by Ken Scholes
Of course, he could never tell if it was the lack of light or if perhaps it was just his age finally creeping home after years of squinting over his handiwork or over the words and specifications his order had dug from the ruins of the Old World and the worlds before that.
He pulled the monoscope over his head and cinched down the straps, blinking into the telescoping device as he spun gears to let more light into the tube and to adjust the lenses. He’d polished the Firstfall metal yet brighter before lining the monoscope’s interior with it.
He turned to the caged rat and dropped a bit of raw meat, finely coated with a pinch of scout powders, in front of the sleeping rodent. It started, grabbed up the bit of venison and started nibbling.
The magicks took the rat quickly, and unfamiliar with the sensations, it launched itself against the sides of the cage, shaking it with the sudden burst of strength even as it warbled out of focus and then became the faintest blur. Charles tipped his head so that the monoscope was pointed at the cage, aware of how heavy it was as it pulled at him.
They weren’t the blood magicks that the Marshers were using these days, but Charles hoped it was a close enough approximation to them. If so, he had accomplished a critical aspect of this work: The rat, now settling down and returning to the meat, was blurry but visible in the reflection cast into the silver of the scope.
Of course, the awkwardness of the device was another matter.
This would be improbable-maybe impossible-for a scout to wear in combat. He would turn himself to solving that problem next. For now, at least he knew it was functional and could be used for observation, even from a respectable distance.
Charles moved across the room and turned back. Closing his left eye, he squinted into the tube. He could no longer tell that it was a rat, but he clearly saw something hunched over in the cage.
Yes. He smiled, pleased with his work.
He pondered his pleasure in it, meditating on the Fourth Maxim of Franci B’Yot, the behaviorist who had influenced P’Andro Whym’s thinking. Examine every turn in the labyrinth of your mind, for your many thoughts are sacred in their truth, and the unexamined mind will be consumed by its fears and desires.
Why is this work so satisfying to me? It did not take him long to see it. It pointed to a simpler time when he’d made simple things.
The days spent working to bring Isaak back from the dead had changed him. When he’d first petitioned the papal offices for permission to build the mechoservitors adapted from Rufello’s Book of Specifications, he’d had no idea he would someday worry for an actual person he had created-a machine that had become human somehow, or something close to it-through the grief of genocide and the blood magick of Xhum Y’Zir’s final spell.
The monoscope gave him such pleasure, he realized, because it was a problem he could solve. And because it distracted him from worrying about his metal child.
He’d seen little of Isaak in the past days. The metal man had spent his time locked away with the book by Tertius, and Charles suspected he was replaying the dream. The one time Charles had brought it up, Isaak had said nothing, though the shaking of his chassis, the pop of gears within and the sudden gout of steam betrayed the mechoservitor’s discomfort.
Charles tried to turn his mind away from his concerns for Isaak, instead considering modifications that might make the monoscope less bulky and more conducive to scout warfare. He’d just lifted his pencil to make sketches when he heard Isaak’s heavy but tentative knock on his door. He put down the pencil. “Come in.”
Isaak came in and closed the door behind him. His bellows pumped, and steam shot from the exhaust grate set between his metal shoulders. “I’ve received a courier from Lord Rudolfo,” the metal man said. “I wish to discuss it with you.” Isaak looked to him and then looked away. “I wish to discuss the dream with you as well.”
Charles nodded and gestured to the heavy stool near his worktable. “Sit with me, Isaak.”
Charles sat, too, and waited for Isaak to speak. When he did, it seemed he spoke faster than normal, as if his words were crowding his narrow throat. “Lord Rudolfo has sent word by courier that an operation in the north requires two of the library’s mechoservitors. They are required to have scripting or archived holdings in cartography and geology.”
Curious, Charles thought. He felt his eyebrows raise. “I wonder what he’s found there?”
Isaak’s chassis trembled. “I do not know. He has asked me to decide which are best suited and send them north under scout protection in utmost secrecy.”
Charles noted the lie Isaak’s body betrayed with such subtlety. Perhaps it was a half lie. “Regardless, his specifications are clear. It should be easy enough to identify the two best equipped.”
“Yes,” he said. “But there is more, Father.” He paused, his eyes flashing brighter and then dimmer. “I am proceeding further in my comprehension of the dream. Tertius’s volume was. clarifying.”
Charles wanted to ask him about the dream but did not. Instead, he forced himself to wait.
Finally, Isaak spoke, and when he did, Charles heard determination and passion in the metal man’s voice. “I must join my cousins in their work,” the metal man said, bursting into tears that filled the room with the smell of wet copper. “I must leave Lord Rudolfo and the library in other hands and serve the light revealed within the dream.”
Charles felt the weight of the words and reached over to place a hand upon Isaak’s shoulder. He wanted to ask him why, but everything the arch-engineer needed to hear was in his metal son’s voice. “You’re going north, too,” he said.
Isaak nodded. “The equation holds true: My work here will not save the light. My work with my cousins may.”
Charles had heard less conviction in the voices of fresh acolytes, still red-faced with zeal. He blinked at it. “When will you leave?”
“Three days from now,” he said, his eye shutters blinking tears from the ducts set just beneath his jeweled eyes. “I will not run with the others. I will ride with a caravan of fresh recruits.”
Charles nodded. It was enough time to set the mechoservitors to their tasks. “And where will you go?”
Isaak’s chassis did not shake this time, though Charles was prepared for it to do so. “I will follow my cousins into the Beneath Places and join them in their analysis of the Book of Dreaming Kings.”
The Beneath Places. Charles felt his face pale. He’d heard stories, of course. The buried basements of the world-civilizations built by survivors over the top of yet more basements stretching back to the forgotten times, the time of the Younger Gods.
Charles looked at Isaak, already calculating how much time he would need to teach the mechoservitors how to reproduce the monoscopes based on his prototype. After that, he would need time to pack and time to be certain the mechoservitors here could maintain themselves as needed. He did not believe for a moment that he would be gone for long. He also did not believe Isaak would be gone long, either, despite the passion he heard in the metal man’s voice.
Still, his metal son was leaving, and Charles needed to be ready to leave with him and stay with him until either Isaak’s cracked heart broke or until this strange dream had worked itself out of him.
When Isaak stood and left, Brother Charles watched the door and wondered how a thing that he had made could now be a person he loved. And how that person could compel him to action without answers to his questions, with questions left largely unasked.
He did not know. But he knew he was going and that once he had a plan in place, he would inform Isaak and House Steward Kember of his intentions.
Charles returned to his workbench, pushed aside his sketches and started plotting out the hours of his next three days.
Jin Li Tam
They pulled the heavy pine door closed behind them, forcing the winter wind back. Servants surged forward to take Jin Li Tam’s, Winters’s and Ria’s heavy fur robes. They’d spent the morning in a leisurely breakfast and had then
set out on foot to the new school, walking on paths plowed clean of snow by men with mules and sticks.
We are far north this winter, Jin Li Tam thought. At least fifty leagues farther than she’d been with the Wandering Army. She instinctively reached for Jakob’s head again, touching his tiny ear. He rode snug and warm in his harness, sound asleep, though she was certain he would be hungry soon.
She wiped the snow from her boots onto the thick towels that had been placed there for them.
Ria did the same, smiling at Winters as she did. “I think you’ll appreciate this,” she said, “given your love of learning. Father’s Androfrancine gave you a taste of what we’re doing here.” She said the word Androfrancine with an unmasked tone of disgust.
Jin Li Tam’s eyes went to Winters’s face just in time to see the look of surprise there. The girl glanced her direction, and the spark of anger that Jin saw gave her pause.
Ria walked down a carpeted hall to another door. Behind it, Jin heard a voice talking in a measured and gentle voice. Pausing, Ria smiled at her and then opened the door.
The classroom sat thirty children easily, lined up on plank tables and benches facing a teacher who sat at a small table at the head of the room. When they saw their queen, they stood.
“Good afternoon, children,” Ria said. “I’ve brought you a most important guest.”
Ria motioned for Jin Li Tam to enter, and she hesitated. Checking Jakob again, she stepped into the classroom.
As one, the teacher and the students bowed deeply. The teacher blushed. “Great Mother, I am honored to meet you. When I heard that you were bringing the Child of Promise to our school, I wept for joy.”
Now Jin Li Tam found herself blushing. She couldn’t find any words, and she was unable to meet the open adoration in the woman’s eyes. She looked instead to Winters, who’d stepped into the room to stand beside her. The anger she’d seen was now tucked away, and Jin Li Tam noted the skill with which Winters concealed it.
Ria went to an empty section of table with three small chairs, motioning for them to sit. Once they had, the children sat, too. “I thought,” the Machtvolk queen said to the children, “that we might sit with you and hear what you are learning.”
The teacher beamed. “I was teaching them about the Great Promise.”
Ria inclined her head. “Please continue.”
The teacher returned the slight bow and walked to her table. Sitting down, she picked up the newly bound book. “Join me, children, in the fourth verse of the sixth chapter of the Last Gospel of Ahm Y’Zir.”
Jin Li Tam remembered that title and glanced to Winters for confirmation. Yes. She knows it, too. It was the book Winters had brought to Rudolfo, the one that convinced him that they would be safe here. He’d translated passages for her, as had Winters, but she wondered how much it had lost through that process.
Now, she listened as the teacher selected a child to read the verse they were to discuss. The little girl stood, looked to Jin Li Tam, her face red, and then she recited from the book. “And at the end of days, a Crimson Empress shall rise from the south and a Child of Promise from the north to reunite a kinship long severed. And their reign shall heal this broken earth and restore the Machtvolk to their rightful home.”
Jin Li Tam watched the room as the child read and saw that both the teacher and Ria closed their eyes for the recitation. When she finished, they opened them. “Excellent, Nandi,” the teacher said. “So who can tell me what is the rightful home of the Machtvolk?”
A boy raised his hand. Jin Li Tam thought he couldn’t be older than eight. When the teacher called upon him, he answered in a loud, clear voice. “Our rightful home is in service to House Y’Zir as hand servants to the Crimson Empress and her betrothed.”
“Yes,” she said. “Very good.”
For the next thirty minutes, the teacher asked questions and various students raised their hands. As they asked and answered questions, she found herself caught up in the elaborate story of their gospel, and it disturbed her. On the one hand, she could see the comfort it would bring to know their station, to hope for a better, healed world and to be connected in some way to that healing through their service. But on the other hand, she saw that they were teaching these things to children. Certainly, adults would also believe it-surely the evangelists she and Rudolfo had spoken with believed with their whole hearts. But those adults would turn quicker to doubt than a child would. What they taught these children, now at such a young age, would stick to their hearts like the snow falling outside. Wizard Kings worthy of worship, kin-healing and magick by the shedding of blood-it would follow them throughout their lives.
Your grandfather created this and fed it, she tried to tell herself. But the more she heard, the less she believed that possible. He’d not created it. He’d believed it. And he would not have without good reason.
This also disturbed her, and she found herself pulled into the Whymer Maze yet again.
At the end of the lesson, the teacher invited Jin Li Tam and Jakob to the front of the class. She presented them with a copy of the gospel they’d read from-bound in cured leather and translated into Landlish from the ancient language of House Y’Zir.
After they bundled into their robes, they trudged back through the snow to Ria’s lodge, where they were met by a warm foyer and yet more servants to help with robes and boots. While the others moved off to the dining room, Jin Li Tam excused herself to feed Jakob. At home, she would have thought nothing of feeding him anywhere she happened to be. But here, with the way these people looked at her and her son, she craved privacy.
She slipped down the hall and opened her door, turning to close it and suddenly stopping when she was caught off guard by the slight breeze that followed her in. “I’ll trust you to turn your back, scout,” she said as she went to the bed and pulled Jakob from his harness.
“Apologies, Lady Tam,” the Gypsy Scout said in a voice muffled with magick. “First Captain Aedric bid me bring word directly to you.”
Jin Li Tam laid her son on the bed and shrugged out of the harness, setting it aside. Then, she checked his diaper and unbuttoned her shirt before raising him to her bared breast. She winced as he took the nipple, feeling the beginnings of his teeth. “What have you learned?”
“We spent today scouting unusual bird migration to the northwest and found something of note. A series of caves outfitted as a messaging station.”
She heard hesitation in his voice, despite the magicks. “What else?”
“There is evidence of messages being intercepted and altered,” the scout said. “And birds are being diverted here somehow.”
She’d known that the birds had become unreliable. She remembered well the forged note she’d received in her sister’s hand just before Jakob’s healing, telling her there was no cure. Setting her up to turn to Ria’s blood magick as her last and best hope.
She closed her eyes against the pull of Jakob’s mouth. “Is there more?”
“More evidence of compulsory worship for those who are not quick to convert. Forced cuttings. We think there may be a fledgling resistance movement at work, as well.”
She nodded. “Very well. Tell Aedric to keep the scouts out and gathering intelligence where they can. I will figure out how to get word to Rudolfo.”
“Aye, Lady.”
She looked over her shoulder in the direction of his voice. “Now, stay put until I’ve finished and I’ll let you out on my way to lunch.”
She turned her attention back to her boy and found herself wondering how it was that he had become so important in this story that she was only now just beginning to grasp. It was an ancient story that stretched back beyond the Age of the Wizard Kings, if today’s lesson was to be believed. And it was a story that her father’s father had embraced to such a degree that he had arranged to sacrifice his first son and most of his family in order to heal kinship with House Y’Zir. He’d engineered within the Named Lands the beginnings of the fall of the Andro
francines and, through her father, both Rudolfo’s reign and her own betrothal to him. He’d arranged for her, through her father, to bear Rudolfo an heir. And had also arranged the transfer of the library, the Order’s holdings, and their own family’s vast wealth into the Forester’s hands.
She wondered if her grandfather bore the coming sacrifice of his family like a great mountain upon his back. Or did he find joy in it? Or both?
She wondered what it meant to believe in something so completely as to make such choices, to love something so wholly as to give everything for it.
Then Jin Li Tam looked to the face of her suckling son and understood what could bring her to that place.
Still, it did not comfort her to know it.
Winters
Outside, wind rattled the shutters and Winters felt sleep pulling at her even as she turned another page in the gospel she read.
She’d read the book innumerable times now, gleaning what she could from the cryptic passages and prophetic promises. She wasn’t sure why she poured herself into it; it seemed the only thing she could do. Somehow, she thought, if she could just understand these new beliefs among her people, she might know how to free them from its hold.
No, she told herself, not new, but old. Some aspects older even than their sojourn in this land.
Still, how long had this resurgence lain in secret, gorging itself on her tribe beneath her and Hanric’s oblivious eyes? At least back to the time of her father, she knew. And had he been aware of it? Had he, like Jin Li Tam’s grandfather, been an active participant in this faith? She could not believe that, but neither could she believe how wrong his dreams had been, how wrong her own dreams had been, in light of what now happened in their world. Some part of her still wept for the home she was so certain would rise, and for the boy now lost to her whom she’d so completely believed would take them there.
She stretched up a hand to check the knife hilts that peeked out from beneath her pillow. They seemed much more likely than dreams or boys when it came to taking back her land. She’d even found herself considering whether or not she could slip one of those blades between the ribs of her older sister and take back by force what she had lost by apathy. But the moment that violent thought intruded, her stomach clenched and recoiled at the thought of it.