She found herself in a storeroom with thin ingots of gold-“zains,” she had learned they were called-in small boxes ready to be pressed into gold foil, which could then be beaten into sheets so thin that light could shine through-glittering, precious metal foil that gilders like ce’Mott used to coat objects. In the main room of the shop, Rochelle saw the glow of candles and heard a rhythmic, dull pounding. She followed the sound and the light, halting behind a massive roller press. A long strip of gold foil protruded from between the rollers. Ci’Braun-a man perhaps in his late fifties, with a paunch and leathered, wrinkled skin, was hunched over a heavy wooden table, a bronze hammer in each of his hands, pounding on packets of vellum with squares of gold foil on them, the packets covered with a strip of leather. He was sweating, and she could see the muscles in his arms bulging as he hammered at the vellum. He paused for a moment, breathing heavily, and she moved in the shadows, deliberately.
“Who’s there?” he called out in alarm, and she slid into the candlelight, giving him a small, shy smile. Rochelle knew what the man was seeing: a lithe young girl on the cusp of womanhood, perhaps fifteen years old, with her black hair bound back in a long braid down the back of her tashta. She held a roll of fabric under one arm, as if she’d purchased a new tashta in one of the many shops along the street. There was nothing even vaguely threatening about her. “Oh,” the man said. He set down his hammers. “What can I do for you, young Vajica? How did you get in?”
She gestured back toward the storeroom, placing the other tashta on the roller press. “Your rear door was ajar, Vajiki. I noticed it as I was passing along the alley. I thought you’d want to know.”
The man’s eyes widened. “I certainly would,” he said. He started toward the rear of the shop. “If one of those nogood apprentices of mine left the door open…”
He was within an arm’s length of her now. She stood aside as if to let him pass, slipping the blade from the sash of her tashta. The knife would be best with him: he was too burly and strong for the garrote, and poison was not a tactic that she could easily use with him. She slid around the man as he passed her, almost a dancer’s move, the knife sliding easily across the throat, cutting deep into his windpipe and at the side where the blood pumped strongest. Ci’Braun gurgled in surprise, his hands going to the new mouth she had carved for him, blood pouring between his fingers. His eyes were wide and panicked. She stepped back from him-the front of her tashta a furious red mess-and he tried to pursue her, one bloody hand grasping. He managed a surprising two steps as she retreated before he collapsed.
“Impressive,” she said to him. “Most men would have died where they stood.” Crouching down alongside him, she turned him onto his back, grunting. She took the two light-colored, flat stones from the pocket of her ruined tashta, placing a stone over each eye. She waited a few breaths, then reached down and plucked the stone from his right eye, leaving the other in place. She bounced the stone once in her palm and placed it on the roller press next to the fresh tashta.
Deliberately, she stripped away the bloody tashta and chemise, standing naked in the room except for her boots. She cleaned her knife carefully on the soiled tashta. There was a small hearth on one wall; she blew on the coals banked there until they glowed, then placed the gory clothes atop them. As they burned, she washed her hands, face, and arms in a basin of water she found under the worktable. Afterward, she dressed in the new chemise and tashta she’d brought. The stone-the one from the right eye of all her contracts and all her matarh’s-she placed back in the small leather pouch whose long strings went around her neck.
There were no voices for her in the stone, as there had been for her matarh. Her victims didn’t trouble her at all. At least not at the moment.
She glanced again at the body, one eye staring glazed and cloudy at the ceiling, the other covered by a pale stone-the sign of the White Stone.
Then she walked quietly back to the storeroom. She glanced at the golden zains there. She could have taken them, easily. They would have been worth far, far more than what ce’Mott had paid her. But that was another thing her matarh had taught her: the White Stone did not steal from the dead. The White Stone had honor. The White Stone had integrity.
She unlocked the door. Opening it a crack, she looked outside, listening carefully also for the sound of footsteps on the alley’s flags. There was no one about-the narrow lane was as deserted as ever. She slid out from the door and shut it again. Moving slowly and easily, she walked away toward the more crowded streets of Brezno, smiling to herself.
Sergei ca’Rudka
“ Have you had a chance to speak with Varina yet? The poor woman-she’s taking her loss so hard.”
Sergei nodded to Allesandra. “I took supper with her yesterday, Kraljica. She’s not sleeping well at all, judging from the circles under her eyes. I sent my healer over to her with a potion.”
“You’re such a kind man, Sergei.”
She was facing away from him, and her comment was carefully modulated. He couldn’t tell if her words had been laced with irony or not. He suspected that they were. “I pray that when Cenzi’s attendants weigh my soul-soon enough now-that it will float in His arms, however slightly, Kraljica. But I’m afraid it will be a rather delicate balancing act.”
They were sitting on the balcony of Allesandra’s outer apartments in the Grande Palais, overlooking the gardens. The wind-horns had sounded First Call a turn and a half ago. Below them, the grounds staff prowled in the morning sun, watering plants and pulling the weeds that dared to raise their green heads in the manicured beds. To their left, workers swarmed the scaffolding where the facade of the north wing was still under construction. The uneven percussion of hammers and chisels kept the birds from roosting easily in the trees.
Allesandra lifted her cup of tea and sipped. She appeared to be watching the workers shaping the granite blocks. Sergei drank his own tea. He had little doubt that Allesandra knew his vices; as he’d aged they’d become, if anything, stronger and more compulsive. When he was in Nessantico, he visited the Bastida a’Drago nearly every day-many of the offiziers within the the Bastida staff were men who had come up through the ranks while he had been Commandant of the Garde Kralji and then the Garde Civile; Capitaine ce’Denise was a recruit he had hired nearly forty years ago. They allowed him to prowl the lower levels, to “visit” the occasional prisoner there, and if they heard the howls of pain, they ignored them (or, often enough, were there with him). In Brezno, in his capacity as Special Ambassador to the Hirzg, there were certain grandes horizontales Sergei would hire who could serve his particular needs in consideration of the considerably higher fees he paid for their pain and their silence.
Sergei prayed to Cenzi frequently to take these impulses away from him, but He had never answered. He had tried to stop, a thousand times, and each time had lost that battle.
He could command an army to victory but it appeared that he could not command himself.
To the public, “Old Silvernose” was generous. He was kindly in person, he was known for his charitable contributions, and praised for his long service and dedication to the Holdings. To his friends, he was loyal and he would give of himself all that he could. That part of him, too, he had strived to enhance over the years, as a balance to the other.
He wondered which side of him would be remembered, once he was gone. He wondered which side Cenzi would weigh the most. He would find out, soon enough, he suspected. There wasn’t a joint in his body that didn’t have issues of one sort or another. He shuffled rather than walked. It took him several breaths to rise from a chair, and his back sometimes refused to straighten. The prosthetic metal nose glued to his face stood out more than ever in the wrinkled bag of flesh in which it sat. Sergei had outlived nearly all his contemporaries. He existed in a world where everyone seemed to be younger than him. For them, the events he had witnessed and participated in were history rather than memory.