Whore! the voices called out at her gleefully, mocking. Why not?-you let them pay you for other services. She glared at him, and showed him the hilt of the knife at her waist. “I’m not a whore,” she told him, told them. Her hand grasped the knife, and raindrops scattered from her cloak with the motion. “Back away.”
The man laughed, gap-toothed, and spread his hands. “As you wish, Vajica. No harm, eh?” Then his gaze slid away from her and he walked on, splashing in the gathering puddles. She watched him go.
She could rid herself of him, but not of the others. They were with her always.
She’d reached the apothecary and glanced inside the open shutters. There was no one inside except for the balding proprietor. She went inside, the man glancing up from his jars and vials behind the counter as the bell on the door jingled brightly.
“Good evening to you. A foul night-I was just about to close up. How can I help you, Vajica?” His words were pleasant, but the tone of them and the look he gave her were less inviting. He seemed torn between coming from behind the counter and returning to his interrupted preparations to close. “A potion for headaches? Something to ease a cough?”
The White Stone would have been firm, would have been certain, but she wasn’t the White Stone now, only an unranked, nondescript young woman dripping on the floor, a person who could be mistaken for a common prostitute walking the streets or trying to escape the weather for a moment.
Is this what you really want? She wasn’t sure who asked the question, or whether it was her own self who asked. The voices had been quiet when she’d been with Jan. Somehow, being with him had quieted the turmoil inside her head, and that had been at least part of the attraction he’d had for her, had been why she’d let herself grow far more attached than she should have. With Jan, for that little time, she’d felt herself healing. She’d thought that maybe she could become someone other than the White Stone, could become normal. Jan. .. She wondered what he was thinking now, whether he was feeling that he’d been played the fool, or if he ever thought of her with regret. She wondered whether he knew who she’d been, that she’d killed his uncle, or if he thought she’d fled only because she pretended to be someone she wasn’t and had been found out.
“Vajica?”
She wondered if he would ever know just how much she regretted it all.
She touched her stomach gently again, as she had more and more recently. She should have had her monthly bleeding even before she’d killed Fynn ca’Vorl. She’d thought perhaps it was the stress that had made it a few days late. But the bleeding hadn’t come during her flight; it still hadn’t come during the days she’d been in Nessantico, and there was now the strange nausea when she woke and there were stranger feelings inside.
It’s all you will have of him. Do you really want to do this?
It might have been her own voice. It might have been all of them.
“Vajica? I don’t have all evening. The rain…”
She shook her head, blinking. “I’m sorry,” she told him. “I…” Her hand touched her abdomen again.
He was staring at her, at the motion of her hand on her belly. His chin lifted and fell, and he rubbed a hand over his bald head as if smoothing invisible hair. “I may have what you want, Vajica,” he said, and his voice was gentler now. “Young ladies of your age, they come to me sometimes, and like you, they don’t quite know what to say. I have a potion that will bring on your bleeding. That’s what you need, isn’t it? However, I must tell you that it’s not easy to make, and therefore not cheap.”
She stared at him. She listened. She put her hand to the collar of her soaked tashta and felt the stone in its leather pouch.
The voices were silent.
Silent.
“No,” she told him. She backed away, hearing the door jingle as her heel slammed into it. “No. I don’t want your potion. I don’t want it.”
She turned then and fled into the plaza and the harsh assault of the rain, the teni-lights flaring around her and reflecting on the wet streets.
That was when she heard the wind-horns begin to blow alarm, all across the city.
EVASIONS
Karl ca’Vliomani
The plan was simple enough-it had to be. Karl had no army with which to assail the Bastida. He had no compatriots among the gardai to open the gates for him or leave them unguarded or to give him copies of the ornate keys to the donjon. He didn’t have the wild, powerful magic Mahri had possessed when Mahri had taken him from the Bastida, to just snatch Sergei away.
He had himself. He had Mika and Varina. He had what Sergei himself had told him.
He had the weather.
The Bastida had originally been designed as a fortress to guard the River A’Sele from invaders coming upriver; it had been turned into a prison late in its life. Portions of its legacy still existed, and no one knew all of its hidden ways, though few knew them better than Sergei ca’Rudka, who had long been in charge of the rambling, dank collection of black stones.
The trio borrowed a small rowboat moored east of the Pontica a’Brezi Nippoli, stepping into it a few turns of the glass after full dark, as the moon and the stars were lost behind the ramparts of scudding sky-towers and a fine mist began to fall. “I’d say thank the gods, if I believed in them.” Mika grinned at Karl as he helped Varina in, then Karl. Knee-deep in the river, he pushed them away from the shore. “I’ll see you two later,” he said.
Karl hoped he was right. He watched Mika splash from the river and run back toward the houses along the South Bank.
Karl and Varina didn’t use the oars for fear that the splashing would alert one of the roaming utilino or some curious walkers above them. Instead, they allowed the A’Sele’s slow current to take them downstream. They were dressed in dark clothing, their faces obscured with soot and ash though the rain quickly washed them clean. As soon as they passed the Pontica a’Brezi Veste and the grim, cheerless towers of the Bastida, they glimpsed wavering candlelight high up in the tower where ca’Rudka was kept-the sign that he was still there.
Karl steered the boat quietly to the shore. He and Varina stepped out into the muck and wet, ignoring the smell of dead fish and foul water, and slipped quickly into the shadow of the Bastida.
Karl found the door where Sergei had said it would be: where the grassy mound of the river wall-which Kraljica Maria IV had ordered built a century and a half ago to keep the A’Sele’s annual spring floods from inundating the South Bank-met the flanks of the Bastida’s western tower. The door was covered by sod where the flood bank swept over the stony feet of the Bastida, but the sod was but a few fingers’ thickness, the barest covering, and Karl’s hands quickly found the iron ring underneath. He tugged on it, carefully. The door yielded grudgingly, rain-clotted dirt falling away from it, but the sound of protesting hinges was largely covered by the hiss of rain on the river. Karl held the door open as Varina slipped inside, then he stepped inside himself, letting the door close behind him.
He heard Varina speak a spell-word, and light bloomed inside the hooded lantern they’d brought: the cold yellow light of the Scath Cumhacht. The glare seemed impossibly bright in the blackness. Karl could see moss-slick stones and broken flags, the walls festooned with strange fungal growths and decorated with curtains of tattered spiderwebs. The brown, sinister shapes of rats slid away from the light, squeaking in protest.
“Lovely,” Varina muttered, the whisper seeming to echo impossibly loudly. She kicked at a rat that scuttled too close to her feet, and it chattered angrily before fleeing.