Antiphon (31 page)

Picking up her boots, she eased open the door to her room and slipped into the empty hallway.

She had no destination in mind, but the lodge felt suddenly oppressive, heavy as a wet quilt weighing her down. She needed open sky and cold air. Winters let her feet carry her to the front door, where a guard awaited.

He did not speak to her as she approached, and when he saw that she intended to leave the house, he stepped aside and opened the door. She passed through and into the winter night.

Moonlight washed the snow in blue and green, and stars throbbed above her in a clear sky. As she stepped from the porch, she saw movement from the corner of her eye and smiled. It did not matter the time of day; her escorts awaited.

Winters studied the paths and decided against the familiar trail she’d taken past Garyt, the one that led to the river where she practiced with her knives and the door in the hill that had once been her home.

Turning around, she took the path that led behind the lodge, walking slowly and savoring the night. The top layer of newest snow had frozen, and she listened to the sound of it crunching beneath her boots. Otherwise, the night was silent.

But as the trail twisted and started to climb the hill, another sound reached her ears, faint and coming from above her.

Someone is singing.

The farther she climbed, the more clear it became, until she stood at the top and looked upon a circular stone building. The wooden doors stood open, and from within, a woman’s rich alto voice trickled out into the night, singing a song that Winters recognized from her ride though that gauntlet of evergreen boughs with their gospel’s Great Mother, Jin Li Tam, and Jakob the Child of Promise.

She stood still a moment and allowed the words to wash over her. Then, curiosity drove her to the open door. Peering in, she saw a small foyer and another open door. Beyond that, she saw a woman kneeling
at the altar with upraised and bloody hands. Even with her back turned, her sister was unmistakable.

Winters stepped into the foyer.

A guard materialized to her right, offering a low whistle, and Ria looked over her shoulder.

When she saw who it was, Ria smiled and stood. “Little sister,” she said. “Have you come to worship?” A second guard appeared, bearing a basin that Ria rinsed her hands in.

Winters shook her head, hoping her disgust at the notion did not show. “No. I was walking. I heard singing.”

Ria approached, drying herself with a towel. “I was just finishing.” She laid the towel aside and embraced Winters. Winters returned the gesture though she was sure her sister would know it was false. “Walk back with me? You’ve been here for days, and we’ve scarcely seen each other without a roomful.”

Winters nodded. “Certainly.” It was true—they’d been at meals and on tours together. But she’d not intended to seek out her sister and found it odd that her sister wanted her company.

Still, it is a way for me to learn.

Ria pulled on her heavy coat and blew out the lanterns in the temple. “So you walk when you cannot sleep. I come to the temple.” Her brow furrowed. “The dreams keep sleep at bay sometimes, and I’m finding the meditation helps with them.”

Dreams?
Winters blinked. “You have the dreams, too?”

For some reason, the idea that her sister might share the dreams had not occurred to her.

She nodded. “Some of them. I am our father’s daughter, after all. But I’ve learned meditations and prayers to help with them.” She smiled. “So I come to the temple.”

To help with them.
The way she said it made it sound as if the dreams were something to be treated rather than studied. And she only shared some of them. Which dreams?

They passed through the doorway and into the night.

“I’m told you carry the gospel I gave you everywhere you go,” Ria said as they walked. There was a kind of pride in her voice that raised the hair on Winters’s neck and arms. And her smile seemed arrogant in the moonlight. “I’ve studied the scriptures for years under the best teachers. If you ever have questions—or want to read more of them—you only need ask.”

Winters wasn’t sure how to respond. “Thank you,” she said. “I do
have questions. But not about the scriptures.” She thought she saw the faintest trace of a frown pull at her sister’s mouth and returned her eyes to the path. “Not yet, anyway,” she added, “though I’m sure I will.”

If Ria truly had frowned, she recovered quickly and chuckled. “Very well,” she said, stopping on the path. “I will grant you answers where I can. Walk with me each morning and bring your questions. But I would ask something of you in return.”

Winters stopped as well. “What would you ask in return?”

Ria smiled. “In a week’s time, we celebrate High Mass of the Falling Moon. I want you to attend with me.”

She’d read about the Year of the Falling Moon during her studies with Tertius—when the Moon Wizard came down to depose the Last Weeping Czar, destroy a world and establish the Age of the Wizard Kings that P’Andro Whym and his scientist scholars had eventually ended in their Night of Purging. Certainly, the gospel she’d read painted it differently, speaking of retribution for that deicide and viewing the Moon Wizard’s advent as the beginning of salvation. Attending the mass was a small price to pay.

“I will attend,” she said.

Ria smiled. “Good.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence, and when they reached the door, Ria embraced her again. “We will walk in the morning,” she said. “Bring your questions, little sister. Any of them.”

When Winters was once more in her room, she sat to her desk and took up her waiting pen. She wanted to write out her questions, categorize them as the mechoservitors in the library would do and then write out the answers as she received them. But instead, she wrote out the dream as best she could remember it. She blew the ink dry on each page and folded it carefully into the gospel her sister had given her. And when she was finished, she undressed again and crawled into bed.

For a while, she thought about the questions she would ask in the morning. Then, she thought about Neb and hoped his pain and madness was not real. That it was some twisted part of the dream.

But she knew it wasn’t.

After months of no contact, her dreaming boy was back, and something terrible was happening to him—being done to him—somewhere in the Churning Wastes.

Finally, Winters cried herself to sleep.

The shrill whistle of third alarm pulled Petronus from a light sleep and he kicked his way out of the bedroll, listening to the muttered curses of those nearby as they scrambled for knives and swords and bows.

They’d set up camp at dawn, the Gypsy Scouts establishing a quiet perimeter, hidden in scrub or the twisted stone and glass, magicked when necessary. After a hasty meal and a brief conversation with Grymlis, Petronus had crawled off to sleep in a hollow carved into an outcropping of fused glass.

It seemed he had just settled into his first dreams when the whistle pulled him awake.

Petronus stayed in the shade and let his eyes adjust to the daylight. From the position of the shadows it was late afternoon, and around him, others crouched at the ready. There was certainly no way to hide a company of their size, though they persisted in trying.

Once his eyes could find the way, he moved to where Grymlis waited with Rudolfo’s lieutenant.

A brown bird flashed past to land in the officer’s net. The young man pulled it out, fingers finding the knotted message in the string tied to its foot. “We’ve a man requesting audience,” he said, looking first to Petronus and then Grymlis.

“Audience?” Petronus asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“With the Pope,” the lieutenant added.

Grymlis sheathed his short sword. “Is he alone?”

“He appears to be. He holds letters of introduction and credit from Introspect.”

The men exchanged glances, and Petronus tried to read the old captain. He saw nothing there and knew Grymlis merely waited for him to give the obvious orders. “Ready the camp to ride,” he finally said. “And have our visitor escorted in.”

He packed quickly and then waited in the shade. Soon enough, he heard the nasal whine of Geoffrus and realized there actually
was
a sound more jarring than third alarm.

“But I
assure
and
attest
that we have a
signed
agreement with the current Luxpadre and his Rainbow Men. Your help is not
required
, Renard.”

Petronus recognized that name. Remus’s son had been a Renard. And Remus had been a good friend to the Order over here. He heard a gravelly voice chuckle.

“Geoffrus, I do not
dispute
your contract. Nor do I offer myself for
hire
.” The inflection of the voice, the way he emphasized key words, spoke of some kind of code, but Petronus could not parse it.

When the man appeared, Petronus was struck suddenly by how much he looked like his father: tall, lanky, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and intensely blue eyes. The Androfrancine robes hung loose over his spare frame, and his high boots were worn from league upon league of Waste running. He clutched a long, slender staff in his hand, one end tipped with a fist-sized bulb. “You’re Remus’s boy,” Petronus said as he stepped forward.

“You were my father’s favorite Pope,” Renard answered, offering up a yellowed letter.

Petronus took it and ran his finger over his successor’s seal. He glanced at the words, knowing already that they said roughly the same as the letter he himself had provided the man’s father. “He served the light well.”

“We do our best.” Renard looked at Grymlis and the Gypsy Scout lieutenant. “You are riding for the boy, Neb?”

Petronus shot a glance at Grymlis, then looked back to Renard. “What makes you think that?”

Renard paused before speaking, looking furtively around the camp. “He told me so.” Petronus watched the man’s eyes wander to the map peeking out from the lieutenant’s leather pouch. Renard nodded to it. “I can show you where he is,” he said, drawing a rolled map from his pouch, “but we do not have much time.”

“They’re cutting him, aren’t they?” Petronus winced from the memory of his dreams.

Renard nodded, unrolling the map onto a flat rock. “They are interrogating him about your missing mechoservitors.”

They seek to prevent the antiphon.
Petronus wasn’t sure how he knew this. He leaned over the map. “How far?”

“We’re here,” Renard said, dropping his finger. “They have the boy in an arroyo in these hills. They are running magicked patrols—but they’re not using your scout powders. They’ve blood magicks, and in ample supply. I suspect an encampment someplace. Probably to the southeast.”

Blood magicks.
Petronus looked across to Grymlis’s face and saw the surprise there. “An encampment of what size?”

Renard shrugged. “It’s hard to say. But I’ve counted at least twenty of these runners, and only four of them are with the boy right now.
They use kin-ravens for communication and observation.” He paused, and Petronus saw a hard edge in the man’s eyes. “I suspect they already know you’re coming—it would be impossible to hide a company of this size.”

Petronus thought about this. Surely, the forces he and Grymlis marshaled were sufficient for four women, blood-magicked or otherwise. “If that is the case, why aren’t they on the move?”

Renard shrugged. “They’re far more mobile than we are, even carrying Neb. But I suspect there’s more to it than that. I think either they have help on the way as well or . . .”

Petronus watched a dark cloud pass over the man’s face. “Or what?”

Renard’s look was grim, and he spoke in a low voice. “Or they know that they will have what they want from Neb and be gone before you get there.”

The finality in the man’s voice suggested a dark assumption. The boy’s screams had been near to him for many nights, only to be suddenly gone. He tried to convince himself that no enemy would kill their source of information before confirming that whatever they’d learned was true. But if Renard was correct and there was an encampment of these foreign runners, they might already have the capacity to confirm the information quickly enough.

And it was hard to read the motives of this mysterious foe.

Of course, in the end, it didn’t matter. Neb was in danger, and because of that, the light was in danger as well. Petronus saw it on Hebda’s face, heard it in Hebda’s voice, in his dreams of the man. He didn’t fully understand the stakes but knew that they were high.

We must find Neb alive and before he has been broken.

He looked at Renard now and measured him. If the man was anything like his father, Petronus knew he could trust him. And according to his letters of introduction and credit, he’d served the Order for many years. “You mean to help us recover Neb?”

Renard smiled wryly. “Truth be told, I mean for
you
to help
me
recover him. You’ve no chance of it otherwise—and the lad is too important for anything to go wrong.” Petronus saw the man’s eyes dart downward for but a moment and followed them. The hands were moving just barely, and he recognized the words they formed.
The fate of your light rides on his success
, Renard signed.
Surely Hebda has told you this?