Antiphon (40 page)

Ria’s voice was matter-of-fact. “I will call upon her to pay for her sins.”

What if she doesn’t wish to pay?
But before she could ask the question, the Machtvolk queen continued. “There is no redemption for this one,” she said. “She strikes too close to the heart of our gospel. All that remains is a lesson to be taught that others might understand the consequences of harming you and your son. I will call upon her to surrender herself at her border, and she will be quietly executed. Her body will feed the wolves.”

“And if she refuses?”

Ria’s eyes smoldered now, and Jin found herself wondering how the woman could move so quickly from ecstasy as she discussed redemption and her love of those who received it beneath her knife to such an obvious rage. Her voice was low now as she spoke. “If she refuses, then she will add the blood of her own people to that on her head.”

And the tone with which she said it sent chills along Jin’s spine. Their eyes remained locked for just a moment, and then the storm of fury was gone once more. Setting aside the shovel, Ria took up the pickaxe and hefted it. “I thought you should know. I would appreciate your discretion in this matter until my kin-raven arrives in Pylos.”

Jin Li Tam inclined her head, already considering how she might code the message to Rudolfo. “Thank you.”

Turning, she moved toward the trail. Her stomach knotted and clenched with the smell of death that she could not seem to escape. As she descended the hill, another sound reached her ears, the fall of the pickaxe keeping perfect time with it.

It caused another shudder and she shrugged it off, forcing her attention to the child she needed to feed and the message she needed to write.

Behind her, Ria’s voice rose in a now-familiar song.

The muffled sound of galloping hooves barely rose above the whispering night winds, and Petronus blessed the powders that sped and silenced them as they rode northward. They’d ridden hard for days, those that remained of them. He still flinched at what Renard’s head start had cost them in lives, all for less than a handful of blood-magicked women. They’d lost a third of the Gray Guard and nearly a fourth of Rudolfo’s scouts in that first skirmish. And the random patrols they’d encountered had drained off more men.

Still, they pressed on for the north, following Petronus’s recollection of the map Hebda had shown him. The visions had ceased now, and a part of him felt their absence like a hunger, a hollow ache that he could not understand. Still, the headaches were gone and all that remained was the song.

He squinted, riding low in the saddle, and found the thread of music. Years of Franci meditation and conditioning had taught him how to
call upon great focus when he needed to, and he’d summoned up every shred of that skill to quiet the canticle that played incessantly from his saddlebags.

On and on it played, and within the notes he heard patterns that he could not decipher. There were secrets buried in it.

And when the new moon rose, the song rose with it, sometimes even threatening the focus Petronus used to keep it from driving him mad.

A low whistle to his right brought his head up, and he looked to Grymlis. The old man bore a nasty cut now, red against his pale face and running from his temple along his jawline. One of the medicos had stitched it closed, but it would leave a scar after it healed.

“We can’t push the horses much farther,” the Gray Guard captain said. “They’ve only days left with these magicks in them.”

Petronus nodded, feeling the solid strength beneath him as his mare labored. “We’ve only days to go.” He swallowed against the discomfort of his next words. “I don’t expect the horses to make it.” He didn’t say the other words.
I don’t expect
us
to make it either.

The kin-ravens were flying out of reach of sling and arrow, though the men did their best to bring them down when they saw them. And certainly between those strange sky-faring spies and the patrols that dogged them, he had no doubt they were pursued.

It was only a matter of time.

Grymlis said nothing for a moment, but Petronus felt his eyes upon him. Finally, he spoke. “This antiphon we’re riding for,” he said. “Is it worth the cost?”

Petronus wasn’t sure how he knew it or why exactly he believed Hebda. Certainly what had happened to Neb was a part of it, though he didn’t understand all of it. Somehow, the boy was tied into this along with the aberrant Marsher mysticism with its Home-seeking prophecies. Still, he did not have to understand it. When he looked at Grymlis, he felt the weight of his own words. “The very light depends upon this,” he said.

Grymlis nodded. “Then we ride the horses into the ground for it, Father. And when they’re gone, we run until our feet are raw.”

What was that phrase Geoffrus had used back when they met and first discussed his contract? Yes, Petronus thought.

Time is of the essence.

Grymlis pulled ahead to confer with the Gypsy lieutenant, and Petronus settled into his saddle, once more relegating the song to a quiet corner of his mind that he rarely visited.

At sunrise, when they made camp, he fell fully clothed into his bedroll. They gave themselves four hours per day and one meal; it wasn’t nearly enough, but already the Dragon’s Spine, that vast, impenetrable range running west to east across the top of the continent, loomed before them.

We are close,
he thought as sleep grabbed at him and wrestled him down into dreamlessness and song.

Grymlis’s hand on his shoulder brought him up. Silently, the camp scrambled, and he forced himself alert. Grymlis’s face was white and sober. “We’ve lost a patrol,” he said. “We’re leaving.”

Petronus crawled out of his bedroll and started rolling it. “How long ago?”

“Thirty minutes overdue,” Grymlis said. “On the eastern run.”

They’d sent scouts to the four points of the compass, magicked and sweeping out by five leagues, white and brown birds rigged in belt cages to alert the camp should they encounter anything. Petronus rubbed his face. They’d not lost a patrol yet. “Should we investigate?”

Grymlis shook his head. “Our numbers are dwindling, Father. If you want anything left of us when we arrive, we ride now and we do not look back.”

Petronus sighed and climbed to his feet. “I concur.”

They were mounting up when the whistle of third alarm pierced the morning air. Petronus spun his horse to the east and studied the line of scrub and rock and fused glass there. There were figures moving toward them at an easy pace, and as they drew closer, he saw they were a tattered band. At least two of them were women, bound and walking in the care of cutlass-wielding guards. Another was indistinguishable until he realized it was a twisting and invisible mass tangled in what appeared to be a fishing net.

Already the Gypsy Scouts were fading from sight as they slipped from their horses, magicked to face the intruders. Geoffrus and his men stood aloofly by, watching with bemused interest.

The figure at the head of the party spread his arms wide, and both a white and a brown bird slipped from his hands to speed into the lieutenant’s catch net. “Ahoy the camp,” a voice cried across the distance.

Petronus blinked and felt his mouth go slack. The figures slowed but continued moving, four of them holding the net-tangled scout between them as they went. The women were dressed like
the others they’d encountered—their dark silks torn and dusty. Their faces, like the faces of the others, were haggard, but they also bore a quiet disdain.

“Ahoy the camp,” their leader said again, and Petronus knew him at once though he could not fathom how the man came to be in a vast and desolate waste, to stand here before him now. “We seem to have caught one of your fishes.” There was a brief chuckle that sounded more like the bark of a seal.

Grymlis’s sudden intake of breath told him that he recognized the man, too, and Petronus shook his head in disbelief. “How in the nine hells have you come to be
here
? You are a long way from home.”

“That,” the pirate Rafe Merrique said, “is a long and tragic tale indeed.”

A warm wind pushed at his tangled red hair, and Vlad Li Tam brushed it from his face as he watched his raven approach low over the waters, bearing word back from the clustered remnants of his iron armada.

Even in the shadows of the Moon Wizard’s Ladder, he felt the growing heat of another equatorial day. They’d steamed as close as they could without risking the power sources of their vessels and their metal guide, Obadiah. They’d seen the line quite clearly—for league upon league, the waters had swelled with the d’jin and their song, but two leagues out from the Ladder, the waters were suddenly devoid of life and light.

“The light-bearers know to stay back,” Obadiah had said. And so, Vlad had ordered his vessels to do the same and to outfit the captain’s yacht with a sail and a small company of his brightest sons and daughters. They’d spent several days now sailing about the pillars by day, sketching them and writing down the strange symbols they ran across on its ancient white surface.

Still, so far there had been no sign of an access point and nothing at all that might pass for the Behemoth Obadiah spoke of.

I do not know what is required, my love.
Vlad closed his eyes, conjuring up the image and sound of her. At night, when they returned from their reconnaissance of the Ladder, he still stood at the bow of his
ship to be near her, though he wasn’t certain he could pick her out from the mass of light that undulated beneath the surface.

What had begun as bewildered awe had become willing curiosity that now gradually moved toward frustration, and it did not help that here, near the Ladder itself, his scars itched and burned more intensely. When his raven landed on the gunwale, he did not wait for his daughter to strip the message from its foot. He did it himself, his fingers fumbling with it.

Obadiah’s careful script met his eye, and he read the note quickly before crumpling it and dropping it to the small boat’s deck. He sighed, surprised at how much like a growl it was. “We’ll work the perimeter of it again,” he said.

“Father?” His forty-sixth daughter was at the rudder, and when he glanced to her he saw that she too had lost some of the wonder they’d first experienced. In the face of uncertain expectations, he was faltering in his confidence, and his children followed him.

“We sail the perimeter,” he said again, turning his face back to the waters.

Again.
There had to be something here. But not even the metal man and his dream had any sense of what was to happen. The coded messages within the canticle had borne the coordinates and vague warnings and prophecies—references to some great underwater beast that would carry them to the basements and make straight a path for the light-bearers.

They’d tried everything they could think of. Some of his strongest swimmers had dived the waters as far down as they could go, to no avail. One of the children had a flute and, with a rigged funnel and length of pipe, had played her closest approximation of the canticle into the water. Still nothing.

Wind caught sail, and the boat surged forward across the water, the waves slapping at it as it picked up speed. They would sail around the pillars until nightfall, and then, in the morning, they would pick it up again.

Eyes scanning both water and stone, Vlad sat silently in the bow.

It was just past noon, as they made their way along the backside of the Ladder, that the bird struck their catch net. The red thread upon its foot sent his children scrambling, and Vlad moved forward quickly to grab it even as a distant thunder reached his ears.

Cannon.
There was no note upon the bird—just the thread—and he turned his head west, where his ships lay at anchor.

The Ladder blocked his view, but he found himself hoping fiercely that his captains would follow his orders. It wasn’t so very long ago that most of his family had been taken—with relative ease—by ambush in unfamiliar waters. In hindsight, it terrified him how simple it had been.

Vlad shivered as sudden memory clogged his nose with the smell of death and his ears with the sobbing screams of his family as they cried out their last words to him.

Now, they knew better. For two millennia, the Tams had stayed ahead of their neighbors by learning and adapting to that path of change the Androfrancines preached about. The captains would err on the side of caution. They’d engage in defense and not wait to see how strong their opposing force might be . . . and they would not come looking for him. Not ever again.

They would divide what remained of the fleet and flee at top speed.

He forced his eyes to his daughter at the rudder. “Myr,” he said in a quiet voice, “bring us in closer to the pillar.”

She nodded and they moved into the shadows.

“Bring down the sail,” he told one of his sons.

They huddled there, close up against the wall of white stone, and listened as the gunfire dwindled. Vlad nodded, keeping the worry from his face so that his children would not be alarmed.

“Good,” he said. “They’re fleeing.”

But what were they fleeing?

He played out the scenarios while they waited. His children sat quietly, and he wondered how many of them did the same. They’d been trained from birth to observe everything, scrutinize all potentials. He’d already watched two of them inventory the contents of the yacht—their eyes darting to and fro as they calculated.