With Nacalia in the lead, they trod up the hill to the Talarannos estate for the second time in three days. At the gate, Zerafine pulled the cord and heard a bell ring, somewhere in the distance. They waited. Zerafine pulled the cord again, harder, though this didn’t seem to make the bell ring any louder. Gerrard pounded the door with his longstaff. Finally the gate creaked open and a small, stout woman in Talarannos formal livery peered out. “Madama isn’t home,” she said in a voice that belonged to a much larger person.
“I know,” Zerafine said. “I’m here to speak to Morica Akennos.”
“She’s not receiving visitors,” the woman said, and made as if to close the gate.
“Wait,” Zerafine said, and Gerrard inserted the end of his staff into the gap to prevent the gate from closing entirely. “May I ask your name?”
The woman looked suspicious. “Toria.”
“Toria, tokthelos Genedirou was killed by an apparition this morning. You and everyone on this estate are in danger. Morica’s experiments may make things worse. I need to speak with her to ensure the estate’s safety.” Only half of that was a lie. No, not so much a lie as a calculated guess, because her mouth tasted no bitterness.
Toria’s small, round eyes darted between Zerafine, looking innocently earnest, and Gerrard, looking stolid. “Move your stick,” she said, kicking it, and shut the gate.
Zerafine sighed. “I suppose—” she began, but then the gate swung open fully, and Toria motioned to them to come in.
“You better be right,” she said darkly. “Atenas alone knows why I take such risks.”
“You’re a worshipper,” said Zerafine, startled.
“My dad was a thelos ‘fore he gave up the traveling life. I adore Madama, we all do, but she’s been toying with things she ought to have let lie.” Toria glanced up at Gerrard. “My mam was dad’s sentare,” she added. “Damn near deadly with a longstaff, she was.”
Zerafine smiled at her. “Thank you, Toria.”
“Don’t thank me, thank the god, because when Madama finds out I broke the rule I’m like to be out on my ass. But just this morning I was thinking it wasn’t right, keeping this secret, and I believe you’re a sign from the god that I’m doing the right thing.”
Toria led them into the salon and knocked on the door. “Visitors for you, madama,” she said.
“Who—wait a bit. I’m not ready.” Moments later the door opened and Morica Akennos stood before them. She wore a leather apron and a sleeveless tunic. Her hair was even untidier than before and she had a smear of the white powder on her cheek. A pair of complicated lenses rode high on her forehead. She seemed unsurprised to see Zerafine and Gerrard. “Good, you’re here,” she said. “Come in.” She walked away as if assuming they would follow; exchanging a mystified glance, Zerafine and Gerrard did.
The room was small and windowless, but well-lit by lanterns and a few of Kandra’s spheres hovering at the ceiling. It was also brutally hot. The source of the heat was a forge that took up most of one wall. A table bearing the tools of the blacksmith’s trade, hammer, tongs, files of all sizes, lay adjacent to the forge, and a barrel of what Zerafine took to be water or oil stood opposite. But pride of place belonged to a bizarre contraption of metal bars, some rough, some filed down, about three feet in diameter. A cage. And it was made entirely of seicorum. She’d never seen so much refined metal in one place in her life. Even Atenar kept its stores in raw ore. No wonder Gerrard had gotten such a good exchange rate.
Akelliou Rodennos paced back and forth in front of the forge. When he saw Zerafine, he threw up his hands and shouted, “Morica, why did you let her in here? She’s going to ruin everything!”
“I told Alita she needed to come. She’ll understand. She knows about spirit,” Morica, focused on the cage, responded absently.
“It’s because she’ll understand that she’s a danger,” Akelliou retorted. He glanced at Zerafine, then at Gerrard. “She won’t let you continue.”
Morica turned her gaze on Zerafine, suddenly very intent on her. “You won’t make me stop,” she stated. “I’ve done good work. You won’t undo it.” She had her hand on the table and began tapping her fingers against it, one-two-three, one-two-three.
“I just want to understand more about what you’re doing,” Zerafine said. Morica was clearly unstable and saying the wrong thing might make her shut down completely. “Your...experiments...caused the apparitions?”
“It was a side effect,” Morica said, still tapping. “Leaks. Cracks in the surface.”
“Stop telling her things,” Akelliou hissed. He grabbed Morica’s arm, but she shook him off. “But I want her to know,” she said.
“Alita said not to tell anyone,” Akelliou said.
“Alita doesn’t understand. She does.” She pulled the lenses down over her eyes. They were round and silvery and made her look like an insect, long limbs and all. “You can look at it,” she told Zerafine, and pointed at the cage.
Zerafine furrowed her brow. Did she mean...? She sat cross-legged on the floor next to the cage and took three deep cleansing breaths, then opened her heart’s eye.
She nearly fell over backwards. A gigantic knot of spirit threads nearly filled the cage, the filaments so close together that it looked like a solid mass. Hundreds, possibly thousands of threads emerged from the ball toward the floor, fading into near-invisibility before leaving the confines of the cage through the gaps in the seicorum. The effect was that of a vine, or a snake, lifted in the middle by a stick and allowed to hang down on both sides. Its surface was covered with dozens of deep cracks, as if the knot were made of mud that had dried and split under the scorching sun. As she watched, she saw threads emerge from one of the cracks and tangle themselves together, drifting away from their parent until they brushed against a seicorum bar. Then the knot dissolved and the threads fell back to be absorbed by the ball.
Zerafine reached out to touch it, then restrained herself. If a small one had killed Genedirou, who knew what an apparition this size could do to her? But—was it really an apparition? There had been no image associated with it, nothing to indicate the cage wasn’t empty. “This is a piece of a bigger thing,” she said, giving herself time to come up with the questions she actually wanted answers to. “The apparitions come from it.”
“I figured out that it’s all one piece,” Morica said. “That was the key.” She took a long rod from the table that to Zerafine’s inner sense looked black, without the fuzzy edges most objects appeared to have from that perspective. She slid it between the gaps in the bars and Zerafine saw the knot recoil from it. Seicorum again. She let go of her meditative state and stood up.
“I tried to tell them to stop,” Akelliou said, apparently forgetting that he wasn’t speaking to Zerafine. “After they broke it, I told them it had gone too far. It’s not my fault.”
“What do you mean, broke it?” Gerrard said, looming over Akelliou. Akelliou cringed.
“It cracked when Morica started to cage it,” he said. “Then the apparitions came from the cracks. Don’t blame me. I didn’t do anything.”
Zerafine gave him a scornful look. “The apparitions are all over the city, but you only caged it here.”
“It’s all one piece,” Morica said, tapping her fingers more insistently. “I had to isolate it so the other estates wouldn’t be affected. You know. You were supposed to understand.”
“I do understand,” Zerafine said, and felt the lie turn to bitter acid in her mouth. She’d have to be more careful.
“What I don’t understand,” said Alita Talarannos, “is why you are here on my estate without my permission.” She noiselessly closed the door behind her.
“You sent her. Didn’t you send her? I told you I wanted to talk to her,” said Morica. She wrapped her arms around herself and began to hum tunelessly.
“I told you it was too dangerous for her to see your work,” Alita said gently. She put her arm around Morica’s shoulders. “I wish you’d listened to me.”
“I’m sorry I’m such a thorn in your side,” Zerafine said, glaring at Alita so she’d know she wasn’t sorry at all. “I imagine you’re disappointed that you haven’t been able to get rid of me permanently.”
Alita glared back. “As I said, this is private property and I want you gone.”
Akelliou said, “I tried to make her leave, Alita. I told Morica not to talk to her.”
“Shut up, you pathetic whiner,” Gerrard said.
“I wanted her to tell me how to make it do what I want,” Morica complained.
Her words made something shift inside Zerafine’s head. How to make it do what I want. As if it were a dog, or a horse in training. Impulsively, she said, “Did you know it was alive when you started, or did you only figure it out later?”
Alita stared at her. “It’s not alive. It’s just spirit. It flows through the city.”
“I thought that, too,” Zerafine replied. “How could it be alive if there was no body? But there’s nothing that says a living creature can’t be pure spirit. And just now I saw it recoil as if it was backing away from something painful, which it seems seicorum is to it. That it’s a living creature that doesn’t happen to have a physical body is far less ridiculous than that it’s loose spirit or some kind of embodiment of the life of a city.
“Let me see if I have this right,” she continued in the face of Alita’s stunned silence. “You discovered this creature on your estate because it’s somehow more solid here, or closer to the surface—the details don’t matter. The point is that here, at this estate, you were capable not only of perceiving it, but of capturing it. But you fractured it when you caged it, and it started...let’s just say ‘bleeding’, shall we?”
“It’s not alive,” Alita said through clenched teeth.
“You know what? I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt about that, that you didn’t realize it was alive, but now I think maybe you suspected otherwise. But, again, it doesn’t really matter. The bleeding took the form of apparitions—I’m not totally sure about that, but who knows what enough concentrated spirit in one place might do? That explains Genedirou’s banishments; he was putting a patch on the problem, but it wasn’t a perfect seal and there were loose ends. But why didn’t you let him work his ritual here? The apparitions must have been an annoyance.”
“I needed them for the experiment,” Morica said. “If I touched the source it fought back. I learned so much from them.”
“Don’t answer her questions, dear,” Alita said. She regained her poise and began to speak, but Zerafine overrode her.
“Only one more question, Alita, and I’ll be gone. Just one question. What was the point of all this?”
Alita said, “I don’t have to answer—”
“It gives us power!” Akelliou blurted out. “All our estates, there’s a source on each one. Luck, wealth, power, anything we want. It makes us better than others.”
“Akelliou, why are you kissing up to the emissary?” Alita said, rounding on him.
“It’s not fair that you’re keeping it all to yourself!” he shouted. “You promised it would be me next, but you’re just saving it all for yourself!”
“Oh, shut up, Akelliou,” Alita said wearily. “As if I would ever have helped someone like you. I may hate your uncle, but he’s three times the man you are.”
“I would agree with that,” Zerafine said. “Goodbye, Alita. Morica, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” Alita said.
Zerafine shook her head. “She’s a genius, Alita. And you’ve got her torturing an innocent creature. Do yourself a favor. Take all this apart.”
“How is that a favor to me?” Alita sneered. “I’m not going to give up my power just because some upstart thelis from nowhere tries to ride her moral high horse over me.”
“It’s a favor to you,” Zerafine said, “because if you don’t, I will. And I will make sure everyone in your social circle knows what you tried to do. How long do you think your power will last when your peers find out you were trying to gain an unfair advantage over them?”
“I can make sure you never leave this estate,” Alita said.
Zerafine laughed. “Now you’re just embarrassing yourself. Unless you happen to have a few more assassins on tap.” She turned away and let Gerrard precede her out the door. “Let’s leave quickly. Just in case.”
They found Nacalia outside at the front of the house, playing with a litter of kittens, Toria watching over her. “Does Alita know you let us in?” Zerafine asked.
“Not so far,” Toria replied. “But I think she will.”
“If she fires you, come to the shrine. We won’t let you suffer for this.”
“Thanks for that, madama.”
Once on the road, Zerafine breathed easier. The wind had died down, and the clouds provided a welcome break from the sun’s rays. She’d sounded much more certain than she was. For all she knew, Alita might have had fifty men in her household guard, and Zerafine had no doubt that she could have made good on her threat. “You could have defeated fifty men, right?” she asked Gerrard.
He gave her a surprised look. “No.”
“Then I’m glad she didn’t have fifty men waiting outside.”
“I might have been able to handle twenty. Definitely ten.”
“You inspire such confidence.”
He grabbed her around the waist with one arm and lifted her off her feet, and kissed her, startling a few other pedestrians. “I’m not entirely sure I can handle you,” he said.
“Put me down, ox! Such unprofessional behavior.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t look sorry. “So. It’s an actual creature. And here I thought that was the impossible scenario.”
“I wonder...” Zerafine began.
“Yes?”
“If it’s a creature, and it’s wounded, I wonder if the theloi of Kalindi might be able to do something about it. It certainly seems to have vital energy enough to permit a healing.”
Gerrard scratched his chin. “Would they even be able to perceive it?”
“I don’t know. It’s worth asking, anyway.”
“And we’d have to find a spot where they’d be able to reach it.”
“We’ve got nine of them. Eight, since Alita’s never going to let us back in.”
“True. Do you think she’s going to dismantle her contraption?”
“No. Maybe. I hope so. Who knows what could happen to the creature if this plan works? It might destroy her setup for her.”
Gerrard nodded. “You want to talk to the Marathelis of Kalindi now?”
“Is it a woman, then? I never even thought to ask.”
“Her name is Yelenita and Dakariou said she’s a good choice to follow Alestiou. Strong-willed, a good administrator, maybe not as close to the Goddess as Alestiou was, but a good woman.”
“I’m impressed. You managed to say all that without making the face you always make when you say Dakariou’s name.” He looked surprised, so she pursed her lips and furrowed her brow and said, “Like that.”
He laughed. “I suppose I no longer feel threatened by him,” he said.
Zerafine grabbed his tunic collar and pulled him down for a kiss. “Now who’s being unprofessional,” he murmured against her lips. She poked him in the stomach.