“Another word,” she heard him say in the teni’s ear, “and you’ll have no throat with which to talk.”
The teni’s hands dropped and he stopped his chant. The gardai, regaining their feet, were now around him as well, several of them stepping between Allesandra and the teni. She heard shouts and cries. Hands hurried her to her carriage. Past uniformed shoulders, she saw the teni being dragged away, still screaming. “… betraying the Faith… no better than a Numetodo herself…”
She stepped up onto the carriage, and saw ca’Vikej, the dagger taken from him, also being hurried away. “No!” she shouted. “Bring Vajiki ca’Vikej here.”
They brought him to her, a garda holding each arm. “You may release him,” she told them; they reluctantly let go of ca’Vikej. “Give me his dagger,” she said, and one of them handed it to her. “Vajiki, in my carriage, please.”
As the door of the carriage closed and the driver urged the horses forward, Allesandra glanced at ca’Vikej. He was disheveled, his clothing torn, and there was a long scratch on his shaved head with beads of darkening blood along it. She lifted his dagger from her lap-a long, curved weapon, crafted from dark, satiny Firenzcian steel with a carved ivory handle. She turned it in her hand, admiring it. “Very few people are permitted to bear a weapon in the presence of the Kraljica,” she said to him, keeping her face stern and unsmiling. “Especially one made in the Coalition.”
He inclined his head to her. “Then I beg your forgiveness, Kraljica. I will remember that. Please, keep it as my gift to you; the blade was forged by my great-vatarh-my vatarh Stor gave it to me before…” She saw a brief flash of teeth in the dimness of the carriage. The springs of the seats groaned once as they jounced over the curb of the temple plaza onto the street.
She allowed herself to smile, then. “I thank you for your gift,” she said. “But in this case, I think it’s better to return it. Let that be my gift to you.” She handed the dagger to him.
He hefted it in his hand, touched the hilt to his lips. “Thank you, Kraljica,” he said. “The blade is now more valuable to me than ever.” She watched him sheathe it again in the well-worn leather hidden under the blouse of his bashta.
“Are you hungry, Vajiki?” she asked him. “We could take supper at the palais, and then…” She smiled again. “We could talk, you and I.”
He inclined his head in the deep Magyarian fashion. “I would like that very much,” he said. His voice was like the purr of a great kitten, and Allesandra found herself stirring at the sound of it.
“Excellent,” she said.
Rochelle Botelli
She hadn’t expected to find herself in Brezno. Her matarh had told her to avoid that city. “Your vatarh is there,” she’d said. “But he won’t know you, he won’t acknowledge you, and he has other children now from another woman. No, be quiet, I tell you! She doesn’t need to know that.” Those last two sentences hadn’t been directed to Rochelle but to the voices who plagued her matarh, the voices that would eventually send her screaming and mad to her death. She’d flailed at the air in front of her as if the voices were a cloud of threatening wasps, her eyes-as strangely light as Rochelle’s own-wide and angry.
“I won’t, Matarh,” Rochelle had told her. She’d learned early on that it was always best to tell Matarh whatever it was she wanted to hear, even if Rochelle never intended to obey. She’d learned that from Nico, her half brother who was eleven years older than her. He’d been touched with Cenzi’s Gift and Matarh had arranged for him to be educated in the Faith. Rochelle was never certain how Matarh had managed that, since rarely did the teni take in someone who was not ca’-and-cu’ to be an acolyte, and then only if many gold solas were involved. But she had, and when Rochelle was five, Nico had left the household forever, had left her alone with a woman who was growing increasingly more unstable, and who would school her daughter in the one best skill she had.
How to kill.
Rochelle had been ten when Matarh placed a long, sharp knife in her hand. “I’m going to show you how to use this,” she’d said. And it had begun. At twelve, she’d put the skills to their intended use for the first time-a man in the neighborhood who had bothered some of the young girls. The matarh of one of his victims hired the famous assassin White Stone to kill him for what he’d done to her daughter.
“Cover his eyes with the stones,” Matarh had whispered alongside Rochelle after she’d stabbed the man, after she’d driven the dagger’s point through his ribs and into his heart. The voices never bothered Matarh when she was doing her job; she sounded sane and rational and focused. It was only afterward… “That will absorb the image of you that is captured in his pupils, so no one else can look into his dead eyes and see who killed him. Good. Now, take the one from his right eye and keep it-that one you should use every time you kill, to hold the souls you’ve taken and their sight of you killing them. The one on his left eye, the one the client gave us, you leave that one so everyone will know that the White Stone has fulfilled her contract.. .”
Now, in Brezno where she had promised never to go, Rochelle slipped a hand into the pocket of her out-of-fashion tashta. There were two small flat stones there, each the size of a silver siqil. One of them was the same stone she’d used back then, her matarh’s stone, the stone she had used several times since. The other… It would be the sign that she’d completed the contract. It had been given to her by Henri ce’Mott, a disgruntled customer of Sinclair ci’Braun, a goltschlager- a maker of gold leaf. “The man sent me defective material,” ce’Mott had declared, whispering harshly into the darkness that hid her from him. “His foil tore and shredded when I tried to use it. The bastard used impure gold to make the sheets, and the thickness was uneven. It took twice as many sheets as it should have and even then the gilding was visibly flawed. I was gilding a frame for the chief decorator for Brezno Palais, for a portrait of the young A’Hirzg. I’d been told that I might receive a contract for all t he palais gilding, and then this happened… Ci’Braun cost me a contract with the Hirzg himself. Even more insulting, the man had the gall to refuse to reimburse me for what I’d paid him, claiming that it was my fault, not his. Now he’s telling everyone that I’m a poor gilder who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and many of my customers have gone elsewhere…”
Rochelle had listened to the long diatribe without emotion. She didn’t care who was right or who was wrong in this. If anything, she suspected that the goltschlager was probably right; ce’Mott certainly didn’t impress her. All that mattered to her was who paid. Frankly, she suspected that ce’Mott was so obviously and publicly an enemy of ci’Braun that the Garde Hirzg would end up arresting him after she killed the man. In the Brezno Bastida, he’d undoubtedly confess to having hired the White Stone.
That didn’t matter either. Ce’Mott had never seen her, never glimpsed either her face or her form, and she had disguised her voice. He could tell them nothing. Nothing.
She’d been watching ci’Braun for the last three days, searching-as her matarh had taught her-for patterns that she could use, for vulnerabilities she could exploit. The vulnerabilities were plentifuclass="underline" he often sent his apprentices home and worked alone in his shop in the evening with the shutters closed. The back door to his shop opened onto an often-deserted alleyway, and the lock was ancient and easily picked. She waited. She watched, following him through his day. She ate supper at a tavern where she could watch the door of his shop. When he closed the shutters and locked the door, when the sun had vanished behind the houses and the light-teni were beginning to stroll the main avenues lighting the lamps of the city, she paid her bill and slipped into the alleyway. She made certain that there was no one within sight, no one watching from the windows of the buildings looming over her. She picked the lock in a few breaths, opened the door, and slid inside, locking the door again behind her.