S Farrell - A Magic of Nightfall

He stared at the buildings, wishing he could see Kenne’s balcony from here. Everything was quiet; people still walked in the plaza as if nothing were happening. But he knew. He knew.

And he also knew that Varina was right. He could change nothing. He looked over his shoulder. Talis had waved down a carriage; he was looking back at them curiously. A woman-dressed strangely poorly for this part of the city-scuttled past them from the direction of the plaza. As she passed, she seemed to stumble and brush against Karl. “Sorry, Vajiki,” the woman muttered. Her voice… it seemed vaguely familiar, but the woman kept the cowl of her tashta up and her head down. He caught a glimpse of dirty brown hair. “It’s going to be a bad night. A bad night. You really should hurry home…”

She scurried quickly past them.

Karl stared after the woman, who vanished around the other side of the waiting carriage. Talis was waving at them. It was then that Karl remembered where he’d heard that voice.

Karl didn’t believe in either coincidence or omens.

“All right,” he told Varina. “We’re leaving.”

“ I’m afraid that your poor Petros is dead. It’s a shame.”

Kenne heard the words, and his old eyes blurred with tears, though he’d already known that Petros was gone. He’d felt it in his heart, ever since the Garde Kralji had come and snatched him away to the Bastida. He could only hope that Karl and his people had escaped the sweep; they’d left only a few marks of the glass beforehand. The leather-clad metal tongue gag tasted vile; the irons binding his hands were heavy enough that he could barely lift them from his lap.

Kraljica Sigourney’s scarred, torn face stared down at him. Kenne held her single-eyed regard for only a few breaths sucked in past the horrible device over his head, then dropped his gaze, broken and defeated. Between his legs, his manacled hands plucked restlessly at the straw of the rude bed as he sat in his cell high in the Bastida’s main tower. Her voice was sympathetic, almost sorrowful. “You’re a good man, Kenne. You always were. But you were too weak to be Archigos. You should have refused the title and told the Concord A’Teni to elect someone else.”

He could only nod in agreement. There had been so many nights lately when he’d wished exactly the same thing.

“You should have known this would happen, Kenne,” she told him. “You chose to consort with the enemies of the Holdings. You should have known. And now…”

She hobbled to the cell’s single window, leaning on a gilded, padded crutch, her right leg dangling to the emptiness beyond the knee. The window looked west, Kenne knew-he’d seen the sun’s fading light on the wall opposite that window the past few nights, turning yellow, then red, then purple as it crawled up the damp stones. “Come here,” Sigourney told him. “Come here and look.”

He lifted himself off the bed with difficulty: a broken old man now in truth. He shuffled over to the window as she stood aside. Outside, under a cheerful blue sky, he could see the A’Sele gleaming in the sun as it wound its way past the city toward the sea. Near where the river turned south, he could see dozens of gathered sails. Across the river, what had once been farmland and the estates of the ca’-and-cu’, the land crawled with a dark infestation that had not been there yesterday. “You see them?” Sigourney asked. “You see the Westlander army approaching? Those are the ones for whom you betrayed the Holdings, Archigos. Those are the ones who frightened you so much that you tried to make a pact with the Firenzcian dogs against me.” Her voice was growing angry now, the single eye raking him. “Those are the foul creatures who killed my brother. Those are the villains who razed our towns and villages. Whether you believe it or not, I’m certain they’re also the ones who killed Audric and made me into a horror. Do I hate them? Oh, you can’t imagine how much. Watch, and you’ll see good Holdings chevarittai send them running, and then we’ll deal with your Firenzcian friends as well. Very soon, it will begin. And you’re going to help us, Kenne.”

He turned his silenced head toward her, quizzical. She laughed. “Oh, you are. We must have the war-teni, after all, and we want to make certain that they understand that their Archigos now regrets his horrible treason, and that he wishes all teni of the Faith to help Nessantico in this terrible time in whatever way they can. You do wish that, don’t you, Archigos?”

Kenne could only stare at her, mute.

“You think not?” she told him. “Well, the proclamation is already written; it only requires your signature. And whether you wish to do so or not, I will have that signature. You were a friend of Sergei Rudka, after all-you should know that the Bastida always gains the confessions it wants.”

Even with the horrible device strapped to his face, he could not keep the horror from his face, and he saw her smile at his reaction. “Good,” she said. “I shall reflect on your suffering when the capitaine hands me your confession.”

She gestured to the gardai outside the cell. “He’s ready,” she told them. “Make sure he receives your full hospitality.”

The city lifted stone flanks on the low hills; its towers and spires and domes crowding the large island in the river’s center so that it looked like a barnacled rock. The metropolis had leaped far outside the confining girdle of its walls, magnificent and proud and unafraid, and the fields surrounding it were laden with grain and crops to feed its teeming inhabitants. This city… It was the rival of Tlaxcala, somewhat smaller but more crowded and compressed, the architecture strange. The cities of his home were dominated by the pyramids of the temples of Axat, Sakal, and the Four; here in Nessantico, what was most visible were the spires and towers of their great buildings and the gilded domes of their temples.

So foreign. So strange. Niente wanted nothing more than to see the familiar places again, and he feared he never would.

Niente looked at Nessantico and shivered, but this was not the reaction he saw in Tecuhtli Zolin. The Tecuhtli, instead, stood on the hill overlooking the river and the city, and he crossed his arms over his chest, a close-lipped smile playing on his lips. “This is ours,” he said. “Look at it. This is ours.”

Niente wondered if the man even noticed the thick lines of Easterner troops arrayed along the road, if he counted the boats that crowded the river, if he glimpsed the preparations for war all along the western periphery of the city.

“What do you say, Niente?” Zolin asked. “Will we rest tomorrow night in this place?”

“If it is Axat’s will,” he answered, and Zolin barked his laugh.

“It’s my will that matters, Nahual,” he said. “Don’t you understand that yet?” He didn’t give Niente time to answer-not that there was any answer Niente could have made. “Go. Make sure that the nahualli are ready, that the rest of the black sand has been prepared for the initial attacks. And send Citlali and Mazatl to me. We will begin this tonight. We will keep them awake and exhausted; then, when Sakal lifts the sun into the sky, we’ll come on them in a storm.” Zolin stared for a moment more at the city, then turned to Niente. Almost with affection, he placed his hand on Niente’s shoulder. “You will see your family again, Nahual. I promise it. But first, we must give the lesson of their folly to these Easterners. Go look in your scrying bowl, Niente. You’ll see that I’m right. You’ll see.”

“I’m certain I will, Techutli.”

But he already knew what he would see. He had glimpsed it this morning, even as they approached this place.