A Magic of Dawn

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 powerful Cenzi 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 Cenzi. 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 Scath Cumhacht. She wondered whether he even realized what he was doing: without a spell, without calling on Cenzi 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 Cenzi? 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 Cenzi 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 Cenzi, 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 Cenzi 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 Scath 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.