by S L Farrell
“I must apologize profusely, Kraljica,” Sergei said, though Rochelle thought he sounded more pleased than apologetic. So that was the Kraljica. Great-matarh, I’m here for you… But not now. Not yet. There were too many people around her: Sergei, the one called Talbot, as well as a quartet of gardai.
“Your ‘accident’-if that’s what it really was-may have jeopardized our chance to assault the Tehuantin on the South Bank. Now there’s only one route over, so…”
Their voices drifted into unintelligibility as they walked down the corridor. Rochelle risked opening the door wider. There were two gardai stationed at the door from where the group had come. Rochelle ducked back into the servants’ corridor. She took the corridor that led off in the direction of the room with the gardai, counting her steps to judge when she’d walked the distance. There was another door a few strides farther down the corridor. She opened that door.
She found herself in the Hall of the Sun Throne. The crystalline mass of the Sun Throne itself dominated the hall on its dais. Fine. This would do: the Kraljica must come back here in time, and Rochelle could fulfill her promise.
She saw a flash of light through the high windows of the hall, and the palais itself shook as thunder grumbled. She could smell woodsmoke and the windows of the palais were alight with a dawn of flame.
Rochelle settled herself in to wait.
Niente dusted the water in the scrying bowl with the orange powder and chanted the spell to open his mind to Axat. The green mist began to rise, and he bent his head over the bowl.
They were encamped in the city itself, with warriors securing the streets and plundering the houses and buildings there-for food and supplies, had been Tototl’s orders, but Niente was certain that many of the warriors were also taking whatever treasures they could carry. Others had been set to building a catapult, and Niente had tasked the nahualli with enchanting the bags of black sand that the catapult would hurl onto the island so that they would explode upon impact. The chanting of the nahualli and the hammering of the warrior engineers filled the wide boulevard outside the fortress prison at the river’s edge. From the gates of the edifice, the skull of a horrible, many-toothed creature leered down at Niente-almost as if it could be the head of the winged serpent that flew on the Tecuhtli’s banner. That, Niente thought, was nearly an irony. Axat’s Eye had risen, and it seemed to watch Niente as he performed the ritual, watched him as intently as did Tototl.
The visions came quickly, rushing toward him almost too fast for him to see, the paths of the future twisting and intertwining. Niente could still see victory along the clearest, closest path, but now it was a victory won at terrible cost. There were changes wrought on the landscape, powers rising that hadn’t been glimpsed before, or that had been hinted at only in wisps of possibilities: the king of black-and-silver; the old woman who smelled of black sand; the young man with the wild, strange power. That last one… He was the most difficult of all for Niente to see, wrapped in mist and mystery. Around him, all the possible paths of the future seemed to be coiled. Niente wanted to stay with this one, but the mists kept pushing him away no matter how hard he tried.
In the mist, Niente could also feel Atl, so close that he almost thought that his son was standing beside him, peering into his bowl at the same time. Here. He tried to cast his thoughts toward Atl. See what I see. Let me find the Long Path, and hope you see it also…
But there was no response. He couldn’t show Atl what he had seen, nor could he see what Atl saw. In the mist, they stayed separate.
“Will they take down the other bridge?” Tototl asked. “If they do that…”
“If they do that, then we can’t get across to help Tecuhtli Citlali. I know. Now let me look…”
He’d already seen that: in the primary path, the Easterners inexplicably never destroyed either bridge. He didn’t understand that. With the bridges up, Tototl would win through to the Isle, though at terrible cost. The strange black sand weapons that the Easterners wielded would take down far too many warriors before they could, inevitably, overwhelm them. They would reach Citlali and still crush the Easterners between them, but this was no longer the overwhelming victory that Niente had seen in Tlaxcala. Everything had changed.
Which meant the Long Path had changed as well. If the Long Path were still there at all.
Niente bent his head into the mist again, searching. Please, Axat. Show me…
And She did.
The Storm’s Passing
“Well?” Tototl asked Niente as he poured the water from the scrying bowl onto the cobbles of the boulevard. Niente cleaned the bowl with the sleeve of his shirt and looked solemnly at the High Warrior.
“Do you remember, Tototl, that we talked about how something that appeared to be a victory might not be so?”
Tototl’s painted visage remained impassive. “I remember you saying that,” he said. “And I remember that I told you that I believed you saw more in the bowl than you were telling Tecuhtli Citlali. So tell me now, Uchben Nahual, what did you see? Tell me the truth.”
Niente placed the scrying bowl back in its pouch, feeling the texture of the incised patterns along its rims. He took up his spell-staff; he could feel the energy of the X’in Ka throbbing within the wood, captured and ready to be loosed. The smells filled his nostrils: burning wood, the scent of water, the odor of clothing worn too long. He swallowed, and he tasted the lingering tang of the green mist he had inhaled. His senses seemed too full and too sharp. He glanced up at the leering skull on the wall above him, and he could imagine the thing alive once more-teeth like ivory knives slicing open a victim caught in its powerful jaws.
“Listen to me, Tototl,” he said. “I said nothing to Tecuhtli Citlali because he couldn’t see beyond now and beyond his own ambitions. You have the imagination to do that. You could become a great Tecuhtli. One whose name would ring for generations.”
Tototl couldn’t entirely conceal the eagerness those words brought to him: Niente saw it in the the faint movement of the warrior’s mouth, in the slight widening of his eyes in their pools of red paint. There was ambition in the warrior. “You saw that?” he asked.
A nod. “It’s one of the futures. A possibility.” Niente paused. He looked at the catapult, nearly finished now. He looked at the bridge arching near them at the end of the boulevard, at the great building that loomed just beyond it, at the golden dome rising above the other rooftops in the middle of the island. “Tototl, victory right now hinges on a thread. You are that thread, Tototl. Without you, there is no victory at all. I’ve seen that.”
“What must I do?”
“You must win through to the island and to the other side, as you said earlier. You must bring your warriors to attack the Easterners from their rear. If you want victory, that’s what you have to accomplish.”
“Why would I not? That’s why we came here: to take the city, to avenge our loss with Tecuhtli Zolin, to rule this land.”
Niente wondered if he should tell him. Certainly Citlali would have heard none of it; he would have stopped Niente already, and Niente-he had to admit-would have bowed to the Tecuhtli. I will have victory here… That was all Citlali wanted to hear. He would scoff at the Long Path; he wouldn’t care what happened years afterward. But then, Tototl might feel the same. Niente took a breath. He watched the nahualli place the first of the black sand charges in the carrier of the catapult as the warriors winched down the arm.
“Citlali’s victory here will be too costly for us in the end,” Niente said. “He might yet take the city, but he won’t be able to hold it for long. Other Easterner armies will come from the far corners of their empire. This land is huge, and we have too few warriors here and not enough time to send for more from across the sea. And when the Easterners have killed all of us who are left, they will look toward our homeland and they will return there with an even greater army than the one they brought before. They will hunt us down until they’re certain we can never trouble them again.”
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“You know this?”
Niente shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “But it’s a future I see; the likely one.”
“Has the new Nahual seen this also?”
Niente shook his head. “No. But Atl’s still learning. He sees only the near future, not the Long Path.”
“Before, you saw an easy victory. You said that before we ever left our own land.”
“I did,” Niente admitted. “At the time, that was the truth. But that has changed. There are forces here that were hidden from me, situations that have changed from what they were when I first consulted Axat. Nothing in the future is ever solid and fixed.”
“Then this future you see might also change. Will also change.”
“It might. Still… Tototl, I would tell you to take the warriors here and leave. Find our ships-by now, they should be nearly to the city. Take them and return home. I would tell you to become the Tecuhtli so that when the Easterners come back to our land-and they will come back-we will still be strong enough to resist them. They’ll understand that as we couldn’t conquer them, also they can’t conquer us, and our empires will have to deal with each other as equals.”
Tototl was already shaking his head. “I won’t run,” he said. “I won’t abandon Citlali. Not without knowing that I have no other choice.”
“Then here are the signs, Tototl. When the magic is snatched away from all the nahualli, when you see me fall to a weapon that shouldn’t kill-those are the signs that what I tell you is true. Will you retreat then, Tototl? Will you listen to my advice, as Tecuhtli Citlali would not.”
Tototl seemed to laugh. “You’re like a length of smoked beef, Uchben Nahual,” he said, “too old and tough to die. And who could snatch away the power of the nahualli?”
“If it happens,” Niente pleaded, “if you see those signs, will you go?”
“If it happens,” Tototl told him, “I will remember what you said, and I’ll do what I think I must.”
As he said the words, the catapult sang its deadly song, and a fireball went hissing across the river toward the island. They both watched it fall and explode in a roar of orange flame.
Jan wondered if this would be his final day.
Smoke smudged the southeastern sky from fires burning unchecked on the South Bank of the city. Runners had come from his matarh during the night with a message-the Tehuantin were on the South Bank; they would try to push them back in the morning; send a company of your gardai if you can spare them.
But he couldn’t spare them. They were already too few for the task before them. The night before had been hideous, with the ground shaking as both sides pounded at each other with black sand. Now the eastern sky was pink and orange, and the Tehuantin would be renewing the ground attack. He was certain of that; it was what he would have done himself.
One of the pages was assisting him with his armor, and Jan winced as the boy tightened the lacings of his cuirass-an armorer having pounded out the indentation from the brick the night before. “Go on,” he told the page. “Make them tight. Can’t have it falling off in the middle of battle.”
Any movement hurt. It hurt to breathe. He’d coughed up blood last night after he’d recovered consciousness, though that, thankfully, had stopped. Binding his chest in the armor actually felt good, but he wondered if he could take a sword blow to the ribs without collapsing. He wondered if he could lead his men the way a Hirzg should: at the head of the charge into the enemy. “Bring my horse to me,” Jan said, and the page saluted and scurried away.
He had spent the night in a tent beyond the second wall of earthworks. Most of the black sand had fallen well short of that encampment, but there were still craters of dark earth here and there, and smoke from grass fires that had to be extinguished. The offiziers had reported the losses to him a half-turn earlier after calling the rolls. Jan had been appalled. He had brought over 4,000 gardai and some 300 chevarittai to Nessantico. He and Starkkapitan ca’Damont had split them nearly equally. Jan now had less than 1,000 gardai and five double hands of chevarittai; ca’Damont had less.
No, he could not send a company to the Kraljica. He would be lucky to return to Nessantico with a full company himself. He’d read the message from ca’Talin: Outlook grim. Recommend holding as long as possible, then falling back to the city itself. Under it, in his spidery handwriting, ca’Damont had added a brief I concur. Jan had sent his own message in return to the two:
Agreed. Make them pay for crossing the river, then fall back to the River Market. We’ll regroup there and consult with the Kraljica.
The page came back leading a warhorse that had once borne one of the dead chevarittai. The boy placed a step next to the horse, then helped hoist Jan into the saddle. He managed to get himself seated without groaning aloud. “Thank you,” he told the boy, saluting. He cantered away, wincing as every step jarred his body. He rode up the short slope to the top of the second embankment. He waited there for several breaths, looking out over the landscape.
Most of his troops were gathered below, in the wide trough between the earthworks, snaking away far to the south and the Starkkapitan ca’Damont’s command, and past there to Commandant ca’Talin, and extending north for a half-mile or so to the Avi a’ Nostrosei. Beyond the slope of the first embankment across from Jan, there was a quarter mile or less of flat ground between the earthworks and the River Infante-the field was torn by horses and the boots of the soldiers, and pockmarked with craters from the black sand bombardment. On the other side of the Infante, Jan could see the army of the Tehuantin. Their offiziers were already setting the formations, and Jan could see small flags planted here and there along the far riverbank-he assumed their scouts had marked the shallows where the river could be forded.
There were far too many flags. The Infante was neither deep nor wide like the A’Sele; there were too many places where the Tehuantin could cross. Last night, Jan had asked one of the local gardai to map the spots where footmen could wade across; he had archers placed across from the potential fords.
Make them pay for crossing the river… He might not be able to stop them, but he could charge them a steep toll.
A few Westlander archers sent futile arrows in his direction; they fell short, and Jan gestured obscenely at them. “Come on!” he shouted at them, his chest burning with the effort. “Come on; we’re waiting for you, bastardos! We ready to make your wives widows and your children orphans!” He said it for the benefit of the gardai in the trench between the embankments, who looked up at him and cheered; he doubted that any of the Westlanders understood his words at all, even if they understood the tone. He wanted to double over from the stabbing pain in his chest as he roared his defiance, but instead he smiled and gestured again at the Tehuantin. A few hundred strides away, he saw his banners, and he saluted the men and went to where his offiziers had gathered.
“Another sunrise,” he told them. “That’s always a good sight. The sun is at our backs and in their eyes. Let’s make this day the last they see.”
Allesandra paraded on her warhorse before those gathered in the courtyard of the palais. In the false dawn, her armor gleamed, yesterday’s gore scrubbed and polished away. Brie, Talbot, and that damned fool Sergei were behind her on their own horses, watching as she stalked the line. She let her anger and frustration ride freely in her words.
“We have no choice,” she told them. “It is my duty-it is our duty-to protect this city, and I will not let us betray that trust. Right now, the Westlanders hold the South Bank. They walk streets that should be safe for our citizens, plundering our houses and our temples, killing and raping those who have remained behind. The Hirzg’s forces and our own Garde Civile are facing their main army on the North Bank; they have tasked us with protecting their rear flank, and with keeping the city a safe place for their return. We must hold the South Bank. I will hold the South Bank.”
She paused as another fireball screamed through the brightening sky-they all watched it. Her horse trembled
underneath her, and she patted its muscular neck, calming it as the fireball fell to earth behind them across the Avi. “You see?” she said. “The Tehuantin mean nothing less than the destruction of the Holdings and Nessantico. Stay here, and all of you will die anyway. If I’m to die, I would rather die with my sword in my hand and my enemy bleeding at my feet.”
The cheer that came from them was loud but ragged. Even some of those shouting looked unsure. The sparkwheelers, to one side, shuffled uneasily; she noticed Brie glaring at them. “We march today to glory,” she told them, pulling her sword from its sheath and holding it aloft. “We march for the Holdings. We march for Nessantico. And I will march with you, at your head.”
An open-top, teni-driven carriage rattled down the streets through the smoke, moving slowly around the rubble in the street; Allesandra could see the symbol of Cenzi’s cracked globe on the doors of the vehicle. “Today, the Archigos himself will march with us,” she added. “Make yourselves ready. We will begin the attack in two marks of the glass, and we’ll show these Westlanders how the Holdings responds to those who threaten it.”
They cheered again, because-Allesandra knew-it was expected of them, because they wanted to believe her even as fear made their bowels want to turn to water. She rode toward the Archigos’ carriage with Brie, Talbot, and Sergei trailing her. Archigos Karrol’s balding head peered over the side of the carriage; he did not look pleased to be here. Two pale, younger faces were visible behind him. “Archigos, I’m glad to see you,” Allesandra said. “However belatedly.”
“Let’s not pretend that you or the Hirzg left me any choice, Kraljica,” he answered. “But I’m here.”
“And the war-teni?”
“There are four more who have arrived from the east today. I sent two to the Hirzg; the other two are with me. They understand the consequences if they fail to serve.” He gestured to the other two teni in the carriage.