Requiem (14 page)

Once back in the wind-driven snow, Rudolfo turned north and made for the edge of camp. He did not wait for his men, and none questioned him as his deliberate stride increased in pace until a near run. What he longed for, what he willed with all of his being, was a place out of earshot where he could bellow his rage and despair at the cold white sky above him.

But in the end, Rudolfo, son of Jakob, settled for a quiet stream of curses, carried by gouts of steam into the winter air around him. Then he turned back for camp, for there was much to do. There would be hurried meetings with his commanders and scouts, and packing, and after that, he would gather those of his people that he could to bear witness.

When they stood around him with the rising sun, he would name his second captain, Philemus, Over-sheriff of the Wood, placing his green turban of office and his scout knives into that man’s care—something done only three times in the history of his people in the New World.

Then afterward, Rudolfo would ride south to honor a treaty that he’d been shaped both to serve and to loathe, and he would save as many Named Lands’ lives as he could with that gesture.

Vlad Li Tam

Vlad Li Tam lost count of the days and nights that he walked, remembering only the four times he paused at the oases that presented themselves to him just as his strength began to flag.

Those nights, he slept with his belly full, folded into leaves that cooled him or warmed him as needed, and awakened refreshed and ready to walk again.

The kin-raven, his constant companion now, continued its back and forth as it sped west and then back to him throughout his pilgrimage.

Finally, one afternoon when the sun burned hot and high, the bird flew forth and did not return. Vlad pondered it as he lifted first one foot and then the other, feeling the heat of the sand despite the thick calluses on his feet. He’d grown used to the kin-raven and had even begun to think of it as a friend of sorts in this desolate place.

Not that it is good for anything.
He noted its lack of usefulness with a wry smile. Like every Tam before him, he’d been trained from an early age to identify every resource—animal, mineral or vegetable—and keep it inventoried against the day that it might be needed in his family’s work.

Of course, also in keeping with his training, he knew that the most potent, effective weapon or tool any Tam could lay hold of was family, and the thought of them brought both shame and longing to the surface of his heart. He’d borne the loss of most of them; he could bear the loss of this bird.

But at the end of the day, as the sun sank low, Vlad heard the kin-raven’s cry echoing along the cliff line, and he saw its dark shadow as it circled ahead.

What have you found for me?
Vlad drew in a lungful of hot air and felt strength surge into him from the staff. He set that strength into his feet and shuffled them forward until he stopped at a pile of dark boulders at the base of the cliffs.

The kin-raven landed upon one of the boulders and tipped its head. “Be gone,” it said.

Vlad squinted at the black stones until he saw what he assumed the kin-raven intended him to see. When he did, he chuckled. “Yes,” he said. “You have purpose after all.”

Stretching up behind the kin-raven, obscured in twilight shadows, a narrow stairway had been cut into the cliff.

Vlad looked to the strip of beach behind him and before, then out to sea, before circling around to the back of the boulders and the base of the cliff to get a better look at the stairs.

He suspected they were nearly invisible from any real distance and that even in daylight they would be a tricky ascent. But something tickled at him, moving under the surface of his skin and his skull, drawing him upward.

Maybe you crave something other than sand and sea?
He pondered this and released the thought. No, it was more. It was not unlike the compulsion that drew him along the beach. As if to test it, he stepped back and thrust the staff into the sand. Then, he released it.

He was not surprised at all when it tipped toward the stairway. But he jumped when the kin-raven once more shrieked its solitary words. “Be gone!”

As if no other route were conceivable, the bird launched itself from the stone, pounding its wings as it rose along the cliff to vanish into the night.

Taking the staff up once again, Vlad Li Tam kilted up his robes and tied them to his belt to keep the tattered hem from tripping him. Then, he slowly began to climb in the dark.

He moved with great care, testing each step tentatively and pressing his body against stone still warm from the day. The moon rose to offer its dim light, but Vlad closed his eyes to it and let his feet carry him upward. Below him, the sound of the surf faded from a roar to a whisper, and when he finally stopped and opened his eyes, he gazed out over an ocean alive with the light of the moon. Craning his neck to look above, he tried to gauge just how far he had left to climb, but the night withheld that information from him.

Twice, he stumbled and caught himself against the wall, and once, he nearly lost the staff in an effort to regain his balance. Each time, he pressed on, slowing his pace to accommodate the sudden ache in his legs and lungs.

The sky lightened to gray and the moon hung low when Vlad crested the cliff to fall panting and sweating into the shade of a large tree that awaited him there. He slept through the day, arose, drank the water that pooled in its large, low-hanging leaves, and nibbled at the fruit that had fallen in its shadow. And he didn’t need to look back to know that it evaporated back into the waste when he set out again, following the staff and kin-raven inland in the cool of the evening. But he did marvel at how unsurprised he was now when the staff provided for him in this place.

Still, the village that he stumbled upon the next morning
did
surprise him.

It was dug into a hollow in the dark, barren landscape. When he stumbled upon it, he blinked and rubbed his eyes, unsure of what he saw.

A cluster of buildings lay scattered along a brackish pond, and central to them stood a round building made of stone that Vlad knew all too well.

A Blood Temple.

His stomach knotted at the sudden anger. And with that emotion, something shifted in him, and once more he was a Tam, looking for information and advantage in this newest find. There was a pump house of some kind behind the temple, and pipes from it ran over the ground to buildings he assumed must have some significance, and he noted that the same buildings had what appeared to be boilers pumping steam into the morning sky.

He followed the steam, and movement caught his eye—birds, kin-ravens by the size of them. They circled above the village, diving down and then lifting up. Vlad heard a solitary voice, though he was too far away to hear the words it uttered.

Still, the sound of it compelled him for reasons he did not fathom. The kin-raven he had followed here regarded him with one dead eye, then surged into the air to join the others.

It intends me to follow.
He did not know how entering this village would bring him to the spellbook he sought, but after so much had passed, questioning now made little sense.

Sighing, Vlad clutched the staff tightly and slowly made his way down the slope, picking his way among patches of scrub that now speckled the landscape. He moved along the edge of the water, his eyes scanning the village ahead as he went. He could pick up the sound of pigs and chickens somewhere to his west now, and the voice ahead became clearer.

“—bear witness to the death of our sins, poured into your Vessel of Grace,” a woman’s voice intoned, “that we may be made whole and in turn make whole our world.”

Vlad paused, realizing suddenly that the voice spoke no language he was familiar with, yet he understood perfectly. And something in the words compelled him further, his feet picking up their pace as he advanced. He could see a small crowd now, all hanging back from robed, crouched figures there in the square outside the temple. A robed woman stood over them, her hands outstretched in benediction. Her long white hair cascaded over her shoulders, and though he wasn’t close enough to see it, he knew her face bore the markings of her faith—words from their gospel spelled out in carefully carved scars.

Vlad willed himself to stop, but his feet did not heed him. He could feel the urgency in the staff now, pulling him toward the village, and as he strode forward, he raised the silver rod into the air.

The audience was a tattered assortment of men, women and children, all dusty despite the early hour. When the first of them saw him coming, he heard the gasp and watched it move from person to person even as they fell back from his advance.

“We thank you for this great gift,” the woman said again, noticing Vlad for the first time.

I was right about the scars.
He smiled at this, but the smile faded when he saw the twitching, groaning thing that lay sprawled upon the ground.

It had been a woman once, he thought, though he couldn’t be certain. The shredded robe she wore revealed skin raw with sores black from the dirt that infected them. Every bit of her that he could see bore the same sores, even the patches of scalp between the thin clumps of her remaining hair. She lay with one cheek in a pool of black vomit, one nostril bubbling in the thick mess. When her eye opened and locked on his, Vlad’s urgency became a raging need.

His voice was a roar that surprised him. “This woman needs help and you stand by preaching?”

The other robed women looked up from where they knelt. The one who stood lowered her arms. “Her moment has come at long last, and with it, the passing of sin from the world. Rejoice that you are present to see it, stranger.”

Vlad tapped the staff on the ground and felt a ripple of power go out from it that vibrated through the ground. “If her moment has come, why does she lie upon the ground in her own filth? Why is she not stretched out in a borrowed bed or perhaps in your temple?”

The woman regarded him, and now, the crowd was taking him in for the first time. Vlad felt their eyes upon him even as they stepped back. “Our father—
her
father, even—has decreed that her passing be thus or the sins of the world remain,” the woman said. “It is written in the Gospel of the Crimson Empress, ‘Make straight the passing of the Vessel of Grace in great sorrow, for her sacrifice is for your salvation.’”

Vlad tapped the staff again and still did not understand the compulsion that gripped him. There was anger growing in him as his awareness grew. “I am a father as well,” he said. “And I cannot abide salvation at such cost.”

But it was a lie and he knew it, twisting in him. He’d sent too many of his own sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters into harm’s way for his own version of salvation. And he’d paid for it in the Y’Zirite currency of kin-healing himself, watching most of his family cut away beneath Ria’s knives.

“I do not know who you are,” the woman said, “but I do know that you interfere with the will of Ahm Y’Zir and his daughters.”

Vlad raised the staff high now and brought it down, hearing the thunder of it as it smote the ground, showering sparks that bounced and popped over the dry, hard-packed earth. “Who I am is of no importance to you,” he said. “But I gladly defy Ahm Y’Zir and his daughters.”

Already, the girl was coughing and seizing, wrapped suddenly in a white light as she bucked and twisted. When she finally stopped and the light faded, her sores were gone and her skin shone pink and new. Her eyes were wide as she rolled out of her vomit and rose to her knees. Above, a single kin-raven cried “Be gone,” and Vlad looked up in time to see the circling birds disband and scatter, flying straight and low in their separate directions.

Bearing word of what has transpired here,
he realized.

He felt hands upon his feet and looked down to see the woman kneeling there, healthy and whole, gazing up at him with tearful eyes. “Lord, how am I restored? Have I borne the sins fully to their grave?”

Vlad Li Tam looked to the evangelist, her face awash with horror and wrath. Then he looked down again. “Yes,” he said to the woman.

“Take him,” the evangelist said.

When invisible hands seized him, he shook them off easily. When they came for him again, he spun quickly, swinging his staff with two hands. He felt it connect with first one, then another magicked scout, and when the staff touched them, their magicks flashed and popped, guttering out quickly. The two women, clad in dark silks and bearing dark steel knives, lay writhing and twitching on the ground, their lips moving without offering any sound, their eyes wide upon the old man who stood over them.

“You will not
take
me anywhere,” Vlad Li Tam said. “But I will come with you.”

And then he smiled.

Winters

Winteria bat Mardic drew herself up to full height, though she knew she barely reached the chin of the lieutenant she confronted. “We are not asking your leave, Lieutenant.”

Already weary of this assignment, Rudolfo’s officer allowed impatience to leak into his voice. “I cannot let you go without consulting with General Rudolfo, Lady Winteria.” She watched him look from her to the old man who sat on his saddle pack in the snow. “And certainly, Arch-Engineer Charles, the same applies to you.”

Charles’s own impatience was also evident. “And how are you going to seek his consultation?”

The man blinked. “We’ve sent runners to establish a courier route. Surely this matter can wait another day?”

Winters shook her head. “It cannot. Each day we wait is a day lost. And again, Lieutenant, I do not ask. I am a queen. I am not one of Lord Rudolfo’s subjects.”

“You shelter beneath his trees, Lady.” He nodded to Charles. “And you, you serve the general’s library.”

The old man’s eyes grew hard at that. “I serve the light, Forester, and have since your father was a pup.”

The man grew red in the face, and Winters suspected that though he was a seasoned veteran, he had many leagues to travel when it came to statecraft and diplomacy—something in which the southern officers tended to have more training.