The sunrise was flickering off the ice, and Sorcha was still huddled at the stern in her fur cloak, a dark shadow except for the copper blaze of her hair. Raed paused as he came up the stairs of the quarterdeck. She had to be aware of his presence, but she did not turn.
As he watched, Sorcha flicked the remains of her cigar over the side. “Well, that was the last one of those.” She sighed theatrically.
“I have some in my cabin,” he offered, walking over to stand at her back. “I acquired them off a pirate captain.”
Sorcha glanced up at him. “No honor among thieves, then?”
Raed laughed despite himself. This Deacon was as prickly as a desert cactus. Leaning on the gunwales, he stared over the ice. It was beautiful in a threatening kind of way, like shattered gleaming glass as far as the eye could see.
“I don’t suppose you are going to be able to careen your ship now.” Sorcha pulled her legs up close to her on the bench in a curiously childlike gesture.
“Now, that would be rather foolish under the circumstances.”
She shrugged. “You could. After all, it doesn’t look like anyone is going anywhere for a while.”
“Which leaves us with another problem. What do we do about these annoyed townsfolk? They outnumber us by quite a bit, and not all of my crew are fighters.”
They were both silent a moment. The sun was finally free of the ice, but Deacon Sorcha Faris was not looking at it. She was looking at him with an expression he interpreted as trust. Something had definitely changed between them back in the tunnel.
Both of them glanced up at the sudden creak of a step. Aachon, his weirstone clenched in one hand, had managed to walk up on them unnoticed. The Pretender knew by his expression that he did not like the look of the situation he thought he’d stumbled into. His first mate knew him better than even his own father, and he felt incredibly uncomfortable under that dark gaze.
Still, on the surface Raed managed not to reveal that, keeping his voice level when he spoke. “What is it, Aachon?”
“I thought you’d like to see this,” the older man replied and gestured toward the quay. Quickly, Raed and Sorcha scrambled down to where a group of the crew was leaning over the side.
Jocryn, with his shock of balding red hair, was yelling something down to someone on the dock. For a second Raed thought that a battle was about to break out. That was, until he heard, “No, I need more fresh kale, my friend. These mouths need feeding, you know, and sharpish.” As Dominion’s cook, Jocryn was in a constant battle to keep the vessel provisioned, ideally with supplies that wouldn’t be—literally—thrown back in his face.
Sorcha yanked at Raed’s sleeve. “Townsfolk.” Her look was still feral, and he remembered her display on the walls of the Priory with sudden vividness. Quickly, he looked her over. The tell-tale blue cloak was in his cabin, and nothing about her screamed Deacon . . . except for one thing. When he reached out and took her badge of office from her shoulder, he thought he was about to get another slap. Perhaps even a punch.
“Wait.” He held up one hand. “You’ve just discovered the Priory is not what it seems. Maybe the townspeople aren’t, either.”
“Your point—and quickly?”
“The Deacons are not exactly popular here.” Raed pressed the badge into her hand. “So perhaps a little discretion would be sensible right now.”
Sorcha’s fingers tightened on her badge but she gave a little nod. “Very well, then, but I think these might also be a bit of a giveaway.” The Gauntlets.
Raed snorted. “I was not about to try and take those off you.”
“Sensible.” A ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she loosened her shirt and tucked them underneath, against her skin; his eyes followed the Gauntlets’ progress. Ancients, he had been naked next to her only hours ago.
The crew were now yelling at Jocryn, while he continued to negotiate with the unseen person down on the dock. Food was the only thing that crew ever argued about. A long time at sea had only sharpened their desire for decent rations, and their confinement on Dominion had made them somewhat cranky.
Sorcha and Raed managed to get through to the crowd to see what was going on below. The person standing on the dock was a young man, his face just bursting with its first hair. Around him were several baskets stuffed with fresh food, making the crew go almost insane with delight. Aachon had ordered the gangway pulled up and no one allowed on board, so how exactly this youngster was going to deliver his produce to Jocryn was an interesting question.
“Lad,” Raed called down, “are you the only grocer in Ulrich?”
The boy looked down at his baskets, realizing that their small contents were not going be to able to feed the entire crew. “No, sir,” he replied after a minute. “These are a sample. My father will bring more this afternoon.”
“Why not this morning?” Sorcha leaned down over the side, her unbound bronze hair falling off one shoulder. Without her cloak, badge or Gauntlets, she was simply a beautiful woman, and the way the grocer’s lad was blushing, he’d not been questioned by many of those in his life. “Is he up at the Priory with the others?”
Even from this distance the boy looked shocked. “No, ma’am . . . He . . . he is with my sister.” This last part was muttered.
Sorcha stiffened. “The lad has a strange aura,” she said to Raed softly. “Touched by a geist.”
Before he could stop her, the Deacon had swung her legs over the side and dropped down next to the boy. Being on the high tide, it was quite a distance and an impressive physical feat. The lad leapt back in shock and knocked over several of his baskets. Leaning over the side, Raed watched cautiously. He doubted that one grocer was going to be much danger to the Deacon, but if he broke and ran for his kin, there could be a mob surrounding Dominion in very short order.
From this distance he couldn’t hear what Sorcha was saying. At their captain’s gesture, the crew scrambled to thrust out the gangway. She was talking to the lad earnestly with one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. At first he looked very tense, ready to make a dash for it, but as Sorcha continued he began to nod and relax. By the time Raed and Aachon had lowered the gangway and jogged down to where they were, the lad was positively calm. The Pretender was surprised. He’d never seen any sign of diplomacy from the Deacon before, but perhaps the danger her partner was in had tempered her mood.
Sorcha turned to them. “I’ve told Wailace here that my partner and I are not from the Priory. You can vouch for that, Captain Rossin?”
The lad’s wide eyes focused intently on him. “Indeed. We brought Deacon Sorcha from the South, direct from the Arch Abbey itself.”
The grocer’s lad let out a sigh and then abruptly grabbed hold of Sorcha. “You must come back to our house, then. My sister . . .”
“No need to explain.” Sorcha shoved her hand once more into her shirt and pulled out her Gauntlets. The appearance of these talismans made the lad’s eyes light up, or maybe it had been the glimpse of the top of her pale breast.
The Deacon and the stunned lad turned and trotted back up the street. He’d not been invited, but Raed was certainly not about to let Sorcha go anywhere without him. He told himself it was because of her ability to dismiss the Rossin.
“Look after the crew.” He squeezed Aachon’s upper arm. “Keep them on the ship a bit longer, just in case.”
His first mate fingered his weirstone’s bag and nodded somberly. They both knew that nowhere was safe. “Be careful, my prince,” was all he said.
Raed, as he turned and raced after Sorcha, only wished that he could promise such a thing.
After the strangeness of the last day, Sorcha had been reassured to see something familiar in Wailace’s eyes—at last, something normal. Relief. After she’d told him the story, he had willingly grasped it. Whatever the Priory had done, they had not quite eroded the built-in faith in the Order.
This time, as she followed him into the town, there were even fewer signs of life.
“Tell me when the first attacks came.” She actually had to tug the young man back to slow him down. “I need to have information if I am to help your sister.”
He gulped a minute, clearing his throat and shaking his head. “They—they began slowly at first, a month ago. We thought our Deacons would protect us.”
“A month.” Sorcha wished Merrick was here. He would perhaps see the significance of that more than she could.
“Where are we going?” Raed had caught up with them at a jog, neither out of breath nor put off by the glare she shot him.
She waved at Wailace to lead on, while whispering at the Pretender out of the corner of her mouth. It was never good to expose frailty in front of a distressed next of kin. “What are you doing here?”
“You don’t have a partner at the moment”—he grinned—“so I am standing in for Merrick. He would want me to keep an eye on you.”
“By the Bones,” Sorcha hissed, “you are more useless in this than a fifth leg on a dog.”
“Now you’re just hurting my feelings.”
The lilt of his voice, charming and roguish at the same time, should have irritated her, but instead her mind treated her to a recollection of his nakedness and the feeling of his mouth on hers. Ridiculous.
“Since you insist on being here,” she asked as evenly as possible through gritted teeth, “may we just concentrate on helping this boy and his family?”
He was mercifully silent for a bit, though she was still painfully aware of his presence. It was almost a relief to get to the grocer’s house.
Wailace stood by the door, talking to a man who sat slumped on the ground, leaning against the wall of the house with his head in his hands. Sorcha walked up slowly and stopped to look down at him. His eyes were red-rimmed and haunted, his hand trembling. “Can you—” He cleared his throat. “Can you help my daughter?”
She knew better than to offer any definitives. “I promise to try.”
“She—” The father looked away, shame burning on his face. “She says things that . . .”
Sorcha had seen plenty of distraught relatives who had been forced to do terrible things, so she was partly ready for what lay within. “I understand.” She gave his shoulder a light squeeze, and asked the one question she needed to have answered. “What’s her name?”
“Anai,” he whispered, clutching his son’s hand.
Sorcha let him nurse his shame and distress. It wasn’t her job to comfort the kin, and now at least she had a familiar task at hand.
The door creaked open; the door always creaked. It was a given. Inside, there was an incredible plunge in temperature, enough to make her wish that she’d stopped to gather her cloak. Accompanying it was a smell, a pungent odor that assailed her mortal senses.
“Ancients, what is that stench?” Raed, who had probably experienced plenty of vile odors in his time on board ship, held his arm up over his nose.
It was certainly one of the stronger ones she’d encountered in her time in the Order. The unliving were fond of odor because it was one of the most evocative senses. This one was, appropriately enough, very like ripe fish heads—ones that had been out in the sun for a few days. But there was something else; the scent of shit—a sure sign of the unliving.
Sorcha already knew what she would find when she followed her nose to the locked door leading down into a root cellar. She turned about and warned Raed. “Whatever you do, Pretender, keep quiet.”
“Is there anything more useful I can do?” he gasped through his mouth.
She gave a little shrug. She wasn’t about to tell him that she was grateful not to be alone. “You can watch my back, for what good it will do.”
Sorcha knocked the lock open and stepped inside. It was as expected. The cellar had been cleared of everything; drag marks in the ground showed where the grocer’s stock had been quickly shifted. The small window at the far end had been barricaded from the outside, and the light was consequently gray and limited. Against the far wall was where they had chosen to shackle their daughter.
She could only have been about eight or nine years old, curled up on the bare floor sniffling to herself, her head hanging down with tangled copper hair obscuring her features. Her clothing was stained and torn, as if she had been at the center of some violent storm. It was a sight to soften the hardest heart.
Sorcha, however, was not fooled, even though the few maternal instincts she possessed kicked in every time a child was involved. Instead, she jerked her head at Raed, indicating that he could come in. When he made to go to the girl, she stopped him with one hand on his chest; a silent gesture that reminded him to be quiet.
The troublesome pirate frowned, but thankfully remained still by the door.
Together they stood there for a few minutes, breathing in the fetid odor and waiting for the child to stop crying. Finally she drew in a ragged hiccupping breath and looked up at them. Her eyes gleamed like a cat’s in the dimness of the cellar, but the light they were reflecting was not from this world.
Sorcha did not put on her Gauntlets, but instead went over to the girl and knelt down. The child’s lips drew back in a feral snarl while her head tilted at a knowing angle. The Deacon and the unliving creature inside the girl regarded each other; she with cool professionalism and it with undisguised hatred.
Finally, the Pretender couldn’t contain himself any longer. “What is it?”
The girl’s eye fell on Raed and she snarled, surging upward only to be brought back to the ground with a jerk as her chains snapped taut. It was good that her parents had been vigilant.
“A poltern, I think.” Sorcha, having stepped back smartly, now sat down on the ground two feet away from the thrashing girl.
“Then why . . .” He cleared his throat. “What about the Rossin?”
“This particular geist is buried very deep inside, barely any of it is actually in this world. Very much like a parasitic worm. You should be safe enough.”
He came to stand behind her, obviously taking her request to watch her back seriously. “And what about the girl?”
Anai’s lips stretched wide, but no words came out; polterns were not the most verbose of the geists. Instead the air grew even colder, an attempt to drive them out without expending too much of its energy or giving away its location.
The Deacon flicked a sharp gaze at Raed. “Remember the bit where I told you to be quiet?”
He took the hint and stepped back into the shadows. She had to have the geist’s entire attention. Letting her Center drop away from her, she concentrated her vision on the creature. Seeing into a possessed being was hard. The geist could hide deep within the psyche of a person, and a child was more complicated still.
The changing facets of a still-forming personality made an ideal hiding place, so children were favored victims of the poltern. Sorcha knew immediately that she was ill equipped to judge the strength of this one with her Sight. The hollow space where Merrick should have been felt even more gaping now.
Finally, she retrieved her Center and sagged back with a sigh of annoyance. The geist, meanwhile, danced in the eyes of the child and looked smugger than a cat with a mouse in its mouth.
“What’s the matter?” Raed was pacing, showing that being this close to a geist was unnerving him. Sorcha could understand that.
Without stopping to explain, she got up and went out of the ripe cellar into the house; a welcome if slight respite from the strength of the odor. Everything lay in disorder out here. The family had been forced to keep their supplies in the rooms where they lived. The mother was coping with a possessed child and a house she could barely move about in.
Scrambling over boxes, Sorcha went into the kitchen to find something heavy but innocuous. The drawer of knives and cutlery was immediately discarded as something she didn’t want to arm a geist with. Anything breakable, like the stoneware dishes, could also be deadly, and they were not nearly heavy enough. Finally, she settled on an iron cooking pot that had probably been used for making jams in better times.
Spotting Raed as he stood watching her made her chuckle. “Afraid to be alone with a little girl?” she asked, struggling with the cooking pot. It was big enough, even, to boil the child in it.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I’m just enjoying watching you.” She gave him a look that could have melted lead, until he took the hint and strode over to help shift the large pot back into the cellar.
The gleaming eyes of the poltern stared at them with visible delight. Nothing pleased a geist as much as the ability to stymie a Deacon.
“What on earth is this for?” Raed grumbled as they positioned the pot to her liking, only a few feet away from the cellar’s occupant. “Planning to whip up some jam while we’re here?”
“You’ll see.” She jerked her head toward the girl, hopefully reminding him that they were not alone.
She slid on her Gauntlets, just in case this all went horribly wrong. For the sake of the girl and the structural integrity of the house, Sorcha hoped that everything would go smoothly. She prepared to use Aydien just in case.
Unlike Merrick, her Sight was a blunt object. The Deacon had no way of judging the strength of the poltern, hiding within the girl as it was. It would be an important thing for her to know. If she tried to remove a powerful geist from within the soul of a child, she could rip the girl’s psyche into nothing, but if it was a small one, she might be able to manage it.
First things first. “Whatever you do”—she glanced over her shoulder at the Pretender—“do not move unless something comes at you.”
He opened his mouth, ready with some smart remark no doubt, but closed it when he saw her stern look. Sorcha flicked her head back and activated Shayst. At the flare of green fire, the girl’s eyes grew impossibly large in her head, glittering like dark jewels. Sorcha felt the Otherside’s presence as an ice-cold breeze on her skin.
“Time for you to leave,” Sorcha growled between blue lips. The stench crashed about her, filling her nostrils and her enhanced senses in repulsive waves. At her back, she heard Raed choke back an oath. Every vile ounce of air was ordering her primitive brain to run, to flee before the horror of the geist. But training and experience were a stalwart defense against this assault.
With a flick of her wrist she brought one Gauntlet, burning with barely contained green light, up in the direction of the girl. The reaction was instantaneous. Dust whirled up around them and the air was suddenly full of tiny spinning debris. Little pebbles bounced off her exposed skin, but there was nothing much else in the room for the geist to use as a weapon. Except for one thing.
The huge cast iron pot wobbled in its place as the poltern screamed through the throat of the girl. The wind grew louder. The walls themselves seemed to swell like sails on a ship and the stench made Sorcha’s stomach churn like the worst kind of sea-sickness. And the pot, that pot that she and Raed had only been able to move together, swung upward in the grip of the geist. It flew at Sorcha, clanging and spinning, end over end.
She’d hoped the poltern was a small one, but had been prepared for the worst. As the pot tumbled through the air toward her, she seamlessly closed her right fist around Shayst, and with the other hand summoned Aydien. The pot smashed into the blue shield she’d summoned and bounced off, like some toy thrown by a child in the grip of a tantrum. The warmth of the rune filled the room, momentarily driving off the freezing miasma surrounding the geist; the unliving creature she had now convincingly identified as at least a level six poltern.
Little Anai was thrashing about in her chains like one dog being worried by another. Spittle and phlegm flew from her snarling mouth, while her eyes of reflecting darkness burned with utter hatred at Sorcha.
The Deacon had no choice now. As quickly as possible, she closed her fist on Aydien and once more summoned Shayst, the green light flashing from her left hand. The ripping of power from the geist was abrupt and unforgiving, but if she did not deny the poltern its strength as quickly as she could, the geist would turn on its foci. The rush of the Otherside into her was heady and delightful as ever, sending her pulse racing and blood surging through her veins.
“Ancients,” Raed whispered, going to where the thick cast iron pot lay upended on the floor. “It’s dented!”
The state of the cookware was the least of Sorcha’s worries. Anai was slumped on her side, tangled copper hair falling over a face slackened by unconsciousness.
“But you got the thing out of her?”
Slowly the Deacon shook her head. “No. There is a good reason why we work in pairs. Without Merrick, that is quite impossible. I cannot see where it is hiding to root it out.”
“Then it will be back?” The tone in the Pretender’s voice was sad. He could undoubtedly comprehend what the girl was going through.
“Yes, I am afraid so.” Sorcha bent and with the corner of her shirt wiped the spittle from Anai’s mouth and pushed her hair back behind her ear. “She must be incredibly strong to hold out so long against such a powerful poltern. If she survives, she would make a fine Deacon.”
“What?”
“The poltern are attracted to those children with talent. If the Order find such little ones, they are often brought into the Abbey for protection—most later become Deacons.” She glanced up at him in the half-light, and despite herself her voice was a little shaky. “It was how I became a member of the Order.”
“But if she is so powerful, why did the Prior not take her in?” His question was deliberately pointed.
“I think Aulis had other plans for her, or even”—Sorcha paused before being able to give voice to her darker fears—“or may have even caused this to happen.” She stood up and looked down at the girl. “Please do not give Aulis the title she doesn’t deserve. She is no Prior of the Order.”
“And the girl . . . Can you do anything for her?”
She was sick of feeling powerless; it was not the natural state for a Deacon. “No. She will wake with the poltern still in control. I have only given her some rest—hopefully enough to hold out a little longer.”
As Merrick descended the steps beneath the Priory, he felt the cold envelop him, banishing the warmth that had flooded him when he was near Nynnia. Writing decorated the walls to each side of him. Taking a deep breath, Merrick stopped at the last step to look at the scrawls. It was a protection cantrip, one that Sensitives were taught in those final months of training, and it was made in blood. This explained the blind spot in his awareness.
Once beyond the ring of the cantrip’s protection, his Sight flickered down the corridors, and it didn’t take long to find the body. The cellar was at the end of the corridor. The Deacon jogged toward it, his throat already dry. The door was locked, but Merrick carried his tiny toolkit everywhere out of habit so it took only a few moments with the brass implements to flick the mechanism open. The Sensitive must have been truly terrified because she had also barricaded herself in.
Merrick had to shove hard against it to get past the barrels she’d used. He knew that she was dead long before he actually saw her. Yet, the moment he burst in, for a blink of an eye, he considered that he’d been wrong. A pale shape flickered in the corner, the face turned toward Merrick in abject misery. The glimpse of her shade lasted only a moment, a full apparition that blinked back to the Otherside as soon as she had been seen. Whatever her name, she’d waited to be discovered.
The young Deacon was curled up in the dusty corner of the cellar. One of her hands, lying limp and red by her side, showed where she’d taken her own blood to write the cantrip. Her eyes were wide and bulging under cropped blond hair, while the Strop she’d been using hung slack and askew around her neck. It was charred as if it had been held over a flame.
Merrick shifted aside his cloak and glanced down at his own Strop, still firmly in its case. Until now there had been no call to use it, but as this whole mess was unraveling he was certain that would change.
Kneeling next to her, Merrick carefully slid her eyelids shut, avoiding touching the Strop. Only an Abbot could touch another’s talisman without repercussions. His attempt at dignity made no difference to a corpse, but not having to look into her ruined eyes made him feel a little more comfortable. He examined the scene as his training had taught him. She was wearing the emerald cloak, but underneath she was dressed in a light shift, the kind of thing a Deacon might well sleep in. Therefore she’d obviously got up hurriedly, stopping only to grab her cloak and Strop.
Cautiously he opened her curled, bloody left hand. The tips of four fingers were sliced almost down the bone in ragged cuts that indicated she’d been in a hurry—desperate for her own blood to save her. A small knife was discarded only a few feet away, its dull blade darkened with blood. It was not much of a weapon, more like something used at the dinner table than for eldritch spells. He could see no other wounds immediately visible.
Merrick pressed his own finger to her flesh. She was cold, but it was clear she hadn’t died in the initial attack. She could have come upstairs at any time for help—and yet she hadn’t.
Sitting back on his heels, the living Deacon ran his eyes once more over the scene to seek out anything he may have missed, but the body before him seemed to have already revealed all it could. The Strop was another matter. Such an intimate item, so personally connected with another Sensitive, and she had actually died wearing it. Merrick was not foolish enough to pick it up, even though it looked destroyed.
A noise, the slightest noise in the ether, made him spin around on his heels and reach for his saber. It was nothing mortal. Some other part of the dead Sensitive still lingered in the dimness of the cellar. Carefully Merrick rose to his feet.
The unliving thing was scuttling among the barrels like an ill-proportioned rat. He knew it instantly—a darkling. Mortals, when touched at the moment of death by the Otherside, usually passed through into it. But some, those touched by the unliving, became shades. The darkling was a form of shade, one created specifically from Sensitives. If they were killed while their Center was away from their body, it would shatter and the pieces could become darklings.
Merrick quickly brought his Center back to him. He didn’t want to risk the same thing happening to him; even death was preferable to that. He knew he should lay down some light cantrips of his own, go back upstairs and get one of the Actives to exorcise the darkling as quickly as possible.
It was only the smallest of geists, a slice of pure blackness that seemed unable to find its way out of the room. It had no physical presence, but as it stumbled around the barrels rolled sideways and the dust from the floor kicked up. He actually felt sorry for it.
Caught in a moment of indecision, he glanced over at his dead fellow Sensitive. If the Actives came down here, they would kick the darkling back to the Otherside within moments, and it was the only portion of the nameless Deacon left.
“Bones,” he swore at his own recklessness. His tutors back in the Abbey would have a fit at what he was about to do.
Merrick held out his hand to the darkling—more than that, he stretched out his Center to it. The shade spun around, sensing warmth and Sensitivity; it was drawn to it like a mad magnet.
The portion of the dead woman rushed into Merrick, locking itself into his Center. To take a piece of the Otherside in like that was prohibited by everything the Abbey taught, but the time to obey prohibitions was long past. If the unliving had stopped following the rules, then so would he.
The darkling merged with him, becoming part of his own soul; a tiny sliver like a scar that he would bear forever. But it brought with it memories, flashes of what the young female Deacon had seen.
Sweat broke out on Merrick’s forehead. Shakily he got up and went to the body. “Illas,” he named her softly. “Poor brave Illas.”
Gently he rolled her over. Thanks to the darkling, he knew what would be under there, but still he had to see.
The Deacon’s corpse made a gentle sighing noise as the final air was squeezed from her lungs. Beneath were the marks he’d known would be there, but that he feared.
Five deep gouges had wrecked the stone, tearing it as easily as cloth. They had passed through the Deacon’s body, destroying her but leaving not a mark on her. Only the stone revealed what had actually killed her.
Merrick let out a ragged breath and slumped to his haunches, staring at those five marks. They were so familiar and had haunted his nightmares since he was seven. Five gouges in stone, just the same as had been carved above the stairs where his father had stood on that terrible night. They’d summoned a Deacon all the way from Delmaire to try to help him, and it had ended in disaster. Distantly, he heard himself let out a strangled gasp.
He delved suddenly and dangerously into the darkling’s memory. It was not the moment of her death that Deacon Illas had desperately tried to preserve; it was not even the memory of the night she had died.
Through the eyes of his compatriot, Merrick watched the Prior Aulis give the command—the command that Illas could not obey. It was this command that had sent her fleeing in terror in the dead of night, rather than join the rest of the Priory at morning Matins.
The attack on the Sensitives had not been a surprise. It had been deliberate, arranged by the Prior as a way of summoning a being from the Otherside.
Merrick came to himself, choking on disbelief and shock. This was why Illas had risked creating a darkling; her darkling was a bottle cast adrift on the sea, seeking a home and someone to believe her story.
He was shaking, terrified of what he had found. This was a cursed way for him to get an introduction to the life of a working Deacon. Struggling to his feet, Merrick felt the cellar spinning around him. He’d grab Nynnia and find Sorcha. Only together could they decide what to do with this rebellious and corrupted Priory.
“Well, aren’t you the little investigator?” The sound of Aulis’ voice behind him made Merrick jerk straight. Wheeling around, he saw Aulis and three of her Actives framed in the doorway. He moved to draw his saber, an instinct that seemed justified even if it was against his own kind.
The room shimmered with heat and the air cracked with power. Merrick didn’t have his Center open, but he caught a glimpse of one of the Actives raising a Gauntleted hand even as Merrick was slammed back against the wall and held there like an insect. It was Deiyant, the ninth Rune of Dominion, and they had used it against him. Merrick screamed out in shock more than pain.
Knowing it was useless, Merrick struggled nevertheless, furious and raging. His fingers arched, desperate to reach his Strop and invoke the final solution taught to every Sensitive.
Aulis, the Prior who had seemed impassive but honest, now grinned at him, crossing the distance and ripping the box containing his talisman from his belt. “You won’t be needing that.”
“Abomination,” Merrick yelled fruitlessly. “Fallen into the clutches of the unliving, you sacrificed your own Sensitives. Kill me if you like. It will make no difference . . .”
“Ah, but it will.” She smiled up at him. “It will most certainly make a difference. Our task is not done here, and you, young Deacon, will help us complete it.”
Merrick would have denied it, but a sickening realization was growing in him. Whatever this corrupted Prior was planning for him, it did not require his permission. His only chance was to reach Sorcha across the Bond, warn her if he could . . .
The rune Deiyant tightened around his throat. He was choking and twitching. His Sight twisted and blurred; the one thing every Sensitive relied on was suddenly being taken away. He reached out desperately for his partner, hoping despite it all that they couldn’t stop him. Sorcha, be careful, Sorcha. They are . . . And then all was silent.