Antiphon by Ken Scholes Read Free Book Online Page B

curiosity shall ever be satisfied, Father.”
    Now it was Charles’s turn to chuckle. “I think you may be right.” Then his thumb found the switch beneath that out-of-place feather. “But for now, let’s bend our curiosity towards your message.”
    The bird fluttered to its feet. Its small beak opened, and the tinnyvoice of a faraway mechoservitor echoed into the workroom. “Addressee,” it said, “Mechoservitor Three, Ninefold Forest Houses, Seventh Forest Manor, Library.”
    Charles looked to Isaak. “I am Mechoservitor Three, also called Isaak,” the metal man said in a quiet voice. “Chief Officer of the Forest Library.”
    The tiny bird twitched slightly in his cupped hand, and when the stream of numbers hissed out they were too fast for Charles to identify them. Their pitch and tone warbled, and the old arch-engineer was impressed with what that told him.
Numeric code with inflection markers to show emphasis and vary definition.
When he was younger, if he’d had the luxury of months, he might’ve parsed out the code with a forest of paper and an ocean of ink. And yet, he watched Isaak’s flashing eyes and saw his fingers spasm as he deciphered the code as it was given.
    It was a mighty thing, Charles decided, to watch something he had made with his own two hands do something in seconds that he would need most of a season to accomplish.
    Isaak looked to the bird and then to Charles, his mouth flap opening and closing as if he meant to say something.
    Then, the metal man snatched the moon sparrow from Charles’s fingers and fled. In his haste, he tipped over a chair and forgot to close the door behind him. All the while, he whispered to the bird, cupping it near his mouth.
    Charles leapt to his feet and ran into the hall, his heart hammering in his temples. The last mechanical he’d seen move this fast was the one he’d scripted to escape from Erlund and bear his message to the Order. Both times, he tasted fear at the daunting machinery he had constructed. “Stop him,” he cried.
    But before anyone could react, Isaak had thrown open the doors and flung his silver messenger into the sky.
    Then, Isaak turned to Charles, bellows chugging with grief and surprise.
    “I’m sorry, Father,” his metal child said.
Neb

    Neb ran though the rest of the day and long into the night before he made camp to give his body at least a few hours of sleep away from the black root that fueled it. As he ran beneath the moon, he heard thecrescent’s song increase in volume, and he bent his mind to that cipher. As he slept beneath that same moon, he cradled the sliver of silver to his ear to dream music and numbers and light.
    At one point, in his deepest dreaming, he thought he heard his father’s voice calling to him beneath the melody of the canticle. He stirred, cast about for some memory of Winters with her long, dirty brown hair, her muddy face with its big brown eyes. But when he found nothing, he let the song enfold him and carry him back down into sleep.
    By noon on his second day alone, he skirted the ruins of Y’leris, a scattering of mounded wreckage and glass that had melted and then cooled in twisted, razor-edged hills.
    He would have kept south if it weren’t for the commotion.
    At first, he thought it might be kin-wolves hunting, but that made no sense. They hunted only at night and slept by day unless something disturbed them. Renard had shown him—very carefully—how to look for the spoor and avoid the dens of these fiercely territorial predators of the Churning Wastes. And with the sun at its highest point and the sky ribboned with waves of heat, he knew they could not be hunting.
    He stood at the edge of the ruins and listened to the howls and snarls warble through the glass-and-steel Whymer Maze. He hefted his thorn rifle and felt the bulb for freshness. He frowned at what his fingers felt and quickly wet a small cotton wad with water, then pushed it up into the bottom of the thorn bulb. Then he