A Magic of Nightfall (74 page)

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Authors: S. L. Farrell

BOOK: A Magic of Nightfall
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Kenne waved a hand as if in dismissal, but Karl could see the man’s chest still heaving. “I’m fine,” Kenne said. “And impressed. Your son’s one of the few natural talents I’ve known. Archigos Dhosti had been one, and Ana, too. With training, well . . .”
“
I
will train him.” Talis’ answer was wrapped in a scowl. He clutched the spell-staff tightly. “This is Axat’s gift, not Cénzi’s.”
“Of course,” Kenne told him, but his gaze stayed on Nico. “Don’t worry,” he told the boy. “No one here is angry with you. Do you understand that?” Nico nodded, still sniffling.
“If I’d known about this, I’d have been far more careful when I first approached you,” Karl told Talis. “But since no harm’s been done . . . We still have plans and contingencies to make. Archigos, is Petros prepared to make the offer we’ve talked about to Firenzcia?”
Kenne nodded, more hesitantly than Karl liked, but at least it
was
a nod. In truth, he’d been afraid that Kenne might not have followed through, especially given the undeniable danger into which it placed Petros. “He is.” The Archigos’ voice quavered a little—fear combined with age, Karl decided. “In fact, he should have done so by now.”
“Good,” Karl told him. He patted Kenne on the shoulder. “He’ll be fine,” he told the Archigos. “And he’ll be back with you soon. Now, for his part, Talis will bring the supplies from Uly’s rooms here to the temple tomorrow, and we can begin to prepare the black sand for the demonstration. That should show this Tecuhtli of the Westlanders that attacking the city would be foolish. We can prevent hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.”
 
The Archigos’ carriage was a ruse—four of Kenne’s servants clambered into that vehicle when it pulled up to the rear entrance of the building, while Karl and the others hurried down a back stair toward a little-used side servants’ door. None of them knew whether the subterfuge was necessary; Karl hoped not; if it was, then none of the contingencies for which they’d prepared might come to fruition.
They started to hurry away from the plaza, moving toward the Avi. Kenne had given them enough money to hire one of the carriages there to take them back to Oldtown. As they moved toward the street, they saw three separate squadrons of Garde Kralji hurrying across the Archigos’ Plaza. “Wait a moment,” Karl said. Talis, Serafina, and Nico were already on the Avi, looking for a carriage for hire; Varina, a little ahead of him, paused. As Karl hesitated on the edge of the plaza, he and Varina watched two of squadrons rush into the building from which they’d just come; the other entering the Archigos’ Temple.
Their weapons were drawn, steel shining in the lights of the lamps.
“Karl? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know, Varina. I think I should go back. Take the others. I’ll—”
“No,” Varina told him firmly. She came back to him, lacing her arm into his. “No, Karl. Not this time. Even disguised, your face is too recognizable to the Garde Kralji, and there are too many of them anyway. You don’t know why they’re there; it may be nothing. It’s
probably
nothing. And if it’s not . . .” She bit at her lower lip. Her eyes pleaded with him. “You need to let the Archigos take care of this himself. Come with me. Please.”
“But if things have gone wrong—”
“If things have gone wrong, you can’t change it now.
We
can’t change it. All that would happen is that you’d be lost, too.” Her arm tightened on his. “Please, Karl. Let’s go. If there
is
a problem, we can help Kenne more by staying alive than by being thrown in the Bastida with him. We got Sergei out; we could do the same again if we had to. Karl . . .” She leaned her head against his shoulder. “If you’re going back,” she told him, “then I’m going with you. But that’s the wrong decision. I know it.”
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.”
The Battle Begun: Kenne ca’Fionta
“
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’Téni 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-téni, after all, and we want to make certain that they understand that their Archigos now regrets his horrible treason, and that he wishes all téni 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 Battle Begun: Niente
T
HE 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.
He had called upon Axat and he had looked into the bowl, and he would not dare look again.
The Battle Begun: Sergei ca’Rudka
F
OR MOST OF THE MORNING, Sergei had ridden alone in the midst of the Firenzcian troops, lost in ruminations that were keeping at bay—at least for a bit—the growing ache in his back from the long ride. His thoughts had not been kind or gentle ones. And his body was no longer used to long days in the saddle, nor to evenings spent under a tent.
You’re getting old. You won’t be here much longer, and you have much to do yet.
“Regent, I would talk with you.”
At the hail, Sergei glanced over, seeing the stallion draped in the colors of Firenzcia that had come alongside him unnoticed.
Old. Once, you would never have missed his approach
. “Hïrzg Jan,” he said. “Certainly.”
The boy brought his war stallion alongside Sergei’s bay mount, the mare’s ears flicking nervously and rolling her eyes at the much larger destrier. Jan said nothing at first, and Sergei waited as they rode along the Avi, dust rising in a cloud around them. The army was approaching Carrefour, with Nessantico another good day’s march farther. The Nessantican forces had vanished, dissolved; gone the afternoon of the parley. “Matarh says that you have lost two good friends,” Jan said finally.
“I have,” Sergei told him. “Aubri cu’Ulcai was on my staff for many years in both the Garde Kralji and the Garde Civile, before I was named Regent. He was a good man and an excellent soldier. I don’t look forward to speaking to his wife or his children and telling them what happened. I especially don’t relish telling them that his loyalty to me was responsible for his death.” Sergei rubbed at his metal nose, the glue pulling at his skin as he frowned. “As for Petros . . . well, there wasn’t a gentler person in the world, and I know how important his friendship was to the Archigos. I don’t know what the news will do to Archigos Kenne. Killing them was cruel and unnecessary, and if Cénzi grants me a long enough life, I will make certain Councillor ca’Mazzak regrets the pain he’s given to me and those I care about.”

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