Sorcha nodded and glanced at him with a slight smile. Then she touched Troupe’s shoulder, a curiously sweet gesture from a Deacon known for her sharp tongue and no-nonsense attitude. “Each of us needs to come to this realization. I suggest we let the Sensitives examine the next step in our Conclave.”
Then just like that, Sorcha ended the meeting. She left her cloak and insignia where they had fallen and walked from the room. The other Deacons watched her like a flock of curious crows. Merrick smiled slightly, as they inevitably trailed after her; he was sure there would be much gossip among the Deacons.
Merrick looked down at his own abandoned golden and gleaming insignia. His fingers hovered a little above it for a moment. It was hard to give up something after so many years of wanting it.
No, he pulled his hand back. It was just a piece of metal, and the cloak a scrap of cloth that had seen too many adventures. Even the name of the Order did not contain what it was really about. Sorcha was right.
Deliberately, Merrick turned away and opened his Center. In the citadel spread below him, he could have picked out and counted the remaining Sensitives and Actives—but he didn’t because that would have been direly depressing. Instead he opened his mind to the members of the Conclave.
They were six of the strongest Sensitives that remained; Akiline, Heroon, Khandir, Yituna, Daschiel and Suseli. They had been only passing acquaintances before the destruction of the Mother Abbey, but he had been cobbling them together into a Conclave for the last few weeks. In fact, Akiline and Yituna were far older than he, and had been among his instructors back at the Mother Abbey. Three others he had known only by sight. Daschiel alone had been in his novitiate class.
Now, however, all six were locked in a tangled web that none of them had ever imagined. It was time to take the Conclave out and find out what it could do. Merrick knew that it was their best chance to avoid what had happened to the previous Order they had belonged to. He sent the signal, then felt the Sensitives respond and prepare themselves.
While he waited for them to be ready, Merrick sat himself down at the table, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. It was just a moment.
“You know you will have to do it.” The voice was not in his head, and he was no longer in the citadel. Used to visions and seeing the unseen, Merrick did not jerk upright. Instead he slid his Center open and glanced to where the voice addressed him; it was one that he recognized immediately.
Merrick looked up. Nynnia stood before him. Her dark hair blew in unseen winds, and he could see the trees and forest behind her through her body. She was younger than the last time he had seen her, but that was only to be expected. He had traveled back in time to when she’d been alive; before her people had fled to the Otherside. They had wanted to save the world with their sacrifice. It was a pity that they had failed.
“Has the gap between our worlds become so narrow?” he asked, blinking in the light that seemed to have traveled with her.
She nodded, her eyes dropping away from his. “Everything is much closer now. It is all in flux. I needed to see you again, but do not think it was easy of me to send my image to you.” Her brow was furrowed, and he noticed her form was flickering slightly.
“I am glad you did,” he muttered softly, unsure what to say to the woman he had loved, and still did in a very real way.
Nynnia took a hesitant step forward. “It was not for our sake, Merrick. I had to. The Native Order has worked tirelessly to thin the barrier between our worlds.”
“Why would they do that?”
She reached out for him but then stopped herself. Nynnia was as she was, and she had no body to clothe herself with. Merrick flinched inwardly. Despite his love for Zofiya, Nynnia would always be his first, and it would have been good to feel her touch. She took a deep breath, and glanced away to her right. Merrick realized she was examining something in the distance that he could not see. Whatever it was, she did not seem pleased by it.
A breath of chill wind brushed over his skin.
“They think . . .” she paused and locked her gaze with Merrick’s. “He thinks he can use and control the power from the geists and the Otherside for his own purposes. He is very, very wrong.”
“Derodak?” Merrick frowned. “You mean Derodak.” Now she looked away, and he saw a stain of guilt in her gaze.
His people had called Nynnia’s the Ancients; lost in the mist of time, builders of fantastical machines, and masters of the weirstone. Merrick had cast them as heroes when he was a child. He had only later learned that through their actions in trying to use weirstones they had drawn the attention of the geistlords. They had paid that price however, when they had chosen to flee to the Otherside rather than sacrifice this world to the geists.
Merrick could not use his Sight in this vision Nynnia had conjured, but he could still observe, and what he was seeing from his former lover was indeed something verging on guilt. He suspected he knew why.
She hung her head. “I was not the first of my people to be reborn into the human world. Derodak was. The first Emperor, the first Deacon, and the grandest traitor is indeed one of the Ehtia.”
“I know,” he murmured. “Sorcha and I fought him in the ruins of the Mother Abbey. I used Aiemm, the Rune of the Past on him. I saw. We all saw.” He could hear the bitterness in his own voice.
If he had not been so consumed with sadness, he might have felt some satisfaction that he had surprised the Ehtia—that seldom happened.
“He is our greatest shame, among many great shames.” Nynnia glanced away to her right again—but this time her expression was pained. “At least we brought the geists here with our ignorance. Unfortunately, Derodak is all of our own making. By the time we found out his true nature, it was too late. He found a way back into the world that had born us.” She leaned toward the Deacon. “You shall have to be careful now, Merrick. You showed him his humanity, again, something that he does not wish to be reminded of. He will not like that. He will seek you out to punish you for that.”
Merrick could feel a pull in his brain, the tug of the Conclave drawing nearer to completion. This dreaming that Nynnia had conjured could not last much longer. She must have brought him here for something.
“You can do something. You can tell us how we can beat him,” he demanded. He knew that Nynnia and the Otherside was beyond time, so perhaps she could see and understand more than he could—even with the Conclave.
She looked at him, her head tilted, dark hair blowing in a wind he could only feel intermittently. When she spoke again, Nynnia had to scream for him to hear her over the howl of it, “It is not Derodak you have to fear—you already have the tools to overcome him. It is her that you must fear. Sorcha!”
Now the Sensitive could actually discern the voices of his peers coming up to join him, and the pull of the real world was now becoming more and more insistent. Nynnia was making no sense at all. Derodak was the problem—not Sorcha who had worked so valiantly to save them all.
“You can’t mean that,” Merrick found himself yelling back, as the wind grew louder and louder.
Nynnia was having a hard time standing in front of him as the gale increased. Her hair was whipped about her, and eventually she dropped to the ground to grab hold of it with her fingers. It was an act of pure will for her to remain.
“I do,” she howled into the chaos. “Sorcha could rip everything apart. She is the Harbinger of the end of everything. You know what you will have to do . . .”
“Not the Last Rune. Not that.” Merrick jerked himself upright in an effort to reach her—but it was too late. The real world grabbed hold of him and pulled.
“Deacon Chambers?”
His eyelids flicked open. For a moment his mind was lost somewhere between reality and dream. The person standing over him was Heroon; the younger man, only just out of the novitiate, had his hand on Merrick’s shoulder.
Merrick shook his head, wiped his eyes, trying to separate the real world and the one that Nynnia had taken him to. Once under the palace of Orinthal the Ehtia had managed to take his whole body to the Otherside, but this time it had just been his Center. He swallowed, and reminded himself of the task that still lay ahead.
“I am fine, Deacon Heroon,” he replied quietly. “I am just tired is all.”
He pulled himself to his feet, feeling his skin prickle with exhaustion, and tried to size up the six other Sensitives. They did not appear to have caught the strange visitation. Merrick was pleased; he did not want to stain their already fragile trust in him any further. What Nynnia had communicated was something to be digested,
