The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

A score of men had gathered around by then. Vaile saw their boots in the ultraviolet spectrum.

  Rain was dripping from her brows, her nose, her chin. It ran along the strands of her hair into her open mouth as she gasped.

  “Dallen and you three are with me,” the man said to others beyond her view. “I want to see if this so-called sa’reyth lives up to its hype. The rest of you, find the traitors.”

  Most of the boots vanished from Vaile’s sight.

  With her energies waging an embittered contest, her vision refracted, and debilitating pain sweeping her, Vaile knew an intimate duality: of uncommon impotence and righteous fury; of aching hopelessness and dauntless duty; of yearning protest and numb submission—

  But she would not submit defeat to an amalgam of treachery and guile in the guise of a veritable Carnivále mask. The very idea of this despicable mortal surveying the First Lord’s private chambers set her aflame in a way she hadn’t been keen to since...well, a very long time.

  The Nodefinders of the rebellion would have to take care of themselves. The sa’reyth was her only concern.

  “Honor,” Vaile whispered to distract him while she embarked upon the mammoth undertaking of corralling enough power to carry out her intent.

  “What was that, she-cat?” He crouched down again to look upon her dripping face.

  Lightning flashed. Thunder cracked the firmament. The storm was fighting her efforts to contain it.

  She saw enough of her attacker in the light’s afterimage to note he was wearing a wide-brimmed hat, which kept the rain from ruining his carefully curled moustache.

  “Honor,” she gasped again, barely croaking out the word. “You have none.”

  He rested elbows on his knees and smiled. “Honor. Now there’s another massively over-hyped word. Clinging to it only gets in the way of getting things done. As case in point, a man with honor would not have stabbed a lady in the back, you understand? But I guess that’s your point, isn’t it?”

  Vaile held his gaze, seeing him in triplicate on three visible spectrums. He saw a lady brought to her knees. But she was no lady.

  With her power finally in hand, Vaile framed Absolute Being around the sa’reyth, whose tents rested just beyond the distant rise. Then, with a desperate force of will that left her visibly trembling and sick, she ripped the entire camp out of that timestream and shoved it into the future.

  Lightning splintered the sky. Thunder made a continuous timpani roll. Rain poured sideways on a sheering wind that nearly tore the remaining men off their feet.

  They cursed. They staggered.

  Vaile smiled into the muddied grass.

  Deep beneath her clawed fingers, she felt the world-fabric tremble.

  “Shade and darkness!” someone cursed. “Just kill her, Consuevé, and be done with it!”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” said the man Consuevé, her attacker. “Don’t you know what that would do?”

  “No,” the other yelled above the howling storm. “What would it do?”

  Consuevé appeared to be pondering this, for he paused before he answered. “I don’t know, but it would be bad. Clearly you know nothing about zanthyrs.”

  Vaile was thinking this Consuevé person knew far too much about zanthyrs.

  “Don’t get your knickers in a wad,” Consuevé yelled over the wind. “We’re not leaving her like this—she’d recover too quickly. Grab her wing!”

  Someone yanked one of her wings and dragged Vaile down onto her side with a sharply painful gasp. Boots stepped on her wing’s bony cartilage, pinning it to the ground.

  An instant later, he staked her through that cartilage with another zanthyr’s blade.

  Vaile definitely screamed that time.

  A shockwave of power lanced through her system. Paralysis seized her body. Her lungs froze.

  Her energies rebounded in alternating current between the two poles of the daggers. She could feel her lifeforce draining away, absorbed by the earth, while she lay in its effluence, quickly suffocating.

  His breath touched her ear a moment before that voice posed, “You’re no one’s avenging angel now, are you, sweetheart?”

  Then he kicked her in the face.

  Fifty

  “Do not pray for courage. Pray to have no fear.”

  –An old desert saying

  Tannour Valeri flew towards Ivarnen on tides of Air he shouldn’t have been able to manipulate, much less commune with. He’d felt tetherless, dispersed into millions of non-cohesive particles, certain on some level that he would never regain himself.

  He still couldn’t comprehend how it had happened. One moment he’d been aimless and lost, the next self-aware and rushing into form. He had no idea how he’d first tethered himself to Loukas, or later to Trell; and he certainly didn’t understand how Loukas had managed to tether him, hauling him out of the aether like fruit netted down from a tree.

  Perhaps Loukas had been right in saying that the Sorceresy had been lying to him about his abilities since day one...that they didn’t have nearly as much power to control him as he believed.

  Yet if that was true, it made no sense of what had come before.

  %

  Tannour had returned to the Sorceresy with dread in his heart. He’d completed his mission, but he hadn’t been able to withhold his desires. In the ten days he’d spent with Loukas, he’d marked him with his affections as surely as tattooing a target on his back.

  Always, Tannour lived with the threat of losing Loukas dominating his conscience, ever afraid they would pluck the truth from his thoughts. But over the course of the following year, his instructors continued his training and missions as if nothing had happened, building his skill-set through their typical cruelty and subversion, binding him with ever more tattoos, until...

  It was the first and last time he’d ever argued a mission. He’d rushed into his superior’s office and slammed the door. “I won’t do it!”

  Kmourra lifted her gaze from the papers she’d been reading. She was a tall woman with grey-streaked red hair and shrewd green eyes that had seen every horror under the sun. She might’ve passed fifty years or five hundred. Still, she was beautiful as she rose from behind her desk. “An anchor must be tested before you know it will hold.”

  “I don’t care,” he growled. “You don’t own me!”

  “Actually we do.” She smiled as she came towards him, gracefully lean beneath her Sorceresy robes. A tattooed collar of daggers banded her throat. “You were the coin Lord Orinth Valeri paid us for the luxury use of our magic.” She took his face in her hand, his gaze in her own. “You were chattel to him, but to us, Tannour, you are priceless. Even so...” her green eyes looked him over, “we have many priceless things. We can always make more.”

  Tannour felt sick. “I’ve done everything you asked,” he said desperately.

  “And now you will do this.”

  He dropped his gaze. “I won’t. I...can’t.” The very thought made his breath leave his lungs and refuse to return.

  Kmourra took his hands and opened his palms to the ceiling, revealing the delicate filigree inked in bands around his wrists. The tips of her own fingers were entirely silver with solid mercuric tattoos. “You are who you are, Tannour. Ver’alir chose you. The path requires sacrifice. You know this.”

  Tannour stared at her with burning eyes. “You ordered me to befriend him.”

  “But I didn’t order you to fall in love with him.” Her smile that time had invisible fangs. “No friends. No ties. You know our rules. If you want him to live, you’ll do this.”

  She held onto the back of his hands. He knew better than to pull away from her, but he made fists within her mercury-tipped fingers as he growled, “How can I keep my tether if I betray him?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out.”

  But it made no sense. He’d been communing for years. They couldn’t just now want to test the strength of his tether. This had to be about breaking him, about severing al
l ties to anyone who stood to become a threat to their hold over him.

  “You know nothing about tethers.” Kmourra ran her thumbs over the tattoos on his wrists, sending tiny electrical shocks through his body. “You only know what you feel, and I dare say you barely understand that.”

  Touching her tattoos to his tattoos linked their energies. It felt like worms were writhing inside his veins. She could touch other tattoos and harvest other sensations, most of them deeply unpleasant. Kmourra knew his tattoos intimately.

  “You are an alloy of elements, Tannour. A blade forged in our furnaces. You must be annealed, quenched and tempered, as with any blade.” Her green eyes looked him over calmly, but it was the calm of a placid lake teeming with poisonous eels.

  Tannour banked the coals of his fury, lest he do something really stupid. “And what if I shatter in the process?” he ground out.

  Her smile that time slid ice down his spine. “Then we’ll melt you down and start all over again.”

  ***

  Loukas n’Abraxis stood at the edge of camp, staring through the night at two flaming pyres. One burned on the near moors, the other inside the yard of the fortress that had once belonged to the warlord.

  It had taken days to free all of the Dannish soldiers and to gather the fallen from both sides of the conflict. Now Trell’s men stood a vigil around the nearer pyre, paying their respects to the dead.

  The ranks of Trell’s army had grown to fifteen hundred men. Loukas had spent hours conducting searches through the fortress to acquire supplies and armor to outfit the additions, many of whom had little more than breeks to their name. Madaam Chouri was still seeing men in need of her ministrations, and the line extended long every night.

  They would need several days more to ready everyone for the long march out of Abu’dhan. And within that time, Tannour had to find Trell and bring him back.

  Fiera’s ashes! The fact that Trell had been taken and Tannour nearly killed while everything else had been going so right...Loukas could barely wrap his head around the paradox. And now, worrying over Trell’s wellbeing was nearly driving him mad.

  That the A’dal had surely foreseen something like this was a given. They’d gone into battle plenty of times without Trell feeling any need to pass the reins. But this time, he’d been explicit.

  ‘You’re in charge if I don’t return, Loukas. I trust no one better to see Naiadithine’s missive accomplished.’

  Fethe, Trell. Loukas shoved a hand through his hair. He couldn’t even think about what would happen if the prince didn’t return.

  Trell had made the cause his crusade, but Loukas knew the others were not such fervent believers. Lazar would follow no one but Trell. Raegus was chomping at the bit to return to Raku, and Gideon could barely sleep for the weight of the duty he felt to reunite with his king and the Dannish forces at Nahavand.

  Talk about impossible tasks...

  And on top of all of this, with everything he needed to be figuring out and solving, all Loukas could really think about was Tannour.

  Sometimes he felt like his entire life pivoted around the Vestian. Even when they’d been assigned to separate companies of Converted, Loukas had barely managed a day when he didn’t think about Tannour, wonder about him, be simultaneously furious with him and miss him so hard that it hurt to recall his face to mind.

  There were times when Loukas felt like Tannour was the embodiment of Death, like his life had begun its decline when Tannour shot that arrow across the Ver; and times when he believed, deep down, that his life had only truly begun that day—

  ‘All of the years and everything between us...how could you do this to me?’ Loukas had felt like his heart was being repeatedly ripped from his chest.

  Tannour had been on his knees before him, his face wracked by contrition. ‘All of the years and everything between us...how can you not forgive me for it?”—

  Fethe, why did he do this to himself?

  But he couldn’t stop thinking of that night, as if the tether between them still existed, as if Tannour, wherever he was, kept hauling Loukas’s attention back to the betrayal—whether to punish Loukas or punish himself, he honestly couldn’t say.

  %

  Tannour changed after they became lovers. Or perhaps it was truer to say he’d been continuously changing, but it wasn’t until they became intimate that Loukas could track the course of the changes so closely.

  Every time Tannour came back from the Sorceresy, there were more shadows behind his eyes, more scars on his body...as well as in other places Loukas couldn’t see. Every tattoo seemed to claim a little bit more of him—hiding more of the boy Loukas had grown up with and the man he’d taken to his bed.

  Frequently Tannour would appear in Loukas’s room in the middle of the night, distraught or melancholy, sometimes distracted or oddly confused.

  Once he’d come in a tumultuous, dark humor and fethed Loukas until he was senseless and spent, then left without saying a word. Another time, Tannour had entered through the window, laid his head on Loukas’s lap and stayed there, shaking, for three solid hours, never speaking a word. He’d just stared into space. Loukas didn’t even think Tannour knew he’d been crying. Then he’d gotten up again and left without speaking a word of explanation, ever.

  If after any of these episodes Loukas asked him what had happened, Tannour would only say there were dark things in the world that he never wanted Loukas to know about.

  Yet for all of these glimpses of Tannour’s private turmoil, they had as many nights of bliss—arguing philosophy over wine or a game of Twenty Squares, rendezvousing for a hunt or a swim, sharing their meals and each other’s beds as often as they could.

  When he was being truly daring, Tannour would take Loukas far from civilization and show him some of the things he could do with his gifts. Sometimes he would show him in his own bed.

  Loukas paid a courtesan in the city a lavish fee to say she’d been with him on the nights he spent with Tannour—just in case his father’s men came calling. And he shared her bed from time to time so she’d have true memories for his father’s baddha satya to find.

  Tannour had asked him about it once after they’d finished their lovemaking. He’d been lying with a hand behind his head and the other across one bent knee, the sheet draped between his bare legs and his mercuric tattoos covering his form like armor sculpted to every inch of muscle.

  “Do you prefer women, Loukas?”

  Loukas turned from pouring them a drink, immediately bewildered. “Why would you ask that?”

  “You seem to be spending a lot of time with a certain courtesan in the city.”

  Loukas grunted. “I’m covering my ass, Tannour.”

  “Seems to me you’re uncovering it.” Tannour smirked. “Isn’t that the point of seeing her?”

  “Women are for breeding, men are for fething, or so says my father.” Loukas crossed the room and handed Tannour his wine. “I’m never giving that bastard a chance to doubt me again. One unproven infraction he might overlook. Two he would never forgive.”

  “The better to come live with me.”

  Loukas snorted. “In your dreams. I’m headed for the Fire Courts next year. You love the debate, but I actually intend to change things.”

  Tannour’s expression sobered. He set down his goblet. “I won’t be able to visit you in the Fire Courts. Not regularly.”

  Loukas stood over him, drinking his wine. “I thought you said you could go anywhere.”

  “I can’t afford to be seen there.”

  For some reason, Loukas didn’t think Tannour meant being seen by someone at the Fire Court. He couldn’t make sense of the subtext.

  Tannour looked Loukas’s naked form up and down. “Will you miss me?”

  Loukas rolled his eyes. “Horribly. I shan’t be able to sleep.”

  Tannour settled both hands behind his head. “Love can often do that to you.”

  “I’m not in love with you, you moron.”

&n
bsp; “No? Then why are you always staring at my ass like you want to grab it?”

  “Grabbing versus pounding, very different activities.”

  Tannour flashed a dark smile. “Pounding with your cock, perhaps.”

  “For fethe’s sake, Tannour—”

  “Why do you blush when I speak of the things we do together?” He pinned Loukas with that smile that always aroused him whether he wished it or not. “Oh, I know sex is taboo to Avatarens. The Ghost Kings forbid anyone outside the Fire Courts should learn how licentious you all truly are.”

  Tannour was still leveling him that smile. Then he dropped his eyes to Loukas’s groin, and the smile became cat-like.

  He sat up and tugged Loukas closer. “I love that I can make you hard just by looking at you.” He took hold of Loukas in a way that made his breath catch. “Think you’ll find someone in the Fire Courts that can do to you what I do?” And he proceeded to prove to Loukas the likelihood of that.

  %

  In the tragedy of hindsight, Loukas saw that in this single conversation, he’d given Tannour everything he needed to damn him.

  Sometimes Loukas wished they’d had one last night together. More often he was glad Tannour hadn’t come to him again. It would’ve made his betrayal feel premeditated on top of everything else.

  %

  Loukas had been studying the High Court Orations when they summoned him. He knew the Orations backwards and forwards, of course, but they were lengthy speeches combined with complicated hand gestures, and even one mistake was an unforgivable offense.

  They’d ushered him, bewildered, into his father’s audience chamber. A balcony lined the high-ceilinged room, the better to admire the designs carved into the dome overhead, or perhaps those of the parquet floor. Sometimes the ladies would gather above, but that night the room stood empty save for his lord father, the baddha satya, Ianver, and a large contingent of guards, all of whom looked ready to kill.

  As Loukas entered, the Lord n’Abraxis froze him with a stare. Loukas drew up short and looked around at the others, but their expressions revealed only their fury, not what had roused it. He stood in a hum of ill apprehension.