Division of the Marked (The Marked Series)

by March McCarron

  Ko-Jin and Peer ran forward, but not before three of the enemy set upon Adearre. He attempted to fight, but was overcome in a matter of moments—fists and feet moved so quickly they were nearly invisible. He received a hard blow to the face with a short staff and hit the floor with a sickening thud.

  Peer called out in alarm and ran forward.

  “No, Peer!” Ko-Jin shouted. “We need to stay together.”

  But it was too late. Peer placed himself before Adearre’s crumpled form protectively. He managed to deliver several blows before he was caught by either arm and restrained. Then he, too, sustained a sharp thwack to the head and fell limp to the stony ground, just beside his friend.

  Yarrow and Ko-Jin took several steps back.

  “Stay by my side,” Ko-Jin said from the side of his mouth. Yarrow nodded, but knew not even Ko-Jin could overcome such numbers. Yarrow watched as they closed in. They were young, he could tell, but they worked together as a unit, with a single mind and a single purpose. Yarrow’s heart thudded rhythmically in his chest, but his head remained clear and his breathing even. Ready.

  Three figures stalked forward, as no more could fit abreast in the cave. Two of them struck at Ko-Jin and one at Yarrow. His opponent, a tall young woman with cold eyes, moved inhumanly fast. Yarrow could not hit her—every swing he took struck nothing but air. She, however, had no problem finding openings in his defense. She hit him square in the jaw with enough force that spots appeared before his eyes, but he remained standing. He was, after all, rooted. He could not be knocked down.

  To his left, Ko-Jin was a sight to behold. He seemed to possess more than his fair share of arms and legs. He took down his first two opponents easily. They were instantly replaced by two more. Yarrow heard, distinctly, the sickening crack of Ko-Jin breaking an arm.

  In his distraction, Yarrow did not see the girl’s fist coming until it struck him squarely in the nose. Blood poured hot and fast into his mouth. But, still, he remained upright.

  Again, a crack reverberated in the cave. A second teen’s arm broken at the elbow.

  “Enough!” a commanding voice echoed.

  Yarrow’s opponent halted immediately and stepped aside. A thick-shouldered man with fair skin and deep red hair, barely younger than Yarrow himself, stepped forward. In his outstretched arm he held a pistol cocked and, Yarrow could only assume, loaded.

  The man brought the gleaming barrel of the gun to rest flush against Yarrow’s forehead. The metal felt cool. It sent a shiver down his spine.

  The redheaded man turned to Ko-Jin, who stood motionless, dark eyes wide. His fear sang in harmony with Yarrow’s own.

  “Stand down, or your friend loses his head,” the man said through a thick north Dalish accent.

  Ko-Jin raised his hands in surrender.

  The man smiled, revealing a line of crooked teeth. “Very good.”

  And his arm stretched back then slammed forward, the butt of the pistol hitting Yarrow sharply in the forehead. There was a moment of sharp, agonizing pain and a loud ringing noise—then blackness.

  Darkness and silence pervaded the compound as Bray phased through the wall, careful to keep in the shadows. She knew, generally, where the sphere was being kept, but not what kind of defenses or protection it had, if any.

  Bray slunk soundlessly, keeping flush with the great crumbling wall. A bird cawed from somewhere nearby and she nearly jumped out of her skin at the sudden breach in the stillness. She paused, allowing her heartbeat to regulate and her breathing to slow, and chastised herself for her jumpiness. Yarrow was liable to have felt that and be needlessly worried.

  The wind whipped at her clothes, numbing her fingers with its cold. Her face stung and she could feel her nose beginning to run. Best keep moving, she told herself.

  She came to the building from which she had seen the sphere taken several days before. Its roof had long since collapsed, though the walls were more intact than many of the other edifices in the ruin. Bray listened for several moments—it was utterly quiet within. With a deep breath, she phased through the wall and entered the structure. Though the ceiling was open to the falling snow and the star-strewn sky, the walls did provide some shelter from the wind, for which Bray’s numb appendages were glad.

  She found herself alone in a long hallway. To head right would take her to the entrance, so she proceeded to the left, careful to keep her footfall silent. She came to a great oaken door, old and ornately carved, though rotting and splintered in places. It stood ajar, and through the crack a soft blue glow emanated. Crouched low, Bray peeked into the room. Within was a near-empty chamber, dark save for that cold light. Its source was the sphere, which, the only occupant of an inner chamber, sat like a piece of art upon a pedestal, cradled on a white silken pillow.

  Bray’s breath caught at the sight of it, then her brow furrowed. That she should enter this highly-occupied compound without seeing a single individual seemed a blessing. That the building was unguarded, a miracle. But that her target, an ancient and powerful treasure, should be plainly on display, unprotected, and exactly where she expected it to be, that was far too good to be true. Bells of alarm rang in Bray’s mind. It was ideal, and in her experience such circumstances were never ideal. This must be a trap.

  But trap or no, she could not turn back. She pushed the door open far enough to admit her and crept cautiously into the room. She entered an antechamber that circled the main atrium, an additional doorway standing between herself and her goal. The round chamber had high ceilings and a crumbling stair that led to what had once been a second story. The sphere sat at the very center, below the skeleton of a domed ceiling high above.

  Bray studied the room as best she could in the limited light, but there were so many dark recesses it was impossible to feel entirely alone.

  She stood upright—if anyone was here, they would have seen her by now—and stepped further into the antechamber, towards the sphere. She could not wrest her eyes away from the swirling mists it seemed to contain. It beckoned to her, tugged her forward, consumed all of her attention. She was so mesmerized that she walked through the final doorway heedlessly.

  Two things happened when she entered the interior chamber. First, a strange, horrible sensation washed over her. She felt cold and stripped, as if some vital part of herself had been removed, ripped clean from the bone.

  The second, equally alarming, occurrence was the door shutting behind her with a definitive click, followed by the sound of a turning key. Bray spun on her heel, alarmed. They thought to shut her in? Well, she reminded herself with a deep breath, they were in for an unpleasant surprise.

  She did not want to come any closer to the sphere—from which, she was confident, that discomforting feeling must derive—but there was nothing for it. She crossed the room and took the sphere in her hands. It was cool to the touch and perfectly smooth, like glass.

  She tucked it into the crook of her elbow and walked confidently toward the northern wall. She willed herself to phase, and a streak of panic shot through her. It was like attempting to stretch a muscle and discovering it gone. She was moving with too much momentum to stop. She charged straight into the rocky surface and fell backward, landing with a thump on her bottom. Her forehead, which had taken the brunt of the impact, ached in protest.

  “No!” Bray said aloud, her hand coming up to feel along to the hard, unyielding surface of the wall. “No, no, no…”

  Her breath came in ragged, irregular bursts and her heart lurched in a wild syncopation. Despite the cold, her face turned red. She abandoned the sphere on the floor; it must be the cursed thing’s effect that had stripped her of her gift. She crawled away from it, as if it were some kind of rabid animal, trying to escape its influence. But it was no use. The chamber was not large enough to allow her the necessary distance.

  Still, she circled her stony cage, groped the walls until the skin of her fingers shredded against the roughness of the stone, as she tried with all her might to phase. She studi
ed the upper level without hope; the stairway was in the antechamber and she could never jump so high.

  She needed to calm down, she told herself. She needed to breathe. But she could not.

  Her hand fell upon the gun strapped to her thigh, and she nearly slapped herself in the forehead for having forgotten she was armed.

  She hadn’t brought additional ammunition. Pistols took long enough to load to not be worth the trouble in combat. So she had two shots only.

  She hefted the pistol in both hands, aimed for the lock, and fired. The round was ear piercing, it filled her nose with acrid smoke. She tossed the weapon aside; it hit the stone floor with a dull clink. She unholstered the second pistol and repeated the process.

  She shoved against the door, but it did not give. Damn.

  She was trapped, she was helpless—a feeling she had not experience since she was a girl. At least, she reasoned, this unbridled panic would be an alarm for Yarrow. He would be on his way, with the others. How they would get to her, she did not know, but the thought gave her some small measure of comfort.

  Footsteps thumped above her. She looked up, feeling like an ant trapped in a jar.

  On the second story, a shadow of a man materialized. He sat down on the ledge, his feet dangling well above Bray’s head. He leaned forward and his face moved into the blue light. He smiled pleasantly down at her.

  “Bray Marron,” Quade said. His deep voice echoed in the chamber and calmed her frayed nerves. “How lovely.”

  “Let me out,” Bray said, and was not pleased to hear the note of desperation in her voice. She wished she’d saved her second round.

  “It is unpleasant, isn’t it?” Quade said conversationally, gesturing to the sphere where it lay on the stony floor. “I try not to go near it myself, I confess. It’s a nasty sensation. A curious artifact, the Sphere of Chisanta—it has the ability to help you, but it strips you down first. Makes you feel like a normal mortal. Very curious.”

  “Let me out.”

  “That’s what I love about studying ancient things. We can learn so much about cause by examining effect. For example, this room.” He gestured down at the small chamber in which Bray was held captive. “It is the exact size to keep a person confined with the sphere. You see, in the antechamber you’re safe, as long as the sphere is kept in the center, and up here on the second floor you’re clear as well. But the inner chamber is perfectly designed to keep a person within proximity. An exact fit. Long ago, this room must have been used exactly as I am using it now, to keep a Chisanta stripped of their gifts. Why they did such a thing? I do not know—perhaps as a kind of punishment or ritual. Still, it’s nice, don’t you think? There is a sort of beauty in a thing fulfilling its purpose once again.”

  “Quade, please,” Bray said, her voice shrill. She wanted to appear strong, but the panic that coursed through her body was so all-consuming, she could not even begin to feign strength.

  “Of course, the same principle can be applied to many different objects—that effect reveals cause. Take yourself,” Quade went on, his dark eyes gleaming in the blue light. “Your first gift is rather a remarkable one. To become immaterial. It means you cannot be harmed and cannot be trapped. That, taken with the anxiety you are currently experiencing, are very illuminating pieces of information. What does it tell me?”

  Bray didn’t answer.

  “Well, it tells me several things. A person who has been hurt usually develops an ability to heal or a more offensive ability, like strength. But not you; you did not want to be touched, which, forgive me my dear, implies a history of sexual abuse.”

  “Stop,” Bray said, desperately. His words were like honey, they sounded sweet but they filled her with a kind of unbearable anguish. She would not engage him in this conversation—she would not!

  “But it doesn’t just extend to human touch—you can move through walls. Which suggests that, whoever this abuser was, they used to keep you locked up. Your current anxiety reinforces this theory. You have childhood trauma written on your features as clear as day. The only question is who. A father?”

  “My father would never—” Bray burst out, despite her resolution to not speak.

  “No, not father. An uncle then, perhaps? Yes. That’s it. An uncle.” Quade smiled kindly. “Yes, the uncle you couldn’t stand up to when you were a weak little girl. So you spend your days punishing other such people—bad men, especially bad men who hurt little girls. And you hate every single one of them, because, to you, they are all your uncle. And you’re punishing these men for that early sin, the one they didn’t commit. You punish them for locking you up and touching you in bad ways.”

  Bray wanted to jam her fingers into her ears, wanted to block him out. Her fists clenched and she began to pace again, her entire body on fire with rage. She could not bear to listen, but neither could she stop.

  “And you feel no remorse when you kill them. They deserve it, don’t they Bray? Those bad men? They deserve whatever you give them and more.”

  “They do,” Bray agreed, her tone dark.

  “You see, my dear Bray Marron, how much a person can surmise by examining effect? I figured all of this about you years ago. I was able to use it. You might have been a thorn in my side, but with this knowledge, I was able to divert you easily. Use you, even.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You see, the fires looked like accidents. That was easy enough. The problem was, if a fourteen-year-old child was always missing, the Chisanta might have found me out before I had a large enough force.”

  “So you replaced the bodies with other children…”

  “Yes. Usually thirteen and fifteen-year-olds, to avoid suspicion. Those disappearances could not go unnoticed, or look like accidents.”

  Quade’s words triggered in Bray’s mind a devastating understanding. All of those missing children she had investigated for the past ten years—they were, every one of them, victims of Quade’s insane agenda.

  “Naturally I needed to keep you busy. I gave you many bad men, or seemingly bad men, to chase. And I avoided suspicion. It was all very neatly done, if I may sing my own praise.”

  Bray nearly retched. How many innocent men were behind bars, how many were dead, because of her?

  “But there were clues…they acted guilty. Some confessed!”

  “Yes,” Quade agreed. “I have a knack for persuasion, you see. Especially if the target is weak-minded. Those men believed themselves guilty. You really can’t blame yourself, dear.”

  “You’re a monster,” Bray said, looking up at him, horrified.

  “No.” Quade took a slender black case from his pocket. “I am a visionary. The two are often confused.”

  “And Ambrone Chassel?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Ah, yes. My old friend. I imagine you are curious about that. It was you, was it not, who found his body?”

  Bray unclenched her fists with an effort. Her fingers felt stiff. “Yes.”

  “We had a disagreement—”

  Bray laughed, a high hysterical sound even in her own ears. “He didn’t fancy starting a child army or murdering whole families?”

  “Quite,” Quade agreed with a smile. He turned the black object over in his hands. “I had just had a tremendous stroke of luck. I arrived in Gallan on Da Un Marcu, just after midnight, and I looked up at a window. And there she was—my pale little angel, with the Chisanta mark upon her neck.”

  “So you kidnapped her and murdered her family?”

  A memory flashed in Bray’s mind, clear and unbidden: a young woman sobbing, her mother comforting her. Her love had died—had been taken from her, by this man.

  “Very good. Yes, that is what I did. But, not two days later, my old friend Ambrone caught up with me. Hit me in the head while I slept, the unsporting rascal. Took the sphere and my sweet girl, and went to the Temple to inform others. Fortunately, I caught up with him as soon as he arrived, before he had time to raise the alarm. I confess, I
didn’t expect his body to be found. That was a mite vexing.”

  Bray scowled at him, but the warmth in his eyes began to leach away her anger.

  “Here, dear, catch,” he said, and tossed down the case.

  Bray caught the object instinctively. It was black leather, and when she popped it open she found a needle and small vial of a clear liquid.

  “A sedative,” Quade said pleasantly, “go ahead and take it.”

  Bray laughed, wild eyed. “You’re insane. Why would I willingly drug myself?”

  “Because I need to move you to the prison, and it will be rather easier if you’re unconscious. If you don’t do it willingly I’ll have to come down there and well, it would just be a lot neater this way.”

  Bray could hear the charm in his voice. It was seductive. Part of her wanted to please him, to do as he said. But she would not be so easily manipulated. She dropped the case to her feet.

  “I’m afraid I’m not inclined to make it neat.”

  Quade sighed, as if disappointed. “Very well.”

  And he jumped from his ledge, his coat billowed up behind him, and landed on his feet.

  Bray recoiled. This Quade that joined her was an entirely different creature than the one who had sat above. His face, though in features identical, no longer appeared handsome. His demeanor was no longer pleasant.

  “You see how the sphere affects me?” he said with a cruel smirk. There was nothing charming or seductive in his voice now; it was chillingly cold. Illuminated only by the blue glow of the sphere, he was a corpse.

  He came forward, his face set in hard, vicious lines. Bray grounded herself, as Yarrow had taught her, and drew her blade. He produced his own; it slipped from its sheath like a sigh.

  “You know, without your gift, you cannot win this fight,” Quade said. Bray suspected this to be true—her fighting style was entirely built upon her ability to phase. But that did not mean she would go quietly.