The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Down, down past darkness and stone...five levels down, to where the air stood stagnant. He reversed planes and reappeared in an empty passageway.

  And there he felt it—Trell’s pattern. Faint, because his life pattern was faint.

  More than faint. Practically nonexistent.

  Tannour sprinted down the hall.

  Communing would’ve been faster, but he had difficulty communing underground, with hundreds of feet of rock above and even greater density below. Air became nearly solid in such places, immobile, difficult to manipulate.

  He was mentally thanking Mithaiya for the blessing of her distraction—he remained vaguely cognizant of the drachwyr through Air’s intermittent whispers—when the passage he’d been following opened onto a central hub where other passages connected, and he came face to face with a dozen men guarding a door.

  Either the door, or they were guarding the eidola standing between Tannour and the door, and thus, between Tannour and Trell, for he perceived Trell just beyond the tall iron barrier.

  Tannour’s first thought was to commune, but the door...patterns woven into the iron made it impenetrable to his senses. He tried assessing it on a different magnetic plane, but the entire space beyond it was sealed with patterns that confused his bearings, making the mental compass necessary to such shifting spin wildly.

  He’d have to do it the hard way, then.

  Tannour crossed arms before his chest and drew two curved daggers from his vest—scythe-like, seven-inch blades that made crescents across his knuckles. He could feel Trell’s life slipping away on the falling sands of the hourglass. His patience was diminishing in time with it.

  None of the men standing to oppose him looked too bright, but he gave them the benefit of the doubt. “Choose now if serving that wielder is more important than your lives,” he said in the Common Tongue. “I have no quarrel with any of you. If you give me reason to have one, you’ll meet the Ghost Kings.”

  They laughed among themselves.

  Soon thereafter, none of them were laughing. None of them were breathing. Tannour supposed it was difficult to do either with your throat sliced open.

  The eidola had been leaning against the tall iron door the entire time. Now, as Tannour stood in a circle of the dead, it pushed itself off.

  “He thought you’d come,” the creature said in a wood-slat clatter. “When he burned your pattern off the prince, he thought you’d show up here sooner or later. But you’re too late.” The eidola’s face split in a black-gummed smile. “He’s one of us now.”

  Tannour felt a shock go through him. Air resonated a sluggish truth.

  The eidola grinned wickedly. “When the Lord Abanachtran arrives, he will take your prince to be a leader in his armies. You’re too late to save him.” Still grinning, he waggled a finger at the scythes in Tannour’s hands. “Those blades cannot harm me.”

  Battling a reeling refusal to believe the thing’s words, Tannour ducked his head. “No,” he hissed, sheathing his blades, “but I can.”

  He spun into the cortata and drew upon another of his of skills—changing the solidity of his form.

  The creature dodged his first two punches, but the granite-hard elbow Tannour slammed across its jaw sent it stumbling. He doubted the creature had ever fought anything like himself.

  The eidola recovered and returned a strong right hook that Tannour sidestepped and rejoined with his elbow in the middle of the creature’s back. It stumbled forward. Tannour kicked out its knee, and it staggered. But when he went in for a stunning blow to the back of its neck, the creature launched up and sealed its hand around Tannour’s throat. Instantly they were nose to nose.

  “It won’t be that easy,” it clack-clattered.

  Whereupon their dance began in true.

  “Any minute now...” it taunted as they whirled through a series of blows and counters, with the eidola grinning and Tannour feeling his strength waning and his binding tattoos waxing. “Any minute he shall open his eyes as one of us.”

  The creature slipped inside Tannour’s guard and landed a two-handed punch to his chest, which sent him flying. He hit the stones and somersaulted backwards onto his feet again. But the force of the blow had winded him, and he had to shake off a dazed stupor.

  After days spent in communion flying to get there, his power was siphoning out of him faster than he could replenish it. The iron door and its guard were beginning to seem insurmountable barriers.

  The creature dragged its feet across the floor in a mirthful mockery of a bull, grinning at Tannour around the black ridges that had once been its teeth. “He comes, he comes. The Lord Abanachtran comes!” It wagged its head from side to side, laughing a slatted cackle. “He’ll split the fabric of the realm and snatch your precious prince away!”

  Then it charged.

  Tannour was just a second too slow in dodging. The eidola caught him in the ribs, and he flew sideways. He communed an instant before slamming into a wall.

  Tannour knew an agonized desperation. The faintest sense told him Trell’s hourglass was nearly empty. The tattoos on his own neck were burning. The mercuric cuffs on his wrists felt like manacles of ice. He didn’t know what chance remained for Trell, but if anything at all was left of his prince...

  But he had to get past the eidola first.

  How do you kill a creature that isn’t alive?

  Shifting as quickly through ideas as particles of form, Tannour materialized behind the eidola with his hand inside its head.

  He felt something soft among that stone honeycomb and closed his fist around it. Gripping it for all his worth then, he clenched his jaw, magnetized to the next dimension, and took the creature’s soft parts with him as he shifted.

  An ethereal hand ripped brain tissue out through stone.

  The eidola crumbled.

  Tannour rematerialized before the iron door and collapsed against it, sucking in ragged breaths. The world was spinning, and his stomach was lurching tumultuously. He was unbearably weary, heartsick...furious.

  He flung the creature’s detritus away, cast air into the mechanism to unlock the door, and sent it crashing open with the same force.

  Urgency fueled him as he sprinted down the dim passage beyond.

  Air in that granite corridor reeked of rotting flesh and rotting souls. Tannour ran past hollow rooms and rooms occupied by hollowed minds, down passages painted in shades of death and clogged with patterns that brought the same.

  Trell’s tattoo hauled him now as surely as his own intention drove him to push through exhaustion and concern and a hundred other fears he didn’t dare think about—most pressing of which was how faint Trell’s connection felt in his mind.

  Tannour’s neck burned. His wrists were icy chains dragging against his consciousness. The number of times he’d had to shift dimensions or commune had left him feeling gauze-thin, as if some of his particles had failed to find their way back into form, leaving him ephemeral, a shadow shy of solidity.

  And to rub salt in his wounds, just as Tannour’s senses told him he was finally nearing Trell, eidola roaches came pouring out of the woodwork.

  One moment, the tunnel was empty. The next, it stood chockablock with demons snarling and spitting in their clattering voices.

  There were far too many to take them on individually. Already exhausted and growing desperate, Tannour saw only one solution. But, oh...as drained as he was, this was going to hurt. He just hoped he’d still be functional after it was over.

  Clenching his jaw, Tannour reached out with mental arms—past the granite blocks and the earth that supported them; far out, through time and space, beyond the ethereal fabric called reality—and magnetized two walls in an alternate dimensional plane.

  Then, closing his eyes and exhaling a deep, tremulous breath of what-the-fethe-are-you-thinking? he slammed the two dimensional walls together.

  Searing light flooded his consciousness. He nearly blacked out.

  When he regained himself, h
e was braced raggedly against a wall, heaving breath into his agonized lungs. The tunnel stood empty, save for floating particulates that might’ve been ash.

  Tannour absently wiped tears from his eyes. Blood came away on his fingers, but at least his mind remained his own. For the moment. A trick like that surely would’ve roused his Sorceresy masters’ notice.

  He shoved off the wall and forced his feet to run down the passage on shaking legs.

  His head felt like daggers were lodged inside it and throbbed violently with every step, making his vision a blur. But he had a line on Trell’s position now.

  He knew the door the moment he neared it, if only from the foreboding that suddenly coursed through him. Staggering to a halt, Tannour placed a hand on the wood and sent Air to turn back the bolt. But then he just stood there, momentarily frozen, emotionally panicked and somehow unable to make himself open the door.

  Deep in its heart, the island trembled.

  Tannour sucked in his breath and slammed the door against the wall as he shoved into the room. His eyes were dreading what they would see; his heart was dreading it more.

  He’d so prepared himself to find a terrible truth that at first his eyes rejected the sight of his prince stretched out on the stone platform, shirtless and still. Trell’s face was very pale and his lips were blue; likewise the fragile skin beneath his eyes.

  Tannour pressed his ear to Trell’s chest—fethe, it was like a block of ice!—and his fingers to his throat. For a horrifying moment, the only heartbeat he heard was his own. Then a beat, faint and feeble, accompanied the barest flutter beneath his fingers.

  Tannour heaved a shuddering exhale of relief and straightened over his prince.

  Only then did he notice Trell’s hands.

  They were as black as Merdanti stone.

  Tannour choked back—

  A scream? A sob? A furious roar? He shoved his emotions deep into the trenches of his fortitude and hefted up the unconscious prince. His legs protested mightily against the added weight as he staggered out of the room.

  The island gave an agonized groan.

  Suddenly the floor heaved. Tannour pitched into the wall. Where he’d been standing an instant before, the floor split—

  No, it disintegrated.

  Tannour grabbed Air and launched himself and Trell out of the room, just as the stone floor became a flood of cascading sand.

  The corridor soon fared no better. Chunks of flooring were melting away, leaving isolated shafts of igneous rock, like the tiny one currently supporting Tannour with his charge.

  All around him, the walls were molting.

  The ceiling began shedding itself in murky veils of black sand. The whole place was coming down around him.

  Tannour swore profusely in three languages.

  The trick he’d used in Khor Taran wouldn’t help him this time. There were no foundations he could wrap air around. In fact, Air told him the entire island was in motion, swaying hither and yon, huge splices of igneous rock sliding atop each other. The whole of it was suddenly as unstable as a stack of oil-slicked stones.

  Tannour couldn’t commune while carrying Trell, and he couldn’t airwalk him through the layers of crumbling castle above them. Shifting dimensions might save Tannour, but Trell would not survive it.

  Then again, they would definitely die if they stayed there.

  Coughing and choking on the bitter air, Tannour turned a slow circle amid waterfalls of sand, agonized by untenable choices, trying to ignore the uncertainty and desperation clutching at him. There had to be a way.

  Tannour couldn’t see a way.

  Ten paces beyond him down the corridor, a bright silver line appeared. Air fled it in terrified refractions.

  Tannour knew at once what he was seeing. This must be what the creature had been meaning—the Lord Abanachtran was coming to claim Trell. Fury found new purpose. He’d be damned if he’d let a stranger take his A’dal!

  The silver line split into two, and a blacker than black portal opened. Air screamed.

  Beneath Tannour’s feet, the pillar of safety trembled.

  A man stepped to the edge of the portal.

  Dark hair, flashing eyes. The same nimbus encased his form that had surrounded the Sundragon Mithaiya. When his sweeping gaze found Tannour and Trell, he gave a muted curse.

  “Hurry!” He slung one hand towards Tannour while flashing the palm of his other hand towards the ceiling, instantly clearing a path for them through the falling sand. “Come now—I can’t hold the portal and the ceiling for long!”

  Air showed Tannour the bridge the man had built for him, but—

  Fethe, how could he deliver Trell right into his hands?

  When the man saw his indecision, he swore again, winced—perhaps from the effort of holding up the collapsing mountain—and called with desperation, “Rafael!”

  An invisible force lassoed Tannour and ripped him and Trell towards the portal.

  Tannour flew into darkness just as the tunnel roof buckled.

  Fifty-seven

  “Heaven lies where she lies, my heart’s accomplice.”

  –The Immortal Bard Drake di Matteo

  Baelfeir could’ve found Vaile anywhere in the realm just by thinking of the smell of her skin. Admittedly, finding her in an entirely different realm had proven more of a challenge.

  But Cephrael had always established his sa’reyths within a particular quarter of the realm’s pattern, and whoever had made this one had continued the tradition.

  He arrived into a violent storm.

  Wind and rain flattened the meadows. Lightning thrashed the cowering land. Thunder sounded a near continuous roll beneath boiling midnight clouds backlit with green.

  Baelfeir hovered as disbanded particles of self. The storm had no effect upon his energy, for he was made of different stuff. What stuff was the subject of longstanding debate.

  This storm...should not have been.

  Unless the rules had dramatically changed, something was very wrong. Sa’reyths didn’t suffer storms. Rain, wind, certainly, but a storm of such desolating destruction could only mean...

  Vigilance narrowed the scope of his suspicion. He cast his starpoints wide so as to pervade more space.

  Vaile liked to claim that the same energy formed them both, just in different portions and patterns. But if he had any native form at all, Baelfeir knew it only as a collection of energy particles that were each a unit of his own attention, each a starpoint in and of itself. He could send every particle of self far beyond his primary point of awareness to permeate and pervade, or bring in those units of energy to congregate into whatever form he chose.

  In that moment, he sent them all out to become the storm.

  That’s how he found her.

  He might as easily have followed the lightning. It flashed continuously out of an epicenter a mile above where she lay pinioned in the grass.

  Baelfeir coalesced on one knee beside Vaile.

  Her flesh was icy. Her emerald eyes were dull. Mud splattered her features, mingled with blood. She did not respond to his touch on any plane of awareness.

  Anger ignited in him.

  Every particle of self snapped into such solidity that the rain rebounded off a ridge of power twenty feet beyond his form. Baelfeir ripped the offending blades out of her body and flung them far. Then he knelt again and gently held her face, reading of her energy—or at least what was left of it.

  And sat back again, stunned by what he found.

  Zanthyrs were made of both sides of existence in cohesive balance, yet somehow deyjiin had formed a singularity within Vaile’s core. It was magnetizing elae into itself, causing an unstable rift. Her immortal pattern had begun unraveling.

  It should’ve been a simple thing to correct the imbalance of energy when it had first occurred. He couldn’t fathom why no one had helped her—stars above and below, or why she hadn’t helped herself!

  Now, with deyjiin eating every stray particle of
elae, her body couldn’t heal. Nay, it was consuming itself.

  Baelfeir knew a thrumming anger.

  He lifted a lightning stare to the storm and shouted on every plane of reality, so as to be clearly heard: “HOW COULD YOU LET THIS HAPPEN?”

  Deyjiin exploded out of him.

  The storm inverted backwards into itself in rolling masses of evaporating clouds. The rain turned to mist and then vanished completely. The dead men surrounding Vaile disintegrated into ash, which the wind blew away in dark, escaping whorls.

  When his burst of fury had expended itself, crystalline heavens gazed down upon a muddy plate of earth, and a fog, rising out of the heat of his irritation.

  As much as Cephrael’s inaction infuriated him, in truth, Baelfeir directed his anger more at himself—for taking so long to return, for not foreseeing this eventuality, for letting things go too damned far!

  He swept Vaile up into his arms and stood, looking around for the sa’reyth.

  His starpoints perceived some tents in an adjoining valley, where a battle seemed to be underway, but the place hadn’t the resonance of a sa’reyth.

  He had to use the third strand to find it.

  Whatever had happened, Vaile had expended her last breath of power to push the sa’reyth forward in time.

  When he realized this, Baelfeir looked at the woman in his arms with blank bewilderment.

  With the same effort it had taken her to thrust the sa’reyth out of time, she might’ve torn the realm’s fabric and dragged herself into Shadow—taken refuge in its timelessness, and survived.

  But she hadn’t.

  Now he, who couldn’t tear the fabric, desperately needed that timelessness to revive her.

  Baelfeir pressed a kiss to Vaile’s cold forehead and murmured darkly, “You always were adept at making me claim the other side of myself.”

  Then he summoned elae and started carrying her up the hill.

  There was no avoiding it now. The working he intended would travel on the currents—Creation’s stars, Cephrael would probably read it seven realms away.

  For an instant, he wondered if this was part of some plan—using Vaile in lure to force him into action without time to fully explore the consequences—but he just as quickly dismissed the notion. If Cephrael had known Vaile was so close to oblivion, he surely would’ve done something to help her.