A Magic of Dawn

FAILINGS
Cenzi

Cenzi had abandoned him, and he could only wonder what he’d done wrong, how he could have misinterpreted things so badly that Cenzi would have allowed this to happen. Nico had spent the time since Sergei had left him on his knees, refusing all food and water. He used the chains binding his hands and legs as flails, to break open again the scabs of the wounds he’d sustained in the battle for the Old Temple, letting the hot blood and the pain take away all thought of the outside world. He accepted the pain; he bathed in it; he gave it up to Cenzi as an offering in hopes that He might speak again to him.

You’ve taken my lover and stolen my child. You’ve allowed the people who followed me to die horribly. You’ve taken my freedom. How did I offend You? What did I fail to see or do for You? How have I misheard Your message? Tell me. If you wish to punish me, then I give myself to You freely, but tell me why I must be punished. Please help me to understand…

That was his prayer. That is what he repeated, over and over: as the wind-horns spoke Third Call over the city, as night came, as the stars wheeled past and the moon rose. He prayed, on his knees, lost inside himself and trying again to find the voice of Cenzi somewhere in his despair.

He couldn’t keep the other thoughts from intruding. His mind drifted, unfocused. He could hear Sergei’s voice, telling him over and over, “It’s Varina who has spared your life, your hands, and your tongue, and thus your gift: a person who doesn’t believe in Cenzi, but who believes in you… It’s Varina who saved your child…” Muffled by the silencer, Nico shouted against that terrible voice, screwing his eyes shut as if he could deny the memory entrance to his mind if he denied himself sight. “I told you about the young woman-I told her that she still had time to change, to find a path that wouldn’t end where I am,” Sergei persisted. “I think that’s what Varina believes of you, Nico. She believes in you, in your gift, and she believes you can do better with it than you’ve done.”

No! If Varina saved me, it was because she was unwittingly being twisted to Your will. It must be. Tell me that it’s so! Give me Your sign…

But what surfaced in his mind was instead the image of Liana’s broken and torn body, of the way her eyes stared blindly toward the dome of the Old Temple, and the way her hands clutched her stomach as if trying to cradle the unborn child inside her. He called upon Cenzi to change this horrible act, to return her to life, to take his own life in her place, but she only stared and her chest did not move and the blood thickened and stopped around her as he tried to rouse her, as he held her, as the gardai tore him away as he screamed…

Cenzi, I know Your gift was given to me-why did You give it to me if not to serve You? What do You ask of me? I will do it. I thought I had done it, but if that’s not true, then show me. Just take this torment from me. Make me understand…

He thought he felt a hand on his shoulder and he turned, but there was no one there. It must have been the dead turns of the night, when even the great city was at its most quiet. He must have been kneeling there for turns, with his legs gone dead under him. The still, foul air of the cell shivered and he heard Varina’s voice. “I hate what you’ve preached and what you’ve done in the name of your beliefs. But I don’t hate you, Nico. I will never hate you.”

“Why not?” he tried to say but his tongue was pressed down by the silencer, and he could only make strangled, unintelligible noises. “Why don’t you hate me? How can you not?”

The air shivered and he thought he heard a laugh.

Cenzi? Varina?

Again, he tried to return to his prayer but his mind wouldn’t allow it. His head was full of voices, but not the one he so desired to hear. He fell backward into memory, lurched forward again into the squalid, filthy present, then fell back again.

He was eleven, in the house where they lived after Elle took him away from Nessantico, where she stayed when her belly was at its fullest with the child inside, the one she said would be his brother or sister. He could hear Elle groaning and crying in the next room, and he huddled in the common room, scared and frightened by the obvious pain in her voice and praying to Cenzi that she’d be all right. He’d heard many times about women dying in childbirth, and he didn’t know what would happen to him if Elle died-not with his own matarh and vatarh dead, not with Varina and Karl probably dead also for all he knew. Elle was all he had in the world, and so he prayed as hard as he could that she would live. He promised Cenzi that he would devote his life to Him if he would keep Elle alive.

Elle moaned again, and this time gave a long, shrill scream that was quickly muffled, as if someone had placed a hand or a pillow over Elle’s mouth, and he heard the oste-femme in attendance give a call to her assistants. Nico uncurled himself from the corner and went to the closed door, opening it carefully. He could see Elle propped up in a seated position on the bed, two of the attendants holding her. “Where’s my baby?” she was saying, weeping. “Where… No, be quiet, be quiet! I can’t hear! Where is it?” Nico knew she was talking not only to those in the room, but to the voices in her head.

There was a lot of blood on the sheets. He tried not to look at it.

A wet nurse sat on chair nearby, but the laces of her tashta were still tied and her face was drawn. The oste-femme was crouched over a bundle at the foot of the bed. She was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Vajica,” she said to Elle. “The cord was-what is that boy doing here?”

Nico realized the oste-femme was staring at him in the doorway. “I can help,” he said.

“Out!” the oste-femme shouted, pointing at the door. She gestured to one of the attendants. “Get him out!” she ordered, and turned back to the bundle. Nico ran into the room. He could feel the cold of power around him. He had felt it since he’d begun praying, growing more frigid and more powerful with each breath he took. Now it seared his lungs and his throat, and he couldn’t hold it back. He pushed forward even as the attendant grabbed at him, as Elle shouted either at him or the voices in her head or the oste-femme. Between the arms of the oste-femme he could see a baby, though her skin was a strange blue-white color and there was a flesh-colored rope around her neck. He reached toward her… And when he touched her, he felt the cold energy surge out of him as he spoke words he didn’t know at all and his hands moved in an odd pattern. His fingers touched her leg, and he gasped as the power ran out of him, leaving him as exhausted as if he’d been running all day. The baby’s leg jerked, and then the body convulsed and the rope dissolved: the child’s mouth opened and there was a wail and cry. The oste-femme had taken a step back as Nico had pushed past her; now she gasped. “The child,” she said. “She was dead

…”

The baby was crying now, and the wet nurse came forward, untying the blouse of her tashta and taking the baby in her arms. “What is going on?” Elle was saying, but then…

… then the memory shifted. It no longer possessed the soft haze of recollection. Everything was sharp-edged and too brightly colored, the way it was when Cenzi gave him a vision. It was no longer Elle on the childbirth bed but Varina, and she opened her arms. Nico cuddled himself happily in her arms. She stroked his hair. “You saved her life,” Varina said. “It was you.”

“I prayed to Cenzi,” he told her. “It was Him.”

“No,” Varina/Elle answered softly, her hands stroking his back. “It was you, Nico. You alone. You reached into the Second World and took its power, which doesn’t come from Cenzi or any other god but just is. You are able to tap that. Rochelle owes you her life. She will always owe you that.”

“Rochelle? Is that going to be her name?”

“Yes. It was my own matarh’s name,” Varina/Elle said, “and I will teach her all I know, and one day she might give you back what you gave her.”

The woman who was both Elle and not-Elle hugged him hard, and Nico hugged her back, but now there was only empty air there. He opened his eyes.

The sun had risen, and now he heard the wind-horns sounding First Call, as sunlight crawled reluctantly down the black tower of the Bastida a’Drago toward the opening of his cell. He wanted, suddenly, to look outside, to see the rising light. He tried to get to his feet, but they were as stiff and unyielding as stone, and when he tried to move them, the pain made him scream behind the gag of the silencer. He couldn’t stand. Instead, he dragged himself forward on his chained hands, crawling to the opening that led to the small open ledge in the tower. He pulled himself up on the railing there, moaning with the sharp prickling in his legs as life returned to them. He stared out at the morning. A mist had risen from the A’Sele, and the Avi a’Parete outside the gates of the Bastida was beginning to fill with people walking to temple or to early morning errands.

One figure snared his gaze… A woman was standing near the Bastida gates, underneath the leering grin of the dragon’s head. She wasn’t moving, but staring at the Bastida, and at the tower in which he was held. Even at the distance, there was something about her, something familiar. “Rochelle…?” he breathed. He didn’t know if he was dreaming, or if it was even possible; he’d not seen her in years. But those features…

He tried to pull himself upright on the ledge, but his hand slipped on the rail, his legs couldn’t hold him, and he fell. He pulled himself up again, hating that he couldn’t shout her name. But he could wave, he could make her see him…

She wasn’t there. She’d vanished. He scanned the Avi for some sign of her-there, could that be her, hurrying away north over the Pontica?-but he couldn’t be certain and he couldn’t shout after her. The figure vanished into the crowds and distance.

He let himself fall again on the ledge.

Was it her, Cenzi? Did you send her to me?

It wasn’t Cenzi who answered. Instead, he thought he heard the soft laughter of Varina.