The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Speaking of which...

  He banged the flat of his sword against the head of the wielder standing in front of him—you know, to get his attention.

  The man turned with a glare. He looked about sixteen to Demetrio. He was one of those Vestian types with a total absence of facial hair, and eyes that were too slanty. Made him look like he was perpetually trying to squeeze out a turd.

  Demetrio sniffed. “You know what to do when we get there, eh, chum?”

  The man gave him a black look. “It isn’t alchemy.”

  Demetrio didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. Maybe it was a Sorceresy thing. Dore preferred using Sorceresy freaks over Sormitáge-trained wielders—the gods alone understood why.

  Demetrio’s nose itched. He scrubbed it against his upper arm again. “So...you know what to do then, yeah?”

  “Hold the shield. Don’t let her get through to us.”

  “And you know what’ll happen to you if you fail.”

  The freak gave him a wan smile. “Same thing that’ll happen to you.”

  Demetrio’s eye twitched in reply to this.

  The freak didn’t know there were two classes of fools—the ones Dore made into eidola if they pissed him off, and the ones he made into puppets if they pissed him off. Demetrio wasn’t of a mind to educate the freak to the fact that he wasn’t any class of fool.

  “What about the rest of it?”

  The freak rattled off the rest of the plan with the bored inattention of a school boy stuck inside on a blue-sky day, which rather strengthened Demetrio’s impression that he was sixteen, even though the tattoos on his neck and the backs of his hands would imply he’d spent more than his share of years getting fully fecked over by the Sorceresy. Because, hell, everyone knew that’s how it worked over there.

  “I found it!” Dallen announced this like he’d just discovered bloody Xandeng or something.

  Demetrio shook his head. The idiot had no idea he was about to get slow-cooked by a zanthyr. She’d probably serve him up with pickles and a bun, slathered in hot sauce.

  “Good show, chum!” Demetrio called cheerily back. “Get us off the bloody Pattern.”

  They were all linked together with hooks and rope, which was a hell of a lot easier than trying to keep everyone together by touch. The downside of this arrangement was that you kind of got yanked forward by the people in front of you as they started moving off the Pattern of the World, which reflexive effect built momentum, so that by the time Demetrio felt the motion it was less a gentle tugging than a giant jerk.

  He flew hips-first across the node and slammed into one of the men in front of him, who knocked into someone else, and so forth, until an uneven pie slice of the mercenary force was rebounding into one another.

  “Detach!” Demetrio ordered, even as he yanked the hook off his own belt. If someone more competent than Dallen had been leading them, they would’ve all spread out the moment they arrived, thus avoiding the pileup.

  He looked around. A luminous moon showed him they were standing within a wide valley, perhaps five miles across. It was hard to estimate the distance in the dark. High mountains jutted all around them, blacker than black, save where the moon lit on a snowcapped rim or a ridge of trees. No lights shone anywhere.

  Demetrio started a countdown in his head.

  “Form up!” he called. Then he nudged the wielder. “Do your thing.”

  “The currents don’t show—”

  Demetrio grabbed him by the arm hole of his vest and pulled him nose to nose. “It’s a bloody zanthyr out there coming for us, bujete?” Understand? It was the only non-swear word he knew in Vestian. “Do your thing.”

  The freak did his thing.

  Demetrio wasn’t sensitive to elae, but he could damn well tell when the hairs on his arms were standing on end. There wasn’t any reason to account for that except a zanthyr flying towards them on tides of the fifth and the freak shielding them with the same.

  He wished he’d had a hand free to check his moustache. It never suited to go into battle with one’s whiskers awry, but his hands held black-bladed steel—Merdanti, and a zanthyr’s blades at that—which he planned to lodge in the flesh of Leyd’s sister in very short order.

  Plus, Dore had warned him that if he let go of either of those very special blades for so much as a second, he would make him eat his own balls, so...there was that.

  “Move out!” Demetrio called.

  They moved out.

  It was less a militant march than a coordinated walk where every man kept an eye on the man beside him so that if their neighbor was the first to go down beneath an unseen foe—namely Leyd’s sister—the rest could move rapidly out of striking distance.

  Not one of these hundred men knew they were there mostly to serve as fodder for an immortal’s fury. That part of the plan you generally didn’t share with the troops.

  Leyd had said to go up the hill, so they were going up the hill. As the grumbling cloud of malcontent that was their party started up the incline, Demetrio just hoped they were heading in the right direction.

  Dore had been all never-trust-a-zanthyr! after Leyd left their meeting, and the gods knew the oily bastard was a scheming prick—he’d have sliced his own mother’s throat just for shites and giggles, if he even had a fecking mother—but Demetrio knew that anything that served to satiate Leyd’s particular brand of malice would be solid intelligence, and for whatever reason, he really wanted to see his sister skewered.

  Skewering people happened to be something Demetrio was really good at. Very nearly competent, even.

  The countdown in his head ended pretty much at the exact moment that something big slammed against the wielder-freak’s shield, directly over Dallen’s head. If the shield hadn’t been there, the little fecker would’ve been mincemeat.

  Demetrio couldn’t afterwards say if his countdown ended because he’d actually reached one or if he’d just lost count completely when the Sorceresy freak’s shield lit up like fire candles over the Archduke’s palace on Rimaldian Independence Day.

  The men shouted. Many hunched behind upraised swords, as if even Merdanti steel had any hope against a zanthyr in the form. The only weapon that could mark them was one of their own blades, and Demetrio was the only one holding that kind of steel.

  ‘You’ll have to force combat, make her leave the form.’

  The freak’s shield was meant to do that. If she couldn’t get at them from the air, she’d have to confront them in hand-to-hand combat, or so Leyd had claimed.

  It took a while to convince her, apparently. The shield lit up like a damned lightning storm and stayed that way for what felt like forever. The men hunched and cursed while the wielder-freak stood with his hands in fists and sweat pouring down his face. Demetrio picked at a sore tooth and thought about how good a meal of roasted lamb sounded right about then.

  Eventually a break came in the lightning. This was the change Demetrio had been waiting for. It indicated the zanthyr was changing out of the form to come at them with her blades, just like Leyd had predicted.

  Beside him, the wielder-freak sucked in a shuddering breath.

  Demetrio nudged him. “You keep that shield solid, chum.”

  The freak gave him a sickly look that said clearly, I don’t know if I can.

  “Keep it solid,” Demetrio growled, “or I’ll offer you up as her amuse-bouche.”

  Demetrio had learned that word from eating at the Archduke’s table. Technically it was a Veneisean word, but the Rimaldian gentry generally used Veneisean words to describe culinary events, kind of the way Demetrio swore in other languages because it made him look learned.

  Suddenly the shield flared again, but that time it was all mottled and sickly looking. The wielder fell into convulsions, and his shield vanished.

  A wild scream sliced the night.

  Then the entire left side of the formation became a churning mass of carnage, like a great beast had chomped its maw on half a dozen
men at once and was shaking its head from side to side, flinging bodies hither and yon.

  The rest of the men charged an attack.

  Wearing a dark smile of satisfaction, Demetrio began inching around the battle.

  ***

  Vaile’s claws scraped across the shield, and blue-white lightning lanced outwards, illuminating a dome of protection. The fifth hummed. The air vibrated. Inverteré sizzled in her thoughts.

  Vaile pushed her wings down and thrust herself into a climb. These men obviously meant ill or they wouldn’t have arrived at the sa’reyth armed and using a node that equated to sneaking in the back door. Beyond these facts, she didn’t need to know why they’d come, nor did she care.

  She kept a flow of the fifth aimed into the shield as she circled, assessing it. The pattern of its construction caused a convex inversion of the fifth that effervesced deyjiin as it reacted against itself.

  This was mor’alir at its best. Whoever these men were, they must’ve had a Sorceresy Adept protecting them, for few others in this day were so adept at wielding inverteré patterns.

  Vaile tried a few ways of breaking the shield without success. This was the power of inverteré, the reason the Sorceresy spent centuries studying Warlock patterns—because inverteré drew upon both elae in the positive and deyjiin in the inverted negative; such patterns were therefore stronger than elae alone.

  She was going to have to attack the shield with Merdanti, which nullified both energies.

  Vaile flew out over the hillside and phase-shifted out of the form. The patterns ingrained in her native process of thought recombined particles of her life energy to assume her human shell—

  A memory flashed, recalled perhaps by her shifting particles of self, for assuredly she would not have thought of him, not if it could be helped:

  ‘You know I’m not of the fifth,’ he goaded her.

  ‘But you could be,’ she replied, too easily falling into their favorite contention. ‘All of the immortal races are fifth-strand, and you are immortal.’

  ‘But I don’t work the lifeforce,’ he answered with a smile full of defiant grace, ‘therefore I cannot be fifth-strand.’

  ‘But you could work it if you chose to,’ she argued, ‘thus, you could be of the fifth.’

  To which he replied in that darkly sensuous way, ‘You know precisely why I can work elae, Vaile, and it has nothing to do with my native construction.’

  In response to which she curled her fingers in his hair and whispered close at his ear, ‘You have no idea how you were actually constructed—

  Hissing at herself, Vaile dropped from the sky and landed in a crouch. Her head was swimming. For once, the cold knot twisting in her stomach had nothing to do with the singularity at her core.

  Storm clouds began amassing overhead in response to her emotional distress. Shifting had drained her more than she’d expected or she would’ve maintained tighter control over her power. She reined in tightly on both and focused on the mass of men downhill.

  Leather creaked as she straightened. Her swords left their scabbards in a silken scrape of steel.

  Then she rushed the intruders.

  Halfway down the hill, the wielder’s shield was draining itself of the elae she’d thrust into it, turning invisible again. Vaile made a talisman of one of her blades and channeled a potent cocktail of destabilization into it. She took a running leap, flew through the air and came down slamming her blade into the shield.

  Magnetic deionization shivered through its pattern. Energy particles decayed at speeds beyond the capacity of mortal eyes to follow. The shield disintegrated.

  Vaile charged into the mass of men with dual swords spinning in the ta’fieri, the zanthyrs’ spiraling figure-eight form. Utterly lethal. Men came at her and ricocheted away, sundered, bleeding, broken. Most did not rise again.

  Her muscles knew what to do without conscious thought. She was an unstoppable force shearing through the mortal tapestry, severing dozens of threads at a time.

  They’d brought this fight to her. Protecting the sa’reyth was her charge. She would not falter in it.

  Yet within the part of herself that perpetually ached, that selfsame indecision roused again. Was this really what she wanted to be doing? Hacking pieces out of the tapestry like a seamstress taking to a moldy drape?

  ‘When all the Cosmos asks of us is menial labors even a goat herder could manage, isn’t it time we moved on?’ Her brother Leyd’s words felt like acid in her veins, yet she couldn’t deny the pain of their truth.

  Bodies kept coming at her. They were just forms, not men. Just a field of sugarcane to be cut for pressing, and her the downtrodden worker with machetes in hand.

  When had she become so cold?

  Was it deyjiin’s singularity that had corrupted her resolve into apathetic indifference? Or was it the long years of impotence spent watching the realm decline, watching everything she adored wither and fade, yearning for a love she would rather have forgotten, watching time tick in an agonizing trickle while the game ever-so-slowly shifted the great bulk of cosmic will back towards benevolence.

  It seemed so futile, so purposeless, this gargantuan effort of rerouting Fate’s river against His wishes—

  ‘Do you really think he desired the decline?’ Björn had asked her. Theirs was not a favorite contention, though they’d discussed it often.

  ‘He willed it,’ she’d declared with ferocious certainty.

  ‘Cephrael didn’t twist the welds to Shadow, Vaile. Mankind did that. I did that.’

  ‘With his blessing,’ she’d hissed.

  He’d given her a look. ‘You know better than to claim our choices are his because he refused to interfere’—

  Lightning struck ground in a jolting clap of thunder, and a jagged dissonance in the aether jerked Vaile back to the moment.

  The storm was whipping her hair, tearing through the battle she was waging against straw men. They had no more hope of withstanding her than they had of avoiding the storm. The storm was her, the embodiment of her anger, her frustration, her pain. Still, she should’ve been able to keep a tighter hold upon it.

  But fatigue kept pushing her thoughts awry of her will, as much as her own unwilling participation was spawning it; and with the singularity in her core continuously eating elae, she couldn’t keep her power contained. Her mind was splintered.

  The remaining men parted to let the mor’alir wielder come at her.

  He was a firefly in the night. She captured him in a glass container of power and extinguished his life with a pinch of the fourth.

  The others backed away.

  Lightning splintered the sky, mirroring her resolve.

  Vaile stared down at the Adept’s lifeless form while the clouds split and poured rain upon them. Water made pools of his dead eyes.

  What had he thought as he expired? Had he wished for more, for better, for a different life? Had he felt purposeless, hopeless...lost in his own shell?

  All paths are valid, the Sorceresy claimed, but Vaile had no path, nor even any purpose any longer, when she’d been reduced to the tapestry’s plow.

  Water was dripping into her eyes. The wind plastered wet hair to her skin. Vaile looked upon the dead wielder, mourning all she’d lost—her lover, her friends, her joy and hope...her compassion.

  She perceived him an instant too late.

  Pain stabbed an electrical current up and down her spine.

  Energy exploded unbidden, warped.

  Lightning fractured the sky, illuminating the world in negative.

  Vail pitched to her knees. She might’ve cried out.

  Her energies dove into instant contest, fighting for dominion. Forced duality of awareness plunged her between halves of herself. She caught her hands in the blood-muddied grass, gasping raggedly, while parts of her body flickered in refraction.

  “Interesting, the things I’ve recently learned about zanthyrs,” a man’s voice said from behind her.

  Vaile saw
a pair of boots appear before her blurring vision. Agony continuously lanced her body, in time with the shockwaves of power coursing her spine. Wings had sprouted from her back, stealing energies to fuel their construction. They quivered half-in and half-out of form. Her eyes flicked into the spectroscopic dimension.

  She was phase-shifting without conscious control.

  “For instance,” he said cheerily from above her, “if you strike them in their sacral energy center with a dagger of their own making, it forces them to phase-shift—but only partway, as you’ve probably noticed. While you’d think this would make them more powerful, it actually incapacitates them, as their energies become split between the phases and can’t fully settle into either one.”

  Vaile tried to reach for the dagger lodged in her back, but her muscles were locked up—with pain, shock, or from the nullifying patterns of the Merdanti weapon buried in her spine...she couldn’t say which.

  The man half-turned to someone else and continued his cheerful explanation while her wings spasmed and her heart fluttered and pain ravaged her remorselessly.

  “Like a shark, you get me? You turn them over in the water and the bloody things are practically docile. You can split them open and gut them for all those pricey eggs, and the fins that fetch such a fortune on the black market, and then set them off again still swimming. The damned things don’t even know they’re dead until their brothers come to feast on them.”

  Suddenly a hand caught Vaile under the chin. She couldn’t even jerk free of his touch.

  He crouched down to meet her refracting eyes, revealing a face with a waxed moustache and pointed goatee. He flashed a smile of slightly imperfect teeth. “Someone’s got it in for you something fierce, kitty-cat.”

  Vaile knew exactly which someone.

  He released her chin and straightened out of sight again while she sucked in shallow, shuddering breaths.