by S L Farrell
He realized after a few steps that they were alone. Talis remained standing in the statue’s shadow. He had Serafina’s hand, and Nico’s. “Talis!”
Talis shook his head. “No,” he said loudly.
“Talis, Sergei went to Firenzcia. We can follow him. You don’t have anything you can use to bargain with these people. Not anymore. You’re endangering Serafina and Nico.”
Talis smiled at Karl and Varina. “Ah, but I do have a bargaining chip-Uly’s black sand. Remember? It’s still there.”
Karl felt Varina’s hand tighten on his arm. He remembered: Uly, the casks of ingredients in his rooms, waiting to be mixed… “You can’t. To give them that…”
“These are my people,” Talis said. “I thank you for all you’ve done for Sera and Nico, but these are my people, the people I know, and it’s time for me to go back to them. You go on to yours.” He waved to the soldiers, shouting something in a language that Karl could not understand. “Go on,” he said to Karl. “Go on while you have the chance.”
“At least let us take Serafina and Nico with us,” Varina called to him, but Talis shook his head.
“They’re my family and they stay with me. Go, Karl. Or stay. But make your choice.” Serafina looked at them, her face panicked and uncertain. Nico stared, wide-eyed but seemingly calm.
Several painted warriors were coming at a run now. Talis raised his spell-staff. Light blossomed from it, coruscating and banishing the shadow of Henri VI. “Karl?” Varina’s hand was raised; he could feel the energy of the Second World gathering around her.
“There are too many of them,” he told her.
“We can’t leave them. Can’t leave Nico.”
“We don’t have a choice,” he answered.
Karl took Varina’s hand, and they ran.
Nico Morel
Nico couldn’t understand what Talis was saying as the painted soldiers approached them. He could hear the uncertainty in his vatarh’s voice and the way he was speaking louder and faster, holding the magical walking stick in front of him like a cudgel. His matarh clutched Nico so fiercely that he could barely breathe as the strange men surrounded them, impossibly large and frightening and smelling of blood and death.
Nico could feel the fear rising in him and with it, the strange coldness he’d felt in the Archigos’ office, as it had when he’d run away from Ville Paisli. It began to build inside him, and he muttered to himself the strange words that came to his mind as his hands made small motions under his matarh’s clinging embrace.
“Talis,” he heard his matarh say, “what’s happening? I’m frightened…”
“It’s fine,” his vatarh said, but his voice belied that. “I just need to talk to the High Warrior. Let me do that. They’re my people; they just didn’t expect to find me here…”
He turned back to one of the painted men, the one with a red-tongued black lizard crawling from the top of his skull, around his left eye, and down the side of his head. As they half-shouted at each other, Talis shaking his stick in the man’s face, Nico felt the cold growing and growing inside, so intense that he knew he would burst if he tried to contain it any longer. Nico cried out: the strange words. He gestured.
There was no blue fire this time. Instead, the air shivered around him, rippling visibly outward, and where that fast-moving wave struck the painted men, they were thrown backward as if a great fist had struck them. “Come on, Matarh!” Nico yelled. He grabbed her hand, pulling her away so that she stumbled after him as he fled in the direction that Karl and Varina had gone. “Talis! Hurry!”
But Talis wasn’t running with them; he’d also been felled by the wild burst from Nico. The lizard-warrior had already regained his feet, and Nico-glancing over his shoulder as he started to run-could see him shouting to the others as Talis screamed something back at him and raised his walking stick. Blinding light flashed from the stick and one of the warriors howled. Nico pulled at his matarh harder. “Run!”
She took a step with him, but her hand dropped away from his. He took another step before he realized that she wasn’t with him. He heard Talis scream-“Sera!”-and turned back.
His matarh was lying sprawled on the cobbles of the plaza, a spear in her back and blood staining the paving stones. She was reaching toward Nico, crawling after him, her face drawn with pain. “Matarh!” Nico screamed, and ran back to her. He went down alongside her just as Talis reached her also.
“Nico…” she said. “I’m sorry…” Her head turned to Talis and she started to speak, but he stroked her head, cradling her carefully.
“No, don’t say anything. We’ll get you to a healer, someone who can help…” Talis looked up at the painted soldiers, who had gathered around them. He spoke to them, sharply, in their own language. The lizard-warrior scowled, but he gestured to his men. One pulled the spear from his matarh’s back, and she screamed again. Nico hurled himself at the lizard-warrior, pummeling at the man’s armor with his fist. The man grabbed Nico in one muscular arm and grunted something to Talis. “Nico!” Talis said. “They’re going to help her. Please listen to me. You have to stop fighting them.”
All the energy left him; he went limp in the lizard-warrior’s grasp.
Two of the warriors crouched down; they tore strips from their clothing and bound it around his matarh’s waist, around the wound. Then one of them gathered up his matarh in his arms; she groaned and her eyes rolled back in her head, but Nico could see that she was still breathing. One of her hands dangled; Nico wriggled in the lizard-warrior’s grasp, and the man let him go. He ran and took his matarh’s hand.
He held it, sobbing, as they walked quickly away from the plaza.
Niente
They had the city.
Or, more properly, they held portions of it. Nessantico was too large and their force was too small to actually control the entire city. They had smashed it instead, they had used black sand to set it afire, they had sent the Garde Civile retreating to the north and south.
The city no longer belonged to the Kraljica and her people, but it was not the Tehuantins’ either.
Niente was certain it would never be theirs.
“Well?” Zolin asked as Niente peered into the water of the scrying bowl.
“Patience, Tecuhtli,” he told the man. “Patience.” But he already knew. The vision had already passed and the water was simply water. But by pretending, he could decide what he wanted to say. By pretending, he could recover from the worst of the weariness and exhaustion the spell cost him.
He’d seen-again-in the midst of the great, ruined city, the dead Tecuhtli and the dead nahualli, and he’d felt again that shiver of certainty that he was seeing Zolin and himself. Nothing had changed. Axat still showed him the same future, the same path. Nothing had altered after this victory; Niente felt that nothing could alter it. It was fixed, as inevitable as the sunrise in the morning.
They were standing in the ruins of the temple, and Zolin sat on the throne the Kraljica had used. A spear had been thrust, butt foremost, into a crevice in the shattered tile floor next to the throne. The Kraljica’s head had been set there, her single, glazed eye staring outward, the hair hanging down obscenely-her body was crumpled against the wall behind the throne where it had been tossed. A fire pit had been made in the middle of the room, fed with the wood of the temple’s pews; thin, gray smoke drifted upward toward a sky that was beginning to turn purple. Tables had been erected around the pit, and a banquet was in progress, served by frightened Easterner prisoners. There was no particular need for their fright; Zolin and the other High Warriors would not have permitted any of them to be harmed. Yes, there would be the inevitable rapes and looting and killings, but the incidents would be few, and those who perpetrated them would be severely punished if they were caught. A few high-ranking offiziers would be sacrificed for the glory of Axat and Sakal, but no other prisoners would come to harm.
The Tehuantin were more lenient and kind victors than the Easterners had been when th
ey came to the Hellins.
As the warriors feasted, Niente gazed into the scrying bowl near the pit. The firelight licked at Niente’s skin, but the warmth couldn’t touch the cold he felt within. He picked up the scrying bowl finally and tossed the water into the blazing coals, which hissed and steamed in response.
“So,” Zolin said, “does Axat see me staying here? I think this a fine place. We could build a new city here, one like this land has never seen, one to rival Tlaxcala, and I could be Tecuhtli here, and the Easterners will serve us as they forced our cousins to serve them.”
“I do see you staying here, Tecuhtli,” Niente told him, and that was no more than the truth.
Zolin slapped the crystalline arms of the throne. He roared with delight, and the warriors gathered in the hall laughed with him. “You see!” he shouted to Niente. “All those worries-I told you, Nahual. I told you.”
“You did, Tecuhtli,” Niente told him.
Zolin leaned forward on the throne. “Did you see other battles? Did you see me taking new cities?”
Niente shook his head. “No,” he answered. “And that wouldn’t be wise, Tecuhtli. We have no more black sand at all. If we could replenish the warriors who have fallen, if I could bring more nahualli here…” He spread his hands. “I would tell the Tecuhtli…” he began, but there was a commotion at the end of the hall: the High Warrior Citlali, with a man alongside him-a man carrying a spell-staff. Niente squinted into the firelit gloom of the evening; it was not a nahualli that he recognized, and the man was dressed as one of the Easterners, the front of his clothing stained with blood. Still, that face…
“Talis?” Niente said. “Is that you?” The face-he looked years older than he should, his face as ravaged by Axat’s power as Niente’s was, but Niente remembered the youth in the man’s face.
“Niente?” Talis hurried forward and grasped Niente’s forearm, his eyes searching Niente’s face, no doubt as changed as his own. “By Axat, it’s been a long, long time. You’re the Nahual? Good. Good for you…” He saw Tecuhtli Zolin then and half-turned, bowing his head to Zolin. “Tecuhtli. I see that Necalli has fallen.”
Niente was still looking at Talis. There was pain in the man’s eyes that wasn’t of the X’in Ka. “Are you hurt?” he asked, and Talis shook his head.
“No, it’s…” He stopped, and Niente saw worry and sadness collapse in on the man. “I… I have a wife here, and a son. She’s
… been terribly injured. I need to get back to them…”
“We’ve taken her and the boy to the healing tent, Tecuhtli, Nahual,” Citlali broke in. “They’re doing what they can.”
“Good,” Zolin said. “And you may go to them in a moment, Talis. So you are the one the previous Nahual sent here? I know he told Tecuhtli Necalli that you were nearly as strong as Mahri-that you would have been a fine Nahual.” Zolin glanced once over to Niente. “Perhaps that will end up being your fate. I’ve read your reports over the years; they’ve helped us understand and defeat the Easterners. For that, I’m grateful.”
“Tecuhtli,” Citlali said as Zolin paused, leaning back in his chair. “Talis has information you must know, about an army just to the east of the city. That is why I’ve brought him here.”
Talis nodded, and Niente listened to him with growing dread as he talked about this army of Firenzcia, and the reputation of that country’s military. Niente especially was distressed by the growing look of eagerness on Zolin’s face. “Tecuhtli,” Niente said, “this is what the scrying bowl was saying to me. We have done all that we came here to do. We should take ship now and return home before this army comes on us. We could raise a new army and come again with more ships and more warriors and nahualli the next time, and if you wish to sit on this throne as Tecuhtli of the East, we will place you here with enough resources to make that happen. But not now. We are too few-warriors and nahualli-for another great fight, especially without black sand.”
Niente thought that, finally, he had made his point. Zolin grimaced as he sat on the throne, tapping fingers on the crystalline arm. He nodded, as if thinking.
But Talis then dashed any lingering hope. “There is black sand,” Talis said. “Or rather, there are enough of the ingredients here in the city to make much of it. I know where it is.”
Zolin leaned forward on the throne, his eyes widening so that the wings of the eagle danced on his face. “Where? Take us to it now.”
“Tecuhtli, my wife… I need to go to her.”
Niente knew how Zolin would react to that; he wasn’t surprised. “We all have wives and family,” the Tecuhtli retorted. “Our duty is here and now. Citlali, how is the woman?”
Citlali lifted a shoulder. “She is in the hands of those who know best what to do. There’s nothing else that can be done.”
“There. You see, Talis?” Zolin said. “You have your answer. I’m sorry for your wife’s injuries, and I understand that you want to be with her. But your Tecuhtli has need of you also. Nahual Niente is correct-without more black sand, we will lose what we have gained. The black sand, nahualli, that is what is needed.” Zolin leaned forward, elbows on knees. “The wife of a traitor would receive no help at all,” he said.
Niente heard the next words as if they were the ringing of death chimes. “As you wish, Tecuhtli,” Talis told him. “I will take you there.”
“Good,” Zolin said, standing. “Citlali, refresh yourself and get the warriors ready for more battle. Nahual Niente, you will do the same with the nahualli. In the meantime, I will speak with you, Talis, while we find this black sand.”
Sergei ca’Rudka
Sergei found it difficult to believe all that Karl and Varina told him. Sergei had seen the smoke of the fires in Nessantico and the wind had brought its scent to them and he knew that the city suffered, but this: Nessantico conquered, much of it in ruins…
He had not expected this.
There was too much he had not expected. Sergei was feeling very old and frail indeed.
“Archigos ca’Cellibrecca is here? ” Karl said, and Sergei nodded in acknowledgment. Karl’s face was hard and set, his voice clipped and grim. “Then take me to him, Sergei. Let that be the payment for releasing you from the Bastida. Just take me to him and walk away. You don’t need to be involved in the rest.”
“It’s not that simple, Karl,” he said.
“Actually, it is that simple,” Karl retorted. “The man killed Ana, and I want justice for her murder.”
“I can’t give you that,” Sergei told them. “Not here, and not now. But I can tell you that Hirzg Jan has no great affection for the man. I think that the same can be said of A’Hirzg Allesandra-at least for the moment. Karl, let me deal with this. Please.” Sergei looked at Varina for support; she leaned close to Karl.
“Listen to him,” she said. “Or listen to Ana-what would she tell you?”
The trio were in Sergei’s tent in the Firenzcian encampment, where the two had been brought by the first soldiers they’d encountered. Sergei had been amazed and pleased to see the two Numetodo; after their separation, he’d been afraid that they’d been caught and imprisoned, or worse. If their tale had caused him distress, it was the thought of Nessantico laying ruined that was too painful to imagine.
He also knew that the Hirzg and A’Hirzg, at the very least, would also have been informed of their arrival; he was somewhat surprised he hadn’t yet heard from either of them. And when Archigos Semini learned that the Ambassador of the Numetodo was in the encampment… He needed to prepare against that. Allesandra and Jan were another issue; he wasn’t quite certain how they would respond. He’d do his best to protect Karl and Varina, but…
“Karl,” he said. “I promise you this: when the time comes, I will help you with ca’Cellibrecca. The man is a blight and an insult to the robes Archigos Ana wore. We both agree on that. When the time comes, I will gladly help you make his death as painful as you like.” Sergei almost smiled, thinking of Semini ensconced in the Bastida. Yes,
that would be delightful. That would be… enjoyable.
Varina’s eyes widened somewhat at the statement, but Karl, tight-lipped, nodded. There was a discreet clearing of a throat at the tent flap a moment later. “Enter,” Sergei said, and the flap opened to reveal one of the Hirzg’s pages. “Regent, Hirzg Jan requests that you bring your two guests-” the boy’s eyes flicked across to Karl and Varina, “-to his tent. He’s set a supper for them and wishes to hear what they have to say.”
“Tell the Hirzg that we’ll be there directly,” Sergei told the page, who bowed deeply and withdrew. “You’ve nothing to fear from Hirzg Jan,” he told the two. He hoped that was the truth. “I rather like the young man. In some ways, he reminds me of myself…”
“Archigos Semini will counsel me that the Numetodo are heretics and liars, and dangerous to me physically as well as to my eternal soul,” Hirzg Jan said.
“Archigos Semini is a liar and a fool, and an ass besides,” Sergei answered. “If I may be forgiven my bluntness, Hirzg.”
Jan grinned. “Sit,” he said to Karl and Varina, gesturing to the table where bread and cheese and a pot of meat stew sat. Plates of dull pewter were set before them. “Enjoy the little comforts we have here in the field, since I can’t give you the full hospitality of Firenzcia.” When they hesitated, Jan’s smile broadened. “I assure you that I share the opinion of the Regent when it comes to Archigos Semini.”
Varina managed a smile; Karl still looked uncertain. “And what is the Hirzg’s opinion of the Numetodo?” he asked.
“One of the things that Regent ca’Rudka has taught me is that I should judge people not by what they are, but by who they are. I have no opinion on the Numetodo yet-until now, I’ve never met one.” Jan gestured at their seats again. “Please…”