by S L Farrell
The foul, miserable day matched Kenne’s mood.
He was a dead man if he made the wrong move, and he wasn’t sure how to avoid that fate.
Even if he avoided physical death, he was dead within the Faith. He could already feel the vultures beginning to gather: in the whispers of everyone from the lowliest e’téni to the subtext of the messages he received from the a’téni in their cities. When will we have another Conclave? they asked. There are urgent matters that we must all discuss. How should we respond to the news from Nessantico? What is the Archigos’ thought on these matters?
The subtext was always below the innocent questions. It had begun even when he’d been elevated to Archigos after poor Ana’s assassination. The chorus had grown louder and more constant since Kraljiki Audric’s death and the news of the Westlander invasion. The messages came every day by courier: from Fossano, from Prajnoli, from Chivasso and Belcanto and An Uaimth, from Kasama and Quibela and Wolhusen. We don’t trust your leadership. Someone else needs to be Archigos. That’s what they said underneath the polite, indirect words they wrote. You should be removed from Cénzi’s Throne.
Worst of all, he found that he agreed with them. I never wanted this, he wanted to write back to them. I never asked to sit in Ana’s place. I would have much preferred that someone else take this task from me. He had told Ana herself this long years ago, after he’d returned to Nessantico to become A’Téni of Nessantico under her, after the Firenzcian army had been dispersed. “You were here before I was,” she’d said to him, looking almost embarrassed to be sitting behind the desk that they both remembered Archigos Dhosti using. “By rights, you should be here and not me, my friend.”
He had laughed at that, shaking his head. “Archigos Dhosti told me, long ago, that I was an excellent follower. He was right, too. I follow very well. But I don’t lead. I don’t have whatever it is you have, Ana. Dhosti saw those qualities in you, too—you can lead. You’re strong, you’re talented, and you have a strength of will that’s amazing. That’s why he made you his o’téni. Had he lived, he would have groomed you for this anyway. Me . . .” Another headshake. “I was destined to be what I am. No more. And I’m quite content to have it that way.”
She had protested, politely, but they both knew that—inside—she agreed with him. With Dhosti.
Yet Cénzi had thrust this on him late in life, and Kenne could only wonder whether that had been some kind of cosmic joke.
The a’téni of the Faith were one danger to Kenne, and the new Kraljica was another. She was in pain—she would be in pain for the rest of her life, almost certainly. She had been thrust into a terrible crisis with the loss of the Hellins, the assassination of Audric, and now the invasion of the Holdings itself by the Westlanders. There was Firenzcia on her other side, no longer an ally but another enemy at her back. She would be trying to consolidate her position. She would be trying desperately to simply survive as Kraljica, and to do that, she would be looking for people with strength who could support her and she would be casting aside those she thought too weak to be of help—because weakness in her allies was as much a danger as the Westlanders or Firenzcians.
Kenne knew that Sigourney’s opinion of him was perhaps even less high than that of the a’téni. She would be maneuvering to have him replaced, and quickly. Knowing the history of the Kralji in Nessantico, Kenne could not rule out that her solution would be his own assassination and replacement by someone more suitable for her. It had happened to Archigi before Kenne when they had come into conflict with the political rulers of the Holdings: such an Archigos might die under mysterious circumstances. One had only to look back to Archigos Dhosti himself, after all.
Kenne stared down at the plaza below, where Dhosti’s broken body had once sprawled, the blood flowing between the cobbles. He wondered if one day soon it might be his body being tossed over the railing to fall, flailing desperately, to the ground below.
“Archigos?”
Kenne shivered at the call. He turned slowly, expecting to see Petros standing there. But it wasn’t. It was, instead, a ghost.
“I know,” the ghost said, and the voice’s accent confirmed his suspicions. “You didn’t expect to see me again. Frankly, neither did I. Sorry to startle you, Archigos. Petros was kind enough to let me in.”
“Karl . . .” Kenne stepped back into the room, going around the desk to embrace the Numetodo. “Look at you—your beard shaved, your hair dyed and cut like some unranked person, and those horrible clothes. I wouldn’t have recognized you . . . but I suppose that’s the idea, isn’t it? I thought, after you helped Sergei escape, that you’d have fled the city.” He shook his head. “These are dark times,” he said wearily, the depression washing over him again. “Terrible times. But—I forget myself. You look tired and hungry. Can I have Petros bring something?”
But Karl was already shaking his head. “No, Archigos. There isn’t time, and I shouldn’t stay here longer than necessary. I . . . I need a favor.”
“If it’s within my power,” Kenne told him, and had to quash the thought that followed: as weak as my power is, I’m afraid . . .
“It is, I hope,” Karl said. “Please, Archigos, sit. This may take some time. I know, at least I think I know, who killed Ana.”
Kenne listened to Karl’s tale with growing dread, suspicion, and horror. By the end he was sitting in his chair behind his desk, shaking his head.
“A man named Gairdi ci’Tomisi, you say?” Kenne said finally. The name had shocked him; he wondered what else he had not known. “A Firenzcian? He did this with help from Westlander magic?”
“Firenzcian, yes,” Karl stated. “But you must understand that there was no magic involved. No—this black sand isn’t of your Cénzi’s making, nor that of the Westlander gods, either. It’s not magical, not of the Second World—just the product of a person’s imagination and logic.” Karl tapped his head. “And that makes it even more dangerous. Look . . .”
Karl took a small pouch from the pocket of his grimy and tattered bashta, spilling a dark, granular powder on the blotter of Kenne’s desk. Kenne prodded it with a curious finger. “Uly had a stash of this in his rooms; I bribed the innkeeper to let me in. Uly had the ingredients there in his rooms so we know what they are. Varina thinks she can reproduce this mixture even if Talis won’t help us. Sitting there like that, the black sand’s innocent enough, but put a flame to it, and . . .” Karl’s voice trailed off, and he looked away. Kenne knew what the man was remembering; he remembered it, too, all too well.
“What can I do?” Kenne asked him. He stared down at his soiled desk.
“See if you can find out more about this Gairdi ci’Tomisi that Uly mentioned.”
Kenne looked at him bleakly. “I know him. At least I think I do. He’s a trader with Writs of Passage from both Brezno and Nessantico, and goes back and forth over the border. We—both Ana and I—have used him. We thought . . . we thought he was our man, our spy. He carried messages from us to the téni within the Brezno Temple that we thought we could trust, and brought back their messages to us about Archigos Semini. Now . . .” Kenne looked up at the Numetodo. “If he was actually a dual agent, in the employ of Semini ca’Cellibrecca . . .”
“. . . Then it was ca’Cellibrecca who ordered Ana killed,” Karl finished for him. His jaw shut audibly.
Kenne felt the remnants of his lunch rise into his throat. He swallowed hard against the bile. Yes, he believed ca’Cellibrecca would be capable of murder—after all, the man had been a war-téni for most of his life. He had no doubt killed hundreds of soldiers with the mage-fire. But he wouldn’t have killed Ana without a reason. Kenne was afraid that he knew exactly what the reason might be: that ca’Cellibrecca expected the person placed in Ana’s stead would be weak, and that he might exploit that weakness to reunite the Faith again—with ca’Cellibrecca as Archigos in Nessantico as well as Brezno.
Because he knew it would be me. He’s probably already speaking to the Kraljica, making h
is overtures.
“Archigos?” Kenne took a long breath before looking up at Karl. “No Numetodo killed Audric,” Karl declared. “No Numetodo killed Ana. That killed them both.” Karl gestured at the black sand on Kenne’s desk. “That makes me think that the same person is responsible for both murders.”
It seemed a reasonable assumption to Kenne, but he’d been wrong about so much that he no longer trusted his own reasoning. “What . . . what do you want me to do?” Kenne lifted his hands from the desk, a fingertip dark with the powder he’d touched. “How can I help?”
“See what more you can find out,” Karl told him. “See if Semini really did this—if he did, I want to make the man pay. But Varin . . .” He stopped. “I mean, Ana wouldn’t want me to do anything until I knew, knew for certain. Can you help me with that?” Karl pointed again to the drift of black sand on Kenne’s blotter. “You know what that is, don’t you?” the Numetodo asked. Kenne could only shake his head.
“That’s the ashes of magic, Archigos,” Karl said. “That’s what magic looks like when it’s dead.”
Kenne glanced down again. It felt like he was looking at his own remains.
Aubri cu’Ulcai
COMMANDANT AUBRI CU’ULCAI LOOKED backward and shook his head, wondering how the battle had come to this. It should never have happened. It wasn’t possible.
He wondered how the new Kraljica would receive the news, and expected he knew the answer. And the only excuse he had was that the Westlanders refused to fight honorably, as they should.
It had begun only three short days before. . . .
Several chevarittai—as was common—rode out on their destriers to call for individual challenge as the Westlander forces approached Villembouchure. No Westlander warriors rode out to meet their challenge; the front ranks of the army marched forward, unbroken and unfazed even as the chevarittai mocked their honor and their courage. They were ignored or, worse, attacked with cowardly arrows and fire from the Westlander spellcasters. Three chevarittai were killed before Aubri had the horns call “return” and the chevarittai turned their warhorses and galloped back behind the lines of waiting infantry and war-téni.
Aubri and his offiziers huddled; they expected the attack to start as soon as the Westlander army crested the last hill before Villembouchure. After all, it was just before Second Call, and there were still hours of daylight. The Westlanders had come within a double bowshot of the front lines of the Holdings force and halted . . . and remained stopped. The chevarittai and his offiziers had pleaded with Aubri to allow them to advance and engage. He’d refused, regretfully—to do so would mean to abandon the earthworks and bunkers they’d erected in the past few days. The Holdings army was arrayed in a perfect defensive position, and Aubri was loath to move from that.
That had been the first day. He’d gone to sleep that night convinced of eventual victory—the Westlander advance would break against their hardened lines. The Westlander force, as his scouts and all the reports from the field had verified, was substantially smaller than their own: no army of that size, not even the Firenzcians at their best, would have been able to overrun the defenses Aubri had erected. The ships of the Tehuantin fleet clogged the A’Sele, but were too far from the field of battle to affect the issue; in any case, Aubri knew that a Nessantican naval force was on its way to deal with the enemy ships. At worst, the walls of Villembouchure would hold them if for some unforeseen reason Aubri could not contain them in the fields outside the city. The Westlander forces were far too small for an effective siege, and Villembouchure was well-provisioned and could withstand a siege from an even larger army for at least a month.
Yes, Aubri was confident. Despite the fact that his army had been hastily mustered and most of the infantry was poorly trained, his offiziers and the chevarittai with them were battle-tested by the many skirmishes over the last few decades with Firenzcia and the Coalition nations.
They would prevail here.
The battle began on the second day, but not—as in all of Aubri’s experience and the experience of the offiziers who had trained him—at the advent of dawn. No . . . the attack came well before the sun clawed its way into the sky. And it came strangely. The lookouts posted in the foremost bunkers had sent urgent messengers running to the commandant’s tent behind the lines, the uproar waking Aubri from a light, dream-troubled sleep.
“A storm walking toward us on legs of lightning,” they clamored. “A wall of cloud . . .”
Alarm horns were sounding over the encampment and soldiers were hastily donning armor and grabbing weapons as offiziers screamed orders. In the distance, blue light flickered and danced and thunder boomed, yet above them the sky was clear, pricked with the crowded and familiar constellations. Aubri mounted the horse his attendants hurriedly brought to him. He galloped quickly toward the front, joined on the way by A’Téni Vallis ca’Ostheim of Villembouchure, who was in charge of the war-téni. “What in the name of Cénzi is going on?” ca’Ostheim roared. His shock of thick white hair seemed to spark in the light of the storm ahead; his belly sagged over the pommel of his horse’s saddle. The lashes of his eyes were still clotted with sleep rime. A thick gold necklace with a broken globe hanging from it bounced on his chest as they rode. “I thought you said the attack would come at dawn, Commandant.”
“I said that, yes,” Aubri replied calmly. “It appears that the Westlanders weren’t listening.”
At the first line of bunkers, the two men stopped, gazing out over the space between the two armies. The Westlander encampment, which when Aubri had gone to bed had been twinkling on the far hillside like yellow stars fallen to earth, was no longer visible. Instead, an apparition of nature confronted them: a wall of black, roiling cloud perhaps twelve men high and floating two men above the ground. Like some ominous, supernatural monster, the cloud-creature crawled toward them on hundreds of legs of flickering lightning. The flashes stabbed at the ground below, seeming to pull the clouds forward a few feet with each stroke. Aubri could see the ground tearing wherever the lightning struck, leaving a trail of storm-footprints ripped from the ground. A constant din of thunder and a high, crackling snarl accompanied the vision. All around them, the army of the Holdings stared at the creature with faces illuminated by erratic white-blue. Aubri could feel the panic moving through the ranks, the men falling involuntarily backward a few steps, away from the mounds of low earthworks and fortifications they’d raised. “Hold!” Aubri cried out to them. The horns took up the call along the line: “Hold!”, and the men shook themselves as if awakening from a nightmare. They clutched useless spears, gazing at the monster that confronted them. It was nearly across the open ground now and Aubri could glimpse nothing beyond its ferocious border.
“A’Téni ca’Ostheim, this is magic—it’s your domain.” Aubri had to nearly shout over the increasing din of the storm-creature to ca’Ostheim, the leader of the war-téni. “Can you stop this?”
“I’ll try,” he answered, dismounting. He began to chant; his hands moved in strange patterns in front of him. Aubri could feel the hair on his arms standing up as ca’Ostheim continued to chant and as the lightning began to touch the edges of the ramparts—he didn’t know which it was that caused the reaction. Aubri’s steed, though accustomed to the clamor, noise, and sights of war, was stamping worriedly at the ground, half-rearing away from the apparition. Aubri had to lean down and pat the horse’s neck to calm it. “A’Téni! Soon, please.”
Ca’Ostheim raised his hands; the chanting came to a halt. He gestured toward the storm. A wind shrieked outward from the war-téni, and where it touched the storm-creature, the clouds were torn apart. Soldiers cheered, but to either side, the storm still crawled forward, unabated, and now lighting bolts tore at the ramparts themselves, the forked legs reaching out to where the soldiers of the Holdings stood. Screams rose from either side as the bolts seared and shattered the ranks, sliding inexorably forward. And now the sundered halves of the clouds were coming back together; eage
r tongues of lightning were beginning to flash in front of Aubri. Ca’Ostheim had sunk to his knees. He shook his head up to Aubri. “Commandant, I can’t . . . Not alone. I need to gather the other war-téni . . .”
“To your horse, then,” Aubri told him. He looked to his banner bearers and the messenger horns as the screams of the wounded and dying vied with the thundering. “Retreat!” he shouted. “Back to the next line!”
The banners signaled retreat; the horns sounded the call. The ranks of soldiers broke instantly, those who still could turning to flee the storm. Faintly, in the space beyond the storm, he could hear new voices: the battle cries of the Westlanders.
Aubri yanked hard on the reins of his mount and followed his men.
That was the morning of the second day. The rest of the day went no better. The war-téni were able to disperse the spell-storm, but the task exhausted them and they had little energy left for other spells. Behind the storm, the ranks of the Westlanders—warriors with scarred and painted faces—surged forward. The hand-to-hand combat was fierce, but the chevarittai and infantry could match sword for sword. However, for the Westlander spellcasters, wielding sticks from which they cast spells, Aubri had no answer—the war-téni were largely depleted from their earlier efforts, and by late afternoon, Aubri called for the army to return to Villembouchure, behind the walls and stout gates. He was convinced that he could have held the outer defenses, but the price in lives would have been enormous. He did what any Commandant in his position would have done: he had the horns blow “disengage.”
