how effective a leader they can be. I assure you that the soldiers of Firenzcia will not fail to fight even if a false Archigos threatens their souls-because those who command them will not allow it.
Because
The man nodded, slowly. “Yes. I believe I do, my Hirzg.”
Jan took a step toward him, close enough that he could see the hairs in the man’s nostrils. “Then I ask you, U’Teni cu’Kohnle, as the commander of the war-teni, do you think that those in your charge would understand that an Archigos who has betrayed his word to me is a false Archigos who does not deserve his title? Do you think they would understand that such a man no longer speaks for Cenzi, no matter what title he might claim for the moment?”
The man’s eyes narrowed. He was looking at Jan, but his gaze was somewhere else, wandering in his imagination. “I think I can persuade them to see your point of view, my Hirzg, if it should become necessary. Yes.”
Jan lifted his wine and tapped the rim of his goblet against that of cu’Kohnle. “Good,” he said. “Then let us drink to our understanding.”
Ana cu’Seranta
Nessantico bereft of a Kralji lurched like a boat without a hand on the tiller. Concenzia bereft of an Archigos in the temple stuttered and hesitated. The city held its collective breath and jumped at every strange noise and cowered with every cloud-shadow. Rumors flew through the city like dark, flapping bats, frightening and furious.
The Garde Kralji was especially skittish, and the Bastida was crowded with people arrested for treasonous statements. The judicial system was quickly overwhelmed; judges offered many of those incarcerated the chance to prove their loyalty (and regain their freedom) by joining the Garde Civile; many did so. In addition, the conscription squads of the Garde Civile roamed through the city and the villages and farmlands around it daily, taking any unwary men they found and depositing them in the growing tent encampment outside the city walls along the Avi a’Parete. There, ragged and uncertain squads could be seen marching and training during the day. Garrisons from Villembouchure and Vouziers arrived a few days after the Kraljiki’s departure, swelling the encampment so that the Avi north and west of the city swarmed with them from the road to the banks of the River Vaghian.
Hundreds if not thousands of the soldiers flooded into the city at night: into the restaurants, the bars and taverns, the brothels. Even during the day, groups of sword-girt soldiers were seen in every public square.
The crisis affected Concenzia as well. With the Archigos and the more-adept lesser teni gone, the infrastructure of Nessantico faltered.
The a’teni, most of whom had remained behind to attend to the affairs of Concenzia in the Archigos’ absence, were rumored to be looking for excuses to return to their home cities and planning their departures.
The teni of the city were poorly directed as a result, and worries and uncertainty rendered their Ilmodo spells weak and ineffective. Sewage flowed untreated into the A’Sele, making it more of a cesspool than usual, the stench reaching far out from its banks. The nightly lighting of the Avi a’Parete was erratic-sometimes long stretches of the Avi, especially in east Oldtown, went dark only a few turns of the glass after the lamps were set aglow. The foundries that utlizied teni to power their great ovens and forges found their Ilmodo-fires sometimes too weak to melt the ore without using far more coal than usual. The teni-driven carriages were a rare sight even for those within Concenzia, and since the growing army had taken most of the horses, people walked or stayed home. Of greatest concern was the lack of teni for the fire patrols, and there were worries that an errant spark could destroy blocks of houses, especially in Oldtown, before enough teni could be found to extinguish the flames.
The great stone heads at the various gates of the city no longer rotated with the sun; there were no teni available to lend them mobility.
The wind-horns on the temples still sounded the calls and the services continued in the temples-the u’teni and o’teni who performed the rituals found more people in the seats than usual but fewer folias, siqils, and solas in the donation boxes.
War shadowed everyone’s thoughts, everyone’s activities. Nessantico herself hadn’t experienced a siege or even a nearby battle in centuries. This was not a situation that had a counterpart for long generations of the families living within the long-sundered walls of the capital. War was something that took place on the edges and frontiers of the Holdings-in Tennshah, in Daritria, in Shenkurska or cold Boail or the far Westlands-always there, always easily available for those who sought glory and fame through its bloody auspices, but always held at a safe distance.
No more. War hovered just to the east, a thunderhead on the horizon, lightning crackling under black ramparts. The markets were crowded every day, but the stalls were thinned by the swelled ranks of the city and by all the produce diverted to feed the army, and the haggling was halfhearted and the conversation was not regarding the quality of the vegetables and meats, but what might happen if the Kraljiki’s negotiations failed. On the South Bank, it became even more expensive to eat in the fashionable restaurants as supplies became short and menu prices rose in response. On the North Bank, for the poorer residents, bread prices that had been fixed for decades at a d’folia tripled over-night after the Kraljiki’s departure and continued to rise; there were reports of sawdust mixed in with the flour, or of loaves rather smaller than the required minimum standards-both illegal practices but also unsurprising. Storekeepers opened their shutters each morning but fewer customers entered, and those who did wanted to talk about politics, not the goods on display. Those in the crafts found that the rich patrons who hired them to build or remodel, to plaster and decorate, to play music for their parties or paint their portraits, had few commissions. “The war, you know. .” was always the answer, with a roll of the eyes to the east.
The war. .
The war shadowed Ana as well. The conscription squads raided the tavern below Mahri’s dwelling twice more in the week following the Kraljiki’s departure. The uproar woke her and Karl from sleep late at night, though again the squads never came upstairs to their rooms, a fact that Ana no longer found quite so unusual. The third time they came, it began with the same muffled shouts heard through the floor of their apartment, shouts that disrupted, then banished, the dream she had of herself talking to Archigos Dhosti in the Old Temple. In the dream, the Archigos was telling her to heal her Matarh, but matarh seemed possessed, speaking in voices that were not hers, shouting loudly. .
“Ana?”
“I hear them.” She opened her eyes. She could dimly see Karl in the bit of moonlight trickling from between the slats of the shutters. He was standing at one of the windows, holding the shutter slightly open to see the courtyard below. Mahri was gone. Ana heard the crash of glass below, and more shouts.
“There they go,” Karl said from the window. “Dragging four poor bastards with them who won’t be coming home to wives or family tonight or any time soon. They’ll be down to taking children soon.”
Ana rose from her blankets and went to him. Karl’s proximity felt good, a warmth along her side, and his arm came around her as they watched the conscription squad hauling the men away down the street.
She felt Karl’s arm lift from about her, heard him start to speak in his odd version of the Ilmodo-speech.
“You can’t, Karl,” she told him. “They’d know you were here, they’d take you back to the Bastida.”
His hands stopped moving, his voice stilled. She could see other faces at the windows along the street-people wondering who had been taken this time. A woman came hurtling from one of the door-
ways, screaming and trying to pull one of the men away from the squad; they pushed her away. “Falina, I’ll be back. Take care of Saddasi. I’ll be back. .” they heard the man calling as he was hauled along the street and down the next corner. The woman huddled on the street wailing as neighbors came out to comfort her.
Karl’s arm tightened around Ana’s shoulder. She leaned into the embrace.
“I hate this,” she heard him say. “I hate all of it: the hiding, the constant fear, the way the whole city
“I know,” she said. “I’m tired of it also.”
“We should leave,” he said. “Go somewhere else. Back to the Isle, maybe. There are things I would love to show you there, if you’d come with me.”
