Varina ca’Pallo
“HERE IT IS,” PIERRE GABRELLI SAID handing the device
to Varina. “I hope this works for you,” he added with a wry
grin.
She took the device
in her hands, marveling. “Pierre, this is gorgeous . . .” His grin widened.
She’d put together
most of the experimental versions of the piece herself, scrounging
bits and pieces from here and there in the city and cobbling them
together. Her own devices had been functional but ugly and clumsy
in the hand. Pierre was a metalworker and artisan as well as a
Numetodo. What he had given her wasn’t a crude facsimile of the
idea in her head, but a piece of artwork.
She turned the
“sparkwheel,” as she’d decided to call it, in her hands to examine
it from all sides, marveling. The device was deliciously heavy and
solid, yet well balanced enough for her to wield in one hand. A
straight, octagonal metal tube—thicker this time than the
last—extended a hand’s length out from a curved wooden handle.
Varina’s barrels had been plain and unadorned; this one was incised
with curling lines of vines and leaves, the metal burnished while
the lines were stained a satin black. Where the barrel met the
wood, the leaves flared out, fitting neatly into niches in the wood
carved to receive the leaf pattern. And the wood: Pierre had taken
several different woods, laminating them together, the varied
grains creating a lovely, warm pattern under hard, gleaming
varnish. The pan that held the powder was no longer a crude device
screwed lopsidedly onto the top: here it nestled into its own niche
in the handle, and Pierre had added a metal door to keep out the
weather and enclose the pan. The finely-ridged steel wheel
protruding slightly into the pan was chromed and polished; the
small clamp above the pan reflected the leaf-and-vine pattern on
the barrel, with a fine piece of iron pyrite grasped in its jaws. A
trigger guard—also in the shape of a leaf and chromed—enclosed the
firing mechanism.
Staring at the piece,
she for a moment forgot the grief that had lain over her like a
dark shadow for days. For a moment, there was light in her
world.
“I’m afraid to try
this,” she told Pierre. “I’d hate to ruin it.”
“It’s all to your
specifications, which were, I must say, ingenious; I just added
decoration to make it look pretty. Go on—pull the clamp back. Put
your thumb on that leaf and press it back . . .”
Varina did: she heard
mechanisms click smoothly as the pyrite lifted away from the pan,
heard the spring attached to the wheel purr as it was extended,
felt the trigger slide forward and lock. She curled her finger
around the trigger and pressed it: the trigger snicked back cleanly; the wheel spun madly; the
pyrite clamp slammed down against the rim of the wheel, and she saw
sparks fly into the pan.
She could imagine the
rest: the sparks setting off the black sand in the pan; the
explosion propelling a lead ball from the round hole bored into the
barrel . . .
At least, that was
the theory. Her last, far cruder, version had nearly worked, as
she’d told Karl. Nearly—she still bore the scars from that
experiment. The barrel of the device had been too thin or the metal
flawed or her hole bored at a slight angle. The explosion of the
black sand had caused the barrel to rupture, spraying the room with
metal fragments, one of which had cut a deep gash in Varina’s
arm—two hands higher and it would have hit her face, a hand to the
side and it might have penetrated her chest. She could’ve been
blinded or killed—that’s what she hadn’t told Karl.
With the thought of
his name, the pall threatened to return, and she forced herself to
smile at Pierre and pretend. “Pierre, I should have had you craft
this long ago. This is far more elegant than the contraptions I was
making myself. All this lovely work. It’s just . . . What if it
breaks like the last one?”
“Then you can tell me
what I need to do to make the next one work better, eh?” He grinned
again. “Go on. Try it. I’m dying to see.” His eyes widened suddenly
as he realized what he’d said. “A’Morce, I . . .”
Varina smiled at him,
touching his hand. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she told
him. Until now, she’d conducted all her experiments alone. The
other Numetodo knew that she was experimenting with some kind of
device to deliver black sand, but no one—not even Karl—had known
the specifics. “Pierre . . . it’s dangerous. If . . .” Excuses.
That’s all they were. She didn’t want
him to be there; she could see from the way the lines of his face
fell that he understood that.
He frowned. Shrugged.
“Whatever you wish, A’Morce,” he said. He moved to the door of the
room; almost, almost she called out to him, feeling guilty, but the
lethargy that had wrapped her for the last several days made her
sluggish and slow, and she did not.
The door closed
behind him.
She was in a basement
room of the Numetodo House on the South Bank, one of the several
laboratories there. Her laboratory. It
was here that Varina, years ago, had ferreted out the formula for
making the Tehuantin black sand. It was here that she had worked on
developing the Westlander magic as well: the physically-demanding
ability to enchant an object to hold a spell. She had spent many
long hours here. Too many, she thought sometimes. It sometimes
seemed that her entire life had been spent here. Alone, most of
that time. Every mark, every scratch on the furniture, every stroke
of paint on the walls reminded her of the past.
Varina had set the
room carefully: at the longest end stood a fabric-filled dummy,
wearing a set of old, battered plate mail Commandant cu’Ingres had
given her. At the other end, she’d placed a table with a heavy
wooden vise. One of the things she’d learned in the course of this
experiment was that the device would recoil when the powder was set
alight. During one of the experiments, she’d injured her wrist when
a version of the sparkwheel had slammed hard against her hand when
fired. Since then, she’d used the vise to hold the various
incarnations of sparkwheels, using a string tied around the trigger
mechanism to set them off—it was that arrangement that had probably
saved her from further injury when the barrel had shattered on the
last one.
She took Pierre’s
sparkwheel over to the table. Gently, carefully, she filled the pan
with black sand. She’d prepared paper “cartridges” with more black
sand and a lead ball; she tamped that into the barrel. She folded a
cloth around the barrel—“It’s so beautiful I don’t want to scratch
it in the vise,” she would have told Pierre, had he been there—and
clamped it down, making certain it was aimed directly at the
dummy’s chest. She cocked back the pyrite clamp and tied a string
to the trigger. She moved behind the table, holding the
string.
The barrel of the
sparkwheel pointed ominously at the mail-clad dummy. She tugged the
string.
The wheel spun,
sparks flew. There was a loud bang and
white smoke poured from the end of the barrel and the pan. From the
other end of the room, she heard a distinct, metallic ping.
Varina waved at the
acrid smoke. She peered at the dummy: in the middle of the chest
plate, a dark hole had appeared. Varina shuffled over to it as
quickly as she could, leaning over to examine it. There was a hole
as thick around as her index finger, the edges torn and pressed
inward. She put her finger into the hole—she could not feel the
bottom of it, and the hole expanded as it burrowed into the dummy’s
stuffing. Somewhere deep in there, pieces of the lead ball were
buried. Varina realized that she was holding her
breath.
A sword cut would
have been turned by this armor. An arrow from a bow would have
rebounded. A bolt from a crossbow might have penetrated it, but not
so deeply.
It worked. Had that been a garda standing there, he would
be on the ground, bleeding terribly and perhaps dead . .
.
She could imagine it,
and it wasn’t a pleasant vision; she’d seen too many people die in
battle. She straightened. She went back to the table, looking
closely at the sparkwheel in its vise. It appeared whole and
unaffected, the barrel still straight and untouched except for a
smear of black soot around the end. There were soot marks around
the pan as well, but otherwise the weapon appeared to be intact.
Varina unclamped the vise, picking up the device again. She held it
out at arm’s length, sighting down the barrel at the
dummy.
Well, old woman, there’s the obvious next step, if you
want to take it . . . It sounded like Karl’s voice,
chuckling as he admonished her. The rememberance brought tears to
her eyes, and she had to stop for a moment and fight back the
grief. She laid the sparkwheel on the table, and after a few
moments, began to refill the pan with more black sand and tamp
another paper cartridge into the barrel. She picked up the weapon,
pulling back the pyrite clamp to cock it. Her hands were trembling
slightly as she aimed the weapon. She brought her other hand up to
steady it as she sighted down the barrel. She wondered, for a
breath, if she was being reckless and foolhardy, if she should wait
and repeat the experiment as before, but even as the thought came
to her, she pulled the trigger, closing both eyes as she did
so.
The report of the
sparkwheel was terrible, and the weapon bucked in her hand, though
not so terribly as she remembered. She lowered the weapon, peering
at the dummy. Yes, there was a second hole in the armor, this one
on the other side of the chest plate and higher.
Someone knocked on
the door of the laboratory. “A’Morce, are you all right?” a voice
called faintly.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m
fine. Everything’s fine.”
She sat in the single
chair in the room, cradling the sparkwheel in her lap. It was warm,
and a thin trail of smoke still wafted from the barrel. She stared
at it: her creation.
Anyone could wield this. It takes little skill and a few
moments to learn. With this, anyone could kill another person from
a distance, even a garda in armor. She had always been able
to imagine possibilities; Karl had always said that was what had
made her a good researcher for the Numetodo. “You have imagination,” he’d told her. “You can see possibilities where no one else does. That’s
the best magic of all to have.”
The line of research
that had produced the sparkwheel had been due to that kind of
serendipity—she’d been experimenting with a new mixture of black
sand, a few years ago. She placed a small amount of the black sand
in the bottom of a narrow metal container; she’d tamped it down
with a stone pestle; she hadn’t noticed that the pestle was
cracked, and that she’d left behind a chunk of the pestle in the
container. She used a fire spell to set off the black sand . . .
and the fragment of pestle had been propelled out of the end of the
container to slam against the ceiling of the laboratory. The gouge
in the wooden beam was still there, above the table. She’d realized
then that might be another use for the black sand than simple
unfocused destruction.
An army of soldiers with sparkwheels . . . She
could imagine that, and the vision made her hands
tremble.
That could change
warfare. That would change warfare.
Completely. As the black sand itself was beginning to render the
use of war-téni far less important, so skill with a heavy blade
would no longer matter, not when all one needed was the strength to
pull a trigger and eyes to sight down a barrel.
Anyone could be a
warrior. Anyone could dispense justice.
Anyone could exact
revenge. Or slay a mad dog.
Anyone could murder
needlessly. For the worst or most trivial of reasons.
Anyone. Even
herself.
What have I done this time, Karl?
She blinked. Her hand
stroked the silken varnish of the handle. An irony, that: a
beautifully-crafted instrument dedicated entirely to
destruction.
She rose from the
chair finally and went to the table. She stoppered the vial of
black sand, gathered up the paper cartridges she’d prepared. She
placed the vial, the cartridges, and the sparkwheel in a leather
pouch and slung it over her shoulder. She blew out the lanterns
that illuminated the room, opened the door, and locked it again
behind her.
The pouch heavy
around her shoulder, her hands still remembering the feel of the
sparkwheel as it had fired, she ascended the stairs.
