Karl and Varina were untouched-the bodies nearest them were charred and blackened; there was a smell of cooked meat in the air. Sergei’s false nose was entirely gone and his left cheek had been laid open by a cut; where the nose had been, the flesh was mottled and the cavities of Sergei’s head gaped open, making his face look terrifyingly like a skull. The nausea hit Jan again, and this time the world seemed to spin a little around him. He put his sword tip on the ground and leaned heavily on it.
“Tecuhtli!” Jan heard the call again, and this time a man stepped out from the building where the sign of the red swan hung, no more than a half dozen strides from where Jan and the others stood. He held a glass flask in his right hand, packed with dark granules; in his left was a gnarled walking stick. The man stopped, as if startled by the display of carnage before him.
“Talis…” Jan heard Karl breathe the name: a wonderment, a curse, a spell. “Black sand…”
The man scowled. He hefted the jar in his right hand, he brought his arm back as if to throw it. Jan wondered what it would feel like to die, and whether he might meet Great-Vatarh Jan and Fynn there.
A woman rushed from the alley behind the tavern, a blur of brown and gray, so quickly that none of them had time to react. As Talis lifted his hand, she grasped his hair and yanked his head back. Talis’ mouth opened, gaping like a fish in a market, and red followed silver as she slid a knife over his throat. A second mouth gaped wider than the first, vomiting blood. The glass jars fell from Talis’ hands, shattering on the ground but without exploding. The woman leaned down over the body-she seemed to be placing something hurriedly on the man’s eye-and Jan had a good look at her face through the tangled, matted hair.
His heart leaped in his chest. His breath caught. “Elissa?” he whispered.
The young woman’s head came up. Her eyes widened as she saw him, and though she said nothing, he heard the intake of her breath. She snatched something from Talis’ face-Jan caught a glimpse of a pale white stone between her fingers. She ran into the alleyway from which she’d come. One of the soldiers began running in pursuit after her. “No!” Jan called after the man. “Let her go!”
The soldier stopped. Jan heard the whispers around him: “The White Stone…”
The White Stone…
No, he wanted to tell them, that couldn’t be, because that person had been Elissa, whom he’d loved. It couldn’t be because the White Stone had assassinated Fynn, whom he’d also loved. That couldn’t be.
Yet, somehow, impossibly, it was.
It was.
Niente
The ship was crowded with those fleeing the city, with those from other ships now canted over and half-submerged in the river. The deck was slick with water and blood and vomit. The water around them was dotted with bloated, stiff bodies-Easterners and Tehuantin alike. There were wounded warriors and nahualli sprawled everywhere on the deck, moaning in the dying sunlight; those crew members who were still able climbing the masts to loose the sails and tighten the lines. The anchor, groaning and protesting, was hauled up from the muck of the river’s bottom, and the ship’s captain screamed orders. Slowly, far too slowly for Niente, the city was beginning to fall behind them as the river’s currents and the wind bore them away.
Niente watched from the high stern of the warship, standing at Citlali’s right hand. The High Warrior’s body was decorated with the black-red tracks of clotted sword cuts, and he leaned heavily on a broken spear shaft as he glared back at the city.
“You were right, Nahual,” Citlali said to Niente. “Axat’s vision-you saw it correctly.”
Niente nodded. He still marveled that he was here, that he was alive, that Axat had somehow, impossibly spared him. He could still see the vision from the scrying bowl-only now, it wasn’t his face on the dead nahualli who lay next to Tecuhtli Zolin, but Talis’. Axat had spared him. He might yet see home, if the storms of the Inner Sea allowed it. He would hold his wife in his arms again; he would hug his children and watch them play. Niente took a long, shuddering breath.
“I wasn’t strong enough,” he said to Citlali. “I wasn’t the Nahual I should have been. If I’d spoken more strongly to Zolin, if I’d seen the visions more clearly…”
“Had you done that, nothing significant would have changed,” Citlali answered. “Zolin wouldn’t have listened to you, Nahual, no matter what you told him. All he could hear were the gods singing for revenge. He wouldn’t have listened to you. You would have been removed as Nahual and you’d have died here, too.”
“Then it was all a waste.”
Citlali laughed-humorless and dry. “A waste? Hardly. You have no imagination, Nahual Niente, and you are no warrior. A waste? No death in battle is wasted. Look at their great city.” He pointed eastward to where the sun shone golden on the broken spires and lanced through the curling smoke of the remaining fires. “We took their city,” Citlali said. “We took their heart.” He held his hand out, palm upward as if clutching something. His fingers slowly closed. “Do you think they’ll ever forget this, Nahual? No. They’ll shiver in the night and start at a sudden sound in terror, thinking that it’s us, returned. They’ll remember this for hand upon hand of generations. They will never feel safe again-and they would be right.”
Citlali spat over the rail into the river. His spittle was flecked with blood. “We took their heart, and we will keep it,” he said. “I make that promise to Sakal here, and you are my witness-let His eye see my words and mark them. We will keep what we’ve taken from them. A Tecuhtli will stand again where Zolin fell.”
He clapped Niente on the back, hard enough that Niente staggered. “What do you think of that, Nahual?”
Niente stared at the city, dwindling in the boat’s wake. “I will look in the scrying bowl tonight, Tecuhtli Citlali” he said, “and I will tell you what Axat says.”
The White Stone
The new voice in her head screamed and wailed and raged, speaking half in the language of Nessantico and half in a language she didn’t understand at all. The others in her head laughed and hooted.
“Your lover Jan… What a pleasant vision he has of you now!”
“Do you think he would marry the filthy assassin he saw?”
“He laid with a murderer and now she carries his child.”
“He’s glimpsed the truth. I hope you always remember the horror on his face when he recognized you.”
That last one was Fynn, pleased and smug. “Shut up!” she shouted at them, but they only laughed all the louder, their voices crowding out what she heard with her own ears.
She’d followed Talis and the Westlander leader from the Isle back to the Red Swan after she’d made certain that Nico seemed to be safe. She was angry, furious with Talis-he’d broken his promise to her. The Numetodo… they might be disgusting heretics, but they had treated Nico kindly and with respect, the woman especially.
But Talis…
Talis had betrayed Nico and because of that Nico’s matarh lay near death, and she had told Talis what the price would be. She had told him, and she would exact payment. The White Stone always kept her word.
So she had followed him, when-all out of nowhere-the sounds of battle had erupted from the east and she’d watched the Westlander leader arrange his men to ambush the Firenzcian chevarittai and soldiers. Suddenly there was far too much fighting going on, too much movement for her to make a move, and she was worried now about Nico and whether he was truly safe and she wanted desperately to run back to him, afraid that following Talis might have been a mistake. But she’d seen Talis slip from the room into which he’d gone and rush out into the street, and she’d followed. She watched the confrontation and she’d seen the chance. She slashed her blade across his throat and she felt him die as he dropped the flask of dark powder And as she laid him down and started to put the stone on his eye, she’d glimpsed him.