A Magic of Dawn

by S L Farrell

  . . . In the mists, he sought the path that he’d seen before, but the landscape had changed and the futures were all tangled and snarled, the mists rising high in all but that first, terrible vision. He could still see it, vaguely: the two armies clashing in fire and blood, the battle turning suddenly and unexpectedly as Niente—was it him? The mist made it difficult to see—raised his spell-staff a last time . . . And beyond, in the the future of that path, a city rising higher than before in the east, and the pyramids of Tlaxi strong against the backdrop of the smoking mountain . . .

  . . . but there was a figure standing before that path, barring it, and Niente tried to pierce the mist around the man. It was his own face gazing back at him . . . No, it was a younger version of himself, the features shifting . . . Atl! It was Atl, his spell-staff raised in defiance, and lightnings crackled around him, licking hot and fierce toward Niente . . .

  Niente lifted his head from the bowl with a gasp. The green mist was swept away, vanishing in the sun and leaving Niente staggering in the midst of a reality that seemed thin and unreal. He shook his head to clear it, allowing himself to come back from the vision. His legs threatened to stop supporting him, and he sank onto the ground, the rickety table that held the scrying bowl falling over. The water spilled from the bowl, the brass bowl rang as it hit the stony ground, and one of the nahualli stuck his head through the tent flaps. “Nahual?”

  Niente waved him away. “I’m fine,” he said. “Go away.” The nahualli stared for a moment, then withdrew.

  Niente sat there, hugging his knees to himself. Atl . . . It was Atl who now made the path he’d glimpsed difficult to find. It was Atl who blocked the way.

  Atl. “You can’t give me this burden,” he said. He was weeping—from the exhaustion, from the fear, from his love for his son. “You can’t expect me to pay this price.”

  Axat, if She listened, remained silent. Niente stared at the bowl, upturned in the grass, and he shuddered.

  Rochelle Botelli

  BEFORE SHE’D LEFT THE ENCAMPMENT, she’d gone back to her own tent, taking the coins she’d hidden there—the money she’d received for killing Rance and the others she’d slain in her short career. She’d bound the coins under her clothing so that they made no noise; Jan’s dagger was sheathed just above her boots under her tashta.

  She watched the encampment for a few days from a clump of trees near the royal tents, twice having to evade searchers beating the brush for her. She saw Hïrzgin Brie, saw that fool Paulus, saw the Starkkapitän. She saw the Archigos and Sergei arrive. And finally, she saw her vatarh. She stared at him until his figure wavered in the tears forming in her eyes.

  Then, finally, she slipped away.

  It had been easy enough to evade the patrols looking for her—they were noisy and large, giving her ample time to conceal herself. She was good at that, at blending in. She found a bitter-eye tree and stripped long peels of the bark from it, boiling them in a small pot she stole from a farmhouse she passed, and washing her hair with the pale, caustic extract until her black hair became a paler nut-brown. The bitter-eye extract made her hair brittle, coarse, and untamable, her natural curls gone, but that only enhanced the effect. She looked like some ragged, unranked young woman, a farmer’s daughter. She took on the accent of the region; she stole a chicken and basket from another farm, and walked the road with that as if she were on her way home or to a market. Once, as a test, she even stayed on the road when a quartet of chevarittai in Firenzcian livery came by on their warhorses, greeting them as if she had no idea they were searching for her. They looked at her, talked among themselves for a moment, then asked her if she’d seen a dark-haired woman about the same age. Rochelle shook her properly-downcast head shyly, and after a moment, they cantered on.

  She held back the angry laugh until they’d gone.

  She moved south and west, crossing the border into Nessantico at Ville Colhelm. There she took a room at one of the inns, calling herself “Remy.” She remained there, restless but not yet certain what she must do.

  The nights were the worst. She could hear the revelry in the tavern downstairs, and yet it repulsed her. People should not be happy here, not when her own mind was in such turmoil. Her dreams were haunted by memories of that final confrontation with her vatarh. Sometimes Matarh was there with her. “I told you,” she said, her face touched with sadness as she looked from Jan to Rochelle. “I told you not to go there . . .”

  “But he’s my vatarh, and I knew you loved him,” she answered, and they were no longer in the tent-palais, but in the home she remembered best, the cottage in the uplands sheep country of Il Trebbio. “You should have known that I’d be drawn to him.”

  “I know, and they know,” she answered. She touched the stone she kept around her neck, the pale stone that held all the voices that haunted her, that drove her mad, and Rochelle pressed a hand to her own neck to where the same stone hung, its presence reassuring. “They told me that you would be the one to finally pay for my sins, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for that.” She was sobbing, and her tears dissolved the daub-and-wattle side of the cottage. The smell of burning peat was heavy in her nostrils, but the scene had shifted again, and she and her matarh were standing in a meadow under a starlit, moonless sky, with silvered clouds hurrying along the horizon as lightning licked at the distant hills with white snake tongues. Thunder growled imprecations and curses around them.

  “But you’ve not done what I’ve asked,” Matarh said, and she was no longer weeping. The fury of madness was on her face now, and her fingers gripped hard at Rochelle’s shoulders. She was thirteen again, still a few fingers shorter than her matarh but more muscular, her first few kills already behind her. Her matarh lay back on the bed, and they were no longer on the hilltop but in that last home they shared, in Jablunkov, Sesemora. The painted, great oaken timbers loomed over them. Matarh was gasping for air, on her deathbed. She’d picked up the red lung disease and begun coughing up blood a week before. The healers had all shaken their collective heads at the symptoms and told Rochelle to prepare for the worst. “Listen to me now,” her matarh said, still grasping Rochelle’s shoulders as she leaned over the soiled rag she’d held over her mouth and nose.

  “Listen to me, Rochelle. There is one responsibility that I place on you, something that—no, just shut up! You can’t stop me from telling her . . .” That last was to the voices in her head. Matarh shook her head as if trying to dislodge a persistent fly. She turned her head to cough, loosing a spray of red flecks that coated the pillow. “. . . something I intended to do myself, but now . . . No, I will not be with you, you bastards. I killed you all, and I’m going to where your voices will be silent forever. Do you hear me?”

  Then Matarh’s eyes cleared again and her fingers tightened on the cloth at Rochelle’s shoulders. “I wanted to kill her for what she did to me,” she husked. “If it weren’t for her, I could have been happy, could have stayed with your vatarh. I wanted to hear her scream in torment in my head as she realized what I’d done—not because someone paid me to do it, no, but because I wanted it. I could have been happy with him, Rochelle. Your vatarh . . . The voices were gone when I was with him, but she . . . She ruined it all, for me, for Jan, for you too, Rochelle. She ruined it . . .”

  Her hands loosened, and she fell back on the bed. For a moment, Rochelle thought that Matarh was dead, but her breath shuddered in again and her eyes focused. Her hand, trembling, lifted to touch Rochelle’s cheek. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you will do what I couldn’t do. Promise me. You will kill her, and as she dies, you will tell her why, so she goes to Cénzi knowing . . .”

  “I promise, Matarh,” Rochelle husked, crying.

  The smell of peat overcame the odor of sickness. Rochelle sat up, startled, in her bed in the inn. She could hear the wind blowing outside as a storm came through, the chimney to the hearth in her room losing its draw and the smoke from the peat chunks glowing there wafting back into the room. Then t
he wind changed and the smoke was sucked upward again. The wind screamed, and Rochelle thought she heard a fading whisper in it. “Promise me . . .”

  She’d not yet kept that promise. She’d told herself that she would, that one day she’d go to Nessantico as the White Stone, and there she would find the woman who had ended Matarh’s affair with her vatarh.

  Allesandra. The Kraljica.

  Why not now? Jan would be going there, also, she was certain. That was what all the offiziers and gardai were saying. He would be taking the army to Nessantico.

  She could be there first. She could keep the promise to Matarh, and Jan would know who had done it, and he would understand why.

  Rain spattered against the shutters of the room. Thunder boomed once. Rochelle brought the covers around her, suddenly awake.

  “I will go to Nessantico, Matarh,” she whispered. “I promise.” The peat hissed in response.

  Varina ca’Pallo

  THE SPARKWHEEL WAS HEAVY ON THE BELT under her cloak, a constant reminder, and her mind burned with the spells she’d cast the day before, holding them for this afternoon. On the far side of the plaza, looking ominously abandoned and empty, the Old Temple’s golden dome gleamed even in the rainfall, as water spilled from the copper gutters into the mouth of gargoyle rainspouts, which disgorged white, loud streams into the plaza far below.

  There were lights in the Old Temple and the attached buildings: the light of normal fires and téni-light both. They had all seen faces staring outward; those eyes could not have missed the massing of the Garde Kralji around the plaza and the arrival of the Numetodo. There could be no surprise here. This would be a frontal assault into the face of a well-prepared enemy.

  Talbot, Johannes, Leovic, Mason, Niels, and others of the Numetodo were gathered near her, all of them grim-faced. A’Offizier ci’Santiago of the Garde Kralji approached them as they waited. “My gardai and utilinos are all in position,” he told them. “The Kraljica is also here to observe.” He pointed to a window above them, one of the government buildings that bordered the plaza. “You’re certain that you want to try speaking to Morel first, A’Morce?”

  “I have to,” Varina answered.

  Talbot shook his head. “No, you don’t, A’Morce. We could send in someone else with the message. I would go myself, willingly . . .”

  Varina smiled at Talbot. “No,” she told him, told all of them. “I know Nico. He’ll recognize me, and he’ll talk to me. I’ll be safe. He’s the head of his group as I’m the head of mine. He’ll see us as peers. This is the way it needs to be.”

  “And if you’re wrong?” Ci’Santiago asked.

  “I’m not,” she told him firmly, though she wondered herself about that possibility. “Wait here. All of you. If this goes well, we can end this siege without bloodshed.”

  She could see the disbelief on all of their faces. None of them shared her optimism. In truth, she had little hope herself.

  She nodded her head to them, then started across the plaza. As she walked, her footsteps splashing through puddles, she spoke a release word. Light bloomed above her head, illuminating her as she made her way across the dark, wet flagstones in the false night of the storm. Despite the rain, she kept down the hood of her cloak so that her white hair shone in the light and her face could be recognized. She looked back once, when she was halfway across the open area: her friends appeared to be little more than specks in the darkness. All around the plaza, she could see torches alight: the waiting gardai. She turned back, walking slowly toward the Old Temple’s main doors. “I am Varina ca’Pallo, A’Morce of the Numetodo,” she shouted out loudly as she came near. “I need to speak to Nico Morel.”

  In the storm-gloom, her voice echoed from the buildings around the plaza, sounding weak and lonely and thin. A head peered down at her from a window high in the temple and vanished again. She could almost feel arrows pointed toward her or spells being chanted. She felt old, frail. This was a mistake . . .

  But she heard a small door open to the side of the main doors, one without light behind it, and a figure stood there: a shadow in deeper twilight. “Varina,” a familiar, gentle voice said. “I’m here. The question is, why are you?”

  “I need to talk to you, Nico.”

  She thought she saw the flash of teeth in the darkness. The shadow moved slightly, and a hand waved. “Then come inside, out of the rain.”

  With a final glance backward, she moved past him into incense-perfumed dimness. She was in one of the side chapels off the main nave of the temple. Down a wide corridor, she could glimpse the torchlight vista of the main chapel underneath the great dome. There were people there, many in téni-robes, some of them staring in her direction. She could see the main doors of the temple, barricaded and barred.

  She heard Nico close and lock the door again, sliding a heavy wooden beam across it. Another person was there with him: a young woman with a heavily pregnant curve to her stomach: very noticeable as her téni-robes pressed against her as she stood next to Nico. He must have noticed Varina’s attention on the woman; he smiled again. “Varina, this is Liana. She and I . . .” He smiled. “We are married, even though Liana insists that I should remain free of the actual rite.”

  “Liana,” Varina said. Varina wondered if she had ever looked that young and that obviously in love. Varina touched her own belly: if I’d known Karl back when I was young enough . . . “That’s a lovely name.” Then she looked back to Nico, whose arm had gone around Liana. “Nico, you can’t win here. Kraljica Allesandra has made the decision that the Old Temple must be retaken. She doesn’t care about the cost—in terms of lives or in damage. She’s massed the Garde Kralji and those chevarittai who are still in the city, and they are ready to attack.”

  “And the Numetodo?” Nico asked. “Are they out there, too?”

  Varina nodded. “We are. You can’t stand against us, Nico. Not even with the war-téni you have here. We have our own magic, and we have black sand in quantity. This will be a massacre, Nico. I don’t want that. At the very least, I would ask you to release Commandant cu’Ingres as a sign that you’re willing to negotiate an end to this. Let’s talk. Let’s see if we can come to some sort of agreement.”

  “You want me to release cu’Ingres so that the Garde Civile might have some competent leadership.” He smiled at her, his arm tightening around Liana. “You forget that I have Cénzi on my side. I know you don’t believe, Varina, but you have no idea what you really face here. He has told me that He will send down fire from the sky to protect us. Do you think it’s a coincidence that there’s a storm tonight? It’s not.”

  As if on cue, lightning sent multicolored light slashing through the rose window above them, and thunder grumbled. Liana laughed. “Look at yourself, Varina,” she said. “You nearly jumped out of your skin just now. You want to believe; you just won’t let yourself. Can’t you feel your husband’s soul calling to you from the afterlife?”

  “No,” Varina told the young woman. “You believe in a chimera. You say ‘I don’t understand this’ and you make up a myth to explain it. We Numetodo look for explanations—we don’t need to call on Cénzi to create magic; we call on logic and reason.”

  Nico was frowning now. “You slap the face of Cénzi with your heresy,” he snapped. “You have no idea how powerful Cénzi has made me.”

  “You would have been this powerful regardless,” Varina told him. “The power is within you, Nico. It has nothing to do with Cénzi. It’s your power. You’ve always had it, and I’ve always known it.”

  Nico drew himself up, releasing Liana. In the dimness of the temple, he seemed larger, and his voice—Varina realized—crackled with the power of the Scáth Cumhacht. She wondered whether he even realized what he was doing: without a spell, without calling on Cénzi at all. She was amazed: this was nothing she could do herself, nothing any Numetodo could do. He was tapping the Second World instinctively and naturally, as if he were a part of it. She wondered, knowing this, what else he w
as capable of doing. Karl, I could use you now. Together, perhaps we could understand this . . . “Is this what you’ve come to do, Varina?” Nico continued. “To insult me here in the very house of Cénzi? If so, you’re wasting your breath and we are done talking.”

  Varina started to respond angrily, then stopped herself. She took a long, slow breath. “Look at me, Nico,” she said. “I’m an old woman. I don’t want this. I’m here because I cared about you when you were a child, and I still care about you. I don’t want you to be hurt. I don’t want the death and destruction that will come if the Kraljica hauls you and your people out of here by force. And she will do that, Nico. She’s determined that she must do this, and unless you surrender yourself, that’s what will happen. Is that what you want? Do you want your followers here to die?”

  Nico laughed again, hearty and rich, so loud that the others in the main portion of the temple glanced their way. Liana smiled with him. “That’s all you have, Varina?—to appeal to fear, to play on my sympathy? Do you think me that naive? I have been charged by Cénzi to do this—perhaps you can’t understand what that means, but because of that charge, I have no choice. No choice at all. I do His bidding; I am His vehicle. This is not my action nor my battle. If the Kraljica and the Archigos wish to defy Cénzi, then it will be their own souls and everlasting salvation that they risk, and the same for those who support them. Each of you out there is damned, Varina. Damned. You want me to surrender? That won’t happen. Rather, let me give you this task: go to your Kraljica, who coddles you and your heresy. Tell her that, instead, I demand her surrender. Tell her that otherwise she risks the destruction of everything she has built. Tell her that she will find that Cénzi will send fire and flame to assault her, that those she commands will tremble and quake with fear, that they will run in terror from what awaits them. Tell her that.”