Like all acolytes, he’d studied the various resurgences that had sprung up. Most of the Franci behaviorists believed it was a holdover from the Age of Laughing Madness, much like the Marsher dreams his metal children now followed. But in the early words of the sermon that thundered out beneath the risen moon, Charles heard underlying structure supported by anecdotes and quotations from gospels and prophecies he’d never heard of.
This is something new.
Still, as much as he wanted to comprehend this change, he was not here to listen about the grace and love of Y’Zir and its Crimson Empress or its Child of Great Promise. He forced himself back to the line of footprints leading back toward the hill. He could not make out exactly where they ended, and so he put first one booted foot in front of the other and trudged out after them.
As he made his way across the snowfield, he stopped at the sound of a faint movement on the far side and heard a low growl. He’d grown up in the humid jungles of the Outer Emerald Coast and had spent his childhood paying more attention to the tools his father hunted and fished with rather than the actual work, leaving him less experienced in woodcraft. But this was not the high-pitched growl of a cat. More likely, it was a bear or a wolf.
Charles stopped and held his breath. When the growl drifted over the snow the next time, it was closer and circling him. Squinting into dim moonlight, he saw a form-no, forms, large and four-footed, approaching him.
Wolves. Only larger than wolves should be.
There were two of them, and even as he crouched and drew the hunting knife Garyt had given him to complete his Marsher disguise, he knew he’d be no match for what he suspected now hunted him.
He’d heard of kin-wolves, those rare leftovers from the days of the Wizard Kings, reduced to small but savage packs that roved the Churning Wastes and harried the Order’s expeditions in that desolation. But beyond the studies, sketches and bones from the Office of Natural Science, he’d not seen one.
He waited and held his breath.
When something fast shot past his head, he flinched and fell backward even as the first shadowy form yelped. It took him a moment to make the connection. He struggled up out of the snow as a second and third bullet zipped across the open meadow to find their marks in their targets; then the kin-wolves were snarling and leaping 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 Book of Specifications.
“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.