Antiphon (34 page)

As the day crept on, Vlad was surprised to see his children and grandchildren gathering on the decks of the ships. He looked to the vessels to their port and starboard and saw it was the same there, as well. When the sun hung low in the sky, the silver globe burned red as the bloody sky.

Vlad watched as the water darkened and wondered if his dreams would tell him more when morning carried him to his narrow bunk for a few hours of sleep. He tried to imagine what it was that awaited him—this Behemoth Obadiah spoke of—and what it was that he was meant to do in the basement of the ladder. And most of all, he wondered when the light of her would rise so that his day-long need would subside. That ache that steadied him.

But when the lights did rise, blue and green beneath a moonless sky, Vlad Li Tam’s breath caught in his throat. He heard the same all
around him and could’ve sworn he heard it from the other ships from half a league away.

In the end, he could not help himself. He held back as long as he could.

Then Vlad Li Tam wept as a thousand, thousand d’jin swelled the sea around them, their song loosed upon the air.

The images floated and spun now faster than Neb could lay hold of them, and the pain from the blades settled into a dull ache. He’d stopped screaming, but it wasn’t that he had nothing to scream for.

Instead, he bottled it and hoped to somehow turn it into strength.

Renard will come for me,
he thought.
And Petronus, too
. Those realizations gave him focus. But still, he found now that it was easier to spin the dial faster rather than slowing it down when it came to the fleeting dreams, waking and sleeping, that he raced through beneath her knife, beneath the touch of that cold dark carving in her hand.

Something was happening to him, and he did not know what it was.

Her name is Shyla.
The woman with the short, gray hair. He didn’t know how he knew it and didn’t know if it was even truly her name. But he heard it in her, and during yesterday’s cutting, images of a vast hot desert and a silver, vacant throne draped in red robes flitted against his inner eye when her knife and her kin-raven touched his hot and bloody skin.

A new image seized him, and the surprise of it stopped him before he could spin it away. He stood on the deck of a ship with a metal man and a scarred and familiar old man with tangled red-gray hair. The cuttings upon him were like those of his thirty-second daughter and like the ones Neb knew now covered him.

That was not what surprised him, though.

It was the vast series of white columns rising up into a star-speckled sky and an ocean swimming with undulating moonlight where there was no moon to be found.

“It is the song,” Shyla said, and Neb realized now that she was not speaking to him. She was speaking in the guttural language they’d been using among themselves.

She repositioned the knife, and he missed the beginning of the reply. “. . . Ladder?”

“It appears so,” Shyla said, and he heard what he thought was fear in her voice.

He spun himself away, but not before the metal man met eyes with him. “Hail Homeseeker,” he said.

“Take me back to the Moon Wizard’s Ladder, Abomination,” Shyla said.

Neb forced his eyes open and found hers. He tried to speak, but no words formed. He struggled long enough to push a dry croak through his lips, but it wasn’t intelligible.

The knife bit into him again, and the kin-raven touched his blood. It was a dark place, warm and underground. A mechoservitor and an old Androfrancine moved through the passageways with a lantern.

Isaak.
The mechoservitor stopped and turned. “Neb?”

But Neb couldn’t speak. He simply spun and watched Isaak fall away.

“Avert your eyes, Homeseeker” the next mechoservitor said, looking up from the book it was eating.

He did, spinning now into a vast underground quicksilver sea with a large black stone floating in its center like the dark iris of a mirrored eye. Lying across it was a man he recognized, despite how much weight he’d lost or his haggard features.

He still could not find his voice, but his mind found words:
Brother Hebda?

The man sat bolt upright. “You are learning how to manipulate the dream stone.”

He’d seen his father in his dreams before, but he’d not been in these surroundings. He’d looked more like the man from his memory, only sometimes he was pale as a corpse with bloodshot eyes. This image of him felt different.

Dream stone.
The black of it matched the black of Hebda’s island.

He heard a whistle and the sound of oars. Neb turned and saw a longboat moving across the silver water toward them, a Gray Guard rowing.

Neb looked back to Hebda and stared into his eyes. He saw the fear there, and it stung him, though he did not know what his father was afraid of.

Then he left as Shyla started a new line of text using her knife as a pen.

He was in a valley hidden within a mountain, and at its center stood a giant scaffold.

Figures scrambled over the scaffold, and within it, a large object took shape. As they worked, they sang. And Neb recognized the song they sang.

“We have found them,” Shyla said.

And when she said it, blood poured from her mouth, and her eyes went wide with surprise even as they glazed over.

Neb felt hands upon him and a voice near his head. “Hold, lad,” Renard whispered. As he said it, the camp erupted in pandemonium. Neb heard the sound of fighting, the muffled sounds of magicked boots across the ground. The ropes that held him were cut away.

He felt warm water splashed against his lips. “Open,” Renard said. But when Neb opened his mouth, he found it filled with bitter powder that he recognized. He felt the magicks taking hold, hot on his boiling skin.

Renard lifted him on his back. The Waste salts on the guide’s robes burned him, and as the man staggered into a run that became a sprint, the wind cut him as deep as those silver knives.

Behind them, he heard the sound of muffled fighting. Renard ran them away from the camp, though Neb had no idea what direction. As they ran, the magicks that concealed him also began to work at his acuity. His sense of smell and hearing sharpened even as his stomach lurched at the nausea of the scout powders.

Something nagged at him as his focus gathered. Something was missing. Something terrible, and he could not quite place it.

But the farther they ran, the more he remembered the pouch and the silver crescent it contained.

I’ve lost the canticle.

“Go back,” he tried to say, his voice rasping and quieted further by the magicks.

“We are not going back,” Renard said. “Rest easy. We’ll stop to bandage you up soon. We’ll be to Petronus by tomorrow.”

Neb kept his eyes closed and tried to lose himself in the rhythm of Renard’s stride and the gentle draw and release of Renard’s breath, the air filling with the scent of the root the guide chewed.

Somehow, he slept, and when Neb dreamed, he dreamed of an ocean shining like the moon and the song upon those waters.

Jin Li Tam held the sweet tea in her mouth and tried to maintain her composure. The room was heavy with the thick stench of decomposing meat and bird dung. It was all she could do not to retch when she entered that space.

Still, she did not want her metal host to see this. And because the magicks that guttered beneath and upon her skin could not hide her, she forced herself to the same calm that she would show in any distasteful aspect of her father’s work. If she could manage it beneath Sethbert’s fat and sweaty face, she could manage it for this strange mechanical she suddenly found herself at tea with.

They sat at a table now, she with a cup and saucer and the metal man watching her take small sips. As they sat quietly, she took in the room. There were three workbenches—one covered in paper and pens and threads for the birds, and another covered in books in various states of binding scattered amidst loose pages and pens. Then, on the far wall, another workbench stood covered in vials and bottles, pots and pipes.

In the corner, a chimneyed furnace warmed the place, adding heat to the smell of dung and death.

There was no other furniture in the room.

“You write the Y’Zirite gospels?” Jin Li Tam finally said. She wasn’t sure exactly how she found her words. The oddness of sitting to tea
with a mechoservitor like nothing she’d seen before confounded her, gave her a sense so strongly surreal that she felt a level of disconnect from the moment.

The mechoservitor nodded. “I do. I provide oversight to Queen Winteria the Elder for education and religion as well.” The metal man somehow smiled. “I hold thirteen percent of the Y’Zir Library in my memory plates. Part of my work here has involved establishing a network of Y’Zirite faith. I’ve spent half a century here preparing the way for the Crimson Empress, seeding our faith back into the land and reminding the Machtvolk of their true station. Their place in that faith.”

Jin Li Tam sipped her tea again. “And monitoring our communications. Modifying them in some instances.”

“Yes.” The metal man nodded.

“And helping my family establish Rudolfo’s Ninefold Forest as the centerpoint of the Named Lands.”

“Yes,” the Watcher said again.

Yes.
And she was a part of that, arranged through her father to bear the Gypsy King an heir, a Child of Promise. She reached for the tea again, wishing the strength of its flavor would drown out the stench. She understood the reason for the smell of bird droppings, but the carrion smell made no sense to her until a dark bird hopped into the room. She recognized it immediately from her dreams, though up close the kin-raven seemed less fierce. It was still oversized, its feathers mottled and its eyes dead black drops of ink. It smelled like it had been dead for weeks.

She fixed her attention back on the mechoservitor. “You knew my grandfather, then,” she said.

He nodded. “He took the mark with Lord Jakob on the Eve of the Falling Moon. I watched them weep for joy at what was coming.”

The words drew her head up from her tea. “Lord Jakob was an Y’Zirite?”

The metal man’s matter-of-fact tone surprised her. “Of course. It was a secret conversion. But all conversions were secret because of the children of P’Andro Whym. Those days are nearly past. We worship openly here in the Machtvolk Territories. Soon, the faith will spread and all may partake of her grace.” The mechoservitor smiled again, and she was amazed at how the metal face could emulate such a human expression. “And one day,” the Watcher said, “that grace will bring restoration.”

Rudolfo’s father had been a part of this. It went much deeper than she realized if the Ninefold Forest was complicit. She could not fathom Lord Jakob as an Y’Zirite. She’d heard stories of him, had read scattered bits of the history of his reign before her father’s seventh son—Fontayne—cut his life short. Known for being fair and just, Jakob had ridden against the cult under an Androfrancine flag during a half-dozen resurgences. She thought about the book her father had taken from Mal Li Tam, her nephew. “Because my son and this Crimson Empress will somehow heal the world.”

The Watcher looked at her cup, saw that it was empty, and stood to put the kettle on. He placed it on a small furnace and returned to his chair. “Yes, Great Mother. Their union will heal a world broken by deicide.”

Their union.
She had read over passages of the gospel they’d given her, seeing vague references to the Child of Promise as a bridegroom adorned for his empress. If she hadn’t heard the singing on the day of her arrival here, she wouldn’t have believed such a thing was possible. But the tears in those eyes and the reverence in those voices had told her that regardless of the plausibility, those Machtvolk believed.

As had her grandfather and her nephew.

As had Rudolfo’s father, Jakob.

The prospect of it terrified her. It raised the question that she didn’t know she wanted an answer for:
What if these beliefs are true?

She shook it off. “I find this all hard to comprehend.”

There was a quiet murmur deep in the ancient metal man. “You do not have to comprehend it to accept it.”

Actually,
she realized,
I do.
But she didn’t say that. Instead, she put down her teacup and met those dark jeweled eyes with her own. “You know what is coming.”

“I do,” the Watcher said. “It is my great honor to have shaped it and watched it unfold for my soon-arriving lady.”

Jin Li Tam remembered the note her father had left for her so long ago, during her brief stay in the papal summer palace.
War is coming.

He’d certainly been referring to the resulting war that followed Windwir’s fall. But now she could see the larger conflict. Years of damaged kin-clave and resources squandered in civil wars and minor conflicts, the loss of their Androfrancine shepherds and their war-making technologies and magicks, the creation of a strong army in the north, the return of blood magicks and Y’Zirite worship to their world.

This, she realized, was what the Androfrancines had been afraid of. Ironically, it was why they’d brought back Xhum Y’Zir’s spell and the metal men capable of wielding it without being utterly destroyed by it.