floated glistening in his mind, and he heard the Archigos step onto the stairs of the High Lectern.
Sergei would remember the next moment for the remainder of his life.
There was a ferocious, impossible light-as if Cenzi had sent a lightning bolt from the heavens through the gilded dome above. The harsh glare penetrated Sergei’s closed eyelids; a thunder roared in his ears and the concussion pounded at his chest. Instinctively, Sergei hurled himself over Audric, knocking the boy to the floor of the balcony and covering the Kraljiki’s body with his own. His aging joints protested at the sudden movement and the abuse. He could hear Audric gasping for breath; he could also hear the screams and wails from below, pierced by Karl ca’Vliomani’s stricken, horrified shout ringing above them all: “Ana! Ana! Nooooooo!”
“Kraljiki! Regent!” Hands pulled at Sergei, lifting him-a quartet of the Garde Kralji, whose job it was to protect the Kraljiki and the Regent. Dust clouded the air inside the temple and Sergei blinked against the grit, barely able to breathe himself. He could hear the desperate coughing of Audric. The temple stank of sulfur and brimstone.
“You, and you-escort the Kraljiki from here and back to the palais immediately,” Sergei said, jabbing his fingers at the gardai. “You two, come with me.”
Sergei hurried down the forward stairs of the balcony, flanked by the gardai with swords drawn pushing aside those who were in their way. People were screaming and yelling, and he could hear the moans and shrill cries of the wounded. Sergei was forced to limp, his right knee sore and swelling rapidly; it took him far too long to navigate the stairs, clutching at the railing with each step. Below, everything was confusion.
“Regent! Here!” Aris cu’Falla, the Commandant of the Garde Kralji, gestured over heads to Sergei as gardai pushed at the crowds. The din of pain and grief was enormous, and Sergei noted many bloodied faces and arms. The front of the temple was littered with cracked stone and splintered wood; he glimpsed several bodies in the rubble.
One of the bodies wore the Archigos’ robes. Sergei’s breath left him, to be replaced by a cold, icy rage. “Commandant, what happened here?”
Cu’Falla shook his head. “I don’t know, Regent. Not yet. I was watching the ceremony from near the rear of the temple. When the Archigos came to the High Lectern… I’ve never seen anything like that, Regent. It was a spell of some sort, almost certainly, but like something a war-teni would do. The flash, the noise, the stone and wood and…” He frowned. “… other things flying everywhere. The blast seems to have come from underneath the High Lectern. There are at least half a dozen dead, and far more injured, some of them badly.
Groaning at the pain in his knee, the Regent crouched next to Ana’s body. Her face was nearly unrecognizable, the lower half of her body and her right arm entirely gone. He knew immediately that she was dead, that there was no hope here. An odd black dust coated the floor around her. Sergei turned his head away to see Karl ca’Vliomani being held back by the gardai, his face panicked, his bashta coated with dust. Sergei pushed himself slowly to his feet again, grimacing as his knees cracked. “Cover her and the other bodies,” he told cu’Falla. “Clear the temple of everyone but the teni and gardai. Send for Commandant cu’Ulcai of the Garde Civile if you need more help.” He released a long, shuddering breath. “And let the Ambassador through to me.”
Cu’Falla nodded and called out orders. Ca’Vliomani immediately darted toward Ana’s body, and Sergei moved to intercept him. “No,” he told Karl, clutching his shoulders. “She’s gone, Karl. There’s nothing you can do. Nothing.”
He felt the man sag, heard him sob once. “Sergei, I have to see her. Please. I have to know.” His eyes were stricken, and he looked suddenly decades older. His Paeti accent, which the Ambassador had never lost despite his years in Nessantico, was stronger now than ever.
“No, you don’t, my friend,” Sergei persisted. “Please listen to me. You don’t want this to be the last image you have of her. You don’t want that. Truly. I say that for your own sake.”
Ca’Vliomani started to weep, then, and Sergei held him as the gardai moved around them, as teni of the temple-silent in their shock and horror-went to tend to the wounded and the dead, as the dark dust settled around and on them, as the roar of the spell echoed eternally in Sergei’s ears.
He didn’t think he would ever forget that sound, and he wondered what it heralded: for himself, for Audric, for the Concenzia Faith, for Nessantico.
Nico Morel
Nico sipped at the tea that his matarh placed in front of him, holding the wooden mug with both small hands. “Matarh, why would someone want to kill Archigos Ana?”
“I don’t know, Nico,” she answered. She set a slice of bread and a few hunks of cheese before him on the scarred table near the window. She brushed wisps of brown hair from her forehead, staring through the open shutters to the narrow street outside. “I don’t know,” she said again. “I just hope…”
“You hope what, Matarh?”
She shook her head. “Nothing, Nico. Go on, eat.”
They’d attended the Day of Return ceremony at Temple Park, a long walk from their apartment in Oldtown. Nico always enjoyed it when they went to Temple Park, since the open, green space was such a contrast to the crowded, dirty streets in the maze of Oldtown. Just as they were leaving the park, they heard the wind-horns start to blow, and then the rumors had gone through the crowds like a fire in a summer-dry field: the Archigos had been killed. By magic, some of them said. Awful magic, like the heretic Numetodo could do, or maybe a war-teni.
Nico had cried a little because everyone else was crying, and his matarh looked worried. They’d hurried home.
Once, Matarh had taken Nico across the Pontica Mordei to the Isle a’Kralji, and he’d seen the grounds of the Regent’s palais and the Old Temple, the first one built in Nessantico. He’d marveled at the new dome being built on top of the Old Temple, with the lines of scaffolding holding the workers so impossibly high up in the sky. It made Nico dizzy just to look at them.
Afterward, they’d even gone over the Pontica a’Brezi Nippoli to the South Bank, where most of the ca’-and-cu’ lived. He’d walked with Matarh through the grand complex of the Archigos’ Temple and glimpsed the Archigos herself: a tiny figure in green at one of the windows of the buildings attached to the massive temple, waving to the throngs in the plaza.
Now she was dead. That was easy enough to imagine. Death was utterly common; he saw it often in the streets and had watched it come to his own family. Matarh said that Ana had been Archigos since she’d been a baby, and Matarh was twenty-eight years old-practically ancient, so it was hardly a surprise that the Archigos would die. Nico could barely remember his gremma, who had died when he was five. Maybe Gremma had been as old as Archigos Ana. Nico could remember his older brother fairly well, who had died of the Southern Fever four years ago. Matarh said there’d been another, even older brother who had also died, but Nico didn’t really remember him at all. There was Fiona, his sister who had been born first-he didn’t know if she was still alive, though he always imagined that she was; she’d run away when she was twelve, almost three years ago now. Talis had been living with them- Talis had been living with Matarh ever since Nico could remember, but Fiona had told him that hadn’t always been the way it was, that there’d been another man before Talis who had been Fiona’s vatarh and the vatarh of his brothers. She said that Talis was Nico’s vatarh, but Talis never wanted Nico to call him that.
Nico missed Fiona. He sometimes imagined that Fiona had gone to another city and become rich. He liked to think of that, sometimes. He dreamed of her coming back to Nessantico with a ce’ or even a ci’ before her name, and he’d open the door to see her wearing a tashta that was clean and brightly-colored as she smiled at him. “Nico,” she’d say. “You, Matarh, and Talis are going to come and live with me
…”
Maybe Nico would leave home when he was twelve, too-two years from now. Nico could see the deep lines in Matarh’s face as she stared out toward the street. The hair at her temples was streaked with white strands. “Are you watching for Talis?” he asked.
He saw her frown, then smile as she turned her head to him. “You just eat, darling,” she said. “Don’t worry about Talis. He’ll be along soon enough.”
Nico nodded, gnawing on the hard crust of the nearly stale bread and trying to avoid the loose back molar
