S Farrell - A Magic of Dawn

He leaned forward and touched her knee with a thin hand momentarily-the gesture of a confidant. Shadows slid over his silver nose, around the much-wrinkled face. “He was a good friend to me, Varina. Both of you have been. The two of you literally saved my life, and I will never forget that. Never.”

She nodded. “That debt, one way or another, was paid and repaid between you and Karl. You needn’t worry.”

“Oh, I don’t,” Sergei answered, and she pondered that remark before letting it waft away like the rest. Unimportant. The carriage lurched, one of the horses snorting, and they began to move. She could hear the steel-rimmed wheels clattering on the uneven paving stones of Old Temple Court. She sat silently, neither looking at Sergei nor at the view outside, but inside her own head, where Karl’s face still lived. She wondered if she would begin to forget the familiar lines, the crinkled smile, and his eyes. She wondered if he would fade, and one day when she tried to conjure up his face she’d be unable to do so.

She heard voices outside the carriage, but she paid them no attention. Sergei, however, had straightened in his seat across from her and moved the curtains aside with a hand, his silver nose pressed against the wavy glass there. Past him, she could see the lines of onlookers beyond the gardai, and beyond them…

A huge person had appeared: a giant dressed in green, his head larger than the carriage in which they rode and his shoulders as wide as three men abreast, clad in an imitation of teni-robes and his eyes glowing with a red fire that sent shadows racing out toward the carriage from the people between them. The chanting voices seemed to come from that direction, and she realized that it wasn’t a person but some sort of gigantic puppet, manipulated from below by poles. It bobbed and weaved over the heads of the onlookers, who were turning now toward it rather than the funeral procession.

She realized who it must represent in that moment: Cenzi. She had seen images of the god done that way, with his eyes glowing as he cast fire at the Moitidi who opposed him. The puppet-god wasn’t staring at Varina, however, but at the space before her carriage-the space where Karl’s bier moved.

“Sergei?”

Sergei had opened the carriage window and called to one of the gardai on the line, who ran over to him. “Who is doing this?” he asked.

“The Morellis,” the garda answered. “They assembled behind the crowd, and when the bier approached, all of a sudden that thing went up.”

“Well, get it down before-” That was as far as Sergei got.

The puppet-god roared.

The sound and heat of its call washed over her. It lifted the carriage-she heard horses and people alike screaming even as she felt herself rising-and sent Sergei tumbling backward into her. He struck her hard, and then the carriage, lifted in the wind of the puppet-god’s scream, fell back to earth hard.

There must have been more screams and more sound, but she could hear nothing. She was screaming herself; she knew it, felt it in the rawness of her throat, but she heard no sound at all. She could taste blood in her mouth and Sergei was thrashing his limbs as he tried to untangle himself from her, and he was shouting, too. She could see his lips mouthing her name-“Varina! ”-but all she heard was the remnant of the puppet-god’s roar, echoing and echoing.

Then she remembered. “Karl!” she shouted silently, pushing at Sergei and trying to rise from the wreckage of the carriage. She could see the street and horses on their sides, still in their harnesses and thrashing wildly at the ground, and bodies of people here and there.

Especially around the bier.

Which burned and fumed and smoked in the middle of the courtyard.

The island city Tlaxcala gleamed like white bone on the saphhire waters of Lake Ixtapatl, but Niente didn’t see it. All his attention was on the bronze bowl before him and the water shimmering there.

The scrying bowl. The bowl that held all the possible futures. They swam before his eyes, blotting out reality. He saw war and death. He saw a smoking mountain exploding. He saw a queen on a glowing throne, and a man on another throne. He saw armies crawling over the land, one with banners of blue and gold and the other of black and silver. He saw an army of warriors and nahualli coming against them. Yet beyond that war, down a long, long path, there was hope. There was peace. There was reconciliation. Go to war, and you will find peace. That was what the god Axat seemed to be saying to him. The images surrounded him, warm and gentle, and he basked in their heat…

“Taat Niente?” Father Niente.

The query was accompanied by a touch on his shoulder that broke his concentration, and Niente grudgingly lifted his head from the futures swimming in the bowl’s waters. The emerald light illuminating his face faded with the spell’s passing, and his soul returned to the city with a shudder. He was standing atop the Teocalli Axat, the high, stepped pyramid that was the temple of the moon-god Axat. The Teocalli Axat wasn’t the highest structure in the city-that honor belonged to the Calli Tecuhtli, the House of the King, though the Teocalli Sakal, the sun-god’s temple, was only a few spans lower. Still, from the summit on which Niente stood, all of Tlaxcala was laid out before him: the canals that served as streets glistening straight as spears and crowded with acal, the small, paddled watercraft used for transportation within the island city; the huge plazas bustling with people on their unguessed errands; the market with its thousands of stalls. Beyond the market rose the Calli Tecuhtli, its facade decorated with the bleached skulls of vanquished warriors. Out beyond the city and the lake in which it sat, the great valley was ringed by snow-capped peaks, with a trail of fuming ash wind-smeared across the summit of the volcano Poctlitepetl and its neighboring mountains. The sun had already slid behind the slopes though the western sky was still ablaze, the flanks of the lower clouds touched with the colors of burning while the east was a deep purple in which the first stars glimmered.

The magnificent view from the summit of Teocalli Axat never failed to stir Niente, never failed to make his heart beat harder in his chest. He loved this land. His land. And he was grateful to Axat for giving him hope that it could become the seat of a greater empire yet.

“Taat?” Father.

He turned finally to the young man, panting from his long climb up the steps of the temple, his arms crossed over his chest-Niente’s son. “I hear you, Atl,” he said. “It’s later than I thought. I’m sorry. Did Xaria send you?”

Atl grinned at him. “Na’ Xaria says if you don’t get home soon, she’ll throw your supper to the dogs and you can fight them for it. She also said that you’d be sleeping with the dogs as well.”

Niente smiled in return. The expression pulled at the scars of his face. He knew what that face looked like, knew what his decades of casting Axat’s spells and peering into the scrying bowl had cost him, as it had cost every nahualli who utilized Her power so deeply. His left eye was a white, blind horror, his mouth sagged on that side also, as if his flesh had melted there. Ridged, hard scars furrowed his face and body; his muscles wobbled in sacks of skin as if they had shriveled inside him. He appeared at least two hands of years older than he was.

But none of the other nahualli would dare to challenge him and try to wrest the title of Nahual from him. No. He was the famous Nahual Niente, whose spells had driven the army of the Easterners from their cousins’ land along the coast, who had accompanied Tecuhtli Zolin across the Great Sea to the Easterners’ land, the empire of the Holdings, who had burned their great capital city, and who had warned Tecuhtli Zolin of the consequences of his pride even when the Tecuhtli had refused to listen to him. He was Nahual Niente, who with Tecuhtli Citlali had razed the last Easterners’ fortress in the Hellins-the city of Tobarro-to the ground and ended the Holdings’ occupation of the Hellins forever.