by S L Farrell
He inclined his head to her. “Then I beg your forgiveness, Kraljica. I will remember that. Please, keep it as my gift to you; the blade was forged by my great-vatarh—my vatarh Stor gave it to me before . . .” She saw a brief flash of teeth in the dimness of the carriage. The springs of the seats groaned once as they jounced over the curb of the temple plaza onto the street.
She allowed herself to smile, then. “I thank you for your gift,” she said. “But in this case, I think it’s better to return it. Let that be my gift to you.” She handed the dagger to him.
He hefted it in his hand, touched the hilt to his lips. “Thank you, Kraljica,” he said. “The blade is now more valuable to me than ever.” She watched him sheathe it again in the well-worn leather hidden under the blouse of his bashta.
“Are you hungry, Vajiki?” she asked him. “We could take supper at the palais, and then . . .” She smiled again. “We could talk, you and I.”
He inclined his head in the deep Magyarian fashion. “I would like that very much,” he said. His voice was like the purr of a great kitten, and Allesandra found herself stirring at the sound of it.
“Excellent,” she said.
Rochelle Botelli
SHE HADN’T EXPECTED TO FIND HERSELF IN Brezno. Her matarh had told her to avoid that city. “Your vatarh is there,” she’d said. “But he won’t know you, he won’t acknowledge you, and he has other children now from another woman. No, be quiet, I tell you! She doesn’t need to know that.” Those last two sentences hadn’t been directed to Rochelle but to the voices who plagued her matarh, the voices that would eventually send her screaming and mad to her death. She’d flailed at the air in front of her as if the voices were a cloud of threatening wasps, her eyes—as strangely light as Rochelle’s own—wide and angry.
“I won’t, Matarh,” Rochelle had told her. She’d learned early on that it was always best to tell Matarh whatever it was she wanted to hear, even if Rochelle never intended to obey. She’d learned that from Nico, her half brother who was eleven years older than her. He’d been touched with Cénzi’s Gift and Matarh had arranged for him to be educated in the Faith. Rochelle was never certain how Matarh had managed that, since rarely did the téni take in someone who was not ca’-and-cu’ to be an acolyte, and then only if many gold solas were involved. But she had, and when Rochelle was five, Nico had left the household forever, had left her alone with a woman who was growing increasingly more unstable, and who would school her daughter in the one best skill she had.
How to kill.
Rochelle had been ten when Matarh placed a long, sharp knife in her hand. “I’m going to show you how to use this,” she’d said. And it had begun. At twelve, she’d put the skills to their intended use for the first time—a man in the neighborhood who had bothered some of the young girls. The matarh of one of his victims hired the famous assassin White Stone to kill him for what he’d done to her daughter.
“Cover his eyes with the stones,” Matarh had whispered alongside Rochelle after she’d stabbed the man, after she’d driven the dagger’s point through his ribs and into his heart. The voices never bothered Matarh when she was doing her job; she sounded sane and rational and focused. It was only afterward . . . “That will absorb the image of you that is captured in his pupils, so no one else can look into his dead eyes and see who killed him. Good. Now, take the one from his right eye and keep it—that one you should use every time you kill, to hold the souls you’ve taken and their sight of you killing them. The one on his left eye, the one the client gave us, you leave that one so everyone will know that the White Stone has fulfilled her contract . . .”
Now, in Brezno where she had promised never to go, Rochelle slipped a hand into the pocket of her out-of-fashion tashta. There were two small flat stones there, each the size of a silver siqil. One of them was the same stone she’d used back then, her matarh’s stone, the stone she had used several times since. The other . . . It would be the sign that she’d completed the contract. It had been given to her by Henri ce’Mott, a disgruntled customer of Sinclair ci’Braun, a goltschlager—a maker of gold leaf. “The man sent me defective material,” ce’Mott had declared, whispering harshly into the darkness that hid her from him. “His foil tore and shredded when I tried to use it. The bastard used impure gold to make the sheets, and the thickness was uneven. It took twice as many sheets as it should have and even then the gilding was visibly flawed. I was gilding a frame for the chief decorator for Brezno Palais, for a portrait of the young A’Hïrzg. I’d been told that I might receive a contract for all the palais gilding, and then this happened . . . Ci’Braun cost me a contract with the Hïrzg himself. Even more insulting, the man had the gall to refuse to reimburse me for what I’d paid him, claiming that it was my fault, not his. Now he’s telling everyone that I’m a poor gilder who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and many of my customers have gone elsewhere . . .”
Rochelle had listened to the long diatribe without emotion. She didn’t care who was right or who was wrong in this. If anything, she suspected that the goltschlager was probably right; ce’Mott certainly didn’t impress her. All that mattered to her was who paid. Frankly, she suspected that ce’Mott was so obviously and publicly an enemy of ci’Braun that the Garde Hïrzg would end up arresting him after she killed the man. In the Brezno Bastida, he’d undoubtedly confess to having hired the White Stone.
That didn’t matter either. Ce’Mott had never seen her, never glimpsed either her face or her form, and she had disguised her voice. He could tell them nothing. Nothing.
She’d been watching ci’Braun for the last three days, searching—as her matarh had taught her—for patterns that she could use, for vulnerabilities she could exploit. The vulnerabilities were plentiful: he often sent his apprentices home and worked alone in his shop in the evening with the shutters closed. The back door to his shop opened onto an often-deserted alleyway, and the lock was ancient and easily picked. She waited. She watched, following him through his day. She ate supper at a tavern where she could watch the door of his shop. When he closed the shutters and locked the door, when the sun had vanished behind the houses and the light-téni were beginning to stroll the main avenues lighting the lamps of the city, she paid her bill and slipped into the alleyway. She made certain that there was no one within sight, no one watching from the windows of the buildings looming over her. She picked the lock in a few breaths, opened the door, and slid inside, locking the door again behind her.
She found herself in a storeroom with thin ingots of gold—“zains,” she had learned they were called—in small boxes ready to be pressed into gold foil, which could then be beaten into sheets so thin that light could shine through—glittering, precious metal foil that gilders like ce’Mott used to coat objects. In the main room of the shop, Rochelle saw the glow of candles and heard a rhythmic, dull pounding. She followed the sound and the light, halting behind a massive roller press. A long strip of gold foil protruded from between the rollers. Ci’Braun—a man perhaps in his late fifties, with a paunch and leathered, wrinkled skin, was hunched over a heavy wooden table, a bronze hammer in each of his hands, pounding on packets of vellum with squares of gold foil on them, the packets covered with a strip of leather. He was sweating, and she could see the muscles in his arms bulging as he hammered at the vellum. He paused for a moment, breathing heavily, and she moved in the shadows, deliberately.
“Who’s there?” he called out in alarm, and she slid into the candlelight, giving him a small, shy smile. Rochelle knew what the man was seeing: a lithe young girl on the cusp of womanhood, perhaps fifteen years old, with her black hair bound back in a long braid down the back of her tashta. She held a roll of fabric under one arm, as if she’d purchased a new tashta in one of the many shops along the street. There was nothing even vaguely threatening about her. “Oh,” the man said. He set down his hammers. “What can I do for you, young Vajica? How did you get in?”
She gestured back toward the storeroom, placing
the other tashta on the roller press. “Your rear door was ajar, Vajiki. I noticed it as I was passing along the alley. I thought you’d want to know.”
The man’s eyes widened. “I certainly would,” he said. He started toward the rear of the shop. “If one of those nogood apprentices of mine left the door open . . .”
He was within an arm’s length of her now. She stood aside as if to let him pass, slipping the blade from the sash of her tashta. The knife would be best with him: he was too burly and strong for the garrote, and poison was not a tactic that she could easily use with him. She slid around the man as he passed her, almost a dancer’s move, the knife sliding easily across the throat, cutting deep into his windpipe and at the side where the blood pumped strongest. Ci’Braun gurgled in surprise, his hands going to the new mouth she had carved for him, blood pouring between his fingers. His eyes were wide and panicked. She stepped back from him—the front of her tashta a furious red mess—and he tried to pursue her, one bloody hand grasping. He managed a surprising two steps as she retreated before he collapsed.
“Impressive,” she said to him. “Most men would have died where they stood.” Crouching down alongside him, she turned him onto his back, grunting. She took the two light-colored, flat stones from the pocket of her ruined tashta, placing a stone over each eye. She waited a few breaths, then reached down and plucked the stone from his right eye, leaving the other in place. She bounced the stone once in her palm and placed it on the roller press next to the fresh tashta.
Deliberately, she stripped away the bloody tashta and chemise, standing naked in the room except for her boots. She cleaned her knife carefully on the soiled tashta. There was a small hearth on one wall; she blew on the coals banked there until they glowed, then placed the gory clothes atop them. As they burned, she washed her hands, face, and arms in a basin of water she found under the worktable. Afterward, she dressed in the new chemise and tashta she’d brought. The stone—the one from the right eye of all her contracts and all her matarh’s—she placed back in the small leather pouch whose long strings went around her neck.
There were no voices for her in the stone, as there had been for her matarh. Her victims didn’t trouble her at all. At least not at the moment.
She glanced again at the body, one eye staring glazed and cloudy at the ceiling, the other covered by a pale stone—the sign of the White Stone.
Then she walked quietly back to the storeroom. She glanced at the golden zains there. She could have taken them, easily. They would have been worth far, far more than what ce’Mott had paid her. But that was another thing her matarh had taught her: the White Stone did not steal from the dead. The White Stone had honor. The White Stone had integrity.
She unlocked the door. Opening it a crack, she looked outside, listening carefully also for the sound of footsteps on the alley’s flags. There was no one about—the narrow lane was as deserted as ever. She slid out from the door and shut it again. Moving slowly and easily, she walked away toward the more crowded streets of Brezno, smiling to herself.
Sergei ca’Rudka
“HAVE YOU HAD A CHANCE to speak with Varina yet? The poor woman—she’s taking her loss so hard.”
Sergei nodded to Allesandra. “I took supper with her yesterday, Kraljica. She’s not sleeping well at all, judging from the circles under her eyes. I sent my healer over to her with a potion.”
“You’re such a kind man, Sergei.”
She was facing away from him, and her comment was carefully modulated. He couldn’t tell if her words had been laced with irony or not. He suspected that they were. “I pray that when Cénzi’s attendants weigh my soul—soon enough now—that it will float in His arms, however slightly, Kraljica. But I’m afraid it will be a rather delicate balancing act.”
They were sitting on the balcony of Allesandra’s outer apartments in the Grande Palais, overlooking the gardens. The wind-horns had sounded First Call a turn and a half ago. Below them, the grounds staff prowled in the morning sun, watering plants and pulling the weeds that dared to raise their green heads in the manicured beds. To their left, workers swarmed the scaffolding where the facade of the north wing was still under construction. The uneven percussion of hammers and chisels kept the birds from roosting easily in the trees.
Allesandra lifted her cup of tea and sipped. She appeared to be watching the workers shaping the granite blocks. Sergei drank his own tea. He had little doubt that Allesandra knew his vices; as he’d aged they’d become, if anything, stronger and more compulsive. When he was in Nessantico, he visited the Bastida a’Drago nearly every day—many of the offiziers within the the Bastida staff were men who had come up through the ranks while he had been Commandant of the Garde Kralji and then the Garde Civile; Capitaine ce’Denise was a recruit he had hired nearly forty years ago. They allowed him to prowl the lower levels, to “visit” the occasional prisoner there, and if they heard the howls of pain, they ignored them (or, often enough, were there with him). In Brezno, in his capacity as Special Ambassador to the Hïrzg, there were certain grandes horizontales Sergei would hire who could serve his particular needs in consideration of the considerably higher fees he paid for their pain and their silence.
Sergei prayed to Cénzi frequently to take these impulses away from him, but He had never answered. He had tried to stop, a thousand times, and each time had lost that battle.
He could command an army to victory but it appeared that he could not command himself.
To the public, “Old Silvernose” was generous. He was kindly in person, he was known for his charitable contributions, and praised for his long service and dedication to the Holdings. To his friends, he was loyal and he would give of himself all that he could. That part of him, too, he had strived to enhance over the years, as a balance to the other.
He wondered which side of him would be remembered, once he was gone. He wondered which side Cénzi would weigh the most. He would find out, soon enough, he suspected. There wasn’t a joint in his body that didn’t have issues of one sort or another. He shuffled rather than walked. It took him several breaths to rise from a chair, and his back sometimes refused to straighten. The prosthetic metal nose glued to his face stood out more than ever in the wrinkled bag of flesh in which it sat. Sergei had outlived nearly all his contemporaries. He existed in a world where everyone seemed to be younger than him. For them, the events he had witnessed and participated in were history rather than memory.
“I understand you’ve convinced A’Téni ca’Paim to allow the Old Temple to be used for the funeral, despite the confrontation yesterday.”
Allesandra nodded. She set down her cup and turned to him. “I did—in fact, the confrontation may have helped; she felt guilty that one of her téni was involved in such an assault. Still, I’m glad that Vajiki ca’Vikej was there.”
Sergei sniffed at that. He knew that ca’Vikej had stayed for several turns of the glass at the palais, and he hoped that wasn’t for the reason he suspected—but that was a question he couldn’t ask. “I interviewed the téni along with A’Téni ca’Paim. He’s a follower of Nico Morel, but claims he was acting on his own. I believe him.”
“I’m sure you coaxed the truth from the man,” she said with a strange inflection in her voice, but she hurried past the comment before Sergei could remark on it. “A’Téni ca’Paim seems to think Archigos Karrol will still be suitably outraged at the use of the temple to honor a Numetodo.”
Sergei lifted an aching shoulder. “Oh, he’ll pretend to be so. He has to. But he also realizes that without Karl and Varina’s help, the Tehuantin might still be feasting in the ruins of Nessantico or conceivably walking the streets of Brezno. Karrol doesn’t like the Numetodo beliefs—I don’t either—but he understands that they’ve made themselves useful occasionally.”
“Hmm.” Allesandra put her hand atop his. Once, years ago, Sergei had thought that Allesandra might have even been attracted to him despite the differences in their age. That would have been a horrible an
d awkward situation, and he’d been pleased that she had never moved to take their relationship beyond friendship. Now he wondered whether she’d found another infatuation with ca’Vikej. “I do worry about the Morellis, Sergei,” Allesandra said. “We’re taking precautions, but . . . All the reports indicate that Nico Morel is somewhere here in the city, and his attitude toward the Numetodo is quite clear.”
“Clear and entirely unreasonable,” Sergei spat. “Karl and Varina were nothing except kind to him as a boy, and now he’s turned on them because what they believe isn’t what he believes. I assume you’ve alerted Commandant cu’Ingres.”
“I have, and I’ve suggested to the Commandant that he should step up the attempts to find Morel and hold the young man in the Bastida until after the funeral.”
The Bastida. That brought images of dark stone and . . . other things. Sergei stirred uneasily in his seat. “That’s sensible. We don’t want a repeat of what happened last Day of Atonement. Allesandra, despite Varina’s objections, I think you’re going to need to move against our self-proclaimed prophet and his Morellis soon. Varina may feel that he’s redeemable, but Nico Morel is too charismatic and dangerous, and too many people are beginning to listen to him. The problem is that Archigos Karrol is half in sympathy with the boy—the Faith won’t do more than slap him on the wrist. If Archigos Karrol or Hïrzg Jan can see a way to use the Morellis against you, they will. At best, he’s an unnecessary distraction at the moment; you don’t want him to become more.”
Allesandra nodded but said nothing. Her hand had gone back to her own lap. “Ambassador ca’Schisler of Brezno will attend the funeral,” Sergei said. “I spoke with him before I came here. I was a little worried that the Coalition wouldn’t be represented, and that would have been a terrible insult to Karl’s memory.”
