The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Keeping marginally dry inside, Shailabanáchtran pushed out of his chair to pour himself another drink. Branches and leaves beat against the roof in an uneven rhythm that counted the passing hours while the swaying trees sang an incessant lament. The tribal gods of Shi’ma had turned their backs on that section of Bemoth that night, probably for hosting the likes of him.

  With drink in hand, Shail swept aside the folds of his tent and stared through the rain at the darkly lit cavity twenty paces away. Braziers demarked the temple opening, dug out of vines and earth, while strings of hanging lamps danced and spurted, lighting a winding path into the bowels of the ruin. The temple complex had probably crowned these hills once. Now its rooms and galleries lay broken over the course of half a mile, its decaying skeleton crushed by giant trees.

  The place had once housed scholars, scientists and Adepts but was now the demesne of monkeys and poisonous snakes. The efforts Shail had taken to find this temple could’ve filled three volumes, a battle waged not only against ignorance and superstition but also the indomitable wilds.

  The lording jungle hovered attentively now, impatiently, while Shail’s men searched within the labyrinth of caves and rot for the item of his unique interest. The storm was a warning: the jungle god might’ve been allowing Shail’s men a brief delving into the temple’s secrets, but it was in no way offering them leave to make themselves at home.

  Shail had scoured the confines of so many moldering temples over the centuries that each one now blended into the next. Through his meticulous, exhaustive efforts, he’d found these places thought long destroyed, recovered them from burying sand, jungle or sea, and searched-searched-searched their once-hallowed chambers for bright stars of understanding.

  Sometimes those stars were sparks that flared but once. If he missed that singular expiration, he would never find the link to the next star in the vast heavens of his search. And he was searching for a single star in a galaxy of forgotten lore—verily, the galaxy itself was lost, along with its vast network of dark worlds harboring darker secrets.

  Dark...like the tear in the realm’s fabric.

  He remembered so well his first sight of that incongruous splotch far from the riotous firmament of Chaos. He’d watched Pelas vanish through it and thought nothing at the time—anomalies were paradoxically commonplace in Chaos—that is, until his brother failed to return.

  Time had little context on the unraveling cosmic fringes, but almost two centuries had passed in the Realms of Light before Shail flew through the tear in search of his brother.

  Pelas had never thanked him for that.

  And Darshan...he might never have followed at all if Shail hadn’t brought the fact of his favorite brother’s absence to his attention before departing in search of said brother.

  Behind Darshan had come Rinokh, with his monolithic disposition, more petrified by purpose even than Darshan. By Chaos born, the bigger Rinokh grew, the smaller his rationality by comparison. Long before they found the Realms of Light, his insatiable appetite for red stars had consumed all capacity for reason.

  But all of this was neither here nor there.

  The tear...the tear was the pertinent piece of this recollection. The tear for which they’d neither been given nor ever found any explanation. This mysterious tear that had so effectively lured all of them into the Realms of Light.

  In the reflected flames of the braziers, the rain glimmered.

  Shail sipped his bourbon while suspicions fomented in his thoughts. Had the tear occurred naturally? This had been his first line of inquiry and remained unanswered, centuries later, though his speculations were definitely leading in one direction.

  In all of recorded history, there was only one natural disaster that held a thread of potential for having caused the tear, though it seemed unlikely, for planets endured earthquakes as life endured the seasons.

  But after decades of studying the infamous second cataclysm, reading every accounting he could put his hands upon, he found a link—tenuous and fragile, yes, but one that had pointed to a potential truth.

  The more he masticated its possibilities, the less palatable it became. Soon, it congealed into an obsession to prove the theory wrong.

  He had to—for it was absolutely unconscionable to him that someone might’ve purposefully enticed them into the realm. Yet if the tear wasn’t natural, if it had been engendered with intent, then he saw little other explanation for its existence, save as a dark lure for them.

  They were the gods of these worlds! Yet if another’s intent had indeed brought them inside the Realms of Light, might they conceivably be unknowingly acting along the lines of that selfsame will?

  To imagine himself the stooge, the patsy of some faceless, nameless entity, the cuckold of another immortal concealed behind a screen...it pickled Shail’s very essence!

  Thus, he’d put every ounce of his considerable intelligence towards solving the mystery.

  That none of his brothers had thought to seek these truths hardly surprised him. Rinokh had all of the intelligence of a belching hole, Pelas was too much of a dilettante by nature and Darshan too self-absorbed. Put the three of them together and their intelligence only decreased in the average. By Chaos born, Pelas had spent centuries neither recognizing nor caring that they innately worked elae!

  But Shail had wondered. Shail had inquired. He had looked for answers.

  His research had quickly tumbled him into the opaquely mysterious Quorum of the Sixth Truth, whose only historical remnants—prior to his own investigation—were the writings of historians advancing personal soapboxes of conjecture and error, the disjointed accountings of survivors—who were barely willing to give their own names, much less the details of any personal involvement in sundering the realm—and the elaborately embellished recountings of bards, who in short order had spread a plague of misinformation throughout the known world.

  After the Quorum’s fall, its Adepts had been hunted, its surviving temples burned. The hatred harbored by the na’turna masses had run deep. Records were not easily found because the blighted peasantry had mindlessly destroyed anything even remotely connected to the order.

  So Shail had scoured the hearsay, dissected the rumors, explored every temple still in the known...and eventually discovered that in their last days, the Quorum had been organizing a worldwide effort around an intensely important but highly secretive event.

  He couldn’t be sure if the event occurred before the second cataclysm, twenty-five hundred years ago—even, perhaps, had caused it—or if the cataclysm shook the world and then the event occurred. But he knew that the cataclysm had devastated the Quorum.

  In the chaos following, a desperate effort had been made to move all surviving records describing the all-important ‘event’ to the Quorum’s sacred archives, whose location remained a mystery.

  Sormitáge historians—even the Arcane scholars of his own order—believed those archives had perished in the cataclysm itself and from which the Quorum had never recovered.

  But Shail had braved the tumbled and broken reaches of temples that no mortal had dared enter for millennia. He’d suffered through vicious patterns and traps, and breathed poisoned air for weeks while toiling in utter darkness, seeking the shameful truths buried when history had turned its back on the Quorum.

  Thus he’d found the crumbled writings left by once-enlightened Adepts, whose skills with the lifeforce remained unmatched, which writings indicated unequivocally that the Quorum’s sacred archives had not fallen during the second cataclysm but remained ‘safely beyond the ken of cret.’

  It had taken him some time, but he’d learned what the Quorum meant by the ken of cret. Now all he needed was a name, a description, any hint in any context to guide him towards his next star: the actual location of the archives.

  He wouldn’t stop searching until he found it.

  Wavering shadows pitching against the tunnel wall drew Shail’s gaze back to the temple opening. He let the flaps of his
tent fall, shutting out the rain, and walked to the long table he used as a desk.

  Ancient, moldering books littered its expanse, shedding crumbling vellum onto the oiled wood, molting dirt. None of their pages had proven fruitful.

  A moment later, the tent flaps split in a gust of damp wind to admit two Fhorgs, their shaved heads and faces tattooed with blue woad. The Fhorgs wore garments of leather and hammered bronze bound all over with bewildering straps. Both were dripping the storm onto his carpet.

  “A’thiarna,” My lord, said the first of the pair in his native dialect, “found an’er as mae interest ye.” He made an offering of yet another book with black mold for a cover, which he set on top of the others.

  Shail plopped into his chair uninterestedly. “What of the journal of the Archimandrite?”

  “Jaro be huntin’ it,” said the second Fhorg. “Saw ‘im slip t’ween a crack in the floor a lizard could nae ‘ve fit through.”

  Shail said icily into his bourbon, “He’d best not be wasting my time hunting his own agenda. You tell him that.”

  The look the Fhorgs exchanged at this indicated that neither of them were likely to tell Jaro that.

  Shail reached for the book. “How many chambers still need to be searched?”

  “Three,” said a deep voice from the doorway.

  Shail sat back in his chair to see Jaro’s tall form standing in the opening. The Vestian Adept wore his black hair short and his beard thick and long; the dense sides were trimmed close to emphasize the overall length, which grew a full handspan beyond his chin. The thing looked heavy enough to affect its own gravity.

  A tattoo in an ancient script marked an unbroken line from Jaro’s hairline, over one eyelid and across his cheek, where his beard consumed the rest of it. Similar script marked the left side of his neck. Jaro had as many tattoos as Shail had puppets.

  His eyes were dark, his gaze darker, his morality darker still. Shail got along with him tolerably well.

  Jaro let the tent flaps fall closed behind him and moved inside. Not a bead of water fell from his form. The lamplight bent around him.

  Shail shifted his gaze back to the Fhorgs. “Three chambers. See to them.”

  They bobbed their woad-stained heads and struck off for the temple.

  Jaro watched them until long after the tent flaps had closed again, all the while slowly unwrapping the leather bindings that secured his elbow-length gauntlets. He pitched the latter onto a chair. They landed with a dull thunk.

  Shail could tell from the set of Jaro’s lips that the man had found something. “Have a drink, Jaro.”

  “You should know it’s a kinetic mess out there.” Jaro walked to the chest and Shail’s collection of bourbon. He carelessly doused a glass with the rarest one and turned to face him. “The grid’s bent into irregular decagrams. There are rooms literally upside down.”

  “Which is why I hired a weirwarden for the work,” Shail replied with a smoldering gaze. “Or perhaps the task is beyond your skill.”

  Jaro smirked at him. He leaned back against the chest. “Heard an interesting rumor about you recently.”

  Shail sighed. “And?”

  “Is it true?”

  By Chaos born, the man required an intolerable level of humoring at times. If he wasn’t so good at his job, Shail would’ve erased him from the aether years ago simply to assuage his own irritation. “Which rumor are we discussing, pray?”

  Jaro shot back his drink. “An Arcane scholar who can work the fifth?” He set down his glass and started rolling up his sleeves, revealing dual bands of mottled flesh cuffing each wrist. Tattoos began where the burn scars ended, mercuric vambraces etched of dark patterns that danced with each ripple of his muscular forearms. “They’re calling him the Martyr of Myacene. It’s got a nice ring to it.”

  “Arcane scholars cannot work elae,” Shail replied, wondering how Jaro had already heard the rumor halfway around the world. Not that it mattered. He’d expected it sooner or later.

  “That’s what I said.” Jaro carelessly doused his glass again. “Rumor has it, the Literato Isahl N’abranaacht—that’s you, by last accounting—worked the fifth in front of thousands before dying on the blade of a demon.” He looked Shail over amusedly. “But here you sit, so we know the dying part, at least, was a lie.”

  Shail stared stonily at him.

  Jaro gave him a breezy smile. “Seems to me there’s only one answer to that riddle. And a man who can work the fifth definitely doesn’t need a weirwarden to find an Archimandrite’s journal, no matter how inside-out the place is turned.” He swirled his bourbon around in his glass. “I’m thinking you just didn’t want to leave your mark on the currents.”

  As a matter of fact, it was a point of pride for Shail that he never left his mark on the currents, no trace of his own wielding on the tides of elae—ever. In his hundreds of years pretending to be a na’turna scholar, no one had found a reason to doubt he was anyone other than who he claimed.

  Shail took a deep draught of his patience. “What’s your point, Jaro?”

  The weirwarden studied Shail with his smoke-grey eyes while the rain drummed a doleful rhythm. Then he flashed a smile. “Hell, there’s no point. I just like pissing you off.” He downed his drink and poured another. “This is good bourbon.”

  Shail sighed. The man had no concept of the precipitous nature of his own mortality. He traced an eyebrow with his forefinger. “Are you going to show me what you found, or were you perhaps waiting to unveil it at the turn of the century?”

  Jaro’s eyes glinted with dark victory. “I found what you wanted.”

  Of course you did. It was the only reason he put up with the man. Competence like Jaro’s was worth its weight in gold but was far harder to come by. He could make gold.

  Jaro carried the decanter of bourbon in one hand and his glass in the other and settled into the chair where he’d pitched his Merdanti-lined gloves. Such were needed when ‘running glissandos on the harmonic arch,’ as Jaro had explained to Shail. The picture he’d conveyed of the way Vestian weirwardens navigated the world’s magnetic grid had made Shail think of monkeys swinging through the trees, dropping or flipping from limb to limb, dexterously weaving magnetic leylines into new vines of travel.

  Even so, it was hard to envision Jaro as a primate.

  Setting down his drink, the Adept withdrew a book wrapped in suede from a satchel at his hip and tossed it on the table. Shail dragged the book across to his side.

  “You’ll be glad you sent me in for that.” He sat down and propped a booted foot over one knee. “The chamber where I found that book had slipped out of the relative continuum into a stasis field between weir points.”

  Shail looked up at him beneath his brows.

  “No gravity, you ken me?”

  “I ken you.”

  “You would’ve had a hell of a time in there, fifth strand or not.”

  Shail didn’t bother to tell him he had far more experience in zero gravity vacuum than Jaro did. The less the ballsy bastard knew of him, the better.

  Shail flicked off the folds of suede to find a leather journal bound with silk ribbon. It was in pristine condition. Shail’s gaze again lifted to the Adept inquiringly.

  “Preservation patterns on the chest. Made it easy to track on the currents.”

  “Admirable work, Jaro.”

  Jaro saluted him with his glass.

  Shail opened the book with care and read the inscription on the first page, written in a clean, neat hand. It was, indeed, the exact journal he’d spent decades hunting for. A trill of excitement coursed through him.

  He lifted his gaze to the Adept. “Your fee?”

  “Same as usual.” The weirwarden pushed himself tall and dragged the decanter off the table. “And the bourbon.”

  “A bargain, Jaro.”

  “Nice doing business with you, Isahl.” He retrieved his gloves, flashed a dark grin and exited into the night.

  Seventeen

/>   “Nature abhors a vacuum, Your Grace.”

  –The royal cousin Fynnlar val Lorian, to the Duchess of Aracine,

  on why he drinks so much

  Alyneri had decided that Cassius of Rogue’s mansion in Veneisea was the oddest place she’d ever visited. There were doors that led nowhere, rooms with no doors at all, staircases that ended in blank walls, and so many identical arcaded walkways that you could as easily wind up in the stables as the bath house.

  Some rooms overlooked mountains. Others offered, impossibly, a view of the Fire Sea. A drawing room on the third floor appeared to be in the middle of a desert oasis, while a terrace-level solar offered a sweeping view of Myacene’s capital city of Skyye.

  When she’d asked Cassius about the unusual attributes of his home, he’d just winked at her.

  So...are the rooms actually in different locations? Trell asked as Alyneri was walking down a long hallway hung with paintings of crows. Could you open a window and step out into a different city altogether?

  I can’t decide. Alyneri stopped to wonder at a disturbing painting that looked neither a crow nor a man but something in between both. Obviously you’re crossing a node at some point as you enter these rooms, she told him. When I once opened a solar window, Cassius’s own grounds lay without, but when I closed the window again, I appeared to be back in Tregarion.

  Curious. He sent her a mental grin.

  Indeed, Your Highness. She started walking again, feeling unsettled by the crow-man painting for no clear reason. Then she thought of how many days she’d spent aimlessly wandering Cassius’s home and puffed a frustrated exhale.

  Day after day spent idling around might’ve felt a blissful respite to Fynn, whose only vocation involved drinking wine and pontificating on the plight of the underappreciated aristocracy, but even one day wiled away frayed Alyneri’s nerves, and it had been nearly a moon that she, Carian and Fynn had been the ‘honored guests’ of Cassius of Rogue, every one of those days spent just waiting to find out if Cassius would allow the Nodefinder Rebellion to use his network of nodes.