Yes. “I concur,” he said.
Then, he reached for his glass of chilled peach wine but found that his interest in it had passed. Instead, Rudolfo fixed his eyes upon his sleeping son and pondered the darkening paths that lay before them both.
Neb
Neb sat in the shadowed opening of a glass cave and watched the dark bird moving high across the sky. He’d seen more of them in the last day, and unlike the messenger birds, these seemed to fly with purpose and direction in this desolate place.
Renard had called them kin-raven, but he’d also told him that they were supposedly extinct. until approximately two years ago, when the first of their kind had migrated back to the Named Lands. Though they flew too high for him to tell, he wondered if it was the same species he used to see in Winters’s dreams.
Once the kin-raven passed, he went back to lacquering his thorn rifle and wetting the bulb for another night of guarding the woman.
She’d stirred but had not awakened since he pulled her from the rubble and washed her wounds. He’d mixed the herbs and powders as Renard had showed him, adding extra kalla for the pain she’d feel if the wolf venom took. Then, he wrapped her with bandages torn from a clean cotton shirt he’d found in her bag.
Last, he found the cave, twisted into a wall of glass, where they could wait out the worst of her wounds. He marked their territory, shaking drops from his phial of kin-wolf urine though he doubted it would work with the girl’s blood on the wind. Then, he rolled large rocks in front of the opening, leaving just enough room for him to squeeze through if he needed to. And so, he forced himself awake, chewing the root for focus.
He put away his rifle brush and lacquer pot, then crawled back to check on the woman again. She moaned in her sleep from time to time, twisting in the blanket he’d wrapped her in. Neb found himself trying hard not to look at her. Her chiseled features and the gentle curves of her pulled at his eyes. He forced them to her scars.
The cuttings were clearly intentional, forming symbols that he recognized from his years in the Franci orphanage in the shadow of the Androfrancine’s Great Library. It was the language of blood magick; the cuttings of House Y’Zir and its Wizard Kings. He could not read the runes from that former age, but he knew there was dark meaning behind them.
He crouched beside her now and placed a hand upon her forehead. She was cool and clammy to his touch and she stirred again, the blanket falling aside to reveal another curve. When he averted his eyes, they fell upon her pack.
It was small, made for traveling fast and light, not dissimilar to those the Gypsy Scouts wore. Apart from the clean shirt he’d shredded, he’d not gone through it other than to be certain there were no weapons. Her dark iron scout knives were safely tucked away, out of reach and out of sight.
He stared at the pack for a full minute, biting his lower lip. But in the end, he did what he thought Rudolfo or Renard would do; he reached for the pack and retreated with it to the mouth of the cave.
Neb eased the contents out onto the fused glass floor and used his hands to spread them out. He felt his cheeks grow warm when he saw her undergarments and toiletry kit.
He pushed them aside and picked up a compact, thick book. It was old, and he opened it, not recognizing the language within it. But he saw that it was marked with notes, including an inscription in the front. A few of the letters looked familiar but none registered. He set it aside and next looked to the tarnished silver flask. Holding it to his ear he shook it gently.
Half-empty. He hesitated, then unscrewed the top to sniff the contents. The rancid smell turned his stomach, and he glanced back to the woman again. His initial thought was that these were blood magicks-that perhaps she was one of these runners-but he thrust the thought aside. The blood magicks he’d seen lasted three to five days and, in the end, killed their users, consuming them from within before the effects had worn off. And apart from her wounds, the girl showed no signs of other discomfort.
Unless. The other runners had also seemed to defy this fate. What if this was a new blood magick?
Or, he thought, a new people? Certainly the cuttings suggested that.
Tucking the flask into his own pouch, he went to the next object that caught his attention. It was an oddly shaped sliver of black stone. At first he thought the shape held no meaning, but he quickly saw the wings and the beak. It was a crude carving, but clearly a kin-raven. He reached out for it, and when his finger touched it he felt warmth rolling through him, tingling along the bones of his arm, up into his shoulder. Even that brief second, a dozen images flooded him and he felt the nausea of sudden vertigo, as a sound like mighty rushing water swept him.
Neb jerked back his hand and blinked.
He put a finger on the carving, this time forcing himself to keep it there to a count of ten.
The images were there again, spinning about him, and he reached for one, though he wasn’t sure how he did it. And as he laid hold of it, it wasn’t so much that his own sense of space vanished as it was a new space falling into place around him. He pulled at it, drew upon it like a thread.
It was a darkened place that smelled old and closed off and cold. In the distance, water dripped. Neb did not know how he could pick out that single sound beneath the roar around him, and yet he did. He also heard the gentle wheeze of bellows behind him and turned around.
When the golden eyes fluttered open, his breath caught in his throat. “Nebios Homeseeker,” the metal man said, “you should not be here. How have you circumvented our dream tamp? I charge you by the light to leave quickly.” The eyes flickered on and off as the mechoservitor worked its shutters and looked from left to right. “We are being listened to.”
Neb opened his mouth to ask who was listening but suddenly found himself standing in the courtyard of the Franci orphanage. Brother Hebda stood before him, gaunt and hollow-eyed, now these two years dead. “Neb?”
There was surprise in his voice.
“Brother Hebda?” Certainly, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen his father since Windwir’s fall. Hebda had warned him that the Marsh King rode south back in the gravediggers’ camp in what remained of Windwir, and he’d also told the boy that he would proclaim Petronus Pope and King and that eventually Petronus would break his heart. Both had come true. Still, how was it possible that the small black carving could do this?
Brother Hebda’s face paled even as it began to fade along with the crisp blue winter skyline of the great city of Windwir. “Runners in the Wastes,” his father said. “Beware of them, Son. I fear they-”
Then, Neb fell out of the scene and into the roaring once again. Spinning, he found himself at the center of a Whymer Maze beneath a graying sky. There, upon a marble bench, a girl sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap. There were evergreen wreaths upon a grave there, and he remembered this place very well. He’d stood here what seemed so long ago and kissed Winters good-bye after Hanric’s funereal rites.
The girl wore a plain dress, and her prettiness made his heart hurt. Her long hair was held back from her face by wooden combs, and a light dusting of freckles speckled the bridge of her nose. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. He knew her, though he’d never seen her without the mud and ash of her people’s faith. “Winters?”
She looked up. “Nebios? How-?”
And he was gone again, falling away to land upon a jagged sea of razor-edged glass. “He’s wandering in the aether,” a woman’s voice said. “Awake and casting.”
“Yes,” another said from the eastern end of D’Anjite’s Bridge.
Then a third spoke, and Neb saw the locked well she camped near. The very place he’d found the silver crescent. And this time, he saw the woman who spoke. Her close-cropped hair was blonde, and the cuttings upon her flesh were similar to those upon the woman he watched over.