by Ken Scholes
Rudolfo pulled away with his lead scout while the others set up camp. Jin Li Tam tried to make herself useful, but in the end she was only in the way. The Gypsy Scouts moved with precision, quickly putting up tents and laying in a small fire.
Of course, Oriv would be a fool to have them followed. His already limited Gray Guard had been thinned by a handful of men. He’d not risk losing more or leaving his Palace unguarded. If he went looking for vengeance-and Jin was not sure he was the sort to do so-he would hire it out. Or turn to his cousin. She had no doubt that birds were already winging their way rapidly south and east, carrying news of Rudolfo’s escape.
Isaak had not spoken since leaving Oriv’s office, and for the first time since they’d left she realized he no longer wore his Androfrancine robe. How had she missed that? He sat against a tree, staring out through the woods at nothing. His bellows shook from time to time, as if he heaved sighs that his chassis was not designed for. She could see the intricacies now of his metal frame and musculature. His long, slender arms and legs and his helmetlike head with his jeweled eyes all glistened dully as the Gypsy Scout struck the sparks for their fire. His mouth opened and closed periodically.
Jin Li Tam walked to him and crouched. “Isaak?”
He did not respond. She reached out a hand, hesitated, and then lowered it onto his cold, metal shoulder. He spun, eyelids flashing to life as his hand came up. He paused. “Apologies, Lady Tam.”
“Where are your robes?”
His eye-shutters flitted and steam released from his back. “Pope Resolute ordered me to remove them. He said it was unseemly for a mechanical to wear the habit of P’Andro Whym.”
“I suspect,” Jin Li Tam said, “that P’Andro Whym would have been glad for you to wear it.” She waited, wondering if she should continue. “Is that what troubles you?”
Isaak looked up, his eyes full of a sorrow of such magnitude that she had only seen once before. “No, Lady Tam. I am troubled by another matter.”
She felt her eyebrows knit together. amp;«nit
“I fear,” Isaak said, “that I am malfunctioning. I do not believe I will serve well to assist with restoration of the library.” He paused, and his mouth clacked open and closed in a metallic stammer. “I am no longer… reliable.”
“In what way?” Around them, the scouts put the last finishing touches on the camp. She could smell the onions that the cook sliced as he prepared dinner.
Isaak looked back out at the forest. “Pope Resolute asked me many questions. Difficult questions. About my role in the Desolation of Windwir.” He paused. “Then he asked me if I could reproduce the spell from recall, in writing.”
Jin Li Tam felt her stomach clench. But she couldn’t bring herself to ask it.
Isaak continued, still staring off into the forest. “When he asked me to, I told him I could not. I told him that part of my memory scroll had been damaged in the execution of the spell.”
Jin Li Tam sighed. “And he believed you?”
“Of course he believed me. Mechanicals cannot lie.”
She nodded. “You are worried that you are malfunctioning because you lied to the archbishop?”
“Yes,” Isaak said, turning back to look at her. “How can a mechanical lie? I think-” He sobbed, and the violence of it cause Jin Li Tam to jump back. “I think perhaps the spell altered me.”
It changed all of us, she thought. “If it did, Isaak, then it was for good. You are carrying the most dangerous weapon the world has ever known. A spell that killed a world to satisfy a father’s wrath. A death for each of the seven sons P’Andro Whym executed in his Restoration Scientifika pogrom. Those Deaths must be kept hidden in you, Isaak. The Androfrancines were the best and noblest of us-with infinite patience, studying their matrices and working their ciphers, only releasing to the world what secrets and wonders it was ready for. If they couldn’t safeguard this secret, no others of us could. You are the safest tomb for it until it can be removed and destroyed.” She paused, charting her course of words carefully. “If you must lie to keep this secret, then lie.” Her eyes narrowed. “There is no price too high, Isaak.”
She waited to see if he would respond. When he didn’t, she put her hand on his chest, her fingers splayed out. Where his shoulder had been cool, his chest was warm. “Change is the path life takes,” she told him. “Maybe the death you have seen has brought you life.”
“It is an odd sensation,” he said in agreement.
She opened her mouth to speak again but Rudolfo interrupted her as he swaggered in from the forest. “Hail, Isaak,” he shouted, and tossed a bundle toward the metal man.
Isaak caught it and stared down at it.
“I thought perhaps you could use it. I picked it up on our way out.”
Jin Li Tam looked at the bundle now too, and felt the smile pulling at her mouth.
In that moment, she suddenly knew that love was planted in her heart toward the laughing Gypsy King, Rudolfo.
She smiled at Rudolfo while Isaak stood and dressed himself in Androfrancine robes.
Vlad Li Tam
Vlad Li Tam was not even halfway to the Emerald Coasts when the bird found him. This bird always found him. He was riding when it settled upon his shoulder and nibbled playfully at his beard. He’d petted it and raised his fist to signify a halt. They helped him down from the saddle, and he pulled the message.
While he read it, his servants hastily erected a tent and chair for him to sit in. He summoned his master sergeant and his aide. “There has been a significant change in the course of events,” he finally said after leaving them in silence for a time. “I have in my hands a decree from our invisible Pope. Of course, he doesn’t name himself. But he has the tone of authority, the confident positioning of his words.”
Vlad Li Tam stopped, took the message and passed it to his aide, who sat quickly and began to study it, making ciphers in the margins. “He’s moved faster than we thought he would,” the aide said.
“But without his name,” Vlad Li Tam, “we have nothing but words.”
The aide went back to reading. “He encourages the continued gathering of resources at the Papal Summer Palace and commends Archbishop Oriv for his strategic effort on behalf of the Order.” Then he shook his head, amazed. “And then exercises his Right of King by way of kin-clave to declare war on Lord Sethbert, Overseer of the Entrolusian City States.”
“Note that,” Vlad Li Tam said, accepting his kallaberry pipe from the servant who was setting luncheon. “He does not declare war on the City States themselves.”
The aide chuckled. “He is allowing them a way out. They can deliver Sethbert or they can support him.”
Vlad Li Tam nodded. “Mark him, Arys. Petronus is the wiliest of men.”
But, he thought, for all of his wiliness, he still hid himself from the world. Vlad Li Tam had spent a year fishing with Petronus when they were both young. Vlad’s father, Ben Li Tam, had insisted that his first son spend a year without privilege. Of course, every Tam father realized that a true first son would think beyond the edges of the light. So they offered the families that took them in a stupendous amount of currency to ensure that the experience truly was without privilege. Because these boys-the first sons-would someday inherit the lucrative and invisible network that the Li Tam shipbuilders had created when they turned to banking both currency and information. And that inheritance demanded a broad range of experience to give a broad range of knowledge.
He’d lived with Petronus and his family, had eaten at the table with him, taken his share of beatings with him, fishing daily the wide waters of Caldus Bay.
Even then, he remembered Petronus’s love affair with the Androfrancines. He showed him the excavations he’d led to his own backyard forest, pointing out the holes he’d dug in search of artifacts that did not exist in the New World.
“Maybe someday,” Vlad Li Tam had said to Petronus as they mended their nets at the end of a day, “you’ll be Pope.”
Petronus had laughed and he had joined in. But he wasn’t surprised at all to read about a young Archbishop Petronus in his intelligence training with Father. By the time Petronus was made Pope, Vlad Li Tam had already seen his twenty-third daughter into the world, fully managing House Li Tam. They rekindled their friendship as if twenty years hadn’t passed.
Though they didn’t see each other often, they met occasionally at affairs of state. Three times, they met in conference at the Summer Papal Palace over Androfrancine accounts. Vlad’s most vivid memory was the summer before Petronus’s so-called assassination. They were sitting in the office on the upper floor, the afternoon sun spilling into the room through glass doors wide open. They’d pored over the papers from morning until night and only had the afternoon left because of Li Tam obligations that called him elsewhere.
After a particularly challenging conversation on asset liquidation, Petronus paused, and a pained look crossed his face. “Do you ever wonder what your life would be if you weren’t Lord Tam of House Li Tam?”
“I can’t,” Vlad remembered saying. “I was made for this. I can’t imagine being anyone other than who I am.”
Petronus had thought about this and nodded. “But do you ever miss fishing?”
Vlad Li Tam laughed. “Every day.”‹«ry /p›/font›
Five minutes later, the staff and servants at the Papal Summer Palace did not know what to do when their Pope came bellowing down the hall for bait and tackle and wine.
Now all these years later, Vlad Li Tam still believed the answer he’d given his boyhood friend. He had thirty-seven sons and fifty-three daughters, all honoring him in some fashion. At no time had he wondered what it might have been like otherwise.
I do not believe in otherwise.
It’s what he was made for. Somehow, he had to make his friend see the same thing for himself.
Vlad Li Tam turned to the Master Sergeant. “We will need the birder to order a flock. You’ll have a day to set up the bird-tents.” He looked over his aide. “You’ll have the same day to rescript the proclamation.” He drew in on the pipe as his servant held a long stick match to it. “The next day, we ride for Windwir.”
He dismissed them with a nod, and they stood to leave.
I’m coming, Petronus, he thought.
I’m coming to remind you what you’re made for.
After they left him, not even the kallaberry smoke could lift his spirits.
Chapter 18
Rudolfo
Rudolfo arose early, as was his custom, and walked alone through the forest. He whistled, long and low, to warn his sentries that he approached. They whistled back to acknowledge him, but after years of riding with their general, they did not approach or interrupt.
He loved the mornings most of all. It was a time when the world still slept and he could be in solitude, apart from everything. It was a time for processing strategy and plotting the day’s schemes.
The rain let up sometime in the night, but the ground and foliage were still wet. The air hung heavy with moisture-ribbons of mist moving low across the ground in the deep gray of predawn.
They would ride hard today and put yet more distance between themselves and the last of the Androfrancines. But soon enough, that small remnant would be the last of Rudolfo’s concerns.
War was coming. A bigger war than he’®/fo;d imagined when he launched that dark raven with its scarlet thread what seemed so long ago. Then, he’d thought it would his Wandering Army against Sethbert. But much had happened in the weeks that followed.
Vlad Li Tam’s message intrigued him and he wondered how this new development would play out. A second Pope, one with a more direct line of succession, could mean divided loyalties. At the very least the Writ of Shunning would not stand, though he was certain Sethbert and his cousin would force the issue for as long as they could. The Androfrancines’ leadership crisis would reproduce itself around the world as the houses of the Named Lands were forced to pick a side.
You get ahead of yourself. Rudolfo chuckled.
For all he knew, this Pope was also in Sethbert’s pocket. Though he doubted it very much. Li Tam’s involvement would have been different if that were the case.
Of course, the papal succession aside, there were other developments that also intrigued him. He’d seen the messages and knew now about the Marsh King’s sudden declaration of kin-clave with him. A strange and unexpected alliance that prompted him to send birds to the Forest Manors, sending his stewards into the records archives to search for some shred of information about kin-clave between the Gypsies and the Marshers. The only connection Rudolfo could make was the Marsh King’s capture when he was a boy.
Still, the Marsher Army was a formidable force when pulled together. Less predictable even than the Wandering Army, they relied on chaos-even madness-to prevail. Known mainly for their skirmishing raids, those few times the Marsh King’s army had been called together over the last thousand years were formidable for those they faced. They rarely won when strategic minds came into play against them, but they never really lost, either. They slunk back north to their swamps and marsh grass, daring generals and kings alike to enter their demesnes and fight on Marsher land.
Few did, though the Androfrancine Gray Guard had forced the issue with them a time or two, exacting a price on skirmishers who raided the villages and towns that Windwir protected.
Why would the Marsh King side with the Ninefold Forest Houses?
And alongside that strange and unexpected alliance, there was another. His sudden kin-clave with House Li Tam through betrothal to Vlad Li Tam’s forty-second daughter. It was a surprise that Rudolfo still did not know quite how to measure.
The consummation had been effective and even pleasurable. Though it wasn’t the physical act that defined the pleasure of that night for him. Certainly, she was skilled enough. And judging by her response to him, their skills were well matched for the deed. But his pleasure had been deeper than their bodies pressed together or his hands tangled in her long, honey-scented hair or their mouths moving along one another’s bodies. There was something deeper. Something sparked by their mutua? byangl conquest of one another. For though he took great pride in wearing her down and at long last commanding her body to pleasure, the truth of it was that she had done the same thing for his heart, and he was compelled now to think of her, to wonder about her, to wish to see her.
He’d considered going to her that night. Their eyes had caught across the fire and they’d traded brief smiles. But in the end, they’d slept side by side but in their separate tents.
Gods, what a woman.
And her father had not changed his strategy to the best of his knowledge. Nor would Rudolfo change his. He would align himself with this new Pope-if he were a man of reason and moderate strength-and he would win that new Pope to his way of seeing. When the war was finished, he would rebuild the library in a place where he could watch over it, a place far from the meddling of men like Sethbert.
Rudolfo heard a whistle behind him. It was too high and it did not warble at the end.
Setting his jaw, he crouched near a thick evergreen and drew his long, curved knife. He did not return the whistle, and after a moment he heard soft footfalls.
“Lord Rudolfo?” It was Jin Li Tam’s voice.
He stood, putting his knife away. “I’m here, Lady Tam.”
She slipped through the foliage with the ease of a Gypsy Scout. “I don’t quite have the whistle down,” she said.
Rudolfo smiled. “It’s nearly there. You learn quickly.”
She curtsied. “Thank you, Lord. May I join you for your walk?”
He’d just started to think it was time to turn back, time to rouse the last watch from their few precious hours of sleep and strike camp for the long day’s ride ahead. “Please,” he said.
She came alongside him, and they were both careful not to touch. “You are well?”
“I am. And you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Be
tter now that we’re on our way.”
They walked together, side by side, and her measured footsteps impressed him. She moved like a scout, confident and light with her step. The ferns and branches around her only trembled lightly as she went past; they did not leak the water that had collected there.
The sky lightened above them, patches of it showing through the canopy of forest.
Rudolfo enjoyed the silence as they continued together. Eventually, they reached the edge of the wood and looked southeast and downslope to see the edge of the wide, wide river-this was the Third River, the largest of the Three but also the most desolate. They stood and watched the sunrise.
After it climbed onto the horizon, they turned back and walked slowly toward camp.
“What will you do now?” Jin Li Tam asked.
“I ride for Windwir,” he said. “I still have men there.”
“What of Isaak?”
Rudolfo stopped. The way she said it-the tone of concern and the expectation of a favorable response from him-suddenly reminded him of the way his mother had spoken to his father about him when he was a child. Of course, she didn’t know Rudolfo listened. When his father showed the five-year-old heir a myriad of passages and tunnels built into and beneath the Forest Manors, Rudolfo spent his free time learning the arts of espionage and found his parents were easy marks.
By six, he’d abandoned it. Wise to his ears, they’d begun fabricating tales of buried artifacts and ancient parchments in the gardens and forests surrounding the manor. Of course, he came back empty-handed at least a half dozen times before he realized their strategy. Disappointed with espionage, he’d moved into pickpocket training.
He blinked the memory away. She cared for him like a child.
“I was hoping for your assistance,” Rudolfo said, walking again.
She glanced at him. Ahead of them, a rabbit bolted. “How may I help?”
“Stay near him. Use the pretense of helping him with the library.” Rudolfo reached out, gently pulling a branch aside for her as they walked. “Your father knows who this second Pope is. Perhaps he would speak to him on your behalf, asking that this invisible Pope authorize Isaak under your care to gather the necessary data to rebuild and restore what can be found.”
