Geist

This was why new partners usually stayed safely within the Abbey walls, learning each other’s strengths and getting used to the sensation of the Bond. After a moment, Sorcha’s Center felt like she’d been looking into the sun for too long.

Snatching back her hand, she shot a look up at Merrick. He was glaring down at her. Rated Sensitives didn’t need to send their Centers out; they trained to keep both the real world and the ethereal one in focus. What sort of strange double vision that might engender, Sorcha couldn’t really imagine. She tugged on her left Gauntlet without looking away.

After a second of playing staring games with each other, Merrick shook his head. “By the Bones, that was uncalled for! Give me a second, and keep your hand off me . . . if you can manage that?”

He too dismounted and wandered a little distance off, looking out over the patch of water. The locals called the little dips in the land vamma kesi, or dark water, because no sunlight reflected off the pools that collected there. It was something to do with the earth itself, as Sorcha had read in an indolent moment in the Abbey library. Whatever the reason, they were dire little spots.

Merrick pointed over toward the farthest reaches of the water, where low scrub tumbled down a small rise. “It’s not a geist, but there is something lingering there . . . something in pain.”

Sorcha snorted. Everything was always in pain or tormented. She’d trained Kolya not to get involved with every injured kitten or bruised plant, and it looked as though she would have to do the same with Merrick.

“If you haven’t noticed, we need to get moving. Those ships are leaving if we are there or not . . .” She looked up and realized that her new partner was already off the road and tromping through the light snow in the direction he had pointed.

“Stubborn,” she muttered to herself. “Hastler had to give me a stubborn one.” Tucking her fur cloak around her shoulders, she strode after him. He was at least fifteen feet in front of her, not even bothering to look behind him. Basically giving her the same treatment that she’d handed to him at the Abbey. The phrase “too big for his britches” was made for this one. She’d much rather have had a lesser-ranked Sensitive than one who knew he was good.

“You know, if I get wet boots, you’ll be riding the pack mule the rest of the way,” she barked at him. Merrick had stopped and was actually yanking aside bushes. Whatever he had sensed from the road had probably crawled in there to die. Her only satisfaction was that he was tossing enough snow about to get himself rather damp as well.

Finally reaching his side, Sorcha stood with Gauntleted hands on hips, staring down at her new partner as he fossicked around in the undergrowth. “I’m not carrying any . . .”

She stopped in midsentence as Merrick finally cleared away the snow and branches. A long length of what she assumed was bleached wood was wrapped in the remains of a red skirt. It was a human leg.

Wordlessly she bent and helped her partner yank away the swath of brush that covered the scene; cold and dread were building in her. What she’d thought was merely growing near the water had in fact been deliberately laid down to cover the horror beneath.

When they finally both stood back, panting into the air, the scene had been revealed. It was difficult to count exactly how many bodies there were, but all were frozen into terrible shapes. Merrick clapped a fist to his mouth and turned away.

Sorcha took a deep breath herself. Many of those in the pile of dead were women and children. The jumble of body pieces was not random, however. They were stacked in a pattern, limbs placed like firewood with heads facing upward in an inner circle around what looked like the burnt remains of a wagon. They appeared to have been a family group, probably Tinkers who traveled from village to village repairing items and selling cloth and such. Whatever they had met on the road had been the death of them all.

It was a terrible, half-frozen, macabre display. No doubt it was an exhibit not meant to be seen by mortal eyes.

Merrick, to his credit, wasn’t throwing up his breakfast. He turned around and stood at her shoulder. Sorcha felt his Center open, but he didn’t share. What he was Seeing, he was best qualified to make sense of.

“They aren’t here,” he muttered. “The souls are all gone. Such pain and fear should have left terrible marks on the ether—but there is nothing.”

“Then how did you . . .”

Merrick cleared his throat. “One of the children didn’t die immediately. Whatever it was, it took her soul, but her pain left the smallest whisper.”

It must have been tiny, indeed.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” he asked in a thick voice. “I’ve read the textbooks, but . . .”

“Not like this.” She pointed to the nearest bodies. “This wasn’t done by anything human. Think about it for a moment. Geists can usually only operate to kill through humans. These wounds were not made by anything mortal. Something unliving made this circle.”

Merrick nodded. “We should at least bury them. Their souls . . .” He stopped and surged upright. Suddenly, he was sharing a portion of his Center with Sorcha.

Through his eyes, the world was tinged with red. Something was coming through the ether toward them; something that she had also never seen before. Leaping to her feet, Sorcha put herself between Merrick and the approaching geist.

In the real world, the vamma kesi was bubbling and writhing as if a fire had been lit underneath it. The bubbles were moving toward them at a rapid pace.

“What is it, Chambers?” she hissed. She held the Gauntlets up, as yet unsure which Rune to activate upon them. “By the Bones, what is it?”

Her new partner was scrambling at his belt pouch. “I can’t see.” There was an edge of real panic in his voice. “I need the Strop to see . . .”

“No time for that,” Sorcha yelled. “Give me the damn Sight . . .”

Merrick’s Center swept up and filled her just as the geist leapt into the real world. Amid the blaze of light, Sorcha was almost blinded by the detail, but she did finally get a good look at the unliving creature barreling toward them.

Flesh was usually the only container for a geist, yet this one had thrown a body together from what appeared to be mud and dark water. No time to open a door and draw power. It was the height of rudeness, and usually done only after years of being partners, but Sorcha drew from the Bond. As the link between Sensitive and Active was made using Otherside power, it could also be a source of strength for the Deacons.

Sorcha needed strength as she called on Yevah. The shield of fire leapt into existence around them like a bubble, and even Merrick would have a hard time arguing with her use of the Bond to help forge it. The water and debris smashed into the orb as the flame poured from her Gauntlets. The air was full of the smell of earth and charred wood. It made one very spectacular mess. For a moment, steam and flying fragments blinded both Active and Sensitive.

Staggering back, the two mortals almost fell into the strange pattern of bodies. Merrick grabbed her arm, pulling her to the left and away from it. The shield Yevah conjured moved with them, but Sorcha’s arms were already beginning to ache from holding it there.

“Name it,” she screamed. The howl of wind and water was painful on mortal and Deacon senses. But she could not know how to destroy what Merrick could not name. “Damnation, remember your training!”

“Look,” he screamed back. The full power of his Sight flooded into her once more, and only by focusing it on the geist was she able to bear it. Deacons learned all the forms of the unliving: the dukh, the rei, the ghast. Centuries of experience had slotted each shape into categories memorized by every novice. The swirling forms of the vortex and the spinning shapes of the rei were among those familiar to every Deacon.

As Sorcha stood gaping up at the geist that was all around them, she abruptly understood Merrick’s indecision. This creature was not in the books. The pattern she could make out in the flickering geist form was like no other; complicated and knitted together like one of those visual puzzles popular at court. The difference was that this one was tightening on them. The shield of fire was actually shrinking under the weight of the dark water. Holding Yevah up within the Gauntlets was keeping Sorcha fully occupied.

“Don’t you dare open Teisyat,” Merrick bellowed at her while the geist began to squeeze in on the shield of fire.

Did he imagine that she popped that door open every time things got a little hairy? Only Kolya going down in