empty socket of his left eye, the smashed nose laying on the right cheek, the gaping darkness between his remaining teeth, the shiny white tracks of burns over the left side of his face, pulling and twisting at the flesh. Those who glanced at his face always quickly looked away-except sometimes the children who would point and stare.
“That’s just Mahri,” the parents would tell them, pulling the children away with a brief glance at Mahri himself, talking as if Mahri weren’t there, as if he couldn’t see or hear them. Sometimes, they might toss a bronze d’folia in his direction in compensation for their son’s or daughter’s rudeness. He’d stare at the tiny coin on the pavement, not deigning to pick it up. Perhaps for that reason, or perhaps for others, he was sometimes called “Mad Mahri.”
He generally didn’t attend the Archigos’ blessing, but he’d heard the rumors flowing through the nether regions of Nessantico; he’d seen the whispers of possibilities in his vision-bowl, and so he’d come. The Numetodo had been stupid, so stupid that Mahri decided that the clumsy assassination attempt must have been carried out entirely through the man’s own foolish impulse. Certainly Envoy ci’Vliomani wouldn’t have condoned this. No, this person had to be a rogue within the Numetodo, and one that the Envoy would quickly renounce if only to save his own flesh. Mahri watched the Garde Kralji hustle the man roughly away, shoving him through the door of a neighboring government building.
He shook his head; whoever the Numetodo was-and he was not one of those Mahri recognized, probably someone new to the city-he was destined for a slow, painful end.
But what interested Mahri more than the doomed would-be assassin was the young woman the Archigos brought into his carriage afterward. Mahri had seen her teni-driven carriage near Sutegate and he’d wondered who the Archigos had sent for, so he’d followed her to the temple. He’d seen that it was her defense that had foiled the attack.
He knew enough about the techniques of Ilmodo use by the teni that the speed and power with which the woman reacted had widened his remaining eye and made him scratch at the ruined skin of his chin.
Now he knew why an image of a young woman had haunted the vision-bowl.
This one. . this one would bear watching. Obviously the Archigos felt the same, for the woman stayed with him as the teni around the dwarf’s carriage began their chants and the carriage made its turn onto the Avi in its slow procession toward the Old Temple amid the renewed clamor of the wind-horns atop the temple domes and the cheers of the crowds-doubly pleased that their beloved religious leader had escaped unharmed.
As the crowds closed in around the Archigos, Mahri watched them go, unsurprised that the Archigos would keep to his routine despite the attack. After all, ritual was important in Nessantico. The city was bound and fettered and choked with ritual, as ancient and unyielding as the walls that had once enclosed it. The carriage passed within a few dozen strides of where Mahri lurked at the corner of an apartment building. He stared not only at the Archigos, but at the woman who sat alongside him, looking uncomfortable at the attention, her face weary.
Mahri would watch this young woman. He would know who she was.
Mahri slunk back deeper into the shadows between the buildings.
Silent, a shadow himself, he slid away from the Avi and the noise, finding his own hidden path through the city.
Ana cu’Seranta
“You’re beginning to recover?” the Archigos asked, and Ana nodded. The Archigos had said nothing to her for several minutes, allowing her to gather herself. The fatigue was receding and she no longer felt as if she needed to sleep, though a deep ache still lingered in her muscles.
“I’m feeling much better now,” she told him. “Thank you.”
“So tell me, Vajica cu’Seranta, do you know why I wanted to speak with you?”
Ana shook her head vigorously at the Archigos’ question. “Certainly not, Archigos. In fact, I thought. .” She shook her head again.
The sound of the wind-horns faded as they moved away from the temple, but the crowds still hailed the Archigos as they passed, their clasped hands tight against their foreheads. The acolytes were still singing, another of Darkmavis’ compositions. The Archigos nodded to the people lining the Avi as they approached the Pontica a’Brezi Nippoli.
He raised his hand in greeting even as he spoke with Ana, not looking at her though she had the impression that he knew the expressions that twisted her lips and lowered her eyebrows. “Go on,” he said quietly.
“I thought that, if anything, I would hear only from U’Teni cu’Dosteau,” Ana continued. “As often as he corrected me or told me that I wasn’t trying hard enough or wasn’t paying close enough attention in his classes, I thought that he would give me a Note of Severance.
I knew all the Marques had already been signed. . ” The Archigos had turned completely away from her, and she wondered whether she’d offended him. “I’m sorry, Archigos. I’m chattering on and I shouldn’t speak so about U’Teni cu’Dosteau, who was entirely correct in his attitude toward me. I wasn’t a good enough student for him, I’m afraid.”
“I have indeed signed the Marques that the Acolytes’ Council gave me,” the Archigos said. He waved to the crowds. He smiled. The sun danced on the silken field over his head. He didn’t look at her at all. “Your name wasn’t on any of them.”
Ana nodded in acceptance, not able to speak. Despite having steeled herself for the inevitability of her failure, the intensity of the disappointment that washed over her then told her how stubbornly she’d been grasping to hope that she was wrong.
She’d told herself that she wouldn’t cry, though she’d done so many nights in private since she’d heard about the Marques, but until the note she dreaded came from U’Teni cu’Dosteau she could dry the tears and pretend that she had confidence, at least during the day. The Archigos’ words made her eyes burn and caused the boulevard around them to waver before her as if it were under the waters of the A’Sele.
She could feel the moisture on her cheeks and dabbed at it with her sleeve angrily, hating that she would cry before the Archigos, that her pride was so overweening that she couldn’t accept the fate Cenzi had set before her with due humility, that her faith was so fragile and her fear so great.
She hoped that the Archigos didn’t know about what she’d done with her matarh. If so, she was entirely lost.
Ana realized that the Archigos was looking at her, and she wiped at her eyes again. “You should know that it was U’Teni cu’Dosteau who came to me after I was given this year’s Marques,” the Archigos said softly. “He wanted to talk to me privately. About you, Vajica cu’Seranta.
Do you have an idea of what he said?”
Ana shook her head, mute. Hope lifted its head again, battered and bloodied, but fear caught it in a stranglehold and bore it down. “I won’t tell you all,” the Archigos continued. “It’s enough for you to know that U’Teni cu’Dosteau insisted that the Acolytes’ Council had made a mistake, that they’d looked too much at the family names and too little at the students themselves and U’Teni cu’Dosteau’s evaluations. He told me that he had a student who sometimes created her own spells with the Ilmodo rather than those of her instructor’s. A student who used the Ilmodo for fire or earth or air or water, when most students found a strength in only one of those. A student who could quote the Toustour and seemed a devout follower of the Divolonte, even though there were whispers among her fellow students regarding Numetodo tendencies. A student with a natural talent who didn’t quite know how to harness or control it-who started a terrible fire, he said, in the Acolytes’ Dining Hall one night, then put it out before the fire-teni could come.”
“It was an accident-” Ana began, but the Archigos glanced at her, his hand raised.
“I was impressed by the force of the u’teni’s argument, especially after he reminded me that sometimes Cenzi manifests even in the most common of frames. As the Toustour says-”
“ ‘Even the humblest can be raised, even the lowest exalted.’ ” She provided the quote without thinking.
He laughed then, indicating his own stunted body with a hand.
“Even the lowest,” he repeated. “Vajica cu’ Seranta, do you still desire to accept a Marque? Are you willing to join the Order of Teni if asked?”
