Onika called the remaining members of his guard, told them to follow after the Deacon, and treat him as they would their Prince. They were all well trained and obeyed without question.
The doors were shut, and without turning, she listened to Onika’s footsteps walking on the polished stone toward her. She was not without allies, even if she still didn’t have the full measure of them.
Sorcha contemplated the Prince of Chioma, hidden behind his swaying mask. “So, how difficult is it going to be getting into this Temple?”
“I think you have seen I am not without my own resources.” His voice was hard, distant and worthy of a god. “It was how I stopped the mob getting into the throne room, after all. The trouble will be getting to the desert Temple in time. Unfortunately, I do not have wings.”
It was hard to tell if he was attempting some kind of joke—certainly Sorcha was not about to ask him to remove the mask, and besides she did have an idea.
“Tell me, Your Highness—have you ever traveled by Imperial Dirigible? It is quite the way to fly.”
His low chuckle was the most cheery noise Deacon Sorcha Faris has heard in many, many hours.
TWENTY-SEVEN
A Son’s Love
Walking away from Sorcha was hard, and Merrick was afraid to do it. Everything that he had ever been taught told him to stay with her—but a child’s love for his mother went deeper even than that. It was certainly not a situation he had ever envisaged, but if they found Japhne quickly enough, then he should be able to get back to his partner before she faced the goddess.
The palace was not making Merrick feel confident about his goals, though. He kept his Center open, but all he captured was the feeling of panic and terror.
“Sir.” One of the guards, by his insignia a sergeant, glanced around the corner of the corridor. “If you don’t mind me saying, don’t you Deacons always travel in pairs?”
Merrick could smell the fear coming off the man; these guards were trained to deal with assassins, rabble-rousers, and maybe a catfight between the Prince’s women. “What’s your name, soldier?”
“Dael.” His eyes flickered uncertainly to Merrick.
“Well, Dael”—Merrick led them around the corridor brusquely, communicating certainty he didn’t feel—“while members of my Order do indeed customarily travel together—we are also trained to look after ourselves.” He left out the bit about the strange Bond and the power it gave him and Sorcha over and above a normal Deacon.
They reached the harem to find the doors swinging open and a dead eunuch in the garden, but it was another direction that interested Merrick. There in the disturbed gravel of the once immaculate path he found what he was looking for—a single tiny drop of blood.
He bent and held his open hand over it. It was hers, and Merrick would not permit himself to think about the circumstances in which it might have landed there; the thing that mattered was it was just one tiny drop. This was no murder scene. Aiemm, the Second Rune of Sight, flared in his mind, and he looked back in time to his mother’s terror.
Running, she was running, and someone pursued her. The cut in her hand was tiny, one slip of the knife she’d used to defend herself. She held it tightly, the pain inconsequential in her panic. Her pursuers were cloaked, even in the heat of the garden, and her stride was awkward this late in her pregnancy.
Merrick opened his eyes. She hadn’t seen; they weren’t just chasing her—they were herding her.
“Quickly.” He stood up. “There is still time.”
It was down into the tunnels once again—that was where they had harried his mother to, like so many sheepdogs. Except he suspected these dogs would bite.
Merrick’s mind raced, and not just with the unnaturalness of this situation; he was thinking of a time when he had lost another parent.
The taste of remembered fear filled his mouth, and suddenly he was that little boy hiding behind a tapestry and watching his father being ripped apart by something from the Otherside. He hadn’t cried, hadn’t uttered a word, but he recalled the anguish. His mother’s sobs had seemed to have no end, all through his childhood. And finally he summoned up the image of Japhne of a few nights before, sitting on the end of the bed, smiling with genuine happiness. He had never thought to see that look on her face again. He had thought she would never see his face again.
He swallowed hard on the knot of fear in his throat. Remaining calm was the only course now—if not, his mother would be lost.
“Down here,” he barked as they turned the final corner of the final staircase and reached the tunnel from which Nynnia had taken him. Something had reached out to grab him then, and she had pulled him through time and space to save him. Merrick could only hope she would understand why he was now stepping right into the jaws of that trap.
The guards waited patiently as he stared down into the broken maw of the storm-water pipe that had collapsed under his feet what felt like an age ago now. His Center was wide and open, so he easily found another splatter of blood—this one larger. Japhne had placed her hand right there and somehow lowered herself down into the tunnel. It was quite a feat for a woman seven months into her pregnancy—but there was nothing like being pursued to provide motivation.
His mother might have been a noble lady, but she had never been one to stick to needlepoint—it was one of the reasons she had been such trouble for her brother to marry off. When Merrick’s father had been alive and in his own senses, she had ridden often to the hunt with him. Still, running for her life in the dark tunnels under Orinthal while heavily pregnant was something no one trained for.
“Light your lanterns,” Merrick instructed the guards over one shoulder. As a Deacon he didn’t need light to see, but the others would. Three of the ten guards at his back took hooded lanterns from the walls of the corridor, while others nervously waited for his next instruction.
When Merrick gave it, he knew that they wouldn’t like it. “Follow me.” And then he swung down into the pipe. He had never actually hit the bottom before; Nynnia had been very accurate when she snatched him away.
It was pitch-black, but with his Center open he could feel so many more details than mere human sight could give him. When the guards dropped down behind him, he barely registered their arrival.
The tunnel was old, more ancient than even the palace above, and had been made with great care. The whispers of the makers, even after centuries, still clung to the curved brick walls. The water at the bottom was only an ankle-deep trickle, and thankfully this was not part of the smaller sewage systems that burrowed above this grand pipe.
“This carries flash flood waters away from the palace,” one of the guards muttered. “I pray there is nothing happening in the mountains while we are down here.”
Despite the serious situation, Merrick’s lips twitched in a faint smile. With the kingdom gone to chaos above them, the guard was worried about the weather? If rain came, then it would wash all of them away before they had time to care.
No sign of his mother or any other human was on the ether, but there were plenty of rats and crawling creatures in the pipe to keep them company. Merrick pushed harder with his Center, burrowing into their mercurial brains in which thoughts ran like water, but the most important ones were for survival.
It was possible for some people and geists to erase their passing in the ether—not common but possible. However, everything that walked or scurried on the earth had a memory, even if it was a small one, and that was far harder to erase.