Antiphon

Chapter 7

Jin Li Tam

The courtyard on the south side of the library was a mad press of people as Foresters and refugees alike gathered for the dedication of the west-facing wing.

Jin Li Tam stood between the pillars of the western patio and bounced on her heels to keep Jakob amused while Rudolfo talked quietly with Aedric and Isaak. Jakob had been fussy of late after being so long a quiet baby, but she suspected that his first teeth were coming in.

I will ask Lynnae for teething powders. The girl had spent the last few months working with the River Woman and seemed to have an aptitude for the work. The River Woman herself had referred to her as an apt apprentice at least twice, both times bringing a blush to the girl’s cheeks.

Thinking of Lynnae, she glanced around the front lines of the crowd to see if she could find her. When she singled her out, standing between the River Woman and her father, Lysias, Jin Li Tam flashed a smile that was quickly returned. Then, she turned back to Rudolfo and the others.

“It’s time, Lord Rudolfo,” Isaak said.

Ahead of them, the crowd built. This first wing was small, but in these times, small victories had to be celebrated as they were achieved. There at the base of the stone steps, wagons of food and wine stood ready for the feast to follow. After eighteen months of construction and a near-constant stream of books flowing from the mechoservitors’ pens, they’d reclaimed some tiny part of what had been lost at Windwir.

And today marks two years.

She stepped to the side of the podium and felt pride as her husband stepped forward. He held a single sheet of scribbled notes in his hand and glanced to her and Jakob as he placed the paper on the flat, wooden surface. Then, he looked to Isaak and Aedric before clearing his voice.

“Two years ago,” he began, “we all watched the sky and lamented that loss of light that was Windwir’s pyre.” He glanced to Isaak again, and Jin saw how carefully he chose his words. “Evil men with terrible intent used the Androfrancines’ knowledge against them, and in doing so, changed our world.”

She heard the timbre in his voice as he projected it over the crowd. Watching them, she could see the rapt attention upon their faces as they listened to their king. They love him, she realized. And she knew he and his family had earned that love over two millennia in this place. She’d seen that love poured out-even extended to her, especially since Jakob’s birth-since she’d first come to the Ninefold Forest nearly two years ago.

She could remember pondering that charismatic Gypsy King and what one of his young Gypsy Scouts had told her in those early days. He always knows the right path to take. and he always takes it.

Not so anymore. She could see the doubt in his eyes, and sometimes, in their late-night murmurings, he would whisper his fears to her while she held him close. And though she did not say it, she felt it, too. The world had changed with the Desolation of Windwir and had kept changing from there.

People were applauding, and Jakob stirred awake in her arms. She felt a stab of guilt and looked up. Had he finished so soon? She looked to him and he appeared to be paused, finger raised to make another comment. She scanned the crowed, glancing again toward Lynnae.

She paused.

Just left of Lynnae stood a young man with close-cropped hair, and in a sea of smiles and clapping, his face was sober and his hands were at his sides. He was staring at the central pillar of the portico.

Rudolfo continued speaking, and she followed the young man’s eyes. Something shimmered there, and she opened her mouth to shout.

The light was white and followed by a hot fist of wind and sound that shattered her ears. Something large and metal and fast impacted her and the world spun as she felt long metal arms encircling her, pulling her and Jakob close as heat billowed around them. She heard cracking as the pillar collapsed and the roof followed. She heard rock hitting metal and bellows rasping. She choked and sobbed.

The dust and smoke settled, and Jakob’s wail rose up to join the screams and cries of the wounded and bereaved.

A reedy voice whispered in her ear. “Safe,” he said. His voice had an odd lilt to it, and she heard popping and grinding deep in his chest cavity.

The world wobbled around her, and she fought its graying, forcing herself to move as best she could, shifting Jakob. “Isaak?” she asked.

But the metal man did not answer.

Neb

Outside the cave, kin-wolves slunk about, casting shadows by the light of a blue-green moon as a warm wind moaned down the canyons of the ruined city. They’d been out since the sun dropped, though they’d not approached as yet. Still, when the wind dipped, he could hear their claws upon the ancient, decimated street.

Odd. They do not howl.

Behind him, the woman stirred, and he turned to face her. Her fever had broken early in the day, telling him that his poultice and powders were doing their work. More and more, she moved and mumbled, her eyes moving behind closed lids. Neb went to her now and drew his canteen, unscrewing the cap.

He’d found three sources of water on the quick scouting runs he’d allowed himself since securing them in the cave. In the morning, he would need to make another run if she kept taking the water.

Placing a hand beneath her head, he lifted it and put the mouth of the canteen against her lower lip. Her lips parted by reflex, and he tipped the water into her mouth. The skin on the back of her neck felt cool and smooth now in his hands.

Her eyes fluttered and opened. They went wide, and he saw that they were a light green. She started to struggle, her mouth opening as she pulled in the breath to shout. When she did, it was a hoarse sound but in a language he did not recognize, and her wrestling was too weak for any kind of effectiveness. He waited, holding the canteen to her mouth once more.

“I can’t understand you,” he said, keeping his voice low and quiet.

Her eyebrows furrowed, bending the scars on her forehead. “Understand?” she asked.

He heard the snuffling outside now and pressed the canteen into her hands. Lifting his thorn rifle, he moved back to the mouth of the cave in time to see a large shadow retreating from the stones he’d piled at the front of the cave. He took aim and squeezed the bulb, listening to the hiss and cough of the thorn as it exited the rifle and closed the distance between them. He could not tell if the poisoned missile clattered off against stone and glass or if it found its mark in the flank of the kin-wolf.

He turned back and saw the woman pulling herself weakly from the blanket. She wasn’t getting far, but the fear on her face was unmistakable. Neb moved slowly toward her, crouching nearby as she tried to pull herself up with trembling arms. Her clothing, wet from sweat, clung to her, and once more, Neb found himself averting his eyes. He thought perhaps the scars upon her arms and neck and face would snare his eyes, but in truth, each line of images pulled toward the curved parts of her he sought to avoid.

Neb swallowed. “You understand Landlish?”

She stopped, her eyes going wide for a moment. She turned to him. “Yes.” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was hesitant and uncertain. “But. it has been a very long time.”

She settled back now, still eyeing him with suspicion. But when he extended the canteen, she took it and drank from it. He watched as her eyes broke contact with him here and there to take in her surroundings. Each time, he knew she marked some detail.

She is a scout of some kind. Keeping his voice even and low, he asked her the first question that came to mind. “Where are you from?”

“Far away,” she said. “But that doesn’t matter.” Her eyes narrowed. “Are you the Abomination?”

The other woman called me that. He did not know how to answer, but the questioning look on his face must have been sufficient. She continued. “The one called Nebios Homeseeker?”

He felt the blood leave his face as the hair on his arms and neck rose. “I’m Neb. How do you know my-?”

She leaned forward, interrupting him, her eyes suddenly wide and wild. “You’re in grave danger. My sisters hunt you even now, and through you, the mechoservitors. You must go.”

Neb blinked, his memory pulling him back to his encounter with the carved kin-raven and the woman in the Wastes who had spoken to him. We see you there as well in your glass cave. He thought of them, magicked and racing across the Wastes, and then he recalled the phial of blood magicks this woman had in her pack. “And what of you?” he asked. “Are you here hunting me as well?” And how is it you can use the magicks and not be killed by their potency?

Their eyes met. “I was not hunting you, though it is what I was sent to do.” She looked away. “I have other matters to attend to.”

He looked to her bandaged shoulder and saw the fresh blood seeping through. “I don’t think you’ll be attending to those matters any time soon.”

Even as he said it, he could see the pain and weariness registering on her face. She settled back into the makeshift bed. “You must leave,” she said again. “My sisters will tend to me.”

Neb glanced toward the mouth of the cave. The kin-wolves had gone quiet, and that meant it was time for him to take up his post. He looked back to the girl. There was urgency in her voice and written into her furrowed brow. “Why would your sisters wish me harm?” Another question dug into him with the sharpness of an Entrolusian cavalry spur. “And why do they call me Abomination?”

“They do,” she said, “because of what you are. But they need to stop the metal dreamers first, and only you can find them.”

“And why are you telling me this?”

Her eyelids drooped, and her voice faltered. “So that you will listen to me and leave while you can.”

She closed her eyes now, and her breathing became heavy. He looked once more to the mouth of the cave, then set himself to changing her dressing and rebandaging her wound. She stirred twice and tried to push him away, but he easily held her in place long enough to finish his work.

Then, he slipped back to the mouth of the cave. He fished the cloth-wrapped icon from his pouch and studied it, careful not to touch it. He had no idea what it was or how it did what it had done, but he did not doubt for a moment that it had shown him one of the mechoservitors who had fled Sanctorum Lux, and that he’d seen Winters, though she looked foreign to him, cleaned and dressed like any other woman in the Named Lands instead of wearing the dirt and ash of her people. The strange carving had even reached beyond the grave to his father Hebda. And he’d seen the women who hunted him, too.

More importantly, they’d seen him. And if this girl spoke the truth, they wanted him to help them find the metal dreamers.

He put the wrapped image away and thought for a moment about pulling out the plain box and the silver crescent that lay within it. The moon was up, and the canticle would be clear. He could taste the code buried in that song, could feel the equations and formulas within the numbers it hid. He knew it lay there, ancient and beguiling, and that somehow the mechoservitors had found a dream within it.

The metal dreamers.

The idea of the metal men dreaming intrigued him. He’d spent a good deal of time with Isaak during their early days at the Seventh Forest Manor. He’d found him different from the others, somehow set apart after his experience with the blood magicks at Windwir. Of all his kind, Isaak seemed the most advanced, and Neb had watched fascinated as the metal man became more and more human each day.

He had passed Isaak the scroll from Sanctorum Lux, and he believed that it was a copy of the metal dream. He wondered if the metal man had run the script. If he had, what had he seen?

And what about it brings these strangely carved women, hunting us in the Wastes?

His eyes went back to the box, and he glanced to the sleeping girl. He craved the song in its fullness, but knew if he used the crescent, the woman might hear it as well. And he could not trust her. Not yet. Certainly she’d seemed sincere in her effort to convince him to flee. And he believed her-believed his own ears, having heard them say so-that her sisters hunted him. Some small voice in the back of his head assured him that he did not want to be found by them.

Still, how could he leave?

It was a question for another time because there was time. Tomorrow, he would check her wounds and reassess.

He closed his eyes and called up a map of the Wastes by memory and recalled what geography he’d seen when he saw and heard the Blood Scouts. The closest had been the one at the well-at least a week by the root. But he could not be certain that the blood magicks didn’t cut that time drastically. Regardless, there was time. He could not afford to panic.

“Panic,” Renard had told him again and again, “is the Waste’s swiftest killer.”

They do because of what you are.

Her words were cryptic. How or why anyone could see him as an abomination eluded him, but nothing he’d experienced these past two years had made any kind of sense. Rationally or not, it was happening. Even his very father-dead now these two years-had cast his own warning.

Neb shook his head and moved his focus to the song. He could hear the crescent in its lockbox, and again he resisted the urge to open it and cradle it against his ear.

Outside, the kin-wolves broke their silence and bayed as the swollen stars guttered overhead. The canticle was indeed loud tonight.

Settling into his dark corner, thorn rifle laid carefully across his knees, Neb watched the night and listened for the dream beneath each note.

Rudolfo

They burned bonfires in the courtyard to illuminate the rubble, and Rudolfo paced and cursed as the rescuers dug the last survivors and bodies from the wreckage.

He stung from a dozen cuts and burns; he ached from the same number of bruises. His right arm hung broken in a sling, and his stomach clenched and unclenched as rage and anguish washed through him.

Be alive.

Twice, he’d tried to move past the Gypsy Scouts set to keep him from the wreckage. Both times, their hands upon his chest had been enough to subdue him, though the first time he’d raised fist to them before he caught himself.

Be alive, he willed again.

Once more his mind veered into that place he could not bear it to go. His first thought was of them when he first stirred to wakefulness in the medico tent, and he’d felt the world shift and slide when Aedric, battered, burned and bleeding himself, told him that they still hadn’t found his wife and child. Or Isaak.

How long ago had that been?

Hours.

A white bird flitted back from the blast zone and was caught in the catch net. He’d seen it happen three times now this night and had watched the medicos race out. He heard shouting, and a team set out even now at a sprint, carrying a stretcher between them.

He saw Lysias barking orders to teams of refugees as they moved books by wheelbarrow around to the entrances of the subbasements. He’d been told that the general’s men had extinguished the flames quickly, forming a bucket brigade within moments of the blast, even as the Gypsy Scouts took up a perimeter and rescuers began pulling out survivors. Of course, he’d been unaware of this, and he still felt the knot on the back of his head. As close as he was to the explosion, he had no idea how he had survived.

He also had no idea how it could have happened. After Ria’s infiltration, he’d doubled the watch. And still, somehow, someone had done this terrible deed. There were over thirty dead now and three times that number of wounded.

And still they dug. The entire roof and front portion of the wing had collapsed in the blast.

I did not listen to her. Ria had warned him, and he’d not listened. Certainly, some part of him wondered if she herself hadn’t instigated this attack. And yet even as he thought it, he knew it couldn’t be. She would not put him at such risk. Despite everything, she had still spent tremendous resources to concoct Jakob’s cure-and he’d heard the reverence in her tone when she spoke of the Child of Promise, the Great Mother in their gospel. The very book itself lay open upon his desk, and already he’d marked passages that seemed to speak prophetically about his wife and son.

He looked to the pile of rubble, the devastated front third of the wing, and wondered again what kind of device could do this and how it could come to be here, in his forest.

A scout approached at top speed, his rainbow-colored uniform torn and smeared with ash. He inclined his head to Rudolfo and to Aedric, his face lined with worry. “We’ve found the mechoservitor.”

Rudolfo felt his heart race. “Isaak?”

The scout nodded. “He’s. nonfunctional.”

Rudolfo’s stomach fell away, and his head suddenly ached. “Nonfunctional?” He glanced to his left, where Charles labored under a makeshift tent, moving between two of the most damaged mechoservitors. Over half had been damaged in the blast, though most superficially. “Take the arch-engineer. Tell him it’s Isaak.”

The scout nodded and took off at a run.

Rudolfo sighed. “Gods,” he muttered.

“Or devils,” Aedric answered. “I have magicked the scouts, and they are scouring both town and forest, General. I’ll wager that Machtvolk bitch has something to do with it.”

Rudolfo shook his head. “I don’t think so, Aedric.”

But who? Whoever it was, he would find them and-

Another scout approached at full sprint. “We have them, Lord Rudolfo! They’re alive!”

Rudolfo felt the wind go out of him. The world slid away, and his legs went to water. Gravity pulled him down and he went to his knees. They’re alive. The building rage slipped from his clenched fist for just a moment, and he felt his face flush as tears threatened. He blinked them away and realized Aedric’s hand was upon his shoulder, firm and much like Gregoric’s had been so many times before.

He heard himself breathing, and each gasp seemed a sob. He swallowed against it and forced himself to his feet. “Take me to them.” He stared at his first captain, his grief suddenly frozen into resolve and anger.

Aedric opened his mouth and closed it. “Yes, General.”

They made their way around the edges and then down a makeshift path through the debris. As they walked, Rudolfo fixed his eyes ahead.

I did not listen. I did not protect them. It was sharper than any scout knife, and it twisted in him. She’d proven to him how vulnerable he was when she snuck into his forest, into his home, into the very room where he met with her evangelists. Before that, she had sent her kin-raven, beseeching her sister to bear warning to him.

Another path that eluded him.

He found his footing and increased his pace as Aedric guided him by his good arm. Ahead, he saw the men and women gathered around Isaak. The metal man’s head was twisted at an impossible angle, his chest cavity crushed and his left jeweled eye dangling free on gold wire. He felt another sob shake him. Then, he saw them lifting his wailing boy from the ruins, and Rudolfo faltered in his run.

The cry was wrong; it was agonizing pain. And the blood on Jakob’s blankets wrenched Rudolfo at some deep place in himself that he did not know existed until now. He pulled away from Aedric and then sprinted ahead.

Now hands were lifting Jin Li Tam from the rubble, and when she looked to Rudolfo, he saw wild panic and grief upon her face. Two medicos intercepted Rudolfo. “No further, Lord.”

“My son,” he shouted, pushing against them.

“A ruptured eardrum, I’ll wager,” the River Woman told him, placing a hand on his chest. “Lord Rudolfo.”

“I need to see them,” he said.

“They will be fine. They need to be cared for, and you have work to do.” Her voice was firm and it surprised him, though it shouldn’t have. She’d pulled him from his mother and into the world when she was a younger lass.

Rudolfo looked past her and the medicos. Jin was being forced into a stretcher, her hands stretched out for Jakob. The River Woman followed his eye. “Give the child to his mother-she’ll better soothe him until we can get the powders on him.” She gave the Gypsy King another stern look and went back to her waiting work.

Rudolfo looked to Isaak. Charles had arrived and was running his hands over the metal man’s chassis and head, checking the limbs. He saw the matter-of-fact manner with which he did his work and marveled at it. If I were to look at it as such, Rudolfo thought, how would I behave now?

He pondered for a moment and looked up to Aedric. “Bring Lysias over,” he said.

Aedric gave him a puzzled look but heeded. He whistled to a scout and sent him careening through the rubble. Rudolfo knew the younger man wanted to ask-his father, Gregoric, most likely would have asked. And would’ve privately let Rudolfo know in clear words his opinions on the matter.

I miss you, Gregoric. Still, he saw his fallen friend in the face of Gregoric’s son, and he knew that the father’s strength was in Aedric.

Rudolfo looked to Aedric now. “How long to muster the West Brigade of the Wandering Army?”

Aedric’s eyebrows furrowed. “A day, maybe two.”

Rudolfo nodded. “Good. You’ll call them up tonight after I speak with the two of you.”

Even as he said it, Lysias approached. The general’s eyes were filled with worry and red from smoke. “Lord Rudolfo? Are they safe, then?”

Rudolfo shook his head. “None of us is safe, Lysias.” He paused. “General Lysias.”

He saw the look of surprise in the old soldier’s eyes. “Lord?”

“Swear fealty to me and mine, General, and serve my family and my people well.” Something caught in Rudolfo’s voice, and the words sounded foreign to him as he said them. “Build me an army to keep my borders,” he said.

“You have my oath, Lord,” Lysias said.

Rudolfo looked to Aedric. “Lysias will raise them up; the Gypsy Scouts will train them. Bear witness, First Captain.”

“Aye, General Rudolfo.”

“Until they are ready, the Wandering Army will watch out for us. I want the Western Brigade on the line in three days’ time.” Rudolfo wanted to close his eyes for these next words, but he knew he could not. It went against everything his people had believed these two thousand years in the forest, and he had to look them each in the eye as he said it.

“The borders of the Ninefold Forest,” Rudolfo said, “are now closed to passage. Send birds at dawn to all, kin-clave and foe.”

Aedric and Lysias exchanged glances. Aedric spoke first. “Are you certain, Lord Rudolfo?”

Am I certain? He heard the wailing of his son and the cries of the frightened and wounded around him. He heard Charles cursing and grunting as he manhandled Isaak onto the stretcher with the help of two scouts.

He remembered the anguish in Jin Li Tam’s eyes.

“Yes,” Rudolfo said, letting the wrath show in his voice. “I am certain.