Antiphon (51 page)

The words were unfamiliar to her. “I have read the Book of Dreaming Kings since my earliest recollection,” she said. “I’ve not read any passage similar to that.”

The regent looked to Ria again, and the woman smiled only slightly. “No, I suspect you haven’t. But I digress. My point is that our faiths are built one upon the other. And more than that, they are intertwined one with the other.”

She wanted to argue with him. She wanted to list the ways that they were different, but she saw clearly now that though he spoke of reason, there was no reasonable way to convey those differences. Her Marshers had skirmished with the Androfrancines and their neighbors, bellowing out War Sermons of a promised home as they did. They’d murdered for their faith even as surely as the Y’Zirites had. They’d raised their children in the certitude of those beliefs, baptizing them in mud and ash when they were old enough to walk. She swallowed, and her eyes darted again to Jin Li Tam. The Gypsy Queen’s face was a mask, but her eyes bore both worry and curiosity.

Finally, she looked back to the regent and her sister. “Our faiths may be related, but they are not the same. And though parents may raise their children in the traditions they themselves were raised in, that does not make their belief necessarily compulsory.”

The regent smiled. “Our way is not compulsory, though I think you believe for some reason it is.”

Winters’s eyes narrowed. “I know about the camps for those who dissent. I know about the children you are training on the blood magicks and the marks your priests cut over their hearts. I’ve visited the schools myself and heard your version of history.”

The regent stepped toward her. “You believe the Y’Zirite faith is being imposed here. Very well. What assurance would you have from me that this is not the case?”

Winters looked out over the crowd. The gathered masses remained silent, and their faces were a kaleidoscope of emotion. Some were ecstatic, some frightened, a few even angry.
What would serve my people best?
“I intend to leave these lands,” she said. “Your beliefs are an abomination to me. If you would assure me that your faith is not compulsory, then permit those of my people who wish it to follow me as I follow the Homeward Dream. Grant them the choice.”

The regent and Ria exchanged glances. There was anger on the woman’s face, though she tried to hide it. But Eliz Xhum simply nodded slowly as his smile widened. “That is something I could agree to,” he said. “But I would ask something of you in return, Winteria the Younger.”

Winters saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and when she realized it was Jin Li Tam’s hands, she forced herself to glance slowly and interpret the coded message from her peripheral vision.
Be cautious here,
Jin signed.
Their bargains are never what they seem.

She knew this. She remembered the look of despondency and hope on Jin’s face when Jin watched Petronus killed and then raised, then begged for her son’s cure from the woman whose magicks had been so compelling. Like this night, it had also been before a crowd. “What would you ask of me?”

“On the Eve of the Falling Moon,” he said, “it is customary to select one to go beneath the knife that their blood might be given to the earth for our sins upon her.” He reached behind him to a waiting guard and took a large burlap sack filled nearly to the brim with bits of parchment from the man’s hands. “Honor us by drawing the name of our blood-giver, and you and any who wish to leave with you may
do so. But you will leave in the morning and you will not look back.” Ria’s face was red, but the regent continued. “I promise it,” he said, and his voice rolled out and away.

Winters looked at the sack and then looked out over her people. “It is by lottery?”

He nodded. “That is the custom. It is a great honor to be selected.”

“To be cut upon in the name of Y’Zir?”

“Yes.”

Winters looked to the cutting table and saw the knives lying upon a velvet cloth nearby. She’d seen the table in the blood shrine with its dark stains and knew that Ria had killed upon it. And she’d heard the stories from the Tam survivors of what that family had been subjected to upon that island. She’d dreamed of Neb stretched out and staked, writhing and screaming beneath salted blades.

Reaching out, she took the sack from Xhum’s hands and held it. She drew in a deep breath, and when she spoke, she looked out over her people. “When I became queen, the charge of those who went before me was that I love my people as a shepherd and study the dreams for them that they might find a better home.” She looked at Ria and her voice rose. “When I climbed the Spire and declared myself, this was the promise I bore in my heart.” She lifted the bag of names, and as she did, she heard Ria gasp and then caught the momentary flash of rage on the regent’s face. “I will not harm my people,” Winteria bat Mardic cried out. “I will not let them suffer beneath your knife.”

Then, she hurtled the sack of parchments down from the platform and watched the scraps of paper scatter on a cold wind that suddenly moaned around them.

The regent’s voice betrayed impatience. “You are—”

But Winters interrupted him, her own voice sharp. “You will still have your blood, Eliz Xhum, and I will hold you to your promise.”

She looked to Jin Li Tam, and when their eyes met, she knew the woman understood. The Gypsy Queen broke eye contact first, but not before Winters read the emotion clearly framed there.

She is afraid for me.

But in that moment, Winteria bat Mardic, Queen of the Marsh, was not afraid. She felt nothing but resolve. Fixing her eyes upon the moon where it hung high and inviting in the night sky, she walked to the cutting table and slowly started to undress.

The field lay shimmering white beneath the moon, and Charles squinted out over it to the hillside. Once the sun had dropped, the temperature had as well, and the freezing sweat beneath his clothing from hiking the snowdrifts added to the chill.

He’d come across the tracks hours ago and had known them instantly. The stride was far too long for any human, and the footprint was not dissimilar from those of his re-creations. The metal man—or Watcher, if that was its designation—had run this way, no doubt bound for the night’s ceremony.

He’d retraced the prints with ease until the light went, mindful that his own tracks would give his path away as surely as the Watcher’s had done. He’d pressed on into twilight, and when the dark settled in altogether and the moon rose, he found himself at the edge of the clearing.

He took a tentative step forward and then jumped when a voice of many waters roared out through the forest, resounding from the hills.

“May the grace of the Crimson Empress be with you.” It was a woman’s voice.

For a moment he thought he heard the distant roar of cheering, and then after more words, the woman launched into a discourse. Charles was familiar with voice magicks—they were distilled from blood and forbidden by the Articles of Kin-Clave, but the Marshers had never cared for, nor endorsed, those articles. They did not raise his curiosity nearly so much as the sermon she preached.

Like all acolytes, he’d studied the various resurgences that had sprung up. Most of the Franci behaviorists believed it was a holdover from the Age of Laughing Madness, much like the Marsher dreams his metal children now followed. But in the early words of the sermon that thundered out beneath the risen moon, Charles heard underlying structure supported by anecdotes and quotations from gospels and prophecies he’d never heard of.

This is something new.

Still, as much as he wanted to comprehend this change, he was not here to listen about the grace and love of Y’Zir and its Crimson Empress or its Child of Great Promise. He forced himself back to the line of footprints leading back toward the hill. He could not make out exactly where they ended, and so he put first one booted foot in front of the other and trudged out after them.

As he made his way across the snowfield, he stopped at the sound
of a faint movement on the far side and heard a low growl. He’d grown up in the humid jungles of the Outer Emerald Coast and had spent his childhood paying more attention to the tools his father hunted and fished with rather than the actual work, leaving him less experienced in woodcraft. But this was not the high-pitched growl of a cat. More likely, it was a bear or a wolf.

Charles stopped and held his breath. When the growl drifted over the snow the next time, it was closer and circling him. Squinting into dim moonlight, he saw a form—no,
forms
, large and four-footed, approaching him.

Wolves. Only larger than wolves should be.

There were two of them, and even as he crouched and drew the hunting knife Garyt had given him to complete his Marsher disguise, he knew he’d be no match for what he suspected now hunted him.

He’d heard of kin-wolves, those rare leftovers from the days of the Wizard Kings, reduced to small but savage packs that roved the Churning Wastes and harried the Order’s expeditions in that desolation. But beyond the studies, sketches and bones from the Office of Natural Science, he’d not seen one.

He waited and held his breath.

When something fast shot past his head, he flinched and fell backward even as the first shadowy form yelped. It took him a moment to make the connection. He struggled up out of the snow as a second and third bullet zipped across the open meadow to find their marks in their targets; then the kin-wolves were snarling and leaping past him.

A half dozen windstorms kicked up snow as another four bullets shot from magicked slings impacted. The volley brought one of the wolves down, and it thrashed and yelped as invisible blades from scouts on the run found it and carved it in a snow-swept dance.

A hand gripped Charles’s upper arm to drag him back and away. When he offered momentary resistance a harsh voice whispered into his ear. “I told you to stay put, Gray Robe,” Aedric said.

Charles felt the strength in the man’s hand as Aedric pulled him backward through the snow, and the arch-engineer said nothing, simply watched and listened as Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts did their work. The second wolf put up more fight but eventually succumbed to bullet and blade. When it was finished, Aedric’s men clicked their tongues quietly against the roofs of their mouths to announce their status.

With help from Aedric’s strong hands, Charles climbed to his feet, shaken. “Thank you,” he said, the fear of it all suddenly settling upon him like clouds on the Delta.

Aedric’s voice still held anger in it. “Do not thank me yet, old man. Just hope that what you and Isaak need so badly can be found in yon metal man’s cave and that it is worth the lives of my men.”

One of the scouts whistled for Aedric, and Charles walked with him, watching the prints from invisible feet materialize within the broken snow in an attempt to confuse his footprints. A match flared, and the light and smoke from it dimly illuminated part of a hand as a watch lantern was lit. Its lens of light was turned to the bloody ground, and Charles saw now the massive, dark-furred kin-wolves stretched out in death. The dark iron collars surprised him.

Aedric’s voice was low and muffled by the magicks. “It seems our metal friend has set out watchdogs in the days since we’ve last visited him.” He pointed to the bodies. “Take them up and bring them.”

Then, by the light of the small lantern, Charles followed them to the waiting cave entrance, where they stood and listened. But the booming voice and its impassioned rambling about blood and life and empresses drowned out any sound that might’ve drifted back to them from deep beneath the ground.

“We go in carefully,” Aedric whispered. His finger found Charles’s chest and poked it. “You stay behind us until we know it’s safe.” He was quiet for a moment, then spoke again. “Feris, Grun, stay back here and guard our backs.” Then, in afterthought, he added, “Skin these pups for me while you wait.”

Charles blinked. “Why would you—”

But Aedric cut him off. “It is not your concern. You just worry yourself about finding your missing pages. You’ve only my grace because of the two queens who’ve granted theirs. This is madness, in my mind.”

Charles waited until he felt the wind of them moving into the cave and then followed after. As they moved, slowly, he watched as the light fell upon the stone walls and tried to filter out the thick smell of dung and blood that choked him. When they reached the first room and its line of cages, they stopped again. Within the cages, birds of a dozen nations waited amid their stacks of papers. “In for a drachma,” Aedric muttered before ordering his men to wring the birds’ necks and gather up what intelligence could be found. “After tonight,” he said, “our welcome will indeed be worn.”

They only spent a few minutes in the cutting room, and Charles was glad of it, for that was the worst-reeking space. They left it untouched and moved into its simple working space with its tables of potions and powders, inks and papers.

Aedric’s voice drifted across the room. “Tell us what we look for, Francine.”

Charles went to the table of papers. “Parchment pages,” he said, “handwritten and of varying ages.” Of course, despite the potions the Marshers used to preserve the ancient tomes that held their dreams, some of these pages might not have survived their removal from the books. He only hoped that whatever they might find here would be sufficient for his children’s antiphon to be successful.