The Luminoso (The Quintana Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The Luminoso

  the Quintana Trilogy Book #2

  by Michael Wallace

  Copyright ©2019 Michael Wallace

  Balsalom Publishing

  cover art by Jeff Brown

  The Quintana Trilogy

  Book 1: Wandering Star

  Book 2: The Luminoso

  Book 3: Chasm of Fire

  Chapter One

  Naila Roja affixed a concerned expression on her face as the Guardian of Secrets paced back and forth across the Holy Vault of the temple. The actual vault was beneath Salvatore’s feet, where a brass door, set flush in the marble floor, opened into a lead-lined chamber—or so she’d surmised from scraps of information gathered from other cabalists. None but temple cabalists and a handful of masters were allowed access, and then only if accompanied by an archivist.

  Untold riches lay down there, she was sure of it. Artifacts, imbued with the magic of the ancients, jealously hoarded by the Luminoso and locked away awaiting some future golden age, the legendary Fourth Plenty of Mankind. Naila wanted them now. She wanted to palm the illusion egg, creep through the temple, and search for the key. To let herself in, the archivists be damned.

  Salvatore’s expression shifted between anger, worry, and greed, depending on whether he was looking at Naila, at the paper with Lord Carbón’s seal crumpled in his fist, or at the stone ribbing holding up the vaulted ceiling.

  “He should have told us,” Salvatore said.

  “He did tell us. Iliana brought the note to the temple herself.”

  “And you shouldn’t have intercepted it. I should have read it first. Anyway, code says Carbón was in error. Code says that he must tell us immediately when an artifact is found. So why didn’t he tell us earlier? Is he playing some sort of game?”

  “Lord Carbón claims he didn’t know what it was at first,” she said. “He thought there might be witherers coming out of the seam, and so he brought in his foremen and engineers to get around the blighted area. Only when it killed this man—what was his name? Zayas?—did he realize there was something else in the mine.”

  Salvatore crumpled the note and threw it to the floor with a disgusted sneer. “That’s an obvious lie. Carbón was trying to steal the artifact. And your husband’s father was helping him. Only the Elders know what they intended to do with it.”

  Naila thought back to the conversation she’d overheard in the baths that night at Mercado’s festival banquet. Carbón and Torre weren’t trying to steal the artifact—in fact they’d intended to hand it to the Luminoso all along—but trying to get it out of the way so that the mines could continue to produce the coal that was Quintana’s life.

  She discreetly picked up Carbón’s note and glanced at it whenever Salvatore paced away. Just as the master suspected, and Naila knew, it was a combination of facts, obfuscations, and outright dissembling.

  According to the note, Lord Carbón had faced some difficulty getting into a seam of coal that passed behind a vertical shelf of rock. They found a narrow entry, but when witherers drove the miners out of the shaft, he was forced to bring in engineers. One had come all the way from Basdeen, a city that lay north, along the coast. She’d been hired, it seemed, by Lord Torre, who had once used the woman’s family for repairs to the waterworks that opened and closed the Great Span.

  It was only when Carbón was down in the mines himself that he and his engineers discovered what appeared to be a large and dangerous artifact from one of the plenties. It had killed a man by the name of Zayas before the others could escape. Apart from being dangerous, the artifact’s exact nature was unknown, but Carbón claimed to be happy for the Luminoso to claim it, if they could.

  Naila knew the truth of the matter wasn’t exactly how Carbón presented it; he’d known full well the thing was an artifact, and had planned to extract it from the mine. So what had happened? He must have tried to do just that and failed badly. Was it just the death of the one foreman—this Zayas fellow—or had others died as well?

  She pocketed the note. “So how are we going to get it out?” she asked. “We’ll need some other artifact, I assume, to make it happen. Something to neutralize it.”

  There was that greedy look on the master’s face again, followed by fear. “I . . . I don’t know. It sounds extremely dangerous. I think it might be best if we sealed it underground for now.”

  She stared. “Are you mad? Seal it underground? Whatever it is has immense power. We need to seize it and learn its secrets.”

  “Hmm. Yes, of course . . . it might even be . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “What? What do you think it might be?”

  “But how to remove it safely from the mines?” He hadn’t answered the question, leaving Naila to wonder where he’d been going with that thought.

  “I’ll go in there myself,” she said. “I’m not afraid—why should I be? You read what Carbón said about the lead-lined gloves. They offered some shielding from the artifact. And I have the underworld bracelet. It will protect me from witherers.”

  “Probably, it won’t. Not if the new artifact itself is breeding them. That close to its center of power—well, I don’t know. Maybe the bracelet will, maybe it won’t. It’s a question for the next plenty.”

  “The next plenty? We need it now. So give me another artifact, protect me from whatever this thing does.”

  Salvatore gave her a hard look. “And who are you? A week ago you were an acolyte. Barely anointed and you’re already giving orders. I don’t think so, Naila Roja y Torre. Be careful, or you’ll find yourself under censure of blasphemy.”

  “Ask the Master of Whispers,” she urged. “What would he say?”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  Salvatore threw up his hands. “Because I don’t know who he is.”

  The admission hung in the air, and Naila stared as he turned away. Salvatore didn’t know? Well, that was something interesting. Salvatore was the Guardian of Secrets—the wise public face of the Luminoso, and second ranking among all cabalists. If the Master of Whispers hadn’t chosen Salvatore for that post, who had? And who did know the identity of the master, the head of the temple and the ultimate power behind the Luminoso?

  An old man entered the room. He had snowy-white hair and bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows, but was tall, slender, and erect in spite of his age. His sack-like robe—it still being penance for another blasted, miserable week—hung loose about his bony frame.

  Naila didn’t know the man, but he wasn’t one of the lay acolytes who worked in the temple, which must mean that he was a cabalist. Yet she believed she’d seen him before, somewhere in the Thousand, she thought.

  In any event, she did not have his name on her list of known cabalists. Salvatore was getting careless. First, he’d made a startling admission about the Master of Whispers, and now he was exposing another cabalist in front of her.

  The old man handed Salvatore a note, and the master turned his back on Naila to read it. Naila carefully observed the old man, memorizing his features, both his face and his slumping way of walking, as he retreated from the room, then studied Salvatore. Some of the worry worked out of the master’s features as he read. In contrast to his abuse of Carbón’s letter, this one he folded carefully and tucked into his shirt pocket.

  “We’ll decide about the artifact later,” he announced. “What needs to be done to wake it, and whether we should do so in the first place.” He pulled pensively at his goatee. “For now we have political problems. Specifically, trouble in the Quinta. Even more specifically, some of the trouble begins in your own household.”

  Naila didn’t like the sound of that. She’d been working that angle herself, turning over how to get Daniel back in the good graces of his father so that he would inherit the ring. One final attempt, she thought, before resorting to harder measures.

  Torre had taken his nephew, Pedro, to the mines with Carbón, along with a handful of other trusted people. Naila had been watching her father-in-law, and spotted Torre and Pedro going up to the plateau in Carbón’s carriages. When she rushed home, Daniel hadn’t known a thing about it.

  Pedro was trusted. Daniel was not. Pedro would someday be given the ring that should rightfully belong to Naila’s husband. She had to stop it, but that didn’t mean she wanted Salvatore meddling in her family business, either.

  “What kind of trouble do you mean?” she asked.

  “Carbón and Torre broke the code, whether we can prove it or not. They were trying to get that artifact—by the Elders, I know it for a certainty—and were intending to keep it from us. Perhaps even to move against the Luminoso itself.”

  That sounded . . . far-fetched. And didn
’t at all match what the two lords had been discussing in the baths that night. Carbón’s reason was far more practical: he simply meant to keep the coal flowing out of his mines so someone like Salvatore didn’t cripple his operation. A fear that seemed entirely reasonable.

  Salvatore nodded. “It’s blasphemous, any way you look at it.”

  “So this is about maintaining purity?” she asked.

  “What else is there? Purity and honor to our ancestors and to the Elders. The artifacts are ours to dispose of as we will. We are the Luminoso, the cabalists who study the heavens, gather the wisdom of the ancients, and await the glorious coming of the Fourth Plenty. For another person to touch these things, to use them for their own purposes, is against code. And we must put a stop to it.”

  “And so what will we do about it?” she asked.

  Salvatore paced back and forth across the room two times, bare feet silent on the marble, before he returned to stand in front of her. “Torre is an old man. He is not long for the earth. A year or two is all he has. Maybe three. Four at most. He is not our problem, except that he’s allied with Carbón. It’s Carbón we need to remove, which should be easy enough, as he has no family, no allies. Only servants.”

  “And a full coin vault—don’t underestimate that. You can buy a lot of loyalty with that much gold.”

  “Which is why we need the other members of the Quinta to turn against him.”

  “What about Mercado?” Naila said. “She is devout.”

  “She is plenty devout, but if Torre stands with Carbón, she’ll believe their story. Anyway, she’s just one against two. Puerto is living in Dalph, and it’s doubtful that he’d return to Quintana for a power play. De Armas would, but that risks his own code violation, doesn’t it?”

  “His armies can’t cross the bridge,” Naila said. “So if de Armas comes, he comes alone. He has no power base in the city.”

  “Indeed, you see the problem we’re facing. I would be happy to wait for the old man’s death, but that will take time. You have to convince Torre to turn against Carbón.”

  “I have no leverage over Torre.”

  “You do through your husband. Daniel will go to his father and warn him of the consequences of standing against the Luminoso. That if Torre is stripped of his ring, there’s a good chance it will be given to another, not to his son. The Luminoso would choose. What about that nephew of his? The boy? The Luminoso might give Pedro the ring, leaving Daniel with nothing. What a blow that would be to Torre’s hopes. His entire legacy would be destroyed. That’s the threat your husband will hold over the old man’s head.”

  Oh, you fool. That’s precisely what Torre wants anyway.

  “What was in the letter the old cabalist gave you just now?” Naila asked.

  “Never you mind.” Salvatore patted his pocket. “Other things I have put in motion. So you’ll speak to your husband? Have him approach Lord Torre and explain why he must abandon Carbón?”

  “And supposing he does?”

  “Then I’ll force Carbón into exile and find another to take his place.” Salvatore must have seen the doubt on her face, because he added, “The wandering stars are in a dangerous position, and if my calculations are correct, they will be all the more dangerous in the weeks to come. We have to stop this blasphemy before it spreads. And it has to be now, not in three or four years when Torre dies.”

  Salvatore seemed to have misread the origin of her doubts. This whole thing was nonsense. From the master’s religious fervor to his erroneous understanding of Lord Torre. Her father-in-law didn’t care for the Luminoso any more than did Lord Carbón. And Daniel’s words of warning—no doubt uncertain and reluctant—wouldn’t mean anything anyway. Would probably only accelerate Pedro’s inevitable ascent, in fact.

  Still, Naila could put this situation to work, both within the family and within the Luminoso at the same time. And perhaps she could get her hands on that fabulous artifact buried in Carbón’s mines, as well.

  But only if she stopped dithering.

  “I’ll take care of Lord Torre,” Naila said.

  “You’re certain?”

  “By this time tomorrow, he will no longer stand in your way. Meanwhile, I suggest you make a concrete plan to take down Lord Carbón. With or without Torre, he’s not going to be as easy to defeat as you think.”

  Chapter Two

  Torre stood outside the family shrine, watching as Pedro, kneeling with his back to his uncle, dabbed his forehead with ash and bent to touch it to the glossy black flagstone. It was overcast, but hot, and the boy wore no cloak, only a linen shirt and short trousers. He was barefoot.

  Pedro prayed in a quiet, solemn tone, the words too soft for the older man to hear. Age had weakened Torre’s hearing, leaving the world perpetually muffled. On and on the boy prayed. Earnest and devout.

  In fact, a little too devout, Torre thought, growing impatient. Just like his mother, Torre’s youngest sister. She was a praying sort, too. Once a week, at least, to the shrine, and twice daily during the penance weeks. Calling on the spirits of their ancestors to intercede with the Elders. To bring back the days of plenty, when hunger, war, and disease were unknown. Back to the days when a man died quietly, painlessly in his sleep at ninety, instead of hobbling, cursing and ailing, toward the grave.

  It wasn’t that Torre disbelieved in the plenties—the evidence was visible all around them—so much as he doubted that prayers and penance would bring them back. If they did return, it would be because of engineers like Grosst and Lozada, because of the work of the Luminoso. Not through wishful thinking.

  At last Pedro rose to his feet and approached the eroded statues in their niches. A stone figure with a staff stood in the center, wearing a strange, conical hat on his head. Surrounding him were flying machines: a sphere tethered to a basket, an oblong object with a horizontal cross propped above it, and a long, tubelike carriage with wings like a bird. Pedro dabbed the statue with ash and touched his thumb to the flying machines and then to his lips. He removed the thong with its carved wooden bird from around his neck and placed it on the shrine platform, which already contained wilting flowers, prayers written on scraps of folded paper, and several burned-down sticks of incense—the offerings of other days, other members of the greater Torre family.

  A crow glided in from above the Rift and landed on the stone slab that perched on the edge of the hillside a few feet away from Lord Torre and his nephew. At one time or another that slab had held the bodies of Torre’s father, his mother, a brother killed in a fall, his wife, and his dead children. The crow cocked his head and eyed the two men—one old, one young—with an inquisitive expression in its black eyes, as if wondering if this gathering was the precursor to a funeral.

  Always hungry, these crows of the Rift, always ready to call a flock of their brethren through their loud, jeering cries. It was said that a crow could live for twenty years or more, a time in which they became adept at stripping the flesh from a body. From a corpse to bones in three, maybe four days.

  And that reminded Torre that the next body to be laid out on that slab to have its bones picked clean would most likely be his own. An image of his pale, flaccid body being unwrapped from its linens came unbidden into his mind. Annoyed at the reminder of his own mortality, he waved his arms and made as if to take a menacing step toward the bird. It flapped into the air with a startled caw.

  Pedro turned around at the noise, and his eyes widened in surprise when he saw Torre behind him.

  “Uncle, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were there. Were you waiting long?”

  “You didn’t hear my knees popping? My breath wheezing? I swear, the forty-two steps up here feel like eight hundred these days.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I was . . . I was in my prayers, I think.”

  “That was obvious enough. Going on and on like that.”

  “I suppose you heard my last prayer.”

  “Not a word of it. Bunch of mumbling and nodding. I’m more than a little deaf, you know.”

  “I was asking for another twenty years for you.”

  “Twenty years? Good heavens, I’ll be cooling on that slab in five.”

  “The Elders forbid. I never want you to die.”

  “All right, all right. That’s enough flattery, and enough of that religious nonsense. I didn’t come up here for this—I have something for you to do.”