Antiphon

from,” he said. But before Baryk spoke, Vlad knew what he would say.

“It would,” the warpriest said, “but I think your family is restless. I think this constant reminder of loss is no longer sharpening your blade.” He paused. “It may even dull it.”

Vlad turned from the man and looked back to the water. “You may be right, Baryk. I’ll consider it.”

Baryk inclined his head slightly. “It’s all I ask, Father.”

He calls me father now. It stirred something in him, and he savored the meaning in it. He remembered the first time it had happened, the day they’d buried Rae Li Tam in the frozen plain of Windwir. Baryk had not done it in front of the other children, though. No, he reserved the title for the times they were alone, and Vlad understood that very well. He looked to his daughter’s widower and forced a smile. “You are a good man, Baryk.”

Baryk stood and returned the smile. “Shall I tell them you’re coming soon?”

Vlad nodded. “Soon.”

As the warpriest’s footfalls faded across the wooden dock, Vlad pulled in his line. The man was right, of course. They had learned everything they could from this place. And it was a reminder, a constant reminder.

One that I need, he thought, though as he thought it he also knew that perhaps what little remained of his family did not need such reminding.

I will grow my pain into an army. They were the words that had carried him through the worst of the cuttings, the worst of his children’s screams. And they were the words that his daughter had later given him with her final breath.

Perhaps it was time to leave after all.

He sat with the rod across his lap while the sky darkened and the harbor stilled. He sat until he lost track of time, and when a flicker of blue-green danced across the waters he felt his heart catch in his throat. He could hear the song, too, if he listened for it. If he could just listen for it. And somehow, that ghost could soothe him, could save him. But in the end, it was not the catch he longed for. No, it was simply the moon, rising up to lend its light to those quiet waters he contemplated daily.

Victorious, the stars at last poked through a dark velvet veil of sky, and Vlad Li Tam sighed at them. Perhaps tomorrow, he thought.

He rose, turned his back to the Ghosting Crests and made his way up the hill.

Chapter 3

Charles

Charles spun the gears and listened to the low groan as the mirrors around his workroom moved on their tracks and bent more light onto the object upon his table.

The moon sparrow lay disassembled, its various pieces laid out for examination with the magnifying lens he held before his eye.

When Jin Li Tam and Isaak had awakened him just after sunrise, he’d thought perhaps one of the mechanicals had broken down during the night’s work. He’d pulled on his robes and met them at the locked door of his subbasement workroom.

He wondered now, hours later, if they had seen his face grow pale when he saw the little messenger. Or if they had noticed a catch in his voice. Or the trembling in his fingers as he sought the tiny reset switch beneath that one small feather that felt slightly rougher than its other silver companions.

Fortunately, their questions had been few and he’d managed to deflect them under the guise of getting to work to find answers for them.

Charles lifted the tiny firestone that powered the bird. It was the size of a grape, burning white but without heat that he could feel through the thumb and forefinger that gripped it and held it beneath his eye. With his thumbs, he carefully pressed it into the bird’s silver chassis and used tweezers to carefully hook the long golden wires that led from it to the memory scroll casing. The casing had been punctured by what he assumed must be the kin-raven’s talon or beak. It was a small puncture-and precise.

Where have you been off to? Biting his lower lip, he found the switch and moved the bird’s wings and feet farther from its torso and head, as if somehow it might reattach them itself when it saw that it could not flee. When his callous fingertips found it, the bird’s tiny red eyes flickered open and it started humming in the palm of his hand.

When the hum reached its highest pitch, Charles held the bird even closer to his face and whispered into its small audio receivers. “Authorize, Charles,” he said, “arch-engineer, School of Mechanical Studies.” He listened to the chirruping and waited until it subsided. “Report, scroll unwind five oh three. Backtrack flightpath to point of origin for confirmation of navigational accuracy.”

The small beak opened, and a voice trickled out. It was his own, from years ago, and it caught him off guard. Though certainly, he remembered the days he’d spent speaking to the little birds they’d found within their little cages, giving them a language they had not previously known. “Report unavailable,” his own voice told him, tinny and sounding far away.

“Confirm authorization,” he said, feeling his brow furrow and feeling his curiosity melting into something more pronounced, more anxious. These birds had not required much in the way of maintenance. Androfrancine archaeologists had dug them out, still functioning in their cages, from the ruined subbasement of one of the Wizard King’s palaces in the Old World. But still, they were complex mechanicals of a time that dated back beyond even the Age of the Wizard Kings. He’d learned what he could of them and had even found obscure reference to them in Rufello’s notes on the golden birds that ancient scientist had managed to bring back into the world.

It had taken Charles years, but he’d learned enough about them to eventually offer them up to the Office of the Holy See as an improved means of communication, particularly in the Churning Wastes where the living message birds lost their magicks and their direction.

“Authorization unconfirmed.”

Unconfirmed? Charles let his held breath out through his nose, watching the force of his exhalation move the moon sparrow’s soft silver feathers. He could remember establishing the authorizations for these particular messengers. He’d updated them just months before his apprentice betrayed him and destroyed Windwir. He paused a moment, trying to reach back into his memory to find the correct query language. “Emergency protocol, unwind scroll four, six, two: Destination?”

With the slightest pop, his voice vanished and another-this one reedy and metallic-slipped out of the bird’s open beak. “Mechoservitor Three, Ninefold Forest Houses, Seventh Forest Manor, Library.”

He thought about asking again, thought even that perhaps he could find other hidden paths within the Whymer Maze of its tiny memory casing. Some back path that might tell him where the bird had come from. They’d used moon sparrows as a part of the Sanctorum Lux project, along with other similar endeavors that required something more reliable than an organic bird or a person. The birds were small, fast and-until now-had not encountered anything that could successfully stop them.

Charles heard the heavy footfalls outside his door, heard the slightest wheeze of bellows and hum of gears from where the mechoservitor waited. He put down the small mechanical and stood from his stool, stretching the muscles that threatened to knot his shoulders and neck.

He was opening the door just as the robed mechoservitor raised a metal hand to knock. “Good afternoon, Isaak.”

Isaak’s eye shutters flashed open and closed. Steam slipped out from the back of his robe, where he’d carefully cut away the fabric around his exhaust grate. “Good afternoon, Father.”

Father. Until recently, Charles had never considered himself truly a parent. Certainly, he’d joked often enough about his mechanical creations and re-creations being his children, but he’d come to the Order as a young zealot from the Emerald Coasts. At that age, with the precepts and gospels of P’Andro Whym so near his tongue and matters of the flesh so far out of mind, he couldn’t even comprehend the act that might lead to fatherhood. And throughout his tenure in the Order, he’d stayed that course.

Now, however, a machine he had built, assembled based on Rufello’s Book of