by Ken Scholes
Jin Li Tam spoke, her voice sharp. “And you have no evidence that you should not. The mechoservi? Thstitor corroborated-”
“The mechoservitor corroborated only what Rudolfo had told him. I do not doubt at all that Brother Charles’s apprentice changed the mechanical’s script. I do not doubt at all that this mechoservitor spoke the spell and destroyed Windwir. Beyond that, I know nothing.”
Jin Li Tam’s fingers moved along the arm of her chair. He stalls.
Yes, Rudolfo signed. “I can appreciate your position, Excellency,” he said. “Please continue.”
“In light of this, you will continue to be my guest. We continue to gather our people and our resources-every day, a few more respond. Soon enough, I’ll be able to convene a Council of Investigation.”
Rudolfo nodded. “A fair solution, I’m certain.”
There was a knock at the door. Resolute looked up. “Yes?”
An aide materialized, moving quickly to the Pope’s side and leaning down to whisper in his ear.
I cannot stay, Rudolfo signed.
I concur, Jin Li Tam signed back.
When the Pope looked up, his face betrayed surprise. The aide left quickly, and Resolute released his held breath. Rudolfo thought he might even look more pale than usual. He glanced at Rudolfo, then stared at Jin Li Tam.
“I have surprising news,” he told her.
But before he could continue, the doors opened. Pope Resolute stood, and Rudolfo took it as a cue to the same. Jin also rose, and out of the corner of his eye Rudolfo saw surprise now color her face as well. A slight man in saffron robes and short red hair shot through with gray entered the room. Two young men dressed in black silk accented with saffron colored sashes accompanied him, and Rudolfo immediately saw the resemblance in the faces and the posture. Brothers with their father, he noted.
But he saw more than that. He glanced at Jin Li Tam again to be sure, and there was no doubt. They had the same eyes.
“Lord Tam,” Resolute said. “It is an unexpected honor to meet you.”
“Some messages should be delivered personally,” the slight man said, his eyes sharp and hard. “I will be brief, Archbishop Oriv.”
Cu?s Nll rious, Rudolfo thought, that he does not address him as Pope.
Resolute noticed it, too, he realized. The man’s eyes narrowed. “When I’ve concluded my business with-”
Vlad Li Tam waved aside the words like so many gnats. “I believe you will find that my business takes precedence.” He looked at Rudolfo and offered a tight smile, then he looked to his daughter and the smile widened. “It is good to see you, daughter.”
She bowed. “You also, Father.”
“I promised to be brief,” Vlad Li Tam said, turning to Pope Resolute.
“I will have my guests escorted-”
Again, Lord Tam waved the words away, interrupting. “That will not be necessary, Archbishop. What I have to say is for their ears as well.”
Resolute sat heavily, a dark look crossing his face. “Very well.”
“The matter of your succession to the throne of Windwir and the Holy See of the Androfrancine Order appears to be in dispute,” Vlad Li Tam said in a matter-of-fact tone. “There is another Pope-one with a more direct line of succession. I can personally verify this.”
Rudolfo watched Resolute’s eyes widen. “Another Pope? How is that possible?”
Vlad Li Tam shrugged. “Those questions are for another to answer. But as a steward of the Androfrancine treasury, I am required to inform you of this officially before suspending your access to the Order’s holdings. I could have sent a courier but I felt such news should come directly from me.”
“Where is this Pope then? Why has he not announced himself?”
Vlad Li Tam smiled. “I cannot say. He remains… discreetly anonymous. In light of recent events, I’m certain you can appreciate that discretion.”
Resolute sat back in his chair. For a moment, he looked deflated. Beyond him, framed in the glass door, dark clouds broke open and rain fell. “This is highly irregular,” he said. “And you claim he has clear rights of succession?”
“It is not for me to make that claim. I simply say it is a more direct line of succession. It will be a matter for the Order to investigate. It would be improper for me to speculate further on the intricacies of Androfrancine law.”
Resolute’s face went red. The surprise is wearing off, Rudolfo thought. Anger touched the edges of his voice. “Certainly, there will need to be further investigation,” the Pope said. “Meanwhile, I have an Order to rebuild and that requires access to funds. How do you propose I handle that?”
“I would not presume to tell you,” Vlad Li Tam said. “I am merely fulfilling my obligation to convey this information to you.”
Resolute glared. “This is entirely unacceptable. You can’t-”
For a third time, Lord Tam dismissed him with a gesture of his hand. “It is,” Vlad Li Tam said slowly, “what it is.” He paused and Rudolfo knew that it was not to choose the right words but to set the stage for them. Vlad Li Tam’s words were chosen before he’d left his office on the eighth patio of his seaside manor. “You of all people should appreciate the importance of taking great care with what little remains of P’Andro Whym’s Order.”
The Pope looked from Vlad Li Tam to Rudolfo. Then he looked at Jin Li Tam. Rudolfo watched him calculating, saw the hardness growing in his eyes. “I understand entirely,” he said, his jaw tight.
Vlad Li Tam inclined his head. “Excellent. I have urgent matters to attend to. I’m afraid I must return to the Emerald Coast immediately.”
Without a word to his daughter, Vlad Li Tam spun and strode out of the room. Rudolfo caught Jin’s bemused look out of the corner of his eye.
Resolute looked again at Rudolfo and Jin Li Tam. “I will have you escorted to your quarters, Lord Rudolfo. I’d speak with Lady Tam about this unexpected turn of events.”
Rudolfo stood and smiled. “If Lord Tam speaks true, your Writ of Shunning has no teeth.”
But the two Gray Guards that stepped quickly to either side of Rudolfo, hands on the pommels of their short swords, were all the teeth this pretender required.
Jin Li Tam
Jin Li Tam waited for the archbishop to speak. Her father’s sudden arrival had surprised her. His sudden departure had not. He was a man given to a strange blend of effectiveness and attentiveness. He would ride the length and breadth of the Named Lands, deliver his message and then ride back.
And the news of another Pope also surprised her, though it was no shock at all that her father knew of it. He was ever at the center of the web-and often, the web was of his own design.
“This i?"› amp;eb s most unexpected and unacceptable,” the archbishop said. “How are we to resolve it?”
Jin Li Tam pushed a strand of hair back from her face. “I am my father’s daughter, always about his business. But the matter of succession is not my matter to resolve. My interest lies with Lord Rudolfo and the Ninefold Forest Houses. I want him released immediately.”
Resolute chuckled. “When I needed your father’s good favor that might have had clout with me.”
The insolence stunned her momentarily. When she spoke, her voice was low, even menacing. “You will always need my father’s good favor,” she said. “And you will never have his without mine.”
“Regardless,” Resolute said, “Rudolfo remains with me. As does the mechoservitor.” When she opened her mouth, he continued, not giving her a chance to interject. “Do you dispute that this mechanical belongs to the Androfrancine Order? Matters of succession aside, I am at the very least an archbishop of the Order and the ranking member accounted for thus far.”
She looked at Isaak, then back to Resolute. Oriv is his name, she reminded herself. She would not allow herself to think of him as Resolute any longer. “I cannot dispute that.”
“Very well. I think given the strained relationship that presently exists between House Li Tam
and the Androfrancine Order, it would be best for you to leave the Papal Summer Palace. The Gray Guard will escort you and your Gypsy Scouts to the gates tomorrow morning. Until the matter is resolved, you will not be permitted to return. Do you understand?”
She nodded and stood. “I do. Thank you, Archbishop.”
He flinched when she said it and she was glad for it. The more she dealt with him, the more she thought he must be Sethbert’s puppet. He probably was not in on the plan to destroy Windwir, but he was certainly a part of it. Sethbert had ensured his cousin’s survival somehow, and now pulled the strings that made him dance.
Once more it brought her back to the question that had plagued her since she’d first learned of Sethbert’s act of genocide. Why? Madness, she thought, and yet the plan was better conceived than she had initially thought.
Jin Li Tam left the room, her eyes darting left and right at the Gray Guard who stood in the shadows just outside the open office door. But they did not move as she walked quickly past.
The Gypsy Scouts were waiting for her in the guest barracks on the back of the palace. She slipped out the servant door and into the cold rain, knocking lightly on the door. The lead scout opened it. “What news, Lady Tam?”
She pushed past him and into a spacious room lined with bunks and chests. “House Li Tam has suspended all fiscal transactions with this so-called Pope,” she said. “My father claims there is a more direct successor. The pretender intends to hold Rudolfo and to enforce his Writ of Shunning. Sethbert intends to ride on the Ninefold Forest.”
The scout nodded, his face hard and unreadable. “What about the mechoservitor?”
“He is Androfrancine property. And Isaak will not dispute that, Pope or not.” Unless, she thought, someone with more authority than the archbishop directed otherwise.
“Very well,” the lead scout said. “I will send word to the others.”
He whistled and a scout stepped forward, pulling parchment and ink-needle from his kit. Another drew a small brown bird from a belt cage.
Jin Li Tam smiled. She had read Rudolfo’s instructions before passing them on to the scouts. Having nothing but time on his hands, he’d written up instructions for every possible circumstance he could imagine. She’d spent most of a day reading them, her respect for the man growing with each page. He was perhaps the most strategic thinker she’d ever known. He wasn’t quite as meticulous and careful as her father, but he was very close.
“So tonight, then?” she asked the Gypsy Scout.
“Tonight,” he answered.
Leaving them to their work, she returned to her quarters. She locked the door first, then went to her bed. Reaching below the pillow, she drew out the note she expected to find there.
It was a simple letter-the kind one would expect a father to write a daughter. It even included congratulations for her betrothal, and she smiled at this. It had been her father’s work and will-yet he congratulated her for it. But buried within the banality of the letter was another message. She read it twice to be sure. Then she read it again before crumpling it and pushing it into the furnace.
War is coming. Bear Rudolfo an heir.
Neb
It took three days for violence to erupt on the plains of Windwir. Neb watched the tension grow for those days, working quickly as the first of the rains fell. The ruins became a treacherous soup of wet ash and Neb slipped and slid behind the wheelbarrow as he jogged it to the nearest open grave.
When the snows came, he wondered what they would do. Surely Petronus didn’t intend for them to work when the bones wer?n tsize frozen to the ground and buried beneath a foot or two of snow.
“Riders,” someone shouted.
Neb looked up in time to see a line of horses, the soldiers they carried riding low in the saddles. He drew a line out from the horse’s noses and saw that they were riding for the Entrolusian line. They were Marshers by the looks of them, but it was hard to tell from so far away-harder still with four armies encamped about the ruins.
He dumped his load into the trench and moved back out to the line of shovelers. He saw Petronus approaching through a haze of rain.
“Whose were they?” he called out when he was close enough for Neb to hear him.
“I’m not sure,” Neb shouted back. “Marshers, I think.”
Petronus looked worried. He’d not been the same since the night the Marsh King arrived. For the rest of that night and all of the next day, the Marsh King had preached from the northern edge of camp, his magicked voice blasting out across the ruined city. He railed against the injustices the Androfrancines had delivered upon his people, he quoted long passages from obscure, apocryphal gospels that Neb had never heard of, and at some points over the course of his oratory, he even babbled in ecstatic utterances.
It was unsettling. Several of the diggers dropped their shovels and left. Even the Entrolusian sentries seemed shaken in the end. But when the other two armies arrived the long oration wound down, and the Marsh King’s voice no longer boomed across the blasted lands.
From there, the tension had built until now. Petronus stood by Neb, and together they watched the riders gallop south. They watched a group of riders break from the forests to the south, riding north.
Neb couldn’t look away. The horses met and passed each other amid the distant sound of shouting. Some of the horses rode on without riders as spears and swords found their marks, bringing men from both sides out of the saddle and into the black soup. He felt Petronus’s hand on his shoulder and he looked up. The old man was pointing to the northeast where more riders, these followed by a scattered cloud of foot soldiers, advanced south as well.
“The Marsh King is to war now,” Petronus said.
Neb watched as the two cavalries made another pass before breaking off. Then he watched as a group of soldiers and horsemen moved north to meet the next wave of Marshers. But these weren’t Entrolusians-more likely the Honor Guard of the Queen of Pylos. At least that’s where Neb thought their camp was. “He’s outnumbered-three armies to one.” He looked at Petronus. “Why would the Marsh King enter into this war? And why on the side of the Gypsy King?”
“I’m not sure, but he does. He has a long hatred of Windwir. Perhaps he thinks Rudolfo brought down the city as the so-called Pope has said.”
Neb had studied the Marshers a great deal in school. They had a history of skirmishing with Windwir and the outlying villages under Androfrancine protection. The Marshers had come to the Named Lands early as well, a ragged tribe made up of those the Madness had particularly tainted. They’d arrived not long after the first Rudolfo and they’d settled into the valleys along the banks of the Three Rivers. But after a generation or two proved that the Madness had not purged itself, they were gradually pushed back-under the auspices of the early Androfrancines-into the swamplands and marshes near the headwaters of the Central River.
Neb turned back to his wheelbarrow. “I should get back to work,” he said.
Petronus squeezed his shoulder. “I should, too.”
Neb finished out his shift and cleaned up in the bathing tent. The temperature had dropped considerably in the last few days. He scrubbed his robes while he danced around the lukewarm shower, rubbing the same rough bar of strong soap over them as he did himself. After drying and slipping into clean clothing, he went back out into the mud long enough to hang his wet clothes in the tent he shared with Petronus, then went to find dinner in the galley.
He sat alone, holding a metal cup of venison stew close to himself, eating it slowly and savoring the wild taste of the young deer cooked with turnips and potatoes, carrots and onions.
That voice had stayed with him. The scriptures and the ecstatic utterances raised the hairs on his arms even now.
I sounded like that. Not as loud, certainly. Yet the Marsh King’s words had marched out strong and clear, not jumbled and squeezed together like sausage into skin.
And when he said them, he said them as if those words were the most imp
ortant words ever spoken.
Neb finished his dinner and crawled back into his tent. Yesterday, Sethbert’s wagons had arrived with long wooden pallets and they’d laid them in the mud within their tents and along the causeways where they walked the most. There weren’t nearly enough of them, but it was a start.
Neb wrapped himself in his blankets and listened to the water running beneath his pallet.
In the distance, he heard the Marsh King’s voice start up again, too far away to hear clearly despite the magicks that enhanced it.
But Neb heard the laughter at the end of this night’s brief?_›
It haunted his dreams.
Petronus
“You must pull your people back,” Gregoric said, his voice sounding both weary and angry at the same time.
Petronus shook his head. “I’ll not. Not until this work is done.”
One of the other Gypsy Scouts had found him in the galley, pressing a scrap of paper into his hands-a call to the river. He’d dumped his stew back into the communal pot, grabbed a chunk of dark, sweet bread that was only partly stale, and made his way to the place where he’d first encountered the Captain of the Gypsy Scouts.
“Sooner or later, you’ll start losing men,” Gregoric said.
Petronus’s laugh was more of a bark. “It’s already happening. And with the rains coming on, there are fewer showing up to help.”
“I don’t mean just attrition,” the scout said. “You’re caught between four armies, old man. One of them is bound to fall on you.”
Petronus knew this was true. Today’s battle had been within sight and sound and he’d watched it drift closer and closer to where his men worked with their shovels and wheelbarrows. Talking to the Entrolusian lieutenant, he’d learned that the Marsh King had surprised them all. No one had expected him to ride down from the north and declare some strange kin-clave with Rudolfo. They’d waited and watched, but when he sent horse-bound skirmishers across the fallen city to attack Sethbert’s forward cavalry, the waiting and watching evaporated into warfare.