Antiphon (2 page)

Rudolfo looked to Aedric, the first captain of his Gypsy Scouts, and grinned. “Aye. He does.” Then, he leaned forward and whistled the horse faster as Jakob squealed with delight. They’d ridden long enough now for father and son to both grow comfortable with the riding harness that held the swaddled infant snug against Rudolfo’s chest.

The same that bore me upon my father’s steed.
Rudolfo felt the slightest stab of loss. Those knives were different upon him now that he himself was a father. The cut upon his soul took a different turn as the moments with his new heir brought back hazy recollections of his own rides with the man he’d named his son for—the man Rudolfo had watched die in his twelfth year. And those memories came with others—wrestling with his brother in the shallows of the Rajblood River, singing in the
forest with his mother, learning the
Hymnal of the Wandering Army
with Gregoric, Aedric’s father, now nearly two years dead.

Those memories had brought sadness to him many times before, but now, alongside the grief, he found hope and joy in remembering.
This child helps me find the good in it,
Rudolfo realized.

A whistle to his right brought his head around. Low in the saddle and laughing herself, Jin Li Tam pulled ahead of him.

“You’re slowing down, old man,” she shouted over her shoulder. Her red hair, shining in the sunlight, caught wind and flowed behind. She wore the rainbow-colored riding silks of a Gypsy queen, and though they were unnecessary and did not match her chosen outfit, she also wore the scout knives that had once belonged to his mother.

They’d been on the move for two months now, visiting each of his forest manors, introducing a jubilant people to the heir they had longed to see. Of course, so soon on the heels of their wedding at the Seventh Forest Manor, each stop simply continued the celebration as each of his towns rallied to honor both his bride and his boy.

And they honor me as well.
They always had, even back to his days as a boy king. But until recently, like those losses in his life, it had meant something different to him. Now, it was a kind of amazement tempered by a gratitude he’d never felt before.

Paramo had been their last stop—a logging town that now stretched itself into a city as refugees settled in to work the old-growth forest, milling the wood and shipping it south by river for the library Rudolfo and Isaak built. Tonight, they would rest easy in their own bed. And tomorrow, Rudolfo would approach the waiting tower of paper that no doubt threatened collapse as it dared gravity there in the basket on his desk. Still, it had been a good respite between the first rains and the last of the sun.

A flash of white on the horizon caught his eye, and Rudolfo slowed his horse at the familiar sight. It shimmered and blurred in the heat of the day, moving in a straight line toward them, low to the tops of the grass. When the bird struck Aedric’s catch net, Rudolfo matched his pace with that of his first captain and watched as the man stripped the note, read the knotted message in the blue thread and unrolled the scroll.

Behind them, the rest of their caravan slowed. Ahead, Jin Li Tam turned and doubled back in a wide and sweeping circle.

Aedric frowned and turned, looking to the northwest. Rudolfo followed his gaze. In the distance, the Dragon’s Spine rose up, gray and
impenetrable, above the Prairie Sea and the Ninefold Forest that spread like ancient islands across it.

Rudolfo laid his hand upon Jakob’s cheek. Aedric’s grim look in the direction of the Marshlands told him the source of this latest news. “What are they up to now?”

It had been six months since the Council of Kin-Clave. Half a year since the woman Ria had announced herself as the Machtvolk queen and saved his son’s life before slipping back into the north and vanishing behind her closely watched borders. The Named Lands had slid into madness and disarray, though of late there had been a brooding peace of sorts.

Aedric’s voice brought him back to the moment. Already, the young captain was inking a response and twisting knots of reply into the blue thread of inquiry. “They’ve breached our borders again, General.”

Rudolfo sighed. “Where now?”

“Glimmerglam.”

He felt his stomach sink. Jin Li Tam had slowed her horse to a trot and joined them. “We were just there three weeks ago.”

Aedric nodded. “Two evangelists this time. Preaching their so-called gospel in the streets openly. The house steward has them locked away for now. I’ll deal with them once we’re home and I’ve seen to the men.”

Rudolfo stroked his beard. This had started not long after the council there on the plains of Windwir. Initially, they had found Marshers wandering the Prairie Sea or the more isolated parts of the Ninefold Forest. These they turned back—even chased back—to the low hills that served as a border between his lands and the woman who called herself Winteria the Elder and claimed the Wicker Throne. Later, the ragged preachers had shown up in the towns surrounding his forest manors. These, his militia beat and delivered back to their border. It was less violent than what his father would have done, and still it made Rudolfo wince. Lord Jakob would have placed them on Tormentor’s Row, and after a day or two under the knives of his Physicians of Penitent Torture, they’d have seen the value of keeping their beliefs within their territory. If they’d returned, he’d have had them killed and would have buried them at the border.

The beatings had seemed a reasonable compromise when reason failed.

But still they persist.
Rudolfo sighed. “I think a new tack is in order,” he finally said, glancing down at his son. “Have them brought to me.”

Aedric’s face registered surprise. “You want to see them?”

Rudolfo nodded. “I do. I want to speak with them. Question them.”

He glanced to Jin Li Tam. She regarded him with a face he could not read, but her hands moved with subtle grace along the reins. He admired the care she took to be sure none saw but him.
Are you certain giving them voice is the answer?

He smiled, though it was brief and felt out of place. He’d just started teaching her the subverbal language of House Y’Zir last month, and she was nearly proficient. Of course, she’d already known eleven other subverbals. Rudolfo’s fingers moved over Jakob’s shoulder and head as he formed his reply.
I’m not certain
.

Rudolfo felt the power of his words even as his hands made them. He truly wasn’t certain, and it was foreign to him. “I think our old strategies are no longer serving us well,” he said, keeping his gaze steady on her blue eyes.

Then, he looked away from her, toward Aedric. “Be certain they’re well cared for, Aedric. I intend to return them
whole
to their bloodletting queen.”

He did not wait for Aedric to speak before he pushed his horse forward. He wondered if Jin Li Tam would follow him but secretly hoped she wouldn’t. He needed this time for himself and his son.

Two years ago, he’d ridden these same plains, Gregoric at his side. A shadow had moved over the light of that second summer day, and he’d looked up to a pillar of smoke on the sky. He marked it now as a day when his life—and his world—changed utterly. From that moment, so many other changes had flowed out to him, sweeping him away with the force of their current, including his betrothal to Jin Li Tam and the birth of their son.

He felt the warmth of his son against his chest and thought about the new shadow passing over the light that remained. Six months earlier, at the edge of spring, he’d watched Ria bring Petronus back from the dead with her blood magicks and had watched his betrothed beg for their son’s life as a result of it, the culmination of a grand manipulation. With relations already strained, the events on the Plains of Windwir had driven an even deeper wedge between his houses and the other nations of the Named Lands. Pylos had broken off kin-clave entirely, and Turam was close behind. The Delta remained a loose ally, but it was a paper kin-clave as they wrestled through the upheaval of political reform. And now, adherents to this new Y’Zirite Resurgence brought their sermons into his lands, preaching them to his people and pointing to his son as their so-called Child of Promise.

As he whistled his horse to a gallop, Rudolfo wondered what path he would take. His own words came back to haunt him:
I am uncertain.
It was a strange sensation, not knowing the best path to take.

He felt the sun on his face and savored the wind that pulled at his silk clothing and his scarf of rank. Silent for a time, Jakob gurgled and laughed again.

When Rudolfo placed his hand over his child’s chest he felt strength there. His fingers moved, and he tapped a message there.
Whatever I do, I do for your future.

He could not bring himself to laughter now with the gravity of that thought. Instead, he kept his hand there and urged his stallion faster, finding delight in the voice of his son and purpose in the heart that beat lightly beneath the palm of his hand.

“My best and truest compass,” Rudolfo said in a quiet voice.

Then, he turned his horse toward the line of old-growth forest and raced homeward to his waiting work.

Holding his thorn rifle loosely, Neb lay still and studied the dust cloud that moved across the shattered landscape of the Churning Wastes. The afternoon sun baked the ground beneath him, and from his vantage point in the hills, he watched heat waves rising from the sand and rock floor of the valley below. There, against the backdrop of that shimmer, a figure ran under cover of magicks.

This was the third time they’d encountered magicked runners in the Deep Wastes in as many weeks.

Shielding his eyes, he chewed the black root and watched. Using fixed patches of scrub or outcroppings of rock to mark distance, counting silently beneath his breath, Neb ciphered out the runner’s speed as he had with the others. He moved too fast for the scout magicks Neb had trained under during his short time with the Gypsies. Faster even than the black root would allow.

Neb had a theory but didn’t want it to be true.

If his theory was correct, the scout below would not only be fast—he would be strong, too. Stronger than four men. And he would be dead in three days’ time, once the blood magicks burned their way through his organs.

Neb shuddered. A sudden memory of Rudolfo’s Firstborn Feast
gripped him—the sudden clamor of third alarm as the doors burst inward, the invisible wall of iron that pushed through the Gypsy Scouts as if they were made of paper, assassinating Hanric and Ansylus. It had been a dark night of violence throughout the Named Lands.

Blood magicks.
Forbidden by kin-clave in the New World and the product of older ways—the way of the Wizard Kings with their cuttings and bloodlettings and bargains made in the Beneath Places.

He glanced to his right where Renard lay, also scanning the landscape below. The Waste Guide wore the tattered robe of an Androfrancine and the sturdy boots of a Delta scout. He lay with a spyglass to his eye, his own thorn rifle within easy reach. Renard’s mouth was a grim line.

“Three now,” Neb said in a whisper.

Renard’s eyes narrowed as he pulled back from the glass. “More are coming, I suspect.”

But from where?
And more importantly, why?

After Renard’s leg had healed from his brutal encounter with the mechoservitor at D’Anjite’s Bridge, they’d spent months in the deeper Wastes. By day, Neb learned not only how to survive, but how to thrive in the harshness of the blasted lands. He’d learned how to trap, how to hunt, and how to find the scant pockets of life that sprang up hidden in the Wastes. Renard had shown him the secret gun grove nestled in an arroyo at the base of the Dragon’s Spine and had taught him how to harvest both the rifles and their thorn pods from the tangled thicket they grew in. Then, he’d taught him how to use them.

At night, Neb held the silver crescent to his ear and listened to the strains of the song that trickled out from it, trying to find his way into the dream he knew lay beneath that haunting music. Even now, he heard it faintly, though the crescent was wrapped tightly in thick wool and buried in his pack. He’d deciphered bits of the code within the song—series of numbers without meaning to him—but so far, he’d not been able to interpret what response the canticle required.

It chewed him, not knowing.

But somewhere out here, he knew there were metal servants who
did
know the response. Yet in months of searching, there had been no sign of the metal men themselves, only evidence of where they had been. Carefully concealed digs. Empty supply caches. He and Renard moved from place to place, tracking them as they could.

Between them and the song, Neb already had two Whymer Mazes to solve. Now the runners presented him with yet another.

Already, the figure below had disappeared behind a massive outcropping of fused glass and stone, and Renard tucked the spyglass back into his pouch as he pulled himself up into a crouch. Neb did the same.

Renard scratched his close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. “You say the blood magicks will kill the user in three days’ time?”

Neb nodded. “That’s what Aedric told us.” Even the scout magicks that Neb had trained under could eventually kill a man if he hadn’t been raised up in them from an early age and if he didn’t exercise caution and moderation in their use.

Renard backed away from their vantage point and bent to pick up his pack. “It makes no sense,” he said. “We’re weeks from anywhere—at least two from the coast and three from the Keeper’s Gate. Three days wouldn’t get them very far.”