Canticle poi-2

by Ken Scholes

  If the assassin hadn’t paused to speak, he would have succeeded. Petronus grabbed that thread and worked it as Grymlis’s young lieutenant worked the oars and rowed them around the edges of the Bay. Caldus Bay was massive-nearly a sea of its own, he knew, from the hours he’d spent poring over the artifacts and writing of the Age of Settlement, that time just after the Age of Laughing Madness when the Order was newly formalized, having grown to the point of requiring a clearer hierarchy and chain of command. He’d nearly pursued history, specializing in that field. But his advisor had seen his potential in Francine School. Franci B’Yot had been the leading scholar of human nature and evolution-and a correspondent with the young P’Andro Whym after the first Scientism Movement failed. The Francine science ultimately won young Petronus’s attention, and it served him well now as he thought about his attacker.

  He wished to punish me. And that meant it was likely someone Petronus had wronged, someone who could blame him for something. No villain is evil for evil’s sake, according to the Settlement playwright Sebastian. Because every antagonist wanted to accomplish something that they could at least convince themselves-if not others-was benevolent.

  And this villain wished to punish-or perhaps the master he spoke of wished it. Petronus shivered at the memory of that voice, then remembered something.

  “He spoke Whymer,” Petronus said.

  The old guard grunted and looked up. “He did.”

  The Whymer tongue was ancient and guarded, the house language of P’Andro Whym. It was unusual that anyone not affiliated with the Order would speak it. “His accent was heavy. We didn’t train him-but one of our own did.”

  “Yes,” Grymlis said, looking around them and cocking his head. His voice lowered. “We’re nearly there,” he said.

  Petronus looked around, seeing nothing. “Nearly where?”

  Grymlis whistled, low and long. He waited. Then just ahead and to port, an answering whistle. Petronus squinted in that direction. Certainly, with the sky barely gray he couldn’t expect to see anything with much certainty. But the absence of anything at all, not even a shadow on the water, was perplexing. That combined with the proximity of the whistle alarmed him. Grymlis offered a roguish smile. “All these years,” he said, “I wondered how he did it.”

  “Who?”

  The bow of their boat brushed against something solid, but there was nothing there.

  Grymlis chuckled. “That sea jackal you yourself employed on a few delicate matters.”

  Even as he heard the voice above him, Petronus made the connection. “Father Petronus,” the pirate Rafe Merrique said, “I’m pleased to see that your demise was overstated.”

  Petronus’s laugh was more of a bark. Stretching out his hands, he touched the cold wet sides of an invisible wooden ship. “You spirited me away to the Emerald Coasts the night after my funeral.” He studied the air above him where the voice seemed to be.

  “Aye,” the pirate the said. “It appears I did. At the time, I didn’t ask any questions.”

  Grymlis stood up. “I’m sure we paid you quite well not to.”

  But who is paying you now? Merrique had cost a small fortune each time they hired him once he’d exhausted his need for the technological wonders the Androfrancines were willing to offer for the occasional use of his vessel. Touching the hull of the old magicked sloop, he could appreciate just why Rafe Merrique placed such a high price on his services. There was no way the old pirate was turning a kindly deed. Petronus had always dealt favorably with him during his office, but that was fairness three decades ago and not sufficient to merit uncompensated assistance. No, someone was paying him well to be in this place at this moment.

  He caught Grymlis’s eye and willed his hands to move quickly. Who is paying him?

  Grymlis’s own hands moved faster. Allies on the Delta.

  Petronus blinked and, forgetting his hands, spoke aloud. “The Delta?” He’d killed Sethbert with his own hand in front of a thousand Androfrancines. He’d excluded the Entrolusian delegate from attendance, rejected Sethbert’s own sister’s pleas not out of cruelty but selfishness. He couldn’t bear to have their eyes upon him when he murdered Sethbert at the end of his sham trial.

  Allies on the Delta.

  Another voice joined in. “Hold fast, old man. I’m putting your hands upon the ladder.” Rough hands grabbed at his arms and tugged them. Petronus found a rope ladder and stepped onto it. The ladder swayed as he climbed, and when he reached the top, firm hands reached out to pull him onto the invisible deck.

  “Welcome aboard the Kinshark,” Rafe Merrique said. “I am at your service, Father Petronus.”

  Petronus saw nothing and found himself suddenly pulled into the vertigo of the magicked vessel and its invisible crew. He pitched forward, watching the waves far beneath his feet. The hands steadied him, and Merrique chuckled. “You’ll want to close your eyes until you’re belowdecks. You and the others have quarters and breakfast waiting. Your benefactor has ensured that every comfort will be afforded you.” Petronus squeezed his eyes closed and trusted the new set of hands that took him and guided his shaking steps across the deck. Once he was hustled into the hatch, he opened his eyes and found himself staring down the stairs to a plush carpet and the beginnings of an elaborate paneled hall. Not anything like the sleek, spartan vessel he remembered from the night of his escape. They’d colored his hair and shaved his beard, passing him off as a traveling scholar who required his privacy-a common cover for Li Tam agents-and had taken him to the island port closest to House Li Tam’s holdings on the Inner Emerald Coast. He’d not spent that trip in any comfort that suggested rugs and decorative wood trim. Merrique had done well for himself in the years since.

  Girls in silk, with dark skin and wide, genuine smiles greeted him at the bottom of the stairs, inclining their heads demurely. They did not speak; they simply led the men down the corridor, stopping in front of an open door for each of them. When they ushered Petronus into his cabin, he saw that his things were already aboard. The cabin itself was comfortable-polished wood paneling with paintings from the Days of the Gathering, at the tail end of the Age of Laughing Madness, when the fledgling Order first opened the New World that the Gypsies and Marshers had inherited from Xhum Y’Zir. The bed was oak and wide enough. The porthole shutters were pulled and locked on the outside. There was an armchair and a desk. A small bookcase with a dozen volumes of varied age stood across from an equally small wardrobe.

  Someone wanted him dead for his association with the Order. And now, in his escape from whomever that was, he was sailing for the Entrolusian Delta, toward a collection of city-states that had been embroiled in civil war since Sethbert killed their economy and Petronus killed their deranged but strong leader. There were still those who maintained that the Overseer was a patriot for what he did.

  I’ve seen the evidence of it, Petronus realized, knowing that even he suspected the Order after seeing his forged signature.

  The ship shuddered to life as the sails caught wind. Petronus smelled frying bacon and hot chai mixed with the aroma of cooking onions and sliced potatoes. Regardless of whether he sailed into more or less danger than the attack on his life, he certainly sailed in comfort.

  Petronus followed his nose to the galley, suddenly grateful to be alive. It hadn’t struck him until now: It was the first time he could remember being personally attacked. It was the first time he’d been utterly certain he would die.

  Petronus blessed his benefactors and sat himself down to breakfast.

  Neb

  The Marshers wove their way through the Whymer Maze in Rudolfo’s northern garden, carrying Hanric’s body and singing as they went. When he’d first joined them, Neb thought he would stay to the edges, but from the beginning, Winters kept him by her side and held his hand tightly.

  He’d not slept that night, the events of the banquet playing out again and again in his mind. Now, he felt the weariness saturating him as the buzzing in his brain subside
d. Neb shivered, feeling the cold despite the winter woolens of his scout uniform.

  He and Winters kept the lead, the others following and reciting the Marsher death psalms low and in minor key. They were in a tongue he did not recognize-perhaps simply glossolalia, though the language seemed more structured than that-and their voices blended into harmony. He glanced at the young girl beside him and saw her lips moving, though he heard no sound.

  The early morning was dark and still around them, the noise of the manor muffled by the high thorny walls of the maze. Soon enough, he would join Aedric and Isaak at the front of the manor and they would ride for the Keeper’s Gate. All his life, Neb had wanted to see the Gate, wanted to cross the solitary pass and descend into the ruins of the Old World. He’d grown up in the Franci Orphan School, his imagination nourished by legends of the former years and tales of the Order’s exploits to save what light they could in their expeditions. The day his father died with Windwir, Neb had stayed with the wagon he was to escort into the Wastes on his first expedition until Sethbert’s men pulled him away.

  But now, looking at the hollow-eyed girl beside him and thinking back to the night they’d passed through, Neb’s interest in the Wastes competed with something else. A part of him wanted desperately to stay with his Marsh Queen, pledge his blade and his mind and heart to whatever cause lay ahead of her, or at the very least, to hold her hand and let her cry as she needed.

  Once, back on the plain of Windwir-before he’d known her true rank-she’d teased him about marriage when he’d asked her to come with him. She’d laughed on that day, but he’d known there was no malice in it. “Would you take me as your bride, Nebios ben Hebda, and grant me a Gypsy wedding filled with dancing and music?” she’d asked him. “Is that what you would do?”

  Now, as they approached the center of the maze, Neb found himself thinking of it again, only now he saw himself in the Marshlands, moving with her among her people, shoring up Hanric’s loss. Surely it made a kind of sense if he was indeed their Homeseeker. And yet deeper in the center of him, a voice whispered that this was not their time no matter how badly he wished to lend her his strength.

  The procession stopped in the center, and two of the larger men moved the marble meditation bench aside, while two of the others set in with pickaxes to loosen the frozen ground ahead of the shovels. The songs continued, quietly, as they dug, and Neb felt Winters’s grip tighten on his hand. He looked down at her and saw the firmness in the line of her jaw despite the tears that traced their pathways down her cheeks. Her tears threatened his own, now carefully held back as he steeled himself to face his First Captain, and he looked away. Back to the rectangle of ground they cut and dug. Memory tugged him backward, to a vast field of graves on a shattered plain.

  When Petronus had first suggested that they bury Windwir’s dead, he’d thought it an impossible task. Nearly two hundred thousand souls strong-each skeleton left intact by Xhum Y’Zir’s blood magick rite, each bone a message of violence. But they’d gathered their ragged army of gravediggers there at the end of second summer, and had worked through autumn, into winter, wrapping up in the spring. And somewhere along the way, the scruffy old fisherman had pronounced himself the Pope and left the gravedigging in Neb’s hands. Naturally, he’d done his best. How could he not?

  His father had been among Windwir’s dead.

  And at the end of that work, on the night before Rudolfo and Petronus arrived to escort him to his new home in the Ninefold Forest, Neb had presided over the quiet funeral of the world’s greatest city. The band of diggers that still remained had gathered up on the hill above the east bank of the Second River, and after a song about the light, they had called upon their young captain for a few words.

  Here, at this grave today, Neb could not remember a single one of those words. But he’d given them; he’d seen the nods of assent and the tears of grief satisfied. He’d heard every cough and every creak of every boot heel. He could not recall that eulogy, but at the same time, he felt better for having given it. Still, it felt easier then than now though he was not called upon for any role in this present grave-digging. Maybe the vast number of Windwir’s graves made the grief and loss then so much harder to lay hold of.

  Maybe it just now settles in, he thought. Or maybe it would settle in slowly, like a large man to a bath, gradually becoming more real with each loss that followed.

  Or maybe it is because deep down we know that whatever laid Windwir low has now taken Hanric from this world as well.

  The sudden thought ambushed him and he blinked at it. The world had changed on the day of the spell. And it had not recovered. The nations that weren’t locked in civil war were at odds with their neighbors. And now that violence had spilled over into assassinations. The only thriving place in the Named Lands seemed to be the Ninefold Forest, with the construction of its new library and rapid expansion of the town around it. Before Windwir, Rudolfo ruled a resource-rich corner of the New World and led a simple, pleasurable life. Now, the path of change took them in a new direction as the Ninefold Forest Houses emerged as perhaps the strongest nation in the Named Lands.

  Another thought struck him: Three of the most prominent leaders from the War of Windwir were in that Great Hall last night. Two were dead. One had not even been scratched.

  He looked up as Winters released his hand and stepped forward. As the men continued working their shovels, the others gathered around her and Neb stepped back. She raised her hands and broke into tongues, her eyes fixed upon Hanric’s corpse. The Marshers swayed at her words, and suddenly Neb felt misplaced.

  He felt a light touch at his elbow and glanced to his right.

  Rudolfo and Aedric had joined them. The Gypsy King and his First Captain looked haggard and worn, though they now wore fresh clothing. Rudolfo held a rolled-up quilt in his hands and handed it somberly to Neb.

  This is for Hanric, he signed slowly. Present it on my behalf, Lieutenant. It belonged to my father.

  Neb nodded, hesitant to speak and unable to sign. Finally, he risked a whisper. “Yes, General.”

  Rudolfo’s brown eyes were bloodshot, and there were dark circles beneath them, offsetting the deep lines of worry on his face. Behind his short beard, his mouth was tight and grim. Rudolfo returned Neb’s nod, cast Aedric a sidelong glance, and the two slipped back into the maze.

  As they vanished, Neb looked back to Winters. As she continued speaking, the men continued digging and some of the women began stripping Hanric down, putting his bloodstained clothing to the side in a pile. A bucket of steaming water appeared, and Neb watched as they scrubbed the hairy corpse clean of both the blood and the telltale filth that set Marshers apart from the other residents of the New World. After, they scooped dirt into the bucket and mixed it into mud with their hands. Keening beneath a sky that now shifted into deep, star-specked gray, they smeared the mud over Hanric’s naked form as Winters’s voice rose in pitch.

  Her glossolalia passed and she looked out at the small group, her eyes wet. “Hanric ben Tornus’s sojourn in shadow is past,” she said, “and he shall walk the Beneath Places in search of Home. How shall he find his way?”

  A woman stepped forward with the discarded stub of a candle, bowing deeply, and placing it at Winters’s feet.

  Winters returned the bow and continued. “Hanric ben Tornus’s sojourn in hunger is past,” she said, “and he shall hunt the Beneath Places in search of food. How shall he strike his prey?”

  An older man stepped forward with a handful of smooth stones and an old leather sling, laying it beside the candle with a bow.

  Her voice became sorrowful now. “Hanric ben Tornus’s sojourn in the sunlight is past and he shall rest in the cold of the Beneath Places. How shall he warm his soul?” Her eyes found Neb and met them. They were wide and there were worlds of grief within them.

  On shaking legs, Neb forced himself forward. He took the quilt and laid it at her feet, his eyes never leaving hers. He bowed, sadness pulling again
at his heart and eyes.

  She nodded to him and he stepped back. As the ritual continued, he tried to pay attention. Other gifts were brought forward; and then, as the diggers finished the grave and the women finished the mudding, songs and stories of Hanric ben Tornus and his shadow-reign upon the Wicker Throne were lifted up to the winter morning. As if paying obeisance of their own, the swollen stars winked out and the sliver of blue-green moon slid from the sky and into the ground.

  When it was time, they wrapped Hanric in Lord Jakob’s quilt with the candle in one hand and the sling in the other, and lowered him into the ground with his other gifts. Then, each in turn cast a shovel of dirt upon his sleeping form and let the Beneath Places swallow their friend.

  When they were finished, one by one the Marshers drifted off, leaving Neb and Winters beside the new-turned earth. They sat, side by side, on the meditation bench, and finally Winters sighed.

  “I know you need to go,” she told him.

  He slipped his arm up around her narrow shoulders. “I do. But I do not wish it.”

  She chuckled and it almost sounded bitter. “What we wish does not often enter into matters, Nebios ben Hebda. Your lord bids you go.”

  He looked over to her. There beside him, she seemed much smaller than when she stood before her people. “But what does my lady bid?”

  She smiled. “I bid you take the path you are called to. I bid you find our Home as the dreams have told us you will.”

  But what if the dreams are wrong? He did not ask it. He would not ask it. Instead, he made a statement that he willed into a promise. “I will be back within a week,” he said.

  She moved closer to him, leaning in, and he felt her shiver. “I will be gone by then.” She paused, shifting uncomfortably. “I fear something dark becomes of my people, though I do not know what it is. My own kind have brought this about. I must know why.”