Spectyr

“Onika!” Sorcha screamed, uncertain where he was. The envelope of the Winter Falcon caught fire with an ear-ringing roar. The heat was so intense that the Deacon threw her arms around her head, fearing her hair would catch alight. The dirigible burned bright blue, and flames licked up the skin as if caressing it. It would have been beautiful if it wasn’t also everyone’s death.

The Deacon knew there was nothing to be done now. The Falcon was bending in half, falling toward them, and they only had one chance. Everything slowed.

To her right she could at least now see Onika. “Cut the harness! Cut the harness now!” Sorcha screamed to him, unsure if in the panic he would hear her. Then she pulled her knife from her belt and did as she hoped he would.

Free of the swing, she didn’t want to let go for a split second. Her mind screamed denials, but the device was a false safety—they would be tangled with the doomed Falcon and burn with it.

Sorcha took a deep breath, wiggled free and then with a cry dropped into the darkness. All she could hope for was sand or a quick death.

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. ’”