The sound moved on, rumbling over the rest of the palace and left them in a momentary lull of shock and stunned silence.
Ren picked himself up, unable to remember when exactly he had fallen.
He looked across the courtyard as the white lights faded from his eyes. The rift was gone, and from here it looked as if much of the stone circle had disintegrated with it. He stumbled forward as the remaining guards began to climb to their feet. At the sound of someone groaning, he glanced over at the forecourt gate to find Logan, Pete and Trása climbing to their feet, apparently unharmed.
And then, in the stunned silence, he heard a whimper.
Ren staggered into a run, suddenly filled with hope. Perhaps the explosion had thrown Teagan and Isleen back into this realm. Perhaps it had closed before they could be taken through. Perhaps it had only seemed like they were already into the rift when it collapsed. It was raining, after all, and dark, and hard to tell ...
He could hear the others running close behind him, although whether it was because they believed he might have seen or heard something, or they'd heard the whimper for themselves, Ren didn't know.
"Teagan!" he called. "Isleen!"
He reached the remains of the stone circle and cast about in the darkness, uncaring of the rain. There were several bodies scattered about, dressed in ordinary linen
yukata
that would have made it seem as if they belonged here - right up until they pulled out the machine guns and opened fire.
The rain kept pelting down, making it hard to see, and even harder to hear.
Then Trása called out, "Over here!"
She was squatting over the body of a large man with a shaved head and distinctly Asian features - probably the reason he'd been chosen for this foray into enemy territory. She grunted with the effort of pushing him out of the way. By the time Ren and the others got to her, she was dragging one of the empresses clear and helping her to her feet.
Miraculously, she seemed unharmed. The man's bulk must have protected her from the explosion.
Dishevelled and terrified, the little girl clung to Trása and looked about in a panic. "Teagan!" she demanded. "Where is my sister, Teagan? She was right in front of me. Where is she?"
Nobody answered her.
Nobody wanted to be the one to tell the little empress that her sister had been taken by the
Matrarchaí
and that with the
rifuto
stones destroyed, there was almost no chance of getting her back.
It amazed Trása to see a man disembowel himself and not utter a sound. She couldn't imagine how anybody could do that. Couldn't imagine, for that matter, how a man could disembowel himself in the first place, let alone do it with silent dignity and honor.
But they could and they did. As she stood with Rónán and Pete and Logan Doherty, staring down over the forecourt from the balcony of the throne room watching the commanders of the Imperial Guard commit
harakiri
, she realized that despite living in this realm for the past three years, she didn't understand these people at all.
"How could they just walk into the palace and walk out with the Empresses?" Logan asked in a low tone that sounded as if he was trying to think about something else besides what was happening down in the rainy forecourt.
Trása doubted he expected an answer. Logan Doherty, of all people, understood the power and the reach of the
Matrarchaí
.
"Does anyone have any idea where they might have taken her?" Pete asked. He sounded like a cop, again, Trása thought. He'd certainly sobered up since last night when he, Logan and Rónán had their stupid party out by the moat. He was standing beside her, like all of them, morbidly fascinated by the ritual taking place below them.
Wakiko, as regent of the empire, was overseeing the sacrifices with a grim expression, although what she actually thought about this harsh reckoning was impossible to tell from this distance. Rónán was standing beside Trása looking out over the palace forecourt where, behind the
harakiri
ceremony, in the harsh light of the early morning servants were cleaning the blood off the paving stones, and making preparations to bury the dead after each of the three commanders offered up their lives in recompense for their failure to protect the Empresses and the empire.
"They came through a rift," Trása said with a shrug, "and there's an infinite number of realities out there, Pete. Pick one."
"Wakiko might have some idea," Logan suggested. "She belonged to the
Matrarchaí
once."
Trása shook her head. "She was never high enough up the ranks to know where any of the strongholds are. Her job was to bear children for the
Matrarchaí
."
"I don't think they'll hurt Teagan," Logan suggested. "If they'd wanted to kill the girls, they could have done that while they were still in the palace."
Below them, the last of the Imperial Guard commanders was readying to present himself to the regent. Around him were ranked the surviving members of the guard, those who hadn't been on duty, standing to attention in the drizzling rain, ignoring the rivulets of blood-tinged water pooling at their feet as their second-in-command was carried away. Trása wondered if Wakiko was expecting the lives of all of the guard, rather than just the officers.
"They could have murdered them while they were still babies in the crib," Rónán muttered darkly beside her. Trása suspected only she had heard the comment.
Pete turned to glance at him. "What was that?"
"Nothing."
The third officer now stepped forward to stand before the regent. It was hard to say who it was. He was dressed in full samurai armor, but Trása thought it might be Andoryū Tanabe, cousin of the
Konketsu
magician, Chishihero, who'd tried to kill both her and Rónán when they first arrived in this realm. Chishihero was long dead and Trása had never grieved her passing, but she liked Andoryū and was sorry his young life was going to end in this absurd, yet fiercely proud, ritual of taking your own life when an apology and a good look at what could be done to prevent the situation happening again seemed the more reasonable course of action.
"If we don't know where she is, how are we going to get her back?" Pete asked.
Trása turned on him, venting some of her despair at what was happening in the forecourt on the unsuspecting former cop. "Well, then ...
do
something about it, Pete. You used to be a detective, didn't you? Get out there and ... detect!"
"Hey!"
She sighed. "I'm sorry."
"We could just wait for them to come back," Rónán suggested softly, not taking his eyes off the events unfolding below.
Trása couldn't bear to look any longer. She turned her back to the window, leaned on the sill and folded her arms across her body against the chill. The brazier on the other side of the room did nothing to combat the cold here by the open window. "How can you know they'll be back?"
Pete nodded. "That's a thought. They're after a
set
of Empress twins, aren't they? Thanks to you, they only got away with one of them."
"I think your gratitude is a bit misplaced," Rónán said, his gaze still fixed on the gut-wrenching scene. "Thanks to my misguided heroics the
rifuto
stones are pulverized. There's no chance of even guessing where they went with Teagan."
"Actually, that's not entirely true," Trása said.
"What are you talking about?" Logan asked. He had turned away too. It seemed only Rónán and Pete had the stomach to watch three ritual suicides in a row.
"Delphine would know."
"No," Pete and Logan said, almost simultaneously.
Trása glared at them, wondering why, in their most dire hour of need, they were trying to prevent Rónán from accessing the one thing they needed to rescue Wakiko's daughter - intelligence about the enemy. She turned to Rónán. "You have all her memories. You should be able to locate every one of the
Matrarchaí
strongholds."
Delphine would have known how to get back to the world Pete and Logan came from. The same world where Rónán had been raised thinking his name was Ren Kavanaugh ... all he had to do was access Delphine's memories and he could open a rift, and could have done so anytime he wanted in the past three years.
However, it wasn't just Rónán she was fighting about this. For some reason, Pete and Logan were just as determined Ren not have anything to do with Delphine's memories. "I can't understand why you're siding with Rónán. Don't you want to go home?"
"Home?" Pete asked, turning to look at her. "You think we can go
home
? We have no
home,
Trása. We belong somewhere we have no memory of. We're Undivided," he reminded them. "We're almost pure
sídhe
. We can heal with a thought. We can blow things up by folding a bit of paper. What do you think we'd go back to? The night shift? The weather report? There is no place for either of us in that world any longer."
"That's not your call," Trása said. "Rónán is the one who has the information. It's his decision whether to use what he knows or not."
"It's not that simple," Rónán said, leaning against the sill.
"Seems pretty simple to me," Trása said, turning on him. "You've always known how to find the realm where Darragh is trapped, Rónán, and you won't do it because ... why? You like it here with the ninja-
Leipreachán
and your new best friends?"
Rónán was glaring at her, fists clenched by his sides. "I wish I
could
tell you the location of the other realm, Trása, if just to be rid of your nagging me about it, but I can't. I spend every waking moment fighting the memories that evil bitch dumped on me. I don't know what Delphine knows because if I open up to her, I don't know if I can come back. Ask Pete and Logan what happened the last time I tried."
"Trust me, Trása ... you don't want him to go there."
"Shut up, Logan," she said, fixing her gaze on Rónán.
She'd shared a
Comhroinn
plenty of times, but they'd been controlled and only those memories or information the other person wanted to share had passed between them. Delphine was dying when everything she knew, everything she was, passed between her and Rónán. Trása couldn't imagine what it must be like to try and hold that at bay. She turned to him, placing herself between him and the Doherty twins. She could not bring herself to believe Rónán would have left Darragh behind for anything but the direst of reasons.
"Have you tried to sort through her memories for the location of the rifts?"
"Jesus Christ, Trása, if I could find a way back, don't you think I'd open a rift tomorrow and be gone from here?" As if to punctuate his words, a tormented scream echoed across the forecourt. The argument paused for a moment. Trása's heart constricted a little for the man who had just died by his own hand to satisfy the forms of some twisted sense of honor.
Poor
Andoryū.
It seems he lacked the stoicism to take his own life in silence.
Rónán broke the awkward hush that followed Andoryū's final scream, adding, "Do really you think I've not said anything because this place is such a barrel of frigging laughs?"
He pushed off the balcony and walked across the woven matting to the brazier, holding his hands out to warm them. It was an odd gesture, because he could have warmed himself with magic much more effectively.
"Could you not even
try
?" Trása asked gently. "You did it to help Logan and Pete find their realm. Can't you do the same for Darragh? For Teagan?"
The question hung between them for a long moment. When he finally answered her, his response was nothing like she expected.
"If you were offered everything you ever wanted," Rónán said, staring down at the coals in the wrought-iron brazier, "what would you do for it?"
"If it meant getting out of this lunatic asylum, whatever it took," Trása muttered.
"Really?" Rónán said, turning to look at her. He held his hand out over the brazier. "What if the cost was unthinkable, intolerable agony? What if, to get the prize, you had to plunge your hand into these coals? The pain would be unbearable. You'd probably lose a part of the limb, but that's okay, because the payoff would be amazing. All the power you ever wanted or could imagine. All the knowledge ..." He stopped and looked down into the coals and added softly. "Of course, you'd be in agony and lost your hand in the process, so there'd be a piece of you missing, and the nightmares would be unendurable, but you'd have everything else you could desire." He looked up again. "Would you do it?"
"If it meant saving a little girl from being turned into monster, then yes," Trása said. "In a heartbeat."
"Then you're a braver soul than me, Trása," Rónán said, pulling his hand back from the fire.
"This isn't about you, Ren," she said in a much more conciliatory tone. "It's not even about Darragh. For all we know he could have escaped back to our home realm three years ago. This is about two little girls who don't deserve to be turned into breeding cows, at best - genocidal monsters, at worst."
Rónán nodded, his expression grim. "You think I don't know that?"
"Then do something about it," she said. "Or go down to the forecourt and throw yourself on your sword with the others right now, because trust me, even if you can convince yourself that Darragh's fine and we don't need to go anywhere, you're not going to be able to live with the fact that you abandoned a little girl to the fate awaiting her in the hands of the
Matrarchaí
."
Rónán didn't answer her. He just plunged his hands in his pockets and stalked out of the room without another word.
Darragh had been in prison in this strange magic-depleted reality long enough to know he was a target.
Had he been a little more contrite, more willing to confess to the crimes of which he was so unjustly convicted, he might have avoided transfer to Portlaoise Prison when he turned twenty-one, and been sent to a less terrifying medium-security prison to serve the remainder of his life sentence.
Had he not gained a reputation for being troublesome.