He nosed his way around the large square, which faced the palace, eyes darting every now and then to where the pale stone wall ran. His fellow geists had not let the palace alone, despite the cantrips and protections laid down by Deacons over the centuries.
The coyote stopped and let out a faint yip as the thought occurred to him; those Deacons had for much of Arkaym’s history been the Circle of Stars. The newer Order that Sorcha Faris had served might have laid their cantrips over the top, but if the earlier foundation had been torn aside then it was all for naught. He sensed that was what they had done as soon as the Mother Abbey was destroyed.
At last, near the rear of the palace, the Fensena found what he was looking for; one section of the wall and the cantrips that had protected it had given up its structural wholeness. The crumpled heap of red stone was a welcome sight. The Fensena needed to get within and soon, since his master was not the most forgiving of creatures.
He entered the pleasure garden of the palace, and realized that no pleasure was ever likely to be found here again. It looked as though a small whirlwind had passed through the ordered rows of plants and topiary. Everything was ripped up and thrown about, and he suspected that mist witches had once again taken to the Ancient paths that the building of the palace had displaced. Though the island was no longer a swamp, the witches would traverse their old paths, and thanks to the thinness of the veil between this world and the other, their powers would be greater.
The Fensena disliked the lower geists and their chaotic nature. He preferred logic, since it usually meant a greater chance at survival. A low rumble started in his chest, and his brindle tail tucked instinctively closer to his body.
The mist witches were still here.
Robbed of any chance to lead travelers astray, drown them in the swamp and take their essence for their own, they would instead be quite happy to rip apart a human. Or indeed another geist or geistlord. Energy was energy after all.
The Fensena snarled, but the mist witch was a mindless thing; designed only to tear apart and feed. It was no geistlord capable of thought, reasoning and plotting. It was drawn to whatever living thing was about. Before the Circle of Stars, the recently returned Native Order, had done whatever necessary to rend the barrier between the Otherside and here, the mist witch might have only lured people to their deaths, or scrabbled their wits. Now however it was far stronger.
Like a Deacon, the Fensena saw its shape completely; the spiraling patterns that looked remarkably like runes that held together this spiderweb of hunger. When it came at him, howling and flinging its icy fingers at the Fensena’s flesh, he snarled and leapt.
He might have been one of the lesser geistlords, but he was still more than a match for a simple mist witch. His teeth connected with the strands of the geist, and his own power was transferred to the knot of runic, shifting shapes. With a jerk of his head, the Fensena pulled the thing apart as if it were the ripe flesh of a caribou that had been sitting out under the sun for days.
It dissolved in on itself howling, leaving only a bitter taste in the coyote’s mouth. Regrettably there was no way to get rid of that, and generally why he avoided skirmishes with geists when he could.
The Fensena inclined his head and directed his senses to the building, which lay beyond the gardens. It smelled of death and there was fresh blood throughout every corridor. Whereas once, in his early days in this realm, he had reveled in it, now it disturbed him.
His long pink tongue lolled from one corner of his mouth, and the huge pants that he needed to draw air were quite distracting. He knew why too; this body had not much more time to run.
This was why the coyote geistlord no longer liked to travel to Vermillion; too many bodies were already occupied by other geists. His connection with human blood was tenuous at best, and it was very hard for him to take a host when there was already one of his fellows within. Another reason to dislike recent events.
With a long canine sigh, the Fensena trotted up what had been a well-manicured gravel path. Up ahead there were humans; he could smell them as well as sense them with his geist-sight, but they were in such disarray.
The coyote nudged open a door that should have been barred and guarded, and wandered into the corridors and hallways, where once the business of the Empire had been conducted. His nails clicked on the stone floor, and the smell of piss and desperation filled his nostrils.
As the Fensena moved through the palace, he thought about how it had come to this. The Rossin had been a ferocious force on the Otherside; devouring many of their kind. However, since he had taken up with the royal family he had been much subdued. The Fensena had found he had not needed his protection. Indeed, in this realm, the coyote had been quite free to wander, as he preferred. It had only been the shift in currents, the fractional thinning of the border between this world and the Otherside, that had signaled a change.
That powerful fool Derodak had made this happen when he decided the time was ripe to complete his plan to harness the geists, and take this world finally for his own. That in turn had set in motion a series of events that could bring the realm to an end. It would make the destruction heaped on this palace seem like a drop in a bucket.
It was amusing to the Fensena that the Rossin was now the one to try and save this realm, well . . . save it and cut a slice for himself; a particularly leonine slice. His jaws split in a canine smile. He would see the proud Rossin brought down from his high-and-mighty perch before this was all over—provided there was an opportunity to stop the Maker of Ways ripping reality open.
The Fensena turned his mind away from these dire thoughts and padded on up the hallway in the direction his nose was leading him. A few times he was forced to hide in shadows, and duck into damaged rooms to avoid people, but considering this was the center of the human Empire it was ridiculously easy.
The coyote found the stairwell that lay at the heart of the palace. This was part of the original fortress that had stood long before Emperor’s vanity built pleasure gardens and golden rooms above it. The deeper down the Fensena went the cooler and quieter it became, but the less he liked it. The faded murals on the walls were deeply etched and told stories of his kind and the humans that had sought to control them.
Many things had been buried down here beneath the palace; things that the various Emperors of Arkaym had wanted hidden. Some had broken loose over that time, but there were still plenty of others that remained.
The Fensena stopped and paused at a smashed section of wall. His nose told him a geistlord had once been imprisoned here. His memory was not good for names, but he recalled a beautiful winged creature—one that had been very good at pretending to be what she was not.
The floor was now sloping down even farther, and the cavern walls were transitioning to rough from polished and carved. The flickering weirstone lights were also now few and far between. It didn’t matter; he needed no lights to see by. He had both animal and geist-vision to guide him.
The Fensena stopped at the place where all pretense at building ended, and the Ancient caverns began. The roots of the palace were down here. His ears flattened on his head as he looked up at an image carved above the entrance. That it stood open was yet another sign that the Emperor was losing his grip. This place had always been sealed as long as Vermillion had an Emperor to sit on the red throne high above. Now Kaleva had gone mad, the locks were all sprung—just as the Rossin had told the Fensena they would be.