Wrayth (8 page)

“The
Autumn Eagle
is at your command,” he muttered, and then strode away to hurry his crew to their tasks.

Aachon set off after Sorcha and her bearers. Serigala grunted and called out to Arriann, “Hold on a moment!”

The two lowered the Deacon to the deck. Serigala bent over and rubbed at his arm with his face contorted in pain.

Aachon caught up with them. “What’s the matter, lad?”

“It’s nothing,” the young man grunted, but held out his arm revealing a nasty and quite deep bite. “Some damn Vermillion dog took a disliking to me.” He twisted the wound back and forth in the air, but was careful not to touch it. “Hurts like the bloody blazes.”

That was all they needed right now. The crew were few in number as it was, and all were committed to finding their captain; Aachon knew he would require every one of them.

Taking Serigala’s arm in a not quite gentle grasp, he held the weirstone over the wound, and peered at it. “A dog you say?”

“Yes, a huge brute of a thing, rushed right at me while we waited for you outside the Mother Abbey.” The crew member winced as the first mate poked at the edges of the bite. “The others pulled it off me, but it got away.”

“Frothing at the mouth at all?”

“Thank the little gods, no.”

Under weirstone light, Aachon could detect no inflammation that looked out of the ordinary. It would probably take a while to heal, and be painful, but with the right treatment Serigala would survive. “Get some of Aleck’s healing salve and keep it clean,” Aachon growled.

Serigala nodded and took up his burden with Arriann once more. Two men was more than enough to carry the Deacon. She was a deadweight but not a great deal of one. Her long time in bed, unable to move had whittled her
curves down to sharp lines. Aachon had thought her beautiful once—now she was a shadow of that glory. Once they got her into the cabin, he dismissed the crew members and took care of her himself. As Aachon tucked her into the bed, he couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for the Deacon. To be sure she had caused a great deal of trouble for his Prince, and had dragged Raed Rossin into more scrapes than were necessary—but she had also risked much to save him.

Garil had given him the details of her flight to save the Young Pretender in the soaking heat of Chioma. Her partner Merrick had relayed them to the lay Deacon, and it was quite a tale. The desert principality was not a place Aachon would have cared to go—but like Sorcha he would have for duty.

He looked down into her face, and all belief that the Deacon was merely a sack of meat was lost. Those open blue eyes had lost none of their power, and even though her face did not move, her eyes flicked back and forth—focusing on him with the kind of baleful intent he had only ever seen on the face of a geist-possessed person. It must be terrifying and frustrating to be trapped in your own body, and then whisked away in the dead of night.

Aachon did not consider himself a cruel man. With a sigh, he squeezed himself into one of the chairs by the bed. The tight confines of an Imperial Airship had not been made for a man of his size. The engines of the
Autumn Eagle
began to thrum, and outside he could hear the shouts of her crew making ready to cast off.

Dipping into his coat pocket he withdrew a swirling orb. The weirstones were illegal, dangerous the Order said. No one should deal with them but their Deacons.

Aachon had never made secret his dislike of the Order of the Eye and the Fist. While most sane citizens were cautious of them and the power they wielded, they were mostly just grateful to them for ridding Arkaym of the geists.

The first mate of the
Dominion
had another opinion entirely. He had wanted to be one.

“I will tell you a little tale, Deacon Faris,” he began resting his arms on his knees, and staring into the orb swirling in his hands. “And you will have to do me the service of keeping quiet.”

It was a foolish joke to break the tension, but he could see by Sorcha’s eyes it was not one well taken. Aachon cleared his throat. “When I was a lad, my father sent me across the ocean to Delmaire to train with your Order.”

It felt so long ago that it was like telling the story of someone else entirely. “I was lucky to have a tutor by the name of Garil Reeceson.” Aachon tilted his head back, and closed his eyes, smelling some of the musk of cigar smoke that had even then lingered around the Deacon. “Back then he was rather handsome, and I was smitten with him immediately, but it wasn’t until I was just about to take the final tests that we became lovers.”

The flames died in Sorcha’s eyes as realization spread there instead. Aachon looked down at the weirstone again, feeling old regrets beginning to bubble up. “Perhaps we would have become Bonded partners.” He let out a short laugh. “Then you and Garil would have just been colleagues. What might have been is now lost however. Instead, my research on weirstones offended some people, and then when I tried to defend myself…well let’s just say I had to quickly return to Arkaym.”

He glanced across at the still Sorcha before continuing. “When you brought us here to Vermillion chasing the Murashev, we met again,” the first mate of the
Dominion
went on, his fingers tracing patterns on the surface of the weirstone. The swirls of water in the deep blue orb mimicked his motions. “He told me of his wild talent—told me of a dark shadow that lay ahead for you and my prince.

“Then when I lost Raed in the heart of Chioma, where he went looking for his sister, I came here to get Garil’s
help locating him. But my prince’s path had fallen into such chaos that even he couldn’t discern it.”

Aachon leaned across and touched her hand. “We both knew that because of your Bond with my prince you could be the only one to track him—Garil has had a vision of you well again and with my prince. I know not, however, how this will come to pass.”

He sighed. “You must know that the ability the Prince of Chioma placed over you should have been temporary and faded at the next sunrise. No mortal creature can hold on to a truly geist power as you have done. Not without some kind of foci.” With one hand on Sorcha and the other cupping the weirstone, Aachon looked down. He did as Garil had tried, to see into the flame-haired Deacon’s past. His was a much more blunt instrument than the Order’s Rune of Sight Aiemm—but he should have been able to see more than he did—only her time within the confines of the Abbey. The moment of her first hesitant kiss with another initiate under the bowers of a flowering jasmine. The time she passed the test and carved her first rune into her Gauntlets—the pride swelling in her chest. He caught glimpses of her running as a child through the infirmary garden, smelled the lavender in her nostrils, and heard the squeal of excitement in her mouth.

Yet, if he tried to push back further there was nothing but a void. Aachon closed his fist about the weirstone. When he looked up, a tear had trickled free of Sorcha’s eye, so he carefully wiped it away with the edge of his sleeve. “How anyone let you into the Order with such a nothing for a history even Garil doesn’t know. Any Sensitive could look back and see this hole in your past if they cared to.”

The
Autumn Eagle
began to lift beneath them, and the thrum of the weirstone engines could be felt running through the ship. So many wonderful uses for them—and yet every one exposed the population to danger. Aachon looked deep into his own stone. Without access to the
runes that the Deacons used, it was his only way back to power, but he’d accepted that danger long ago.

With a sigh, he put his own weirstone away, and exchanged it for the one Garil had given him. He moved it closer to Sorcha. Her eyes blinked rapidly, as if she were trying to tell him something. It was a nightmare he would have spared anyone the living of, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Best to think of her as a compass—a compass that he needed to keep a cautious eye on. “My prince,” he muttered, and narrowed his eyes, looking at Sorcha through the weirstone. Through her, and to his friend and charge.

The Bond was so powerful that it was confusing, deep and wide, so as to almost swallow up the rest of her. Aachon felt the strength of it, like a magnet stone drawing him. In that moment, a stab of jealousy hit. Something like this could have been his if the past had run differently.

He had to get past that. Focusing his etheric vision on the Bond, he traced where it ran back to Merrick; disappearing behind them in Vermillion.

Sorcha! Sorcha, where are you?
The lad’s voice was so strong, that for an instant Aachon was sure that somehow the young Deacon had found a way to smuggle himself aboard the
Autumn Eagle
.

The first mate took a deep breath and tried again. While Merrick was a powerful Sensitive—stronger than the last time he’d seen him—he was not the target. Besides, a powerful Deacon like that would find another Bond soon enough.

His captain was in far more deadly danger. Pouring all of his concentration into the weirstone, strengthening it with a lifetime of care and friendship, Aachon saw beyond the looming part of the Bond between the two Deacons.

Far away and to the north his Prince was in danger. Alone, angry, guilty and with the Rossin riding very close to him. Aachon caught a glimpse of the great leonine head
turning to him. A snarl of rage and victory echoed in his ears and the connection was abruptly severed.

The first mate sank back on his heels and stared blankly at Sorcha. She was staring right back at him. Both of them had seen where Raed Syndar Rossin was, and how he was surviving.

The
Autumn Eagle
could not go fast enough for Aachon, and had he the power and the right paperwork he would have insisted Captain Lepzig burn all the weirstones he had to reach his own captain. However, at least now he had a direction. “North,” he whispered, “and then west to the land of Ensomn.”

He levered himself up, and glanced down at Sorcha. “I give you my promise I’ll find him and bring him back.”

She couldn’t utter a word in reply, but instead she closed her eyes: a mute acceptance of his terms. It was, after all, the only thing she had to offer.

SEVEN

There were no two ways about it; Merrick knew that he was going to stick out like a donkey in a horse sale at this ball—no matter what. The Order’s plain clothes and cloak harkened back to the style of at least a hundred years ago, and so it was not as if he were going to make some incredible statement that would set the Court aflame with his fashion sense.

And yet…

Merrick swallowed. He had made up his mind, but the prospect was still daunting. He was about to turn his back on the world of the Order—the place he had journeyed across countless miles and a wide ocean to find. It would give anyone pause, but still he knew in that uncomfortable place where his conscience resided that it was the right thing to do.

“It will have to be this then.” He seized up his best-kept cloak, shirt and trousers.

Charming the Grand Duchess was uncertain territory that no Order teacher had ever instructed him on. A young man his age should have many conquests under his belt, a
few notches on his bedpost—but while the Order did not demand celibacy of its members, it did not exactly provide normal social relations either. Deacon Merrick Chambers had only ever had one lover, and through a strange set of circumstances she had been taken from him. She now lived on the Otherside, surrounded by geists and quite without a body.

This thought propelled him from his room out into the hall. The tall mirror that stood at its end was etched with the mantra of the Sensitives;
SEE DEEP, FEAR NOTHING.

He stared at himself in the mirror. He knew the Duchess liked him—he was not that much of a fool as to not be able to spot her eye lingering on him. He wouldn’t be much of a Sensitive had he failed to observe that.

He knew he was not an ugly man, but he also realized of late he’d been more likely to frown than to smile. His curly brown hair was unruly, but at least the diet at the Mother Abbey and their vigorous training regime had kept him trim.

Staring into his own brown eyes, he tried one final time to think of another way to get to Sorcha. Another way that did not involve Zofiya. It was not the path of an honest man, and he liked the Grand Duchess too much to feel good about this. Yet he had been unable to find one all day, and no other struck him now. Before he could change his mind, Merrick turned and raced down the steps.