“Light,” Isaak continued, “is simply a metaphor in P’Andro Whym’s Gospels for the collected knowledge of humankind. A sanctuary is a sacred location regarded as safe or set apart.” The metal man whirred and clicked, his hands coming up to assist in the delivery of his message. “It is a reasonable assumption that the Androfrancines, who spent twenty centuries gathering and guarding this so-called light of knowledge, would have considered the risks associated with storing that knowledge in one public and well-known place. Certainly, if I can deduce those risks as a mere mechanical construction, their keenest minds could easily draw the same conclusion and prepare accordingly.”
Neb thought about this. Could they dare hope for something so simple to make up for Sethbert’s folly? It would not bring back the two hundred thousand souls-including Neb’s father-and it would not restore the Order’s primacy in the Named Lands. The Order was as dead as Windwir. But if the Great Library had been reproduced and saved elsewhere against such a time as they now faced, what could it mean? Even with the mechoservitors’ stored knowledge and the holdings they’d gained access to by donation or loan from the various collectors, book houses and universities within the Named Lands, they could only hope to restore 40 percent of what the Great Library had held. A hidden library would be a treasure trove beyond their wildest expectations.
“Have you found any references so far?”
“None at all,” Isaak said. “And this is the third time I’ve searched. I’ve coded a message back to the others and they are searching now, too.”
Neb studied the mechoservitor in the faint light of those amber, jeweled eyes. He’d spent a great deal of time with Isaak and the others of his kind, both under the bookmakers’ tents during the summer and as they moved from room to room in the estate, filling it with volume upon volume of material pulled from their memory scrolls. Rudolfo had employed a dozen bookbinders to keep up with them; and even now, with trade routes interrupted by the political unrest in the Named Lands, a paper mill was being built upriver from the new library. Even it would not keep up with the mechanical wonders, so Neb had no doubt that if any references to this Sanctuary of Light could be found, they would find them quickly.
He hesitated, suddenly not sure if he wanted to take the path his foot hovered over. Then, he committed himself to it. “When you’ve finished that cipher, I’ve another. See what you can find in reference to the name ‘Renard.’ ”
When Isaak looked up at him, Neb shrugged. “I dreamed it. It may be nothing.”
“I will do my best,” Isaak said.
Neb stood and stretched. “I’m going to walk the perimeter.”
Isaak nodded, and his eyes went back to fluttering as gears and scrolls and wheels spun with whispered intricacy beneath the metal skin. Neb left him beneath the tree and moved toward the whistle he’d heard earlier.
As he walked, he thought about his dream and about Winters. Their encounters there were becoming more sparse, her dreams filled with violence and pursuit, high in the cliffs of the Dragon’s Spine. There was no room, no time, for Neb in them. And his own dreams were now turning in a new direction, backward to his father, Brother Hebda, and eastward to the Churning Wastes.
Watch out for Renard, his father had said.
And tomorrow he would see the strange metal man who’d borne his message of warning to the guards at the Gate. He cast his memory back to the snowball fight and the kiss in Rudolfo’s Whymer Maze, summoning up Winters’s earthy scent and the softness of her tongue. Those were the dreams he wanted for them, not these dark and twisted labyrinths they ran their nights through now. But what he wanted wasn’t relevant. He’d learned from the Androfrancines that service to the light was about what was required, not what was wanted. Desire beyond knowledge, P’Andro Whym had written in his Fourteenth Gospel, is the chasing of wind. Something was happening to the New World, and somehow, he and Winters were caught in the midst of it. Their dreams bore the weight of that.
Something inside warned him that this was only a beginning, that blood and sorrow lay ahead of them on their separate paths. But alongside that realization lay another: At the end of this all, if Winters and her people spoke true, a new Home rose. A new Home that Neb would somehow find for them.
Neb willed himself to believe and took comfort in the spark of hope he found.
Rudolfo
Rudolfo rode the Prairie Sea, his Gypsy Scouts fanning out behind and beside him. His stallion’s hooves, magicked for speed and sure-footedness, kicked up the drifted snow as they chewed the leagues.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d ridden the prairie that hemmed in his Ninefold Forest-it had been months. Before Windwir, he’d ridden it constantly, moving between the islands of old-growth forest with his men, sitting under purple canopies to mete out justice in the nine towns that made up the seats of his government. But now, with the Seventh Manor becoming the focal point as the library took shape and as bands of refugees showed up looking for work, he rode his desk more than he rode his stallion.
Over his left shoulder, the sun climbed into the sky, a cold white wafer obscured by the thin veil of clouds. It had already been up when he’d left the woods for the ocean of frozen grass. Tonight, they would camp on the Southern Porch at the edge of the low, round hills that bordered the Prairie Sea to the west and the south.
Funny, he thought, how many hours he’d spent at his desk wishing for the wind in his face and for the sound of hooves in his ears, the solidness of a stallion beneath him. But now he took no pleasure in it.
It is a dark time for journey-making. And yet here he rode and he could not know exactly where the journey would take him or when he would again return to his wife and child, to the work that awaited him. Still, he left the Forest in capable hands. Even at her worst, Jin Li Tam was a skilled and formidable leader. And he did not doubt for a moment that he left her at her worst. Certainly, this pregnancy had already taken its toll, and with that past, Jakob’s frail health and constant care would now be steady teeth upon her. But he could trust her eye for fairness, justice and strategy, and he could trust his people to take her to their heart at the very least because of the heir she bore them all. And this would be an opportunity for her to become more familiar with them and they with her.
Nearly three decades had passed since they’d last had a queen, and Lady Marielle had ruled alongside Lord Jakob as an equal, receiving the loyalty and love of the Gypsies as one of their own who had been chosen from humble beginnings to reign alongside their king.
Until now, Rudolfo had not thought much of these things. But it was as if the tiny soul they had made together shifted all of his thoughts into a different direction, adding a new element to his strategies for the future.
Because now I truly build something beyond myself. And something for someone other than himself.
He’d had no idea until now how powerful the notion of fatherhood would be, and he wondered if it was how his own father had felt when his two boys were born.
He remembered the death of his brother, Isaak. At the time, they thought he’d taken ill with the red pox, killed by fever in the night. Now, of course, he knew that Vlad Li Tam had engineered it, perhaps with the aid of the same woman he now sought to save his own child. All some grand manipulation to remove the older of the twins and pave a way for Rudolfo to come into power. Even the infant he now rode forth for was a product of the Tam strategy, commanded of Vlad Li Tam’s forty-second daughter as a part of the plan to move the library north and place that light into the hands of someone other than P’Andro Whym’s careful followers. How many of his own children had the old banker sacrificed along with Rudolfo’s brother and later, his parents, to accomplish his work in the Named Lands?