Psalms of Isaak 01 – Lamentation

“Rudolfo?” The voice was hoarse and far away, laced with something he thought must be madness. More scrambling, and Rudolfo saw a filthy form crawl into the light. Sethbert had already started losing his fat, his clothes hanging off him. He was covered in filth from head to toe, his hair and beard matted with mud, his clothing ripped and gray with grime. His eyes were wide.

“Yes,” Rudolfo said. “I am here. This is over now. Come out.”

Sethbert smiled, relief washing his face. “I will come out. Soon.” He offered an exaggerated wink. “But first, did they not tell you that I intend to hurt you?”

Rudolfo’s hands clenched the knife hilt, his eyes on Sethbert’s hands, both splayed out on the muddy boathouse floor. “With what do you intend to hurt me?” he asked.

“With knowledge,” he said. Rudolfo waited.

Sethbert continued. “I had the evidence. ?€the evidI saw it. I saw the charts and the maps. They intended to use the spell to enslave us.”

Rudolfo laughed. “I thought you were going to hurt me, not amuse me,” he said. “What would the

Androfrancines gain from enslaving us?”

“I’m a patriot of the light,” Sethbert said. The madness crept into his eyes now, too, and his face twitched in the shaft of morning sunlight.

Rudolfo scowled. “Enough of this. You’ve run out of time, Sethbert.”

He stepped back and almost missed the next words because Sethbert whispered them, low and with a sharp clarity. “Ask the whore who shares your bed who paid for the coups that killed your parents.”

Rudolfo spun, the knives coming out. “What did you say?”

Sethbert’s eyes met his, but the Overseer did not utter another word.

Later, after the physicians had chained Sethbert into the wagon, Rudolfo rapped on the outside of it with the pommel of his long, narrow sword and ordered the black-robed driver to make the return trip at a leisurely pace, stopping in what towns they could along the way.

He’d hoped he could follow, but he knew now that he could not. Sethbert’s words had chewed at him despite the Overseer’s obvious madness. He’d actually believed that the Androfrancines meant to harm the people they were sworn to protect. In the end, the paranoia of a madman brought down a city.

But this other-it touched on a suspicion he had harbored for a long while now. Everyone had said that his parents’ death was a terrible tragedy, an unseen insurrection that exploded in one night of intense violence that left Rudolfo an orphan. They’d shaken their heads when, even at his young age, Rudolfo suggested an investigation. It had seemed too convenient, and in two thousand years of forest life, there

had never been insurrection. The night his parents died, he stayed up past dawn drafting his strategy for investigation. Gregoric’s father was supportive, but the pontiff felt the Physicians of Penitent Torture would better serve the occasion. Rudolfo listened to the pontiff. It was the first and last time he did not follow his instincts.

Even now his instincts led him, and he raced his new horse westward.

Ask the whore who shares your bed who paid for the coups that killed your parents.

_{No, Rudolfo thought, I will not ask her.}

Instead, he would ask her father.

_Neb

The mechoservitors fascinated Neb.

Certainly, he’d seen them on occasion in the library-though not often. Now, he could walk among them, talk with them and on occasion work with them as they cataloged and inventoried what pieces of the library lived within their memory scrolls.

Today, he worked with Isaak integrating the inventory of the latest caravan from the summer papal palace. After Resolute’s unexpected suicide, the Androfrancines at the Palace had quickly accepted Petronus’s invitation to return to the fold. But when a certain Captain Grymlis showed up at the gates with a small contingent of Gray Guard, Petronus turned them away.

“The Gypsy Scouts guard the Son of P’Andro Whym now,” he told them. “If you would be true to your vows, obey me now. Bury your uniforms and take up new lives far away from here.”

Neb had never seen anything like it. To a man, they stripped naked, buried their uniforms in the forest floor and left.

That had been two weeks ago.

Now, the wagons full of books and artifacts had formed a steady stream, two or three per week. Androfrancine refugees and property from the Emerald Coasts, from the Summer Papal Palace and even a few from the City States on the Delta trickled into the Ninefold Forest. Word of the restoration had spread throughout the Named Lands, and a corps of engineers already worked hard at digging its deep basements.

And Neb worked with Isaak to inventory each wagon so that the information would be recorded on the metal man’s memory scroll.

He watched the metal man work, his eye shutters opening and closing rapidly as he wrote. “Sethbert will arrive day after tomorrow,” Neb said.

Isaak looked up. “What do you think they will do with him?”