Canticle poi-2

by Ken Scholes

  “And under the cover of the Old and Forgotten Ways,” one added.

  Forgotten and forbidden, Winters thought. The only blood magick left to them after the Purging had been the voice magicks used for war and coronation. But somehow, those old ways had been restored and employed without the knowledge of council or queen. “I fear discord and division is now sown in our House,” she said. “We must find it and heal it by whatever means necessary. But beyond this, we must also look beyond our borders. We’ve long held our neighbors’ respect through force and fear, but it is not a far leap from sorrow to rage. And Marshers have done these dark deeds-it is not unknown to them; they’ve bodies to show it.”

  The oldest spoke up. “How we respond to their rage will speak louder than any War Sermon.”

  Winters nodded. “I concur.”

  “We should be prepared for war,” another said.

  She looked at him. “We are the House of Shadrus. War prepares for us, and ever we meet it as our sorrow commends us to.”

  The oldest looked to the other. “To do more than necessary will send a message. Our neighbors, though misguided and affected, may see these attacks as something more than what they are. We would do no less. But that our own Hanric was among the fallen-he they perceived as our king-may soften the edge of their fear.”

  But not their wrath, Winters realized. And for all she knew, the assassinations were more than what they were. So shortly on the heels of Windwir, it certainly felt like more.

  “What do you propose?” another asked her, and she sighed.

  “We find this disease within our body and we eliminate it,” she said. “You are the Twelve, respected and loved by all. Find truth for me among your clans.” She cast her eye to the Wicker Throne. “At dawn, I will lay hold the throne and climb the spire to announce myself. It is earlier than my father wished, but the time for shadows is passed.”

  To a man, they nodded.

  She nodded as well, and then once more banged the handle of the Firstfall axe against the stone floor to close the council. As the old men stood slowly and filed out, their chief approached her.

  “You will be a wise queen,” he told her in a quiet voice, “but I fear for your time upon the throne.”

  She took a deep breath, standing. “I fear it, too, Father.”

  “I must show you something that I wish to the gods was not so,” he said. “In the tent where my grandson lies.”

  He turned and watched the others as they filed out of the hall, up the carved steps and into the narrow corridor that let them into the cold night. When their footfalls were distant, he moved in the same direction and Winters followed.

  Without words, they climbed up and into a clouded night that smelled like smoke and imminent snow. The tent stood nearby, guarded by two large men with spears who stood on either side of a guttering lamp. He nodded to them, lifted the lamp and slipped inside. Winters followed.

  The six were laid out in banks of snow, their faces hollow and pale, twisted in agony. All were clothed but one-he lay swaddled in oilcloth, stitched into it by Rudolfo’s Physician. Only now, the stitches had been cut away. “My grandson,” he said in a low, mournful whisper.

  Winters felt the stab of shame. He’s brought me here because of the cutting of his kin. “It had to be done,” she said, “but I’m sorry for it. They wished to know how he’d died from such superficial wounds.” She vaguely remembered the briefing with Rudolfo’s River Woman and the dark-robed Physician who’d wielded the blade. The others they’d found were also dead-some without a scratch upon them. Their bodies and hearts had simply given out, dropping them dead in midsprint. When they’d asked her permission to cut the others, she’d refused and told them that the findings from one should suffice for all. She remembered that much, but the rest of those early days following Hanric’s death were clouded.

  “No,” he said. “Not that.” He stooped and with one liver-spotted hand peeled back the cloth to reveal the naked body of a young tangle-haired man. She watched where the old man pointed and wondered suddenly how she’d not seen this before.

  There, upon the chest, slightly smaller than her closed fist, lay a cutting that she did not recognize. She leaned in to see it, the smell of death heavy in her nostrils. “He’s been cut,” she said. The scar was pink and new-healed. And it took a shape that she knew was intentional though she did not recognize it. “Do you know what it is?” she asked.

  He looked to her, and she saw in the dim light that tears coursed his cheeks, cleansing the mud and ash from them and wetting his gray tangled beard. “Yes,” he said. “It is an abomination.”

  He covered the body and went to the next, stooping and pushing the tattered hide vest and filthy wool shirt aside. There, over the heart, the same cut symbol.

  Silently, she watched as he did the same with the others, each time careful to replace the clothing. When he finished, he stood and spoke quietly. “Forgotten heritage has found us,” he said, “though few will know it when they see it, for these times are buried in two thousand years of forgetting.” His wet eyes met hers, and she saw something in them that made her stomach lurch. “Few should know it,” he continued. “Better to burn these before someone sees and knows it for what it is.”

  He would burn the child of his child to hide this. That he would go to such lengths, so contrary to their custom, confirmed for her what she saw in his eyes.

  It was terror there, mingled with his grief, and suddenly she could not hold back her own sorrow. A solitary sob shook her in its fist and released her. She argued back the tears and forced herself to meet his gaze. “What are these markings?” she asked, but at some core part of her she knew. She of all her people was most intimate with the history they’d chosen to forget. Because though her own people no longer wished to know it, the Androfrancines with their digging about in the grave of the Old World had forgotten nothing. And her tutor, the fled scholar Tertius now five years dead, had taught her even that which she had not wished to know. He had no books that he might show her himself, but he’d had the words.

  When the old man didn’t answer, Winters asked again. “Tell me,” she said, “what they mean.”

  “These,” he said, his voice full of despair, “are the Scars of House Y’Zir, the markings of a servant’s ownership.”

  Outside, far and distant, a wolf howled at the rising moon.

  Jin Li Tam

  Afternoon sunshine slanted through the tall windows of Rudolfo’s study, flooding the room with light and warming the back of Jin Li Tam’s neck where she sat at his desk. She looked up from the papers she’d spent the last four hours reviewing and rubbed her eyes, fighting back the nausea and headaches that took her daily now.

  She understood why the River Woman had insisted that she share the work with a wet-nurse and knew Lynnae fared no better. If she’d tried to carry this entire load she had no doubt that the stabbing between her eyes and the roiling storm of her stomach would incapacitate her. Still, neither of them complained to each other. For Jin Li Tam, it was a matter of pride. Already, she hated the notion that another fed her child, that the powders that had brought life to Rudolfo’s loins now threatened death and weakness to the baby boy they had made between them.

  These are the consequences of my actions.

  Three doors away, the young woman napped with Jakob in the suite of rooms they’d prepared for her. At first, Jin had irrationally insisted that the wet-nurse do her work in Jin Li Tam’s rooms or in the nearby nursery, but very quickly it became obvious that Jakob’s needs did not conform to her desires. He ate frequently, waking up from his lethargy with weak, gurgling cries throughout the day and night. Finally, she’d been forced to relent, and Jakob split his time now largely between Lynnae’s rooms and hers. Still, for the hundredth time since she’d left the two of them there, Jin Li Tam resisted the urge to go and look in. To make certain that he was still breathing. To know when he’d last nursed. To see if the gray pallor of his flesh had somehow
miraculously become the pink tone of a healthy infant.

  But never, she realized with a start, to know how Lynnae held up beneath the power of the River Woman’s potion. She started to rise from her chair to go and ask just that, then chuckled at herself and sat back down. She needed to let Lynnae do her work.

  And I have work of my own, Jin Li Tam thought.

  She bent her attention back to the papers and reread Rudolfo’s last message, sent under code by bird from Caldus Bay.

  Buried into an imaginary list of supplies available for the library by caravan from the high docks of Caldus Bay was first one message and then another, coded skillfully with each twist and smudge of the pen. P guarded by Gray; attacked, survived and fled, the first said; and as disturbing as that news was, the second message brought her hope. Are you and the boy well?

  He is warming to me again.

  Her family’s role in the course of Rudolfo’s life, in the murder of everyone he’d cared for-his family, his closest friend-had killed his love for her in its cradle. It was the last betrayal, betrothed suddenly to the forty-second daughter of the man who’d poured suffering and loss into the river of his life, changing its path. Still, her father’s will was woven skillfully into the man he’d shaped both for the world and for his daughter. And when she’d told him about the child she carried, she’d seen in his eyes that her father had used Rudolfo’s greatest strength against him.

  Once, she’d asked a Gypsy Scout to tell her about his king, and she heard his reply echoing now these many months later. He always knows the right path and always takes it. Faced with the prospect of an heir, he’d proven himself truly her father’s work.

  There was a knock at the door; Jin Li Tam looked up. “Yes?”

  The door opened, and the House Steward, Kember, looked in. “Second Captain Philemus has a bird from the Fifth March Scout. The envoy from Turam is in the Prairie Sea. They will bring them in-they should be here late tomorrow.”

  “Good,” she said. “Is there more news from Pylos or their eastern neighbor?” Last she’d heard, the young heir of Meirov’s crown lay in state for public viewing. And on the Delta, Erlund’s death was fueling the civil war that raged.

  The elderly man cleared his throat. “They bury the boy day after tomorrow. We were not invited to attend.”

  Of course not. “They suspect us,” she said. “Our kin-clave with them is strained by these events.”

  He nodded once. “Yes. And our man on the Delta has heard that Erlund is not truly dead but that a body double was killed. He believes the Overseer is in hiding, but he’s uncertain where. There have been strange goings-on. They lost nearly a squad of Scouts north of Caldus Bay on the Whymer Road.”

  “That’s curious,” she said. “What word from Aedric?”

  “They are pursuing the metal man into the Wastes. Isaak believes that it was lying when it denied knowing anything about Sanctorum Lux.”

  Her eyes narrowed at this. “Metal men don’t lie,” she said under her breath.

  But they can. She remembered Isaak in the rain, his metal body exposed to the weather because Pope Resolute could not see the soul that had emerged within the Order’s mechanical creation, Mechoservitor Number Three. He’d ordered the metal man to remove his Androfrancine robes, offended that the machine went clothed as if he were human. When asked about the spell the metal man had recited to destroy Windwir, Isaak had lied to the Pope, claiming it had been damaged beyond recovery.

  Now, Isaak rode with Neb and Aedric and the squad of Gypsy Scouts they led in pursuit.

  Finally, she asked the question she’d wanted to ask first. “Is there further word from Rudolfo?”

  “No,” he said. “They wait in Caldus Bay.”

  She glanced down to the papers, suddenly uncomfortable with having asked. They’d just had word yesterday. But something hadn’t set well the moment Rudolfo committed himself to seeking her father. No good can come of it, she knew. Though for their boy to survive, he had to do this.

  “Very well,” she said. “Keep me apprised on the envoy’s progress.”

  He inclined his head. “Yes, Lady.” Then, he slipped through the door, pulling it closed behind him.

  Jin Li Tam stood and stretched, listening to her joints crack. Her muscles ached from this morning’s workout-she’d danced with her knives for the first time in months, and she could feel it in her body. She turned and looked out the high windows. Below, shrouded white now, lay the Whymer Maze. Rudolfo had mentioned once that he’d hoped to build a larger one on the hill where the new library now sprawled, but the one below stretched out a goodly ways from the house-and there, at its center, rested Hanric, shadow of the Marsh Queen. The sun had dropped behind the trees so that the light was soft and graying. Shadows lifted up within the maze, and she wondered about the girl-queen Winters and the work she had ahead.

  Moments that will shape her destiny, she thought. And another thought stuck her just as suddenly. So sudden that she flinched. Like Rudolfo.

  It wasn’t possible. She ciphered, working the datum as her father had taught her, and the answer rattled her.

  These are the work of House Li Tam, she knew. Well crafted and carefully laid, she could see the threads now-even reaching into the Marshlands-and her heart sank within her breast. The thread went back past the blood-magicked Marsh assassinations. It went back to.

  She said it aloud because she simply couldn’t stop herself. “Windwir,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

  It was a grief she’d carried along with her child, teeth that chewed upon her as she puzzled out her own part in her father’s dark work.

  She stood at the window for a long while, until the light had left the sky and the lamp had guttered low. Her father had done all of this, perhaps his father before him. An elaborate cutting on the skin of the world, a Whymer Maze drawn in blood and loss that surgically removed the Androfrancine Order and now used its salted blade to cut even deeper. But why? For a long while she stood there, pondering this.

  Then, Jin Li Tam sat down to her chair, turned up the lamp, and went back to her unfinished work.

  Chapter 10

  Neb

  They rode in silence, low in the saddles and pushing their horses as hard as the magicks would let them. Behind them, pack horses kept up without effort, led by the scouts bringing up the rear. The hooves struck the wide, flat stones of the Whymer Road, but instead of sparks and a drum-pounded gallop, they offered the slightest of coughs as the magicks bent sound around them even in the same way that the scout magicks bent light. The landscape whipped past quickly too as their enhanced strength carried them across the rocky terrain.

  Neb clung to the saddle and leaned forward, letting the cold wind wash over his back as it spilled over him. He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the scout ahead, but the scenery kept pulling his attention away. There was a beauty in the shattered lands they rode through, and it tugged at his heart.

  And these are just the far edges of it. Deeper into the Wastes, glass mountain ranges cast bloody shadows over forests of bone. And near these dead cities, expanses of white, coarse, glass where sea salt, left behind when the water boiled away, had fused with the sand to make razor-edged dunes that the wind moaned over. At night, creatures hunted there by the light of a blue-green moon. Indescribable leftovers of an age long past, driven mad by Xhum Y’Zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths.

  He’d seen it in his dreams and had no doubt now that it awaited him somewhere ahead.

  But for now, the landscape was simple rock and sand and scrub. Outcroppings of granite shaped by years of wind and dark straggly brush that squatted low to the ground. It looked nothing like his imaginings.

  They’d entered the Wastes just ten minutes behind the metal man who fled them. If it had noticed, it paid them no mind. The mechanical moved fast, and just before they’d lost sight of it, it had still been upon the Whymer Way and moving east, the sun glinting off its bare head in the distance.

  Neb feared no
w that they sought a solitary pearl in a vast ocean, but he was hesitant to say so. Beside him, Isaak rode uneasily in the saddle and kept his amber eyes on the road ahead, and his head swiveled to the left and right as he scanned the hills that lined the highway.

  Finally, Aedric pulled forward and said what Neb wouldn’t say. “I think we’ve lost him,” he said, slowing his horse. “Even with the magicks, the horses can’t keep up.”

  The others slowed as well.

  “I can catch him,” Isaak said. His eye shutters flashed open and closed, the glassy jewels still fixed ahead.

  Aedric shook his head. “We need to stay together. General Rudolfo would not-”

  But he was interrupted when something hard bounced off the side of Isaak’s head with a dull clunk. A small stone clattered across the pocked surface of the highway. They heard giggling above. Neb and the others looked up to the rocky outcroppings that hemmed them in.

  “Rainbow Men and Metal Men far from home,” a voice shouted. Its tone and timbre was off-it went high when it should’ve gone low and vice-versa. “No Ash Men to guard you.”

  They stopped, and at Aedric’s low whistle, the men reached for their bows and backed their horses away from the direction of the voice. Aedric fixed his eyes in the direction of the voice. “We do not wish violence.”

  More laughter. “Who ever wishes such a thing? But in the basement of the world violence simply is.” Another rock-this one smaller-pitched and arched slowly, giving Aedric time to sidestep his horse. “Where do you ride in such a hurry, Rainbow Man? And without your shovels and wagons?”

  Aedric raised his voice and answered. “I am Aedric, First Captain of the Gypsy Scouts. We’re here on the business of Rudolfo, General of Wandering Army and Lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses.”