by Ken Scholes
Isaak’s eyes flashed again.
“I don’t understand,” Marta said.
Isaak’s voice was far away as he watched the pillar of ash and fire fill the sky. “He has altered it in some way that I have yet to fully comprehend. But this is the last time it will be used as a weapon.” There was a touch of wonder in the metal man’s voice. “I will need to do extensive calculations, but his alterations point toward the possibility of further alterations that would restore it to its original purpose.”
The Song of Shaping. Marta wondered about it and would’ve asked, but Isaak turned away suddenly. “Now that you are safe, I must assure the safety of Lord Jakob and Lady Tam,” Isaak said.
Marta felt the anger and let it out in the icy tone she adopted. “How are you going to do that? And how do you know we’ll be safe once you abandon us here?”
His eyes dulled and sparked. “I’m not abandoning you. Ire Li Tam will keep you safe. She is—”
The Blood Guard interrupted him, and Marta turned in the direction of her voice and saw the slightest warble of light where she crouched. “She isn’t able to guarantee her own safety, let alone the girl’s. So if Marta’s safety is part of my father’s directive to you, her safest place is by your side, metal man.”
Isaak sighed. “Your reasoning is sound.”
“And I am not leaving Ire,” Marta said. “So if we go, we all go together.”
When he spoke next, he sounded more like his old self, and Marta felt a stir of gratitude. “I am compelled to go, but I am not compelled to go alone or at a pace that would be considered harmful to my companions.”
“Good,” Marta said. “Then let’s go.”
They put the pyre of Ahm’s Glory to their backs and walked as ash snowed down upon them. Isaak limped again as they went, and Marta thought perhaps now it was even more pronounced.
This is how my mother died, she thought again.
Then Marta turned her back upon the desolation and fixed her eyes upon her home, following him in faith she couldn’t fathom.
Through fire and under sea, Marta thought, beneath the ground and in dreams upon the moon, I am with you, my love.
Petronus
The library was dark but for the dim, rainbow glow of gems that hung low upon the branches, and Petronus sat in that space and pondered.
I am too old for this. But even as he thought it, he chuckled. Certainly as a younger man he’d violated his vow of chastity a time or two. And he’d found in those moments that everything worked as it should. In the days following those dalliances, he’d found himself hungering for more. But it was a dragon that went easily back to sleep.
Until now.
He’d chosen this tree for its sentimental value, and he felt the stirring in his body as he remembered the moment that Nadja Thrall slid onto his lap, the warm skin of the tree pressing against his back even as her warmth enfolded him. He sighed.
“Too old,” he mumbled. But he wasn’t. He was closer to seventy-five now, but with a body in better shape than his own at thirty. And having a tryst, it seemed, with an ambassador in her twenties.
Something tickled at Petronus’s ears, and a split second later, the room shook slightly as a vibration passed slowly through the tower. He climbed carefully to his feet, cocking his ear.
The tickle was gone.
An earthquake, maybe? He couldn’t recall the tower moving before. But whatever it was, it had been mild. Still, it bore investigating. Petronus savored the feeling of the bark upon his back and the memory of Nadja Thrall and their first time together, here in a library of trees in a tower on the moon, for another moment. Then he climbed to his feet.
He heard the cough near the center of the library and stopped. “Hello?”
Something croaked, and Petronus moved toward the sound. There, at the foot of the tree bearing the dark rings, lay a pile of burnt skin and bone propped up upon a silver staff and shimmering with silver light.
Petronus took a cautious step forward. “Who are you?”
A burnt and scarred face looked up at him. “Oh my friend,” Vlad Li Tam said, “you’ve grown young again.”
Petronus crouched and studied the man that lay before him. The hair and clothing had been mostly burned away, but even before whatever calamity had overtaken his old friend, he’d wasted away to nearly nothing. Vlad had never been a large man, but he’d been powerfully built and now was skin and bone. “What’s happened to you?”
Vlad coughed. “The tools of the parents.”
Petronus remembered the quote. Are not toys for children. He nodded, thinking of the blood of Aver-Tal-Ka that fused with his own to grant him access to the temple but at the cost—at some point soon, he knew—of his life.
“Where is Neb? We need that staff, Vlad. It is time to lay it down.”
“Neb is close,” Vlad croaked. “And I’m finished with it now.” The tattered old man tried to stand and couldn’t. He raised a finger to the dark rings that hung low before them. Petronus saw a matching ring upon it. “You are authorized,” Vlad whispered.
The tree shook slightly, and the Watching Tree beside it turned its dark eyes toward Petronus for a moment. But he forced his attention back to Vlad Li Tam.
“Have Neb bring you back to the tower,” Petronus said. “We can treat your wounds. The war is nearly over, and we’ve new waters to fish.”
Vlad shook his head. “Sorry, old friend. Only one fish left for me to hook.” He coughed again. “Tell them I am sorry.”
Petronus leaned forward. “Tell who?”
“All of them. My daughter. Rudolfo.” He paused for another fit of coughing. “And Isaak.”
Petronus’s stomach sank. “What have you done, Vlad?”
Their eyes met for a moment before Vlad looked away. “You are authorized,” he whispered again, and then vanished.
Petronus stood and took a hesitant step toward the tree. He stretched out a finger to touch one of the rings and felt that it was warm to his touch. Holding his breath, he slid his finger into it and then pulled it from the branch. It came away easily, and the flood of light and sound that swept him away as it did so dropped Petronus to his knees.
“Oh,” he said as the Library of Elder Days introduced herself to him in a cascade of data.
Petronus wasn’t sure how long he knelt there as it all unfolded itself before him. It felt like hours but was likely minutes. He saw vast archways leading into deeper and deeper forests of information. And he saw the burn marks where forests had been cut out. He saw the controls for the temple and for the Seaway. Finally, he forced the ring from his finger and tucked it into the pocket of his robe next to the stone Nadja had given him.
As he brushed against it, her voice filled his head. Petronus?
He closed his eyes. Yes?
Come to the roof, please.
The memory of their second time washed over him as he remembered the grass at the top of the temple and the light of Lasthome washing her pale, supple body. He shook it away and took to the stairs. The urgency in her tone wasn’t the same urgency of the last call that had brought him up to her.
He raced the stairs and found her standing with a small collection of New Espirans and settlers. They were watching Lasthome and talking in sober voices.
Petronus squinted up. “What is it?”
Nadja’s culture had no shame regarding couplings, and she kissed him quickly when he approached. “Look,” she said.
He saw a large dark smudge over the southern continent. “What is it?”
“It was Ahm’s Glory,” she said. “It’s been destroyed.”
Petronus felt it like a boot to his stomach. “Neb’s there.”
She nodded, her eyes rimmed with tears. “Yes. Isaak, too. And others.”
Tell them I am sorry. Petronus could not contain the sob that shook him.
Oh Vlad, what have you done?
Y’Zir had cut a city from the world and then cut Vlad’s family from him. And now, those cut
upon did their own cutting. But at what cost?
He looked away, his mind flooded with the memory of the pillar of smoke and ash upon the sky that drew him back into a papacy he’d laid down years before. “Have we heard from Neb or any of the others?”
Nadja shook her head and opened her mouth to speak. But she was silenced when a collective gasp went up from the small group that gathered.
Petronus looked up and saw the flash of white as it bloomed, went orange, then went dark maybe eight hundred leagues west of Ahm’s Glory.
Nadja held a hand up and used it to measure distance. “T’Erick’s Fall, I think.” And as she said it, once more the tower vibrated.
“We have to reach Neb,” Petronus said. A cold terror gripped him, and once more he thought it, Oh Vlad, what have you done?
Somehow, he’d taken the spell from Isaak and had used it twice now.
Petronus turned to Nadja. “Keep trying him by the stone. I’ll go fetch the crescent.”
She nodded, and Petronus saw the fear upon her face. He paused long enough to kiss her again, quickly, before moving for the door and stairs.
He took them three at a time and was halfway to his room when the tower shook again.
And for the third time, Petronus wondered what dark and terrible thing his childhood friend had done with all of his pain and just how far he would go to cut Y’Zir out of the world.
Neb
Neb spat blood and dirt from his mouth as he climbed up from the wreckage of a collapsed wall and looked around for some sign of Isaak and Vlad Li Tam.
One of Vanya’s men had died upon impact, and the other had vanished. Vanya lay with her legs pinned beneath more rubble at the other end of the alley, and the kin-dragon shrieked and tore up gouts of cobblestone with its claws.
Neb contorted his mouth and screamed for his own kin-dragon, hearing its reply from a league away. Guard me.
Then he tightened the silver suit he wore, feeling strength and calm flood him. Neb took a step toward the kin-dragon. “Amylé,” he said. He blinked and tried again. Amylé.
The kin-dragon snarled. I can’t believe you would betray your own people, Nebios Whym, in service to these bloodletting children of Y’Zir.
The accusation caught him off guard. “I don’t know what—”
The kin-dragon surged forward, interrupting him, and Neb leaped toward Vanya, feeling the wind of the massive beast’s wings as it lunged past.
He lifted the section of wall that held her, his eyes never leaving the dragon as it turned on him again.
His own kin-dragon dropped silently like a massive silver stone to land upon Amylé. A whirlwind of dust and debris spun out from them as they twisted and writhed, tails and legs tangled, then lashing out. Another wall collapsed, and Neb pulled Vanya up and away from the fighting. “We need to find them,” he said.
Something, he realized, had gone horribly awry. And not for the first time. All of the carefully laid plans brewing for thousands of years, dreams buried in songs and so many working parts to bring together a whole. Neb supposed the acolytes who had taught him and the other orphans Androfrancine logic and statistics would’ve have postulated that flaws in execution would be logical and likely for a strategy of such magnitude.
What is Isaak doing? And why? When the door had burst open and they’d come racing out, it was the last thing Neb had expected to see. And before he could pursue, Amylé had engaged them from above.
“Did you see where they went?”
Vanya pointed. “That way.” Then she paused. “Sergeant Quinley says they were running toward the Magisters’ Quarter.”
Neb nodded. “It will be faster if I carry you,” he said.
She blanched, then looked to her fallen man and the kin-dragons as they tore at each other. She inclined her head and he lifted her, surprised at how little she weighed.
Then Neb started out at an awkward jog. Behind him, Amylé’s kin-dragon shrieked and tried to disengage. They’d gone a few leagues when her voice filled his head. He’s lost them.
A tickle of fear at the base of Neb’s neck spread out into an ocean of cold in his belly. It was a realization that he could not bear to comprehend, and he heard the panic in his voice. “He’s controlling Isaak with the staff and ring.”
He said it aloud and felt Vanya stiffen in his arms. If he’s controlling Isaak, then we must assume he has access to the Cacophonic Deaths.
Neb forced the word through the gate of his terrified mind. Yes. Then he forced more words through his suddenly dry mouth. “Which means we need to leave now. I can’t stop him if I can’t find him. And if we stay…” He remembered that day as if it were yesterday. There on the hillside, waiting for the man he thought was his father—Brother Hebda, actually a behaviorist from the Office for the Preservation of the Light tasked with monitoring Neb—to return. He’d not returned, and Neb had stood and watched Windwir fall, his brown hair turned white and his speech reduced to glossolalia and bits of Androfrancine scripture as a result of that Desolation. “If we stay,” he said, “we die.”
He wanted to vomit, and even as the fear overtook him, so did the grief at what was coming. Vanya twisted in his arm as he forced his feet forward. To me, he called to the kin-dragon.
“Bring your man back to us quickly,” Neb said, cocking his head. Then he tucked her into the alcove of a building. “I may have to fight our way out of here, so wait until I call you.”
“What are you going to do?”
He looked to the sky. “I’m going to get us out of here.”
MARTA.
The word dropped into his head like a rock, and he felt the pulsing in his temple. He knew the voice, and he shuddered at the urgency he heard. Isaak? Where are you?
There was no answer, and he heard a crash half a league to his west. His kin-dragon landed in the open road ahead of him, and the other fell upon it with claws and teeth. Neb held his breath and felt the silver skin tighten against him as he leaped into the fray and pressed for his dragon’s offered belly. He felt the solid crush of the other beast as it shifted its weight, and then Neb and his own beast were one as he twisted away from Amylé and her teeth upon his neck. He whipped his tail and kicked his legs against her, surprised when she suddenly released him. Without a word, she beat her wings against the sky, climbing and then speeding north.
Neb scanned the alcove and saw Vanya and Quinley watching him with slack jaws. Step out and stand closely together, he sent. They did, and he gently wrapped them into his paws, pulling them against his stomach until the silver skin shifted and they were suddenly tucked inside the kin-dragon in small pockets near where Neb’s own body lay. He wasted no time, surging up from the cobblestones and beating his wings furiously as he climbed and built speed.
He felt his skin go cold as the air around him went completely still and a solitary note rose up from somewhere far below. Neb glanced toward it, marking the place as best he could in his memory. Then he beat his wings furiously against what he knew followed soon.
The mechoservitors, even those reconstructed by Brother Charles, had contained some original element that made them immune to the effects of the spell. It had been mechoservitors—of the more ancient variety like the Watcher and Isaak’s current form—that had delivered Xhum Y’Zir’s death song in the first place, creating the Churning Wastes. Neb could only hope that the same immunity held true for the kin-dragon he flew.
He felt the wind and fire rush over him, and the force of it tumbled Neb through the sky as his wings tried to compensate. Drawing his legs in, he forced himself upward and away. Everything was white heat and then utter darkness as the city started into its second sigh. And as he raced against the expanding pillar of fire and smoke, he could not help but think of that day seemingly so long ago. He’d seen a metal bird—golden—flitting out of the firestorm. And now, he wondered what those below him might see. Dragons upon the wind of death.
The darkness released them, and Neb cast about, finally settin
g them down upon a hill that overlooked the boiling canals and pillar of fire. Wait for me here, he sent. I need to find Tam.
He pushed them gently out and stood them on the ground, then waited for the two of them to step back. When they were clear of his wings, Neb lifted off again and turned himself back to the desolation. He hovered there, as close as he could fly, and took in the wrath of Vlad Li Tam.
After everything that had transpired, he was once more here in this place overlooking more devastation and loss than any heart could contain. It did not matter that these were the people who had engineered the fall of Windwir or that their knives had carved the words of their faith into his skin while whispering to him. They called me Abomination. But truly, the Abomination was whoever had shaped such a vast and terrible weapon and unleashed it upon the world.
He tested the heat as he flew closer, pausing to adjust his course. If he strained his ears to filter out the roaring of cacophony, he could hear the notes of the song at the heart of the fire. Neb pushed and then waited, pushed and then waited, and scanned the ruins and craters with eyes that could see through magicks or smoke with ease.
He had no sense of how long it took before he was able to reach the center and find the withered remains of the man stretched out there in a large smoldering crater. He saw the silver staff clutched in the man’s hands and the wide, empty eyes staring into nothing. Neb settled the kin-dragon down and adjusted as its paws settled into the ash. He heard the crunch beneath his feet and felt a stab of memory that drew him back to that forest of bones that he and Petronus had buried during that dark and violent winter.
The season brought Winters to mind. He’d fallen in love with her there amid those graves and had shared that first kiss and those early dreams.
This dream is of our home.
He shook it all away and forced himself to leave the kin-dragon. He wasn’t prepared for his body’s response. His senses had been bolstered, filtered by the kin-dragon when they were synchronized. But now that it was his lungs, his eyes, his skin, he felt the burn and the heat and the taste, and it was Windwir all over.