Requiem (35 page)

“Yes,” he agreed, then looked to Jin. “Your father, Vlad Li Tam, is here.”

Jin Li Tam once more let her surprise show. “Here? In Y’Zir?”

“In Ahm’s Glory, we suspect. And he carries a staff that makes him quite dangerous.”

A staff?
She knew nothing about this. But she also had no idea why he would be here. The last she’d heard from him, he was scouring the Blood Temple and searching for clues about what they all knew now as the Empire of Y’Zir. “Why would he come here?”

Xhum met her eyes this time and held them. “We were hoping you might have some idea. I have to assume it has something to do with you or Jakob.” Now he leaned forward, and Jin read in his posture the gravity of his next question. And she was glad for it, because knowing gave her a moment to steel herself. “Do you know anything at all about a Tam presence here in Y’Zir?”

He knows of Ire.
That was her first thought. That somehow, he’d learned about her half-sister, planted here decades ago to work her way into the Blood Guard and play her part in all of this. And Jin’s second thought was that somehow the man knew about her grandfather’s plot, the true work she’d been honed for—to assassinate the Crimson Empress and end the madness of this faith. But her face did not betray her, and her eyes met his without evidence of guile. “The only Tam presence I am aware of here, Lord Regent, is my own—and I left that family behind when I created my own.”

He studied her for a moment longer, then nodded. “Very well. But you can certainly understand why I would want to hear it from your very lips?” At the inclination of her head, he continued. “And you’ll understand why I think it most prudent to increase security here in the palace?”

She nodded again. “Certainly, Lord Regent.”

He stood now. “And if you do hear from him, you’ll let me or Sister Elsbet know?”

“Of course,” she said.

Now, he inclined his head and then glanced to Elsbet. “I’m sorry again for the interuption. I know the two of you have much planning ahead.”

Then, he moved off with his guards falling in around him.

Jin Li Tam watched him go, and after he’d gone, she settled back into the chair to listen to her son’s laughter mixing with that of the girl these people intended him to marry.
My future daughter-by-law, if they have their way.

Depending, of course, on what her father had planned. Because regardless of this staff they considered so dangerous, she knew something they could not. She knew that if her father wanted to see her, guards or no, staff or no, there was nothing on this earth that would stop Vlad Li Tam from being by the side of his children when he chose to be there.

And, she equally knew, there was nothing that would move him to their side when he did not choose it.

Father, what are you up to?

But she suspected that she knew. And she also knew that she wanted her son far from this place when the wrath of her grief-crazed father fell upon the blood cult of Ahm Y’Zir.

Chapter

18

Neb

Winters moaned into his ear as Neb’s mouth found her neck. Her hands were moving over him now, and he was lost in the heat of it. He couldn’t remember their last night of shared dreams—at least before the dreams turned dark. Back when they were the playful explorations of teens made possible by their inexplicable link.

His own hands traveled her, the smoothness of her skin surprising him.
I don’t even notice the scars of her cutting.

“Nebios,” she whispered. Her hand slid lower, and she smiled at him in the dim light. “The call is upon us.”

The call.
He opened his mouth to answer and then froze. The eyes that met his were blue, not brown. “Amylé?”

When the change struck her, it was ferocious and instant. Her face contorted, and her voice rose into a shriek of rage and loss that Neb knew too well. Amylé’s fist slammed into his nose with surprising strength even as her knee found his softer regions.

White light blurred his vision as the pain bent him into himself. He felt the hot rush of blood wash through his half-open mouth. And he felt the solid blows that she continued to land with her fists and feet and knees and elbows until she’d scrambled to her feet. Her breath was ragged, each pant a small scream of its own.

“You do not touch
me,
” she said. Neb tried to move back and away, but he was not fast enough. He was still disoriented from the blow to his nose when her right foot shot out to connect with his left temple.

The white light was back, and then darkness fell for a time and there was no pain.

In the gray, Neb felt the pain flowing back into him and slowly forced his eyes open. He sat up slowly and touched his nose with careful fingers. It ached, as did his groin and the half-dozen bruises and scratches she’d left on him in her enraged assault.

What happened?
They’d wandered the tower, stumbling through chambers the size of small towns, climbing ramps and stairs as they found them. They’d climbed until they were too tired to keep going, and they’d finally stopped to sleep. When they’d lain down, they’d been an appropriate distance apart.

And then he’d dreamed and awoke entangled in Amylé D’Anjite.

He climbed to his feet carefully and touched his nose again. Then, he limped in the direction that she had run in.

Neb had no idea how long he walked. But as he went, he noted the openings to smaller chambers and the labyrinthine flow of the tower’s narrow corridors and wide avenues. A template emerged for the average, vast floor of the Firsthome Temple—a large central space surrounded by a series of smaller chambers and rooms connected by passages. He counted the stairs and ramps as he went and had ascended three floors when he heard the music.

It was distant, but he knew the song. The sound of it washed him with hope, though he did not know why exactly. Finding the source of the dream would not necessarily change his circumstances. He was still sealed within a tower without the tools necessary to unseal it, trapped with a dangerous woman he could not trust but also could not abandon.

Neb moved through the dimly lit rooms, steering in the direction of the music. As he drew nearer, the notes upon the harp became more rich and full, and he found himself moving faster.

When the song stopped abruptly, followed by the sound of something breaking against a hard surface, Neb broke into a run.

Ahead, the light began to change. It took on a whiter, brighter glow, and he found his eyes hurting from it. He moved through interconnected chambers until the rooms spilled into a wider passage lined with darkened hallways … but for one. At the far end of the passage and to the left, light spilled from a corridor. Neb approached it and slowly leaned his head around the corner. The hall ended upon an open door. And in that light, Neb could see the tracks clearly in the dust. It looked like Amylé had come and gone from this place—and not too long ago, if she was responsible for stopping the song. He watched her tracks vanish farther down the passage, then looked to the open door again.

I have to see.
Squinting against the light, he moved down the hallway only to stop halfway when he heard something beyond the door. It sounded like the faintest whisper, a quiet but steady murmur. He took a few tentative steps forward, and when he noticed no change in the noise, he walked to the door.

His eye caught movement, and he jumped at it. In the corner of the room, a silver mechoservitor sat upon a stone stool, its arms and fingers mimicking a harpist. Its red jeweled eyes were dark, and its body whispered with the movements of the arms, hands, and fingers. If it noticed him, it showed no sign of it.

Neb stared at it. It was nothing like Isaak and the other Androfrancine models. Charles had built them from Rufello’s
Book of Specifications,
and that old Czarist engineer’s approximation of the ancient mechoservitors of the Younger Gods. This, Neb knew, was one of those original metal men. He’d encountered another—the Watcher—though that one had lost its silver, its metal surface dark and pitted.

Neb forced his eyes away to take in the rest of the room. It was lit by several large, egg-shaped stones that burned white-hot. There was a tangle of string and black crystal shards that must have been the harp. He walked to it and saw that it had already been gone through. A section of the harp was missing, and he had no doubt that it was the sharpest shard that she’d taken. He started to do the same and paused.

He had no interest in hurting this girl. But she’d attacked him once, easily overpowering him before she had a weapon. Now that she was armed, he did not know that he would survive another encounter. The only thing in his favor was that she might experience another shift. Finally, he resisted the shards of crystal that had comprised the body of the harp and instead carefully unwound three of the strange silver strings. Then, he turned back to the metal man.

“What is your designation?”

It did not answer. Its dead eyes stared at nothing as its fingers plucked out the song Neb knew as “A Canticle for the Fallen Moon in D Minor.” The song that had, buried within it, a dream that led somehow to his birth and to the ship that brought them here.

He looked down at the stone table that sat before the mechoservitor and noticed the bare patch surrounded by dust. It was the shape of a crescent. He looked back to the metal man.

“Can you hear me?” He snapped his fingers in front of its eyes. Nothing moved on the metal man but what was necessary to play its song.

Neb looked back to the table. It made sense that it would be another crescent here, carrying the music to the crescent the mechoservitors of Sanctorum Lux had found buried in the Churning Waste. He did not know how many years the mechoservitor had sat here, playing the song into the crescent. Thousands, he suspected. And she’d ended it. And by taking the crescent it meant that, in addition to being armed, she now also had a means of communicating with Petronus and the others.

And she’s climbing for the top now.
She’d trapped them here to keep the temple sealed. And now she’d ended the song that had been set up to play from this room. Neb wondered what she intended next.

Whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. And his only hope of stopping her was to catch her unaware or to find the less dangerous version of her.

Wrapping the harp strings around his closed fist, Neb turned his back on the room and its single resident and once again took up his pursuit of the girl.

Petronus

Petronus wandered darkened wings of the library that he did not remember existing before, pulling down unfamiliar volumes by unfamiliar authors and hauling them back to his table. He took the solitary lamp with him as he ventured out, each time going farther, until finally he ran the risk of getting lost. When he reached that point, he started using the books themselves, laying them upon the floor to mark his progress and show him the path back to his table.

The windows were dark, and at one point, when he grew curious enough, he tried to open one. It was wedged closed, but Petronus thought it might be a blessing. Beyond its glass, he saw nothing whatsoever. No stars. No dimly lit cityscape of the ghost of a city, tucked away in his own mind beyond the walls of the library he waited in.

Is this what it means to be dead?
He didn’t think so. He’d been dead before, and it had been pain and light and disorientation followed by the nothingness of sleep … until he’d come choking and gasping back to life again. This felt real.

It is the aether,
Aver-Tal-Ka whispered into his mind.
It is real and it isn’t, the fabric of dreams but in a context that can be manipulated from within and without.

Petronus turned instinctively back to the table, knowing somehow that the spider now waited for him there. He tucked the three volumes under his arm and shuffled in that direction, the lamp extended before him to cast light for his return.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been alone here, but it had been long enough to read a goodly stack of books. “Where have you been?” he asked.

He heard his voice carry down the hall, then heard Aver-Tal-Ka’s reply. “We are approaching the temple canal,” he said. “But we are not yet ready, so I needed to instruct the crew. Have you found answers to your questions?”

Some.
But each answer opened a floodgate to an ocean of more. The Order had documented evidence of three cataclysms: One that he now knew of as the Downunder War, followed millennia later by the Wizard’s War that toppled Frederico’s empire. The survivors of that apocalypse had founded a new home under the reign of the Wizard Kings. And then, P’Andro Whym had led the overthrow of the Wizard Kings in a Night of Purging, bringing about the most recent cataclysm—the Seven Cacophonic Deaths of Xhum Y’Zir.

But now, he knew that P’Andro Whym was a reproduction—not quite offspring but more closely a replica—of the Younger God Whym. And he’d learned even more: He knew now that the Younger Gods were gods only by the limits of human imagination to come up with any other explanation in the face of such capability. But they were not gods at all.

They were the People and we are their children.

And they were merely the children of those who’d gone before them, the Elder Gods. Who, Petronus realized, were also the People. It stretched back over vast distances in space and time, and it contained cataclysm after cataclysm, a species rising up to fall again on the blade of its own propensity for self-destruction. But its tenacity to survive, again and again, finally brought about a mechanism to assure their future.

The Continuity Engine of the Elder Gods.

A way of living forever that, as a result of Y’Zir and his Downunder War, had been shut down.

“That is a close approximation,” Aver-Tal-Ka said. His voice was closer, and Petronus recognized the books placed on the floor now. He rounded a shelf and saw the pale man seated at his table, waiting.