Jacob rode Mal’s shoulder, content to let the magus carry them both along the King’s Highway. Despite the early hour the day was already promising to be the hottest of a miserable summer. The air currents above the city were no more pleasant than those at street level. It was not the sort of weather that allowed man or beast any comfort.
Both the hour and the heat ensured the road east of Wilhaiim was mostly deserted. A lonely tinker rested in the shade of a sycamore off the highway just past the north gate, breakfast in hand. Jacob eyed the tinker’s mince pie then clacked his beak in irritation.
“You’ll have your tart as soon as we return,” Mal assured the raven. The tinker looked around at them in surprise, but didn’t comment. If she recognized the magus out of his Hennish leather she knew enough to pretend otherwise.
It was possible she didn’t know him. Dressed in yeoman’s garb, his long hair only recently shorn to ringlets, the king’s vocent might pass as unremarkable to any that didn’t know him well. The residents of squatter’s row paid him no attention as he passed before their huts; a gray-faced man, naked but for a loincloth in the heat, whistled at Jacob in between swigs of sour wine.
“Pretty magpie!” the drunk called. “Clever, clever bird!”
Mal snorted under his breath. Jacob ruffled his feathers in indignation.
“It was you as followed me out of the palace this morning,” he reminded Jacob. “Easier for us both if you simply convinced your mistress I don’t need chaperoning.”
He meant Avani, Jacob supposed, when in truth the matter was much more complicated. Fool enough to discount godhood nevertheless Mal seemed unable to escape divine attention.
Not far beyond squatters’ row Mal turned away from Wilhaiim’s white walls and crossed a small, moss-hung bridge. Jacob left the magus’s shoulder to splash in the bubbling creek beneath. The water was deliciously cool and sweet. Fingerling trout wriggled lazily in the shade beneath the gray stone arch. Jacob entertained himself by chasing the school into frightened circles before selecting the largest for his breakfast. He ate the fish on the bank while the sun steamed his ebon feathers, then took to the air.
He found Mal outside the Bone Cave, sorting absently through the toys, flowers, and candles littering the ground near the edge of the crop. The magus’s expression was pensive. He started when Jacob landed amongst the small memorial, scattering trinkets, then sighed.
“I can hear them through the wall,” he said. “Renault should have prevented this.”
Unsympathetic, Jacob flapped his wings. The children trapped in the cave were loud, certainly, but not so noisy one couldn’t ignore their imprecations. Jacob poked about with his beak in the clutter around the cave’s sealed entrance, looking for treasure. Upon finding a child’s silver name-day token hidden amongst the mess he croaked his delight aloud.
Mal tossed him a look of disgust.
“Thieving from the dead is bad luck,” he warned, and disappeared around the side of the grass-covered mound. Jacob shook his feathers in derision and hopped after, clutching the silver coin in his beak.
The back way into the Bone Cave smelled of dog. Jacob sneezed in disgust. Mal pretended not to hear. Standing outside the half-open gate, he conjured a mage-light. The light pulsed silver and green above his shoulder. Theist sigils carved into the cave wall glittered in response.
The inside of the mound smelled of nothing at all, not dog, nor charred bone, nor desiccated corpse. Theist book-magic kept the air stagnant, too cold, and too dry. The makeshift tomb was a moment frozen in time; Master Paul had outdone himself. The Bone Cave was well contained indeed.
Mal sent his light to spinning beneath the ceiling. He turned in a slow circle, taking in the carpet of bones, the dismembered corpses, disordered pieces of armor, and Lane’s blood still staining the sand. He made a sound of grim amusement over the chopping block, then caught sight of the ferric soldier and froze.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Lane. She stood now at Mal’s shoulder, ringed about by her lost children. They clutched her hands and legs and grasped at her clothes.
“I didn’t believe them, when they told me,” Mal confessed. “I thought it must be a farce, or a replica.”
“Holder has seven of them kept in his barn,” the armswoman’s ghost replied. “Seven of the original army, kept back from destruction. His family was proud of their artistry—too proud, mayhap.”
Mal approached the Automata. Bones broke beneath his feet. Lane drifted after, dragging a train of dead children. Goodwife Farrow limped along with them, ghostly brow furrowed.
Jacob perched on a withered sidhe corpse, dug his claws into leathery white flesh. No dead sidhe loitered in the Bone Cave. The Tuath Dé were gods amongst themselves.
“Imagine what seven walking machines would have meant to our cause,” Lane continued. Her blue eyes burned. “We would have had full run of the city, if not the entire flatland. And Holder thought he could build more, in time, with his nuncle’s old scrolls to guide him.”
Mal tapped a thumbnail against the Automata’s breastplate. Jacob spat the silver coin from his beak and muttered. The metal monster was not dangerous on its own, not any more so than a Kingsman’s sword or theist’s spell book—but like any tool, it waited upon the whim of a master.
“And your plan was, what?” Mal wondered. “Toss Renault from the throne, set yourself there in his stead? You never struck me as the sort who cared much for worldly power, Lane. I thought you were happy shaping soldiers.”
“Until the king’s impiety took happiness from me by way of the plague,” said Lane, gruffly. She stroked a hand over the head of a ghostly lad in a page’s uniform. “Renault believes himself above temple decree and so the god sends the Red Worm to steal what we hold most dear. The Masterhealer warned him again and again, but still he insists on ignoring the temple’s counsel. If he’s not soon stopped Wilhaiim will surely fall in the face of the one god’s fury.”
“You didn’t think you would draw the god’s fury by putting a sword through his highest priest?” wondered Mal, staring up into the face of the ferric soldier. The metal creation was a full half man taller than the magus. Jacob didn’t like the way Mal’s face had brightened with avarice. He rattled his wings, uneasy.
“Paul betrayed us,” Lane spat. Her dead eyes burned blue. “I but hoped to remove a godless man from the throne. Paul made promises to the desert tribesman.”
Mal hesitated, attention briefly drawn from the Automata. “Did he? So you killed him. And the others? Baroness Belmas, Farrow, the prostitutes?”
“Holder said we needed new bone to animate the walking machine, in the way of the old magi. No one misses a whore or five. This tomb was perfect, for the butchering and the conjuring. Holder’s place is nearby, the cave afforded us privacy. And it worked, at first. Paul managed to spell dolls into walking, and then the straw men. But that was as far as it went. The spell was clumsy, the ferric soldiers too wieldy. We needed something more powerful.” Lane, too, gazed up at the walking machine. “Farrow and his wife were lately bedeviled by sidhe amongst their foul. Paul thought, mayhap, sidhe bones would work a stronger magic—” She rolled her shoulders. “Greta came across one of our traps whilst out riding, saw the barrowman within. She meant to go to her husband. I stopped her. After that Farrow lost his nerve. Everything began to fall apart.”
“Things do,” mused Mal. “Sooner or later.”
“I don’t regret what I did.” The armswoman stood stolidly amongst wide-eyed children. “I serve my god when so many in court follow His Majesty’s lead into faithlessness.” She took a deep breath. “I’ll stand before him in judgment soon, and I’m not afraid. Will you break the seal, my lord, and let us leave this place, let us rest?”
Mal stood still for so long that Jacob thought the magus hadn’t heard her plea. Lane shifted soundlessly. The small spirits around her began to drift restlessly. Jacob launched from the ground to Mal’s shoulder, only to be knocked again to the sand when the vocent raised silvery-green wards.
“Nay,” Mal decided, as Jacob tried to regain his feet. “Wilhaiim has need of you still, Armswoman.”
Lane’s brow creased. “I don’t understand,” she began, and then she gasped in belated recognition. “You wouldn’t!”
“I have,” Mal said grimly. From the pocket of his plain trousers he drew a single knucklebone, newly cleaned of flesh. “They laid your corpse upon my table last night, old friend. I had the forethought to keep a piece, in the off chance what I learned from your escaped barrowman was true.”
Fear was not an emotion Jacob knew. He was prince among ravens, lord of the wind, chosen by the Goddess for his courage and wit. But the pounding of his heart recalled a long ago dawn when he was thrown from the nest by his mother to try fledgling wings and the terror he felt as the ground came up too fast to meet him.
He’d found his wings then and he found them again. He flew once more at Mal’s face, talons extended to rake and scratch. One more Mal tossed him away, this time with enough force to leave Jacob broken and panting.
Mal began calmly to chant, and as he did so he added a fistful of bone scooped from the floor to those in his hand. His mage-light snuffed out, only to burn again within the Automata’s helm. First Lane and then, one by one, Wilhaiim’s dead children snuffed to nothing as the necromancer stole their essence and used their strength to kindle the ferric soldier. They cried out as they were consumed. The Bone Cave swallowed their wails.
Jacob made it through the gate and into the morning an instant after the Automata woke.
He saw it stir as he fled, one wing gone limp and useless. Its gauntlet fingers moved first, tentative, a slow flexing. Then its tail twitched, a lazy uncoiling. Its chest began to rise and fall with a sound like a farrier’s bellows. At last, as Mal’s chanting rose to shouting, its head turned to watch Jacob as the raven fluttered toward safety.
He felt the stain of its regard on his feathers long after he crawled into the field and hid amongst the wheat.