by S L Farrell
It was easy to locate the Hirzg’s tent, with his banner caught in mid-flutter above. She walked unchallenged through the encampment and past the gardai outside. She lifted the flap-the canvas as stiff and unyielding as if it were frozen-and stepped inside.
She stopped, breathing heavily with the exertion of simply walking in this gelid air. The interior of the tent was ornate: a thick rug covered the ground, a wooden field desk stood on its stand to one side, a brazier trailed an unmoving wisp of incense, and teni-lights had been lit to brighten the room. There were several people in the tent, gathered around a table set with food: ca’Cellibrecca she recognized instantly, his hand lifting a fork-ful of meat toward his gaping mouth. There was another man in black and silver with the insignia of the starkkapitan on his sleeves; a thin man who was seated at the middle of the table; a green-robed teni with the slashes of an u’teni-that could only be cu’Kohnle.
The Hirzg sat at the head of the table. . and on his lap, unexpectedly, was a young girl. The sight puzzled Ana for a moment, then she realized: it was the Hirzg’s daughter Allesandra. It had to be her; she could see the similarity in their faces.
They were all statues crafted by a flawless artist. The power snarling in her head, she went to the Hirzg. She pulled the knife from its scabbard.
So easy. . Draw it hard and deep, and he will die, and then do the same to ca’Cellibrecca and cu’Kohnle, and the starkkapitan as well. .
But she stood there, staring at the tableau, the power within Mahri’s spell buzzing insistently in her ears. Allesandra was gazing up at her vatarh, her mouth half-open, and there was such deep love and affection in her gaze that it stopped Ana’s hand.
Once it was that way for me, before Matarh became sick. Vatarh loved me, and I loved him in return, and he would hold me on his knees and play with me and I never, never wanted to leave. .
She almost heard the girl’s chuckle. She saw the Hirzg’s hand, ready to brush away an errant curl from her forehead, and in his eyes was the same affection, the same love.
Ana’s hand trembled. The tip of the knife wavered just above the Hirzg’s flesh. The Ilmodo seethed and crackled around her, as if Cenzi Himself were laughing.
You don’t have time. Mahri told you. Kill him. Leave. . She imagined the aftermath and how it would be for the girl: one moment laughing with her father, then a breath, a waver, and the blood would be pouring from him and her vatarh would collapse on her, dead in an instant.
Impossibly taken.
A breath, a waver. . A brief instant of disorientation and reality dissolving around her. As Ana had felt when Mahri came to her with the glass ball. “It’s just my finger. It might as easily have been a knife. .”
The brief instant of disorientation. .
The dissolution of reality. .
So familiar. .
Ana gasped.
She knew. All in that instant, she knew. This was what Mahri needed. Not what she needed.
She glimpsed another way. A better way, she hoped.
There was little time left. The Ilmodo screamed in her mind, a rising wail, and she could not hold the spell together for much longer. She slid the knife back in its scabbard and went to the field desk, spreading out a piece of thick paper that seemed to fight her hand, taking a quill and dipping the end into the inkwell.
Even writing was a struggle, as if the ink itself were fighting her.
She wrote a brief, scrawling note and signed it. Returning to the table, she tugged the Hirzg’s arms away from Allesandra-they moved reluctantly, as if he were loath to allow this. She tucked the note in his hand and closed his fist around it.
Finally, she took the unaware girl in her arms.
Hoping she could make her way from the encampment before she could no longer hold the spell together, she fled. Carrying the stiff body of Allesandra, it was as if Ana were fighting her way upstream against a rushing, white-watered current. She stumbled from the encampment with the burden of the young girl, past the campfire and beyond the line of guards, and out into the open field between the two armies, pausing a few times to rest and recover her breath.
The campfires of the Nessantico defenders edged closer.
There was a man standing between herself and the campfires, though, and he stood where there had been no one before. “Kenne?” she breathed, hoping somehow it was true and knowing it was not.
“Karl?”
“No,” the apparition answered, and the shock of his speech was enough to tear away the remnants of the spell. The world returned to motion around Ana, the impact of it causing Ana to drop Allesandra to the ground.
“It was you, wasn’t it, Mahri?” Ana said.
Allesandra ca’Vorl
“You are my little bird, and I love-” her vatarh said, but then the world lurched around her and she wasn’t there on his lap anymore but somehow lying on the cold, wet ground in the night. Someone-a woman’s voice-was growling at a black figure in the middle of a meadow. Allesandra tried to get up, but she was disoriented and could only struggle to her knees.
“It was you, wasn’t it, Mahri? The Kraljica didn’t die because of ci’Recroix’s spell-it was you who killed her.”
Dizzy, feeling nauseous from the strangeness, Allesandra stared at the speaker. It was hard to see in the dim, fleeting moonlight, but the woman was dressed in a teni’s robes-robes that looked similar to those the fat Archigos wore. She was speaking to a man: he was little more than a beggar. His face, when the moonlight caught it under the hood of his cloak, was horrid: all twisted and scarred with one eye missing, and the smile he gave the woman was hideous.
“Yes, it was me,” he admitted. “This won’t do, Ana. I can’t have you take the girl back to be ransomed. That would leave the Hirzg alive. .” He smiled again, and the coldness of the expression made Allesandra shiver. She would have cried out, but they were both ignoring her. She remained still, but her fingers crept to where her vatarh’s knife was tucked under her tashta. “But I can remedy that problem.
After all, finding you out here with the girl’s body will tell everyone who killed the Hirzg-that will work nearly as well for my purposes, I think.
There’s still time. In fact, there’s all the time I need.”
He lifted a hand; in it was a small glass ball. He closed his eyes and spoke a word; but the woman had done the same-gesturing sharply with one hand and speaking a phrase that boomed loudly in the night air. The glass ball shattered in the man’s hand. Green-and-yellow light shot through the air, sending shadows racing over the ground. The man shouted and staggered backward.
“I didn’t come entirely unprepared, Mahri,” the woman-could she really be Ana, the false Archigos? — said to the man. “And I’ve learned from Karl, too.”
“You’ve not learned enough,” the cloaked man told her, cradling his arm. “Not enough. .”
He lifted both his hands, sweeping them through the air, and speaking a sequence of words in a strange tongue. The attack came so quickly that Allesandra was certain that the woman would be consumed by it: crackling blue fire streamed from the gesturing man to envelop the woman. But Ana had raised her own hands at the same moment and the blue fire split into two streams just in front of her, hissing and fuming as they struck the ground on either side of the Archigos.
But the firestream continued to pour toward her, and Allesandra heard the woman gasp as she held her shielding hands before her. Her mouth was moving, but the words were unheard over the fury of the spell; her eyes were closed and lines of effort creased her face. The sundered firestreams began to close, threatening to drown her in the blue flames.
Allesandra wanted to believe this was a nightmare, that she had simply fallen asleep suddenly in her vatarh’s lap, but it couldn’t be a dream. And she knew that when the cloaked man killed Ana, he would look next at her. .
Georgi had told her that a starkkapitan must know when to make alliances, even with those who might the next day be your enemy. Vatarh had shown her the
same.
Allesandra closed her fingers around the knife Vatarh had given her.
She pulled the blade free of the scabbard. Gathering all her strength, pushing away the dizziness, she rushed toward the man, screaming. His gaze shifted to her and the firestreams began to curl, but she was already beside him and she thrust the blade into his cloak blindly.
The firestream nearly touched her, but in the instant she thought she would feel its touch, the blaze shifted as if someone had taken hold of it, and the flames instead wrapped around Mahri himself. He screamed, and Allesandra flung herself away from him, dropping the knife. She struck the ground hard, the breath taken from her. As she tried to breathe, to move, she saw the firestreams crackle and flare, covering the man’s entire body and flinging him a dozen feet away. The spell-fire vanished then, but real flames-yellow and pale in comparison- sputtered on his clothing.
He did not move.
Allesandra could hear people shouting nearby, calling alarm. Tenifire was beginning to glow to both sides of them.
Ana was on her knees in the mud, breathing heavily. Allesandra saw the woman rise, and she tried to get up herself to run away, but she didn’t know which way to go, she was frightened and sore, and Ana already stood over her. “Are you all right?” Ana’s voice was hoarse and cracked and tired.
Allesandra nodded silently, sniffing away the tears that threatened, and when Ana stretched a hand toward her, she took it. “We have to hurry,” Ana said.
“I want to go back to my vatarh.”
Ana nodded. “You will,” she said. “I promise you. In time, you will.”
There were men approaching them, and they wore blue and gold rather than black and silver. Allesandra whimpered in alarm and tried to break free from the older woman, but Ana hugged her tightly. “They won’t hurt you,” she whispered to Allesandra. “I promise you. They won’t hurt you. I won’t let them.”
“Vatarh promised me the city,” Allesandra told her.
“And I will show it to you,” Ana said. “But Nessantico belongs to itself.”
Epilogue: Nessantico
Ebb and flow…
Nessantico breathed a collective sigh as the army of Firenzcia
melted away like a spring ice storm, the Hirzg returning to Firenzcia and his throne in Brezno, returning to his wife who was, after all, a relative of the Kraljiki and therefore still useful.
The Hirzg’s daughter Allesandra remained behind, in palatial imprisonment in the Archigos’ Temple where she waited for the ransom to be paid for her release-she would wait much longer than she imagined. Hirzgin Greta would produce a healthy son for the Hirzg not long after his return to Brezno; having a new heir in hand would make the Hirzg slow to pay the ransom.
A descendant of the ca’Ludovici line held the Sun Throne and ruled as Kraljiki-but Justi the One-Legged would not rule anywhere near as long as his matarh had, nor would his reign be remembered as anything but a disaster.
Archigos Ana the First ruled in the temple, though another claiming the title of Archigos dwelled in Brezno. The Concenzia Faith, for the first time, was sundered, and some gave their allegiance to Nessantico and others to Brezno. The two branches of the Faith would drift farther and farther apart in both belief and temperament.
In Nessantico, the Numetodo gained acceptance and even some prominence, and those professing to be in their ranks would eventually be among the ca’-and-cu’. There were even rumors that the Archigos took one of them as a lover, though she would never marry.
The other countries of the Holdings would remember how Firenzcia had nearly thrown off the yoke of Nessantico, and they would wonder if perhaps they could succeed where Firenzcia had failed. None would try, however.
Not yet.
Ebb and flow. .
Nessantico: the city, the woman.
Once there had been no city who could rival her. She wondered now if that would always be true. She had escaped the rape of invaders, but the reverberations of the attack shook the empire from her center to the far borders, and their echoes would linger for decades.
She knew that with age and prominence inevitably come jealousy and risk. She was no longer invulnerable, and there were rivals in the world who wanted what she had always had.
There was darkness, and forces gathered in that gloom: in the west, she saw, as well as in the east. .
After twilight, there would inevitably come nightfall.
She could not hold it back forever.
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-97b0ff-82b9-1a45-09b6-cf5f-041f-ea498b
Document version: 3
Document creation date: 14.02.2013
Created using: calibre 0.8.56, Fiction Book Designer, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
S. L. Farrell
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