Antiphon (44 page)

“Then his death—and the others—will truly be on your head.”

That may well be,
he thought, as he turned and walked wordlessly away.

While the scouts ran their patrols and the sailors and soldiers established a perimeter, Petronus slipped back into his small tent. The woman’s words stayed with him, and he reached for one of the packs where it lay beneath a gray wool blanket.

A sudden memory intruded upon him—a gaunt man stretched out over a black island floating in a quicksilver sea, dimly illuminated in the green light of phosphorescent lichen. He dug in the pack for the tiny statue, and when his hand closed over it, he thought for just a moment that he felt the slightest shock numb his hand and forearm. Withdrawing it, he held it to the light.

Dreamstone.
He was not certain of its purpose, but a hunch grew in him. Could it be so simple? It would explain why she wanted it, certainly. He tightened his fist around it and squeezed, forcing his attention into the unsettling sensation that swept up from his hand to swallow the rest of him. The walls of his meditation slipped, and the song blasted out around him, so strong that his stomach lurched and
his head threatened to explode. Biting his lower lip against the pain, he closed his eyes.

Are you out there?

No answer; just the noise of the canticle as its melody crushed him.

Can you hear me?
He shifted his body on the bedroll where he sat, turning himself first westward and then north and—

He felt the shift and heard the dripping of water, the gentle wheeze of bellows in the dark as amber eyes came open.

The tamps have failed, Father. The aether is compromised. You must not be here.

“I am here,” Petronus said. “I have come to serve the light.” He paused, looking for more words. “I have come to assist in your response.”

The eye shutters flashed.
It is not for your kind. The Homeseeker will—

Petronus cut off the mechoservitor, his words sharp. “The Homeseeker is in the west with Hebda. I’ve brought men to defend the antiphon. I charge you to admit us.”

The metal man clicked and clacked as gears and scrolls spun beneath its brass plating. Its head tilted. “You have brought the dream with you.”

He nodded. “I have. It was taken from Neb and returned to me. I’m charged with its care.”

Do not access the aether again, Father. We will come for you.

The eyes closed, and somewhere, far away and behind him, Petronus heard something. He turned south and felt the landscape rushing at him, bearing the distant and cold sound on strong, fast legs.

As he released the stone and slumped in his bedroll, Petronus knew that sound, and it chilled him.

It was laughter on the hot wind of the Churning Wastes, running north at breakneck speed.

“Come quickly,” he whispered to the metal man he could no longer see. He felt something warm and wet in his tangled beard and tasted salt upon his lips.

Petronus wiped the blood from his nose, and the red of it on the back of his hand stood out, a prophecy of what swept northward toward them.

“Come quickly,” he said again, and his voice was not even the slightest whisper in the cacophony of that swelling, roaring song.

Jin Li Tam winced as Jakob bit her and shifted him against her breast, careful to keep her back to Aedric. These briefings after lunch had become more and more regular, though they’d largely curtailed the more blatant intelligence gatherings.

And the Watcher is what we need to know more about.
But even as she thought it, Jin knew that they could not get close enough to that ancient mechoservitor to study it and parse its role in the current state of the Named Lands. It had played some part in her grandfather’s and Lord Jakob’s conversions to a faith thought extinct and carefully guarded against by the Androfrancines. Its forged notes and control of information by the birds was obvious now in hindsight.

“What more for today, Aedric?” she asked over her shoulder.

She heard the hesitation in his voice. “I’ve a note from Philemus. Lord Rudolfo is not well.”

She bit her lower lip. “In what way?” But of course, she knew. She’d seen it in his messages.

Aedric said nothing, and Jin felt her eyebrow arching and let the irritation creep into her voice. “In what way, Aedric?”

“He is drinking. A lot. He does not sleep.” He paused, then continued. “There is more. They’ve found shrines in the Forest. Rudolfo has the scouts compiling lists of Y’Zirite practitioners.”

She had thought the words might surprise her, but she’d considered this possibility off and on since her meeting with the Watcher. This resurgence had decades of life here before Windwir’s fall, but whatever came next could not do so with the Androfrancines watching.

She looked at her son’s face.
We are a part of this.
Finally, she sighed. “What are they doing about the Y’Zirites?”

“For now, they watch them. Some of them are highly placed in Rudolfo’s trust.”

Jin Li Tam felt her heart sink and resisted the strong emotion that welled up in her.
I should leave tonight and return to him. He needs me.
And truly, she realized, the network that had plotted against them was now clearly dismantled with Jarvis and Cervael now cold in the ground along with countless others the blood cult had redeemed in their investigation. Perhaps it was time to put Ria’s promise, sworn on her gospel, to the test.

Still, they needed to know more about this Watcher and what was
yet to come. There was an army growing here, and soon thousands of Machtvolk would gather at midnight for the Mass of the Falling Moon. Jin felt the weight of something imminent growing in the air, and the voice of her father—a voice she often worked hard to deny—told her that she must persevere in this place.

She saw now that Jakob was finished, and she shifted him to her shoulder, letting his blanket cover her bared breast. She patted him. “I think we’ve been away too long, Aedric.”

“Aye, Lady,” he agreed. She could hear the worry in his voice.

“Still,” she said. “He is Rudolfo. He will find the right path.” She heard him moving toward the door, his feet whispering along the carpet. “Meanwhile, keep the scouts on the ready.”

“We are always ready, Lady Tam.”

She stood and walked to the door. “Thank you, Aedric,” she said. “Go safely and hunt well.”

“Aye,” the first captain said. She opened the door and stepped partway into the hallway. She saw the Machtvolk guard nearby and called out to him as Aedric’s magicked form slipped past her and moved the opposite direction.

“I am in need of more diapers,” she said as the guard approached. “Would you ask the house staff to bring some?”

The guard inclined his head, and she slipped back into the room, closing the door.

She took Jakob to his crib and laid him in it. Then she went to the bed and stretched out upon it.

The whisper seemed a shout in the quiet of the room. “You are not meant to return to him.”

Ria.
Jin felt fear wash her colder than the icy streams that interlaced these foothills. She sat upright quickly and lunged for her knives. An invisible hand swept them out of reach.

“Hold, Sister,” the muffled voice said, and she blinked.

No, not Ria. Someone else.
She came to her feet and lunged forward even as the belt and its sheathed knives danced farther back, away from her. “I am not your sister,” she said, her voice a hiss of anger. She put herself between the magicked woman and Jakob’s crib.

The woman’s voice was still low and calm. “Hold,” she said, “and hear me. The message I bear you is the work of my life. What I have done, what I’ve endured, to reach this moment . . .” The words trailed off. “Hear me,” she said.

Jin crouched by Jakob’s crib, her eye upon the door and upon the belted knives that moved before her. She could just barely pick out the form of the shadowy figure that held them. “Speak.”

“I’m glad it was you, Jin. Grandfather had several of us in mind, though he had no way of knowing who the task would eventually fall to. He left much to trust with the work he’d done in our father.”

Jin Li Tam’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you? What do you know of my family?”

“You do not remember me, but you know me,” she said. “I have been gone for a long while.” The knives lowered now and slid across the room beneath the bed. With the slightest wind, the magicked figure slipped close to her, and Jin saw a light green eye swimming in a latticework of scars—symbols framed by short red hair. “I am the thirty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam.”

Thirty-second?
Her childhood had been riddled with loss. She could not count the aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters that did not come home from her father’s work and his father’s work before him. There had been many daughters born to Vlad’s various consorts the year that Jin had been born. She’d naturally never known her mother, had been raised by her father and his siblings in the shadow of her aging grandfather. She’d grown up with those girls and had lost four of them before their training—their “sharpening” as grandfather called it—was completed.

“This is an easy claim to make,” she said, “but not so easy to prove.”

“Grandfather will prove it to you himself,” the girl said. “Watch for his golden bird and listen carefully to it when it finds you. You must leave the Named Lands and fulfill the work you were shaped for.”

The words were settling into her now, and as they did, more questions rose. “What work is that?”

“I do not know for certain,” the girl said, “but I’m sent to assure you it must be done. The Named Lands are fallen and do not yet know it. The kin-wolves are at the fence, and the shepherds are crippled by their ravening. The antiphon will stand or fall as it will, Homeseeker willing, but what remains here will be lost utterly if you fail the work you were made for.”

There was a knock at the door. Jin Li Tam opened her mouth to speak, but the magicked woman spoke first. “Come in,” she said in a convincing imitation of Jin’s voice.

The door opened, and a girl entered with a stack of folded cloth. Jin felt a cold hand suddenly on her shoulder and felt the words pressed
there in the Tam subverbal. Jin read the words on her skin as she spoke. “Put them on the table.”

And with the slightest rustle of wind, the hand was gone and Jin knew that this strange messenger had slipped from the room along with the servant.

But the words were in her skin still, and she could feel the weight of them.

Watch for the bird. When the regent bids you come, go with him. The boy will be safe in Y’Zir.

She felt those words and turned her eyes east toward Rudolfo. Surely it was yet another carefully laid trap. Some way of dividing the fold further, giving the wolves their run of the meadow.

She closed her eyes and called up the image of a sister just months older than her, stretched out upon the table, dead from the moonpox.

Ire Li Tam.

She’d seen much death. She’d seen the bone forests of Windwir and had lent her own hands and blades to the violence that had plagued them since. But never until Windwir had she seen the dead come back. And since then? Petronus, Jakob, supposedly Ria and now an older sister. The Y’Zirite gospel proclaimed the raising of the dead as a sign of a dawning age. She suspected this was true even while she maintained her skepticism of that faith.

It did not take faith to see the intricate web that was spun to remove the Androfrancines and pave the way for this resurgence.

The boy will be safe in Y’Zir.

The boy would, but she noted that the magicked messenger had not extended the same promise to her.

Looking to the face of her sleeping child, Jin Li Tam wondered exactly what she’d been sharpened for and what path lay ahead of her family. And when she wondered, it was about both the family she’d been born to and the one she’d made with Rudolfo and their son.

Somber guards shook Neb awake, and he let them lead him back to their camp through warm caves that twisted and turned as they swept farther down into the Beneath Places.

The Androfrancine camp was a massive cavern bathed in pale green light from a spiderweb of phosphorescent lichen and scattered with field tents and hastily constructed structures. Horses ate hay in rough corrals, and soldiers drilled in the wide open spaces.

Neb remembered Orius’s order to Hebda and wondered how many brigades of Gray Guards they’d managed to hide away before Windwir fell. At least two from the numbers he saw here, possibly three.

The guards led him quietly across the camp to a simple wooden building. When they paused at the door, Neb heard low voices talking behind it as he raised his hand to knock. When he rapped lightly, the voices stopped.

“Come,” he heard Hebda say in a congested voice.

He pushed open the door, and even the sight of his father was a cold fist in his stomach. He felt the sudden urge to turn and leave again, but the sight of the man, shoulders slumped where he sat on the edge of his bed, stirred something like pity in him. Renard sat beside him, holding the man’s hand with a worried look on his face.