A Magic of Nightfall

Karl ca’Vliomani

Karl clutched a necklace in his hand: a shell of polished gray stone that he had given to Ana, long ago. The necklace had been around her neck when she died; Sergei had given it to him. Flecks of Ana’s blood were caught in the deep ridges. He tightened his fingers hard around the shell, feeling the hard edges press into his palm. The pain didn’t matter; it meant that he could still feel something other than the emptiness that filled him now.

Who did this? Why would they kill Ana?

Karl had lost too many of the people he most cared about over the years. He’d wrapped himself in grief and sorrow and sometimes anger at their passing, he’d awakened at night certain he’d heard their voices or thinking that “Oh, today I should call on him or her…” only to remember that the person in his mind was forever, irrevocably, gone.

This… this was worse than any of those deaths. This was a knife-blow to his heart, and he could feel himself bleeding inside.

Can I survive this? I’ve lost my best friend, the woman I love.. ..

Karl was seated at the front of the temple, with Regent Sergei and Kraljiki Audric to his left and the newly-installed Archigos Kenne and the a’teni of the Faith to his right. Kenne had been Ana’s friend and ally from the beginning, when they had both been part of Archigos Dhosti’s staff. Now, looking two decades older than his actual years, his hair white and hands shaking with an eternal palsy, Kenne appeared severely uncomfortable with the responsibility thrust upon him. The Archigos leaned over to Karl and patted his hand. He said something that Karl didn’t hear against the choir’s singing: “Long Lament,” by the composer ce’Miella. Kenne’s actual words didn’t matter: Karl nodded, because he knew it was expected.

In the pew directly behind them, in the midst of the ca’-and-cu’, was Varina and Mika ci’Gilan; like Varina, Mika was also a longtime friend of Karl and Ana. Mika was the local head of the Numetodo faction in Nessantico, directing the research of the sect here. Varina’s hand touched Karl’s shoulder; without looking back, he covered it with his own before letting his hand, like a dead thing, slide into his lap. Her fingers tightened on his shoulder; her hand remained there.

The embrace was meant to be comfort, he knew, but it was simply an empty weight.

Who did this? Karl had heard a dozen rumors. Predictably, some blamed the Numetodo. Some Firenzcia. Some the Brezno branch of the Faith. The wildest story said that the assassin called the White Stone had been responsible, that there’d been a pale pebble on Ana’s left eye when she was found, the White Stone’s signature.

That last rumor was certainly not true. But the others… Karl didn’t know. But he vowed he would find out.

Karl had envied, sometimes, the comfort of faith that Ana had. He and Ana had even spoken of that, the night that he’d learned Kaitlin was dead: the woman he’d married and who had borne him his two sons on the Isle a’Paeti. Kaitlin had steadfastly refused to come with him to Nessantico. Kaitlin had known of the deep friendship between Karl and Ana; Karl was just as certain that Kaitlin knew that-despite Karl’s reassurances and promises-for Karl, at least, there was more than friendship there.

He had never been able to lie easily to her. He told himself he loved Kaitlin, but he was never really able to lie to himself either.

The night he’d received the horrible letter from Paeti that Kaitlin had fallen ill and died, he’d been devastated. He never quite knew how Ana learned of it, but she came to him that evening. She fed him, she held him, she let him cry and wail and shout and grieve. Most tellingly, she never tried to give him the comfort of faith as she would have with any of her followers. She never mentioned Cenzi, not until he spoke, wiping away the tears with the sleeve of his bashta.. ..

“I envy you,” he said.

They were sitting by the fire she’d started in the hearth. Tea simmered in a pot. The wood was damp; it hissed and sputtered and cracked under the assault of the flames, sending fountains of orange-red ash spiraling up the chimney.

She raised a single eyebrow toward him.

“You believe that Cenzi takes the souls of those who die,” he told her. “You believe that they continue to exist within Him, and that it’s possible you may one day meet them again. I…” Tears threatened him again and he forced them down. “I don’t have that hope.”

“Having faith doesn’t take away the pain,” she told him. “Or very little of it. Nothing can ease the grief and loss we all feel: not faith, not the Ilmodo. Time, perhaps, might manage it, and that only blunts the sorrow.” Folding the sleeve of her robe around her hand, she took the teapot from the crane and poured the brew into their cups. She handed him the jar of honey. “I still remember my matarh. Sometimes it all comes back to me, everything I felt when she died, as if it had just happened yesterday.” Her fingers brushed his cheek; he could feel their softness drag against stubble. “That will happen for you, too, I’m afraid.”

“Then what good is your faith, Ana?”

She smiled, as if she’d been expecting his question. “Faith isn’t a commodity,” she told him. “You don’t buy it because it will do this or that for you. You have belief or you don’t, and belief gives you what it gives you. You don’t have faith, my love-Cenzi knows I’d give it to you if I could. I’ve certainly talked about it enough with you over the years. You Numetodo… you try to wrap the world in reason and logic, and so faith just crumples into dust whenever you touch it because you try to impose rationality on it. You’ll do that with Kaitlin, too-you’ll try to find reasons and logic in her death.” She touched him again. “There’s no reason that she died, Karl. There’s no logic to it. It just happened, and it had nothing to do with you or with your feelings for her or what happened between the two of you.”

“Not even Cenzi’s will?”

She lifted her chin. She smiled at him sadly, the firelight warm and yellow on her face. “Not even that. It’s a rare person who Cenzi cares about enough to change the Fate-Moitidi’s dice roll for them. It was your Kaitlin’s time. That’s all. It’s not your fault, Karl. It’s not.”

That had been nine years ago. He’d traveled back to Paeti to see Kaitlin’s grave and to be with his sons. He’d even brought Nilles and Colin back to Nessantico with him when he’d returned the next year. Nilles had stayed two years with him, Colin four, until they’d reached their majority at sixteen. Both had eventually left the city to return to the Isle. Nilles had already given him a great-daughter-three years old now-that he’d yet to see.

He’d stayed here because his work was in the Holdings, he told anyone who asked. But truthfully, it was because this was where Ana was. There were those who knew that, but they weren’t many and most pretended not to see.

Varina’s hand tightened again on his shoulder and dropped away.

Karl stared at Ana’s wrapped-and-shrouded body on the stone altar and the phalanx of six fire-teni gathered in a circle around it. The corpse was layered in green silk wound with golden metallic thread. The threads glinted in the multicolored light from the stained glass in the temple’s windows; censers fumed around the altar, wreathing sunbeams in fragrant smoke. He could not believe it was Ana bundled and displayed there. He would not believe it. It was someone else. The memory he had of the light, of the concussive roar, of her body torn apart, the blood, the dark dust… It was false. It had to be false. Even the thought was too painful to endure.

Kaitlin’s death, that of his parents, all the others that had passed over the decades: none of them hurt like this. None.

Someone had killed the one person he loved most in the world, had struck down a woman who had struggled more than anyone since Kraljica Marguerite to keep peace within the Holdings, who believed in reconciliation before confrontation, who might have potentially reunited the broken halves of both the Holdings and the Concenzia Faith. There would be no comfort for Karl until he knew who had done this, and until that person was dead. If there was an afterlife as Ana had believed, then Karl would let the murderer’s soul be condemned to care for Ana for eternity. If there were gods, if Cenzi truly existed, if there were justice after death, then that’s what must happen.

He would have faith in that: a grim, dark, and uncompromising faith.

Archigos Kenne patted his hand and whispered more words he couldn’t hear. The Regent Sergei’s shoulder pressed against his to the left. Kraljiki Audric wheezed on the other side of the Regent, his labored breath louder than the chanting of the teni. He heard Varina weeping softly in the pew behind him.

The fire-teni stirred around the green-wrapped body. Their hands moved in the dance of the Ilmodo, their voices lifted in a unison chant that fought against the choir’s ethereal voices. They spread their hands wide as if in benediction, and the fierce blaze of Ilmodo-fire erupted around Ana’s body. The heat of the magical flames washed over them, savage and relentless. There were no sparks, no pyre feeding them: while the Kralji and the ca’-and-cu’ burned in flames fed by wood and oil, the teni burned their own with the Ilmodo-quickly and furiously. The Ilmodo-fire consumed the body in the space of a few breaths, the metallic-green fabric turning black instantly, the heat shimmer so intense that Ana’s body seemed to shake within it. As Karl watched, as his body instinctively leaned back against the fierce assault of the heat, Ana was taken.

The flames died abruptly as the choir ended their song. Cold air rushed back around them, a wind that tousled hair and fluttered cloth. On the altar now, there was nothing but gray ash and a few fragments of bone.

The mortal cage of Ana was gone.

“She is back in Cenzi’s hands now,” Archigos Kenne said to Karl. “He will give her solace.”

And I will give her better than solace. He nodded silently to the Archigos. I will give her revenge.