Spectyr

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.