This could not go on. The more he talked, the more poison he was infecting the people around her with—people who she was going to have to rely on in the months to come. That was if there were more months to come.
Zofiya drew her saber in one practiced motion. She knew her brother was no match for her; not in sanity or skill. It was almost certain she could drop him to the deck without having to kill him. Her gaze raked over the few people that stood behind him. All were members of the Court, and as far as she could tell, terrified by the Deacons and not capable of standing as seconds to their Emperor. Now all that remained was for her to make the move.
However, before she could get herself to the point of action, something curious happened. It was not on the deck, and it took only a second. Between one heartbeat and the next, something opened in the mind of the Grand Duchess Zofiya. A crack of understanding that had been levered open by the geistlord Hatipai, who had occupied her brain. It was the same curious something that had alerted her that all was not as it seemed with the new aristocrat in her brother’s Court months before. The same person who, it had turned out, was Derodak. Merrick had seen that glimpse of potential in her, and now, under pressure, it sprang open again.
She was, in that instant, terribly aware of Deacon Petav standing beside her, his Center wide open. She was aware of it, because she was suddenly seeing what he was seeing. The world flared a whole range of colors that she’d never known existed. Everything around her was now not only beautiful, but also packed with meaning that none could see. Emotions, Bonds and intentions were all swirling around her, and the regent had no way of interpreting what any of them meant. It made her feel sick and exhilarated all at the same time.
Deacon Petav, the Sensitive was seeing something, something that was about to happen but had not yet come to pass. A sickly green light danced around her brother’s form, rendering him into an eerie figure that she barely recognized. However, Petav saw what was coming.
The Emperor Kaleva was going to shoot his sister in the head, and then himself. He would end this line of Emperors before it was even really begun. Cut out the contamination before it spread.
Zofiya snapped back to reality and felt all the cool air rush abruptly back into her body. She had been holding her breath for that long moment. Before she could think on what she had experienced, she moved.
Sheathing her saber, she tucked and rolled across the deck. Kal had only time to pull out the pistol concealed in his jacket, before she was on him. The Imperial siblings crashed into each other, sliding across the tilted deck and colliding with the gunwales on the other side. Zofiya had her brother pinned with one knee and grappled with him for the pistol. He might not have the skill she did, but he was much stronger.
Everyone else on the deck ceased to matter, as for a time, Kaleva and Zofiya were pressed against each other, as close as if they were twins in their mother’s belly. Face-to-face, the Grand Duchess wrapped her fingers around the weapon and pulled mightily. “No, no, Kal!” she screamed at him, hoping to get him to loosen his grip.
“Yes,” he hissed back, even as his greater strength began to win out. “We were never meant to be in Arkaym, Sister. The geists are coming and neither of us should be here to see them.” His eyes were wide as they stared into hers.
Suddenly she realized that he was not struggling to aim the pistol at her.
The Grand Duchess Zofiya flicked her gaze away only a moment before her brother put the barrel under his chin. All she had time for was a strangled “Kal!” and then the pistol went off. Blood and gore sprayed all over the deck and Zofiya. The bullet exploded through the top of his skull and took away any chance of his recovery.
Dimly, she heard the screaming of the Court and the shouts of her troops, but they were a very long way off. Zofiya knew if she turned back she would see Kal’s mutilated face. She wouldn’t do that.
Before anyone could reach her, she stood up, drenched in her brother’s scarlet blood. The Imperial color. Silence swallowed up the chaos, and those on the Winter Kite formed a circle around her. Carefully, she took off her jacket, and without looking down draped it over her brother’s body. Then Zofiya pushed aside her hair, mopping scarlet drips from her face as best she could.
She had rolled across the deck of the airship a regent, but she arose as an Empress. Zofiya could only hope that her reign would not continue as it had begun—in blood and death.
She stood there, locking gazes with all of those around her: people who had only a short while ago been enemies. It was Deacon Petav who broke the silence when he called out, “The Emperor is dead. Long live Empress Zofiya!”
Soon the cry was taken up and echoed down the airship. As she looked around, the new Empress noticed that even on the faces of the Court, who had been her brother’s only moments before, were definite looks of relief. She would bury Kal in the vault under Vermillion, and make sure he was remembered, not as the mad Emperor, but as another victim of Derodak and the Circle of Stars.
It had not been meant to be like this when she and Kal had set off from Delmaire. She thought of the moment that they’d first set foot on Arkaym soil, a bright blessed time that seemed in memory to be surrounded by golden light. As she walked forward and became Empress, she would hold on to that. It was something even these events could not tarnish.
Both brother and sister were gone now. Only Empress Zofiya remained.
TWENTY-FOUR
Vision of Battle
For a coyote, the Fensena would have made a better sheepdog than Merrick could ever have imagined. The young Deacon might have thought Sorcha was a hard taskmaster, until he fell under the tutelage of the geistlord.
Word of the success at Waikein spread from city to town to village. Soon the outpost they had wrestled from the geists was inundated by as many people as could find their way there. An airship, a commandeered vessel from the Imperial Fleet, had even arrived within a week. It was damaged beyond the repair of anyone in Waikein, but it had been commandeered by a brave contingent of Deacons from the west, who had answered the call Sorcha had sent out from the citadel. An extra hundred Deacons put a strain on resources, but also made Merrick feel a little more confident.
Then there were the throngs of normal folk who poured into Waikein asking, pleading and sometimes demanding to be tested. Merrick snatched what sleep he could from time to time, but all of the trained Deacons found themselves working every hour they could keep their eyes open.
However, there was one problem: getting all these Deacons to Vermillion. Certainly without Sorcha they could not make use of the Wrayth portals. So Merrick thought of another woman who was just as powerful as his partner.
She did indeed come when he called.
Merrick stood on the hill just outside the city of Waikein and watched as the ships of the air appeared from among the clouds. They were very beautiful, too beautiful to be part of the world that seemed to be falling down on itself. The sharp wind from the east made him blink his eyes and draw the cloak of silver fur closer.
It seemed to be the right thing to do to wear it. With Sorcha gone, the Order needed someone to follow, and the cloak distinguished him from everyone else. He was First Presbyter now, after all. Young as he might be, he was all they had now.
“It suits you, boy,” the Fensena, who lounged at his side, commented while his golden eyes remained fixed on the approaching airships, “but those better not be tears in your eyes.”
Merrick pressed his lips together and chose not to answer. The coyote kept quiet when in earshot of other Deacons, but all of them knew what he was. It was disturbing how none of them questioned the fact that their de facto leader had a geistlord at his side. They swallowed his statement that he and Sorcha had quelled and tamed the Fensena, and it was he that had given up the information that would lead them to victory.
The world had become such a hardscrabble place that any little hope—even from a geistlord—was eagerly grasped. Merrick turned his head away from the onc
oming airships and spared a glance behind him.
The Order may have grown in the weeks since Sorcha’s abduction, bulging to almost three times the size it had been in the citadel, but he wondered if it was going to be enough.
It was not the Order that Merrick’s previous Arch Abbots would have recognized—there were not enough cloaks to go around, so many had provided their own. Consequently, the group waiting below him was a variegated patterned quilt of a gathering. Their lack of proper training was the thing that still haunted him though.
Merrick’s bleak thoughts were interrupted by a sharp nip on the ends of his fingers. Merrick jerked back from the Fensena, who had drawn blood with his sharp fangs. The coyote’s gold-coin eyes were narrowed and fixed on him.
“You must not think of things you cannot have,” the beast growled. “You cannot give proper training without time—and you do not have time. What you have is what you have.”
Merrick pulled his cloak tighter with a frown. He didn’t think the coyote was inside his head, but he very much disliked the impression the beast gave that he was. “It does not seem much to take on Derodak and his Circle of Stars—let alone the Maker of Ways . . .”
The Fensena did not deign to reply, but raised his muzzle as the three airships approached. “You have transport to get where you need to, that should be enough.”
It was the Summer Hawk. The First Presbyter smiled; even in these dark times something as familiar as that airship lit a small fire of hope in his chest. This had been the very airship he and Sorcha had first commissioned to take them back to Vermillion. Afterward they had defeated the Murashev. He could only hope it was an omen of things to come.
Captain Revele—if it was she, still in command—maneuvered the airship down to a hundred feet off the mountaintop and secured her position with landing ropes. Finally, a sturdy, yet swinging ladder was dropped. Still, apparently someone couldn’t wait.
A person, dressed in white, slid down one of the ropes to land only a body’s length away from him. For a moment Merrick was caught completely off-guard. Zofiya had come to meet him, but he knew immediately something had changed.
She was dressed in a white jacket and Imperial scarlet trousers, with her dark hair braided up at the nape of her neck. On her left ring finger she wore a thick strap of silver, surmounted with a massive sapphire. It was the Imperial Ring he had last seen on her brother’s hand. Encompassing her forehead was a band of gold decorated with a strand of silver leaves. Each of those leaves represented a principality of Arkaym. It was not the Imperial Crown, but it might as well have been. Merrick knew the only thing this all meant.
The Grand Duchess was no more. The person standing beside him was the Empress Zofiya of Arkaym.
Merrick’s throat was suddenly dry, and his hands dropped to his side instead of wrapping around her. Automatically, he stooped into the deepest bow a Deacon could give.
“Rise, First Presbyter Chambers,” she said softly. Their eyes met and he saw with some relief that she was still herself—though there was a deep, abiding hurt hidden in there. She had said nothing of her change in status in the brief weirstone missives she had sent.
A frown darted across her Imperial brow. “I wanted to tell you myself,” she whispered, for a moment looking very vulnerable.
He swallowed before answering. “That is entirely your right, Imperial Majesty. May I ask . . .”
Zofiya looked about, and seeing that they were alone except for the silent coyote, threw herself into his arms. Suddenly she was just his love: warm, soft and hurt. She whispered the horror of it into his neck. “I had to take the throne, Merrick. Kal . . . Kal killed himself in the end. I couldn’t stop him . . .”
The feeling that she had been holding all this in for weeks was immediate.
Merrick let her hold him for a little while, but there was no time for much more. Eventually, he pulled back and wiped her tears with the sleeve of his shirt. By the time he was done, no one would have been able to tell that the new Empress had a heart.
“You did what you had to,” Merrick said, holding her quite still in his grasp. It was entirely inappropriate for a man—even if he was Presbyter—to hold the Empress in any way at all. “When Derodak worked on your brother for months, he got his claws deeply into him. You cannot blame yourself for that.”
Her jaw tightened slightly as she straightened. “I spent all my life looking out for Kal, Merrick. I thought I was doing a good job, but I didn’t move quickly enough when I suspected something was wrong with that man. I’m not ever going to forgive myself for that. Never.”
Zofiya would hold on to that until her grave; it was what she was like. “Then you must learn to live with it,” he replied softly, “because it is not just your brother who has endangered the world.”
“We have no time for this,” the Fensena, who had been mercifully silent until this moment, said, getting to his feet. His ears pricked forward. “You need to tell the Empress about all this, but we must be off immediately.”
Zofiya’s saber was out of its sheath and in her hand in a flash. “What is that? Another talking beast?” Her gaze fixed on Merrick accusingly. “Another geistlord?”
The coyote did not help his cause by folding one front leg and performing a bow like some well-trained dog. “Indeed. The Fensena.”
Her brother would most likely not have recognized the name, but Zofiya had spent hours learning about the dangers of Arkaym. “The Broken Mirror? The Widow Maker?” She turned slightly on Merrick, but kept her eyes and weapon pointed at the coyote. “Are you the new Derodak then, Merrick? Would you make pacts with geistlords as he did?”
A headache began to form itself at the base of the First Presbyter’s head. He’d known that this meeting would not be easy, but he did not want to argue with the new Empress. “The Fensena is not to be trusted—”
“I am right here you know,” the coyote broke in dryly.
Merrick shot him a dark look and continued, “But he is as invested in this world as we are. On the Otherside he was one of the weaker geistlords.” The coyote growled but held his peace. “He knows more of this than even a Deacon can, and he says that Derodak is planning to contact the Maker of Ways.”
The Empress blanched and reluctantly sheathed her saber. “Why would he do that? If the Otherside came through, there would be nothing but chaos and death.”
The Fensena answered before the Deacon could. “Derodak has lived in this realm for hundreds on hundreds of years. He was both the first Deacon and the first Emperor. He thinks his knowledge and power is limitless, so when the Otherside spills into this world he imagines that he will control the geists as he has the ones here.”
“He is a fool!” Zofiya spat, kicking a rock out from under her boot.
“Indeed,” the coyote said, shaking himself as if he’d received a sudden dunking, “but he thinks he knows best. All will look to him, and he will be their father. However, when the Maker of Ways comes, Derodak may have cause to remember the true horrors of the Otherside.”
Merrick watched his lover out of the corner of his eye, because he did not want to interrupt her thinking. When she spoke, there was more than a touch of weariness in her voice. “I have spent the last weeks fighting and negotiating my way around Arkaym. Even the false Rossin woman has been dealt with. I think I have mended much of what my brother did, but now you tell me it is all in vain—that the geists are coming and there is nothing I can do about it?”
“Nothing.” The coyote sat up tall, his brindle head at the height of her chest. “Nothing except get those who you can to Vermillion.” He regarded her with his tongue lolling out of the corner of his mouth. “I expect you remember the tunnels and vaults under your palace?”
Zofiya looked for a moment as if she might strike the beast, but eventually she nodded. “Yes, I remember very well. Is that where the breach will happen?”
“It was where it happened before.” When she looked aghast, the coyote made that peculiar yi
pping noise again, his version of a laugh. “Humans forget so easily! Important things too, like the fact Vermillion was built by Derodak in his early days as protection against the geists.”
Zofiya took the scolding with good graces and nodded slowly. “Then let’s get your new Deacons aboard, Merrick. You can tell me the rest while we make all haste back to the capital.”
It was not easy work to do. The seasoned Deacons that had survived the scourging of the Order were used to airship travel for the most part, but the newcomers were not so comfortable to climb up a swaying rope ladder. Merrick made sure to be the last to go up and held the bottom of the ladder as steady as he could manage. Several times it looked as though there might be a dreadful accident—but eventually they were all aboard. Most looked as unhappy as Raed Syndar Rossin on his first trip during their ascent though.
However, it was only when they had all climbed away from him that Merrick considered what was to be done about the Fensena. He was a large beast. Perhaps they could throw down a net?
He need not have worried. By the time the First Presbyter had held the rope ladder for the last of his Deacons and turned around, there was a naked man standing on the stones next to him. He was older with gray in his hair and beard, but he did not look ashamed of his state of undress.
Merrick blinked. So did the man. For an instant it looked as though a shiver of gold passed through the stranger’s eyes.
His voice croaked a little when it came out. “As you see, Presbyter, I am true to my word, the folk I travel with do not burn and die when I can help it. As you can see, it is sometimes most useful to be able to use hands rather than paws.”
While Merrick was still bemused, the Fensena used said hands to climb the rope ladder as quickly as a monkey. The First Presbyter did not look up for obvious reasons, but once the rope was clear, climbed up to the Summer Hawk himself.
Captain Revele was standing next to the Empress talking to her in an undertone. Merrick felt a surge of awkwardness; he knew Revele had harbored some feelings of attraction toward him. However, he only knew it because Sorcha had pointed it out to him in no uncertain terms. The little flick of her eyes toward him and then away made him realize that his partner had been right.
Harbinger (A BOOK OF THE ORDER) Page 25
