“What’s that?” Merrick raised himself off the wall by his elbows, his chin pointed up toward the ceiling. Raed strode over to stand next to him, determined not to be left out of any further discoveries—he had a real stake in all of this now. Sorcha and Merrick scrambled onto the Arch Abbot’s bed so that they could trace the strange shapes.
Indecipherable letters were scrawled on the ceiling of the alcove. Raed was no expert, but they did seem familiar. He’d spent many years in exile as a child, being schooled by the aristocrats who had chosen to go with their king, and he had learned many languages and many stories. These words seemed on the very edge of his understanding. They looked similar in construction to the Brytsling tribesmen’s language of the far north, but also similar to the Edgic letters of the warm swamps of the south. He was just beginning to figure out the pronunciation when Merrick, closer in years to his scholarship, whispered the sounds that had been forming in the Pretender’s mouth.
“Taouilt.”
He blinked hard. “Isn’t that the word for—”
The grating of stone against stone bought the words to a halt in his mouth. The raised dais of the bed was beginning to shift. The two Deacons leapt down hastily.
“Hidden.” Merrick finished his sentence softly as the stairs leading downward slotted neatly into formation.
Sorcha grinned brightly. “Arch Abbot Hastler is trying to help us—he must have been able to scrawl that before they got him away.”
Raed ran his fingers across his beard and considered. He did not like the idea of blindly going down those stairs. They seemed a little too convenient for his liking. But they had come this far, and it wasn’t as though they could just go back the way they had passed. He would have said something but he knew it would matter little; if there was one person Sorcha Faris believed in, it was Arch Abbot Hastler. Instead he swallowed his suspicions and determined to be on his guard, even if his companions were not.
He placed his foot on the topmost step and turned to look back at the Deacons. “Well, let’s find the old man.”
He wanted to hold out his hand to Sorcha, and in fact half raised it toward her, but then remembered his anger. He tucked the hand instead into his belt as smoothly as possible. This was going to make a difficult situation even worse. Everything about this was wrong. He wasn’t meant to be on land. He wasn’t meant to be falling in love with a Deacon who had betrayed him. Vermillion should have been his city.
Raed let out a little sigh. They’d whispered that into his ear since his birth, but he’d never really believed in it. Still, others had, and he felt responsible for them and their hopes. What would happen if he died here, though? The vision of his green-eyed sister, so fragile and happy, flashed in his memory. He knew the answer—she would be the heir, and the Curse would fall on her.
Raed disliked the atmosphere. As they descended, it filled his lungs like buckets of ice. The steps were wetter the deeper they went, and in Vermillion they surely couldn’t go very far down. The lagoon couldn’t be too far below them. He wiped moisture off the back of his neck. The lantern Merrick had taken from above cast orange light about them as they reached the bottom.
If the Abbey above was huge, below was just as vast; it was a cathedral of the earth. Soaring limestone walls leapt above them to meet in smooth vaulted arches, while great caramel-colored decorations swooped down at some points, almost resembling gargoyles. Merrick’s small lantern was not the only light now. Vast patches of glowing blue lichens covered the swells of limestone like fine tapestries, filling the intricate crevices with a soft light. Everywhere was the sound of water and the feeling of moisture on the face. For a second, the Pretender stood still in the unexpected beauty of it. A secret world that a man of the sea could never have dreamed existed.
“Did you know this was down here?” Raed asked softly as they looked about.
“No.” Sorcha’s whispered reply did not go far, swallowed up by the vastness and not returned.
The more scholarly Merrick looked just as surprised. “I’ve never even heard a rumor of it, but this place must have been known by the native Order; the stair mechanism would never have been put in easily by the Arch Abbot. Not in complete secrecy.”
Somehow the way he said “native” sounded ominous to Raed’s ears. He knew as much, if not more, than they could know about the Order that had once occupied the halls above their heads. His family and Arkaym’s native Order had been as intertwined as two snakes, sometimes mating and other times fighting. Those Deacons had originally claimed to be benefiting the people of the continent, just like these new ones. However, they had fallen into corruption, and not all of it political.
It was true they had meddled in the affairs of his family—the royal line—but they had also wanted more than that. Few knew the truth of how far that native Order had fallen, yet he was wary of telling Sorcha and Merrick. Would it make any difference to them to know that their predecessors had reached for the ultimate power? Perhaps these newest Deacons were no different from the previous set.
While Raed was considering this, Sorcha was leading them farther in, her dark form visible only as an absence of light among the gleaming lichen. At his side, Merrick shuttered the lantern. “We will need to be quiet, I fear. If the Arch Abbot’s kidnappers hear—” Merrick did not finish the thought.
Raed was not entirely convinced about these “kidnappers.” He’d seen no sign of struggle above, and his gut told him it was nigh on impossible to spirit the most powerful Deacon on the continent away from his own Mother Abbey.
While the Deacons ahead of him quietly followed the damp path forward, his heart began to race with fear and excitement. The Rossin was very close to the surface now—not yet capable of emerging, but so close that he could do the one very disturbing thing Raed hated: he whispered into the Pretender’s mind.
We should kill her. Her blood would taste as sweet as her sweat did. She betrayed you.
The Rossin’s intense hatred for the Deacons engendered in Raed a physical reaction that was only a few steps away from desire. These primitive reflexes were the ones easiest for the Beast to reach. He tried to ignore the hardening in his breeches and the dark whisperings that went with them.
Tear her, play with her a little, perhaps, if we like. She deserves it, after all.
The images began, flashing in his head like vivid tapestries of what the Rossin would do. Suddenly, Raed’s skin burned like lava in the freezing cavern.
She will burn for real when you touch her this time.
The Rossin laughed seductively, showing him an accompanying image that was both terrifying and erotic. Sorcha’s red hair would be made of flame as she caught alight with what was within him. When he entered her, she would scream . . .
“Raed?” He almost ran into Merrick, who had stopped, concerned, near an upward curve in the path. Merrick’s brow was furrowed and for an instant the Pretender was sure the Deacon could actually see the Rossin lurking nearby—after all, he was a Sensitive. He was surprised when Merrick glanced almost guiltily ahead toward Sorcha.
Pitching his voice low, the Deacon ducked his head. “If things go badly, Raed, Sorcha has two choices . . . She can open Teisyat, or she can unleash the Rossin.”
Oh, the Beast liked these words. He twisted in near-orgiastic delight at the thought, but he did not like the next words from Merrick’s lips.
“She must not do either.”
Oh, she can; she will. Let me loose, let me feed on her sweet charms, or open the Great Door and I will take us all there.
Raed shifted uncomfortably, choking down a groan. “Why not?”
“I have been thinking. The only people who could take the Arch Abbot”—Merrick pressed his lips together for a second before going on—“would be Deacons. And if they are that powerful—they could perhaps control the Rossin.”
The Beast was suddenly silent, turning inward and hiding its thoughts from its foci with uncharacteristic subtlety.
“And if she opened the Great Door?”
Merrick’s sharp look caught him by surprise, but then he realized—he had used the Rossin’s words. They’d just slipped out. The Deacon didn’t make any comment, though. Instead, his voice dropped lower. “She has opened Teisyat once before, and such things . . .” He paused and his expression hardened, making him look a lot older than his years. “They can affect a Deacon . . . weaken them.”
“So if it comes to a confrontation, what’s your suggestion?” Raed instinctively checked his saber in its sheath.
In a similar fashion, he noticed Merrick tuck his hand within his cloak, touching the one talisman that all Sensitives relied on. “I’ll take care of it, but you may have to restrain Sorcha. Stop her from going for the Gauntlets.”
“I can’t touch—”
“Thanks to the Bond . . . yes, you can,” Merrick said sternly, and then he turned and trotted after the very person they’d been discussing.
You can touch her. All of her, with fangs or hands or . . .
“Shut up,” Raed hissed, pulling his own cloak around him.
Up ahead, the blue light of the lichen was giving way to an orange glow that reminded him of a large fire. When he crested the rise, at first he didn’t know what to make of what he saw. Neither, apparently, did Sorcha, for she was still standing there, looking down into the odd grotto.
A great ceiling of daggerlike rocks hovered over what looked at first glance like a floor covered in tiny streams and honeycomb-shaped pools of water. The red light was coming from the rocks above, not from another form of lichen but a brighter, deeper light that seemed to well up from inside the stone itself.
The air was even colder here, penetrating through the Rossin-induced heat. He shivered wildly, trying not to let his teeth chatter. A quick glance at the others revealed that they were having the same problem. Raed closed his eyes and swayed slightly, feeling through the Bond. Apart from the usual surge of fear so close to the Change, he could sense other strengths. Merrick’s presence in his head was like a light seen through winter trees, cool but entrancing. Sorcha was a hot sun against his side, reminding him of their time aboard the airship.
Caught between these two presences, now fully aware of the Bond, the Rossin struggled briefly; but they were trained, and they held against him. They were, in fact, as deeply ingrained within the Young Pretender’s psyche as the Beast.
Damn crowded in here,
Raed thought with little rancor. It was good to be sharing the load of the geistlord in his head. With a sigh, he opened his eyes. Sorcha’s bright blue gaze and Merrick’s steady brown one were only inches away; her hand wrapped around Raed’s waist, while the younger Deacon had one hand on her shoulder. It should have been uncomfortable, and he should have still been angry, but they had literally just saved his skin.
Instinctively, he felt for the Rossin. The Beast had gone deep, hidden further down so that it would be unable to speak directly into his head. Another relief.
“We have to go down there and see what that is,” Merrick finally said softly, though they were all feeling the same desire to run in the other direction.
Sorcha took a deep breath and nodded. “You tell us what to do. You lead us.”
The young Deacon turned his eyes toward the still-glowing red rocks. “The Otherside is near, but I think we should be all right as long as we don’t trigger anything.”
“Fine, then.” Raed clambered out of the stalactite grotto and made his way down the path toward the carpet of pools and rivulets, ignoring the urge in every fiber of his being to flee from it.
Each little depression was filled with water and interconnected to the others by a web of streams. It was a large area; he couldn’t actually see the end of it under the ruddy light cast by the rocks. What he did see gave him the shivers. Instead of reflecting the rough cave surface above them, each showed an image. The three of them stood and looked out over an ocean of possibilities.
He saw his own face: at the court of Felstaad; standing beside Aachon at the helm of
Dominion
; fishing out Merrick and the fiery Deacon. He recognized all those, but there were others, just as disturbing, nearby: the Rossin running, raging, through Felstaad’s mirrored halls,
Corsair
sailing with a possessed crew and chasing down
Dominion
, and finally the chilling image of himself, fishing out the dead body of a red-haired Deacon.
“By the Blood, what is it?”
“This,” Merrick said in a voice that verged on reverence, “is a Possibility Matrix.”
“A what?”
“The Scholar Abbot Horris, two generations back, speculated that some of the wild powers that crop up in Deacons, such as foresight, could be replicated by the physical construction—models to aid those without the gift.”
“What my learned friend is saying”—Sorcha tucked her hands into her belt—“is that this is why we have been dogged from the very beginning.”
Merrick, who only moments before had been pale with worry, was now scrambling around the edges of the cells and rivulets like a boy who had just discovered rock pools for the first time. He peered into them with great enthusiasm, and Sorcha shot Raed the ghost of a smile.
“Horris theorized the creation of a matrix, but he reckoned the background activity in the human world would make it far too difficult to accurately use it predict the future.” Merrick’s gesture swept out over the cavern floor. “I wonder—” He darted over to the edge where the cave wall began its impressive swoop upward. The young Deacon’s head cocked.
“Is he going to start writing his own thesis?” Raed asked, not feeling nearly the same level of excitement. In fact, the sooner they got out of here, the better he would feel.
“Give him a minute,” Sorcha said softly.
“It’s the rock itself,” Merrick called. Raed winced at the loudness of it. The echo seemed to go on forever, and the chances of hundreds of enraged Deacons descending on them seemed not too far off. But the young man came darting over to them, and his hands were covered in white dust from the rock.