A Magic of Nightfall nc-2

by S L Farrell

  Niente watched from the high stern of the warship, standing at Citlali’s right hand. The High Warrior’s body was decorated with the black-red tracks of clotted sword cuts, and he leaned heavily on a broken spear shaft as he glared back at the city.

  “You were right, Nahual,” Citlali said to Niente. “Axat’s vision-you saw it correctly.”

  Niente nodded. He still marveled that he was here, that he was alive, that Axat had somehow, impossibly spared him. He could still see the vision from the scrying bowl-only now, it wasn’t his face on the dead nahualli who lay next to Tecuhtli Zolin, but Talis’. Axat had spared him. He might yet see home, if the storms of the Inner Sea allowed it. He would hold his wife in his arms again; he would hug his children and watch them play. Niente took a long, shuddering breath.

  “I wasn’t strong enough,” he said to Citlali. “I wasn’t the Nahual I should have been. If I’d spoken more strongly to Zolin, if I’d seen the visions more clearly…”

  “Had you done that, nothing significant would have changed,” Citlali answered. “Zolin wouldn’t have listened to you, Nahual, no matter what you told him. All he could hear were the gods singing for revenge. He wouldn’t have listened to you. You would have been removed as Nahual and you’d have died here, too.”

  “Then it was all a waste.”

  Citlali laughed-humorless and dry. “A waste? Hardly. You have no imagination, Nahual Niente, and you are no warrior. A waste? No death in battle is wasted. Look at their great city.” He pointed eastward to where the sun shone golden on the broken spires and lanced through the curling smoke of the remaining fires. “We took their city,” Citlali said. “We took their heart.” He held his hand out, palm upward as if clutching something. His fingers slowly closed. “Do you think they’ll ever forget this, Nahual? No. They’ll shiver in the night and start at a sudden sound in terror, thinking that it’s us, returned. They’ll remember this for hand upon hand of generations. They will never feel safe again-and they would be right.”

  Citlali spat over the rail into the river. His spittle was flecked with blood. “We took their heart, and we will keep it,” he said. “I make that promise to Sakal here, and you are my witness-let His eye see my words and mark them. We will keep what we’ve taken from them. A Tecuhtli will stand again where Zolin fell.”

  He clapped Niente on the back, hard enough that Niente staggered. “What do you think of that, Nahual?”

  Niente stared at the city, dwindling in the boat’s wake. “I will look in the scrying bowl tonight, Tecuhtli Citlali” he said, “and I will tell you what Axat says.”

  The White Stone

  The new voice in her head screamed and wailed and raged, speaking half in the language of Nessantico and half in a language she didn’t understand at all. The others in her head laughed and hooted.

  “Your lover Jan… What a pleasant vision he has of you now!”

  “Do you think he would marry the filthy assassin he saw?”

  “He laid with a murderer and now she carries his child.”

  “He’s glimpsed the truth. I hope you always remember the horror on his face when he recognized you.”

  That last one was Fynn, pleased and smug. “Shut up!” she shouted at them, but they only laughed all the louder, their voices crowding out what she heard with her own ears.

  She’d followed Talis and the Westlander leader from the Isle back to the Red Swan after she’d made certain that Nico seemed to be safe. She was angry, furious with Talis-he’d broken his promise to her. The Numetodo… they might be disgusting heretics, but they had treated Nico kindly and with respect, the woman especially.

  But Talis…

  Talis had betrayed Nico and because of that Nico’s matarh lay near death, and she had told Talis what the price would be. She had told him, and she would exact payment. The White Stone always kept her word.

  So she had followed him, when-all out of nowhere-the sounds of battle had erupted from the east and she’d watched the Westlander leader arrange his men to ambush the Firenzcian chevarittai and soldiers. Suddenly there was far too much fighting going on, too much movement for her to make a move, and she was worried now about Nico and whether he was truly safe and she wanted desperately to run back to him, afraid that following Talis might have been a mistake. But she’d seen Talis slip from the room into which he’d gone and rush out into the street, and she’d followed. She watched the confrontation and she’d seen the chance. She slashed her blade across his throat and she felt him die as he dropped the flask of dark powder And as she laid him down and started to put the stone on his eye, she’d glimpsed him.

  Jan.

  The shock had been palpable. She’d felt it as strongly as if her heart had been placed directly on a bed of hidden, red-hot coals. Jan: he stood there, and she had witnessed the slow recognition on his face. His expression had frightened her. It was full of shock and affection, of yearning and horror. Seeing him was awful and wonderful at the same moment, and she had wanted to run to him, had wanted to take his hand and place it on her swelling stomach and whisper, Here, darling. This is the life we have created together. This is what our love has made; she wanted also to run, to flee, to hide her face and pretend this revelation had never happened.

  The second impulse was the stronger.

  She’d taken the white stone from Talis’ eye and she’d fled, wanting Jan to follow her and afraid that he actually would.

  She didn’t stop until she reached the Pontica Kralji. There were no strange, bronze-colored men there; none who were living, anyway, though their bodies littered the ground. She could see soldiers in the black and silver of Firenzcia moving everywhere on the streets-causing Fynn to exclaim excitedly inside her head-and she carefully made her way across the Pontica and slid quickly into cover on the island. That was easy; so many walls tumbled down, so many fire-scarred buildings. She went to the gardener’s cottage on the palais estates where they’d taken Nico and his matarh, where the healer for the Westlander had worked over her injured body.

  The healer and all the Westlander soldiers were gone, but her fears eased when she saw that Nico was still there, holding onto his matarh’s hand as he crouched next to the table on which she lay-it must have once been one of the dining tables from the palais, still covered with fine, lacy damask, now bloodstained and filthy. She could see Serafina’s chest rise with a slow breath, but her eyes were still closed and she seemed unresponsive.

  “Nico,” she said, and he started, his hand clenching his matarh’s tightly.

  “Oh,” he said a moment later. His face brightened slightly. He sniffed and ran his hand across his nose. “Elle. It’s you.”

  She nodded and came to him. She clasped her own hands around his and his matarh’s. She saw him stare at the blood that mottled her skin. “We need to go, Nico,” she told him.

  “I can’t leave Matarh,” he said. “Talis will be back soon.”

  She shook her head. Her hands pressed tighter against his. His skin was warm, so warm, and she felt the child within her jump at the touch-the stirring of life, the quickening. She gasped slightly at the feel. “No,” she told him. “I’m afraid Talis is dead, Nico.”

  She saw the tears start in his eyes and his lower lip trembled. Then he sniffed again and blinked. “That’s the truth?”

  She nodded. “The truth, Nico. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

  He was crying fully now, the words coming out between the sobbing breath. “But my matarh… I can’t… They just left her… She’s asleep and I… can’t wake her up…”

  “Your matarh would want you to go with me. Look at her, Nico. She loves you so much, I know she does, but I don’t know if she’s ever going to wake up, and the city is full of soldiers and death. She would want you to go with me because I can keep you safe. I will keep you safe.”

  “But I did this to her,” Nico said. “It was my fault. I want her to know that I’m sorry.”

  She pressed Nico’s hand around his matarh�
��s. “She knows. Nico, we need to hurry.”

  She pulled his hand away from his matarh’s, prying away the fingers gently. He released his grip reluctantly but without protest. “Give her a kiss,” she said. “She’ll feel it, and she’ll know.”

  Nico stood up. Leaning over his matarh’s body, he gave her a kiss on the cheek. He put her hand, dangling over the side, on the table, and patted it. He looked back over his shoulder, then, his eyes swimming with tears that didn’t fall.

  “I promise you, Nico-I’ll find her again if she lives and bring her back to us. I promise you.”

  He nodded. She held out her hand to him, and he took it. She brought him to her, hugging him briefly, then releasing him with a sigh. She took his hand again.

  “It’s time,” she told him.

  Together, hand in hand, they made their way from the smoldering, ruined city.

  Allesandra ca’Vorl

  “ Here you are, Matarh. It’s all yours. I hope it makes you happy.”

  Jan’s words were scalding water poured over her. They burned and seared her, delivered with an appalling and terrifying scorn and distance. He gestured grandly and mockingly in the direction of the Sun Throne. Allesandra stared at the massive piece of carved crystal, sitting-strangely misplaced-in the middle of the ruined Old Temple. The throne had been cracked and badly repaired; a cloth with strange geometric patterns was draped over it, the ruins of the shattered dome and its lantern littered the broken tiles behind, and all around the hall were the remnants of some feast. Rats prowled the corners of the room, and the air stank of smoke and rotting meat. Near the rear there was a body, with one of the tapestries thrown hastily over it.

  Allesandra knew whose body was under the covering: Sigourney, her staked head lolling separately near the throne.

  The Regent and the two Numetodo were standing limned in sunlight by the open doors of the temple, too far away to hear her and Jan’s conversation. Starkkapitan ca’Damont called out orders in the temple’s plaza, sending out patrols to make certain that all the Westlander troops were gone from the city and to stop any looting by the survivors.

  Allesandra heard the scrape of footsteps at the temple doors; she glanced over her shoulder to see Archigos Semini stepping carefully over the rubble on the floor. Jan saw him also. “Ah, Archigos Semini,” Jan said. “I’m glad you’re here, since this is also yours. I give you Nessantico. You won’t be in Brezno any longer.”

  “My Hirzg?” Semini asked, glancing worriedly from Allesandra to Jan. “I was considering that perhaps the Archigos should reside in Brezno now, given the destruction here. I could assign an a’teni to Nessantico…”

  “Oh, I agree,” Jan said, and his smile made Allesandra shiver. It was the grim, bloodless smile her vatarh used when he was angry. She had seen it many times in her childhood, and in her adulthood after he had finally brought her back to Firenzcia. Now here the scornful, mocking expression was again, returned. Jan’s face was smeared with soot and blood, and his right arm and leg were heavily bandaged. He limped, he seemed barely able to lift his sword arm. She wondered what her son had seen, what he was feeling. She longed to fold him into her arms and comfort him as she had when he’d been a child, but he stood a careful step from her as if he were afraid of exactly that. “You see, there will be an Archigos in Brezno. As to whether there’s one in Nessantico, well…” Jan shrugged, coldly. “That’s your choice. You might wish to claim the title and hold it for a while-though you’ve always said you wanted a reunited Faith. Or perhaps the Archigos in Brezno will let you be the a’teni here in Nessantico, though I’ll advise the Archigos against that.”

  “Hirzg?” ca’Cellibrecca spluttered. His face had gone the color of the white that sprinkled his dark beard and hair, the contrast strong. “I don’t understand.”

  “Perhaps Matarh will explain it to you, since this is now her city,” Jan said.

  Allesandra stared at the throne. She felt dead, numbed. If someone cut her now, she thought, she would feel nothing, not even the heat of the blood on her skin. “My son gives me Nessantico, but he has informed me that Firenzcia will not be rejoining the Holdings,” she told Semini, and her voice was as dead as her emotions.

  “Consider it my wedding gift, Matarh,” he told her. “For the wedding I never had, with the woman you sent away from me.”

  “I was protecting you, Jan,” Allesandra told him, though there was no energy to her protest. “Elissa was a fraud. An impostor.”

  “I know,” Jan told her. “She’d been hired to kill Fynn.”

  “What?” That brought her head up and caused fire to course through her briefly. Allesandra swung to face him. “What are you saying? The White Stone killed Fynn.”

  “Indeed, she did,” Jan told her, with that same infuriating smile. “Let me tell you something you might not know, Matarh, though you should have: Elissa was the White Stone. She used me in order to get to Fynn.”

  “That’s not possible,” Allesandra said. It couldn’t be; it wasn’t possible. The voice she’d heard, the woman go-between; no, it wasn’t possible, yet… She remembered the voice, higher than she might have expected for a man. And she had never seen the Stone. She had just assumed…

  “Believe whatever you need to believe,” Jan was saying. “I really don’t care.” He gestured again toward the throne. “Take your new seat, Matarh. Don’t be shy. You’ve waited for it for so long, after all, and Regent ca’Rudka has renounced all claim to the title. You can have Semini give you a blessing. Maybe the ca’-and-cu’ will come back to the city now, so you can tell them that there’s a new Kraljica.”

  Jan started to walk away toward the open doors. She took a step and caught at his wounded arm. “Jan. Son…”

  He wrenched his arm away from her, grimacing with obvious pain as he did so, and that was more an agony to her than any sword cut. “ Sit, Matarh. Take your Sun Throne. You have what you’ve always wanted. Enjoy the gift I’ve given you.”

  With that, he walked away toward ca’Rudka and the others. She watched him leave, wanting to call out to him, to keep him from leaving, to stop the pain.

  She didn’t. She watched him reach the bright doorway, and she heard his laugh as he clapped ca’Rudka on the back with his uninjured hand. The four of them walked away and sunlight collapsed around them.

  Semini was staring up at the sky where Brunelli’s dome had once been, his breath loud in his nose. Allesandra walked slowly to the Sun Throne.

  She sat.

  In the depths of thick crystal, there was no light. No response at all. The throne remained sullenly dark.

  Epilogue: Nessantico

  She was shattered. She was broken.

  She had been scorched by fire and magic; she had been slashed with steel. She had been looted and ravaged. Her greatest treasures were damaged or gone. The buildings that had been her crown were tumbled ruins and piles of blackened stone. The jeweled necklace of the Avi a’Parete no longer glistened in the night. Now there were only stars in the sky above, gleaming mockingly down at her darkness.

  Half her population was dead or had fled. She had felt for the first time in long centuries the tread of conquering soldiers along her streets: had felt them not once, but twice. A Kraljica sat on the Sun Throne, but she looked out on an empire that had withered and shrunk.

  There was no denying the gauntness of the visage that stared back at the city from the filthy mirror of the A’Sele: the city’s face was a crone’s face, a blasted face, a face of scars and open wounds and pain. There was no beauty here, no glory, no wonder.

  That was gone, as if it had never been.

  When the rains came, as they did frequently that autumn, it was as if the entire world wept for her: the city, the woman. The storms washed away the soot and extinguished the fires, but they could not heal. They cooled and soothed, but they could not restore. They flushed away the bodies and garbage and soil that choked the river, but their thundering could not shatter the memories.

&n
bsp; The memories would stay.

  They would stay for a long, long time…

  Appendices

  PRIMARY VIEWPOINT CHARACTERS

  (by rank, then alphabetical order)

  Audric ca’Dakwi [AHD-ric-Kah-DAWK-whee] The Kraljiki in Nessantico.

  Sergei ca’Rudka [SARE-zhay Kah-ROOD-kah] The Regent of Nessantico until Audric comes into his majority at sixteen.

  Karl ca’Vliomani [Karhl Kah-vlee-oh-MAHN-ee] Ambassador of the Numetodo from the Isle of Paeti, friend of Archigos Ana and Regent ca’Rudka.

  Allesandra ca’Vorl [Ahl-ah-SAHN-drah Kah-VOORL] Daughter of the Hirzg of Firenzcia, and once the heir to that title herself.

  Jan ca’Vorl [Yahn Kah-VOORL] Son of Allesandra and Pauli.

  Eneas cu’Kinnear [Eh-NIGH-us Coo-ken-EAR] An offizier with the Garde Civile in the Hellins, fighting the Westlanders.

  Varina ci’Pallo [Vah-REE-nah Kee-PAHL-low] A Numetodo.

  Nico Morel [NEE-koh Mohr-ELL] A young boy living in Oldtown.

  Niente [Nee-EHN-tay] The Nahual (chief spellcaster) of the Westlanders (Tehuantin).

  The White Stone An assassin.

  SUPPORTING CAST

  (by rank, then alphabetical order)