Antiphon (53 page)

The young man scooped the girl into his arms, and Jin heard the sorrow catch in his throat as Winters cried out at his touch. “I will
bear you, my queen,” the young man said in a voice that stumbled with emotion.

Jin inclined her head. “Thank you.”

He returned the gesture and then set out down the wooden boardwalk in the direction of Ria’s lodge.

Jin paused before turning to follow him. The night was filled now with song instead of screaming, and she looked back in the direction of the singing.

This must be ended.

She did not know now how that could happen exactly. It was a vastly larger proposition than she had conceived when she’d first seen the beginnings of this resurgence last year. And she’d had no suspicion that anything could be darker and more frightening than the pillar of smoke and fire on the day that Windwir fell. But that pyre, it seemed, had only been the beginning of a darkness she could not comprehend and could not bear to be a part of.

The last thing she noticed, gleaming wetly in the scattered moonlight that penetrated the evergreen canopy, was the footprints in blood leading backward along the way that they had taken.

“We walk a path of blood,” Jin Li Tam whispered, and as she said it, a shudder ran its course along her body, like the kiss of a silver blade over a cold and salted wound.

An unsettling calm flooded him, and Neb looked down to where he stood upon the silver pond before looking back up to the waiting mechoservitors.

He could feel their song now vibrating up through his feet, and he could hear the whispering of their processing scrolls in the aether.

And from where he stood, he could sense a myriad other vibrations in the strange waters.

You stand upon the veins of the world. They are yours to command now,
something whispered within him.
And the aether is yours to walk, but you will need assistance there.

He cocked his head. “Father?”

I am with you, Son, but only for a short while. I cannot follow where you must go.
A strong sense of urgency flooded him, and he felt the pull of his inner eye eastward across the aether. But whatever lay there was out of reach.

Neb walked to the waiting mechoservitors, and as he did, they both knelt. He took his robe from them and clothed himself. One reached within a pouch to withdraw a small object and hold it out to him in a closed metal fist. “I’ve held this for you, Lord Whym,” the mechoservitor said, its voice reedy.

When the small black bird fell into the palm of his hand, the world
shifted and Neb fought the vertigo that seized him. His mind flashed back to his last encounter with it, lying naked and staked in the Churning Wastes while the Blood Guard took their knives to him and pressed a similar bit of carved stone into his skin. Now he saw the meaning of it.

The stone extends my sight within the aether.
They’d used it to find the location of the antiphon.

Yes.
Once more, the whispering of his father’s ghost.

Neb felt the slightest tingle beneath his scalp, soft fingers on his brain, pulling at him, and he gave himself to it.
This is how you look,
the whisper continued. And Neb understood, bending the lens of the dreamstone east.

He found Petronus first. The old man stood at the foot of a tall door, surrounded by a ragged group of Gypsy Scouts, Gray Guard and sailors looking out of place. The song poured out from the old man.

No, he realized, it poured out from the pouch the old man held.

Neb smiled. “You hold the dream, Father Petronus.”

Petronus jerked alert and looked around, his eyes wide.

“Do not be afraid, Father. It’s only me.”

His voice was incredulous. “Neb?”

There was a low rumbling, and Neb saw that the gate was slowly swinging open. And though he could not see behind the gate with his eyes, the aether showed him. A single metal man dressed in Androfrancine robes worked the large wheel that opened the way to them. Beyond him, others took down the scaffolding and camouflage to reveal a large metal vessel that was tethered to the ground. Overhead, the moon filled the small circle of sky visible from the bottom of the hollow mountain.

Amber eyes turned upon him. “The antiphon is ready for you, Nebios Homeseeker, son of Whym.”

But before he could speak, those ghostly fingers were in his mind again, pulling him away, and he looked south to see a storm of wind that raced across the shattered plains, raising clouds of dust.
Time,
his father’s ghost told him,
is of the essence.

“But how will I—?”

The ghost anticipated him.
You will swim the veins. I will show you.
Already, the fingers were back, and Neb felt as if parts of his mind long left dark were suddenly lit, though poorly. He saw the veins and the pools they linked to, a world shot through with silver, and he knew that it was made for him. He held dominion over every aspect of it, and it served him with gladness. The vast network of pools were his for traveling if he bent them to his will.

He was before Petronus again as the man and the others moved quickly into the large cavern behind the door. “I will be to you soon,” he said, “but they will be to you sooner. You must hold the gate against them.”

Petronus opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, a scream rose from the west so loud that it blotted out the song. The old man’s eyes went wide and Neb faltered. He lost hold of the aether and found himself suddenly pulled back to the cave and the mechoservitors who still knelt before him.

The scream was still with him even in that place, and the sound of it raised the hair on his arms. There was familiarity in the shrill cry, and the power of it drowned out all other sound within the aether.

He released the stone and fell to his knees to bury his face in his hands and somehow rub the pain from his skull.

You are new to the dreamstone,
the whisper told him,
but with time you will learn how to control it.

He couldn’t find his voice. Instead, Neb poured focus into his own thought.
Who is it?

It is irrelevant; time is of the essence. The antiphon awaits.

But the familiarity of the voice chewed him, and with shaking fingers, he reached out again to take up the carved kin-raven.

Her scream flooded him when his fingers closed around the stone. Closing his eyes and gritting his teeth, he forced himself to steer into the scream and follow it west across the aether. What he saw broke him, and his own cry joined hers.

He knew her instantly, stretched out upon the table, and the shock of seeing her there blinded him momentarily to the massive crowd that watched. He saw the lines of words upon her bleeding skin, saw the strong, sure hand that wielded the silver knife, and it summoned a memory of pain and despair. He felt the bite of the hard ground in wounds now healed, felt the burn of salted blades upon the softest of his skin, and heard the questions incessantly asked as the kin-raven was pressed to each wound.

Neb blinked. “Winters,” he whispered.

Their eyes met for the briefest moment before her back arched and she screamed again. The man who stood over her wore a red robe and set to his work with a quiet smile. Now Neb took in their surroundings and saw the gathering. He saw the platform, saw Jin Li Tam as she whispered with a woman he did not know before handing a baby—Lord Jakob, he realized—over to her. Another woman, one who could
be an older twin to Winters, stood by watching the man at his knife work.

Abomination.

It was a metal voice that filled his mind, overpowering even the screams.

Neb looked around and singled out a lone robed figure on a hillside. “Who are you?”

I am one who watches. Your woman is beneath the knife. Come and save her, I bid you.
There was a tone of amusement in the voice.
Surely your baptism has revealed your heritage. Surely you have now attained dominion over the ancient ways.

Come and save her, Abomination.

Neb saw the distant flash of jeweled eyes from beneath the cowl.

Do not listen,
the ghost of his father whispered.

But Neb did not know how to do that. The sound of the screams tore at him from the inside, wrenching a sob from him even as he pulled back from the aether.

“Time is of the essence,” he told the metal men. “I must leave you now. Join Rudolfo in his work. He will hide you among the others.”

He turned to the bargaining pool and stepped out onto it, willing its silver water to bear his weight. He clutched the kin-raven in his fist and felt the veins of the world shifting and whispering beneath his feet.

He looked first east to the pool buried deep beneath the antiphon, then looked west to find the pool closest to Winters.

All will be lost,
the voice inside told him,
if you do not reach the antiphon.

He heard the truth in it, though he also knew from the canticle that played among his abacus, his metal servants, that only part of the antiphon was truly complete. Silence to the south told him that his abacus had failed there, that Frederico’s kin had yet to attain the staff. And in the midst of the madness to his west, a dream could not be found.

He felt the weight of it, but a greater weight settled upon him, and it surprised him after so long away from the girl.

“No,” Neb said, “all will be lost if I lose
her
.”

Then, he bent the fingers of his mind west and pulled at the vein that would carry him there. Light swallowed him as he descended suddenly into the pool and rushed at him, roaring, as he shot west, now blue-green lightning in a twisting stream of silver.

When he stood at last upon the pool he’d called for, he stretched out a hand over it.

“Clothe me,” Nebios Whym cried out, though he was uncertain why he did so.

The blood of the earth heard him and gave itself to him, rising from the pool to enfold him in its embrace. It crept over him, into his ears and nostrils and mouth, and he pulled it in to himself with a reflex he did not know he had.

He felt strength flooding his body even as the makers and workers within that fluid shored him up and fit his hands for war. He felt his mind clearing, felt the gentle rhythm of his breathing as it steadied.

He stared down at his hands and flexed them. The sheath that encompassed them flexed as well, fluctuating between a bright white that blinded and a silver so pure that its intensity reflected his surroundings and bent light around him.

He took the dreamstone from his pocket now, letting his fingers brush its dark surface. Winters’s screams still flooded the aether, and he winced as he turned in the direction they came from.

Two leagues hence he knew a ladder and hatch awaited him. Beyond that, the woman he loved and must soon leave lay writhing beneath knives his own body remembered too well.

“I am coming,” he whispered to her where she lay stretched upon the table.

He ignored the metal laughter that tickled in the back of his brain and, instead, gave himself over to the surge of strength within his legs, the sudden sureness of his feet in dark places, the sweeping song that filled him up to overflowing and threatened to burst his heart.

A wall of water struck him and then lifted Vlad Li Tam up, bringing him down hard, and he moved into a breaststroke in the direction of Behemoth. The sea was hot enough to burn him, and his nose stung from the briny steam that lifted from it.

What in hells is it?

It thrashed the waters, and as a wave lifted him up, Vlad saw that the beast—something like a snake—had turned in their direction, its maw grinding open. Ahead, Mal Li Tam swam for the open mouth, and Vlad tried to recall what Obadiah had told him about Behemoth.

He will take you into the basements of the ladder.

His first grandson spilled over into the gaping mouth and vanished.

Vlad felt the strain in his chest as he swam for it. He did not know what lay in the basements of the ladder, but he knew that the dream required it and that the d’jin had brought him to the dream and to this place. He swam and felt his muscles straining.

When the next wave raised him up, he was nearly upon it. And then when it dropped him, he found himself tumbling into a metal mouth lined with algae and sea moss. He caught at it with his hands to slow his fall, but the water pushed him deeper in, and the slick sides of the inner mouth afforded him no grip. Vlad felt himself tumbling and then felt his fall slowing as the beast leveled out.

At one point, he thought he brushed up against a soft, yielding form that flinched at his touch, but then he fell away from it and found himself suddenly caught by a pocket of water. His fingers were still curled tightly around the handle of his knife, and when his feet pushed against the soft, slippery floor, he kicked against it gently and let that kick carry him to a surface that was not far out of reach. Even under the hot water, he could hear the loud grind and clank of Behemoth’s machinery, and when he found the warm, brine-thick air, he drew it in quietly.