord Duke?” She was still leveling him that knowing smile. “Or might I more accurately say, whom?”

  “Alyneri d’Giverny, Duchess of Aracine.”

  “Last seen with Dannym’s royal cousin Fynnlar val Lorian in Rethynnea.” She surprised him with her knowledge.

  “The duchess is my only insurance against the interference of Dareios of Kandori.”

  She gave him a predatory smile. “Consider it done.”

  Stefan slipped an arm around her waist and dragged her close. Her body was as absent of warmth as his own, but her curves felt right in all the important places. Shadows circled her eyes as she gazed up at him, faint beneath the powder that concealed her olive complexion.

  Stefan tossed back the last of his drink, then let the glass fall to the carpet while his throat flamed. Could she still read his thoughts with her talent siphoning out through every pore? He’d seen enough Marquiin to recognize the signs of the Prophet’s poisoning. He knew what the change of her eye color revealed.

  She lifted herself and closed her mouth over his. Her tongue probed seductively; her lips tasted of the drink. She removed his hand from her hip and pressed it to her breast. He squeezed obligingly.

  “We’re in far over our heads, Stefan,” she breathed at his ear. “You don’t know the morass you’ve stumbled into—witchlords and Warlocks, and wielders bearing immortal grudges.”

  Stefan found her nipple beneath the silk of her robe. He pinched it hard, feeling the rough nub rising along with his own need. “Is that a warning?”

  “A comment only.” Her breath was coming faster, in tune with his own. She slipped her hand inside his pants and made expert work of his desire. “There is more you want, Stefan, Duke of Morwyk. Tell me.”

  He had to focus to recall the answer, the second of his needs, which he believed she could manage without difficulty. “The witchlord you claim Madden reports to. I want to meet him.”

  If Madden failed him, perhaps the witchlord would not.

  “I will forward your request.” She pressed her lips to his ear while her hand continued stroking heat through his core—Stefan wondered how he could feel such burning when he knew himself to be so hollow.

  “Ah, but it is the hollow shaft where lies the strength,” she purred, quoting from the Book of Bethamin, while her hand continued teasing heat into his groin, the only part of him that still knew warmth. “How does the passage go? ‘Those whose cores have endured the erosion of contempt. Strengthened by their emptiness, they suffer not Man’s frail inconsistencies—love, happiness, connection, compassion. Absent such debilitating fragilities, they are elevated. They are already free, for they know in their scoured core that death is the only purposeful end.’”

  Her hand stilled as she finished the words, leaving him aching, burning, breathless. Her eyes lifted to meet his. “This is who we are, you and me.”

  He knew it for truth, as much as anything in the world could be true.

  “And the last thing you need?” she teased with lips and breath and stroking hand.

  The last thing, he knew she could provide in spades.

  Growling, Stefan ripped open the folds of her robe. Her skin was the color of dark honey. Her breasts hung ripely, the nipples large and hardened, begging for his mouth. He grabbed her and shoved her across the room towards the Earl of Pent’s desk.

  She gasped as he bent her backwards over the wood. “And my fee, Lord Duke?”

  “I’ll pay it,” he growled, ripping silk as he shoved her legs apart and himself between them. “Whatever it is.”

  She laughed, then cried out as he entered her. Every desirous utterance she offered him was like a fine drink, redolent of despair.

  Stefan drank it all.

  Fifty-two

  “Gold can buy everything but common sense.”

  –Yara, an old Kandori woman

  A tremendous clap of thunder shook the night, and Fynnlar val Lorian startled fully upright in his chair with his hand outstretched, gasping, “My wine!”

  Then, realizing his surroundings, he scowled.

  Wine had become an unpopular subject with him of late. The entire topic compounded indignity upon indignity, starting with weeks spent drinking Cassius’s bubbling travesty of a beverage and ending with Balaji getting himself ousted into some distant, unknown future.

  How could the drachwyr have been so utterly careless with his own welfare, especially knowing Fynn was depending on him for sustenance? He was going to have hard words with He Who Can’t Get His Priorities Straight when the drachwyr finally found his way back into the proper timestream.

  Thunder exploded directly overhead, startling Fynn again. The nearby tent poles trembled.

  Fynn had never heard thunder at the sa’reyth. It was a strange enough occurrence to make him sit up straighter in his chair.

  Technically, he had a room to himself at the sa’reyth and a cot assigned for his use in the tent where the Nodefinders crashed when their eyes and brains simply wouldn’t endure another minute upright, but Fynn had been fronting troubling dreams of zanthyrs ever since Vaile saved him from those daggers that his abdomen had inconveniently acquired in the Kutsamak, and sleep had accordingly lost its appeal. He spent most nights slouched in an armchair in the rebellion’s main pavilion and let his sword have the cot.

  Thus, he was in the perfect position to witness the intruders sneaking inside.

  The part of his brain that triggered his fight or flight response kicked him out of his chair, and he was running for his sword before the men fully materialized through the tent opening.

  Fynn careened around a corner right into Gannon Bair.

  The hirsute truthreader and leader of the Nodefinder Rebellion was bearlike in more ways than just body hair. Gannon’s tree-trunk arms grabbed Fynnlar as he rebounded off his chest and thus kept the royal cousin from bouncing backwards into yesterday.

  “Intruders!” Fynn hissed when he’d recovered himself.

  Gannon clutched Fynn’s arm. “We know. The others are coming.”

  A rumbling avalanche of thunder rolled across the camp. In its wake, the sky opened up and rain emptied down in a roar against the tent canvas.

  Gannon moved determinedly past him. Fynn ran for his sword.

  He reemerged in the main pavilion amid a smoky chaos. A brazier had been overturned and a rug was burning. Smoke choked the air.

  Near the open tent flaps, beyond which the rain poured in solid sheets, the thief Kardashian was holding his own against four goons wielding Merdanti blades. The intruders were like bees flying around, spraying rainwater as they tried to mark the thief.

  Near the glowing globe of the world grid that hovered in the pavilion’s center, Devangshu Vita and another Nodefinder were battling back to back, surrounded by a mass of intruders. To Fynn’s right, the Whisper Lord Ledio Jerouen was a force unto himself, holding off at least a dozen men by way of his daggered gloves.

  Gannon Bair was now nowhere to be seen.

  Fynn rushed to engage one of the closest intruders. He drove the man on the defensive towards the burning rug, while in the back of his mind, a voice kept demanding how in the hell Consuevé’s goons could’ve found their headquarters.

  Thunder pounded beneath the continuous drum roll of rain. The tent’s canvas flapped and strained against the wind.

  The air grew hotter and barely breathable the closer Fynn got to the fire, which was sucking a damp wind in through every orifice to fuel itself, and spreading madly.

  The man Fynn was fighting battled h
ard, but Fynn proved the better swordsman—despite being sober—and in short order he had him pinned between his flashing blade and the flames. One well-placed kick, and the man flew backwards into the boiling smoke.

  Fynn spun around, looking for his next opponent—

  Only to watch in horror as Kardashian staggered, clutching a spear lodged in his chest. The thief fell into a hanging map, which ripped from its supports and crumpled atop him.

  The man who’d speared Kardashian grabbed up a blade from the floor and made a beeline for Devangshu.

  Seeing red, Fynn sprinted in pursuit.

  The man barreled through the mass of intruders surrounding Devangshu, flinging his fellows hither and yon, and engaged Devangshu in a hard press, driving him back towards the glowing globe. Fynn had to fight his way through the men in chase.

  He’d just downed his third attacker when he heard a cry from Devangshu.

  Fynn elbowed one goon in the face and kicked another’s knees out from under him—he ensured he stayed down by putting his blade through the man’s gut—then he spun towards the sound...

  Only to watch Devangshu gripping a blade where it impaled his chest.

  Vita toppled.

  Fynn let out a murderous cry and charged Vita’s attacker.

  The man turned wearing an expression of dismay—and well he should. Fynn could be a fury when his veins were dry of drink. He slammed into the man—it was a bit like ramming an iron door; the man was a lot heftier than he looked—and they both went down into the smoke in a tangle of growls, splayed blades and bludgeoning fists.

  That is, until something hard met the back of Fynn’s head, and he snuffed out like a light.

  ***

  Demetrio Consuevé muttered a litany of curses in the name of zanthyrs as he stomped around, taking out his aggression on the dead grass and the mud.

  What in Tiern’aval had the she-cat done?

  He stood there being pounded by wind and rain in a space that should have—by all accounts and Leyd’s promises—housed the tents of Björn van Gelderan’s famous sa’reyth.

  But the bloody place was gone.

  The plateau where Demetrio, Dallen and the other men stood had certainly housed something. A great big something. Many tents-worth of something.

  The long grass of a wide space lay flattened into brittle straw, which flashed a sickly brown beneath the near-continuous lightning. In other places, the rain splashed into pools made in the bare mud.

  But of the many conjoined tents that supposedly housed luxuries and treasures beyond reckoning? Demetrio found nothing.

  He cursed again.

  He had to bring back something to show Leyd he’d been there...something other than Carian vran Lea’s head.

  Even more than vengeance, though, he’d wanted to sit in Björn van Gelderan’s chair—surely the man had a chair somewhere—and gaze out over his domain, wearing a smile of satisfaction. That smile was his due, damn it!

  But all he had to show for his efforts were muddy boots and a ruined hat. The latter was so soaked that its wide brim was drooping and its feather had become a waterlogged noodle that kept dripping water down inside his collar.

  Demetrio sniffed and wiped his eyes. “Belloth’s necrotic balls.” He swung a glare at Dallen, who was staring absently around like a gaoler who’d misplaced his keys. Demetrio shouted to be heard over the rain, “Dallen!”

  The man turned him a blank look.

  “What in Tiern’aval are you doing?”

  Dallen shoved dripping hair out of his eyes. “Did they move it?”

  “She moved it.” He’d half a mind to stalk back to the she-cat and slice her stem to stern just to assuage his irritation. But then he wouldn’t be there to see vran Lea and Gannon Bair strung up like pigs, and that was the main show he didn’t want to miss. “Come on,” he growled to Dallen. “There’s nothing here.”

  Demetrio stalked back down the hill towards the rebellion’s compound. In the distance, the pavilion tent was aglow—lit by a fire, if told from the black smoke leaking out the seams.

  Demetrio shoved his way through the long grass, which alternately fled from and attacked his legs, depending on the direction of the wind. Between the lightning and the lashing rain, he was starting to feel a bit henpecked and decidedly sullen, especially since Leyd would never let him live down getting bested by his sister Vaile even after Demetrio had skewered her.

  To rub salt in the wound, Demetrio had that itchy feeling between his shoulder blades, like someone was watching him. It was probably the she-cat. It didn’t sit well with him, leaving an enemy alive at his back, even if she was staked into the mud.

  Speaking of mud, it squished beneath his boots, making every step a potential slip. Lightning cut jagged scars through the heavens, illuminating boiling clouds that flickered constantly with greenish light.

  Dallen joined Demetrio’s side, staring warily at the sky. “The lightning’s weird,” he commented. “I don’t think this is a natural storm.”

  Demetrio angled him a disgusted stare. “You’re an idiot.”

  “About time you showed up,” said the man guarding the tent opening.

  Demetrio considered skewering him for his impudence—he was in a skewering kind of mood—but the sight inside brought such immediate cheer to his heart that he gave the bastard a magnanimous stare of pardon and shoved past him into the tent.

  Across the way, flames were consuming a large portion of rug and giving off clouds of smoke. The remainder of the tent housed a motley assortment of fallen bodies. But what really warmed Demetrio’s cockles was the slowly rotating illusion of a globe in the center of the space.

  He wandered towards the sphere of silvery blue lines, entranced, while his remaining men toed uninterestedly at the dead. He stopped beneath the globe and let out an amazed exhale. “Belloth blow me. They’ve got a bloody weldmap.”

  “And that’s D’Varre’s map generator,” Dallen said from behind him, noting the marble board on the other side of the globe.

  Smoke from the fire was stinging Demetrio’s eyes, which only intensified his eagerness to get back to Rethynnea now. With the map generator and an actual weldmap in hand, he could name any price he wanted from D’Varre and Dore Madden.

  But first...

  He blinked stinging eyes and peered around at his remaining men. From the count of them, three times as many must’ve been lying strewn upon the carpets. It soured his mood, realizing more of his own men were dead than the rebellion’s.

  “Where’s vran Lea?”

  “He wasn’t here,” one of his men said. Demetrio couldn’t remember his name. Peter or Pewter...his face looked like a turtle’s that got all smashed in. The bruise blooming around his right eye was an actual improvement.

  Demetrio grimaced. “Balls, man! You’ve got to be the ugliest bastard I’ve ever seen. What did you say about vran Lea?”

  “He wasn’t here. I got the Bemothi and the thief though.” Ugly Bastard hitched a split eyebrow, ostensibly towards said bodies over in the corner. “But none of us seen the pirate or the Hallovian.”

  “Vran Lea and Bair.” Demetrio sniffed. He really was getting a cold. And the damned storm wasn’t helping his health. “If they weren’t even here, why the hell are there only six of you?”

  “They had a Whisper Lord,” another guy said, like a Whisper Lord equated to a bloody siege engine.

  “So where is he now?”

  “I got him, too,” said Ugly Bastard. “He fell into the flames.”

  “You’re the bloody hero of the hour, huh?” Demetrio speared his gaze around at the other men. “A hundred men and I’m the one that has to skewer the she-cat while Ugly Bastard here does all the cleanup of the rebellion scum. What the hell did I bring the rest of you for?”

  They weren’t so stupid as to answer him, seeing as how he was in a skewering kind of mood.

  Demetrio sucked on a tooth and considered his options. He wasn’t keen to return without the t
wo rebellion leaders on the end of his rope, but the place was already going up in smoke, and losing their weldmap and generator would put a hefty chink in their resolve. Thirteen hells, these rebellion dogs hadn’t an Adept’s chance in Shadow of posing a threat to Niko now!

  Plus, the weldmap almost made up for missing Bair and vran Lea and would buy him a lot of clout with D’Varre. It certainly went a long way towards buoying his mood.

  Demetrio considered making the rounds to stab a few of the dead men a few more times, just for kicks, but it wouldn’t be good for the morale of the troops, because then they’d want to join in and that would take too long. Consuevé was tired of sloshing around, soaking wet.

  He trudged through the lower half of the glowing globe and snatched the weldmap off the generator. The illusion vanished. The tent pitched into darkness, save for the glow of the fire.

  Demetrio started rolling up the map. “One of you idiots get D’Varre’s generator.”

  Ugly Bastard and another guy attended to the task.

  Demetrio took one more look around. Then he shoved Dallen into the lead. “Get us the hell back to Rethynnea.”

  Dallen scowled over his shoulder at him. “I was nearly eviscerated by a zanthyr today. Why can’t you take us back?”

  Demetrio kicked him in the seat of his pants, and Dallen stumbled forward. “Why would I go to all that trouble when you already know the way?”

  Shooting him a black glare, Dallen stomped out into the rain, followed by the men carrying the marble map generator, and Demetrio, patting the weldmap bulging beneath his coat and smiling like the cat who ate the canary.

  He’d done good work that day—very nearly competent, even.

  ***

  Fynnlar gasped awake to find Kardashian’s salacious grin hovering over him like the face of death. All he saw was blackness, and that face, illuminated by a wavering candle the thief was holding.

  “Belloth’s balls,” Fynn cursed. “Am I dead too?”

  “You’re not dead yet, mate.” Kardashian offered his hand to Fynn.

  Fynn eyed it suspiciously. “You’re dead though, so if I take your hand...”