by Ken Scholes
Rudolfo nodded. “Very well. Hold here unless we whistle for you.”
“Aye, General,” the second captain said.
Then Rudolfo looked to Isaak. “Are you ready?”
Isaak nodded slowly but said nothing.
Rudolfo nudged his horse forward at a walk, and the two followed. The forest around them was alive with the rainfall, and a shrouded moon offered no light between the clouds and the thick evergreen canopy. They rode forward in darkness until Rudolfo saw the amber lights ahead. When he did, he slipped from his saddle and led his stallion into the small clearing.
The four stood together, side by side, and steam rose from the heat of them. They’d run far, he realized, and yet had somehow circumnavigated the only pass across the impenetrable Keeper’s Wall. Rudolfo waited until Isaak and Charles were beside him, and then he stepped forward. “Greetings,” he said, “I am Rudolfo, lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses, general of the Wandering Army.”
One of the mechoservitors broke ranks with the others and raised his hand. “Well met, Lord Rudolfo.” The metal man looked to Isaak next. “Greetings, cousin.” Then, last, he looked to Charles. “Father,” he said, inclining his head.
Charles grunted and returned the nod.
As his eyes adjusted to the night, Rudolfo saw the differences between these mechoservitors and Isaak. They were more boxlike, with harder right angles, and copper in color.
Isaak inclined his head. “Greetings, cousin.”
“Do you serve the light?” the mechoservitor asked.
Isaak nodded. “I serve the light,” he said. Then, he looked to Rudolfo. “And I serve this man and his family.”
The mechoservitor’s voice lowered. “Do you yet comprehend the dream?”
The dream? Rudolfo glanced at Charles. The old man looked away, and Rudolfo noted the question that required asking once they finished here. He would ask Isaak first, of course, out of courtesy for his friend.
Isaak’s eye shutters flashed, and his voice took on a heaviness that sounded so unlike the metal man that Rudolfo found himself blinking. “I do not comprehend it,” he said. “But I know that it requires a response.”
“Yes.”
Another mechoservitor stepped forward. “Even now the antiphon is being shaped. We are here to aid that work.”
Rudolfo was not familiar with the word and set it aside for later conversation. “Return with us to my manor,” he said, “and we will discuss this aid.”
The mechoservitor looked at him, and Rudolfo saw something in those eyes, in the way the metal man held his head, that spilled uneasiness into him like ink in a pond. “Do you serve the light?”
Rudolfo cocked his head. “I do. I am restoring what I can of it by-”
There was gravity in the mechoservitor’s tone when he interrupted. “The dream has shown us that the light cannot be truly preserved in a building of stone and wood. Your aid is not required.” He looked to Isaak. “You have tasted the dream and we have come for you, cousin. Join us.”
Rudolfo held his breath. He had not foreseen this, and judging by the look on Charles’s face, the old arch-engineer had not expected it either. They both stared at Isaak.
Isaak’s eyes flashed, bright and then dim, as his working parts clacked and whirred with this new information. “I cannot join you,” Isaak said. Rudolfo heard the sadness in his friend’s voice. “I have work to accomplish here.”
Another of the four stepped forward, repeating the other’s words. “The light cannot be truly preserved in a building of stone and wood, cousin. You of all our kind should comprehend this fully.”
Rudolfo started. They know of his role in Windwir.
A gout of steam burst from Isaak’s exhaust grate, and his metal plating rattled. “I cannot join you, but I will aid you as I can.” The metal man looked to Rudolfo, and he thought for a moment he heard pleading in his voice. “I believe Lord Rudolfo will aid you as well if you will be forthright with him.”
More trust. And Rudolfo had no reason to offer it. Yet.
The last mechoservitor joined them now. “We run for the Marshlands to search the Book of Dreaming Kings.” He looked to Rudolfo and repeated his companion’s words. “Your aid is not required.”
Rudolfo felt his frustration building and wrestled it down. “You are in my forests,” he said in a low and even tone. “You may not wish my aid, but you should still desire my grace.”
The mechoservitor’s eye shutters flashed open and closed. “We will not long be in your forests and require only such grace as will let us pass in peace and secrecy.”
Rudolfo looked to Isaak and Charles again. “And you think the Machtvolk queen will grant you access to her book?”
“We will not seek access from her.” The mechoservitor dug into his robes, and Rudolfo felt wind nearby as his scouts drew closer. He whistled them to stand down as the mechanical pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle and passed it to Isaak. “Should we fail,” the mechoservitor said, “our task will fall to you or the antiphon will be incomplete.”
Isaak took the bundle and looked at it.
“It is the only existing copy,” the mechoservitor said, “and it should remain so.”
The first mechoservitor spoke to Isaak now, even as Rudolfo opened his own mouth to speak. “If you change your mind the book will bring you to us, cousin. It is glorious to serve the light by way of the dream. We beseech you to reconsider and take your part in formulating the antiphon. We will not send for you again.”
Isaak said nothing. And before Rudolfo could find his own words, the mechoservitors turned and sped from the clearing.
Follow them, he signed to the scouts surrounding them. At a distance, but do not breach the Machtvolk border.
He heard the faintest clicking of tongues to the roofs of mouths as the scouts set out. As they left, he looked to Charles and Isaak. “It seems we have much to discuss,” Rudolfo said.
Isaak nodded absently, carefully unwrapping the book while shielding it from the rain with his cloak. It was an old volume, one that had somehow been spared the destruction of the Great Library.
“What book is it?” Charles asked, leaning in.
Isaak read the cover. “It is Tertius’s Exegesis of Select Lunar Prophecies As Recorded in the Book of Dreaming Kings.
As if on cue, the rain around them let up as high winds pushed back the clouds enough to leak the moon’s blue-green light over the clearing. In the distance, Rudolfo heard the fading clack and clank of the metal men as they ran west, but the metal man before him captured all his attention.
Isaak looked at the book and then raised his amber jeweled eyes as if in prayer. “It requires a response,” Isaak said as he gazed upon the moon. And there was such sacredness, such conviction in Isaak’s voice that Rudolfo could not help but join his friend in staring at the sky. Above them, that same wind brought back the clouds, shrouding what little light they had as the rain once more began to fall.
Chapter 10
Petronus
Geoffrus’s men found the shallow grave just west of D’Anjite’s Bridge, and only Petronus’s insistence kept them from skinning the corpse they found there.
The sun was low and heavy with morning when he saw their quiet commotion in the camp, and he’d known instantly that something was afoot. Whistling for Grymlis and the first lieutenant of Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts, Petronus had fetched his horse and followed the ragged band of Waste runners to their newest find.
They’d already exhumed the body.
Now, they stood at a distance, muttering and whispering, while Petronus and his men studied it.
It was a woman, her hair shorn and her yellow-gray skin scarred in a way that dropped ice into Petronus’s stomach. He knew those markings, had seen them all too recently upon the skin of his childhood friend, Vlad Li Tam. She lay stretched out, her hands folded upon her chest and her eyes closed, dressed in a loose-fitting tunic and trousers of unfamiliar cut, wearing well-worn low boots made for r
unning. Around her lay the scattered rocks that had covered her shallow grave. And though she’d been dead for some time, her body looked more asleep than not.
Grymlis bent over her while Petronus hung back. “There’s no decomposition,” he said. His large hands moved her head, revealing the deep bruising around her throat. “And her neck has been broken.” He scowled. “It’s a clean break. Something strong and fast.”
Petronus glanced back to Geoffrus and his men. “Did you find anything else?”
Geoffrus shook his head. “Nothing, Luxpadre. But my men wish to assert to you the contractual clause regarding the fair division of found objects among our party as-”
Petronus cut him off with a stare to match the hardness of his words. “This is a woman, Geoffrus. Not a found object. You’ll not desecrate her corpse.”
For the briefest instant, Petronus saw rage on the man’s face, and he noted the line of the man’s jaw. He could do me harm, he realized. And then, the rage was gone, replaced by calm acceptance. “As you direct, Luxpadre, so I serve.”
He looked back to the woman. She was young-perhaps the tail end of her twenties. And even before he ordered it, he knew what he would find. The cuttings on her face and arms, the symbols etched into her, told him exactly what he needed to know. “Open her shirt,” he said.
Grymlis looked up, surprised, and Petronus watched the light spark in his eyes. He nodded, swallowed, then forced her arms from her chest. Then, he used his scout knife to cut the fabric open.
Petronus’s hand moved to his own chest, fingers tracing the skin of his own raised scar through the fabric of his robe. There, just to the left of center, cut into her skin between her breasts, was the mark of Y’Zir. And surrounding it, swirling in line upon line of symbols, was a lattice of scars he could not read, though he caught their meaning well enough.
Grymlis slowly rose and stepped back. “What next, Father?”
Petronus looked to the sun. The day was young, and though they’d slowed their reckless pace somewhat, they had much ground to cover.
Runners in the waste, the man Hebda had said. This, he knew, must be one of them. But something had intercepted her, snapped her neck like dry wood and buried her here in the Wastes, even placing a white stone at her head in the custom of the Androfrancine funeral rites. The lack of decomposition made it impossible to know how long ago, but he suspected it had not been more than days.
He turned to Edrys, the first lieutenant of the scouts that rode with them. “Have the scouts walk the surrounding half league for anything they can find.” He gave Geoffrus another firm stare. “You pull back your men, Geoffrus.”
The Waste runner did not look at Petronus; his eyes never left the naked chest of the girl, and it was not the scar that caught his eye, not by the way he licked his lips. Disgusted, Petronus raised his voice. “Geoffrus,” he said. “Pull back your men. We ride in two hours.”
Startled, the Waste runner looked away from the girl and with a word to his ragged band, slunk away with them.
When only Grymlis remained, Petronus sighed.
“That one will be trouble before we’re done,” the Gray Guard captain said in a low voice.
He nodded. “He will; but for now, we need him.”
“Still, he and his would cut our throats in our sleep. And if the rumors in Fargoer’s Station have any truth, he’d make a tasty stew of us and our horses.”
Petronus offered a grim smile. “You’ll not let it come to that, I’d wager.”
“Aye, Father,” Grymlis said. “I’ll not. My eye is on him.” The old soldier nodded toward the body. “What do you make of her?”
“She’s an Y’Zirite.” Petronus looked at her, her arms stretched out and her chest bared, the purple bruising of her neck offsetting the pale Whymer Maze of etchings in her flesh. That one mark, central and larger than the rest, still pulled at his eye, and he felt the burning in his own bosom from the scar Ria had cut into him when he lay dead upon the floor of that tent on Windwir’s desolate plain. “But not of a variety I’ve seen before.”
“And these are the runners this mysterious behaviorist was warning us about? The ones looking for the boy?”
Petronus nodded, remembering Hebda’s words. “And looking for the missing mechoservitors.”
Grymlis studied the body, and Petronus followed his eyes. “She was a tough one by the looks of her, but no match for whatever found her. And likely not much of a match for our men.”
Still, Petronus knew there must be more to this than what lay before their eyes. And as if in answer, a low whistle reached his ears from the other side of a low rise of bent and mounded glass.
They joined Edrys where he crouched with his scout. “It happened here,” the lieutenant said, pointing with his knife to the bare patch of ground. “She was carried to the place they buried her.”
Petronus stared at the ground, barely able to see the marks so obvious to the Gypsy’s trained eyes. “They?”
Edrys nodded. “There were three-maybe four of them-not counting the girl.” He pointed to another nearby outcropping, blue and yellow and green, with wind-sharpened ridges. “They waited here and took her quickly by ambush, I suspect, without much fight.” He stood and stepped carefully out of the clearing. “She ran from the east. Possibly in pursuit. Her stride indicates magicks of some kind were employed.”
Yes, Petronus thought, remembering that night so long ago in his shack, when the blood-magicked assassin had attacked him and sent him into Ria’s trap there on the Entrolusian Delta. The trap that had laid him out dead for his sins and brought him back in some twisted mercy he still could not comprehend, bending him into a miracle to prove their abominable gospel.
Grymlis must’ve been thinking in the same direction. “If she were under blood magicks, even a half-squad would be hard pressed to take her so easily-let alone four men.”
Edrys stood. “Not men,” he said as he looked to Petronus, and the realization dropped into his awareness like a rock in a well. He followed the scout’s knife tip and saw the clear outline of a footprint.
“The mechoservitors killed her,” he said, and his voice sounded flat in his ears. “The ones we saw moving west toward the Wall.”
Edrys nodded. “It appears that way.”
“Gods,” Grymlis muttered.
Petronus inwardly cursed the broken skies of this place that kept the birds from finding their way. Then, he cursed their already small numbers and gave his orders anyway. “This,” he said, “is something new that we cannot overlook. Magick a runner and send him for the Wall. And gather the party-we ride immediately.”
Then, as they moved off and away, Petronus turned back and made his way slowly back to the shallow grave and the girl who waited there in it. He was not sure if it was her nakedness or the starkness of the mark over her heart, but something compelled him, and he stooped to pull her shirt closed. With the scar covered, his eyes found the bruises at her neck and he imagined the quick, possibly even painless end she’d met in service to her faith in this desolate place.
Whatever the mechoservitors guarded, whatever they were about, they were willing to kill for it. And that was something utterly against the gospels and precepts that fueled their scripting. It unsettled him deeply.
And at the same time, he found himself quietly rejoicing.
Because if these are the same that seek Neb, he realized, there’s now one less of them for us to deal with.
Grabbing up a stone in each hand, Petronus set about to bury his enemy. He worked quickly, feeling the sweat that trickled from his hairline and armpits tracing its way down his back and sides. When he reached that final stone, the white one that signified the light inherent in every human life, he hesitated.
In the end, the mechoservitors had more mercy than he himself could muster, despite the cold and calculated murder of their prey.
He remembered Ria’s knife, remembered her words, and felt the burning of the scars she’d left upon him. Felt
the despair washing over him when he realized just what his death and resurrection had accomplished after a life of service to the light of reason, the light of human knowledge and experience. Then, he looked to the place near the corpse’s head, where the light-colored rock had lain before.
Hefting that stone, Petronus cursed and hurled it as far from the grave as his strength would allow.
Then he turned back to find his horse and press eastward with his men.
Jin Li Tam
Cold rain pounded them from a bruise-colored sky, and Jin Li Tam’s hands kept moving beneath the rain cloak to where Jakob nestled close against her in his riding harness.
She was grateful that he rode so well, having heard stories from the house staff about the less amenable infants they’d encountered. And she’d been surprised-she’d been prepared for his ear to keep him screaming for the trip. But Lynnae’s powders, administered through Jin’s milk, seemed to cut the pain, and he’d ridden largely in silence.
Still, after so many days in the saddle she was ready for a real bed and a hot bath and a roof that wasn’t canvas. She imagined little Jakob felt the same way, though he seemed content enough to pass the time sleeping and nursing and looking about when the weather was less foul.
Aedric’s company of Gypsy Scouts were all around them, a platoon’s worth magicked and on the run, maintaining a perimeter that moved around her entourage as they rode for the Machtvolk Territories. They’d sighted the first of Ria’s watchtowers the day before, tall and dominating the rugged terrain, and a kin-raven late in the evening informed them that they would be met today by an escort who would guide them into the territories.
It was hard to believe that she’d been here not so very long ago, deep in the winter, riding at the head of Rudolfo’s Wandering Army. It had been much colder, but the rain seemed more miserable to her than the snow. Of course, growing up on the Emerald Coasts, where winter was a warmish rain, had made settling into her new northern home a bit of an adjustment.