“But what,” his grandson asked, “if it was simply a ruse?”
“I’ve wondered that myself,” Vlad Li Tam admitted. “All I know for certain is that they were frightened enough of something to bring back Xhum Y’Zir’s spell.”
Mal Li Tam nodded. “If it is out there,” he said, “I’m certain we will find it.” His face brightened in the purple light of evening. “Oh, I have something for you, Grandfather.” He reached into his pocket and drew a small pouch. “Rae Li Tam found these just before the feast and asked me to bring them to you. I wanted to dry them first,” he said with a chuckle. “Not an easy task when you’re at sea.” He passed the pouch over and Vlad Li Tam took it, tipping the contents into his hand.
He held the kallaberries to his nose and inhaled their pungent scent, feeling his heart quicken at the sight and smell of them. How long had it been? Four months or maybe five? He’d given up the pipe first by necessity, knowing the dried berries would be harder and harder to come by the farther out they sailed. But later, it had become a choice. The forgetfulness and calm were luxuries he could no longer afford to steep himself in with the work he was presently about, despite the occasional flashes of brilliance the berries offered him. Still, he’d asked his daughter, each time they made landfall, to watch out for the rare kallabush and its small crimson berries. And now that they were in his hand, he knew that he would return to his room and smoke them in the long-stemmed pipe he kept there. He smiled at his grandson. “Thank you,” he said.
Mal Li Tam returned the smile and bowed slightly. “You are welcome, Grandfather.” Then the young man turned and walked back to the pilot house and Vlad watched him go.
A sharp arrow, indeed. Someday, he thought, Mal will replace me.
Later that night, he took three of the small berries and crushed them into the bowl of his pipe. He drew a match across the rough paneling of his stateroom’s wall and held it to the berries while he drew on the stem, turning the red mash to a bubbling purple. He held in the smoke as long as he could, exhaled, then did it again.
Liquid centeredness flowed out from his lungs into the rest of him and he sighed, climbing into his narrow bunk with his pipe and matches. The room moved as he did, and initially he thought the berries were stronger than usual or that perhaps four months away from the pipe had lowered his tolerance for the berries. But when he felt his legs become heavy and then nonexistent, Vlad Li Tam knew the error in his thinking. The realization struck him, and he tried to deny it but could not.
Mal Li Tam did not knock at the door. He merely opened it and stepped into the room. His smile was wide and full of teeth.
Vlad Li Tam willed his mouth to work, but it refused him, twisting and closing off the words. He closed his eyes against the vertigo that tugged him down. Even the questions he formed were diffused by the haze of whatever had been mixed into the berries.
“You’re wondering,” Mal Li Tam said in a slow, careful voice, “how it is that the Franci conditioning of your House could fail so utterly, that one of your own could betray you.”
Two thousand years of careful breeding, careful scripting, and it had never happened before. His children and grandchildren had walked willingly into death for him, knowing that their purpose was to serve him as he served the light. And it had been the same for his father and his father’s father for as far back as their time in the New World. Vlad Li Tam tried to nod, tried to move his eyes, but could not.
“Soon enough you will meet those who can show you,” Mal said. “For now, it suffices to say simply that your time has passed, Grandfather. A crimson sun dawns over the Named Lands, and your work has been a part of it. Everything House Li Tam has done builds toward it.” He paused. “Everything I have done builds toward it, too.” He held up a slim black volume, and Vlad Li Tam blinked at it. The style was familiar to him, but he’d burned those books before steaming off to sea, the day Rudolfo confronted him at the edge of that great bonfire.
“Your father wrote this and left it for me,” Mal Li Tam said. “In the coming days, when the pain is such that you heap curses upon those who delivered you over, I want you to know that in the end, it was he who betrayed you.”
The room spun now, and the pull of the vertigo overcame him. He did not move when his First Grandson carefully took the pipe and matches from his hands to place them on the bedside table next to the pouch of poisoned kallaberries. Closing his eyes against it, he let it drag him under.
After it did, the nightmares began. Vlad Li Tam ran naked across the bone-field of Windwir, his lungs filling with the ash his bleeding feet stirred up. Overhead, a blood-colored sun filled the sky. And just ahead of him, flitting to and fro among the wreckage of cast down stonework, a kin-raven kept pace with him as he ran.
When Vlad Li Tam screamed, the kin-raven smiled to show its impossible teeth.
And after, that red swollen sun swallowed the world while the kin-raven ate his eyes.
Neb
Neb waited just beyond Winters’s dreams, unwilling to intrude. He watched, though, from afar.
Her dreams, or at least those he found himself within, had grown dark. Images of a bloody wall, a twisted and thorny wicker throne atop an impossibly steep spire with Winters running toward it, chased by Marshers in wolfskin armor. But the scene shifted suddenly, and Winters now ran through the streets of Windwir while wolves slaughtered sheep draped in black robes.
Neb held back, lurking at the edge of the nightmare, until she started screaming.
“I’m here,” he told her, and she stopped running.
“Another dream,” she said, looking up to him.
He nodded. “It is. We’ll reach the Gate tomorrow afternoon.”
“We’re camped in the Prairie Sea,” she said. She looked smaller in this dream, as if a part of her had withered when Hanric died. More images flickered across the walls of the dream: Armies marching. Fires raging. Bodies in the river. “I’m afraid, Neb.”
He took her hand. “Me too.”
For a moment, they were children again. And then the birds starting shrieking and the noise of it drove Neb, stumbling, out of her dream and back into his own.
Sunrise on the Churning Wastes was a terrifying glory.
The light bent like dripping blood through mountains of wind-carved glass. The glass, Neb knew, had once boiled and cooked the surface of the Old World when Xhum Y’Zir’s Death Choirs went marching out into all of the cities of all nations of men. Overhead, stars pulsed around a blue-green setting moon.
Neb stood in the midst of the mountains and measured it against the only taste he’d had of the madness: Windwir. As terrifying as that had been, he could not imagine the storm of violence that had swept these barren wastelands into sand and glass and slag.
Brother Hebda-Neb’s father-put a hand upon his shoulder. “Men used to watch the sea and feel awe,” the dead man said. “I often thought about that when I came here.”
Neb looked at his father. He looked younger, healthier than the last time he’d seen him. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said.
Brother Hebda winked. “You will, Neb.”
They were on a dig and the workers were at it, only beneath their black digger’s robes were the sleek metal limbs of the mechoservitors, their eyes yellow and flapping like night moths when they blinked in the morning gloom. They whispered a prayer as they dug.
“None of this makes any kind of sense,” Neb said in a low voice. “It’s a dream,” his father reminded him. “Things don’t always make sense in dreams.” His face became serious. “More dark times ahead, Neb.”
Brother Hebda walked toward the hole they were digging and stood by it. “Watch out for Renard,” he said, and Neb couldn’t tell if it was a warning or an encouragement. He opened his mouth to ask and closed it when Brother Hebda jumped into the hole.
Neb woke up and rolled onto his back. It had been months since he’d seen Brother Hebda in his dreams. The last time had been in the camp at Windwir, when he’d been warned of the Marsher army and told that he would announce Petronus as Pope. He’d also told him that the old Pope would break his heart-and he had, by removing Neb from the Order before the trial, preventing him from exacting his vengeance on Sethbert when Petronus called for a volunteer executioner from among the Order. Neb had felt angry over that for weeks, but now, with months between him and that time, he understood Petronus’s intentions and grieved instead that the old man had chosen Neb’s deception and rejection over reasoned dialogue between friends. Or between a father and a son.
Watch out for Renard.
The words played out again and again, and finally, Neb knew that sleep would not return no matter how he wished it. He slipped out of the bedroll and pulled on his boots. He crawled out from the tent, shivering in the cold, and crouched beside it until his eyes adjusted to the dark. A low whistle of greeting from the watch drifted across the grove of old growth and the low tents hidden within it. Neb returned the whistle as he picked his way across the scattering of frozen snow that patchworked the ground. Amber lights flickered, and he suddenly remembered the night moths from his dream, the methodic rise and fall of pickaxes and shovels keeping time with the bellows and the gouts of steam from the bent backs, released into the predawn air through holes cut into the rough Androfrancine robes.
“Good morning, Isaak,” he said, keeping his voice low.
Isaak blinked again. “Good morning, Neb.” His metallic voice was reedy, nearly a wheeze.
Neb walked to where the metal man crouched beneath the shelter of a pine. “What are you ciphering?”
“I am running another full search of my memory scrolls for any reference to the term ‘Sanctorum Lux,’ ” he said. “I am also cross-referencing it against references to my creator, Arch-Engineer Charles.”
Neb squatted beside the mechoservitor. He’d spent many days in the library as a boy, his life largely defined by books until the day that Windwir’s Great Library burned. He’d not heard the term “Sanctorum Lux” before Aedric spoke it, but that did not surprise him-it was a vast library. But it did surprise him that Isaak had not heard it. The best they had done so far was to lay meaning to the words-old words, older than the Old World, from the earliest days of the Younger Gods.
“Sanctuary of Light,” he whispered. “What do you think it is?”
Isaak’s eyes fluttered, and his mouth-flap opened and closed a few times. He tilted his head. “If I were to freely speculate,” he said, “I would hypothesize that it was a secondary library developed and hidden by the Androfrancine Order.”
The words struck Neb, unexpected in their simple clarity, and he exhaled quickly, his breath nearly as white on the air as the steam trickling from Isaak’s exhaust grate. “A library?”
“Light,” Isaak continued, “is simply a metaphor in P’Andro Whym’s Gospels for the collected knowledge of humankind. A sanctuary is a sacred location regarded as safe or set apart.” The metal man whirred and clicked, his hands coming up to assist in the delivery of his message. “It is a reasonable assumption that the Androfrancines, who spent twenty centuries gathering and guarding this so-called light of knowledge, would have considered the risks associated with storing that knowledge in one public and well-known place. Certainly, if I can deduce those risks as a mere mechanical construction, their keenest minds could easily draw the same conclusion and prepare accordingly.”