Sergei couldn’t entirely keep his irritation at the old man’s waffling from his voice. “It’s what I know. What I must know from you, Kenne, is whether I will have your support.”
A headshake. “I want to give you that,” Kenne told him. “I do. But I must pray first, Sergei. You say you believe. I want to believe also, and I look to Cenzi to help me. Let me pray. Let me think. Tomorrow… I will talk to you tomorrow. Or by Draiordi at the latest…”
Useless. This is useless… Sergei bowed, smiled falsely, and gave the Archigos the sign of Cenzi. “I will pray for you myself, Archigos, that Cenzi speaks to you soon.” And He had better. He had better or Nessantico might find itself crushed between the stones of the East and the West.
Sergei plucked the communique from Kenne’s desk. He went to the hearth of the Archigos’ office and let the paper flutter onto the flames there. He watched the paper darken, curl, smoke, and finally ignite
He imagined the city doing the same.
Nico Morel
Nico had never followed Talis before. Nico’s matarh worked at the tavern around the corner and down the alley from their rooms. If Talis worked, it wasn’t as other men did in their neighborhood: keeping a shop; working as an apprentice to some master; acting as a simple laborer, perhaps in the grainery mills where the massive grinding wheels were driven by the chants of e-teni, or in the fiery smelters outside the old city walls, the furnaces blazing with Ilmodo fires and the chanting of differently skilled e’teni-who in return for their labors took a portion of the profits for the Concenzia Faith.
Nico had heard his matarh or others in Oldtown complain bitterly about that, how the Faith kept its hands in the pockets of every major industry in the city. The gossip gave Nico strange thoughts: he would imagine long green-sleeved hands snaking out from the temples to pluck coins from the purses of the populace. He wondered why the teni needed to do that, when his matarh and everyone else put coins into the baskets every Cenzidi when they went to the temple. If Nico had that many coins, he could buy a palais on South Bank to live in with Matarh and Talis.
Talis…
Nico was playing kick-the-frog in the street with some of the other boys. He was winning: he’d kicked the straw-stuffed sack that was the frog into the puddle three times already, but his friend Jordis had managed it only once and the others not at all. Nico was good at kick-the-frog. Sometimes, when he was playing, he’d feel this strange coldness go through him and he could almost see the frog going into the puddle, and when he kicked it then, the frog would go splash right into the water.
He’d plucked the soaked frog from the puddle for the fourth time when he saw Talis come out of their door and start walking up the street. Nico kicked the frog to Jordis and the others. “I’ll be back,” he said, and ran after Talis.
Since he’d seen Talis with his brass bowl, he’d been watching his vatarh carefully, whenever he could. He’d seen and heard strange things when Talis thought he was asleep, even when his matarh was asleep, too. Talis would chant and move his hands the way the teni did, usually with his walking stick set in front of him. When he did that, Nico could feel the frigid tendrils in the air until the walking stick seemed to suck them in.
It was very strange, but the words-they almost sounded like the dream-words Nico sometimes heard, and he wanted to know more.
At first, he intended to simply catch up to Talis and ask him where he was going, but when Talis turned at the first intersection, striding fast as if he were intent on some destination and his walking stick tapping on the cobblestones, Nico decided to drop back and just watch him. He wasn’t sure what made him do that, but with the determined way that Talis was walking, he thought his vatarh might be annoyed if Nico suddenly tugged at his bashta.
Talis was walking so quickly that Nico nearly had to run to keep up with him. A few times, as Talis turned left or right along the twisted jumble of streets, Nico nearly lost him, and the farther they went on the more frightened Nico became-he no longer knew where he was. He didn’t even know which way home might be, turned around by the winding, curving streets of Oldtown.
There was sunlight suddenly ahead, and he saw Talis turn sharply left. Nico hurried after him. He found himself standing at the confluence of the alleyway with the grand river of the Avi a’Parete, the great boulevard that circled the inner portion of the city. Nico was assaulted by color, noise, and movement: the bashtas and tashtas of every conceivable pattern and shade, the carriages pushing through the throngs (look-that one had no horses at all, only a teni driving it, with one of the a’teni riding inside), a thousand people all going someplace all at once: talking or silent, grim or laughing, together or alone. Vendors along the walls called their wares; drivers called warning or rang their caution bells; a dozen conversations drifted past Nico in a moment to be replaced by a dozen more.
The buildings here, along Nessantico’s most visible avenue, seemed as grand and tall as those on the South Bank, though more crowded together and far older. To his left, Nico could see the piers of an arching bridge leading over to the Isle a’Kralji, where the Kraljiki and the Regent lived. Yet among the grandeur, there were reminders that not everyone in the city lived so well. Beggars sat huddled on the corners; the one nearest Nico, swaddled in foul rags, seemed to have only one arm and about the same number of teeth in her red-gummed mouth. Her eyes were white with cataracts, like the old blind lady who lived across the street from Nico. Her single arm, rattling a battered wooden cup with a few bronze d’folias in the bottom, had too few fingers. The crowds sliding past her mostly ignored her, as if they didn’t see her at all.
Nico realized that he had no idea where Talis had gone in the crowds. He looked left, then right, panic rising from his stomach into his throat. He started to run in the direction that he thought Talis had gone.
A hand grabbed his shoulder; Nico jumped and nearly screamed.
“What are you doing here, Nico? Why are you following me?” Talis’ face was frowning down at him, his fingers bunched in the fabric of Nico’s shirt. Relief conquered fright; Nico gasped. “Talis! I was.. . You were leaving and I thought I’d see where you were going and if I could go with you, and then I was already too far away and I was afraid I was lost.”
Talis’ frown melted slowly. “You don’t know the way home?”
Nico shook his head. “That way?” he asked tentatively, pointing toward one of the buildings behind him.
Talis snorted. “Only if you want to take a bath in the A’Sele. I should just leave you here,” he began and Nico’s heart began to beat harder and tears started in his eyes, but the man continued. “But Serafina would kill me if she found out. I’m already late. You’re going to have to come with me, Nico.”
Nico nodded furiously. He hugged Talis around the waist, as the man put his hand behind his head and pulled him close. Nico could feel the knob of the walking stick on his back. “I need you to be quiet, Son,” Talis told Nico. “No badgering me with questions, understand? I need to meet someone.”
“Who are you meeting?” Nico asked, then gulped. “I’m sorry, Talis,” he said, but the man was already chuckling.
“You’re hopeless, you know that? Come on,” he told Nico. “Stay close with me, now.”
With Nico hurrying alongside him, Talis set out across the width of the Avi a’Parete, dodging between strolling groups and pausing now and then to let a carriage pass, then rushing across the path of the next one. When they finally reached the other side, Talis quickly ducked into a small side street, and the bustle and color and glory of the Avi a’Parete vanished as if it had never been there at all. They turned left, then right, following a narrow, twisting lane, and suddenly emerged-as if from a forest made of houses and buildings crushed together into too small a space-into an open area.
Nico could smell the A’Sele before he saw the river: an odor of dead fish, human waste, and oily water. They stood in a marketplace, with dozens of stalls set up in rows along the riverbank. To his left, Nico could see-from the other side, this time-the grand arch of the Pontica a’Kralji, and out in the glittering waters of the A’Sele, the Isle a’Kralji crowned with the Kralji’s Palais, the Old Temple, and the Regent’s Estate. Nico stared, then realized belatedly that Talis was already strolling along the aisles of the market, and he scurried to keep up. Now he found he could barely keep his gaze on Talis; he kept being distracted by the goods in the stalls: great heaps of onions, racks of drying herbs, dried and fresh fish, bright knives and glittering stones, bolts of fabrics, tabors and lutes, mounds of apples… “This is better than Oldtown Market,” he said, his voice echoing his amazement.
