Harbinger (A BOOK OF THE ORDER)

by Philippa Ballantine

  To see her standing there without cloak or insignia was disturbing and exhilarating; Merrick felt as though his partner was on the edge of something. Perhaps it had only been meant to be a gesture, but he felt like it might be somewhat more.

  The chair scraped on the stone floor as he slid it back and got to his feet. He took off the green cloak that signified that he was a Sensitive. He unhooked the pin and laid it on the table. Holding his cloak in his hand, he thought briefly about how hard he had worked to earn it, then, he folded it up and placed it on the back of the chair.

  Troupe, Elevi, and Radhi looked at them, and the expression was not quite terrified, but Merrick sensed immediately that they were not ready yet to abandon their own cloaks.

  Sorcha nodded and glanced at him with a slight smile. Then she touched Troupe’s shoulder, a curiously sweet gesture from a Deacon known for her sharp tongue and no-nonsense attitude. “Each of us needs to come to this realization. I suggest we let the Sensitives examine the next step in our Conclave.”

  Then just like that, Sorcha ended the meeting. She left her cloak and insignia where they had fallen and walked from the room. The other Deacons watched her like a flock of curious crows. Merrick smiled slightly, as they inevitably trailed after her; he was sure there would be much gossip among the Deacons.

  Merrick looked down at his own abandoned golden and gleaming insignia. His fingers hovered a little above it for a moment. It was hard to give up something after so many years of wanting it.

  No, he pulled his hand back. It was just a piece of metal, and the cloak a scrap of cloth that had seen too many adventures. Even the name of the Order did not contain what it was really about. Sorcha was right.

  Deliberately, Merrick turned away and opened his Center. In the citadel spread below him, he could have picked out and counted the remaining Sensitives and Actives—but he didn’t because that would have been direly depressing. Instead he opened his mind to the members of the Conclave.

  They were six of the strongest Sensitives that remained; Akiline, Heroon, Khandir, Yituna, Daschiel and Suseli. They had been only passing acquaintances before the destruction of the Mother Abbey, but he had been cobbling them together into a Conclave for the last few weeks. In fact, Akiline and Yituna were far older than he, and had been among his instructors back at the Mother Abbey. Three others he had known only by sight. Daschiel alone had been in his novitiate class.

  Now, however, all six were locked in a tangled web that none of them had ever imagined. It was time to take the Conclave out and find out what it could do. Merrick knew that it was their best chance to avoid what had happened to the previous Order they had belonged to. He sent the signal, then felt the Sensitives respond and prepare themselves.

  While he waited for them to be ready, Merrick sat himself down at the table, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. It was just a moment.

  “You know you will have to do it.” The voice was not in his head, and he was no longer in the citadel. Used to visions and seeing the unseen, Merrick did not jerk upright. Instead he slid his Center open and glanced to where the voice addressed him; it was one that he recognized immediately.

  Merrick looked up. Nynnia stood before him. Her dark hair blew in unseen winds, and he could see the trees and forest behind her through her body. She was younger than the last time he had seen her, but that was only to be expected. He had traveled back in time to when she’d been alive; before her people had fled to the Otherside. They had wanted to save the world with their sacrifice. It was a pity that they had failed.

  “Has the gap between our worlds become so narrow?” he asked, blinking in the light that seemed to have traveled with her.

  She nodded, her eyes dropping away from his. “Everything is much closer now. It is all in flux. I needed to see you again, but do not think it was easy of me to send my image to you.” Her brow was furrowed, and he noticed her form was flickering slightly.

  “I am glad you did,” he muttered softly, unsure what to say to the woman he had loved, and still did in a very real way.

  Nynnia took a hesitant step forward. “It was not for our sake, Merrick. I had to. The Native Order has worked tirelessly to thin the barrier between our worlds.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  She reached out for him but then stopped herself. Nynnia was as she was, and she had no body to clothe herself with. Merrick flinched inwardly. Despite his love for Zofiya, Nynnia would always be his first, and it would have been good to feel her touch. She took a deep breath, and glanced away to her right. Merrick realized she was examining something in the distance that he could not see. Whatever it was, she did not seem pleased by it.

  A breath of chill wind brushed over his skin.

  “They think . . .” she paused and locked her gaze with Merrick’s. “He thinks he can use and control the power from the geists and the Otherside for his own purposes. He is very, very wrong.”

  “Derodak?” Merrick frowned. “You mean Derodak.” Now she looked away, and he saw a stain of guilt in her gaze.

  His people had called Nynnia’s the Ancients; lost in the mist of time, builders of fantastical machines, and masters of the weirstone. Merrick had cast them as heroes when he was a child. He had only later learned that through their actions in trying to use weirstones they had drawn the attention of the geistlords. They had paid that price however, when they had chosen to flee to the Otherside rather than sacrifice this world to the geists.

  Merrick could not use his Sight in this vision Nynnia had conjured, but he could still observe, and what he was seeing from his former lover was indeed something verging on guilt. He suspected he knew why.

  She hung her head. “I was not the first of my people to be reborn into the human world. Derodak was. The first Emperor, the first Deacon, and the grandest traitor is indeed one of the Ehtia.”

  “I know,” he murmured. “Sorcha and I fought him in the ruins of the Mother Abbey. I used Aiemm, the Rune of the Past on him. I saw. We all saw.” He could hear the bitterness in his own voice.

  If he had not been so consumed with sadness, he might have felt some satisfaction that he had surprised the Ehtia—that seldom happened.

  “He is our greatest shame, among many great shames.” Nynnia glanced away to her right again—but this time her expression was pained. “At least we brought the geists here with our ignorance. Unfortunately, Derodak is all of our own making. By the time we found out his true nature, it was too late. He found a way back into the world that had born us.” She leaned toward the Deacon. “You shall have to be careful now, Merrick. You showed him his humanity, again, something that he does not wish to be reminded of. He will not like that. He will seek you out to punish you for that.”

  Merrick could feel a pull in his brain, the tug of the Conclave drawing nearer to completion. This dreaming that Nynnia had conjured could not last much longer. She must have brought him here for something.

  “You can do something. You can tell us how we can beat him,” he demanded. He knew that Nynnia and the Otherside was beyond time, so perhaps she could see and understand more than he could—even with the Conclave.

  She looked at him, her head tilted, dark hair blowing in a wind he could only feel intermittently. When she spoke again, Nynnia had to scream for him to hear her over the howl of it, “It is not Derodak you have to fear—you already have the tools to overcome him. It is her that you must fear. Sorcha!”

  Now the Sensitive could actually discern the voices of his peers coming up to join him, and the pull of the real world was now becoming more and more insistent. Nynnia was making no sense at all. Derodak was the problem—not Sorcha who had worked so valiantly to save them all.

  “You can’t mean that,” Merrick found himself yelling back, as the wind grew louder and louder.

  Nynnia was having a hard time standing in front of him as the gale increased. Her hair was whipped about her, and eventually she dropped to the ground to grab hold of
it with her fingers. It was an act of pure will for her to remain.

  “I do,” she howled into the chaos. “Sorcha could rip everything apart. She is the Harbinger of the end of everything. You know what you will have to do . . .”

  “Not the Last Rune. Not that.” Merrick jerked himself upright in an effort to reach her—but it was too late. The real world grabbed hold of him and pulled.

  “Deacon Chambers?”

  His eyelids flicked open. For a moment his mind was lost somewhere between reality and dream. The person standing over him was Heroon; the younger man, only just out of the novitiate, had his hand on Merrick’s shoulder.

  Merrick shook his head, wiped his eyes, trying to separate the real world and the one that Nynnia had taken him to. Once under the palace of Orinthal the Ehtia had managed to take his whole body to the Otherside, but this time it had just been his Center. He swallowed, and reminded himself of the task that still lay ahead.

  “I am fine, Deacon Heroon,” he replied quietly. “I am just tired is all.”

  He pulled himself to his feet, feeling his skin prickle with exhaustion, and tried to size up the six other Sensitives. They did not appear to have caught the strange visitation. Merrick was pleased; he did not want to stain their already fragile trust in him any further. What Nynnia had communicated was something to be digested, alone, and with his senses dedicated to it. The Council—or whatever it was—had asked him to do this, to look ahead and find the weaknesses in the armor of the Native Order.

  To step into the future was not a journey to be taken lightly. He gestured to the seats. “Let’s set ourselves together, and see what we can find. There is a way forward, and like many times before, the Sensitives shall find it.”

  The others looked less than impressed with his little speech, but it was all he had to give at this point. Nynnia had left him feeling fractured and disorientated. Her words about Sorcha would haunt him, but he could not let them distract him. For the first time in his life, he did not want to believe what he had been told by Nynnia and pushed what she had told him to the back of his mind. He had more than enough to occupy his time and thoughts with.

  Sorcha was his partner, and there was no other reality he wanted to contemplate.

  SEVEN

  In the Shadow of Love

  “Sorcha!” Raed stood in their shared room and called her name, even though it was a small enough space that he could immediately tell she wasn’t there. He stood there on the threshold, and let out a long breath. After shedding the fur cloak, he found fresh clothes in the tiny set of drawers, and stripped out of the ones he had recovered by the river. He always thought there was a strange feral scent in clothes that had come near the Rossin.

  As he dressed, Raed eyed the cloak on the bed; it disturbed him, and yet it was a beautiful thing. Could it possibly be a gift from the Rossin? The fur was an exceptional silver color, not at all like the ruddy fur of the Beast that he shared flesh with. He’d found tufts of it before and knew the difference well enough. Then maybe it was something from a victim of the Rossin?

  Raed pushed one of his hands through his hair in frustration. Perhaps, he should find Merrick and just make sure there was no geist connection. He would have asked Sorcha, but he did not want to add to her worries.

  Things might have been terrible; they’d been on the run for months from the Emperor and the Circle of Stars after all. However, the truth of it was despite all of that these had still been the best months of his life because they had at least been together.

  “My prince.” Aachon’s voice made Raed start and spin around. His friend moved around as quietly as a Deacon; his boyhood training standing him in good stead. The tall, dark man, with the physical presence of a bear, should not have been able to move around with the ease of a mouse. They may have had to leave their ship the Dominion behind, but Aachon had not given up on being Raed’s friend. “I am glad you were not here when—”

  The first mate’s words ground to nothing when he took in the Young Pretender’s expression. He had hoped that Aachon wouldn’t be able to read what had happened. It was—as always—a false hope.

  “Again?” Aachon whispered, glancing up and down the corridor, before stepping hastily into the room and shutting the door. “My prince, if the Rossin is finding—”

  Now it was Raed’s turn to interrupt; he grasped his friend’s shoulder. “Sorcha and the Deacons have more to worry about than my curse. I have been dealing with it for the last couple of weeks.” When Aachon’s eyebrows shot up, Raed forestalled him once more. “However, things have changed; it appears the Rossin has not killed anyone. Perhaps he has found a way to be content with simply running free instead of needing blood . . .”

  Carefully Raed angled himself, so that Aachon could not see the cloak on the bed. Luckily, the other man was distracted by this change in the Rossin’s behavior. He rubbed his chin and stared directly at Raed. “I find that highly unlikely. The Beast lives on blood and chaos—why would he be any different now?”

  “Everything is turned upside down at the moment,” Raed replied. “The Deacons feel it—even I feel it.” He met his friend’s gaze, daring him to contradict him.

  Aachon nodded slowly. “Indeed—and that is why I came to find you, my prince.” Aachon’s jaw clenched, as did his hands, but when he spoke his voice was considered. “Last night geists broke through into the citadel.”

  Raed’s heartbeat picked up. “Is Sorcha—”

  “Deacons Faris and Chambers are safe, but many were not so lucky.”

  Raed felt a prickle on the back of his neck, as if he was being watched. He cleared his throat. “But this is a Priory of the Order—how could they breach the walls with all the cantrips and runes?”

  “This place was long abandoned,” Aachon explained, “and none of the Deacons here had the strength to shore up the crumbling cantrips of protection. This is no Mother Abbey.”

  They both knew that was a rather sour joke; even the Mother Abbey now lay in ruins.

  “So what happened?” Raed asked dully, already suspecting the answer.

  “A dozen or so lay Brothers and followers were slain in the Great Hall, but Deacons Faris and Chambers were able to close the breach—at least temporarily.” Because Aachon had been his friend for years, Raed caught the slight flinch that his friend made, even mentioning Merrick’s name. The first mate was a man of real honor, and his failure to find the Deacon’s mother and brother cut deep.

  In the chaos after the destruction of the Mother Abbey, Merrick had asked Aachon to rescue them from the Emperor’s palace, while he and Sorcha wrestled Zofiya from Derodak. Aachon had been unable to and had returned empty-handed. Most likely, the Emperor had already squirreled them away somewhere as surety against the Sensitive. What their fate had been remained a mystery. No matter how often Merrick used the runes to search for them he could not find anything.

  “Where is Sorcha now?” Raed asked, hoping to provide a distraction for his friend.

  It had taken some time for Aachon not to wince when Raed spoke of his lover. Their first meeting had been rather fraught, and then just before the fall of the Mother Abbey he had seen her do things in the home of the Wrayth that had underscored her relation to the geistlords. This was not the type of person the first mate wanted his Prince and friend to be connected with in any way.

  “She is on the upper battlements,” he said in a low growl.

  However, before they could get into any kind of awkward discussion, another figure appeared in the doorway behind them.

  “Aachon! Raed!” Merrick smiled, and seemed not to notice the first mate shuffling out of the way, his shoulders slightly stiff. “I am glad to see you are both well. Sorcha was worried after she found you missing . . .” His eyes grazed appraisingly over the Young Pretender.

  Raed glanced at Aachon, who took the none-too-subtle hint. Since Merrick arrived he had probably been looking for a way to escape the room. He bowed slightly to both of them. “I shall
be in the infirmary if you need me, my prince.” Then he disappeared back into the citadel’s dark corridors.

  Merrick looked at the Young Pretender, his head tilted. “Did you . . . did the Rossin find you last night, Raed?”

  The Young Pretender gave a curt nod. “But don’t worry; no one died last night—at least not under his paws.”

  Sometimes there was a comfort in dealing with Sensitives; they were very good at telling the truth. Merrick folded his hands behind his back. “That’s very good, Raed, but you will still want to find Sorcha. She does worry about you . . .”

  “I will,” the Young Pretender assured him. He pushed his hair out of his eyes and sighed. “You know, I don’t want to make things harder for her . . .”

  Merrick patted his shoulder, turned to leave, but then stopped and glanced back at the bed. “What is that?”

  It was then that Raed noticed the Sensitive was no longer wearing the green cloak that had seemed part of him. The Young Pretender opened his mouth to tell Merrick the whole story, but something very strange came out in its place. “I found it in one of the lower floors of the citadel. It’s a rather fine old cloak, don’t you think?” A warmth ran up his spine, and he knew that he had to do something nice. “I’m not in need of a new one, though, so why don’t you have it?”

  “That’s . . . that’s very generous,” Merrick replied, already taking up the fur, and running his fingers over it. “It is a beautiful gift.” He did not ask if Raed was sure about giving it, but instead unwrapped it and swept it around his shoulders.

  “It looks good on you,” Raed had to admit. “You’ll be quite the envy of the Deacons.”

  The Sensitive shook his head, even as he wrapped the fur cloak around himself. “Good point . . . I must return to the Conclave.” He paused. “Thank you again Raed, it shall definitely keep the cold out.”