She laughed. “No, Vlad. Do you take us for monsters? Those below the age of reason will take the mark of House Y’Zir, just as we all have.” Here, she opened the top of her robe and revealed her breast to him. There, over her heart, he saw the cutting and knew it from some distant memory of a life before this island, this room, this bloodletting.
I am your Kin-healer, her voice echoed in his memory.
She continued. “You’ll take the mark, too, before it’s finished.” She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “Dear Vlad, we’ll cut the children and then we’ll send them away.”
His eyes moved toward her, and again he felt himself stirring to life. Where? He heard his voice croak the question.
She stroked his hair. “Someplace where they will learn a new way.”
An Old Way, he thought. Vlad Li Tam was back for just a moment. long enough to file that knowledge away.
Then, he hung limp in the harness. Strong hands held him up while strong fingers worked the buckles. The robed men lifted him and carried him the seventy-three steps back to his room, depositing him on the floor there.
Ria stepped over him as the door swung shut and the lock turned. She walked to the small dining table laden with exotic foods and sat down. He could not remember exactly when she had started dining in his room-the days had blurred into a scarlet haze. Vlad closed his eyes and tried to let the aromas from the table fill him, but they could not expunge the overriding odor of blood. He rocked back and forth there, curled up on the floor, and tried to find focus.
“I think tomorrow,” Ria said, “you will be ready for your first cutting.”
He felt the moan rising up within him and knew it for longing. If the blades are on me they will not be elsewhere. But he knew it was a false hope. He knew that his children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren would all take the knife sooner or later. Some to their death, others to take the mark of the Wizard Kings upon their hearts.
He heard the sound of wine being poured, of meat being sliced, of a plate being prepared. “The cooks have outdone themselves. Are you certain you won’t join me, Vlad?”
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt hunger. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten, though he knew he hadn’t held it down. The part of him that watched and waited, buried underneath the surface, knew that would have to change soon. He said nothing.
She ate slowly, making conversation as she did. “Today went very well, though I’m surprised. I thought the young ones would have more stamina than that.”
He closed his eyes against the wave of nausea that hit him. The smell of their blood was everywhere. And if she weren’t here, grounding him with her voice and presence, the sound of their screaming would chase him into some dark, hazy place within that he was never quite sure he’d come back from.
Again, he said nothing. She continued to eat. “Mal will return soon with more,” she said. “Our kin-raven scouts them even now.”
Finally, he found words, twisting in a way that he could look up to her from the floor and meet her eyes. “How many more?”
Her laughter was dark music. “All of them.”
All of them.
She continued. “Except the Great Mother and the Child of Promise, of course.” She looked at him, her fork poised halfway between plate and mouth. “But in the end, that broken kinship will be healed.”
Great Mother. Child of Promise. He wanted to ask but did not. Instead, he filed it away with the other scraps of knowledge.
She ate in silence after that, and when she finished, she stooped over him and kissed him on the forehead. “I will see you in the morning, Vlad. Get some rest. Try to eat. Tomorrow, I let your blood.”
He recoiled from her touch but did not have the strength to strike out despite the will. She frowned, straightened and went to the door. She tapped at it and waited for the men to let her out.
After she had gone, Vlad Li Tam returned. He stepped into himself slowly and gathered about him the bits of broken man as an old woman gathers a shawl around cold shoulders. He tested out his feet and his hands, he worked his mouth and rolled his eyes. Then, slowly, he crawled to his feet and went to the table. He passed the wine and food, taking instead a pitcher of water that was nearly too heavy to lift.
Returning to the floor, he slouched against the wall, within eyeshot of the door, and sipped the water from the pitcher, holding it with both hands.
Now, the soul-shattered father and grandfather lay cast aside like ill-fitting clothing. In its place was a cold river of a man flowing toward one purpose-to avenge himself upon his tormentors, upon the murderers of his family.
To do that, he had to escape. He was in no condition now to mount any kind of vengeance. He could barely walk. He’d given up hope some time ago of being able to rescue his family from the clutches of this Y’Zirite madness. At the pace they moved at, they would all be dead, or in the case of the younger children, marked and shipped away, before he could ever find the strength to do anything about it.
And he also knew that no one would come looking for him. Whatever remained of his family and iron armada would certainly have implemented emergency protocols and fled for a safe place to reassess the situation. Unless Ria spoke true; unless his first grandson even now prepared to capture the others as well.
It left Vlad Li Tam with nothing to do but hold on and bide his time. He would have vengeance for this. He would have it one hundredfold.
“Everyone has a weakness, Vlad,” his father had told him. “If they don’t,” he added, “you can create one within them if you are patient and crafty.”
He thought about his father a lot these days. It was a source of his hatred and fury. He found now, in these few moments of clarity he allowed himself, that many of his father’s words had been clues in this Whymer Maze.
My family is my weakness, Vlad Li Tam understood now. But more than that, he understood that it was a weakness his father had built within him, intending Vlad for this very day.
The depth of that betrayal, at first, had made him despondent. But now, it enraged him, and he exhilarated in the strength of that rage as it flooded him, driving out the fog and grief.
He thought again about the slender volume his First Grandson, Mal Li Tam, had shown him. Your own father betrays you.
But not just me, Vlad Li Tam realized. Behind his closed eyes, as the hot tears of anger coursed down over his cheeks, he saw the Desolation of Windwir and knew it for his father’s work.
He has betrayed us all.
Vlad Li Tam banked his anger and took another sip of the water.
Tomorrow, when those firm hands reached for him, Vlad Li Tam would be gone again. The broken, anguished animal would be there in his place. For now, he needed rest.
When he finally fell into fitful sleep, his dead children surrounded him, their mouths moving as they formed their last words beneath his watching eye and beneath the cutter’s knife.
Even in his dreams, their poetry made him weep.
Rudolfo
Rudolfo laid down the last page in Petronus’s packet and rubbed his eyes. He’d read what he could-certainly none of the notes from the former Pope had been intelligible, but the other papers had made perfect sense.
Gods, what have they done? As a general with firsthand knowledge of what Xhum Y’Zir’s spell was capable of, Rudolfo saw clearly that the Androfrancine maps and notations were the work of frightened strategists frantically reaching for some way to protect the New World.
Sethbert had taken but one mechoservitor and infused him with the power of that devastating spell. But the Androfrancines had intended to make a dozen such weapons and deploy them to key strategic points along the coastlines of the Named Lands.
There was only one sound reason to do such a thing: the fear of an invasion.
Still, it wasn’t much of a leap in logic for the mad Entrolusian Overseer to see a threat in this-these maps showed three of the metal spell-casters on his Delta.
Because the Delta was the path to Windwir.
Rudolfo shook his head and shuffled through the papers again. He stopped again at the authorization letter, saw Petronus’s signature and stamp there upon that dread parchment and sighed. Certainly, the old man could not have been the one to bring back the spell. Rudolfo found that impossible to believe.
And yet Vlad Li Tam’s life’s work had been making Rudolfo into a shepherd of the light-moving the library to the Ninefold Forest, set deeper north in a more secluded and strategic place. Another defensive move.
They meant to protect us. It was the only note he could read on any of the documents, and it was in a small, pinched script that he recognized instantly.