Antiphon by Ken Scholes Page A

consuming them from within before the effects had worn off. And apart from her wounds, the girl showed no signs of other discomfort.
    Unless.
The other runners had also seemed to defy this fate. What if this was a new blood magick?
    Or, he thought, a new people? Certainly the cuttings suggested that.
    Tucking the flask into his own pouch, he went to the next object that caught his attention. It was an oddly shaped sliver of black stone. At first he thought the shape held no meaning, but he quickly saw the wings and the beak. It was a crude carving, but clearly a kin-raven. He reached out for it, and when his finger touched it he felt warmth rolling through him, tingling along the bones of his arm, up into his shoulder. Even that brief second, a dozen images flooded him and he felt the nausea of sudden vertigo, as a sound like mighty rushing water swept him.
    Neb jerked back his hand and blinked.
    He put a finger on the carving, this time forcing himself to keep it there to a count of ten.
    The images were there again, spinning about him, and he reachedfor one, though he wasn’t sure how he did it. And as he laid hold of it, it wasn’t so much that his own sense of space vanished as it was a new space falling into place around him. He pulled at it, drew upon it like a thread.
    It was a darkened place that smelled old and closed off and cold. In the distance, water dripped. Neb did not know how he could pick out that single sound beneath the roar around him, and yet he did. He also heard the gentle wheeze of bellows behind him and turned around.
    When the golden eyes fluttered open, his breath caught in his throat. “Nebios Homeseeker,” the metal man said, “you should not be here. How have you circumvented our dream tamp? I charge you by the light to leave quickly.” The eyes flickered on and off as the mechoservitor worked its shutters and looked from left to right. “We are being listened to.”
    Neb opened his mouth to ask who was listening but suddenly found himself standing in the courtyard of the Franci orphanage. Brother Hebda stood before him, gaunt and hollow-eyed, now these two years dead. “Neb?”
    There was surprise in his voice.
    “Brother Hebda?” Certainly, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen his father since Windwir’s fall. Hebda had warned him that the Marsh King rode south back in the gravediggers’ camp in what remained of Windwir, and he’d also told the boy that he would proclaim Petronus Pope and King and that eventually Petronus would break his heart. Both had come true. Still, how was it possible that the small black carving could do this?
    Brother Hebda’s face paled even as it began to fade along with the crisp blue winter skyline of the great city of Windwir. “Runners in the Wastes,” his father said. “Beware of them, Son. I fear they—”
    Then, Neb fell out of the scene and into the roaring once again. Spinning, he found himself at the center of a Whymer Maze beneath a graying sky. There, upon a marble bench, a girl sat quietly with her hands folded in her lap. There were evergreen wreaths upon a grave there, and he remembered this place very well. He’d stood here what seemed so long ago and kissed Winters good-bye after Hanric’s funereal rites.
    The girl wore a plain dress, and her prettiness made his heart hurt. Her long hair was held back from her face by wooden combs, and a light dusting of freckles speckled the bridge of her nose. He rubbedhis eyes and looked again. He knew her, though he’d never seen her without the mud and ash of her people’s faith. “Winters?”
    She looked up. “Nebios? How—?”
    And he was gone again, falling away to land upon a jagged sea of razor-edged glass. “He’s wandering in the aether,” a woman’s voice said. “Awake and casting.”
    “Yes,” another said from the eastern end of D’Anjite’s Bridge.
    Then a third spoke, and Neb saw the locked well she camped near. The very place he’d found the silver crescent. And