S Farrell - A Magic of Nightfall

There will be Numetodo bodies gibbeted and displayed on the Ponticas again. He could see them in his mind, and he could see his own face on one of the bodies. He hoped it was only fear that gave him that vision, and not some portent.

There are no gods. There are no portents. The rational thought did nothing to ease his mind. He wasn’t feeling rational; he was feeling afraid.

Mika and Varina had agreed to meet him in his usual Oldtown tavern. Even here, where the patrons knew him and greeted him by name, Karl could imagine dark stares from those in the booths or at the tables. He no longer knew who he could count on, except these two. Varina sat next to him in the corner booth, her body a welcome warmth along his side, Mika across the booth’s table.

Friends. He hoped they would remain so, after this. “You’re the A’Morce of the Numetodo here,” he told Mika, his voice hurried, pitched low so that none of the bar’s denizens could hear him. The musician in the corner, playing a five-stringed luth and singing ballads that had been old when his great-vatarh taught them to him, helped cover their conversation. “I don’t ask you to be involved, but I’ve made a promise to ca’Rudka and I intend to keep it. I need to warn you so you can… make arrangements.”

Mika shrugged, though the drawn look of his features told Karl that the man was more worried than he was going to admit. Mika reached for the ale in front of him and drank a long gulp, wiping the foam from the ends of his mustache. “If Audric or the Council is willing to kill ca’Rudka, then they’ll be looking at the Numetodo next as additional scapegoats, whether you do anything or not, Karl. The blame for everything will fall on us, as it always has.”

“You have family here. I know. I’m sorry.”

“Sali’s been through this before,” Mika said. “She’ll understand. I’ll send her and the children off to family in Il Trebbio.”

“What about the boy Nico?” Varina asked. “What do we do with him?”

“We’ve heard nothing from Talis or his matarh?” Karl asked, and Varina shook her head in answer. “Then keep him with you for now, if you’re willing. If things get too dangerous, just let him go-I’ve no interest in having the child hurt because he’s associated with us.” Karl gave a long sigh. His own ale sat untouched on the table, and he stared at the bubbles frothing against the wooden mug. Thousands of bubbles, all rising for a time, then bursting and gone. Like me. Like all of us. Too quickly gone, and nothing afterward. Nothing…

“I’ll go with you tonight, Karl, after I’ve sent Sali and the children on their way,” Mika told him. “You’ll need help with this.”

Karl shook his head. “That’s not necessary.”

“If ca’Rudka is snatched from the Bastida by magic, then we all know who’s going to be blamed and who’s going to be hunted,” Mika said. “For once, they’ll be right in blaming the Numetodo, eh? But the response we get won’t change whether you go alone or with a dozen of us, or whether you succeed or fail: just the attempt will be enough.”

“I’m not going to risk the lives of a dozen of us. I’m going to take two,” he said. “Myself, and one other.”

Mika grinned. “So I might as well make certain that you succeed-as long as ca’Rudka’s alive, there’s a chance he may find his way back to power, and that would be best for us.”

“I’m stronger than either one of you with the Scath Cumhacht,” Varina interjected. “I’m going with you also.”

With that declaration, the knot in Karl’s stomach tightened. He imagined Varina dead, or worse, captured. The pain of that thought made him grimace, made his head shake. “There’s no need. You have Nico to watch.”

Her lips tightened. She tapped the booth’s table with her fingernails. “Mika,” she said, “I think we need another round here. Would you mind getting it?”

Mika blinked, puzzled. “Just call Mara over and-” He stopped, then his eyes widened slightly. “Oh,” he said, his lips pursing. “Certainly. I’ll go get it.”

He had barely left the booth when Varina turned in the bench seat to face Karl. Her voice was low and dangerous. “Karl, I have spent years- years -doing the research and experiments to expand the catalog of spell formulae we now use regularly. I have thrown myself into understanding the Westlander magic and how it might work and how we might harness their ways. I have given up…” She stopped, biting her lower lip momentarily. “I have given up the life I might have had for the Numetodo and a cause I thought we shared. And now you’re going to relegate me to a babysitter? If you do that, Karl, you will be telling me that I’ve wasted all that time and all that effort and all those years. Is that what you’re telling me? Is it?”

Her accusation sliced into him like a honed dagger. He lifted his hands from the table as if wounded. “You don’t understand-” he started to say.

“What don’t I understand?” she shot back. “That you don’t think I’m of any use to you? That I don’t… don’t care enough for you to want to help?”

“No.” He shook his head helplessly. “Varina, our odds aren’t good here.”

“And they’re better without me?”

Karl sighed. “No. That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t want you hurt.”

“You’re willing to let Mika take his chances, though? Why, Karl? Why is it different for me? Why?” The questions were hammer blows, and he thought there was a strange urgency to her questions, as if there were an answer she wanted him to give.

But he had no answers. He ducked his head, staring down at his mug, at the bubbles expiring on its rim, at the water ringing the bottom and staining the wood. “If you want to go with me, Varina,” he said, “then I will be glad for your help,” he told her. He lifted his head. She was staring at him with a fragile defiance. “Thank you.”

Her mouth opened slightly, as if she were going to say more. Then she nodded.

Mika came back with more ale. He placed the mugs on the center of the table. “Settled?” he asked.

“Yes,” Karl answered. “Settled. If this is what you both truly want, then let’s finish our drinks so we can go to our rooms and prepare the spells we’ll need this evening. Mika, if you’d make sure that word gets passed along that all Numetodo should leave the city or plan to make themselves very scarce for the foreseeable future…” He picked up his mug finally, and Mika and Varina lifted theirs. They touched them together. “To luck,” he said. “We’ll need it.”

They drained their mugs as one.

“ You look awful tired, Varina,” Nico said.

She was. She was exhausted, so tired that her bones ached. The afternoon had been spent preparing spells, shaping the Scath Cumhacht until the spell was complete, then placing the trigger word and gesture to release it in her mind. The spell-weariness dragged at her-it was worse now than it had been when she was younger, worse since she’d begun experimenting with the Tehuantin method. She’d gone to the small room where they kept Nico to bring him his supper and check on him.

“I’ll be fine in a few turns,” she told Nico. “I just have to go to sleep for a bit so I can recover.”

“Talis was always tired, too, when he did magic things, especially with that bowl. I thought it made him look old, too. Like you.”

The brutal honesty of a child. Varina touched her graying hair, the deep wrinkles that had carved themselves into her face in the last few years. “We pay for magic this way,” she told Nico. “Nothing ever comes to you in this world without cost. You’ll learn that.” She smiled wryly. “Sorry. That sounds like something a parent would say.”