A Magic of Dawn

by S L Farrell

  “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.

  A sword cut would have been turned by this armor. An arrow from a bow would have rebounded. A bolt from a crossbow might have penetrated it, but not so deeply.

  It worked. Had that been a garda standing there, he would be on the ground, bleeding terribly and perhaps dead . . .

  She could imagine it, and it wasn’t a pleasant vision; she’d seen too many people die in battle. She straightened. She went back to the table, looking closely at the sparkwheel in its vise. It appeared whole and unaffected, the barrel still straight and untouched except for a smear of black soot around the end. There were soot marks around the pan as well, but otherwise the weapon appeared to be intact. Varina unclamped the vise, picking up the device again. She held it out at arm’s length, sighting down the barrel at the dummy.

  Well, old woman, there’s the obvious next step, if you want to take it . . . It sounded like Karl’s voice, chuckling as he admonished her. The rememberance brought tears to her eyes, and she had to stop for a moment and fight back the grief. She laid the sparkwheel on the table, and after a few moments, began to refill the pan with more black sand and tamp another paper cartridge into the barrel. She picked up the weapon, pulling back the pyrite clamp to cock it. Her hands were trembling slightly as she aimed the weapon. She brought her other hand up to steady it as she sighted down the barrel. She wondered, for a breath, if she was being reckless and foolhardy, if she should wait and repeat the experiment as before, but even as the thought came to her, she pulled the trigger, closing both eyes as she did so.

  The report of the sparkwheel was terrible, and the weapon bucked in her hand, though not so terribly as she remembered. She lowered the weapon, peering at the dummy. Yes, there was a second hole in the armor, this one on the other side of the chest plate and higher.

  Someone knocked on the door of the laboratory. “A’Morce, are you all right?” a voice called faintly.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

  She sat in the single chair in the room, cradling the sparkwheel in her lap. It was warm, and a thin trail of smoke still wafted from the barrel. She stared at it: her creation.

  Anyone could wield this. It takes little skill and a few moments to learn. With this, anyone could kill another person from a distance, even a garda in armor. She had always been able to imagine possibilities; Karl had always said that was what had made her a good researcher for the Numetodo. “You have imagination,” he’d told her. “You can see possibilities where no one else does. That’s the best magic of all to have.”

  The line of research that had produced the sparkwheel had been due to that kind of serendipity—she’d been experimenting with a new mixture of black sand, a few years ago. She placed a small amount of the black sand in the bottom of a narrow metal container; she’d tamped it down with a stone pestle; she hadn’t noticed that the pestle was cracked, and that she’d left behind a chunk of the pestle in the container. She used a fire spell to set off the black sand . . . and the fragment of pestle had been propelled out of the end of the container to slam against the ceiling of the laboratory. The gouge in the wooden beam was still there, above the table. She’d realized then that might be another use for the black sand than simple unfocused destruction.

  An army of soldiers with sparkwheels . . . She could imagine that, and the vision made her hands tremble.

  That could change warfare. That would change warfare. Completely. As the black sand itself was beginning to render the use of war-téni far less important, so skill with a heavy blade would no longer matter, not when all one needed was the strength to pull a trigger and eyes to sight down a barrel.

  Anyone could be a warrior. Anyone could dispense justice.

  Anyone could exact revenge. Or slay a mad dog.

  Anyone could murder needlessly. For the worst or most trivial of reasons.

  Anyone. Even herself.

  What have I done this time, Karl?

  She blinked. Her hand stroked the silken varnish of the handle. An irony, that: a beautifully-crafted instrument dedicated entirely to destruction.

  She rose from the chair finally and went to the table. She stoppered the vial of black sand, gathered up the paper cartridges she’d prepared. She placed the vial, the cartridges, and the sparkwheel in a leather pouch and slung it over her shoulder. She blew out the lanterns that illuminated the room, opened the door, and locked it again behind her.

  The pouch heavy around her shoulder, her hands still remembering the feel of the sparkwheel as it had fired, she ascended the stairs.

  Jan ca’Ostheim

  “. . . OUR TROOPS WERE EASILY a day’s march past Il Trebbio’s borders before we had any sign that we’d been noticed. We did have a small skirmish with a company of Holdings chevarittai. Two of them were killed by our war-téni, and they turned and fled after that; none of our own people were seriously harmed. Given our last discussions, after a day there I brought the battalion back over the border. From everything we’ve learned in the last several months, Hïrzg Jan, it would appear that the Holdings borders are rather porous, and Il Trebbio is certainly one of the weaker points. Kraljica Allesandra doesn’t have enough—”

  Armen ca’Damont, Starkkapitän of the Firenzcian Garde Civile, halted his report to Jan as the door to the room burst open, the doors slamming hard against their stops. A trio of children entered in the wake of the disturbance, trailed distantly by one of the staff servants with another, smaller, child in her arms. “Vatarh!” Kriege, Jan’s eldest son, was the first into the room. He stamped his foot, glaring back at his older sister. Caelor, a year younger than Kriege, stood beside his brother, nodding vigorously and echoing the glare. “We were playing Chevarittai, and Elissa cheated! It’s not fair!”

  The nursemaid rushed in, looking harried, and bowed awkwardly to Jan and ca’Damont with Eria, Jan’s youngest, now in her arms. “I’m so sorry, Hïrzg,” she said, not looking up. “The children were playing fine and I was dressing little Eria, and there was an argument and they were running to find you . . .”

  “It’s fine,” Jan said, grinning at ca’Damont. “Don’t worry yourself. Now then, Kriege, what’s all this about cheating?”

  “Elissa cheated,” Kriege repeated, scowling so fiercely that it was nearly comical. “She did.”

  “Elissa?” Jan said sternly, his gaze moving to his daughter.

  Another child might have looked at the floor. Jan knew that Caelor would have, with even the hint of a rebuke, and even Kriege looked away now. But Elissa gazed placidly back, glancing once at ca’Damont’s thin face marred and disfigured with the ridged memories of old battles, then fixing on Jan. She brushed back brown-gold strands of hair that had escaped her braids to flutter around her eyes. “I didn’t cheat, Vatarh,” she said. “Not really.”

  “Yes she did,” Kriege interrupted, stamping his foot again. “She lied.”

  Elissa didn’t bother to look at Kriege. Her regard stayed with Jan. “I did lie, Vatarh,” she admitted. “I told Kriege that I’d help him if he attacked Caelor’s keep with his soldiers.”

  “She said she’d use her war-téni on her next turn and help me,” Kriege interrupted again. “And she didn’t. When it was her turn, she attacked me instead and I lost all my keeps and most of my chevarittai. She cheated.”

  Jan glanced again at ca’Damont, who was stifling his own grin. “Is that true, Elissa?”

  She nodded. “It is,” she said gravely. “You see, Caelor had the most keeps and soldiers left on the board, and Kriege and I had about the same. I knew I couldn’t beat Caelor by myself, so I told Kriege that I’d help him because I knew Caelor would take lots of his soldiers and Caelor would lose enough of his so that he couldn’t attack me, and then, when it was my turn, I could take most of Kriege’s keeps and capture enough
soldiers that I’d probably win the game.” She glanced at her brothers. “And I would have, too, if Kriege hadn’t gotten mad and knocked the pieces all over the floor.”

  Ca’Damont’s snicker was audible, and he turned his blade-scarred face away for a moment. Jan had to fight to hold back his own amusement, though it was tempered by just how much Elissa was like her great-matarh Allesandra. Jan could well imagine her doing the same as a child; it was what he’d watched her do as an adult.

  “So . . .” Jan said to her, “you offered your brother an alliance that you didn’t intend to keep so you could win? Is that right?”

  A nod. Jan looked at the two boys. “I think your sister has just taught you an excellent lesson,” he told them. “In war, sometimes a person’s word isn’t enough. Sometimes your enemy will lie to you in order to gain an advantage. And there’s more to war than simply moving your soldiers about. You should remember this. Both of you.”

  “But she cheated!” Kriege insisted, stamping his foot again.

  Jan stroked his beard, trying not to laugh. “What do you think, Starkkapitän?” Jan asked ca’Damont. “Should I punish Elissa for her cheating?”

  “No, my Hïrzg,” ca’Damont answered, and Jan saw Elissa’s face relax slightly—so she had been worried about what he might do. “But I would say that there also is a lesson for her from this—that when one gives her word, others will be upset if that word’s not kept, and sometimes their reaction may prevent one from gaining the advantage they’d hoped to gain. Now no one will ever know which one of you might have won the game.”

  Jan clapped ca’Damont on the shoulder. “There, you see,” he told the children. “You have it from the Starkkapitän himself. He knows war better than any of us. I hope you’ve learned well, so when one of you is Hïrzg . . .”

  “Let’s pray to Cénzi that isn’t for many decades yet, my husband.” The voice lifted up Jan’s head, and he saw Brie standing in the doorway and smiling in at the scene. He went to her, kissing her and embracing her briefly. She smelled of jasmine and sweetwater, and her hair—once the same color as Elissa’s, but darkening now—was soft even in the tight Tennshah braids that were currently so popular. If her figure had become heavier after bearing their children, well, that was like the scars on ca’Damont’s face: a sign of the sacrifices she had made.