Antiphon (60 page)

And now, he held his dying friend in the belly of a ship that bore them slowly upward. Voices that called him out to serve. Dreams that pointed the way in whispers he could not comprehend. Promises of home and promises of violence. These all moved across his inner eye, going back two years to the pillar of smoke that marked Windwir’s grave.

Petronus looked up and saw the bloody sky of another sunrise over the Churning Wastes.

“Look Grymlis,” he said. “We’re flying.”

But Grymlis had already flown, and Petronus hoped his friend would find home and light awaiting him in whatever place he landed.

Weeping, he lay still and watched the porthole as the sky shifted from red to black. When they came to take Grymlis away, he let them, his eyes never leaving the expanse of night they now flew.

A cold wind whistled outside as Rudolfo sipped chai made over an Androfrancine camp furnace. Sleep had eluded him, and he’d eventually given up his cot to spend the night going over reports that he’d been too drunk to read the first time they’d crossed his worktable. As he
read, he’d packed those that needed to be packed into his administrative chest and fed the rest into the furnace, watching the fire gobble down the words. Once he’d finished that, he’d laid out traveling attire—doeskin pants, a heavy wool shirt, a coat made from beaver pelts that had been a gift from one of his house stewards, and his green turban of office. He laid his father’s knives and knife belt next to the clothing.

Then he’d packed the rest of his things. After, he put on the chai and settled into his chair with a copy of the Y’Zirite gospel.

Two years.
Where had he been riding when his life had changed so irrevocably? He frowned and stared at the lantern. Paramo. They were turning toward Paramo, where he’d hoped to bed down with a log camp dancer or two and enjoy a Second Summer night of drinking wine from freely offered navels. That was when he looked up and saw the pillar of smoke upon the sky. He remembered that Gregoric, who never flinched at anything, went pale at the sight of it.

“I miss you, my friend,” he said as he lifted the chai mug to his lips. “I wish you were here now.” Still, he wondered now if even Gregoric would be daunted by all that had transpired.

He’d given the orders yesterday. Philemus already sped south for the Seventh Forest Manor. The second captain would follow those orders, though Rudolfo knew that trust was strained. He’d written the edict himself, carefully and in four drafts, having Lysias read each. It grieved him to write it, and a part of him knew that it was not the right path; but another part recognized that sometimes, when only wrong paths were left, one chose the best wrong path available and hoped a right one would emerge eventually.

Before, he would have felt he shamed the memory of his father. But now, he questioned that man he’d revered for so very long, and feared that if he were brave enough to exhume the corpse and if time were kind enough to have left his body intact, he would find a mark over the man’s heart that would break his own.

He thumbed through the pages of the book, his eyes settling on a passage about the Child of Great Promise and the healing of the world. He’d read the gospel through several times, each time gleaning more from the patchwork words of Xhum Y’Zir’s seventh son, the one-eyed Wizard King, Ahm. What he took most from it was how carefully it was woven with just enough truth to foster a sense of trust, enough fancy to stimulate imagination and enough personal application to engender a sense of belonging and commitment. It delivered
purpose. He could see why the Androfrancines, focused upon the light of human achievement and knowledge, would resist and suppress this. Making each and every individual potentially an important contributor in a faith that promised healing to the world—particularly in the midst of cataclysm and upheaval—was a potent elixir for the disempowered, disenfranchised and disillusioned.

But how different is it from Winters and the Homeward Dream of her people?
He wasn’t certain, at the root of it, that they differed much, though her people’s faith had no gods to speak of. Their Homeseeker, if he understood it correctly, was more a servant than an object of worship. Still, it was no coincidence that the one people who had room in their hearts for a faith were the first to openly declare their commitment to Y’Zir.

If it had been left at that, this would all be simpler.
But it hadn’t. There were secret shrines, even in the Ninefold Forest, and even his own father had been a practitioner, it seemed.

Rudolfo sighed and sipped his chai. He tried to conjure the smell and smile of his infant son to comfort him, the softness of his bride’s cheek and the fierceness in her eyes. He’d sent the bird yesterday, calling them home. Something dark crept toward them—he heard its footfalls in the changing times—and he knew now that he could not truly protect anyone whom those forces wished to harm. And he also knew now of a certainty that those dark footfalls intended grace for his family, not harm. While others fell, the Ninefold Forest thrived. What the Androfrancines once hoarded and kept hidden, the Forest Gypsies now rebuilt and made open.

The words had ridden him hard of late.
We cannot win here.

Still, he would try. He would resist. But he would not bend his knee; he would not bare his heart.

Hefting the gospel in his hand, he weighed it carefully and wondered how many other gospels there were, how many prophecies and psalms, and how many more were coming.

Rudolfo took a deep breath, held it, and gently placed the book into the furnace. He watched long enough to see it catch fire. Then, he stood and dressed carefully, quickly, and slipped outside into the gray light of morning.

The stars were guttering and the moon was down. To the east, pink tinged the peaks of the Keeper’s Wall. He walked alone at a brisk pace, climbing the ridge until he found a place where he could watch the sunrise.

He could not watch it without thinking about her and the first time they’d met. In those days, he’d been more interested in pleasure than love, but something in her had struck him and struck him hard.

A sunrise such as you belongs in the east with me.

It had been a blow to him and to that fledgling love when he learned it had been engineered by her father, followed soon after by the announcement that she carried his heir. And the day that he’d watched his son, Jakob, emerge from her was a day he could never forget. Those first weak cries changed his life, and he’d wept and laughed at the wonder of it all.

Learning yet later that the betrothal and heir were part of a larger scheme had not shaken him as much, though now it did. Still, the why of it was not nearly as important, regardless of the knives and blood of the Y’Zirite faith that overshadowed his son.

Because, Rudolfo realized, he is
my
child of promise first and foremost. A promise that his line would continue even in a world vastly changed from the time he first saw the pillar of smoke against the sky. A promise that life and light could emerge from death and darkness.

Yes,
he thought. It would be good to have them home.

The sun rose now and smeared the sky red.

Rudolfo watched it and squinted at a star where no star should be.

No, not a star.
It was light reflected upon something golden and distant, rising above the Keeper’s Wall and moving slowly up and away.

What strange bird is this?
Rudolfo wondered.

He watched it until it vanished from his view, and then he climbed slowly down the ridge beneath a sky that promised no snow at least for this day but offered no promises at all for the morrow.

Jin Li Tam stood at the rail and held Jakob close to her chest as the moon rose over the Named Lands. The gentle rocking of the ship lulled her son but did nothing to settle her own restless heart.

She and Lynnae had packed after seeing Winters and her ragged band of Marshers off in Aedric’s care. The man had refused to meet her eyes as he left, and it grieved her still, knowing that Rudolfo’s rage would be even greater than his captain’s.

When she and the regent had finally left, it was without fanfare and with a small escort.

They’d ridden hard, Jakob swaddled and slung against her as they galloped magicked horses down from the mountains, across the plains of Windwir and into the lower nations of the Named Lands. During those long days in the saddle, she’d learned what she could of the regent and his forces, even picking up smatterings of the guttural language they spoke quietly among themselves.

Part of her restlessness was what she’d seen on that ride. The mounds of earth and snow where teams of Machtvolk and other robed figures excavated the desolate city, their shovels and pickaxes digging up artifact and skeleton alike. But that was not nearly as unsettling as what awaited farther south.

Pylos had brought the bile to her throat, but she’d held it in despite the lurching of her stomach. At least someone had cleared the highway
ahead of their horses, stacking the bodies of those who’d tried to flee off to the side to make way for the riders.

She’d lowered her eyes, knowing the truth like a blade on her skin.

Every man, woman and child killed for Queen Meirov’s sin.
And the queen herself—or at least her head—now decorated a pike in the courtyard outside her palace, if Ezra’s report to Regent Xhum was accurate.

Jin suspected that it was.

Now, as the moon came up, clouds drifted in to blot out corners of the sky, veiling stars that throbbed in the cold night. She found herself looking first to the southwest, where she’d spent her youth learning from her father how to be his daughter and his spy. Then, she looked to the north, where one day, two years earlier, her life had changed suddenly into something she would never have imagined.

Mother. Queen. Wife.
These were not roles she’d asked for or particularly wanted, and yet now, she could not fathom relinquishing them. Gifts given in the midst of desolation. Gifts, she realized, carved from the manipulations and machinations of her family in service to a dark gospel.

And now, in some ways, it felt as if she gave those gifts back.

She closed her eyes and tried to bring up Rudolfo’s face, tried to find the memory of his hands on her and hers on him, but found now that all had fled. In its place lay the hollow, dead eyes of Pylos and the gnarled hands grasping against whatever fell sorcery had decimated that nation.

What kind of magick visits plague with such careful discrimination?
Across the river from the highway, life on the Entrolusian Delta seemed business as usual, though there were more soldiers at the river crossings.

She shuddered the memory away and opened her eyes at Jakob’s sudden laughter.

There, perched on the railing of the ship, was her father’s golden bird. Last she’d seen it, Isaak had restored it and caged it in his office in the basement of the new library. Before that, she’d seen it delivered to the forest in a wagon with other artifacts and books from her father’s library.

She looked around to be certain no one was in eyeshot and then looked back. Its beak opened, and the voice that leaked out was one she’d not heard in many years.

“I do not know,” her grandfather’s voice whispered, “which of you will be the one Vlad sends to Jakob’s son. Ire. Jin. Gwen. But whoever of you hears this message, heed me well. I am a foolish old man, and my
transgressions are multitude. My greatest folly was bending my knee to the resurgence, though at the time I thought it the only path left me. Their path is the path into darkness and an end not only to the light but also to life. If my greatest, fondest hope is true you are now en route to Y’Zir, and when you arrive you will do what you are made to.” The voice paused. “It falls to you, under the protection of your role and the role of your son, to end this madness. It falls to you, Granddaughter, to kill the Crimson Empress.”

There were no other words, no blessings bestowed. The bird simply lifted from the rail and bent its way north and east in a direction she knew well.

Long after it had gone and long after Jakob had settled into sleep gentled by the waves of the Emerald Sea, Jin Li Tam, Great Mother to the Y’Zirite Child of Promise, watched the northeast and wondered how desolation could find someone a home they never expected, and how love of that home could drive one to leave it behind.

The boy will be safe in Y’Zir.
Her grandfather had offered her no such assurance. But she’d heard the songs and seen the look of adoration in the eyes of the Y’Zirites; she’d read the passages and heard the schoolmistress expound upon them with her own ears. He would be safe, but what kind of life awaited him in Y’Zir if she failed?

And why did I choose this path knowing the risk I take for this child who is my very soul?
The answer arose within and brought a sudden sob to her shoulders that she forced aside.

“Because I am my father’s daughter after all,” Jin Li Tam told her sleeping son.

Then she watched the waters for a long while until clouds choked out the moonlight and a cold rain baptized her for that dark work ahead.

This is my third time out and I’m even more mindful that it does, indeed, take a village to produce a novel. There is a long list of folks I’d like to thank for helping put
Antiphon
together and into the world.