Canticle poi-2

by Ken Scholes

  Mal Li Tam returned the smile and bowed slightly. “You are welcome, Grandfather.” Then the young man turned and walked back to the pilot house and Vlad watched him go.

  A sharp arrow, indeed. Someday, he thought, Mal will replace me.

  Later that night, he took three of the small berries and crushed them into the bowl of his pipe. He drew a match across the rough paneling of his stateroom’s wall and held it to the berries while he drew on the stem, turning the red mash to a bubbling purple. He held in the smoke as long as he could, exhaled, then did it again.

  Liquid centeredness flowed out from his lungs into the rest of him and he sighed, climbing into his narrow bunk with his pipe and matches. The room moved as he did, and initially he thought the berries were stronger than usual or that perhaps four months away from the pipe had lowered his tolerance for the berries. But when he felt his legs become heavy and then nonexistent, Vlad Li Tam knew the error in his thinking. The realization struck him, and he tried to deny it but could not.

  Mal Li Tam did not knock at the door. He merely opened it and stepped into the room. His smile was wide and full of teeth.

  Vlad Li Tam willed his mouth to work, but it refused him, twisting and closing off the words. He closed his eyes against the vertigo that tugged him down. Even the questions he formed were diffused by the haze of whatever had been mixed into the berries.

  “You’re wondering,” Mal Li Tam said in a slow, careful voice, “how it is that the Franci conditioning of your House could fail so utterly, that one of your own could betray you.”

  Two thousand years of careful breeding, careful scripting, and it had never happened before. His children and grandchildren had walked willingly into death for him, knowing that their purpose was to serve him as he served the light. And it had been the same for his father and his father’s father for as far back as their time in the New World. Vlad Li Tam tried to nod, tried to move his eyes, but could not.

  “Soon enough you will meet those who can show you,” Mal said. “For now, it suffices to say simply that your time has passed, Grandfather. A crimson sun dawns over the Named Lands, and your work has been a part of it. Everything House Li Tam has done builds toward it.” He paused. “Everything I have done builds toward it, too.” He held up a slim black volume, and Vlad Li Tam blinked at it. The style was familiar to him, but he’d burned those books before steaming off to sea, the day Rudolfo confronted him at the edge of that great bonfire.

  “Your father wrote this and left it for me,” Mal Li Tam said. “In the coming days, when the pain is such that you heap curses upon those who delivered you over, I want you to know that in the end, it was he who betrayed you.”

  The room spun now, and the pull of the vertigo overcame him. He did not move when his First Grandson carefully took the pipe and matches from his hands to place them on the bedside table next to the pouch of poisoned kallaberries. Closing his eyes against it, he let it drag him under.

  After it did, the nightmares began. Vlad Li Tam ran naked across the bone-field of Windwir, his lungs filling with the ash his bleeding feet stirred up. Overhead, a blood-colored sun filled the sky. And just ahead of him, flitting to and fro among the wreckage of cast down stonework, a kin-raven kept pace with him as he ran.

  When Vlad Li Tam screamed, the kin-raven smiled to show its impossible teeth.

  And after, that red swollen sun swallowed the world while the kin-raven ate his eyes.

  Neb

  Neb waited just beyond Winters’s dreams, unwilling to intrude. He watched, though, from afar.

  Her dreams, or at least those he found himself within, had grown dark. Images of a bloody wall, a twisted and thorny wicker throne atop an impossibly steep spire with Winters running toward it, chased by Marshers in wolfskin armor. But the scene shifted suddenly, and Winters now ran through the streets of Windwir while wolves slaughtered sheep draped in black robes.

  Neb held back, lurking at the edge of the nightmare, until she started screaming.

  “I’m here,” he told her, and she stopped running.

  “Another dream,” she said, looking up to him.

  He nodded. “It is. We’ll reach the Gate tomorrow afternoon.”

  “We’re camped in the Prairie Sea,” she said. She looked smaller in this dream, as if a part of her had withered when Hanric died. More images flickered across the walls of the dream: Armies marching. Fires raging. Bodies in the river. “I’m afraid, Neb.”

  He took her hand. “Me too.”

  For a moment, they were children again. And then the birds starting shrieking and the noise of it drove Neb, stumbling, out of her dream and back into his own.

  Sunrise on the Churning Wastes was a terrifying glory.

  The light bent like dripping blood through mountains of wind-carved glass. The glass, Neb knew, had once boiled and cooked the surface of the Old World when Xhum Y’Zir’s Death Choirs went marching out into all of the cities of all nations of men. Overhead, stars pulsed around a blue-green setting moon.

  Neb stood in the midst of the mountains and measured it against the only taste he’d had of the madness: Windwir. As terrifying as that had been, he could not imagine the storm of violence that had swept these barren wastelands into sand and glass and slag.

  Brother Hebda-Neb’s father-put a hand upon his shoulder. “Men used to watch the sea and feel awe,” the dead man said. “I often thought about that when I came here.”

  Neb looked at his father. He looked younger, healthier than the last time he’d seen him. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.

  Brother Hebda winked. “You will, Neb.”

  They were on a dig and the workers were at it, only beneath their black digger’s robes were the sleek metal limbs of the mechoservitors, their eyes yellow and flapping like night moths when they blinked in the morning gloom. They whispered a prayer as they dug.

  “None of this makes any kind of sense,” Neb said in a low voice. “It’s a dream,” his father reminded him. “Things don’t always make sense in dreams.” His face became serious. “More dark times ahead, Neb.”

  Brother Hebda walked toward the hole they were digging and stood by it. “Watch out for Renard,” he said, and Neb couldn’t tell if it was a warning or an encouragement. He opened his mouth to ask and closed it when Brother Hebda jumped into the hole.

  Neb woke up and rolled onto his back. It had been months since he’d seen Brother Hebda in his dreams. The last time had been in the camp at Windwir, when he’d been warned of the Marsher army and told that he would announce Petronus as Pope. He’d also told him that the old Pope would break his heart-and he had, by removing Neb from the Order before the trial, preventing him from exacting his vengeance on Sethbert when Petronus called for a volunteer executioner from among the Order. Neb had felt angry over that for weeks, but now, with months between him and that time, he understood Petronus’s intentions and grieved instead that the old man had chosen Neb’s deception and rejection over reasoned dialogue between friends. Or between a father and a son.

  Watch out for Renard.

  The words played out again and again, and finally, Neb knew that sleep would not return no matter how he wished it. He slipped out of the bedroll and pulled on his boots. He crawled out from the tent, shivering in the cold, and crouched beside it until his eyes adjusted to the dark. A low whistle of greeting from the watch drifted across the grove of old growth and the low tents hidden within it. Neb returned the whistle as he picked his way across the scattering of frozen snow that patchworked the ground. Amber lights flickered, and he suddenly remembered the night moths from his dream, the methodic rise and fall of pickaxes and shovels keeping time with the bellows and the gouts of steam from the bent backs, released into the predawn air through holes cut into the rough Androfrancine robes.

  “Good morning, Isaak,” he said, keeping his voice low.

  Isaak blinked again. “Good morning, Neb.” His metallic voice was reedy, nearly a wheeze.

&n
bsp; Neb walked to where the metal man crouched beneath the shelter of a pine. “What are you ciphering?”

  “I am running another full search of my memory scrolls for any reference to the term ‘Sanctorum Lux,’ ” he said. “I am also cross-referencing it against references to my creator, Arch-Engineer Charles.”

  Neb squatted beside the mechoservitor. He’d spent many days in the library as a boy, his life largely defined by books until the day that Windwir’s Great Library burned. He’d not heard the term “Sanctorum Lux” before Aedric spoke it, but that did not surprise him-it was a vast library. But it did surprise him that Isaak had not heard it. The best they had done so far was to lay meaning to the words-old words, older than the Old World, from the earliest days of the Younger Gods.

  “Sanctuary of Light,” he whispered. “What do you think it is?”

  Isaak’s eyes fluttered, and his mouth-flap opened and closed a few times. He tilted his head. “If I were to freely speculate,” he said, “I would hypothesize that it was a secondary library developed and hidden by the Androfrancine Order.”

  The words struck Neb, unexpected in their simple clarity, and he exhaled quickly, his breath nearly as white on the air as the steam trickling from Isaak’s exhaust grate. “A library?”

  “Light,” Isaak continued, “is simply a metaphor in P’Andro Whym’s Gospels for the collected knowledge of humankind. A sanctuary is a sacred location regarded as safe or set apart.” The metal man whirred and clicked, his hands coming up to assist in the delivery of his message. “It is a reasonable assumption that the Androfrancines, who spent twenty centuries gathering and guarding this so-called light of knowledge, would have considered the risks associated with storing that knowledge in one public and well-known place. Certainly, if I can deduce those risks as a mere mechanical construction, their keenest minds could easily draw the same conclusion and prepare accordingly.”

  Neb thought about this. Could they dare hope for something so simple to make up for Sethbert’s folly? It would not bring back the two hundred thousand souls-including Neb’s father-and it would not restore the Order’s primacy in the Named Lands. The Order was as dead as Windwir. But if the Great Library had been reproduced and saved elsewhere against such a time as they now faced, what could it mean? Even with the mechoservitors’ stored knowledge and the holdings they’d gained access to by donation or loan from the various collectors, book houses and universities within the Named Lands, they could only hope to restore 40 percent of what the Great Library had held. A hidden library would be a treasure trove beyond their wildest expectations.

  “Have you found any references so far?”

  “None at all,” Isaak said. “And this is the third time I’ve searched. I’ve coded a message back to the others and they are searching now, too.”

  Neb studied the mechoservitor in the faint light of those amber, jeweled eyes. He’d spent a great deal of time with Isaak and the others of his kind, both under the bookmakers’ tents during the summer and as they moved from room to room in the estate, filling it with volume upon volume of material pulled from their memory scrolls. Rudolfo had employed a dozen bookbinders to keep up with them; and even now, with trade routes interrupted by the political unrest in the Named Lands, a paper mill was being built upriver from the new library. Even it would not keep up with the mechanical wonders, so Neb had no doubt that if any references to this Sanctuary of Light could be found, they would find them quickly.

  He hesitated, suddenly not sure if he wanted to take the path his foot hovered over. Then, he committed himself to it. “When you’ve finished that cipher, I’ve another. See what you can find in reference to the name ‘Renard.’ ”

  When Isaak looked up at him, Neb shrugged. “I dreamed it. It may be nothing.”

  “I will do my best,” Isaak said.

  Neb stood and stretched. “I’m going to walk the perimeter.”

  Isaak nodded, and his eyes went back to fluttering as gears and scrolls and wheels spun with whispered intricacy beneath the metal skin. Neb left him beneath the tree and moved toward the whistle he’d heard earlier.

  As he walked, he thought about his dream and about Winters. Their encounters there were becoming more sparse, her dreams filled with violence and pursuit, high in the cliffs of the Dragon’s Spine. There was no room, no time, for Neb in them. And his own dreams were now turning in a new direction, backward to his father, Brother Hebda, and eastward to the Churning Wastes.

  Watch out for Renard, his father had said.

  And tomorrow he would see the strange metal man who’d borne his message of warning to the guards at the Gate. He cast his memory back to the snowball fight and the kiss in Rudolfo’s Whymer Maze, summoning up Winters’s earthy scent and the softness of her tongue. Those were the dreams he wanted for them, not these dark and twisted labyrinths they ran their nights through now. But what he wanted wasn’t relevant. He’d learned from the Androfrancines that service to the light was about what was required, not what was wanted. Desire beyond knowledge, P’Andro Whym had written in his Fourteenth Gospel, is the chasing of wind. Something was happening to the New World, and somehow, he and Winters were caught in the midst of it. Their dreams bore the weight of that.

  Something inside warned him that this was only a beginning, that blood and sorrow lay ahead of them on their separate paths. But alongside that realization lay another: At the end of this all, if Winters and her people spoke true, a new Home rose. A new Home that Neb would somehow find for them.

  Neb willed himself to believe and took comfort in the spark of hope he found.

  Rudolfo

  Rudolfo rode the Prairie Sea, his Gypsy Scouts fanning out behind and beside him. His stallion’s hooves, magicked for speed and sure-footedness, kicked up the drifted snow as they chewed the leagues.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ridden the prairie that hemmed in his Ninefold Forest-it had been months. Before Windwir, he’d ridden it constantly, moving between the islands of old-growth forest with his men, sitting under purple canopies to mete out justice in the nine towns that made up the seats of his government. But now, with the Seventh Manor becoming the focal point as the library took shape and as bands of refugees showed up looking for work, he rode his desk more than he rode his stallion.

  Over his left shoulder, the sun climbed into the sky, a cold white wafer obscured by the thin veil of clouds. It had already been up when he’d left the woods for the ocean of frozen grass. Tonight, they would camp on the Southern Porch at the edge of the low, round hills that bordered the Prairie Sea to the west and the south.

  Funny, he thought, how many hours he’d spent at his desk wishing for the wind in his face and for the sound of hooves in his ears, the solidness of a stallion beneath him. But now he took no pleasure in it.

  It is a dark time for journey-making. And yet here he rode and he could not know exactly where the journey would take him or when he would again return to his wife and child, to the work that awaited him. Still, he left the Forest in capable hands. Even at her worst, Jin Li Tam was a skilled and formidable leader. And he did not doubt for a moment that he left her at her worst. Certainly, this pregnancy had already taken its toll, and with that past, Jakob’s frail health and constant care would now be steady teeth upon her. But he could trust her eye for fairness, justice and strategy, and he could trust his people to take her to their heart at the very least because of the heir she bore them all. And this would be an opportunity for her to become more familiar with them and they with her.

  Nearly three decades had passed since they’d last had a queen, and Lady Marielle had ruled alongside Lord Jakob as an equal, receiving the loyalty and love of the Gypsies as one of their own who had been chosen from humble beginnings to reign alongside their king.

  Until now, Rudolfo had not thought much of these things. But it was as if the tiny soul they had made together shifted all of his thoughts into a different direction, adding a new element to his strategies fo
r the future.

  Because now I truly build something beyond myself. And something for someone other than himself.

  He’d had no idea until now how powerful the notion of fatherhood would be, and he wondered if it was how his own father had felt when his two boys were born.

  He remembered the death of his brother, Isaak. At the time, they thought he’d taken ill with the red pox, killed by fever in the night. Now, of course, he knew that Vlad Li Tam had engineered it, perhaps with the aid of the same woman he now sought to save his own child. All some grand manipulation to remove the older of the twins and pave a way for Rudolfo to come into power. Even the infant he now rode forth for was a product of the Tam strategy, commanded of Vlad Li Tam’s forty-second daughter as a part of the plan to move the library north and place that light into the hands of someone other than P’Andro Whym’s careful followers. How many of his own children had the old banker sacrificed along with Rudolfo’s brother and later, his parents, to accomplish his work in the Named Lands?

  Rudolfo heard his First Lieutenant’s whistle and glanced to the man on his right. First Lieutenant Jaryk, dressed in the rainbow-colored woolen winter uniform, pointed to the southern horizon. Ahead of them and slightly to the west, he saw a short and ragged line in the distance, dark against the white and yellow of the prairie. They were still too far out for detail, but Rudolfo could just make out the wagons and horses of a small caravan.

  With a loud whistle, he changed course and rode for the line. His scouts moved with him, and from the corner of his eye, those he could see lowered themselves into their saddles, loosening bows and knives that were never far from a Gypsy Scout’s hands.