The voices were gone when I was with him, but she… She ruined it all, for me, for Jan, for you too, Rochelle. She ruined it…”
Her hands loosened, and she fell back on the bed. For a moment, Rochelle thought that Matarh was dead, but her breath shuddered in again and her eyes focused. Her hand, trembling, lifted to touch Rochelle’s cheek. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you will do what I couldn’t do. Promise me. You will kill her, and as she dies, you will tell her why, so she goes to Cenzi knowing…”
“I promise, Matarh,” Rochelle husked, crying.
The smell of peat overcame the odor of sickness. Rochelle sat up, startled, in her bed in the inn. She could hear the wind blowing outside as a storm came through, the chimney to the hearth in her room losing its draw and the smoke from the peat chunks glowing there wafting back into the room. Then the wind changed and the smoke was sucked upward again. The wind screamed, and Rochelle thought she heard a fading whisper in it. “Promise me…”
She’d not yet kept that promise. She’d told herself that she would, that one day she’d go to Nessantico as the White Stone, and there she would find the woman who had ended Matarh’s affair with her vatarh.
Allesandra. The Kraljica.
Why not now? Jan would be going there, also, she was certain. That was what all the offiziers and gardai were saying. He would be taking the army to Nessantico.
She could be there first. She could keep the promise to Matarh, and Jan would know who had done it, and he would understand why.
Rain spattered against the shutters of the room. Thunder boomed once. Rochelle brought the covers around her, suddenly awake.
“I will go to Nessantico, Matarh,” she whispered. “I promise.” The peat hissed in response.
Varina ca’Pallo
The Sparkwheel was heavy on the belt under her cloak, a constant reminder, and her mind burned with the spells she’d cast the day before, holding them for this afternoon. On the far side of the plaza, looking ominously abandoned and empty, the Old Temple’s golden dome gleamed even in the rainfall, as water spilled from the copper gutters into the mouth of gargoyle rainspouts, which disgorged white, loud streams into the plaza far below.
There were lights in the Old Temple and the attached buildings: the light of normal fires and teni-light both. They had all seen faces staring outward; those eyes could not have missed the massing of the Garde Kralji around the plaza and the arrival of the Numetodo. There could be no surprise here. This would be a frontal assault into the face of a well-prepared enemy.
Talbot, Johannes, Leovic, Mason, Niels, and others of the Numetodo were gathered near her, all of them grim-faced. A’Offizier ci’Santiago of the Garde Kralji approached them as they waited. “My gardai and utilinos are all in position,” he told them. “The Kraljica is also here to observe.” He pointed to a window above them, one of the government buildings that bordered the plaza. “You’re certain that you want to try speaking to Morel first, A’Morce?”
“I have to,” Varina answered.
Talbot shook his head. “No, you don’t, A’Morce. We could send in someone else with the message. I would go myself, willingly…”
Varina smiled at Talbot. “No,” she told him, told all of them. “I know Nico. He’ll recognize me, and he’ll talk to me. I’ll be safe. He’s the head of his group as I’m the head of mine. He’ll see us as peers. This is the way it needs to be.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Ci’Santiago asked.
“I’m not,” she told him firmly, though she wondered herself about that possibility. “Wait here. All of you. If this goes well, we can end this siege without bloodshed.”
She could see the disbelief on all of their faces. None of them shared her optimism. In truth, she had little hope herself.
She nodded her head to them, then started across the plaza. As she walked, her footsteps splashing through puddles, she spoke a release word. Light bloomed above her head, illuminating her as she made her way across the dark, wet flagstones in the false night of the storm. Despite the rain, she kept down the hood of her cloak so that her white hair shone in the light and her face could be recognized. She looked back once, when she was halfway across the open area: her friends appeared to be little more than specks in the darkness. All around the plaza, she could see torches alight: the waiting gardai. She turned back, walking slowly toward the Old Temple’s main doors. “I am Varina ca’Pallo, A’Morce of the Numetodo,” she shouted out loudly as she came near. “I need to speak to Nico Morel.”
In the storm-gloom, her voice echoed from the buildings around the plaza, sounding weak and lonely and thin. A head peered down at her from a window high in the temple and vanished again. She could almost feel arrows pointed toward her or spells being chanted. She felt old, frail. This was a mistake…
But she heard a small door open to the side of the main doors, one without light behind it, and a figure stood there: a shadow in deeper twilight. “Varina,” a familiar, gentle voice said. “I’m here. The question is, why are you?”
“I need to talk to you, Nico.”
She thought she saw the flash of teeth in the darkness. The shadow moved slightly, and a hand waved. “Then come inside, out of the rain.”
With a final glance backward, she moved past him into incense-perfumed dimness. She was in one of the side chapels off the main nave of the temple. Down a wide corridor, she could glimpse the torchlight vista of the main chapel underneath the great dome. There were people there, many in teni-robes, some of them staring in her direction. She could see the main doors of the temple, barricaded and barred.
She heard Nico close and lock the door again, sliding a heavy wooden beam across it. Another person was there with him: a young woman with a heavily pregnant curve to her stomach: very noticeable as her teni-robes pressed against her as she stood next to Nico. He must have noticed Varina’s attention on the woman; he smiled again. “Varina, this is Liana. She and I…” He smiled. “We are married, even though Liana insists that I should remain free of the actual rite.”
“Liana,” Varina said. Varina wondered if she had ever looked that young and that obviously in love. Varina touched her own belly: if I’d known Karl back when I was young enough… “That’s a lovely name.” Then she looked back to Nico, whose arm had gone around Liana. “Nico, you can’t win here. Kraljica Allesandra has made the decision that the Old Temple must be retaken. She doesn’t care about the cost-in terms of lives or in damage. She’s massed the Garde Kralji and those chevarittai who are still in the city, and they are ready to attack.”
“And the Numetodo?” Nico asked. “Are they out there, too?”
Varina nodded. “We are. You can’t stand against us, Nico. Not even with the war-teni you have here. We have our own magic, and we have black sand in quantity. This will be a massacre, Nico. I don’t want that. At the very least, I would ask you to release Commandant cu’Ingres as a sign that you’re willing to negotiate an end to this. Let’s talk. Let’s see if we can come to some sort of agreement.”
“You want me to release cu’Ingres so that the Garde Civile might have some competent leadership.” He smiled at her, his arm tightening around Liana. “You forget that I have Cenzi on my side. I know you don’t believe, Varina, but you have no idea what you really face here. He has told me that He will send down fire from the sky to protect us. Do you think it’s a coincidence that there’s a storm tonight? It’s not.”
As if on cue, lightning sent multicolored light slashing through the rose window above them, and thunder grumbled. Liana laughed. “Look at yourself, Varina,” she said. “You nearly jumped out of your skin just now. You want to believe; you just won’t let yourself. Can’t you feel your husband’s soul calling to you from the afterlife?”
“No,” Varina told the young woman. “You believe in a chimera. You say ‘I don’t understand this’ and you make up a myth to explain it. We Numetodo look for explanations-we don’t need to call on Cenzi to create magic; we call on logic and reason.”
Nico was frowning now. “You slap the face of Cenzi with your heresy,” he snapped. “You have no idea how
