The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  “Well, make it fast. We’re no longer alone in hunting the Quorum’s archives.”

  Jaro swirled the bourbon in his glass and grinned. “Competition. Splendid.”

  “Don’t take this lightly, Jaro. If the others arrive first, there will be consequences.” Shail’s smoldering gaze said, You don’t know the half of what I can do, and my displeasure will be great.

  Jaro arched a cocky brow. “Is that a threat, Isahl?” His tone implied he found the prospect thrilling, while his grey eyes said with a taunting gleam, You don’t know the half of what I can do, either.

  Shail forced back a retort. It wasn’t Jaro but Pelas who had his fury so frayed that it constantly sparked and sputtered.

  Jaro wandered over to the windows, sipping his bourbon. “I’ve never been to Faroqhar. Maybe I’ll stick around while I’m waiting for that window, tour the Sacred City, take in the sights.” His gaze danced with dark mirth. “I hear there’s a new popular public attraction in the Piazza dei Elura.”

  Shail breathed deeply of the thin air of patience. “Vestian Adepts aren’t too popular in the Sacred City at present.”

  “You know, I heard that.” Jaro wandered back over to refill his glass. “But I don’t walk mor’alir.”

  “I somehow doubt the Order of the Glass Sword’s operatives will make that distinction.”

  Jaro’s lips spread in a derisive smile. “I’ll take my chances. That is, unless you want to show me around yourself, Isahl? I’ll bet you know all the best attractions.”

  Darkness roiled in Shail’s gaze. The places I would show you, I guarantee you would not enjoy. “As much as the prospect intrigues me, Jaro, I have important matters to attend to.”

  Jaro looked the frozen Keil up and down again, smirking. “Evidently.” He waggled a finger at Keil. “Is he merely decorative or—”

  “Is there something else you needed?” Shail hissed.

  Jaro grinned. “Nah, I’ll leave you two to your private time together.” He motioned to the decanter. “You don’t mind if I take the bour—”

  “Get out.”

  A grinning Jaro saluted him and vanished down through the floor.

  Shail warded the room.

  Then he seated himself in an armchair and moved his consciousness into Keil’s mind. He opened his puppet’s eyes, felt the weight of his vestments dragging at his shoulders, slightly too-tight shoes...

  And elae surging into him.

  He’d seen no choice, really, after that visit from...whoever had been masquerading as the Quai player and his lover. If he’d had access to elae at the time, they wouldn’t have been capable of fooling him. Too many of his games had reached critical junctures. He couldn’t afford to be caught unawares.

  The downside of having awoken his puppet to the lifeforce was that Keil would have access to it forevermore. He could become a wielder himself, though Shail doubted he would let the man live long enough to do so.

  The upside was that Shail could now wield elae through Keil’s body. Alone in his own mind, the man had no training, no idea how to use the power, but when Shail held dominion over him, he would be able to do miraculous things.

  Wearing Keil’s body, Shail swept from the room and down the dim corridor towards the waiting assembly. They would be the first to witness the miracle, proof that his infamous pattern would in fact waken elae in a man—providing he possessed the dormant gift.

  Mind, it wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

  As the Empress had so irritatingly pointed out to him while he wore Senator Schiavone’s face, while it was a fact that a na’turna Palmer could now suddenly work elae—Keil being just the latest of them to do so—this fact in no way proved that the pattern in question had engendered this change.

  But the fools waiting in the hall wouldn’t care. Like most of humanity, they would see only what they wanted to see and ignore everything that cast a shadow across their chosen rose-colored reality.

  Indeed, they would keep ignoring any signs that darkened those skies with warning, all the while they were walking themselves to their doom. They all just made it so easy.

  Shail turned down another corridor towards the great hall, even as he turned a corner in his mind, once more towards those proverbial thorns in his side.

  Once Jaro had procured what Shail needed from the Quorum’s archives, nothing Ean val Lorian could do would matter. The only outstanding thorns then would be Björn van Gelderan...and Baelfeir.

  Baelfeir, with his pompous illusions and holier-than-thou pedantry—the tapestry this, the tapestry that....

  Pshaw! What elevated craft lay in twisting a man’s thoughts to wring the natural shape out of them? A washwoman did the same with her homespun. This did not make her an artist.

  A thousand realms to choose from, Shail fumed, and the distempered cur chose Alorin for reasons unfathomable.

  Björn he could handle. Baelfeir was going to be a problem.

  Well...Shail would show him how to make new designs in his precious tapestry. He would see a chaos unfolding the likes of which this realm had never known.

  Still trailing the fumes of his acrimony, Shail-as-Keil wound his way through the back rooms and antechamber of the great hall and emerged onto the dais just as the sun was angling its long rays through the windows behind him.

  The hum of conversation instantly lulled to a hush.

  Glowing in the angled sunlight—and perhaps with a little help from the fifth—Shail raised Keil’s arms and strode to the front of the dais, where hundreds of faces were upturned to him.

  “My friends,” he said, letting the fifth carry Keil’s soft voice directly to every ear, “you see before you a miracle...”

  Forty-five

  “Their aspect is known throughout the realms,

  but only the greatest of them bound himself to the angiel.”

  – Excerpted from Genesis Legends, Tales from the Before

  Gadovan Mandoril hunched his shoulders against the wind and pressed harder on the edges of the canvas map spread out before him to hold it flat. At eye level, suspended before a rugged landscape of red rock canyon, Alorin’s world grid glowed a pale silver-blue, the illusion woken by the flow of elae he was sending into the canvas.

  The wind whirled on past Gadovan and around sky-scraping clay spires two or three times as tall as the oldest trees. They’d been carved to resemble ornate columns and formed a promenade that led to the exact proscenium where Gadovan was standing.

  “It ought to be here,” Jude said for the umpteenth time. He yawned wide enough to show his tonsils and then looked around dispiritedly.

  “We know, Jude.” Mat was stretched out on a ledge bordering a precipitous drop to the next level down in the canyon floor. “Why do you think the lad is investigating on the grid?”

  “Yeah, but why aren’t we investigating on the grid?” Jude asked.

  “Because this world isn’t intrinsic to us,” Gadovan murmured. “It will always feel slightly alien. Besides, Tanis doesn’t need our help to find a weld.”

  Mat’s grunt said that was an understatement of magnitude.

  Gadovan frowned at the illusion of the world grid hovering in front of him. Jude was right. According to the weldmap, the temple and the weld it harbored should have been right where they were standing. Even the canyon itself seemed oriented around that position, a grand earthen theater aligned to the stage of their plateau.

  Gadovan scrubbed at his jaw. The wide silver band he wore on his thumb caught the light, dragging his eyes to the ring as well as its twin, worn on his other thumb.

  Patterns adorned the bands, which fit exactly between the knuckles of his thumbs. If he brought his thumbs together just so, the armor of the Paladin Knights would flash into being, formed of all of the strands of elae.

  The armor’s structure resembled the walls of a celantia—impenetrable, invisible when necessary, responsive to their thoughts and capable of withstanding all but the most devastating patterns. Gadovan fe
rvently hoped they wouldn’t need to wear it.

  Mat grunted his agreement, catching the thought.

  Gadovan touched a ley line on the illusion of the world grid, and the network of crisscrossing lines shifted and reformed to magnify the section of his interest. Of course, in lifting his hand, the physical weldmap blew up off the table, obscuring the illusion.

  Gadovan sighed. “Jude, make yourself useful and hold this down for me.”

  Jude pushed off the spire he’d been leaning against and dropped to his knees beside the rock where Gadovan had the weldmap spread out. He slapped a palm onto the canvas to hold it down. Then his eyes widened. “Criim, Gad,” he whispered with awe, “this is the map.”

  “I’m aware of that, Jude.”

  “We’re all aware of that, Jude,” Mat grumbled beneath the arm thrown over his eyes, “or did you forget our truthbinding already?”

  Jude turned Mat a dreamy look. “I’m not likely to forget that any time soon. The Lady Isabel’s hands on my head, her mind all enmeshed with mine—”

  “By the Time Fathers, will you stop with that already?” Mat flung an agonized glare at his cousin. “I don’t want to even think about you with her, much less see it in your thoughts! It’s like thinking about you with my sister.” He shuddered.

  “Oh yeah, your sister...” Jude nodded an emphatic agreement. “You know, technically we’re only third cousins—”

  “Would that the Lady Isabel might’ve found a way to shield the rest of us from your fantasies, Jude,” Gadovan muttered.

  “Hey, I’m a man with needs, and they’re not being aided by untold weeks spent in a desert on an isolated world no one can get to.” Jude grinned skeptically at Gadovan while the wind blew his auburn curls into his eyes. “You’re telling me you haven’t thought about the Lady Isabel that way?”

  With his voicing of that way, Jude flashed on all of the ways he’d thought about the Lady Isabel.

  “Unholy Criim and all his demons.” Mat turned a wince into the crook of his arm. “Poor Tanis probably saw all of your thoughts about his mom just now, Jude. What if he was between ley lines? You might’ve just jolted him right off the Pattern of the World.”

  “I’m fairly certain Tanis has seen worse.” Pelas came and studied the weldmap over Gadovan’s shoulder. Gadovan had almost forgotten the Malorin’athgul was with them, he’d been so silent these last few hours.

  Pelas pointed to a section of the globe. “Can you focus in on that reticulation?”

  Gadovan touched the node point Pelas was indicating, and the globe shifted again. Ley lines rearranged as their view of the grid focused on a single star in the matrix of nodes and welds, making the section large before their eyes.

  Heavy lines of energy—the lines between nodes—connected the star to other similarly weighted points in the grid; while a multitude of thinner, nearly translucent lines—the leis—formed a finer webwork between each.

  Pelas motioned to one of the smaller sections of webbing. “Tanis is somewhere about there right now, but he’s on his way back to us.”

  Gadovan shook his head. “This is the node behind us,” and he pointed to a star that sat very close to a larger one, as a planet closest to its sun. “I don’t understand. The weld should be right there.”

  “If it was here I would feel its energy.” Pelas crossed his arms and frowned slightly. “I’ve cast as far down as the planet’s mantle. There is no weld in this region.”

  Occasionally Pelas would say things that made all the hair stand up on the back of Gadovan’s neck.

  “...Riiiiight.” Jude tugged uncomfortably at one ear. “So, what happened to the weld, then?”

  “My best guess is it moved.”

  Jude snorted. “Just up and wandered off, eh?”

  Pelas eyed him coolly. “Something like that.”

  Gadovan thought he understood. “There was a cataclysm that shook this world. You think it shifted the magnetic grid itself?”

  “It would follow. The welds we’re dealing with were all magnetically bound to each other so that Quorum members could travel easily between their temples. Whatever force caused the cataclysm may have pulled the entire chain of welds out of alignment with the rest of the grid.”

  Mat sat up to look at him. “But isn’t that supposed to have happened, like, millennia ago?”

  “Yes,” Pelas said.

  “But Dagmar’s map doesn’t show the current location of the weld?” Mat exchanged a wide-eyed stare with Gadovan. “How old is that map?”

  Pelas arched brows to acknowledge his point. “The question I’ve been wondering is, who made it to begin with?”

  “Every known weld on every known world,” Mat said with large eyes.

  “And the only map in existence that shows the welds that once linked to Shadow,” Gadovan added.

  Jude looked at the map beneath his hand like it was something godlike and sacred. “It’s got to be one of the oldest magical relics in the realms. No wonder everyone wants it so badly. Eltanin would probably ransom an entire planet for it.”

  Pelas gave a lengthy sigh. “Knowing the importance of our task, I’m not sure you can put any price on it.”

  “The price of a thousand worlds,” Gadovan said quietly

  Pelas nodded to him. “Just so.”

  A forceful exhale from behind them drew everyone’s gaze to find Tanis stepping off the node.

  The lad was dressed as they were: in traveling leathers of muted hues, with his cloak rolled up. He had a long case strapped diagonally across his back, a Merdanti blade at his hip, and more daggers hidden than displayed. Gadovan just hoped the lad knew how to use all of those weapons.

  Mind, he was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Tanis had the height and frame needed to hold his own in a dance of swords, and he must’ve received decent training as the Lady Isabel’s son. He’d certainly been trained well in his Adept craft.

  By the Time Fathers—Tanis was a natural, a prodigy even! The lad could run circles around them on the grid, and he was barely ten and seven.

  “Well, it’s definitely moved,” Tanis said as he walked over. He pushed a hand through his ash-blond hair and frowned. “I think we’re going to have to come at this from the earlier weld point, travel downstream on the current and jump off onto the tributary that the weld is hung up in now.” He glanced around at the others and clarified, “It’s still anchored to the grid, but it’s like a massive ship that got flung out of the river’s current and is wedged into the mouth of a tributary. It’s upstream of us, and because the current is blocked now, we’re not going to be able to reach it from here.”

  “Where, then?” Gadovan looked back to the globe glowing above the weldmap.

  Tanis came over and bent to study the grid. “Well...the closest welds are here and here,” and he waggled a finger at two large stars separated by what equated to hundreds of miles. “But this one...” he looked west, as though seeing through canyon and mountains to the coastline beyond, “is probably underwater. If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d rather try the other one.”

  Pelas bent to study the grid also. “Which one again, Tanis?”

  The lad pointed at the star in question.

  Pelas looked northeast, and his copper gaze narrowed. “That’s going to place us in Pashmir.”

  “Is that a problem?” Mat asked.

  Pelas glanced at Tanis, his expression unreadable. “It doesn’t have to be. Shall we move on?”

  Tanis looked to Gadovan and indicated the map. “With your permission, sir?”

  “Right.” Gadovan released it and stepped back, and the globe illusion vanished. Tanis rolled up the canvas and stowed it in the leather case he kept strapped to his back.

  Exhaling a lengthy sigh, Mat pushed to his feet and joined their group.

  Pelas was moving them from place to place using the ley lines, a technique he’d apparently learned from a book in the Fifth Vestal’s library. Gadovan and the others were all
rather round-eyed about it.

  Pelas had described the process as casting a mental hook around the nearest ley line—ley lines formed the primary induction channels between nodes. Then he ‘magnetized’ to the ley line—which Gadovan compared to throwing yourself into the path of a lightning bolt—and they would move easily a hundred miles in the space of a forceful exhale. Gadovan didn’t think he would ever get used to that feeling.

  They all placed a hand on each other’s arms, Gadovan braced himself, and—

  Suddenly they were standing on a flat expanse of desert. To the north, a fortified city of russet stone dominated a high hill, its walls and minarets making a wavering image beneath the day’s heat. It seemed barely more than a mirage. Far beyond the city, snowcapped mountains jutted, forbidding but starkly beautiful, scraping the blue sky.

  “I thought we were done with the desert.” Jude blew out a distasteful breath. “There are places on your world with trees and running water, right, Tanis?”

  “Last I checked.”

  “Behold, Pashmir.” Pelas was eying the city with a quiet regard, not quite respectful, nor either disdainful, but something in between. “This is as close as I dare take us to the walls.”

  Gadovan murmured, “They won’t take kindly to our arrival on your magic carpet?”

  Pelas turned him a look. “Adepts are not afforded the same rights in Avatar as in the west.” He started off towards the city.

  “What does that mean, exactly?” Mat asked, following behind him.

  Pelas glanced over his shoulder. “Just don’t tell anyone you’re an Adept. That’s what that means.”

  ***

  For Tanis, saying goodbye to his mother had been tearful. He’d tried to hold his tears back, mainly because she wasn’t trying at all and he felt one of them ought to, but it hadn’t worked in the least.

  He could tell she was concerned about not seeing him again, but he couldn’t tell if it was due to something she’d seen on his path or on her own. He knew she wouldn’t tell him in either case, so he’d just held her, and breathed in her scent, and remembered what it felt like to be little and sitting on her lap, which didn’t seem that long ago to him, though it had been three centuries for her.