TWO
Whispered Messages
“When you’ve buried
your husband three months past, you don’t expect to come home and
find him rattling around in your attic!”
The old woman stood
there, an ancient blunderbuss cradled in her arms, looking ready to
go upstairs and blast her undead spouse for his temerity. However,
her real ire was directed at Deacons Sorcha Faris and Merrick
Chambers—as if the Order of the Eye and the Fist was solely
responsible for this awkward situation.
Sorcha, who had
managed to perch herself on the low wall outside the lady Tinker’s
shop, watched with amusement as her partner tried to negotiate his
way in. Perhaps she was enjoying the situation a little too much,
but these days she savored any excuse to leave the grounds of the
Mother Abbey. Her cigar was already half-smoked, evidence of just
how much the owner did not want them to go inside the
shop.
Merrick, who had
always been the more diplomatic of their partnership, posed the
same question he had when they’d first arrived: “What is the
deceased’s name?” He had to raise his voice because Widow Vashill
was impossibly deaf—which only served to increase Sorcha’s
enjoyment of the situation.
The old woman’s eyes
narrowed as if she suspected it was some sort of trick. “Joshem
Vashill—and I was never more happy to see a person in the
ground.”
“Doesn’t sound like
he had much reason to come back,” Merrick muttered softly over his
shoulder to Sorcha. This was why she liked working with the younger
man; when she’d been partnered with her husband, Kolya, he had not
been nearly as amusing.
“You are sure it is
Joshem?” Sorcha shouted, then blew out a smoke ring and tried to
keep her hopes in check. The Order had been plagued with a spate of
false alarms recently, and though she appreciated getting out of
the Mother Abbey, she wasn’t about to crawl around in a dusty attic
chasing a figment of this Master Tinker’s imagination.
“I know my own
husband!” Widow Vashill snapped. “Now you just yank him down out of
there, and I can go about my business.”
“ ‘Yank’? ” Sorcha
managed not to roll her eyes. People so quickly forgot the nature
of things. Her Order had only been here in Arkaym a scant few
years, and yet the population seemed incapable of remembering the
plague of geists they had suffered from before the Order’s arrival.
“We have to go up there and deal with him,” she replied in what she
thought was a perfectly reasonable tone, “because we don’t just
‘yank’ geists. It’s more like wrestling.”
“What?” The Widow
Vashill bellowed.
Sorcha gestured up to
the top story. “We’re going to have to go up there!”
The woman’s face went
abruptly pale. “Oh no—I must have been mistaken. I’m just a silly
old woman seeing things in the shadows. No need to—”
“Madam”—Merrick
pusheds dark curls out of his eyes with something that looked
awfully like exasperation—“if you will just let us up into the
attic, we can assess the situation and take care of things for
you.” His earnest youth usually moved even the most elderly of
women to compliance—this one, though, hesitated.
Tinkers’ Row had
grown under the patronage of the forwardthinking Emperor Kaleva:
ramshackle houses had been transformed into impressive new brick
buildings, the open drains decently covered, and sweeps employed to
keep the street clear of filth. Carriages and pedestrians bustled
up and down the Row, which had become one of the busiest in
Vermillion. The sign above this particular door said VASHILL—MASTER
TINKER TO THE PALACE, but then most of them on this street did. The
Emperor had become the patron to nearly all the Tinkers in
Vermillion.
Sorcha sighed,
knocked the top off her cigar and pulled her Gauntlets out from her
belt. Usually these symbols of her rune powers tended to grab
people’s attention. She was sharply aware of this as she fixed the
old woman with a cold blue stare. “So, what’s really up there,
apart from your dead husband?”
Widow Vashill’s lips
pressed together in a pale line, and she leaned forward. “Things.
Secret things.”
Every guild had their
mysteries, but the Tinkers, thanks to their close working kin, the
airshipwrights, were especially paranoid since the Emperor wanted
full control of the new technology. Merrick stood to his full
height. “Madam, as long as the devices you are working on are
regulation, then you have our assurance that we will never reveal
anything to another soul.”
If Sorcha had tried
to sound so officious, people would have taken fright, but out of
that earnest young mouth it was so much more reassuring. The old
woman smiled, revealing a broken expanse of teeth. “Never doubted
it, lad; it’s just that many of the devices in the attic contain
weirstones.”
Sorcha clenched her
teeth on an explicative. The Order had long ago limited the
ownership of those things to Deacons and members of the Imperial
armed forces—but the Emperor had extended that in recent years to
include Master Tinkers.
At her side, Merrick
shifted—well aware of her particular bugbear with the stones. Along
the Bond they shared he tried sending out waves of calm, but it
didn’t make any difference. She didn’t want to be calm. She’d had
far too much of being calm lately. Time to let some of that
frustration out.
“Then we will just
have to manage,” she growled. “Now let us get about our business.”
Sorcha stepped around the Tinker and strode into the shop, leaving
protestations and excuses in her wake.
The inside of the
building was dim simply because of the very few windows. A single
lamp burned on the back wall, illuminating the devices of brass
that the Tinkers had lately become specialists in. The constant
rattle of clocks, all slightly at a different tempo, put Sorcha’s
nerves on edge. Perhaps the Widow Vashill’s deafness was an
advantage.
Merrick, standing in
the doorway, had the look of a child on the threshold of a candy
merchant. Sorcha knew her partner fancied himself an amateur
Tinker, but she held hope that he would snap out of it soon.
Undoubtedly the smells of linseed oil and the whiff of sulphur were
exciting her partner a little too much to be healthy.
While Merrick crept
in, casting covetous eyes over the goods displayed in the shop,
Sorcha stalked over to the lifting pallet at the back of the room,
stepped aboard it, and kicked the crank handle with one foot. The
mandyery whirred and clanked, its staccato rattle occupying her
mind, while the mechanism carried her up three stories into the
storage attic. Her partner would just have to take the
stairs.
Whatever else was
true of Widow Vashill, she looked to be in demand as a Tinker. The
storage area was stacked with many crates and other more mysterious
sheet-covered items. The Deacon examined them curiously. From the
labels she could see many were waiting to be shipped all over the
Empire.
“Sorcha, wait!”
Merrick, in the way of the young, did not sound at all puffed after
three quick flights in pursuit. Her partner caught up and looked at
her from under his curly hair with something close to reproach.
“You shouldn’t get upset over people’s disrespect for the Order”—he
adjusted his emerald cloak and tilted his head—“especially after
what happened at the ossuary this winter.”
Sorcha’s stomach
tightened, and she felt herself flush. “Actually”—she pursed her
lips—“after what happened at the White Palace, the people of this
city should trust us more not less.
They treat us more like ratcatchers than protectors.”
“We’ll earn back
their respect and trust,” he replied with a certainty she did not
possess. “Anyway”—Merrick touched her arm—“she is probably just
jumping at shadows—most people are these days.”
Sorcha smiled
bitterly. “You’re right—it’s not like Rictun would ever knowingly
send us anywhere that actually has a geist.” She did not give him
his proper title; to her there had only been one Arch Abbot.
Despite his treachery, the nowdead Hastler had earned her respect.
Rictun, who currently sat on the Council in that position, was
worse than a fool—and he had always despised her, for reasons she
could not deduce.
A cruel fool.
“Yes, yes, he is.”
Merrick probably didn’t even realize he had picked unspoken words
from her head. Their Bond was not supposed to work that way. A
topic they were both avoiding. “However, that doesn’t mean we
shouldn’t be cautious all the same.”
“I think we can
handle one little shade, Merrick. We can’t possibly be that out of
practice.” Still, she did turn and regard the attic with some
caution.
The world bloomed to
life as her partner’s Sight enveloped her; it heightened her
awareness and gave her own powers direction. As an Active, Sorcha
was only too well aware that her life relied on her partner.
Without him she would be a raging fireball with no direction that
was more likely to hurt herself than a geist.
Sorcha’s breath
coalesced in front of her eyes. Outside it was summer, but the
chill on her skin was as if the depths of winter had come again. It
was a sign every human in the Empire could read.
Her heart raced, and
her skin ran with goose pimples, yet a slow smile spread on her
lips. It had been far too long since she had done the job she’d
trained for all her remembered life.
Suddenly Merrick was
at her shoulder, the only warmth in the room, and she was very
grateful for it.
Caution. Watch. Danger.
His Sight meshed with
hers again, and now she began to realize she should have stopped to
question the widow a little more thoroughly. Their Sight was
compromised in the attic—a low-level gray light flooded the space.
It came from the number of weirstones used by the
Tinker.
Their shared Sight
dipped and swayed as Merrick tried to compensate for the staining
of the ether. A scuttling sound made his mouth snap shut. Rats were
running from every corner, scrambling through the walls, and
skittering down the drainpipe. Animals were more sensitive than
humans and always fled in the face of the undead. The noise was
unnerving—even to the trained.
Leaving her partner
to hold his position at the rear, Sorcha crept forward. Until
recently the very idea of an unliving incursion into Vermillion
would have been unthinkable; however, everything had changed since
the battle in the ossuary. It had taken the Order back to the bad
old days when they had first arrived on this continent. Now once
again they were flooded with alerts of geist activity—both real and
imagined. The new Arch Abbot Rictun had made sure his Presbyter
Secondo gave only the latter kind to Deacons Chambers and Faris. So
whatever chance had brought them here to an actual geist she was
not going to question.
They were bitter
thoughts to keep Sorcha company as she scanned between crates, her
hands steady in her Gauntlets. They were the holder of her magic
and her only protection against the geists.
Something flickered
between the rows, a suggestion of shadow darting away from the
Deacons and deeper into the attic. So it was not a brave
geist—surely only a shade and nothing as dangerous as a ghast or a
poltern. Still, after a long dry spell, she would take whatever she
could get.
Yet, by the time she
had reached the far end of the attic space, Deacon Faris had the
sinking feeling that it was she who was imagining things. Her
shared sight detected nothing. Perhaps she had been too hopeful,
and her eyes had seen only what she wanted to see. After so long
she was practically conjuring geists from the woodwork. Her hands
clenched in the smooth leather of her Gauntlets.
Sorcha turned back to
Merrick with a sigh. “I think you were right. The woman was just
jumping at shadows. There’s nothing here.” She couldn’t contain the
disappointment in her voice.
Her partner shrugged.
“Maybe she saw what—”
And that was when she
felt every hair on her body stand on end. The rush of intense cold
flooded down her spine, and in the corner something metallic
rattled. Sorcha spun around and jerked the drop cloth off a
six-foot structure. It was a calendar, with the phases of the moon
and the date inscribed on a huge dial—probably meant to stand in a
warehouse. On cue it began to tick loudly, almost in time with the
rhythm of her heart.
Sorcha! Merrick’s voice blared in her skull, just
as their shared Sight cleared. Something was wrapped around the
base of the clock, spinning and shifting like a bundle of snakes.
Her eyes widened. She took a shocked step back and raised her
Gauntlets. Shades were the remains of a recently dead
person—spectyrs were their evil cousins. Twisted by the Otherside,
they were human souls who sought revenge. However, they usually
manifested alone—what she was faced with now was entirely
different. A shade haunting was usually more irritating than
terrifying. These spectyrs were not.
The rattle of
irritated spectyrs grew louder, as the spinning knot of them flew
apart to darken the ceiling and every corner of the attic. Sorcha
knew that she had received far more than she wanted.
“Stay still,” she
bellowed at Merrick, as she ducked away from the swooping shards of
darkness that were beginning to shape themselves into skeletal
forms.
A nest of spectyrs
was particularly dangerous, a fact that Sorcha became aware of as
the contents of the attic began flying at her head. Ducking and
diving was making it rather hard to concentrate. What appeared to
be a lighthouse lens tipped over, knocking her off her feet and
exploding glass all across the floor.
With one hand Sorcha
called on Shayst, the Sixth Rune of Dominion, and the attic flared
green. Shayst sucked away the spectyrs’ power, at least those she
was lucky enough to hit with the rune. That power became hers,
enough that she could lever the lens mechanism off her and crawl
out.
Out of the corner of
one eye she saw Merrick step toward her, his hands reaching for his
Strop, the talisman of the Sensitives.
Sorcha could taste
his fear. “Don’t you dare go Active!”
Though every Deacon
had both talents in them, a Sensitive using their Active power was
ridiculously dangerous and ultimately pointless. He made a face at
her. “I think I have something better.” He called on Masa, the
Third Rune of Sight, and their shared Center blurred, deepened, and
now Sorcha saw double. As the contents of the attic tumbled, as the
spectyrs wheeled, hissed, and threw them at her—she was able to see
everything before it happened.
The Active ducked and
rolled as a tall machine with long lines of cogs and wheels toppled
from the wall. It was hard to imagine what the widow Vashill was
thinking outside. It couldn’t be good.
A twisting cluster of
spectyrs dived at her, their skulls screaming for vengeance, ready
to burrow into her body and take it for their own. Sorcha dropped
onto her back, raised her Gauntlets; one lit with the blue fire of
Aydien, holding off the larger mass of spectyrs, while she
concentrated Shayst on the immediate attackers.
A line of sweat broke
out on her lip as she drained them of their strength, and in the
back of her mind was the joyous hum of delight.
Take it. Take it all. Take everything. The
insidious, tempting call yammered in her head, because it felt so
very, very good.
Sorcha was so busy
draining the spectyrs swarming on the ceiling, she almost missed
the stragglers that were darting and blundering through the crates
in the attic.
Sorcha! Merrick, still standing motionless in the
corner, howled, but she had only two hands and two Gauntlets.
Though she dropped Shayst and reached for Chityre, she wasn’t quite
fast enough. The spectyr came barreling out of the shadows, its
jaws wide and snapping.
She heard Merrick
yell—this time physically, but she saw nothing else, because they
were on her then. The nest turned everything black, and her throat
became abruptly unable to utter anything at all. Sorcha scrabbled
at her neck, choking. Despite everything she had learned, primitive
physical reactions were impossible to deny.
As she rolled across
the floor, unable to use her Gauntlets to get more air into her
lungs or summon a rune, the screaming of the damned wailed in her
ears. It was the sound of the unliving calling her to them, and she
was aching to go.
Then dimly, on the
edge of consciousness, she felt Merrick. He slid across the floor
to her, throwing himself into the middle of the snarling, vengeful
geists. A Sensitive was supposed to stay out of the melee, out of
harm’s way. But her partner broke through the swarm and put his
hands on her.
The Bond flared,
suddenly stronger and more important than anything hidden in
shadow. Merrick was in her head, she was in his, in ways that no
Deacon Bond should allow.
Yet Sorcha didn’t
care about that,ecause up against their surge of power the nest
backed away. She could breathe. Gasping, with Merrick wrapped
around her, she released the rune Pyet.
The attic was full of
flame, blessed cleansing fire that flickered and danced in the
polished brass of the Tinker’s craft. The spectyrs wailed loud
enough to rupture normal human eardrums, shriveling as the geist
power that held them captive was burned away.
Together, she and
Merrick got all of them—all bar one.
“Wait!” Her partner
called, but she was already up and chasing the fleeing geist. This
one was not going to hang about and be sent back to the black
embrace of the Otherside. It flashed away from her, phasing out and
passing through the crates, before heading for the far brick
wall.
“Sorcha!” Her
partner’s voice chased after her, but she refused to acknowledge
him as she dashed after the spectyr. Damn it, after weeks of
inactivity, she wasn’t about to let any of the undead get away from
her.
Sorcha raised her
right hand, spread her Gauntleted fingers, and called Voishem. The
air bent around her, twisting, breaking into the space between
things. Brick, stone or wood could not stop her now.
On the heels of the
geist, Sorcha slipped through the wall and into the adjoining
attic. The Bond, though, held tight, and she still shared Merrick’s
sight. In fact, once through the wall, the influence of those
cursed weirstones was mercifully dampened.
This second attic was
completely empty except for two crates by the far window. It was
full of enough dust that Sorcha was surrounded by dancing motes,
and for an instant she was confused by the flicker of light. The
spectyr she half expected to have moved on was in fact huddled at
the far end of the new room, crouching in shadow. All of her
training as a Deacon told her this was very strange behavior for
this kind of geist.
Though her heart was
pounding, this was the one remaining problem from the whole vicious
nest. She wasn’t afraid of it. Still, she kept her Gauntlets raised
as she approached the cloaked form. Stopping two feet from the
spectyr, Sorcha waited. It had been a long time since she had tried
to communicate with a geist—usually the mistake of a newly minted
Deacon—but she opened her mouth and said the first thing that came
to mind. “Why are you here?”
Slowly the spectyr
pivoted toward her, like a circus ringmaster revealing the final
act in his show. Despite all her power, all her training, Sorcha
swallowed hard.
In the dim light of
the attic the transparent skull in a gray shroud flickered, a
reminder of every humans’ fate. Suddenly Sorcha was no longer
thinking of it as a simple, single geist. It was a part of the
great void that waited for them all: the Otherside. She had danced
there for a while the previous season—but her memory of that time
had faded. Now, as the geist faced her, flashes of it returned.
Sorcha wanted desperately to smoke a cigar in that moment—remind
herself that she was still among the living.
She cocked her head,
Gauntlets half raised, waiting to ignite a rune and send the
apparition tumbling back to the Otherside. The spectyr mimicked the
gesture, and then its bone white jaw creaked open.
“Sorcha!” The voice
was like the wheezing cry of a dying man, stretched out and
desperate in the silent warehouse attic. The Deacon could not have
been more surprised than if the geist had started a song and dance
routine.
“Sorcha?” Merrick’s
voice came from below and was an eerie echo. She heard her
partner’s boots on the stairs and was reassured that soon he would
be here.
“Sorcha,” the geist
repeated, raising a shimmering hand and reaching out to her. “You
must save him, Sorcha.”
In many of the
religions it was said three repetitions of a name were required for
a binding. As a Deacon she didn’t believe in such foolish
nonsense—but, oddly, a chill still ran up her spine. She smothered
the rune that she had been meaning to cast—because she guessed who
the apparition meant—and now she had to know.
Sorcha remained
stock-still as the spectyr’s hand touched her face. She let
it—something that went against every ounce of her training. Beyond
reality and time, the Otherside held knowledge that no human could
ever possess, so the greatest Deacons of the Order had often taken
chances to snatch what they could from the void. This was her
moment.
Slowly her eyes
drooped, heavy with the cold of the undead. As Sorcha trembled on
the edge of death itself, she accepted its vision.
Raed Syndar Rossin,
Young Pretender to the throne, fugitive, and the man she had not
stopped thinking of since she met him. Sorcha could see him, like
looking through water: as if she was below, and he was
above.
A girl who she
couldn’t quite make out was screaming while men carried her
away—then her face changed to a terrifying smirk. Raed was there
trying to save her, yet dark hands reached out and took him. Lured
into a trap under a circle of spinning stars, he and the Beast
within were devoured by a creature of snapping, snarling gold and
scarlet. It was awful, terrible, and as she watched, Sorcha was
sure it had not yet happened. However, it would—this was Raed’s
fate.
A sense of peace
stole over her, and for an instant the voice of the spectyr was
familiar: light, womanly, one that had given her life for them all.
Nynnia, the creature from the Otherside, was whispering into the
mind of the Deacon. The words were far off, but Sorcha caught
“angel,” “son,” “trap” and “stars.”
The Deacon strained
to hear the rest, but then Merrick was screaming her name more
forcibly: standing on the top stair and shouting to her. Her
concentration was broken, and Nynnia’s voice melted away into the
still air.
Merrick’s yells were
not without reason. Sorcha shook her head and looked up. The
shrouded skull now loomed forward, and its eyes caught fire. A
cloud of freezing air blasted into her face and knocked Sorcha back
a step.
The burning skull
under the hooded cloak snarled, its teeth snapping as its hand of
bone reached for her. Sorcha spun away and summoned Yevah from her
Gauntlet. The shield of fire leapt between them, giving her a
moment to breathe.
Raising her
Gauntlets, she next called the rune Tryrei. Opening up a tiny
pinhole to the Otherside would draw away the power of the geist and
send it back where it belonged.
Opening even a tiny
crack to that place hurt. The sound of the hungry void was like a
thousand screaming voices, calling for love, friends, life. It was
a noise that would have driven a normal human insane, but a Deacon
was trained and honed to not bend in the face of the undead. Sorcha
stood before it, hands spread, directing the anger of the Otherside
toward the spectyr.
Yet, it did not
succumb but rather elongated. It came at her still, stretched and
spinning, the white bones of its fingers reaching for her. However,
the Otherside continued to exert its pull, and the vengeful geist
had nothing to hold it eade human world. It scrambled, it fought,
but then the terrible void took it.
Sorcha closed her
fist on Tryrei, and the crack was sealed. Just as suddenly as it
had come, the terrible noise and fury was gone. The two Deacons
stood in the silent warehouse and stared at each other, not even
panting.
“Nynnia was here.”
Sorcha took a deep breath. “She used that last spectyr to send us a
message.”
Her partner’s deep
brown eyes studied her for a minute. The Bond between them was
stronger than any normal Deacon pairing—she had no doubt Merrick
had seen a portion of what she had.
Carefully Sorcha
removed her Gauntlets, folded them up, and took out the remains of
her cigar. The sole window in the warehouse attic looked over the
mercantile quarter and toward the Imperial Palace.
Merrick stood beside
her, by now used to her smoking and her silences. For a young man
he was very good at being still. He was well aware of his partner’s
feelings for the Young Pretender but also of the bind they were in.
Even in the best of times no Deacon was a free agent. And these
were not the best of times, for Arch Abbot Rictun had them under
close observation. He would never let them leave
Vermillion.
Sorcha inhaled the
smoke, letting it sit heavy in her mouth for a moment before
exhaling it toward the window. She was trying to logically assess
the situation, but each time she did, she saw Raed’s dying gasp.
“He’s not dead yet,” she said calmly, “or we would have felt it.”
An attempt to control the Beast inside the Young Pretender had also
ended up binding the two Deacons to the fugitive—a triple
Bond.
“It could be a trap,”
Merrick replied softly, pulling his cloak around him.
“Yes.” She blew a
smoke ring. “It very well could be. Yet—”
“—apparently we have
allies on the Otherside.” Her partner glanced up and then away.
Nynnia had undoubtedly been more than human, but neither of them
had expected to hear from her after death.
Sorcha examined the
glowing tip of her cigar. “But we don’t know what her nature really
is. Quite a bit to hang our future on, don’t you
think?”
“Raed is our friend .
. . more than that.” Merrick’s mind reached out, tugging on the
Bond like a boy might pull on a fence wire to test its strength.
The part between them sang, and there was a distant whisper of the
one between them and the Young Pretender.
Sorcha had made the
Bond in haste, but none of them had been able to cut it.
Wordlessly, both Deacons reached out for the Young Pretender,
searching for the connection they had spent the last three months
denying. He was out there somewhere—they could tell that—but too
far for them to sense very much else.
“I saw them kill him,
Merrick.” Sorcha turned to her partner, her blue eyes gleaming in
the half-light. “We can’t let that happen—even if it is a
trap.”
He sighed, looked up
at the ceiling as if searching for answers from some uncaring
little god. But when he looked back, on his lips was a wry smile.
“No—you’re right—we can’t. The trick of it though will be getting
the Arch Abbot to agree to us leaving.”
Sorcha’s expression
was amused as she knocked the end off her cigar to save for another
occasion. “We’ve spent long enough playing by Rictun’s rules.
There’s no fun in it anymore.”
Her partner’s
reaction was a slightly nervous laugh—but he didn’t for one second
try to stop her. Sorcha knew it was another reason she liked the
boy.