A Magic of Dawn

by S L Farrell

  Xaria didn’t understand. Neither did Atl, and he could tell neither of them. He couldn’t allow Atl to use the scrying spells, not because of the cost of them—though that was signficant—but because he knew that Atl had the Gift as he did, and he could not let Atl see what he saw in the bowl. He could not. If Atl saw what he saw, Niente could lose the Long Path. Axat’s glimpses of the future were fickle, and easily changed. “I’m sorry,” he said to Atl. “But it’s important.”

  “I’m certain it is,” Atl said, “because the Nahual is always right, isn’t he?” With that, Atl gave a mocking obeisance to Niente and stalked away toward the other nahualli even as Niente stretched out his arm toward him. Niente blinked; through his remaining eye, he saw Atl stride into the group.

  He could feel them all, staring back up the hill toward him and wondering: wondering if Atl would soon challenge his Taat as Nahual, wondering if perhaps they should do it first.

  Their gazes were appraising and challenging and without any mercy or sympathy at all.

  Sergei ca’Rudka

  FROM THE STREET, SERGEI WATCHED Commandant cu’Ingres’ squad crowd around the door of the shabby, rundown building in Oldtown in the gray dawn. The stench of the butcheries up the street filled their nostrils. There were four men at the front, another three around the rear door, and two each in the space between the house and its neighbors. There was also a quartet of war-téni lent to them by A’Téni ca’Paim—they huddled around the front door, already beginning chants of warding.

  The morning was chilly, and Sergei wrapped his cloak tighter around his shoulders. The street was empty—there was an utilino stationed at the nearest crossroads to stop people from entering, and crowds had gathered behind them to watch. Those neighbors who had noticed the Garde Kralji moving in stayed judiciously in their houses. Sergei could see the occasional flicker of a face at the curtains, though there’d been no movement at the house they were about to enter.

  That twisted his lips into a frown. The tip had come from a good informant, and had been “verified” by the interrogation of two suspected Morelli sympathizers in the Bastida. Sergei was hopeful that this sweep would catch Nico Morel. Yet . . .

  “Now!” cu’Ingres shouted, waving his hand. One of the war-teni gestured, and the door of the house exploded into slivers of wood, accompanied by a loud boom and dark smoke. The Garde Kralji rushed inside, brandishing swords and shouting for anyone inside to surrender.

  Sergei heard their calls go unanswered. He scowled and started across the street, his cane tapping on the cobblestones—Commandant cu’Ingres following at Sergei’s measured, careful pace—even as the o’offizier in charge of the squad came to the door, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Ambassador, Commandant,” he said, standing aside as Sergei entered the house, his knees cracking as he stepped up onto the raised threshold. He could hear gardai searching the rooms upstairs, their boots loud on the floorboards above. “There doesn’t appear to be anyone here.”

  “No. They knew we were coming,” Sergei said. The room in which he stood was sparsely furnished: a table whose scarred surface a square of stained linen did little to conceal; a few rickety chairs with wicker seats in need of recaning. It seemed that if the Morellis had lived here, they hardly lived in luxury. He went to the hearth in the outer room and crouched down, groaning as his legs protested. He held his hand out over the ash: he could feel heat still radiating up from the coals underneath. He stood again. “They were here only last night. Someone warned them.”

  He scratched at the skin near his false right nostril. On the mantel above the hearth, there was only a neatlyfolded piece of parchment; lettering looped over the front and Sergei leaned in closer to read it: his own name, written in an elegant, careful script. He snorted laughter through his metal nose.

  “Ambassador?” Cu’Ingres was peering over Sergei’s shoulder. “Ah,” he said. “Then our informant was right.”

  “Right about the location. Wrong with the timing,” Sergei said. He plucked the paper from the mantel and opened the stiff parchment.

  Sergei—I’m sorry to have missed you. Cénzi tells me that someday you and I must talk. But not today. Not until I’ve accomplished the tasks He has given to me. I would like to think that perhaps now you’ll see that I am only doing His work, but I suspect your eyes, like those of the Kraljica and the A’Téni, are blinded. I’m sorry for that, and I will pray for Cénzi to give you sight. It was signed simply “Nico.”

  “We won’t find anything here,” Sergei told cu’Ingres. “Have your men search the place thoroughly in case they’ve missed something important, but they won’t have. The Morellis have an informant of their own, either in the Garde Kralji or—more likely—within the Faith. We’ve missed them.”

  He poked at the ash in the fireplace with the tip of his cane until he saw glowing red. He let the note drift from his hand onto the coals. The edges of the paper darkened, lines of red crawling over it before it burst into flame. “I won’t let this happen a second time,” he said: to cu’Ingres, to the paper, to the ghost of Nico.

  The paper went to dry ash, fragments of it lifting and rising up the flue. Sergei shrugged his cloak around his shoulders. He slammed his cane hard once on the floor of the house, and left.

  “We’ll be successful next time,” Sergei said. “I promise you that.”

  He watched Varina shrug in the light streaming in between the lace curtains of the window. The patterns of the lace speckled her face and shoulders with dappled light and put her eyes in deep shadow. “I know this isn’t what you want to hear,” she said, “but part of me is glad Nico escaped you, Sergei. I think Karl would have felt the same.”

  The teapot on the table between them clattered as Sergei adjusted himself in the chair. “Your compassion is admirable, and is what makes everyone—including Karl—love you.”

  “But?” Varina put down her teacup. Lace-shadow crawled across the back of her hands.

  Now it was Sergei who lifted his shoulders. “Compassion isn’t always good for the State.”

  “Would you have said that back when the Numetodo were called heretics and condemned to death?” Varina retorted softly. She looked out to the curtained window and back again. “Would you have said that when Kraljiki Audric and the Council of Ca’ named you a traitor?”

  Sergei put his hands up in front of him as if to stop an onslaught. He remembered the time he’d spent in the Bastida after Audric’s condemnation of him all too well: how frightened he’d been that what he’d done to many others would now be done to him, and how it had been Karl and Varina who had saved him from that fate, at the risk of their own lives and freedom. “I yield,” he said. “The lady has taken the field.”

  Varina almost smiled at that. The expression was momentary, but Sergei grinned in response—it was the first time he’d seen her show a trace of amusement since Karl’s final illness. He reached out and patted her hand; the skin sagging around his bones made her hands look youthful by comparison. “The boy’s had a hard life,” she said. “Snatched away from his poor matarh by that horrid madwoman, the White Stone. What kind of life could the boy have had? We have no idea what horrors he might have experienced with her.”

  “I agree, we can’t know that. However, he’s no longer a boy but a man who must be responsible for his actions,” Sergei said, then lifted his hands again as he saw Varina start to answer. “I know, I know. ‘The child shapes the man.’ I know the saying, and yes, there’s truth to it, but still . . .” He shook his head. “Nico Morel isn’t the boy we knew, Varina, no matter how much you’d like that to be true. His last action killed five of your friends and injured many others.”

  “I know,” she answered sadly. “And I’m not saying he should have no punishment for that. Nor do I think him the monster you’d make him out to be, even after what he’s said, even after what he did to—” She stopped there. He heard the catch in her voice and saw the moisture gather in her eyes, and he knew what she wouldn’t
say. Varina sniffed and gathered herself. “But compassion . . . You’re wrong about that, Sergei. You’re wrong about what I’m feeling. A dog gone mad can’t be blamed for its madness, but it still must be dealt with for the good of all. I understand that, Sergei. But if the dog is mine, then it’s my duty to deal with him. Mine.”

  Her voice was fervent, and Sergei wondered at the urgency he heard there.

  “Just promise me that if you hear from Nico, for any reason, that you’ll tell Commandant cu’Ingres immediately,” he said. “He’s promised to watch over you while I’m in Brezno, but I worry about the Morellis, especially after Karl’s funeral. Cénzi knows what they’re capable of doing. Dealing with him yourself would be risky. From what Archigos ca’Paim has told me, his skills with the Ilmodo are positively frightening, if he would choose to use them. Promise me you’ll be cautious. Promise me that you won’t make any effort to contact him. This particular mad dog threatens everyone in the city; let the city deal with him.”

  Another smile, this one far fainter than the last. “You sound like Karl now. I’ve always believed that caution was overrated,” she said, and the smile broadened suddenly. “And you, Sergei—you’ll be careful yourself?”

  “Hïrzg Jan, though it probably shows his lack of judgment, seems to like me despite the frigid relationship between him and his matarh,” Sergei told her. “And in any case, I’m only the messenger for Kraljica Allesandra.” And sometimes the messenger is blamed when the message isn’t the one they want to hear . . . Sergei smiled even as the doubt crept into his mind. Jan wouldn’t like Allesandra’s message, that was certain. He suspected that Allesandra was going to dislike Jan’s reply just as much.

  You’re getting too old for this . . . That thought kept rising to the surface, more and more. He was tired, and the thought of several days in a carriage on the road and the pounding his body would take from that, and the discomfort of the inns and strange beds along the way . . .

  Too old . . .

  “Take care of yourself, Varina,” he said. “Be careful, and please remember what I said about Nico.” Grimacing, Sergei pushed his chair back and rose. He took up his cane, leaning against the table. Varina rose with him, going to him and hugging him. One-handed, he returned the gesture.

  “And you take care of yourself,” she told him. “And watch yourself with the court ladies, Ambassador. I hear that in Brezno, they aren’t as . . . discreet as we are here.”

  It won’t be ladies of the court with whom I consort . . . “I’m afraid that when they look on me, the court ladies wish to do nothing more than flee the room,” he told her, touching his nose. He pressed her tightly once more, then released her. “I’ll call on you again as soon as I return. I promise.”

  Brie ca’Ostheim

  KRIEGE SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN in their dressing room at all, but he had a habit of slipping away from the nursemaids who watched him. Brie would have to talk to them later.

  Brie was awakened when she heard the servants’ door to the dressing room creak open. She heard Kriege’s feet padding over the carpet. She slid from her bed and into the dressing room both she and Jan shared. Kriege was standing in front of Jan’s dresser, his hands busy with something that his body masked. Brie smiled indulgently, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Kriege,” she said, “what are you doing?”

  Krige spun around, startled, and she saw the dagger in his hand, the blade out of the scabbard, the edges of the dark Firenzcian steel glinting. His mouth opened in an “O” of surprise, and his face colored as he realized that he was still holding the weapon.

  “Kriege,” she said. “Put that down. Carefully now. Your vatarh would be terribly angry if he saw you with that.”

  The nine year old’s eyes widened. She saw his lower lip start to tremble. “I’m not angry with you, Kriege. Just put it down.”

  He did so, a little too hastily, so that the blade clattered against the wood and rattled the boxes there. She slid forward quickly and grabbed the dagger, sliding it back into its well-used scabbard. Kriege watched her movements: he watched everything that had to do with things martial—in that, he was unlike his vatarh and more like her own vatarh, who had an obsession for edged weapons and possessed a collection of swords and knives that was the envy of even the museums. Kriege’s true name was Jan—for his vatarh as well as his great-great-vatarh; he’d quickly acquired the nickname “Kriege”—warrior—for his stubborn and colicky personality as an infant. The name had stuck; he was “Kriege” to everyone in the palais. Now it seemed he might be intending to live up to the nickname.

  Brie herself had inherited her vatarh’s fascination for weaponry; in fact, she’d first come to her husband’s attention when she’d demonstrated her skill with swordsmanship at a palais affair she’d attended with her vatarh, dueling and defeating a chevaritt who had made a disparaging remark when she’d commented on his weapon. She generally carried a knife somewhere on her person, still.

  But this wasn’t her weapon; it was Jan’s. She put the dagger back in the rosewood box where Jan kept it when it wasn’t on his belt, then crouched down in front of Kriege. The boy’s brown, curly locks tumbled over his forehead as he lowered his head, and she lifted his chin with a hand, smiling at him. “You know you aren’t supposed to be in here, don’t you?”

  He nodded, once, silently. “And you know you shouldn’t be going through your vatarh’s things, don’t you?”

  Another nod. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What are you sorry for?” The voice came from behind them; Brie looked over her shoulder to see Jan standing in the door of his own bedroom, still in his nightshirt, his hair bed-tousled. He yawned sleepily, rubbing his bearded face.

  Brie hesitated, but Kriege was already slipping past her, grabbing his vatarh’s legs. “Vatarh, it was your dagger. I wanted to see it . . .”

  Jan glanced at Brie, still crouching in front of the dresser. She shrugged at him, shaking her head. “My dagger, eh? Well, come here . . .” He took Kriege by the hand and walked to the dresser. He opened the rosewood box and took out the weapon and its soiled, stained sheath. The pommel end of the hilt was decorated with semiprecious stones—Brie suspected that was what had attracted Kriege in the first place—the hilt itself carved from hard blackwood. The blade was double-edged, tapering to a precise and deadly point. An exquisite weapon. With an exquisite history.

  Jan held the knife, sheathed, in his hand. “This is what you were after?”

  Kriege nodded his head energetically.

  “What do you know about this knife?”

  “I know you always wear it, Vatarh. I see it on your belt nearly every day. And I know it’s old.”

  Jan smiled at Brie over Kriege’s head. “It’s very old,” Brie told him. “It was made for your great-great-great-vatarh Karin when he became Hïrzg, almost seventy years ago, and he gave it to your great-great-vatarh Jan when he was young man, and Jan gave it to . . .” She stopped, glancing at Jan, who shrugged. “. . . your great-matarh Allesandra.” She didn’t mention that Allesandra had used the dagger to kill the Westlander magician Mahri. Reputedly, both Karin and the first Jan had also killed someone with the same dagger. Her Jan, too, had found a reason to feed the steel with an enemy’s blood—when his sword had broken in the midst of a battle against the army of Tennshah. “And Allesandra gave it to your vatarh.”

  Kreige’s eyes had gone wider and wider as Brie had given the history of the weapon. “Will you give it to me one day, Vatarh?” he asked Jan, and then his face clouded and he scowled. “Or will stupid Elissa get it ’cause she’s the oldest?”

  Brie stifled a laugh as Jan opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again. “No one is going to get it until they’re much older,” he said finally. “It’s not a toy or a plaything.”

  “I want a knife of my own,” Kriege persisted. “I’m old enough. I won’t cut myself. I’d be very careful.”

  “I’m sure you would,” Jan told him. He took a breath, glancing a
gain at Brie, who shook her head slightly. No, she mouthed.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Jan said to Kriege. “I’ll tell Rance to have a talk with the weapons master for the Garde, and see if he can give you lessons on the proper handling of a knife. If he tells me you understand and have learned all of his lessons, then perhaps for your next birthday we might talk about something you could wear on state occasions.”

  “Oh, thank you, Vatarh!’ Kirege burst out, hugging Jan again. He broke away, then. “I’m going to go tell Elissa and Caelor. They’re going to be so jealous!” He ran from the room, calling for his siblings.

  “Don’t,” Jan said, raising a hand as Brie started to speak. “I know what you’re going to say. I know. Elissa will be in here in a few minutes, demanding to know why she can’t have a knife, too, and Caelor will be right after her.”

  “And what are you going to tell them?”

  “That Caelor needs to wait until he’s as old as Kriege.”

  “And Elissa?”

  “I think lessons in handling a weapon would be good for her. It’s a skill she may need one day.” He put the knife back in its box, closing the lid. “You don’t agree?”

  It’s one of many skills she’ll need, she might have retorted, remembering Mavel cu’Kella, who was by now on her way to relatives in Miscoli. Brie was certain that Jan knew what had happened, and who had sent her away, though neither of them had spoken about it. Jan had come to her room last night, which told her that no one had shared his bed last night. “Sometimes,” she said to him, “you can’t have everything you want. Even the Hïrzg.” His gaze rested on her more sharply with that, and she added: “Or Hïrzgin. If that should be her fate.”