Raed turned and saw what she meant; around Raed and the old woman was a community of people, all thrown together by conflict, but still getting on, doing things, looking after one another. Lay Brothers caring for the sick and the injured while others came in bringing them food and supplies. It was—when examined closely—a well-oiled machine.
A machine. The Rossin’s voice bubbled to the surface. The Beast was nearer today than any day before, a consequence of breaking loose and not having fed, Raed assumed. A sharp tang caught his attention, and it was not a natural substance that burned his nostrils.
Dropping his pestle back to the bench, Raed turned as if he were being pulled on a string. “Excuse me,” he murmured to Madame Vashill, and he began to circle the room like a dog seeking a bone.
Lay Brothers shot looks at him—mostly annoyed that he was in their domain—but they kept out of his way. The Young Pretender ignored them all. Instead, he began to listen to the Beast inside him. The geistlord was, after all, more powerful than he and had sharper instincts. It stung him to admit that—but there it was.
A strange place to bring her leftovers. The Rossin growled, shifting deep inside Raed, who knew at once he was speaking of Sorcha. He felt the Beast was uncomfortable too. A bastion of her greatest enemy.
It was hard for Raed to talk to the creature without seeming like he had run mad. The lay Brothers were eagle-eyed for such things and might whip him off into a bed if he wasn’t careful.
“The Circle had all these outposts originally,” he hissed as he made a great show of peering at the shelf of ointments and lotions. “She hardly had a choice.”
Then she shouldn’t be surprised with what happened two nights ago. The Rossin sounded very self-satisfied.
Ignoring the Rossin’s barbed observation, Raed nonetheless proceeded with a little more caution. The sense of unease he and the Rossin shared led him over to a rack of shelves on the far wall. At present they were stocked with the lay Brothers’ meager supply of liniments and ointments. They barely took up a corner of this vast shelf.
Raed ran his eyes over the rack suspiciously up close and then stepped back to examine how it stood against the wall. His father’s rickety palace had been full of hidden rooms and corridors, and he wondered if it was the same in the citadel.
He was certain that the smell and the sense of unease were coming from here. Raed shot a glance over his shoulder, to ascertain that no one was watching him, and then ran his hands over the wood.
The shelves were beautifully carved with all manner of forms that were obviously meant to be various geists; there was the pair of staring malevolent eyes that had to be a darkling, the spinning whirlwind of a vortex, and one he knew very well, the beautiful, deadly form of a Murashev in all her painful glory.
And everywhere on the bookshelf were the stars that were the symbol of the Ancient Native Order. Raed frowned. The fact that the lay Brothers were moving around, ignoring him and this bookcase meant that they had complete confidence in it. Sorcha and her Sensitives had carefully examined every surface of the citadel before they’d moved into it and made it their base.
They would not have missed any kind of cantrips or runes.
That is because they refuse to acknowledge the rest, the Rossin purred into his brain.
“Rest?” Raed whispered under his breath.
You saw the pitiful Sensitive become not so pitiful. You saw it and decided to ignore it. You never questioned what it meant. The Rossin dug up the memory that he had brushed aside; how Merrick had brought a whole street of people to their knees outside the Emperor’s prison.
He rubbed the space between his eyebrows and muttered into his shoulder, “What does that have to do with this?”
You will see. Look a little deeper. Remember who you are. Even these Deacons do not come from a lineage as great as yours.
It was the first time he’d ever heard the Rossin call his family great—mostly the Beast just belittled them as traitors and weak. Raed let out a faint snort as he realized that most likely the Beast was talking about his own involvement with his ancestors. Literally, his blood was in the Rossin line.
Putting that aside, Raed leaned forward and examined the shelf. He recognized most of the geists, but one that stood out to him was his own sigil. It was the one that the Dominion had sailed under—the rampant Rossin. Without thinking overly on it, Raed reached out and traced the shape of it. Under his fingers it felt sharp. It was a curious thing to see here in the remains of an old citadel of the Order—and what’s more, it looked freshly carved.
Raed was about to turn around and inquire if anyone else had noticed this, when the world went cloudy and gray. The hustle and bustle of the lay Brothers and their patients faded to incomplete shadows, while the sounds reached him as muted whispers.
Move! The Rossin was like a sharp burr under his skin, but one he could not shake or rip off. Hesitantly, Raed took a step forward. He knew about the rune Voishem, but the fact that he was experiencing it firsthand—without an Active Deacon—was terrifying.
You have his Blood, but you do not know that you are not the only one.
He didn’t need to ask whose blood. Merrick and Sorcha had told him all about Derodak and the fact that he was the first Emperor. The knowledge settled in his stomach like a stone.
The Rossin remained silent.
The sensation of moving through the wall was every bit as unpleasant as Sorcha had described it to him; every particle of his being screamed to turn and race back to the real world. The image of being trapped in stone by this abrupt appearance of Voishem was foremost in his mind.
However, the Young Pretender did not have time to panic because the stone wall behind the shelves was not thick at all. He pushed through and arrived on the other side. As he reappeared back into the normal physical world, he glanced back at the wall he had just passed through. Even though Raed knew it was true, he couldn’t help running his hand over the rough rock.
Someone had made Voishem into the wall itself, perhaps to avoid detection from the Sensitives outside. Raed’s jaw tightened as he realized there could only be one group capable of crafting such a thing—the very people who had let in chaos the night before.
Raed flicked his head around, realizing that a faint light was gleaming in the tunnel he now occupied. This, clearly, was how the saboteur had infiltrated the citadel.
That lying traitor, Derodak! The great cat sounded almost as angry as Sorcha had been. The Rossin’s hatred of the Circle of Stars was embedded in more than just recent events. It was all because Derodak, their leader, had been both first Emperor and first Deacon, and it was he who the Rossin had made the deal with. Apparently being trapped in the Imperial bloodline was not what the geistlord had envisaged when he had struck the deal with the first Emperor. He still carried an intense hatred for Derodak and anything he had created.
Deep within his host the great cat uncurled and against the back of Raed’s eyes everything was suddenly awash in golden light.
You cannot deal with a Deacon, the Rossin reasoned with the Young Pretender, but I can.
The Beast spoke the truth; sword and pistol would be very little use against a Deacon of the Circle of Stars. However, if he let the Rossin have his way, there would be nothing left of the traitor but blood.