Canticle poi-2 Read online

  It had been seven months, and he had forgotten how good she tasted. “This is better than the dreams,” he said.

  She shuddered beneath his hands, squirmed and pushed at him. “Don’t you need to get dressed for the feast?” she asked, laughing.

  He pulled her back and kissed her again. “Yes, Lady Winters, I do.”

  “Then I release you to your responsibilities,” she said, slipping away. “I will see you in the morning.”

  Winters moved away with a speed and sureness of foot that astounded Neb. Unmagicked, she was easily the best scout he’d seen. He followed at a slower pace, willing his heart to stop racing. He’d forgotten how powerful the draw to her was. Certainly, the dreams reinforced it. Bits of prophecy, strands of glossolalia and, sometimes, a sensuality that caught Neb’s breath in his throat and woke him up sweating and trembling. Even now, he blushed as he thought about it.

  He left the maze and took the winding garden path up to the scouts’ back entrance to the Seventh Forest Manor. He could hear the woodwinds and stringed instruments trickling from the Grand Hall’s windows and could hear girls and scouts laughing in the kitchens. Neb slipped inside and found himself in hallways crowded with scouts and soldiers in the dress uniforms of the Ninefold Forest Houses. Servants bustled about, moving from room to room. Neb took the back stairs, and after a few twists and turns of the hall, he let himself into his small room.

  Normally, officers in training stayed in the barracks, but because he was considered a member of Rudolfo’s household they had kept him in the same room he’d used since his first arrival in the Ninefold Forest. It was a small room divided roughly into a living area and sleeping area-the sleeping area was separated from the rest by a heavy curtain. A small wooden desk and chair sat near a large window that led out onto a small balcony. A few scattered pieces of art decorated the walls-two, he thought, were original Carpathius oil paintings of the Great Migration west from the ruins of the Old World. Carpathius had been commissioned for a series of paintings during the first millennial celebration of the settling of the Named Lands. These were from that series, showing the Gypsy folk in their tattered rainbow clothing-their leader, that first Rudolfo of legend, standing apart from the others-cresting a hill to look out over the Ninefold Forest. Those ancient green islands of old-growth timber isolated in the yellow grass of the Prairie Sea were to become their new home, and though their faces were tiny, Neb was convinced of the hope on them. Neb wondered what it had been like to be the first setting foot in a New World so long ago.

  Unbuckling his knife belt, he hung the twin blades over the back of a chair. He slipped out of his snow-stained woolens and after quickly scrubbing up and shaving in the small bathing chamber adjacent, Neb pulled on his dress uniform. Ordinarily, Rudolfo’s officers came into their training with no rank, but in light of his previous leadership, running the gravediggers’ camp for Pope Petronus during the worst of the war, Neb wore the scarf of a lieutenant wound around his upper left arm. He sat down to pull on his boots and looked up when there was a knock at his door.

  “Come in,” he said.

  The door eased open, and Aedric, First Captain of the Gypsy Scouts, peeked in. “You’re running late,” he said, grinning.

  Neb tugged at the boot. “Sorry, Captain.”

  Aedric came into the room, pulling the door closed behind him. “Does it have anything to do with a certain Marsh girl who happens to be accompanying her king?”

  Neb felt his cheeks grow hot. He opened his mouth to speak, but Aedric’s chuckle cut him off. “She has you quite firmly in hand, I imagine.”

  The double meaning wasn’t lost on Neb, and now his ears burned, too. But Aedric clapped a hand on his shoulder, his chuckle now open laughter. “Take heart, Neb,” he said. “It happens to all of us at one time or another. Just be careful-Marshers are a strange lot.”

  He doesn’t know, Neb realized. He thinks Hanric is the Marsh King. Rudolfo knew the truth, though Neb wasn’t sure how he’d learned it. And Neb suspected that Aedric’s father, Gregoric, had known as well. But Gregoric had been killed on the night they liberated the mechoservitors from Sethbert’s camp.

  The Marshfolk survived because the rest of the Named Lands either feared or discounted them. Legend had them coming to the Named Lands just after that first Rudolfo led his band of desert thieves and their wives and children over the Keeper’s Wall. Carpathius had certainly painted no pictures of that event. At one time, they had been the house servants of Xhum Y’Zir and his wizard king sons. But-as the Androfrancines taught-the Age of Laughing Madness had not bred its way out of the Marshers over a span of several generations. As other settlers came to the New World, the Marshfolk were gradually pushed back along the northern edge of the Dragon’s Spine mountains into the marshes and forests at the headwaters of the First and Second Rivers. Someplace where their madness and mysticism could not taint the remains of humanity.

  Of course, the more Neb learned firsthand from his dealings with the Marshers and their leader, the more he questioned the Order’s interpretation of events. The Marshfolk were certainly different, but not necessarily mad.

  Neb blinked away the history and stood, grabbing up his knife belt and buckling it on. Aedric looked him over and adjusted the scarf of rank, turning the knot around to the inside of his arm. “You’ve commanded men during a time of war,” he said as he adjusted it. “This is the proper way to show that.”

  Neb didn’t think of it as commanding men during war. He had commanded an army of gravediggers, doing his best to keep them alive and fed while the armies sallied out around them. He’d lost twenty men that winter to stray arrows and miscommunication and cold. Still, in the eyes of the scouts it was what it was. Neb was a veteran commander who felt like an orphaned boy most days. “Thank you, Captain,” he said, moving toward the door.

  Aedric paused. “You may want to go easy on the firespice tonight. And if you intend to see more of your girl, you should be ready for an early muster.”

  Neb’s puzzlement must’ve shown.

  Aedric saw the surprise and continued. “We’ve received word from the Keeper’s Wall. Strange things afoot at the gate. We ride out with Rudolfo and Isaak in the morning.”

  Neb felt the disappointment like a knife. Tomorrow was to be a holiday, and he’d planned to spend it with Winters as her schedule allowed. Still, he felt the curiosity as well. “What is happening at the wall?”

  Aedric shook his head. “Tomorrow. I’ll brief you when we’re under way.” He grinned. “Meanwhile, make the most of your night, Neb.”

  The large hand settled on his shoulder once more, and Neb suddenly remembered his father’s hand there. It seemed so long ago. Brother Hebda had been a fair, kind, large man who did more for his unsanctioned son than most Androfrancines. He’d even gotten Neb a grant to assist with a dig in the far east of the Old World. One morning they were loading the wagons, setting out along that same road-the Whymer Way-that led over the Keeper’s Wall at Fargoer’s Station and into the Churning Wastes beyond it. And by afternoon, Neb was alone in the world, watching the fire and lightning consume the only home and family he’d ever known.

  He thought of Rudolfo, of Aedric, and last of Winters. I have a new family now. And somewhere ahead, he thought, a new home if Winters and the Marsh Kings before her dreamed true.

  Neb forced a smile. “It will be a fine night,” he said. With a nod, Aedric walked to the door, and Neb followed after him.

  He may not get his day with Winters but perhaps, he thought, he could have what remained of the night. The manor was filled with hidden passages-he’d used his knowledge of architecture and strategic building design to find most of them after stumbling across the first by accident. Maybe, when the party wound down, he would slip off to spend a few quiet hours with her before he left for the Keeper’s Gate.

  Maybe.

  Thoughts of it started him blushing all over again, and Neb found himself hoping that Aedric didn’t notice.
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  If he did, that First Captain of the Gypsy Scouts said nothing of it. Instead, Aedric laughed and clapped in time to the music from downstairs, improvising a shuffle-booted jig as he danced down the corridor toward the great, sweeping staircase.

  Without prompting, Neb joined him in the dance and wondered what the night might bring him.

  Petronus

  Petronus looked out his cottage window before pushing another log onto the fire and returning to his crowded desk. He couldn’t quite place the feeling that kept him checking his window, but it was an uneasiness in his soul, the sense that a reckoning approached him.

  I have earned a reckoning, he thought.

  He was a fisherman’s son, but he had felt the call to the Androfrancines, and had joined the order to preserve and protect the light. He’d started out an acolyte like everyone else and had climbed the ranks to become their youngest Pope. Then, after a painfully short papacy, he’d left believing his life was becoming a lie. He faked his own assassination with the help of an eager successor and went back to his nets and his boat in the quiet waters of Caldus Bay. And the longer he was away, the more he was convinced that the Androfrancines’ backward dream no longer served the New World.

  But then came the day he saw Windwir’s pyre in the northern skies. They’d brought back the spell of Xhum Y’Zir-despite his warnings-and it had undone them, reducing the world’s greatest city to a Desolation of ash and bone.

  I have earned a reckoning.

  He looked back to his desk. It was awash with paper. Every flat surface of his one-room shack was, too. Notes and maps and scraps of parchment.

  At the center of it all, on his desk, lay the leather satchel Vlad Li Tam had given him on the day Petronus had executed Sethbert. With the same knife he’d used to gut ten thousand salmon, he’d cut Sethbert’s throat in front of them all in one final act that disqualified him as Pope and disbanded the Order. He had already invoked Papal Sanction to transfer the Order’s vast holdings and wealth into the care of the Ninefold Forest Houses. Rudolfo would rebuild the library and take guardianship of the light.

  He reached into the open satchel and drew out the papers. He’d read them every day for the last seven months, and in the first weeks he’d read them over and over again, committing them to memory. He could recite them; and on good days, when his hands were steadier, he probably could’ve drawn the maps and illustrations they contained.

  He studied them again now, starting with the first page.

  By Order of Petronus, Holy See of the Androfrancine Order and King of Windwir.

  His own name on the first form, authorizing research into the reproduction of the mechoservitors from Rufello’s Book of Specifications and the scattered, broken pieces of the Old World. And his own signature marked by the papal signet. This one didn’t bother him as much. He remembered seeing the head and torso and arm of that first model, remembered the sweltering heat of the massive boiler they’d required to power his basic functions. Still, it was the most impressive mechanical feat of the Old World that they’d been able to re-create until that moment. He remembered signing this order. It was the one beneath it that perplexed and enraged him.

  It opened the same way.

  By Order of Petronus, Holy See of the Androfrancine Order and King of Windwir.

  But the unthinkable order that followed baffled him. Though it had nearly blinded him, Petronus had read every scrap of parchment he attached his signature and seal to over the course of his papacy. He had not signed this one. He would never have signed it.

  But below, with the signet beside, his signature stared back on the order. It called for expediting the restoration of Xhum Y’Zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths in conjunction with the Office of Mechanical Sciences, ordering thirteen expeditions into the Churning Wastes under Gray Guard protection and magicked courier.

  He’d not signed that, but someone had. And it had paved the way for all of the papers that followed. For two generations of metal men not intended merely to serve but also to be weapons, somehow immune to Y’Zir’s spell and thus perfect carriers for it. And for studies into the effects of limited recitals of the spell at strategic points in the Named Lands.

  No wonder Sethbert acted, Petronus thought. He had thought the Order intended to attack him.

  And here was the only note Tam left, the only explanation of his work to secure the light in Rudolfo’s wood and of his father’s work to build and break a Pope that the Order might be ended and the light might pass to safer hands.

  They meant to protect us.

  Somewhere, beyond the Named Lands, the Androfrancines feared something. Something powerful enough to turn them toward the weapon that Desolated the Old World and ushered in the Age of Laughing Madness. They of all people knew the power of that spell; they held the keys to the Keeper’s Gate and salvaged the Churning Wastes for scraps of light. They saw firsthand that handiwork two thousand years later, a wasteland of scrub and rock and fused glass and the dust of bones.

  whatever they feared, it had to be significant to bring that weapon among all others.

  And what if that threat somehow turned the Androfrancines’ weapon against them, using Sethbert as their pawn? Or worse, what if the fear of an outside threat was manufactured in a great misdirection ultimately designed to bring about the restoration of the spell and the destruction of the Androfrancines and their library? That pointed to a network of connections, skilled in forgery and espionage, with access to the Order’s archives and the resolve to murder a city. Vlad Li Tam was still the most likely candidate. But they’d known each other as boys, and Petronus believed him when he said that Rudolfo was his work, not the Desolation of Windwir.

  Why would he give me the evidence?

  The work bore the mark of a Tam. And Vlad had moved quickly to dismantle his network and remove it from the Named Lands. His house was surely involved in some manner. Why else would he flee, taking his vast system of courtesans and spies out of play, closing down the bank they had operated for generation upon generation and passing the House Li Tam holdings over to the Order in the days just prior to the Order’s holdings passing to Rudolfo?

  Or perhaps there was indeed an outside threat. Perhaps the document that Petronus hadn’t signed was not a Tam forgery but the product of some hidden group within the Order bent on a secret agenda to defend the light at any and all costs.

  Seven months ago, with Sethbert’s blood still under his fingernails, Petronus had given himself to the work of finding out.

  He put the papers back into the satchel and went again to the window. A reckoning. The feeling was stronger, but the night was quiet. High above, a sliver of blue-green moon shone in the star-speckled sky. Petronus sighed and pulled the rough fabric curtains closed.

  He shrugged out of his robe and pulled on his sleeping shirt before crawling into his narrow bed. He pulled the wool blankets up around his neck and lay on his side, watching the fire across the room. The light dancing there was not much comfort to him, but eventually sleep pulled him down into cold but strong arms. The fire continued in his dreams. A burning village, a smoldering city. Blood beneath his fingernails.

  He stirred at a sound and sat up quickly when the door to his shack swung open. His fingers curled around the handle of the fishing knife he kept beneath his pillow.

  The magick-muffled voice came to him from across the room, but Petronus saw nothing there. “And thus,” it said, “are the sins of P’Andro Whym visited upon his children.”

  Petronus smiled and rose to the reckoning with his knife in hand.

  Chapter 2

  Winters

  Winteria bat Mardic looked out over Rudolfo’s gardens from her balcony, wondering how it was that she had come here for a boy.

  The noise of her host’s Firstborn Feast filled the cold night, and she imagined the show Hanric gave them on her behalf. It was strange to be the Marsh King, she thought. Queen. Soon enough she would come into her majority and take the Firstfall ax
e and the Wicker Throne away from Hanric. Her father’s closest friend had trained her for that day along with the Androfrancine scholar they had hired away from those gray-robed thieves. She was nearly ready for the rest of the world to know the truth.

  Her people knew the truth and kept her trust. They’d learned the hard way that it was better to keep Marsher business in the Marshlands. But for outside eyes, she was a servant in the Marsh King’s entourage, kept about for nefarious reasons, according to their neighbors in the New World. She had it on good authority that Androfrancine intelligence had once noted her role as that of soothsayer and companion. Under normal circumstances, surrounded by just her tribe, she ruled quietly and served her people by adding her dreams to the Book of Dreaming Kings. In these affairs of state she truly had no place. But she had not come here for Rudolfo’s Firstborn Feast, though it was a fine occasion to honor.

  She had come here for a boy. Nebios ben Hebda, the Homeseeker. Snow had slowed their journey to the Ninefold Forest, and their entourage had arrived that morning to a quiet but public welcome. Hanric, as her shadow, followed the forms with gruff acquiescence. The Named Lands saw a giant barbarian with bits of wood and bone woven into his long beard and his tangled hair, carrying an enormous axe. That’s what the Marshfolk needed the Named Lands to see to keep them frightened. After the public reception, she’d spent a few hours talking with Rudolfo in a quiet place about the unrest on the Delta and elsewhere in the Named Lands, had lunched with the other servants and then sought out Neb. Rudolfo and Neb were the only two beyond her own people who knew the truth about her. The rest believed the image the Marshers projected, and few drew close enough to learn otherwise. The Marshfolk kept to themselves, and their neighbors preferred it that way. There was a saying, though she didn’t know if it was in use much these days. As welcome as a Marsher at a wedding. For two thousand years, they’d huddled in the north in lands they’d not chosen, biding their time and waiting for the season that would bring about the end of their sorrow in the Named Lands.