by Ken Scholes
Spies in my house. “I want specific details.”
“When I have them,” she said, “you will have them.” He sensed more hesitation in her next pause. “Meanwhile, I wish to extend aid to you. Already, my network is scouring the Named Lands for more substantive evidence of this threat. With your permission, I can widen my investigation to include the Ninefold Forest, and I can also send you a hundred of my Blood Scouts.”
Rudolfo’s mind reeled at her suggestions. Blood Scouts in the Ninefold Forest? The Machtvolk Y’Zirites investigating his people. But three of her words snared him fastest. “With my permission?”
She chuckled. “I know you think us monsters. The Desolation of Windwir. The kin-healing of House Li Tam and the night of purging. But we are not monsters, Lord Rudolfo. We are the servants of House Y’Zir, and by bonds of kinship, we are your servants as well.” Her voice drifted across the room now from the other side. “My deception this day notwithstanding, I have the very best interests of your son at heart, and I would not easily violate the trust or sovereignty of your Ninefold Forest Houses.”
Then why not come in open dialogue? Why sneak in, magicked? But even as the questions formed in his mind, he knew the answers without asking. If there were spies in his house, the arrival of the Machtvolk queen would not go unnoticed. Her strategy was sound. if she was indeed being truthful.
He glanced at Jin Li Tam. Still her face retained its calm expression. But when their eyes met again, he saw the rage there. “I appreciate your offer of assistance,” he said. “But we will handle these matters within the Ninefold Forest without Machtvolk assistance. If you truly have my son’s best interests at heart, you will respect our borders and will share your intelligence with my people as you receive it.”
For a moment, she said nothing. Finally, when she did speak, she was near him again. “Think carefully, Rudolfo,” she said, “and you will see that at no time have we raised a finger to harm you or your family. We are allies.”
Rudolfo pondered this. He could still remember the voice on the night Hanric was killed. No, not him. And Rudolfo had been cast aside without even a bruise. Later, when Jin Li Tam had taken the Wandering Army to field, she’d challenged a Blood Scout single-handed, and when the Marsher had known it was his so-called Great Mother, he’d refused to fight. Still, these cultists left a forest of bones on the plains of Windwir and had murdered thousands of others in their faith.
“You have done enough harm to others to merit my suspicion,” he said.
“And I have saved your son’s life,” she reminded him. “What does that merit with you?”
Rudolfo nodded slowly but found no words to accompany it.
Her voice became even more muffled, heavy with emotion. “Your son will be the salvation of our world,” she said. “We have pledged blade and heart to his well-being and to the well-being of his parents.” Her voice was moving across the room. “I will ask you to reconsider my offer of aid. You have many enemies in the Named Lands, and your borders are not secure. Allow me to assist you or, if you can not abide a Machtvolk presence on your soil, send your wife and child to me and I will watch over them until this threat has passed.” Her voice was near the door now. “It will pass, Rudolfo, and when the Crimson Empress arrives, she will make all things right.”
He squinted but could not even make out the ghost of her. She will make all things right. That would be quite a trick. He considered his next words carefully, tasting them like iron shavings in his mouth before he spoke them. “Ria,” he said in a quiet voice, “do not come to me in this way again, and do not broach my borders without announcing yourself.”
The door handle moved beneath a hand he could not see. “I will do what I must to preserve the life of this Child of Promise,” she said, and her next words stung him though he knew she meant them to. “The question remains, Lord Rudolfo, as to whether or not you will do the same.”
Rudolfo heard Jin’s swallowed gasp and looked over to see her face red in wrath she could no longer conceal. Still, Jakob slept on.
As the door swung open slowly, Aedric looked in. “Was there someone-?”
When Ria moved past him, the first captain leaped back and reached for his knives, his lips puckering to whistle third alarm.
“Let her go,” Rudolfo said, hearing the weariness in his own voice. Even as he said it, his fingers were moving. Do you believe her message?
Jin Li Tam sighed. She had not spoken through the entire exchange, and he could see that her lips were a tight, pale line. I believe her, but I do not trust her.
Yes. “I concur,” he said.
Then, he reached for his glass of chilled peach wine but found that his interest in it had passed. Instead, Rudolfo fixed his eyes upon his sleeping son and pondered the darkening paths that lay before them both.
Neb
Neb sat in the shadowed opening of a glass cave and watched the dark bird moving high across the sky. He’d seen more of them in the last day, and unlike the messenger birds, these seemed to fly with purpose and direction in this desolate place.
Renard had called them kin-raven, but he’d also told him that they were supposedly extinct. until approximately two years ago, when the first of their kind had migrated back to the Named Lands. Though they flew too high for him to tell, he wondered if it was the same species he used to see in Winters’s dreams.
Once the kin-raven passed, he went back to lacquering his thorn rifle and wetting the bulb for another night of guarding the woman.
She’d stirred but had not awakened since he pulled her from the rubble and washed her wounds. He’d mixed the herbs and powders as Renard had showed him, adding extra kalla for the pain she’d feel if the wolf venom took. Then, he wrapped her with bandages torn from a clean cotton shirt he’d found in her bag.
Last, he found the cave, twisted into a wall of glass, where they could wait out the worst of her wounds. He marked their territory, shaking drops from his phial of kin-wolf urine though he doubted it would work with the girl’s blood on the wind. Then, he rolled large rocks in front of the opening, leaving just enough room for him to squeeze through if he needed to. And so, he forced himself awake, chewing the root for focus.
He put away his rifle brush and lacquer pot, then crawled back to check on the woman again. She moaned in her sleep from time to time, twisting in the blanket he’d wrapped her in. Neb found himself trying hard not to look at her. Her chiseled features and the gentle curves of her pulled at his eyes. He forced them to her scars.
The cuttings were clearly intentional, forming symbols that he recognized from his years in the Franci orphanage in the shadow of the Androfrancine’s Great Library. It was the language of blood magick; the cuttings of House Y’Zir and its Wizard Kings. He could not read the runes from that former age, but he knew there was dark meaning behind them.
He crouched beside her now and placed a hand upon her forehead. She was cool and clammy to his touch and she stirred again, the blanket falling aside to reveal another curve. When he averted his eyes, they fell upon her pack.
It was small, made for traveling fast and light, not dissimilar to those the Gypsy Scouts wore. Apart from the clean shirt he’d shredded, he’d not gone through it other than to be certain there were no weapons. Her dark iron scout knives were safely tucked away, out of reach and out of sight.
He stared at the pack for a full minute, biting his lower lip. But in the end, he did what he thought Rudolfo or Renard would do; he reached for the pack and retreated with it to the mouth of the cave.
Neb eased the contents out onto the fused glass floor and used his hands to spread them out. He felt his cheeks grow warm when he saw her undergarments and toiletry kit.
He pushed them aside and picked up a compact, thick book. It was old, and he opened it, not recognizing the language within it. But he saw that it was marked with notes, including an inscription in the front. A few of the letters looked familiar but none registered. He set it aside and next looked t
o the tarnished silver flask. Holding it to his ear he shook it gently.
Half-empty. He hesitated, then unscrewed the top to sniff the contents. The rancid smell turned his stomach, and he glanced back to the woman again. His initial thought was that these were blood magicks-that perhaps she was one of these runners-but he thrust the thought aside. The blood magicks he’d seen lasted three to five days and, in the end, killed their users, consuming them from within before the effects had worn off. And apart from her wounds, the girl showed no signs of other discomfort.
Unless. The other runners had also seemed to defy this fate. What if this was a new blood magick?
Or, he thought, a new people? Certainly the cuttings suggested that.
Tucking the flask into his own pouch, he went to the next object that caught his attention. It was an oddly shaped sliver of black stone. At first he thought the shape held no meaning, but he quickly saw the wings and the beak. It was a crude carving, but clearly a kin-raven. He reached out for it, and when his finger touched it he felt warmth rolling through him, tingling along the bones of his arm, up into his shoulder. Even that brief second, a dozen images flooded him and he felt the nausea of sudden vertigo, as a sound like mighty rushing water swept him.
Neb jerked back his hand and blinked.
He put a finger on the carving, this time forcing himself to keep it there to a count of ten.
The images were there again, spinning about him, and he reached for one, though he wasn’t sure how he did it. And as he laid hold of it, it wasn’t so much that his own sense of space vanished as it was a new space falling into place around him. He pulled at it, drew upon it like a thread.
It was a darkened place that smelled old and closed off and cold. In the distance, water dripped. Neb did not know how he could pick out that single sound beneath the roar around him, and yet he did. He also heard the gentle wheeze of bellows behind him and turned around.
When the golden eyes fluttered open, his breath caught in his throat. “Nebios Homeseeker,” the metal man said, “you should not be here. How have you circumvented our dream tamp? I charge you by the light to leave quickly.” The eyes flickered on and off as the mechoservitor worked its shutters and looked from left to right. “We are being listened to.”
Neb opened his mouth to ask who was listening but suddenly found himself standing in the courtyard of the Franci orphanage. Brother Hebda stood before him, gaunt and hollow-eyed, now these two years dead. “Neb?”
There was surprise in his voice.
“Brother Hebda?” Certainly, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen his father since Windwir’s fall. Hebda had warned him that the Marsh King rode south back in the gravediggers’ camp in what remained of Windwir, and he’d also told the boy that he would proclaim Petronus Pope and King and that eventually Petronus would break his heart. Both had come true. Still, how was it possible that the small black carving could do this?
Brother Hebda’s face paled even as it began to fade along with the crisp blue winter skyline of the great city of Windwir. “Runners in the Wastes,” his father said. “Beware of them, Son. I fear they-”
Then, Neb fell out of the scene and into the roaring once again. Spinning, he found himself at the center of a Whymer Maze beneath a graying sky. There, upon a marble bench, a girl sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap. There were evergreen wreaths upon a grave there, and he remembered this place very well. He’d stood here what seemed so long ago and kissed Winters good-bye after Hanric’s funereal rites.
The girl wore a plain dress, and her prettiness made his heart hurt. Her long hair was held back from her face by wooden combs, and a light dusting of freckles speckled the bridge of her nose. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. He knew her, though he’d never seen her without the mud and ash of her people’s faith. “Winters?”
She looked up. “Nebios? How-?”
And he was gone again, falling away to land upon a jagged sea of razor-edged glass. “He’s wandering in the aether,” a woman’s voice said. “Awake and casting.”
“Yes,” another said from the eastern end of D’Anjite’s Bridge.
Then a third spoke, and Neb saw the locked well she camped near. The very place he’d found the silver crescent. And this time, he saw the woman who spoke. Her close-cropped hair was blonde, and the cuttings upon her flesh were similar to those upon the woman he watched over.
“We know you see us, Abomination, despite our magicks,” she said as her smile widened. “And we see you as well, there in your glass cave.”
It is the stone. Somehow, the count had escaped him, and he still held his finger to it. Neb yanked back his hand and scowled down at the carving.
What had he just seen? And was it real? Mechoservitors in dark, forgotten places who spoke of dream tamps. The ghost of his dead father warning him of runners in the Wastes-something Neb already knew, in an uncharacteristic prophetic failure. And a Winters who no longer wore the mourning hope of her promised home.
And what had the woman in the Wastes called him? Abomination.
He tucked the book into his pouch alongside the flask, but for the longest time he sat and stared at the carving, suddenly unwilling to touch it again.
Finally, he scooped it up into a bit of cloth and tipped it into his pouch as well.
Then, he settled back against the wall, his thorn rifle across his lap. Beyond his cave, a kin-wolf bayed beneath a rising moon. Behind him, the scarred woman whimpered and cried out in her sleep at whatever darkness rode her dreams.
Jin Li Tam
Jin Li Tam sheathed her knives and wiped the sweat from her face and neck. The evenings grew cooler now as the winds picked up, sweeping south from the Dragon’s Spine. With the sky still purple from the setting sun, she felt that breeze now as it kissed her wet skin.
Taking in a great lungful of lavender and roses, she tested herself to see if the evening’s knife dance had settled her.
Yes, she realized, I feel better.
After the audience with Ria and her evangelists, Jin had left Jakob with Rudolfo and stormed away to rage privately for an hour. But it had not been enough. In the end, between breaks spent feeding Jakob, a run and a dance or two with the knives had dulled the anger as she suspected it might. There was a time when she would not have known that about herself, but there was also a time when she wouldn’t have realized that she went to anger first when she became afraid.
She was there in the room with Rudolfo for hours biding her time. How long had she hidden there? How much had she heard? And had she hidden in other rooms, too? Was she here now, watching? She felt another stab of anger.
Jin Li Tam took another breath. Then, she looked to the house. The windows were lit now, beckoning, and she found the one she knew belonged to Rudolfo. No doubt, he sat in his study and took dinner in the midst of reports and messages to digest and respond to.
She set out for the manor and paused near the edge of the Whymer Maze. Faint footfalls reached her ears, and she saw a young woman emerge from it. Winters, she realized, no doubt returning from Hanric’s Rest at the center of the maze, near the Whymer meditation bench.
There is much to meditate upon.
Jin whistled the low, soft note of a Gypsy Scout on alert.
Winters looked up, startled. “Lady Tam,” she said.
Jin stopped. The look upon the girl’s face was consternation and fear. To a degree, it made sense-Ria claimed to be her older sister, thought dead in infancy, and certainly by now Rudolfo had told her about their magicked guest. Still, she had to ask. “Are you okay, Winters?”
The girl shook her head, and for a moment, Jin thought she might burst into tears. “I don’t think I am. I failed my people. And I think I saw Neb.”
Neb? Jin Li Tam looked around. “You think Neb is home?”
Winters took a deep breath. “No, not like that.” She swallowed. “More like a dream. He was in a cave made of glass. There was a woman with him. Only, he didn’t look like himself. Hi
s hair’s too long, and he’s too gaunt. He looked at me and said my name, and then he was gone.”
Jin knew the two of them had somehow shared dreams together before he’d entered the Churning Wastes. Until recently, Jin hadn’t put much thought into Marsher mysticism with its glossolalia, prophecies and Homeseeking. But she’d also not believed there was a magick strong enough to bring back the dead or heal the mortally ill. She felt her eyebrows furrow. “It’s been a long time since you’ve shared dreams with him, hasn’t it?”
“Seven or eight months,” Winters agreed. “But this was not a shared dream. It was like a dream, but I was awake.” She looked away and Jin read the discomfort. “A. vision, I think.”
She knew the girl was no stranger to such things and wanted to ask more to get to what part of this made her uncomfortable, but then it struck her. There was a woman with him.
She thought about telling her that she should not concern herself with it or leap to any specific assumption about the woman, but instead, she changed the subject. “And you feel you gave up on your people?”
She watched the discomfort melt into sadness. “I did. I did not have to give up on them. But I did. I came here and hid myself underneath a mountain of books.”
Jin Li Tam chuckled, and it was sardonic. “You’ve not failed them yet, and I don’t think it’s fair to say you’ve given up on them, either.” She watched the girl’s eyebrows knit together. “Maybe you don’t remember, but you had few choices left on that day, and you needed time to absorb that great loss and craft an appropriate response to it. You came to your only kin-clave in the Named Lands and took asylum. This is not failure or abandonment.”
She saw a bit of hope spark there, but it went out too soon. “I can’t even fathom an appropriate response to this.”
Jin Li Tam nodded. “For now. But you will.” She locked eyes with the girl, willing courage and hope into her that she did not herself have to give. “Give it time. Meanwhile”-here she hefted her knife belt, dangling the sheathed blades-“it’s time for you to get back to your knife lessons.”