by S L Farrell
“The children are fine, and should be in Brezno by now,” she answered. “I returned to be with my husband, that’s all, and to stand with him when he meets the Kraljica. If you would tell him that I’ve come, I’d appreciate it. I thought he’d be here . . .”
Cu’Weller looked away a moment, his lips pressing together. “I regret, Hïrzgin, to have to tell you that the Hïrzg, Starkkapitän ca’Damont, and several of the chevarittai had ridden ahead of the army. They are likely in Nessantico already.”
“Oh.” The vision of Jan standing in flame came back to her, and the mysterious woman with him . . . She bit at her lower lip, and that gave cu’Weller the chance to hurry in. He opened the door of the carriage for her, as if expecting her to immediately return inside.
“I’m sorry, Hïrzgin.” He glanced again at the mounted gardai with him. “I’ll assign a squad of additional troops to accompany you back to Stag Fall, and give you new horses and driver. The cook can put together provisions for the road . . .”
“I won’t be leaving,” she told him, and surprise lifted his eyebrows.
“Hïrzgin, this isn’t a place for you. An army on the march . . .”
“My husband isn’t here. That means that I am the authority of the throne of Firenzcia, does it not, A’Offizier?”
Cu’Keller looked as if he wanted to protest, but shook his head slightly. “Yes, Hïrzgin, I suppose so but . . .”
“Then my commands supersede yours, and I will continue on with you to Nessantico,” she told him, “until such a time as the Starkkapitän and my husband return. Do you have an issue with that, A’Offizier?”
“No, Hïrzgin. No issue.” The words were an acceptance, but the look on his face belied them.
She didn’t care. Something told her that she needed to be with Jan, and she would. “Good,” she told him. She opened the door of the carriage, one foot on the step. “Then let us not keep the army waiting,” she told him. “We’ve a long march ahead.”
Niente
THE WATERS OF AXAT BETRAYED HIM. He could see little of the Long Path in the mist. Even the events just before them were clouded. There were too many conflicting signs, too many possibilities, too many powers in opposition. Everything was in flux, everyone was in movement. He could no longer see his Long Path at all. It was gone, as if Axat had withdrawn Her favor from him, as if She were angry with him for his failures.
He saw only one thing. He saw himself and Atl, facing each other, and lightning flashed between them, and through the mist, he saw Atl fall . . .
With an angry shout and a sweep of his arm, Niente sent the scrying bowl flying. The trio of nahualli who had brought him the bowl and the water and were in attendance on him, scrambled to their feet in surprise. “Nahual?”
“Leave me!” he told them. “Go on! Get out!”
They scattered, leaving him alone in the tent.
It’s gone. The future you sought to have has been taken from you. Can you find it again? Is there still time, or has the possibility passed entirely now?
He didn’t know. The uncertainty was a fire in his stomach, a hammer pounding on his skull.
He collapsed to the ground, burying his head in his hands. The bowl sat accusingly upside down on the grass before him, orange-tinted water dewing the green blades. The foreign grass, the foreign soil . . .
He didn’t know how long he sat there when he saw a wavering shadow against the fabric, cast from the great fire in the center of their encampment. “Nahual?” a tentative voice called. “It’s time. The Eye of Axat has risen. Nahual?”
“I’m coming,” he called out. “Be patient.”
The shadow receded. Niente pulled himself up. His spell-staff was still on the table. He took it in his hand, feeling the tingling of the spells caught within the whorled grain. Can you do this? Will you do this?
He went to the flap of the tent, pushed it aside. He stepped out.
The army had encamped along the main road where it descended a long hill. The tents of the Nahual and the Tecuhtli had been placed on the crown of the hill, surrounded by the tents of the High Warriors and nahualli. Below, Niente could see the glimmering of hundreds of campfires; above, the ribbon of the Star River cleaved the sky, dimmed by the brilliance of Axat’s Eye, staring down at them. The High Warriors and the nahualli stood in a ring around the trampled grasses of the meadow. Near the campfire, blazing in the open space between the Nahual’s tent and that of the Tecuhtli, stood Tecuhtli Citlali, Tototl, and Atl. His son was bare to the waist, his skin glistening. He held his spell-staff in one hand, the end tapping nervously on the ground.
“You still want this, Atl?” Niente asked him. “You are so certain of your path?”
Atl shook his head. “Do I want it, Taat? No. I don’t. But I am certain of the path Axat has shown, and I’m confident that the path you want us to take leads to defeat, despite what you believe. You were the one who taught me that even when someone in authority tells you that they’re right, they might still be wrong—and that in order to serve them, you have to persist. You said that was the Nahual’s role to the Tecuhtli, and that of the nahualli to the Nahual.” He took a long, slow breath, tapping his spell-staff on the ground again. “No, I don’t want this. I don’t want to fight you. I hate this. But I don’t see that I have a choice.”
Citlali stepped forward between the two. “Enough talk,” he said. “We’ve wasted enough time on this already—and the city waits for us. Do what you must, so I know who my Nahual is, so I know which of you is seeing the paths correctly.” He looked from Niente to Atl. “Do it,” he said. “Now!”
He stepped back, gesturing to Niente and Atl. Niente knew that Citlali wanted them to raise their spell-staffs, wanted the night to blaze suddenly with lightnings and fire, to see one of the two of them crumple to the ground broken, burned, and dead. He could see it in the eagerness of the man’s face, the ways the red eagle’s wings moved on the sides of his shaved skull. The nahualli, the High Warriors, they all shared that same hunger—they stared and leaned forward, their mouths half-open in anticipation.
No one had seen a Nahual battle a challenger in a generation. They looked forward to the historic scene. Neither Atl nor Niente had moved, though. Niente saw the muscles bunch in his son’s arm, and he knew that Atl would do this. He knew that the vision in the bowl would be kept. At the first lifting of his staff, it would begin—and Atl would die.
“No!” Niente shouted, and he cast his spell-staff to the ground. “I won’t.”
“If you are my Nahual, you will,” Citlali roared, as if disappointed.
“Then I am not the Nahual,” Niente said. “Not any longer. Atl is right. Axat has clouded my vision of the Path. I’m no longer in her favor, and I no longer See true.”
He bowed to his son, as a nahualli to the Nahual. He stripped the golden bracelet from his forearm. His skin felt cold and naked without it. “I yield,” he said. He knelt, and he proffered the bracelet to Atl. “You are the Techutli’s Nahual now,” he told him. “I am simply a nahualli. Your servant.”
He could feel the Long Path fading in his mind. You took it from me, Axat. This is Your fault. If he could no longer see, then he would trade his vision for Atl’s. If there was no Long Path, then he would take victory for the Tehuantin.
He would be satisfied. He wouldn’t live to see the consequences.
FAILINGS
Nico Morel
Sergei ca’Rudka
Jan ca’Ostheim
Niente
Varina ca’Pallo
Rochelle Botelli
Varina ca’Pallo
Brie ca’Ostheim
Niente
Nico Morel
CÉNZI . . .
Cénzi had abandoned him, and he could only wonder what he’d done wrong, how he could have misinterpreted things so badly that Cénzi would have allowed this to happen. Nico had spent the time since Sergei had left him on his knees, refusing all food and water. He used the chains binding his h
ands and legs as flails, to break open again the scabs of the wounds he’d sustained in the battle for the Old Temple, letting the hot blood and the pain take away all thought of the outside world. He accepted the pain; he bathed in it; he gave it up to Cénzi as an offering in hopes that He might speak again to him.
You’ve taken my lover and stolen my child. You’ve allowed the people who followed me to die horribly. You’ve taken my freedom. How did I offend You? What did I fail to see or do for You? How have I misheard Your message? Tell me. If you wish to punish me, then I give myself to You freely, but tell me why I must be punished. Please help me to understand . . .
That was his prayer. That is what he repeated, over and over: as the wind-horns spoke Third Call over the city, as night came, as the stars wheeled past and the moon rose. He prayed, on his knees, lost inside himself and trying again to find the voice of Cénzi somewhere in his despair.
He couldn’t keep the other thoughts from intruding. His mind drifted, unfocused. He could hear Sergei’s voice, telling him over and over, “It’s Varina who has spared your life, your hands, and your tongue, and thus your gift: a person who doesn’t believe in Cénzi, but who believes in you . . . It’s Varina who saved your child . . .” Muffled by the silencer, Nico shouted against that terrible voice, screwing his eyes shut as if he could deny the memory entrance to his mind if he denied himself sight. “I told you about the young woman—I told her that she still had time to change, to find a path that wouldn’t end where I am,” Sergei persisted. “I think that’s what Varina believes of you, Nico. She believes in you, in your gift, and she believes you can do better with it than you’ve done.”
No! If Varina saved me, it was because she was unwittingly being twisted to Your will. It must be. Tell me that it’s so! Give me Your sign . . .
But what surfaced in his mind was instead the image of Liana’s broken and torn body, of the way her eyes stared blindly toward the dome of the Old Temple, and the way her hands clutched her stomach as if trying to cradle the unborn child inside her. He called upon Cénzi to change this horrible act, to return her to life, to take his own life in her place, but she only stared and her chest did not move and the blood thickened and stopped around her as he tried to rouse her, as he held her, as the gardai tore him away as he screamed . . .
Cénzi, I know Your gift was given to me—why did You give it to me if not to serve You? What do You ask of me? I will do it. I thought I had done it, but if that’s not true, then show me. Just take this torment from me. Make me understand . . .
He thought he felt a hand on his shoulder and he turned, but there was no one there. It must have been the dead turns of the night, when even the great city was at its most quiet. He must have been kneeling there for turns, with his legs gone dead under him. The still, foul air of the cell shivered and he heard Varina’s voice. “I hate what you’ve preached and what you’ve done in the name of your beliefs. But I don’t hate you, Nico. I will never hate you.”
“Why not?” he tried to say but his tongue was pressed down by the silencer, and he could only make strangled, unintelligible noises. “Why don’t you hate me? How can you not?”
The air shivered and he thought he heard a laugh.
Cénzi? Varina?
Again, he tried to return to his prayer but his mind wouldn’t allow it. His head was full of voices, but not the one he so desired to hear. He fell backward into memory, lurched forward again into the squalid, filthy present, then fell back again.
He was eleven, in the house where they lived after Elle took him away from Nessantico, where she stayed when her belly was at its fullest with the child inside, the one she said would be his brother or sister. He could hear Elle groaning and crying in the next room, and he huddled in the common room, scared and frightened by the obvious pain in her voice and praying to Cénzi that she’d be all right. He’d heard many times about women dying in childbirth, and he didn’t know what would happen to him if Elle died—not with his own matarh and vatarh dead, not with Varina and Karl probably dead also for all he knew. Elle was all he had in the world, and so he prayed as hard as he could that she would live. He promised Cénzi that he would devote his life to Him if he would keep Elle alive.
Elle moaned again, and this time gave a long, shrill scream that was quickly muffled, as if someone had placed a hand or a pillow over Elle’s mouth, and he heard the oste-femme in attendance give a call to her assistants. Nico uncurled himself from the corner and went to the closed door, opening it carefully. He could see Elle propped up in a seated position on the bed, two of the attendants holding her. “Where’s my baby?” she was saying, weeping. “Where . . . No, be quiet, be quiet! I can’t hear! Where is it?” Nico knew she was talking not only to those in the room, but to the voices in her head.
There was a lot of blood on the sheets. He tried not to look at it.
A wet nurse sat on chair nearby, but the laces of her tashta were still tied and her face was drawn. The oste-femme was crouched over a bundle at the foot of the bed. She was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Vajica,” she said to Elle. “The cord was—what is that boy doing here?”
Nico realized the oste-femme was staring at him in the doorway. “I can help,” he said.
“Out!” the oste-femme shouted, pointing at the door. She gestured to one of the attendants. “Get him out!” she ordered, and turned back to the bundle. Nico ran into the room. He could feel the cold of power around him. He had felt it since he’d begun praying, growing more frigid and more powerful with each breath he took. Now it seared his lungs and his throat, and he couldn’t hold it back. He pushed forward even as the attendant grabbed at him, as Elle shouted either at him or the voices in her head or the oste-femme. Between the arms of the oste-femme he could see a baby, though her skin was a strange blue-white color and there was a flesh-colored rope around her neck. He reached toward her . . . And when he touched her, he felt the cold energy surge out of him as he spoke words he didn’t know at all and his hands moved in an odd pattern. His fingers touched her leg, and he gasped as the power ran out of him, leaving him as exhausted as if he’d been running all day. The baby’s leg jerked, and then the body convulsed and the rope dissolved: the child’s mouth opened and there was a wail and cry. The oste-femme had taken a step back as Nico had pushed past her; now she gasped. “The child,” she said. “She was dead . . .”
The baby was crying now, and the wet nurse came forward, untying the blouse of her tashta and taking the baby in her arms. “What is going on?” Elle was saying, but then . . .
. . . then the memory shifted. It no longer possessed the soft haze of recollection. Everything was sharp-edged and too brightly colored, the way it was when Cénzi gave him a vision. It was no longer Elle on the childbirth bed but Varina, and she opened her arms. Nico cuddled himself happily in her arms. She stroked his hair. “You saved her life,” Varina said. “It was you.”
“I prayed to Cénzi,” he told her. “It was Him.”
“No,” Varina/Elle answered softly, her hands stroking his back. “It was you, Nico. You alone. You reached into the Second World and took its power, which doesn’t come from Cénzi or any other god but just is. You are able to tap that. Rochelle owes you her life. She will always owe you that.”
“Rochelle? Is that going to be her name?”
“Yes. It was my own matarh’s name,” Varina/Elle said, “and I will teach her all I know, and one day she might give you back what you gave her.”
The woman who was both Elle and not-Elle hugged him hard, and Nico hugged her back, but now there was only empty air there. He opened his eyes.
The sun had risen, and now he heard the wind-horns sounding First Call, as sunlight crawled reluctantly down the black tower of the Bastida a’Drago toward the opening of his cell. He wanted, suddenly, to look outside, to see the rising light. He tried to get to his feet, but they were as stiff and unyielding as stone, and when he tried to move them, the pain made him scream behind the gag of the
silencer. He couldn’t stand. Instead, he dragged himself forward on his chained hands, crawling to the opening that led to the small open ledge in the tower. He pulled himself up on the railing there, moaning with the sharp prickling in his legs as life returned to them. He stared out at the morning. A mist had risen from the A’Sele, and the Avi a’Parete outside the gates of the Bastida was beginning to fill with people walking to temple or to early morning errands.
One figure snared his gaze . . . A woman was standing near the Bastida gates, underneath the leering grin of the dragon’s head. She wasn’t moving, but staring at the Bastida, and at the tower in which he was held. Even at the distance, there was something about her, something familiar. “Rochelle . . . ?” he breathed. He didn’t know if he was dreaming, or if it was even possible; he’d not seen her in years. But those features . . .
He tried to pull himself upright on the ledge, but his hand slipped on the rail, his legs couldn’t hold him, and he fell. He pulled himself up again, hating that he couldn’t shout her name. But he could wave, he could make her see him . . .
She wasn’t there. She’d vanished. He scanned the Avi for some sign of her—there, could that be her, hurrying away north over the Pontica?—but he couldn’t be certain and he couldn’t shout after her. The figure vanished into the crowds and distance.
He let himself fall again on the ledge.
Was it her, Cénzi? Did you send her to me?
It wasn’t Cénzi who answered. Instead, he thought he heard the soft laughter of Varina.
Sergei ca’Rudka
“HOW LONG HAS HE been this way?”
The garda at Nico’s cell shrugged at Sergei’s question. His gaze kept dropping to the roll of leather under Sergei’s arm. “All night,” he said. “He started praying when you left; he won’t drink, won’t eat. Just prays.”
“Open the door,” Sergei told the man, “and come inside with me. I may need your help.”