The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Next it was Pelas’s turn. He moved forward. The veil shifted from faint blue to silvery-white, like the ones screening the na’turna on the left side of the promenade.

  Not that Tanis found this surprising. Pelas had spent centuries concealing his nature from the Empress of Agasan and the most able Sormitáge maestros. A screen made by modern-age wielders didn’t have a hope in thirteen hells of perceiving his true nature.

  The man behind the veil wore robes of tangerine silk and a flashing collar of citrine stones interspersed with carnelian lions. The wide collar fanned out a handspan beyond his throat and might’ve been beautiful if not for all of the patterns woven through it.

  He had the long nose, high cheekbones and deep brown skin common to the desert peoples of Avatar, and he gazed neutrally at them through a truthreader’s colorless eyes.

  “Your name, please?” he said, seeming neither bored nor especially interested in Pelas’s response.

  “Immanuel di Nostri.”

  The Adept paused for the space of an inhaled breath, then broke into a smile that might’ve looked sincere had it made it all the way to his colorless eyes. “Welcome back, Sardaar di Nostri. My master is honored that you grace his gala tonight and looks forward to meeting you in person. He’s heard much about you. Please proceed to your left.”

  Tanis watched Pelas heading off to wait for them and swallowed. The truthreader looked to him. “Please step beneath the veil and lower any mental shields.”

  Tanis stepped beneath the veil. It immediately turned bright blue. He felt the energy trying to penetrate his mental shields like cold water seeping through a heavy woolen cap. He wouldn’t be lowering them under any circumstances.

  “State your name.”

  “Tanis di Adonnai of Agasan,” he said with his heart pounding.

  The Adept stood still with an unfocused stare for an uncomfortable span of heartbeats—quite a bit longer than he had with Pelas. Tanis resisted the urge to look at Pelas or over his shoulder at the Eltanese.

  Eventually the Adept refocused upon him. “My Furie asks what brings a stacked truthreader from a mythical province in Agasan to his doors on this night.”

  Tanis blinked, caught off guard. He hadn’t anticipated that the Furie might recognize the valley of his birth or know the legends surrounding it. And he certainly hadn’t expected that the Furie could see through his truthreader’s eyes to notice he was wearing two Sormitáge rings on the same finger.

  Rallying his resolve, Tanis held a hand to the waiting Eltanese. “My companions and I bring a precious artifact for the Furie’s appreciation and request an audience at his leisure.”

  The Adept gave another of those vacant pauses, then replied, “That is acceptable. Have you concealed upon your person any item that might be used as a weapon?”

  “No,” Tanis answered, which was technically true—the weapons themselves were stored in his coach; only the rings connecting to the coach were on his person.

  The humming veil maintained its calm, bluish light.

  “My Furie welcomes you, Tanis di Adonnai, and looks forward to viewing your artifact. Proceed to your right. Next in line step forward please...”

  Tanis hadn’t realized how big the Furie’s palace was until the four of them reached the top of a wide staircase and the next promenade, which ran a lengthy runway through multiple terraced gardens to reach the palace itself. Jude was complaining mightily under his breath by the time they’d climbed to the top of all those terraces.

  They entered a courtyard large enough to hold a thousand people. This courtyard opened into another one that was even larger, which in turn led to a hall even larger than that, and all of them hosted display cases with the Furie’s collection of antiquities.

  Here sat the crown jewels of an extinct kingdom. There stood a squad of copper mannequins dressed in ancient robes and armor. More items and artifacts were scattered everywhere in between. Docents dressed in tangerine silk stood by every station waiting to describe their contents in multiple tongues.

  The mix of peoples, races and languages assaulted Tanis’s senses as much as the overwhelming display of food and drink beckoned to them—from the scent of roasted boar, to small fountains bubbling with melted chocolate or sparkling wine, to the incredible host of other delicacies too numerous to name.

  Guests were either directed to partake from the mile-long table on the left side of the grand hall or the mile-long table on the right side, depending on their caste. Outwardly, it could’ve been interpreted as a gesture of equality, for surely the delicacies were just as delicate no matter which table you ate from; but the Avatarens didn’t guard their thoughts, and Tanis heard the truth clearly enough.

  Our Furie is so rich that in his domain, even the untouchables eat like kings.

  There were hundreds of foreign Adepts in attendance, all of them dutifully eating from the tables on the right side of the hall—

  ‘Like dogs at a pile of kitchen scraps,’ Tanis overheard one Avataren thinking.

  —and even though many na’turna also partook from these same tables, and even though Adepts intermingled throughout the hall, the guests from Avatar’s upper castes never crossed to the right side of the room.

  Thousands of people mixed and mingled, yet there remained a pervasive sense of segregation, a clear separation, and the disturbing feeling that some lives were far less valuable than others.

  The abundance of collared Adepts—like the truthreader at the gate—who passed among the crowd made Tanis feel hunted. Every eye in the room seemed to be watching him, either with disdain or speculation, perhaps as to how much gold he might fetch in Avatar’s slave market.

  Every Avataren Adept wore a collar. Tanis could see patterns clinging to the jewels, woven into the designs fashioned in the colors of whatever Furie or lord the Adept served.

  He could tell the collars bound the Adepts beneath certain compulsions—probably limiting their powers, assuredly their freedom—and he’d witnessed already how the collars operated as a bonded channel to the Adept’s master. It chilled Tanis to realize that the only people capable of constructing those collars were the ones who were wearing them.

  And this was hardly the worst of the indignities he saw there.

  The Avatarens gave Adepts a wide berth, even the ones dressed more richly than themselves. The ebb and flow of the crowd on the left side of the palace was entirely governed by the motion of Adept traffic moving through it.

  What Tanis found most objectionable about this was the way these Adepts seemed resigned, or even oblivious, to their degradation. They smiled, they intermingled, they were deferential or reverent when politeness called for it. He never saw them look appalled at being shunned, or dismayed by the contempt directed at them.

  He saw Adepts driven to their knees by a single condemning look from their master, and others forced to stand there, shedding soundless tears, while obviously experiencing an agonizing reprimand for some perceived wrong.

  Tanis supposed if you were raised as a worthless animal, you would only think it normal to be treated like one, but it wasn’t a truth he could easily stomach.

  It took Tanis and the others the better part of an hour to reach the hall where the food was being served, and not a one of them spoke the entire time—not even in their thoughts.

  When they did finally stop and partake of the Furie’s generosity, as it were, Tanis and the Eltanese drained their first glasses in unison. Pelas sipped his, but his copper eyes were dark embers beneath a layer of char.

  Three sets of doors the size of hills opened off the hall on each side. Two sets opened into smaller halls, while the third remained closed but for an inset door which opened to admit guests arm in arm with men or women who could only be courtesans in the Furie’s employ.

  “What now?” Gadovan murmured, looking around. You would never know from looking at him the loaded spring of tension he was holding in check.

  For his part, Tanis felt unease stitched i
n cross-hatches through his form.

  Pelas sipped his wine. “Now we wait on the Furie’s pleasure.”

  Mat blew out his breath. “That could be a while.”

  Tanis was struggling to wrap his head around everything he’d seen. “Was it like this when you were here before?”

  “No.” Pelas’s gaze reflected shades of concern mingled with a cold-simmering disapproval. “The Furie I knew was a reasonable man who saw the flaws in Avatar’s social structure. He was as bound by it as the Adepts, yet he sought ways to...soften the relationship. This goes beyond anything I’ve witnessed.”

  “The Council of Realms would impose deep censures if they knew,” Gadovan said. “Enslaving any race is a violation of their consensus on human rights.”

  “Alshiba Torinin has unfortunately been occupied with larger issues of late,” Pelas murmured, and Tanis could tell he was thinking of himself and his brothers as the objects of her focus.

  Jude meanwhile kept eyeing the inset door at the far end, and the steady flow of lovely women moving through it. “Do you think—”

  “No,” Mat and Gad said together.

  With a glance that acknowledged everyone’s disquiet, Pelas set them in motion, and they strolled past one of the smaller halls, where easily a hundred tables each hosted four seated players. Hundreds of other guests feathered the edges of the room, observing the games or waiting for a turn at the tables.

  The game at the tables involved small ivory tiles, etched on one side with different shapes and animals and on the outward-facing side with a red lion, the Furie’s own insignia. The players appeared to be trying to match the tiles to other tiles laid in the center of the table, though Tanis couldn’t see rhyme or reason to some of the matches.

  Some tables had tiles stacked in uneven pyramids, while others snaked in twisting designs. At unpredictable intervals, every player seated around a table would get up and move counter-clockwise, claiming an opponent’s stool, and, ostensibly, his hand.

  From the gaming room, they passed through an archway into a ballroom where the dancing was well under way. Couples occupied the floor without any particular attention to the gender of their partners.

  It was so...odd, these dichotomies of freedoms and subjugations.

  “So what’s your opinion of Avatar thus far, Tanis?” Gadovan asked casually, though meaning aplenty underscored his tone.

  Tanis looked to him. “Is my expression that obvious?”

  “Either that, or someone pissed in your wine.” Mat came up on his other side, equally frowning at the sea of dancers.

  Every one of the five hundred plus guests in that ballroom were either bound Adepts, foreign Adepts or Adept sympathizers—a term Tanis had overheard too many times to count. There wasn’t a single Avataren in sight, leastwise not from the upper castes.

  “I’ve been to a lot of places where I knew I wasn’t welcome,” Mat said, low and tight, “but this just might top them all.”

  “The sooner we can get out of here, the better,” Jude said by way of agreement. He assessed the dancing couples with a speculative gaze. “Doesn’t it feel like every step is just leading us deeper into the funnel of someone’s web? Add a few more poisonous smiles to the mix and we could be in Illume Belliel.”

  The dancers turned and whirled. Faces passed in and out of focus. Between one set of twirling men, Tanis spotted a face that made him instantly stiffen.

  He stared at the place he’d seen the face, waiting for the dancers to move out of the way again. It took another stanza of the song before a visual path cleared, but the Vestian was still standing there, leaning an elbow on a mantelpiece, sipping his drink. Clearly watching them.

  “It’s the same man.” Tanis felt unease uncoiling inside him.

  “Who?” Gadovan scanned the crowd.

  “That man, there.” Tanis flashed a visual image across their bond to help the Eltanese spot the stranger through the crowd. “It’s the same Vestian from the inn.” Tanis shook his head. “There’s something off about that man.”

  “You can barely see him under all those tattoos,” Jude smirked.

  “It could just be a coincidence, lad,” Mat offered reasonably.

  Tanis exhaled a slow breath. “I just get the feeling that he’s here for the same reason we are.”

  “For the gala,” Mat said as if this proved his point.

  Tanis looked to him. “Because Pashmir was the nearest city to where the weld was supposed to be.”

  He looked back to the Vestian and met his gaze through the shifting masses of swirling forms. The hint of a dark smile curled one corner of the Adept’s mouth, appeasing, even tolerant in a wicked sort of way, as though he knew Tanis was shoving through the smoke in his head and also knew he would asphyxiate long before he found anything.

  The Vestian arched brows and nodded significantly to Tanis just as a woman said from behind them—

  “Immanuel?”

  They all turned at the address.

  When Tanis glanced back again, the Vestian had vanished. So the lad returned his attention to the woman standing behind them.

  She was stunningly beautiful. The tangerine silk of the nobility made her dark hair shine vibrantly. Long, heavy curls draped across one shoulder, the whole elegantly affixed with citrine stones. Her complexion was dark honey, her eyes the pale aquamarine of a winter sky. She wore a necklace of rubies and citrines—not an Adept collar—yet Tanis sensed the first strand all about her.

  Pelas looked genuinely startled to see her. “Gemina.” He bowed to her radiance by kissing her hand.

  She tried to withdraw from his hold, glancing around. “You shouldn’t do that here.”

  He ran his thumb across her fingers. “Then you shouldn’t be so lovely.”

  “Immanuel—” an amused exasperation hinted in her smile, “what are you doing here?”

  “Attending a gala. And you?”

  Her eyes were marveling. “I...it’s been so long...most of us thought you’d relented and passed into the Returning.”

  “Most?”

  She flushed beneath the intensity of his gaze. “Well, I...thought I knew you better than most.”

  He blessed her with a dazzling smile. “I would say that you certainly did.”

  Seeing the images that poured through Pelas’s mind upon this recollection, Tanis became a bit flushed himself. He did his best to pull a curtain between his mind and Pelas’s out of deference to his bond-brother’s privacy.

  Gemina looked Pelas over with overtly admiring eyes, but beneath the surface of her expression, surprise commingled with uncertainty, and her thoughts were a confused static. “Does the Furie know you’re here?”

  “Apparently.” He angled her a look. “I didn’t expect to be recognized.”

  Gemina drew back, though not enough to extract her hand. “You didn’t expect him to know you? After—”

  Now her thoughts made Tanis blush.

  He dropped his gaze to his toes, wishing he could as easily divert the images flooding out of her mind as he could avert his gaze. He tried shunting off the deluge but only succeeded in accidentally relaying the whole caboodle on to the Eltanese, who quickly joined him in staring anywhere but at her.

  Pelas apparently gleaned more from her thoughts than just a recollection of the passion they’d once shared, because he sounded shocked as he replied, “You mean...Gabriel is still—”

  “No, not Gabriel. His son Luftan.”

  “Luftan.” The name clearly meant nothing to Pelas. He switched to Agasi so the Eltanese could understand their conversation—that language being a dialect of the lingua franca of Illume Belliel. “Gemina, may I present my companions: Tanis, Gadovan, Mathias and Jude. Gentlemen, this is Princess Gemina Anshirali of Pashmir.”

  They all bowed to her with appropriate murmurings. Tanis took the moment to dart the question, She’s a Healer but she’s not wearing a collar?

  She was born to a Furie’s line—above the law. Pelas’s thou
ghts reverberated with warning.

  “It is a pleasure to meet all of you,” she murmured politely while her gaze shouted, You should not have come here.

  Her thoughts whirled with uncertainty as she extracted her hand from Pelas’s, only to thread it through his arm instead. Casting a smile across the crowd, perhaps to cover her disconcertion, she led them further into the ballroom. Nervousness practically hummed in her wake.

  Gemina affected a tone of gaiety as she asked, “Immanuel, what must I do to convince you to tell my nephew who helped you achieve immortality?”

  Tanis got the impression she was asking this odd and rather astonishing question for the benefit of listening ears.

  Pelas arched a brow. “Immortality?”

  “Obviously someone helped you work the Pattern of Life.” Her tone was light, but Tanis perceived tension in the way she clung to Pelas’s arm, and her manner held a stiffness borne of long years spent living far from safe shores. “In all this time, you haven’t aged a day.”

  “Nor you, Gemina.”

  “But you know how I achieved it,” she replied with a consequential smile, while her gaze, traveling across Tanis and the others begged, Stay close and follow me.

  Verily, she cast the thought to Tanis directly, knowing he would hear her thoughts as well as her desperation.

  “The search for immortality has become something of an obsession of Luftan’s.” Gemina returned a smile to Pelas, full of apparent amusement, but Tanis could tell it was all for the benefit of those watching. Which was a considerable number by that point. The stunning princess walking arm in arm with Pelas? They drew a great deal of attention.

  “There is only one other na’turna artist as famously immortal as you,” Gemina continued breezily.

  “The Immortal Bard,” Pelas supplied.

  “Just so.” She looked him up and down with invitation in her gaze. “Drake di Matteo was just as silent about his benefactor as you are, though he purportedly dropped many confusing hints.”