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 w
as 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 jerkth="1emway, 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.
TWENTY-NINE
Prodigal Son
Sorcha woke in a cradle of sand. It had blown over her, cushioned her, but was now trying to swallow her. She jerked erect, the broken swing tangled on top of her, her mouth dry and her pulse racing. Turning her head to the left, she saw the still-smoldering remains of the Winter Falcon spread over the dunes.
The brave Chiomese and the Imperial sailors had died together because of Hatipai—Sorcha had no doubt of that. It was up to her to stop the false goddess from taking any more victims.
After she pushed herself free of the remains of the swing, she dragged herself to her feet and examined her body carefully. She felt as though she’d been given a damn good beating, and even without pulling aside her clothes, Sorcha could tell there would be plenty of bruises. Though she had no way of knowing how far she’d fallen, nothing felt broken. Next she tried to orient herself under the blazing sun.
“It’s over there.” Onika’s voice at her back made her jump like a green Initiate. The Prince of Chioma could have been a statue revealed by blowing sand—he certainly didn’t look as though he had fallen any great distance either. He looked no more ruffled than if he’d been standing in his own Court.
He didn’t point, but then he didn’t need to. The Temple of Hatipai was the only structure in a blinding ocean of sand. It stood out, red like a blister among the gold of the dunes.
“You don’t have to go.” She tottered o
ver to stand at his shoulder. “I have sworn an Order Oath; I have to go down there, but you—”
“I too swore an oath.” The Prince raised his hand and tore off the shining mask. He flung it into the sand as if it were something vile, but he didn’t turn around. “The people of Chioma are mine to protect—they always have been.”
Sorcha averted her eyes. “How can you protect them if you are dead? What about your son waiting to be born?”
His voice was calm. “I cannot think of that now. Even as much as I love Japhne and him to come, I cannot put them above my people. I trust Merrick will take care of his mother.”
The Deacon heard his cloak slide through the sand as he moved forward, but she still dared not look. She could almost feel the heat of his charisma beating on her head like the sun. “A child should always have its parent.”
“Not everything that can birth a child can be called a parent.” Onika touched her hair. “Some parents do better to leave this world before they can teach a child to fear. How could I have a son who cannot even look at my face?”
Sorcha had never known her own parents, so could not argue with him. His open hand appeared in her peripheral vision.
“Please, Deacon Chambers, I need someone to look at me.”
His voice cracked with melancholy and fear. Sorcha looked up and opened her Center. While her humanity was stunned by the immortal god, her Deacon training helped her see behind it to the man he was.
“Why?” she stammered through numb lips and burning eyes. “Why are you going down there straight into her hands?”
The Prince smiled and jerked aside his cloak. Underneath, hanging from his belt was a long, curved dagger with a weirstone gleaming on its hilt. “Not long ago I found a secret book of prophecy. It can only be done by me, with this blade, in her Temple, as she becomes mortal. Just before she does, there will be a moment of weaknesses.” His hand touched Sorcha’s head lightly. “I am the only one who can strike.”
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