by Ken Scholes
Vlad Li Tam smiled. Another of his old laws.
Glaring, Neb sat down.
A voice rang out, and Petronus looked away from the boy. “A Pope would not do such a thing,” one of the bishops said. “The Whymer Bible forbids it.”
Petronus waited. A murmur rose beneath the tent, and a wind outside whipped through the three entrances, carrying the scent of evergreen and lavender.
Vlad Li Tam watched his old friend’s next move and nodded. The brilliance and beauty of his father’s work was something to behold. In that moment, he realized his own part in that work, and it awed him.
“Very well,” Petronus said. He walked to Sethbert and stood before him. “None of you will kill for the light.”
Petronus laid his hand on the side of Sethbert’s face, gently as if he were a father comforting a wayward child.
But when the old man brought the knife up with his other hand, he was fast and sure, with the precision of a fisherman.
Petronus dropped the blade. He raised his bloody hands above his head.
“This backward dream is over,” Petronus said. “I am the last Androfrancine Pope.”
Then he tugged off his ring and dropped it alongside t›€it alonghe red-stained knife.
Vlad Li Tam stood and quickly slipped from the pavilion. He moved fast, his escort beside him.
Soon, he thought, I will return to fishing.
Chapter 32
Petronus
Petronus scrubbed the blood from his hands and forearms in the fountain outside the manor. He’d slipped into a plain brown robe in the commotion that ensued just after his last act as Pope, then he’d made his way out the back of the pavilion and cut through the forest to the town.
So far, it had gone exactly as he’d planned, though he despised himself for the pain he’d caused the boy, Neb. He’d already sent out the birds, disposing of the properties and transferring what holdings remained into Rudolfo’s name. All that remained was to pack and go home.
He moved past the Gypsy Scouts that guarded the manor without speaking, and slipped into his office, locking the door.
“I know why Sethbert destroyed Windwir.”
Petronus looked up to see Vlad Li Tam sitting at his small desk. He had expected him, knowing there would be words between them as soon as he saw him sitting in the crowded tent.
Petronus felt the anger rise in him. “I’m not so sure that Sethbert did destroy Windwir. At least not without prompting.” He pointed to the golden bird. “We know your bird was in Windwir. Did it bring word back to you?”
Vlad Li Tam’s eyes narrowed. “You suspect me. But I had nothing to do with Sethbert. Rudolfo was my work. Just as you were my father’s.”
Petronus felt the words hit him like a fist. “What do you mean?”
Vlad Li Tam shrugged. “You were made for this day, Petronus. Just as Rudolfo was made to guard the light.”
“You’re lying.” But Petronus wasn’t sure.
Vlad Li Tam smiled. “Regardless, I have something for you.”
He drew out a leather pouch and handed it to Petronus. “You’ll find evidence here that there was a secret program in the Order to restore the spell.”
Petronus took the pouch and placed it on his desk. “I don’t doubt that. But that is hardly damning.”
“There is more,” he said. “The bird did tell me that Windwir had fallen. But I did not send the bird to Windwir. It had been missing from its cage for nearly a year before that.”
Petronus looked up, surprised. “Where had it gone?”
Vlad Li Tam stood. “I intend to find out. I am leaving the Named Lands. I will not see you again.” When he said it, Petronus heard finality in his former friend’s voice.
They did not embrace or shake hands. Petronus simply nodded, and Tam left.
Petronus looked at the pouch. Finally, he picked it up, sat at his desk and unclasped the buckles. He drew two bundles of paper out and started scanning one. The first several pages were bank receipts in Whymer script acknowledging Petronus’s closure of Androfrancine accounts. These were followed by Documents of Transfer, moving all remaining holdings to the Ninefold Forest Houses. But the last page stopped his eye. It was a Letter of Contribution addressed to the Order and dated three days before the transfer of holdings occurred.
Vlad Li Tam had found a way to pass his vast wealth on to his daughter through the Androfrancine Order and the Ninefold Forest Houses.
Petronus retied the strings and placed the bank letters on the stack of correspondence that waited for Rudolfo, Isaak and Neb to sort through after he was gone.
He opened the second bundle-meticulous reproductions of Order correspondence and reports. He went through page after page, looking at the drawings and seeing it written plainly in some places, veiled in others. He watched it unfold in front of him, and he couldn’t take his eyes away from it. Beyond just the restoration of the spell, they’d made calculations and ciphers on the population impact of the Seven Cacophonic Deaths if used in a limited fashion. They had even developed a delivery system for the spell. A walking, talking and thinking machine brought back from the days of the Younger Gods, resistant to the magicks of such as Xhum Y’Zir.
Petronus felt his heart break for Isaak and the other metal men. These documents had to be forgeries. They simply had to be, because what he read stood in the face of everything he knew about the Order. True, he’d grown to hate it as much as he ever loved it, but he could not believe this. Sethbert’s decision to strike first suddenly made sense, and Petronus felt a pang of hot, sharp grief twist in his stomach as what he’d done settled in.
Then he saw Vlad Li Tam’s note at the bottom. The ink on it was still wet and smudged.
They meant to protect us.
It made sense now. The Androfrancines had ever considered themselves the shepherds of yesterday, guarding the New World from itself and from a past they feared might be repeated.
They meant to protect us.
He felt the tears now, pushing at his eyes, and his thoughts turned suddenly as that greater strategy took form before his very eyes. Someone out there had penetrated Vlad Li Tam’s network of sons and daughters or his closely shielded staff. They had somehow maneuvered the rescripting of the golden bird to implicate Vlad Li Tam in the Desolation of Windwir. A savvy player of queen’s war, when the consort was threatened, would have moved him to a point on the board as far removed from that threat as possible. Vlad Li Tam, dismantling his vast network, had done so.
But who was the other player, that Vlad Li Tam would remove himself utterly from the New World, transferring his wealth to the Androfrancine Order and donating his holdings to the new library, leaving nothing behind but his daughter?
Someone beyond the Named Lands.
Petronus felt his knees go weak.
The Androfrancines had known this, at least some part of them. And they had feared it even to the point of seeking out the terrible song of Xhum Y’Zir to protect the Named Lands from this invisible threat.
In the end, their best intentions for the light had nearly extinguished it.
Perhaps his actions had been justice. Perhaps they had been mercy. Either way, Petronus had done what he had done. Sethbert lay dead and the Order lay dead alongside him. He thought of Grymlis and the Marsher village so long ago.
He put papers in the pouch and put the pouch with the small pile of things he intended to take back with him to Caldus Bay.
By the time he’d finished packing, the tears had already begun.
Jin Li Tam
In the pandemonium that followed Sethbert’s execution, Jin Li Tam slipped from the pavilion. She’d seen something unexpected there-one of the younger Androfrancines looked surprisingly like one of her many siblings, and when their eyes met, he had looked away, and then vanished through one of the three wide entrances.
She followed.
She felt no anger over Sethbert’s death. He would’ve died regardless, she realized. A?€he re
alind despite the years she spent with him, at no time had she forged any kind of bond with the man. She had no more doubt that he had brought down Windwir than that her father’s hand was intricately tied to all of these events, right down to the execution that for all practical purposes ended the Androfrancine Order’s legitimacy. Certainly, those few who remained-the Remnant-could try to come back from this, but it would never be successful. And what could they come back to? She had no doubt that Petronus had wrapped the Order’s loose strings before disqualifying himself from the Papacy by wetting his hands with Sethbert’s blood.
She wondered if that were her father’s work as well.
The thought of her father brought her back to the moment, and she pressed her way through the gathering crowd. She caught sight of the young Androfrancine moving quickly ahead of her and she quickened her pace. But when she caught up to him, it wasn’t her brother after all.
“I’m sorry,” she said, slipping back into the crowd and looking around.
You want to see someone from House Li Tam, she realized. She thought about this. Why? Over the past few months, her anger had ebbed and flowed like the tidewaters of Tam Bay in her home city. When the anger rolled out from her, the sand in her heart filled in with grief to the point that she longed for the anger’s return. Inevitably, the wave crashed back to enrage her all over again.
But suddenly, now, at the end of it all, it was as if both her anger and her grief toward her father had vanished beneath the tip of Petronus’s knife. Rudolfo had told her once that people spent their lives living with a thousand insignificant injustices, and that sometimes seeing justice served on one great evil could move them forward from the path where they’d been stuck. That sudden death, both of Sethbert and the Androfrancine Order, left her hollow and spent, thinking only of the better world she hoped to give her baby.
She took her time returning to the manor. She knew she should wait for Rudolfo, but she felt a sudden craving for solitude, and knew that his work for the night was just beginning. There would be uproar to quell, fears to assuage and assurances to offer to what little remained of P’Andro Whym’s lineage.
It was near dark when she approached the hidden doorway near the rear garden, and she stopped. The door was open, and a figure stood in the shadows of the concealed passage. She drew closer and stopped again, suddenly afraid and uncertain and alone.
Her father broke from the shadows, dressed in a deep gray archeologist’s robe. He said nothing, his face unreadable and hard though his eyes were soft. She said nothing, certain that her own face matched his own and equally certain that her eyes did not. She thought she would feel the anger again at the sight of him, but absolutely nothing stirred inside of her.
Their eyes met, and he nodded once, slowly. Then he moved?€Then he past her, his shoulder brushing hers as he went. She turned around to watch him go, and she thought he walked more slowly and with less confidence.
She considered calling after him, but she did not know what to say. Instead, she watched him walk away, and after he’d gone, she went into her new home and closed the door. She had a life to build with Rudolfo and their unborn son.
She did not find her father’s note until much later. She had not thought to look for it, though she could not remember a time when he’d ever failed to leave word for her. It was simple, scrawled quickly and without code.
For my forty-second daughter, the title read, upon the celebration of her nuptials and the birth of her son, Jakob.
It was a poem about a father’s love for his daughter. At the end of it, the father sailed into the waiting night and the daughter learned a new way of life.
Neb
The crowd caught Neb up and moved him. By the time he disentangled himself from it, most had left the pavilion to gather in the field outside. Voices buzzed, rising in an ever-growing noise. He stayed by the entrance watching Rudolfo speak with a handful of the Androfrancine bishops, even while his Gypsy Scouts loaded Sethbert’s body onto a stretcher to carry it off.
I would have done it for you, he thought. But he knew that Petronus buried his own dead in his own way and that he’d intended better things for Neb. Just as he also knew that the old man had no more wanted to kill Sethbert than he had wanted to take back the ring.
We do what must be done.
Isaak limped out of the pavilion. “Brother Nebios,” he said. “Have you seen Father Petronus?”
Petronus no longer wore the title, but Neb didn’t have the heart to remind Isaak of that. Instead, he shook his head. “He left quickly.”
Isaak’s eyes fluttered and flashed. “I am alarmed by the events of this day.”
Neb nodded. “I am too, Isaak.”
Isaak continued. “I know that what I have seen is wrong. I know that it goes against the teachings of P’Andro Whym. I also know that it must surely mean an end to the Order that brought me into this world. And yet I feel an unexpected satisfaction.”
Neb studied him, unsure of what to say. His own satisfaction came from knowing that the man who killed his father would never harm anyone again. But another man-P?€er man amp;#etronus-had made him an orphan all over again, bringing down what little remained of the only family he had ever known.
You were always an orphan, some voice deep inside of him said. He looked at Isaak again. He was an orphan, too, Neb supposed.
“I will look for him in his office,” Isaak said. “I must speak with him about what has transpired here today.”
Neb walked with him in silence, certain that they would not find Petronus in his office. He doubted they would find him at all, at least not around here. The old man’s work was done now, for better or for ill, and the world must now move forward from it.
They passed the canopy with its long trestle tables and benches, stacks of paper and bottles of ink. Even now, a few of the mechoservitors sat, gears humming and eyes flashing, as they wrote down the events of the council so that it might be preserved in the Great Library.
At Neb’s questioning look, Isaak paused. “I sent them out right away to record it all. I thought it could be important someday.”
Neb said nothing, and they continued without further words.
The office was dark and the door closed when they approached. The lamp was still warm when Neb relit, it and most of the papers had been neatly arranged on the desk for the next day’s filing. He saw an envelope with his name on it, and he took it, breaking the seal.
I’m sorry, it read. You were made for more than backward dreaming.
Isaak’s eyes dimmed, and his bellows pumped. “What does it mean?”
Neb lay the note back on the desk and leaned over the other pages. Notes and receipts of transfer, letters of credit, disposal of excess properties. All signed and sealed with the papal signet, and waiting for whoever would find them first. “It means the work goes on,” he said in a quiet voice. “It means we lament what light is lost and honor what remains.”
Leaving Isaak, he wandered the hallways and finally escaped into the gathering darkness. He ran into the woods as far as his feet could carry him, then found a stone and sat on it. He had no tears. He felt no anger. He simply was.
“I was always an orphan,” he said to that darkness as it drew in close around him.
He remembered Petronus’s note. You were made for more than backward dreaming.
Perhaps he was. Neb thought about Winters. He thought?€rs. He t about the dream where above them, a large brown world filled the sky. This is our home, she had said, laying naked beside him, and he believed her. Somewhere beyond this time, a new home arose.
Someday, in the fullness of time, he would help them find it. But until then, he would stay here in the Ninefold Forest. Perhaps Rudolfo would let him serve the library in some fashion.
“Are you still here?” he asked the empty forest.
Nebios ben Hebda heard the soft grunt and the slightest stirring from somewhere nearby, and he smiled.
Rudolfo
Rudolfo caught up with Petronus on the road to Caldus Bay on the evening of the following day. He’d spent most of a night and a day soothing his shaken guests. When he heard that the old man had slipped quietly out of the city the night before, he called for his fastest stallion. He waved off his Gypsy Scouts, and Aedric didn’t balk when he saw the anger in Rudolfo’s eyes.
He pushed his stallion hard, riding low and feeling the wind tug at his cloak and hair. He inhaled the smell of the forest, the smell of the horse, and the smell of the plains ahead.
When he spotted the old man and his old horse two leagues into the prairie, he felt for the hilt of his narrow sword and clicked his tongue at his steed. He pounded ahead, overtaking Petronus, and spun his horse. He whipped out his blade and pointed its tip at the old man.
Petronus looked up, and Rudolfo lowered his sword when he saw the look of devastation on the old man’s face. Those bloodstained eyes, he realized, looked too much like the red sky he’d seen over the smoldering ruins and blackened bones of Windwir.
The old man did not speak.
Rudolfo danced the stallion closer to ask a question that he already knew the answer to. “Why?”
“I did what I must.” Petronus’s jaw clenched firmly. “Because if I didn’t, everything else I did would be a lie.”
“We all do what we must.” Rudolfo sheathed his sword, the anger draining out of him. “When did you know? When did you decide to do this?”
Petronus sighed. “Some part of me knew it when I saw the column of smoke. Another part knew it when I saw the field of bones and ash.”
Rudolfo pondered this and nodded slowly, searching for the right words to say. When he couldn’t find them, he spurred his horse forward and left the old man alone with his tear?€ with his.
Rudolfo raced the plains until the moon rose and stars scattered the warm, dark night. At some point, everything fell away but a false sense of freedom that Rudolfo embraced for the moment because he knew it would pass soon. He sped through the darkness, feeling the stallion move beneath him, hearing its hooves on the ground and the snorting of its breath. It was he and his horse and the wide open prairie, with no House Li Tam, no library, no Androfrancines, no nuptials and no heir. And though he knew it was false, Rudolfo honored the lie of it until he saw the forest on his right. Then he slowed the stallion and turned for the trees, eventually slipping from the saddle and leading the horse on foot back in the direction of what was true.