Sorcha tried to block out the sounds of battle at her back, and the imminent threat of becoming part of the Wrayth breeding program, and concentrate on what she was seeing. From time to time she wished she could go back to the novitiate and tell her younger self to study a little harder. Merrick would have, once again, been a welcome addition to this moment. How Aachon expected her to know any more about this was a mystery. He’d worked and examined weirstones more than she ever had, and it was specialist Deacons that tuned the stones for the Emperor and his military.
However useless it might be, Sorcha did at least try. She saw that it was not just weirstones, there were cantrips and things that might have been runes too. All of them were wrapped around each other, and the stones, like a braid. Whatever the Wrayth had done to create these things was complicated and required blood—probably their own.
Sorcha jerked her head up as the words filled her mind. She couldn’t tell if they were from the Rossin, or from somewhere deeper; somewhere that she had just discovered.
“By the Blood,” she muttered, for the first time realizing the irony of that statement.
The sounds of battle behind her faded away, and she turned back to see if the crew had dispatched all the peons. What she in fact saw changed everything.
The peons had backed away from Raed and his people and parted to let others through. Tangyre Greene was striding a few paces behind the assembly of tall women and men. They had milky white complexions and dark eyes that the Deacon had seen before in the possessed. Though these walked with none of the clumsy, shattered gaits of the shambling mob she’d fought outside the gates of Vermillion. They were under far more severe control.
“Keep trying,” Sorcha hissed to Aachon. “I’ll see if I can gain us some time.”
The woman in front was a lovely thing, like a statue carved out of alabaster. She held lightly in her fingers a brass chain that ran down to, and was attached to, a collar. This was in turn tight around the neck of another woman. She had long blonde hair to cover her nakedness but that was all.
The Wrayth woman stopped short of the outstretched swords of the crew and examined them as if they were bugs beneath glass. “I am Iuhmee. Set down your weapons and you will be allowed to live.” Her gaze flickered to Raed. “Some of you may even find our company pleasurable.”
“I would rather die,” the Young Pretender growled. “Your women are not my type at all.”
The corner of one of her lips quirked at that. “Many say that…at first. Eventually they come around.” Her eyes flickered to Sorcha, and that calm mask of the Wrayth was broken for an instant. “What have we here?” It seemed like a genuine question.
A wave of sighs passed through the assembled peons, and two of the first women’s companions, those not on chains and with the same dark eyes, stepped up closer.
“A hybrid?” The tall, heavily muscled man among them tilted his head in an alien gesture that made Sorcha’s skin crawl.
“One of ours—but how?” the third commented, a note of excitement in her voice.
“Only one ever escaped.” Iuhmee grinned. It was a gesture that Sorcha was sure she was copying, rather than actually experiencing. It made the Deacon’s skin crawl. “We never knew what she made with us.”
The Deacon had quite enough of being talked about as if she were not there. She knew, just knew, deep in her bones that she was her own person, not some monstrous creature.
“My mother made me!” She shouted it so emphatically, that even the Wrayth stopped conferring among themselves. “I am what she was—a Deacon, and proud of it. I have sent thousands of your kind back to the Otherside. You will be no different.”
“Sorcha,” Raed murmured at her side, but she didn’t acknowledge him. She was busy facing the black eyes and cool regard of the geistlord that had forced her mother to bear her.
“So many of you Deacons have thought us that easy.” Iuhmee pointed at Raed. “Ask the Rossin how difficult we are to banish. We have found the perfect way to survive in this world. No one body holds us. The death of one of our number does not diminish us in the slightest. We are immortal and unstoppable.” She smiled, showing rows of perfect, sharp teeth all at once.
Sorcha felt her fingers grow numb, while her vision blurred. She would much rather have been having this conversation with Merrick at her side, and after a couple of weeks to regain her strength. However, it was what it was, and she had never backed down in the face of a geist before.
“Give us back Fraine!” Tangyre had apparently had enough talk. She pushed forward from the back of the press of Wrayth. “You had no right to take her.” Her face was set in a red mask of anger—such as a mother might when her child had been snatched away.
However her rage was nothing next to Raed’s. As Sorcha melted back to the tunnel entrance to examine it as quickly as she could, he stepped forward, bloodied blade held before him. “You poisoned her and forged her into your own cursed weapon! I won’t let you use my sister to destroy thousands upon thousands of lives. I won’t.”
That’s good, Sorcha thought as her fingers darted over the braid of weirstones and cantrips. Behind her, dimly, she could hear Raed and Tangyre yelling at each other, but all of the Deacon’s focus was in front of her. Somehow her own mother had figured this out—else Sorcha would have been born in the Wrayth nest. An image flashed in her mind; her own tiny infant hand pressed against the stone by her mother’s. The Wrayth within her responded.
No sooner had she remembered that than one of the weirstones shifted under her fingertips. For a second the stone was not hard and resistant, but smooth like water. Sorcha glanced at Aachon, but he merely shrugged, distracted by the continuing arguing over Fraine.
So Sorcha was on her own. Concentrating, she pressed harder on the stone, and closed her eyes. A memory darted up, like a fish from the depths of her unconscious. She had done this before. Her own hand, so very tiny, held against the stone by her mother. A child only a few moments old, she had moved these stones before.
Now, behind her lids she could see a town built in a mountain of gray stone. Shelton. It was a city to the northeast of Vermillion. Lovely people with the most atrocious thick accent. She’d dined on land crab there, steamed over an open fire. She could almost taste them now.
Ripping her fingers free of the stone, she found another. Lisle, a dreary little town of the Apotol desert inland. Kubmagahwe, a city built on the confluence of three rivers, in the southeast of Arkaym. Andis-Most-High, the capital city of Delmaire, where she had studied in the novitiate. She could hear the great bells in the town squares and smell the ocean.
The Wrayth had indeed mapped out many places all over the world. They had only seconds to escape, yet she did not want to be stuck in a distant city that could take weeks to get away from. So she searched on. There it was! Vermillion, the city of the Emperor and the Mother Abbey. The taste of the roasted chestnuts, and the sound of the tide pulling on the lagoon. She had not been gone that long, but she swore she was homesick.
“Raed.” She spun around, and only then realized her mistake. She had called attention to herself and what she was doing. The Wrayth had been watching the verbal sparring between the two captains with some amusement: the kind an owner of a dog pit might have while watching two puppies preparing to fight.
Their dark eyes flicked up. The Wrayth might be proud of the invulnerability that they had achieved by spreading their power among so many hosts, but it had been bought at a cost. Unlike the Rossin, or any other geist Sorcha had ever fought, they were not sensitive to what was happening in the ether. They were blinded by looking out so many human eyes and ears.
It was a handy thing to realize.
“Stop them,” Iuhmee hissed, shooting out her hand. The peons were fast, but Tangyre was faster. She drew her sword and charged at Raed.
Sorcha slammed her hand down on the stone for Vermillion, and slid it upward, away from the clutter of other stones at the side of the tunnel entrance. It moved smoothly toward where the great eye stood at the very top of the curve, and then clicked into place. The darkness the braiding encompassed resolved itself from oily barrier to the simple shadows of a corridor lined with bricks.
“Get Fraine through,” was all that Raed had time to shout before Tangyre reached him. Aachon scooped up the screaming, howling Princess and shoved her into the corridor. The line the crew held buckled and bent under the now-coordinated surge of the peons. They turned back to their Prince, but he was no longer there.
As Tangyre, her scream of outrage rising above the chaos of the Wrayth, leapt through the press of peons, Raed shimmered. Flesh twisted and turned, bent and was made anew, as the Rossin thrust himself out into the
