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 Cénzi’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 téni 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’Hïrzg. I’d been told that I
might receive a contract for all the
palais gilding, and then this happened . . . Ci’Braun cost me a
contract with the Hïrzg 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 Hïrzg 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 plentiful: 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-téni 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.
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.
