Antiphon (18 page)

“I installed that to keep your secret safe. It is a complex cipher known only to the two of us,” Charles said, then brought the conversation back to the news he could not bear to deliver. “Because of the fusing, your memory scrolls are inextricably intertwined with your power source.”

Isaak nodded again. “Yes, Father. I believe it is a result of the spell.”

Charles offered a grim smile. “I concur. You were certainly not designed that way.” He sighed. “I will simply be frank with you, Isaak. Your sunstone is cracked and there is no way to know when it will break, but exertion and overheating could bring it about sooner.” He waited for the words to register. “I cannot replace it without irreparably damaging your memory scrolls.”

Isaak’s eye shutters flashed, and Charles watched another shudder take the metal man. “When it breaks I will become nonfunctional.”

Charles nodded. “And I will do everything in my power to find a way around that outcome, but as yet there is no clear path ahead of me.”

Isaak said nothing for a long while. When he spoke, Charles heard sorrow and resolve in the reedy metal voice. “I do not wish to lose who I have become.”

No,
Charles realized.
I do not wish it either.
He opened his mouth to offer some kind of additional comfort. He closed it when Isaak stood.

“I wish to ask something of you,” Isaak said.

“Ask,” Charles answered, and suddenly the thought that this metal child of his might someday run out of questions, run out of curiosity, run out of
life
—it opened a chasm of sorrow in him that he couldn’t fathom.

Isaak stood. “I must get something from my room.” He looked around. “May I have a robe, Father?”

Charles pointed to where a fresh scholar’s robe hung waiting. He watched as the metal man pulled it on quickly and cinched its rope belt. Then, he waited and wondered what surprising question would come back to him.

Isaak was not gone long. When he returned, he extended a hand to Charles, and the arch-engineer reached for it. It was small but easily recognizable—a golden scripting scroll, rolled tight.

“I want to dream before I become nonfunctional,” Isaak said.

Charles looked at it, turning it over in his fingers. “How did you come by this?” He recognized it, though at the time he’d thought it merely the work of the apprentice who betrayed him into Sethbert’s hands two years ago. It had been fused into the memory scroll of the mechoservitor that he’d sent out last year in search of Petronus, the mechoservitor that had fled into the Churning Wastes. He’d read the numbers and symbols, finding nothing but the notes of an ancient love song.

“It was given to Nebios that he might give it to me. It is what my cousin called the
metal dream.
”

Charles felt his eyes narrowing, remembering Neb’s report on the other mechoservitor. They’d found nothing when they searched Sanctorum Lux just days after its supposed suicide—its body vanished without even a screw or bolt left behind to show it had been there. That mechoservitor had been dangerous—violent, even, damaging both Isaak and the Waste guide Renard and killing dozens of Erlund’s finest Delta Scouts during its escape and flight east. “Nebios gave this to you? You’ve kept quiet about it for some time.”

“I was . . . uncertain.”

Charles sighed. “I’m also uncertain, Isaak. I would prefer to wait and study it more carefully.”
Perhaps run it on one of the others and—
He caught himself, realizing what he did now. He didn’t want to risk losing Isaak again. And if this truly was more than a simple song, if it
was
some kind of coded script dressed like a dream, there was no telling what it might do. Isaak could have done this for himself. He didn’t have to ask. He had the tools and mirrors.

He came to me because he sees me as his father.
Charles felt an emotion that he could not quite label.

When Isaak spoke next, his voice was a reedy whisper. “I want this, Father.”

Charles looked up and studied the amber eyes that stared back at him. Without a word, he stood and went to the worktable where Isaak had so recently lain lifeless and battered. He gestured to it, and Isaak stood and removed his robe, replacing it on the hook by the door. Then, he climbed onto the table and stretched out.

In silence, Charles spun the cipher into the lock and opened Isaak’s chest cavity. He reached around and found the spool for incoming scrollwork. Carefully, he started the thin gold strip into the threading, then tightened down the scroll on its spool.

Finally, he closed the chest cavity and spun the lock. “Isaak,” he said, “run scroll seven six three.”

He heard the spool whir, heard the clacking of the metal strip as it began to unwind. Isaak seized for a moment, his limbs going rigid and his eyes lighting brighter than Charles had seen them. Then, the eye shutters closed and fluttered, the bellows wheezed, and Isaak slept.

Perhaps it
is
a dream,
Charles thought.

Then, he went and sat by the fire to worry and wait for his metal son to awaken.

Because,
Charles realized,
that’s what fathers do.

Neb used his scout knife to carve a roasted Waste rat he’d snared in the quiet hour before dawn. The crackling meat smelled sour on the morning air, but Neb’s stomach growled at it.

He glanced back at the woman deeper in the cave. She was getting stronger and stronger. She’d polished off an entire rat on her own the day before, warning him between bites of his need to flee her sisters.

He was beginning to believe her. There was an earnestness to her voice that compelled him. So he did the math and factored his best guess of their speed beneath the magicks and hoped that his sense of distance here was accurate.

He speared the hindquarters of the Waste rat and slid it onto the tin plate he’d found in her pack. He carried it back to her and hunkered down to watch her eat.

She tore into the rat, peeling back the crispy skin to find the meat beneath.

He didn’t wait for her to start this time. He brought it up himself. “I think we should leave tomorrow,” he told her.

She looked up from the meat, her face smeared with grease. Her eyebrows furrowed, bending the symbols carved into her forehead. She finished chewing and swallowing. “Tomorrow will be too late. You’ve—” She closed her eyes in concentration. “Miscalculated.”

Tomorrow.
It was possible, he realized. He was not familiar enough with the blood magicks to know exactly how fast they made these women who supposedly hunted him. He’d factored them as faster than a horse, perhaps nearly as fast as a mechoservitor. He wanted to
ask, but earlier questions had been deflected in her constant press for him to leave while he still could. If they really could arrive as soon as tomorrow, Neb needed to leave.

But what to do about this scarred woman? He could not leave her. His eyes fell upon her exposed leg, and when he averted them, he saw her boots and her pack. He felt the idea land between his ears like a stone in a well. “It is time for us to be frank with one another,” he said. “Where were you going when the kin-wolves waylaid you?”

She looked up but continued to chew her food, her eyes hard.

He continued. “You called me an abomination, and you told me your sisters were hunting me to get to the mechoservitors,” he said. “But what about you? You claimed to be attending other matters?”

“They are not your concern,” she said in an even voice. “Your concern is to not be caught by my sisters if you love the light.”

Her words rocked him back on his heels. “The light?”

“You want frankness, Abomination?” She gave him a hard look, then put down the tin plate. “The Whymers are not the only ones concerned with shepherding the light. My family was set to this work long before the days of P’Andro Whym. I’ve spent myself for it, even against my will at times, and stand now on the brink of failure because of a stubborn boy.”

The emotion in her voice surprised him. It was raw, nearly desperate. And the ambush of her sudden forthrightness made him suspicious. “What happens if they find the mechoservitors?”

She shook her head. “I do not know. I only know that they mustn’t, or truly the light is snuffed. And I must not be found, either, until I’ve finished my work.”

He felt the bolt slide free in this particular Rufello lock. “You are working against them,” he observed. “But who are they?”

Her words were carefully chosen and did not answer his question. “I had limited time to bear my message before this delay; my work is now jeopardized.”

Neb sat back on his haunches, propping himself against the cool glass wall of the cave. He looked at her and felt himself blush as she returned the look. There where she sat, the blankets had fallen around her, exposing her scarred shoulders and the cotton sleep shift she’d changed into that morning after bathing herself from a metal cup of water he’d heated. The memory of that intensified the heat in his cheeks as he recalled sitting at the mouth of the cave, listening to her
behind him as he forced himself to watch the ruined city beyond their hiding place.

His eyes moved to her breasts without any effort on his part and he forced them away, hoping she didn’t notice. He swallowed his sudden discomfort and forced himself to look at her face. It was regal, despite the scars, and she regarded him with an air that he found familiar.

But I find everything about her familiar.
It was as if he knew her or should know her. The high cheekbones, the wide mouth, the long legs. The eyes were the right shape but the wrong color, and her red hair should be long and flowing and—

Neb gasped and wondered how it was he hadn’t seen it until now. “You are a Tam,” he said.

For a moment, she looked angry. Then, her features softened. “I am the thirty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam,” she said. “I have spent my life for this brief season, and if it is to mean anything, we must not be here when my sisters arrive.”

He read earnestness in her face and voice and realized that he believed her. He’d read that Petronus, when he was young and Pope, could read a person’s character by the line of their jaw. He wished he had that skill now, and wondered what he would see. She held her head high, the jaw straight and firm.

He looked to her pack and boots again, then looked back to her. “Can you run?”

She nodded.

His decision was made quickly despite knowing it meant he would not be meeting Renard. He looked toward the mouth of the cave, his mind’s eye out in the east beyond the ruins where his friend pursued one of her sisters. He looked back to the Tam woman.

Their eyes met, and he willed strength into his, hoping it would lend power to his question. “Where are we running?”

Her nostrils flared, but she did not break eye contact. He watched her make her own choices regarding trust, her lips pursed for a moment. “The Keeper’s Gate,” she finally said, her voice low and steady. “I bear urgent word for Jin Li Tam, queen of the Ninefold Forest and Great Mother to the Child of Promise.”

Nodding, Neb started calculating exactly how much time it would take for them to pack their belongings and leave this place to the kin-wolves.

Seven minutes later, they ran west.

Cold rain soaked Rudolfo despite the cloak he wore, and he tipped his head to let the water run from his hood. A chill wind found the gaps in the cloak and licked at the bits of skin it could find. He could read the weather here. Winter would come fast and harsh this year, and it made him nervous.

How do I raise an army in the dead of winter?
Lysias assured him it would be fine, and his carefully drawn plans seemed to support the general’s assertion. And Rudolfo had faced Lysias’s men in the War for Windwir—of all the academy-trained officers he’d encountered, Lysias was the most formidable.

Trust,
Rudolfo thought,
is an exercise of the will.
And he would trust this man to bring about what Lysias promised he could. By spring, the general claimed, the borders would be sixty percent controlled, eighty-five percent by the next fall. And each of the nine houses would have their own troops, supplemented by the Wandering Army as needed.

The thought of it both pleased Rudolfo and broke his heart.

A white bird, blurred by the darkness and rain, flashed past to land in his second captain’s catch net. With a low whistle, they stopped and Rudolfo looked to his right.

Isaak and Charles rode side by side. He’d seen them together before, certainly, but something had changed between them since the events at the dedication. Rudolfo had meant to ask about it but had been buried beneath a mountain of maps and meetings and strategies, the meticulous planning that went into Jin Li Tam’s upcoming diplomatic mission to the Machtvolk Territories. It had been as carefully considered as any campaign, and though his stomach knotted at the thought of it, Rudolfo knew it was the best path left to them for this time. His family would be protected—Ria’s latest kin-raven had assured him of this, sworn upon the mark of Y’Zir that guarded her heart—and the Ninefold Forest would have eyes in a place no other Named Lander was permitted to go. The army Ria had raised now held a border as far south as the Desolation of Windwir.

So now, with Jin Li Tam and Winters leaving tomorrow, Rudolfo once more could exercise his trust, turning his mind to other matters.