The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Now he stared at the rings in his palms. The one in his left...may have outlived its usefulness. He couldn’t say for certain, for the man who held its partner ring was resourceful. Yet doubt tarnished the likelihood of gaining useful orders from that quarter, and the spy liked to stay useful. Mostly he liked to stay alive.

  He wasn’t getting a good feeling from the left-hand ring to this end, and in spycraft, getting a good feeling—or even a slightly-better-than-disastrous feeling—was ninety percent of survival. He put that ring back in his pocket.

  The mind which the ring in his right hand linked to was...unpredictable, and decidedly vicious, but far less likely to overreact to bad news. And since the spy only had bad news to report, it made sense to report it to the man less likely to blow up at him—or blow him up—in a fit of fury.

  The spy put the right-hand ring on his finger and pressed his thumb across the stone. Master...

  They all wanted to be called master, the lords of the rings. It made the spy’s life easier to humor them. At least, in addressing them both as ‘master,’ if he ever got the rings mixed up, the man on the other end wouldn’t immediately know that the spy thought he was addressing a different person.

  He imagined the man putting on a ring similar to his own, but in truth, he didn’t know what bonded item his ring linked to. It could be a dagger, a button, even a tattoo made with specialized inks.

  After an agonizing length of time, he felt an awareness come into being at the other end of the bonded pair. The feeling of the man’s mind touching his always sent an inadvertent shiver down the spy’s spine.

  I’m busy. Why do you disturb me?

  Master, you said to let you know if any new trouble arose surrounding the shipments.

  Yes, yes—and?

  The band of Converted who’ve been causing trouble in the area are now seeking the warlord’s stronghold. If you want the latest shipment, I would claim it soon.

  I thought you said you had these Converted misdirected?

  A new commander arrived from Raku, master. He is not so easily manipulated, and now that the warlord is holding the commander’s men—

  What men? What’s this?

  Kifat sent five hundred Dannish soldiers to the warlord to hold hostage for him, master. Moving the Dannish soldiers from Khor Taran was insurance, in case the Converted’s rescue attempt succeeded.

  Why do you bring these trifles to me? His master’s ire sliced through the bonded line like a stinging whip. Notify the warlord and let him deal with it. This band’s interference with my activities has already caused me much inconvenience. I will not suffer it again.

  The spy winced at his master’s strident tone. Respectfully, I did notify the warlord. His efforts have not effectively stopped their forward progress towards the fortress.

  In truth, the warlord had launched some kind of scare campaign which served no purpose but his own amusement. But the spy knew who would be blamed if another shipment was lost, and it sure as silver wouldn’t be the warlord.

  Kifat tried eliminating the new commander even before he reached Khor Taran, master, but the commander has powerful friends.

  His master’s attention snapped to this comment. What powerful friends? What do you mean by this?

  Sundragons, master. The spy was already cringing from the expected backlash of speaking this truth. And Cephrael Himself, if rumors be true.

  Do not speak to me of fairytales! As expected, the reprimand struck with a vengeance. A pause followed, and then, Who is this commander?

  The spy was seeing double from his master’s last rejoinder. He closed his eyes to ease the throbbing in his skull and leaned a hand against the boulder for stability. Prince Trell val Lorian, master.

  A sudden silence descended. Long did it lengthen. The spy could feel a seething disquiet coming from his master’s side of the bonded line. When the man spoke again, the terrifying chord of his command made the spy’s mental ears ring.

  BRING HIM TO ME—alive and unsullied. Keep me appraised. I will come for him when he is subdued.

  The spy swallowed back a reflexive surge of bile. Still, he felt palpable relief knowing it was the prince who needed to fear his master’s will, not himself. By your command, master.

  He pulled the ring roughly off his finger and exhaled a shaky breath. His mind felt shredded, and his head was throbbing, but he’d escaped relatively unscathed, all things considered. The prince would not be so lucky.

  The spy pocketed the ring, picked up his pole with its buckets of water, and as soon as he was no longer seeing double, made his way back to camp.

  Seven

  “Small men cannot brook others becoming large,

  for then they cannot escape the peril posed by their shadows.”

  –Valentina van Gelderan, Empress of Agasan

  Baelfeir coalesced in a piazza in the shadow of a statue.

  Across the wide plaza, an elaborate marble fountain representing—he assumed—four gods in contest was casting its spray on the breeze to gloss the limestone pavement. The usual café tables had been cleared aside to give the mist ample room to drift. Save for that wedge of mist, peppered there and again by intent pedestrians and courageous children, crowds swarmed the piazza.

  So many bees busily upon their tasks...yet this hive of humanity knew no guiding mind, no queen to impose order, not even a coordinating purpose. Free will, Cephrael called it. Millions of individual determinisms running amuck. Total chaos.

  No one in their right mind would admire a tapestry made in such a fashion, with every thread choosing for itself which way to wander, and then only wandering whenever or however it willed. There could be beauty in chaos, but always with some underlying natural order.

  He and Cephrael had long been at odds on this point.

  And now the tapestry held a startling dearth of familiar threads, a clear product of the angiel’s lax stewardship.

  Baelfeir lifted his gaze to the heavens and shook his head. I leave the Realms of Light for a few thousand years and everything falls to pieces. This is the produce of your ‘free will.’

  He listened for a time but received no reply. It had been an admittedly long while since Cephrael had answered him. Not since he’d buried one of his mortal forms under a mountain of rock, in fact. Rather infantile of him to still be so angry.

  Baelfeir spotted a café table that suited his purposes. It was occupied by a couple having lunch, but they experienced a sudden urge to be elsewhere and take their dishes with them. They clutched their plates of food to their chests and squirreled themselves away, dragging the attention of the nearby diners such that Baelfeir took his seat within the vacuum of their notice.

  As he unbuttoned his coat, he looked at all of the colorful threads busily weaving themselves. At least this piazza, central to a place of learning called the Sormitáge, played host to many of the metallic threads he favored. They called them Adepts now, and the power they wielded, they called elae.

  Librarians, he’d discovered, could be very helpful.

  This Sormitáge was like a weld in the mortal tapestry; thousands of metallic threads connected through it. He would’ve investigated it for this reason alone. But what had actually brought him there was the single gold thread he’d isolated in his initial study.

  Oh, there were glimpses of other gilded stitches here and there in the tapestry, but none that bound other threads to them. Of this type of thread, he’d found but one.

  One, when it used to shine with thousands! It enraged him to find the strand so diminished.

  Yet...he admitted a delicious anticipation of the game now. The compounding mysteries became added barriers, new factors to consider in his strategy. He still didn’t even know if he would find himself opposed. The single gold thread in the tapestry obviously did not belong to his opponent.

  The table he’d chosen gave him an unhindered view of the piazza. While he waited for the waitress to bring him the beverage order he’d slipped into her though
ts, he surveyed the busy square.

  The drachwyr of old had played a game called Shari, the ultimate goal of which involved overtaking the game board with one’s own stones. It required a strategic jumping of stones to claim those belonging to one’s opponent. A skilled player did this in very few maneuvers. A truly artful one overtook the board and created a pattern with his remaining stones.

  On a whim, Baelfeir decided which threads milling in the plaza would be his and which would belong to his ‘opponent.’ Then he selectively implanted the decisions upon those threads to drive cause and consequence in the tapestry.

  He was still upon this idle amusement when the waitress arrived with his beverages—a selection of everything they were drinking these days. Baelfeir began tasting each one as he continued his survey of the threads tangling the piazza.

  Two women coming out of a stationers seemed well placed for a maneuver, but as he was implanting the proper intent within their minds, one of their threads caught his attention.

  The ladies suddenly experienced an urgent desire to enjoy a cup of tea. Whereupon the man at the table next to Baelfeir discovered that he desperately needed to be elsewhere. He scurried away with his drink clutched to his chest.

  The ladies nodded and smiled to Baelfeir as they took the table he’d cleared for them. He nodded politely in return.

  Thereafter their eyes continued to stray to him of their own volition. Albeit he admitted some hand in the matter, for he knew what feminine eyes admired in their male counterparts, and he’d always found aesthetics more efficacious to his purposes than the grotesque. Even when he’d worn the head of a bull, it had possessed a handsome symmetry.

  Finishing his survey of beverages, Baelfeir got to his feet. The women’s eyes followed him upwards. He nodded to the Adept but extended his hand to the other woman. She took it wordlessly, darting a wide-eyed glance at her friend.

  “My lady,” Baelfeir caressed her hand with a gloved thumb, “would it please you to tell me your name?”

  He could as easily have plucked it from her thoughts as require her to offer it to him, breathless with desire, but there was little entertainment in such compulsion—his dalliance at the fête notwithstanding. That had served a different purpose entirely.

  Her eyes glued themselves to his, and she answered him faintly, “Giuliana, my lord.”

  “Giuliana.” He let the name reveal its tones as it crossed his tongue. You could learn much of a being through the resonance of their name. This is why he’d never used his true name in any of the realms. Cephrael was so careless with his. “Tell me of yourself, Giuliana.”

  She prattled on about family and titles and indicated the woman across from her as her sister.

  Baelfeir tilted his head slightly to the left. “But unlike your sister, you have no Adept talent?”

  Her gaze clouded, and she dropped her eyes. “No, my lord.”

  He received this with only partial surprise, for it explained what he saw in her thread—a glint of rose, interwoven with the mundane. A dormant gift, then.

  He caressed her hand again to soothe the disappointment evident in her admission. “Does it happen often that one child is gifted and another is not?” In his day, siblings were always born equally talented.

  Giuliana glanced to her sister, the Adept. “It isn’t uncommon.”

  “Our race is dying, my lord,” her sister offered solemnly. He discerned from her tone that this truth was commonly known.

  But clearly not understood, or surely someone would’ve done something about it much sooner. Baelfeir set this thought aside for further consideration.

  He planted a chaste kiss upon Giuliana’s hand and bowed to both women. “Enjoy your afternoon, ladies.” He felt their eyes following him all the way to the café’s edge.

  Where his waitress was waiting for him with a glass of wine.

  Thousands of years, and still humanity hadn’t devised anything so complex to the senses as a well-aged wine from the region now called the Solvayre. Baelfeir plucked the goblet from the waitress’s tray and sipped it as he strolled through the crowd.

  Architecture had certainly changed since last he’d walked the realm. The buildings framing the piazza were immense and majestic—perhaps one aspect of free will that hadn’t backfired; the advancement of artistic creativity should never be restricted.

  He climbed the steps before an imposing edifice and leaned against a jade statue of a lion while he waited for his game of Shari to unfold.

  Behind him, he perceived another’s sudden arrival. The tapestry dipped like a heavy iron ball had been dropped upon it, distorting the design.

  “Baelfeir,” greeted the newcomer. A spoiled and pouting child could not have bellowed a shriller disharmony on the currents of elae.

  Baelfeir glanced amusedly at him. “Shailabanáchtran.”

  Shail came up beside him, invisible to the mortals beneath a cloak of deyjiin. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself at the fête the other evening.” His tone was slicing beneath his razor gaze.

  “Thank you kindly for providing the entertainment.”

  “Do you intend to keep following me about the realm? I’ve never been fond of hounds, but I suppose they have their uses.”

  “As do Malorin’athgul.” Baelfeir smiled and sipped his wine.

  Shail’s expression darkened. “I gave you access to the Realms of Light.”

  “Yes, kudos for that,” Baelfeir tipped his goblet to him, “but I recall something about a weldmap as well.”

  “The map no longer exists,” Shail somewhat ground out.

  “Then it may be difficult for you to complete the terms of our accord.”

  Shail watched him with an agate stare, casting ripples of malcontent through the fabric. After a moment of this, during which Baelfeir imagined he could hear the Malorin’athgul gnashing his own humiliation between his teeth, Shail inquired tightly, “What then? Will you set up court for yourself here, establish a new harem of the bewitched and beguiled?”

  “Perhaps.” Baelfeir looked him over with dancing sapphire eyes. “If I did, it would be no less than your own diversions, making a Kings board of all the realm.”

  Banked fury burned in Shail’s gaze. “I need but walk to change these creatures’ destinies. My will harrows the tapestry.”

  Baelfeir chuckled. “That’s not art, it’s farming.” He waved his goblet across the expanse of piazza before them. “To be art, the chaos must unfold with delicate precision...”

  A man suddenly emerged from a café, gripping his throat. He fell onto a table, dispersing its occupants, who staggered into other tables, spreading the disruption.

  On the far side of the piazza, Giuliana started ripping at her bodice, screaming of bees. Her Adept sister fluttered in uncertainty, drawing a curious crowd.

  Triangular to these, a man snatched a case out of the arms of another and ran headlong through the masses, disrupting them in waves.

  “...it must tumble and bloom, pass from one pod to the next as a vine blossoming indecorously beneath the sun’s languorous heat...”

  A screaming Giuliana was shredding the bodice of her dress and inadvertently revealing her bosom. Her sister was frantic, trying to both settle and cover her while avoiding her flailing arms. The growing crowd around them formed a milling chrysanthemum.

  Baelfeir sipped his wine appreciatively. “It must unfurl in a rippling rush...”

  The two men in chase spiraled through the crowd, churning waves of confusion to merge with the chaos surrounding the continuing disturbance outside the café; one side a pinwheel, the other a froth.

  “Study me then, you who would ken the unknowable,” Baelfeir recited. “In the darkness forged of nothing, birthed of vision; For I am that which binds, From which all things find new alchemy.” He eyed Shail amusedly and sipped his wine.

  “Charming,” Shail drawled.

  Baelfeir swept his goblet to the side and gave an elegant bow. Looking back to the unfolding ch
aos, he exhaled a contented sigh. “I don’t expect you to understand, Shailabanáchtran, for you see but one side of the coin, despite being birthed of both of its faces.”

  The Malorin’athgul’s eyes were dark orbs. The tapestry was rippling with his malcontent. “Respect my business, and I—”

  “Will respect mine?” A dangerous smile hinted on Baelfeir’s lips. “Somehow I doubt that.” The effect on the tapestry from the Malorin’athgul’s fuming was turning out to be more entertaining than his own little game of Shari. He swirled his wine in his glass. “You know what they say about making deals with the devil.”

  “A sentiment as trite as it is trivial.” The words were very nearly a snarl. Shail nodded tightly to him. “Baelfeir.”

  “Shailabhanáchtran.” Mirth dazzled in Baelfeir’s gaze as he watched the Malorin’athgul summon a portal and vanish through it.

  The midday sun was illuminating his wine into a gorgeous shade of rose. Baelfeir sipped at it appreciatively. Minute details such as these were critical in constructing a world. They made the difference between crafting an illusion that appeared real or one that was readily apparent.

  The smallest details...ever these defined the dividing edge between two overtly similar things. Case in point: the niggling detail asking him, why could he find no trace of his opponent’s hand upon the tapestry?

  The mystery increased the game’s intensity but was one he wanted to have answered before he advanced too much deeper onto the field—or perhaps his advancement onto the field would provide an answer one way or another.

  Baelfeir smiled at this thought.

  He knew just where to place his next step. He would pay a visit to two old...friends wasn’t the right term, while acquaintances seemed too insincere a descriptive for the contentious intimacy they often exchanged. Doubtless both would have the answers he sought, but drawing them out of either would require a careful repartee.

  Baelfeir was still watching his design fully blossom when he noticed a bright silver thread surrounded by a knot of others come to a standstill in the piazza, obviously moved by the artistry of his unfolding chaos.