Antiphon (30 page)

Now, the woman was there with them, too. Only now she did not wear the dark silks or the close-cropped gray hair. Instead, she wore a simple black dress that hugged her curves in a way that made Neb suddenly uncomfortable. Her hair, now long and the color of ash, spilled down around her shoulders. “He will show us,” she said, “eventually.” When she smiled, she showed her teeth. She leaned in toward Neb
there on the bench they shared. “And after we find the Abomination’s hand servants, we’ll come and find you as well, digger.”

“Hold fast, Nebios,” his father told him.

And then he, too, spun away.

“Hold fast,” the woman said, repeating his father’s words, “and let me hurt you more, Abomination.”

Then, the blade was no longer on him. And neither was the token. He lay still, certain that any moment both would be back to spin him into a pain-frenzied, stomach-lurching dervish. When it didn’t happen, he risked opening his eyes.

The sun was high and the sky spread out over him, a canopy of fierce blue that stretched beyond his peripheral vision. A breeze moved over him like hot breath on his cuts.

These were the times he tried to sleep, though he had no idea how much time passed between cuttings and how much sleep he actually found. At first, he’d used that time to try to ascertain something about the women who held him. But he’d given up on that some time ago now. The rest seemed more useful to him—it gave his mind the focus he needed, despite the pain, to keep his mind away from the one place they wished him to take them.

And it was working.
But it took everything inside of him.

Still, he realized, each hour under the knife, it grew harder and harder.

He heard low voices talking nearby in an unfamiliar tongue, and then, a cool hand was on his arm, quickly pressing words he could not understand into his skin. He turned his head and saw the thirty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam gazing down upon him. For the briefest moment, he saw concern in her eyes. Then, all emotion vanished from them.

“You will show us what we’re looking for eventually, Abomination,” she said in a flat voice. Then, she leaned closer, her mouth so close to his ear that none could hear but him. “It will not be long, Nebios. I swear it to you.”

When she left, he fell into a light, dreamless sleep. He drifted there, feeling the heat gradually leaking out of his wounds and momentarily forgetting the dull ache of the rocky ground that bit into his back. He’d just reached a moment of oblivious peace when he was jarred awake by the sounds of pandemonium.

He opened his eyes, suddenly alert, but could see nothing but a
twilight sky and its tentative moon. Still, he instantly placed the snarling and howling of kin-wolves mixed with the sounds of battle nearby.

Twisting his body, he pulled at the ropes that held him, but the stakes were driven too deep. He felt a light breeze, and a strong hand clamped down suddenly over his mouth. A strong arm snaked across his chest to hold him still.

Neb felt an instant of panic when he could not see the figure that now kept him from speaking or struggling. He felt the hot breath of a mouth against his ear and heard the muffled but familiar voice.

“I followed them to you,” Renard whispered. “You’ve been impossible to get close to until now.”

Neb stifled a sob at the sound of the Waste guide’s voice and tried not to cry. Relief flooded him, and he felt his body trembling from it.

Renard’s hand stayed firm over his mouth. “Listen well, lad,” he said. “They’ll not kill you until they have what they want from you. I’m no match for them on my own, and I’m not sure the wolf trick will work more than once. Stay alive. I will be back for you.” He paused, and Neb felt another hand giving a reassuring squeeze to his shoulder. “I will be back for you,” Renard said again.

The hand loosened over his mouth, and Neb felt terror racing through him.

Don’t leave me.

He wanted to shout the words, to shriek them, but instead, he swallowed against the fear. He’d watched a small number of blood-magicked scouts cut easily through a room of armed men at Rudolfo’s Firstborn Feast. He quickly ciphered the odds and knew that Renard—a far more savvy scout and soldier than Neb—was right. He’d most likely used the urine of a female kin-wolf in heat to draw down a handful of males, but they would be no match for the four women who held him. Renard would not fare much better on his own.

Petronus rides for you.
Once more, his father had spoken from his grave in Windwir. As the hand left his mouth and the arm lifted from his chest, Neb swallowed and formed words that he hoped Renard could hear within the raw rasp that his voice had become from days of screaming. “Petronus rides for me,” he croaked.

If Renard heard, he did not answer. Already, there was yelping and yowling as the defeated wolves realized their mistake and fled the knives of Neb’s captors.

Neb tried to will the trembling from his body, tried to take hold of the sobs that threatened him with a storm of tears.

He failed, but when he wept now, it was from the sure knowledge that he wasn’t alone. He simply had to hang on, to keep averting his inner eye and inner ear from the mechoservitors at their work and the song that compelled them.

Neb closed his eyes again, and the next time he awoke, it was beneath the knife.

But this time, Nebios Homeseeker did not scream.

They rode the last two leagues in somber silence, Rudolfo and Isaak side by side in the lead and Charles behind them. They left their horses at the opening of the canyon, handing the reins over to scouts freshly recovered from their magicks and dressed in robes that matched the Androfrancine and his metal son.

I am too old for this,
Charles thought. But it was something he’d thought often since that day his apprentice had drugged him and spirited him out of Windwir. Before his secret imprisonment by Sethbert and later, his nephew Erlund, he’d not considered himself especially old.

Perhaps losing everyone and everything you love in a span of hours changes one’s perspective on time,
he thought.

Rudolfo led them forward over freshly salted ice until the canyon walls narrowed and the downward slope was sealed away from the white sky as the base of the Dragon’s Spine swallowed them.

When they reached the cave, it was crowded with men and buzzing with activity. A wooden frame had been set up over and around a large circular hole in the floor, and a system of pulleys had been rigged to move equipment in and out of the ground. Tables and chairs were strewn around the cavern, and men sat at some of them going over crudely sketched maps. Even as they stood, men started climbing from the well, ducking beneath the frame as they scrambled over the edge. They were followed at last by a mechoservitor—Number Eight, Charles thought—and a heavyset man with thick, curly hair, his face and hands black with grime. The man approached them.

“Lord Rudolfo,” he said, inclining his head.

Rudolfo returned his nod. “Turik, how goes our exploration?”

“We’ve mapped extensive tunnels and chambers six leagues south
and east. The western passages have been more difficult—a lot of debris and water—but we’re making headway.”

Rudolfo turned to Charles and Isaak. “This is Turik, chief engineer of our operation here. He’s spent most of his life underground in our mines in Friendslip.” He offered a grim smile. “Who’d have thought that for two millennia we’ve had a Whymer Maze beneath us.” He looked back to his engineer. “This is Brother Charles, formerly arch-engineer of the Androfrancine Office of Mechanical Science and Technology and now attached to the new library. And Isaak, of course.”

The man studied the two of them. “I received your message, Lord, and hoped to speak with you about it. I don’t think it is prudent for—”

Rudolfo raised a hand and interrupted him. “It is
not
prudent. But neither will I prevent them. Isaak is most insistent about his ability to find their destination. I want your men to escort them as far west as you have mapped . . . but no farther.” Rudolfo looked at Isaak, and Charles saw concern in the Gypsy King’s eyes. “From that point, they are on their own.”

On our own.
It did not appeal to him, traveling underground passages into unfamiliar territories. But Isaak would go either with or without him, and the same curiosity that had driven him into engineering in the first place so many years ago drove him now. Something had happened to his mechoservitors. He had resisted Introspect’s order to send them alone and unsupervised into the Churning Wastes on the Sanctorum Lux project, but in the end, Holy Unction compelled his compliance. He had trained them to maintain themselves, had scripted them each for scheduled visits to the Keeper’s Gate for a clandestine escort to his offices in Windwir for routine checkups. And something had happened. Somehow they had stumbled across the data coded into that song and had created a new script for themselves based upon it.

And it changed them.
As it was now changing Isaak.

Isaak spoke, drawing Charles back to the present moment. “I am confident of my direction.” He reached into the leather satchel he carried over his shoulder and drew out the book that the mechoservitor had given him. “There are rudimentary maps ciphered into the text of this book.” He extended it to Rudolfo. “The mechoservitors attached to your operation should be able to decipher at least some of them. When they are finished, the book should be destroyed.”

Charles felt his own eyebrows rise. Rudolfo raised his as well, a hand moving instinctively to his beard. “You would destroy a book?” the Gypsy King asked.

Isaak nodded. “I would destroy
this
book.”

Charles saw the question on Rudolfo’s face but asked it first. “Why?”

Isaak blinked, his eye shutters clicking. “Enemies of the light beset us. They must not be permitted to prevail.” He paused, his body shaking slightly as his bellows wheezed. Charles saw water at the lower corners of his eyes, where he’d installed the tear ducts as per Rufello’s
Book of Specifications.
“My analysis of your physiological and verbal cues indicates that you are displeased with me, Lord. It was never my intention to—”

Rudolfo raised his hand again. “Isaak,” he said. His voice was low, and Charles thought for a moment that he might’ve heard it crack with emotion. “I am not displeased with
you.
I am displeased with this outcome and concerned by your decision.” He waited a moment. “You understand some of my concerns, I think. Those that I have discussed with you.”

Isaak nodded. “I will guard it, Lord. I swear. And the library will function adequately without my presence. I have reproduced from my memory scrolls all appropriate holdings contained therein and have left them with Mechoservitor Number One.”

All appropriate holdings.
Charles had not seen the scrolls but felt confident that all matters regarding the spell and the dream had been carefully expunged from the scripts Isaak had left behind.

“But there is another concern,” Rudolfo said, “that I have not discussed with you.”

Isaak cocked his head, and Charles was struck yet again at how human his creation seemed. No, he realized, not seemed.
Was.
And becoming more so. “What concern is that, Lord Rudolfo?”

Charles watched the hardness soften in Rudolfo’s eyes and watched the line of his jaw relax as the Gypsy King stepped closer. Isaak towered above the shorter man. Stretching himself to full height, Rudolfo embraced the metal man. “That I will miss my friend until he comes home to me.”

For a moment—just a moment—the arch-engineer thought there were tears in the man’s eyes. There was no mistaking Isaak’s tears.

And when he was partway down the ladder, wrapped in the warmth of an unexpected wind that rose from beneath them, Charles discovered his own tears.

Blinking them away, he followed his dreaming son into the Beneath Places and wondered what they would find there.

The howling of a wolf reverberated through the room, and Winters sat upright, mouth opening to scream. She could still smell the burnt rock of the Churning Wastes mingled with the iron scent of blood, and she could taste salt in her mouth from either sweat or tears.

Neb.

“Petronus rides for me,” he had told her, his voice more a croak than a whisper. Still, this time he smiled, and when he did, she saw madness in his eyes.

She shivered, soaked in sweat, and climbed from her bed. The dreams had grown increasingly more disturbing, and she could mark the difference in them now. There were the dreams of the white tower and its surrounding sea, the song permeating the air as the metal men moved about her. And the dreams of the Book, each night devoured by more mechoservitors.

Then there were the dreams of Neb.

She walked to her desk, looked at the paper that waited for her there and felt a knot growing in her stomach. After nights and nights of these dreams, she felt them taking their toll upon her. She no longer sat down eagerly to write them out.

And some of them, she realized, seemed stuck. Like wagon wheel
ruts running in a circle. And try as she might, she could not steer out of them.

As if they are not my dreams.

No, she did not want to write these out. At least not now, not with the sweat of the night terrors still wet upon her. Instead, she shrugged out of her sleeping shift and pulled on her trousers, a shirt and a thick pair of wool socks.