by S L Farrell
Jan nodded. He handed the scroll to Semini, who read it, pursed his lips, then passed it to ca’Rudka. Jan seemed to be waiting, and Allesandra, seated next to him at the small table in the field tent, tapped her fingertips on the scarred surface. “We are wasting time, my son,” she said. “The message is clear. The Kraljica is willing to abdicate the Sun Throne if we bring the army there immediately to stop the Westlanders. Rouse the men now, and if we march our forces at double-time, we can reach the city gates by early morning.”
Jan didn’t seem to hear her. He was looking at Sergei. “Regent?” he asked. “Your thoughts?”
Ca’Rudka, maddeningly to Allesandra, rubbed at his nose for a long time, staring at the parchment. She could see the candlelight flickering on sculpted nostrils. “The Kraljica wouldn’t consider abdication when it was offered it to her at the parley, Hïrzg Jan, or at least ca’Mazzak would not,” he said finally. “The councillor seemed entirely confident that the Garde Civile could defeat the Westlanders. Now the Kraljica’s suddenly been afflicted with altruism? But as I told you, Hïrzg, I wish what’s best for Nessantico. I wouldn’t care to see the city destroyed. But this must be your decision.”
“There, Jan, you see?” Allesandra said. She stood. “Starkkapitän, you will—”
But Jan had laid his hand on her arm. “I’m not finished yet, Matarh,” he said. “Archigos Semini, what do you think of this offer?”
Allesandra started to protest, but Jan’s hand tightened around her arm. They were all watching her. Pressing her lips together, she sat again. Semini especially stared at her, his umber eyes expressionless. He knew, she realized then. He knew that she had been ready to offer him up in exchange for the Sun Throne. Sergei . . . could Sergei have told him? Or . . .
Jan?
“I notice that the Kraljica’s offer says nothing about the Faith,” Semini answered, still staring at her. “That’s not acceptable to me. I’m reluctant to commit the war-téni to an alliance with Nessantico unless Archigos Kenne is also willing to abdicate in favor of me.” Semini turned from her then, and inclined his head to Jan. “Unless, of course, that is what the Hïrzg requests of me.”
“Jan,” Allesandra persisted, ignoring Semini. “This is what we wanted from the start. We have it in our grasp; we’ve but to reach out and take it.”
“Oh, I disagree, Matarh,” Jan snapped back at her. “It’s what you’ve always wanted. It seems your whole life has been about what you wanted: your ambitions, your aspirations, your desires. Even as a girl, from what I’ve been told: you wanted Nessantico in the first place, so Great-Vatarh forced his army to march faster than it should have and lost—yes, Fynn told me that tale, which he said Great-Vatarh told him.”
“That’s not true,” Allesandra objected. It was Vatarh who wanted Nessantico so badly. Not me. I told him to wait and be patient. I did . . . but Jan wasn’t listening, continuing to talk.
“You decided you didn’t want to help Vatarh after he finally brought you back, so your marriage was a sham when it could have been a strong alliance. You didn’t want me to be involved with Elissa, so you sent her away. You didn’t want to be Hïrzg, so you campaigned for me to have the title. What you’ve always wanted is to be Kraljica, and now you want us to take this offer so you can have it now, whether that’s best for Firenzcia or not. It’s always been you, Matarh. You. Not Vatarh, not Great-Vatarh, not me, not the Archigos, not anyone. You. Well, you made me Hïrzg, and by Cénzi I will be Hïrzg, and I will do what’s best for Firenzcia and the Coalition, not what’s best for you. I love you, Matarh—” strangely, to Allesandra, he glanced at Sergei when he said that, “—but I am Hïrzg, and this is what I say: We will move on to Nessantico, but we will do so in our own time. Nessantico cries out for help from us? Well, let her cry. Let her fight the battle she has brought on herself. Starkkapitän, we will break camp in the morning as planned, and we will proceed at normal pace until we are within sight of Nessantico, and there we will wait until we know more or until the Kraljica herself comes out and bends her knee to me. I won’t send a single Firenzcian life to be lost defending Nessantico from her own folly.”
“Jan—” Allesandra began, but he cut her off with a snap of his arm.
“No, Matarh. We’re not discussing this any further. You wanted me to be Hïrzg? Well, here I am, and that is my wish. We won’t talk of it further. Starkkapitän—you have your orders.”
Ca’Damont bowed, and with a glance at Allesandra, left the tent. Semini yawned and stretched like a bear waking from hibernation. He gave Jan the sign of Cénzi and followed after the starkkapitän, avoiding Allesandra’s gaze entirely. Sergei watched the two men leave, then stood himself. “Should you need my counsel, Hïrzg, you know where to find me,” he said. “A’Hïrzg, a good evening to you.”
Allesandra gave him the barest inclination of her head. For several breaths, she and Jan sat there, silent. “You don’t want me to be Kraljica?” she said, when the silence had stretched on for too long.
“Just as Sergei wants what’s best for Nessantico, I want what’s best for Firenzcia,” he answered. Then, before she could form a response: “All I ever wanted from you was your love, Matarh.”
His words stung like a slap across the face, so hard that it started tears in her eyes. “I do love you, Jan,” she told him. “More than you can understand.”
He glared at her: a stranger’s face. No, his namesake’s face, as she imagined it all during her captivity in Nessantico, when he refused to pay the ransom for her. “Shut up, Matarh. You’ve taught me well. You’ve shown me that aspirations and drive are more important than love. I talked to Archigos Semini. I told him how you’d been willing to sacrifice him to be Kraljica. He told me something in return: that he had plotted to assassinate Fynn. For you, Matarh. All for you. He told me that you knew, that day I saved Fynn, that the attack would come. You used him—your lover—to make me a hero, to make me the Hïrzg. The rest, I can figure out myself. I wonder, Matarh, who hired the White Stone—but I have an excellent guess.” She felt her face coloring, and she looked away. “Then that oh-so-noble gesture of yours,” he continued, “stepping down in favor of me: you never wanted to be Hïrzg. You always wanted more. You didn’t want what was best for me, but what was best for you. I was your second child, the lesser one, Matarh. Ambition was always your firstborn.”
The breath left her. She sat there, tears damp on her cheeks, as Jan pushed away from the table and stood. “Jan . . .” she said, lifting her arms to him, but he shook his head. He looked down on her and for a moment she thought she saw his face soften.
But he turned and walked away into the night.
Niente
THEY USED WHAT LITTLE of the black sand they had left to hurl into the city again that night. Otherwise, Niente ordered the nahualli to rest and restore their spell-staffs for the next day’s battle. He had lost ten more of the nahualli during the battle, most of them late in the day as Zolin tried unsuccessfully to take the closest of the bridges over the river. The energy in their spell-staffs had been entirely gone, and there was no time to rest and replenish them. The nahualli—as Niente had ordered—tried to retreat behind the lines as soon as their power was exhausted, but some were cut down by Nessantican swords, unable to defend themselves. Niente didn’t know how many of the warriors had been lost. They’d been cast back by a desperate charge of the chevarittai, and Zolin—at Niente’s insistence, afraid that they would lose still more of the nahualli—had finally called a halt to their advance.
They were too few . . . both nahualli and warriors. But Zolin didn’t see that, or didn’t care, or was so caught up in his own vision that it overrode that of his own eyes. “Tomorrow,” he said to Niente, to Citlali and Mazatl. “Tomorrow all of the city will be ours. All of it.” Niente didn’t know if that was to be true or not, and he was too exhausted to care.
After the last of the fireballs had been catapulted into the city, Niente went to his own tent. There, alone, he held the
scrying bowl in his hands: afraid to cast the spell, afraid that he would only see the same vision, afraid of the exhaustion and pain casting the spell would cost him. He tried to remember the faces of his wife, of his children: he could bring them up in his mind, but that only made the longing worse. He wondered how they were, how they’d changed, if they missed him as he missed them.
He wondered if he would ever know.
He put the bowl away.
Sleep that night was fitful and unrestful. Nightmares intruded; he saw his wife dead, saw his children hurt and injured, saw himself fighting, fighting, trying to run but unable to do more than walk while demons draped in blue and gold swarmed around him. He tried to imagine his wife’s face before him, her mouth half-open as he leaned in to kiss her . . . and her face was blank and featureless, a mask. Unable to escape the dreams, he eventually paced the encampment, listening to the sounds of the warriors resting, gazing at the strange shapes of the buildings around them. As he passed one building, he heard his name called out. “Niente.”
He recognized the voice. “Citlali.”
The High Warrior was leaning against the doorway of the building. Behind him, a candle gleamed in the darkness. “You can’t sleep?” Citlali asked.
Niente shook his head. “I don’t dare. Too many dreams,” he told the man. “You?”
Citlali’s black-swirled face creased into a smile. “Too few,” he said. “I would like to see our home and my family again, even if in my sleep.”
“That won’t happen if—” Niente bit off the comment, angry at himself. If he’d been less sleep-addled, he’d have said nothing at all.
“If Tecuhtli Zolin has his way?” Citlali ventured. “I’ve thought the same, Nahual. You needn’t look so distressed.” The smile widened to a grin, and he glanced from side to side, as if looking to see that no one was listening. “And let me answer the other question you won’t ask. No. I won’t challenge the Tecuhtli. Look at how far he’s taken us, Nahual—all the way across the sea to the great home of the Easterners. That is true greatness, Nahual. Greatness. I am proud to have been able to help him.”
“Even if it means you’ll never see home and family again?”
His shoulders lifted. “I am a warrior. If that’s Sakal’s will . . .” His shoulders fell again. “I don’t need a scrying bowl, Nahual. I have no interest in the future, only the now. It’s a beautiful evening, I am alive, and I am seeing a place that I never thought I would see and that few Tehuantin have ever glimpsed. How can one not take pleasure in that?”
Niente could only nod. He bid Citlali a good night and left the warrior to his reverie. For his own part, he returned to his own quarters and performed the rituals to place spells in his stave once more. Then, entirely drained from the effort, he took to his bed and let the nightmares wash over him again.
And the next day, the nightmares came true.
At dawn, Tecuhtli Zolin led them deeper into the city, and they fought street by street toward the wide main boulevard. The battle was a mirror of the one the day before: again, the initial push sent the weary Nessanticans retreating backward; by the time Sakat’s eye was well up in the sky, they had reached the boulevard, where Zolin quickly regrouped them and began marching them south.
There, the Nessanticans had gathered: around the market where they’d finally stopped the Tehuantin advance yesterday, and around the bridge leading to the island. Out in the A’Sele, Zolin had ordered the ships to advance toward the army; the ships of the Nessanticans had moved to stop them, and there was another battle taking place there, one whose outcome Niente could only guess at, though many of the warships of both sides were afire. There was no retreat possible there anymore—there were too few ships left for them all to return home.
“Nahual!” From his horse, Zolin jabbed a finger toward Niente. “You will take your nahualli with you and follow me. We have the main street, now we must have the bridge. Citlali! To me!”
Zolin quickly placed the warriors in position. Citlali and Zolin would attack the piers of the bridge from the boulevard, directly into the heart of the Nessantican forces; Mazatl would wait until the assault was underway, then strike from the west flank through the River Market. Several double-hands of warriors would also begin an attack to the north immediately, pushing the other way along the ring boulevard so that the Nessanticans could not concentrate their attention on the bridgehead—not without possibly losing the easternmost bridge to the great island. Zolin sent the diversionary warriors on, then waited for the sun’s shadow to move a finger’s length before waving his hand and leading them east and a little north to the boulevard, where he set them into position. They could see the Nessanticans: a wall of bristling shields across the boulevard, a scant few hundred strides from them.
There was no black sand and no time to make any more even if they had the raw materials. This time, the archers began the assault with a barrage that rained down on the shields of the Nessanticans without doing a great deal of damage. The war-téni sent their fireballs screaming toward them, and Niente—with the other nahualli—raised their spell-staffs quickly. The warding spells crackled outward, a nearly visible pulse in the air. Most of the fireballs were deflected; they fell into the buildings to either side, setting them afire. But there were too many of them, and not enough nahualli. The war-spells crashed down on the assembled warriors; where that happened, men screamed, their bodies twisted and charred. Those who could do so fled, terribly injured from the burns of the viscous fire. Those who could not, died. One fireball fell close enough to Niente that he could feel the heat of it, like a smithy’s furnace opening in front of him. The heat washed over his face, scouring and drying. Zolin felt it also; he glanced back at the scene as his horse reared up in fright. Zolin shouted: “Forward! Now!” He brought his mount under control and kicked him into a gallop. The High Warriors on their horses followed him and the infantry surged forward as well. Niente was pulled along in the wave.
The wave crashed against the shields painted blue and gold, and impaled itself on their spears. In the roaring chaos, Niente saw Zolin’s horse go down, a spear tearing deep into the creature’s chest, but Zolin himself was lost in the press of soldiers and Niente couldn’t see what happened to him.
There were swords and fighting all around him, and Niente could think only of himself, of taking out as many Nessanticans as he could. He pointed his spell-staff, speaking the release word over and over, and lightning crackled from the tip, hissing and bucking as it plunged into the ranks in front of Niente. A hole opened in the shield wall as Niente released another spell, and another—the flashes sending dozens of men to the ground. Warriors, shrieking and howling, plunged into the gap with swords waving. The wall began to give, then it collapsed entirely. Niente again was pushed along with the tide, and he saw close by the towers that marked the bridge entrance.
To his right, there was a cacophony of shouts: Mazatl’s warriors striking at the flank. Horns shrilled deep in the Nessantican ranks. Niente could see a banner waving there and a cluster of chevarittai on their horses. Suddenly, the banner was moving away to the south over the bridge, the chevarittai with it. He could see the realization on the faces of the enemy soldiers in front of him. He could see the way their swords dropped momentarily, the lines weakening visibly. Arrows no longer rained down, the war-téni no longer cast fireballs over Niente’s head to fall into the rear of their ranks. They were moving steadily forward: the warriors, the nahualli, and now Niente could see Zolin again, bloodied and injured but on his feet, his sword cleaving the soldiers who dared to stand before him. Citlali was alongside him, his face grim and eager.
They were on the bridge now. It was theirs. The river moved sluggishly below them, and bodies fell from the rails to splash into its waters.
The Tehuantin roared. They sang as they killed, and Niente sang with them.
Varina ci’Pallo
THE STREETS OF OLDTOWN were awash with panicked citizens, most of them running eastwar
d away from the approaching Westlander forces and the battles along the Avi a’Parete. They could all hear the sounds: the shouts reverberating down the lanes, the cries, the screams, the constant din of the wind-horns shrilling alarm from the temples. The smoke of the fires was smeared across the sky, filthy rags sometimes obscuring the sun, and the smell of fire and carnage was thick in the air.
Varina found herself staying close to Karl for most of the day. She would smile at him, nervous and uncertain, and he would give her the same smile back. “Promise me,” she said finally. They were alone in one of the rooms; Talis, Serafina, and Nico were in the other.
“Promise you what?”
“That whatever happens, it happens to us both. Save a last spell for us, and I’ll do the same.”
“It’s not going to be that bad,” he told her. “Talis . . . he’s one of them, after all.”
She nodded at that, as uncomforted by that fact as he was.
Late in the day, the smell of smoke became stronger. From the windows of their rooms, they could see thick, greasy smoke boiling up from the houses a street over to the west, with flames occasionally shooting up through the black. Ash was drifting down like gray snow. Karl imagined he could almost feel the heat. They went into the front room with the others.
