The bird fluttered to its feet. Its small beak opened, and the tinny voice of a faraway mechoservitor echoed into the workroom. “Addressee,” it said, “Mechoservitor Three, Ninefold Forest Houses, Seventh Forest Manor, Library.”
Charles looked to Isaak. “I am Mechoservitor Three, also called Isaak,” the metal man said in a quiet voice. “Chief Officer of the Forest Library.”
The tiny bird twitched slightly in his cupped hand, and when the stream of numbers hissed out they were too fast for Charles to identify them. Their pitch and tone warbled, and the old arch-engineer was impressed with what that told him. Numeric code with inflection markers to show emphasis and vary definition. When he was younger, if he’d had the luxury of months, he might’ve parsed out the code with a forest of paper and an ocean of ink. And yet, he watched Isaak’s flashing eyes and saw his fingers spasm as he deciphered the code as it was given.
It was a mighty thing, Charles decided, to watch something he had made with his own two hands do something in seconds that he would need most of a season to accomplish.
Isaak looked to the bird and then to Charles, his mouth flap opening and closing as if he meant to say something.
Then, the metal man snatched the moon sparrow from Charles’s fingers and fled. In his haste, he tipped over a chair and forgot to close the door behind him. All the while, he whispered to the bird, cupping it near his mouth.
Charles leapt to his feet and ran into the hall, his heart hammering in his temples. The last mechanical he’d seen move this fast was the one he’d scripted to escape from Erlund and bear his message to the Order. Both times, he tasted fear at the daunting machinery he had constructed. “Stop him,” he cried.
But before anyone could react, Isaak had thrown open the doors and flung his silver messenger into the sky.
Then, Isaak turned to Charles, bellows chugging with grief and surprise.
“I’m sorry, Father,” his metal child said.
Neb
Neb ran though the rest of the day and long into the night before he made camp to give his body at least a few hours of sleep away from the black root that fueled it. As he ran beneath the moon, he heard the crescent’s song increase in volume, and he bent his mind to that cipher. As he slept beneath that same moon, he cradled the sliver of silver to his ear to dream music and numbers and light.
At one point, in his deepest dreaming, he thought he heard his father’s voice calling to him beneath the melody of the canticle. He stirred, cast about for some memory of Winters with her long, dirty brown hair, her muddy face with its big brown eyes. But when he found nothing, he let the song enfold him and carry him back down into sleep.
By noon on his second day alone, he skirted the ruins of Y’leris, a scattering of mounded wreckage and glass that had melted and then cooled in twisted, razor-edged hills.
He would have kept south if it weren’t for the commotion.
At first, he thought it might be kin-wolves hunting, but that made no sense. They hunted only at night and slept by day unless something disturbed them. Renard had shown him-very carefully-how to look for the spoor and avoid the dens of these fiercely territorial predators of the Churning Wastes. And with the sun at its highest point and the sky ribboned with waves of heat, he knew they could not be hunting.
He stood at the edge of the ruins and listened to the howls and snarls warble through the glass-and-steel Whymer Maze. He hefted his thorn rifle and felt the bulb for freshness. He frowned at what his fingers felt and quickly wet a small cotton wad with water, then pushed it up into the bottom of the thorn bulb. Then he dug into his pouch to find one of the vials of kin-wolf urine he and Renard had traded for last month.
Their snarls intensified, and one kin-wolf yelped.
What are they up to? He counted four distinct wolves. And they were perhaps a league or two into the heart of the city. Neb tried to shake off his curiosity, bending his mind to the south, where the shell of Sanctorum Lux and Rudolfo’s expedition of Gypsy Scouts awaited.
But the girl’s scream, blood-chilling and long, clinched his decision. Neb swallowed the bitter root juice, raised his thorn rifle, and ran into the ruins toward the sound.
His feet moved easily over the debris and scattered stones. Overhead, the sun beat down; and within the city, the varied colors of twisted glass threw a rainbow of light against the shadows, lending it an unearthly quality. Even as he increased his speed, Neb’s nostrils flared and his eyes moved over the ground ahead of him, looking for sign. Still, he didn’t need it. The noise of the commotion deeper in the city was enough to guide him true.
When he came upon the makeshift camp, strong with the scent of kin-wolf urine, he stopped and drew his vial. It took only a few drops, but once this new aroma found the wind, it proclaimed a rival wolf laying claim to this marked territory. He sprinkled the drops and moved forward slowly.
The camp was in shambles. The blanket was shredded, the small cooking pot overturned and the remnants of a smallish fire scattered. Quickly, his eyes took in what they’d been trained to take in. A sling lay discarded amid a scattering of silver bullets, and a knife belt, its sheaths empty, lay near a pair of small boots made from the skin of some kind of lizard or snake.
No time to linger here. Neb skirted the camp, the snarls louder just to the west of him. As he drew closer, he also heard the ragged rasp of labored breathing.
Now, he moved slowly, the rifle up and ready. A hot wind picked up behind him. It would carry his scent forward to the pack, but this didn’t alarm him much. It would also bear the markings of the white kin-wolf.
There were four of them-one male, two females and a pup. They circled a low mound of rubble, growling and snapping at it. Beneath the rubble, Neb saw occasional flashes of light as a knife blade darted out. Just as the kin-wolves stopped and looked in the direction of the breeze, Neb raised his thorn rifle and sighted in on the largest of them. He flexed the bulb and heard the slight cough as the needle-sized thorn launched from the long lacquered tube to bury itself in the right shoulder of the male kin-wolf. He squeezed again and put another in its side as its yelp became a snarl and the wolf launched himself at Neb.
Fire and flee. Renard’s words from months of hunting the Wastes came back now, and Neb embraced them. The snarl of the wolves and the sudden smell of them, heavy and sour, brought the taste of copper to his mouth and threatened his balance. Still, he moved as quickly as the root would allow him, all the while counting the seconds. Spinning, he fired another thorn at one of the females now also in pursuit, but the shot went wide and the thorn clattered off a bent wave of purple glass.
He saw a mound ahead and gathered speed to leap for it, glancing quickly over his shoulder. Behind him, the male was already faltering as the thorn’s sap worked its way quickly into his bloodstream. And only one of the females pursued; the other stayed near the pup and cornered prey.
Neb leaped to a round boulder of black glass, then scrambled onto the mound of rusted steel and spun around. The female was close behind him. Firing blindly, he put three thorns into her face and breast as she pounced for him. Behind her, the male had collapsed into a whimpering, twitching pile of matted fur.
Yelping, she scrambled over the glass, then onto the mound itself, her teeth bared. Neb smelled the carrion on her breath. Kicking out with one booted foot, he discarded the rifle and drew a single scout knife from his belt. He felt his hands slick with sweat, and though the black root increased his strength and stamina, he could hear his own ragged breathing as it reverberated through the desolate city.