past him.
A half dozen windstorms kicked up snow as another four bullets shot from magicked slings impacted. The volley brought one of the wolves down, and it thrashed and yelped as invisible blades from scouts on the run found it and carved it in a snow-swept dance.
A hand gripped Charles’s upper arm to drag him back and away. When he offered momentary resistance a harsh voice whispered into his ear. “I told you to stay put, Gray Robe,” Aedric said.
Charles felt the strength in the man’s hand as Aedric pulled him backward through the snow, and the arch- engineer said nothing, simply watched and listened as Rudolfo’s Gypsy Scouts did their work. The second wolf put up more fight but eventually succumbed to bullet and blade. When it was finished, Aedric’s men clicked their tongues quietly against the roofs of their mouths to announce their status.
With help from Aedric’s strong hands, Charles climbed to his feet, shaken. “Thank you,” he said, the fear of it all suddenly settling upon him like clouds on the Delta.
Aedric’s voice still held anger in it. “Do not thank me yet, old man. Just hope that what you and Isaak need so badly can be found in yon metal man’s cave and that it is worth the lives of my men.”
One of the scouts whistled for Aedric, and Charles walked with him, watching the prints from invisible feet materialize within the broken snow in an attempt to confuse his footprints. A match flared, and the light and smoke from it dimly illuminated part of a hand as a watch lantern was lit. Its lens of light was turned to the bloody ground, and Charles saw now the massive, dark-furred kin-wolves stretched out in death. The dark iron collars surprised him.
Aedric’s voice was low and muffled by the magicks. “It seems our metal friend has set out watchdogs in the days since we’ve last visited him.” He pointed to the bodies. “Take them up and bring them.”
Then, by the light of the small lantern, Charles followed them to the waiting cave entrance, where they stood and listened. But the booming voice and its impassioned rambling about blood and life and empresses drowned out any sound that might’ve drifted back to them from deep beneath the ground.
“We go in carefully,” Aedric whispered. His finger found Charles’s chest and poked it. “You stay behind us until we know it’s safe.” He was quiet for a moment, then spoke again. “Feris, Grun, stay back here and guard our backs.” Then, in afterthought, he added, “Skin these pups for me while you wait.”
Charles blinked. “Why would you-”
But Aedric cut him off. “It is not your concern. You just worry yourself about finding your missing pages. You’ve only my grace because of the two queens who’ve granted theirs. This is madness, in my mind.”
Charles waited until he felt the wind of them moving into the cave and then followed after. As they moved, slowly, he watched as the light fell upon the stone walls and tried to filter out the thick smell of dung and blood that choked him. When they reached the first room and its line of cages, they stopped again. Within the cages, birds of a dozen nations waited amid their stacks of papers. “In for a drachma,” Aedric muttered before ordering his men to wring the birds’ necks and gather up what intelligence could be found. “After tonight,” he said, “our welcome will indeed be worn.”
They only spent a few minutes in the cutting room, and Charles was glad of it, for that was the worst-reeking space. They left it untouched and moved into its simple working space with its tables of potions and powders, inks and papers.
Aedric’s voice drifted across the room. “Tell us what we look for, Francine.”
Charles went to the table of papers. “Parchment pages,” he said, “handwritten and of varying ages.” Of course, despite the potions the Marshers used to preserve the ancient tomes that held their dreams, some of these pages might not have survived their removal from the books. He only hoped that whatever they might find here would be sufficient for his children’s antiphon to be successful.
Still, as they sifted through the room they found nothing that matched what they sought. They’d stuffed a sack full of the gospels they’d found, freshly transcribed and bound in leather, adding to that sack anything else Aedric deemed worthless to them. And just as they were finishing, one of the scouts whistled them over.
“There is a door here,” a muffled voice said as a buckskin was lifted aside to reveal a small, dark door in the wall. The small dial betrayed a Rufello lock, and Charles pushed past the invisible scouts to kneel and look at it by the light of their lantern. He stretched out his fingers and felt the lock. It was one of Rufello’s simpler models-one of the more common they’d found.
“I know this lock,” he muttered. Many of the inventor’s smaller locks had been designed with a master cipher known only to the Czarist engineer and coded into his
“Can you open it?” Aedric asked.
“If its universal release has not been reset, I can.” He licked his lips. “Otherwise, we’d need Isaak or one of the others.”
“We do not have that luxury.”
Charles pressed his ear to the lock and shifted the dial, pressing at the buttons and levers set into the faceplate around it with careful fingers. When the first code brought about a quiet click inside the lock, the old man smiled.
“I have it,” he said, and after he finished, he let Aedric pull him back so that they could cast their light within the chamber that awaited them when the door swung open on oiled hinges.
The familiarity of the room hit him first. It was nearly the mirror image of the same chamber in the northern reaches of Rudolfo’s Ninefold Forest, a sealed hatch set in the granite floor and the walls lined with tables. Upon the tables, he saw the bent and twisted bits of wreckage so out of place here, though in hindsight it made sense.
“Gods,” he whispered, walking into the room. He traced his fingers over some of the objects and drew up his memory of them and of the last day he’d seen them. There were tools and broken artifacts, scorched by the fires of the Seven Cacophonic Deaths. The broken wings of moon sparrows and the warped barrels of hand-cannons kept hidden in deep vaults, unknown even to the Pope. There were bits of metal scroll and broken pens for scripting them.
But as staggering as that was, it was nothing compared to what he saw next, dead and looking nothing like the petrified remains they’d found in the deepest ruins of the Churning Wastes. This specimen lay stretched out, its eight large legs tacked to the wood of the table and its seedwomb cut open and empty. He stretched back his memory to his studies of this particular madness but could not remember just how many thousands of eggs each one carried. But he remembered how quickly they reproduced, and the knot in his stomach clenched even as he forgot to breathe.
“We need to leave,” he said, and the panic in his voice made it shake. “Now.”
“Gather what-”
“No,” Charles said. “We leave the past in the past,” he said. “We need to go now. We need birds to send to Rudolfo-as many as we have.”
“What is it?” Aedric’s voice now took on a quietness that Charles thought must be fear, and he was glad of it.
But Charles didn’t answer. Instead, he turned and left. He moved quickly through the caves, and when he broke into the fresh, cold air of the winter night he found the forest was full of screaming. He did not recognize the voice, but her agony filled sky.
Aedric caught up to him and spun him around. “You do not have the luxury of secrets or silence,” he said in a voice now obviously afraid and angry about that fear.
Charles took in a deep breath and tried to force the screaming from his ears, tried to keep from screaming himself. “They’re digging up Windwir,” he sobbed. “And they’ve brought back the plague spiders.”
Aedric said nothing, but Charles heard the gasps of his men. Every boy and girl learned about the Seven Cacophonic Deaths in ghost tales passed down around fires and in moral lessons from their parents. “Behave,” they’d say, “or Xhum Y’Zir’s death golems will find you.” “Be kind to your sister, or plague spiders might visit their fevers upon her in the night.” They were cruel admonitions that none would offer if they’d known what darkness truly lay within that spell that had decimated the Old World.
They took all of the birds they had between them, brown and white both, and as three of the scouts worked their ink needles and pulled black threads from their scarves of rank, the others laid a fire to the sack of gospels and
