Spectyr to-2

by Philippa Ballantine

  The Deacon shivered as he recalled the landscape of that dread place.

  “Still, Onika made quite the impression on you, didn’t he?” Nynnia’s eyebrow crooked, and a slight smile lurked and her delectable lips.

  “He certainly is . . . different.” Merrick wrapped his arm around her waist. “Though my Emperor is a fine person, still some part of me is always surprised that anyone in power can be good—let alone the son of a ‘goddess.’ ”

  She nodded thoughtfully and then led him back into the tunneling machine. “I confess, we did not believe Onika when he first offered us his help. Many doubted that he would turn against his mother—but he proved himself.” She took his hand and pulled him along a long corridor.

  “Where are we going?” His stomach clenched as the machine began once again to descend—this time with no terrifying rolling.

  “As Onika said”—Nynnia squeezed his fingers—“Mount Sytha. All of our people are gathering there to perform the ceremony.”

  The Nynnia on the Otherside had said there was a reason for her to send him here, and then she would bring him back to his own time. Merrick didn’t want to go back—even if this world was falling apart. This was where Nynnia was still alive.

  He knew that Sorcha was back in his own time, his mother too—and both Merrick knew were in deadly peril. The Deacon found himself torn between duty and happiness.

  “And then what?” he asked, terribly afraid of the answer.

  Nynnia stood poised with one hand on a door handle, her brow furrowed. “We have to atone for our crimes: swear off the use of weirstones and runes. Give up our bodies.”

  “You’re leaving this world,” Merrick whispered. “Traveling to the Otherside.”

  A muscle in her jaw twitched as she gave a sharp nod. “If we stay, Hatipai and the other geists will tear this world apart hunting us. We will go to the one place she dares not follow. Having anchored herself into this world with a focus, she can no longer go back to the Otherside—nor would she want to—the human meat here is so much sweeter. So, with our knowledge, we can build a place there—and maybe one day come home when it is safe.”

  Merrick pressed his lips together and closed his eyes—remembering the tales of that Dark Time. The suffering the people of this time were about to endure would be terrible. Yet from that maelstrom would arise the Order, the Rossin dynasty, and eventually the Empire. It would take hundreds of years, but they would conqueror the geistlords, even Hatipai, and learn to contain the lesser geists.

  Nothing he could do would change that. Nor should it.

  Nynnia pushed open the door, and he saw that it led into a small bedchamber with a reasonably sized bed bolted to the wall. A luxurious cerulean quilted blanket brightened what would otherwise have been rather bleak accommodations. He drew in his breath and shot the woman at his side a confused look. “Nynnia, I—”

  She stopped his words most effectively by pulling his mouth down to hers. The kiss was long, desperate and sweet. When she finally let him go, her brown eyes were wide and her smile crooked. “When we leave this world, Merrick Chambers, we Ehtia will abandon our bodies—become part of the Otherside. I intend to give mine a proper send-off.”

  The Deacon’s blood raced. Merrick wanted to grab what time there was that remained, but his gentlemanly sensibilities wouldn’t let him take total advantage. “You hardly know me.”

  The pad of her thumb brushed his mouth. “But I know you love me, and sime in the future, however that may happen, I will love you. When we next meet, I would have one of us remember these moments.”

  The Deacon’s mind did another flip. It was all too complicated and painful.

  “We will love each other,” Merrick replied and let himself be led into her bedroom. He said nothing of them losing each other again. That pain could wait.

  Once the door was shut, nothing outside mattered. The Deacon did not care to think that this would be the one and only time for them—he pushed that realization as far back as he could. He would have her find nothing bitter in his mind.

  Instead, Merrick took his time undressing Nynnia, even as she raced to strip him of his cloak, shirt and breeches.

  “So young,” she breathed, looking up at him. The comment was soft and almost sadly said.

  Nynnia would in fact have taken a step back, but Merrick paused unbuttoning her blouse and captured her hand, pressing it firmly against his bare chest. “You will be young again someday—the very one we meet.”

  She frowned, shook her head, laughed and then leaned forward to kiss him. Perhaps there wasn’t as much meaning for her as there was for him, yet it was still precious. Merrick delighted in her unashamed trust, when he released the last of her rather intricately tied trousers and she stepped back to allow him to look at her.

  “You are beautiful, Nynnia,” he said through a voice grown abruptly rough with desire. It was no lie; she was. However in the future she regained her youth, for right now, she had a lithe, muscular body, only slightly touched by age. He thought it ripe like a fruit brought to sugar and fullness.

  Merrick ran his hand down her right arm and felt the ridges of five wide scars that streaked from shoulder to elbow. As he slid his palm around her, he was able to make out that they in fact took in half her back.

  Nynnia looked at him so very earnestly. “Very few escape the geistlords without some sort of mark. I hope they don’t put you off—”

  When he bent and ran the sweep of his tongue against the ridges, she stopped mid-sentence and let out a low groan. Then Merrick pulled her with him as he flopped back on the bed. The sensation of the full length of their bodies pressed against each other with no unnatural hindrance was bliss.

  Please let this go on forever. Merrick’s head was spinning. The Nynnia he had met in his own time had loved him, but they had never been able to find a time to consummate those feelings. He had wanted to badly, and yet he’d been so wrapped up in being a Deacon, he’d missed the chance.

  “Are you—” Nynnia’s gaze narrowed, even as her breath began to come in shallow pants that were echoed by his own. “Are you a virgin?”

  Sometimes telepathy was a double-edged sword—but Merrick had only become used to it between Sorcha and himself. Whatever gifts the Ehtia had meant that very few of his surface thoughts were sacrosanct.

  Nynnia blushed. “I am sorry—you are broadcasting so loudly.”

  A chuckle rolled through his body. “Well, it is at the top of my concerns right now. I don’t have much experience, but I am not quite a virgin. I just don’t want to disappoint you.”

  Her teeth nibbled along the line of his neck, rising toward his ear, and suddenly those concerns melted away. Nynnia puled back and licked her lips. “A handsome young man, travels back through time to find me, and beds me on my last day in this realm? How could you disappoint me?” Her voice was low, husky and laced with raw desire.

  Warmth was stealing through Merrick, warmth that needed to be fulfilled, yet he couldn’t help it. One tiny thought ran like a dark streak through this moment of utter bliss. “I want more. I want the woman I love forever.”

  She could have replied something trite. She could have leapt off him, offended. Instead, Nynnia only smiled sadly and kissed him.

  Yes, Merrick realized, he might only have this moment with her, but only a few hours of his time before this, she had been dead. It would be churlish to diminish the delight of finding her alive and in his embrace. He would not sully this gift.

  Deacon Chambers put aside all those nagging fears and doubts and plunged into the moment. Soon enough she would be gone. Soon enough they would all be gone.

  The Rossin’s roar faded even as Sorcha screamed after him—a sound that echoed the pain inside her—a confused mix of loss and anger. The geistlord was still as he had been when first she had encountered him, and even worse, she remembered how it had felt to be him.

  As she ran to the window and watched the elegant, massive creature bound off the edge
of the terrace, she nearly forgot to snuff out the rune burning on her Gauntlet.

  The great lion was beautiful, terrifying, destructive, and it had just carried Raed away. Yet, for an instant she stood there, quite forgetting the mess that the geistlord had just made.

  By the Bones, she thought to herself, I am not pining after the Rossin. Her hands clenched on the broken window, the glass crunching under her Gauntlet.

  A burbling cry behind her made the Deacon spin on her heel. Lady Lisah was sobbing, spluttering, her eyes wide as blood trickled from her mouth—scarlet red against her pale skin. Unable to speak, her hand was spread and stretched toward Sorcha. Only minutes before they had been adversaries—now they were just people.

  The Deacon dropped to her knees, stripped off her Gauntlets, and clenched the dying woman’s hand tightly in her own fist; that which had been so beautiful, flawless and cosseted was torn and gaping. Too much was now outside that should be inside.

  Sorcha didn’t know how powerful the healers were here in Chioma—so perhaps there was still hope. Blood bubbled and ran through her fingers as Sorcha pressed down on the wound, trying to stop it from gushing. It was warm and sticky, but the worst of it was the desperate look in Lisah’s eyes—as if the Deacon could save her.

  Sorcha whispered to her—foolish, impossible things that were becoming more so. It had been a long time since she’d comforted the dying. That first year when the Emperor landed at Arkaym she had experienced it quite enough. And now, looking down at this beautiful woman whom she had so easily judged as vapid, Sorcha thought of those young Initiates they had lost. Certainly she had hoped to never be in this position again.

  Desperately she pushed down harder. “Listen, Lisah. Help will be here soon—don’t give up.” The younger woman’s mouth worked as her face grew paler. She was trying to say something, but there was no air in her lungs—only blood.

  Then she spasmed, gouts of her life pumping over Sorcha’s hand. Lisah’s gaze went from full of life lazed and empty in a split second—so quick that Sorcha could not have said when it was she had gone. Her beautiful bright blue eyes were now surround by scarlet drops she coughed up.

  Unable to save the poor woman, Sorcha opened her Center and waited. She might have failed to protect the innocent women of the harem, but she watched as their shades gathered and made sure no geist took them on this side. Their souls swirled, confused by the abrupt severance from their bodies—and that was why most shades stayed in the human world. Sorcha would not let these women suffer that fate.

  Slipping her Gauntlets over her blood-drenched hands, she pressed them down against the cooling flesh of Lisah. The rune-clad leather would not hold the blood, and without Merrick, the added presence of it would help make the connection easier.

  “I’m sorry,” Sorcha whispered as she opened Tryrei, the peephole to the Otherside. What they would find there she could not say, but it was the way souls had to pass for any chance of peace. The tiny gold light pierced reality, and the souls drifted toward it.

  Maybe there were gods waiting for them as some said—she wished she could believe that. Maybe it was a place of trial before they could be reborn. It wasn’t her place to say, but at least the slain women would not be condemned to walk the earth repeating the moments of their death.

  Sorcha watched them go and then closed her fist around the rune. These were not the first people she had been unable to save—and would likely not be the last, either.

  With a soft sigh the Deacon leaned over and closed Lisah’s eyes, smearing blood on her face but at least giving her an illusion of peace.

  It was at that moment that the eunuch guards shoved open the door. For a minute Sorcha stared at them as they took in the room. Books scattered around the room, shelves pushed over, three women’s bodies dismembered, and there she was sitting in the middle of it all—covered in blood and gore.

  Deacons were considered necessary—yet it was not unheard of for them to go suddenly and spectacularly mad. The hospital at the Mother Abbey had a whole ward devoted to the care and restriction of such poor creatures. In all the Empire there was no more dangerous madman than a Deacon.

  Then Sorcha realized how it looked to these new arrivals. She had asked to see these women; she had demanded they be alone. The Chiomese guards might have respect for the Deacons of their own realm, but she was a stranger—a stranger wearing her gauntlets and bathed in the blood of the Prince’s women.

  The rifles in the guards’ hands spun and were quickly raised to their shoulders. The tallest eunuch, the one who had brought in the women to see her, bared his teeth at her, his brow darkening like a thundercloud. These women were his charges, so she knew he was not going to stop and ask questions.

  These men had been bearing the shame of deaths all around them for weeks—and now they had a very convenient target to blame. One dead Deacon would make a handy scapegoat to drag before their Prince. Dead would be preferable to alive.

  Without a single word of protest, Sorcha sprang to her feet, leapt over Lisah’s body, and ran toward the inner wall. Unlike the Rossin, she couldn’t survive a jump through the window—but fleeing into the city was a very good idea. She was not about to take her chances with the guards or even the Prince—who surely, with the deaths of his women, would be considerably less gracious.

  “Fire!” the chief eunuch bellowed, and the Deacon dived as bullets spat over the chaotic scene. Luckily, the opportunities for these guards to shoot at anything must have been few.

  With her Gauntlet outspread and Voishem blazing on its palm before her, Sorcha leapt through the wall. It was a most inelegant use of her training.

  The sound of bullets spitting against the hardened mud was the last thing she heard as she phased through the wall and tumbled onto the other side. In this situation she had no time to find somewhere to wash off the blood and think. Sorcha knew she had to keep using Voishem until she was beyond the palace and into the city.

  The Deacon dared not stop running, knowing that soon enough the whole city would be in an uproar, looking for the stranger who had gone mad and slain women of the Prince’s harem. Already she could faintly hear the palace alarm bell ringing. While in the grasp of Voishem, everything was dim and out of sync with her eyes. People were reduced to gray shadows, and the palace itself looked more like an artist’s sketch than something real.

  Sorcha knew she had to find the Rossin and stop his rampage at all costs—there simply was no one else who had a chance of controlling the Beast. So she dashed through the palace, hearing screams echo softly in her wake, and the rune she dared not release drained her strength. She was running blind without Merrick’s power to help her and would have to take a gamble.

  Wherever you are, Merrick—come back soon. I need you.

  And with that final thought, Sorcha passed through the thick mud walls of the palace and out into the chaos of the city itself.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Freedom and Fight

  The Rossin was running, and for once it had nothing to do with his need for the taste of blood. The women in the harem had given him his fill, and he was strong on it. Instead he was running toward something just as tasty: revenge.

  His wide paws struck the sturdy mud roofs of the Hive City precisely and loudly. Flocks of shrieking birds fled from their nests as he thundered past them. Citizens below caught glimpses of the lion as he leapt between buildings, and their screams, which would have once satisfied him, now were as meaningless as the squawks of the birds.

  For the first time in a very, very long time, the geistlord known as the Rossin had a mission, and his golden-flecked eyes were narrowed on the target.

  Ahead, close to the curve of the river, was the Temple of Hatipai. Even thinking that name brought a snarl of hatred from the massive chest of the Beast.

  In the thick jungles to the east of Chioma there were snakes that preyed upon other snakes; they were the most feared of the poisonous creatures that crawled in Arkaym. And now, o
ne of those creatures, or at least the geist equivalent, had come home to her lair.

  The Rossin stopped on a wide rooftop at the edge of the city and rested for a moment. In a body of flesh, the geistlord enjoyed the heady rush of blood in his veins and the joy of a heart pounding in his chest. His tongue ran over the curve of white canine teeth and licked over his muzzle, drawing in the last few drops of blood that stained his fur. The Rossin contemplated the last small distance between him and his goal.

  Ahead the palace complex fihed and the long, wellguarded road to the port and markets of the city began. No more rooftops remained to provide him access.

  He was not out of breath or frightened at the prospect of going down among the humans, but he was worried about alerting her that he was coming. The proud head of the Rossin turned to glare once more at the Temple. No Deacon of the Order could have scanned the horizon as well as he did—but if they had been able, they would have trembled.

  Through unearthly eyes that saw better than any human and pierced deep into the reality of this world, he watched a great storm drawing in on the kingdom of Chioma and its Prince. The patterned fur on the Rossin’s head rippled, and he raised his head and sniffed. The odor was of the tomb and lost hopes—the smell of the long dead—something that the Rossin despised but she loved. Hatipai’s adoring followers had no rest, even when they were dead. The self-styled goddess had that much of a hold on them.

  Nearly a thousand years before, it had been the family that bore his name that had, with his assistance, trapped her beneath Vermillion. His lip pulled back from his fangs at the memory of that bright and terrible battle. Now the tables had turned. She was in the ascendant, while the bloodline that had protected him was whittled down to two fragile twigs.

  The great cat felt his ire rise and perhaps a little fear. Hatipai had destroyed many geists and geistlords, and the Rossin had only survived because he had not done as many of his kind had done—relied on faith and worship. It had not been easy to become part of a human bloodline, yet it had proved to be the smartest choice.