A Magic of Twilight nc-1 Read online

  Cenzi was on Orlandi’s side. He could feel the strength Cenzi lent him, stronger each day.

  He lifted his clasped hands to his forehead. He prayed, and he thought, and he imagined.

  When I’m the Archigos. .

  Encounters

  Ana cu’Seranta

  “IT’s so good to see you, Vaji… I mean, O’Teni Ana.” Sala

  blushed, her head down. “After we heard about what you did for

  the Archigos, and how he rewarded you. . well, we were so happy for you. You look very good in the green, I must say.”

  “Thank you, Sala,” Ana said. She glanced around the entrance-way. The walls of the house had been freshly painted; she could smell the oils. A cabinet of carved wood with blue glass stood in what had been an empty corner, two huge ceramic pots frothed with greenery and flowers on either side of the doors, and she glimpsed a woman she didn’t recognize in servant’s drab clothing in the kitchen hallway. “How is Matarh? Is she still. .?”

  “Oh, she’s nearly recovered, though still a bit weak. She’s in the garden out back. Would you like me to run and fetch her for you?”

  “No, I’ll go back there myself in a moment. I just wanted to retrieve a few things from my rooms.” She took a few more steps into the house.

  The stairs had been carpeted with a runner that looked Magyarian, with diagonal patterns of orange and green. The air was aromatic with a spicy incense.

  “I’ll go tell her to expect you, then. Wait until you see the garden.

  Vajiki cu’Seranta has brought in all sorts of workers in the last several days, though sometimes they seem to be everywhere underfoot…”

  Sala bowed, and gestured at the stairs. “We have three new servants for the house, including a woman who’s taken over the cooking duties from Tari. But your rooms have been left just as they were. I wouldn’t let anyone in there. I told them they weren’t to be touched until you’d been here.”

  “Thank you, Sala. I appreciate that.”

  Again, a shy blush and a duck of the head. “I’ll go tell your matarh now.” She rushed away. Ana went up the stairs, marveling at the touch of the banisters, which seemed freshly varnished and polished. The house had been so drab and shabby for the last several years, and now …

  “I thought I heard your voice.”

  Ana’s hand tightened on the railing at the top of the stairs. “Vatarh.

  I thought you’d be. . gone at this time of day.” She turned. He was standing at the bottom of the flight, a smile on his face: the forced smile he always wore around her. He bounded swiftly up the steps, the smile fixed, the fine bashta he wore flowing around him. Ana found herself backing away, looking from side to side. Everything was different-the hallway that had once been bare was crowded with furniture. Her shin collided with the side of a plush chair. “We all have demons in the night. .”

  She heard the Archigos’ voice, and she took in a breath, drawing herself up as her vatarh reached the top of the stairs, his hands extended toward her as if he expected her to come to him.

  “I’ve quit my job, since I expect to be offered a better one by the Kraljica soon,” he was saying to her. “You see all I’ve done here already?

  For you, Ana. So you could be proud of our family again. So you and I-”

  “I’ve been paid for, Vatarh,” she said, interrupting him. “You don’t own me anymore. I owe you nothing.”

  “Ana!” He recoiled as if in horror. “You make me sound like a monster. You know how much you mean to me. I. . I love you, my little bird. You know that. All this. .” He was walking toward her again, the smile returning tentatively. “They’re just things. I would rather have you here still with us, Ana. With me.”

  “I came to get my belongings from my rooms, Vatarh. That’s all.”

  “Then let me help you.”

  “I don’t need your help.” She turned away, rushing to her room and closing the door behind her. She stood there, letting her heartbeat slow and her breath sink back into her lungs. Finally, she pushed away from the door, moving from the antechamber into her old bedroom.

  She went to a chest at the foot of the bed, pulling out a few clothes and a wooden box that held a few mementos.

  She heard the click of the outer door. “Sala?” she called out, but she knew who it was, knew from the sound of the breathing and the heaviness of the tread on the carpets. “Get out of here, Vatarh,” she told him, rising. He was standing in the door of her bedroom, filling it.

  His expression was at once sad and eager.

  She realized that she’d dropped the clothes and the box and clasped her hands together before her. She’d prayed in this room before, after the other times he’d come to her, masked in night and shielded by a daughter’s respect for her vatarh, when he’d held her and told her how frightened he was for Matarh and how much he missed her and how difficult times were for their family, how all they had was each other and how they had to help each other and how she could help him now.

  And the embraces changed with his breathing, and then, finally one night, when even her tears didn’t stop him, his hands slipping under her nightclothes. .

  And afterward, after her vatarh’s tears and apologies and explanations, after he’d left her in the darkness, and she’d allowed her own tears to come while she’d prayed. She had prayed as she shaped Cenzi’s Gift and used it inside herself even though she knew that to be wrong-if Cenzi desired more punishment for her, then she should have allowed the possible consequences to happen.

  But she couldn’t, not when she had the power to prevent them.

  As she had the power now. .

  She prayed now, chanting the words of Ilmodo-speech, and as she spoke she felt the Second World open with her plea to Cenzi. She stopped the chant long enough to reply. “I gave you Matarh back, Vatarh, and the Archigos has paid you handsomely-far more than any dowry you could have received for me. Stay away from me.”

  “Ana. .” He took a step toward her, his lips twitching with a faint smile under his mustache. “You don’t understand. What we did, you and I. . It was your fault as much as mine.”

  His words sent white-hot fury surging through her. “My fault?” she shouted at him. “It wasn’t me who came into my room at night. It wasn’t me who touched. .”

  Her vatarh’s eyes widened at her vehemence. “Ana, listen. I’m sorry.

  You need to understand-”

  She was chanting, not listening to him at all. The Ilmodo opened to her, and she took it. Light shimmered between her clasped hands, so intense that it passed through and illuminated her skin, the shadows of bones dark against orange-red flesh. Knife-edged shadows surged and flowed around the room. She could see him looking at her hands, could see his throat pulse as he did so. Holding the Ilmodo, fully formed, she could speak again. “I do understand, Vatarh. I’m the only one who can.

  And I’m telling you to stay away. For your own good, stay away from me.”

  “You’re my daughter. You’ll always be my daughter,” he answered.

  “What we did. . I did. . well, we shouldn’t have. I was wrong, terribly wrong, and I’ve already asked you to forgive me. To forget it.” Each sentence was another step. He was close enough that he could touch her now. He was watching her face, only her face. Her prayers were already answered; she held Cenzi’s power in her hands and it ached to be released, screaming so loudly in her blood that its pounding rhythm nearly drowned out her vatarh’s words. If he touched her, if his hands moved toward her. .

  They did. His fingers stroked her cheek, touched the tears that she hadn’t realized were there.

  “No,” she said, very quietly. “You don’t touch me. You don’t ever touch me again.” She opened her hands.

  The concussion hammered at her chest, the roar deafened her, the burst of light sent her vision tumbling away. Faintly, she thought she heard her vatarh scream.

  Her head spun and she thought she might lose consciousness. She fought to stand upr
ight, blinking to clear away the blotches of purple afterimages. Her vatarh lay crumpled against the wall near the door, the plaster cracked around him. Ana wondered whether she might have killed him, but his chest rose and his eyes opened even as she looked at him: she’d flung the spell aside at the last moment.

  It was her bed, the bed where she’d borne his suffocating weight on top of her, that had taken the direct force of the spell’s impact; it lay shattered, black, and nearly unrecognizable, the bedposts splintered.

  All the furniture in the room was overturned and damaged, the wall where the headboard had rested broken all the way through the mortared stones to reveal the sunlight outside. Shards of mirrored glass glittered in the wreckage near where her dresser had stood; her vatarh’s cheek trailed blood where a flying piece had cut him.

  Sala came running in, stopping at the doorway to look in horror at the wreckage of the room, at Ana’s vatarh slumped dazedly on the floor.

  “O’Teni Ana. . what. .?” Ana forced herself to stay upright though the edges of her vision were closing in. Just get to the carriage. That’s all you have to do, then you can let go.

  “Tell Matarh I can’t stay, Sala,” Ana said. “Let her know that I’ll send a carriage for her tomorrow after Second Call so we can talk. So I can explain.” She looked at her vatarh, his eyelids fluttering as he groaned and stirred. “I won’t come back while you’re here, Vatarh. I won’t ever see you again willingly. If you ever try, you won’t survive the attempt.”

  Ana reached down to the floor for her clothes and the memento box and picked them up, clutching them to her. Then she walked past the dumbstruck Sala and out of the house. She managed to make it to the carriage waiting outside before the darkness closed around her.

  Karl ci’Vliomani

  The stench made Karl’s stomach lurch hard enough that he could taste the garlic from the pasta he’d eaten a few turns of the glass ago. Here on the banks of the A’Sele near the Pontica Kralji, the open sewers of Oldtown and-across the river-those of the Isle A’Kralji emptied into the water. Adding to the noxious smells were the slaughterhouses, tanneries, and dyers which clogged the riverbank all the way to the River Market, each of them dumping their own wastes in the water.

  The air was foul, and the rocks along the riverbank and the piers of the Pontica Kralji were snagged with wriggling trailers of slime and filth.

  Karl could see the skeletal, rotting carcass of a pig in the water a few arms’ lengths from them, the eyeless and lipless skull leering at him.

  “No one drinks from the A’Sele anymore, at least not here in the city, and not anywhere close to Nessantico downriver,” Mika said, as if he’d overheard Karl’s thoughts. “The old folk will talk about how in their own grandparents’ time the A’Sele ran clean and sweet, and you could dip a cup in and quench your thirst, but not anymore. That’s why everyone goes to the fountains for their water, or they drink only wine or ale, and they don’t eat any fish unless they were caught east of the Fens.”

  His gaze went up then to the ramparts of the Pontica Kralji, the longest of the bridges over the A’Sele. They’d both seen the small, black iron cage that had been suspended from a post there, and the corpse that was stuffed inside it: Dhaspi ce’Coeni’s body. The chain groaned and protested as the cage swung in the breeze. The crows had found the display quickly; there was a crowd of them pecking at Dhaspi’s remains through the bars. They could see people passing over the bridge stopping to look at the gibbeted body. Two painted signs had been attached to the cage. Assassin, one said. Numetodo was written on the other. Ce’Coeni’s hands were nailed to that sign, and there was a bare nail above the hands where his tongue had once been-the crows had taken that.

  “Poor stupid bastard,” Karl muttered.

  They both looked away, deliberately. Mika picked up a stone from the mud and tossed it into the river, where it splashed brownly and vanished, then looked at his hand, grimaced, and wiped it on his cloak.

  Mika was wearing a perfumed cloth over his nose and mouth; Karl wished he’d taken the same precaution. “I doubt the river’s been truly clean for centuries, not with Nessantico straddling it forever,” Mika said. “I heard that the Kraljica had swans brought in for the Jubilee all the way from Sforzia. She thought they’d look nice swimming around the Isle A’Kralji. They took one look at the A’Sele, sniffed in disgust, and took off for home.”

  Karl grunted at the image. “I can believe that,” he told Mika. “Right now, I’m tempted to do the same.”

  “I’ve been here for, oh, almost seven years now, Karl. They can make the city look brilliant and wonderful with their teni-lights, with their dances and their clothes and their great buildings. They can make certain that the Avi a’Parete is swept and clean so the ca’-and-cu’ can promenade and be seen; they can build temples and palaces that prick the very clouds with their towers, but they can’t hide this.

  Look over there. .” Mika pointed to the nearest slaughterhouse where Karl glimpsed cloth the color of spring grass through the twilight of an open door. “Do you see the teni? There are dozens and dozens of e’teni assigned-probably as punishment, I’d think-to cleanse the filth from the sewers and the slaughterhouses with their Ilmodo skills, but it’s not anywhere near enough. It would take an army of them working all day, every day, to keep up with the garbage this city spews out, and the place grows bigger each year. Cenzi knows what Nessantico would be like without the teni-and each year there are more people for the teni to clean up after. I don’t even want to imagine Nessantico a generation forward.” Mika lifted his kerchief and spat on the ground. “Even the Kraljica must shit and piss, and it smells no better than mine or yours.”

  Karl laughed despite the filth, despite the grim reminder on the Pontica above them. “Now there’s an image I don’t care to retain.”

  Mika sniffed and pressed his kerchief against his nose. “It’s true, still. All those grand ca’-and-cu’ sit and look at Oldtown from their lovely houses on the Isle or South Bank and grumble about how disgusting and filthy it is, but they’re no different. Even the grandest chateau has its privies.”

  “If you’re going to start spouting cliches, then let’s do it where we can drink and eat as well. Where’s this Mahri? I thought he asked to meet us?”

  “I’m here.” With the word, a portion of the stained Pontica seemed to detach itself from an arched support, and Mahri stepped out from the shadows under the bridge, directly under Dhaspi’s gibbet. Karl shivered at the sight of the man’s ravaged face under the black cowl, hoping that Mahri didn’t notice the quick revulsion.

  “You live up to your reputation,” Karl said.

  “And what is that?” The man’s voice was as broken as his face, a hissing and grumbling issuing from a misshapen maw. If the expression on his twisted lips was a smile, it couldn’t be read; the raw and exposed socket of the missing left eye seemed to glare. The breath from his mouth smelled nearly as bad as the riverbank itself.

  “That you’re a ghost who appears anywhere there’s trouble.”

  That seemed to amuse Mahri. He turned his head, glancing back

  and up over his shoulder at the caged body surrounded by crows. Something approaching a cackle emanated from his mouth, and a thick tongue prowled the edges of his few teeth as he looked back to them.

  “Ah, the Numetodo are indeed trouble, aren’t they, Envoy?”

  “That’s not our intention,” Karl said. “Why did you want to meet with me, Mahri? You told Mika it was important.” Karl had been reluctant to agree to the rendezvous, but Mika had persisted. “They may call him Mad Mahri, but I’ve also heard them say that Mahri knows things that no one else knows, that nothing happens here without his somehow knowing about it first. It may be a waste of time, but. .”

  Again, the cackle. “Ah, so impatient. That’s not a good quality for someone trying to gain the Kraljica’s sympathy. Patience is a virtue she possesses in abundance, and one she expects from those who petition her. I woul
d expect that someone trying to negotiate with her must understand that.”

  Karl pushed down the rising annoyance. He saw Mika glance at him and shrug. “I’ll remember that advice,” he said. “It’s true enough, considering how long I’ve been here.” He waited, his boots squelching noisily in the mud as he shifted his weight. Mahri waited also, until frustration at the man’s silence threatened to make Karl snort in derision and stalk away. He was ready to do exactly that when Mahri spoke again.

  “I came to offer an alliance.”

  “An alliance?” Karl couldn’t keep the scornful chuckle from his voice. “I’m afraid that I wasn’t aware that you represented anyone.”

  Mahri lifted a single shoulder. “You mean to say that you can’t imagine an alliance with a common beggar? I see the Numetodo aren’t so much different from the ca’-and-cu’, Envoy. I hear the same disdain and scorn in your voice that I hear from those who worship Cenzi.”

  Karl glanced at Mika, who rolled his eyes. Again, he took a breath and pushed down his irritation. “I’m sorry for that, Mahri. You’re right, and I would ask you not to judge all Numetodo by my poor example.”

  He could hear Mika snicker under his breath.

  “Ah, now that is spoken more like a diplomat, even if you mean nothing of it. Good.” The beggar pulled his tattered clothing around himself as if cold; on one hand, Karl glimpsed a thick silver seal ring.