by Ken Scholes
Lysias nodded. “You may be correct.”
“And I am thinking,” Rudolfo said, “that it may have been a mistake, killing the girl.”
The old general nodded again. “It may have been. I think I could’ve broken her.”
Rudolfo regarded him. “Perhaps,” he said, “but I think it would’ve broken something in you. Some actions we take can do that.”
Lysias chuckled. “You underestimate me, Lord. Those parts of me were broken a long time ago.” He was quiet for a moment. “Still, she is dead and that is an unchangeable fact.” He looked back to Rudolfo, and their eyes met. “At least,” he said, “you took action.”
Yes. “I hope it was the right action.”
Lysias shrugged. “It felt right at the moment?”
“It felt. ” Rudolfo let the words trail out. His answer troubled him. “It felt satisfying.”
“Perhaps it was what you needed to find your path again.”
Perhaps it was. But another part of him rebuked that inner voice. He let the quiet settle in again.
The sound of the bird was loud, and Rudolfo heard its shrill cries long before it settled onto a fallen log in the center of the clearing. His hand moved instinctively for his scout knife as it flapped the ice from its wings.
It was larger than he’d imagined it would be up close. Its dead, glassy eyes stared, and even from a distance, he could smell the decay of it. The kin-raven hopped in place upon the log and opened its beak.
A voice leaked out. “Greetings, Rudolfo son of Jakob, lord of the Ninefold Forest. I am Eliz Xhum, regent of the Crimson Empress. Grace and peace to you from the Empire of Y’Zir.” The voice paused, though the beak did not move. “Your father rejoiced at the coming of this day and bid me bear you his pride and love. He had longed to hold the Child of Promise in his arms but, alas, it was not the path set out for him.”
Rudolfo felt the words even as he heard them. They were colder than the winter sky and sharper than knives. My father? He forced his attention back to the mottled dark messenger upon its log.
“I have been informed of the recent treachery against your family and can assure you that every step is being taken both for the prevalence of justice and the safety of the Great Mother and her Child of Promise. I regret the chaos and violence of the past two years and I regret the chaos yet to come, though I’m certain a time is coming when you will concur, as your father did before you, that this is essential for the healing of our world.” There was a pause, and Rudolfo glanced to Lysias. The man listened intently with a look of understanding that grew to look more like alarm with every word. The voice continued. “My emissary will reach your western border by way of the Whymer Road in approximately one week’s time. My eager hope is that they will be met with peace and welcome, and escorted safely to you that our strategy for a successful transition may be discussed. I look forward to our work together, Rudolfo.”
The bird’s beak closed, and Rudolfo did not hesitate. He drew his knife and flung it at the kin-raven even as its great wings spread. He’d not thrown in a goodly while, and he felt the strain of the sudden movement in his shoulder and arm. The knife went wide, missing by a span, and the bird lifted into the sky to shriek at him as it fled west.
Rudolfo cursed and walked to the log, recovering his knife. Lysias said nothing, and by the look on his face, Rudolfo could tell the older officer was trying to read him, to gauge this new information and its impact upon him.
My father. He did not believe it, of course. It wasn’t possible. He’d watched his father ride out to put down resurgences in the name of the Pope. What was his role in this? The knots in his stomach were twisting now as his mind went back to the blood shrine they’d found in the forest. And the list of names, including some of his father’s closest and most trusted friends.
Our strategy for a successful transition. He looked to Lysias. “What do you make of it?”
“Invasion,” the old general said. “And he would not tell you so much if he did not know already that there was nothing to be done for it.”
Rudolfo nodded. “I hope you’re wrong.”
But he did not believe he was, any more than he believed this sudden fear he felt about his father was somehow misplaced. It answered too many questions.
In that moment, Rudolfo wept, and he felt rage and despair rising off of him like heat from a banked fire.
Chapter 26
Winters
Somewhere in the crowd, an infant wailed and broke the silence that had taken hold of them. Winters looked out over the mass of people who had gathered beneath the rising moon, took in the cutting table and then turned her attention to the man who had just spoken.
When she answered him, her voice rolled out for league upon league. “There is nothing reasonable about your faith,” she said. “You impose it. You force your mark. You press your gospels into the hearts of small children and teach it to them as if it were certain truth.”
As she spoke, a smile played at the corners of Eliz Xhum’s mouth. Something bright sparked in his eye. “And how is that any different from your Homeseeking Dream? Were you not taught as a child that eventually this Homeseeker would arise? Did you not cover yourself with ash and mud to remind you of sorrow and loss during your sojourn between homes?” The regent spoke slowly, his magicked voice a gentle thunder in the winter air. “And beyond matters of faith, your Androfrancines-soulless offspring of that deicide, P’Andro Whym-did they not also teach their view of things as if they were certain truth? To children? And did they not hold hostage an entire population to their atheistic convictions and their worship of human knowledge, hoarding that knowledge to themselves in their walled city, doling it out or withholding it at their whim?”
Winters glanced to Jin Li Tam. The woman watched her, her eyes betraying concern, as she shifted Jakob in her arms. Winters turned back to the regent. “As to the Androfrancines,” she said, “my people have resisted them from the time they arrived upon our lands. You know this.” She looked to her sister. “And as to my faith. ” She paused. My faith. It was indeed hers, and it stirred up a feeling in her even stronger than the feelings that Neb had stirred up in the days when their dreams had touched and they had touched within them. She met the regent’s eyes. “My faith is built upon two thousand years of the Homeward Dream, passed down from father to son until at last, it came to me.”
“And mine,” Xhum said, “hearkens back to the days before, when the Moon Wizard Raj Y’Zir fell to live among us and teach us the love of a father for his child. But regardless, our faiths are not mutually exclusive, young Winteria. Indeed they are intertwined. You are young in your knowledge of Y’Zir, but there are many passages about the Machtvolk and their role. Perhaps this one will interest you.” He looked from her to Ria, and Winters followed the glance and saw the worry upon her face. “ ‘In the Winter of Days, a daughter shall be born and named for the season of her arrival, and she shall call forth the true Machtvolk by blood in the shadow of the Deicide’s pyre to take back that which was promised and heal that which was broken.’ ” It correlates with a passage from your own father’s dreams that I suspect you have not read.”
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 belief
s, 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.
Charles
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.”
