The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  “I can’t imagine they were planning for much at all except their own deaths,” Ean muttered.

  He moved around to where Rafael was standing, mainly because it was too strange to talk to him while at least one of them appeared to be sticking sideways out of the wall. “But I take your meaning. They must’ve imagined someone would be along eventually to rescue the library from oblivion. There has to be some way of manipulating the field.”

  Yet if there was, Ean couldn’t see it. The patterns creating the geodesic stasis field were some of the most complicated fifth-strand patterns he’d ever encountered.

  “I fear I will be of little help to you in solving this riddle.” Rafael said, having picked up on his thought. “I see nothing of inverteré in these designs. But I believe this temple bears more investigation. There’s...something...”

  The flames of Rafael’s hair stilled to listen.

  Ean cast him a smile. “Go do your thing. I might be here a while.”

  “As you will, Ean.” Rafael bowed and faded, and Ean felt the Warlock’s mind growing distant.

  He returned his attention to the field.

  ***

  Dispersing into the aether, Rafael pervaded the temple in the way of Warlocks and discovered that he and Ean were not alone.

  Less troubling than the phase-shifting Adept using refraction to ghost around the temple were the actual ghosts—

  this was not a truth but was a fairly accurate descriptor

  —being roused, either by the other Adept’s agency or by Ean’s, from whatever phase refraction had been holding them out of time.

  Rafael had known such entities before, but he’d rarely seen them in the Realms of Light. These ghūls were a Warlock trick, very dangerous and quite deadly to beings who relied on things like breath and a beating heart.

  Rafael was immensely curious to know how they’d come to be there.

  ***

  Jaro phase-shifted into stasis in a half-collapsed hall to be greeted by wielder’s lamps flaming to life.

  Thousands of years of neglect, the entire temple being ripped out of alignment with the Pattern of the World, and those bloody lamps still worked—while in twelve kingdoms he hadn’t been able to find a timepiece that didn’t run slow. There was something to be said for ‘They don’t build them like they used to.’

  Even so, this place was giving him the creeps.

  Jaro had delved his way through countless smashed-all-to-hell temples on behalf of Isahl N’abranaacht—or whatever the fethe the literato’s name actually was—but this place was raising the hair on the back of his neck something fierce.

  N’abranaacht was paying him a fortune in Agasi silver, but it wouldn’t be worth its weight in salt if he wasn’t alive to spend it.

  Jaro hadn’t gotten where he was by letting caution nag him senseless, but he’d lain with prudence on more than one occasion and found her to be a sensible partner. Whatever was raising the hair on the back of his neck was probably not something he wanted to deal with. Better to call in N’abranaacht and his goons before things got chancy.

  Jaro was pretty fethen sure things were going to get chancy.

  He placed his thumb over the black onyx ring he wore on his middle finger and concentrated on finding the mind at the other end of the bonded line. After only a small delay, Isahl’s mental presence flooded Jaro’s thoughts. The man must’ve really been anxious to get to that temple, because he never answered so quickly.

  Jaro told him, I’m here.

  Show me, Isahl replied.

  Jaro shared a view of the hall where he was standing, which faintly resembled a mine field after a cyclone had ripped through it.

  Isahl grunted. Stay linked. I’m following your connection...

  Jaro kept his finger on his ring and pulled out his timepiece with his other hand. He counted off the seconds until a silver line split the air and Isahl walked out of the parting, followed by his trusty Fhorg hounds.

  “A minute thirty-seven.” Jaro pocketed his timepiece. “Getting rusty, Isahl.”

  N’abranaacht spied him with one of those tight-eyed looks that said Jaro was already trying his patience and the day’s interaction had barely begun. Half the fun of these endeavors was getting all up under Isahl’s skin. Anybody so obviously megalomaniacal deserved as much shite as you could dish out to them.

  Isahl looked around the room, his gaze seeming to see much farther than the gloom obscuring the walls. “The archives?”

  “There’s at least seven more halls like this one,” Jaro said, “and the place is broken all to hell. It’s going to take some searching.”

  “There’s...something...else.” Isahl’s gaze narrowed even more.

  “Noticed that, did you?”

  Isahl abruptly focused back on Jaro. “Keep looking but stay alert.”

  “Alert is my fethen middle name, Isahl.”

  ***

  Tanis’s first view of the Shaido temple made a less than optimistic impression on the lad, especially considering he and the Eltanese had been required to clear seven dead guards off the weld back in Pashmir before they could even travel it, which implied that someone—and Tanis was fairly sure he knew exactly which someone—had passed that way not long before them.

  Now he stood in the weld chamber, surrounded by columns pitched sideways against a wall that he was pretty sure used to be a ceiling, and a grossly disheveled floor where a few giants had clearly been stomping out their fury. The whole place reeked of wrongness the same way a Marquiin did.

  To top it all, he’d been bouncing around through so many realms and welds of late that his body had no idea what time it was. It only knew that it was hungry. His stomach was pitching a fit to rival the tantrum of the giants who had destroyed the floor.

  Behind him, Mathias let out a low whistle. “This place looks like it was dropped from about fifty stories up.”

  “And not onto flat terrain,” Gadovan agreed. The Eltanese fanned out into the room, encased in the fifth. “Mat, set up a perimeter of wards. Jude, let’s get some mapping started.”

  The other two nodded and set to work.

  Pelas came to stand beside Tanis and Gadovan. “We’re not alone here.”

  “So I presumed after the dead guards back in Pashmir,” Gadovan muttered.

  “The Vestian is likely nearby, but...others also.” Pelas frowned slightly. “Stay here and keep your shields up.”

  “This place looks like it eats Adepts for breakfast,” Jude muttered.

  “I was just thinking of hunting down a bite to eat,” Tanis quipped. “But if you think I should stay...”

  Pelas angled him a look. Then he ducked beneath the leaning archway and vanished into the gloom.

  ***

  Ean felt the moment in his bones.

  It was the collision of threads. That single stitch in the tapestry that bound one design to the next, one Player to another—or would, providing the next stitch continued on the same vector. For that to happen, Ean had to be gone before the needle next pierced the cloth.

  Rafael, we have to get out of here.

  Rafael coalesced beside Ean seconds later. The Warlock’s arrival felt like a massive, cold sea was pouring itself into a mold a foot from where he was standing and dragging the gravity of the planet askew along with it.

  “That seems wise to me.” Rafael nodded to the slowly rotating library. “What of the archives?”

  “If we can’t disengage the stasis field, we have to make it work for us.”

  “Fair enough. How?”

  Ean spun through and rejected about twenty possibilities before he landed on a solution. He turned to Rafael, eyes suddenly bright. “We move the whole thing into Shadow.”

  Rafael gave him a slow smile. “That’s ingenious, Ean.”

  Ean could practically feel the needle parting the air on its way to place that next stitch.

  “I’ll tear the fabric. If you would be so kind as to frame Shadow, I’ll frame space around t
he archives, and we’ll move the whole thing over in one swoop.”

  Rafael bowed to his command.

  If only it would actually be that simple.

  With one part of his mind, Ean summoned a portal—but this one would have to be broader, taller...vaster. Larger than anything he’d ever summoned before. This was a salient point, because the realm resisted being torn—the larger the tear, the more it resisted.

  Ean started small, slicing the fabric laterally beneath the archives like a net over the abyss. Then he exerted pressure evenly in all directions.

  The mental effort was somewhat akin to holding open four sliding granite doors, all of them magnetized to each other and trying to stay closed, with himself standing spread-eagle in the parting, muscles locked and trembling, pinning each door open with outstretched hands and feet.

  Then he had to frame space again to box up the library.

  Around him, the walls started seething.

  Every hair on Ean’s body stood up in alarm. “Rafael, what the—”

  “You don’t want to know, Ean. I suggest moving this process along as expeditiously as possible.”

  The Warlock’s wings snapped forward, and the rousing darkness dispersed into mist.

  Ean quickly realized that he couldn’t summon Absolute Being around the library all at once; the effort of holding the portal open was too consuming of his focus and energy. It was all he could do to manage one agonizing starpoint at a time.

  While Rafael was holding off the seething shadows, Ean placed one starpoint and then another...with effort he focused a third and held it fast. Finally he started on the fourth—and realized that now he would have to hold open the portal and keep these starpoints in place.

  What the hell had he been thinking? I’ll just summon a portal and then frame space over here, Rafael, he mocked himself. Sure! Why not? While I’m at it, I’ll reposition a few suns into new solar systems...

  Ean, focusing on the now might be more helpful.

  Rafael was blasting shadow things left and right. The instant the darkness began gathering into form from walls or ceiling, he cast a bolt of deyjiin to zap it into oblivion. But there were so many of them amassing that the room was flickering constantly with violet-silver light.

  Ean clenched his teeth. Almost there...

  He fixed the final starpoint in place and gave a forceful exhale. Beneath his intent, a cube of air solidified around the floating library.

  Finally!

  He demagnetized from the wall and fell towards his portal, sliding past the rousing darkness that was very definitely sentient. Ean wasn’t at all sorry that they weren’t sticking around to see what these things turned into.

  He caught himself on the edge of framed space and urgently pulled-pushed-dragged the library towards himself. It felt like trying to haul a sunken ship up from beneath the sea.

  Very soon his brain was screaming obscenities and his lungs refused to inflate, but he finally disengaged the mass from whatever gravity had been holding it, and the entire library of countless stacks plummeted down, through the portal and into Shadow.

  Rafael followed, falling in a rush of uplifted wings with silver-violet lightning shooting in every direction.

  As the Warlock flew past Ean, the prince summoned his own stasis field, borrowing one of the patterns he’d just been studying, and tossed something into it.

  Then, heaving a massive sigh of relief, he fell gratefully backwards off the edge of framed space into the yawning darkness of Shadow.

  ***

  Jaro found the archives just as the stacks were—

  Floating away?

  He stood at the top of the abyss, in what might’ve once been an antechamber or reading room adjacent to the stacks, with the tips of his boots extending out over the precipitous edge, staring down.

  Trying to figure out what he was seeing, Jaro watched what had to be the archives tumbling down towards a portal like the one N’abranaacht had walked out of minutes ago, only a hundred times bigger.

  A man was perched on the edge of that portal, clearly maneuvering the entire library of stacks into that gaping pit like a harbor master flagging a galleon into its berth. The moment the cube passed through, the man fell backwards after it, and the portal winked shut.

  Jaro uttered a muted curse. Isahl was going to be seriously pissed.

  All around him, the walls were seething.

  He phase-shifted before whatever was rising from the dead shadows in that place could set its sights on him, but just as he was refracting out of stasis, he noticed something floating over the abyss.

  He tossed out a magnetic lasso and scooped up whatever it was. Then he threw another line back to where he started and reappeared in the corridor in front of Isahl.

  The latter drew up short in his pacing, his expression darkly expectant. “The archives?”

  “Yeah...about that.” Jaro scrubbed under his ample beard. “So, the archives were here, but now they’re not.”

  “Not.” Isahl repeated.

  “Yeah. They’re gone.”

  “Gone.”

  Jaro felt the currents go flat.

  He’d known powerful Adepts before, but he’d never known anyone who could flatten the fethen currents into whimpering submission.

  Isahl took a threatening step towards him. “Define gone, Jaro.”

  “That would be when they’re there and then they’re not there, Isahl. As in, a man took them.”

  “Took them.” Isahl’s gaze felt like spears driving through Jaro’s brain. He seemed to grow taller also, but that might’ve just been his anger rearing its misborn head. “A man took the entire archives?” You could’ve slain a troll on the blade of his dubiety.

  “Bound the stacks up in a sweet stasis cube and whisked them out through one of those portals you like to use,” Jaro said.

  The currents had started seething. He could feel them like eels slithering beneath his clothes, seeking a way under his skin. Clearly the literato commanded a lot more power than he’d let on...but if you backed down in front of someone like Isahl N’abranaacht, you might as well make your peace with the Ghost Kings because you sure as silver weren’t rising up again.

  Jaro smirked at him. “Pretty inventive, actually. He kindly left you this memento.” He tossed Isahl the thing he’d lassoed, along with a goading grin.

  Isahl looked down at the book in his hand. His eyes became very, very dark.

  “Isn’t that the same book—”

  The roar that burst out of Isahl pushed Jaro backwards despite his shields, flattened the Fhorgs against the wall, and sent the currents skidding for cover.

  As elae’s tide made a tentative return, shadow eels rose with it, rearing up and pouncing on Isahl.

  The latter cursed violently in a foreign tongue. Violet-silver light flared, blinding Jaro and evaporating the shadow things.

  Whereupon a voice said from further down the corridor, “Come now, brother. Things can’t be that bad.”

  Jaro was still blinking the spots out of his vision when Isahl spun and bellowed with such fury that it sucked the currents into a vacuum. Jaro felt like his head was about to explode. Violet flames raged down the corridor towards the voice. Jaro grabbed his ears and doubled over in a silent scream.

  The next thing he knew, Isahl was shaking him out of semi-consciousness, the corridor was dripping molten stone, and the burning shadow things were emitting an inhuman, high-pitched squeal that felt like needles stabbing his brain.

  “Find the boy!” Isahl shook Jaro by both shoulders. His dark eyes glowed red in the firelight. “Pelas always travels with a—”

  “Truthreader.” Jaro was finding his wits, putting two plus a dozen other facts together.

  Isahl thrust an image into his mind, confirming Jaro’s guesswork. “This truthreader can travel the nodes. Bring him to me!” His words speared with compulsion, but Jaro had permanent shields against such workings, so the spear just skimmed off him.

&nbs
p; Still, anything Isahl wanted that badly he would pay well to get.

  Regaining himself, Jaro tugged his gloves tighter. “Whatever you say, boss.” He flashed a smile and phase-shifted out of stasis.

  This was going to be fun.

  Sixty-three

  “I am certainly bound to His cause.”

  –Björn van Gelderan,

  on if he’s actually the angiel Cephrael

  Vaile roused through webs of disorientation, dragging her consciousness back from oblivion’s vacuum, helpless to the force reeling in her awareness...until finally she broached the glossy surface of time—

  And gasped, opening her eyes.

  Her vision automated through three dimensions until it snapped into critical focus on the extant now.

  And him, seated in an armchair across the room, leaning on one hand with a forefinger bracing his temple and the rest supporting his chin.

  She immediately and without reservation summoned the fifth—

  Whereupon, she realized she was drawing he fifth with her full strength and therefore really let the extent of her displeasure explode out of her.

  Elae blasted walls, sundered the air, sent violent concussions detonating.

  But of course, he’d anticipated her. Her power exhausted itself harmlessly against his wards.

  In fact, she doubted he’d actually assumed solidity in his chair so much as pretended it. If he’d warded the room, he’d been expecting her anger well enough. There was little point giving it anything real of himself to react against.

  When the blistering particles of energy finally subsided, he looked a little windblown but sat otherwise as he had before, as he’d always presented himself to her—infuriatingly handsome and pretending innocuous innocence just to taunt her patience.

  Stars above. She could barely believe he was sitting there after so many envisioned reunions, after so many long millennia of missing him, after hating him and Cephrael so desperately, simply because she loved them both so completely.

  And then to find out that he’d returned in the same breath that she discovered he’d undone all of her agonizing efforts to suspend her own awareness, to answer definitively if Balance still needed her? She doubly wanted to open his insides to the light of day.