His eyes caught her again where the blanket fell free, exposing her bootless calf and foot. He forced them away again and tried to conjure up Winters’s face.
I cannot remember her. After so long sharing dreams with her, she’d become a constant companion. Yet so quickly, she faded. He found the fickleness of his memory frustrating. He replaced the blood magicks, and his fingers lingered over the cloth-wrapped kin-raven. He pulled it out, careful not to let it touch his skin.
Holding it in the palm of his hand, Neb let the cloth fall away, exposing the black stone carving. He’d thought of it often since his first experience with it but had not let himself even bring it out.
“What are you doing?”
Her voice startled him and he jerked, spilling the kin-raven from the cloth and onto the floor. Without thinking, he snatched for it even as her hand found his wrist.
She cried out. “Don’t-”
But the rest of her words fell away as his skin brushed the dark bird. Suddenly, he spun away and found himself in a darkened room that smelled like lavender. Winters stood at the foot of a bed, unbuttoning her dress and lifting it up over her lithe form. Her breasts had grown larger and her hips were more pronounced, and Neb found himself suddenly-
— in a great white tower high above a deep blue sea. An enormous brown moon filled the sky, and beside him, Isaak clacked and clicked in time to the song that surrounded them, his eyes flashing bright and then dull. Neb felt the reverberation of the canticle lifting the hair on his arms and neck.
“Neb?” the startled metal man asked. His eye shutters flashed, and before Neb could answer, he stood on a hillside, looking out over a sea of glass. The thirty-second daughter of Vlad Li Tam stood beside him as winds from the north and east rushed down upon them and-
— his father cried into the black stone he lay stretched out upon. “Hold fast, my son,” his voice rang out. “Petronus rides for you.”
A sharp pain in his wrist caused him to cry out, and he released the kin-raven. He looked up and locked eyes with the woman, his mouth falling open. Her face was washed clean of any expression, but her eyes were fierce. She twisted his wrist again, and he tried to twist himself with her. As he did, her other hand shot out and snaked the thorn rifle from the loose grip of his left hand.
She moved fast, and he found himself suddenly falling backward as she raised the rifle and pointed it at his chest. He saw her fingers stroke the thorn bulb, and he suddenly realized by the way she held it that she knew the weapon even better than he did. The bulb undulated beneath her touch, and before he could say anything, she squeezed two thorns into him.
“What are you-?” His tongue filled his mouth even as his arms fell heavy to his sides and the sudden weight of his body dragged him to the ground. She blurred ahead of him, her face still a mask, her eyes now shining emeralds so sharp that they could shred him at a glance.
“I’m sorry, Nebios,” she said as the venom took hold and pulled him down toward thick, warm darkness.
The last thing he saw was her hand stretching out to take hold of the tiny black token. And the last thing Nebios Homeseeker heard before that dark swallowed him was her voice, low and suddenly sounding relieved.
“I have the Abomination right here for you, my sisters,” she whispered to the kin-raven. “Come to me.”
Chapter 12
Charles
Charles put down his screwdriver and lifted the tubelike monoscope by its leather harness. Outside, a steady snow fell, and the afternoon light that struck his work mirrors was barely enough to see by.
Of course, he could never tell if it was the lack of light or if perhaps it was just his age finally creeping home after years of squinting over his handiwork or over the words and specifications his order had dug from the ruins of the Old World and the worlds before that.
He pulled the monoscope over his head and cinched down the straps, blinking into the telescoping device as he spun gears to let more light into the tube and to adjust the lenses. He’d polished the Firstfall metal yet brighter before lining the monoscope’s interior with it.
He turned to the caged rat and dropped a bit of raw meat, finely coated with a pinch of scout powders, in front of the sleeping rodent. It started, grabbed up the bit of venison and started nibbling.
The magicks took the rat quickly, and unfamiliar with the sensations, it launched itself against the sides of the cage, shaking it with the sudden burst of strength even as it warbled out of focus and then became the faintest blur. Charles tipped his head so that the monoscope was pointed at the cage, aware of how heavy it was as it pulled at him.
They weren’t the blood magicks that the Marshers were using these days, but Charles hoped it was a close enough approximation to them. If so, he had accomplished a critical aspect of this work: The rat, now settling down and returning to the meat, was blurry but visible in the reflection cast into the silver of the scope.
Of course, the awkwardness of the device was another matter.
This would be improbable-maybe impossible-for a scout to wear in combat. He would turn himself to solving that problem next. For now, at least he knew it was functional and could be used for observation, even from a respectable distance.
Charles moved across the room and turned back. Closing his left eye, he squinted into the tube. He could no longer tell that it was a rat, but he clearly saw something hunched over in the cage.
Yes. He smiled, pleased with his work.
He pondered his pleasure in it, meditating on the Fourth Maxim of Franci B’Yot, the behaviorist who had influenced P’Andro Whym’s thinking. Examine every turn in the labyrinth of your mind, for your many thoughts are sacred in their truth, and the unexamined mind will be consumed by its fears and desires.
Why is this work so satisfying to me? It did not take him long to see it. It pointed to a simpler time when he’d made simple things.
The days spent working to bring Isaak back from the dead had changed him. When he’d first petitioned the papal offices for permission to build the mechoservitors adapted from Rufello’s Book of Specifications, he’d had no idea he would someday worry for an actual person he had created-a machine that had become human somehow, or something close to it-through the grief of genocide and the blood magick of Xhum Y’Zir’s final spell.
The monoscope gave him such pleasure, he realized, because it was a problem he could solve. And because it distracted him from worrying about his metal child.
He’d seen little of Isaak in the past days. The metal man had spent his time locked away with the book by Tertius, and Charles suspected he was replaying the dream. The one time Charles had brought it up, Isaak had said nothing, though the shaking of his chassis, the pop of gears within and the sudden gout of steam betrayed the mechoservitor’s discomfort.
Charles tried to turn his mind away from his concerns for Isaak, instead considering modifications that might make the monoscope less bulky and more conducive to scout warfare. He’d just lifted his pencil to make sketches when he heard Isaak’s heavy but tentative knock on his door. He put down the pencil. “Come in.”
Isaak came in and closed the door behind him. His bellows pumped, and steam shot from the exhaust grate set between his metal shoulders. “I’ve received a courier from Lord Rudolfo,” the metal man said. “I wish to discuss it with you.” Isaak looked to him and then looked away. “I wish to discuss the dream with you as well.”