Antiphon (45 page)

His eyes met Neb’s first, and for a moment he saw anger there before
it melted into something softer. When Hebda’s eyes came up they were red. His nose was swollen and bruised, and the gaunt man looked away quickly.

Neb saw an empty chair, and without waiting to be told, he went to it and sat. He waited quietly, then finally, when neither of them spoke, he repeated Orius’s order from earlier.

“Tell me everything,” Neb said in a quiet voice.

Hebda nodded, and Renard squeezed his knee. “I’ll be outside,” the Waste guide said. He looked at Neb, and there was a hardness in his eye. “Don’t hit him again,” he said, “or you’ll have me to deal with. I don’t fault you your anger, Nebios, but there are many other shoulders at work here, each worthy of bearing the weight of your blame.”

Neb nodded and waited until Renard slipped from the room.

After the door closed behind him, Hebda sighed. He reached into his pocket and drew out an ornate envelope made from a high-quality parchment. He handed it over, and Neb ran his fingers over the wax seal, feeling the crest of Windwir and its holy see beneath his fingers. “I was told to give this to you,” Hebda said.

Neb broke the seal and drew out a carefully folded letter, the pinched script unfamiliar to him though the letterhead caused him to draw in his breath.

From the Office of Introspect, King of Windwir, Holy See of the Androfrancine Order.

His eyes scanned the first line and narrowed. “It is addressed to me.”

Hebda nodded. “It is.”

He read further.

Grace and Peace to You, Nebios Homeseeker, for the cause of the light. I beg your forgiveness of the man who bears this note, for his deception of you was by Holy Unction and with his objections voiced clearly. Two great sins have I committed without possibility of atonement: First, I have condemned a city to die in the hope that the light might persevere. Second, I condemned a boy to watch it die that he might find his path.

Neb scowled and read the paragraph again, then continued. He stopped when the anger began to build yet again.

“How many people knew the city was going to fall?”

“Very few,” Hebda answered. “We weren’t certain ourselves until just four days before. But there had been rumors and fears for years before—it’s what initially funded the research into the mechoservitors and the establishment of Sanctorum Lux.

Four days.
“You had four days and you let every man, woman and child within Windwir’s walls die in the Cacophonic Deaths?” Neb heard the disgust in his voice and made no attempt to soften it. “You had four days and you let Isaak sing the spell?”

Hebda shifted uncomfortably. When he looked up, his eyes were brimming with tears. He shook his head. “Introspect chose it. I watched him weep for his choice, and I wept with him. But he had to choose the city or the light.”

Neb continued reading. A long and rambling confession with much reference to change being the path life takes and an admonition that he give himself fully to the mechoservitors’ response and heed carefully the words of his father. He looked up to Hebda again at those words before continuing.

As a boy, I was asked by a Gray Guard if I would kill for the light,

the letter continued.

If you are reading this, you know that I have. I am bargaining to save the light. I charge you under Holy Unction, let not this sacrifice be in vain.

Bargain? Sacrifice? The room felt suddenly cold to him, and he forced his eyes to finish the letter.

He read to the end and looked up. “What bargain?”

He heard the voice again in the back of his mind.
I have bargained for you.

Hebda nodded. “It is . . . complicated.”

A thousand other questions crowded his brain, buzzing flies that eluded his voice. Finally, he settled upon one. “And Introspect ordered that I witness the city fall?”

A sob shook Hebda. “I protested it, but it was part of the bargain. We were told that it had to be so, that something in your blood would be activated by the spell or the desolation or both.”

Neb recalled the day that his life had fallen away. He remembered being held, transfixed and cruciform, to watch the city swallowed by heat and fire. It had changed his hair from brown to silver-white and had left him without his own words for a time. Not long after, he’d fallen into the northern dreams of Winters and her people.

He looked away and then looked back. “You left me there. You rode out with me and left me.”

Hebda shook his head. “We came back for you. But we underestimated Sethbert’s eagerness to see his handiwork. His men arrived ahead of us. And once you were in Petronus’s care, we were relatively confident of your safety.”

Relatively confident.
Another question jostled for position. “Why me?”

Hebda glanced to the door and then looked down. “It’s what you were made for, Neb. Marsher mysticism aside, you
are
the Homeseeker. Tertius showed us that.”

But the answer did not satisfy him. He took a breath, released it, then asked again. “Why me?”

Hebda sighed. “You’ve heard from Renard that your mother was one of his people?”

Neb nodded. He’d spent a month among them while Renard’s leg healed, but the subject of his mother had not come up, and the Waste guide had warned him to let the dead stay a distant memory. And prior to meeting Renard, before his life changed on the plains of Windwir, he’d known better to ask about her of the one man who must surely know her. “I’ve heard it, yes.”

Hebda nodded. “Did he tell you that she was his sister?” Neb’s mouth fell open, and the gaunt Androfrancine continued. “I met her on a dig eighteen years ago. The Office often sent me east to observe the behavior of the nomadic tribal survivors in the Waste, and Renard and I had recently—” He paused, looking for the right words even as his cheeks tinged red. “We’d recently struck up a friendship.”

He’d seen them holding hands, and he had a vague recollection of them kissing when they met in the caves back when the fever still racked his body from his infected cuts. He opened his mouth to ask another question, but Hebda kept talking.

“She’d been ostracized by her people—more mad than even the Age of Laughing Madness could accommodate.” Hebda’s eyes narrowed, and he chose his words carefully. “But she’d not always been
so. She vanished from the village well one dawn and was found raving and mumbling just a few weeks later a hundred leagues to the west.” He swallowed, and Neb saw the advent of uncomfortable words in the man’s red eyes. “I met her a few months later and interviewed her. She claimed that mechanical men had taken her into the Beneath Places. She was great with child.”

Neb blinked. “You’re not my father.” The words were a statement, not a question, and he watched Hebda flinch from them.

“Not in the biological sense. But I’ve loved you like I would imagine a father loves a son.”

Neb’s voice was cold and measured when he spoke. “By lying to me? By leaving me—intentionally—to watch everything I loved destroyed? By letting me believe you were dead when you were here the entire time?”

The tears spilled over. “I protested the path, but—”

“Do you even know who my father is?”

He felt that voice again, moving through the quicksilver to surround him.
I am sorry for this deception, my son.

Hebda nodded. “They are coming to take you to him.”

“Who is coming?”

But at that moment, the sounds of second alarm reached his ears from outside the closed door. Hebda stood, and Neb did the same. “Who is coming?” he asked again.

Their eyes locked, and Hebda’s voice shook with emotion. “Nebios,” he said, “I am truly sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. I only hope we chose the correct path. If we did not, then all is lost. If we did, then the light will live beyond us all.”

There was a knock at the door, and when it cracked open, Neb heard the commotion outside. Renard poked his head in. “They’re here for the boy,” he said. “Orius is taking it about as well as we thought he would.”

Hebda nodded. “It was never his to decide.” He looked to Neb again. “If you succeed, I will never see you again. I’m sorry for the wrongs I’ve done you.”

Neb looked at the man and tried to find some kind of pity or empathy for him, but there was nothing but distant echoes in the hollow space his heart had become. He said nothing and turned to Renard.

“Who is here for me?”

But even as he said it, he heard them coming. The whisper of their
bellows and the dull clicking of their behavior scrolls buried deep beneath their metal skins. They moved with purpose, clanking forward wordlessly in the face of Orius’s protests.

“He rides with the Sixth Brigade,” the general said.

“It is not yours to decide,” the metal man said. “Circumstances have changed; your army will not reach the antiphon in time. It should remain hidden.”

There were three of them, dusty and battered, the remains of their Androfrancine robes torn and dirty from long running. All three looked up and raised their hands to him where he stood framed in the doorway.

“Hail, Homeseeker,” they said in unison. “We’ve come to bear you to your father.”

Neb did not look back. He bottled the remainder of his questions and gave himself to the mechoservitors. He did not ask for his pack or his clothing. He took nothing but the ill-fitting robes they’d put on him when he’d crawled from the bargaining pool.

And when they reached the edge of the camp and began to run through the tunnels, Neb ran with them, stretching his legs to keep pace with his metal escort. He pushed the image of Hebda’s tear-streaked face away from him and forced emptiness to replace it.

He pushed his questions aside and clung only to the wordless rage that fueled his pumping legs.

When the dripping of the water awakened him, Vlad’s first impulse was to find her. She filled his dreams with light and song, and he longed for her. She awaited at the prow of his ship; it was time to dress and go to her.

He sat up and started climbing to his feet before he realized he was no longer aboard his vessel.

I am not in my cabin.

Two nights here now. He forced himself back to the moldy straw floor and the tattered blanket they all shared during their sleep shifts.

Slowly, it came back to him.

There was a ship. The others had fled. They had magicked themselves and hidden in the sea near one of the Ladder’s massive pillars until the new vessel stopped to search the water near their overturned
yacht. They’d snuck aboard and mapped the vessel in less than a day. They’d raided the lifeboats for scout magicks and rations and had found a corner of the hold where they could sleep in shifts, unmagicked, while the others gathered what they could and kept watch.

Myr Li Tam’s voice, muffled and low, drifted to him across the hay. “Father,” she said. “Good morning.”

He nodded. When the pouch of magicks materialized, he took it and applied a handful quickly, shuddering at the bitterness of the powders when he licked his hand. He felt them take hold of him and tried not to let her see the grimace on his face or notice that he’d broken out in sweat suddenly.

He knew it was the magicks. Chest pains and cold sweats were a sure sign that he’d passed the age of using them safely. Now, they would tear at his organs as long as he used them. And if he wasn’t careful, his heart would fail him.

Still, he had little choice.

He inclined his head toward his daughter even though she could not see him do it. “Good morning,” he said. “What do we know?”

“We’re continuing to sail the perimeter of the Ladder,” she said. “More vessels have arrived, and we’ve taken on passengers. Officers and a priest, by the looks of them.”

One of the first things they’d noticed was that this was a uniformed fleet—a navy—though the markings were unfamiliar to him. These ships, though, were familiar.

He’d seen them at the Blood Temple.

Vlad forced his attention back to his daughter. “How many officers?”

“Three,” she said. “Two women. High ranking; even the captain saluted. The priest was robed and hooded; male, I’m certain. And young.”

Vlad felt the nausea hit him now, and his head started to pound. “Young? How can you tell?”

“Hands,” she said. “And a certain swagger. Arrogance of youth.”

Vlad smiled. “Good. Where are they?”

“They’re in the captain’s quarters. She is bunking with the XO and none too happy about it.”

He nodded. “Good. Are we making any headway on language?”

“Very little, Father. It’s nothing we’ve heard before. But we’re taking down words as best we can.”

He rubbed his eyes, feeling the stab of the magicks behind them. “What is there for me to do?” But he knew what she would say.

“Just stay nearby. Help us think. Collate the data.”

Then, she handed him an apple and slipped away.

In the corner, nearby, he saw the faintest movement and realized it was the next recipient of the blanket, in from their work, with the magicks guttering their last. He stood and made way. Then, he found a place along the hull where he could crouch and munched his breakfast.