Her short laugh was brittle, but at least sounded like her. “Don’t get cocky, Your Majesty. I’ll hold myself together until we get out of here, then fall apart in a heap you can enjoy picking up.”
Getting out of here. Raed let out a slow sigh. “And we must stop Fraine too,” he reminded her as gently as he could.
Sorcha met his gaze. “We will—but first let’s get to Aachon. His head will implode if I don’t bring you directly to him.”
They went out into the hallway once more, and Sorcha slipped her hand into his. They were both fragile and weak right now, but even if that had not been the case Raed would still have enjoyed that little gesture. She had said she would not leave him again, and the Young Pretender appreciated that. As they left the cells and moved deeper into the nest, he felt very vulnerable.
“I confess,” he whispered into Sorcha’s ear, “I wish I was not doing this naked. That’s the real problem with the Rossin, I never have any cursed pants or boots.”
She turned and kissed him, lightly at first, and then more passionately, clutching him for a moment tight against her. She was smiling against his mouth a second before they parted.
“It is good to see you, Raed,” she muttered, “and I don’t care how few clothes you wear.” She was trying to hold off what was going on around her, and what she had learned, and yet she was still aware of him. The prickly Deacon he had pulled out of the ocean the previous year had not escaped unscathed from all they had been through. But then, none of them had.
“Take me somewhere you and I can explore that further.” It was a boastful thing to say, because the Rossin inhabiting his body for nearly a week had eaten away any strength he’d had before. Raed thought it was perhaps only pride and stubbornness keeping him on his feet and moving. If there was any fighting or running ahead, he didn’t know what he would do—probably just lie down and try and gain Sorcha some time.
The Deacon up ahead was peering around a corner. Her head whipped around, and she fixed him with a baleful glare. “Don’t you even think about doing any such thing!”
That damned Bond was going to take quite some getting used to—and he had no time to learn the skills to hide his thoughts. “Chivalry used to be all the rage,” he grumbled.
Sorcha poked him with her finger, then pulled him close so that they could both peer around the corner of the hallway. It made quite the impression. With the new closeness of the Rossin, Raed felt more and saw more through the Beast’s eyes, but there was a difference. The geistlord did not linger overly on visual details; he was always more concerned about the sounds and smells.
What to him had only been a pile of stinking, yammering humanity looked quite different to Raed with his own eyes. It looked, to put it bluntly, like an orgy. He’d never been to one himself, but there had been plenty of books in his father’s library on many subjects that an impressionable boy probably should not have gotten hold of.
Men and women, covered in the mud and dust of their shadowy nest, were piled in the great room. All were naked, all were touching, writhing. Many of the females looked to be in various stages of pregnancy, but that apparently did not stop them. Men, women, all in one groping, licking, grinding mass. However none of their eyes were focused on each other, but rather at some distant unseen point.
“What are they doing?” Sorcha shook her head as a frown deepened on her forehead.
“You don’t know?”
“Raed, I know what they are physically doing,” she replied with an arched eyebrow. “However I studied as long and as hard as any Active, particularly when it came to the kinds of geists I might run into. This makes no sense.”
A thought scuttled across the surface of his mind; one that was not his own. This part of the Wrayth mind is solely consumed with pleasure. It doesn’t have a higher function.
“I can see that,” Sorcha rubbed her temples. “So you are saying that the Wrayth functions like a beehive, with different parts doing things? Like some parts of it working the limbs, remembering to breathe, while other bits plot and scheme?”
You’re getting it now.
It was hard for Raed to decide which was the more unnerving; that Sorcha was plucking thoughts from him, or that those thoughts were in fact the Rossin’s. Strangely enough it appeared when the Beast was actively thinking his own thoughts it went unnoticed by Sorcha; she just assumed they were the Young Pretender’s thoughts. It was all a nasty muddle.
“Seems a little too much like pleasuring yourself,” he added, more to have something to distract her than anything. “It gets so dull after a while. Maybe that is why they brought in the female Deacons.”
“Oh no, these bits of the Wrayth had nothing to do with that. That was a real plan, with a purpose—we just don’t know what that is…at least yet.” She pointed to the far side of the wide room. “Aachon and your crew are coming up through the drain over there. We should help them. I don’t think this part of the brain is conscious enough to be bothered with us.”
Carefully picking their way across the rocky floor, but still sticking to the edges of the room, they reached the grate. It was, like everything else here, made of stone, but Sorcha used her long knife to lever it open. Both of them had to yank it away however.
Aachon and the dozen Dominion crew who emerged from inside the pipe were a sight for sore eyes. Mud and other unmentionable filth were caked all over them. They stood blinking, wiping the muck out of their eyes, and taking in the undulating bodies of the Wrayth mind with more than a little slack-jawed incredulity.
“I am sure,” Sorcha said, trying to draw away their attention, “you wish at least one of you had taken me up on my offer.”
Aleck, the tallest of the crew members, was rubbing the small of his back. Crawling and crab-walking through the muck of the Wrayth fortress could not have been fun for him in particular. “Remind me of that next time.”
Aachon insisted on flicking as much filth off himself as he could, before embracing Raed. It had been months since the Young Pretender had seen his first mate, and he was damned if he was going to stand on ceremony. He grabbed him roughly and hugged him, quite lost for words.
“My prince,” Aachon stumbled out, “it is good to see you alive and well—though somewhat lacking in the clothing department.” Then he swung a rucksack off his back, and proceeded to pull out pants, boots, shirt, a pistol and most remarkably a stout leather tricorne hat. He had even thought to bring a second sword.
“Familiarity certainly doesn’t breed contempt in your case,” Raed exclaimed, and clasped his friend’s arm. “It only makes you much better prepared.” The rest of the crew members let him dress before roughly shaking his hand and slapping him on the back.
After so long apart, Raed felt like he was back among family again. Yes, family—the only real one he’d ever had.
“I am sorry to do this to you, old friend,” he said, breaking into their moment of congratulations, “but we cannot leave just yet—though I do yearn to climb into a sewage pipe with you. Fraine and Tangyre are here, and we must get my sister away before she creates bloodshed in the Empire.”
Aachon and Sorcha exchanged a puzzled look. “Are you suggesting,” the first mate growled, “that the Wrayth have them prisoner?”
By the Blood, it was hard to have to say the words, but they all deserved to know, and more importantly they couldn’t go charging around the Wrayth nest not knowing who their enemies were. “No, I am not. They are here of their own free will.” He clamped his hand on Aachon’s upper arm. “Tangyre Greene has been poisoning Fraine’s mind for years. My sister is trying to drag Arkaym into civil war to gain the throne for herself.”
“It will be civil war,” Aachon whispered. “Thousands will be killed. Thousands of innocents.”
“Not if we get her away from here.” Raed glanced back at the writhing human bodies behind them, full with the influence of the Wrayth, now part of its twisted mind. “We can’t let her be used.”