Requiem (39 page)

Orius stepped forward slowly and crouched before her, unhooking the canteen from his belt. “The war is over,” he told her. “We’ve surrendered, and your release is a term of that surrender. Do you understand?”

She looked at him, and Lysias read the hope as it settled over her. She nodded.

Orius uncapped the canteen and took a drink. “Unchain her,” he told one of the guards.

As the guard bent with his key, Orius passed the canteen to her.

Then, he stood slowly and backed away.

Her hands shook as she raised the canteen and took a drink.

The results were instantaneous. She collapsed, wheezing, as her body began to seize. She threw herself over onto her side and then onto her back, her hands tearing at her skin as her eyes went wide. Lysias turned away as her tongue began to swell, suddenly sick to his stomach.

We drank the same water.
The realization struck him, and when he looked to Orius the old general nodded. “Yes.”

“I don’t understand.” Lysias looked at the girl. Her eyes had rolled back into her head and already she gasped her last. “Blood magick?”

“Not exactly,” Orius said. “But you’ve just seen how it interacts with blood magicks.” He nodded to the woman. “She was one of their Blood Guard.”

Lysias looked at the woman and then at Orius. “You’ve found a way to kill the Y’Zirites.”

“Some of them,” Orius said. “We estimate most of their officers and priestesses and all of their scouts.”

Her eyes were glazing over in death. Lysias couldn’t look away. “How many have you tested it on?”

“Two scouts. One kin-raven.”

He nodded. “And what’s beneath the papal palace?”

“Access to the water tables of the Named Lands,” he said.

And Lysias didn’t know exactly what that meant—or how the Androfrancines knew this—but he did know that he’d seen enough to give Orius his trust. He would take Rudolfo’s army north and keep them underground like rats for as long as it took if it might turn the tide in a war that had been one-sided for far too long.

Chapter

20

Jin Li Tam

Jin Li Tam awoke to a light tap at the door and forced herself from her sheet-tangled bed to answer. Jakob lay spread-eagle on his stomach in the middle of the plush mattress, though she couldn’t remember just when she’d fetched him from his crib.

She unbolted the lock and cracked the door open, rubbing her eyes. “Yes?”

“Regent Xhum and Mother Elsbet wish to speak with you about a matter of some urgency,” the young Blood Guard said. Behind her, Lynnae yawned and rubbed her own eyes, also pulled too soon from bed.

Jin pulled the door open. “Very well. I’ll be with you shortly.”

Lynnae slipped past the guard, and Jin closed the door behind her. “Damnation,” the younger woman said. “It’s barely light out.”

Jin glanced to the window on her way to the dressing room. Beyond the gauzy curtains, a gray sky slowly moved toward pink. “I wonder what’s afoot?”

Lynnae walked to the bed, a smile pulling at her mouth as she saw the little Gypsy Prince sprawled out. “He’s well on his way to kingship,” she said. “Look at the territory he’s learned to conquer.”

Jin chuckled and pulled on a pair of silk pants before shrugging out of her sleep shift. “He takes every bit he can.” She’d lost count of the times his tiny feet had found her in the night, kicking her farther and farther to the edge of the bed.

Lynnae sat heavily in the armchair beside the bed and slouched down into it, closing her eyes. “I may sleep more.”

Jin looked up from the shirts she considered, glancing from the woman to her sleeping son. “He’ll sleep another hour or two, I suspect. Get whatever sleep you can.” She picked a green short-sleeved top and slipped into it.

Lynnae yawned again and settled deeper into the chair. Jin put on a pair of sandals and opened the door. The Blood Guard awaited. Moreover, she saw that others had joined her. A half-squad of lithe, dark-clad women took up various positions in the hall beyond her quarters. She looked at the guard who’d awakened her and no doubt Lynnae as well. “What is happening?”

“Regent Xhum has increased your security detail, Great Mother,” she said. “I’m confident he and Mother Elsbet will answer any questions you have.”

Jin inclined her head and fell in behind the woman as she led the way. As they moved from the guest wing and into the central halls and wide open spaces of the main palace, she saw soldiers everywhere, both the men of the regular army and the elite women of the Blood Guard of the Crimson Empress. When she passed the large double doors leading to the wing that housed Empress Amara’s living quarters, Jin saw that they were closed and heavily guarded as well.

And she did not know exactly what had had happened, but she knew it was significant, and she had a strong suspicion as to who exactly was responsible.

Father, what have you done?

Her escort led Jin quickly through the building, skirting the central throne room and through another guarded door, to the regent’s conference room. Elsbet, Xhum, and a robed man she did not recognize waited for her there around a large round table.

They stood as she entered, and Regent Xhum approached first, his hand extended. “I’m sorry to wake you, Great Mother.”

She took the hand and grasped it. Then, took Elsbet’s.

The man she did not recognize approached last. His own hand was cool but dry. “Great Mother,” he said. “It is an honor to meet you. I am Magister General Ahmir.”

She inclined her head. She’d heard of the magisters but had yet to meet one. They kept to themselves in their white marble compound on the edge of the city. “The honor is mine, Magister General.”

At a nod, the guards left the room. Jin started to sit but stopped when Xhum and the others did not. Instead, Xhum gestured to the wide balcony. Its curtains rustled in the morning breeze. Beyond it, the sky was moving from purple to pink now. “Something …
unexpected
 … has happened,” Xhum said as he looked beyond the balcony.

The others did not move. Instead, they watched her and she felt the discomfort of their stares. She joined him and followed his eyes out beyond the central courtyard and its fountain to the Daughter’s temple beyond.

The courtyard was crowded now with at least a battalion of soldiers, officers and noncommissioned officers moving up and down the ranks, sending platoons out into the city. The temple itself was surrounded by a gathering crowd, a line of soldiers holding them back. She followed the craned necks of the men and women who stood around the temple and saw men moving carefully across the roof, scrambling around the base of the statue of Ahm Y’Zir. And as the first of the sun’s light touched the gold of the statue, she saw what had brought the palace and city to such a state of heightened alarm.

The statue and the sides of the building were streaked in red as blood dripped from a hundred different gashes upon the gold. It puddled in the street below, thick and dark in the morning gloom.

Jin realized she held her breath and released it slowly.

She was still staring at the pooling blood when Eliz Xhum spoke. “We believe your father is responsible for this,” he said.

Jin nodded.
Yes.

She felt a hand upon her upper arm and looked over to see Elsbet’s concerned face. “The magisters tell us that the statue bears the marks of a kin-healing. The same used upon your father … though his was not completed.” The woman looked away, but before she did, Jin saw something in her eyes that she recognized. The incomplete kin-healing had significance of some kind. And the woman did not want Jin to know what it was. She noted it for another time. “These marks are complete.”

The magister spoke up. “The marks themselves are irrelevant beyond their symbolism and the impact that will have upon the people. But the blood—flowing from a statue made of solid gold—is
very
relevant. He is mastering use of the staff.”

The regent turned from the balcony and returned to the table. “Yes,” he said as he gestured for everyone to sit. “That appears to be our situation.” He paused as they took their seats. Then, he looked at Jin Li Tam, and she saw a hardness in his eyes that she had not seen there before. “What I want to know,” he said slowly, “is
why.
What does your father want, Lady Tam?”

He did not call me Great Mother.
She looked at him and let him see the surprise on her face. Still, she managed to slip a subtle message into her reply. “I have no idea what he wants,
Lord
Xhum.”

Elsbet spoke now, and Jin instantly recognized the ploy and wondered if they’d agreed to their parts before waking her. The older woman’s hand slid across the table to cover Jin’s. “If you do know something, Great Mother, this is the time to tell it.”

She met the woman’s eyes and let her surprise become anger. “As I’ve said before, I do not know why he is here. I’ve not seen him since he sailed for your island Blood Temple.”

“But surely,” the magister said, “you’ve heard from him.”

“No,” she said. “I have not.” But she
had
heard from a sister thought long dead, and she’d heard her grandfather’s voice whispering to her in a message left decades ago for whichever daughter landed this particular role in his scheme to end the Y’Zirite madness.

Regent Eliz Xhum cleared his throat, and Jin looked at him, measuring the line of his jaw. “Mother Elsbet is correct. Now is the time to speak up if you are holding anything back.”

Jin said nothing but did not break eye contact.

The regent slowly nodded. “Very well,” he said. “But I want to assure you that you and your son are only as safe as our empress. Any threat to her is a threat to us all—and to you and the Child of Promise. We know that your father travels with the Vessel of Grace.”

A subtle threat.
Still, she kept her focus and felt her eyebrows furrow. “The Vessel of Grace?” It was familiar to her—referenced in passing in the gospel she’d nearly memorized now.

Elsbet’s voice was low. “Through her, Lord Y’Zir gave us the Crimson Empress, and upon her he then laid the sins of the world to usher in a new age.”

Jin tried to make sense of it but couldn’t. Instead, she turned to Xhum. “Lord Regent,” she said, “I fully realize that my safety and my son’s safety are at risk here as well. I assure you that I am unaware of my father’s motivations, but I am aware of just how dangerous—how utterly ruthless—he can be.” She paused to give her words time to settle into him. And in that pause, Jin wished she were wrong about him. But the man had sent too many of his sons and daughters, nephews and nieces to die in his thousand schemes and manipulations. She glanced to the balcony and then back to the regent. “I did not know of his presence here until our last conversation about this matter.”

Xhum took a deep breath, held it, and then released it. “I will accept your word on it. I apologize for my lack of trust.”

She forced concern into her voice, willing it to lend a soothing quality. “As you’ve told me, Lord Regent, these are hard times.”

He opened his mouth to answer but closed it when the door opened and a colonel hurried into the room.

The officer bent over the regent, whispering quickly into his ear. Jin saw the regent’s face pale as his eyes went wide. He whispered a reply, then stood.

“There has been another development,” the regent said looking to the magister and then the priestess of Ahm, “and we are needed elsewhere.” Then he looked to Jin, and she saw fear in his eyes that he could not hide. “The soldiers and acolytes who first discovered the blood have fallen ill,” he said. “Some kind of fever.”

Jin felt the fear now herself, fed by the awe in the regent’s voice. What was her father up to? And was her son safe here?

She had no illusions. She knew the Y’Zirites would not harm even a hair on her son’s head as long as their faith continued to be in force and knew equally that the same was not true of her father. He used his children as weapons and tools to build and break the world into what House Li Tam felt it should be. He’d twisted Rudolfo’s life, her own life, in ways inconceivable to leverage change. And he himself had been used by his own father as a tool, ultimately seeing most of his family die beneath Y’Zirite cutting knives.

In this moment, Jin Li Tam realized, her father seemed to have the upper hand. And she saw her kinship with him in that, as the others stood to file out of the room, her first thought was how to use this moment to her own advantage.

Jin Li Tam, forty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam, stood and slipped out of the room as well. She followed her guard in silence, her eyes noting every soldier, every scout, every door, and every window.

Something hurtled her way now, and she did not know what it was. She could not quantify how she knew it, but the truth felt solid within her. Darkness gathered in this place with her father’s advent here, and a reckoning was soon coming for Y’Zir. And she knew that she must take her son and flee before that happened.

Winters

Winters stood upon shattered land breathing the reek of sulfur and burnt meat, ozone and smoke. She was alone in vast, pockmarked territory and still reeling from the sudden change of venue.

She’d swum, weightless, in dark before this, with whispering all around her that she could not understand. It took her hours to realize that it was the glossolalia that she’d heard and uttered as a result of the dream’s work within her family.

And nowhere in the midst of it had she seen Isaak.

She turned to take her surroundings in once again. The charred horizon stretched out all around her, lost eventually to a charcoal haze of distant smoke.

The world is burning.

“Isaak?”

There was no response.

She set out at a slow walk, mindful of the blackened bones that crunched beneath her feet. The sun, hot upon her skin, gave Winters the only compass she needed, and she walked west. To her left, she saw distant mountains, though they were burned as black as the ground she covered. Keeping those mountains to the south, she walked for hours. And despite the heat and exertion, she found that in the aether, she had no need of water or rest.