Antiphon (42 page)

He floated, suspended above the dream, and felt it moving over his skin, filling his mouth and ears and lungs, all the while the song vibrating the thick fluid that held him. He had no memory of being carried into this dark place, deposited with waters at first cool and then warm as his fever was leached away by them.

I am sorry for this deception, my son.

The words formed without voice, barely discernible above the noise of the song. Neb forced his eyes open, suddenly aware that he had no sense of up and down in this place. He moved against the fluid and felt a panic rising in him as the realization struck him that his lungs were full and his voice would not work against the thickness of the fluid that filled his mouth.

Be at ease, Nebios Homeseeker. Do not fight the pool.

The pool?
Neb blinked.

I have bargained for you.
Though there was no voice, there was still a
pattern to the words, and it was familiar to him.
Be at ease and let the workers heal you.

He tried to focus upon the words. The words were not Hebda’s, or at least didn’t seem like them.

A lethargy tugged at him, and he struggled against it though it felt he drowsed for a moment or two. When he felt that pull, he forced his eyes open, twisting and trying to move his hands and feet as he became gradually more oriented. He hung suspended in viscous fluid, the music washing through him. He could see a vague light, watery and silver, just beyond his reach.

You are whole now.

Neb focused his scattered thoughts into words.
Who are you?

But the words were gone, and all that remained was the song and the dream. He floated above it and watched a line of men who ran and rode the Wastes, a familiar old man with a tangled beard riding at the front. North of them, a mountain rose, and within it, metal men clambered over hidden scaffolding. And south of them, women ran, their eyes sliding in and out of the aether as they cast about, stone carvings clenched in their sweating palms.

He felt them there and flinched, then realized they could not see him from whatever place he watched from. He watched for a moment longer, then rolled in the pool to face west.

He found Isaak first, and the others were near him, their dreams nearly touching, clicking and clacking as their memory scrolls spun. Just beyond them, he found the girl.

She stood high upon a tower amid a metal song, and he recognized the scene, shuddering at the memory of the silver knife and the small dark amulet against his skin, the lurching sensation of his mind being forced into the dream.

Now, there was no forcing—it flowed around him and he relaxed into it.

“This dream is of our Home,” a woman said. The voice was low and murmuring, and it drifted out from a copse of trees in a warm jungle that smelled of flowers he did not recognize. He pushed a palm frond aside and saw the makeshift bed. He saw Winters there and a young man with silver hair that he vaguely recognized as himself. A fine sheen of sweat covered their naked skin and they lay together, tangled in each other and gazing up. Neb followed their eyes and saw the sky full of a moon impossible to fathom, brown and scarred and beautiful in its brokenness.

Slowly, that moon turned, and as it did, a familiar continent moved within his view.

Neb gasped from the surprise of it.

Still, it was clear to him. He saw the horn. He saw the massive scar that carved the Wastes asunder and the mountain ranges that walled off a sanctuary of green. And there, he could make out the Delta and the Divided Isle to the south of it. And the lush peninsula that formed the Inner and Outer Emerald Coasts.

Father?

Above him, the gray light grew, and he suddenly found himself rising. As if carrying him, the liquid bore him upward, and he rolled and choked as he broke the surface into a warm room that smelled of kerosene. Those waters—silver and thick, he saw now—carried him gently to a smooth metal shore, and when his naked flesh pressed up against it, he felt it was warm to the touch. He coughed, and as if helping him, the liquid silver rushed from his lungs, his nose, his ears, his mouth, rushed away even from his very skin to leave him dry upon the floor.

He rolled to his side and watched it chase itself back into the pool, then looked up and felt his jaw go slack.

Brother Hebda stood before him—certainly thinner than Neb remembered—holding out a thick robe to him. The man’s eyes were red, underscored by dark circles of sleeplessness. Beside him, Renard watched with grim resolve upon his face.

Neb stared, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to find some coherent thought, some emotion he could lay hold of. All eluded him in this moment as he confronted a man he’d believed dead for over two years—a man he’d thought he’d killed by his own carelessness. He looked to Renard, took in the man’s slow and careful nod, then looked back to his father.

“You’re alive,” he finally said.

“I am,” Hebda said. His eyes had more to say, but his mouth was a firm, silent line.

Neb stood and took the robe, slipping it on and cinching its belt. When Hebda embraced him, wooden and brief, he accepted the embrace but could not feel it. He stepped back and took the man in again. “How is this possible?”

Hebda looked to Renard, and the Waste guide gripped the man’s shoulder, answering for him in a sober voice. “Things are not exactly as they seem,” he said. Behind him, a familiar man—another he’d
thought dead these two years—entered the chamber, surrounded by a swell of gray uniforms. He’d seen the general in a dozen papal processions, standing beside Introspect in somber support.

“How is the boy?” Orius asked.

Neb stared at the Gray Guard and their general. He’d dreamed of the Androfrancines in another cave—one with a hatch and shaft much like the one where he’d found the silver crescent. He blinked as realization found him.

It wasn’t a dream.
He’d been carried underground by a Gray Guard led by his father.

“He’s whole,” Hebda said. “The bargaining pool restored him as we were told it would. Not even a scar.”

Neb pulled up the sleeve of his robe, sudden memories of Shyla’s knife upon his skin. The arm was unmarked, and when he opened his robe, he saw the same was true of his stomach and chest. He looked up. “Bargaining pool?”

I have bargained for you.

He suddenly felt the room moving, and as he sagged forward, Hebda and Renard both moved in to catch his elbows and steady him.

He turned to his father, letting him take some of his weight. His first question resurfaced, and when he asked it this time, his voice was a mumble. “How are you alive?”

“It’s . . . complicated.”

Neb heard something beneath the words and felt the first stirrings of an emotion. His legs found their strength suddenly, and he shook off Hebda and Renard as he staggered back. The heels of his feet hit the water line of the bargaining pool, and the men before him gasped.

He straightened himself, noting their fear. “It’s an
uncomplicated
question, Brother Hebda.”

The man’s eyes held a plea in them. “Some of us survived the attack.”

Neb shook his head. “I saw the Seven Cacophonic Deaths. No one survived but the mechoservitors.”

“Some of us survived.”

Orius sighed. “Tell him everything, Hebda.” There was anger and sadness in the general’s voice. “The time for secrets has passed, and the boy needs to ride with Sixth Brigade tomorrow if you want him to yon antiphon in time.” The old man took Neb in with his one good eye. “Tell him everything,” he said again.

Then, he turned and strode from the room, his guards falling in behind him as he went.

Neb’s eyes went from the entrance back to his father. The man’s face was pale. “Tell me, Brother Hebda.”

But Neb already knew and felt that emotion twisting into something he could recognize and act upon. He felt it coil around the base of his neck. “I will tell you. Let’s go back to camp and get you fed. We’ll sit down and—”

Neb’s voice slipped out low, nearly a whisper, but it sounded heavy in the room. “You knew,” he said.

When Brother Hebda flinched, Neb saw the rest of it. The general spoke of brigades. There was a camp. They’d had time to hide themselves somewhere ahead of the spell. And that morning long ago, when they’d ridden out with their wagon supposedly en route for the Churning Wastes and his father had asked after the letters of introduction and credit . . .

“You knew, and you left me on that hillside. I didn’t forget the papers.” Now, his words marched out slow and sure as veterans coming home.

Hebda’s eyes overflowed. “I argued against it, but he told us it had to be that way. He swore that you would—”

But in that moment, Neb had stopped listening. He surged forward quickly, so fast that Renard could not prevent him and Hebda could not escape him.

The sound of his fist against the man’s face was a solid, meaty slap, and Neb felt the nose give way as red spray went up and out from it. He felt the power of the blow all the way into his shoulder, and as Hebda fell backward, Neb stepped over him and dodged Renard’s grabbing hands.

“Neb—”

He heard his name but did not comprehend it. He felt rage washing through him, and he let it carry him like the silver waters of the bargaining pool had carried him. He slipped into the tunnel that Orius had used and followed it, changing course blindly at intersections, left here and right there, following patches of white moss that illuminated the ceilings and walls. He wandered for as long as the anger would bear him, and when it finally released its grip, he sat down against the wall.

He was in a large cavern lit high above by the mottled white moss.
A quicksilver lake reflected back the blotchy light, and at its center, floating like a black iris, Neb saw an island of familiar stone.

There, upon the shore, a rowboat sat empty.

He blinked, wondering at the new emotion that now filled in the hollow spaces that the anger had left in its wake.

Then, holding his head in his hands, Neb gave himself over to the grief of a betrayal he could not comprehend and sobbed himself into a dreamless sleep.

Cold morning air kissed the exposed skin of her face, and Winters blinked at it as the last of the moon vanished behind the mist-shrouded evergreens.

That moon dominated her nights and her days now, and she found her obsession with it alarming. At night, she stared at it, trying to pick out the Moon Wizard’s Tower as the orb made its slow turn in the night sky above them. And by day, she mulled over what she had learned, savoring the return of a faith that said maybe—just maybe—the dreams would take them to this new home. Though how that was possible eluded her.

And the absence of Neb from those dreams frightened her as well.

In a few minutes, her sister would emerge from the lodge for their morning walk, and once again Winters would try to learn what she needed to. She had no sense of how to broach the subject of the missing pages with her sister. She’d considered magicking herself and searching the lodge and surrounding environs; but the scout powders would have been one more thing to hide in her room, and she had no training in their proper use.

She’d also considered bringing Jin into her trust, but something in that notion felt wrong to her.
It is not yet time for this much truth.
Though part of her thought perhaps Aedric and his men could find something.

Winters looked about at the gray morning. The shadows swallowed most of it, and hidden in them she saw movement. When Ria approached, it wasn’t from the lodge after all but from behind it.

“Good morning, little sister,” she said. Her smile was wide, but something lived beneath it that led Winters to believe it was forced. Behind her, a familiar figure followed—escorted on either side by a Machtvolk guard—and Winters’s breath caught.

She’d not seen the Prophet Ezra since her arrival here, and though the man seemed even older than she remembered, he carried himself with stately grace. He smiled and turned his milk-white eyes toward her. “Greetings, Winteria the Younger.”

She regarded him with level eyes, aware of the discomfort she felt. This man had lived among her people, teaching the Y’Zirite ways beneath her very nose, feeding the secret weed that had sprung up in the Marshlands. Certainly he’d not done this alone, but she’d heard him speak and knew the emotional power of his prophetic utterances. He’d played a key part in the loss of her throne. She forced herself to answer him, forced her sudden anger to the side.

“Greetings, Ezra,” she said.

The old man inclined his head. “Your sister tells me that you are learning the faith. She says you carry your gospel with you everywhere and that your curiosity has no end.”

She nodded, though she knew he could not see her. “I am learning it.”

His smile widened. “You will enjoy the mass, then.” His face darkened. “I’m sorry to miss it, especially with such notable guests in attendance at this first open celebration.”

She’d seen the pilgrims arriving since her own arrival here, wandering in to stay with family or to bunk in the massive temporary structures that had been built to house them. Thousands would be in attendance at this most holy of Y’Zirite days, celebrating the advent of their wizard gods. She could hear the surprise in her voice. “You will not be attending?”