Canticle

Chapter 2

Winters

Winteria bat Mardic looked out over Rudolfo’s gardens from her balcony, wondering how it was that she had come here for a boy.

The noise of her host’s Firstborn Feast filled the cold night, and she imagined the show Hanric gave them on her behalf. It was strange to be the Marsh King, she thought. Queen. Soon enough she would come into her majority and take the Firstfall axe and the Wicker Throne away from Hanric. Her father’s closest friend had trained her for that day along with the Androfrancine scholar they had hired away from those gray-robed thieves. She was nearly ready for the rest of the world to know the truth.

Her people knew the truth and kept her trust. They’d learned the hard way that it was better to keep Marsher business in the Marshlands. But for outside eyes, she was a servant in the Marsh King’s entourage, kept about for nefarious reasons, according to their neighbors in the New World. She had it on good authority that Androfrancine intelligence had once noted her role as that of soothsayer and companion. Under normal circumstances, surrounded by just her tribe, she ruled quietly and served her people by adding her dreams to the Book of Dreaming Kings. In these affairs of state she truly had no place. But she had not come here for Rudolfo’s Firstborn Feast, though it was a fine occasion to honor.

She had come here for a boy. Nebios ben Hebda, the Homeseeker. Snow had slowed their journey to the Ninefold Forest, and their entourage had arrived that morning to a quiet but public welcome. Hanric, as her shadow, followed the forms with gruff acquiescence. The Named Lands saw a giant barbarian with bits of wood and bone woven into his long beard and his tangled hair, carrying an enormous axe. That’s what the Marshfolk needed the Named Lands to see to keep them frightened. After the public reception, she’d spent a few hours talking with Rudolfo in a quiet place about the unrest on the Delta and elsewhere in the Named Lands, had lunched with the other servants and then sought out Neb. Rudolfo and Neb were the only two beyond her own people who knew the truth about her. The rest believed the image the Marshers projected, and few drew close enough to learn otherwise. The Marshfolk kept to themselves, and their neighbors preferred it that way. There was a saying, though she didn’t know if it was in use much these days. As welcome as a Marsher at a wedding. For two thousand years, they’d huddled in the north in lands they’d not chosen, biding their time and waiting for the season that would bring about the end of their sorrow in the Named Lands.

Like Rudolfo’s kin, the Marshers had arrived ahead of the other settlers and had chosen their lands well. And like the Foresters, their unusual relationship with the fallen wizard kings cast suspicion upon them and kept them set apart. But unlike Rudolfo’s Gypsies, they had been unable to hold their lands, and the young Androfrancine Order had pushed them farther north, into the marshes and scrub at the base of the Dragon’s Spine so that the militant scholars and archeologists could establish their second fortress in the New World there on the banks of the Second River.

The Named Lands were safer with the Marshfolk contained, according to Pope Windwir, the poet whose name had been given to that fort years later when the library was young and the Order was finding its legs. After all, those protectors of the light reasoned, these were the near-kin of Xhum Y’Zir and his seven sons, the Wizard Kings of the Old World. It didn’t help that many of the hallmarks of the Age of Laughing Madness had never quite bred out of her people despite their pilgrimage from the Churning Wastes so long ago.

Of course, Winters understood this. She was the first queen in their long history-and the first to receive an Androfrancine education of sorts. Her people covered themselves in the ash and mud of the land as a constant reminder of their sorrow. They embraced superstition and mysticism, preferring prophecy and glossolalia to the so-called Androfrancine light; their kings preached those dreams to the Named Lands during times of war, and they still practiced the alchemy of blood magick in a limited fashion.

They were a different people, Winters realized, and her limited understanding of history-both in the New World and the Old World-was that being different did not often bode well unless you were stronger than those peoples considered to be the norm. So they waited, hidden in the north, only riding forth to raid the border towns. They kept kin-clave with none and were even hostile from time to time, depending where the dreams carried them.

But everything had changed last year when Windwir fell and the war they had prayed for and longed for began there on the bone-scattered plains of the fallen city. She’d led her army down from the north with Hanric bearing the axe of her office as her shadow, honoring the dreams and announcing kin-clave with the Gypsies, knowing that somehow Rudolfo’s blade guarded the way to their new home. That change alone was enough.

But then she’d fallen into someone else’s dreams and found herself face-to-face with the promised Homeseeker himself, Nebios ben Hebda, the Androfrancine orphan. And more: She’d grown to know the awkward boy who had seen Windwir fall beneath Xhum Y’Zir’s spell, and she thought she might love him.

And so she had come for a boy. Now she had seen him, and it had frightened her. The feelings he stirred up within her felt larger than her heart could contain, and there was an edge to it that felt sharp enough that it could cut a part of her soul away if she let it.

Maybe it has already? She wasn’t sure. Her own mother had not lived long enough to talk to her daughter about these things. Hanric was the closest thing she had to a father, and he left those matters for her to ascertain through the women among her household. She’d not asked them. She’d not felt it proper.

Still, ever since that day at the edge of the Desolation, she couldn’t help but imagine Neb’s mouth on hers and his hands moving along her hips and sides and shoulders. Even now, she shuddered a bit. After that kiss, their dreams had shifted. They dreamed of the new home Neb would find, of being limb-tangled and naked in a silk-draped bed, staring up at a massive, swollen, brown-and-blue world that filled the sky. Birds sang around them. Water cascaded nearby. Occasionally in those dreams, they kissed again, but most of their dreams were flashes of light, bent images of the world, vast expanses of sand and glass and scrub.

Seeing him today, kissing him today, was even more powerful than the dreams, and a part of her hoped that tonight, after he’d had his fill of the feast, he would find her and kiss her again.

She blushed at the thought of it despite the cold wind on her cheeks.

“You’re a silly girl,” she said to herself and the night. “Not much of a queen at all.”

She turned to let herself back inside the manor when she heard a distant and growing sound carried by a slight breeze. She felt her stomach lurch and her mouth pull downward and twist. Before she could catch herself, her legs gave out, and she dropped to the snow-crusted balcony floor. She felt her body contort and her eyes blinking as the words swept over her and out of her in a torrent of glossolalia. She bucked and twisted against it every time; she didn’t know why.

Heaven must be resisted at all costs. Finally, she gave herself to ecstasy and utterance. The words tumbled and expanded as she felt her eyes widening. But this ecstasy was suddenly hot, suddenly intrusive, and Winters felt the prying ache of it. She took the logos out of heaven’s tongue and spoke it. A wind of blood that cleanses. A cold iron blade that prunes that which is found wanting on the vine.

The fit passed and she sat up slowly. The noise was louder and closer now, spreading from the forest through the town, over the gates of the manor, and she recognized it. The lurching in her stomach was now a knot that ached.

The Seventh Forest Manor was at Third Alarm.

Vlad Li Tam

Vlad Li Tam stood barefoot on the night-cooled sand and watched the sun wash the sky purple with morning. The last of the stars tucked themselves away, and the birds, already announcing the day, matched their growing volume to the growing light. The air was heavy and wet and warm, and a breeze from the water moved over his naked skin. He could smell the salt of the sea mingled with last night’s sweat. Behind him, the girl in his hammock yawned and stirred. He glanced over his shoulder at her and smiled. She smiled back and inclined her head. He returned her nod and watched her scramble to her feet and flee the beach.

No doubt to tell her father what transpired here. He chuckled.

He stretched, feeling his joints pop and his tendons crack. He’d surprised himself last night. At seventy-two he rarely pursued fleshly liaisons, but kin-clave in the Scattered Isles operated at a baser level. For the last seven months, he’d witnessed the island rites and rituals firsthand, participating himself when necessary and sending one of his sons or daughters when it was not. Each island was similar to the others in practice, and most fell within the more primitive social forms of the rites that had kept the Settlers alive in the New World. Far from the Named Lands, the disconnected islands and their scattering of villages followed a method Vlad Li Tam was most familiar with-the expanding bonds of family-to establish a network of trust and trade.

He had arrived yesterday morning, anchoring his massive iron steam-driven vessel within eyesight of the village lookout. They’d sent up the blue smoke of inquiry, and Vlad had launched a bird to them with the green thread of peace tied to its foot. Six of his sons had rowed him ashore by longboat and waited politely aloof while he bartered kin-clave with the chieftain. In the end, they had settled on the chieftain’s younger brother’s oldest daughter-young, pretty, and more coy than shy. Vlad Li Tam smiled at the memory of her flashing white teeth offset by her dusky skin and her wide, dark eyes. His sons had withdrawn so that he could consummate the strategic alliance, and Vlad Li Tam had waited on the beach, appropriately distant from the village to show that he was clearly an outsider.

She had come to him when the moon rose up over the silver sea and cast lines of blue and green across the waters. She’d been eager, and certainly, he realized, this was not the first time she’d happily given herself for the good of their remote collection of villages. She’d coaxed his seed from him twice that night, and they both took and gave pleasure on one another’s behalf, their quiet noises offset by the surf and the sounds of monkeys and birds in the jungle.

It had been a fine night, and now, once she reported that the rites of kin-clave had been satisfied, that the old man had indeed risen to the occasion, they would spend the day feasting as Vlad Li Tam and all of his sons and daughters now at sea with him in their iron armada celebrated with their new allies and trade partners.

You are too old for this. And yet twice in one night. Shaking his head, he walked to the surf and urinated into the ocean. He stood there for a time, scanning the horizon.

This far out, there were no other islands visible to the naked eye, but he could trace them out on the map of his memory. This was their tenth in the last three months. Each had required slightly different tribute, but most had focused on allowing the potential of offspring to unite the two tribes. It made a crude but practical kind of sense. The farther southwest they sailed, the less populated the islands became. Those islanders and villages they found lived quiet lives of abundance and knew little to nothing of what happened beyond their own island.

Until Windwir was destroyed, the Androfrancines had paid generous fees to keep ocean traffic at a minimum. From time to time, they’d even called upon House Li Tam to use their iron armada to enforce their control. And because they’d given the Tam shipbuilders the specifications for those iron vessels, Vlad Li Tam had been most willing to render assistance. Before they’d turned to banking over five centuries ago, the Tams had been the Named Lands’ biggest shipbuilding concern, so working from Rufello’s re-created design sheets had not been much challenge. Powering the vessels had been harder-but the Androfrancines and their Arch-Engineer Charles had seen to that under a veil of secrecy that Tam honored as part of his secret kin-clave with the Order. The engine housings were massive Rufello lockboxes, the ciphers of which were lost when Windwir’s great library fell to Xhum Y’Zir’s spell. It wasn’t hard to extrapolate, though, that the same sunstones that powered the mechoservitors also powered the steam engines for Vlad Li Tam’s fleet of ships.

Vlad Li Tam heard footsteps behind him and turned slowly, mindful that he still wore no clothing. The chieftain and several others approached, including the girl. She still smiled.

“Hello, my friend,” the chieftain called out in a loud voice. He also smiled.

Vlad Li Tam returned the smile. “Hello, Dayfather Ulno Shalon.” He used the title now to indicate his kin-clave. They were speaking an older form of Lower Landlish that had been pidgined together with a handful of Named Land dialects all built from the languages of the Old World. The people of the Divided Isle and the other islands close enough for the Named Lands to place them on a map spoke an easily intelligible dialect. But the farther out they’d gone, the less effective the common tongues became. There were scattered words here and there, but not with any rhyme or reason.

Finally, he’d put the children on the problem, turning them loose with island children, positioning his older sons and daughters nearby to capture the vocabularies. They’d learned enough at the first two islands in this particular archipelago to carry on conversations with the others. And with each stop, once kin-clave was established, he turned the children loose again.

The chieftain was a short, plump man in a ratty cap that Vlad Li Tam recognized as an officer’s hat from the Entrolusian river patrol. He wore little else besides that and a length of faded cloth twisted around his middle. Bits of bone and feather decorated the cap, and his grin continued as he approached Vlad Li Tam with open arms.

“I trust my”-here he used a term that Vlad Li Tam was not familiar with-“performed her duties for the tribe in a satisfactory manner?”

Vlad Li Tam nodded, winking to the girl as she smiled out at him from behind her uncle. “Yes, Dayfather. She was more than satisfactory.”

“I will hope for a strong son,” the chieftain said, “that his hands may join us in our work.”

Vlad Li Tam touched his head and then his chest. “And I will hope for a beautiful daughter,” Vlad Li Tam replied, according to their custom, “that she might bring lightness to the heart of your people.”

Satisfied, the chieftain nodded. “Your tribe is now kin-clave with mine. Today, we will celebrate this joining, and from this day forward you will have haven among us.”

Vlad Li Tam smiled. It had been a small price to pay to gain this people’s trust and earn the right to walk freely among them. Of course, there was the matter of the girl. Though it wasn’t required, it was certainly customary for him to keep trying until the seed took hold, and judging from last night’s experience, she would be an eager partner in that work. And he didn’t mind the effort. They did not need to know that no child could possibly come from this union. His sixth daughter, Rae Li Tam, had taken care of that, giving him the powders he would need to dull his soldiers’ swords before they marched through the gate.

The two men embraced, and the Dayfather left with his entourage. Vlad Li Tam watched him go, then walked to the hammock in its thatched lean-to to dress himself. Offshore, he saw the first of his iron ships come around the cliff side of the island, steam belching into a clear sky. Drawing a mirror from his pocket, he flashed a message to it in the House code of the Tams. They would drop anchor in the island’s single natural harbor and begin offloading their contribution of kin-clave for the tribal feast. Wines and spirits like this people had never tasted. Cheeses and breads. And steel tools and a few choice bolts of brightly colored silk. The Tam armada would stop here, their blacksmith would set up his anvil and furnace to do minor repairs both to the ships and to the assorted metal goods these people had traded for in years past. From the outside, they would appear to take their rest among the Dayfather’s people for a fortnight. But in that time, his sons and his daughters would do the work he had made them for. They would build alliances; they would gather information; they would compile their findings and compare what they learned. When their stay here was complete, House Li Tam’s network would include this small island and its remote tribe. And this people’s knowledge and history would be added to the matrix that he built.

When light flashed back to him, confirming his command, Vlad Li Tam tucked the mirror away. So far, in seven months of searching, he’d found nothing substantial but had not wavered in his conviction. Somewhere out here there had to be proof.

He’d studied Sethbert’s so-called evidence of Androfrancine aggression carefully and had reached the only possible conclusion: The Androfrancines were afraid of something. Something so threatening to them and their light that they would bring back Y’Zir’s spell and create a generation of mechoservitors to carry it. Their maps, with their strategic lines drawn and delivery points marked at key locations, indicated a fear of invasion along the Outer Emerald Coast with a secondary incursion onto the Delta. And Tam knew now that someone had bent his own network of children to bring down Windwir. But who and why?

It was folly to believe that the Named Lands, set apart from the rest of the spell-blasted continent by the Keeper’s Wall, was the only place left where life could be sustained. The Wizard King, in his wrath, had brought down the world; but like these islands now grown apart from the Named Lands, there had to be pockets of life elsewhere.

And so the question was: Which pocket of life had engineered the end of the Androfrancine Order and the destruction of its Great Library? And how had they controlled his family to accomplish this horrific task?

So far, his search had borne no fruit, but Vlad Li Tam was a patient man.

I will have the truth, he thought.

But when he did, Vlad Li Tam wondered, what would he do with it?

Rudolfo

It happened faster than Rudolfo thought possible. One moment, he was leaning over to whisper something to Aedric about the quality of Hanric’s singing, and in the next, the music and laughter of the feast vanished beneath the sudden call to Third Alarm. The double doors of the Great Hall burst inward, and a muffled pandemonium swept into the room-his own Gypsy Scouts at the center of it, knives dancing and connecting with invisible blades. They already bled from a dozen cuts of varying severity, their winter uniforms slashed and stained with their blood. The invisible assailants did not stop, and judging by the flood of sentries and armed servants now pouring into the room, they had not stopped since breaching the border.

Aedric pushed away from the table, reaching for the ceremonial knife he wore and whistling the men to guard their king.

Guard our guests first, Rudolfo signed as he drew the narrow sword he’d chosen to decorate his outfit. Aedric nodded.

The tornado moved through the large room, breaking tables and scattering food, shattering dishes and bottles as the unmagicked Gypsy Scouts sought to contain this sudden invisible threat.

How many? It was impossible for Rudolfo to say. But they were strong and fast and silent and deadly, cutting through servant, scout and guest alike as they made their way to the head table.

Hanric bellowed, knocking the table over and reaching for the silver axe of the Marsh King’s office. The giant Marsher was on his feet, his escort surrounding him with weapons drawn as the clamor approached.

Across from Hanric, Ansylus the Crown Prince of Turam shot Rudolfo a surprised glance as he climbed to his feet. “What manner of-”

Before he could finish, his own guards were down beneath a storm of steel. The Crown Prince himself flew back against the wall, tossed by unseen shoulders, bucking and twitching as hidden knives found him and pierced him with surgical precision. Three Gypsy Scouts pressed the attacker as Rudolfo’s guest slumped to the floor, eyes already glassy in death.

Rudolfo lunged in with his sword and felt it strike cloth and then flesh. He pushed and twisted, withdrew, then thrust again. Something heavy and panting collapsed, lifted itself from the floor, and staggered through the wall of men that surrounded it. They fell easily before its strength, then rallied and rode it back down to the ground, where it twitched and burbled.

Around the room, clusters of men pressed similar attackers with similar result.

Rudolfo turned to Hanric and his bodyguards.

Two of the three guards had fallen, and the last stood between the shadow of his king and the blades of these invisible assailants. Rudolfo moved in with his sword, letting it dart here and there at what he hoped were the backs of knees and the smalls of backs, and he whistled for Aedric. As Aedric and three other Gypsy Scouts approached, the Marsh Queen’s shadow’s last remaining guard fell with a cry. Before the body hit the floor, Hanric’s axe swept up to wet itself on one of the attackers. The axe hummed from the blood, and Rudolfo stared at the double-headed weapon. There in the silver reflection he saw too many arms, too many torsos. Too many knives.

The axe reveals them. Even as he realized it, he shouted it to the room. “You can see their reflection in the axe.”

He moved in closer and found himself against a wall of transparent flesh. He pushed at it with his sword.

Sudden hands that he could not see lifted Rudolfo from the floor with a strength far beyond that of any scout magick he knew. Then he heard the muffled sound of a slap and a distant voice. “No,” the voice whispered. “Not him.”

Rudolfo fell to the floor as the hands released him. He whipped his sword up and felt it snag in cloth and skin. “Who are you?” he hissed at the unseen foe.

Hanric bellowed, and Rudolfo looked up to see a jagged red tear erupting down Hanric’s forearm. Aedric and the others were pressing to reach him, held back by a storm of knives. All of the fighting now centered on the man the Named Lands considered the Marsh King.

Rudolfo pushed forward as another cut opened Hanric’s chest. Roaring his rage, the Gypsy King dodged and thrust with his narrow sword, whistling out the chorus of “The Fourteenth Hymn of the Wandering Army.” His men rallied to the strategy, but even that failed.

Two more fell to Hanric’s blade before they overcame him. He went down with a shout, and Rudolfo growled low in his throat.

Then, the invisible wall struck Rudolfo again, pushing him over and aside as the attackers retreated. The Gypsy Scouts pursued them as they fled the Great Hall. Rudolfo nodded at the axe clutched in Hanric’s hands. “Take that,” he shouted to another scout. “Use it to search every inch of this manor. Then search the town.”

He stood still for a moment, stunned by the events. He’d fought in dozens of skirmishes, had even led a few wars, and last year he’d worn the magicks to raid Sethbert’s camp. In all of his years under the knife, he’d not encountered anything like this. And now two of the Named Land’s leaders lay dead in his own home. He took in the room, eyes wandering the scattered bodies and food, the broken tables, the clusters of guards and guests and servants. He could hear loud voices on the other side of the barricaded door.

He saw Neb, shaking and white, his own ceremonial knife still hanging loosely in his hand. His uniform was torn, and he bled from a few cuts. “Where’s Isaak?”

Neb pointed, and Rudolfo spotted him across the room. “Ask him to join me,” he said. Neb nodded and went as Aedric approached.

Rudolfo looked at his First Captain. He was more shaken than his father would’ve been, but still grim and resolved. “What do you know, Aedric?”

Aedric’s brow furrowed. “Little so far, General. The western watch sounded Third Alarm and launched their birds, but the aggressors outran word of their arrival.”

“They outran the birds?”

Aedric nodded. “Yes, General.”

“On foot?”

Aedric nodded again.

“Gods,” Rudolfo whispered.

Rudolfo knelt by Hanric and reached over to close the dead man’s eyes. He felt rage brewing within him.

They come to my very home on the night of my Firstborn Feast. He stood and went to the Crown Prince, kneeling to close his eyes as well. “Who else have we lost?”

Aedric counted off on his fingers. “Most of Turam’s guards, all of the Marsher scouts, ten of our own scouts, four servants.” He paused. “The Seventh Manor’s army contingent has rallied at the gates.”

Rudolfo’s Wandering Army, made up of most of the Ninefold Forest’s able-bodied men, was a powerful force to be reckoned with. He nodded. “Set them to the search. Create a perimeter around the town and library. They are to hold it until further notice.”

Aedric nodded and left.

Rudolfo moved, and his foot struck something heavy on the floor. He looked down at nothing. Soon enough, as with all magicks, these would fade and they would have a look at the assassins.

Neb and Isaak approached. The mechoservitor wheezed slightly as his bellows pumped. His jeweled eyes sparked and flashed.

Rudolfo looked at his metal friend. “In your work at the library-during the restoration and the time before-have you heard of such a thing? Magicks like these?”

Isaak nodded. “Only from the histories of the Old World, Lord, in the Age of the Wizard Kings.”

Rudolfo sighed. “Blood magick, then.” The Androfrancines had kept tight control of their pharmaceuticals and magicks, doling out some of the earth magicks among the nations of the Named Lands, holding back most in their effort to keep humanity safe from itself. But the Articles of Kin-Clave expressly forbade the use of blood magick. Blood magick-in the form of Xhum Y’Zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths-had brought down the Old World. And two thousand years later, it brought down Windwir. He turned to Isaak. “I want you to set your brethren to scouring the catalogs for everything you can find on this.”

Isaak nodded. “Yes, Lord Rudolfo.”

“And send for the River Woman.” The River Woman mixed their scout magicks and medicines. Perhaps, Rudolfo thought, she’d know something.

The metal man nodded again, then turned and limped away quickly. Rudolfo looked to Neb. “How are you, lad?”

Neb’s eyes were narrow and red, focused on Hanric where he lay in a pool of congealing blood. “I’m fine, General.”

“Find Winters. Tell her what’s transpired and bring her to my study.”

“She will want to see Hanric,” Neb said.

Rudolfo shook his head. “There will be time enough for that later. Take a half-squad with you.”

Hanric was like a father to her, Rudolfo knew. He’d ruled on her behalf since she was a child, even younger than Rudolfo was when he’d taken the turban. He’d been only twelve the day his parents were murdered by Vlad Li Tam’s seventh son, the heretic Fontayne.

Another orphan, Rudolfo realized, like the tall, slender young man before him. Like himself.

I am an orphan who collects orphans, he thought.

Barking orders, he moved through the bloodstained ruins of his Firstborn Feast to stop at the guarded double doors. Beyond those doors, a crowd gathered wanting answers.

Beyond them, the world would soon enough want to know the same. With fires of insurrection and civil war raging in the south, the New World still reeled from the Desolation of Windwir and the loss of their Androfrancine protectors. The assassination of the Crown Prince of Turam and of the man the world thought of as the Marsh King would feed into the chaos already brewing.

“No. Not him,” the voice had said when one of the magicked assassins held Rudolfo at bay.

Why not me? It unsettled him, cold in the pit of his stomach. There had been three prominent lords in the room. And now two were dead. And before the feast, word of the metal man in Androfrancine robes that approached the Keeper’s Gate, claiming to be Charles the Arch-Engineer, with his admonition to protect Sanctorum Lux.

A Whymer Maze to be sure.

Even I wait for answers, he realized.

Rudolfo thought of his formidable betrothed, who also waited for answers, no doubt outside the room and angry that she’d not been permitted to enter.

He thought of the child she carried, his son-Jakob, named for Rudolfo’s father. It was a sudden and unexpected gift that Jin Li Tam had brought to the middle of his road, in the shadow of war, at the time of Rudolfo’s greatest unrest. She’d told him the night he returned from confronting her father. Vlad Li Tam’s confession was still playing itself out behind his eyes when she had joined him in his dead brother’s room and shared her news.

Earlier tonight, he’d thought perhaps they were making the world and that the knives he passed forward to his son must be sharp and balanced for him to continue that work.

But perhaps, Rudolfo realized, the world was making them. And perhaps the blades best be sharp and balanced so that Jakob-and the Ninefold Forest Houses-could survive that making.