Antiphon

shared. “And after we find the Abomination’s hand servants, we’ll come and find you as well, digger.”

“Hold fast, Nebios,” his father told him.

And then he, too, spun away.

“Hold fast,” the woman said, repeating his father’s words, “and let me hurt you more, Abomination.”

Then, the blade was no longer on him. And neither was the token. He lay still, certain that any moment both would be back to spin him into a pain-frenzied, stomach-lurching dervish. When it didn’t happen, he risked opening his eyes.

The sun was high and the sky spread out over him, a canopy of fierce blue that stretched beyond his peripheral vision. A breeze moved over him like hot breath on his cuts.

These were the times he tried to sleep, though he had no idea how much time passed between cuttings and how much sleep he actually found. At first, he’d used that time to try to ascertain something about the women who held him. But he’d given up on that some time ago now. The rest seemed more useful to him-it gave his mind the focus he needed, despite the pain, to keep his mind away from the one place they wished him to take them.

And it was working. But it took everything inside of him.

Still, he realized, each hour under the knife, it grew harder and harder.

He heard low voices talking nearby in an unfamiliar tongue, and then, a cool hand was on his arm, quickly pressing words he could not understand into his skin. He turned his head and saw the thirty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam gazing down upon him. For the briefest moment, he saw concern in her eyes. Then, all emotion vanished from them.

“You will show us what we’re looking for eventually, Abomination,” she said in a flat voice. Then, she leaned closer, her mouth so close to his ear that none could hear but him. “It will not be long, Nebios. I swear it to you.”

When she left, he fell into a light, dreamless sleep. He drifted there, feeling the heat gradually leaking out of his wounds and momentarily forgetting the dull ache of the rocky ground that bit into his back. He’d just reached a moment of oblivious peace when he was jarred awake by the sounds of pandemonium.

He opened his eyes, suddenly alert, but could see nothing but a twilight sky and its tentative moon. Still, he instantly placed the snarling and howling of kin-wolves mixed with the sounds of battle nearby.

Twisting his body, he pulled at the ropes that held him, but the stakes were driven too deep. He felt a light breeze, and a strong hand clamped down suddenly over his mouth. A strong arm snaked across his chest to hold him still.

Neb felt an instant of panic when he could not see the figure that now kept him from speaking or struggling. He felt the hot breath of a mouth against his ear and heard the muffled but familiar voice.

“I followed them to you,” Renard whispered. “You’ve been impossible to get close to until now.”

Neb stifled a sob at the sound of the Waste guide’s voice and tried not to cry. Relief flooded him, and he felt his body trembling from it.

Renard’s hand stayed firm over his mouth. “Listen well, lad,” he said. “They’ll not kill you until they have what they want from you. I’m no match for them on my own, and I’m not sure the wolf trick will work more than once. Stay alive. I will be back for you.” He paused, and Neb felt another hand giving a reassuring squeeze to his shoulder. “I will be back for you,” Renard said again.

The hand loosened over his mouth, and Neb felt terror racing through him.

Don’t leave me.

He wanted to shout the words, to shriek them, but instead, he swallowed against the fear. He’d watched a small number of blood-magicked scouts cut easily through a room of armed men at Rudolfo’s Firstborn Feast. He quickly ciphered the odds and knew that Renard-a far more savvy scout and soldier than Neb-was right. He’d most likely used the urine of a female kin-wolf in heat to draw down a handful of males, but they would be no match for the four women who held him. Renard would not fare much better on his own.

Petronus rides for you. Once more, his father had spoken from his grave in Windwir. As the hand left his mouth and the arm lifted from his chest, Neb swallowed and formed words that he hoped Renard could hear within the raw rasp that his voice had become from days of screaming. “Petronus rides for me,” he croaked.

If Renard heard, he did not answer. Already, there was yelping and yowling as the defeated wolves realized their mistake and fled the knives of Neb’s captors.

Neb tried to will the trembling from his body, tried to take hold of the sobs that threatened him with a storm of tears.

He failed, but when he wept now, it was from the sure knowledge that he wasn’t alone. He simply had to hang on, to keep averting his inner eye and inner ear from the mechoservitors at their work and the song that compelled them.

Neb closed his eyes again, and the next time he awoke, it was beneath the knife.

But this time, Nebios Homeseeker did not scream.

Charles

They rode the last two leagues in somber silence, Rudolfo and Isaak side by side in the lead and Charles behind them. They left their horses at the opening of the canyon, handing the reins over to scouts freshly recovered from their magicks and dressed in robes that matched the Androfrancine and his metal son.

I am too old for this, Charles thought. But it was something he’d thought often since that day his apprentice had drugged him and spirited him out of Windwir. Before his secret imprisonment by Sethbert and later, his nephew Erlund, he’d not considered himself especially old.

Perhaps losing everyone and everything you love in a span of hours changes one’s perspective on time, he thought.

Rudolfo led them forward over freshly salted ice until the canyon walls narrowed and the downward slope was sealed away from the white sky as the base of the Dragon’s Spine swallowed them.

When they reached the cave, it was crowded with men and buzzing with activity. A wooden frame had been set up over and around a large circular hole in the floor, and a system of pulleys had been rigged to move equipment in and out of the ground. Tables and chairs were strewn around the cavern, and men sat at some of them going over crudely sketched maps. Even as they stood, men started climbing from the well, ducking beneath the frame as they scrambled over the edge. They were followed at last by a mechoservitor-Number Eight, Charles thought-and a heavyset man with thick, curly hair, his face and hands black with grime. The man approached them.

“Lord Rudolfo,” he said, inclining his head.

Rudolfo returned his nod. “Turik, how goes our exploration?”

“We’ve mapped extensive tunnels and chambers six leagues south and east. The western passages have been more difficult-a lot of debris and water-but we’re making headway.”

Rudolfo turned to Charles and Isaak. “This is Turik, chief engineer of our operation here. He’s spent most of his life underground in our mines in Friendslip.” He offered a grim smile. “Who’d have thought that for two millennia we’ve had a Whymer Maze beneath us.” He looked back to his engineer. “This is Brother Charles, formerly arch- engineer of the Androfrancine Office of Mechanical Science and Technology and now attached to the new library. And Isaak, of course.”

The man studied the two of them. “I received your message, Lord, and hoped to speak with you about it. I don’t think it is prudent for-”

Rudolfo raised a hand and interrupted him. “It is not prudent. But neither will I prevent them. Isaak is most insistent about his ability to find their destination. I want your men to escort them as far west as you have mapped. but no farther.” Rudolfo looked at Isaak, and Charles saw concern in the Gypsy King’s eyes. “From that point, they are on their own.”

On our own. It did not appeal to him, traveling underground passages into unfamiliar territories. But Isaak would go either with or without him, and the same curiosity that had driven him into engineering in the first place so many years ago drove him now. Something had happened to his mechoservitors. He had resisted Introspect’s order to send them alone and unsupervised into the Churning Wastes on the Sanctorum Lux project, but in the end, Holy Unction compelled his compliance. He had trained them to maintain themselves, had scripted them each for scheduled visits to the Keeper’s Gate for a clandestine escort to his offices in Windwir