TWENTY-EIGHT
Despair and Delight
They dragged Raed into the Temple and locked him a room
about the size of a cupboard, but his surroundings mattered ttle.
The Young Pretender lay there waiting for the hurt to stop. It
didn’t. Eventually blessed unconsciousness wrapped itself around
him.
The next morning his
eyelids flicked open, revealing the world and its ugly realities.
His hands were numb and still bound with the weirstones. Raed
licked his lips, trying to focus his eyes. The only light in here
was from the narrow crack under the door. The cupboard was tiny,
like a hot box found in a prison.
As a thin line of
sweat ran down Raed’s forehead, he tried to come to terms with the
fact that last night had been real. He had found his sister—and she
hated him. His crew had died for him. All these things were
true.
These were merely
another long line of bitter facts that he’d been facing all his
life. Raed would not give up. Fraine, poor damaged Fraine, had
gone. However, if he could get away from this mad situation, he
still could catch up to her, make her see the error of what she was
doing. As painful as it was to think about, it had to have been
Tangyre that had twisted Fraine’s mind. Raed had thought Captain
Greene was his friend, but he was now positive he didn’t know half
the things that had gone on in his absence. She must have been
feeding Fraine venom for years, venom that now threatened to engulf
them all.
So Raed struggled to
his knees and assessed what his chances were. His body ached with
the various kicks and punches he had taken last night, the kind of
deep bruising that would take a while to heal. Still, he had taken
notice of what the charming women had said last night and wondered
if he would even get a chance to heal. He just had to go on as
though he would.
Somewhere out there
was a wild card, one that Zofiya, Tang or his sister didn’t count
on—Deacon Sorcha Faris. He’d put his trust in her before, and she
hadn’t failed him. Getting to his feet, Raed pressed his ear to the
door of the cupboard. An ominous chanting, soft and low and from
many throats, was all he heard. It didn’t matter if it was for gods
or geists, chanting was never a good sign. Yet there was no handle
for him to try, nothing else in the cupboard he could use as a
weapon and the walls were of sturdy stone.
Just as he was
contemplating trying his shoulder against the door, two Chiomese
guards yanked it open and pulled him out into the light. Now Raed
was able to take in the beauty and terror of the Temple of Hatipai.
It did nothing to cheer him.
She, according to the
nature of her kind, dominated it. No other decoration detracted
from the huge carving of her that slithered its way around the
walls of the Temple. Her stretched body resembled nothing so much
as a snake eating its own tail. Her undulating neck carried the
depiction of her head up the stairs so that its distorted face
rested at the top. Her open mouth was like a void, and a freezing
breeze poured from it. Raed was no expert, but he had always
imagined that in a Temple the object of adoration should be lovely,
offering comfort or inspiring awe. This looked like something out
of a mad dream.
The citizens of
Orinthal didn’t appear to feel the same. They were crowded into the
building with barely an inch between them. Parents had their
children on their shoulders so they could see the scene. Raed
wasn’t so lucky. All he experienced was the shoves and jeers of the
mob. A few managed to get punches in, so that by the time he was
dragged to the foot of the stairs he had all new aches and
pains.
One of the cuts on
his head had been reopened, so when he looked up it was through a
veil of blood. Zofiya and an old man waited for him at the top of
the stairs, and behind them was a device that gleamed in the
torchlight. In his childhood Raed had found one of his playmates
cutting a rabbit to pieces in the orchard. The boy had nailed each
of the poor creature’s feet into the ground and was slicing into it
with the care of a surgeon. Yet the creature was still
conscious.
Now, looking up at
the metallic X-shaped device studded with weirstones, Raed recalled
vividly the white, panicked eyes of the rabbit and heard again that
strange scream it had made. He wondered if he would make the same
sound when they got him up there and began their vivisection.
Zofiya had promised Fraine it would hurt. It looked like she would
keep her word.
Death didn’t find
him. Merrick stood panting in the dark and tried to gather his calm
about him.
The guardsmen were
dead at his feet, but he still had his mission to find his mother.
Taking a few deep, slow breaths, Merrick bent and felt around under
his fingers, feeling for a guard’s abandoned rifle. Standing
upright, armed with gun and blade, he slowly opened his Center. He
could still feel nothing of the attacker in the dark. It could not
be geist or human, as he would have detected it—so then what could
it be? His mind whirred.
If he could not find
the attacker nor see it, then he had to move on or remain frozen in
fear while terrible things happened to his mother. His Center
flowed out from him, seeking his kin. She was there . . . in the
shadows, not far away now—but also other presences. Human.
Powerful. Near to her.
Merrick’s eyes
flickered open as he realized they were as aware of him as he was
of them. He grasped his saber’s hilt and ran forward into the dark.
He couldn’t see a thing and was led only by his Deacon-trained
senses. The tunnel echoed with the rapid slap of his feet on the
damp ground and was accompanied by the sound of his own heartbeat
in his ears.
When light spilled
from ahead of him, even though it had only been moments since he’d
last had it, Merrick’s eyes still watered. It was no geist that
stood before him—it was four robed figures—three men and a
woman.
For a heartbeat
Merrick was back in the Mother Abbey, in front of his peers. A
habitual smile almost made it to his lips at the familiar cloak of
his Order.
And then he noticed
the differences. The cloaks were not green or blue but brown. The
light they had summoned gleamed on the brooches pinned to their
shoulders, and he was not surprised to see the circle of five
stars.
Another shape,
another Deacon, for want of a better word, stepped out of the
shadows, and he was dragging Japhne. Merrick started forward in
rage.
“Now, now, Deacon
Chambers.” One of the older men, tall and with a hawklike nose,
held up his bare hand. “Do not be hasty. Young man, this is the
meeting on which your future turns.”
Merrick paused a
moment to gain a foothold on this new reality. “It is rather hard
to think clearly with a knife at a pregnant woman’s back.” He
couldn’t see it from here, but his Center was still open and was
becoming useful again. By telling them about the knife, he was
telling them he was not quite as helpless as they might
think.
Still, everyone could
see he was a Sensitive without his Active.
Their leader, if that
was what he was, tilted his head, and a disturbing smile spread on
his face. Yet he gestured to his cohort, who then dropped the tip
of the blade from close proximity to his mother. “You must know she
is the key to controlling Hatipai, and I am sure you’re clever
enough to realize how important that is.”
Merrick swallowed
hard. “I presume you mean to use her unborn child to do
that.”
The man shrugged as
if they were talking about the price of milk. “The blood she left
behind is her focus. That is why she wanted to get rid of it.
Instead, we will use it with runes and cantrips to put a leash on
‘the goddess. ’”
As he spoke, the
young Deacon tried to judge how many of them he could shoot before
they did anything to his mother. He was good with a blade, but it
had been some time since he’d fired a rifle. “And who are you to do
that?”
The man gave his name
easily. And then grinned as if it were nothing.
The look in Japhne’s
eyes was terrified, and she wrapped her hands about her belly,
trying to provide some protection to her second son.
“But you’re
consorting with Hatipai.” Merrick shuffled forward a little. “The
murderer stalking Chioma was no crazed killer—you called that Beast
for her, for the geist who will have Chioma again.”
The old man smiled,
an expression that chilled Merrick to the core. “We use what
instruments we need—even geistlords can sometimes have their uses.”
His eyes flicked down to Japhne. “Once Hatipai’s son is dead, she
will take Chioma and bring down chaos.”
His mother was
looking at him, her eyes swimming with tears but also something
else: the mad determination for her children to live. At her side
her fingertips brushed her dress, pulling it away a little,
revealing the fact that tucked in tightly against her wrist,
nestled in the palm of her hand, was a knife. It was stained with
her blood and must have been what she had defended herself with
before. It was not much, but the set of her jaw told her son that
she would not let her children die without a struggle.
Merrick swallowed
hard. “But why would you want that? Your Order fights the geists
too.”
“We did once,” the
female Deacon broke in, “until we realized we could do so much
more. We could use them. We could be the ones in control of the
whole Empire.”
Her superior shot her
a look that instantly silenced her, but he seemed happy to finish
the conversation. “You stopped the Murashev, Deacon Chambers. So we
had to find other ways. We are not so foolish as to make the same
mistake we did last century.”
Merrick thought of
the book back at the Chiomese Abbey. “The people rose against you.
They would not tolerate you using the geists.”
“Be on the winning
side, Merrick.” The man’s gray eyes were harder than stone, his
voice smooth and alluring. This man had charisma and power; he was
used to being obeyed. “You became a Deacon to make a
difference—with us you can change the world for the
better.”
“You are the only one
of those fools we have offered to join us.” The female Deacon had
spoken. Her voice held a strange accent that Merrick, despite all
his training, could not quite place. Her hair was pure white,
though her face looked no more than twenty.
Merrick was now only
ten feet from them, looking far more confident that he felt. If he
chose the wrong words, his mother, his unborn half brother and he
would die in this place.
He cleared his
throat. “No offense, but the Native Order has been dead for at
least a generation—what could you offer me that my current Order
does not?”
“We know
?”
Merrick glimpsed a
face, misty and terrified, pressed into it. It was a shade, a
person trapped within.
“We have learned the
art of using geist and weirstone together in ways that not even the
Ancients could have imagined.” The lead Deacon was very pleased
with himself, though such a thing was the worst abomination that
Merrick could imagine.
He was totally unable
to contain his reaction. “But you trap souls—human souls—in order
to do it!”
“Not just human,” the
woman said softly, “but geists too.”
This was why the
population had turned against the Native Order. This was why the
Rossin family had set about destroying them. And these Deacons
thought they saw something in him. “You would set yourselves up as
tyrants!” he barked, hand clenching tightly on his sword hilt, even
though he knew it was useless.
Yet, by the Bones, he
did have another weapon: the wild talent. He’d spent months trying
to avoid thinking of it. The shameful thing that had welled out of
him on the street in Vermillion. Merrick had never spoken of it,
even with Sorcha. Any sign of such a talent would result in
ejection from the Order and then most probably
imprisonment.
It was not his nature
to kill, so he gave them one final chance. “But you can still turn
back.” He held out his hand. “Give me the woman and let me set
Chioma to rights.”
The native Deacon
grinned. “What is she to you, Deacon Chambers? Another slut of a
corrupt Prince. We can offer you the world.”
The slur was enough
to set Japhne off. With a shriek of outrage, she plunged her blade
down into the foot of the man holding her. The knife was small but
obviously very sharp. Her captor bellowed in agony as it skewered
him to the floor.
Displaying incredible
athleticism, Merrick’s mother came off the floor and raced toward
him. Yet she was clever, keeping to the side of the tunnel in order
to give him a clean line of sight. The heretic Deacons were
throwing back their cloaks and reaching for their weirstones, but
he was faster. Merrick fired off a shot that clipped the younger
man in the shoulder and then cocked the weapon and fired again. The
woman went down with an inch-wide hole blasted in her head—it
looked like a masterly shot, but Merrick had been aiming for the
hawk-nosed man.
It wasn’t enough—he
was still just a Sensitive—and they would reach for runes or
something even direr. So, in desperation, Deacon Chambers reached
deep within himself and tried to find the hidden
spark.
It was like grasping
a fish in murky water. He thought of the moment it had welled up
inside him. He thought of Nynnia and her own mysterious powers. And
finally he thought of his mother dying down here in the dark when
she had so much to live for after so long without.
And then he felt it,
waves of power bubbling up from some unexplored place within
himself. The Deacons before him were full of arrogance, confidence
in their own power and the situation they had him in.
It was so easy to
turn that confidence into crippling fear, like flipping a coin from
heads to tails—even though what he was really doing was close to
scrambling their brains. Merrick realized he should have been
horrified both at what he was doing and its ease—but they had
threatened his family—nothing was off limits>
Suddenly the centered
Deacons were anything but. They were twisted, sobbing, terrified at
the dark they had created. Merrick had no way of telling if they
could fight back against his wild talent, but he was taking no
chances. “Mother.” He ran forward and grabbed her hand. He had no
idea how long what he had done would last.
The darkness was so
complete that only the barest hint of the tunnel they were in
revealed itself to Merrick’s Sight, and worse there was no end to
it.
“We should be back to
the main pipe by now,” he muttered under his breath. “I don’t
understand it.”
“We’re not in
Chioma.” Japhne wheezed at his side. How his mother would have such
an idea Merrick could not afford to stop and ask. Yet he feared she
was right. Weirstones and even runes could be used for such
things.
Screams rang out from
behind them, the sounds of the Deacons but higher-pitched—the sound
of pain and death rather than just fear. Whatever shackles they had
put on their Beast had obviously required
concentration.
Merrick was not sorry
for them. Any who chose the path of consorting with the Otherside
deserved their fate. However, he knew the creature would pursue
them now that it was done with its tormentors.
He slipped his arm
around his mother. “Then we have to find the entrance—it must go
both ways for them to come and go into the palace.”
She nodded against
his shoulder, but her breath was coming in ragged gasps. Merrick
had little experience, but he was fairly sure that heavily pregnant
women should not be running for their lives in the
dark.
And then the sound he
had feared and half expected came; the high-pitched whine of a
geist on the hunt. It was like claws on glass—but several types of
geist had similar sorts of calls.
His mother stumbled
and would have gone to her knees without Merrick catching her. The
ground underfoot was now getting slippery, and she cursed. “If only
I was younger; if only I could see!” It took a lot to get his
mother upset, but she was obviously at the end of her
tether.
“It’s not much
farther,” Merrick lied. His Center was only giving him details of
the cave walls a mere five feet in front of them.
Japhne tripped again,
and the sound drew closer, along with a wave of cold so intense it
might have come from the heart of winter. For the first time in his
life Merrick regretted being a Sensitive. If Sorcha was here alone
with the heavily pregnant woman, she would have at least been able
to protect her.
“Leave me.” Japhne
tugged on his cloak, and he didn’t need to see her face to know it
would be racked with pain. As a mother she wanted to protect her
unborn child, but she also wanted him to protect himself. It was a
decision no mother should have to make. “Run.”
It was an idea that
Merrick did not entertain for a moment. If one person was going to
survive this, it was his mother. The geist was upon them. He shoved
Japhne, something that as a good son he would have never have done
until this desperate moment. She stumbled and fell against the
wall, while Merrick stood alone between her and the
creature.
“Go!” he bellowed,
pulling his sword, though it was a totally pointless gesture. The
geist loomed out of the darkness, or maybe more precisely gathered
itself from within the darkness, because he finally recognized it:
a ghast. The dense knot of shades was held together by cantrips and
weirstonea snarling, snapping creature composed of twenty or so
tormented human souls and their lost hopes.
Racked with so much
pain, a ghast was a maw of destruction that would enter a human
body and pull it apart from inside, creating another shade to add
to its conglomeration. They had created more pain and destruction
than any other kind of geist and had been the priority for the
Order of the Eye and the Fist when they had made landfall on Arkaym
with the Emperor years before.
Merrick remained
calm, though he knew the odds; he was a Sensitive adrift without
his Active and had nothing to offer up except his
body.
Flicking around, he
screamed at Japhne, who had not gone much farther than he had
shoved her. “Mother! Save yourself, save the child!” The howl came
out raw, and he knew it would be the last thing he
said.
She clutched the rock
wall with spread fingers, tears streaming down her face and unable
to chose a path. They would all die here then in this lonely
corridor, not even knowing where they were.
Merrick turned and
became Active. No Deacon except the Arch Abbot ever held both the
Gauntlets and the Strop, but every one of them had the seed of both
specialities in them. Merrick did not have the Gauntlets that would
provide protection from the backlash of the runes, and he didn’t
have the training to control them, but at this moment he was out of
all other options. The one thing he did have was
knowledge.
In his mind’s eye he
drew Pyet, the cleansing flame. The long, looping line of the rune,
bisected by the horizontal straight line leapt into existence,
carving itself into the flesh of his palm.
The fire cut to his
core. Never having done it, Merrick nevertheless imagined it felt
the same as shoving his hand into a burning hearth. But he couldn’t
afford the time and energy to scream. If he lost control of the
rune now, they would all be consumed by it. Trained to see through
pain, he managed to hold out his hands.
Red fire coursed from
the rune, flowing over his hands—thankfully not melting his flesh
yet—and enveloped the ghast as it gathered itself to leap from the
shadows.
The conflagration
filled the tunnel, and Merrick wondered, even as the pain chewed at
his concentration, how he had managed such a display. His Active
side was latent only, and he had at best been hoping for a mere
distraction so that his mother could escape.
The smell of charred
brick and dirt filled his nostrils, even as the power filled him.
It was heady and terrifying. The Active talent heightened every
sense, until he was choking, sobbing, overwhelmed—yet still Merrick
held on.
Pyet was more than a
physical flame. It had to be to have any effect on a geist. As the
intense flame poured from the mark on Merrick’s hand, the ghast
writhed.
Its screams were
filled with the pain of dozens of souls trapped and feeling death
again. But it was a little pain compared to the agony of holding
the rune. Merrick knew it was burning far too brightly and far too
long. The ghast was gone, a candle held in a blast furnace, but the
Deacon could not stop the destruction gushing out of
him.
Now the smell was
that of his own mortal form; the hairs on his arm burst alight, and
he could feel real physical flames reaching out to consume skin and
flesh.
He had saved his
mother and unborn brother, but now it was he who would be the
candle. Merrick prepared himself to be taken, until the moment
Japhne laid cool hands on him. He jerkby way, trying to shake her
loose, but she was surprisingly strong. Forcing her fingers around
his wrists, she pulled him to her, and Pyet and the flames were
suddenly gone.
Merrick stood there
for a long moment, feeling his mother’s arms now go around him. She
was soft and cool comfort. And he was alive.
When the Deacon
pulled back, she still held on to his hands, cradling them in her
own. He looked down, fearing what he would see. They were not
blackened lumps as he might have guessed, but they were bright red
and blistered. It was going to be painful, but he might keep his
hands.
“How did you—” he
began.
Japhne smiled, leaned
forward and kissed his cheek. “The Ancient blood flows in your
veins—but not from your father’s family.”
“The Ehtia,” he
whispered in return, wondering how much of the wild talent that his
Order was so afraid of came from them. “So you—”
“It is a little
talent.” His mother stroked his hair back from his face. “I can
calm magic from time to time. It turned out to be a very useful
skill when I fell in love with Onika.”
Despite the
situation, Merrick blushed—he had wondered if the Prince kept his
mask on in private—but if Japhne was unaffected, then it all made
sense. He quickly changed the topic of conversation, which was
unseemly and awkward for him as both a son and as a
Deacon.
“Come on.” He put his
arm around his mother. “We have to get you back to the palace, and
then I must try to catch up with Sorcha and Onika. They have gone
to stop the goddess Hatipai gaining a body in this world. I fear I
know how I was able to channel an Active rune.”
Holding each other
up, they made it back to the junction with the pipe under the
palace. Now, with the darkness lifted, Merrick could make out a
circle of weirstones embedded in the brickwork—it was a masterfully
done job.
“But your hands,” his
mother murmured as they stepped out of one pipe and back into
Chioma.
Once there, Merrick
could feel the Bond singing in his head. The buzz was not a
comforting noise. Somewhere not far off, he feared he had left his
partner significantly diminished. He glanced down at his palms.
“I’ll bind them. Perhaps if I take the fastest horse, I can still
catch them.”
Japhne frowned,
undoubtedly thinking of her own lover in danger. “What use can you
be, my son? Surely what is done is already done?”
“Not where Sorcha is
concerned, Mother.”
“Then go to the
dirigible station.” Now she was tugging him along. “There are two
vessels in port, and if they burn weirstones, you may just get
there in time.”
Merrick’s heart
welled with admiration and love for Japhne. He had saved her, and
then she had saved him. The young Deacon could only hope that he
would get to his partner in time to bring her the same
hope.