Antiphon

during the day so that he could spend his nights here, watching.

So far, their penetration into the deeper waters of the Ghosting Crests had been uneventful. And while his children had finally seen the anomaly that their father was so utterly fixated upon, they still did not fully comprehend the depth of his obsession.

Not obsession, he told himself with a sigh as he scanned the waters off his bow. Love.

But even as he thought it, he knew it was ridiculous. Yet he felt the mark of it on him as real as the scars that Ria had given him. His heart raced when he stood here, waiting for his ghost to appear. His hands were clammy. His mind was filled with the image of her graceful movement in the water, and when he tossed in his cot and tried to sleep, it was the song that emanated from her that kept him awake. No matter where he went upon his ship, inevitably the sunset found him here. Waiting.

Because she draws me.

More importantly, he suspected that she was aware of her pull upon him and used it now to move him and what remained of his family southeast, farther into the Ghosting Crests than any Named Lander had sailed.

The stars throbbed to life above him as the sky blurred from purple to deep charcoal, and as he watched, the moon lifted itself into the sky-a sliver now but enough to light the water. As the day slipped past, the noise of the crew dissipated and the night noise of wave and clanking engine took over.

Here she comes, he told himself, and he felt it on his skin, in the tiny hairs within his ears, as her song started up beneath the water. A patch of ocean shimmered and undulated ahead, and he clung to the railing, leaning forward.

He watched as she moved through the water, tendrils of light trailing behind like hair. There was a grace about her that he’d never seen before, and once more, he felt his heart aching and felt that compulsion to join her.

I have become a foolish old man. And even as he thought it, he watched as she abruptly changed course and struck south. He raised his hand to the pilothouse behind him and pointed in the direction she raced, waiting for the ship to turn along with their guide. Slowly, he felt the list as the ship bore hard to starboard.

After an hour, she was back and changing course yet again, this time heading due east.

He motioned to the pilothouse again and heard the engines groaning as they increased power and turned the ship. He gripped the railing and let the wind catch hair he’d been too distracted to cut and a beard he’d been too unfocused to trim. Ahead, as the ocean around and ahead grew darker, he watched his ghost in the water.

The d’jin slowed enough for them to keep up, adjusting course here and there as needed, and Vlad Li Tam stood watch and counted the hours as they raced over a placid sea.

The sky was lightening when they finally slowed, and he watched as the blue-green lights swung in a wide circle ahead of them. Squinting ahead, he saw something vaguely outlined in the water, and he called it out for the watchman and pilot.

As they slowed and approached, the d’jin rolled and broke the surface, illuminating the small drifting object with the glowing tendrils of light.

It was a lifeboat.

Behind him, the ship went to third alarm and he heard his family scrambling. Before the flagship’s longboat slapped the waves, the d’jin had darted off to the southeast again, and Vlad knew that she would not be back until the next nightfall.

Sighing, he left the bow and moved to the port side where he could watch. He saw Baryk, bare chested and wearing silk sleeping pants, and approached.

“Your ghost has found us something,” the warpriest said.

Vlad Li Tam studied the water below, watching as his men, illuminated in the light of their lantern, threw their hooks and drew the drifting boat to their own. “Yes,” he answered, though his voice sounded more distant than he’d wanted it to. “She has.”

He heard excited voices carrying up and across the water, but he wasn’t able to pick out any of the words. He saw them scrambling into the boat and heard their gasps at what they found there.

Two men manned the oars of the lifeboat and steered it toward the flagship. The longboat followed after, and when they reached the lift, Vlad leaned over the railing. “What have you found?”

His fifty-first son looked up. “The boat bears the markings of the Kinshark.” Lying in the bottom of it, Vlad saw a vague shape that took form as the longboat approached with its lantern, and found himself gasping with surprise as well.

What have you brought us, my love? He blinked at the shape, uncertain of his eyes.

There, stretched out cruciform, lay a broken metal man in Androfrancine robes.

Rudolfo

A light snow fell in the northern reaches of the Ninefold Forest, and Rudolfo shrugged the flakes from where they gathered in his cloak. The morning air was still and heavy with the smell of wood smoke and pine. It was cold, too, carrying his breath away in clouds as he walked his woods in the quietest hour between night and dawn.

Behind him, the camp stirred to life as Lysias’s sergeants moved among the recruits with their pine switches, slapping buttocks and thighs as they went about motivating the men to a more eager wakefulness. Already, the Gypsy Scouts were up and loaded-as was Rudolfo-and this morning they would ride ahead of the battalion so that Rudolfo could see their discovery for himself.

Just days on the heels of Jin Li Tam and Jakob’s departure, his second captain, Philemus, had brought word of what his scouts had found after days of chasing the metal men. He’d been sipping a pear wine that was nearly too sweet for his palate and pushing his fork through a rice-and-venison dish that seemed flavorless when the officer was ushered into Rudolfo’s private dining room.

“We’ve found where they were running,” he’d said. And even in that moment, Rudolfo could see on the man’s face that he would be packing and riding out himself. The next day, under the cover of a training exercise with Lysias’s army, he and an elite squad had set out for the far northern reaches of his territories.

Normally, Rudolfo relished those times he spent away from the manor. He’d always equated it with freedom, but lately he’d found himself counting security as a higher value than liberty. More and more, his guarded manor and his Gypsy Scouts felt safer to him than the wide open expanse of the forest his forefathers had claimed for their people two millennia ago. And everywhere he went, he carried a knot in his stomach and the dull ache of tension behind his eyes.

Picking his way carefully across the new-fallen snow, he tried to find solace in the morning but found worry instead. True to her word, Ria had welcomed his family into her lands-her entire people had welcomed them, it seemed. And she’d also sent what fruit they’d harvested in their investigation. Scraps of intelligence, cut no doubt from the prisoner they’d taken, that pointed south to the coastal nations. The War for Windwir had begun that strain, and then the events last winter-the assassinations and the resulting Council of Kin-Clave-had further eroded their relationship with those nations. The Delta continued a kin-clave on paper, largely forced by Esarov and his compatriots there in the Governor’s Council. But it was becoming clear that the attack upon his family and his library was a well-orchestrated operation by allies now become enemies in the madness of these dark times. And he could see why these friends had become enemies. His family and people were the only ones to have profited from the desolation of Windwir, and the rise of the Machtvolk and their demonstrated kin-clave with the Gypsies surely pointed toward collusion. The clear evidence that it was all the product of a carefully crafted Tam intrigue, right down to the Y’Zirite resurgence with its gospels, shrines and evangelists, was not enough.

Closing his borders and raising the army would not be enough, he realized, and that truth frightened him.

He heard a low whistle behind him and turned. Philemus slipped from a darker patch of the forest. “The scouts are ready, General.”

Rudolfo sighed and forced his mind back to their present dilemma. Mechoservitors passing through his lands. and what his scouts had uncovered far to the north, at the foot of the Dragon’s Spine. “Very well,” he said, turning back to the camp. “Let’s ride.”

They rode out before the sun rose, their horses magicked for speed and strength, hooves muffled by the River