by S L Farrell
ILLUMINATIONS
Niente
Citlali was not one to hide his anger and displeasure. Niente suspected that was true of all Tecuhtli-when everyone is below you in stature, there’s no need to conceal your feelings.
Citlali’s face was nearly as ruddy as the eagle tattooed on his bald skull. Even the black, geometric lines of the warrior across his body were dimmed. Behind him, the well-muscled form of the High Warrior Tototl loomed. Citlali pointed at Niente as he entered the tent. “You’ve lied to me,” he said without preamble.
Niente grasped his spell-staff tightly, feeling the power of X’in Ka trapped within it, and wondering if he would need to use that today. He forced his bowed back to straighten as best he could. He ignored the screaming of his muscles and the urge to sit down. He lifted his face to Citlali and Tototl, let them see the scarred and withered horror that his use of the scrying bowl and the deep enchantments made in the name of the Tecuhtli over the years had made of him, how he aged far more than his years in the service of the Tehuantin. His blind and white left eye stared at Citlali. “Tecuhtli, I have never-”
“Your own son tells me this,” Citlali interrupted. That, Niente realized, explained why Atl had avoided him this morning, remaining far down the army’s column from the Tecuhtli and Nahual’s escorts. “He says that he also has the gift of Axat’s far-sight,” Citlali continued, “and he insists that your path at Villembouchure nearly led us to disaster. No, be silent!” he roared as Niente started to protest. “Atl said that had we followed the path that Axat showed him, we would not have needed to leave our fleet blocked and tangled in the A’Sele, that we wouldn’t have had the losses we had in the river or at Villembouchure. He says we could have gained an easy victory there, and have sailed with the fleet on up the A’Sele to Nessantico.”
“And after that?” Niente asked, almost afraid to voice the question. “What did he see past that point?” If Atl could glimpse the twisting paths of the future that far ahead, there was nothing he could do. He would fail in his task, now, and the future he’d seen would slip away entirely.
Tototl’s face was impassive, but Citlali shrugged. “Atl said that Axat granted him no glimpse of the future past that point. Still, an easy victory at Villembouchure, not having to abandon the river for the road…”
The army of the Tehuantin had taken all they could from the ships, the deep channel they needed hopelessly blocked by the wreckage of the lead vessels of the fleet, the A’Sele effectively barricaded by their own wrecked, halfsunken ships. Now it was the army who carried everything on their backs, or on groaning, scavenged carts pulled by stolen horses and donkeys. Where the wind could have carried them on the backs of the ships without effort, now they were obliged to walk the long miles to Nessantico, to arrive later, to endure the constant attacks of the defenders who would sneak toward their lines, shower them with arrows or attack them with black sand and vanish again.
Niente understood Citlali’s foul temper.
“If Atl could see nothing beyond Villembouchure, that is the issue,” he told Citlali and Tototl, and that statement deepened the scowl on the Tecuhtli’s face. “Atl does have Axat’s gift. And I forgive him for coming to you-it was his duty to tell you what he’s seen, Tecuhtli, and I’m pleased that he understands his responsibility. But his far-sight isn’t as deep as mine, and that’s where he’s mistaken. As he admits, he doesn’t see far into the mist. Yes, there was another path that would lead to victory, one that seemed easier and better. But had I advised you to follow it and had you taken that advice, it would have led to our destruction later. We would never have taken Nessantico.”
Citlali narrowed his eyes, the wings of the eagle moving in concert, and Niente hurried to continue his explanation-to give Citlali the lie he’d prepared against this. His voice was quavering; that only seemed to lend verisimilitude to the tale: the worried Taat explaining the mistakes of the inexperienced son. “In a few days, the remnants of the Easterners’ own fleet would have caught us-from both behind and forward. We would have been snared in their trap, and our army would have drowned in the A’Sele without being able to fight. That was the fate that awaited us, Tecuhtli Citlali. Now…” Niente lifted his hands. “Now our ships hamper those coming up the A’Sele in pursuit and the rest of the fleet can turn to handle them; with our army on the road, the rest of their ships can do nothing to us. This is the way of victory, Tecuhtli, as I told you. I never promised that it would be an easy path, or is it that the High Warriors are now afraid of the Easterners?”
The last was a calculated risk-the Nahual should be outraged that his skill was being questioned. There should be anger in response to anger, and if he could blind Citlali by the accusation, then perhaps the lie might be accepted easily.
“Afraid?” The roar was the response Niente had expected; the flush deepened on Citlali’s face, as well as on the face of Tototl. Tototl’s hand was on the hilt of his sword, ready to hew Niente’s head from his shoulders should the Tecuhtli order his death. Niente grasped his spell-staff tighter.
This was one of the futures he’d glimpsed, and in it, his life was exceedingly short from this point…
But Citlali laughed, suddenly and abruptly, and Tototl’s fingers loosened on his sword hilt. “Afraid?” Citlali roared again, but this time there was no fury in his words, only a deep amusement. “After the dead Easterners I’ve already left behind me?” He laughed again, and Tototl laughed with him, though Niente saw him gauging Citlali closely-Tototl would undoubtedly be the next Tecuhtli, if they all lived long enough. “You promise me that you see me in their great city, Nahual Niente?” he asked. “You promise me that you see our banner flying over their gates?”
“I promise you that, Tecuhtli Citlali,” Niente told him. His hand had loosened from his staff, and he let his head droop and his spine sag.
“You need to speak with your son, Nahual,” Citlali said. “A son should believe his Taat, and a nahualli should believe his Nahual.”
“I will do that, Tecuhtli.” I will, because this was far too dangerous a moment… Niente bowed to the Tecuhtli and the High Warriors. “I will indeed.”
When he returned to his own tent, Niente pulled the scrying bowl from his pack. He filled it with fresh water, took the scrying powders from the pouch at his belt and sprinkled them over the surface once it had stilled. He chanted over the bowl, the ancient words of the X’in Ka coming unbidden as he called upon Axat, praying to Her to show him again the paths that might be. The water hissed, and the emerald light burst from somewhere in the depths, the mist rising above the water. He leaned over the bowl, opening his eyes…
There was the great city, with its odd spires and domes, and there was the fire of spells and black sand trailing smoke in a grim sky. He was outside the walls with the rest of the nahualli, and like the rest of them, he was exhausted. They couldn’t hold back the assault. A fireball screamed down from above them, and though Niente raised his spell-staff to block it, there was nothing there. The fire descended like a shrieking carrion bird, and it slammed into him, and in that future, even with the Tehuantin razing Nessantico to the ground, in the mists beyond that time he also saw the pyramids of Tlaxcala tumbled in smoke and ruin and the eagle banners cast down, with Easterners walking amidst the rubble…
… In the mists, he sought the path that he’d seen before, but the landscape had changed and the futures were all tangled and snarled, the mists rising high in all but that first, terrible vision. He could still see it, vaguely: the two armies clashing in fire and blood, the battle turning suddenly and unexpectedly as Niente-was it him? The mist made it difficult to see-raised his spell-staff a last time… And beyond, in the the future of that path, a city rising higher than before in the east, and the pyramids of Tlaxi strong against the backdrop of the smoking mountain…
… but there was a figure standing before that path, barring it, and Niente tried to pierce the mist around the man. It was his own face gazing back at him… No,
it was a younger version of himself, the features shifting… Atl! It was Atl, his spell-staff raised in defiance, and lightnings crackled around him, licking hot and fierce toward Niente…
Niente lifted his head from the bowl with a gasp. The green mist was swept away, vanishing in the sun and leaving Niente staggering in the midst of a reality that seemed thin and unreal. He shook his head to clear it, allowing himself to come back from the vision. His legs threatened to stop supporting him, and he sank onto the ground, the rickety table that held the scrying bowl falling over. The water spilled from the bowl, the brass bowl rang as it hit the stony ground, and one of the nahualli stuck his head through the tent flaps. “Nahual?”
Niente waved him away. “I’m fine,” he said. “Go away.” The nahualli stared for a moment, then withdrew.
Niente sat there, hugging his knees to himself. Atl… It was Atl who now made the path he’d glimpsed difficult to find. It was Atl who blocked the way.
Atl. “You can’t give me this burden,” he said. He was weeping-from the exhaustion, from the fear, from his love for his son. “You can’t expect me to pay this price.”
Axat, if She listened, remained silent. Niente stared at the bowl, upturned in the grass, and he shuddered.
Rochelle Botelli
Before she’d left the encampment, she’d gone back to her own tent, taking the coins she’d hidden there-the money she’d received for killing Rance and the others she’d slain in her short career. She’d bound the coins under her clothing so that they made no noise; Jan’s dagger was sheathed just above her boots under her tashta.
She watched the encampment for a few days from a clump of trees near the royal tents, twice having to evade searchers beating the brush for her. She saw Hirzgin Brie, saw that fool Paulus, saw the Starkkapitan. She saw the Archigos and Sergei arrive. And finally, she saw her vatarh. She stared at him until his figure wavered in the tears forming in her eyes.
Then, finally, she slipped away.
It had been easy enough to evade the patrols looking for her-they were noisy and large, giving her ample time to conceal herself. She was good at that, at blending in. She found a bitter-eye tree and stripped long peels of the bark from it, boiling them in a small pot she stole from a farmhouse she passed, and washing her hair with the pale, caustic extract until her black hair became a paler nut-brown. The bitter-eye extract made her hair brittle, coarse, and untamable, her natural curls gone, but that only enhanced the effect. She looked like some ragged, unranked young woman, a farmer’s daughter. She took on the accent of the region; she stole a chicken and basket from another farm, and walked the road with that as if she were on her way home or to a market. Once, as a test, she even stayed on the road when a quartet of chevarittai in Firenzcian livery came by on their warhorses, greeting them as if she had no idea they were searching for her. They looked at her, talked among themselves for a moment, then asked her if she’d seen a dark-haired woman about the same age. Rochelle shook her properly-downcast head shyly, and after a moment, they cantered on.
She held back the angry laugh until they’d gone.
She moved south and west, crossing the border into Nessantico at Ville Colhelm. There she took a room at one of the inns, calling herself “Remy.” She remained there, restless but not yet certain what she must do.
The nights were the worst. She could hear the revelry in the tavern downstairs, and yet it repulsed her. People should not be happy here, not when her own mind was in such turmoil. Her dreams were haunted by memories of that final confrontation with her vatarh. Sometimes Matarh was there with her. “I told you,” she said, her face touched with sadness as she looked from Jan to Rochelle. “I told you not to go there…”
“But he’s my vatarh, and I knew you loved him,” she answered, and they were no longer in the tent-palais, but in the home she remembered best, the cottage in the uplands sheep country of Il Trebbio. “You should have known that I’d be drawn to him.”
“I know, and they know,” she answered. She touched the stone she kept around her neck, the pale stone that held all the voices that haunted her, that drove her mad, and Rochelle pressed a hand to her own neck to where the same stone hung, its presence reassuring. “They told me that you would be the one to finally pay for my sins, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for that.” She was sobbing, and her tears dissolved the daub-and-wattle side of the cottage. The smell of burning peat was heavy in her nostrils, but the scene had shifted again, and she and her matarh were standing in a meadow under a starlit, moonless sky, with silvered clouds hurrying along the horizon as lightning licked at the distant hills with white snake tongues. Thunder growled imprecations and curses around them.
“But you’ve not done what I’ve asked,” Matarh said, and she was no longer weeping. The fury of madness was on her face now, and her fingers gripped hard at Rochelle’s shoulders. She was thirteen again, still a few fingers shorter than her matarh but more muscular, her first few kills already behind her. Her matarh lay back on the bed, and they were no longer on the hilltop but in that last home they shared, in Jablunkov, Sesemora. The painted, great oaken timbers loomed over them. Matarh was gasping for air, on her deathbed. She’d picked up the red lung disease and begun coughing up blood a week before. The healers had all shaken their collective heads at the symptoms and told Rochelle to prepare for the worst. “Listen to me now,” her matarh said, still grasping Rochelle’s shoulders as she leaned over the soiled rag she’d held over her mouth and nose.
“Listen to me, Rochelle. There is one responsibility that I place on you, something that-no, just shut up! You can’t stop me from telling her…” That last was to the voices in her head. Matarh shook her head as if trying to dislodge a persistent fly. She turned her head to cough, loosing a spray of red flecks that coated the pillow. “… something I intended to do myself, but now… No, I will not be with you, you bastards. I killed you all, and I’m going to where your voices will be silent forever. Do you hear me?”
Then Matarh’s eyes cleared again and her fingers tightened on the cloth at Rochelle’s shoulders. “I wanted to kill her for what she did to me,” she husked. “If it weren’t for her, I could have been happy, could have stayed with your vatarh. I wanted to hear her scream in torment in my head as she realized what I’d done-not because someone paid me to do it, no, but because I wanted it. I could have been happy with him, Rochelle. Your vatarh… The voices were gone when I was with him, but she… She ruined it all, for me, for Jan, for you too, Rochelle. She ruined it…”
Her hands loosened, and she fell back on the bed. For a moment, Rochelle thought that Matarh was dead, but her breath shuddered in again and her eyes focused. Her hand, trembling, lifted to touch Rochelle’s cheek. “Promise me,” she said. “Promise me you will do what I couldn’t do. Promise me. You will kill her, and as she dies, you will tell her why, so she goes to Cenzi knowing…”
“I promise, Matarh,” Rochelle husked, crying.
The smell of peat overcame the odor of sickness. Rochelle sat up, startled, in her bed in the inn. She could hear the wind blowing outside as a storm came through, the chimney to the hearth in her room losing its draw and the smoke from the peat chunks glowing there wafting back into the room. Then the wind changed and the smoke was sucked upward again. The wind screamed, and Rochelle thought she heard a fading whisper in it. “Promise me…”
She’d not yet kept that promise. She’d told herself that she would, that one day she’d go to Nessantico as the White Stone, and there she would find the woman who had ended Matarh’s affair with her vatarh.
Allesandra. The Kraljica.
Why not now? Jan would be going there, also, she was certain. That was what all the offiziers and gardai were saying. He would be taking the army to Nessantico.
She could be there first. She could keep the promise to Matarh, and Jan would know who had done it, and he would understand why.
Rain spattered against the shutters of the room. Thunder boomed once. Roche
lle brought the covers around her, suddenly awake.
“I will go to Nessantico, Matarh,” she whispered. “I promise.” The peat hissed in response.
Varina ca’Pallo
The Sparkwheel was heavy on the belt under her cloak, a constant reminder, and her mind burned with the spells she’d cast the day before, holding them for this afternoon. On the far side of the plaza, looking ominously abandoned and empty, the Old Temple’s golden dome gleamed even in the rainfall, as water spilled from the copper gutters into the mouth of gargoyle rainspouts, which disgorged white, loud streams into the plaza far below.
There were lights in the Old Temple and the attached buildings: the light of normal fires and teni-light both. They had all seen faces staring outward; those eyes could not have missed the massing of the Garde Kralji around the plaza and the arrival of the Numetodo. There could be no surprise here. This would be a frontal assault into the face of a well-prepared enemy.
Talbot, Johannes, Leovic, Mason, Niels, and others of the Numetodo were gathered near her, all of them grim-faced. A’Offizier ci’Santiago of the Garde Kralji approached them as they waited. “My gardai and utilinos are all in position,” he told them. “The Kraljica is also here to observe.” He pointed to a window above them, one of the government buildings that bordered the plaza. “You’re certain that you want to try speaking to Morel first, A’Morce?”
“I have to,” Varina answered.
Talbot shook his head. “No, you don’t, A’Morce. We could send in someone else with the message. I would go myself, willingly…”
Varina smiled at Talbot. “No,” she told him, told all of them. “I know Nico. He’ll recognize me, and he’ll talk to me. I’ll be safe. He’s the head of his group as I’m the head of mine. He’ll see us as peers. This is the way it needs to be.”
