The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  “Adepts studying the Laws...pshaw!” He threw up his hands with disbelief, then spun and speared the zanthyr with his stare as much as an accusing finger. “These so-called Sormitáge maestros are children playing dress-up in the yard, waving wands and shouting incantations they barely understand. Meanwhile, I was forced to sit in Shadow smarting from Cephrael’s infantile tantrum for twenty-five hundred years. And you say I went too far?”

  The ghost of a smile hinted on the zanthyr’s lips. “If the two of you could just learn to talk to one another...”

  Baelfeir angled him a look. Then he broke into soft laughter, and all the tension bled out of the dawn. The stars even appeared brighter as the Demon Lord replied with a smile, “One day, I will win you over to my way of seeing things.”

  “That would be a dangerous day indeed for the races of men.”

  Baelfeir’s gaze tightened. “I told you, compulsion is no longer my game. The point I was attempting to impress upon him is long buried by the ages, moot now in any case.” He gave a lengthy sigh. “After one successfully laces one’s boots a brace of times, the accomplishment loses its novelty.”

  Felix roused with sudden indignation. “I’m sorry—did you just compare compelling the entirety of mankind with tying your shoes?”

  Baelfeir looked him over amusedly. “You see?” He shifted his gaze back to Phaedor. “A free mind is infinitely more powerful than a captive one. I’ve never disputed this truth.”

  “Yet you seek to make them all captive.”

  “Not captive, Phaedor. Guided. The tapestry is in chaos. You cannot dispute that. And the realm is dying. This is the product of Cephrael’s free will.”

  Phaedor studied him quietly. “You speak a duality of truth.”

  “Well...” he swept the zanthyr with his gaze, “I learned from the best.”

  Felix had never put any thought into how long Phaedor had been doing whatever it was that he did to pass the centuries, but there the zanthyr stood chatting with the Demon Lord as though they were old friends...or at least old opponents across a King’s board. The entire conversation reminded Felix too nearly of a pair of gods arguing inconsequentially about the fate of Man.

  The zanthyr considered Baelfeir with the slightest of furrows between his brows. “You haven’t tired of this contention?”

  Baelfeir’s eyes flashed. “I will tire of it when he admits to the complete failure of the system.”

  “He would say, one only fails the day one stops trying.”

  Baelfeir shook his head. “Will you never tire of his circular logic? Surely you don’t believe it.”

  “What I believe is inconsequential. My choices don’t affect the pattern any more than yours do.”

  Baelfeir stared at him for a moment again while some deeper meaning passed between them. Then he chuckled. “Do you know...I believe I’ve missed you.”

  “Release the boy,” Phaedor purr-growled.

  “Yes, fine—just one last question.” He held the zanthyr’s gaze. “Has he abandoned this world? I found no sign of him in the tapestry.”

  The zanthyr arched a brow. “Did you not?”

  Whereupon, as his meaning sank in, the Warlock practically purred.

  “You won’t succeed at this, you know,” Phaedor remarked.

  Baelfeir focused back upon him. “Why? Because he’ll stop me?” You could have cut his dubiety with a knife.

  “The goal is unattainable, even for you.”

  The Demon Lord angled his head slightly. “You think you know what I’m about? You think he does?”

  “Unquestionably.”

  Baelfeir’s smile grew to its widest and sharpest yet. “That is excellent news.” His eyes danced as he nodded in farewell. “Phaedor.”

  “Baelfeir.”

  Then the Warlock vanished in a whirl of smoke.

  Phaedor returned to Felix’s side and placed a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Felix...”

  Felix stared at him. His mouth had gone dry. “Was he just talking about what I think he was just talking about? Taking away our free will—like, for everyone, like...forever?”

  “Yes.”

  Felix pushed both hands back through his hair, dislodging a cascade of snow. “But...to do that—merde, you’d have to refashion the entire universe, wouldn’t you?”

  Phaedor gripped his shoulders and shook him. Felix!—

  —Felix shot up with a gasped inhale.

  Strong hands grabbed his shoulders and pressed him to lie back down. He looked around blearily, and the world slowly came into focus.

  A circle of concerned faces hovered over him.

  The High Lord stood beside Vincenzé and Giancarlo. The two truthreaders who were Francesca da Mosta’s guards stood beside the Caladrians, and completing the circle was the Adeptus commander herself.

  “He has returned to us.” The zanthyr’s voice came from somewhere out of Felix’s view.

  Francesca straightened, ostensibly to look at Phaedor. “You’re certain?”

  “I would not state it otherwise, Commander.”

  She hitched her eyebrow as if to reply, well enough, and looked back to the lad. “Felix?”

  Felix gave her a meaningful smile and replied in his best sultry voice, “Francesca?” Whatever had just happened, this was probably the only time in his life he’d get away with calling her by her first name.

  Giancarlo snorted. “He’s back to himself, all right.”

  The others straightened somewhat, giving Felix a chance to look around. For some reason, he was lying on the floor in what had to be the Adeptus commander’s chambers, bare-chested, covered by a blanket.

  He looked around for the zanthyr but still couldn’t see him, so he addressed his question to the others. “What the hell happened? The last I knew, you two were trying to kill each other and—”

  A sudden question occurred to him. Felix lifted the blanket and peered suspiciously under it. His eyes went round and he protested shrilly, “Why am I naked?”

  “You walked into my chambers this way.” Francesca might’ve worn a little smirk. It was hard to tell since Felix was looking at her upside down.

  He shot to his feet, wrapping the blanket around his hips. The Caladrians were definitely smirking at him.

  Felix held the blanket with one hand and used the other to push the hair from his eyes. His head felt...dizzy. Swarmy. Like it was filled with gelatinous goo, yet somehow honeycombed with webby hollows at the same time. His stomach felt a bit queasy, too, but he attributed this to an intolerable level of embarrassment.

  He shoved out of the circle of adults and finally spotted the zanthyr before one of the darkened windows. His mind was desperately trying to fill in the missing pieces of time between the conversation on the mountain and waking naked on Francesca da Mosta’s floor. He staggered over to Phaedor.

  “Did he do this to me? Why didn’t you stop him? Why didn’t you do something?”

  The look in Phaedor’s eyes stilled Felix. “He had hold of you from the start, lad.”

  There was meaning aplenty in those words—layers of meaning, all of which Felix regrettably understood.

  He felt panic welling. “You mean...” But he didn’t want the zanthyr to tell him what he meant. He cast a frantic look around instead. “Is anyone going to tell me what happened?”

  The others exchanged looks, and then Francesca said, “You barged into my stateroom brandishing...” her eyes dipped below his hips and lifted again and she seemed to be suppressing a smile as much as the words she really meant to say, “Vincenzé’s sword, and shouting some nonsense about killing Giancarlo. When my attempts to calm you failed, I summoned the others.”

  “He was in you something fierce, cucciolo,” Giancarlo said with surprising compassion. “You had his strength.”

  “I had to use the fifth to restrain you.” Francesca looked him over with inquisitive dispassion mixed with concern.

  Felix stumbled backwards and plopped down on a chair. His chest
felt so tight he could barely breathe. “So...Giancarlo, Vincenzé...you two weren’t in the lounge just a bit ago?”

  Giancarlo glanced to his cousin before replying, “It’s an hour still before the dawn, cucciolo.”

  Felix thought he might be sick.

  No. He was definitely going to be sick.

  Somehow one of the truthreaders got a wastebasket in front of his face before he vomited what was left of last night’s dinner all over Francesca da Mosta’s carpet.

  Felix was still hanging his head with a hand across his mouth, feeling like his insides were shredded and the world was in tatters, when he felt a soft hand brush across his hair. “We’ll give you some time.”

  Francesca motioned the others out of the room.

  As the door closed, Felix shakily set the wastebasket on the floor, braced elbows on his knees and pushed his head into his hands. He felt betrayed, violated...defiled. And terribly confused.

  He could see the parallels of his fantasy overlaid upon the real events, but he could no more see those actual events in memory than he could’ve envisioned doing them before that night.

  He could only imagine what he’d looked like, barging naked into her stateroom behind the flag of his erection. He thought he might die from the humiliation alone.

  He asked weakly of the zanthyr, “Was any of it real?”

  “None of it,” Phaedor said as he emerged from the shadows, “and all of it.”

  Felix looked desperately up at him. “Was he really the Demon Lord?”

  “Yes.”

  Bloody Sanctos on a stake! “Isn’t he supposed to be locked out of the realm?”

  “It would appear that is no longer the case.”

  Felix felt a little like crying, a little like screaming, and a lot like throwing himself overboard. “Is somebody gonna...maybe...do something about that?”

  “Your companions are discussing what can be done at this very moment.”

  Felix mashed his palms into his eyes and let out a shuddering breath. “It felt so real.”

  “Illusion is his specialty. He has had eternity to perfect it.”

  Felix kept seeing Baelfeir’s unsettling smile. It sat there like a barrier, a disconnect between himself and the part of his brain that analyzed and viewed, even now blocking Felix from being able to know truth from fantasy.

  Hell, the Demon Lord was probably smiling still. Who was to say he wasn’t lurking somewhere nearby even, merged with the shadows. Felix couldn’t push away the feeling of that immense darkness or of the sentience that had pervaded it. He wondered how he was ever going to sleep again.

  He rubbed dispiritedly at one eye. “What’s really buggering me is how do I even know that now is the real now? Am I still imagining everything? Are we even talking? Are you even standing there?”

  “He’s gone, lad. He got the answers he came for.”

  “But why—” Yet even as he posed the question, Felix realized why the Demon Lord had chosen him. He was the only one among the High Lord’s entourage who hadn’t been trained to guard his thoughts at all times. Easy access.

  Felix gravely misliked being the low-hanging fruit, the weakling among the pack. It was quite a blow to his native sense of invincibility.

  “More germane than this, he saw that I’d taken an interest in you,” Phaedor added gently. He helped Felix out of the chair and guided him back towards his own stateroom. “You were the most expedient means to an end.”

  “An end—you mean those questions he wanted answered.”

  Phaedor nodded.

  Felix shuffled along beside the zanthyr with grief clenching his chest, but he’d be damned if he’d give the Demon Lord the satisfaction of seeing him cry. “There was so much to it,” he managed in a choked voice, “so much that happened that I couldn’t have known. Sancto Spirito, at least some of it had to be real!”

  Phaedor ushered him back inside his own stateroom. Bless him for making the wielder’s lamps blaze five times brighter.

  “Baelfeir...pervades.” Phaedor shut the door and stood before it while Felix fell onto his bed and yanked a blanket over himself. “He can glean much from errant thoughts in the aether. He weaves these threads of reality to form the woof and warp of his illusions.”

  Felix was starting to feel slightly more settled, what with being back in his own rooms and with Phaedor standing guard. Perhaps not safe enough to get up and dress himself—he could think of nothing more emasculating than hunting, bare-bottomed, around his room for a pair of clean britches while the zanthyr looked on—but safe enough to sift some truth from illusion.

  He rolled onto his side and hooked an arm behind his head. “Did the High Lord really proposition you about marrying off Tanis?”

  “We have discussed his views upon the matter in the past.”

  “And that whole thing about me helping discover what’s being done to the nodes?”

  “It is the High Lord’s wish that you should assist.”

  Felix sucked on a tooth. “So...did you or did you not bend the High Lord backwards over the railing after he said something about the Empress and Köhentaal?”

  Phaedor arched a brow. “An intriguing fiction.”

  “But in the illusion, you said Baelfeir summoned you through the High Lord, and the impression I got was that it had happened in that conversation.”

  “He summoned me in the way of Warlocks. The means would make little sense to you.”

  Felix curled his upper lip towards his nose while he thought through what else might not have been real. “So...did the Demon Lord really look like that?”

  Phaedor tilted his head inquiringly.

  “You know—smug, aristocratic, a real asshole.”

  The zanthyr might’ve suppressed a smile at this. It was hard to say definitively if the faint curve in one corner of his mouth was a result of Felix’s description. “It seems to be the corporeal form he’s chosen to represent his essence in this age.”

  “Okay...” Felix waved a hand vaguely at him, “we’ll go with that. So what about your whole conversation? I mean...you were there, talking with him, on the mountain. Am I right?”

  “We did converse.” The zanthyr made a dagger appear and began flipping it. “He claimed you to ensure I would answer his summons.”

  “Via the High Lord?”

  “Via you, Felix.”

  “You mean none of that stuff on deck happened?”

  The zanthyr flipped his dagger. “Baelfeir uses a man’s own desires as the framework for his illusions.”

  Felix glowered disappointedly. “So basically, you’re telling me Francesca da Mosta wasn’t wearing a see-through gown while she strolled the deck with the High Lord? Damn. I really wanted that part to be real.”

  “Marius and Francesca were likely foremost in your thoughts. Baelfeir used them to weave his alternate reality.”

  “Let’s get back to the conversation on the mountain. What part of that was true?” Felix shot him an aggravated look of warning. “And don’t say ‘all of it and none of it.’”

  “What mountain?”

  “The mountain where you got all buddy-buddy with the Demon Lord.”

  “There was no conversation on a mountain.”

  “But you did converse with Baelfeir—you said so yourself. And I know he didn’t pull any of that stuff from my thoughts. In my life I wouldn’t have put the Demon Lord and the angiel Cephrael together in one sentence, much less have bloody listed them as acquaintances. And you kept saying ‘release the boy,’ but I didn’t even know I was the boy in question, and I surely didn’t know I needed releasing.”

  “Get to the point if you can find it.”

  “Now see—” Felix hammered a finger at him, “you said that! In the illusion—dream—whatever the hell it was. You said that to the High Lord. Get to the point if you can find it, High Lord,” Felix did his best imitation of the zanthyr’s purr-growl. “You said it exactly like that.”

  Phaedor smiled dubiously. “
Exactly like that?”

  Felix stared reprovingly at him. “What about that whole conversation about Cephrael and the realm dying and all the thousand things the two of you were implying without saying? Real or not real? And don’t quote scripture at me—‘reality is collective thought agreement’ and blah, blah, blah. I don’t need a bloody lesson in the Esoterics.”

  The zanthyr grinned and flipped his dagger. “You’ll have to be more specific then.”

  “Fine.” Felix blew out his breath and framed his question. “Does Baelfeir really intend to take away our free will?”

  “That’s an oversimplification of his intention, but yes. Ultimately, that would be the consequence.”

  “Can he do it?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  “Are you going to stop him?”

  Phaedor flipped his dagger. “The more pertinent question is, should he be stopped? What can be done is not always what should be done.”

  “And by that you mean you could do it if it suited your motives.” Felix eyed the zanthyr narrowly. “See, I’m onto you.”

  “Rue the day I became so transparent. I must work on my opacity.”

  “Your sarcasm is as thick as ever.” Felix sucked on a tooth for a while as he pondered the zanthyr’s subtext. When he made no real progress in figuring out what the zanthyr was implying, he assumed his thinking-hard-upon-an-important-matter face. “Baelfeir talked as though you and he knew Cephrael, as though you’d had conversations with Him—as though the three of you played bloody bocce together and shared a vacation home.”

  “Is there a question in this somewhere?”

  “Well?” Felix sat up to pin him with an uncompromising stare. “Do you know the angiel? I mean, like...personally?”

  To this, Phaedor answered with an opaque smile and calmly flipped his dagger.

  Sixteen

  “I hold a wolf by the ears.”

  –The Nodefinder Anglar Tempest,

  on Malachai ap’Kalien

  A damp wind tore at the walls of Shail’s tent, turning the doubled canvas into taut, misshapen balloons, while the rain whipped violent lashes across the oiled cloth. All around, the jungle moaned.