by S L Farrell
“Good,” she told him. “I hope they’re well-rested. We need them now. Talbot, if you’d take charge of the war-teni and the archers. Brie, you have the sparkwheelers.” She scowled at Sergei, still feeling anger at the man’s insolence in disregarding her orders. “Sergei, you’ll be with me and the Archigos.”
They assembled quickly. While Allesandra remained furious with Sergei for having destroyed the eastern bridge, she had to admit that a two-pronged attack across both bridges would have divided and thinned their forces too much. Still, the difficulty was that they would all need to cross the Pontica a’Brezi Veste. The fact that the Tehuantin had left the bridge standing and not destroyed it from their end told Allesandra that they wanted the bridge intact as much as she did-so they could meet up with their army on the North Bank. Sergei’s urging to retreat to the Isle and the North Bank, destroying all the southern bridges across the A’Sele to isolate this arm of the Tehuantin, made tactical sense.
Allesandra knew that intellectually, yet emotionally…
This was her city, the seat of the Holdings. She would not allow it to be taken from her. She’d already had to rebuild this city once; she didn’t want to do that yet again. She would rather fall here and leave it to her successor-whomever that might be-to do that.
Their attack began with a barrage of spells from Talbot and the few Numetodo, as well as the new war-teni and the Archigos. Nearly all the spells were neutralized or deflected by the Tehuantin spellcasters, but those that went through sent the Tehuantin scrambling back from the Bastida and the area immediately around the South Bank end of the bridge. “Now!” Allesandra shouted, and she led the Garde Kralji in a charge across the bridge while Talbot directed their archers to provide a cover of arrows ahead of them. Sergei was behind her, and the Archigos’ carriage, rattling over the timbers. The Tehuantin sent their own shower of arrows toward them as they started across, but the Archigos chanted and gestured from his carriage seat; the arrows were swept wide with a spell-wind to fall harmlessly in the A’Sele.
In a few breaths, they were across. The warriors came shrieking and shouting toward them. “To the Bastida!” she shouted to the gardai; they pushed forward, riding and shoving through the open gates of the prison, not caring that they were leaving the Avi full of Tehuantin behind them, that they were surrounded.
Behind the Garde Kralji, Brie led the sparkwheelers across the pontica. At the foot of the bridge, they formed their lines and their weapons bellowed a rhythmic call of death. The warriors in the Avi began to fall, and none of them could reach the sparkwheelers to stop them. From the gates of the Bastida, Allesandra could see Brie, dismounted, prowling behind the sparkwheelers, her voice exhorting them to stay, to keep the lines moving, to move faster. Her strong voice called out the commands; the stuttered roar of the sparkwheels echoing around the Avi. The Tehuantin fell back. Allesandra and the gardai were no longer pressed on all sides.
“Follow me!” Allesandra shouted, and led the Garde Kralji in a furious charge from the Bastida gates.
The night had been horrible; the dawn was simply brutal. As the sun hauled itself over the trees and the roofs of Nessantico, the Westlanders came: with a roar and a shout, with their swords and spears waving, with volleys of black sand and shrieking, violent spells. They plunged into the waters of the Infante. Water splashed high and white around them while arrows from the Garde Civile rained down on them. At first, it was slaughter and the gardai shouted in exultation and relief, but there were more and more of them, and they just kept coming, and now their nahualli were casting enchantments that sent the arrows to ash in the air.
They were across, more warriors coming with every passing breath. The war-teni and the Numetodo poured fire on them; it did not stop the advance. The Tehuantin left hands upon hands of warriors dead on the ground, but they still came, relentless.
“Pull back!” the offiziers and the cornets called, and the Garde Civile scrambled out from between the double wall of embankments, retreating to the higher crest of the second wall. As they retreated, they tipped over barrels of oil that had been brought up from the city, soaking the ground with it and leaving black pools behind. As the Tehuantin crested the first wall, they were again greeted by arrow fire. Bodies tumbled into the slick trench before them, but now their companions, unhurt, were with them.
The prepared spells pounded in Varina’s head, in the minds of all the Numetodo along the earthworks. “Wait!” Varina heard ca’Damont order the war-teni and Numetodo. “Not yet! Wait!”
The Tehuantin warriors had reached the trench and were beginning to ascend the second embankment, where the Garde Civil troops waited. “Now!” ca’Damont shouted; Varina gestured and spoke the release word, as did the two Numetodo alongside her, Leovic and Niels, as did the war-teni farther up the line. Fire arced out from between their hands. The oil-soaked ground between the earthworks erupted into a pit of hissing, smoky flame. Those caught in the inferno screamed-Varina saw them writhing among the flames. The heat beat on her skin as the horrible stench of blistered flesh wafted over them. Just below her, a warrior staggered out of the flames, his body horribly charred, flames still licking about his armor and clothing. She saw his face, terribly young, the mouth open as he screamed in his own language. Varina didn’t know if he called for help or for his god or simply from the pain. She could imagine him at home, embracing his wife or holding his children, laughing at something one of them might have said. She hardly noticed the sword he held, or the fact that he raised it above her.
Arrows sprouted along the man’s front, and he collapsed, forever silent. Varina gagged and vomited on the ground, falling to her knees next to the dead warrior. As she spat out the bile, she wondered: so strange; I’ve seen hundred of people die in the last few days, and this one face has affected me the most…
“You must come with us, A’Morce!” Leovic and Niels closed around her, pulling her up and half-dragging her down the far side of the slope. The Tehuantin had momentarily pulled back as the fires roared in the trench, but the flames were dying quickly as the oil was consumed. The Tehuantin pushed forward again, spilling over the earthwork and up the other side. The waiting Garde Civile drew their swords, and Varina, along with the other Numetodo and war-teni, retreated as hand-to-hand combat flared all along the ridge. She could hear the cornets blaring and see the flags waving, but they meant little to her now as Leovic and Niels continued to help her retreat, one on each arm. She simply moved with the flow of people in blue-and-gold uniforms: back toward the city, always back. The retreat was slow at first, but gained momentum, and suddenly they were not walking but running, giving their spines to the Tehuantin as they fled. She could hear the pounding of the hooves of warriors’ horses, saw people fall around her, struck by arrows or felled by spells.
Leovic and Niels were half-carrying her as they ran. She didn’t dare stop to look back. She didn’t want to.
“Move, move, move!” Brie screamed at the sparkwheelers as she saw the Kraljica, with Sergei on their horses, the Archigos in his carriage, and the Garde Kralji, pour out from the brief shelter of the Bastida. “Let’s go! Keep up!”
They had made an abattoir of the Avi at the bridgehead. The sparkwheelers ran over cobbles slick with blood, around bodies that still moaned and writhed. The faces of the sparkwheelers looked alternately horrified and pleased with the carnage they’d caused, but Brie gave them no time to ponder or exult. She pushed them forward toward the Bastida’s gates.
In the open, the sparkwheelers were most vulnerable; they were best at defending a confined space. And if their lines were broken, they would be overwhelmed quickly. She shepherded them, not letting them separate, screaming at them.
Allesandra’s people charged into a clot of warriors at the end of the Bastida walls. More of the Westlanders hurried from the side streets, led by a mounted warrior whose face was painted red and his skull shaved clean. Brie could see a spellcaster with him: an old man whose face was ravaged as if by som
e disease, his left eye white and blind. As Brie lined up the sparkwheelers near the Bastida gate to deal with the renewed assault, she saw the Archigos chanting and moving his withered hands in a new spell with his green-and-gold robes swaying. The Westlander spellcaster raised a wooden staff, shouting a single word in his strange tongue.
His spell came immediately.
The Archigos and his carriage were enveloped in flame. The teni-driver fell from his seat, shrieking and flailing at his burning robes with his hands. She heard the old man shrilling in surprise and agony. He pushed open the door and fell from the carriage to the street, his robes seeming to drip liquid flame. He rolled on the pavement, a long, thin wail coming from him that ended suddenly, but Brie could no longer see the Archigos, not in the swirl of the battle. As she shouted at the sparkwheelers, trying to get them into their proper lines, she glimpsed the red-skulled warrior with a spear in his hand urging his horse into a gallop toward Allesandra. The Kraljica brought up her sword, but the red-painted warrior’s spear thrust was quicker; with horror, Brie saw the tip of his spear drive hard into and through the Kraljica’s armor. The warrior leaped from his horse, still holding the spear that impaled Allesandra, dragging her down. Brie, shouting at the sparkwheelers desperately, saw Sergei jump from his horse as if he were a young man.
They, too, vanished in the melee.
The spellcasters on both sides were hurling spells, and yet more warriors were arriving, filling the streets. She could feel the chill of the Ilmodo all around them. “Fire!” she screamed at the sparkwheelers, who were staring in confusion. “Fire!”
But then it all changed.
Nico was abandoned. Bereft. Even Rochelle had left him sometime during the night. He had felt her departure, even if he hadn’t responded to her.
He had been praying for over a full day now without eating, drinking, or sleeping, and Cenzi remained silent. Or perhaps He was saying too much. Nico was afflicted by visions, but he couldn’t tell whether they emananted from Cenzi or from the sounds he was hearing outside or from his own fevered imagination. He was cold and shivering, as if wrapped in an impossible winter as cold as the Ilmodo itself. Behind his closed eyes, he felt that he watched the battle to the west as the sun touched him through the window of the hovel in Oldtown. He could see the troops running from the Westlanders, could see the mounted chevarittai vainly trying to protect the rear of the retreating men from the mounted High Warriors with their painted faces and strange armor. Those in black and silver, those in blue and gold were failing; too many of them taken by arrows or by the warrior riders.
Nico witnessed it as if he drifted above the battlefield in the cold arms of his prayers, staring down at the scene. He was a bird, a falcon, drifting on the cold wind. He could see the banner of Commandant ca’Talin, and farther north, those of the Starkkapitan and the Hirzg. They were all flying back toward the city, the foremost of them already in the streets near the Avi a’Certendi, the westernmost limb of the sprawling city.
He drifted above it all, watching…
… and he saw her: Varina. She was exhausted, being pulled along by two other Numetodo heretics; the three of them dangerously separated from the main mass of the Garde Civile. The mounted warriors were close by, only a few strides away and the grim foot-soldiers of the Tehuantin weren’t far behind them. They were going to be overrun and killed. All too soon.
Why do you show me this, Cenzi? Why do you show me the heretic so clearly?
As he watched Varina, he felt the cold wrap its arms even tighter around him. He was falling, tumbling down toward Varina as he saw the warriors on the warhorses rushing at her, as her companions turned to hurl futile spells toward the attackers, as they surrounded her.
Then he was there, on the ground and standing not far from Varina. He heard her gasp and call his name-“Nico?”-but there was so much energy here that he could barely hear for the buzzing of it. The Second World seemed to gape open in the sky above him, a cold fire, the frigid power of the Ilmodo pouring down. He could feel them all pulling at the energy above him: the war-teni, the heretics, the spellcasters of the Tehuantin, even those across the A’Sele in the city. He could feel the power stored in the spell-sticks of the Tehuantin, in the minds of the Numetodo.
All of them channeled the Ilmodo from the Second World where Cenzi still lived.
Nico felt vast. He could stretch out his fingers and touch the threads of all of their connections to the Ilmodo; he could pull on them, take them for himself…
So he did.
It wasn’t a conscious movement. He acted as if someone else had control of his body, without volition. He heard himself saying words he couldn’t comprehend, felt his hands moving in patterns he had never used before. Cenzi? But if it was Cenzi, there was no answer.
He shouted the final words, made the final gesture. He snatched the cords of power that tied the Westlanders to the Second World, but he left that of the teni and even the Numetodo alone. He stood on the battlefield with his arms wide, and the Second World took him as it never had before.
He had never felt so full of the power of the Ilmodo. It filled him, burning and too dangerous to handle for more than a breath. He took it all in, breathed in the gift of Cenzi, and exhaled it again, shouting.
What do I do with this? he asked Cenzi, and he heard the answer:
Do what you should do…
The wave of energy pulsed out from him, radiating westward and north along the line of battle. Where it touched, the Tehuantin were thrown back, flung wildly backward into their own ranks. They toppled like game pieces swept aside by an angry hand.
The warrior riders about to slay Varina and her companions were taken in the storm, both steeds and riders hurled away. “Go!” Nico told them. “This is Cenzi’s Gift!” His voice was that of Cenzi; it roared, a thunder that could be heard all along the lines. “Go!”
And it was over. The threads of power snapped; the Second World shut with a deep thunder. A terrible exhaustion filled him, so overpowering that he couldn’t stand. His legs gave way, and he collapsed into cold darkness.
“Let them come across,” Tototl said. “Once they’re in the boulevard, they’ll be easy targets and we’ll hit them from all sides at once.”
The tactic had worked initially. The Easterners used their spells as the sun rose; Niente told the nahualli to let them waste their energy even though they could have easily countered them all with the spells in their spell-staffs. The warriors drew back, abandoning the catapult. Niente waited on his horse next to Tototl, just down the first major cross street of the great boulevard. Their archers sent volleys into the sky; an ancient nahualli Easterner riding in a carriage showed his strength and sent the arrows flying harmlessly away. The Tecuhtli of the Easterners-the woman clad in steel-escorted her warriors across.
They heard the rush of warriors who were hidden near the river and in the courtyard of where the monster’s skull was set, but Tototl raised his hand as the warriors behind them pressed forward, eager to join the battle. “Wait,” he said. “Not yet.”
Through the gaps between the buildings, Niente glimpsed the Easterners pressing farther up the street, the woman, strangely, leading them into the courtyard from which the warriors had come. He wondered at that for a moment, then the answer came: the terrible shrill chatter of the black sand weapons, sounding eerily like the eagle claws used in the sacrifice of captives. They heard the screams that followed, and saw the warriors falling like maize being harvested. The warriors grumbled now behind Tototl, wanting revenge for the fallen, and still he held them back. The Easterner Tecuhtli called out, and their warriors poured back into the boulevard, pushing back the remnants of the warriors in the boulevard.
“Now!” Tototl cried, and they surged out into the fray. Tototl charged directly toward the woman, snatching the riding spear from its holder on his saddle, his sword still sheathed. Niente tried to follow him. The Easterner spellcaster in the carriage, clad in green and gold and older th
an Niente, was chanting, his hands moving in familiar patterns. Niente could feel the power gathering around him, and so Niente raised his spell-staff, shouting a release word. The X’in Ka shot from the staff, a sun-blast that enveloped the spellcaster in blue flame. The man screamed, the blast covering carriage and rider.
So slow. The Easterner way of magic was so slow.
Niente saw Tototl’s spear skewer the Easterner Tecuhtli like a haunch of meat. The High Warrior leaped down from his horse with the spear still grasped in his hands, wrenching the helpless woman down from her horse to the cobblestones. Tototl shouted in triumph. Niente heard the impact as the woman’s body hit the ground.
He could feel their spellcasters readying spells, could hear the woman commanding the terrible eagle claws shouting orders to her people, a long brown braid swaying from underneath her helm. Niente raised his spell-staff ready to take down the braided woman-to his mind, she was the most dangerous of their enemies.
He shouted the release word, but in that same moment, a terrible force pulled at him, at all the nahualli. The frigid air of the X’in Ka swirled over them, above them, and it swept away his spell-and he knew: he had seen this, though he had not believed it possible.
The misted man, the hidden one-he had made his decision. He had acted.
The Long Path was open.
Niente gasped. This was a raw force he had never felt before.
An invisible vortex sat over them, like the hungry mouth of a fierce tornado, and it sucked at the energy locked in Niente’s staff, in all of their spell-staffs, ripping away the power stored there and leaving their staffs as empty as if they’d cast all the spells they’d so laboriously placed within them the previous night. It was not only the nahualli that felt it: he could see everyone pause and look about, glancing upward, searching for something they could not see. Tototl had ripped the spear from the body of the Tecuhtli; he stood over her, the spear poised to strike again, and he, too, hesitated.
