if a Sophos doesn’t have enough to worry about without being in love.”
“They’re going to be married, then?” Perun asked. Zeno snorted disapproving assent.
“After Charleston, I had Stanton utterly resolved to give her up—for her own good, of course.” Zeno shook his head. “But all she had to do was show her face at the wrong place at the wrong time, and …” Zeno threw up a hand. “Love!”
Perun smiled. “We can’t all be priests, Benedictus.”
Zeno slapped a hand on the table with remembered indignation. “Do you know what he said to me when I reminded him that there were still larger goals to be considered?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“He said, ‘the board has changed, and our strategy must change as well.’ And in the most insolent manner!” Zeno frowned at his own boots. “Without a doubt the board has changed—it has changed for the worse. We have been pushed a dozen moves closer to checkmate, and the one man who has even the remotest hope of forestalling it is picking out china and deciding what to put on the wedding invitations.”
“Claiming Mirabilis’ power with blood magic …” Perun sighed, shook his head, watched the smoke rising between his fingers. “Well, I suppose there wasn’t anything else to be done. But really, you brought it on yourself. Letting Mirabilis go through with that ridiculous symposium in the first place. If you’d just handed the stone over to us …”
“Caul would have reduced the Institute to rubble,” Zeno growled.
“Every man has something he wishes to protect,” Perun mused, lifting the cigarette to his lips. “But to save the world, he may be asked to sacrifice that which he holds most dear.”
The men contemplated this in silence for a long time. Perun smoked his cigarette down to a scant nub, flicked it onto the flagstones, and watched it burn itself out.
“We will look for the poison that Komé spoke of,” he said finally. “The poison hidden by the god of oaths. She could only have meant Volos’ Anodyne. If we can find it and implement it quickly, perhaps no one will be required to sacrifice anything.”
Volos’ Anodyne, the unripened fruit of the Sini Mira’s profoundest scientific mind. It was always thought lost, uncompleted … but if Komé spoke the truth, it existed—somewhere. This was hope, great and brilliant, and all too fragile.
“The High Priest was at the symposium,” Zeno said. “Yet another instance in which I find myself questioning your Great Mother’s boundless wisdom. I don’t suppose she might have told us about the poison without Heusler being there? Now we have to raze the Temple to find it. You know they will stop at nothing to destroy it.”
“The Temple does not know Volos’ true identity. They won’t even know where to begin to look.”
“And we do?”
“Surely Miss Edwards—”
Zeno shook his head curtly, breaking off the words. “The less she knows, the less trouble she can cause us,” he said. “That woman has a positive knack for getting into trouble with sangrimancers. And if they manage to discover that Lyakhov was—”
“Please,” Perun interjected, lifting a hand. “Call him by his nom de guerre. Call him Volos, after the god of oaths. It honors his memory better.”
“It may well be the only honor his memory receives,” Zeno snapped. “Miss Edwards says her mother left nothing behind when she died in Lost Pine; a few minor female ornaments. Certainly no notes or papers. She assured me of this—she said that her ‘Pap’ told her everything he knew.”
“And she is telling the truth?”
“Do you think she could lie to me?” Zeno asked. Perun drew in smoke, closed his eyes, exhaled peacefully.
“We will find it,” he said. “The Great Mother will not let us fail. Ex fide fortis, yes?”
Zeno took a deep breath—of good clean Russian air, instead of smoke, and released a sigh. “Yes,” he said. “Ex fide fortis.” Then he stood, shrugging on his coat and clapping on his hat. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go teach a lovestruck sangrimancer how to run my Institute.” He opened his mouth as if to say something more, but then pressed his lips together and shook his head. He lifted a hand in mute farewell as he vanished into the twilight.
Perun sat alone on the terrace for a long time after he was gone, smoking and thinking. He watched the sun go down, listened to the sounds of darkness closing in. Finally, when the last cigarette in his case was gone, he barked a laugh that resounded off the inkstroke trees. He lifted a glass of now-cold tea in a salute to the rising moon.
“To the only thing that can civilize a skycladdische, redeem a sangrimancer, and leave a poor old credomancer at a loss for words!” He poured the liquid on the ground for luck, then rose to fetch more cigarettes.
The Native Star is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Spectra Mass Market Original
Copyright © 2010 by M. K. Hobson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Spectra, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
SPECTRA and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52169-9
v3.0