Spectyr

by Philippa Ballantine

  She went on until she came to a small side room. Here the stone was polished to such a high sheen that Zofiya had to avert her eyes, while under her fingertips the symbol of Hatipai faded. The removal of the goddess was painful, but she did not cry.

  Hatipai must have brought her here for a good reason. Shielding her eyes from the glare, Zofiya looked around. The chamber was bare of any furniture; the blank piece of stone that gleamed so brightly was the sole focus of the space. Something inside the Grand Duchess told her that to go forward armed and proud was not the thing to do. This was the goddess’ place.

  Taking off her sword belt and laying it by the door, Zofiya dropped to her knees and shuffled forward, mimicking the gestures of those long-ago penitents. Reaching the gleaming stone, she laid her fingers against it and bowed her head.

  The light bloomed around her, so bright that even through closed eyelids it burned. When it faded, Zofiya risked opening them again.

  The stone was transformed into the finest sheet of rock crystal. Beyond was something that made her sit back on her heels and gape like a child who had just seen her first dirigible.

  An angel waited on the other side. Its form was wreathed in light, so that it was hard to discern much beyond the humanoid shape—but behind trailed wings, fine as silk, fluttering in ethereal winds.

  It was a sight so beautiful that Zofiya felt fresh, hot tears coursing down her cheeks, and yet she sensed something else. For as the light dimmed a fraction more, she was able to see a dark sword in the creature’s white hand. Now when she glanced up, its eyes were staring back into hers. They were beautiful but pitiless. In them Zofiya could feel herself being judged, weighed, measured and held to account.

  Suddenly she questioned every action in her life, every misstep, every harsh word, for this angel was no creature of kindness.

  Kindness leads to weakness, child.

  The voice in her head was a whisper, a murmur in the night.

  You, of all people in this city, are a creature of faith. We have searched long for one of your kind.

  “I’m not worthy of your attentions.” Zofiya bowed her head and meant every word of it. Daughter of Kings, with a lineage stretching back to the beginning of civilization, she might be, yet in the presence of this angel she felt as common as a pig farmer.

  Be that as it may—but you have been chosen.

  The angel pressed against the crystal sheet, though its form was still indistinct.Only you can bring me through. Only one child of faith and blood is required.

  In Zofiya’s heart belief burned, but Hatipai’s texts warned of creatures of ill intent that could lead even the most devout followers astray.

  “Give me your name?” she whispered, though she trembled at her daring.

  Those dark eyes, full of condemnation and strength, bored into hers, but Zofiya did not flinch.

  I cannot—I am Hatipai’s angel and have none of my own, it whispered, laying its empty hand flat against the surface, a mirror of hers on the other side.

  “What is your purpose?”

  To kill the Young Pretender.

  Zofiya’s jaw tightened before she could voice a protest. Raed Syndar Rossin, only son of the deposed Emperor. He had saved her life at the fountain. Someone had shot at her, planning to end her existence in front of a crowd of people. He’d tackled her to the ground, taking the bullet for himself when her own bodyguard had failed to see the danger.

  He’d been willing to sacrifice himself for the sister of his enemy. A mob had tried to kill Raed, and Kal had him imprisoned for his own safety. The Emperor had hoped to buy some time to decide what to do with the Pretender to his throne. Yet Raed had escaped. Zofiya knew she still owed him.

  His death is necessary.

  The angel’s face was now so close that Zofiya could begin to make out details. The skin was faintly blue and marked with lines that were Hatipai’s secret sigils, known only to her most ardent followers.

  He will bring geists, and they will dance on the cinders of your world. The smooth, dark eyes never flinched from hers.

  Yet the Grand Duchess was not so far lost in awe that she did not consider the possibility that this was an agent of evil. So she leaned forward. “Forgive me, bright angel. But speak the words on the inner Temple of Hatipai—the secrets only the acolytes of her divinity know.”

  For a moment, the angel glared at her with so much wrath boiling behind its eyes that even the fearless sister of the Emperor trembled. Then it tilted its head, a sliver of a smile on its full lips.

  Truly, you are a wise creature, Zofiya of the Empire.

  Zofiya’s heart remembered to beat again. And then the angel whispered to her the words that had been passed down in great secrecy to the Grand Duchess by the most holy sisters of Hatipai. These incantations were the heart of the goddess.

  As the angel’s words reached her ear, Zofiya began to smile. When the angel had finished, it looked down at her with an almost maternal pleasure. Now, child, let me out to begin the goddess’ work.

  The Grand Duchess leaned forward again, placing her lips against the cool slab of mysterious stone. Her warmth traveled into the stone, and a sound like a distant bell rolled from the earth.

  The wall shook once and then crumbled like a theatrical curtain being dropped. Zofiya looked up to see the angel step delicately over the rubble. The wings of light trailed behind, and the shifting face beneath reminded her of her long-dead mother—though it was hard to sure under the veils of light and mist.

  “You have done your world proud, Zofiya, child of Kings.” The sound of her voice, here in the real world, was sharper—like bright knives in the Grand Duchess’ ears. A cold hand touched her shoulder—it burned. “I will hunt the scourge of your world. The Rossin will die.”

  Then the angel wrapped her wings about herself, dissolved into light, and blew from the room. Zofiya was left kneeling on the floor, sobbing frantically with joy.

  TWO

  Whispered Messages

  “When you’ve buried your husband three months past, you don’t expect to come home and find him rattling around in your attic!”

  The old woman stood there, an ancient blunderbuss cradled in her arms, looking ready to go upstairs and blast her undead spouse for his temerity. However, her real ire was directed at Deacons Sorcha Faris and Merrick Chambers—as if the Order of the Eye and the Fist was solely responsible for this awkward situation.

  Sorcha, who had managed to perch herself on the low wall outside the lady Tinker’s shop, watched with amusement as her partner tried to negotiate his way in. Perhaps she was enjoying the situation a little too much, but these days she savored any excuse to leave the grounds of the Mother Abbey. Her cigar was already half-smoked, evidence of just how much the owner did not want them to go inside the shop.

  Merrick, who had always been the more diplomatic of their partnership, posed the same question he had when they’d first arrived: “What is the deceased’s name?” He had to raise his voice because Widow Vashill was impossibly deaf—which only served to increase Sorcha’s enjoyment of the situation.

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed as if she suspected it was some sort of trick. “Joshem Vashill—and I was never more happy to see a person in the ground.”

  “Doesn’t sound like he had much reason to come back,” Merrick muttered softly over his shoulder to Sorcha. This was why she liked working with the younger man; when she’d been partnered with her husband, Kolya, he had not been nearly as amusing.

  “You are sure it is Joshem?” Sorcha shouted, then blew out a smoke ring and tried to keep her hopes in check. The Order had been plagued with a spate of false alarms recently, and though she appreciated getting out of the Mother Abbey, she wasn’t about to crawl around in a dusty attic chasing a figment of this Master Tinker’s imagination.

  “I know my own husband!” Widow Vashill snapped. “Now you just yank him down out of there, and I can go about my business.”

  “ ‘Yank’? ” So
rcha managed not to roll her eyes. People so quickly forgot the nature of things. Her Order had only been here in Arkaym a scant few years, and yet the population seemed incapable of remembering the plague of geists they had suffered from before the Order’s arrival. “We have to go up there and deal with him,” she replied in what she thought was a perfectly reasonable tone, “because we don’t just ‘yank’ geists. It’s more like wrestling.”

  “What?” The Widow Vashill bellowed.

  Sorcha gestured up to the top story. “We’re going to have to go up there!”

  The woman’s face went abruptly pale. “Oh no—I must have been mistaken. I’m just a silly old woman seeing things in the shadows. No need to—”

  “Madam”—Merrick pusheds dark curls out of his eyes with something that looked awfully like exasperation—“if you will just let us up into the attic, we can assess the situation and take care of things for you.” His earnest youth usually moved even the most elderly of women to compliance—this one, though, hesitated.

  Tinkers’ Row had grown under the patronage of the forwardthinking Emperor Kaleva: ramshackle houses had been transformed into impressive new brick buildings, the open drains decently covered, and sweeps employed to keep the street clear of filth. Carriages and pedestrians bustled up and down the Row, which had become one of the busiest in Vermillion. The sign above this particular door said VASHILL—MASTER TINKER TO THE PALACE, but then most of them on this street did. The Emperor had become the patron to nearly all the Tinkers in Vermillion.

  Sorcha sighed, knocked the top off her cigar and pulled her Gauntlets out from her belt. Usually these symbols of her rune powers tended to grab people’s attention. She was sharply aware of this as she fixed the old woman with a cold blue stare. “So, what’s really up there, apart from your dead husband?”

  Widow Vashill’s lips pressed together in a pale line, and she leaned forward. “Things. Secret things.”

  Every guild had their mysteries, but the Tinkers, thanks to their close working kin, the airshipwrights, were especially paranoid since the Emperor wanted full control of the new technology. Merrick stood to his full height. “Madam, as long as the devices you are working on are regulation, then you have our assurance that we will never reveal anything to another soul.”

  If Sorcha had tried to sound so officious, people would have taken fright, but out of that earnest young mouth it was so much more reassuring. The old woman smiled, revealing a broken expanse of teeth. “Never doubted it, lad; it’s just that many of the devices in the attic contain weirstones.”

  Sorcha clenched her teeth on an explicative. The Order had long ago limited the ownership of those things to Deacons and members of the Imperial armed forces—but the Emperor had extended that in recent years to include Master Tinkers.

  At her side, Merrick shifted—well aware of her particular bugbear with the stones. Along the Bond they shared he tried sending out waves of calm, but it didn’t make any difference. She didn’t want to be calm. She’d had far too much of being calm lately. Time to let some of that frustration out.

  “Then we will just have to manage,” she growled. “Now let us get about our business.” Sorcha stepped around the Tinker and strode into the shop, leaving protestations and excuses in her wake.

  The inside of the building was dim simply because of the very few windows. A single lamp burned on the back wall, illuminating the devices of brass that the Tinkers had lately become specialists in. The constant rattle of clocks, all slightly at a different tempo, put Sorcha’s nerves on edge. Perhaps the Widow Vashill’s deafness was an advantage.

  Merrick, standing in the doorway, had the look of a child on the threshold of a candy merchant. Sorcha knew her partner fancied himself an amateur Tinker, but she held hope that he would snap out of it soon. Undoubtedly the smells of linseed oil and the whiff of sulphur were exciting her partner a little too much to be healthy.

  While Merrick crept in, casting covetous eyes over the goods displayed in the shop, Sorcha stalked over to the lifting pallet at the back of the room, stepped aboard it, and kicked the crank handle with one foot. The mandyery whirred and clanked, its staccato rattle occupying her mind, while the mechanism carried her up three stories into the storage attic. Her partner would just have to take the stairs.

  Whatever else was true of Widow Vashill, she looked to be in demand as a Tinker. The storage area was stacked with many crates and other more mysterious sheet-covered items. The Deacon examined them curiously. From the labels she could see many were waiting to be shipped all over the Empire.

  “Sorcha, wait!” Merrick, in the way of the young, did not sound at all puffed after three quick flights in pursuit. Her partner caught up and looked at her from under his curly hair with something close to reproach. “You shouldn’t get upset over people’s disrespect for the Order”—he adjusted his emerald cloak and tilted his head—“especially after what happened at the ossuary this winter.”

  Sorcha’s stomach tightened, and she felt herself flush. “Actually”—she pursed her lips—“after what happened at the White Palace, the people of this city should trust us more not less. They treat us more like ratcatchers than protectors.”

  “We’ll earn back their respect and trust,” he replied with a certainty she did not possess. “Anyway”—Merrick touched her arm—“she is probably just jumping at shadows—most people are these days.”

  Sorcha smiled bitterly. “You’re right—it’s not like Rictun would ever knowingly send us anywhere that actually has a geist.” She did not give him his proper title; to her there had only been one Arch Abbot. Despite his treachery, the nowdead Hastler had earned her respect. Rictun, who currently sat on the Council in that position, was worse than a fool—and he had always despised her, for reasons she could not deduce.

  A cruel fool.

  “Yes, yes, he is.” Merrick probably didn’t even realize he had picked unspoken words from her head. Their Bond was not supposed to work that way. A topic they were both avoiding. “However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be cautious all the same.”

  “I think we can handle one little shade, Merrick. We can’t possibly be that out of practice.” Still, she did turn and regard the attic with some caution.

  The world bloomed to life as her partner’s Sight enveloped her; it heightened her awareness and gave her own powers direction. As an Active, Sorcha was only too well aware that her life relied on her partner. Without him she would be a raging fireball with no direction that was more likely to hurt herself than a geist.

  Sorcha’s breath coalesced in front of her eyes. Outside it was summer, but the chill on her skin was as if the depths of winter had come again. It was a sign every human in the Empire could read.

  Her heart raced, and her skin ran with goose pimples, yet a slow smile spread on her lips. It had been far too long since she had done the job she’d trained for all her remembered life.

  Suddenly Merrick was at her shoulder, the only warmth in the room, and she was very grateful for it.

  Caution. Watch. Danger.

  His Sight meshed with hers again, and now she began to realize she should have stopped to question the widow a little more thoroughly. Their Sight was compromised in the attic—a low-level gray light flooded the space. It came from the number of weirstones used by the Tinker.

  Their shared Sight dipped and swayed as Merrick tried to compensate for the staining of the ether. A scuttling sound made his mouth snap shut. Rats were running from every corner, scrambling through the walls, and skittering down the drainpipe. Animals were more sensitive than humans and always fled in the face of the undead. The noise was unnerving—even to the trained.

  Leaving her partner to hold his position at the rear, Sorcha crept forward. Until recently the very idea of an unliving incursion into Vermillion would have been unthinkable; however, everything had changed since the battle in the ossuary. It had taken the Order back to the bad old days when they had first arrived on this continent. No
w once again they were flooded with alerts of geist activity—both real and imagined. The new Arch Abbot Rictun had made sure his Presbyter Secondo gave only the latter kind to Deacons Chambers and Faris. So whatever chance had brought them here to an actual geist she was not going to question.

  They were bitter thoughts to keep Sorcha company as she scanned between crates, her hands steady in her Gauntlets. They were the holder of her magic and her only protection against the geists.

  Something flickered between the rows, a suggestion of shadow darting away from the Deacons and deeper into the attic. So it was not a brave geist—surely only a shade and nothing as dangerous as a ghast or a poltern. Still, after a long dry spell, she would take whatever she could get.

  Yet, by the time she had reached the far end of the attic space, Deacon Faris had the sinking feeling that it was she who was imagining things. Her shared sight detected nothing. Perhaps she had been too hopeful, and her eyes had seen only what she wanted to see. After so long she was practically conjuring geists from the woodwork. Her hands clenched in the smooth leather of her Gauntlets.

  Sorcha turned back to Merrick with a sigh. “I think you were right. The woman was just jumping at shadows. There’s nothing here.” She couldn’t contain the disappointment in her voice.

  Her partner shrugged. “Maybe she saw what—”

  And that was when she felt every hair on her body stand on end. The rush of intense cold flooded down her spine, and in the corner something metallic rattled. Sorcha spun around and jerked the drop cloth off a six-foot structure. It was a calendar, with the phases of the moon and the date inscribed on a huge dial—probably meant to stand in a warehouse. On cue it began to tick loudly, almost in time with the rhythm of her heart.

  Sorcha! Merrick’s voice blared in her skull, just as their shared Sight cleared. Something was wrapped around the base of the clock, spinning and shifting like a bundle of snakes. Her eyes widened. She took a shocked step back and raised her Gauntlets. Shades were the remains of a recently dead person—spectyrs were their evil cousins. Twisted by the Otherside, they were human souls who sought revenge. However, they usually manifested alone—what she was faced with now was entirely different. A shade haunting was usually more irritating than terrifying. These spectyrs were not.