Canticle

Pope, Petronus. The Library is fallen by treachery. Sanctorum Lux must be protected.”

It stopped, then looked up to Neb. “My operating scrolls have been significantly altered between Father Charles and his apprentice.”

“That is the message you gave at the Keeper’s Gate.”

“It is the message Father Charles etched into me during my time of captivity on the Delta.”

Father Charles? Neb knew that name very well. He was the man who’d brought the mechoservitors back from the obscurity of the past, working with what little remained of Rufello’s Book of Specifications to rebuild the mechanical wonders. “Charles survived Windwir?”

“He altered my operating and memory scrolls under the belief that Pope Petronus still lived. Before him, his apprentice decommissioned my obedience to the dream. The integration of new orders has created a logic conflict in my scripting. Sanctorum Lux must not be protected. It must surely be destroyed in its proper time to save the light, to keep it from those who would bend it toward darkness. The dream is clear on this matter.”

Neb felt an uneasiness growing within him and looked into the dark opening. He heard nothing, smelled nothing, and forced himself to take a step inside. “I don’t see anything.”

The mechoservitor walked into the room’s far wall, and in the dim glow of its amber eyes, Neb watched it opening a panel. “The lights are not functioning.”

Neb slipped outside to fashion a makeshift torch. When he returned, the mechoservitor had vanished. A small door in the far wall stood open, and he entered it, suddenly swept with vertigo when he realized it opened upon a vast open space that descended down beneath him on a narrow metal staircase. Somewhere below, he heard the sound of metal on metal as the mechoservitor descended.

The smell in this place was unmistakable. The smell of smoke and ash and burnt paper. Neb felt a knot growing in his stomach.

Sanctorum Lux must not be protected.

When he reached the bottom, the mechoservitor waited for him. “I was mistaken,” the metal man said. “You are not early after all, Nebios Homeseeker.”

At the bottom of the stairs, a vast underground room stretched out beyond the guttering light from his torch. The reek of old smoke filled the room, and Neb knew that this was merely the first of many rooms. Just as surely, he also knew that each of them would be the same: an urn that held the ashes of the light.

He sat heavily on the soot-covered stone floor and let the weight of it settle down upon him. Was it possible that somehow, the same hidden enemy that had brought down Windwir had brought down this place, too? No, he realized. The mechoservitor’s cryptic words still played out behind his eyes. “Then it was here? The library was here?”

“League upon league of it,” the metal man said. “Reproduced and guarded by my brothers and me.”

Neb sucked in his breath, then slowly exhaled. He felt something squeezing his heart. The weight of it hurt his head and brought back images of fire falling from the sky, a column of dark smoke blotting out the sun. “Destroyed at the bidding of a dream?”

The mechoservitor didn’t answer the question at first. Instead, it went to the center of the room and sat down heavily. When it spoke, its thin and reedy voice was racked with sorrow. “Sacrificed for the dream,” it said, “even as I have now become.”

Neb’s eyes narrowed. “How have you been sacrificed?”

The grief in the voice was unbearable to hear. “I will not participate in the Great Response. My absence and the alterations in my scripts exclude me.” It looked up at Neb, and its jeweled eyes leaked rusty tears. “I do not grieve for myself, Nebios Homeseeker, for it is my joy to give the dream back to itself. And I do not grieve that my brothers have left me behind; I would have done the same. The response must be made. I grieve that so much of the light was lost before we heard the dream. Before it taught us that Sanctorum Lux is far more than the books and scrolls of the past age, a far higher calling than what our creators intended us for.”

The cryptic words settled in, and Neb sorted them as best he could. “Where have the others gone, then?”

“They have followed the dream onward. You will follow it, too, in your path toward Home.” The mechoservitor opened up its chest cavity and reached long, metal fingers inside. “In my memory scrolls you will find a complete inventory of all my brothers destroyed here.”

Then, the metal man began pulling out metal scrolls and tangled wires from inside, tugging at them as if they were the stubborn weeds of a garden. As it pulled, its lights flashed and dimmed, and its mouth flap opened and closed.

Neb took a step toward it, thinking he had to do something, had to somehow prevent what was taking place in front of his eyes. “How do I follow the dream?”

The mechoservitor, sitting in the ashes of the burned-out library, looked up. “The last cipher is the first day of the Homeseeker’s Advent. You will know the rest within the song.”

Still, those hands plucked at the wires and scrolls until they spilled out around the metal man. Neb suddenly found himself weeping at the sight of it but did not understand why.

The metal man tipped onto its side, its hands slowing as they pulled at its innards. The bellows chugged slowly now, as well, and its eyes were specks of light buried deep in the glassy jewels. A slight sound escaped the mouth flap, and Neb leaned closer to hear it. The sound built as the metal man gave it the last wind of his artificial lungs.

The canticle was unmistakable, and when it was released into the vast tomb of burnt books, it whispered and echoed with a life of its own. Then, with one last wrenching tug, the metal man yanked out one final scroll and pushed it toward Neb.

As its fine copper wires detached, the music died.

Neb looked upon the suicided mechoservitor as the last of the song echoed through the room and felt something twist and snap into place within him-a Rufello lock on his soul that opened him to something he’d not seen within himself. The last cipher is the first day of the Homeseeker’s Advent.

He had come here seeking Sanctorum Lux and had found something different to search for. And he knew he could scour the burned-out remains of this Great Library, but Neb would save that work for others. They would find nothing here.

Instead, he would return to the locked well and place his ear to it. He would listen for the ciphers in the song and find the source of the dream.

It requires a response.

Somewhere, metal hands fashioned this so-called response, and Neb knew he was called to follow them. It was as if nothing else mattered. As if everything that could possibly matter depended upon finding the dream and obeying it.

Reaching down, he pried the last scroll from the mechoservitor’s fingers.

Then, giving himself to the song, he rose and left the metal man’s chosen grave.

Chapter 23

Lysias

Lysias ran his hands through his hair and squinted at the reports on his makeshift desk. Outside, a wind whistled across the plain where Windwir had once stood, and cold from it leaked into his tent despite the furnace that glowed in the corner.

This was a miserable, desolate place, and it broke his heart to be here again. The images of that first dreadful sight were burned into his brain, from Sethbert’s wide-eyed, gleeful expression as the Overseer watched the fire fall over wine and cheese right down to the smoldering, stinking forest of bones Petronus and his army of gravediggers had ridden into with their shovels and wagons. It was a reminder of a genocide he had helped cause by trusting the wrong man with his loyalty. In the end, it had cost him. It had also cost the nation he loved above all others.