by S L Farrell
Jan lifted his wine and tapped the rim of his goblet against that of cu’Kohnle. “Good,” he said. “Then let us drink to our understanding.”
Ana cu’Seranta
Nessantico bereft of a Kralji lurched like a boat without a hand on the tiller. Concenzia bereft of an Archigos in the temple stuttered and hesitated. The city held its collective breath and jumped at every strange noise and cowered with every cloud-shadow. Rumors flew through the city like dark, flapping bats, frightening and furious.
The Garde Kralji was especially skittish, and the Bastida was crowded with people arrested for treasonous statements. The judicial system was quickly overwhelmed; judges offered many of those incarcerated the chance to prove their loyalty (and regain their freedom) by joining the Garde Civile; many did so. In addition, the conscription squads of the Garde Civile roamed through the city and the villages and farmlands around it daily, taking any unwary men they found and depositing them in the growing tent encampment outside the city walls along the Avi a’Parete. There, ragged and uncertain squads could be seen marching and training during the day. Garrisons from Villembouchure and Vouziers arrived a few days after the Kraljiki’s departure, swelling the encampment so that the Avi north and west of the city swarmed with them from the road to the banks of the River Vaghian.
Hundreds if not thousands of the soldiers flooded into the city at night: into the restaurants, the bars and taverns, the brothels. Even during the day, groups of sword-girt soldiers were seen in every public square.
The crisis affected Concenzia as well. With the Archigos and the more-adept lesser teni gone, the infrastructure of Nessantico faltered.
The a’teni, most of whom had remained behind to attend to the affairs of Concenzia in the Archigos’ absence, were rumored to be looking for excuses to return to their home cities and planning their departures.
The teni of the city were poorly directed as a result, and worries and uncertainty rendered their Ilmodo spells weak and ineffective. Sewage flowed untreated into the A’Sele, making it more of a cesspool than usual, the stench reaching far out from its banks. The nightly lighting of the Avi a’Parete was erratic-sometimes long stretches of the Avi, especially in east Oldtown, went dark only a few turns of the glass after the lamps were set aglow. The foundries that utlizied teni to power their great ovens and forges found their Ilmodo-fires sometimes too weak to melt the ore without using far more coal than usual. The teni-driven carriages were a rare sight even for those within Concenzia, and since the growing army had taken most of the horses, people walked or stayed home. Of greatest concern was the lack of teni for the fire patrols, and there were worries that an errant spark could destroy blocks of houses, especially in Oldtown, before enough teni could be found to extinguish the flames.
The great stone heads at the various gates of the city no longer rotated with the sun; there were no teni available to lend them mobility.
The wind-horns on the temples still sounded the calls and the services continued in the temples-the u’teni and o’teni who performed the rituals found more people in the seats than usual but fewer folias, siqils, and solas in the donation boxes.
War shadowed everyone’s thoughts, everyone’s activities. Nessantico herself hadn’t experienced a siege or even a nearby battle in centuries. This was not a situation that had a counterpart for long generations of the families living within the long-sundered walls of the capital. War was something that took place on the edges and frontiers of the Holdings-in Tennshah, in Daritria, in Shenkurska or cold Boail or the far Westlands-always there, always easily available for those who sought glory and fame through its bloody auspices, but always held at a safe distance.
No more. War hovered just to the east, a thunderhead on the horizon, lightning crackling under black ramparts. The markets were crowded every day, but the stalls were thinned by the swelled ranks of the city and by all the produce diverted to feed the army, and the haggling was halfhearted and the conversation was not regarding the quality of the vegetables and meats, but what might happen if the Kraljiki’s negotiations failed. On the South Bank, it became even more expensive to eat in the fashionable restaurants as supplies became short and menu prices rose in response. On the North Bank, for the poorer residents, bread prices that had been fixed for decades at a d’folia tripled over-night after the Kraljiki’s departure and continued to rise; there were reports of sawdust mixed in with the flour, or of loaves rather smaller than the required minimum standards-both illegal practices but also unsurprising. Storekeepers opened their shutters each morning but fewer customers entered, and those who did wanted to talk about politics, not the goods on display. Those in the crafts found that the rich patrons who hired them to build or remodel, to plaster and decorate, to play music for their parties or paint their portraits, had few commissions. “The war, you know. .” was always the answer, with a roll of the eyes to the east.
The war. .
The war shadowed Ana as well. The conscription squads raided the tavern below Mahri’s dwelling twice more in the week following the Kraljiki’s departure. The uproar woke her and Karl from sleep late at night, though again the squads never came upstairs to their rooms, a fact that Ana no longer found quite so unusual. The third time they came, it began with the same muffled shouts heard through the floor of their apartment, shouts that disrupted, then banished, the dream she had of herself talking to Archigos Dhosti in the Old Temple. In the dream, the Archigos was telling her to heal her Matarh, but matarh seemed possessed, speaking in voices that were not hers, shouting loudly. .
“Ana?”
“I hear them.” She opened her eyes. She could dimly see Karl in the bit of moonlight trickling from between the slats of the shutters. He was standing at one of the windows, holding the shutter slightly open to see the courtyard below. Mahri was gone. Ana heard the crash of glass below, and more shouts.
“There they go,” Karl said from the window. “Dragging four poor bastards with them who won’t be coming home to wives or family tonight or any time soon. They’ll be down to taking children soon.”
Ana rose from her blankets and went to him. Karl’s proximity felt good, a warmth along her side, and his arm came around her as they watched the conscription squad hauling the men away down the street.
She felt Karl’s arm lift from about her, heard him start to speak in his odd version of the Ilmodo-speech.
“You can’t, Karl,” she told him. “They’d know you were here, they’d take you back to the Bastida.”
His hands stopped moving, his voice stilled. She could see other faces at the windows along the street-people wondering who had been taken this time. A woman came hurtling from one of the door-
ways, screaming and trying to pull one of the men away from the squad; they pushed her away. “Falina, I’ll be back. Take care of Saddasi. I’ll be back. .” they heard the man calling as he was hauled along the street and down the next corner. The woman huddled on the street wailing as neighbors came out to comfort her.
Karl’s arm tightened around Ana’s shoulder. She leaned into the embrace.
“I hate this,” she heard him say. “I hate all of it: the hiding, the constant fear, the way the whole city feels. ”
“I know,” she said. “I’m tired of it also.”
“We should leave,” he said. “Go somewhere else. Back to the Isle, maybe. There are things I would love to show you there, if you’d come with me.”
Like the woman you left there with the promise of your betrothal? She was afraid to say it, afraid that there would be too much bitterness in her voice and too much vulnerability in her heart. “I can’t leave,” she said instead. “This is my home. Matarh is here, the Archigos’ Temple is here, and any hope I have of ever defeating the lies that have been spread about me and Archigos Dhosti. If we run, Karl, everyone will think they were all true, and-” She stopped. Sniffed. “Smoke,” she said, her voice catching. “Something’s burning.” She turned, looking back into the room. She thou
ght she could see a dark mist seeping in the twilight of the room, like a black fog seeping from the floorboards on the other side of the room. There was light as well, a ruddy glow penetrating the cracks between the worn blackwood planks.
“Fire,” Ana breathed. “The tavern. .”
“Come on,” Karl said. He took her arm. “We have to get out of here. Quickly-”
They fled from the rooms and down the outside stairs. Flames were already licking at the shutters of the first floor and smoke boiled from the front of the building. The alarm was beginning to spread, with shouts and cries from the nearby buildings as neighbors alerted each other. “Find the utilino!” someone shouted. “We need the fire-teni or the whole block will go!”
Karl was tugging at Ana’s arm as she stood in the center of the lane and stared at the building, the door of the tavern outlined in fire. “We have to leave. You can’t be here when they come.”
“They won’t come in time,” she protested. “You know that. We can put it out. I know the spell.”
“I don’t,” Karl answered, “and that blaze would take a dozen fireteni, Ana. The building’s gone and so will be all the others around it; we can’t stop this.”
She shook away his hand on her arm. “Ana-”
She closed her eyes to his plea. She began to chant, trying to recall the words that U’Teni cu’Dosteau had taught her. Larger gestures, this time; even bigger than before. . The words came slowly, but then she caught the rhythm of the chant and the words flowed easily, her hands shaping the power that she felt rising around her with the chant.
The form that U’Teni cu’Dosteau had taught them was a truncated one, a small practice spell, but she improvised on it, letting her mind find pathways that expanded it. She thought of nothing, just letting her mind open to the Ilmodo, letting her hands move unconsciously. The power continued to build, an invisible storm of rain and wind around her that only she could feel, thrashing and bucking and fighting her.
When it became so strong that she was afraid that she could not hold it back any longer, she stopped chanting, holding the release word in her mind: again, a word that she did not know, a word that Cenzi must have put in her head.
She opened her eyes and at arm’s length cupped her hands around the tavern. She could see her fingers trembling, glowing with cold blue.
She spoke.
The very air answered her.
The spell rushed outward, an invisible, frigid explosion that sent the tavern doors and the shutters of the windows into splinters. The wind shrieked and howled, a scream that caused the people nearby to clap hands to ears. The smoke roiling from the building increased dramatically, but turned a strange pale white that seemed to glow in the moonlight, overpowering the ruddy flames. A quick fa-WHOOMP reverberated along the street, followed by silence.
The building sat: the first story blackened around the open holes of windows and door, wisps of smoke still trailing upward. But no flames were visible. Ana saw it, but then the weariness of the Ilmodo struck her, as strongly as she’d ever experienced it. Her knees buckled, and she felt Karl’s hands go around her to support her, and she heard the crowd yelling, and a voice close to her saying “Ana, you are more dangerous than anyone thought.” The voice was Mahri’s, and she glimpsed his hooded, scarred face in the narrowed tunnel of her vision.
“Mahri,” she said. “I had to. .”
“No, you didn’t, but I’m not surprised that you thought you did,” he told her. “And now we have to get you out of here.”
She felt herself being lifted-“Karl?”-and she saw the buildings moving around her and heard the people shouting around them. . but it was easier to fall into sleep than to worry about it, and Karl and Mahri were there to keep her safe, so she allowed herself to fall away for a time.
She never quite reached unconsciousness. She was aware of movement, of voices, of being carried into somewhere. She must have slept a bit; she woke smelling warm bread and tea. She opened her eyes to daylight in a room she didn’t recognize.
“It’s about time,” she heard Karl say. He came from the outer room with a plate and mug and set it down on the floor next to her mattress, then sat beside it himself. “Four full turns of the glass, I’d bet, if we had a glass to turn. It’s morning.” He smiled. “I have breakfast. I knew you’d be famished.”
He handed her the bread, with a single thin dab of precious butter on it. The smell alone made her ravenous, and she took one of the slices and tore into it hungrily. “Mahri?” she manage to ask between bites.
“He brought us here, then vanished. Haven’t seen him since around daybreak. The man must not sleep like normal people.” She could feel his gaze on her as she reached for another slice and took a sip from the mug of steaming tea. “That was some impressive display of the Ilmodo,” he said to her. “It almost made me want to believe in Cenzi. I think it impressed Mahri, too. He was mumbling to himself the whole time we were carrying you.”
“The fire would have taken so many houses. All those people. .”
“I know. I know why you didn’t listen to me. I just don’t understand how you did all that.”
“I don’t understand how you do what you do, either,” she told him.
“For a time, that made me doubt everything. Especially myself.”
He smiled again. “Evidently you found yourself again.” His hand stroked her cheek; the feel of it on her skin made her shiver.
“No,” she told him, and he pulled his hand away.
“What’s the matter?”
“What’s her name?” Ana asked him. “The woman in Paeti. Your fiancee.”
She wasn’t certain why she said it; the words slipped out, as they had lurked there in her head, waiting. There was a long silence. Karl stared at her. “How did you know?”
“Does that make a difference?” she asked him. It bothered her that he seemed more irritated than ashamed. “What matters more to me is that you never told me about her. What’s her name?”
She watched him take a breath, then another. “Kaitlin,” he said at last. “Ana, I’ve been gone two years now. I don’t know when I’ll return, or if. Kaitlin and I. . we said we’d be faithful. But I think we both knew that I might find someone else, or that she might. .”
“Has it happened?”
He ducked his head. Nodded. “For me, it has,” he said. “I think you know that.”
“And for her?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know, Karl.”
He said nothing. The tea steamed in the mug in her hands. “Has it happened for you?” he asked finally. “With me?”
“Perhaps,” she answered. “I don’t know. Too much has happened and I’m not sure of anything now. But I don’t know that I’m ready for what you want.”
“Because of Kaitlin.”
Ana couldn’t decide whether that was a statement or a question.
She nodded. “Yes. And. . other things. Karl, I may never be ready.”
Had he left then, had he simply nodded and accepted that, she knew that it would all be over between them. She knew that it would have killed whatever it was that had brought them together. It would have changed things between them forever.
He did not. He knelt in front of her and his hands went around hers as she held the mug.
“Then I can wait,” he told her.
Justi ca’Mazzak
The morning fog had lifted several turns of the glass ago, and the sky was crowded with gray clouds drifting lethargically above them. Justi gestured, and the great portcullis of Passe a’Fiume groaned and protested as it was hauled up and the thick oaken gates of the town swung open. Justi’s entourage was small: no more than twenty of the ca’- and-cu’ chevarittai attending him, Commandant ca’Rudka accompanied by two double-hands of the Garde Civile, Archigos ca’Cellibrecca with U’Teni cu’Bachiga of Passe a’Fiume and a half-dozen war-teni from the Archigos’ Temple.
Justi had watched from the walls of the
town as Hirzg ca’Vorl’s retinue entered the field conspicuously just beyond bowshot range of the walls (though not unreachable by war-teni.) The archers remained arrayed on the walls as Justi’s small force advanced out from the gate and onto the Clario bridge. A page in the livery of the Kraljiki waited at the far side of the bridge, a scabbarded sword cradled in his arms. He bowed low as Justi rode slowly up to him.
“My Kraljiki, the Hirzg Jan ca’Vorl has accepted your sword from me and asked me to give you this in return,” the page said. The young man’s voice trembled slightly as he presented the sword hilt-first. Justi leaned down to take the sword as the page, still bowing, backed away.
The sword was plain but obviously well-used: the sword of someone who used the weapon as a tool of war, not in tedious ceremonies. The leather wrapping of the hilt was stained, and the feel was solid. The Hirzg’s initials were engraved in the pommel, the deep-cut, ornate lines filled with glittering lapis, the only touch of ostentation on the weapon.
Justi drew the weapon; it was beautifully balanced in his hand, and the twin edges were polished and keen, with the slight curve that was the hallmark of the Firenzcian saber. The steel was satin and almost dark, and it sang a shimmering high note as it left the scabbard.
The sword was a message, he knew. The presentation sword Justi had given to ca’Vorl had been one of the ceremonial swords his matarh had commissioned as gifts for ambassadors and representatives: more showpiece than weapon, more jewelry than edge.
“Firenzcian steel,” Commandant ca’Rudka commented, coming up alongside Justi. His silver nose gleamed in the sunlight; Justi could see his own distorted reflection in one nostril. “Beautiful, if you like deadly things.” From ca’Rudka’s raised eyebrows, Justi knew that the man understood the significance of the gift. Justi sheathed the weapon and hooked the loop of the scabbard to his belt, and gently nudged his horse forward again as the page stepped aside. The retinue began to move, hooves loud on the wooden planks of the bridge. Justi glanced up toward the tents farther down the Avi, their sides up to allow breezes to enter-and to allow Justi to see that there was no deception. He could see the Hirzg’s retinue in the shadows under the linen cloth.
