“You’re saying this Uly assassinated Ana?” Karl asked. “That’s what you want us to believe now?”
Talis lifted a shoulder. “I’m saying it’s possible. Probable. I know it wasn’t me. And it was definitely bosh luum that did it. Not Westlander magic. Not Numetodo magic either.”
Karl’s hands were clenched on the tabletop. “Where’s this Uly?”
“I haven’t seen him since after you attacked me,” Talis answered. “I told Uly about it and said that I was going to disappear for awhile, and haven’t heard from him since. I suppose the best place to start to find him would be River Market, but…” Talis began, but Nico squirmed in his matarh’s arms.
“He’s not there,” Nico said. They were all looking at him now, and his matarh’s arms loosened as she looked down at him on her lap.
“Nico?”
“It’s true, Matarh,” he said. “Uly’s not there. After I left Tantzia Alisa’s and walked here, I thought Uly could tell me where Talis was,” Nico said. “But when I went to the River Market, Uly’s stall was empty and the pepper-seller lady said he was gone.”
Talis was nodding. “I thought that would be the case. I don’t know where he is,” Talis said. “Still in the city, probably, but where.. .”
“The pepper lady said that he might be in Oldtown Market,” Nico told them.
Karl was already standing. Now Talis rose also. “I don’t know that Uly did it, Ambassador,” he said. “You don’t know it either.”
“I intend to find out.”
“Then I’ll go with you.”
“Why?” Karl asked. “To stop him if he tells me that it was actually you, or that he hasn’t the faintest clue how to make this black sand of yours?”
“He won’t talk to you, no matter what you do to him,” Talis said. “He’s a warrior; he’s been trained to die first. He trusts me. You? The first time you ask him something that arouses his suspicions, he’ll kill you and run. Or he’ll happily die in the attempt.”
“I’ll be with him,” Varina said. She was standing, too, her arm laced with Karl’s. “And we’re stronger than you think.”
“You’ll need me,” Talis insisted.
“Fine,” Karl said finally. “But not with that.” He gestured at Talis’ walking stick.
Talis grimaced. “I can’t leave that here. I won’t.”
“Then you’ll stay with it.”
Talis seemed to consider that a moment. “All right,” he said. “I’ll leave it. This one time. I’m going.”
“I’ll come, too,” Nico said.
All three of them turned to him, and he could feel his matarh looking down at him as well. “No!” they said, all four of them at the same time.
Niente
The vision in the scrying bowl troubled him. He could feel Tecuhtli Zolin studying his face for any sign of what the visions indicated, and he lowered his head even further into the swirling blue mist rising from it.
A woman sat on a glowing throne, her face twisted by pain and horribly scarred, one eye missing. An army moved through the mist behind her… There, a boy and an older woman, and behind them also an army, though with banners of black and silver, not the blue and gold of the Holdings… A man wearing a necklace of a shell, and with him-could it be?-a nahualli who looked like Talis, though he was embracing a woman and child who were not Tehuantin, but Easterners.. .
The images were coming too fast, and Niente tried to still them with his mind, trying to force them farther out in time, to show the wisps of the future that might come. He prayed to Axat for clarity, he thought of their own army and the ships riding on the river close by. ..
The ships swayed in the midst of a storm, but the storm rained fire down from the sky. Armies crawled over the land, and there were the bright explosions of black sand, and smoke hung heavy over trampled fields… But the mist seemed to divide in twain-as sometimes happened when Axat wished to show two possible outcomes. He saw a field littered with the bodies of Tehuantin warriors, and a single ship of their fleet with tattered sails, hurrying away westward into a falling sun as the other ships burned in orange flame to the water… “Westward… home…” He could almost hear the words in the wind…
But that vision closed, and the other came…
In the second vision, there was a fierce and bloody battle on the fields before the city, and the army of blue and gold retreated behind the solid walls of a city… The same city now, with broken walls, and through the smoke and the mist of the vision it was difficult to see, but he thought he glimpsed the army of the Tehuantin spilling through the breaches…
Another city lay beyond it, far greater, and it seemed to beckon. ..
And there it was again… the image of a dead Tehuantin warrior, with a nahualli lying next to him…
“What is it you’re trying to show me, Axat?” Niente asked, his voice cracking.
“Nahual?”
Niente glanced up; the mist spilled from the scrying bowl and died.
The Tehuantin encampment was noisy and busy around them as a wan sun tried to penetrate high, thin clouds. Niente found himself missing the fiercer, warmer sun of his own land; this place was colder than he liked, as if it leeched the heat from his blood. Tecuhtli Zolin stared at him, the white of his eyes gleaming against the black lines inscribed around the sockets, the red eagle on his skull seeming to want to take flight. There was eagerness in his face. Flanking him on either side were Citlali and Mazatl, and their glances were no less eager. “What did the vision tell you?” Zolin asked Niente. “What did it say?”
“Very little,” he answered, and annoyance showed over the Tecuhtli’s face in a flash of teeth.
“Very little,” he said, mocking Niente’s tone. “Tecuhtli Necalli used to tell me how your visions in the scrying bowl would give him strategies, guide the way he placed the warriors and moved through the terrain. He said you were Axat’s Nahual, showing us the way to victory. But all you give me is ‘very little.’ ”
“I give you nothing,” Niente told him, and Zolin scowled in response. “As I gave Tecuhtli Necalli nothing also. I am only Axat’s conduit. I can relay what Axat shows me, but it’s not my vision. It’s Hers. All I have to give is what Axat offers. If you wish to complain about how little that is, talk to Her.”
“Then tell me this very little, Nahual,” he answered. He pointed eastward, to where the outlier scouts had said that an army of the Holdings waited for them, outside the city a half day’s march away. Niente had ridden forward with Tecuhtli Zolin to see the city-far larger than the mostly-abandoned villages through which they had marched in the last several days, though not as elaborate or huge as the city in the scrying bowl, this Nessantico where the Kraljiki lived. Still, the city huddled behind its walls and spilling out beyond them was easily half the size of Tlaxcala or the other great island cities of the Tehuantin empire, and larger than either Munereo or Karnor.
It seemed that the Kraljiki would permit them to go no farther untested. If Zolin wanted this city, he must fight for it. Niente knew that would bother the Tecuhtli not at all.
“I glimpsed a battle,” Niente told him. He closed his eyes, trying to remember the scenes flashing past in the scrying bowl. “In Axat’s vision, the army of the Holdings fought, but then fell behind the walls of the city when we came upon them. I saw the walls broken, and Tehuantin entering through…”
“Xatli Ket!” Niente stopped as Zolin uttered the war cry of his caste-Citlali and Mazatl echoed the Techutli, and the cry was taken up-fainter and fainter-by the other warriors nearby. “Then Axat has shown you our victory,” Zolin said. He slapped at the bamboo-slatted armor covering his chest.
“Perhaps,” Niente hurried to say. “But she also showed me our army and the fleet destroyed, and a ship hurrying to the west. Tecuhtli, that is also a possible future-a sign. If we return now, if we put our army on the ships and return home, then that’s a future we will never face. The Easterners will fear to ever come to our land again. We have already shown them the consequences; there’s nothing left here to prove.”