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 téni-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
téni-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 téni-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-téni
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 Cénzi 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 Cénzi to create magic; we
call on logic and reason.”
Nico was frowning
now. “You slap the face of Cénzi with your heresy,” he snapped.
“You have no idea how powerful Cénzi has made me.”
“You would have been
this powerful regardless,” Varina told him. “The power is within
you, Nico. It has nothing to do with
Cénzi. It’s your power. You’ve always
had it, and I’ve always known it.”
Nico drew himself up,
releasing Liana. In the dimness of the temple, he seemed larger,
and his voice—Varina realized—crackled with the power of the Scáth
Cumhacht. She wondered whether he even realized what he was doing:
without a spell, without calling on Cénzi at all. She was amazed:
this was nothing she could do herself, nothing any Numetodo could
do. He was tapping the Second World instinctively and naturally, as
if he were a part of it. She wondered, knowing this, what else he
was capable of doing. Karl, I could use you
now. Together, perhaps we could understand this . . . “Is
this what you’ve come to do, Varina?” Nico continued. “To insult me
here in the very house of Cénzi? If so, you’re wasting your breath
and we are done talking.”
Varina started to
respond angrily, then stopped herself. She took a long, slow
breath. “Look at me, Nico,” she said. “I’m an old woman. I don’t
want this. I’m here because I cared about you when you were a
child, and I still care about you. I don’t want you to be hurt. I
don’t want the death and destruction that will come if the Kraljica
hauls you and your people out of here by force. And she
will do that, Nico. She’s determined
that she must do this, and unless you
surrender yourself, that’s what will happen. Is that what you want?
Do you want your followers here to die?”
Nico laughed again,
hearty and rich, so loud that the others in the main portion of the
temple glanced their way. Liana smiled with him. “That’s all you
have, Varina?—to appeal to fear, to play on my sympathy? Do you
think me that naive? I have been charged by Cénzi to do
this—perhaps you can’t understand what that means, but because of
that charge, I have no choice. No choice at all. I do His bidding;
I am His vehicle. This is not my action
nor my battle. If the Kraljica and the Archigos wish to defy Cénzi,
then it will be their own souls and everlasting salvation that they
risk, and the same for those who support them. Each of you out
there is damned, Varina. Damned. You
want me to surrender? That won’t happen. Rather, let me give you
this task: go to your Kraljica, who coddles you and your heresy.
Tell her that, instead, I demand her
surrender. Tell her that otherwise she risks the destruction of
everything she has built. Tell her that she will find that Cénzi
will send fire and flame to assault her, that those she commands
will tremble and quake with fear, that they will run in terror from
what awaits them. Tell her that.”
As he spoke, Nico’s
voice also rose in power and volume. Varina had to force herself
not to step back from him, as if his very words might catch fire
and ignite her. She could not deny the power he had; she could feel
the cold rage of the Scáth Cumhacht surrounding her—what he would
call the Ilmodo—and she realized that she had lost here, that he
was beyond any poor capability she had to convince him. The
sparkwheel sagged heavily on the belt under her cloak, and she
realized that she had no choice. No choice. Her own life didn’t
matter. But Nico was the heart and the will of the Morelli sect,
and if he were gone, the body would collapse.
She took out the
sparkwheel. She pointed it at his chest, her hand trembling. He
glanced at it, contemptuously. “What is this?” he asked. “Some
foolish Numetodo thing?”
She could not
hesitate—if she did, he would call up a spell and the moment would
be over. Sobbing at what she was doing, weeping because she was
about to kill someone both she and Karl had loved, she pressed the
trigger. The wheel spun, sparks flared.
But there was only a
hiss and sputter from the black sand in the pan, and she saw with
despair the dampness beaded on the metal. She dropped the
sparkwheel; it clattered on the marble tiles of the
floor.
Liana laughed, but
Varina could feel Nico studying her face. “I’m sorry,” he said to
her. “It should never have come to this between us. I’m sorry,” he
repeated, and it was the voice of the boy she remembered. Nico
turned; he unbarred the door and opened it: outside, the wind threw
rain across the plaza and black clouds rolled overhead. “Go,
Varina,” he said. “Go for the sake of our old friendship. Go and
tell the Kraljica that if she wants battle, she shall have it—and
the blame will be on her head.”
Varina was staring at
her hand, at the sparkwheel on the floor. Stiffly, she bent down
and picked it up again, placing it back on her belt. She took a
step toward Nico, and she hugged him. “At least let Liana come with
me, for the sake of the child she carries. I’ll keep her
safe.”
“No.” The answer came
from Liana. “I stay here, with Nico.”
Nico smiled at her
and his arm went around her again. “I’m sorry, Varina. You have
your answer.
“I’m sorry, too,”
Varina told him, told both of them.
She nodded once to
Liana, and went out into the storm, drawing her hood over her
face.
