A Magic of Nightfall nc-2

by S L Farrell

  “What about the boy Nico?” Varina asked. “What do we do with him?”

  “We’ve heard nothing from Talis or his matarh?” Karl asked, and Varina shook her head in answer. “Then keep him with you for now, if you’re willing. If things get too dangerous, just let him go-I’ve no interest in having the child hurt because he’s associated with us.” Karl gave a long sigh. His own ale sat untouched on the table, and he stared at the bubbles frothing against the wooden mug. Thousands of bubbles, all rising for a time, then bursting and gone. Like me. Like all of us. Too quickly gone, and nothing afterward. Nothing…

  “I’ll go with you tonight, Karl, after I’ve sent Sali and the children on their way,” Mika told him. “You’ll need help with this.”

  Karl shook his head. “That’s not necessary.”

  “If ca’Rudka is snatched from the Bastida by magic, then we all know who’s going to be blamed and who’s going to be hunted,” Mika said. “For once, they’ll be right in blaming the Numetodo, eh? But the response we get won’t change whether you go alone or with a dozen of us, or whether you succeed or fail: just the attempt will be enough.”

  “I’m not going to risk the lives of a dozen of us. I’m going to take two,” he said. “Myself, and one other.”

  Mika grinned. “So I might as well make certain that you succeed-as long as ca’Rudka’s alive, there’s a chance he may find his way back to power, and that would be best for us.”

  “I’m stronger than either one of you with the Scath Cumhacht,” Varina interjected. “I’m going with you also.”

  With that declaration, the knot in Karl’s stomach tightened. He imagined Varina dead, or worse, captured. The pain of that thought made him grimace, made his head shake. “There’s no need. You have Nico to watch.”

  Her lips tightened. She tapped the booth’s table with her fingernails. “Mika,” she said, “I think we need another round here. Would you mind getting it?”

  Mika blinked, puzzled. “Just call Mara over and-” He stopped, then his eyes widened slightly. “Oh,” he said, his lips pursing. “Certainly. I’ll go get it.”

  He had barely left the booth when Varina turned in the bench seat to face Karl. Her voice was low and dangerous. “Karl, I have spent years- years -doing the research and experiments to expand the catalog of spell formulae we now use regularly. I have thrown myself into understanding the Westlander magic and how it might work and how we might harness their ways. I have given up…” She stopped, biting her lower lip momentarily. “I have given up the life I might have had for the Numetodo and a cause I thought we shared. And now you’re going to relegate me to a babysitter? If you do that, Karl, you will be telling me that I’ve wasted all that time and all that effort and all those years. Is that what you’re telling me? Is it?”

  Her accusation sliced into him like a honed dagger. He lifted his hands from the table as if wounded. “You don’t understand-” he started to say.

  “What don’t I understand?” she shot back. “That you don’t think I’m of any use to you? That I don’t… don’t care enough for you to want to help?”

  “No.” He shook his head helplessly. “Varina, our odds aren’t good here.”

  “And they’re better without me?”

  Karl sighed. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t want you hurt.”

  “You’re willing to let Mika take his chances, though? Why, Karl? Why is it different for me? Why?” The questions were hammer blows, and he thought there was a strange urgency to her questions, as if there were an answer she wanted him to give.

  But he had no answers. He ducked his head, staring down at his mug, at the bubbles expiring on its rim, at the water ringing the bottom and staining the wood. “If you want to go with me, Varina,” he said, “then I will be glad for your help,” he told her. He lifted his head. She was staring at him with a fragile defiance. “Thank you.”

  Her mouth opened slightly, as if she were going to say more. Then she nodded.

  Mika came back with more ale. He placed the mugs on the center of the table. “Settled?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Karl answered. “Settled. If this is what you both truly want, then let’s finish our drinks so we can go to our rooms and prepare the spells we’ll need this evening. Mika, if you’d make sure that word gets passed along that all Numetodo should leave the city or plan to make themselves very scarce for the foreseeable future…” He picked up his mug finally, and Mika and Varina lifted theirs. They touched them together. “To luck,” he said. “We’ll need it.”

  They drained their mugs as one.

  Varina ci’Pallo

  “ You look awful tired, Varina,” Nico said.

  She was. She was exhausted, so tired that her bones ached. The afternoon had been spent preparing spells, shaping the Scath Cumhacht until the spell was complete, then placing the trigger word and gesture to release it in her mind. The spell-weariness dragged at her-it was worse now than it had been when she was younger, worse since she’d begun experimenting with the Tehuantin method. She’d gone to the small room where they kept Nico to bring him his supper and check on him.

  “I’ll be fine in a few turns,” she told Nico. “I just have to go to sleep for a bit so I can recover.”

  “Talis was always tired, too, when he did magic things, especially with that bowl. I thought it made him look old, too. Like you.”

  The brutal honesty of a child. Varina touched her graying hair, the deep wrinkles that had carved themselves into her face in the last few years. “We pay for magic this way,” she told Nico. “Nothing ever comes to you in this world without cost. You’ll learn that.” She smiled wryly. “Sorry. That sounds like something a parent would say.”

  Nico smiled: hesitantly, almost shyly. “Matarh talks like that to me sometimes,” he told her. “Like she’s talking more to herself than me. I’ll try to remember it, though.”

  Varina laughed. She sat on the chair alongside his bed, leaning forward to tousle his hair. Nico frowned, sliding back a little on the bed. “Nico,” Varina said, drawing her hand back, “I have to talk to you. Things are happening, outside. Bad things. After I rest a little, I have to go do something, and when I get back, we’re going to have to leave the city, very quickly.”

  “Like I had to with Matarh?” He drew his doubled legs up to his chest as he sat on the bed, wrapping his hands around them. He looked at her over his knees.

  “Yes, like that.”

  “Are you in trouble?”

  She had to smile at that. “I’m about to be.”

  He sniffed. “Is it because of that man?”

  “Karl, you mean? You might say that.”

  He released his legs and glanced at the food on the tray but didn’t touch it. “Are you and Karl…?”

  She understood what he was asking without the word. “No. What would make you think that?”

  “You act like you are. When the two of you talk to each other, you remind me of Matarh and Talis.”

  “Well, we’re not… together. Not that way.”

  “He likes you, I can tell.”

  That made her smile, but the taste of it was bitter. “Oh, you can, can you? When did you become so wise in the way of adults?”

  Nico shrugged. “I can tell,” he said again.

  “Let’s not talk about this,” she said, though she wanted to. She wondered what Karl would say to Nico if Nico told him the same thing. “I need you to eat, and I need you to get some sleep because very likely we’ll be leaving the city tonight. You need to be ready for that.”

  “Will you take me to my matarh?”

  “I wish I could, Nico. I really do. But I don’t know where we’ll be going, yet. I’ll take you somewhere safe. That much I promise you. I won’t let anything bad happen to you, and we’ll try to get you back to your matarh. Do you understand me?”

  He nodded.

  “Good. Then eat your supper, and try to sleep. I’m going to rest myself, in the next room. If you ne
ed me, you can call me. Go on now, you should try that soup before it gets cold.”

  She watched him for a few minutes as he ate, until she felt her eyelids growing heavy. When she woke up, she discovered she’d fallen asleep in the chair next to his bed, and Nico was asleep himself, curled up near to her with one hand stretched out to touch her leg. Outside, she could hear rain pattering against the roof and the shutters of the house.

  She brought the covers up over Nico and pressed her lips to his cheek. She left him then, closing and locking the door behind her.

  She hoped she would see him again.

  The White Stone

  Nessantico…

  She had never seen the city before, though of course she’d heard much about it. Even with the Holdings sundered, even with the previous Kraljiki having been a pale shadow of his famous matarh, and even with the current Kraljiki a frail boy who-rumors said-wouldn’t live to his majority, Nessantico retained her allure.

  The White Stone had always known she would eventually come here, as anyone with ambition must. The pull of the city was irresistible, and for a person in her line of business, Nessantico was a rich and fertile field to be exploited. But she had not expected to come here so quickly or for these reasons.

  After the nearly-botched and hasty assassination of the Hirzg, she had thought it too dangerous to stay in the Coalition. She’d slipped back into her beggar role as Elzbet, hiding herself among the poor who were so often invisible to the ca’-and-cu’, and she’d made her way from Brezno to Montbataille in the eastern mountains that formed the border of Nessantico and Firenzcia, and then down the River A’Sele to the great city itself.

  Playing her role, she settled herself in Oldtown. That was the best way to avoid drawing attention to herself. She was just another of the nameless poor walking the streets of the known world’s greatest city, and if she conversed with the voices in her head as she walked, no one would particularly notice or care. Just another crazed soul, a mad-woman babbling and muttering to herself, walking in some interior world at odds with the reality around her.

  “You’ll pay for this. You can’t kill me and not pay. They’ll find you. They’ll track you down and kill you.”

  “Who?” she asked Fynn’s strident voice as the others inside her laughed and jeered at him. She put her hand to her tashta, feeling underneath the cloth the small leather pouch tied around her neck, and inside it the smooth, pale stone she kept with her always. “Who will come find me? I told you who hired me. Is she going to search for me?”

  “You’re worried that someone else will figure it out. You’re worried that word will get out that the White Stone was also the woman who was Jan ca’Vorl’s lover. They’ve seen your face; they would recognize you, and the White Stone’s face can’t be known.”

  “Shut up!” she nearly screamed at him, and the screech caused heads to turn toward her. A passing utilino stopped in the midst of his rounds, his teni-lit lantern swinging over to focus on her. She shielded her eyes from the light, stooping over and grinning at the man with what she hoped was a mad leer. The utilino uttered a sound of disgust and the light moved away from her; the other people had already looked away, turning back to their own business.

  The voices of her victims were laughing and chuckling and chortling as she turned the corner into Oldtown Center. The famous teni-lamps of Nessantico gleamed and twinkled on the iron posts set around the open plaza. She gazed up at the placards of the shops along the street. Here in the large plaza the shops were still open, though most of those along the side streets had been shuttered since full dark: the teni might light the lamps of Oldtown Center, but they didn’t come to the narrow and ancient streets that led off the Center. They’d set the ring of the Avi A’Parete ablaze all around the city, so that Nessantico seemed to wear a collar of yellow brilliance, and they would illuminate the wide streets of the South Bank where most of the ca’-and-cu’ lived, but Oldtown was left to dwell in night.

  The moon had slid behind a cloud, and a drizzle threatened to turn into a hard rain. She hurried along toward the Center, knowing that the weather would send everyone home and set the shopkeepers to shuttering their stores.

  There: she saw the mortar and pestle of an apothecary just down the lane, and she shuffled toward it through the rapidly-thinning crowds, keeping her back near the bricks and stones of the buildings and her head down. Once, a passing man touched her arm: a graybeard, who leered at her with missing teeth and breath that smelled of beer and cheese. “I have money,” he said to her without prelude, his face slick with rain. “Come with me.”

  Whore! the voices called out at her gleefully, mocking. Why not?-you let them pay you for other services. She glared at him, and showed him the hilt of the knife at her waist. “I’m not a whore,” she told him, told them. Her hand grasped the knife, and raindrops scattered from her cloak with the motion. “Back away.”

  The man laughed, gap-toothed, and spread his hands. “As you wish, Vajica. No harm, eh?” Then his gaze slid away from her and he walked on, splashing in the gathering puddles. She watched him go.

  She could rid herself of him, but not of the others. They were with her always.

  She’d reached the apothecary and glanced inside the open shutters. There was no one inside except for the balding proprietor. She went inside, the man glancing up from his jars and vials behind the counter as the bell on the door jingled brightly.

  “Good evening to you. A foul night-I was just about to close up. How can I help you, Vajica?” His words were pleasant, but the tone of them and the look he gave her were less inviting. He seemed torn between coming from behind the counter and returning to his interrupted preparations to close. “A potion for headaches? Something to ease a cough?”

  The White Stone would have been firm, would have been certain, but she wasn’t the White Stone now, only an unranked, nondescript young woman dripping on the floor, a person who could be mistaken for a common prostitute walking the streets or trying to escape the weather for a moment.

  Is this what you really want? She wasn’t sure who asked the question, or whether it was her own self who asked. The voices had been quiet when she’d been with Jan. Somehow, being with him had quieted the turmoil inside her head, and that had been at least part of the attraction he’d had for her, had been why she’d let herself grow far more attached than she should have. With Jan, for that little time, she’d felt herself healing. She’d thought that maybe she could become someone other than the White Stone, could become normal. Jan. .. She wondered what he was thinking now, whether he was feeling that he’d been played the fool, or if he ever thought of her with regret. She wondered whether he knew who she’d been, that she’d killed his uncle, or if he thought she’d fled only because she pretended to be someone she wasn’t and had been found out.

  “Vajica?”

  She wondered if he would ever know just how much she regretted it all.

  She touched her stomach gently again, as she had more and more recently. She should have had her monthly bleeding even before she’d killed Fynn ca’Vorl. She’d thought perhaps it was the stress that had made it a few days late. But the bleeding hadn’t come during her flight; it still hadn’t come during the days she’d been in Nessantico, and there was now the strange nausea when she woke and there were stranger feelings inside.

  It’s all you will have of him. Do you really want to do this?

  It might have been her own voice. It might have been all of them.

  “Vajica? I don’t have all evening. The rain…”

  She shook her head, blinking. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I…” Her hand touched her abdomen again.

  He was staring at her, at the motion of her hand on her belly. His chin lifted and fell, and he rubbed a hand over his bald head as if smoothing invisible hair. “I may have what you want, Vajica,” he said, and his voice was gentler now. “Young ladies of your age, they come to me sometimes, and like you, they don’t quite know what to say. I h
ave a potion that will bring on your bleeding. That’s what you need, isn’t it? However, I must tell you that it’s not easy to make, and therefore not cheap.”

  She stared at him. She listened. She put her hand to the collar of her soaked tashta and felt the stone in its leather pouch.

  The voices were silent.

  Silent.

  “No,” she told him. She backed away, hearing the door jingle as her heel slammed into it. “No. I don’t want your potion. I don’t want it.”

  She turned then and fled into the plaza and the harsh assault of the rain, the teni-lights flaring around her and reflecting on the wet streets.

  That was when she heard the wind-horns begin to blow alarm, all across the city.

  EVASIONS

  Karl ca’Vliomani

  The plan was simple enough-it had to be. Karl had no army with which to assail the Bastida. He had no compatriots among the gardai to open the gates for him or leave them unguarded or to give him copies of the ornate keys to the donjon. He didn’t have the wild, powerful magic Mahri had possessed when Mahri had taken him from the Bastida, to just snatch Sergei away.

  He had himself. He had Mika and Varina. He had what Sergei himself had told him.

  He had the weather.

  The Bastida had originally been designed as a fortress to guard the River A’Sele from invaders coming upriver; it had been turned into a prison late in its life. Portions of its legacy still existed, and no one knew all of its hidden ways, though few knew them better than Sergei ca’Rudka, who had long been in charge of the rambling, dank collection of black stones.

  The trio borrowed a small rowboat moored east of the Pontica a’Brezi Nippoli, stepping into it a few turns of the glass after full dark, as the moon and the stars were lost behind the ramparts of scudding sky-towers and a fine mist began to fall. “I’d say thank the gods, if I believed in them.” Mika grinned at Karl as he helped Varina in, then Karl. Knee-deep in the river, he pushed them away from the shore. “I’ll see you two later,” he said.