Neb blinked away the history and stood, grabbing up his knife belt and buckling it on. Aedric looked him over and adjusted the scarf of rank, turning the knot around to the inside of his arm. “You’ve commanded men during a time of war,” he said as he adjusted it. “This is the proper way to show that.”
Neb didn’t think of it as commanding men during war. He had commanded an army of gravediggers, doing his best to keep them alive and fed while the armies sallied out around them. He’d lost twenty men that winter to stray arrows and miscommunication and cold. Still, in the eyes of the scouts it was what it was. Neb was a veteran commander who felt like an orphaned boy most days. “Thank you, Captain,” he said, moving toward the door.
Aedric paused. “You may want to go easy on the firespice tonight. And if you intend to see more of your girl, you should be ready for an early muster.”
Neb’s puzzlement must’ve shown.
Aedric saw the surprise and continued. “We’ve received word from the Keeper’s Wall. Strange things afoot at the gate. We ride out with Rudolfo and Isaak in the morning.”
Neb felt the disappointment like a knife. Tomorrow was to be a holiday, and he’d planned to spend it with Winters as her schedule allowed. Still, he felt the curiosity as well. “What is happening at the wall?”
Aedric shook his head. “Tomorrow. I’ll brief you when we’re under way.” He grinned. “Meanwhile, make the most of your night, Neb.”
The large hand settled on his shoulder once more, and Neb suddenly remembered his father’s hand there. It seemed so long ago. Brother Hebda had been a fair, kind, large man who did more for his unsanctioned son than most Androfrancines. He’d even gotten Neb a grant to assist with a dig in the far east of the Old World. One morning they were loading the wagons, setting out along that same road-the Whymer Way-that led over the Keeper’s Wall at Fargoer’s Station and into the Churning Wastes beyond it. And by afternoon, Neb was alone in the world, watching the fire and lightning consume the only home and family he’d ever known.
He thought of Rudolfo, of Aedric, and last of Winters. I have a new family now. And somewhere ahead, he thought, a new home if Winters and the Marsh Kings before her dreamed true.
Neb forced a smile. “It will be a fine night,” he said. With a nod, Aedric walked to the door, and Neb followed after him.
He may not get his day with Winters but perhaps, he thought, he could have what remained of the night. The manor was filled with hidden passages-he’d used his knowledge of architecture and strategic building design to find most of them after stumbling across the first by accident. Maybe, when the party wound down, he would slip off to spend a few quiet hours with her before he left for the Keeper’s Gate.
Maybe.
Thoughts of it started him blushing all over again, and Neb found himself hoping that Aedric didn’t notice.
If he did, that First Captain of the Gypsy Scouts said nothing of it. Instead, Aedric laughed and clapped in time to the music from downstairs, improvising a shuffle-booted jig as he danced down the corridor toward the great, sweeping staircase.
Without prompting, Neb joined him in the dance and wondered what the night might bring him.
Petronus
Petronus looked out his cottage window before pushing another log onto the fire and returning to his crowded desk. He couldn’t quite place the feeling that kept him checking his window, but it was an uneasiness in his soul, the sense that a reckoning approached him.
I have earned a reckoning, he thought.
He was a fisherman’s son, but he had felt the call to the Androfrancines, and had joined the order to preserve and protect the light. He’d started out an acolyte like everyone else and had climbed the ranks to become their youngest Pope. Then, after a painfully short papacy, he’d left believing his life was becoming a lie. He faked his own assassination with the help of an eager successor and went back to his nets and his boat in the quiet waters of Caldus Bay. And the longer he was away, the more he was convinced that the Androfrancines’ backward dream no longer served the New World.
But then came the day he saw Windwir’s pyre in the northern skies. They’d brought back the spell of Xhum Y’Zir-despite his warnings-and it had undone them, reducing the world’s greatest city to a Desolation of ash and bone.
I have earned a reckoning.
He looked back to his desk. It was awash with paper. Every flat surface of his one-room shack was, too. Notes and maps and scraps of parchment.
At the center of it all, on his desk, lay the leather satchel Vlad Li Tam had given him on the day Petronus had executed Sethbert. With the same knife he’d used to gut ten thousand salmon, he’d cut Sethbert’s throat in front of them all in one final act that disqualified him as Pope and disbanded the Order. He had already invoked Papal Sanction to transfer the Order’s vast holdings and wealth into the care of the Ninefold Forest Houses. Rudolfo would rebuild the library and take guardianship of the light.
He reached into the open satchel and drew out the papers. He’d read them every day for the last seven months, and in the first weeks he’d read them over and over again, committing them to memory. He could recite them; and on good days, when his hands were steadier, he probably could’ve drawn the maps and illustrations they contained.
He studied them again now, starting with the first page.
By Order of Petronus, Holy See of the Androfrancine Order and King of Windwir.
His own name on the first form, authorizing research into the reproduction of the mechoservitors from Rufello’s Book of Specifications and the scattered, broken pieces of the Old World. And his own signature marked by the papal signet. This one didn’t bother him as much. He remembered seeing the head and torso and arm of that first model, remembered the sweltering heat of the massive boiler they’d required to power his basic functions. Still, it was the most impressive mechanical feat of the Old World that they’d been able to re-create until that moment. He remembered signing this order. It was the one beneath it that perplexed and enraged him.
It opened the same way.
By Order of Petronus, Holy See of the Androfrancine Order and King of Windwir.
But the unthinkable order that followed baffled him. Though it had nearly blinded him, Petronus had read every scrap of parchment he attached his signature and seal to over the course of his papacy. He had not signed this one. He would never have signed it.
But below, with the signet beside, his signature stared back on the order. It called for expediting the restoration of Xhum Y’Zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths in conjunction with the Office of Mechanical Sciences, ordering thirteen expeditions into the Churning Wastes under Gray Guard protection and magicked courier.
He’d not signed that, but someone had. And it had paved the way for all of the papers that followed. For two generations of metal men not intended merely to serve but also to be weapons, somehow immune to Y’Zir’s spell and thus perfect carriers for it. And for studies into the effects of limited recitals of the spell at strategic points in the Named Lands.
No wonder Sethbert acted, Petronus thought. He had thought the Order intended to attack him.
And here was the only note Tam left, the only explanation of his work to secure the light in Rudolfo’s wood and of his father’s work to build and break a Pope that the Order might be ended and the light might pass to safer hands.
They meant to protect us.
Somewhere, beyond the Named Lands, the Androfrancines feared something. Something powerful enough to turn them toward the weapon that Desolated the Old World and ushered in the Age of Laughing Madness. They of all people knew the power of that spell; they held the keys to the Keeper’s Gate and salvaged the Churning Wastes for scraps of light. They saw firsthand that handiwork two thousand years later, a wasteland of scrub and rock and fused glass and the dust of bones.