Geist to-1

by Philippa Ballantine

  Once beyond the tumble of broken walls and clouds of dust, the Rossin’s exceptional senses made out the racing of human hearts and the coursing of human blood more fully. Deacons—but not the sort of Deacon that followed him. These stank of the Otherside and desperation. Centuries before, there had been many such kind; before the coming of the Order.

  The humans came running out, slamming on their Gauntlets, preparing to meet any attack. They weren’t expecting a geistlord. The Rossin tore into them even as they threw their puny runes at him; mere shadows of the real power of the Otherside.

  He gorged himself on more than their flesh; he chased them around the compound, relishing their terror. Their screams delighted him as he broke them so easily, sending their shades in shattered shards into the Otherside, the realm that he was denied. Their pain was delicious to him, but no recompense for what their kind had taken from him. The recollection made the Rossin howl again, rending and tearing every morsel of flesh he could reach. Weak humans did not deserve breath. He threw their pieces around the compound like scattered chaff.

  The female Deacon was behind him, closer now, and he could feel the Bond. It was not as weak as he’d thought. It was as fragile as a spiderweb—gossamer thin, but strong as steel. The Rossin threw himself harder against it. By the deep shadows—it was tightening!

  How dare this woman presume to put bonds on a geistlord? The image of the first Deacon, the one who had bound him to this fate, flashed in his ancient memory. The ignominy of that event still burned the Rossin. Now these people would pay. No punishment was enough. The great muscles in his body bunched and exploded as he turned toward her, fast as thought. She would learn the lesson he’d been unable to lay upon the first of the Deacons. Spinning around, the Beast was ready to rend, but something held him back.

  There was one trait in the human world that the Rossin admired: beauty. It was not the kind of beauty of the flesh that tethered men—but the beauty of power. When he turned those blazing eyes on this female, he saw it, gleaming like a gem in a pit of darkness. Perhaps it was the faint influence of his foci—though the Beast would never admit to such a thing—that stopped him from pouncing. Instead he crouched inches from her face, breathing destruction and the smell of blood on her. He saw the Deacon flinch slightly, her blue eyes watering from the nearness of his power. She had dismissed him with her rune Gauntlets before, when he was weak from the transformation. Even if she managed to wedge open his jaws and do the same right now, there would be no repeat. The Rossin had feasted and grown strong. She knew it. He knew it.

  Deacon and geistlord were eye to eye. She was frightened, but did not move. He was transfixed by the thing that only he could see. For now, he would let her live.

  The stalemate was broken when three lay Brothers emerged from the stables and made a break for the gate. With a great shake of his dark mane, the Beast let out a snarl and whirled about to give chase. It was glorious to release himself upon them and he could not contain himself long enough to enjoy the chase this time. Blood, hot and sweet, flooded into his throat, momentarily sating the thirst that never seemed to end. Bones snapped in his mouth and he heard the wail of souls ripped free of their meaty cages. The fizzle of power and blood in the Rossin’s veins was heady bliss.

  He roared again, full of power and delight, before looking around the courtyard. It was clear of anything living apart from the tethering Deacon. Her great power and beauty saved her for now, but would not restrain him forever. He would keep her for last. Once he had taken his fill of energy from the Priory’s humans, no pitiful Bond could possibly hold him. The Rossin looked forward to seeing those blue eyes widen in horror just before he fell on her. He wondered what her soul would taste like.

  Now it was time to find more flesh. He sprang away, his hide the color of angry clouds rippling under the torchlight. Magnificent, he knew. Great paws with their retracted claws moved silently over the stones of the courtyard toward the keep. The doors smashed most satisfactorily as the Rossin landed against them, his great bulk ripping them free of their mounts and scattering their broken fragments on the scarred floor.

  Within, the keep was lit with torches and the moonlit glow of cantrips. Seven large weirstones described a space encompassing the back and the center of the room. The Rossin’s ears lay flat against his neck and the white lengths of his fangs gleamed as he snarled in terrible rage.

  The smell of the Otherside was overwhelming, bringing him to a stop for a moment as he inhaled the remembrance of home. His huge head swung about, emerald green eyes sweeping like searchlights, scouting out the next to die. To the side were the glowing forms of those who were performing the summoning. These whelps were delving deeply into the Otherside—looking for more than the garden-variety shade or spook.

  Then his gaze fell on two forms toward the rear of the room. One female was supporting and clinging to a male strapped to a drainage slab. It was not an unfamiliar sight; human blood was a valuable commodity. Yet, it was not the blood that gave the Rossin pause on the very threshold of further feeding.

  The geistlord, in his great feline form, growled low and slow. He recognized the bubbling energy in this room. One of his own kind was here, and one not chained to a form as the Rossin was. Hackles rose on his bunched dark shoulders and his tail began to lash.

  The gray-haired human female snatched up the cup of the foci blood and spun around with it, splashing a wide scarlet arch around her to paint the floor in that ancient pattern. It wouldn’t have held him. He could still have ripped her apart, and yet, and yet . . .

  It was looking at him. One of them at the end of the hall was more than it seemed. He knew its name; he knew where it came from and its nature: ancient enemy and utterly dangerous to geist and geistlord alike. So few of them now, and yet here was one staring at him with eyes full of power. The Rossin knew no fear on the Otherside, yet here he was corporeal, trapped by the Curse. No pitiful human could touch him, but he was still considerably weaker than he would have been in full unbound form. From the end of the hallway, the being smiled. They both knew which of them held the upper hand for now. The beast was filled with hatred, intense and bitter in the back of his mouth. He wanted to destroy, to rend, and yet could not cross that threshold.

  Not you. Not yet, he thought in terrible rage.

  Instead, the Rossin did what he had never before done in this realm. He fled.

  Never work with children or animals. That was what the thespians said, and now Sorcha was beginning to understand what they meant. The Rossin might not be a true animal, but he proved just as unreliable. She had put her trust in a geistlord and now she was paying the consequences.

  “Unholy Bones,” she growled as the massive bulk of the Rossin dwindled and fractured into the male form of the sea captain. She threw her cloak once more about the shivering naked Raed and slid the pack from her back, dropping it at his feet. They were better prepared this time.

  Her heart was hammering in her chest like a jackrabbit’s, and her whole body tingled. Taming the Rossin had been exhilarating and mad; every moment a victory against destruction and death. The beast was magnificent, a force of nature that none of the rogue Deacons had been able to stand against. She knew of no Deacon who could claim to have stared into the eyes of the Rossin and lived.

  It was ironic, then, that by the looks of things, she was instead going to be killed by two of her own. Aulis held the bloodstained bowl in one hand and grinned maniacally. All semblance of sanity had vanished; the cool Prior had been replaced by a scarlet-robed madwoman.

  “Thank you for bringing us what we wanted,” she hissed, flinging the bowl into the far corner of the room. “The Pretender’s blood will finish the summoning.” An odd triangular stone hung about her neck, and Sorcha knew it immediately for a foci—the one that was drawing the polterns. It was going to be tricky to get it away from Aulis.

  The Deacon judged the odds. To her left, Raed was struggling to his feet, shaking his head like a man concu
ssed. Behind Aulis, Merrick looked gray. Though he was not quite dead, he was near enough to it as to make no difference. Nynnia, the fool with the wide doe eyes, could be seen peeking around the draining slab. No help there. And now, advancing on Sorcha, two remaining Actives. If all this wasn’t enough, the air was alive, humming with power that made her skin tingle and the hair on her head leap away from her skull. A summoning; one hell of a summoning was under way.

  Sorcha took a careful step backward, watching the Actives advance on her while darting a glance upward. There, in the vaulted ceiling, she could see the Otherside pulling closer to the living world; she could feel it like an angry dog preparing to spring. A gathering storm was being born. And for it, they needed Raed, the Young Pretender. Deacon Faris had fought many battles for souls, yet this one was the first one where she doubted victory.

  Perhaps sensing her hesitation, the enemies clustering around them straightened and smiled to one another. However, they did not summon any runes. Instead they drew their swords, and she understood why. The atmosphere here was very finely balanced. Whatever they were doing was dangerous and delicate work. One rune, one summoning of the wrong sort of power, and there would be consequences. Sorcha didn’t think that killing everyone in the room was a good idea just yet, so she was prepared to follow their lead. The sound of her own blade being drawn was like a snake hiss.

  Obviously, with the amount of blood they had taken from her partner, the usual injunctions against spilling it were not in force. It remained to be seen how much of what was about to flow would belong to her and the Young Pretender. Raed, who had recovered from the change far more quickly than Sorcha could have hoped, drew his saber and staggered upright at her side; a noble and impressive gesture, considering he was nearly naked.

  “So”—his breathing was ragged, yet his usual bravado was still in place—“are we going to die?”

  The cocky tone in his voice, despite this rather awkward situation, made Sorcha smile wryly. “I don’t know—I think they just want a gallon or so of your blood.”

  “Well, that is damned unfriendly,” he replied, and then, in between his gasps, the Actives attacked.

  Sorcha was under no illusions about her sword-fighting skill; it was what might be called adequate. Raed Rossin, on the other hand, was a master. While she hacked and parried as best she could, the Captain was a flurry of speed and sweet footwork. Despite the rigors of the Change, he was beating his opponents while she struggled to hold her own. It irked Sorcha to know that. Some competitive streak in her flared at the realization. Her eyes narrowed and she concentrated on her attacks, hearing the Pretender’s grunts of exertion as her admonishment to do better.

  If she survived today, she promised herself more time in the practice yards—that was for certain. For now, she wished she had a pistol instead of a blade. Or a dozen loyal Deacons at her back.

  Her attacker was grinning, his crooked teeth flashing in the half-light; damn it, he knew he was winning. With a half growl, she caught a riposte aimed at her head just in time. An edge of steel sliced through her guard and nicked the shoulder of her armor. That hadn’t happened. It had been a while since Sorcha had been forced to resort to hand-to-hand, not since the bad old days of the Order’s first landing with the Emperor.

  While the swordfight raged, there was no one to stop Aulis. She held her arms spread in the universal gesture of supplication, and the seven weirstones flared. Warmth beat down on the top of Sorcha’s head as she struggled to hold her own. She couldn’t afford to look up to see the cause, yet it made her opponent laugh. That could not be a good thing.

  To her right, a man grunted, followed by the clatter of a body falling to the ground. A quick glance ascertained that it had not been Raed. He was turning to aid her, but suddenly Sorcha had a more pressing concern. Her eyes were drawn to the writhing space above them.

  Something was now rending apart the very air. Her attacker, and indeed everyone capable of movement in the Hall, clapped their hands to their ears. The noise was visceral, felt more than heard, echoing all the way down to the bone. It set muscles to twitching and eyes to watering. Somewhere deep inside Deacon Sorcha Faris, fear bloomed.

  Sorcha had felt this once before, on a staircase in an ancient castle. That memory was one she seldom touched—yet now it reached for her with a great five-clawed hand. Through streaming eyes, she looked up. Aulis was also standing with her hands to her ears, but her face was stretched in a grimace of delight. It was bound to be a short-lived victory—nothing good ever came through from the land of the dead. The rogue Deacons had reached far indeed. No Active had a rune to stop it.

  Sorcha reached out and grabbed hold of Raed. It was an instinctual gesture—a final one. A need to feel human skin one final time.

  Merrick was wide-open to the Otherside. Having slipped loose of his body, he was perilously close to losing sight of it altogether. He had to be near death—surely he had been drained of enough blood for that. None of the books had ever covered what would happen when a Sensitive wearing the Strop stepped out of life—none had ever made one of his kind such a target before. In the calm of his Center, he could feel the bonds of flesh and bone still tying him to something. Could it be the Strop that held him in place?

  He heard the Rossin smash through the keep doors, witnessed the mysterious retreat of the geistlord. Then he saw Sorcha, not as blazing as the Pretender Raed, but still gloriously beautiful through the Strop.

  The books spoke of detachment at the very edge of death. Yet one thing penetrated his calm: a heat from above. It could not have been purely physical; he was beyond the physical now. Merrick did not want to look up. He did not want to see what was coming; what his blood had helped allow through.

  See deep; fear nothing. A voice, light and near, repeated the Sensitives’ mantra, reminding him of his purpose. Even as he was dying he clung to it. It had to be Sorcha. Their Bond, their inconvenient connection, leapt into life.

  Through the Runes of Sight, Merrick tilted his vision upward. Cantrips, weirstones, blood and runes; all the power of this world had been turned to one purpose—to reach deep into the Otherside. He did not know which level Aulis had tapped into, but one glance at the huge five-taloned hand ripping itself into the real world told him all he needed to know.

  Calmness fled in the face of remembrance. The five deep gouges in ancient stone; he’d traced them with his young hands, memorizing the spot where his father had died. He had never been able to find out what had killed him, no matter how many books he read or how many Deacons he quizzed. And now here it was. He wanted to flee. He wanted to fly to the Otherside and quit life. However, the voice was once more in his head. You are stronger than that. Remember your training. Remember your own power.

  The Bond must have been intensified while he wore the Strop. The Strop—of course!

  Merrick bent his mind to the rune carved on it, no lesser than those on Sorcha’s Gauntlets. Mennyt, the rune that could take him to the Otherside. It was not the last Rune of Sight, but it was enough. Through it he could see his connection with the real world. The Bond was not the only link. Many things tethered him to this side: hopes, words and dreams. These were the things that made a person’s spirit into a shade. He had complete knowledge of his fate. He wouldn’t allow it.

  The being was moving toward reality, pushing its head against the natural boundaries of the world like a nightmare child pressing its face against a shop window. It wasn’t meant for this world, though Merrick could feel its siren song tugging at him, promising him much. A deep part of him wanted to give everything to it; bone, flesh and sinew. His blood pulsed in his temples, drowning out all other sounds.

  The weirstones, the cantrips, the blood, Sorcha, Raed and himself; Merrick could feel them like chess pieces in his Sight. Everything was so finely balanced. All it required was one little push. One little nudge and the stack of cards Aulis had so carefully constructed would tumble down.

  However, this was not somethi
ng he could do. As always his role was to See—Sorcha had to take her place in this drama. He reached out to her. The stones, he whispered into her head. Her eyes narrowed and he knew she was Seeing as he did. The Bond was growing stronger; he could feel it like ivy scurrying up a wall, tying them closer and closer.

  The weakest point. Her Active thoughts followed his lead. She was like lightning, burning, acting without thought. He admired that—he now relied on it. Pyet. Naturally she chose Pyet. He could have guessed that.

  Fire bloomed from her Gauntlets, bright and beautiful. Sorcha’s power smashed out at the weirstone positioned right below the trembling arch of the hall, under the vaulted ceiling. The noise of the marble imploding was like a thousand souls screaming from beyond, calling out in horror and loss. The world burned and swirled with runes, a tangle of power that flared brightly for one moment. It was too much for anything but destruction to follow.

  Above, the being from the Otherside howled, wrapped in shreds of white light and anger. However much it bucked and heaved, struggling against the natural order, it could not quite overcome it. The Otherside pulled it back, though it did not go easily. The Priory shuddered right down to its bones, as if it was clawing at itself to be free of the creature’s touch.

  Now Merrick knew he was going to die. The real world was peeling back, breaking apart in a tumble of rock, mortar and dust. Something had to be sacrificed, and if it was himself and the Priory—then so be it. This was the end, but at least there would be no intrusion from the Otherside. His blood had caused the rift, and yet he had pointed the way to stop it. He could leave now. Take me. He opened up himself to the world, letting it do with him as it willed.

  The ringing in his ears was distracting. It hurt. It shouldn’t hurt. The world spun, and then sensation snapped back to him. Someone was holding his face in a viselike grip and calling his name in a very demanding tone. It took a heartbeat for him to realize just who it was.