A Magic of Twilight

streets swarmed with life in all its glory and all its disgust.

If you can’t find what you desire in Oldtown, it doesn’t exist. It was an old maxim in Nessantico.

Justi had found love in Oldtown, and it was toward love that he hurried, every night that he could find the time to steal away from those around him.

“Pardon, Vajiki. Might you have a d’folia to spare for someone to buy a loaf of bread?” The voice came from the black mouth of an alley, accompanied by the scent of rotting teeth. Here in the bowels of the city near Oldtown Center, well away from the teni-lights of the Avi a’Parete, what illumination there was came mostly from the open windows of taverns and brothels, fitful and dim. Wedges of darkness shifted and Justi saw the man there. He knew him, also: the beggar known as Mad Mahri. Where foul things happen, you’ll see Mad Mahri. It was another saying within the city. The man seemed to be ubiquitous, wandering everywhere through the city, and present often enough at critical events in the city that Commandant ca’Rudka himself had questioned the man. It was rumored that Mahri had acquired at least some of the scars on his body then.

Justi rummaged in the pocket of his cloak; his fingers plucked a small coin from among the others there. He brought his hand out.

“Here,” he said to the beggar. He kept his voice deliberately low, growling the words and disguising his natural high tenor. “Buy yourself bread or a tankard. I don’t care which.”

A hand flashed out and caught the coin as Justi flipped it toward the man. “Thank you, Vajiki,” he said. “And in return, let me give you something.”

“I want nothing from you, Mahri.” Justi took a step away from the man, his right hand straying to the knife he had hidden under his cloak.

Mahri seemed to chuckle. “Ah, Mahri’s no threat to you, Vajiki.

Not tonight. But you do want something from me. You simply don’t realize it. Isn’t that the way it happens too often? We don’t know what it is we need until it’s taken from us, or until we receive it.” His voice changed: it became a breath, a hoarse, urgent whisper. “I know who you are. I know what you want. I know what you’re searching for, and what you’ve found.”

Justi exhaled mockingly, a half-laugh. “I’m supposed to listen to the wisdom of a half-wit who doesn’t even have a d’folia to buy bread?”

A hiss sounded in the darkness. “You wait for your matarh to die.

You yearn for it, and you fear it at the same time. And you lie in the bed of a woman who belongs to another man, and who is her vatarh’s pawn.”

Justi sucked in his breath. His eyes narrowed. He forgot to lower the pitch of his voice, and his reply was shrill. “Why are you accosting me?

What is it you want? All I need to do is call for the utilino. .”

“What I want you’ll eventually give me,” Mahri answered. “I came to tell you this: I know the painted face is also a funeral mask. It will soon be your time, as it should be.”

The words sent a chill through Justi. “What does that mean? Do you offer nothing but riddles?” Justi demanded. Mahri was sinking back into the mouth of the alley, back into darkness. “Wait.” He took a step toward the beggar, but faint candlelight glinted on something arcing toward him, and Justi stepped back, ducking reflexively. He felt something strike his chest, then fall to the cobbled street with a faint clink.

He glanced down. The d’folia he’d given Mahri lay there, his own face in profile on the coin. “Mahri!”

Mahri’s voice called back to him, already distant. “The Concenzia believe that everything was put into the world for Cenzi’s purpose, A’Kralj. Discovering what that purpose might be is the real task of life.

If you abandon the path your eyes show you, you’ll never know truth.”

“Mahri!” Justi called again.

No answer came from the night. The man was gone. Justi glanced down at the coin.

“A problem, Vajiki? Is there something I can do for you?” Sudden light made the bronze d’folia shimmer on the paving stones. Justi jerked his head back up. Where the street intersected another lane, a man in the brocaded uniform of an utilino stood holding up a spell-lit lamp with the reflector aimed toward Justi, who shielded his face from the glare. The utilino were e-teni placed in service of the Garde Kralji: their job was to patrol the streets and put down any trouble they might find, or aid any citizen who needed their help. The utilino’s night-staff was still looped to his belt, but the man placed his lamp on the cobbles and held his copper whistle close to his lips. Justi thought he saw the man’s free hand already moving in the shape of a spell.

“No,” Justi answered. He cleared his throat, tried to bring his voice down. “No problem at all, Utilino. I’ve just dropped something while on my way. I’ve found it now.”

The man nodded. He let the whistle drop on its chain to his chest and picked up his lamp again. “Very good.” The reflector clicked and the light focused on Justi went soft and diffuse, but the utilino paused there, still watching. Justi wondered whether the teni had recognized him. He shrugged his cloak around his shoulders and pulled the cowl up so that his face was in shadow to the utilino. He stepped on the d’folia as he walked past the man, feeling the utilino’s appraising stare on his back.

Justi hurried now, turning left, then right, then left again, moving past the knots of people outside tavern doors or walking down the street, keeping the cowl close to his face as he passed the glowing lantern of another utilino on her rounds, then striding quickly down a deserted lane where the houses seemed to lean toward each other from either side of the street as if weary. He went to a door painted a light blue that seemed pale gray in the night. He pushed it open; inside, a young woman turned from stirring the fire in a shabby but clean room.

“Ah, Vajiki,” the woman said, though Justi knew that she knew well who he was and his true title. “We wondered. . My lady’s upstairs, waiting for you. .”

She took the cloak he handed her silently and placed it on a hook next to another. He went up the stairs and knocked on the door at the landing before pushing the door open. Candles glowed about the room, touching with gold the tapestries on the wall. Naked nymphs and rampant satyrs cavorted there in woven fields, entwined in dozens of inventive embraces. The only furniture in the room was a canopied bed with two night stands.

A room such as one of the grandes horizontales he’d known kept-blatantly sexual, blatantly inviting. The similarity secretly amused him.

Francesca would be appalled if he mentioned the comparison to her.

The draperies of the bed were moved aside by a delicate hand as Justi entered. He could glimpse the woman laying there, her hair unbound and spread over the pillow. “I’m sorry to be late, Francesca. I. .”

The memory of Mahri’s strange admonitions made him shiver. “I had an encounter on the way here.”

She frowned, her face at once concerned. She tossed aside the blankets; through the gauze of her gown he saw the hint of darkness at the joining of her legs and the shadows of her breasts. “Dearest, you look as if you just walked through a ghost.” Her eyes were large with pupils the color of newly-turned, rich soil.

Justi forced himself to smile. “It’s nothing,” he told her. “Nothing.

Not when I’m here with you again.”

He closed the door as she came to him in a miasma of perfume. He embraced her, she pulled his head down to her, pressing soft and gentle lips to his, and he would forget everything else for a few hours…

Ana cu’Seranta

The sun was dancing on her eyelids.

Ana blinked and raised her hand to shade herself from the glare.

She glimpsed lacy cuffs and felt the warmth of a thick blanket over her.

She raised her head: she was in a room she’d never seen before, large and richly decorated with a single door. On the wall opposite the foot of her bed was an ornate fireplace within whose hearth Ana could have easily stood upright, and to her left white curtains billowed inward with a breeze from a balcony. The night robe she wore was not one of hers.

The door opened and a head peered in: a young woman, the white, loose cap of a house servant futilely attempting to contain her red curls.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re awake, O’Teni.”

The door closed, only to open again before Ana could move from the bed. Two more servants entered: a middle-aged, stout woman and a younger woman who from their shared features must have been the