Antiphon (23 page)

When the morning slipped upon them, they hid themselves in an abandoned Waste rat warren tucked in a crevice of pockmarked ancient stonework. The woman curled up and fell instantly asleep, and Neb watched her for a while, pondering her. She wasn’t a Marsher, despite her use of the blood magicks. Her accent betrayed her even as her posture and appearance betrayed her kinship with House Li Tam. He dug into his pouch and withdrew the phial, opening the lid and sniffing
the foul contents. Somehow, she was able to survive her use of them—unlike the Marshers, if what he’d heard in the Gypsy camp near D’Anjite’s Bridge held true.

His eyes caught her again where the blanket fell free, exposing her bootless calf and foot. He forced them away again and tried to conjure up Winters’s face.

I cannot remember her.
After so long sharing dreams with her, she’d become a constant companion. Yet so quickly, she faded. He found the fickleness of his memory frustrating. He replaced the blood magicks, and his fingers lingered over the cloth-wrapped kin-raven. He pulled it out, careful not to let it touch his skin.

Holding it in the palm of his hand, Neb let the cloth fall away, exposing the black stone carving. He’d thought of it often since his first experience with it but had not let himself even bring it out.

“What are you doing?”

Her voice startled him and he jerked, spilling the kin-raven from the cloth and onto the floor. Without thinking, he snatched for it even as her hand found his wrist.

She cried out. “Don’t—”

But the rest of her words fell away as his skin brushed the dark bird. Suddenly, he spun away and found himself in a darkened room that smelled like lavender. Winters stood at the foot of a bed, unbuttoning her dress and lifting it up over her lithe form. Her breasts had grown larger and her hips were more pronounced, and Neb found himself suddenly—

—in a great white tower high above a deep blue sea. An enormous brown moon filled the sky, and beside him, Isaak clacked and clicked in time to the song that surrounded them, his eyes flashing bright and then dull. Neb felt the reverberation of the canticle lifting the hair on his arms and neck.

“Neb?” the startled metal man asked. His eye shutters flashed, and before Neb could answer, he stood on a hillside, looking out over a sea of glass. The thirty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam stood beside him as winds from the north and east rushed down upon them and—

—his father cried into the black stone he lay stretched out upon. “Hold fast, my son,” his voice rang out. “Petronus rides for you.”

A sharp pain in his wrist caused him to cry out, and he released the kin-raven. He looked up and locked eyes with the woman, his mouth falling open. Her face was washed clean of any expression, but her eyes were fierce. She twisted his wrist again, and he tried to twist
himself with her. As he did, her other hand shot out and snaked the thorn rifle from the loose grip of his left hand.

She moved fast, and he found himself suddenly falling backward as she raised the rifle and pointed it at his chest. He saw her fingers stroke the thorn bulb, and he suddenly realized by the way she held it that she knew the weapon even better than he did. The bulb undulated beneath her touch, and before he could say anything, she squeezed two thorns into him.

“What are you—?” His tongue filled his mouth even as his arms fell heavy to his sides and the sudden weight of his body dragged him to the ground. She blurred ahead of him, her face still a mask, her eyes now shining emeralds so sharp that they could shred him at a glance.

“I’m sorry, Nebios,” she said as the venom took hold and pulled him down toward thick, warm darkness.

The last thing he saw was her hand stretching out to take hold of the tiny black token. And the last thing Nebios Homeseeker heard before that dark swallowed him was her voice, low and suddenly sounding relieved.

“I have the Abomination right here for you, my sisters,” she whispered to the kin-raven. “Come to me.”

Charles put down his screwdriver and lifted the tubelike monoscope by its leather harness. Outside, a steady snow fell, and the afternoon light that struck his work mirrors was barely enough to see by.

Of course, he could never tell if it was the lack of light or if perhaps it was just his age finally creeping home after years of squinting over his handiwork or over the words and specifications his order had dug from the ruins of the Old World and the worlds before that.

He pulled the monoscope over his head and cinched down the straps, blinking into the telescoping device as he spun gears to let more light into the tube and to adjust the lenses. He’d polished the Firstfall metal yet brighter before lining the monoscope’s interior with it.

He turned to the caged rat and dropped a bit of raw meat, finely coated with a pinch of scout powders, in front of the sleeping rodent. It started, grabbed up the bit of venison and started nibbling.

The magicks took the rat quickly, and unfamiliar with the sensations, it launched itself against the sides of the cage, shaking it with the sudden burst of strength even as it warbled out of focus and then became the faintest blur. Charles tipped his head so that the monoscope was pointed at the cage, aware of how heavy it was as it pulled at him.

They weren’t the blood magicks that the Marshers were using these days, but Charles hoped it was a close enough approximation to
them. If so, he had accomplished a critical aspect of this work: The rat, now settling down and returning to the meat, was blurry but visible in the reflection cast into the silver of the scope.

Of course, the awkwardness of the device was another matter.

This would be improbable—maybe impossible—for a scout to wear in combat.
He would turn himself to solving that problem next. For now, at least he knew it was functional and could be used for observation, even from a respectable distance.

Charles moved across the room and turned back. Closing his left eye, he squinted into the tube. He could no longer tell that it was a rat, but he clearly saw something hunched over in the cage.

Yes.
He smiled, pleased with his work.

He pondered his pleasure in it, meditating on the Fourth Maxim of Franci B’Yot, the behaviorist who had influenced P’Andro Whym’s thinking.
Examine every turn in the labyrinth of your mind, for your many thoughts are sacred in their truth, and the unexamined mind will be consumed by its fears and desires.

Why is this work so satisfying to me? It did not take him long to see it. It pointed to a simpler time when he’d made simple
things
.

The days spent working to bring Isaak back from the dead had changed him. When he’d first petitioned the papal offices for permission to build the mechoservitors adapted from Rufello’s
Book of Specifications
, he’d had no idea he would someday worry for an actual
person
he had created—a machine that had become human somehow, or something close to it—through the grief of genocide and the blood magick of Xhum Y’Zir’s final spell.

The monoscope gave him such pleasure, he realized, because it was a problem he could solve. And because it distracted him from worrying about his metal child.

He’d seen little of Isaak in the past days. The metal man had spent his time locked away with the book by Tertius, and Charles suspected he was replaying the dream. The one time Charles had brought it up, Isaak had said nothing, though the shaking of his chassis, the pop of gears within and the sudden gout of steam betrayed the mechoservitor’s discomfort.

Charles tried to turn his mind away from his concerns for Isaak, instead considering modifications that might make the monoscope less bulky and more conducive to scout warfare. He’d just lifted his pencil to make sketches when he heard Isaak’s heavy but tentative knock on his door. He put down the pencil. “Come in.”

Isaak came in and closed the door behind him. His bellows pumped, and steam shot from the exhaust grate set between his metal shoulders. “I’ve received a courier from Lord Rudolfo,” the metal man said. “I wish to discuss it with you.” Isaak looked to him and then looked away. “I wish to discuss the dream with you as well.”

Charles nodded and gestured to the heavy stool near his worktable. “Sit with me, Isaak.”

Charles sat, too, and waited for Isaak to speak. When he did, it seemed he spoke faster than normal, as if his words were crowding his narrow throat. “Lord Rudolfo has sent word by courier that an operation in the north requires two of the library’s mechoservitors. They are required to have scripting or archived holdings in cartography and geology.”

Curious,
Charles thought. He felt his eyebrows raise. “I wonder what he’s found there?”

Isaak’s chassis trembled. “I do not know. He has asked me to decide which are best suited and send them north under scout protection in utmost secrecy.”

Charles noted the lie Isaak’s body betrayed with such subtlety.
Perhaps it was a half lie.
“Regardless, his specifications are clear. It should be easy enough to identify the two best equipped.”

“Yes,” he said. “But there is more, Father.” He paused, his eyes flashing brighter and then dimmer. “I am proceeding further in my comprehension of the dream. Tertius’s volume was . . . clarifying.”

Charles wanted to ask him about the dream but did not. Instead, he forced himself to wait.

Finally, Isaak spoke, and when he did, Charles heard determination and passion in the metal man’s voice. “I must join my cousins in their work,” the metal man said, bursting into tears that filled the room with the smell of wet copper. “I must leave Lord Rudolfo and the library in other hands and serve the light revealed within the dream.”

Charles felt the weight of the words and reached over to place a hand upon Isaak’s shoulder. He wanted to ask him why, but everything the arch-engineer needed to hear was in his metal son’s voice. “You’re going north, too,” he said.

Isaak nodded. “The equation holds true: My work here will not save the light. My work with my cousins may.”

Charles had heard less conviction in the voices of fresh acolytes, still red-faced with zeal. He blinked at it. “When will you leave?”

“Three days from now,” he said, his eye shutters blinking tears
from the ducts set just beneath his jeweled eyes. “I will not run with the others. I will ride with a caravan of fresh recruits.”

Charles nodded. It was enough time to set the mechoservitors to their tasks. “And where will you go?”

Isaak’s chassis did not shake this time, though Charles was prepared for it to do so. “I will follow my cousins into the Beneath Places and join them in their analysis of the Book of Dreaming Kings.”

The Beneath Places.
Charles felt his face pale. He’d heard stories, of course. The buried basements of the world—civilizations built by survivors over the top of yet more basements stretching back to the forgotten times, the time of the Younger Gods.

Charles looked at Isaak, already calculating how much time he would need to teach the mechoservitors how to reproduce the monoscopes based on his prototype. After that, he would need time to pack and time to be certain the mechoservitors here could maintain themselves as needed. He did not believe for a moment that he would be gone for long. He also did not believe Isaak would be gone long, either, despite the passion he heard in the metal man’s voice.

Still, his metal son was leaving, and Charles needed to be ready to leave with him and stay with him until either Isaak’s cracked heart broke or until this strange dream had worked itself out of him.

When Isaak stood and left, Brother Charles watched the door and wondered how a thing that he had made could now be a person he loved. And how that person could compel him to action without answers to his questions, with questions left largely unasked.

He did not know. But he knew he was going and that once he had a plan in place, he would inform Isaak and House Steward Kember of his intentions.

Charles returned to his workbench, pushed aside his sketches and started plotting out the hours of his next three days.

They pulled the heavy pine door closed behind them, forcing the winter wind back. Servants surged forward to take Jin Li Tam’s, Winters’s and Ria’s heavy fur robes. They’d spent the morning in a leisurely breakfast and had then set out on foot to the new school, walking on paths plowed clean of snow by men with mules and sticks.

We are far north this winter,
Jin Li Tam thought. At least fifty leagues
farther than she’d been with the Wandering Army. She instinctively reached for Jakob’s head again, touching his tiny ear. He rode snug and warm in his harness, sound asleep, though she was certain he would be hungry soon.

She wiped the snow from her boots onto the thick towels that had been placed there for them.

Ria did the same, smiling at Winters as she did. “I think you’ll appreciate this,” she said, “given your love of learning. Father’s Androfrancine gave you a taste of what we’re doing here.” She said the word
Androfrancine
with an unmasked tone of disgust.

Jin Li Tam’s eyes went to Winters’s face just in time to see the look of surprise there. The girl glanced her direction, and the spark of anger that Jin saw gave her pause.

Ria walked down a carpeted hall to another door. Behind it, Jin heard a voice talking in a measured and gentle voice. Pausing, Ria smiled at her and then opened the door.