The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Rafael arched an amber brow. “I give you credit for this understanding.” He vanished his dagger and smiled provocatively. “Now what?”

  Ean offered his hand, and Rafael took it. The blood felt wet and warm, real enough to conceive of the connection. “Now we match starpoints.”

  Rafael glanced to Sinárr. “This gets more intriguing by the moment.” He looked back to Ean and the prince felt him do—something—a shift in Rafael’s own universe that allowed Ean to perceive in ways he could not have perceived before.

  The prince framed his own starpoints with Absolute Being and cast his awareness outwards, putting less attention on what he was doing than on the intention behind the action. They were treading new territory. No patterns existed to define the working he intended—Ean had to do it all innately.

  He found and matched Rafael’s starpoints and then opened his own mind fully to Rafael. Their awarenesses thus pinned together by the same eight points, separate universes yet occupying the same space, Ean offered, Would you like to bind me first?

  Rafael’s aqua eyes danced. With pleasure.

  Tanis had described Sinárr’s binding as cocooning bands of energy, but the power Rafael sent into Ean’s mind felt like millions of fine filaments reaching out to embrace him, gathering his essence with feather-soft tendrils, permeating rather than containing.

  Never had the Fifth Law been so real to him, nor Arion’s philosophies so important: A wielder is limited by what he can envision.

  Sinárr had envisioned a completely different sort of binding from Rafael, while Ean’s vision fell likewise quite afield of Tanis’s; yet Ean believed the bindings would be essentially the same when he and Rafael were finished.

  As Rafael’s binding took hold, an awareness opened in Ean’s thoughts, bringing with it a sensual intimacy that Ean recognized simply as Rafael. In the way no two humans smelled exactly the same, the essence of this being was unique to Rafael.

  Ean realized a vital truth: these magnetizing, captivating energy flows that Rafael emitted...they were intimate to his expression of himself.

  In the same instant that Ean realized this truth, the Warlock recognized that Ean understood it, and a deep-seated bond of trust formed between them.

  Welcome, Ean.

  In Rafael’s greeting, the prince felt that same profound honoring as the Warlock had offered Sinárr. Only now, he realized how extraordinary such salutations were. The elaborate bows themselves were but paltry reflections of the intimacy inherent in offering to share one’s universe with another.

  Then all the prince could do was gape, because suddenly he wasn’t seeing this glimmer of illusion that Rafael chose as a representation of himself. Instead, he was gaining a consciousness-expanding awareness of galaxies and worlds—countless millennia of accumulated creation within the boundaries of Rafael’s starpoints. He could barely conceive of the vastness of the Warlock’s universe, yet it was all right there for him to perceive.

  Ean simply stared at him in awe.

  Do you also feel that I have overstated my skills, Ean? Rafael inquired amusedly.

  You know I can hear you, Rafael, Darshan groused.

  I believe that was my point in asking it, Darshanvenkhátraman. Rafael’s smile widened. It is now time to pay the piper, Ean, as I believe the saying goes.

  For unlike Sinárr to Tanis, Rafael had not bound Ean because he sought a connection with him, but for what Ean could potentially offer him via a binding in return. Their speculation, explored together the day before, formed the basis of a new line of theorizing that Ean intended to follow, one which serendipitously also meshed with the pattern of consequence he’d witnessed.

  Ean refocused his thoughts and reclaimed his concept of pure intent. Then he met Rafael’s gaze. Ready?

  Like never before.

  Ean willed his intent to become.

  It was the fifth he used, his native strand. Ean needed only a clear concept of the effect he wanted to achieve in order to mold the fifth to his desires.

  It wasn’t until after the working became that Ean really inspected what he’d done and decided that he was pleased.

  More than pleased. Stunned, actually. For even though he knew it had been his intent that guided the working, he couldn’t help but wonder if in the last minute some higher power hadn’t stepped in and overseen it, because he never would’ve known mechanically how to do what actually became.

  The millions of tiny filaments of Rafael’s power, those which had woven themselves all through Ean’s life pattern...Ean’s working had simply channeled back down all of those same tendrils of connection—elae blasting through a pipeline in the opposite direction—and in the doing, carved along every fiber and filament a two-way channel upon which elae and deyjiin could flow in harmony.

  And suddenly both powers were doing exactly that.

  Flowing, alternating, building into a resonance that quickly had Ean’s heart pounding wonder through his veins.

  Darshan placed a hand on Ean’s shoulder and squeezed gently. “That was well done, Prince of Dannym.”

  Rafael released Ean’s hand and looked down at his palm. A pattern of iridescent whorls glowed where once the cut had been. He looked up again, smiling. “Is this your doing, Ean?”

  Ean looked at his own palm and found the pattern mirrored there. Bemused, he shook his head. “It wasn’t yours?”

  They both looked to Darshan, who quickly lifted his hands. “I was merely an onlooker.”

  Rafael studied the pattern on his palm while power continued to blossom and bloom around them. A mysterious smile claimed his features. “Now isn’t that interesting?”

  Thirteen

  “Our souls are stained in the color of our thoughts.”

  –Kmourra, Sorceress of Vest

  Isabel added more slack to her anchor on T’khendar’s Pattern of the World and let the current drag her downstream to the next ley line. She threw a mental hook around this tributary, like a mountain-climber securing her harness to a new support rope, and reeled herself in.

  While her actions resembled a climber scaling the side of a cliff, she was actually dredging new connections, opening new channels of flow between the dominant ley lines; bolstering the grid.

  In actuality, her work resembled a spider spinning new strands of a web rather than a climber clinging to the rocks, but the precarious, one-mistake-away-from-death dangling dance she was upon compared more truly to the latter. This webwork of ley lines formed a manageable pattern in her consciousness; in reality, it spanned a score of miles.

  Isabel spun out more slack on her anchor and swung-skipped over to a new channel, another ley line, another section of the pattern’s mountainside, which she also hooked into her mental harness in the same manner.

  Did she really just do that? Jude asked from elsewhere on the grid.

  Isabel could sense the three Eltanese, who were working the Pattern with her that day, but the rushing current blinded her to their actual whereabouts.

  She conceived of the relationship as though she was hanging over the mountain’s edge, while they were anchoring all of her lines at the top, out of view, if still within earshot. Yet this was not entirely true, for Jude and Mathias were actually following her as she skipped across the world’s magnetic grid, each of them dredging an additional line behind her.

  Jude, you know she can hear you. Mathias sent an exasperated reply to his cousin, then added to her, Begging your pardon, Lady Isabel.

  Stop distracting the lady and let her work. Gadovan’s mental voice was even deeper than usual and floated down the channel of their temporary bond upon a resonance of concern.

  The captain maintained an air of competence about him, no matter how perilous the situation. Isabel was in charge that day, showing the Eltanese how to weave this new pattern of connection between the ley lines, but if Gadovan had given an order, Isabel would probably have followed it. He reminded her of her brother in this regard.

  I still don�
�t get how she floats like that. Jude was clearly trying to address his cousin, but his words reached her all the same. Every time I land, I feel like I’m banging against the side of a cliff.

  So pull in your feet, Mathias teased.

  You know it doesn’t work like that, Mat.

  Jude, Isabel cast the thought to all of them, though she only addressed the one, the key to floating on the pattern is compartmentalization of contact points. Hooks and anchors have to be firmly held, each in their own mental compartment. You don’t collapse the compartments until the end.

  Like shielding, Mathias said with an undertone of impatience, like I told you before... He continued discussing this concept with his cousin.

  Isabel shook off the lightheadedness plaguing her and gathered herself for the next jump-swing-float...

  No one had ever really determined where a Nodefinder went when he skipped through the empty aether between ley lines on the pattern of a world. These were not common skills researched and taught at the Sormitáge. They were traversing territory only a master might dare explore, and then only at the forefront of dire need. A second strand Adept would have to have achieved three rings before he could even conceive of the mental mechanics involved in dredging ley lines.

  Once a Nodefinder understood the theory and had the necessary skill to do it, however, the actual work bordered on the mundane—purely routine. It hardly posed a challenge for the High Mage of the Citadel.

  This was the third grate of ley lines they’d charted that day, but she’d easily dredged ten grates a day in the past. Which is why she should not have felt so drained. Yet every time she cast herself between the ley lines, it felt like some necessary part of herself dissolved a little more.

  The last line Isabel needed for this grate lay double the distance of the earlier ones. The grid often worked out this way. They were essentially linking two independent portions of the world grid together by swinging through the empty aether to establish a heretofore nonexistent channel of magnetic flow.

  Gadovan, I’m coming to you.

  The captain would be waiting for her on the final ley line, ready to help close the circuit and charge the new grid they’d just mapped.

  I’ll be here, Lady Isabel, came his even reply.

  Isabel reeled out twice the usual length on her anchor. The node that held her to the pattern was beginning to feel very faint indeed. For her jump to the final line, she wouldn’t have help from the current to propel her, only her own skill with the lifeforce. She took aim upon the ley line and cast herself off.

  The line charged towards her—or she charged towards the line; in the nebulous non-gravity of the world grid, it was hard to say whence the magnetic movement originated.

  And then, quite without warning, elae simply vanished from her grasp.

  It was like a light extinguished, or a deep dousing beneath the surface of a black sea. One instant there, and the next—gone.

  Isabel felt a violent propulsion.

  Everything went dark.

  Fourteen

  “The motivating force beneath all human behavior

  is the need to feel superior to someone else.”

  –Socotra Isio, Sormitáge Scholar

  Felix di Sarcova della Buonara was fairly sure he was the luckiest bloke in the empire. Either that, or he was one of those doomed fools in the stories who don’t realize they’re on a death quest until it’s too late to turn back. Felix preferred to think of himself in the former capacity, since harboring grand ideas of his own immense value to the empire suited his disposition more gallantly than despair.

  And what boy of ten and six wouldn’t think himself lucky to be named as one of the High Lord of Agasan’s official envoys to the Dane’s capital city of Kjvngherad, especially when the High Lord himself was leading the embassy, and said embassy was actually a clandestine investigatory mission under the guise of a diplomatic flag?

  Never mind that the Empress had only allowed him to go because she didn’t want him anywhere near Nadia, and because Phaedor was going and no one wanted to figure out what to do with Felix without the zanthyr around to keep an eye on him. Felix still felt very important.

  He’d been anticipating a secret departure, all of them dressed for combat with Merdanti daggers and other weapons of a deadly nature shoved into concealed places on their persons, but mostly it had been a lot of waiting in boring lines, listening to tedious speeches and pretending to care.

  Felix had been marginally disappointed that they weren’t taking one of the Empress’s dregondar warships, but he admitted that the High Lord’s draegoon was damned impressive. Three-masted, easily fifty paces in length, sleek and fast with red sails with the imperial crest blazoned in thread-of-silver at their center. If his great-to-the-third-power grandfather Dominico had captained a ship like that, those pirates never would’ve caught and planked him.

  Mind, for all it was fun to dream about captaining such a ship—maybe trying his hand at piracy, or setting sail to the Lost Isles of Ren—Felix was discovering there wasn’t much to do on a ship once the voyage was under way, unless you were a sailor manning one of the countless ropes, all of which had impossible-to-keep-straight yet tediously mundane names, like sheets, lines, hauls, halyards and hawsers but which, in Felix’s view, were all still just ordinary ropes.

  The first few days aboard he’d split his time between watching the sailors scampering among the rigging, mooning over the Adeptus Commander Francesca da Mosta, gaming with the High Lord’s Caladrians—they weren’t very nice to him, but they were all too happy to take his coin—and practicing card tricks in his stateroom; but by the seventh day, the ship was running fast through high seas, heeling and hauling up and down fifteen-foot swells, and hanging about belowdecks quickly lost its appeal.

  Felix found his way topside to discover a stormy morning and high seas—not that he couldn’t have figured that out while still in his stateroom—and a steady tailwind, thanks to the zanthyr. The usually staid captain was grinning from ear to ear, for they were pushing fifteen knots.

  The captain summoned Felix the instant the lad emerged and bade him give a message to the High Lord. Then he grinningly nudged him forward into that perilous stretch of ship where, when sailing high seas, most anything not lashed down could be swept overboard.

  With his right hand gripping tight to the guide rope strung to the oiled teak railing, which had a habit of falling away from under his hand at inopportune moments, Felix made his way towards the High Lord and Phaedor. The white spray regularly exploding off the bow simply skimmed around the two men, proof that one of them—most likely the zanthyr—was shielding with the fifth.

  The High Lord’s demeanor towards Felix had softened somewhat since Nadia’s safe—if rather dramatic, in Felix’s opinion—return to the Sacred City. Felix knew he ought to be grateful to the princess for showing up in the nick of time and corroborating everything he’d said; but the problem was that she also seemed to think so, which of course meant he couldn’t show her even a hint of gratitude.

  ‘Give a woman an inch and she’ll take a foot and charge you for two.’ His lord father had lots of helpful advice like this.

  Besides, how could he be grateful when there was so much Nadia obviously wasn’t telling him? Oh...she’d explained what had happened after N’abranaacht took her captive at the Quai game—all about an underground temple that had once belonged to the Quorum of the Sixth Truth, and how Tanis had saved her from hundreds of demons, and then something about Shadow, which had sounded really awful and wickedly thrilling at the same time—mostly just enough to make Felix really sorry he’d involved her in his attempt to find Malin van Drexel.

  But for all that, there was plenty she wouldn’t explain.

  Like, for starters, how—and even more importantly, why—she’d returned with one of the Prophet Bethamin’s Marquiin in tow.

  The best Healers in the empire were now trying to counteract whatever nightmarish working Bethamin had use
d to corrupt Caspar’s connection to elae, which was fine and altruistic and all, but it didn’t explain why in Belloth’s thirteen hells Nadia had brought him back with her.

  She also hadn’t deigned to explain why a Malorin’athgul had rescued her from the Prophet’s temple in Tambarré, apparently in direct opposition to the other Malorin’athgul who’d been holding her captive there.

  Sancto Spirito! No wonder the bards just retold thousand-year-old tales. The truth was always so much stranger than anything even the most inventive bard could think up!

  The hubbub surrounding Nadia’s return had just been dying down when he’d returned—Pelasommáyurek, Ender of Paths; Tanis’s Pelas. The zanthyr had immediately taken him to speak to the Empress.

  Felix hadn’t been privy to that conversation, but whatever had transpired behind those closed doors, the Empress and the High Lord had finally become convinced that Malorin’athgul were real.

  Perhaps it had something to do with finding out that one of the most famous and prolific artists in the empire’s history was in fact an immortal birthed in the unraveling fringes of Chaos who had been traipsing around for centuries beneath their hubris, unrecognized for what he was.

  But all of that was behind them now...along with Felix’s satchel and his favorite coat, neither of which he’d been allowed to bring along; the former because Vincenzé didn’t want any other ‘priceless artifacts vanishing into his knapsack,’ and the latter because they wanted him ‘looking official,’ which Felix was discovering actually meant being really bloody uncomfortable all the time. At least they hadn’t made him cut his hair.

  He hooked a finger into the collar of his coat and tugged against the fabric, but the buttons were newly stitched and the wool starched stiff and there was no hope save to endure a slow strangulation. Only the High Lord could pull off those stiff-necked coats, collars and cravats without looking like a pig stuffed for roasting.