Lamentation (27 page)

Back when young Charles had worked on them, Petronus remembered that the power was the biggest challenge. How long had that enormous fire gotten them? Three minutes? Five? He couldn’t remember now, but it was a massive amount of energy just to power the head and torso.

Somehow, they’d solved it. Something inside of these mechoservitors burned hot enough to boil the steam and power them.

Petronus looked out on the crowd of metal faces. “I am commending you to the care of General Rudolfo of the Wandering Army. All that remains of Windwir’s Great Library is housed in your memory scrolls. Rudolfo will take you to Isaak—Mechoservitor Number Three—and you will work with him for the restoration of the library. Do you understand your instructions?” He held up the ring, and their amber eyes followed it.

“Yes,” they said in a single voice.

“Which of you is familiar with the cartography of the Named Lands? Step forward.”

Four of the mechoservitors stepped forward.

“Should trouble arise along the way, you are to rally at the seventh forest manor of the Ninefold Forest Houses. Do you understand?”

They nodded.

“Very well. Until Lord Rudolfo returns, be seated and close your eyes.”

They sat, and the dim light of their eyes went out as they simultaneously brought down their metal shutters.

Petronus turned back to the south, waiting.

Thirty minutes later, the first of the Gypsy Scouts returned. They breathed heavily, coughing into the cold air. Surgeons from the Queen of Pylos did the best they could to wash and wrap wounds they could not see, their hands slick with invisible blood.

Five minutes after, another wave arrived, followed closely by the rear guard.

“We lost three for certain,” one of the lieutenants said after quickly taking inventory with his men. “Five are unaccounted for, including Gregoric and Rudolfo.”

Petronus cursed under his breath and looked toward the south.

Resolute

Pope Resolute the First had entered the Entrolusian camp just hours before the hostilities broke out. Sethbert had received him coldly, making his displeasure of his cousin’s decision obvious with every word. “You’ve left your people without a leader,” the Overseer said, his jowls shaking with rage.

“I am the Pope,” Resolute said, his own anger flaring. “I will decide what’s best for my people.”

Four days on the road and his nerves had frayed. And the first news he’d heard upon arriving was that someone claiming to be Petronus was this hidden Pope Vlad Li Tam had spoken of.

Initially, he’d laughed it off. He’d attended Petronus’s funeral when he was a younger man. He’d even had a bit of a roll-about with one of the women who had served at the state banquet afterward. Coming back from the dead was not a hallmark of the Androfrancine Papacy.

But when Sethbert assured him that it was true, it had added to his foul mood.

“You may be the Pope,” Sethbert had said, his voice low, “but you have
me
to thank for that.”

At that point, the alarms had sounded. Not long after, squads of scouts and infantry flooded the Overseer’s tent, and Oriv found himself crowded into the corner with his Gray Guard escort.

“We’ve word from the spies,” Lysias said, out of breath as he ducked into the tent. “Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts are on the hunt.”

“On the hunt for what?” Sethbert asked.

Lysias’s reply was nearly a sneer. “You,” he said, through clenched teeth.

Resolute watched the exchange. Sethbert’s command of this man was tenuous at best. It took no expert in statecraft to see that, just as it took no military training to see that the Entrolusian army was divided and growing more so as the winter came on and the pressure increased.

Sethbert bellowed for his sword, and an aide belted it onto him. They heard the sound of fighting grow outside, and Lysias kept himself between Sethbert and the door. A wall of Delta Scouts, magicks shimmering in the lamplight, crouched with ready blades, and Grymlis and the two Gray Guard drew their swords as well. Then, near the back of the tent Resolute heard another sound, and it caught his attention. He’d heard it before, wandering the library, but that seemed impossible to him. Nonetheless, he heard the gears, heard the pumping bellows and the solid sound of metal feet upon the ground.

“Mechoservitors?” He didn’t realize he’d said it aloud until he saw Sethbert staring at him.

“What did you say?” Sethbert’s face went pale, then a deep rose color replaced it.

“It sounds like mechoservitors, but . . .” Resolute felt the realization of it grip him. Sethbert had told him all had been lost but for the spell-caster.

“They’ve freed the metal men,” a scout said at the door. “They are running north to Windwir.”

“It was never about me,” Sethbert said in a low voice.

Lysias cursed and stormed from the tent, barking orders. Sethbert followed.

As the tent cleared, Resolute looked to Grymlis. The old Gray Guard captain studied him, and still feeling short-tempered, Oriv snapped at him. “If you’ve something to say, Captain, say it.”

Grymlis pulled himself up. “I
will
say it,” he said. “I know Petronus. If he is truly alive, you will be no match for him.” The captain’s voice dropped. “And I question the viability of a war of succession.”

“I concur,” he said. But Resolute’s doubts went even further than whether or not this war would be viable.

Deeper than that, he questioned whether or not he should fight at all.

Ride to Petronus now, some part of himself said. Do not let this tragedy become worse than it already is.

But even as the thought crossed his mind, he shoved it aside. It couldn’t be Petronus. Petronus was dead. And if, somehow, it truly was that long-dead Pope miraculously back from the dead, then it would be a matter for the committee to investigate.

Meanwhile, until such time as a committee could be convened to their work, Resolute would perform his duty for the light.

Rudolfo

Rudolfo heard Gregoric’s cry and leaped toward him, his blades ready. His enhanced vision picked up the outline of a man, crouching and facing him. Rudolfo slowed and stepped to the right and the crouching figure turned with him. As he drew near, he made out the Entrolusian lieutenant’s ripped uniform and saw that the officer now held Gypsy blades. The blades turned as if following Rudolfo’s movement.

He sees me, Rudolfo thought. Certainly there were sight magicks, but none so powerful as to see a magicked scout. Though there were rumors that the Androfrancines had a magick to undo all magicks. But how would this lieutenant get access to something like that? Those sorts of secrets were gone now with the Great Library, unless Rudolfo managed to bring some of it back. And to do that, he needed Gregoric. And to get Gregoric, he had to kill this man.

Rudolfo charged with his knives out and ready.

The man did not fight like an Entrolusian. He moved too fast, with confidence and skill. Rudolfo heard Gregoric gasping near his feet and pressed the lieutenant back, sparks striking from the knives as they met.

They spun and thrust and slashed at each other, their knives moving in time with one another.

Rudolfo heard commotion outside, and heard the whistle that meant the mechanicals had cleared the edge of camp. It was time to go.

He heard Gregoric sputtering on the tent floor, and realized in an instant that his first captain was trying to give the whistle to pull back. He feinted with one knife, thrust with the other, and gave the whistle for his men to fall back.

The shouting grew nearer and Rudolfo pressed his opponent, bringing his dominant, left-handed knife to bear after setting him up to follow the right. The Entrolusian lieutenant adjusted fast, and Rudolfo felt the skill and strength in his opponent’s two hands.

He is better than me, Rudolfo thought, the realization hitting him as solidly as any fist. And he’s trying hard not to show me that.

The tent flaps rustled, and two soldiers entered. They were down before Rudolfo could blink, their throats cut with expert precision. He smiled at the work of his Gypsy Scouts even as he cursed their disobedience.

We must flee
.

And as if the Entrolusian heard him, he suddenly opened himself. It was not much of an opening—and one that someone less skilled than Rudolfo or his Gypsy Scouts might not have noticed. But it was an opening, and Rudolfo took it even as he wondered why it was offered.

He put the first knife in through the man’s kidney, and because it was Gregoric at his feet, he twisted it until the man cried out and dropped his blades. Then he put his other knife into the man’s heart, and as he fell, brought the first up and swept it quickly across his throat.

Before the man fell, Rudolfo clicked his tongue and heard three tongues click in reply. He followed the sounds of Gregoric’s labored breathing, and sheathed his knives. “Guard me,” he hissed to his men.

More soldiers entered the tent, and his Gypsy Scouts dispatched them with quick brutality.

His hands scrambled for Gregoric, found him and lifted him. He couldn’t tell if his first captain was conscious, but he found his arm, wet and slippery with blood, and pressed words into it.

Hang on, friend. I’ll see you safely home.

Slinging him over his shoulder, bent beneath the weight of him, Rudolfo left through the back of the tent.

He ran as fast as he could, his tongue clacking lightly against the roof of his mouth. The three scouts who’d stayed behind with him spread out so that two were ahead to clear their path and one was behind to guard their flank. They weaved a shifting line, moving to the left, circling back, then moving to the right. It was a chaotic pattern of movement following a path that few could predict.

When they left the camp and slipped into the forest, they were on the southern side of the camp. When they breached the perimeter, outward bound, they were on the western side. Along the way, the forward scouts had killed six and the rear guard just two.

They stopped at the edge of the forest to bandage Gregoric’s wounds as best they could.

When they laid him out on the pine-needled floor, the First Captain of the Gypsy Scouts stirred, clutched the front of Rudolfo’s scout tunic, and pressed a message into the Gypsy King’s neck.

Leave with me. I’m finished.

Rudolfo found his shoulder.
Nonsense. You’ve a war to win for me.

Gregoric lapsed back into unconsciousness. When the other scouts tried to lift him, Rudolfo’s voice was harsher than he intended. “I have him,” he said.

His legs and back ached from the run. Even with the magicks, his strength was not sufficiently enhanced to compensate for this. Still, he crouched, rolled Gregoric up and over his shoulder, and lurched to his feet. They ran west along the edge of the forest, cut north and ran along the base of the foothills, then broke cover and ran the open, snow-crusted plain.

They did not stop running again until they reached what had once been the center of Windwir. The Rangers of Pylos stood watching the south, bows drawn, not expecting them from the west. Rudolfo whistled, high and shrill, and other whistles greeted him.

“I’ve a wounded man,” he said as he crested the edge of crater. He shrugged off the rangers when they tried to lift Gregoric from his back, laying him down himself. “Do we have a medico?”

But Rudolfo didn’t need a medico to tell him that somewhere along the way another part of the light had been lost from his world.

Jin Li Tam

Jin Li Tam read the note a dozen times before she finally burned it. And even after she burned it, it stayed before her eyes.

It had arrived early that morning on the bird her father knew could always find her, and she was not certain what it meant until she saw the long faces of her escort.

He will need you now,
the coded note read.
Comfort him and you will be his right hand.
Then, buried in a deeper code:
Grieve your brother’s sacrifice for the light.

When she asked the Gypsy Scouts about their downcast countenance, they told her of Gregoric’s death, and suddenly the meaning of her father’s note struck home. She’d gone to her tent then, and for the first time she could remember, she cried silently in the manner becoming of a daughter of Vlad Li Tam.

She had no grief for her brother. Instead, she felt a rage that spilled over to flood her entire family, her father most of all. The strategy was clear to her, certainly. A man is shaped by the events of his life. The Francines taught this and it made sense, just as they also taught that a man or a group or even a nation could be moved by stimulating their lives in the moments that they needed it. A bit of grief to build their compassion, a bit of loss to instill a value of gratitude, an opportunity for vengeance to temper wrath.

And yet, despite the clarity of strategic intent, she found herself suddenly full of doubt. Her father’s work consisted of dozens of living, breathing games of queen’s war, the move in this game connected in some way to the move in another. And she had believed—had been taught to believe—that his work was in service to the light, darker in many ways than the work of the Androfrancine Order, but critical for the Named Lands to never go the way of the Old World.

But now, for some reason, his work enraged her. And at the heart of it, it was the perception of Rudolfo’s mistreatment at her father’s hands.

Is this what love is?
If so, she struggled to find anything useful in it. Love, she thought, should be whatever strategy best protected the greatest good. And who was she to question her father’s will? For all she knew, he merely added to a work his own father had carried forward. Who was she to question the work of House Li Tam?

This work will keep light in the world. And before she’d seen that pillar of smoke what seemed so long ago, she would’ve said without hesitation that the nobility of that end justified any and all means. Now, though, she hesitated.

When she knew Rudolfo was a few hours away, she cleaned herself and washed the red from her eyes and dressed in simple woolens and boots. Tonight, she would do her work—her part in her father’s work—but she would not dress it up.

Jin Li Tam went to the edge of camp with the others, including Isaak, and watched the line of metal men running in perfect synchronicity across the white ground. Alongside and behind them, as if riding herd, the Gypsy Scouts rode their horses hard. For the first time since meeting him, she could not pick her betrothed out of the group of riders.

Even when they pulled up, she did not recognize him at first. When he slid from the saddle and handed his reins to a waiting aide, she finally spotted him. But she stayed at the edge and watched him, gathering what she could.

He was not himself. He walked more slowly, his shoulders slouched, and his face was hard and tired and unspeakably sad. His eyes were rimmed red with exhaustion, and the line of his jaw was tense. He wore the winter woolens of a Gypsy Scout, and the dark clothes were stained with darker patches that she knew must be blood. She wondered if that blood was Gregoric’s.

She watched him pass instructions to another captain, and finally she could wait no longer. She walked out to him, and when he looked up at her, his expression stopped her in her tracks.

In that moment, something broke inside of her and a realization dawned within her—a certainty took shape—but she pushed it aside. After, she told herself, I will reflect upon this.

He did not express any surprise at seeing her so far afield ë so="0from the seventh forest manor, and he only nodded and grunted when she told him she’d brought Isaak to look after the other mechoservitors.

She repeated this to the captain who waved Isaak over, but before the metal man reached his kind, Jin Li Tam had grabbed Rudolfo’s hand and pulled him after her. He did not resist.

She called for a tub and hot water, for food and drink, and while the servants laid these things out, she sat Rudolfo on the wide cot and pulled at his boots.

The loss was hard upon him, she saw, and soon he’d move along that Fivefold Path of Grief the Francines spoke of. Now, he shook his head and mumbled and kept his eyes cast down and away from her.

Still, he stayed pliant, even lowering himself into the hot bath and suffering her to wash his friend’s blood from him. After, as if he were a child, she dried him with thick, heated towels and wrapped him into a heavy cotton robe.

While he sat at the cot and nibbled halfheartedly at a piece of cheese she’d sliced for him, she turned her back to him and poured his brandy.

Swallowing against the lump in her throat, she stirred in the first of the powders. Then she sat with him, forcing him to eat more and to drink down the warm spiced liquor.

After, she lay him back in the bed, blew out the lamps and crawled in beside him. Holding him close, she stroked his curly hair and ran her hands around the back of his neck until he fell asleep.

She lay awake a long time after, thinking of what was to come. She waited the full three hours, then stripped and pressed herself close to him, stroking him and kissing his neck.

When he responded, she pushed open his robe and crawled onto him, taking him into her and finding a rhythm that could sustain them both.

He clung to her but did not make a sound, even at the end. After, he fell into a deep sleep clutching tightly to her.

But Jin Li Tam did not sleep. Instead, she thought about the new certainty she had found when she first saw Rudolfo in his grief, and she knew that she had transcended her father’s will.

This child is not for you, she told her father deep in the places of her heart where she was afraid to go. This child is
never
for you.

She rolled over and faced Rudolfo, feeling the heat of his breath against her neck as he moved in his sleep to embrace her.

“For you,” she said. “Only you.”

As if answering, Rudolfo mumbled.

Jin Li Tam pulled him close and kissed his cheek.

And finally, sleep chased her down into her restless dreams.

Petronus

The men gathered around Petronus in the galley tent, and he looked up with raised eyebrows. Everywhere he went now, magicked scouts moved around him. Meirov’s personal Border Rangers formed his private escort. Someone had even dug up a fancy white and blue and purple robe—from the smell of it, a relic from an attic. Petronus had accepted the gift, but knew he’d not wear it. All he’d brought himself to wear so far was the ring.

“Excellency,” the group’s leader said with a brisk bow. “We beg audience with you.”

Petronus chuckled. “You need not start begging now, Garver. Regardless of recent events, I am still myself.”

Garver looked around at his companions, twisting his knit cap in his hands. “Yes, Excellency.”

Petronus sighed. Everything had changed, and part of him resented the boy, Neb, for his place in that, though he knew it was a road he would’ve walked with or without the boy. And the Marsh King’s role in this was also something he couldn’t afford to forget. Why were the Marshers suddenly supporting the Order? Or were they simply supportive of Rudolfo?