A Magic of Dawn

by S L Farrell

  She sat in the first pew with Sergei and the Kraljica surrounding her, and she stared at the bier on which Karl’s body lay. She felt dead herself, inside. All the oiled and polished words of admiration might as well have been spoken in some foreign language. They did not touch her. She stared at Karl’s body. He looked wrong, as if the corpse was some poor waxen sculpture laying there. Perhaps Karl was standing elsewhere in the temple, laughing at what was being said about him. Sergei leaned over toward her at one point and whispered something into her ear. She didn’t hear him; she just nodded and he eventually leaned away again.

  There was a mourning mask on her lap: a white, expressionless face of thin porcelain, the closed lips too red, the open eyeholes shimmed with wisps of black fabric, a black lace veil glued to the top and draped over the front. The mask was mounted on a long stick so she could fold her hands on her lap and still have the mask cover her face if she felt the need to be private. The mask seemed too much effort to lift, and it seemed wholly inadequate to cover her grief.

  The murals of the newly-rebuilt Great Dome of cu’Brunelli had been draped with silken curtains: all the images of Cénzi and the Moitidi hidden because a Numetodo—a heretic, a horrible unbeliever—lay beneath them. She realized that without really seeing it. The sacred vessels and embroidered cloths had been removed from the altar on the quire, even the bas-reliefs carved on the thick buttresses had been veiled.

  She should have been amused, noting that. Karl would have been, certainly. She was amused, somewhere distantly. She felt as if “Varina” were somewhere outside, observing this dull, wooden simulacrum of herself.

  Varina realized that the people were standing around her, that several of the Numetodo had moved to their positions alongside the bier. The plan was for the bier to move in procession through the streets around the Old Temple to the outer courtyard of the Kraljica’s Palais, where the pyre awaited the body. It was a relatively short distance of about two and a half blocks in the Isle a’Kralji—far, far shorter than the grand processions for Kraljica Marguerite or Kraljiki Justi, which had followed nearly the entire circle of Avi a’Parete around the city.

  Nessantico was still careful about celebrating the Numetodo too much.

  She would watch his body be consumed by the flames, and afterward . . .

  Varina didn’t want to think about that. She didn’t want to contemplate the rest of the day, returning to the Ambassador’s residence on the South Bank where Karl’s ghost would haunt every corner and every memory, where she would constantly be reminded of the loss she had suffered.

  She would never sleep next to him again. She would never hold him again. Never talk to him. She felt emptied of everything important, felt dead herself. Someone could cut off her hands or drive a knife into her heart and she would feel nothing.

  Nothing.

  She was standing with the others. She realized that belatedly, wondering whether she had risen herself or whether someone had helped her up. She didn’t remember. She blinked, heavily. The bier with Karl’s body, resting with hands folded atop his fine white bashta and the green sash of Paeti, was passing her; she shuffled out directly behind it with the others following. Sergei remained at her side, his silver-tipped cane tapping on the flags, his silver-tipped face gazing sternly forward; Kraljica Allesandra and A’Téni ca’Paim were directly behind them, then the various ca’and-’cu’ of the city, the diplomatic representatives living in Nessantico, and finally those of the Numetodo.

  The doors of the Old Temple were pushed open. Even under the dreary sky, the light made Varina narrow her eyes. She could taste rain in the air, and the flags of the plaza were damp. The curious had come out as well: they crowded behind the ranks of Garde Kralji and utilino who were keeping a wide corridor open for the invited mourners to pass through. Varina could feel their stares on her, and she lifted the mourning mask to her face, closing out the world.

  The carriages were there, waiting, along with the flatbedded funeral wagon drawn by three white horses in a four-horse harness, the left front space glaringly vacant. Behind the funeral wagon were two of the Kraljiki’s carriages drawn by black horses, one carriage for Varina and Sergei, who would ride with her; the other for the Kraljica Allesandra. A’Téni ca’Paim’s carriage was next, without horses, only a driver-téni in white mourning robes sitting on the seat, ready to turn the wheels with the power of the Ilmodo. The remainder of the mourners would walk behind—those who wished to follow the procession to the pyre. Many would not, Varina knew—they had already been seen, which was primarily why they were here: so the Kraljica and A’Téni ca’Paim noticed their faces and knew they had performed their social duty and paid their respects.

  A servant opened the gilded door of the carriage for her and proffered a hand to help her up. She felt the suspension dip under her weight, then dip again as she settled into the plush leather seat and Sergei put his weight on the step and ducked to enter. She let the mourning mask fall back into her lap. He smiled gently at her as he settled into the seat with a groan while the attendant closed and latched the door.

  “How are you doing, my dear?” he asked. He groaned again as he shifted position on the seat. She heard his knee crack as he flexed it.

  For a moment, she heard nothing but nonsense syllables. It took her a breath to process the question and have it make sense. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I’m glad you’re here with me. Karl . . . Karl would have appreciated it.”

  He leaned forward and touched her knee with a thin hand momentarily—the gesture of a confidant. Shadows slid over his silver nose, around the much-wrinkled face. “He was a good friend to me, Varina. Both of you have been. The two of you literally saved my life, and I will never forget that. Never.”

  She nodded. “That debt, one way or another, was paid and repaid between you and Karl. You needn’t worry.”

  “Oh, I don’t,” Sergei answered, and she pondered that remark before letting it waft away like the rest. Unimportant. The carriage lurched, one of the horses snorting, and they began to move. She could hear the steel-rimmed wheels clattering on the uneven paving stones of Old Temple Court. She sat silently, neither looking at Sergei nor at the view outside, but inside her own head, where Karl’s face still lived. She wondered if she would begin to forget the familiar lines, the crinkled smile, and his eyes. She wondered if he would fade, and one day when she tried to conjure up his face she’d be unable to do so.

  She heard voices outside the carriage, but she paid them no attention. Sergei, however, had straightened in his seat across from her and moved the curtains aside with a hand, his silver nose pressed against the wavy glass there. Past him, she could see the lines of onlookers beyond the gardai, and beyond them . . .

  A huge person had appeared: a giant dressed in green, his head larger than the carriage in which they rode and his shoulders as wide as three men abreast, clad in an imitation of téni-robes and his eyes glowing with a red fire that sent shadows racing out toward the carriage from the people between them. The chanting voices seemed to come from that direction, and she realized that it wasn’t a person but some sort of gigantic puppet, manipulated from below by poles. It bobbed and weaved over the heads of the onlookers, who were turning now toward it rather than the funeral procession.

  She realized who it must represent in that moment: Cénzi. She had seen images of the god done that way, with his eyes glowing as he cast fire at the Moitidi who opposed him. The puppet-god wasn’t staring at Varina, however, but at the space before her carriage—the space where Karl’s bier moved.

  “Sergei?”

  Sergei had opened the carriage window and called to one of the gardai on the line, who ran over to him. “Who is doing this?” he asked.

  “The Morellis,” the garda answered. “They assembled behind the crowd, and when the bier approached, all of a sudden that thing went up.”

  “Well, get it down before—” That was as far as Sergei got.

  The puppet-god roa
red.

  The sound and heat of its call washed over her. It lifted the carriage—she heard horses and people alike screaming even as she felt herself rising—and sent Sergei tumbling backward into her. He struck her hard, and then the carriage, lifted in the wind of the puppet-god’s scream, fell back to earth hard.

  There must have been more screams and more sound, but she could hear nothing. She was screaming herself; she knew it, felt it in the rawness of her throat, but she heard no sound at all. She could taste blood in her mouth and Sergei was thrashing his limbs as he tried to untangle himself from her, and he was shouting, too. She could see his lips mouthing her name—“Varina! ”—but all she heard was the remnant of the puppet-god’s roar, echoing and echoing.

  Then she remembered. “Karl!” she shouted silently, pushing at Sergei and trying to rise from the wreckage of the carriage. She could see the street and horses on their sides, still in their harnesses and thrashing wildly at the ground, and bodies of people here and there.

  Especially around the bier.

  Which burned and fumed and smoked in the middle of the courtyard.

  Niente

  THE ISLAND CITY TLAXCALA gleamed like white bone on the saphhire waters of Lake Ixtapatl, but Niente didn’t see it. All his attention was on the bronze bowl before him and the water shimmering there.

  The scrying bowl. The bowl that held all the possible futures. They swam before his eyes, blotting out reality. He saw war and death. He saw a smoking mountain exploding. He saw a queen on a glowing throne, and a man on another throne. He saw armies crawling over the land, one with banners of blue and gold and the other of black and silver. He saw an army of warriors and nahualli coming against them. Yet beyond that war, down a long, long path, there was hope. There was peace. There was reconciliation. Go to war, and you will find peace. That was what the god Axat seemed to be saying to him. The images surrounded him, warm and gentle, and he basked in their heat . . .

  “Taat Niente?” Father Niente.

  The query was accompanied by a touch on his shoulder that broke his concentration, and Niente grudgingly lifted his head from the futures swimming in the bowl’s waters. The emerald light illuminating his face faded with the spell’s passing, and his soul returned to the city with a shudder. He was standing atop the Teocalli Axat, the high, stepped pyramid that was the temple of the moon-god Axat. The Teocalli Axat wasn’t the highest structure in the city—that honor belonged to the Calli Tecuhtli, the House of the King, though the Teocalli Sakal, the sun-god’s temple, was only a few spans lower. Still, from the summit on which Niente stood, all of Tlaxcala was laid out before him: the canals that served as streets glistening straight as spears and crowded with acal, the small, paddled watercraft used for transportation within the island city; the huge plazas bustling with people on their unguessed errands; the market with its thousands of stalls. Beyond the market rose the Calli Tecuhtli, its facade decorated with the bleached skulls of vanquished warriors. Out beyond the city and the lake in which it sat, the great valley was ringed by snow-capped peaks, with a trail of fuming ash wind-smeared across the summit of the volcano Poctlitepetl and its neighboring mountains. The sun had already slid behind the slopes though the western sky was still ablaze, the flanks of the lower clouds touched with the colors of burning while the east was a deep purple in which the first stars glimmered.

  The magnificent view from the summit of Teocalli Axat never failed to stir Niente, never failed to make his heart beat harder in his chest. He loved this land. His land. And he was grateful to Axat for giving him hope that it could become the seat of a greater empire yet.

  “Taat?” Father.

  He turned finally to the young man, panting from his long climb up the steps of the temple, his arms crossed over his chest—Niente’s son. “I hear you, Atl,” he said. “It’s later than I thought. I’m sorry. Did Xaria send you?”

  Atl grinned at him. “Na’ Xaria says if you don’t get home soon, she’ll throw your supper to the dogs and you can fight them for it. She also said that you’d be sleeping with the dogs as well.”

  Niente smiled in return. The expression pulled at the scars of his face. He knew what that face looked like, knew what his decades of casting Axat’s spells and peering into the scrying bowl had cost him, as it had cost every nahualli who utilized Her power so deeply. His left eye was a white, blind horror, his mouth sagged on that side also, as if his flesh had melted there. Ridged, hard scars furrowed his face and body; his muscles wobbled in sacks of skin as if they had shriveled inside him. He appeared at least two hands of years older than he was.

  But none of the other nahualli would dare to challenge him and try to wrest the title of Nahual from him. No. He was the famous Nahual Niente, whose spells had driven the army of the Easterners from their cousins’ land along the coast, who had accompanied Tecuhtli Zolin across the Great Sea to the Easterners’ land, the empire of the Holdings, who had burned their great capital city, and who had warned Tecuhtli Zolin of the consequences of his pride even when the Tecuhtli had refused to listen to him. He was Nahual Niente, who with Tecuhtli Citlali had razed the last Easterners’ fortress in the Hellins—the city of Tobarro—to the ground and ended the Holdings’ occupation of the Hellins forever.

  He was Nahual Niente whose fame approached and even exceeded that of the great Mahri.

  No, the nahualli were content to let Axat take Niente when She would. They were content to watch his body burn slowly away at her bidding, a little bit each day. The nahualli who might want his title were content to be patient, to wait.

  Even his own son, who was also one of the nahualli.

  Niente rubbed the golden bracelet around his right forearm: the sigil of the Nahual. Atop the teocalli, the youngest nahualli were lighting the oil cauldrons which would burn all night. They inclined their heads to Niente—“Good evening to you, Nahual Niente!” they cried, and he could almost believe the sincerity in their voices. The cauldrons were already lit on the other teocaltin of the city and atop the Calli Tecuhtli. All over the city, lanterns clawed at the night. Tlaxcala glowed yellow in the darkness of the valley, a city that never slept.

  Niente slapped Atl on the shoulder. At two hands of age, his son had an athlete’s body, and though he was trained as a nahualli, he could as easily have entered the warrior caste. “Let’s get home,” Niente said to him. “I’m hungry enough to eat those dogs if they get in the way.”

  He threw the water from the bowl onto the stones and wiped the brass with the hem of his robe. He slipped the bowl into its leather pouch and slung it around his neck. The two started down the long, steep staircase, Niente moving carefully and noting that Atl stayed close to his elbow. Had Atl been any other of the nahualli, he might have been insulted, but he was glad for Atl’s attentiveness.

  As they descended, Niente saw a young man in the blue garb of the Tecuhtli’s staff hurrying up the stairs toward them—one of the Tecuhtli’s pages. Niente paused, letting the boy approach. The page bowed, prostrate on the narrow stone steps, at Niente’s feet. “Up,” Niente told him. “What’s your message?”

  “The Tecuhtli requests your presence, Nahual.”

  Niente laughed aloud at that, which startled the boy. “I guess the dogs will be well fed tonight,” he said to Atl. “Tell your Na’ Xaria that it’s the Tecuhtli’s fault, not mine.”

  The Calli Tecuhtli was in the next calpulli, the neighborhoods into which the city was subdivided by the canals and large boulevards. Niente followed the page along the terra cotta flank of one of the aqueducts that provided fresh water to the city—the waters of Lake Ixtapatl being rather brackish—and over one of the many arching bridges of the island city to the plaza before Calli Tecuhtli. Ahead of him, the pyramid of the Calli rose like Poctlitepetl itself, its summit also smoking, not with ash and lava but with the fires of oil cauldrons. The plaza was bustling with people: visitors from the other cities come to see the glory of the capital Tlaxcala; citizens petitioning one or another
of the innumerable bureaucrats who actually ran the city; scarred and tattooed High Warriors who served the Tecuhtli. All of them stepped aside before Niente with inclined heads and muttered greetings as he followed the page up the steps. At the third level of the pyramid, the page stopped, leading Niente to a curtained alcove a little way down. He tapped on the call drum outside and lifted the thick, woven tapestry, gesturing to Niente to enter.

  The room—the outermost room of the Tecuhtli’s apartments—was lavish. The walls were brightly painted with figures of birds of prey and solemn warriors. Warm woven rugs covered the floor. Citlali sat in a carved wooden chair cushioned with many pillows, a table with several dishes steaming in front of him. “Ah, Nahual Niente. Sit. Eat with me; no doubt poor Xaria has already given up on you for supper.”

  The red-dyed tattoo of an eagle, the insignia of the Tecuhtli, seemed to wriggle on Citlali’s wide, shaved head as he spoke. He gestured to a chair set on the other side of the table. “Thank you, Tecuhtli,” Niente told him, sinking into the chair with a sigh. “I’m afraid I forget the time too easily.”

  “You look more tired than usual.”

  “I am,” Niente admitted. “Axat is a hard taskmaster, and She doesn’t care what happens to Her servant.”

  “And what did you see in the scrying bowl today?”

  Niente leaned forward and lifted a cover from one of the dishes. He took a flat corn cake and slathered meat on it, folding it over. He gnawed at it hungrily. The battle raging in the waters of the scrying bowl . . . The strange architecture of the buildings . . . The enemy in their steel and shields . . . The blood, the fire, the death . . . And the long path of peace . . . And the cost of that Long Path; he knew that also. “I saw enough,” he said as he swallowed, “to guess why you’ve asked me here, Tecuhtli.” He sighed. “I don’t look forward to crossing the Lesser Sea again.”

  Citlali laughed, clapping his hands together once. “You guess well,” he said. “I thought it would be enough for me to send the Easterners running back home like a pack of frightened dogs. I thought when I stood on the burning embers of their last fortress here on our cousins’ lands of the Hellins that I’d be satisfied. But I find I’m not. I keep dreaming of their cities and the loss we suffered there. I keep thinking that we haven’t yet paid for the souls of those great warriors and nahualli who died there.”