Nico Morel
AFTER SPENDING SEVERAL DAYS with the woman, Nico
decided she was very strange, but also fascinating. She was good to
Nico. She fed him well, she talked to him—long talks in which he
found himself telling her everything about his matarh and Talis and
how he and his matarh had left Nessantico, and how he hated his
onczio and his cousins and left the village, and how the Regent and
Varina had helped him. . . .
The woman walked with
him during the day around his old neighborhood, with Nico hoping he
would see Talis or his matarh.
But he hadn’t. “Your
vatarh’s name is Talis Posti?” she had asked him the first night,
after he’d told her his story. “You’re sure of that? And he’s here
in the city?” He nodded, and she’d said nothing more.
She told Nico her
name was Elle, but sometimes when Nico called out that name, she
didn’t seem to notice. She would sometimes, in the middle of
conversation, respond to some unheard comment or address the air as
if talking to it. In public, she seemed to make herself shrivel and
look old and frail, but in the privacy of the rooms she kept, she
was another person altogether: much younger; strong, athletic, and
vital. She kept weapons in the room: a sword leaning in the corner
near the door and another at the side of the bed, and there were
several knives with wickedly-sharp edges—she nearly always had two
or more of those on her person. Nico would watch her when she honed
her weapons at night with a whetstone. He’d watch her face, and the
loving concentration as she sharpened the razored edges made him
shiver.
She had a small
leather pouch around her neck that she never took off. It was
always there under her clothing, and at night she would clasp her
hand around it as she were afraid someone might steal it. He
wondered if when she took her daily bath in the copper tub in the
common room of the house, she kept it on also. The bathing in
itself was strange, since Nico had never seen anyone bathe
themselves more than once a week, and more likely once a month. His
matarh had always said that if you bathed too much, it caused you
to get sick. Maybe, Nico thought, that was what was wrong with
Elle.
At odd times, she
would tell him to stay in the rooms they rented, and she would go
out alone—usually at night. She would be gone for several turns of
the glass, and usually Nico would fall asleep waiting for her to
return. Whatever she did those nights, she never told
him.
Tonight had been one
of those nights. “Nico . . .” He felt her hand shaking him, and he
blinked up at her face, candle-lit against the darkness of the
room. “Get up,” she told him.
“Why, Elle?”he
grumbled sleepily. It was comfortable and warm under the covers.
She didn’t answer him—she had already moved to the door of their
room.
“I want you to come
with me,” she said. Grudgingly, Nico slid the covers aside and
lifted himself from the straw-filled mattress. “Shoes,” Elle said
as he started to pad toward her barefoot. He slipped on his worn
boots as she opened the door. “Stay with me,” she told him, taking
his hand. They went out into the night.
Nico knew that
Nessantico never slept—not entirely. No matter what time of day or
night, there would be people abroad in the Oldtown streets. But the
night denizens were more dangerous than those of the day, his
matarh had told him. “You’ll understand better when you grow up,”
she’d said, more than once. “Night is a mask that the city puts on
when it wants to do things it shouldn’t. The business people do at
night . . . well, sometimes they need the darkness to hide it.”
He’d glimpsed some of that recently, alone in Oldtown before Elle
had found him. He’d witnessed the slurred speech and uncertain walk
of the tavern denizens; seen the grunting encounters in dark
alleys; glimpsed the quick, brutal assaults; witnessed the furtive
exchange of jingling coins for wrapped packages. He stayed close to
Elle now as they moved through the streets, alive with those
wearing the mask of night.
She walked rapidly,
so much so that he had to half-run to keep up with her. They cut
across a corner of Oldtown Center and into the tangle of lanes
running south and west toward the river, the buildings on either
side growing rapidly older, smaller, and closer together, as if
they wanted to huddle together in the night for warmth. Nico was
quickly lost. There were no téni-lights here, only the occasional
lamps set in the windows of taverns or brothels. Twice they passed
an utilino, and Elle would draw down onto herself, making herself
look smaller and older, and she would husk out a greeting with a
grating voice that didn’t sound at all like her own.
Finally, Elle tugged
him into the darkness of an alleyway and crouched down next to him.
“Listen to me, Nico. I need you to be very, very quiet now. You
need to be careful when you move so that no one hears your
footsteps, and you can’t talk. No matter what you see or what
happens. Do you understand?” In the faint light of the moon, he
could see the white of her eyes, and her gaze was serious and
solemn.
He nodded. She took
his hand, squeezing it once gently. “All right,” she said. “Come
on.”
They moved farther
down the alley to a tiny door half-off its rusty hinges. Elle
reached under her cloak; her fingertips, when her hand emerged
again, had a dollop of some dark substance which she smeared on the
hinges. She pushed at the door, it swung open reluctantly but
silently, and Elle ducked inside, gesturing to Nico to
follow.
The smell inside made
Nico want to gag: there was something dead and rotting close by,
and he was glad for once that it was far too dark to see well,
though he was afraid he was going to trip over whatever was dead
down here. Elle’s hand took his again and he followed her closely
toward a dimly glimpsed stair, and up to a door. He saw Elle stoop
alongside the door and fiddle for a few moments with a few pieces
of wire inside the keyhole. There was a faint click, and Elle
pushed the door open slowly. Nico found himself hurrying behind
Elle down a narrow, dark hallway to stop in front of a door. “When
I open this door,” she whispered huskily to him, “I need you to
stay here in the hall. Don’t move, no matter what. Say nothing.
Just listen. Listen. Do you understand?”
He nodded silently.
Again Elle crouched by the door with her wires; again, there was a
click. Elle opened the door and slipped inside, leaving the door
open. Nico couldn’t see anything inside, though he squinted hard.
Someone in the room was breathing hard, as if asleep. His own
breathing seemed terribly loud, and if Elle made any sound at all
as she moved through the room, Nico couldn’t hear it. He clutched
at the doorframe, frightened and wanting to disobey Elle and call
out to her, but the fear choked his throat.
There was a soft
snick, a startled grunt, and then
Elle’s voice. “That’s right,” he heard someone say softly—it
sounded somewhat like Elle, but her voice was pitched deep and low.
It might have been a man speaking. “That’s a knife blade against
your neck, and if you cry out or so much as move your hands, you’re
a dead man. Do as I say, and you might live. If you understand, nod
your head.” There was a pause, then: “Good. I know who you are and
what you are. I’ve been watching you. Now, I want to know something
else. Do you know a boy named Nico Morel? Answer me: yes or no. And
softly.”
Nico’s own breath
hissed in at the mention of his name. He heard the person
half-whisper an answer: “Yes.”
With that single
word, he knew the voice: Talis. Almost, he leaped into the room,
but he remembered Elle’s warning and he remained crouched at the
door. “Good. You get to live yet,” Elle whispered to Talis. “Ah! No
moving now; remember what I told you. I’d hate for you to slice
yourself open accidentally. You’ve shared the bed of the boy’s
matarh?”
“Yes.”
“Do you love her?
Answer true now.”
There was a
hesitation in which Nico took a quick breath. Then: “I
do.”
“And the boy? Do you
care about him?”
The answer was
quicker and more emphatic. “Yes. The boy is . . .” His voice
trailed off into a long silence.
“The boy is
what?”
“My son. And yes. I
care about the boy. That why I sent away both him and Serafina—so
they’d be safe.”
“But he came back
here, to this city. You discovered that after the Numetodo had him.
You knew the Ambassador ca’Vliomani wanted to talk to you, but you
didn’t answer him. You abandoned the boy, to save your own skin.”
Nico realized that she was talking mostly for his own benefit, so
that he would hear Talis’ reply.
Nico heard the
rustling of cloth and straw as, despite Elle’s warning, Talis
moved. “Ow! No. That’s not true. Ow! Easy! You’re right, I knew
Nico was here and didn’t answer the Ambassador, but not for the
reasons you say. Because . . .”
“Because?”
“I saw the
consequences of trying to do that. I saw that if I’d gone to the
Numetodo, worse things would have happened: for Nico, for me, for
all of us. If I could have gotten Nico back safely, I would have. I
knew the Ambassador would treat him kindly. I knew Nico wouldn’t be
hurt if I stayed hidden. But if I’d come for him, if I’d tried to
rescue him, I didn’t know what would happen. He might be hurt, or
worse. There could have been terrible consequences.”
“You know this
because of magic. Westlander magic.” Nico could almost see Talis’
nod. It was hard to stand silent and listen. He wanted to go to
Talis, to Elle, but he also wanted to hear what Talis would say.
“And did you see this moment in your spells? Did you see me?” Elle
asked in her strange, husky voice.
“No,” he said. “I
kept seeing Nico in the scrying bowl, as if he were close, but
there was something around him, something protecting
him.”
“Then you
did see me. I protect him. And I will
continue to do so.”
“Where is he?” Talis
asked. “Take me to him!”
“Why? Why should I do
that?”
“Because . . .” Nico
heard Talis swallow hard. “. . . Because he should be with people
he knows. I can take him back to his matarh.”
“You’d do
that?”
“Yes.”
“Then I hope for your
sake you keep promises.”
Following Elle’s
answer, no one said anything, though Nico thought he could hear
furtive, swift movements. He peered into the darkness until blobs
of color swam in front of his eyes, trying to see. He could hear
Talis stirring, heard him speak a word in another language, and
Nico shivered, as if some invisble, cold breeze had touched him.
Suddenly there was bright light, light that seemed to come from
Talis himself. He was sitting up in bed, his blankets pooled around
his waist and two small trickles of blood running down his chest
from his neck, and the light was coming from a cold glow that sat
in his upturned palm. Elle was no longer in the room, though
curtains swayed in front of an open window near the bed. Talis saw
Nico in the hallway, and his mouth dropped open.
“Nico!”
Nico ran to him,
crying.