The broken man had read him several pages, then met his eyes briefly. The rage and anguish there nearly matched what Lysias felt as he heard the words.
Now, he lifted the knife and opened the pouch. He’d not been under the scout magicks since his days in the Academy, but he remembered well how it felt. He threw the powders at his shoulders and his feet, then licked the bitterness from the palm of his hand, bracing himself for what was to come. His stomach lurched, and he vomited onto the floor of his tent.
Everything bent around him, and the world moved beneath his feet. The sounds of the camp outside grew to a roar, and his own beating heart kept time like a marching drum.
He sucked in his breath and felt the strength moving through him.
Setting off at a run, he took the course he’d walked out carefully earlier that afternoon when he’d decided what he must do. There was only one answer, though after he gave it there would be no turning back.
Still, he would take this right path.
Ignatio’s tent was guarded lightly, but not by soldiers. The spymaster used his own men for that, and Lysias did not mind dispatching them. Before their bodies stilled, his hand was upon Ignatio’s mouth and his blade was at his throat.
“I know who you are and what you’ve done,” he whispered into the struggling man’s ear.
He called up Vlad Li Tam’s voice now, reading from the book. About the cult in the north and Tam agents planted within the Order, about Y’Zirites in high places. About the daughter of an Entrolusian general who was to be widowed and bereft of her child in order to nursemaid another. About a blood bargain made to spare that Gypsy Prince’s life and prepare them all for the advent of a Crimson Empress. As he remembered, he felt the rage, and in that rage, he found resolve.
“I know what you’ve done, Ignatio,” he said again, “and you pay for it tonight.”
Ignatio bucked against his grip, and Lysias used his own body weight to keep the man pinned. He pricked the knife against the skin and waited for the kallacaine to take effect. He held the spymaster tightly as his struggles slowed, and then just as he went slack, Lysias reached for the pouch of scout magicks and tipped the remainder of the powders into Ignatio’s open mouth.
As he faded from sight, Lysias lifted the paralyzed man onto his shoulder and staggered out into the snow.
He moved carefully through the camp, staying close to the shadows and rehearsing his petition to Rudolfo. After tonight, he was finished on the Delta. He would hope for mercy from both the Gypsy King and his own daughter.
And he would hope that tonight’s work would redeem him in his own eyes, too.
He reached the river quickly and laid Ignatio down in its shallows. He placed him on his back and drew close enough to the spymaster that he could just barely see one wide and frightened eye close to his own. “You killed my daughter’s child, you blood-loving shite,” he said in a low and matter-of-fact voice.
After, he tipped the man over onto his face in the water and stood over him. He placed a boot upon the back of Ignatio’s head and pushed him firmly to the bottom of the shallows.
He stood silent for a time, holding him there, until he was certain of his work.
Then Lysias pushed the body into the current and turned back for the Gypsy Camp.
Vlad Li Tam
Vlad Li Tam leaned on his shovel and tried not to look at the canvas-wrapped body. Still, eyes took him there against his will and then filled with tears-also against his will. The sun rose east of them, turning the distant Keeper’s Wall purple and pink.
They’d sailed with her in the Kinshark specifically for this, but he’d wanted to wait until sunrise. So he’d visited his new grandson and then slept, tossing and turning against the noise of his dreams. Then, he’d arisen to wake Baryk, and they’d carried her and their tools north of the camp to bury her away from all but the eye of Rudolfo’s magicked scouts.
Later, he would speak with the Gypsy King, though a part of him dreaded it after two weeks of avoiding Rudolfo’s watchful eye.
He cleared as much dirt as he could from the hole he’d started. Across from him, Baryk waited with the pickaxe ready. The others had offered to help, but he and Baryk had refused them. Instead, the bereaved husband and father worked together to carve out a grave for Rae Li Tam here among the dead of a city and a way of life that were no more.
It was the only proper choice that they work together, even as they had sat with her to watch her slowly die, still wrapped in the blood magicks that forced them to see her only in memory.
Even at the end, when the pain kept her weeping, she’d given herself completely to the work of finding a cure for her nephew and had died while Baryk napped beside her, an open book upon her invisible chest.
Vlad Li Tam felt the grief stabbing at him and looked up, nodding to Baryk. The gray-haired warpriest swung the pick down, breaking up the frozen ground for Vlad’s shovel.
Again, he tried not to look to her, stitched there in the canvas, and he failed. I remember your first steps, he told her in the deeper places he rarely visited. And your first words. He remembered her last words, too, though he’d not known at the time that they were such.
He’d sat beside her that last night before she died, and she offered no poetry, no celebration of her love. Instead, she squeezed his hand. “Grow your pain into an army,” she told him.
And he knew that he would. Later this morning, he would meet with Rudolfo and he would petition him to take their scarred children and care for them. He would show him the volume-a secret history of the Named Lands that even he had not known about. One in which House Li Tam cultivated an Y’Zirite resurgence in the Marshlands, quietly seeding it with the promised fall of Windwir until, by treachery and intrigue, they toppled that great city.
A resurgence that brought back blood magicks and had cast a great spell of power made from his anguish and from the blood of his children and grandchildren, such that it could heal the baby and raise Petronus from the dead-more miracles that pointed to a dark and rising gospel in their midst.
He would not have believed it if he had not read it coded in the book.
He’d believed at first, mistakenly, that perhaps they’d engineered the cult themselves simply to destroy Windwir. But deeper than that was the matter of faith. His father actually believed the so-called Y’Zirite Gospel. The volume was riddled with references to it. As much a study of scripture as a strategy for bringing out their present circumstances. But why?
To establish the throne of the Crimson Empress.
No, he thought, it could not be faith alone, some blind adherence in mysticism. He could not see his father in that light. There had to be a prime mover beyond him that he was in service to. And it had to be tangible and rational. Whatever the truth might be, the Crimson Empress was real.
Somewhere, someone played Queen’s War with the Named Lands, and his First Grandson and this kin-healing Machtvolk Queen were but pieces in a greater contest. And Vlad Li Tam would find his actual opponents and repay them.
It did not matter if the blood of his family saved his grandson or saved the very world. They who called for it and they who took it would pay for that taking.
So he would tell Rudolfo what he knew. And then he would ask him for money. And with that money, he would outfit what remained of his iron armada and go back to that island, though the thought of it broke his heart. Weeping, he would take it apart stone by stone and learn what he could from it.
He would grow his pain into an army, and while he did, he would learn his foe as well as he could. He would patrol the waters to the south, keeping an eye out for schooners of unfamiliar line and trim, made from a dark wood unfamiliar to the New World’s first family of shipbuilders. He would do all of this, and he would watch the water for ghosts while he did so.