A Magic Of Nightfall Part 33

She watched the scene, her arms unknowingly hugging herself in sympathy. She wanted to feel pleasure at this scene that must be common enough, but what she felt was the hot flush of jealousy. "Yes, that's what you'll never have," Fynn crowed inside her, and the others joined in. "You can never have that. No one will ever love you that way. Not even the child you carry. Never."

"That's not true," she told them, feeling tears streaming down her cheeks. "No, it's not true."

"It is. It is." A chorus of denial. "It is."

She turned and fled them, pursued by the voices. She walked hurriedly, not even knowing where she was going, pus.h.i.+ng through crowded street markets and along half-deserted avenues, past shops and businesses. She found herself finally on the northern bank of the A'Sele near the Pontica Kralji. There, uncaring of the mud and the foul smell, she sat hugging her knees to herself, trying to ignore the screaming voices in her head as she rocked back and forth. If anyone saw her, they thought her deranged and left her alone. She sat there for a long time, her thoughts frayed and chaotic until pure exhaustion calmed her and the voices receded. She sat panting, rubbing the swelling mound of her belly and imagining the life inside.

"I will protect you. I will keep you safe," she whispered to her.

Somewhere across the A'Sele, on the Isle A'Kralji, almost as if in response, there came the sound of sudden thunder, and she saw black smoke billowing up from somewhere among the crowded buildings of the island. Not long after, the wind-horns of the city began to wail, though it was already past Second Call.

She wondered what had happened.

ENGAGEMENT.

Audric ca'Dakwi.

Niente.

Kenne ca'Fionta.

Karl Vliomani

Jan ca'Vorl

Allesandra ca'Vorl

Nico Morel

Niente

Karl Vliomani

Allesandra ca'Vorl.

The White Stone.

Audric ca'Dakwi.

SOMEONE WAS SCREAMING. Over and over and over.

S When Audric opened his eyes, everything was tinged with red as if the world had been painted with blood. Clots of it swam over his vision. His breath was a rasp, a husk; he could barely draw breath. He seemed to be in his own chambers, in his own bed, but he couldn't move his body at all. His face itched, and he wanted to bring his hand up to scratch it, but he could not lift either hand or move his feet. He was afraid to lift his head and look down, afraid of what he might see.

And the pain . . . There was so much pain, and he wanted to scream but he could only moan, a thin, eternal cry. He could feel hot tears running down his face.

"You can't die. You can't . . ." Her voice was as torn and ragged, a bare whisper.

"Great-Matarh?" he asked. "Where are you? Marlon? Seaton? Where is Kraljica Marguerite?"

His voice came from an impossible distance. His ears were full of a continuous roar, as if the city were falling around him. "Marlon? Seaton?" he called again. The pain surged over him like a great, breaking wave. He tried to scream, but nothing emerged from his open mouth.

A face loomed over him and he blinked. He thought he recognized Archigos Kenne. Teni-chants mixed in with the roar in his ears. "Archigos?"

"Yes, Kraljiki. I came as soon as I heard." He could barely hear the Archigos, the words lost in the roaring in his ears.

"What happened?" The two words each weighed as much as the great marble blocks of the palais facade. He could barely spit them out. He closed his eyes.

"We're still not certain, Kraljiki. O'Offizier cu'Kinnear . . . he may have been a Numetodo, or . . ." The Archigos' voice faded. Audric opened his eyes again; the Archigos' mouth was working as if he were still speaking, but Audric could hear only the red-tinged roar, and it swelled and with it the pain again, and he tried to scream along with it, but it was only a gasp. ". . . never know now . . . Councillor ca'Ludovici terribly injured . . . Marlon and Seaton dead . . ." the Archigos was saying, but Audric was no longer listening.

He had glimpsed the painting of his great-matarh. It leaned against the wall near his bed. The thick frame was shattered along its left side, and there were great rents in the canvas itself, frayed wounds crawling over Marguerite's face. He moaned again. "No!" he tried to shout, as if the denial could push it all away and change everything.

He remembered. He wasn't certain. The o'offizier approaching the Sun Throne, a flash . . . then nothing until now.

You can't die . . . !

The pain rushed in once more, and this time he felt his whole body shaking and jerking in response, the middle of his body arching up, and the Archigos was pressing him back down and shouting urgently to someone else in the room. ". . . whatever you can . . . the Ilmodo . . . Cenzi will forgive . . ."

The pain threatened to tear him in half, to snap him like a winter branch, but suddenly it was gone. Gone. His eyes were open, and he could see Archigos Kenne screaming at the palais healer and the woman teni in her green robes, and there were other people in the room and they were all shouting but he could hear nothing, nothing but the roar growing louder and louder. "You can't die," and the pain at least was gone and he wanted to lift his hand toward his great-matarh but his body still would not move and he could not even pull in his breath even though his lungs ached and he tried . . . and tried . . . and . . .

Niente.

HE HAD HOPED that the taking of the island of Karnmor would have been enough, that Tecuhtli Zolin would have been satisfied with that demonstration of Tehuantin power and they would take to their s.h.i.+ps and return home. But Zolin had looked east instead. "Weto have struck a wound to the body," he said, "but the head remains, and the body will heal unless we strike. I know what you'd tell me, Nahual, but now is the time to strike. I feel it. Ask Axat. She will tell you." Niente stared into the scrying bowl, sprinkling the herbs over the water. Maybe it was because the water here was less pure, or maybe it was because the land of his own G.o.ds was so distant, or maybe it was that his own ability had waned, but again the images he saw reflected there were too confused and too fleeting, and they left him uneasy.

. . . A boy on a glowing throne, but his face was a fleshless skull, and there: was that the Easterner he had ensorcelled? A woman lurked in the background, hard to see . . . But the water swirled and when it cleared again Niente saw another boy on another throne, and a woman behind him also, with a green-robed, dark-haired teni beside her . . . Armies crawled over a broken land with banners swaying, marching over ground strewn with bodies . . . Fire and a temple, and ranks of people in green robes praying . . . A great city with a river running through its midst, and smoke rising from its great buildings . . . A Tehuantin warrior on the ground, a spear through him, and the body of a nahualli alongside with a broken spell-staff, but the water was murky now and he could not see the faces that lay there to know who they were, though a queasy roiling churned in his gut, and he suddenly didn't want to see . . .

"Well?" Tecuhtli Zolin asked, and Niente glanced up from the bowl. The Techutli had entered his tent and was watching him. The eagle of his rank spread red-feathered wings down his cheeks as the beak opened in a fierce cry on his forehead.

They were encamped on the edge of a great, wide river that one of the Easterners they'd captured had called the A'Sele. Far up the river, they were told, was Nessantico, the capital of the Holdings. The Tehuantin fleet was anch.o.r.ed close by, near where the mouth of the A'Sele emptied into the Middle Sea, their hulls low in the water with the plunder of Karnmor.

They had left the city of Karnor in ruins a hand of days ago. The city had been raped and plundered but not held; the rest of the great island had been left entirely untouched. Instead, Zolin had taken the army back on the s.h.i.+ps, sailing out from Karnor Harbor and around Karnmor to the mouth of the A'Sele, where the army had taken to land once more. They had met little resistance. The people of the Holdings had melted away before them like spring snow, retreating and vanis.h.i.+ng into the forests and back roads of the land, abandoning the villages with their strangely-shaped houses and buildings. This was land that had been tamed for generations: with rich farms and fields, with wide roads, paved with cobbles inside the villages and lined with stone fences outside. This was a domesticated land, not wild like the slopes of the s.h.i.+eld Mountains, but more like the farmlands of the great cities around the sh.o.r.e of the Inland Sea, or the ca.n.a.ls of Tlaxcala, the capital built out in the sea itself.

"Nahual Niente?"

He started, realizing that he was still staring into the bowl though it was only his own uncertain and spell-ravaged reflection that he saw there, his clouded left eye frighteningly white. A drop of sweat fell from his brow into the water, s.h.i.+vering the image of his face. He lifted his head.

"I saw battle," he told Zolin. "And a boy king on the throne. His face was a skull."

"Ah, then perhaps your Easterner has fulfilled his task?"

Niente shrugged.

"The battle-who won?"

"I don't know. I saw . . . I saw a dead warrior, and a dead nahualli."

Zolin scoffed. "Warriors always die," he said. "Nahualli, too. It is the way of things." Then, he stopped and his eyes narrowed, swaying the wings of the eagle. "Was it me you saw?"

Niente shook his head. "I don't know," he answered, but elaborated no further.

"Did you see us sailing home?" the Tecuhtli asked.

"No." Another single word, and Zolin nodded.

"You don't want to be here, do you? You think I'm making a mistake."

Niente tossed aside the water in the scrying bowl. He wiped the bowl dry with the hem of his s.h.i.+rt, wondering how bluntly he should answer Zolin. He had never been less than honest with Necalli, but Necalli didn't have Zolin's dangerous temperament. "We're a long way from home, in a strange land."

"A land that has offered almost no resistance," Zolin said. He swept his arms to the east. "This great city of theirs must know by now that we're here, but I see no army in front of us."

"You will. And we have no reinforcements behind us, no new warriors or nahualli to fill the gaps of the fallen. I have seen their castles and their fortifications in the scrying bowl, Tecuhtli. We had the element of surprise at Karnor; that's gone now. They will be preparing for us."

"And your black sand will tear down their walls and send their towers tumbling into ruin."

"I've seen the fires of their smithies and the prayers of their war-teni. I have seen their armies and they were large, sprawled over the land like a steel forest. We are but a few thousands here, Tecuhtli, and they have many more. We're now as they were in our land, far away from our resources. I doubt we will succeed here any better than they did there."

"Is that what Axat shows you?" Zolin pointed at the bowl Niente was holding, scribed with the moon symbols of the G.o.d. "Do you see-undeniably-my defeat in the water?"

Niente shook his head.

"Good," Zolin said. The muscles in his jaws worked, flexing the wings of the eagle. "I know you would rather we return home, Nahual. I understand that, and you're not alone in that feeling. I hear you, all of you. We all miss home and families, myself no less than anyone. But my duty is to protect us as best I can, and this . . . this seems to me to best do that. I appreciate that you would not lie and tell me that the G.o.ds insist that retreat is the wise course."

"I tell you what I see, Tecuhtli. Always. Nothing more. Nothing less. I vowed to Axat that I would follow and serve the Tecuhtli, no matter who he is or what he orders us to do."

Zolin gave a laugh that was more a sniff. He rubbed at his scalp, as if stroking the eagle inked into his flesh. "You made that vow to Necalli, not me. Niente, if you wish to be released from it now . . ." A shrug. "One of the other nahualli could serve."

The threat hung there in the humid air. Niente knew what Zolin offered: no Nahual gave up his t.i.tle and lived; Niente wondered which one of the nahualli was whispering in Zolin's ear-certainly there were a few who felt they could be Nahual. "If the Tecuhtli feels that another nahualli is better suited to serve him, then he should have him bring his spell-staff here, and we shall see which one of us Axat favors."

Zolin chuckled, but there was an uneasiness to it that told Niente that the man was tempted. "For now, I will let you serve me, Nahual Niente. And you will see that I am right. I will come to this great city of the Easterners, and I will smash it and leave it burning, as I did Munereo and Karnor. I am a great slow spear, and I will pierce their armor, their flesh, their organs, and burrow through to stab their very heart. The people of the Holdings will understand that their G.o.d is weak and wrong. They will leave our cousins' land and ours forever. They will pay tribute to us, for fear that a Tecuhtli will bring another army here again. That is what I will do, and that is what you will see in your scrying bowl, Nahual. You will see it."

Niente lowered his head. "As I said, Tecuhtli, I will look and I will tell you all that Axat grants me to see, so that you may know the possible futures for the choices you make. That is all any nahualli can do."

Zolin sniffed. He gazed confidently at Niente from eyes surrounded by the feathered wings of the eagle. "You will see it," he said again. "That is what I tell you."

Kenne ca'Fionta.

GUILT GNAWED AT HIS STOMACH and made him push his plate away.

"Kenne, you need to eat." His longtime companion and lover, Petros cu'Magnaoi, u'teni in the Faith, reached out across the white linen of the table for Kenne's hand, cupping it in his own. "You were only a p.a.w.n in Cenzi's plan. You couldn't have known."

Kenne shook his head. It's not your fault . . . You couldn't have known . . . That was what everyone had said to him over the last few days. Sometimes the words were spoken with a heartfelt sincerity; at other times-as when he'd gone to visit Sigourney ca'Ludovici in her bed as she recovered from her wounds-he'd thought he'd heard only a veneer of politeness draped over deep resentment.

"I sent that man to the Kraljiki, Petros. I did. No one else, and-"

"Kenne," Petros interrupted. He was shaking his hawk-thin head, the jaw-long hair that Kenne loved so much, long ago gone white but as thick on the man's head as his own hair was scarce, swaying with the motion. Pale blue eyes, still sharp and wise, held Kenne's gaze and refused to let him look away. "Stop this. You can keep repeating the same words over and over again, but none of them will change what's happened. You did what any of us might have done. This Eneas cu'Kinnear's reputation was solid, and he said he had news from the h.e.l.lins, which the Kraljiki desperately needed. If I'd been in your place, I'd have done the same."

"But you didn't. He came to me."