Hymn

by Ken Scholes

  Ahm was babbling incoherently now, but he’d stopped the tapping and leaned in so that his filthy glass was inches from Vlad’s face. Vlad smelled something foul and rotting and medicinal leaking from the orb. “We will continue later.”

  Ahm left, and Vlad sagged against the ropes that held him. He felt hands upon him and looked over to see a young woman with dark curly hair bending over his shoulder, unwrapping the bandage to change his dressing.

  “I wish,” she whispered to him in Landlish, “they would just kill you and be done with it.”

  The stark honesty and firmness in her tone struck him as odd. As did the Delta accent. From what he saw of her arm and face, she bore no scars. “You’re Entrolusian,” he said.

  She looked at him now, and he saw the hatred smoldering in her brown eyes. “I may kill you myself if they don’t do it soon.” She jostled his stump, and he felt the pain of it shoot like fire through his body. “I keep hoping they’ll hurt you for a while first.”

  She was familiar, and he quickly accessed his inventory of details. When it registered, his heart sank. “You’re Lysias’s girl. Jakob’s nursemaid.”

  She jostled the wound again, and he cried out. “I was until you killed him.”

  He glanced around, his voice low. “You have to get off this ship. It isn’t safe here.”

  Her dark eyes met his before returning to the wound. “I didn’t choose to come here, but I have nowhere else to be.”

  But you do. And yet to tell her so put Jakob at risk. Jin and Chandra and Amara, too. Because until he finished his work the Y’Zirites could not know the children were still alive.

  “This is the Kinshark,” he said. “There is a lifeboat aft of here. Rafe Merrique kept them well stocked. Get off this ship, Lynnae.”

  That he’d remembered the name finally and used it had some impact upon her. Still, her laugh was bitter. “And how long would I last on the open sea?” She finished up with the new dressing. “At least on the moon there is the new dream,” she said.

  Vlad Li Tam had trusted few people in his life beyond his own kin, and even few of them gained his full trust. It was not a part of his economy or the Tam way. He’d trusted his grandson Mal implicitly, and that had been the blind spot that cut away his family from him. And he’d trusted—or more importantly had the blind faith required of a Tam—in his father. And his father—along with Rudolfo’s father and Mardic it seemed—had somehow been involved in this plot to destroy Windwir and bring the Y’Zirite Empire to the Named Lands.

  “You have no reason to believe me or trust me, Lynnae, but there is a better dream waiting for you. Everything is not what it seems to be. Leave this ship. Right now. Take a lifeboat and go.”

  “We are in the middle of the ocean,” she said.

  “Yes,” he told her. “You have no reason to trust me. But you should.”

  She stared at him, and her eyes narrowed for a moment as she looked for something in his. Then they went wide when she found it, and she nodded slowly just once.

  After she left, he sagged in the chair and willed himself back to the library.

  There was a guard posted and Vlad couldn’t risk being overheard, so he passed his message quickly and quietly. “Tell Petronus to have Neb or your people search the Ghosting Crests south of the Moon Wizard’s Ladder. There will be a lifeboat there. Its contents are vital to the work of the Ninefold Forest Houses.” The man stared at him slack-jawed and Vlad was going to repeat himself when the regent entered the cargo hold. He was smiling in a way that made Vlad uncomfortable.

  “I have very good news for you, Vlad,” he said. “Lord Y’Zir has determined that I may complete the kin-healing that Ria began with you. Isn’t that splendid?”

  Vlad met the smile with a laugh of his own. But through his cracked lips and dry throat, it sounded like a bark. “Your faith is dead, Xhum. I’ve killed it. Your kin-healing serves no purpose.”

  Eliz Xhum’s eyes went violently dark for just a moment, and then it passed. “Yes,” he said. “You have killed our faith. And that will make cutting you feel … fine indeed. Which is purpose enough for me.” He looked around the cargo hold. “I’ll have them set up the tables. We should be able to finish most of the cuttings that remain before we take back the tower.” He moved to the door, and his smile broadened. “After that, Lord Y’Zir thinks casting you down from the top of it would be fitting, and I have to say that I concur.”

  Vlad said nothing. Knives meant more pain. And pain was his army. He had his fish upon the line, and he would land it before all was done.

  He felt the ache everywhere in him still, deep in his bones, even in the missing arm, and when Vlad Li Tam closed his eyes, he still saw blue-green light always just out of reach and still tasted the cold and briny waters of a sea that pulled him ever down and down.

  Petronus

  They woke him when Vlad Li Tam’s armless ghost appeared, and Petronus rubbed too little sleep from his eyes as he made his way up to the library. Nadja met him on the stairs, and he wasn’t sure she’d even slept since she’d slipped out of his room just a few hours earlier.

  She caught his hand and squeezed it, then released it and took the lead, forcing him to stretch his legs and keep up.

  The library technologist was waiting for them. Petronus yawned. “So what is this about a lifeboat?”

  The man glanced at the officer of the watch who stood with him. “Lord Tam said that its contents were vital to the work of the Ninefold Forest Houses.”

  What could Rudolfo need from a lifeboat in the Ghosting Crests? He glanced at Nadja. “Do you have a ship within reach?”

  She nodded. “Surely. Mine.” Nadja must’ve seen the look on his face, because her mouth twisted into half of a bemused smile. “We can be out and back within the day. Though I suspect even a fleet of ships might make it something of a challenge—trying to find a pebble in a prairie.”

  “Your brother just lost a ship at Windwir,” Petronus said. “The skies aren’t safe at the moment.”

  Her blue eyes softened. “We’re too close to fulfilling the terms and conditions of the Bargain to count on any safety. Someone once said ‘A ship is not made to stay in port, and the light requires we sail out into that unknown with courage.’”

  Petronus sighed. It had been his first papal writ, and he felt his ears growing hot.

  She continued. “I’d be gone a few days at most. Depending on how the search goes. I could also rendezvous with Endrys, Winters and the others and bring them back with me. We’d likely need more than one ship to search effectively.”

  He nodded. What are you up to, Tam?

  Her eyebrows furrowed, and she leaned in and put a finger beneath his nose. It came away red. “You’re bleeding again.”

  It was the third nosebleed. And this time he felt a tickling beneath his scalp—warm with flashes and pops of electricity at the edges of his vision.

  Petronus wobbled on his feet as the feeling intensified, and her eyes now had worry in them. “Are you okay?”

  “I feel…” He had no words, and he reached out a hand to steady himself. That’s when he realized the black ring upon his finger was whistling in his skull. He pressed his thumb into it and felt the symptoms instantly lessen.

  The command pool has reached maturation, Administrator.

  Petronus had not heard this voice before, and he looked up to see if the others registered the same surprise as he did. He waited. “Did you hear that?”

  “I think you should sit down.” She looked to the technician. “Find us some water.”

  Petronus shook his head. “No. I’m fine now.” He wiped the blood away with his silver sleeve, then watched as the fabric absorbed it into light.

  Command pool. He looked up. “The door,” he said.

  And then, before the others could ask, he moved off toward the edge of the grove, then followed the room’s wall until he reached the far side with its single door that hadn’t been there before Vlad’s conversatio
n with him. He looked at the guard. “Has there been any change?”

  She shook her head. “No, Father.”

  But when he reached out a hand and touched it, he felt it sigh beneath his touch. Open.

  The door opened. You are authorized.

  Vlad had said that as well, and Petronus hadn’t understood; but now, comprehension was dawning like a second summer morn, and he slipped through the door. It sighed closed behind him, and he heard Nadja call out—and heard that call cut short utterly when the door sealed shut.

  It was small room, glowing white, and in its center lay a hollowed-out pool of silver fed by roots the color of bone. And beside the pool was a large white stone. Standing up from that stone was a staff the color of piercing white heat.

  Petronus reached out for it, curled his fingers around it, and felt the power shudder through his body. He started to withdraw it, then stopped.

  No. This is not for me. It is for Neb.

  He looked at the pool and dipped a hand into it. The fluid was room-temperature and thick, and as he touched it, the temple became alive to him. He could see its rooms, its pulse, its temperature, the health of its roots deep down into Beneath Places they had yet to rediscover below them. And he saw the sickness in the bargaining pool beneath them, too—the one that had been poisoned supposedly by Amal Y’Zir on her last visit to her childhood home.

  Holding his breath, Petronus lifted up his robe and climbed into the pool, settling down. As he did, his clothing evaporated into the pool, and he felt roots slithering against his bare skin as the temple enfolded him, drew him down into its heart.

  Petronus saw light spinning and careening and heard cacophony all about him. It is too much.

  And then he felt the dragons. Not just felt them but saw through their eyes, smelled through their noses, felt through their skin. There were three of them left and one that had fallen, its remains in a crater in the desolation of Ahm’s Glory. And he saw the tie that bound one dragon to its rider but also saw that the dragon was riderless and on patrol, hunting the skies of Lasthome.

  Petronus shifted in the pool and felt the roots hold him tighter. Closing his eyes, he let the roots pull him to the bottom. At first he resisted as the liquid pushed at his mouth and nose; then he gave himself to it and let it fill him, feeling his body contort as it resisted drowning.

  He flicked a finger over the ring and brought the library to life within his reach there in the pool, and five minutes later Petronus had the dragons returning to the Seaway and had figured out how to move among them—and how to adjust their telescopic vision—from where he lay. Still, it was not enough. He stood up from the pool and felt the roots release him.

  He looked to the staff again and reached out a hand. Then dropped it back to his side. “Clothe me,” he whispered.

  As the robes spun back around him, he moved to the door and opened it just as Nadja’s hand was coming down. Her eyes were wide with fear now, and he could hear panic in her voice. “Where did you go?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” Petronus said. “But we have a new staff for Neb. And I’m going to find whatever it is Vlad left for us in the Ghosting Crests.”

  “You’re going to find the lifeboat?”

  He offered a grim smile. “I think so. Yes.” He took her hand. “Let’s see.”

  They left the library and took the stairs to the top of the temple, and Petronus went to the edge and scanned the distant line of sea to the south. He thought perhaps he saw a speck of silver there in the sky, but couldn’t be sure at that distance. So instead he raised his head and summoned up the closest approximation to the shriek he’d heard Neb make. And it was as if his throat knew the sound and helped him form it from some lost memory inside his body.

  He felt the answer as a tickle in his eardrums, and he called again, looking over to Nadja and the others as he did.

  This time he heard the cry upon the wind and smiled at her. “I will be back soon,” he said.

  Then Petronus leaped, spreading out his hands as if he were diving from the high docks into the waters of Caldus Bay. Only now, where icy cold should have reached out to grab him and drag him down, warm wind pulled at his robes and hair as he fell. He forced his mouth open again to make the cry and then felt the paws of the kin-dragon as they encircled him and drew him in. There was a moment of light and confusion before he felt the wings, smelled the air, saw the jungle and the sky through different eyes.

  The next time he roared, Petronus was the kin-dragon, and he pounded his wings against the air to carry himself back up the line of the temple. He overshot it and looked down at the faces watching with wonder.

  Then he roared again and turned south for the ocean and the Seaway.

  Petronus found that even from within the dragon, some part of him stayed connected to the library and he was able to pull up maps that he could see—a ghost image superimposed over the terrain that sped by below. And the map in no way diminished the crisp color of the jungle canopy and the crystalline blue of the lunar sea.

  I came to the moon in a vessel, and now I return in the belly of a dragon. Possibly, he thought, the very one that had brought their ship down when they entered the lunar atmosphere.

  He’d envied Neb his kin-dragon, and now he saw that it was every experience he’d suspected he was missing out on. And he knew that whatever it was that was happening—however it was that he now controlled the beast—it stemmed from something deep and instinctive that the pool had opened within him.

  And he suspected it was because Vlad had commanded it to by authorizing him. Administrator.

  Petronus watched the sea unfold beneath him and noted the blue-green lights that swam those waters. He’d not seen them before but had heard from Rafe that there were more now than he’d ever seen in all his years aboard the Kinshark. The d’jin of old—ghosts of gods stranded in the sea.

  He flew low to the water and felt the salt spray of his passage upon his silver skin, smelled the brine of it in his massive nostrils.

  The Seaway was ahead now, its massive riblike pillars extending up from the sea to stretch far into the sky. Above it, a silver globe etched with the continents of Lasthome turned slowly and the waters within those arching pillars bubbled a slightly different color.

  As he went, he watched for ships and noted two bound for the temple under the flag of the white tree and another heading east. Petronus brought his vision in to note the Y’Zirite markings. There were more Y’Zirites getting through. But he suspected that these were the twitches of a warm corpse and easily dealt with once Neb was home.

  Home. He was pondering that notion when he flew between the pillars and everything shifted. Suddenly, the sky was gray and the water gray, too. And the temperature dropped rapidly as he passed through the pillars on the other side and found himself in the cold twilight skies of Lasthome, the moon distant and low in the sky.

  Petronus turned south and sent a tentative call to the other two kin-dragons. They answered, and a few minutes later he joined them where they circled. He saw the lifeboat and the woman standing within it, but he didn’t recognize her. She stood alone, an oar raised as if it were a weapon, as she shouted at the massive beasts that swooped and buzzed about her.

  Petronus rolled himself and twisted, taking in the sea and sweeping it with his eyes. Somewhere relatively nearby was a ship, and once he returned to the command pool, he would task the dragons to find it. He was afraid he knew where that ship was bound, and he suspected that his childhood friend was upon it.

  And whatever Vlad planned, he’d not wanted this person there for it.

  Petronus focused his eyes again, holding himself steady against the wind as he studied the woman and the lifeboat. She had the look of a Delta Entrolusian—curly hair and large dark eyes. And the name on the lifeboat was unmistakable and familiar.

  The Kinshark. The vessel had been lost at sea—suspected captured by the Y’Zirites after Vlad found one of its metal crew stranded in another
of its lifeboats near the Seaway. Now here was another.

  Petronus tried out his voice, clearing it and hearing the thunder roll out as he did. “Who are you? How do you come to be here?”

  The woman’s fear was noticeable in the pallor of her face, and her eyes went even wider. But Petronus wasn’t prepared for her to drop the oar and collapse into the bottom of the boat.

  With an inward sigh, Petronus brought himself closer to the boat. Then, he dug around in the corner of his mind where he knew the knowledge was buried and released his binding to the beast, letting it drop him into the cold waters of the Ghosting Crests.

  Striking out in a breast stroke, he reached the boat easily as the kin-dragons circled above. Then he pulled himself in. The girl was sitting up, reaching for the oar again.

  “They’re here to help,” Petronus said. Then, as an afterthought: “I am here to help, too.”

  There was recognition in her eyes. “I know you,” she said. “You were in the dream.”

  Petronus nodded. “I was. Vlad Li Tam told us where to find you. What is he planning? Do you know?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think there is much that he can do. The regent and Ahm Y’Zir are taking him to the moon to execute him. They have the staff, but it isn’t working.”

  No, he realized. It wouldn’t be. Vlad had seen to that. And the tower had grown a new one for its new administrator. But that, and the matter of exactly where Y’Zir and Xhum were and what to do about them and their prisoner, were all matters that could wait.

  “He asked that you be delivered to the Ninefold Forest Houses. Lord Rudolfo is at Windwir, and I intend to bear you to him if you’ll allow it.”

  “Bear me?”

  He looked up at the kin-dragons and then back to her. “Yes. I’ve not done it before, but we’ll learn together.”