Several painted warriors were coming at a run now. Talis raised his spell-staff. Light blossomed from it, coruscating and banishing the shadow of Henri VI. “Karl?” Varina’s hand was raised; he could feel the energy of the Second World gathering around her.
“There are too many of them,” he told her.
“We can’t leave them. Can’t leave Nico.”
“We don’t have a choice,” he answered.
Karl took Varina’s hand, and they ran.
Nico Morel
Nico couldn’t understand what Talis was saying as the painted soldiers approached them. He could hear the uncertainty in his vatarh’s voice and the way he was speaking louder and faster, holding the magical walking stick in front of him like a cudgel. His matarh clutched Nico so fiercely that he could barely breathe as the strange men surrounded them, impossibly large and frightening and smelling of blood and death.
Nico could feel the fear rising in him and with it, the strange coldness he’d felt in the Archigos’ office, as it had when he’d run away from Ville Paisli. It began to build inside him, and he muttered to himself the strange words that came to his mind as his hands made small motions under his matarh’s clinging embrace.
“Talis,” he heard his matarh say, “what’s happening? I’m frightened…”
“It’s fine,” his vatarh said, but his voice belied that. “I just need to talk to the High Warrior. Let me do that. They’re my people; they just didn’t expect to find me here…”
He turned back to one of the painted men, the one with a red-tongued black lizard crawling from the top of his skull, around his left eye, and down the side of his head. As they half-shouted at each other, Talis shaking his stick in the man’s face, Nico felt the cold growing and growing inside, so intense that he knew he would burst if he tried to contain it any longer. Nico cried out: the strange words. He gestured.
There was no blue fire this time. Instead, the air shivered around him, rippling visibly outward, and where that fast-moving wave struck the painted men, they were thrown backward as if a great fist had struck them. “Come on, Matarh!” Nico yelled. He grabbed her hand, pulling her away so that she stumbled after him as he fled in the direction that Karl and Varina had gone. “Talis! Hurry!”
But Talis wasn’t running with them; he’d also been felled by the wild burst from Nico. The lizard-warrior had already regained his feet, and Nico-glancing over his shoulder as he started to run-could see him shouting to the others as Talis screamed something back at him and raised his walking stick. Blinding light flashed from the stick and one of the warriors howled. Nico pulled at his matarh harder. “Run!”
She took a step with him, but her hand dropped away from his. He took another step before he realized that she wasn’t with him. He heard Talis scream-“Sera!”-and turned back.
His matarh was lying sprawled on the cobbles of the plaza, a spear in her back and blood staining the paving stones. She was reaching toward Nico, crawling after him, her face drawn with pain. “Matarh!” Nico screamed, and ran back to her. He went down alongside her just as Talis reached her also.
“Nico…” she said. “I’m sorry…” Her head turned to Talis and she started to speak, but he stroked her head, cradling her carefully.
“No, don’t say anything. We’ll get you to a healer, someone who can help…” Talis looked up at the painted soldiers, who had gathered around them. He spoke to them, sharply, in their own language. The lizard-warrior scowled, but he gestured to his men. One pulled the spear from his matarh’s back, and she screamed again. Nico hurled himself at the lizard-warrior, pummeling at the man’s armor with his fist. The man grabbed Nico in one muscular arm and grunted something to Talis. “Nico!” Talis said. “They’re going to help her. Please listen to me. You have to stop fighting them.”
All the energy left him; he went limp in the lizard-warrior’s grasp.
Two of the warriors crouched down; they tore strips from their clothing and bound it around his matarh’s waist, around the wound. Then one of them gathered up his matarh in his arms; she groaned and her eyes rolled back in her head, but Nico could see that she was still breathing. One of her hands dangled; Nico wriggled in the lizard-warrior’s grasp, and the man let him go. He ran and took his matarh’s hand.
He held it, sobbing, as they walked quickly away from the plaza.
Niente
They had the city.
Or, more properly, they held portions of it. Nessantico was too large and their force was too small to actually control the entire city. They had smashed it instead, they had used black sand to set it afire, they had sent the Garde Civile retreating to the north and south.
The city no longer belonged to the Kraljica and her people, but it was not the Tehuantins’ either.
Niente was certain it would never be theirs.
“Well?” Zolin asked as Niente peered into the water of the scrying bowl.
“Patience, Tecuhtli,” he told the man. “Patience.” But he already knew. The vision had already passed and the water was simply water. But by pretending, he could decide what he wanted to say. By pretending, he could recover from the worst of the weariness and exhaustion the spell cost him.
He’d seen-again-in the midst of the great, ruined city, the dead Tecuhtli and the dead nahualli, and he’d felt again that shiver of certainty that he was seeing Zolin and himself. Nothing had changed. Axat still showed him the same future, the same path. Nothing had altered after this victory; Niente felt that nothing could alter it. It was fixed, as inevitable as the sunrise in the morning.
They were standing in the ruins of the temple, and Zolin sat on the throne the Kraljica had used. A spear had been thrust, butt foremost, into a crevice in the shattered tile floor next to the throne. The Kraljica’s head had been set there, her single, glazed eye staring outward, the hair hanging down obscenely-her body was crumpled against the wall behind the throne where it had been tossed. A fire pit had been made in the middle of the room, fed with the wood of the temple’s pews; thin, gray smoke drifted upward toward a sky that was beginning to turn purple. Tables had been erected around the pit, and a banquet was in progress, served by frightened Easterner prisoners. There was no particular need for their fright; Zolin and the other High Warriors would not have permitted any of them to be harmed. Yes, there would be the inevitable rapes and looting and killings, but the incidents would be few, and those who perpetrated them would be severely punished if they were caught. A few high-ranking offiziers would be sacrificed for the glory of Axat and Sakal, but no other prisoners would come to harm.
The Tehuantin were more lenient and kind victors than the Easterners had been when they came to the Hellins.
As the warriors feasted, Niente gazed into the scrying bowl near the pit. The firelight licked at Niente’s skin, but the warmth couldn’t touch the cold he felt within. He picked up the scrying bowl finally and tossed the water into the blazing coals, which hissed and steamed in response.
“So,” Zolin said, “does Axat see me staying here? I think this a fine place. We could build a new city here, one like this land has never seen, one to rival Tlaxcala, and I could be Tecuhtli here, and the Easterners will serve us as they forced our cousins to serve them.”
“I do see you staying here, Tecuhtli,” Niente told him, and that was no more than the truth.
Zolin slapped the crystalline arms of the throne. He roared with delight, and the warriors gathered in the hall laughed with him. “You see!” he shouted to Niente. “All those worries-I told you, Nahual. I told you.”
“You did, Tecuhtli,” Niente told him.
Zolin leaned forward on the throne. “Did you see other battles? Did you see me taking new cities?”
Niente shook his head. “No,” he answered. “And that wouldn’t be wise, Tecuhtli. We have no more black sand at all. If we could replenish the warriors who have fallen, if I could bring more nahualli here…” He spread his hands. “I would tell the Tecuhtli…” he began, but there was a commotion at the end of the halclass="underline" the High Warrior Citlali, with a man alongside him-a man carrying a spell-staff. Niente squinted into the firelit gloom of the evening; it was not a nahualli that he recognized, and the man was dressed as one of the Easterners, the front of his clothing stained with blood. Still, that face…