Sensational Six: Action and Adventure in Sci Fi, Fantasy and Paranormal Romance

by Sasha White

  When he said as much to Elin, her eyes lit up.

  “Of course! That has to be it!”

  At his puzzled look, she explained. “He altered the last line of the first book, right? So check the last line of this one.”

  “But I don’t know this one like I know Warriors. Even if he did change the last line, I’d have no way of knowing what that change was.”

  Elin waved off his protest impatiently.

  “You grew up in a scriptorium; surely you’ll be able to detect physical signs of alteration? And the pattern seems to be book titles you know, so that should make it relatively easy to pinpoint, even if you can’t ascertain where the changes were made.”

  Kord couldn’t fault her logic. Turning his attention back to the book, he flipped to the last page, and read the closing line.

  “In the end, the most difficult task that faces any man is not in understanding the difference between right and wrong; it is in acting wisely upon that understanding.”

  He frowned.

  “If there’s a book title in there, it’s not one I’m familiar with.” And though he examined the script carefully, he could see no signs of tampering.

  Elin leaned over to look at the words herself, the smell of her catching Kord off-guard as she did, suddenly strong in their close quarters, musky and yet somehow sweet. The scent of Pantheress, achingly familiar in a way he couldn’t define or deny. A way that made him ache in return.

  “I was so certain that was the key…” she murmured as her eyes scanned the page in vain for some hint as to Murdis’s clue. “Maybe it’s a different sort of message? Not a book, but something you need to do?”

  Kord laughed, and with that, Elin’s scent was no longer in his nostrils, tantalizing him with a longing he couldn’t begin to understand.

  “I’ve never been particularly good at acting wisely.”

  But even as the words left his mouth, he was struck abruptly by a memory of another time he’d said them. To Murdis, in this room, while arguing over this very book. This very line.

  It had been a few days before Kord had left the scriptorium—for good, he had thought at the time.

  A few days after Murdis had extracted all but the last soul-shard from him.

  “I’ve given you the tools, Kordell,” Murdis had said, his voice so much stronger then, his back so much straighter. “You know the difference between right and wrong. Use that knowledge wisely.”

  Kord had laughed then, too, but with considerably less humor.

  “By which you mean, do what you want me to do.”

  Murdis, his hair still full and red, had shrugged.

  “That would be the wisest course.”

  “Well, as you are so fond of reminding me, I’ve never been particularly good at acting wisely.”

  “No,” Murdis had said, and it seemed to Kord now that what he’d taken for arrogance then had really been resignation. Perhaps even sadness. “But you have always been good at following your heart. It will lead you on a more circuitous path, perhaps, but I have to believe you will wind up in the same place, regardless.”

  “Believe whatever you want, but I’m leaving and you’re not getting the last shard, and there’s nothing you are ever going to be able to do or say that will change that.”

  He’d been wrong, of course, and Murdis had been right, for here he was, in the very place the old man had always wanted him to be, trying to find a way to offer up the exact thing he’d fled from here to keep.

  “Tell me.”

  Elin’s soft words pulled him out of his reverie and he looked at her questioningly.

  “You’ve been somewhere else for the last few minutes, obviously remembering something. Tell me. It could help us figure out what the clue is.”

  So he did, knowing that he’d have no choice now but to also tell her about the last shard.

  But to his surprise, she didn’t ask about that. Instead, she asked him to repeat Murdis’s exact words, slowly. It wasn’t hard to remember them; they’d been the last the old man had said to him before he’d left the scriptorium. The last words he’d ever thought he’d hear Murdis say.

  “…lead you on a more circuitous path, perhaps…”

  Elin stopped him with an impulsive kiss, her lips there and gone again before he could react. But not before their touch was burned into his owns lips like a brand.

  “That’s it! A More Circuitous Path. That’s the book he’s been working on for…forever, it seems. The one he says is never quite done, though I never see him working on it anymore and he hasn’t yet burned it to ashes, despite its unfinished state. That’s got to be the clue.”

  Kord nodded in agreement, her excitement contagious.

  “Where does he keep it?”

  “Locked up in his study. It was one of the first things I looked at when I started searching, but whatever clue is in it was obviously meant for you to find.”

  She pushed back her chair and stood, reaching out one hand toward him and picking up a slender candlestick with the other.

  “Come. I’ll show you.”

  ###

  In the study, Elin pulled the chair from Murdis’s desk over to one of the bookshelves and stood on it, reaching for a wooden box that was holding a pile of scrolls in place. She pulled the box out, careful to keep the rolled tubes of paper from falling as she did, mindful of Murdis’s love for them and all they represented, even if she didn’t always share that love herself.

  She stepped down, a bit unsteady now with the box in her hands, but Kord was there with a hand on her arm, his touch all the hotter now that she’d let her excitement get the better of her and foolishly kissed him. She knew he wanted her to do it again—possibly as much as she wanted to—but there was no time for that, and no point in it, really. She’d already as much as promised him that he could keep the Hand—she couldn’t take it from him, now. Wouldn’t. But without it, she would have to find another way to achieve her larger goals, and there was no way to do that here. With him.

  Once both feet were firmly on the floor again, she twisted a bit, casually, just enough so that his hand fell from her arm, leaving a cold spot where it had been. She didn’t want him to think she was rebuffing him—not when it had been her kiss, and her stumble before that, that had ignited this longing, this ache of the Pantheress for her Panther. A desire that would never be satiated, alas. It wasn’t his fault that her plans went beyond just acquiring the Hand, or that there was no place for him in them.

  It wasn’t hers, either.

  Back at the desk, she wiped a thick layer of dust from the top of the box. Murdis hadn’t touched it in months, maybe longer. Whatever clue he’d hidden inside had been placed there long before Kord had even been in the vicinity—perhaps before he’d even begun working for Antrem. How the old man could have known that Kord would return here was a mystery to her. She had thought she understood him, and knew him better than anyone now living, but now she saw the stark arrogance in that assumption. Murdis had known what she was and what she wanted all along, and if she had a part to play in this final act of their story, it was because he had written it for her.

  Thumbing a hidden mechanism, she unlocked the wooden box and raised the lid. Inside, an unbound manuscript lay, looking no different from the last time she’d seen it, years ago. She carefully lifted it from the box and set it on the desk, then stepped aside for Kord.

  As she’d been opening the box, Kord had retrieved the chair from near the bookshelf, pulled it closer to the table, and sat on it. He didn’t immediately touch the manuscript, though. Instead, he placed both palms flat on the surface of the desk, one on either side of the neatly stacked pile of papers. For a moment, Elin thought he might be praying, but as he drew in a deep breath and let it out again slowly, she realized he’d been fortifying himself for whatever he might find in the pages of his old mentor’s last book. The one Murdis had clearly written just for him.

  As with the other books, he turned to the last page, rev
erently lifting the rest of the pile and setting it upside down on the desk beside the box. Elin, looking over his shoulder, skimmed the text. Though she’d only seen it a few times before—not enough to have memorized it—she still knew it better than Kord would, seeing it as he was for the first time.

  She couldn’t be completely certain, but if she’d had to lay a wager on it, she would have bet that the page had not been changed since the last time she saw it. The final lines, at least, were still the same as they had been; there was no way she could have forgotten them, prescient as they had proven to be.

  “In the end, whatever path we take, we end up where we began—naked, helpless, knowing nothing. If we are lucky, we will have been loved at some point along that path, perhaps more than once, and perhaps even well. And if we are luckier still, we’ll have found forgiveness for at least some of the missteps we took while traveling it. And the truly fortunate soul may have one blessing further—to leave this world as he entered it, in the arms of a woman who gave his life meaning. I do not think I will be that fortunate; my greatest hope for you, my son, is that you will.”

  Kord stared at the page for a long time—long enough to have read it several times over, and perhaps have committed it to memory. Elin wondered what he was thinking, but didn’t dare ask.

  “There’s nothing about the Hand,” he said at last, and Elin thought she heard a tightness in his voice, one that might have been reining in tears. She couldn’t see his face, though, so couldn’t be sure. “Nothing about soul-shards at all.”

  “Did you really think it would be that easy?” she asked, placing a hand on his shoulder, even though she knew she shouldn’t, that it wasn’t fair to him. Still, the desire to comfort him outweighed her caution. Or maybe it was just the desire to touch him again; her uncertainty in regards to her own motives was disturbing, yet strangely exhilarating.

  He didn’t answer, but neither did he shrug her touch away, and she realized it wasn’t the fact that there was no mention of the Hand or of soul-shards in the book’s last paragraph that was bothering him.

  “Did you really think there’d be an apology?”

  Kord’s muscles tensed beneath her hand, and she knew she’d guessed right.

  “Tell me about the last shard, Kord.”

  If she had thought him on edge a moment ago, it was nothing compared to the stress that now radiated off him in waves. Almost of its own volition, her other hand rose to join the first on his shoulders and she began trying to knead the strain away. It was a tactic she’d used successfully in the past to get information—and other things—from men. And she wanted information from Kord, too, but she found that even more than that, she wanted to caress the worry from his bunched muscles and replace it with tension of a different—and far more dangerous—sort.

  But the gentle pressure of her fingers seemed to do the trick, for after a moment, he let out another long sigh, and some of the tightness fled from his shoulders along with it.

  “I’m sure you’ve pieced most of it together by now. When I was fifteen, Murdis decided he wanted to try and collect all of his soul-shards—or at least all of the ones that I held. I didn’t know anything about the Hand back then, and I don’t know that Murdis had even acquired it yet. I think he mostly just wanted to see if it could be done.”

  Once the words finally started coming, Kord couldn’t seem to get them out fast enough, almost like a boy racing to confess his sins to his parents before his sibling could beat him to it, in hopes of earning himself the lighter sentence.

  “He brought me here, into his study, sat me down in a chair, and gave me a glass of wine. He said it would relax me and make the transfer easier. I should’ve known he would drug it—he didn’t want me relaxed, he wanted me compliant. When I’d had about half a glass, he took it away—probably so I wouldn’t break it and try to use the jagged edge to slit his throat. Then he placed one hand over my mouth and the other on top of my head, and started to chant.”

  She felt the shudder that coursed through him, but let it pass without comment. This tale would be hard enough to tell without interruptions from her, however well-intentioned.

  “Growing up here, I’d been exposed to dozens of languages, and those I couldn’t speak, I could at least recognize. But not this one—whatever tongue he was using, it wasn’t one meant for human mouths.

  “It wasn’t so bad at the start. Like when you’ve eaten too much food and need to vomit—the first bits come up easily, and it’s actually a relief to get them out of you. Except he wasn’t pulling the shards out of my stomach, he was pulling them out of my brain. Out of my heart.

  “But the painlessness lasted only for the first few shards. Soon enough it was like having the dry heaves, with nothing coming out but bile and stomach lining, no matter how hard my muscles strained. Nothing but the shards, of course, and what seemed like gallons of blood. It poured from my nose and mouth, even my ears, and I was howling in pain, trying to beg him to stop but unable to even speak. And still he kept on, and there was a gleam in his eyes I’d never seen before. A touch of madness that brightened just a bit with every shard he pulled from me.”

  Elin couldn’t see Kord’s face from where she stood behind him, but his body language was easy enough to read. Though he held his back stiff even through her ministrations, she could see that his hands had balled into fists, thumbs clenched tightly inside. He was angry, yes—who wouldn’t be?—but the unconscious placing of the thumbs inside the fist instead of outside was a classic sign that he still felt vulnerable all these years later. Betrayed.

  “He could easily have taken the last shard then—I was too weak from the pain and the blood loss to stop him. I don’t know why he didn’t, unless it was because he realized it would probably kill me, or at least leave me crippled. A qualm he apparently overcame easily enough when it was Kenaris’s turn.

  “Whatever the reason, he stopped without finishing the job. He was about to take that final shard, had his hand ready to pull it out of my mouth, his own mouth open to say the chant one last time, and then he just…stopped. His eyes cleared for a moment, his mouth snapped shut, and he let go of me. He stood and stared at me, and if I didn’t know better, I would say he almost looked horrified at what he’d done. But that of course would require a conscience, and if he’d had one of those, he would have stopped far sooner. Or never started in the first place.

  “And then he turned and rushed from the room, leaving me there bleeding and incapacitated. I think I tried to get up—I fell out of the chair, at any rate, and must have hit my head, because the next thing I remember is waking up in my own bed, clean, in a fresh set of clothes, as if nothing had happened. I might have thought it all a dream, in fact, if I hadn’t had a raging headache and felt an emptiness inside me like nothing I’d ever known. I drifted in and out of consciousness for the next several days, and sometimes Murdis was at my bedside when I woke, but it was like he was a stranger.”

  Kord’s hands opened now, and his shoulders slumped, and his next words were quiet, and almost forlorn.

  “Whatever closeness we had had before, whatever affection, it was just…gone. And not because he’d taken the shards from me by force, though that would have been reason enough, but because the shards themselves were gone, all but that last one. It was like they were what had forged the bond between us—or maybe the bond had been between them all along. Either way, once they were gone, so was it. And so was I; I left as soon as I could walk again, and never looked back.”

  Elin’s hands had grown tired as she worked to massage the stress from his back and neck, but she kept it up as silence filled the study and then stretched on interminably. Gradually, Kord began to relax into her, her touch and his confession combining to drain the last of the pent-up anger from him. When he tilted his head back to rest it against her, she stilled her fingers and slid her hands down his shoulders and across his chest, leaning forward to embrace him from behind as she did.

  “I’m sorry,
” she murmured into his ear, and meant it. It was one thing for an adult woman to willingly go through such an ordeal for the man she loved; it was another thing entirely for that man to force a boy to do the same. She’d known women who’d been violently assaulted by men who professed to love them, and what Murdis had done to Kord carried the same vile stench. For the second time today, she thought about killing the old man, but there was nothing of mercy in the idea now.

  “Wasn’t your doing,” Kord replied, uncomfortable, shrugging against her. She drew back a little.

  “I can be sorry that something happened without having had a hand in it myself. It’s called compassion. Empathy.”

  Kord snorted.

  “Think I lost that with the shards, too.”

  Elin knew that was a lie. He’d returned to pay his final respects, hadn’t he? And she’d seen how he reacted when Murdis collapsed, how willing he’d been to return the last of those shards, if it meant saving the old man.

  “You still have one.”

  Kord made a disgusted noise.

  “For all the good it does me. I should have let him take it the first time.”

  “Don’t say that,” Elin snapped, dropping her arms and stepping around the chair to face him. “Don’t ever say that.”

  Kord looked up at her, his blue eyes wide and startled at her vehemence. She was a little startled at it herself.

  “Well, it’s certainly not helping us figure out this clue.”

  Elin frowned down at the manuscript, glad for the distraction. Her eyes scanned the last paragraph again.

  “It has to be here. We’re just not seeing it. Yet.”

  Kord leaned forward, his eyes on the paper. After a moment, he gave a bitter laugh.

  “What is it?” Had he found something?

  Kord waved his hand at the manuscript, but it seemed to Elin he included the whole room, the whole scriptorium, in that simple gesture.

  “Murdis. This ridiculous path of clues he has us following. ‘A more circuitous path,’ indeed. He could hardly have left us a less circuitous one.”

  A More Circuitous Path…Murdis had lifted that title verbatim from his conversation with Kord. And then repeated the word ‘path’ in the final paragraph of the book, where all the past clues had led them to believe they would find the next one: In the end, whatever path we take, we end up where we began.