S Farrell - A Magic of Nightfall

Nico smiled: hesitantly, almost shyly. “Matarh talks like that to me sometimes,” he told her. “Like she’s talking more to herself than me. I’ll try to remember it, though.”

Varina laughed. She sat on the chair alongside his bed, leaning forward to tousle his hair. Nico frowned, sliding back a little on the bed. “Nico,” Varina said, drawing her hand back, “I have to talk to you. Things are happening, outside. Bad things. After I rest a little, I have to go do something, and when I get back, we’re going to have to leave the city, very quickly.”

“Like I had to with Matarh?” He drew his doubled legs up to his chest as he sat on the bed, wrapping his hands around them. He looked at her over his knees.

“Yes, like that.”

“Are you in trouble?”

She had to smile at that. “I’m about to be.”

He sniffed. “Is it because of that man?”

“Karl, you mean? You might say that.”

He released his legs and glanced at the food on the tray but didn’t touch it. “Are you and Karl…?”

She understood what he was asking without the word. “No. What would make you think that?”

“You act like you are. When the two of you talk to each other, you remind me of Matarh and Talis.”

“Well, we’re not… together. Not that way.”

“He likes you, I can tell.”

That made her smile, but the taste of it was bitter. “Oh, you can, can you? When did you become so wise in the way of adults?”

Nico shrugged. “I can tell,” he said again.

“Let’s not talk about this,” she said, though she wanted to. She wondered what Karl would say to Nico if Nico told him the same thing. “I need you to eat, and I need you to get some sleep because very likely we’ll be leaving the city tonight. You need to be ready for that.”

“Will you take me to my matarh?”

“I wish I could, Nico. I really do. But I don’t know where we’ll be going, yet. I’ll take you somewhere safe. That much I promise you. I won’t let anything bad happen to you, and we’ll try to get you back to your matarh. Do you understand me?”

He nodded.

“Good. Then eat your supper, and try to sleep. I’m going to rest myself, in the next room. If you need me, you can call me. Go on now, you should try that soup before it gets cold.”

She watched him for a few minutes as he ate, until she felt her eyelids growing heavy. When she woke up, she discovered she’d fallen asleep in the chair next to his bed, and Nico was asleep himself, curled up near to her with one hand stretched out to touch her leg. Outside, she could hear rain pattering against the roof and the shutters of the house.

She brought the covers up over Nico and pressed her lips to his cheek. She left him then, closing and locking the door behind her.

She hoped she would see him again.

Nessantico…

She had never seen the city before, though of course she’d heard much about it. Even with the Holdings sundered, even with the previous Kraljiki having been a pale shadow of his famous matarh, and even with the current Kraljiki a frail boy who-rumors said-wouldn’t live to his majority, Nessantico retained her allure.

The White Stone had always known she would eventually come here, as anyone with ambition must. The pull of the city was irresistible, and for a person in her line of business, Nessantico was a rich and fertile field to be exploited. But she had not expected to come here so quickly or for these reasons.

After the nearly-botched and hasty assassination of the Hirzg, she had thought it too dangerous to stay in the Coalition. She’d slipped back into her beggar role as Elzbet, hiding herself among the poor who were so often invisible to the ca’-and-cu’, and she’d made her way from Brezno to Montbataille in the eastern mountains that formed the border of Nessantico and Firenzcia, and then down the River A’Sele to the great city itself.

Playing her role, she settled herself in Oldtown. That was the best way to avoid drawing attention to herself. She was just another of the nameless poor walking the streets of the known world’s greatest city, and if she conversed with the voices in her head as she walked, no one would particularly notice or care. Just another crazed soul, a mad-woman babbling and muttering to herself, walking in some interior world at odds with the reality around her.

“You’ll pay for this. You can’t kill me and not pay. They’ll find you. They’ll track you down and kill you.”

“Who?” she asked Fynn’s strident voice as the others inside her laughed and jeered at him. She put her hand to her tashta, feeling underneath the cloth the small leather pouch tied around her neck, and inside it the smooth, pale stone she kept with her always. “Who will come find me? I told you who hired me. Is she going to search for me?”

“You’re worried that someone else will figure it out. You’re worried that word will get out that the White Stone was also the woman who was Jan ca’Vorl’s lover. They’ve seen your face; they would recognize you, and the White Stone’s face can’t be known.”

“Shut up!” she nearly screamed at him, and the screech caused heads to turn toward her. A passing utilino stopped in the midst of his rounds, his teni-lit lantern swinging over to focus on her. She shielded her eyes from the light, stooping over and grinning at the man with what she hoped was a mad leer. The utilino uttered a sound of disgust and the light moved away from her; the other people had already looked away, turning back to their own business.

The voices of her victims were laughing and chuckling and chortling as she turned the corner into Oldtown Center. The famous teni-lamps of Nessantico gleamed and twinkled on the iron posts set around the open plaza. She gazed up at the placards of the shops along the street. Here in the large plaza the shops were still open, though most of those along the side streets had been shuttered since full dark: the teni might light the lamps of Oldtown Center, but they didn’t come to the narrow and ancient streets that led off the Center. They’d set the ring of the Avi A’Parete ablaze all around the city, so that Nessantico seemed to wear a collar of yellow brilliance, and they would illuminate the wide streets of the South Bank where most of the ca’-and-cu’ lived, but Oldtown was left to dwell in night.

The moon had slid behind a cloud, and a drizzle threatened to turn into a hard rain. She hurried along toward the Center, knowing that the weather would send everyone home and set the shopkeepers to shuttering their stores.

There: she saw the mortar and pestle of an apothecary just down the lane, and she shuffled toward it through the rapidly-thinning crowds, keeping her back near the bricks and stones of the buildings and her head down. Once, a passing man touched her arm: a graybeard, who leered at her with missing teeth and breath that smelled of beer and cheese. “I have money,” he said to her without prelude, his face slick with rain. “Come with me.”

Whore! the voices called out at her gleefully, mocking. Why not?-you let them pay you for other services. She glared at him, and showed him the hilt of the knife at her waist. “I’m not a whore,” she told him, told them. Her hand grasped the knife, and raindrops scattered from her cloak with the motion. “Back away.”

The man laughed, gap-toothed, and spread his hands. “As you wish, Vajica. No harm, eh?” Then his gaze slid away from her and he walked on, splashing in the gathering puddles. She watched him go.

She could rid herself of him, but not of the others. They were with her always.

She’d reached the apothecary and glanced inside the open shutters. There was no one inside except for the balding proprietor. She went inside, the man glancing up from his jars and vials behind the counter as the bell on the door jingled brightly.