by Ken Scholes
“How does it fit, Winters?” It was Ria’s voice, sounding bemused.
She looked again at the long blue dress with its low neckline and laced sleeves. “It fits. well,” she said.
“Well?” her sister asked.
Winters turned and opened the door. Ria wore a similar dress, only hers was in a deep burgundy the color of pooling blood. Her face had been painted in the Machtvolk custom, though tonight there were less greens and more grays and blacks and whites. Still, each color was laid to her skin with precision, interlocking with the others like pieces to a puzzle. The paints covered her face, her neck and even her cleavage, the colors darkening where they intersected with the raised scar tissue that peeked out from the mark of Y’Zir her dress mostly concealed. Her own brown hair was up, offset by a silver tiara that Winters had not seen before.
Ria stepped back to take her in and then frowned. “I could paint your face,” she said. “There is still time.”
Winters shook her head. “I’m certain you have better things to do with your time, sister.”
Ria nodded. “I do. We’ve a special guest tonight that I should see to. Someone I hope will answer some of those questions of yours I’ve not been able to answer.” She moved toward the door, her bare feet shushing the carpet. “Your boots and robes are by the main entrance. Meet Lady Tam and the others there at the fourth bell and my guards will bring you to me. We’ll walk to the amphitheater together.”
Winters nodded. She’d used it-or rather Hanric had-for those rare times that large groups of her people gathered. It was really nothing more than a valley nestled up against the mountain, the downward slopes logged of lumber, with the stumps left as places where people could sit. She’d seen them clearing the snow from it for days in preparation for tonight and knew that even now, bonfires were being set across its wide floor to provide at least some warmth for those able to huddle nearby. Most would rely upon their furs and the warmth of their companions.
Ria paused at the door and smiled. “I am glad you are here for this, Winters.” Her eyes took on a concerned look. “I had thought when I returned to take my throne that I might lose a sister I had never truly had. I’m glad to be wrong.”
Winters felt something cold in her stomach but forced herself to curtsy. “Thank you, Ria.”
The woman returned the curtsy and let herself out. Winters forced herself to count to ten before she released her breath. “Pig shite,” she whispered.
“I’m glad,” a voice from the corner said, “you also see it as such.”
It took her a moment to place it. “Aedric?”
The voice moved. “Aye.”
She blushed. “How long have you been hiding in my room?”
The first captain chuckled. “I’ve kept my eyes averted, Lady Winteria. Rudolfo’s scouts are gentlemen at the very least; we only look when asked to.”
She felt the heat in her cheeks, nonetheless. She went to the dressing room and brought out its lamp, placing it on the desk. “I thought your secret meetings were exclusively with Lady Tam.”
“We’ve a new development. One I am quite late returning to.” The voice was low, muffled with the same magicks that concealed him. “Your sister isn’t the only one with special guests. Charles and Isaak are here. I’ve left the old gray robe in the wood; he seeks pages missing from your Book and believes the Watcher has them.”
“The Watcher?”
“Lady Tam will tell you more when she can. He’s a metal man the likes of which we’ve never seen. A leftover of the Younger Gods, I’ll wager, dug up from their graveyards beneath the ground. Charles and Isaak believe he’s taken pages from your book. Pages required for their work of saving the light. Lady Tam sent me to inquire what you might know of this matter.”
Winters was certain her face had already betrayed her. Charles and Isaak are here? And inquiring after the missing pages? She turned in the direction that Aedric’s voice last came from and swallowed. “Yes,” she said. “I know of it. It was what the other mechoservitors told me when Garyt took me to them.”
“And these pages-do you say they are critical to save the light as well?”
She thought about this. “I do not know about the light,” she said. “But I know they are the path Home for my people, Captain, and a part of the dream the mechoservitors serve, part of the dream I serve.”
“The one that names your boy, Nebios, Homeseeker?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
She heard Aedric sigh. “Then let’s hope that even Y’Zirite metal men celebrate their so-called Moon Mass.” His voice moved near now, and his face took shape before her, shimmering and faint in the lamplight. “I will do what I can to find these pages.”
The sudden thought of a metal man attending the mass piqued her curiosity. Ria had mentioned a guest who could answer her questions, and she wondered if this might be that guest. She shook away the thought at Aedric’s next words. “Open the door for me, Lady Winteria. It’s time for me to go.”
She did, stepping into the hall and calling out to a servant who was going someplace quickly, her arms full of coats. “When you are finished,” she said, “I would like some tea, please.” She felt the slightest wind on her exposed feet and ankles as Aedric moved away down the hall.
The girl nodded and continued on; Winters went back into her room and closed the door.
She walked to her bed and sat upon it.
Do I still want to go through with this? Charles and Isaak were here now. And Aedric was now involving his Gypsy Scouts. Still, the missing pages were only a part of what compelled her toward action tonight. She’d asked for her voice magicks before she’d even known about the final dream. She’d asked for them once she’d started dreaming again, once she’d seen the wrongness of the path her people were being led down.
She looked to her knives where they hung from their belts on the back of the wooden desk chair. Then, she looked back to the bed. She stood and then crouched down, stretching her hand underneath the mattress until it found the small phial. She held it and stared at it, remembering the last time she’d tasted the sour contents that fueled her announcement of ascension to the Wicker Throne. And later, those contents had let her preach her first War Sermon, compiled of glossolalia and the scattered images of her family’s long Homeward dream.
Walking to the mirror, she saw her dim reflection now within it.
Such a girl now. No, she realized, a woman.
She’d much rather go to this in her ragged trousers and tunic, her hair braided in bones and sticks, her face washed with the ash of desolation, the mud of a land that rejected her people and cast them into sorrow. She’d rather face this moment with the knives that her friend had taught her to dance with.
She placed the phial between her breasts and pushed it to the right, adjusting both breast and phial until the one covered the other. She would have to find a safe moment to drink the magicks.
Then, she would have to find the words that needed to be said to her people and to the woman who had stolen them from her.
Wolves in the fold, Winters thought, and wondered if she would be as strong as the hero Jamael when the time came.
Jin Li Tam
The song rose in a cloudless sky the color of slate and speckled with the few swollen stars that were visible by day. Jin Li Tam held Jakob close, hidden in a sling beneath her fur robes, his tiny face peeking out. It was a cold evening, made colder still by the chills the Y’Zirite hymns brought to her skin. She glanced to Winters where she walked beside her and then to Lynnae on her other side. All three of them had been provided gowns and fur robes. They were walking now on wooden planks that had been hammered together to create a path above ground going muddy from those who’d walked it before.
They’d left the lodge in a large throng of people that she assumed were Ria’s elite. Those who had helped her wrest power from her younger sister, those who had seeded the Y’Zirite resurgence in secret. She and her party walked close to the fr
ont, where the Machtvolk queen led the procession, accompanied by a robed figure who had joined them late as they gathered by the front door.
Now, they approached the natural amphitheater and Jin saw the light of a hundred fires and heard the hymn as it built to a crescendo. It was not the song she had first heard, but similar, and the words within it took her back to the war that had raged in her since the meeting with the woman claiming to be her sister.
When the regent bids you come, go with him. The boy will be safe in Y’Zir.
Her child was their messiah somehow, in conjunction with their Crimson Empress. The world’s healing was in their hands, according to the gospels she’d read. And if the magicked woman in her room spoke true, somewhere beyond the Named Lands lay a place bearing the name of their faith-a place she was intended to go to with her son for some purpose yet to be revealed. Initially, she’d been convinced it was a trap. But the more she thought about it, the more she saw that it seemed the direction gravity pulled her toward. Truly, there had been a great conspiracy within the Named Lands, fueled and funded by a branch of her family with help from this Watcher. An enemy greater than these pulled the puppet strings, and the opportunity to get closer to that enemy was nothing to be taken lightly.
And there is no safe place in the Named Lands. Not unless she was prepared to live here with the Machtvolk. The conspiracy had done a good job of assuring that none of the nations of the Named Lands could trust her family or Rudolfo.
The music changed as they drew closer, and they carefully picked their way down a crowded slope, moving slowly. As they went, she felt tentative hands reach out to touch her, and she forced herself not to cringe from it. She brought her arms up over Jakob by instinct.
They reached the bottom of the slope and climbed wooden steps onto a platform where two dozen chairs sat in a ring around a large wooden cutting table. An elaborate system of catch trays was fastened to it, all feeding into a single pipe that fed a silver basin. Nearby, Jin saw a table with silver knives laid out upon it beside a bowl of white powder she assumed must be cutting salts. Over the past several days, she’d heard much about tonight’s mass, but this was an unexpected aspect. Though in hindsight Jin wasn’t sure why she’d not anticipated it.
Someone is going to be cut tonight.
They stood before their chairs. At first, she thought they waited for Ria, but she realized that the Machtvolk queen watched the robed man who joined them. When he sat, Ria did the same, and the rest of them followed.
Jin leaned forward, still unable to see the man’s face, but she noted his hands. They were white and large, laced with scars that reminded her of the marks that her father bore, cut into him by Ria during his time in captivity. Whoever he was, he’d arrived late in the night and had been hidden away quickly. The shimmering forms that she glimpsed from the corner of her eye told her that he was accompanied by magicked scouts.
A handful of her own scouts had accompanied her, and she wondered how the others fared. She’d sent Aedric to Winters, and the fact that he hadn’t returned told her that the girl had confirmed the missing pages and Isaak’s need of them. By now, surely the first captain had reached the caves, gambling that its metal occupant was attending the night’s event.
She looked around the crowd again. If the Watcher was here she could not see him; but there were thousands crowded into this space now, and if he was robed, she might never pick him out.
Still, she kept looking for him even after Ria stood and sipped from a phial she held in her ungloved hand. When she cleared her voice to speak, the sound of it rolled like thunder out over the valley and into the surrounding hills. “May the grace of the Crimson Empress be with you,” she said.
Their response rose up, half a cheer and half a reply. “And also with you,” a multitude of voices answered. One of them was the firm, confident voice of the robed man who sat near her.
“Behold,” Ria said, “the falling moon!” As she said it, the first blue-green light of it rose up on the horizon. “Tonight, we celebrate the salvation it brought us in this-our first open celebration of the mass here in the land of our sojourn.” She paused, the roar of her words echoing out into the forests for league upon league, blending now with the wild cheers of the faithful. Then she turned, pointing toward Jin. “And behold, even our Great Mother attends, bearing the Child of Great Promise.”
The cheer was deafening, and she felt her face grew hot. Her eyes met Ria’s, and behind the adoration she saw there was something else, something off-putting. Was it defiance? She couldn’t be certain. Forcing her eyes away, she inclined her head.
Nestled close to her in his harness, Jakob laughed.
The Machtvolk queen spoke for nearly an hour, her voice rising in passion then dropping low and reassuring as she spoke of their home and their faith. Jin followed what she could but found herself focused instead upon the gathered crowds. Twice she saw uniformed soldiers wrestling individuals to the ground to drag them from the valley. And at least once, she thought she’d seen a tall, robed figure moving along the ridgeline above them.
She also watched the robed man, catching glimpses of a scarred jawline or of a crimson cuff beneath his fur robes. She could distinguish his voice from the others now, and it carried with it an accent she could not place at first.
It is familiar to me. Her sister Ire Li Tam had also spoken with an accent.
To her right, she heard Winters shuffle, and she glanced at her. The young woman’s face was drawn tight, and she bit her lower lip with her eyes closed. She looks pained. Or in prayer.
Jin leaned over. “Are you okay?”
The girl nodded but did not speak.
They were singing again, and when they finished, Ria turned to the robed man. “We are honored by another guest,” she said, passing over the phial to him. “He has come a long way to bear tidings of our empress. Tonight, he honors us by making the cuts of healing upon our proxy.”
The robed man stood and cast off his hood to reveal a scarred and pale face beneath close-cropped silver hair. He looked first over the crowd and then turned to meet the eyes of the others he shared the platform with.
“I am pleased,” Ria said, “to present to you Blood Regent Eliz Xhum.”
The man stepped forward, and when he spoke, his voice was warm, inviting, even as it blasted out from him. “Greetings,” he said with a wide smile. “It is good to see the Machtvolk on the edge of their new home.” The crowd roared at this. He turned slowly as they did, and his smile widened even farther, though Jin was not certain how it could. “It is good to see you at last, Jin Li Tam, Great Mother of Jakob, our Child of Promise. I’ve awaited your coming for many years now, as have all of us in Y’Zir.”
She met his eyes and found them disarming for that briefest moment before he looked away.
“I am honored to worship with you tonight,” he said as he outstretched his hands. “And this mass shall be your last without a home. Even now, the places are set to the table and the feast is soon coming. Even now-”
But another sound interrupted him, and Jin looked to the right, startled by it. Another clearing of the voice like thunder, and she saw that Winters stood now, her face suddenly a hard mask.
“Oh my people,” Winters cried out, “heed not the lie of wolves in our fold. The dreams of the House of Shadrus are clear. Our home is not here for us to take but rather”-she raised a finger and pointed to the sky-“it is there for us to seek.”
Jin Li Tam followed her finger, saw the moon to which she pointed, and then looked back to the girl. Her hands moved quickly though Winters didn’t pay her any mind. What are you up to? Already, uniformed men moved toward her, and Jin saw her own scouts slipping in closer.
Jin shot a glance to Ria and the regent. Ria’s face was mottled purple in rage, but Eliz Xhum’s face looked more bemused than anything.
“You surprise me, little sister,” Ria said in a voice that dripped venom.
Winter raised her hands. “Hea
r me,” she cried. “Our home arises, and our Homeseeker will bring us to it in the end. Do not lose your faith in our dream. Do not trade it for this late-coming lie.” She held her copy of the gospel high above her head and then flung it.
Jin watched it as it tumbled out into the evening air to land within the closest fire. When it landed in the flames, she heard a thousand gasps.
Now, the approaching soldiers faced off with the Gypsy Scouts. Their hands were upon their knife handles as Jin Li Tam’s fingers flew, issuing orders to them that they acknowledged with low whistles. “Stand down your men,” she said over her shoulder to Ria.
“I’ll not-”
But Ria’s voice was cut off by the regent’s. “Stand down,” he said, and they did. When he spoke again, his tone was gentle. “Let us reason together,” he said with a smile.
Jin Li Tam looked to the faith she saw upon Winters’s face, bathed blue-green in the light of the moon, and then to the painted puzzle of Ria’s face and the carved symbols that spiderwebbed Eliz Xhum’s strong features.
Last, she looked to the face of her child, still laughing where he lay against her.
Whatever came next, Jin Li Tam doubted reason would have much to do with it.
Chapter 25
Neb
For the longest time, they followed warm and winding corridors that gradually descended farther into the Beneath Places. Neb’s metal guides ran ahead, the breath of their bellows and the hiss of released steam playing counterpoint to the whir of their gears and the mechanical pulse of their pumping legs.
He ran behind them, surprised at how easily he kept up with them. The deeper down they went, the warmer the air became, and from time to time, the phosphorescent glow faded to leave them moving forward only by the light of their amber eyes in that dark place. Neb used the time to collect his thoughts, giving up on the notion of any answers from them when they ignored his initial questions.
Still hollowed by all he’d learned, he found a numb detachment ran with him. In the span of days, he’d found his dead father very much alive and had discovered through the man’s tearful confession that not only had Windwir’s fall been permitted, but that the man he’d believed his sire was not. True or not, it unsettled him most when he remembered the voice that vibrated through his body as he lay suspended in the bargaining pool.
