Lepzig’s brow furrowed at that, but he was part of the Imperial Fleet and used to obeying orders. Aachon knew how lucky they were to have the right papers as this man did look the sort for protocol.
“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.