His mother was looking at him, her eyes swimming with tears but also something else: the mad determination for her children to live. At her side her fingertips brushed her dress, pulling it away a little, revealing the fact that tucked in tightly against her wrist, nestled in the palm of her hand, was a knife. It was stained with her blood and must have been what she had defended herself with before. It was not much, but the set of her jaw told her son that she would not let her children die without a struggle.
Merrick swallowed hard. “But why would you want that? Your Order fights the geists too.”
“We did once,” the female Deacon broke in, “until we realized we could do so much more. We could use them. We could be the ones in control of the whole Empire.”
Her superior shot her a look that instantly silenced her, but he seemed happy to finish the conversation. “You stopped the Murashev, Deacon Chambers. So we had to find other ways. We are not so foolish as to make the same mistake we did last century.”
Merrick thought of the book back at the Chiomese Abbey. “The people rose against you. They would not tolerate you using the geists.”
“Be on the winning side, Merrick.” The man’s gray eyes were harder than stone, his voice smooth and alluring. This man had charisma and power; he was used to being obeyed. “You became a Deacon to make a difference—with us you can change the world for the better.”
“You are the only one of those fools we have offered to join us.” The female Deacon had spoken. Her voice held a strange accent that Merrick, despite all his training, could not quite place. Her hair was pure white, though her face looked no more than twenty.
Merrick was now only ten feet from them, looking far more confident that he felt. If he chose the wrong words, his mother, his unborn half brother and he would die in this place.
He cleared his throat. “No offense, but the Native Order has been dead for at least a generation—what could you offer me that my current Order does not?”
“We know ?”
Merrick glimpsed a face, misty and terrified, pressed into it. It was a shade, a person trapped within.
“We have learned the art of using geist and weirstone together in ways that not even the Ancients could have imagined.” The lead Deacon was very pleased with himself, though such a thing was the worst abomination that Merrick could imagine.
He was totally unable to contain his reaction. “But you trap souls—human souls—in order to do it!”
“Not just human,” the woman said softly, “but geists too.”
This was why the population had turned against the Native Order. This was why the Rossin family had set about destroying them. And these Deacons thought they saw something in him. “You would set yourselves up as tyrants!” he barked, hand clenching tightly on his sword hilt, even though he knew it was useless.
Yet, by the Bones, he did have another weapon: the wild talent. He’d spent months trying to avoid thinking of it. The shameful thing that had welled out of him on the street in Vermillion. Merrick had never spoken of it, even with Sorcha. Any sign of such a talent would result in ejection from the Order and then most probably imprisonment.
It was not his nature to kill, so he gave them one final chance. “But you can still turn back.” He held out his hand. “Give me the woman and let me set Chioma to rights.”
The native Deacon grinned. “What is she to you, Deacon Chambers? Another slut of a corrupt Prince. We can offer you the world.”
The slur was enough to set Japhne off. With a shriek of outrage, she plunged her blade down into the foot of the man holding her. The knife was small but obviously very sharp. Her captor bellowed in agony as it skewered him to the floor.
Displaying incredible athleticism, Merrick’s mother came off the floor and raced toward him. Yet she was clever, keeping to the side of the tunnel in order to give him a clean line of sight. The heretic Deacons were throwing back their cloaks and reaching for their weirstones, but he was faster. Merrick fired off a shot that clipped the younger man in the shoulder and then cocked the weapon and fired again. The woman went down with an inch-wide hole blasted in her head—it looked like a masterly shot, but Merrick had been aiming for the hawk-nosed man.
It wasn’t enough—he was still just a Sensitive—and they would reach for runes or something even direr. So, in desperation, Deacon Chambers reached deep within himself and tried to find the hidden spark.
It was like grasping a fish in murky water. He thought of the moment it had welled up inside him. He thought of Nynnia and her own mysterious powers. And finally he thought of his mother dying down here in the dark when she had so much to live for after so long without.
And then he felt it, waves of power bubbling up from some unexplored place within himself. The Deacons before him were full of arrogance, confidence in their own power and the situation they had him in.
It was so easy to turn that confidence into crippling fear, like flipping a coin from heads to tails—even though what he was really doing was close to scrambling their brains. Merrick realized he should have been horrified both at what he was doing and its ease—but they had threatened his family—nothing was off limits>
Suddenly the centered Deacons were anything but. They were twisted, sobbing, terrified at the dark they had created. Merrick had no way of telling if they could fight back against his wild talent, but he was taking no chances. “Mother.” He ran forward and grabbed her hand. He had no idea how long what he had done would last.
The darkness was so complete that only the barest hint of the tunnel they were in revealed itself to Merrick’s Sight, and worse there was no end to it.
“We should be back to the main pipe by now,” he muttered under his breath. “I don’t understand it.”
“We’re not in Chioma.” Japhne wheezed at his side. How his mother would have such an idea Merrick could not afford to stop and ask. Yet he feared she was right. Weirstones and even runes could be used for such things.
Screams rang out from behind them, the sounds of the Deacons but higher-pitched—the sound of pain and death rather than just fear. Whatever shackles they had put on their Beast had obviously required concentration.
Merrick was not sorry for them. Any who chose the path of consorting with the Otherside deserved their fate. However, he knew the creature would pursue them now that it was done with its tormentors.
He slipped his arm around his mother. “Then we have to find the entrance—it must go both ways for them to come and go into the palace.”
She nodded against his shoulder, but her breath was coming in ragged gasps. Merrick had little experience, but he was fairly sure that heavily pregnant women should not be running for their lives in the dark.
And then the sound he had feared and half expected came; the high-pitched whine of a geist on the hunt. It was like claws on glass—but several types of geist had similar sorts of calls.
His mother stumbled and would have gone to her knees without Merrick catching her. The ground underfoot was now getting slippery, and she cursed. “If only I was younger; if only I could see!” It took a lot to get his mother upset, but she was obviously at the end of her tether.
“It’s not much farther,” Merrick lied. His Center was only giving him details of the cave walls a mere five feet in front of them.
Japhne tripped again, and the sound drew closer, along with a wave of cold so intense it might have come from the heart of winter. For the first time in his life Merrick regretted being a Sensitive. If Sorcha was here alone with the heavily pregnant woman, she would have at least been able to protect her.
“Leave me.” Japhne tugged on his cloak, and he didn’t need to see her face to know it would be racked with pain. As a mother she wanted to protect her unborn child, but she also wanted him to protect himself. It was a decision no mother should have to make. “Run.”