Spectyr

TWENTY-FOUR Return to Reality

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.