S. Farrell - A Magic of Twilight

The acolyte next to Ana sucked in his breath; the teni in the driv-er’s seat of her carriage grunted in alarm. The crowd was shouting now:

“A Numetodo. .! The Archigos. .!” Ana couldn’t hear the magic-chanting of the man, but his mouth still moved and a blue-white, sputtering glow had swallowed his right hand. Ana had seen similar effects, had performed them imperfectly herself, for that matter. She knew the set of words that could conjure up the heat of the air, could concentrate it into a ball-but the Numetodo performed the spell faster than any teni, with just a few words. .

The gardai the man had struck down were starting to stagger up, but she knew none of them could reach him quickly enough to prevent the attack. Ana knew that the Archigos had seen the disturbance as well, but when she glanced at him he was still smiling, his hands still raised in blessing even though he’d stopped speaking. Otherwise, he had not reacted.

The Numetodo-he had to be one of that shadowy group; who else would dare to do something like this? — swung his arm in a throwing motion and the spitting glare in his hand arced toward the Archigos.

Ana, almost without realizing, had begun whispering a chant herself, and as the glow hissed in the air toward the Archigos-who still smiled-she cupped her hands before her and brought them together.

The ball of blue fire fizzled, sputtered, and vanished long before it reached the Archigos. The Numetodo, standing stupefied in the plaza as his attack failed, went down under a rush of the Garde Kralji. She saw his capture as she staggered with the release of her spell and the inevitable weariness surged over her. For a moment, there was darkness at the edges of her vision and she thought she might faint entirely away, but the shadow passed, leaving her with only an immense fatigue.

The disturbance was over almost as quickly as it had begun, the Garde Kralji re-forming their line as the attacker was hustled away from the plaza into one of the nearest buildings with his hands bound and his mouth gagged, as the Archigos-who seemed entirely unshaken and unperturbed by the incident-raised his voice over the noise of the crowd to finish the blessing. He gestured to the Garde Kralji, making obvious his intention to continue the procession, and the gardai formed an opening in the crowd for the Archigos to pass through in his carriage.

The Archigos looked at Ana and gestured to her.

For a breath, she thought she’d been mistaken, until the teni-driver spoke in a harsh, awed whisper. “Go on, Vajica. The Archigos asks for you.” She forced herself to ignore the desire to do nothing more than lay down and close her eyes as the inevitable weariness of spell-casting washed over her. Hesitantly, her legs aching, she walked toward the carriage, glancing somewhat nervously at the a’teni who stared at her as she approached.

She went to one knee alongside the globe and bowed her head, giving the Archigos the sign of Cenzi.

“Get up, Vajica. Please,” she heard the Archigos say, his voice amused. “And come up here with me. I’d like to speak with my new protector.” She heard a few of the a’teni behind her snicker at that, and her face reddened. But the Archigos was extending a stubby arm toward her and one of the carriage-teni had opened a door in Cenzi’s globe for her, revealing a set of short stairs that led to the platform on which the Archigos stood under his canopy of silk. She climbed up to him, going to a knee again as she reached the platform. Kneeling, she was as tall as the Archigos. She took the hand he extended to her and touched her lips to his palm. She felt him lifting her up and she rose.

“Can you stand?” he whispered to her.

“For a bit,” she answered.

“Then you should sit.” He pulled down a seat built into the compartment of the carriage. “It’s just as well, after all. Otherwise, you’d have to stand there,” he told her, and she noticed that the platform to the Archigos’ left was several inches lower. “Appearances,” he told her with a gentle smile, and she gratefully sank down onto the hard wooden seat, her head no longer higher than his. “I see that you’ve learned how to reverse an incantation as well as to create one, Vajica cu’Seranta.

Strange, I didn’t think that was something that was generally taught to acolytes. Nor, I think, does U’Teni cu’Dosteau know of counter-spells that can be cast quite so quickly.”

Ana felt her cheeks flush again, but the fatigue made her response slow. “Archigos, I-”

He waved off her protest with a gentle laugh. “I was never in any real danger. The Numetodo haven’t the faith to truly use the Ilmodo.

His attack would never have reached me, even if you’d done nothing, not with the a’teni here. And I have my own defenses if they’d failed.”

His grin tempered what might have been a rebuke.

“I’m sorry for my presumption,” she told him. “I should have realized. .”

“There’s no need to apologize, Vajica. You’ve only shown me that what I was told about you was correct. Now, ride with me so we can talk-no matter what happens, it’s important that the schedule isn’t interrupted, after all. It’s all about appearances.”

What does he mean, ‘what I was told about you. .’? Again, the Archigos’ quick, genuine smile made Ana relax and cooled the flush in her cheeks. The teni alongside the carriage were chanting, the silk awning above them flapping in the breeze as the acolytes holding it began to move and the carriage rolled smoothly and slowly forward. The a’teni filed behind the carriage and behind them the u’ and o’teni, and finally the acolyte choir, while the gardai with their long staffs moved into formation on either side of the street and the procession turned out from the plaza onto the Avi a’Parete. The Archigos waved to the crowds lining the boulevard even as he continued to speak to Ana. “Surely you wondered why I would ask to meet with you.”

“ Yo u asked, Archigos?” she managed to blurt out. “I thought. .”

“I know what you thought,” Archigos ca’Millac answered. “You were wrong.”

Mahri

He lurked at the fringes of the crowd, as he always did.

Watching, as he always did.

Even in the warmth of the sun, Mahri wrapped himself in several layers, his clothing rent with great tears and the hems all tattered, the patterns on the cloth smeared with filth and blackened where they

dragged the ground. His hood was up, so that his scarred and ravaged face could only be glimpsed: the 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.