Antiphon

Isaak said as he gazed upon the moon. And there was such sacredness, such conviction in Isaak’s voice that Rudolfo could not help but join his friend in staring at the sky. Above them, that same wind brought back the clouds, shrouding what little light they had as the rain once more began to fall.

Chapter 10

Petronus

Geoffrus’s men found the shallow grave just west of D’Anjite’s Bridge, and only Petronus’s insistence kept them from skinning the corpse they found there.

The sun was low and heavy with morning when he saw their quiet commotion in the camp, and he’d known instantly that something was afoot. Whistling for Grymlis and the first lieutenant of Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts, Petronus had fetched his horse and followed the ragged band of Waste runners to their newest find.

They’d already exhumed the body.

Now, they stood at a distance, muttering and whispering, while Petronus and his men studied it.

It was a woman, her hair shorn and her yellow-gray skin scarred in a way that dropped ice into Petronus’s stomach. He knew those markings, had seen them all too recently upon the skin of his childhood friend, Vlad Li Tam. She lay stretched out, her hands folded upon her chest and her eyes closed, dressed in a loose-fitting tunic and trousers of unfamiliar cut, wearing well-worn low boots made for running. Around her lay the scattered rocks that had covered her shallow grave. And though she’d been dead for some time, her body looked more asleep than not.

Grymlis bent over her while Petronus hung back. “There’s no decomposition,” he said. His large hands moved her head, revealing the deep bruising around her throat. “And her neck has been broken.” He scowled. “It’s a clean break. Something strong and fast.”

Petronus glanced back to Geoffrus and his men. “Did you find anything else?”

Geoffrus shook his head. “Nothing, Luxpadre. But my men wish to assert to you the contractual clause regarding the fair division of found objects among our party as-”

Petronus cut him off with a stare to match the hardness of his words. “This is a woman, Geoffrus. Not a found object. You’ll not desecrate her corpse.”

For the briefest instant, Petronus saw rage on the man’s face, and he noted the line of the man’s jaw. He could do me harm, he realized. And then, the rage was gone, replaced by calm acceptance. “As you direct, Luxpadre, so I serve.”

He looked back to the woman. She was young-perhaps the tail end of her twenties. And even before he ordered it, he knew what he would find. The cuttings on her face and arms, the symbols etched into her, told him exactly what he needed to know. “Open her shirt,” he said.

Grymlis looked up, surprised, and Petronus watched the light spark in his eyes. He nodded, swallowed, then forced her arms from her chest. Then, he used his scout knife to cut the fabric open.

Petronus’s hand moved to his own chest, fingers tracing the skin of his own raised scar through the fabric of his robe. There, just to the left of center, cut into her skin between her breasts, was the mark of Y’Zir. And surrounding it, swirling in line upon line of symbols, was a lattice of scars he could not read, though he caught their meaning well enough.

Grymlis slowly rose and stepped back. “What next, Father?”

Petronus looked to the sun. The day was young, and though they’d slowed their reckless pace somewhat, they had much ground to cover.

Runners in the waste, the man Hebda had said. This, he knew, must be one of them. But something had intercepted her, snapped her neck like dry wood and buried her here in the Wastes, even placing a white stone at her head in the custom of the Androfrancine funeral rites. The lack of decomposition made it impossible to know how long ago, but he suspected it had not been more than days.

He turned to Edrys, the first lieutenant of the scouts that rode with them. “Have the scouts walk the surrounding half league for anything they can find.” He gave Geoffrus another firm stare. “You pull back your men, Geoffrus.”

The Waste runner did not look at Petronus; his eyes never left the naked chest of the girl, and it was not the scar that caught his eye, not by the way he licked his lips. Disgusted, Petronus raised his voice. “Geoffrus,” he said. “Pull back your men. We ride in two hours.”

Startled, the Waste runner looked away from the girl and with a word to his ragged band, slunk away with them.

When only Grymlis remained, Petronus sighed.

“That one will be trouble before we’re done,” the Gray Guard captain said in a low voice.

He nodded. “He will; but for now, we need him.”

“Still, he and his would cut our throats in our sleep. And if the rumors in Fargoer’s Station have any truth, he’d make a tasty stew of us and our horses.”

Petronus offered a grim smile. “You’ll not let it come to that, I’d wager.”

“Aye, Father,” Grymlis said. “I’ll not. My eye is on him.” The old soldier nodded toward the body. “What do you make of her?”

“She’s an Y’Zirite.” Petronus looked at her, her arms stretched out and her chest bared, the purple bruising of her neck offsetting the pale Whymer Maze of etchings in her flesh. That one mark, central and larger than the rest, still pulled at his eye, and he felt the burning in his own bosom from the scar Ria had cut into him when he lay dead upon the floor of that tent on Windwir’s desolate plain. “But not of a variety I’ve seen before.”

“And these are the runners this mysterious behaviorist was warning us about? The ones looking for the boy?”

Petronus nodded, remembering Hebda’s words. “And looking for the missing mechoservitors.”

Grymlis studied the body, and Petronus followed his eyes. “She was a tough one by the looks of her, but no match for whatever found her. And likely not much of a match for our men.”

Still, Petronus knew there must be more to this than what lay before their eyes. And as if in answer, a low whistle reached his ears from the other side of a low rise of bent and mounded glass.

They joined Edrys where he crouched with his scout. “It happened here,” the lieutenant said, pointing with his knife to the bare patch of ground. “She was carried to the place they buried her.”

Petronus stared at the ground, barely able to see the marks so obvious to the Gypsy’s trained eyes. “They?”

Edrys nodded. “There were three-maybe four of them-not counting the girl.” He pointed to another nearby outcropping, blue and yellow and green, with wind-sharpened ridges. “They waited here and took her quickly by ambush, I suspect, without much fight.” He stood and stepped carefully out of the clearing. “She ran from the east. Possibly in pursuit. Her stride indicates magicks of some kind were employed.”

Yes, Petronus thought, remembering that night so long ago in his shack, when the blood-magicked assassin had attacked him and sent him into Ria’s trap there on the Entrolusian Delta. The trap that had laid him out dead for his sins and brought him back in some twisted mercy he still could not comprehend, bending him into a miracle to prove their abominable gospel.

Grymlis must’ve been thinking in the same direction. “If she were under blood magicks, even a half-squad would be hard pressed to take her so easily-let alone four men.”

Edrys stood. “Not men,” he said as he looked to Petronus, and the realization dropped into his awareness like a rock in a well. He followed the scout’s knife tip and saw the clear outline of a footprint.

“The mechoservitors killed her,” he said, and his voice sounded flat in his ears. “The ones we saw moving west toward the Wall.”

Edrys nodded. “It appears that way.”

“Gods,” Grymlis muttered.

Petronus inwardly cursed the broken skies of this place that kept the birds from finding their way. Then, he cursed their already small numbers and gave his orders anyway. “This,” he said, “is something new that we cannot overlook. Magick a runner and send him for the Wall. And gather the party-we ride immediately.”