“Good,” she said. “Is there more news from Pylos or their eastern neighbor?” Last she’d heard, the young heir of Meirov’s crown lay in state for public viewing. And on the Delta, Erlund’s death was fueling the civil war that raged.
The elderly man cleared his throat. “They bury the boy day after tomorrow. We were not invited to attend.”
Of course not. “They suspect us,” she said. “Our kin-clave with them is strained by these events.”
He nodded once. “Yes. And our man on the Delta has heard that Erlund is not truly dead but that a body double was killed. He believes the Overseer is in hiding, but he’s uncertain where. There have been strange goings-on. They lost nearly a squad of Scouts north of Caldus Bay on the Whymer Road.”
“That’s curious,” she said. “What word from Aedric?”
“They are pursuing the metal man into the Wastes. Isaak believes that it was lying when it denied knowing anything about Sanctorum Lux.”
Her eyes narrowed at this. “Metal men don’t lie,” she said under her breath.
But they can. She remembered Isaak in the rain, his metal body exposed to the weather because Pope Resolute could not see the soul that had emerged within the Order’s mechanical creation, Mechoservitor Number Three. He’d ordered the metal man to remove his Androfrancine robes, offended that the machine went clothed as if he were human. When asked about the spell the metal man had recited to destroy Windwir, Isaak had lied to the Pope, claiming it had been damaged beyond recovery.
Now, Isaak rode with Neb and Aedric and the squad of Gypsy Scouts they led in pursuit.
Finally, she asked the question she’d wanted to ask first. “Is there further word from Rudolfo?”
“No,” he said. “They wait in Caldus Bay.”
She glanced down to the papers, suddenly uncomfortable with having asked. They’d just had word yesterday. But something hadn’t set well the moment Rudolfo committed himself to seeking her father. No good can come of it, she knew. Though for their boy to survive, he had to do this.
“Very well,” she said. “Keep me apprised on the envoy’s progress.”
He inclined his head. “Yes, Lady.” Then, he slipped through the door, pulling it closed behind him.
Jin Li Tam stood and stretched, listening to her joints crack. Her muscles ached from this morning’s workout-she’d danced with her knives for the first time in months, and she could feel it in her body. She turned and looked out the high windows. Below, shrouded white now, lay the Whymer Maze. Rudolfo had mentioned once that he’d hoped to build a larger one on the hill where the new library now sprawled, but the one below stretched out a goodly ways from the house-and there, at its center, rested Hanric, shadow of the Marsh Queen. The sun had dropped behind the trees so that the light was soft and graying. Shadows lifted up within the maze, and she wondered about the girl-queen Winters and the work she had ahead.
Moments that will shape her destiny, she thought. And another thought stuck her just as suddenly. So sudden that she flinched. Like Rudolfo.
It wasn’t possible. She ciphered, working the datum as her father had taught her, and the answer rattled her.
These are the work of House Li Tam, she knew. Well crafted and carefully laid, she could see the threads now-even reaching into the Marshlands-and her heart sank within her breast. The thread went back past the blood-magicked Marsh assassinations. It went back to.
She said it aloud because she simply couldn’t stop herself. “Windwir,” she said in a hoarse whisper.
It was a grief she’d carried along with her child, teeth that chewed upon her as she puzzled out her own part in her father’s dark work.
She stood at the window for a long while, until the light had left the sky and the lamp had guttered low. Her father had done all of this, perhaps his father before him. An elaborate cutting on the skin of the world, a Whymer Maze drawn in blood and loss that surgically removed the Androfrancine Order and now used its salted blade to cut even deeper. But why? For a long while she stood there, pondering this.
Then, Jin Li Tam sat down to her chair, turned up the lamp, and went back to her unfinished work.
Neb
They rode in silence, low in the saddles and pushing their horses as hard as the magicks would let them. Behind them, pack horses kept up without effort, led by the scouts bringing up the rear. The hooves struck the wide, flat stones of the Whymer Road, but instead of sparks and a drum-pounded gallop, they offered the slightest of coughs as the magicks bent sound around them even in the same way that the scout magicks bent light. The landscape whipped past quickly too as their enhanced strength carried them across the rocky terrain.
Neb clung to the saddle and leaned forward, letting the cold wind wash over his back as it spilled over him. He tried to keep his eyes fixed on the scout ahead, but the scenery kept pulling his attention away. There was a beauty in the shattered lands they rode through, and it tugged at his heart.
And these are just the far edges of it. Deeper into the Wastes, glass mountain ranges cast bloody shadows over forests of bone. And near these dead cities, expanses of white, coarse, glass where sea salt, left behind when the water boiled away, had fused with the sand to make razor-edged dunes that the wind moaned over. At night, creatures hunted there by the light of a blue-green moon. Indescribable leftovers of an age long past, driven mad by Xhum Y’Zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths.
He’d seen it in his dreams and had no doubt now that it awaited him somewhere ahead.
But for now, the landscape was simple rock and sand and scrub. Outcroppings of granite shaped by years of wind and dark straggly brush that squatted low to the ground. It looked nothing like his imaginings.
They’d entered the Wastes just ten minutes behind the metal man who fled them. If it had noticed, it paid them no mind. The mechanical moved fast, and just before they’d lost sight of it, it had still been upon the Whymer Way and moving east, the sun glinting off its bare head in the distance.
Neb feared now that they sought a solitary pearl in a vast ocean, but he was hesitant to say so. Beside him, Isaak rode uneasily in the saddle and kept his amber eyes on the road ahead, and his head swiveled to the left and right as he scanned the hills that lined the highway.
Finally, Aedric pulled forward and said what Neb wouldn’t say. “I think we’ve lost him,” he said, slowing his horse. “Even with the magicks, the horses can’t keep up.”
The others slowed as well.
“I can catch him,” Isaak said. His eye shutters flashed open and closed, the glassy jewels still fixed ahead.
Aedric shook his head. “We need to stay together. General Rudolfo would not-”
But he was interrupted when something hard bounced off the side of Isaak’s head with a dull clunk. A small stone clattered across the pocked surface of the highway. They heard giggling above. Neb and the others looked up to the rocky outcroppings that hemmed them in.
“Rainbow Men and Metal Men far from home,” a voice shouted. Its tone and timbre was off-it went high when it should’ve gone low and vice-versa. “No Ash Men to guard you.”
They stopped, and at Aedric’s low whistle, the men reached for their bows and backed their horses away from the direction of the voice. Aedric fixed his eyes in the direction of the voice. “We do not wish violence.”
More laughter. “Who ever wishes such a thing? But in the basement of the world violence simply is.” Another rock-this one smaller-pitched and arched slowly, giving Aedric time to sidestep his horse. “Where do you ride in such a hurry, Rainbow Man? And without your shovels and wagons?”
Aedric raised his voice and answered. “I am Aedric, First Captain of the Gypsy Scouts. We’re here on the business of Rudolfo, General of Wandering Army and Lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses.”
Other voices joined in the giggling now, and the laughter bounced from stone to stone, filling the sky above them with what seemed an army of voices. “What forest, Rainbow Man? What general? What lord? Why do you speak nonsense to your orphaned boys? You come from the Luxpadre of the West. Say ‘aye’ to it and bring forward your payment. We will guide you truer than Renard.”
Neb looked up. Isaak did, too, and their eyes met. Neb’s hands moved quickly. Ask about Renard, he signed. Aedric nodded.
The First Captain turned his horse, looking above in the direction of the voice. “Who is Renard? Where can we find him?”
“No one and nowhere. You deal with Geoffrus now. Renard is mad. Geoffrus will see you to your digging holes.”
Aedric’s eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you come down so we can discuss this properly?”
This time the laughter continued on for a bit. There was an eerie quality to it that unsettled Neb’s stomach. He heard danger in it. “Rainbow Men with bows and knives. Do you offer kin-clave to me and mine?”
“Aye,” Aedric said. “For now. If you’ve stopped throwing stones.”
There was the scrabble of dirt and rock cascading above and behind, and Neb looked up to it. A slight form slipped into view, a slender man in patchwork cloth and scraps of rough leather. He moved lightly on his feet as he slid down the side of the hill to land with a flourish before Aedric.
“I am Geoffrus at your service,” he said, chuckling. “And these are my men.” A half dozen heads rose to peer down at them. “Kin-clave you offer and kin-clave we take. Payment for service is rendered upon agreement.”
The man seemed off balance to Neb, but at first he could not tell why. Then he realized that his eyes never quite landed. They moved over everything. His left hand twitched at his side, and when he opened his mouth, his teeth and gums were black from some foul-looking substance he chewed and sucked at while he waited for Aedric to speak.