The Sixth Strand

by Melissa McPhail

  Tanis watched him launching from one leis to the next, bouncing or swinging hand over hand, sometimes somersaulting, sometimes sliding, even slinging himself through the empty aether on magnetic vines of his own construction—his own anchoring lines.

  Tanis studied the patterns he was using closely.

  The next time the Vestian slung an anchoring line, Tanis used the same dagger pattern the Vestian had used and severed the man’s anchor.

  He cursed as he fell. He flipped head over heels and caught both hands on a ley line. Tanis saw a pattern flash.

  The leis dragged down in an arc beneath the Vestian’s weight before hauling him back up as it regained its original cohesion.

  Swinging about thirty feet above Tanis then, the Vestian released one hand to better angle a wondering look down at the lad. “What are you, kid?”

  Tanis’s heart was racing. “Giving you one more chance to see reason.”

  The Vestian laughed. “Where would be the fun in that?” He dropped towards Tanis.

  But Tanis had the pattern he needed now.

  He’d never worked the fifth before, preferring the strands that were native to him, but he had enough facility with patterns to do what he had to do.

  Tanis added the fifth strand pattern into the matrix of his intent and felt the webwork of leis become spongy beneath his feet.

  “Well and good,” he murmured with a steely eye on the man soaring towards him. “Don’t say I didn’t offer.”

  Tanis made a springboard of the leis and launched himself to meet the Vestian.

  ***

  Pelas knew his brother was beyond all reason when Shail dove off the smoldering edge of the broken corridor to chase after him, lobbing curses between balls of starblight.

  Pelas flung himself to the side of the tunnel, magnetized to it, and ran down the corridor wall, dodging meteor balls of destabilized molecular convection, his shields glowing crimson.

  The ground rose up fast.

  Seeing an opening in the opposite wall—once a branching corridor—Pelas launched himself across the open tunnel, then ran along the wall of the adjoining passage, dodging collapsed archways, jumping the gaping crevasses that opened into rooms of vast darkness. He let the currents light his way.

  A hall loomed at the corridor’s end. The temple was as crammed with huge, columned halls as it was with ghūls, apparently. Pelas darted into the dark just as Shail reached the far end of the passageway, his presence announced by a searing explosion that blasted into Pelas’s shield and propelled him off his feet.

  He somersaulted in midair and landed in a run. The further he drew Shail away from Tanis, the better.

  Deep in the hall, he took cover behind a carved stone column and waited, his breath coming fast.

  In the intervening seconds, Pelas took stock of himself, checked his line to Tanis—the distance he sensed between their thoughts meant the lad was somewhere on the Pattern of the World now—and drained the heat out of his shields, which resulted in the rock going gooey around him, so he moved to another pillar to wait.

  He perceived his brother coming closer. Shail was pushing the currents before him like the prow of a ship through the waves. He’d gotten a hold on his temper, though, or at least had found the better side of reason, because he wasn’t lobbing starblight anymore.

  The crimson reflection of Shail’s own shields lit the walls as he entered the hall. He drained the heat from them as he continued inside, so that by the time he reached the first set of columns, he’d left a trail of molten footsteps and made his shields invisible again.

  But his fury was still apparent.

  “Pelas!” Shail shouted into the cavernous darkness. “I warn you—this is your last chance to make good with me!”

  Pelas pressed his head back against the column and called in return, “All that starblight was a warning?”

  There were only about three hundred columns in the hall. If Shail lost his temper again and lobbed another meteor at him, he had pretty good odds of hitting the wrong one.

  “This is not Tal’Afaq, and I am not Dore Madden!” Shail growled. “If you think you will emerge from this unscathed, Pelas, think again!”

  Pelas hadn’t exactly emerged from Tal’Afaq unscathed, but he didn’t think his brother would find that relevant just then.

  Shail stopped between the first two sets of columns. Pelas could feel his brother’s fury like a beacon, and his acrimony made ridges in the currents. “Where have you taken the archives? Return them to me and...”

  Words must’ve failed him. Pelas could just picture his brother’s face in that stubborn moment, gnashing some sort of acquittal between his teeth. Pelas would’ve liked to have been able to answer him just to see what sort of concession Shail would come up with, but he actually had no idea what he was talking about.

  He called back, “Maybe if you told me how I was supposed to have taken these archives—”

  “PELASOMMÁYUREK!” Shail roared at him. “Enough games! The location of the archives—or by Chaos, I will end you!”

  Shail was trying to erase him from the aether over some books?

  At least he knew now why his brother had finally found restraint—albeit rather abysmally late. What if he’d actually succeeding in hitting Pelas with the starblight? But oh, how sweet the honey of this moment! He could’ve kissed Ean.

  Grinning widely, Pelas moved out from behind his column with his hands in his pockets. He kept his shields up though. He wasn’t stupid.

  “You know, it occurs to me, brother, that if I’m the only one who knows the location of these treasured archives...ending me would be counterproductive to your aims.”

  Shail stabbed him with a daggered stare from all the way across the hall. “I vow, I could find a way to make it serve more than my temper.” He stood with his hands clenched at his sides, powerful shoulders hunched forward—the tiger ready to pounce. His growled words made jagged waves of the currents. “What have you done with the archives?”

  Pelas opened his arms, smiled innocently. “I don’t know anything about these archives, brother.”

  “You lie.”

  Pelas’s expression instantly sobered. “Only one of us has ever lied to the other—and we both know that wasn’t me.”

  Shail scoured him with his stare, even as he was surely scouring the currents for the veracity of Pelas’s words. But any close inspection would prove them true—pshaw, Shail could taste a truth from thirty meters and dissect its every nuance. His silence meant he was trying to put together how this truth was possible.

  After a pause charged with animosity, his brother hissed, “Who, then?”

  Pelas grinned. “Now, there I could help you...but that would definitely be counterproductive to my aims.”

  Shail’s expression flickered through fire into something so viciously dark that Pelas actually lost his smile.

  Then the room exploded.

  Pelas anchored to the floor with the fifth and let the churning heat roll across his shield. In the aftermath, Shail came roaring towards him bringing another wave of annihilation. Pelas reflected that his younger brother really could be a terror when he wanted to be.

  Pelas rearranged the molecules in the ceiling above him and launched himself up three levels through amorphous stone, emerging to starlight glimmering on a framework of rubble walls.

  Shail’s rage was trembling the temple’s foundations. The roof was wavering. Broken walls began crumbling in on themselves. Pelas needed his brother away from that place.

  He threw a little taunt, the lightest touch upon their brotherly bond, to be sure Shail would follow him. An instant later, his brother erupted up through the roof in an explosion of stone.

  Pelas dodged the assault of rock and hooked an anchor on Shail. He simultaneously cast another anchor for the closest ley line and magnetized to it.

  He flew—

  Halfway there. Then he slammed to a painful halt, stuck in a jagged ridge of opposing kinesis
.

  Shail had anchored to the temple’s weld.

  Pelas hauled on the distant ley line with everything he had, until his mind was screaming with the forces ripping back and forth through it, until every muscle in his shell was trembling with the effort, fighting against his brother’s equal opposing hold on the weld, an alternating current of slay or be slain.

  And suddenly...Pelas won.

  He was once again speeding towards the ley line with his brother bouncing along behind him, dragging something weighty...

  Whereupon a horrified realization dawned on him.

  Already compromised, the weld had ripped free.

  They were flying towards the ley line, dragging the weld with them.

  Deprived now of the kinetic gravity that had been holding it together, the temple collapsed in upon itself with a terrible, shuddering roar.

  A mighty geyser of dust erupted, visible in the starlight for miles around.

  ***

  Tanis was clinging to a cross section of the world grid, with the Vestian hanging by one arm on the other side of a large open space in the meshwork of leis, both of them out of breath and staring challengingly at each other, when a wrenching shift of perception blinded Tanis, and pain speared through his body.

  The next instant, he was falling.

  He threw an anchor to the weld, but it just went...nowhere.

  He couldn’t see anything—couldn’t even perceive a ley line. It was like the entire sector of the world grid had just ceased to exist.

  It took a harrowing few breaths while falling through blackness for Tanis to realize that his eyes were working just fine.

  His heart lodged in his throat then, for suddenly, he knew what had happened, if not how.

  The grid had gone dark.

  He’d fallen off the Pattern of the World.

  ***

  Gadovan roused to kaleidoscopic light.

  He blinked, tried to focus his thoughts, tried to remember where he was and what had happened. As lucidity slowly returned, he recognized the light as his magical armor reflecting off the rocks covering him.

  He did a quick assessment of fingers and toes and was relieved to find that his armor had protected him from the collapse. He dragged on the second strand and forced himself up through what felt like a mountain of stone.

  Mat? Jude? Gadovan summoned them across their bond while getting to his feet. His eyes scanned the rubble beneath the starlight. He saw naught but mounds of broken stone in every direction.

  Mat! Jude!

  Ugh...don’t shout. Mathias flung a hand up between some rocks.

  Gadovan charged over to help rescue Mat from the obsidian tomb a collapsing wall had made for him. Thank the Time Fathers for magical armor—it enabled him to lift away huge blocks of stone and cast them aside. Moments later, he had unearthed Mat and helped him to his feet. Are you hurt?

  I’m all right. Mat crossed thumbs to deactivate his armor, then sank down on a rock mound and shoved both hands through his hair. “Criim, what in thirteen hells happened?” He looked around at the disaster surrounding them. “Where’s Jude?”

  “Here.”

  They both turned to see Jude climbing up out of the ravine.

  “Unholy Criim and all his demons,” Jude came over, looking around at the destruction. “What was it you said about bad things coming in threes, Mat?”

  “The weld is gone.” Gadovan could hardly believe his own words.

  “So I gathered when the temple fell down on us,” Jude said.

  Mat turned a wince around in the night. “I guess we know what was powering those ghūls now—the bloody weld.”

  Jude shook his head. “How does a weld just vanish off the grid?”

  The night itself seemed to resonate a bewildered awe.

  “Have either of you been able to reach Tanis?” Gadovan asked.

  They both shook their heads. None of them wanted to speculate on what that might mean.

  Mat blew out a forceful breath. “Criim, what now?”

  But to that, the night offered no answers.

  Sixty-five

  “The strands are as interwoven as the visible spectrum.

  As light shows its colors in refraction,

  so the strands in their interaction...yet one

  may be seen to bind the rest.”

  –Sobra I’ternin, Eleventh Translation, 1499aF,

  A Discourse on the Nature and Relationship of Patterning and the Currents of Elae

  Sebastian val Lorian, firstborn of Errodan and Gydryn, reluctant prince of Dannym, frowned at the seated form of his wife-to-be-if-she-decided-he-was-worthy as she rode in front of him down the trail.

  He should’ve predicted that Ehsan would demand to come with them on their wild eidola chase. It was just...she’d let him go off to Tambarré without feeling the need to accompany him. He couldn’t stop wondering what was different about this adventure from his previous ones? They were the same crew—himself, Rhys and Dareios’s Nodefinder cousin, Bahman—this time seeking eidola in the wilderness of the Dhahari.

  With Ehsan.

  Sebastian wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  He adored her, of course. He knew of no one whose company he would rather share. But worrying about Ehsan’s safety put a strain on his attention, one he couldn’t really afford when chasing Dore Madden’s demons through a mountainous wilderness. More than this, however, Sebastian brooded on why: why had she come on this quest?

  He knew his wife-to-be better than she gave him credit for. She wouldn’t have demanded to come along without good reason, but did that reason stem from her own intuition, a new sense of the Healer’s Sight...or from an external source, perhaps Isabel van Gelderan? Which possibility made arguing with Ehsan somewhat of a challenge.

  Actually...many aspects of Ehsan posed a challenge for a mere mortal like Sebastian.

  She had the radiance and body of a woman in her prime, the mind of a matriarch, the tongue of a crone, and the indomitable will of an immortal. His thirty years were no match for her eighty-plus—said number being an informed guess based on his conversations with Dareios. For to be sure, Sebastian was far too savvy to inquire as to his wife-to-be’s actual age.

  After spending countless moons partaking of Dareios’ hospitality at the Palace of Andorr, Sebastian was starting to understand the truthreader’s desire to marry off his remaining six sisters...or was it eight sisters?

  The Haxamanis princesses were all very beautiful, highly intelligent, over-educated, provocative, headstrong women; Adept Healers all, trained at the Sormitáge, bound now to the Pattern of Life, and by Kandori law free to choose husbands at their leisure—or never, if they preferred.

  Sebastian still couldn’t tell them all apart. He was fairly sure three of them were triplets who were having a bit of fun with him by pretending to be a single person.

  Dareios was of no help in this respect. He would only talk about his sisters if Sebastian had new ideas for getting rid of them.

  To complicate current matters, Bahman pleaded neutrality and Ehsan had roped Rhys into complicity with her decision to travel with them. Which only made Sebastian wonder if Isabel might’ve been visiting Rhys’s dreams, too.

  He knew Epiphany’s Prophet was watching out for him. He suspected she’d looked down his path. He knew she wouldn’t tell him anything she’d seen of his own future...but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t tell Ehsan or Rhys.

  It occurred to him in all of this circular pondering that he was, perhaps, granting too much foresight to Isabel.

  But he doubted it.

  It wasn’t even that he desired to know his future; it was the path part he wished for guidance on.

  Before they’d realized Dore was making an army, Ehsan had been gently but firmly encouraging Sebastian to seek out his father and reassume his rightful place as heir to Dannym’s throne. The more so after they’d heard that the Duke of Morwyk was leading a march towards Calgaryn.

  Of co
urse Sebastian felt torn by this news. Of course he wanted to help his father and mother and the people of Dannym. But to appear out of nowhere when most of the kingdom had named and forgotten him? To suddenly return dragging the overburdened sled of his history behind him?

  They would want to know where he’d been, what had happened, how he’d survived. There were no happy endings to that story...and as far as Sebastian was concerned, no future for him in his father’s kingdom. He wished Ehsan could’ve understood this. Debating with her about it only dug the blade of regret deeper into his heart.

  But if it wasn’t his destiny to join his father, where was he meant to go? What kind of future could a man with his past realistically expect to have?

  He opened his eyes every morning with a forceful exhale, giving breathless thanks in those initial frantic moments of waking to realize that the dream had only been a dream, that he wasn’t still chained body and mind to Dore Madden, that he actually could look forward to the day. Even more difficult to wrap his wits around was finding Princess Ehsan Haxamanis in bed beside him.

  But while he knew he’d closed the door on Işak’s past, too many doors to the future still remained shut before him. Either that, or he saw no doors at all, just an empty wall of self-recrimination and hatred of the man Dore had forced him to become.

  When Sebastian tried to envision his future, he just felt...lost.

  So he focused as much as possible on the present. On tracking down the eidola and destroying them. Then, hopefully, he could find a path to destroy Dore Madden so he could seal that door and never think of it—or dream of it—again.

  It was much to this end that they were following a forested switchback trail through the Dhahari mountains.

  The tracing pattern Sebastian had affixed to the eidola in Tambarré gave him a general sense of its traveling direction. They didn’t know how many others might be traveling with it, so their pack horses carried an arsenal of weapons especially designed to battle eidola. Dareios had insisted on giving them every advantage.

  A breeze passed through the trees, rustling the branches of the tall firs and dislodging flame-colored leaves to tumble and flitter around the cloaked form of Ehsan, riding ahead of him.