A Magic of Twilight

beast clutch at the covers. Then the bed shifted as the thing slowly crawled up the short length of his body.

The creature hissed and burbled and chuckled. Dhosti heard and felt it more than he saw it, but there were two flaring red points of light in the room: the beast’s eyes. The creature climbed over him until it was sitting perched on his chest, as heavy as a chest of lead ingots and growing heavier, pressing down on him until he couldn’t breathe, until his rib cage threatened to burst and the bed’s frame to collapse under the demon’s massive weight. “Cenzi sent me,”

the creature spat as Dhosti struggled to pull air into his lungs. “He sent me to punish you. .”

“Archigos, A’Teni ca’Cellibrecca is in the outer chamber. Archigos?”

Dhosti started and blinked. The pressure on his chest eased as the memory of the nightmare faded. His stubby hands were clenched atop the papers on his desk. The bright colors of his invitation to the Gschnas glittered between his fists. He took a breath and unclenched them; the joints ached and protested. “Thank you, Kenne. Give me a few minutes, then send the a’teni in. Oh, and Kenne. . wait long enough to annoy the man, would you?”

Kenne grinned at that. “With much pleasure, Archigos.”

As Kenne closed the door, Dhosti groaned as he stretched and stood up on the stool in front of his chair. His entire body was sore, and flames seemed to shoot from his curved upper spine as he tried to straighten.

The effort barely lifted his chin above his chest. “Once, you could have flung yourself into a double somersault from the desk and landed on your feet.” He shook his head as the thought stirred memories of his days as a performer: the crowds, the applause, the sheer joyful vigor of those moments of seeming flight. “And you didn’t talk to yourself then, either. . ” He stepped carefully down from the stool, supporting himself with a hand on the desk, and took his cane in his hand. He hobbled painfully to the ornate throne on a dais at the other end of the long room. A few hard chairs faced it from the floor. He glanced up at the fractured globe of Cenzi carved in the wooden back of the throne, at the varnished, contorted bodies of the Moitidi clustered around the globe. “Cenzi sent me. He sent me to punish you. .”

“You didn’t have to bother,” he told the memory. “I’m punished enough in this old body. You could at least let me sleep.”

Groaning, he pulled himself up onto the dais and then onto the padded seat. Like his desk chair, the back of the throne had been modified by a local carpenter to accommodate his bowed spine; Dhosti sighed as he sat back in its comfortable embrace. The chair itself had served as the throne for every Archigos for three hundred years now, since the time of Archigos Kalima III. Although there was little of Kalima’s throne left, pieces of the original wood were always incorporated into the throne as it was refurbished or altered for each new Archigos. He sat on long history.

Dhosti found himself nearly dozing again when Kenne’s knock finally came at the door and A’Teni ca’Cellibrecca entered in a swirl of green robes trimmed with intricate arabesques of golden thread.

“Orlandi, please come in and sit,” he said, waving a stunted arm at the seats in front of the throne. “I trust that Kenne has given you something to drink or eat while you were waiting? Kenne, if you’d see that we’re not disturbed. .”

Ca’Cellibrecca grunted a monosyllabic reply as Kenne nodded and closed the door. He clasped his hands on his staff and raised it to his forehead, but his obeisance wasn’t to Dhosti but to the globe of Cenzi above him. “I’ve heard what your new pet o’teni did this morning,”

the man said without preamble as he brought his hands down and the door closed. He sat, the joints of the chair groaning under him. Double chins wobbled as he spoke. Where Dhosti seemed to be shrinking into himself as he aged, ca’Cellibrecca was growing larger. Everything about him was ponderous, his stentorian manner of speaking no less than his girth. “Seems she used the Ilmodo to put a rather large hole in the wall of her vatarh’s house. Given some of the other rumors I’ve heard, I wonder if you haven’t chosen to give your Marque to someone best suited to be a war-teni. Here in Nessantico, she seems to be a wild sword.”

“No one was seriously injured, Orlandi.”

“Not this time. But I understand her vatarh was injured, and the neighbors are understandably terrified. What of next time?”

“There will be no next time. It’s over.”

“Can you guarantee that, Dhosti? Let’s talk frankly here, at least.

When O’Teni cu’Seranta’s matarh suddenly recovers from Southern Fever into full health, I have to wonder whether it was Cenzi’s Will or someone who has ignored the Divolonte.”

“Are you making an accusation, Orlandi? I was there, after all.

Should I call a Council of Examination together so I can give them my witness?”

Ca’Cellibrecca gave the slightest shake of his head; his eyes, already masked under the weight of their eyelids, narrowed to slits. “Not at the moment.”

“Then why are you telling me this?”

Dhosti thought he saw the flicker of a smile on ca’Cellibrecca’s lips.

The man’s hands spread wide before coming back to rest in his green-clothed lap. “You know me, Dhosti. I follow the Divolonte. Always.

Strictly. I expect those to whom I attend to do the same.”

“I know,” Dhosti answered quietly. “Your devotion has been quite. . visible.”

Again, the smile came and his eyes widened slightly. “I do what is necessary. As the Archigos should as well.”

“Then perhaps it’s fortunate that the Concord A’Teni named me Archigos and not you.”

The smile vanished. The eyes slitted again. In his lap, the a’teni’s fingers tightened into his palms. “ ‘Tell your enemy that he offends you before you strike, for he may not understand what it is he does,’ ” he quoted.

“I know the quote,” Dhosti said, nodding. He pretended nonchalance, but the tea he’d had this morning burned again in his throat. His spine ached even against the padded throne back, but he knew if he moved, he would groan at the pain it would cause, and he didn’t want ca’Cellibrecca to hear that. He forced himself to remain still. Dhosti knew that he could not afford to make the mistake of underestimating ca’Cellibrecca’s influence among the other a’teni. If the man was going to quote that verse of the Divolonte to him, then Dhosti needed to make certain that he still had the support he believed he had. “Let me finish it for you. ‘. . but if he does not change afterward, then make your blow quick and strong, and don’t hold back your fury.’ It’s come to that? Do I offend you so greatly, Orlandi?”

“It’s not me you offend but the entire Faith, Dhosti. I’ve made no secret of my feelings on that, and I tell it to your face now. Cenzi blessed you and brought you to your position. I’ve seen how well you used to craft the Ilmodo and I know that, at least at one time, Cenzi smiled on you. I’ve even admitted how much I admire your intellect and your skill. But in this time especially, when Concenzia needs to remain with the Toustour and the Divolonte, I see you falling away from those tenets or ignoring them. You’ve become soft, Dhosti.”

“We believe the same things. We simply interpret the Divolonte differently, Orlandi. That’s all. The Toustour is the word of Cenzi and we agree on that; the Divolonte, however, is only a set of laws fallible people have created to interpret the path the Toustour shows us.”

Ca’Cellibrecca’s head was shaking before Dhosti had finished. “No,”

he answered before Dhosti’s voice had even faded. “There are no interpretations of the Divolonte any more than there are of the Toustour. There is only the truth, right there in the words Cenzi has given us. You convinced the Kraljica that she could coddle the Numetodo and even listen to their entreaties when they, in fact, threaten everything we believe in-that was bad enough. And now you allow this protegee of yours to flaunt the Divolonte as well. I tell you, Archigos, that your arrogance is visible and I’m not the only one who sees it. While you have been sitting there doing nothing, there are those within Concenzia who are less patient and more faithful, and we have more power than you think.”

Dhosti again feigned nonchalance. He suspected it fooled neither of them. “What is it that you want me to do?”

“What you should have done all along. The Kraljica listens to you.

Advise her that this tolerance of the Numetodo must stop. Tell her to use the laws that are already in place