The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  The others had all gained the arcade roof by then.

  Trell put a hand on Tannour’s shoulder, half expecting his hand to pass through the man, but finding his form solid enough. “Let’s keep moving.”

  And so they did.

  The sun had fallen behind the mountains and the forest sat in a twilit gloom by the time they reached the thoroughfare of the ruined city where they’d first entered. Climbing over the fallen columns of a once-grand promenade, they made for the crescent mound of ivy and moss that had long ago served as a defensive wall.

  With Rolan and Lazar in the lead behind Lazar’s scout, Kalid, they fed back through the tunnel beneath the wall, slipped single-file past the towering pile of stone that blocked most of the passage, and emerged into the dim silence of the forest.

  They were a stone’s throw from their horses when they all drew up short.

  Tannour vanished in the same instant that Rolan jerked his head to the side.

  The arrow passed through an evaporated Tannour, grazed Rolan’s cheek, and impaled itself in Raegus’s shoulder. The Avataren staggered backwards and fell over the trunk of a fallen tree.

  The next arrow froze an inch shy of Loukas’s throat, thrumming with mortality, caught in Tannour’s solidifying fist.

  The Vestian hovered in front of Loukas, half tangible, half...something else. Trell could feel elae boiling off him.

  Whereupon arrows started raining down. Trell shouted to take cover.

  He dove behind the tree where Raegus had fallen, slid to the Avataren’s side and helped him sit back against the tree’s jagged stump. All around them, arrows ripped through leaves and plugged into the earth. Tannour had vanished again.

  “What the fethe?” Raegus hissed. “Who’s shooting at us? How’d they get past our lines?”

  “Both very good questions. How’s your shoulder?”

  “It fethen hurts.” Raegus gripped the arrow shaft and broke it off with a curse. He handed the feathered end to Trell. “You recognize that fletching?”

  Trell looked it over briefly while arrows sliced past, keeping them pinned down. Then he tossed it aside. “At least it’s not ours.”

  Raegus narrowed his gaze. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Trell gave him a grim look. “That this could’ve been worse.”

  “A’dal!” Rolan called from elsewhere.

  “We’re fine!” Trell called back. “But they’ve got us pinned!”

  Raegus turned a wince towards the hidden archers. “What’s taking that fethen Vestian so long?”

  As if Tannour had heard him, the rain of arrows abruptly ceased. The sudden still silence felt deafening in contrast.

  Then Trell felt more than heard a silent pop, like pressure clearing from his ears, and a cry rose up from the trees.

  A host of armed men rushed them.

  Trell jumped to his feet and drew his sword, while Raegus struggled up behind him. “This what you meant by could’ve been worse?”

  “I’d take two dozen Saldarians against a wielder any day.” Trell flung him a portentous look, then rushed to meet his attackers.

  “Saldarians?” Raegus seemed only then to notice that the man Trell was engaging had the telltale look of a Saldarian mercenary.

  Trell unbalanced his attacker with an upward swing, then stepped in and elbowed him in the jaw. The man staggered but came back at him. He overextended though, and Trell easily sidestepped his swing. He struck the hilt of his sword across the back of the Saldarian’s head and the man collapsed.

  “Guard him!” he ordered Raegus. “I want answers!” Then he was off.

  Trell leapt onto the fallen tree and ran up its length. He launched off the broken end and slammed into a pair of Saldarians who were ganging up on Loukas. The latter danced back as the men tumbled to the earth.

  Trell rolled to his feet and kicked one of the soldiers in the chin. The man sprawled backwards, down for the count. Loukas ran the other through.

  Two others immediately came on. Trell put Loukas at his back, and they both spun into the cortata.

  Sounds of battle filled the glen.

  The Saldarian that Trell was battling stood half a head taller and a few stone heavier, but his swings had no real power in them. Trell had the cortata to fuel him, but that still didn’t account for how easily he was fending the man off.

  Soon he had him on the retreat. And he kept retreating, away from the glen, drawing Trell deeper into the woods, back the way they’d come in.

  That’s when Trell understood.

  He went in for an overhand blow, and the Saldarian blocked him. As their swords clashed, Trell held him beneath a contest of strength and growled, low and fierce, “Who sent you?”

  The man had three rings pierced through his eyebrow and a ragged scar along one cheek. He was breathing hard. He shoved Trell off and took another three steps back, waving his blade invitingly.

  Trell took three steps in the opposite direction.

  The Saldarian glowered at him.

  “You’ll have to kill me,” Trell said evenly, “and I’m betting that’s not in your orders.”

  When the Saldarian just stood there scowling at him, Trell tipped two fingers to his brow. “Tell him taking me won’t be that easy.” Then he sprinted back to his men.

  In the glen, Loukas was fending off two Saldarians, Lazar and Kalid four others, and Rolan was carving a swath through half a dozen or so while singing a war song in praise of Inanna at the top of his lungs. All of these opponents looked like they were out for blood.

  Trell slid down the incline into the ravine and joined Rolan’s side. The Saldarians pressing him instantly disengaged.

  “Cowardly curs!” Rolan brandished his sword at them as they were backing away. “Come and face Inanna’s wrath!”

  They kept retreating in an ever-widening circle.

  “The game is up, boys.” Trell said quietly. “You lost.”

  The Saldarians exchanged looks. Then one of them whistled, and the entire host abruptly turned heel and ran.

  “Saldarian rats!” an irate Rolan shouted after them. “Six against one and you’re eager to show your teeth! Even the fight, and away you scurry!”

  “After them!” Loukas shouted.

  “Nay.” Trell held up a hand to still his men. “See if any are still alive.”

  Rolan passed the order along while Trell strode over to where Raegus was standing near the fallen tree.

  The Avataren turned as Trell neared. He was holding his blade low. Blood was dripping down its groove. The Saldarian he’d been guarding was sprawled on the other side of the trunk with a sword-sized hole in his gut, bleeding out onto the leaves.

  Raegus looked bewildered. “He woke up, realized he couldn’t get away, and ran onto my blade.” He searched Trell’s gaze with his own. “Who does that?”

  Trell exhaled a slow breath. “A man more afraid of living than dying.”

  ***

  Tannour Valeri swam upstream on Air’s currents, following the ridged course of arrows back to their source point. Air sang a song of three archers using the fat, tangled limbs of the ancient forest as a terrace for their work.

  He found the first archer straddling a wide, mossy limb, firing off arrows at his targets with quick precision. Tannour wrapped a noose of air around the archer’s wrists and materialized long enough to kick him off the limb. He communed again as the man was dangling in midair with his biceps pressed tight against his ears. He’d probably pass out, but he’d be secure until Tannour could get back to him.

  He followed a crescent-shaped course among a maze of limbs to reach the second archer. Tannour materialized beside him, bound his hands to his sides with air even as the man was inhaling to shout, and kicked him out of the tree. He fell twenty feet and hit the loamy earth with a bounce, laying still thereafter.

  Tannour communed.

  The third archer turned his arrows on Tannour—at least, on the place Tannour had just been standing�
�which then allowed Tannour to follow air’s vibrating pathways rapidly to the third archer himself.

  Tannour materialized on a limb above the man, who was standing in the Y of an ancient elm with an arrow nocked to bow, scowling as he searched the forest, ostensibly for Tannour. Tannour bound his wrists and strung him up with a yelp over a higher branch above them both. The archer swung out into the empty air, spitting curses.

  Tannour walked a fat limb to face him, eye to eye.

  The archer was kicking and struggling like a fish on a line, but there was no escaping bounds of air unless one could manipulate air itself. And even then, escaping another airwalker’s bonds usually proved challenging. Tannour knew this firsthand. There was not a single torment he waged upon another that Tannour had not himself experienced; the Sorceresy made sure its operatives knew both sides of their arsenal as intimately as a lover.

  They’d also well taught him how to tell which men would break and which would require breaking down. The archer spitting curses at him surely fit in the latter category. His were the black eyes of a man who strutted proudly in his tabard of wickedness.

  If he’d had the time, Tannour would’ve bled him anyway—the Blind Path required sacrifice, and like a lover, became angry if her pleasure was over too quickly—but he needed answers faster than he was likely to get them from this man. So he drew a curved dagger and sliced the archer’s throat mid-curse. Before the spray of blood could reach him, Tannour had communed.

  He released the man’s bonds as an afterthought, and the body dropped swiftly to the forest floor. Such a man as that could find his own way to the thrones of the Ghost Kings.

  Tannour materialized on the ground by the second archer and used his boot to roll him over. The man was still unconscious. He’d crushed his nose when he landed on his face. It would make it hard to understand anything he said—assuming his brain was in a condition to manage speech at all. Tannour decided questioning him would be too slow and punched a push-dagger through his heart.

  He communed back to the first archer.

  Communing with Air always brought a sort of detachment. Communion was dissolution, dispersal, an elemental disbanding into the aether requiring separation of self and substance. His first attempt had nearly driven him mad.

  In time, he’d learned to embrace the detachment, learned in fact that detachment was the only way to stay sane, to keep a grounded hold on himself. In this paradox lay the tethering line to what was real when all related matter became disassociated.

  Ver’alir, the Blind Path...

  In so many ways, the name was apt. Meaning layered upon meaning as the path’s inherent craving layered with desire. Walking the path engendered less an obsession than a hunger, a knowing that the path must be fed and that it fed upon sacrifice. Ver’alir’s resonance rang an undeniable harmony within Tannour, an aching harmony—regretted, even loathed at times—yet as often, equally sought.

  Only...Tannour now knew that communing with Air was not in itself walking ver’alir, which required such sacrifice of his soul in treading. He’d never separated the two—he’d never imagined it possible—but in Khor Taran’s cavern with Trell, he’d walked Air’s currents without treading ver’alir’s dark pathways.

  Now, Tannour couldn’t help but wonder what other of his powers he might separate from ver’alir’s darkly poisonous maze.

  Nothing the Sorceresy had taught him could be trusted. They’d told him it wasn’t possible to commune unless he walked ver’alir. They’d told him that killing for them would only increase his powers.

  But another, who he did trust, had explained that to kill for them would bind him to them forever. As might using certain of his more...elaborate talents.

  Truth or lie, these were not boundaries Tannour dared explore. He couldn’t risk using all of his gifts and somehow alerting the Sorceresy that his power had returned, or worse, inadvertently binding himself to their will.

  It was another of the many ironies so enjoyed by his masters in Addras: he could leave, hide, deny any connection to them, but in so doing, he would in turn be denied access to the greatest of his powers...that which made him everything he was. In effect, he’d be denied the truths of himself that he’d endured so much hardship and loss to achieve.

  Either he worked elae for them or not at all.

  Yes, he’d constructed a new tether in Trell—even if he didn’t quite know how—and this had restored his gifts, but should he continue to explore his talent and inadvertently wield the wrong aspect...it was entirely possible that using this power could trigger the binding tattoos on his body all over again, and...well, they’d have him—hook, line and sinker.

  This long stream of thoughts occupied but a whisper of time, an instant in which associations and connections were noted like leaves on a breeze and then forgotten. Within an easy count of heartbeats, Tannour was hovering in an invisible whirlwind before the archer hanging from the trees. The man was still conscious, but his lips were showing a faint, bluish tinge.

  Tannour materialized on the ground beneath the archer and lengthened the bonds of air to drop the man swiftly down. He jerked to a halt a foot above the loamy earth. The archer gasped, and his eyes flew wide.

  Ah, now his were the eyes of a man whose questioning would prove fruitful, for they held equal parts fury and fear. They grew wider still as they watched Tannour drawing his scorpjun dagger from its sheath.

  The man kicked at him and cursed, so Tannour wrapped air around each ankle and pulled his legs roughly apart. Now all he could do was swear, which he did vehemently as Tannour came closer. The man’s chest hovered at eye level, his head well above Tannour’s.

  “Be still now.” Tannour took hold of the man’s waistband and gave him a meaningful smile. “You wouldn’t want me to make any mistakes down here.”

  The archer went perfectly still.

  Tannour sliced his dagger through the waistband and along the leg’s inner seam. The razor blade parted the heavy cloth like cream. He made an identical slice along the other pant leg, and after a few more strategically placed cuts, he had the archer’s lower half revealed to the elements.

  “See something you like, jade?” the man snarled in the Saldarian dialect.

  Ignoring the reference to his sexual preferences, Tannour tilted his head slightly to one side. “Generally, I’ve found that men become pliable when their berries are exposed for the plucking.” He spun his deadly curved blade in his hand. “But if you care so little for your own, we can start there.” He reached out.

  “No!” The archer jerked convulsively.

  Tannour’s lips spread in a slow smile. “So we understand each other, then.” More cuts, and he had the man’s chest and abdomen equally bared.

  He fixed his gaze on the archer’s, who met his kind for kind. Tannour’s dagger spun a whispering arc in his hand. “What were your orders from the warlord?”

  The archer shook his head—or tried to, but his arms were bound too tightly against his ears to allow much motion. “Not the warlord.”

  Air confirmed that he was speaking a truth. “Who then?”

  “I can’t speak his name.”

  “And here I thought we were getting along so well.” Tannour reached for him once more.

  “I can’t!” The archer tried to avoid the blade angling for his flesh, but Tannour hadn’t given him much leeway to move. Air was as solid as steel when he willed it so. “I would if I could!” he shrieked. “You don’t need that!”

  Tannour paused the needle tip of his skorpjun dagger an inch from the archer’s ribs. Perhaps he didn’t need the blade. Perhaps ver’alir was not the labyrinthine maze he’d always thought, whose walls allowed no escape, pinning a man to walk a design of its choosing.

  Perhaps with Trell as his tether, he was somehow free of his masters’ bounds—perhaps those bounds were naught but insubstantial lies made to seem the iron manacles of truth. It was an intriguing theory, and one he needed to explore. But today would not
be the day he dared deny ver’alir its tribute.

  Tannour inserted the needle-thin fang of his dagger between the archer’s ribs, angled just so. The man screamed—then gasped, for Tannour had stopped the fang right up against his heart.

  The organ started fibrillating, the archer hyperventilating.

  Tannour added length to his bounds of air to lower the archer so he hung eye to eye with him. “Now,” he took the man’s jaw between gloved fingers and captured his terrified gaze, “let’s see what you know.”

  ***

  Rolan came over to where Trell and Raegus were talking. The dark-eyed Nadori prince was sporting a razor stripe along his cheek where the first arrow had grazed him.

  Raegus gripped his wounded shoulder and scowled at him. “This fethen arrow was meant for you.”

  Rolan grinned. “If it had been meant for me, Inanna would not have pulled me from its path. That arrow was aiming for Valeri before he did his vanishing act.”

  Raegus did a double-take on him. “Vanishing act?”

  “You didn’t see him disappear?”

  Raegus glowered. “I must’ve been too busy falling over a tree.” He shifted his shoulder beneath a wince and looked to Trell. “Arm’s gone numb.”

  “Yes, we need to get that shoulder tended to.”

  Loukas came over, trailing Lazar and Kalid. “No survivors, Trell.”

  Trell nodded. “We’ll have to get our intelligence some other way, then.”

  Raegus looked around at all of them. “Where the fethe is Valeri?”

  “I told you, he vanished.” Rolan pulled a cloth from a bag at his hip and offered it to Raegus. When the latter just looked at him blankly, he nodded towards the Avataren’s wound. “For your shoulder.”

  Raegus took the cloth. “So Valeri vanished.” He pressed the material around the broken shaft protruding from his shoulder. “That’s a new trick.”

  “Actually, it’s not.”