Around the room, clusters of men pressed similar attackers with similar result.
Rudolfo turned to Hanric and his bodyguards.
Two of the three guards had fallen, and the last stood between the shadow of his king and the blades of these invisible assailants. Rudolfo moved in with his sword, letting it dart here and there at what he hoped were the backs of knees and the smalls of backs, and he whistled for Aedric. As Aedric and three other Gypsy Scouts approached, the Marsh Queen’s shadow’s last remaining guard fell with a cry. Before the body hit the floor, Hanric’s axe swept up to wet itself on one of the attackers. The axe hummed from the blood, and Rudolfo stared at the double-headed weapon. There in the silver reflection he saw too many arms, too many torsos. Too many knives.
The axe reveals them. Even as he realized it, he shouted it to the room. “You can see their reflection in the axe.”
He moved in closer and found himself against a wall of transparent flesh. He pushed at it with his sword.
Sudden hands that he could not see lifted Rudolfo from the floor with a strength far beyond that of any scout magick he knew. Then he heard the muffled sound of a slap and a distant voice. “No,” the voice whispered. “Not him.”
Rudolfo fell to the floor as the hands released him. He whipped his sword up and felt it snag in cloth and skin. “Who are you?” he hissed at the unseen foe.
Hanric bellowed, and Rudolfo looked up to see a jagged red tear erupting down Hanric’s forearm. Aedric and the others were pressing to reach him, held back by a storm of knives. All of the fighting now centered on the man the Named Lands considered the Marsh King.
Rudolfo pushed forward as another cut opened Hanric’s chest. Roaring his rage, the Gypsy King dodged and thrust with his narrow sword, whistling out the chorus of “The Fourteenth Hymn of the Wandering Army.” His men rallied to the strategy, but even that failed.
Two more fell to Hanric’s blade before they overcame him. He went down with a shout, and Rudolfo growled low in his throat.
Then, the invisible wall struck Rudolfo again, pushing him over and aside as the attackers retreated. The Gypsy Scouts pursued them as they fled the Great Hall. Rudolfo nodded at the axe clutched in Hanric’s hands. “Take that,” he shouted to another scout. “Use it to search every inch of this manor. Then search the town.”
He stood still for a moment, stunned by the events. He’d fought in dozens of skirmishes, had even led a few wars, and last year he’d worn the magicks to raid Sethbert’s camp. In all of his years under the knife, he’d not encountered anything like this. And now two of the Named Land’s leaders lay dead in his own home. He took in the room, eyes wandering the scattered bodies and food, the broken tables, the clusters of guards and guests and servants. He could hear loud voices on the other side of the barricaded door.
He saw Neb, shaking and white, his own ceremonial knife still hanging loosely in his hand. His uniform was torn, and he bled from a few cuts. “Where’s Isaak?”
Neb pointed, and Rudolfo spotted him across the room. “Ask him to join me,” he said. Neb nodded and went as Aedric approached.
Rudolfo looked at his First Captain. He was more shaken than his father would’ve been, but still grim and resolved. “What do you know, Aedric?”
Aedric’s brow furrowed. “Little so far, General. The western watch sounded Third Alarm and launched their birds, but the aggressors outran word of their arrival.”
“They outran the birds?”
Aedric nodded. “Yes, General.”
“On foot?”
Aedric nodded again.
“Gods,” Rudolfo whispered.
Rudolfo knelt by Hanric and reached over to close the dead man’s eyes. He felt rage brewing within him.
They come to my very home on the night of my Firstborn Feast. He stood and went to the Crown Prince, kneeling to close his eyes as well. “Who else have we lost?”
Aedric counted off on his fingers. “Most of Turam’s guards, all of the Marsher scouts, ten of our own scouts, four servants.” He paused. “The Seventh Manor’s army contingent has rallied at the gates.”
Rudolfo’s Wandering Army, made up of most of the Ninefold Forest’s able-bodied men, was a powerful force to be reckoned with. He nodded. “Set them to the search. Create a perimeter around the town and library. They are to hold it until further notice.”
Aedric nodded and left.
Rudolfo moved, and his foot struck something heavy on the floor. He looked down at nothing. Soon enough, as with all magicks, these would fade and they would have a look at the assassins.
Neb and Isaak approached. The mechoservitor wheezed slightly as his bellows pumped. His jeweled eyes sparked and flashed.
Rudolfo looked at his metal friend. “In your work at the library-during the restoration and the time before-have you heard of such a thing? Magicks like these?”
Isaak nodded. “Only from the histories of the Old World, Lord, in the Age of the Wizard Kings.”
Rudolfo sighed. “Blood magick, then.” The Androfrancines had kept tight control of their pharmaceuticals and magicks, doling out some of the earth magicks among the nations of the Named Lands, holding back most in their effort to keep humanity safe from itself. But the Articles of Kin-Clave expressly forbade the use of blood magick. Blood magick-in the form of Xhum Y’Zir’s Seven Cacophonic Deaths-had brought down the Old World. And two thousand years later, it brought down Windwir. He turned to Isaak. “I want you to set your brethren to scouring the catalogs for everything you can find on this.”
Isaak nodded. “Yes, Lord Rudolfo.”
“And send for the River Woman.” The River Woman mixed their scout magicks and medicines. Perhaps, Rudolfo thought, she’d know something.
The metal man nodded again, then turned and limped away quickly. Rudolfo looked to Neb. “How are you, lad?”
Neb’s eyes were narrow and red, focused on Hanric where he lay in a pool of congealing blood. “I’m fine, General.”
“Find Winters. Tell her what’s transpired and bring her to my study.”
“She will want to see Hanric,” Neb said.
Rudolfo shook his head. “There will be time enough for that later. Take a half-squad with you.”
Hanric was like a father to her, Rudolfo knew. He’d ruled on her behalf since she was a child, even younger than Rudolfo was when he’d taken the turban. He’d been only twelve the day his parents were murdered by Vlad Li Tam’s seventh son, the heretic Fontayne.
Another orphan, Rudolfo realized, like the tall, slender young man before him. Like himself.
I am an orphan who collects orphans, he thought.
Barking orders, he moved through the bloodstained ruins of his Firstborn Feast to stop at the guarded double doors. Beyond those doors, a crowd gathered wanting answers.
Beyond them, the world would soon enough want to know the same. With fires of insurrection and civil war raging in the south, the New World still reeled from the Desolation of Windwir and the loss of their Androfrancine protectors. The assassination of the Crown Prince of Turam and of the man the world thought of as the Marsh King would feed into the chaos already brewing.
“No. Not him,” the voice had said when one of the magicked assassins held Rudolfo at bay.
Why not me? It unsettled him, cold in the pit of his stomach. There had been three prominent lords in the room. And now two were dead. And before the feast, word of the metal man in Androfrancine robes that approached the Keeper’s Gate, claiming to be Charles the Arch-Engineer, with his admonition to protect Sanctorum Lux.
A Whymer Maze to be sure.
Even I wait for answers, he realized.
Rudolfo thought of his formidable betrothed, who also waited for answers, no doubt outside the room and angry that she’d not been permitted to enter.
He thought of the child she carried, his son-Jakob, named for Rudolfo’s father. It was a sudden and unexpected gift that Jin Li Tam had brought to the middle of his road, in the shadow of war, at the time of Rudolfo’s greatest unrest. She’d told him the night he returned from confronting her father. Vlad Li Tam’s confession was still playing itself out behind his eyes when she had joined him in his dead brother’s room and shared her news.