The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  “I’m not dead.” The thief grabbed Fynn’s arm and hauled him to his feet.

  Fynn swooned.

  Now that he was conscious to feel it, his head was pounding as bad as if half of his brain had been torn out by a troll. He gingerly fingered the knot on the back of his skull and scowled around in the darkness.

  The storm had calmed to a steady rain. The fires had all gone out. He couldn’t see much beyond Kardashian’s death-mask leer and wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t dead himself.

  What the hell had happened?

  Fynn angled the thief a determined scowl. “I saw you die. Explain that, Signore Death Come Knocking.”

  “We’ve got no time for your melodrama, Prince of Thieves. The sa’reyth is gone. The weldmap is gone. The generator’s gone, and Gannon’s gone, so we’ve gotta get gone, too.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? How can the sa’reyth be gone?”

  In one swift motion, Fynn stepped back and drew his sword—which seemed to have bizarrely but quite handily found its way back into his scabbard—and leveled it at Kardashian. “I watched you die, ghost. Explain.”

  Kardashian sighed. He turned an I-told-you-so glower off into the darkness.

  A moment later, Devangshu emerged into the glow of the candlelight. “We were hoping to save explanations for later, Fynnlar, seeing as how it’s already been hours since they left and time actually is of the essence.”

  Fynn took another large step backwards. “I watched you die, too. This is some demon trick, isn’t it?” He spun a stare at Kardashian, sure he was the demon in question.

  Devangshu looked pained. “Fynnlar, if you would just come with us—”

  “And get lured down to the next level of hell? No, right here will do just fine for your explaining.”

  “Just tell him and be done with it,” Kardashian groused. “The other way will take too long.”

  Devangshu gave the thief a frustrated look. “You’re not helping.”

  “I told you we should’ve just let him stay unconscious.”

  “And I said only if you’re volunteering to carry him.”

  “Tell me what, dead men?” Fynn looked expectantly between the two of them.

  Devangshu retorted testily, “We’re not dead. Gannon was crafting an illusion to fool Consuevé.”

  It sounded just eccentric enough to be plausible. Fynn lowered his sword from I’m-about-to-spear-you-through to I’m listening-but-you’d-better-not-try-anything. “Illusion, huh? All right, spill.”

  Devangshu pushed damp hair from his eyes, exchanged a look with Kardashian, who shrugged. “After Carian rescued us from the guild hall in Rethynnea—”

  “He rescued you?” Fynn interrupted indignantly. “I’ll have you know I played a major role in that rescue!”

  Devangshu worked the muscles of his jaw. “After you and Carian rescued us from Rethynnea, Carian told us that he suspected Consuevé would be coming after us again. He thought it was only a matter of time before he found his way here.”

  “The bastard was getting inside information somewhere, sure as silver,” Kardashian inserted.

  Fynn frowned. “Fine, so Gannon was working an illusion...that doesn’t account for how I saw some ugly-faced bloke impale you through the heart.”

  “That bloke was Gannon,” Kardashian said. “When the bastards first invaded us, Bair spotted the guy closet to his own size. We killed him first. Then Gannon wove an illusion around himself to look like that guy.”

  Devangshu said, “The more moving parts to an illusion, Fynnlar, the harder it is to make it believable. It would’ve been very difficult to cast an illusion over everyone in the tent to make them think we all died when we didn’t.”

  Kardashian nodded. “Better to just impersonate one man with an illusion, and as that man, pretend to kill us while we pretend to die.”

  Devangshu blew out his breath. “You nearly sent the plan all to hell when you attacked Gannon.”

  “Ledio had to knock you out,” Kardashian added, “then let Gannon appear to kill him and fall on top of you so Consuevé’s goons didn’t get too interested in the fact that you weren’t dead.”

  Fynn wasn’t so sure about the not dead part. His head was really pounding.

  But between the serious illness he’d recently contracted called sobriety and Ledio’s blow to the back of his skull, he was starting to see things more clearly than any self-respecting inebriate had a right to.

  Fynn fingered the knot on his head again. “You said Consuevé took the generator and the weldmap. Carian’s going to keelhaul us for losing those.”

  Kardashian clapped a hand on Fynn’s arm. “This was all Carian’s idea, mate.”

  Since the thief was somehow related to Carian, Fynn was inclined to believe him.

  “Even so, we took heavy losses,” Devangshu said. “Five dead and Ledio might lose a thumb.”

  “Bummer,” Fynn said, meaning it. He looked around. “So where are they?”

  “We attended to them while you were getting your beauty rest,” Kardashian grumbled. “What did you think we’d been doing?”

  Devangshu waved him quiet. “Gannon went with Consuevé, still pretending to be that bloke, and Ledio followed. We’re supposed to meet up in Rethynnea, where we’ll hopefully find out where Consuevé and Niko’s goons have been making their headquarters.”

  Kardashian made a fast thrusting motion with his hand. “Then we can stab this hydra in the brain, so it can’t grow a new head.”

  Fynn supposed it was all sensibly nonsensical. He puffed a deflated exhale. “You could have told me the plan.” He sheathed his sword, scowling at them.

  Kardashian snorted. “A truthreader so much as breathes in your direction, mate, and you spill like a tart’s breasts from a too-tight corset.”

  Fynn eyed him tetchily. “That’s fair.”

  “Good. Now, can we please get going?” Devangshu started off, with Kardashian close on his heels.

  Fynn followed, mainly because Kardashian had the only light, and the darkness felt creepy and wrong, like it was watching them.

  Heading out into the rain, Fynn winced as the chill water met his flesh. He just couldn’t wrap his head around everything that had happened.

  The sa’reyth was gone?

  Who was going to make wine for him now?

  “But why is the sa’reyth gone?” He felt weak, probably from too much sobriety. And the rain pounding on his pounding head didn’t help at all.

  “We don’t know.” Devangshu pulled down his hood to keep the rain off his nose.

  “Consuevé said he brought a hundred men to fight Vaile,” Kardashian told Fynn, “but there’s no sign of any of them. Or the sa’reyth. The zanthyr, Consuevé’s goons, the tents—they’ve all just vanished.”

  Fynn swore.

  If the sa’reyth was gone and the zanthyr was gone, things really had gone from bad to worse. Vaile at least had procured wine for him when he needed it.

  Fynn clenched his jaw. “We can’t let Consuevé get away with this.”

  “I’m so glad to hear you say that, Fynnlar,” Devangshu said out of the darkness ahead of him, “because we’ll need your help.”

  “And it’s not Tuesday,” Kardashian muttered.

  Fynn’s wine-givers were in peril. Sobriety loomed like the Reaper, haunting his every waking breath.

  Until these wrongs of the world were rectified, every bloody day was a Tuesday.

  Fifty-three

  “The Sight only takes one to the threshold of the next choice.”

  –Isabel van Gelderan, High Mage of the Citadel

  Amithaiya’geshwyn flew beneath sunset skies, encased in the fifth and radiating the same simmering fury that had left a miles-long boiling lake of sand around Raku Oasis. At her back, the horizon was aflame. Before her spread a desert of twinkling stars beneath heavens of midnight blue.

  All around, the mortal tapestry fluttered.

  Mithaiya wasn’t merel
y anchoring the tapestry; she was anchoring her siblings in time. Without her presence in Alorin, the others would not have been able to find their way back to the same time stream, and the Mage would not have been able to find any of them.

  It wasn’t lost on her, this course of cause and consequence.

  Had she not encountered Darshanvenkhátraman at the Mage’s sa’reyth, had their altercation ended any other way than with her lying unconscious on an airless planet, she would’ve been at Raku with her siblings and been lost from this time along with them.

  And then all would’ve been lost.

  This providence heartened her in a difficult time, for it was proof in her mind that Darshan had changed his intent towards Alorin—whether or not he even knew this yet. Otherwise, events would have converged differently into the fateful instant, and Mithaiya would not have stayed behind to enable her siblings’ return.

  She wondered now if such a change of intent was what had driven Darshan to the sa’reyth to begin with. Mithaiya was still fuming over his presumption that day, but she admitted a sliver of forgiveness in light of current circumstances.

  For those she was hunting, she would be offering none.

  Mithaiya had long upheld the belief that interfering in the lives of men was courting disaster. Such involvement placed one an immortal like herself squarely upon the mortal tapestry, and this usually resulted in dire consequences for the mortals.

  Rhakar walked the fabric with seeming impunity; likewise the Mage’s zanthyr—they’d learned how to maneuver among that forest of pitfalls—while Mithaiya had always set a more prudent course around the forest’s edge. But a foul pattern had been worked upon her siblings, and she would not be able to skirt the wood this time if she meant to find those behind the act.

  She’d lost count of the weeks she’d been flying, of the number of times she’d watched the sun labor through its arc in the heavens. She floated on elemental tides, buoyed by kinetic drift, magnetized between ley lines to hold her position over the vast swath of desert and mountains that was M’Nador and Saldaria. Viernan hal’Jaitar could not have fled much farther than this with his prince without leaving a mark, and all of the currents in that part of the continent flowed downstream to her location.

  She needed only a glimpse of the wielder on the currents to hone in on his position. If he worked the lifeforce at all, she would be able to find him.

  Of course, Viernan knew this, also. Theirs was a game of cat and mouse, but when the mouse came out of its hole at last, it would find a dragon waiting on its threshold.

  While the land slept, the currents of elae washed along in kaleidoscopic color—bronze, rose and iridescent silver, representing the second, first, and fourth strands respectively—but that night, it was the glorious fifth that finally carried the pattern she’d been hunting.

  Mithaiya roused from her trance of multiple awareness to latch onto the trace of that gilded pattern. She followed its course back to the source, and it led to...

  Ivarnen.

  Mithaiya dove out of the kinetic eddy on a comet course to the north.

  ***

  The compound trunk that Ean had identified as Alyneri’s thread in the pattern of consequence represented two Players—Aly and someone else Ean had yet to identify.

  The Players’ threads intersected and entwined yet remained uniquely their own; dual limbs in a spiral trunk. From each limb, vines of consequence leapt outwards, seemingly disparate, yet only as separate as can be the branches of a single tree.

  That tree was changing before Ean’s eyes.

  Vines of cause and effect one moment were, and then were not, their patterns fading even as new ones unfurled.

  Was the other Player’s thread bound to Alyneri’s? Or was her thread bound to the other Player’s? It was difficult to trace back to the point the two merged, though clearly they’d once been separate threads, now interwoven.

  It was the other Player’s thread that concerned Ean at the moment.

  He’d learned the tells of certain patterns—which ones introduced chaos, disorder, confusion, and which ones balanced the equation.

  The vines of the other Player’s thread were starting to fray. As a result, the more distant vines, the ones that represented a greater alignment towards order, were beginning to fade. The entire limb and all of its ramifications had become—

  Dare he say fragile?

  Endangered. That was Ean’s sense of it.

  Suddenly it hit him with a powerful tremor of understanding.

  Ean reached for Absolute Being.

  Fifty-four

  “What you resist you become.”

  –Fourth Law of Shadow

  Shortly after sunset, a rented coach dropped off Tanis, Pelas and the Eltanese at the gates of the Satrap’s palace, where they joined the procession of elegantly dressed guests making their way down the promenade.

  Pelas had acquired them courtly robes in violet and blue and himself wore his signature damask in burnished gold. The coat flowed almost to his toes.

  All of them wore their own clothes beneath the loose robes, which was only practical, and Tanis had their weapons and the weldmap secured in the stanza segreta that his mother had attached to his Sormitáge rings, which was clearly prudent. He also wore his Nodefinder’s ring stacked on his fourth finger instead of his pointer finger, but that was just being cautious.

  After they passed beneath the towering gates, the promenade split to either side of a reflecting pool a quarter-mile long. Many guests were going left, but Pelas guided them to the right.

  Running the length of the promenade, banded columns of black and white marble supported braziers burning with red flames, while red jade lions set at intervals along the pool cast jets of water from their mouths to meet the larger fountains in the center.

  To either side of the wide road they were following, decorative alabaster lamps gave off a steady, golden light unlike normal wielder’s lamps or brighteyes. Tanis studied them. Then he studied them on the currents. Then he searched for patterns in their construction.

  “It’s air.” He darted a glance at Pelas. “But how are the lamps making air burn? I can see the pattern but not what it’s doing.”

  Pelas said, “The lamps aren’t burning the air. They’re making it glow, using the fifth.”

  “That must make these very old.” Faroqhar was the only city he knew of that had operational devices incorporating the fifth in their construction.

  “And very rare,” Pelas agreed.

  Gadovan said in a low voice, “It looks like the things you heard about the Furie’s interest in antiquities were correct, lad.”

  “Let’s hope the rest of his guesswork is, too,” Jude commented. “I’m not so keen to sit in an Avataren prison waiting on a rescue that might never come.”

  Mat clapped a consoling hand on his shoulder. “On the plus side, they may allow you a conjugal, which could help with your extraordinarily long dry spell.”

  Jude angled him a devious smile. “I think it’s time you questioned your sister about meeting me in Dreamscape.” When Mat opened his mouth to argue, Jude’s smile turned devilish. “Ask her if you don’t believe me.”

  Tanis imagined that if Mat’s sister looked anything like Mat, she had to be beautiful. Only, he didn’t really have to imagine what she looked like, because Jude was thinking about his time with her quite loudly.

  Tanis said apologetically to Mat, “Your sister is lovely.”

  Mat scowled.

  Gadovan clapped a hand on Jude’s shoulder. “The way I understand it, these people would just enslave us. No sense letting a perfectly good Nodefinder waste away in gaol.”

  “That’s our captain,” Mat muttered. “Always seeing the bright side.”

  Tanis was glad they were making light of the danger. He knew the Eltanese weren’t the most cautious of companions—they’d cut their teeth in their craft by dredging illegal ley lines through the aether between worlds—but he was asking th
em to place enormous trust in his ability to read the shifting tides of Balance.

  ‘Pray for more donkeys but keep the one you’ve got.’

  Farshideh used to say this to Tanis, usually as she was shoving a pair of kitchen shears into his hand and pushing him out the door to cut herbs for his lady’s infirmary. Tanis had never figured out what that proverb meant, but he thought it was something on the order of pray for the best, plan for the worst, which was exactly what he was doing.

  That is, praying. A lot of praying.

  It’s a solid plan, little spy. Pelas cast him an amused eye.

  Maybe, but as they say, a plan is only good until the first arrow is fired.

  Pelas clasped hands behind his long coat as they strolled the promenade. Hmm...what was the Fourth Law again? Something about positive determinism being needed to achieve the effect you intend—

  Yes, I take your point. Tanis aimed a grin in his general direction. You sound like my mother.

  And if I may be so bold as to put words in Isabel’s mouth, she would remind you that you are her son.

  Another massive gilded gate separated the promenade from the palace proper. Eight portals opened through the wrought gold, each door wide enough to allow a coach to pass through. Guards in ornate lamellar armor were directing guests through the portals.

  As Tanis neared, he saw a shimmering veil covering each opening. Guests would pause within the veil, answer a question from the attendant standing there, and then step through.

  “It’s some kind of subtle compulsion screen that requires you to tell the truth,” Tanis murmured to the others, “but there’s something else in it, too. I can’t tell everything it’s doing.”

  “Guess we’re about to find out,” Mat said cheerfully, “especially Jude, who apparently can’t tell the truth to save his life.”

  “Just ask her, Mat.”

  Mat spun and hissed, “You’d better hope she doesn’t give me the answer you’re implying—”

  “Play nice, boys,” Gadovan murmured.

  As they watched, a man standing within the shimmering veil responded to a question from the attendant standing beyond it. Abruptly, the entire veil flashed with wavering red energy. Guards rushed forward and took hold of the man, who protested loudly as they dragged him off.