TWENTY-FOUR
Merrick could not
recall having fallen into sleep—yet he must have. His last memory
was the smoothness of Nynnia’s skin, the warmth of lovemaking and
the feeling of completeness. Unfortunately these were not
sensations that could last.
I had to have this. He heard her in his dreams, her
voice ringing like a crystal bell far off in the distance.
I had to have this moment with you. I had to
not just because it happened but for us. When I saw you that first
time I had not forgotten your touch, your love. It was because of
you I chose to be born back into the world.
The light of the
Ehtia building on the Otherside burned against his eyelids, but he
would not look. He didn’t want to see the Nynnia who lived there;
he didn’t want the cold, bodiless image of her to overtake the one
he had been holding just minutes before. She lived beyond his
reach, and there was no comfort in that fact.
Instead, Merrick
waited until the light receded and he could not hear her voice in
his head anymore. He was empty. Only then did Deacon Chambers open
his eyes.
He was lying in a
pile of straw while a set of beautiful brown eyes were watching
him. They were, however, not the ones he had fallen to sleep
beneath. A very curious camel was breathing heavily on him—and
hereatth was not sweet. In fact, it might have been the worst thing
he had ever smelled had he not been dealing with geists for a long
time.
Levering himself
upright, Merrick found himself dressed when he most assuredly had
been naked when last he lay down. More of Nynnia’s
magic.
The young Deacon got
to his feet and picked hay out of his cloak, while the offended
camel jigged sideways, snorting and shaking its head on its long,
shaggy neck. Thankfully she did not spit.
Looking around, the
red mud buildings told him that he was once more in the Hive City,
but when in time that might be exactly was another question. It
came back to him with a rush. The Bond. The connection. Merrick’s
vision blurred, and he was immediately relieved; Sorcha was
nearby.
And if she was here,
then Nynnia had managed to drop him back in the right place and
time. The Ehtia were indeed powerful. Some part of him wished that
he’d taken more notes, asked more questions—perhaps have brought
back some of that power for the Deacons. Another part altogether
wasn’t sorry for an instant of the time that he had managed to
snatch with Nynnia.
Merrick walked in a
somewhat tentative fashion from the yard and peered out onto the
street, trying to orient himself. Turning his head to the left, he
felt that was where Sorcha was. Her mood was easy to read: dark and
despairing. Even in the madness under Vermillion, she had not felt
like this.
Reaching along the
Bond, he alerted her to his presence. Her reaction was an almost
overwhelming surge of relief and delight. They had come a long way
from that first awkward pairing that the Arch Abbot Hastler had
thrust them into.
We are a good team. Her voice in his head was clear
as a matins bell. Many partners in the Order would have been
jealous of Merrick and Sorcha’s powerful Bond—if they had dared
reveal it.
Raed! Sorcha directed Merrick’s attention to the
other part of the Bond: the Young Pretender. Immediately he
flinched back as pain burst through the connection.
Merrick groaned and
doubled up, his hand going against the smooth mud wall to stop
himself from falling. What exactly had happened while he’d been
gone?
Find me. Sorcha’s call was her usually abrupt tone
but mitigated by her genuine fear. Things are
happening.
Like a needle seeking
magnetic north, Merrick turned and strode toward her. After a
moment he broke into a jog. He was not the only one running. It
didn’t take a Sensitive to notice that everything was wrong in the
city. Where before there had been organized chaos, with the streets
full of merchants and citizens, now there was no one in the streets
except for the occasional person darting for their house. Until
Merrick turned onto one of the main streets—and then he discovered
just where nearly everyone was.
The main street of
Orinthal was choked with its citizens, and every single one of them
was wearing the mustard yellow of Hatipai, either cloaks or merely
torn strips of cloth bound around their arms. Merrick stepped back
and hugged the wall. Maybe it was some local festival.
He opened his Center
wider, tasting the air like a dog sniffing the breeze. A crowd, any
crowd, could be a frightening thing; but this one full of religious
fervor frightened him down to his bones.
And there was more. A
sensation akin to turning his back on a lurking danger. Every hair
on his neck was standing up, and every muscle was twitching. As he
spun ad, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find someone coming at
him with an upraised knife.
Taking a chance,
Merrick peered out onto the street again. The people were moving
silently and smiling, but he spotted disturbances at the edge. Some
of the citizens of Orinthal were not entirely happy with this
display of religious zealotry. Unbelievers were being beaten and
kicked in the side streets. The crowd ignored all that, moving like
a sluggish beast but not toward the palace.
Wait, he projected to Sorcha. He couldn’t walk away
from this situation—he had to see more. With dread knotting his
heart, he found a building with soft stone steps leading up to a
flat roof. Until he reached the top of them, Merrick kept his eyes
cast on the ground. Before he raised them, he opened his Center
wide, flinging open everything that he had as a Sensitive. The sun
was beginning to fall toward the horizon, sending beams of scarlet
and umber light darting over the buildings and making them glow. It
would have been a beautiful sight, but for Merrick it was a bloody
vision, punctuated with shadows and dire portents.
The spectyrs were no
longer content with occupying the distant mountains; like the
humans, they were heading east into the desert. The sky was thick
and dark in his vision—though none of the citizens seemed aware of
it as they trooped off under its shadow.
Merrick’s fear
rattled through the Bond, and he could feel Sorcha’s response, like
an echo on a taut string. With a wrench Merrick closed his Center
and staggered back into the real world.
I’m coming, he called along the Bond to Sorcha. As
he leapt down the steps back to the road, he saw her in a nearby
alley. She was wearing the cloak of the Order but turned wrong way
around, the blue of the Active hidden by the black. It reminded him
starkly of Hastler’s funeral and the long ranks of the Deacons
mourning that liar. Sorcha’s face then had been calmer than the one
he saw under the hood now. He had never seen her paler or with
wider eyes, and she smelled of blood. She was running too—like they
were two parts of something broken that needed
mending.
Merrick darted
forward, and they threw themselves into each other’s arms. It was
not the embrace of lovers, but it still contained love. The Bond
wrapped around them until for a brief heartbeat there was nothing
but the two of them. It was an echo of the time under
Vermillion—the time when they had in fact been one.
Finally Sorcha tugged
him off the street into a darker part of the humid alleyway. “By
the Bones,” she whispered, not letting go of his forearm, “it is
good to see you, Merrick.”
His partner had a
lovely way of repeating emotions that their Bond already told him,
but this was not the time to chide her. This close, his Deacon
senses told him that she was indeed soaked in blood and sweat under
the cloak.
“What happened?” he
asked, his eyes already darting into the shadows, though he could
not sense Raed anywhere. In fact...
“He’s gone,” Sorcha
snapped. “I couldn’t stop the Rossin without you, and he
transformed right in the palace. People died, and they’re hunting
me, thinking I did it.”
She delivered a hint
of an accusation to go with his sliver of sudden guilt. Yet that
was foolish—Nynnia had shown him things, taken him places he needed
to be. Instead, Merrick clasped her arm right back, completing the
link. “Then that is what we need to do—find Raed and sort this
out.”
As Merrick turned to
go back out onto the street, his rtner stopped him. “Where
were you, Merrick?” The crack in her
voice was something that he had not expected.
He wasn’t ready yet.
The tumble of time and death was something that he needed to sort
into words. But he knew Sorcha would not let him get away without
some form of explanation. “Nynnia saved me,” he said simply,
surprised at the steadiness in his own voice.
Those blue eyes
widened, and then a frown creased her forehead. “Nynnia is dead,
Merrick.” She was afraid for his sanity.
“I am not crazy—you
would feel it if I was.” He smiled. “And yes, Nynnia is dead . . .
but also alive.”
Sorcha sighed, her
lips twisted into a knot of frustration. “You Sensitives are hard
to understand at the best of times. What do you mean?”
“I will tell you all
soon.” Merrick found he was rather enjoying flummoxing his partner.
He clamped his hand around her arm, giving it a firm squeeze when
she looked ready to demand more. “They have taken Raed, and we need
to get him back quickly.”
Sorcha’s gaze
unfocused slightly, her head lifting and turning east where the
spectyrs had disappeared. “Yes.” Her voice was soft, concerned, not
the usual from his sometimes prickly partner. It remained unspoken
how many cruel and evil things the blood of his ancient line could
be used for.
“What do we do?”
Merrick couldn’t be sure, but that could have been the first time
Sorcha had turned to him for advice so completely. She was older,
more experienced and far more confident than he was.
Usually.
He thought back on
what had happened during his trip into the past: the determined,
dark face of the Ehtia and the great crushing despair in the divine
face of Onika. They were in a strange city, unable to trust their
own Brothers and Sisters of the Order, and far from the protection
of the Arch Abbey. Only one person remained who knew the way of
things here.
Merrick straightened.
“We go to the Prince and lay the case before him.”
His partner jerked
upright. “Remember when I said people died? One of them was his
daughter. I think going back there would be a quick trip to the
gallows or maybe a rapid introduction to a bullet.”
“I think, with me
standing at your side, we should be all right.”
“I don’t care what
the Bond says—I think you have gone raving mad!” Sorcha snapped,
her voice reclaiming some of her usual bravado.
“We’ll be fine.”
Merrick pressed the flat of his hand against her back, guiding her
toward the palace. “Onika owes me a favor.”
She batted his hand
away and glared at him. “You better explain yourself before we get
there. I hate mysteries.”
Despite the situation
and what he had lost, Merrick couldn’t help but laugh. By the time
they reached the palace, he just knew she would be convinced of his
madness.
Raed felt the world
claim him again, and it was not a pretty thing. His muscles ached
right down to his bones, so he knew that the Rossin had taken a lot
from his body. The taste of blood in his mouth confirmed
it.
His eyes were glued
shut, and he wasn’t sure for a moment if he had enough strength to
lever them open. So the Young Pretender lay still, trying to take
in his surroundings.
As the aching
subsided, he was able to perceive that he wa lying on something
that was swaying, so it had to be a carriage or cart. No, a
carriage, because under his left cheek he could feel the softness
of some kind of brocade.
Outside, wheels were
turning, but it did not sound as though it were on gravel or
cobblestones. Instead, he could hear the hiss of something far
softer than any of those surfaces. His mind made the connection
only slowly; the wheels were running over compacted
sand.
And if they were
doing that, then they were no longer in the Hive City. Raed
struggled to control his breathing as he flicked through the images
of what had happened before the Rossin took him.
Something had
attacked them in the library. He’d been standing next to Sorcha and
had felt the geist only for a second before the Rossin inside had
reacted as he always did.
The Young Pretender
inhaled sharply though his nose, because there was another familiar
sensation he suddenly recognized: the pull of blood dried onto his
skin. Was it Sorcha’s? Had he killed the one woman he had dared to
have feelings for just as he had his own mother?
“You did take life,
Raed Syndar Rossin.” The voice was just across from him, low,
accented and somehow familiar—he just had to sort through memories
to get to it. But everything was too sluggish, just as it always
was after awaking from possession by the Rossin.
So he yanked his
eyelids apart, and Grand Duchess Zofiya looked back at him. If Raed
could have picked anyone to be sitting opposite him in the fine
carriage, it would never have been her. His one and only contact
with the sister of the Emperor had been back in Vermillion when he
had taken a bullet for her.
In that split second
she had looked grateful—even if her brother had later thrown Raed
into prison. Now her beautiful dark eyes were leveled on him with
far less grace, and more than that. If he hadn’t known better, he
might have thought she was growing cataracts. Yet she didn’t appear
to have any trouble seeing him.
In the impossible
heat she was wearing a sheer white garment that only barely
concealed her admirable curves. Again, the last time he had seen
the Grand Duchess she had been wearing the Imperial Guard red
uniform—and from what he had heard, that was all she ever wore—even
to state events. Another strangeness.
Raed pushed with his
hands, levering himself off the carriage seat, but quickly found
that they were bound, and it was not with anything he had ever
encountered before, but he knew what they were
immediately.
“Weirstones.” He held
up his hands before him, swaying slightly and still a little muzzy.
The string of tiny stones gleamed like diamonds in front of his
slowly focusing eyes. “Really—you shouldn’t have.”
Zofiya laughed, but
it was a short sound with no real amusement behind it. “But if I
did not, then your passenger would become very
troublesome.”
Raed twisted so that
he was sitting a little more comfortably on the seat, though it
still felt precarious. His feet were bound in the same fashion. “It
takes very little to restrain the Rossin.” He measured how far it
was across to the Grand Duchess, but at this moment he remained
curious rather than angry.
She leaned back, some
of the baking Chiomese sun filtering in through the curtains and
outlining her form even more in the thin white dress. Raed was
aware, if not entirely immune, to her tactics. Zofiya was a
beautiful woman, and the dress not only showed off her womanly
curves but also the lines of honed muscles years of military
training had given her. He began to reconsider how great his
chances of overcoming her physically really were.
“It is not merely the
weirstones that restrain the Rossin,” Zofiya replied, “but the fact
that he was soundly beaten.”
Raed had dreamed most
of his life of hearing someone saying that to him—telling him they
had a way to defeat the great geistlord that haunted his life.
Sorcha, Merrick and the Bond had given him some comfort, but he had
never thought that there could be any more.
Raed was not
comforted—not when her smile did not reach her strange eyes. Raed
knew about possession better than most, and there were many small
signs of it on Grand Duchess Zofiya: a tiny twitch under her right
eye, unusual fashion choices, and a complete lack of sweat on her
body.
“What are you,” he
asked through dry lips, “to sit there talking so calmly about
beating the Rossin, when most people don’t even want to say his
name?”
She gestured down her
body. “I dare because I am protected.” When she shifted, Raed saw
something that his blurry eyes had not noticed before. Sitting on
the seat next to her was a mahogany box, large enough to hold a
man’s head. He wondered if that was what was in it. “My goddess
Hatipai has cast her cloak over me, and even your passenger carries
no dread for me.”
“A goddess?” Raed
couldn’t help letting out a little snort of disbelief. “You are
relying on the protection of a little god against the
Rossin?”
She moved so fast
that all he felt on his skin was the sting of her slap. She had
enough strength behind her attack to rock him back in the seat, and
something else—a brush of power that tasted familiar. It was gone
too quickly for him to identify, but the Young Pretender was left
staring at the Grand Duchess with a new appreciation.
“Don’t you dare talk
about things you have no idea of,” she whispered to him over bared
teeth. “You may call them little—but Hatipai is a living goddess—my
living goddess!”
Raed rubbed his cheek
somewhat awkwardly and smiled in what he planned on being a
charming manner. “A gentleman doesn’t like to bring up debts in
front of a lady, but this seems hardly fair, considering I saved
your life only a season ago.”
She tilted her head,
her luminous dark eyes full of regal pride. “And a Grand Duchess
does not acknowledge what is hers by right. Every citizen of Arkaym
does his duty when he protects the royal family.”
Now, that pinched his
pride. “I have never sworn an oath to you or your upstart brother—I
owe you nothing!” Raed hoped to enrage her to the point where he
might be able to overcome her—perhaps get the tight length of
weirstones around her fine neck.
Idly Zofiya drew her
long knife and began to clean her nails with its shining length.
“Perhaps you do not . . .” The way she
said it so archly implied something that chilled Raed.
The Rossin. It always
came down to the Rossin. If it was not enough trouble to be the
Pretender to a throne with a bounty on his head, he also carried a
geistlord inside him that apparently had even more
enemies.
“What do you want
with him?”
Now Zofiya leaned
back in her seat, a beautiful woman with something dark lodged in
her. The Young Pretender knew a lot about that. He also knew this
was not the Duchess he had taken a bullet for back in
Vermillion.
Her smile was devastating and knowing. “She
wants him. She must have her revenge.”
Raed let his head
drop back on the seat with a slight groan. “Hatipai, you mean. This
is what it is all about?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
And that was all she was going to say.
“Where are we going?”
the Young Pretender asked, hating to sound so helpless, but peering
out from the carriage still only revealed more sand and a group of
Imperial Guard.
The Grand Duchess did
not respond at first, so Raed tried to weigh his options. Without
the Rossin there were very few. He couldn’t be sure of overpowering
Zofiya, who was a fine warrior in her own right. If she carried any
sort of geist, which he suspected was the case, then the chances
went down even further.
He couldn’t for the
life of him find the Bond that Merrick and Sorcha talked about.
Raed was ready to roll from the carriage and see what happened, but
just as he was gearing up to do that, Zofiya spoke
again.
“We are going where
you wanted to go all this time, Raed Syndar Rossin—we are going to
meet your sister.” Her voice was soft and precise.
The Young Pretender
only just managed to stop himself from leaping on her. “Fraine? You
took Fraine?”
She bared her teeth
in a smile that would give him nightmares. “ ‘Took’ is such a
strong word.”
Raed clenched his
teeth, sucked in his self-control, then gave her a curt nod. “For
now you live, Grand Duchess Zofiya. Until I see her.”
She did not reply,
and he did not try to engage her any further in conversation. In
this manner they traveled on into the darkness and the desert: the
second in line to the Imperial throne and the man who had been born
to it.