A Magic of Twilight nc-1
Page 52
Karl cut the straps of the plate mail with his dagger and pulled it free of the torn links of the mail leggings underneath. More blood gushed over his hands. The spear, he saw, had come in at the top of the plate and pierced deep into the muscle. He glimpsed white bone before Sergei packed the wound and bound another strip above the gash. The flow of blood slowly subsided, though the Kraljiki’s face was pale and he’d lapsed into unconsciousness.
“He may lose that leg, if not his life,” the commandant said to Karl as the healer arrived, and ca’Rudka stood up, watching as the healer fussed over Justi. “This was so unnecessary. The Archigos, though, she might be able to help.”
Karl shook his head. “Ana has no strength left. The Kraljiki is in the hands of the healers for now.”
A nod. The commandant was looking back, toward the line of battle. The gloom of twilight was beginning to deepen, aided by the dark fan of a storm front. A few large drops of rain were beginning to fall and the wind had picked up. “We’ve done all we can do,” the commandant said, glancing up. “The city is safe for another day, at least.” He gestured to a nearby page. “Find the horns. Have them call ‘Disengage.’
Tell the a’offiziers to fall back toward the city. I doubt the Hirzg will follow this time.”
He looked down again at the Kraljiki. Karl watched him shake his head.
Jan ca’Vorl
“They’re pulling back all along the line,” ca’Linnett said to Jan. The Starkkapitan’s face, like Jan’s own, was spattered with mud and blood smeared by the driving rain, and the edge of his sword was badly nicked. “If we press, they will turn and fight; if we allow them, they’ll retreat.”
Jan grunted. He wiped at sodden eyes. He was surprised that therain did not hiss like water dropped on heated steel as it struck him, the anger burned in him so hot.
The carriages had come forward as the line of battle had pushed on toward the city. Allesandra, wrapped in an oilcloth against the wet, was at his side again, looking up at him as ca’Linnett gave his report. U’Teni cu’Kohnle stood by ca’Linnett, his hair plastered to his skull and dripping with the rain; he looked as if he’d not slept in a week, drained by the efforts of his spells. Ca’Cellibrecca was present as well-unsoiled, untouched, protected from the rain by a large umbrella held by an e’teni, yet somehow managing to look as if he’d suffered worst of all.
This was not a victory. At best this was a draw. Jan stared at the men in black and silver laying unmoving in the field as the rain pummeled them. This was a defeat. He knew it. The Numetodo illusion had wasted their war-teni’s efforts, and they’d been unable to counter the war-fire that had been sent after them. The Garde Civile had fought like madmen rather than halfhearted conscripts, and the chevarittai of Nessantico had shown their worth. Jan had felt some hope when he’d glimpsed the Kraljiki’s foolish advance beyond his own lines, but another unusual spell-was it the Numetodo again, or the false Archigos? — had saved the idiot.
Now darkness threatened and the rain poured down on them.
“Pursue,” he said, furious. “I don’t care. I will rest tonight inside the walls.
“Hirzg,” ca’Linnett persisted, “they’re not fleeing in panic. Their retreat is orderly and slow, and they will fight all the way back if we press them, on ground they know better than we do. Who knows what these Numetodo can still do? Our war-teni need to rest, and we could use the time to prepare our siege engines.”
Jan was shaking his head at the argument. “Hirzg,” cu’Kohnle broke in, “the starkkapitan is right. My war-teni are exhausted; we have nothing left. Give us the night, though, and we’ll be ready for a final assault in the morning.”
“Are you not listening to me?” Jan spat at them. “I want this city.
I will have it. If you won’t help me take it, then I will find offiziers and teni who will.” He glared at them, and was gratified when both ca’Linnett and cu’Kohnle bowed their heads. Ca’Cellibrecca, in his ornate robes under the umbrella, was looking away, as if fascinated by the Avi behind them.
“Vatarh.” Allesandra tugged at his cloak. He glanced down at her serious face, blinking against the raindrops pelting them. “The starkkapitan and the u’teni are right. They’ll do as you tell them to do because they respect you, but they’re right. I know you want the city, and I know you’ll give it to me as you promised. But not tonight, Vatarh.
Tomorrow.” She smiled at him, and the fury inside him cooled somewhat. “Or even the next day,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. The Firenzcian army is strong, and you are their leader. You will take the city, but it doesn’t need to be this day.”
“I promised you, Allesandra,” Jan said. With his forefinger, he brushed dampened curls back from her cheeks.
“I can wait, Vatarh,” she answered. “I can wear the lights of the city for the rest of my life. Another day won’t matter. I can wait.”
He took a breath. Thunder grumbled overhead, but the rain was lessening, and the lightning was flickering east of them, toward Firenzcia.
“We’ll make camp here,” he said. “U’Teni cu’Kohnle, make certain
that the war-teni sleep and are ready for tomorrow. Starkkapitan, you’ll prepare your offiziers and troops for the final assault, and I will meet with both of you later this evening. We’ll move at first light tomorrow.”
He hugged Allesandra to him. “And you shall have your jeweled city tomorrow,” he told her.
Mahri
Ana was dozing in her chair, but she must have sensed his presence. Her eyes fluttered open. If she was surprised to see
him standing in her apartments near the Archigos’ Temple, she didn’t show it.
“You don’t agree to my advice?” he asked her, chiding her gently.
“You won’t use the gift I gave you?”
He saw Ana touch her robe at her right side. He could see how the cloth rounded there over the enchanted glass he’d given her. She said nothing. “I heard the gossip in the city, Archigos. They say that you saved the Kraljiki’s life with a spell,” he continued.
“It wasn’t me,” she said. “I don’t know. .” Then her eyes widened a bit.
“Yes,” he told her. “I shouldn’t have interfered, but if I hadn’t, my gift to you would have been wasted.”
She stirred, sitting up in the chair in which she’d fallen asleep. Her hand brought out the ball. He could see the glowing colors within it; he could feel the power he’d placed within the glass for her. “Here, then,” she said. “I give it back to you. Use it yourself if you’re so certain.”
“I can’t.” He kept his hands at his sides, refusing to take it. After a moment, she placed it on the stand next to the chair, on her untouched dinner tray.
“Why not?”
In answer, he brought a shallow brass bowl from the bag he wore under his cloak, the rim decorated with ornate filigrees of colored enamel.
He went to the desk and set the bowl there, pouring water into it from a pitcher the servants had left there. From a leather pouch, he sprinkled a dark powder into the water and stirred it, chanting words in the West-speech. He could see her watching him, her head cocked to one side as she listened, and he knew that she heard the similarity between West-speech and the language of the Ilmodo: the same cadences and rhythms, the same sibilance and breathy vowels. A mist rose above the bowl.
“Look into it,” he said.
She gave him a long, appraising look. Then, finally, she rose from her chair (he could see her weariness in the grimaces and the way she stretched her limbs) and-on the far side of the desk from him-stood over the bowl. She looked down.
He knew what she saw, knew because he’d glimpsed it himself a dozen or more times over the last few months.
In the mists, Ana’s face, and the figure of Jan ca’Vorl. She holds a knife, and the blade is bloodied. The mists roil, and there is ca’Cellibrecca, sprawled on the ground alongside the Hirzg, blood spread across his chest, his chest unmoving. Ana’s face is a mask a
s she stares, her eyes cold and hard. The knife drops from her hand, and the mists swirl again, and there is Nessantico, untouched, and on the Sun Throne is Justi. .
He knew what she saw. He stretched his scarred hand between Ana’s rapt face and the bowl, sweeping away the mist.
He would not let her see what came afterward. That was only for him.
Ana looked up at him, her hands fisted on the desktop. “This is the future?” she asked.
He nodded. “It is a glimpse of one path the future can take,” he said. “A path that’s uncertain and hard to decipher sometimes. But when I see the Hirzg’s death, when I see Nessantico saved and Justi on the throne, it is always you who do this deed, Ana. Not me. That’s why I gave you the spelled glass-because I know that if I kill them, Nessantico still falls. Inevitably.”
He wondered if she could hear the half-lie.
“I can’t,” she said. “To murder people while they’re helpless. .”
He smiled, and saw her recoil from his expression. “How better to do it?” he said. “My people have a saying: ‘In time of war, all laws are silent.’ How many have died today-unnecessarily-because you didn’t do what I suggested?”
Her gaze hardened then, and he realized he’d pushed her too far.
“You blame me?”
Mahri hurried to answer, shaking his head. He could not give her time to think, or it would be too late. “No, Ana. I don’t blame you-if anything, the blame is mine for not making it clear enough. You can play by the rules of ‘civilized’ war if you wish, Ana, but you will lose if you do so-ask Commandant ca’Rudka if he truly thinks you will
prevail against Hirzg Jan; ask your war-teni if they believe they are stronger than those on the other side. You’ve already bent the rules of your Faith and your Divolonte. Bend them further. You have tonight to do this. Tonight only. Tomorrow, it will be too late, because the Hirzg will be dining in the Palais and ca’Cellibrecca will be standing where you’re standing right now. Both you and Justi will be dead, or worse.”
“Why?” she asked him. “Why do you care who is Kraljiki or Archigos?”
“I don’t,” he told her. “I care for what is best for my people, as you do. And so I want Justi as Kraljiki and you as the Archigos.”
“You saw that here?” she asked, pointing at the bowl.
For a moment he wondered if she had guessed, or if she’d seen more in the bowl than he’d intended for her to see. “Yes,” he told her tentatively. “Glimpses, as you saw. And I hope that they’re right.”
He was relieved when she nodded. He plucked the glass ball from the dinner tray. “Tonight,” he repeated, holding the ball. “It’s your only chance.”
She stared at him. He was afraid she was going to refuse, afraid that what he’d seen in the bowl would be forever shattered and lost. But finally her hands came up from her sides, palms up.
He placed the ball in her hands and closed her fingers around the glow.
Ana ca’Seranta
Ana was more frightened than she could remember. Her hands were shaking, and she felt impossibly cold.
Kenne brought the carriage, driven by a trusted e’teni. When she told him that she wanted to leave the city along the Avi a’Firenzcia, that she wanted to come as close as she could come to where the Hirzg’s army was camped (trying desperately to keep her voice from shaking), he nodded as if she’d asked him to take her on a promenade around the Avi a’Parete. “And Envoy ci’Vliomani? Will we be picking him up also?”
“Let Karl sleep,” she’d told him. “This is something I must do on my own-but I need your help.”
Kenne had nodded and kept any thoughts he might have had to himself. That gratified Ana; she didn’t know if she would have been able to answer his questions.
She stared out from the curtains as they rattled through the city.
The Avi a’Parete was strangely dark, the teni-lamps unlit for the first time in generations. The storm front had passed on eastward, leaving moon-silver puddles on the flags of the courtyards and the Avi.
The streets were deserted except for Garde Civile (though the taverns they passed were both crowded and noisy), and it was only the cracked globe of Cenzi on their carriage that saved them from being stopped and questioned several times. The A’Sele flowed dark and forbidding under the Pontica Mordei, and the heads on either side
of the gates of the Avi a’Firenzcia were black and still, frozen as they stared outward into the night, gazing blindly to where the army of Firenzcia slept.
The carriage was hailed as they came to the barricades at the gate; Kenne leaned out from the carriage and answered the challenge. At his insistence that they were on the Archigos’ business, they were permitted through. They passed between uncounted tents of the Garde Civile along the Avi.
The world seemed calm, despite the cataclysm that had come to Nessantico, despite Ana’s own apprehensions. She cradled the glass ball nestled in her pocket, letting the Ilmodo energy captured within it tingle her fingers and praying to Cenzi to tell her that she was doing the right thing.
There was no answer. Only an aching uncertainty in her heart and the fear of what she was setting out to do.
She felt the carriage come to a halt as the driver stopped chanting.
“Archigos,” she heard the driver say. “I can’t go farther. .”
Kenne opened the carriage door and Ana peered out. Ahead, the Avi was entirely blocked: the rear defensive line of Nessantico troops.
A squad of the Garde Civile were approaching the carriage; as they saw Ana and Kenne step from the carriage, they all hurriedly gave the sign of Cenzi. “Archigos, U’Teni,” the e’offizer with them said. “I’ll send word to Commandant ca’Rudka that you’ve come.” He started to gesture to one of his men, but she stopped him.
“No, E’Offizier. Let the commandant have his rest. I’ve come to look at the lines, that’s all. I couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d see where we should place the war-teni.”
He nodded, with a quick, almost shy smile. “I understand. Right now, though, things are quiet.”
“Where are the Firenzcian troops?”
The man pointed up the road. “No more than a quarter mile past our lines. You can glimpse their campfires through the trees.”
“I’d like to see.”
“We’ll take you. .”
Ana walked with Kenne, the e’offizer, and his squad through the quiet lines, where most of the Garde Civile were sleeping on the ground or packed into small tents, getting what rest they could before the sun and inevitable battle came. The Avi itself was blocked by a barrier of quickly-felled trees, but there was nothing but field, trees, and the occasional abandoned farmhouse between the two forces on either side of the road. The e’offizier led them to one side of the Avi, to a small stand of apple trees. She could see a few lookouts stationed along the line, but otherwise there was no one near them. “This is as far as we should go,” the e’offizier said. “Any farther out from cover and it would be too dangerous.” Yellow flames blinked like distant fireflies in a rough line ahead of her, flickering through the swaying foliage of trees and brush.
She stared out into the dark.
“You saved us earlier, Archigos,” the e’offizier said behind her. “I want you to know that we appreciate that, all of us.”
She nodded. “Thank you, E’Offizier. Now, if you would leave us alone for a bit, please,” she said. “To pray. .”
He gave her the sign of Cenzi once more. He gestured to the squad and they strode away, leaving Ana and Kenne standing alone in the little grove. She pulled out Mahri’s gift. She cupped it in her hand. “Archigos?” Kenne said, looking at the ruddy fire in her hand.
“I need you to hide me, Kenne,” she told him. “A shielding spell so no one sees or hears me moving in the night. I need to get as close as I can.”
She thought she saw Kenne’s eyebrows lift in the moonlight, but he nodded. He began to chant, his hands swaying in the moonlight.
It was the best she could hope for.
Ana took a long breath, then stepped forward from the sheltering
trees and into the open field. She waited, half expecting to hear the hiss of arrows or a call of alarm. Yett she heard nothing but Kenne’s chanting behind her. She continued to walk: a step, another, with each step fighting the temptation to run.
She was nearly across to the line of trees and the campfire among them when the shimmering of air began to lessen: Kenne was tiring. She lifted the glass ball in her hand.
Speak my name, he’d said. “Mahri,” she whispered, and she felt the power within the glass well up. In her mind, it spread around her and she saw the shape of the spell that contained it in the pattern of the Ilmodo. She marveled at the spell’s complexity, wondering if she could have crafted something like this herself. But she had little time-she remembered how Mahri had said that the spell was difficult to hold, and she could already feel the wildness of it in her mind.
She looked about. In the sky, the fast-moving clouds had stopped.
There was no sound but the roaring of the power in her mind. A night swallow hovered high above her, captured in mid-turn, its wings locked in mid-beat.
Ana began to walk as quickly as she could toward the campfires- but now she found movement difficult and slow. She felt as if she were wading through deep water. As she reached the enemy lines, her heart pounded, seeing a man staring directly at her as he stood beside the nearest tree. She gathered herself-to run or to ready a spell-but then she realized that he was as unresponsive as a sculpture, and that the flames of the campfire against whose light he was outlined appeared painted on the air.
She hurried past the soldier, feeling a chill as he stood there, still staring outward. Kill the head and the snake dies. .