taste brine in his mouth. The air around him seemed to have chilled drastically in the last few minutes as the first outrunners of the storm stretched toward them. The dipping and rolling of the deck underneath his feet was alarming enough that Eneas found himself clutching at the rail.
He could feel the storm. The energy of it seemed to resonate inside him, and his fingertips tingled with every lightning strike, as if they touched him from a distance.
Chasing us from the west-like the hordes of the Westlanders, crackling with the power of the nahualli. Pursuing us even as we flee, coming to us in our very homes… Eneas shuddered, watching the storm’s approach and imagining he could see the shapes of the Westlander warriors in the clouds, or that the thunderheads were the smoke of sacrificial fires. He wondered what had happened in the Hellins since they’d left. He wondered, and he worried at the omen of the storm.
“You’d best get below to your cabin, O’Offizier. I’ll do what I can, but Cenzi knows there’ll be no calming the sea with this.” The wind-teni assigned to the ship had come up alongside him, unheard against the protest of the sails, the shrill keening of the wind through the rigging, and the urgent calls of the ship’s offiziers to the sailors on deck. She was staring at the storm in the same manner that Eneas would gaze at an enemy force arrayed against him, gauging it and pondering what strategies might work best against it. The task of the wind-teni was to fill the sails of the ship when the natural winds of the Strettosei would not cooperate. They would also strive to calm the storms that raked the deep waters between the Holdings and the Hellins, but that was the harder task, Eneas knew: the Moitidi of the sky were powerful and contemptuous of the Ilmodo and the attempts of the wind-teni to calm their fury.
“A bad one?” Eneas asked her.
The deck lifted as they rose on the next wave, then dropped abruptly as Stormcloud raced down the slope beyond. Eneas wrapped an arm around the rail as water sluiced over the deck; the wind-teni only shifted her weight easily and naturally. “I’ve seen worse,” she answered, but to Eneas’ ears it sounded more like bravado than confidence. “But you never really know what’s behind the thunderheads until it gets here. Let me test it.” Her hands lifted and moved in a spell-pattern, and she chanted in the language of the Ilmodo, her eyes closed as she faced the storm.
Her hands dropped. Her eyes opened and she glanced at him. “O’Offizier, are you also a teni?”
Eneas shook his head, puzzled. “No. I’ve had some little training, but…”
“Ahh…” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Perhaps that’s it.”
“What?” he asked.
“Just now, when I opened myself to the storm, I thought I felt.. .” She shook her head, and droplets flew from her spray-darkened hair. The first spatters of cold rain hit the deck like tossed stones. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Right now, I have to see what I can do with this. Please, you should go below, O’Offizier…”
The ship lurched again, and with it, Eneas’ stomach. Lightning crackled nearer, and he thought he could feel the strike in his very flesh, raising the hairs on his arms. He gave the wind-teni the sign of Cenzi. “May Cenzi be with you to still the storm,” he told her, and she returned the gesture.
“I’ll need Him,” she said. She faced the storm again, her hands now moving in a new spell-pattern and her chant longer and more complex. Eneas thought he could feel the power gathering around her; he retreated down the slick, sloping deck, holding onto whatever he could grab until he half-fell into the narrow stairwell leading to the cramped passenger compartments. There, he lay on his swinging hammock and listened to the storm as it broke around them, as the wind-teni struggled to keep the worst of the furious winds away from the fragile vessel that was their ship. Eneas prayed also, his knotted hands clasped to his forehead, asking Cenzi for the safety of the ship and for their safe return to Nessantico.
You will be safe… He thought he heard the words, but against the storm and against the vastness of the Strettosei, they were small and insignificant. His words might have been the the whisperings of a gnat.
The storm has been sent to speed you to your home… The thought came to him suddenly, in that low voice he’d thought he’d heard a few times since his escape from the Tehuantin. Cenzi’s Voice. Eneas laughed at that, and suddenly he didn’t fear the storm though the ship pitched and rolled and the wind screamed shrilly. His fear was gone and he felt a certainty that they would be safe.
He thanked Cenzi for giving him that peace.
Allesandra ca’Vorl
Do I really want to do this? Allesandra shivered at the thought. It was, almost, too late to change her mind.
Alone, in the darkness of a narrow lane in Brezno on Draiordi evening, she waited where she’d been told. A man approached her, hobnailed boots clacking loudly on the cobbles, and Allesandra stiffened, suddenly alert. All her senses were straining, and she pressed a hand close to the knife hidden under the sleeve of her tashta, though she knew that if the White Stone were what he was rumored to be, no weapon would protect her if he decided to kill her. The man came close to her, his eyes on the shadows under the cowl of her tashta, assessing her.
“Ah,” the man said. “I guess you’re comely enough. Care to do some business with me, girlie?” he asked as he approached her, with the smell of beer trailing after him.
He thinks you’re a whore. This isn’t him. But, just to be certain, she opened her hand and showed him the gray-white, smooth pebble in her palm. He didn’t react. “I have a se’siqil that’s yours if you’re good to me,” the man said, and Allesandra closed her fingers around the stone.
“Be off with you,” she told him, “or I’ll call the utilino.”
The man scowled, hiccuped, then brushed past her. He spat on the ground near her feet.
“Did you think it would be that easy?” At the sound of the voice, Allesandra started to turn, but a gloved hand gripped her shoulder and stopped her. “No,” the voice said. “Just keep standing there, looking across the street. I am the White Stone.” Husky, that voice, though pitched higher than she’d imagined. In her mind, she’d heard a deep, ominous voice, not this nondescript one.
“How do I know it’s you?” she asked
“You don’t. Not now. You won’t know until you see the stone on the left eye of the man you want dead. It is a man, isn’t it?” There was a quiet chuckle. “For a woman, it’s always a man… or because of one.”
“I want to see you,” Allesandra said. “I want to know who I’m talking to, who I’m hiring.”
“The only ones who see the White Stone are those I kill. Turn, and you’ll be one of those-I know you, and that’s enough. Do I make myself clear, A’Hirzg ca’Vorl?” Involuntarily, Allesandra shivered at the threat and the voice chuckled again. “Good. I dislike unnecessary and unpaid work. Now… You brought my fee, as Elzbet told you?”
She nodded.
“Good. You’ll place the pouch down at your feet, and place the stone you brought on top of it-it’s a light stone, as near white as you can find? You’d recognize it again?”
Again Allesandra nodded. Resisting the temptation to look back, she unlaced the pouch heavy with gold solas from the belt of her tashta and, crouching, put it on the cobbles of the street next to her feet. She placed the pebble on top of the soft leather and stood up.
“How soon?” Allesandra asked. “How soon will you do it?”
“In my own time and in the place of my own choosing,” the White Stone answered. “But within a moon. No longer than that. Who do you want me to kill?” the assassin asked. “What is his name?”
“You may not take the money when I tell you.”
The White Stone gave a mocking laugh. “You wouldn’t need me if the one you wanted dead weren’t well- placed and well-protected. Perhaps, given your history, it’s someone in Nessantico?”
“No.”
“No?” There was, Allesandra thought, disappointment in the voice. “Then who, A’Hirzg? Who do you want dead badly enough that you would find me?”
She hesitated, not wanting to say it aloud. She let out the breath she was holding. “My brother,” she said. “Hirzg Fynn.”
There was no answer. She heard a clatter out in the street to her right, and her head moved involuntarily in
