by S L Farrell
“I know,” she answered sadly. “And I’m not saying he should have no punishment for that. Nor do I think him the monster you’d make him out to be, even after what he’s said, even after what he did to-” She stopped there. He heard the catch in her voice and saw the moisture gather in her eyes, and he knew what she wouldn’t say. Varina sniffed and gathered herself. “But compassion… You’re wrong about that, Sergei. You’re wrong about what I’m feeling. A dog gone mad can’t be blamed for its madness, but it still must be dealt with for the good of all. I understand that, Sergei. But if the dog is mine, then it’s my duty to deal with him. Mine.”
Her voice was fervent, and Sergei wondered at the urgency he heard there.
“Just promise me that if you hear from Nico, for any reason, that you’ll tell Commandant cu’Ingres immediately,” he said. “He’s promised to watch over you while I’m in Brezno, but I worry about the Morellis, especially after Karl’s funeral. Cenzi knows what they’re capable of doing. Dealing with him yourself would be risky. From what Archigos ca’Paim has told me, his skills with the Ilmodo are positively frightening, if he would choose to use them. Promise me you’ll be cautious. Promise me that you won’t make any effort to contact him. This particular mad dog threatens everyone in the city; let the city deal with him.”
Another smile, this one far fainter than the last. “You sound like Karl now. I’ve always believed that caution was overrated,” she said, and the smile broadened suddenly. “And you, Sergei-you’ll be careful yourself?”
“Hirzg Jan, though it probably shows his lack of judgment, seems to like me despite the frigid relationship between him and his matarh,” Sergei told her. “And in any case, I’m only the messenger for Kraljica Allesandra.” And sometimes the messenger is blamed when the message isn’t the one they want to hear… Sergei smiled even as the doubt crept into his mind. Jan wouldn’t like Allesandra’s message, that was certain. He suspected that Allesandra was going to dislike Jan’s reply just as much.
You’re getting too old for this… That thought kept rising to the surface, more and more. He was tired, and the thought of several days in a carriage on the road and the pounding his body would take from that, and the discomfort of the inns and strange beds along the way…
Too old…
“Take care of yourself, Varina,” he said. “Be careful, and please remember what I said about Nico.” Grimacing, Sergei pushed his chair back and rose. He took up his cane, leaning against the table. Varina rose with him, going to him and hugging him. One-handed, he returned the gesture.
“And you take care of yourself,” she told him. “And watch yourself with the court ladies, Ambassador. I hear that in Brezno, they aren’t as… discreet as we are here.”
It won’t be ladies of the court with whom I consort… “I’m afraid that when they look on me, the court ladies wish to do nothing more than flee the room,” he told her, touching his nose. He pressed her tightly once more, then released her. “I’ll call on you again as soon as I return. I promise.”
Brie ca’Ostheim
Kriege shouldn’t have been in their dressing room at all, but he had a habit of slipping away from the nursemaids who watched him. Brie would have to talk to them later.
Brie was awakened when she heard the servants’ door to the dressing room creak open. She heard Kriege’s feet padding over the carpet. She slid from her bed and into the dressing room both she and Jan shared. Kriege was standing in front of Jan’s dresser, his hands busy with something that his body masked. Brie smiled indulgently, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. “Kriege,” she said, “what are you doing?”
Krige spun around, startled, and she saw the dagger in his hand, the blade out of the scabbard, the edges of the dark Firenzcian steel glinting. His mouth opened in an “O” of surprise, and his face colored as he realized that he was still holding the weapon.
“Kriege,” she said. “Put that down. Carefully now. Your vatarh would be terribly angry if he saw you with that.”
The nine year old’s eyes widened. She saw his lower lip start to tremble. “I’m not angry with you, Kriege. Just put it down.”
He did so, a little too hastily, so that the blade clattered against the wood and rattled the boxes there. She slid forward quickly and grabbed the dagger, sliding it back into its well-used scabbard. Kriege watched her movements: he watched everything that had to do with things martial-in that, he was unlike his vatarh and more like her own vatarh, who had an obsession for edged weapons and possessed a collection of swords and knives that was the envy of even the museums. Kriege’s true name was Jan-for his vatarh as well as his great-great-vatarh; he’d quickly acquired the nickname “Kriege”-warrior-for his stubborn and colicky personality as an infant. The name had stuck; he was “Kriege” to everyone in the palais. Now it seemed he might be intending to live up to the nickname.
Brie herself had inherited her vatarh’s fascination for weaponry; in fact, she’d first come to her husband’s attention when she’d demonstrated her skill with swordsmanship at a palais affair she’d attended with her vatarh, dueling and defeating a chevaritt who had made a disparaging remark when she’d commented on his weapon. She generally carried a knife somewhere on her person, still.
But this wasn’t her weapon; it was Jan’s. She put the dagger back in the rosewood box where Jan kept it when it wasn’t on his belt, then crouched down in front of Kriege. The boy’s brown, curly locks tumbled over his forehead as he lowered his head, and she lifted his chin with a hand, smiling at him. “You know you aren’t supposed to be in here, don’t you?”
He nodded, once, silently. “And you know you shouldn’t be going through your vatarh’s things, don’t you?”
Another nod. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“What are you sorry for?” The voice came from behind them; Brie looked over her shoulder to see Jan standing in the door of his own bedroom, still in his nightshirt, his hair bed-tousled. He yawned sleepily, rubbing his bearded face.
Brie hesitated, but Kriege was already slipping past her, grabbing his vatarh’s legs. “Vatarh, it was your dagger. I wanted to see it.. .”
Jan glanced at Brie, still crouching in front of the dresser. She shrugged at him, shaking her head. “My dagger, eh? Well, come here.. .” He took Kriege by the hand and walked to the dresser. He opened the rosewood box and took out the weapon and its soiled, stained sheath. The pommel end of the hilt was decorated with semiprecious stones-Brie suspected that was what had attracted Kriege in the first place-the hilt itself carved from hard blackwood. The blade was double-edged, tapering to a precise and deadly point. An exquisite weapon. With an exquisite history.
Jan held the knife, sheathed, in his hand. “This is what you were after?”
Kriege nodded his head energetically.
“What do you know about this knife?”
“I know you always wear it, Vatarh. I see it on your belt nearly every day. And I know it’s old.”
Jan smiled at Brie over Kriege’s head. “It’s very old,” Brie told him. “It was made for your great-great-great-vatarh Karin when he became Hirzg, almost seventy years ago, and he gave it to your great-great-vatarh Jan when he was young man, and Jan gave it to.. .” She stopped, glancing at Jan, who shrugged. “… your great-matarh Allesandra.” She didn’t mention that Allesandra had used the dagger to kill the Westlander magician Mahri. Reputedly, both Karin and the first Jan had also killed someone with the same dagger. Her Jan, too, had found a reason to feed the steel with an enemy’s blood-when his sword had broken in the midst of a battle against the army of Tennshah. “And Allesandra gave it to your vatarh.”
Kreige’s eyes had gone wider and wider as Brie had given the history of the weapon. “Will you give it to me one day, Vatarh?” he asked Jan, and then his face clouded and he scowled. “Or will stupid Elissa get it ’cause she’s the oldest?”
Brie stifled a laugh as Jan opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again. “No one is going to get it unt
il they’re much older,” he said finally. “It’s not a toy or a plaything.”
“I want a knife of my own,” Kriege persisted. “I’m old enough. I won’t cut myself. I’d be very careful.”
“I’m sure you would,” Jan told him. He took a breath, glancing again at Brie, who shook her head slightly. No, she mouthed.
“I’ll tell you what,” Jan said to Kriege. “I’ll tell Rance to have a talk with the weapons master for the Garde, and see if he can give you lessons on the proper handling of a knife. If he tells me you understand and have learned all of his lessons, then perhaps for your next birthday we might talk about something you could wear on state occasions.”
“Oh, thank you, Vatarh!’ Kirege burst out, hugging Jan again. He broke away, then. “I’m going to go tell Elissa and Caelor. They’re going to be so jealous!” He ran from the room, calling for his siblings.
“Don’t,” Jan said, raising a hand as Brie started to speak. “I know what you’re going to say. I know. Elissa will be in here in a few minutes, demanding to know why she can’t have a knife, too, and Caelor will be right after her.”
“And what are you going to tell them?”
“That Caelor needs to wait until he’s as old as Kriege.”
“And Elissa?”
“I think lessons in handling a weapon would be good for her. It’s a skill she may need one day.” He put the knife back in its box, closing the lid. “You don’t agree?”
It’s one of many skills she’ll need, she might have retorted, remembering Mavel cu’Kella, who was by now on her way to relatives in Miscoli. Brie was certain that Jan knew what had happened, and who had sent her away, though neither of them had spoken about it. Jan had come to her room last night, which told her that no one had shared his bed last night. “Sometimes,” she said to him, “you can’t have everything you want. Even the Hirzg.” His gaze rested on her more sharply with that, and she added: “Or Hirzgin. If that should be her fate.”
“Indeed,” he said. “Still, I think it might be good for her-and for her to take those lessons with Kreige. They might start getting along better.”
He lifted his head. They both heard the pounding of feet in the hall, the nursemaid calling sleepily and futilely after them (yes, she would need to speak to the woman, and perhaps replace her), and Elissa’s voice: “Vatarh! Where are you, Vatarh?”
Jan sighed, and Brie put her hand on his. “She’s your daughter,” she said. “Like you, when she wants something, she finds a way to get it. You can’t blame her for that.”
He might have answered, but Elissa came bursting into the room through the servants’ door in the next breath, with her younger brother Caelor trailing behind. “Vatarh, it’s not fair!” she exclaimed, stamping a foot.
“I’ll leave you to answer that one,” Brie told Jan, chuckling. “I’m going to call the domestiques de chambre to help me dress. I need to have a chat with the nursemaid…”
Varina ca’Pallo
“ Here it is,” Pierre Gabrelli said handing the device to Varina. “I hope this works for you,” he added with a wry grin.
She took the device in her hands, marveling. “Pierre, this is gorgeous…” His grin widened.
She’d put together most of the experimental versions of the piece herself, scrounging bits and pieces from here and there in the city and cobbling them together. Her own devices had been functional but ugly and clumsy in the hand. Pierre was a metalworker and artisan as well as a Numetodo. What he had given her wasn’t a crude facsimile of the idea in her head, but a piece of artwork.
She turned the “sparkwheel,” as she’d decided to call it, in her hands to examine it from all sides, marveling. The device was deliciously heavy and solid, yet well balanced enough for her to wield in one hand. A straight, octagonal metal tube-thicker this time than the last-extended a hand’s length out from a curved wooden handle. Varina’s barrels had been plain and unadorned; this one was incised with curling lines of vines and leaves, the metal burnished while the lines were stained a satin black. Where the barrel met the wood, the leaves flared out, fitting neatly into niches in the wood carved to receive the leaf pattern. And the wood: Pierre had taken several different woods, laminating them together, the varied grains creating a lovely, warm pattern under hard, gleaming varnish. The pan that held the powder was no longer a crude device screwed lopsidedly onto the top: here it nestled into its own niche in the handle, and Pierre had added a metal door to keep out the weather and enclose the pan. The finely-ridged steel wheel protruding slightly into the pan was chromed and polished; the small clamp above the pan reflected the leaf-and-vine pattern on the barrel, with a fine piece of iron pyrite grasped in its jaws. A trigger guard-also in the shape of a leaf and chromed-enclosed the firing mechanism.
Staring at the piece, she for a moment forgot the grief that had lain over her like a dark shadow for days. For a moment, there was light in her world.
“I’m afraid to try this,” she told Pierre. “I’d hate to ruin it.”
“It’s all to your specifications, which were, I must say, ingenious; I just added decoration to make it look pretty. Go on-pull the clamp back. Put your thumb on that leaf and press it back…”
Varina did: she heard mechanisms click smoothly as the pyrite lifted away from the pan, heard the spring attached to the wheel purr as it was extended, felt the trigger slide forward and lock. She curled her finger around the trigger and pressed it: the trigger snicked back cleanly; the wheel spun madly; the pyrite clamp slammed down against the rim of the wheel, and she saw sparks fly into the pan.
She could imagine the rest: the sparks setting off the black sand in the pan; the explosion propelling a lead ball from the round hole bored into the barrel…
At least, that was the theory. Her last, far cruder, version had nearly worked, as she’d told Karl. Nearly-she still bore the scars from that experiment. The barrel of the device had been too thin or the metal flawed or her hole bored at a slight angle. The explosion of the black sand had caused the barrel to rupture, spraying the room with metal fragments, one of which had cut a deep gash in Varina’s arm-two hands higher and it would have hit her face, a hand to the side and it might have penetrated her chest. She could’ve been blinded or killed-that’s what she hadn’t told Karl.
With the thought of his name, the pall threatened to return, and she forced herself to smile at Pierre and pretend. “Pierre, I should have had you craft this long ago. This is far more elegant than the contraptions I was making myself. All this lovely work. It’s just.. . What if it breaks like the last one?”
“Then you can tell me what I need to do to make the next one work better, eh?” He grinned again. “Go on. Try it. I’m dying to see.” His eyes widened suddenly as he realized what he’d said. “A’Morce, I.. .”
Varina smiled at him, touching his hand. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she told him. Until now, she’d conducted all her experiments alone. The other Numetodo knew that she was experimenting with some kind of device to deliver black sand, but no one-not even Karl-had known the specifics. “Pierre… it’s dangerous. If…” Excuses. That’s all they were. She didn’t want him to be there; she could see from the way the lines of his face fell that he understood that.
He frowned. Shrugged. “Whatever you wish, A’Morce,” he said. He moved to the door of the room; almost, almost she called out to him, feeling guilty, but the lethargy that had wrapped her for the last several days made her sluggish and slow, and she did not.
The door closed behind him.
She was in a basement room of the Numetodo House on the South Bank, one of the several laboratories there. Her laboratory. It was here that Varina, years ago, had ferreted out the formula for making the Tehuantin black sand. It was here that she had worked on developing the Westlander magic as well: the physically-demanding ability to enchant an object to hold a spell. She had spent many long hours here. Too many, she thought sometimes. It sometimes seemed that her entire life
had been spent here. Alone, most of that time. Every mark, every scratch on the furniture, every stroke of paint on the walls reminded her of the past.
Varina had set the room carefully: at the longest end stood a fabric-filled dummy, wearing a set of old, battered plate mail Commandant cu’Ingres had given her. At the other end, she’d placed a table with a heavy wooden vise. One of the things she’d learned in the course of this experiment was that the device would recoil when the powder was set alight. During one of the experiments, she’d injured her wrist when a version of the sparkwheel had slammed hard against her hand when fired. Since then, she’d used the vise to hold the various incarnations of sparkwheels, using a string tied around the trigger mechanism to set them off-it was that arrangement that had probably saved her from further injury when the barrel had shattered on the last one.
She took Pierre’s sparkwheel over to the table. Gently, carefully, she filled the pan with black sand. She’d prepared paper “cartridges” with more black sand and a lead ball; she tamped that into the barrel. She folded a cloth around the barrel-“It’s so beautiful I don’t want to scratch it in the vise,” she would have told Pierre, had he been there-and clamped it down, making certain it was aimed directly at the dummy’s chest. She cocked back the pyrite clamp and tied a string to the trigger. She moved behind the table, holding the string.
The barrel of the sparkwheel pointed ominously at the mail-clad dummy. She tugged the string.
The wheel spun, sparks flew. There was a loud bang and white smoke poured from the end of the barrel and the pan. From the other end of the room, she heard a distinct, metallic ping.
Varina waved at the acrid smoke. She peered at the dummy: in the middle of the chest plate, a dark hole had appeared. Varina shuffled over to it as quickly as she could, leaning over to examine it. There was a hole as thick around as her index finger, the edges torn and pressed inward. She put her finger into the hole-she could not feel the bottom of it, and the hole expanded as it burrowed into the dummy’s stuffing. Somewhere deep in there, pieces of the lead ball were buried. Varina realized that she was holding her breath.