Canticle poi-2

by Ken Scholes

  Neb swallowed. His own sacrifice to the dream. “Tell her I am called to find our Home.”

  Aedric gave him one final look, nodded again, and walked away without another word.

  Renard smiled at him. They were alone now. “You’ve heard it, then,” he told him.

  Neb blinked. “You’ve heard it as well?”

  “No,” Renard said. “But your father did.”

  “I have to go back to it,” Neb said.

  Renard nodded. “We will. I can’t run, but I can ride.”

  Neb looked around the camp. He would need to say good-bye to Isaak at some point and secretly pass to him the memory scroll his metal cousin had intended for him. And he would want to eat with the men. But after that, he thought, it would be good to take the root and stretch his legs.

  To let the history of this land seep into him through his feet as he ran toward that buried song.

  His calling stirred within him, Nebios Homeseeker felt the joy of it pulling him and he smiled at it.

  Jin Li Tam

  Jin Li Tam brushed her long hair out and watched Winters holding her son. Her initial fears of the newborn had faded, and the same instincts that guided Jin as a new mother guided the young girl as she explored one of the wonders that her body could someday produce. She watched and forced a smile.

  My son is saved; I should not need to force my joy. But she did. She saw her hands upon the Machtvolk queen’s feet and heard the catch in her voice as she pleaded for her son’s life. It shamed her, and yet she felt relief flooding her when his skin turned pink and when he found his laughter and his lungs; and even now, when she heard him giggle with Winters, she brushed up against a miracle.

  And Petronus, too. She’d watched him die and then return from the dead.

  She heard a clearing of the voice and looked up, startled.

  Her father stood at the tent flap. He avoided eye contact with her, averting his eyes. “I know that I’ve earned every bit of your disfavor,” he told her, “but I beg audience with you, Daughter.”

  As he stepped into the light, she could see the scars upon his face-wounds nearly healed and yet angrily red. She’d heard what had happened in her brief hours with Rudolfo before he’d left to try to salvage some kind of kin-clave among the others. She furrowed her brows now and tried to find anger for her father; she could not.

  He’s had his reckoning. And she knew that someday, because of who she had begged to save her son, she would have hers. “Come in,” she said, “and meet your grandson.”

  Winters nodded before Jin Li Tam said a word and brought Jakob back to her. “I will think about what we discussed,” the girl said.

  Jin Li Tam smiled. “Do. I know you would be welcome. You would have a home there.”

  Winters returned the smile and inclined her head. After she left, Jin Li Tam motioned her father to a chair. “Sit. You can hold Jakob.”

  She watched her father wince when she said the name. Good, she thought. She did not think it out of bitterness but because he should understand the price that was paid. Jakob had been Rudolfo’s father’s name-a man her own father had killed using one of the Tam sons as a weapon.

  Vlad Li Tam took the baby into his arms. He held the child for a few minutes in silence before he looked up at her. “Your husband told me once that if ever he were a father he would not use his children as pieces in a game.” He took a deep breath. “This was the same day that he vowed to kill me the next time he saw me because of what I had done to his family.”

  “You deserve to die for that.” She said it without thinking and in a matter-of-fact tone.

  He surprised her by nodding. “I do. But the next time he saw me, he did not kill me. He saved me and what remained of my family. our family.” He looked at her, and his eyes were suddenly hard. “I know you’ve thought yourself a strategic piece in some game of mine, and it is true. I raised you for this, shaped you for this day. And now I know that my father did the same to me. That I was a tower in his game, scripted like your metal men to perform a function. To make you and Rudolfo.” He leaned forward and kissed Jakob’s forehead. “And to make you, too, Jakob.”

  She remembered well the note he’d left for her beneath the pillow of her guest bed in the Summer Papal Palace, warning her of war to come and ordering her to bear Rudolfo an heir. But why was he telling her?

  Now when their eyes met, she could see that his were full of tears. “I regret every harm I caused another’s child or father or mother,” he said. “The grief of it consumes me now, and when I sleep at night, I hear only poetry and screams-only it’s not my children but someone else’s, and I have been the cutter, weaving a spell in blood and believing it would save the world.”

  She felt tears pulling at her own eyes, and it made her angry. Sadness often did. Finally, she gave voice to her question. “Why are you telling me?”

  He sighed. “Because I think sometimes you are afraid you will be like me.”

  She remembered her exhilaration on the ride with the Wandering Army, remembered what it felt like to dance with the knives and bring down a Blood Scout in her wrath. “I don’t want to be like you,” she said.

  And then he smiled and handed Jakob back to her. “You are not like me, Jin Li Tam. And I am proud of that.” He stood, and she saw a strange look pass over his face. “Do you remember where you got your name?”

  She nodded. It had been a long time since she’d thought of that. “From the D’Jin of the Younger Gods, swimming in the deepest darks of the haunted oceans.”

  He nodded. “I saw one before your sister pulled me from the sea,” he said. “It sang to me.”

  Jin Li Tam did not know what to say. So she said nothing and simply stood.

  Her father bowed to her. “He is a beautiful boy. He will be formidable and strong.”

  She returned the bow but again could find no words. Her father had changed, and her brain spun now to decipher what he’d become.

  Because he’s been broken.

  And though these past months had worn her, they had not broken her. Seeing what her father had become, she did not want to ever experience it.

  After he left, she slipped into her sleep shift and laid Jakob into the crib beside her bed. Rudolfo would be up late into the night and would probably not sleep until sometime after dawn. He would be working to save what kin-clave he could with Pylos and Turam, though she was certain his effort there would be fruitless. Still, he would try because he always saw the right path and chose it. She would not see him tonight, though some part of her needed to. Some part of her that she was unfamiliar with wanted to smell him, to feel him warm and near her. He’d been away for too long. Still, he was an influential man. He could belong to the Named Lands tonight and she could hope for tomorrow.

  She did not realize that she slept until she felt a warm hand encircling her, stroking her bare stomach beneath her shift. She felt the messages pressed into her soft skin as gooseflesh rose upon her. My sunrise.

  She stirred awake and inhaled the scent of Rudolfo’s hair. “I can’t stay long,” he whispered into her ear. His hand moved again. My truest path.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” she told him and rolled over to pull him into her arms.

  And for a time, she let go of her worry about what came toward them from the gathering storm clouds and savored this moment as a gift of great value.

  Lysias

  Lysias stared at the scout magicks and the poisoned knife before him and willed focus into his hands and feet for what was to come.

  He’d been suspicious before Vlad Li Tam called for him. He’d seen the look of ecstasy upon Ignatio’s face when Petronus fell beneath the woman’s blade, and it had set him to thinking.

  A conspiracy large enough to bring down Windwir would involve infiltrations at key levels across nations, and the Marshlands had fallen too quickly for it to have been a fledgling movement.

  He’d arrived to the Kinshark just after dusk and listened to Vlad Li Tam r
eading from a slender volume. The man had changed, latticed now in scars and meek of voice. Initially, he made no eye contact and kept to his book. He was nothing like the arrogant, confident man Lysias remembered from the night they’d met near the ruins of Rachyle’s Bridge. Vlad Li Tam had given him the means to end the war by bringing down Resolute and Sethbert, and later that night, Lysias and Grymlis had helped Resolute to his end.

  The broken man had read him several pages, then met his eyes briefly. The rage and anguish there nearly matched what Lysias felt as he heard the words.

  Now, he lifted the knife and opened the pouch. He’d not been under the scout magicks since his days in the Academy, but he remembered well how it felt. He threw the powders at his shoulders and his feet, then licked the bitterness from the palm of his hand, bracing himself for what was to come. His stomach lurched, and he vomited onto the floor of his tent.

  Everything bent around him, and the world moved beneath his feet. The sounds of the camp outside grew to a roar, and his own beating heart kept time like a marching drum.

  He sucked in his breath and felt the strength moving through him.

  Setting off at a run, he took the course he’d walked out carefully earlier that afternoon when he’d decided what he must do. There was only one answer, though after he gave it there would be no turning back.

  Still, he would take this right path.

  Ignatio’s tent was guarded lightly, but not by soldiers. The spymaster used his own men for that, and Lysias did not mind dispatching them. Before their bodies stilled, his hand was upon Ignatio’s mouth and his blade was at his throat.

  “I know who you are and what you’ve done,” he whispered into the struggling man’s ear.

  He called up Vlad Li Tam’s voice now, reading from the book. About the cult in the north and Tam agents planted within the Order, about Y’Zirites in high places. About the daughter of an Entrolusian general who was to be widowed and bereft of her child in order to nursemaid another. About a blood bargain made to spare that Gypsy Prince’s life and prepare them all for the advent of a Crimson Empress. As he remembered, he felt the rage, and in that rage, he found resolve.

  “I know what you’ve done, Ignatio,” he said again, “and you pay for it tonight.”

  Ignatio bucked against his grip, and Lysias used his own body weight to keep the man pinned. He pricked the knife against the skin and waited for the kallacaine to take effect. He held the spymaster tightly as his struggles slowed, and then just as he went slack, Lysias reached for the pouch of scout magicks and tipped the remainder of the powders into Ignatio’s open mouth.

  As he faded from sight, Lysias lifted the paralyzed man onto his shoulder and staggered out into the snow.

  He moved carefully through the camp, staying close to the shadows and rehearsing his petition to Rudolfo. After tonight, he was finished on the Delta. He would hope for mercy from both the Gypsy King and his own daughter.

  And he would hope that tonight’s work would redeem him in his own eyes, too.

  He reached the river quickly and laid Ignatio down in its shallows. He placed him on his back and drew close enough to the spymaster that he could just barely see one wide and frightened eye close to his own. “You killed my daughter’s child, you blood-loving shite,” he said in a low and matter-of-fact voice.

  After, he tipped the man over onto his face in the water and stood over him. He placed a boot upon the back of Ignatio’s head and pushed him firmly to the bottom of the shallows.

  He stood silent for a time, holding him there, until he was certain of his work.

  Then Lysias pushed the body into the current and turned back for the Gypsy Camp.

  Chapter 25

  Vlad Li Tam

  Vlad Li Tam leaned on his shovel and tried not to look at the canvas-wrapped body. Still, eyes took him there against his will and then filled with tears-also against his will. The sun rose east of them, turning the distant Keeper’s Wall purple and pink.

  They’d sailed with her in the Kinshark specifically for this, but he’d wanted to wait until sunrise. So he’d visited his new grandson and then slept, tossing and turning against the noise of his dreams. Then, he’d arisen to wake Baryk, and they’d carried her and their tools north of the camp to bury her away from all but the eye of Rudolfo’s magicked scouts.

  Later, he would speak with the Gypsy King, though a part of him dreaded it after two weeks of avoiding Rudolfo’s watchful eye.

  He cleared as much dirt as he could from the hole he’d started. Across from him, Baryk waited with the pickaxe ready. The others had offered to help, but he and Baryk had refused them. Instead, the bereaved husband and father worked together to carve out a grave for Rae Li Tam here among the dead of a city and a way of life that were no more.

  It was the only proper choice that they work together, even as they had sat with her to watch her slowly die, still wrapped in the blood magicks that forced them to see her only in memory.

  Even at the end, when the pain kept her weeping, she’d given herself completely to the work of finding a cure for her nephew and had died while Baryk napped beside her, an open book upon her invisible chest.

  Vlad Li Tam felt the grief stabbing at him and looked up, nodding to Baryk. The gray-haired warpriest swung the pick down, breaking up the frozen ground for Vlad’s shovel.

  Again, he tried not to look to her, stitched there in the canvas, and he failed. I remember your first steps, he told her in the deeper places he rarely visited. And your first words. He remembered her last words, too, though he’d not known at the time that they were such.

  He’d sat beside her that last night before she died, and she offered no poetry, no celebration of her love. Instead, she squeezed his hand. “Grow your pain into an army,” she told him.

  And he knew that he would. Later this morning, he would meet with Rudolfo and he would petition him to take their scarred children and care for them. He would show him the volume-a secret history of the Named Lands that even he had not known about. One in which House Li Tam cultivated an Y’Zirite resurgence in the Marshlands, quietly seeding it with the promised fall of Windwir until, by treachery and intrigue, they toppled that great city.

  A resurgence that brought back blood magicks and had cast a great spell of power made from his anguish and from the blood of his children and grandchildren, such that it could heal the baby and raise Petronus from the dead-more miracles that pointed to a dark and rising gospel in their midst.

  He would not have believed it if he had not read it coded in the book.

  He’d believed at first, mistakenly, that perhaps they’d engineered the cult themselves simply to destroy Windwir. But deeper than that was the matter of faith. His father actually believed the so-called Y’Zirite Gospel. The volume was riddled with references to it. As much a study of scripture as a strategy for bringing out their present circumstances. But why?

  To establish the throne of the Crimson Empress.

  No, he thought, it could not be faith alone, some blind adherence in mysticism. He could not see his father in that light. There had to be a prime mover beyond him that he was in service to. And it had to be tangible and rational. Whatever the truth might be, the Crimson Empress was real.

  Somewhere, someone played Queen’s War with the Named Lands, and his First Grandson and this kin-healing Machtvolk Queen were but pieces in a greater contest. And Vlad Li Tam would find his actual opponents and repay them.

  It did not matter if the blood of his family saved his grandson or saved the very world. They who called for it and they who took it would pay for that taking.

  So he would tell Rudolfo what he knew. And then he would ask him for money. And with that money, he would outfit what remained of his iron armada and go back to that island, though the thought of it broke his heart. Weeping, he would take it apart stone by stone and learn what he could from it.

  He would grow his pain into an army, and while he did, he would learn his foe as well as he
could. He would patrol the waters to the south, keeping an eye out for schooners of unfamiliar line and trim, made from a dark wood unfamiliar to the New World’s first family of shipbuilders. He would do all of this, and he would watch the water for ghosts while he did so.

  Again, his eyes pulled him to Rae Li Tam, and he felt the sorrow moving through him like water.

  She’d given her life to save him, taking in the blood magicks so that she would have the speed and strength to find him and pull him from the sea. He’d not anticipated that, and her sacrifice, at the end of so many other deaths, broke the old man’s heart.

  I have changed, he realized.

  He’d sent many of his children to their deaths to move this river or shift that mountain. He’d sent them to the beds of tyrants and into prisons with thieves and killers. He’d made them murderers and torturers and liars and whores.

  Never again, he vowed.

  Baryk rested on the pickaxe now, and Vlad Li Tam worked his shovel. They went back and forth like that until the hole was just so. Then, they put down their tools and took up their beloved.

  The tears flowed freely now, and he did not despise them. I will grow my pain into an army.

  He looked across and saw that Baryk also wept. He builds his army, too. We all do.

  It would be a mighty army, he realized, that each of them grew. It would be a terrible reckoning for whatever hand had moved those pieces against Vlad Li Tam’s family.

  Gently, and in silence, they laid Rae Li Tam into the ground and readied their hearts for war.

  Winters

  Winters knelt before Seamus, holding his hands in her own. He blinked at the mention of the woman who shared her name, his face showing his surprise.

  She’d finally come and awakened him in the middle of the night when her questions and nightmares would not let her sleep.

  “She claims to be my sister,” she told him. “She said to ask you about her.”

  “It can’t be so,” he said, his voice quiet and low.