His voice could barely be heard above the crowd’s roar. “Absolute? I thought…”
Nico gave him the sign of Cenzi. “It’ll be fine, Ancel. But I’d appreciate if you stay here with me and watch for the gardai. Cenzi. .. Cenzi wishes me to give our people His message in my own voice.”
Ancel’s eyes widened and he bowed low to Nico with the sign. “The scroll… Here it is.” He held out the paper to Nico, but Nico smiled at his friend and shook his head.
“I won’t need it. Cenzi will give me words.”
Another bow. Nico went to the podium as the crowd redoubled their noise. He lifted his hands, his eyes closed as he looked to the sky. He could feel the sun on his face, could feel the crowd’s adulation strike him like a physical blow. “For you, Cenzi,” he whispered. “For you.”
He opened his eyes, and gestured to them to be quiet. Slowly, they obeyed. “Cenzi blesses you all today,” he said, and he heard Cenzi enter his voice, heard it sound loud and booming over the park like an a’teni using the Ilmodo to amplify his Admonition, yet Nico had created no such spell. No, this was Cenzi’s presence, warping the Second World around his words so that everyone could hear him.
“I have prayed, my people,” he said, “and I have listened, and I have heard Cenzi’s Voice.” His last phrase was a roar that lashed the audience and seemed to sway the very trees of the park, and the people roared back at him wordlessly. “The time is coming, He has told me, when we must make a choice, when we must decide if we follow His path or that of weak humans. The time is coming-and it is coming soon, my friends, very soon-when we must show Him that we have heard His words and that we will obey them. The words are there for us. We hear them in the Toustour and the Divolonte. We have heard them read in the Admonitions in the temples. We have heard them in prophets and through the teni, but…” He paused momentarily, closing his eyes and lifting his face again. “The end times approach us. They come slowly, unstoppable. The teni of the Faith no longer hear Cenzi’s words. Oh, they say them, but they don’t hear them, they don’t feel t hem. The words of the Toustour and the Divolonte should strike you like the very fist of Cenzi. They tear at your soul and rebuild it anew, if you let them. I tell you: this is what we need now. We need to open ourselves to Cenzi and let Him make us into his spear!”
The words were fire in his mouth. The heat of them blasted the people before him, and they again shouted their affirmation. “Tell us, Absolute One!” someone shouted, and they all took up the chant. “Tell us! Tell us!”
Nico listened to them for several breaths, his chest heaving from the effort of speaking. He lifted his hands finally and they went silent again. In the hush, in the quiet, he began to speak, and though his voice was but a whisper, they could all hear him. He could hear his voice rebounding from the temple walls on the far side of the park.
“Cenzi has told me that we can no longer tolerate the heretics among us. We can no longer even tolerate those who wear the green robes but who fail to hear Him when He speaks. The Archigos and his a’teni speak with false tongues. We can no longer tolerate those whom this world has blessed with power and money but who do not see that those blessings derive from Cenzi, not themselves. He has told me this: He will give us a sign. He will bring fire and destruction. He will bring death and darkness. He will demonstrate to us our folly so that we may all see it, and when He does…”
Another pause. He enunciated each of the next words clearly. Slowly. Each in its own breath. “We. Must. Respond.”
They shouted, they applauded, they raised their hands. But Nico, looking over them, could see at the rear of the crowd Garde Kralji in their uniforms, squadrons of them pouring into Temple Park. “The sign is coming!” he shouted. “We will know it soon! I promise you this because He has promised it to me. But, look-” he pointed then to the Garde Kralji, “-there are those who want to prevent you from hearing my words. They would stop me from speaking Truth, because Truth is their enemy. Look!”
The crowd turned. They saw the Garde Kralji and they shouted. As the gardai pressed forward, trying to reach the stage, the crowd pushed back. The gardai, armed with batons, responded. Some of the crowd went down under the assault. One of the e’teni in the crowd unleashed a spelclass="underline" a blast of fire that went howling into the ranks of the gardai.
Suddenly, it was chaos-many in the crowd pushing through the new gap in the gardai’s ranks. Batons rose and fell, and there was now open fighting in the park. Utilino whistles shrilled, and the Ilmodo was now being wielded against the crowd. A controlled blast of wind hit near the front of the stage, sending the closest onlookers sprawling onto the dirt and grass of the park, as well as blowing Nico backward into Ancel. “Absolute!” Ancel shouted above the din of the fray. “We must leave! Now!”
Nico stared outward. There was nothing he could do here, and Cenzi was silent in his head. “They don’t listen to me,” he said. “This is unnecessary. The Faithful should not be fighting each other.”
More gardai were coming into the park, some of these in the uniform of the Garde Civile, and armed with swords and spears rather than batons. He saw bloodied heads. Nico started toward the front of the stage, but Ancel took his arm. Liana had clambered on stage now, along with several others of his inner circle, and they were all around him. “You will see!” Nico shouted toward the crowd, but his voice was only his voice now, and if they heard, they paid him little attention. He was exhausted, as tired as if he’d been using the Ilmodo. He sagged in the hands of his people and they hurried him to the rear of the stage and down the steps. “We’re done here,” Ancel told them. “Now we must protect the Absolute One and get him away. Quickly.”
Nico took Liana’s hand as his followers closed ranks around him, and they fled into the depths of Temple Park toward the maze of the Oldtown streets.
Varina ca’Pallo
Pierre’s workshop was in the rear garden of the Numetodo House grounds on South Bank. It stank of iron, oil, wood, and varnish, as well as Pierre’s unfinished sausage, which sat half-eaten on a side table in the cluttered room. Every work surface was filled; no wood showed on any of the tabletops. Instruments and strange devices sat around in various stages of assembly. Varina could only guess at what half of them might be. The room was lit by sun streaming in from several ivy-fringed skylights; the sheets of light illuminated air that was full of wood dust: Pierre was sanding a board set in a vise on one of the tables.
“A’Morce,” he said, suddenly noticing her standing at the door. He dropped the sanding block in a flurry of bright motes. “I wasn’t expecting you.”
As she entered, Pierre plucked up a half-dozen wood chisels from the seat of a chair, and shooed away the cat that had been curled in their midst. He gestured for Varina to sit, as the cat hissed in irritation and went under the nearest table to lick her paws and sulk.
“I understand the Morellis caused a full-scale riot in Temple Park yesterday,” Pierre said. “At least a dozen dead, from what I heard, but that bastard Morel escaped.”
Varina nodded silently. The complex guilt gnawed at her her again: for having let Nico live when she could have killed him; for allowing herself to think she could be his judge and executioner; for having failed Karl; for still having maternal feelings for Nico after all these years; for thinking that there was something about the young man that was redeemable; for the strange sympathy she found she had for him.
For what she was about to do now.