wreckage of the stone carving and stroking the horse’s neck as he made soothing noises. She saw him take his knife from its scabbard. “No!” she began, but he’d already made the cut, deep and swift. The horse bucked once, again, and went still.
Allesandra shook her head, trying to clear it. Half the crowd in the plaza seemed to have fled in terror; the Firenzcian soldiers had formed a thick bulwark around them. Sergei moved away from the horse, striding toward a body sprawled in a pool of blood not far from the base of the tower. Soldiers moved to intercept him; he shrugged them away angrily. Allesandra started to move and realized that her body was sore and bruised, and she was bleeding from a cut on the head. She felt Jan come up behind her.
“Matarh?” He was staring at the horse Sergei had killed. She hugged her son, desperately, then held him an arm’s length away, examining him-his clothes were torn, as well, and there was a scrape along one cheek that was oozing blood, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. “What happened?” she asked him. “Did you see?”
“The Regent saved us,” he said. “He took both of us from our horses just in time.” He glanced up at the scaffolding, then back to the body on the ground. Sergei was enclosed in a clot of soldiers, crouched alongside the corpse. “The man… he was up there-he would have killed you. Maybe both of us. But Sergei…”
Archigos Semini came rushing up then, his green robes swirling. “Allesan-” he began, then shook his head, making the sign of Cenzi hurriedly. “A’Hirzg! Hirzg Jan! Thank Cenzi you’re both safe! I thought-”
But Allesandra was no longer listening to him. She pushed through the crowd to where Sergei was examining the body. “Regent?” she said, and Sergei glanced up at her. He was scowling.
“A’Hirzg. I apologize, but there was no time to give you warning. Are you badly hurt?”
She shook her head. He nodded and stood up, groaning as he did so as if the movement pained him. “I’m too damned old for this,” he muttered. He kicked the corpse in front of him, the boot making a soft, ugly sound as the broken torso jiggled in response. Allesandra saw a fair face underneath the blood, a young face, perhaps Jan’s age; what she saw of his clothing was suspiciously fine. The body was adorned with the broken shafts of several arrows. “Don’t know who he is,” Sergei said, “but we’ll find out. Ca’-and-cu’, though, from the way he’s dressed and the way he looks. I saw him up on the scaffolding just before he tossed down the carving. That’s when I moved; looks like your archers took care of the rest.” He seemed to notice his dangling nose then, and pushed it gingerly back in place, holding it with two fingers. “My pardon, A’Hirzg-the glue…”
“No matter,” she told him, waving her hand. “Regent, I owe you my life.”
She thought he would respond as most would have, with a lowering of his head and deprecation, a protest of duty and loyalty and obligation. He did not. Instead, he smiled, still holding his silver nose in place.
“Indeed you do, A’Hirzg,” he said.
Niente
The town burned and the flames reflected in the scrying bowl. They vanished as Zolin slapped the scrying bowl aside, splashing the water over Niente. The bowl clattered away, bronze ringing against the tiles like a wild bell until it clanged up against the far wall, where a tile mosaic of some ancient battle glittered. Outlined in glass, horses reared as soldiers with pikes marched across a field with a snow-topped mountain looming in the background.
“No!” the Tecuhtli roared. “I won’t have you tell me this!”
“It is what I saw,” Niente answered with a calmness he didn’t feel. The dead warrior, the nahualli sprawled next to him, only this time he saw one of their faces. Zolin’s face… And he was too afraid to ask Axat to let him see the nahualli’s features… “Tecuhtli, we have accomplished so much here. We have shown these Easterners the pain that they inflicted on us and our cousins. We have taken land and cities from them as they were taken from us. We have given them the lesson you wanted to give them. To go on…” Niente lifted his hands. The great city in flames and the tehuantin fleeing, their ships with broken masts canted on their sides on the river… “The visions show me only death.”
“No!” Zolin spat. “I’ve sent word back that we’ll stay here, that they are to send more warriors. We will keep what we have taken. We will strike at their heart-this great city of theirs that is so close.” He turned, his heavy and muscular arms swinging close to Niente’s face. Zolin’s thick fingers stabbed toward Niente’s eyes. “Are you blind, Nahual? Didn’t you see how easily we took this city of theirs? Didn’t you watch them run from us like a pack of whipped dogs?”
“We have little of the materials left to make more black sand,” Niente told the Tecuhtli. “I have lost a third of my nahualli in the fighting; you have lost as many of the warriors. We have come a long way without the resources to hold the land behind us. We are in a foreign country surrounded by enemies, with the only supplies those we can forage and plunder. If we take to our ships and leave now, we will leave behind a legend that will strike fear in the Easterners for decades. The name of Tecuhtli Zolin will be a whisper in the night to scare generations of Easterner children.”
“Bah!” Zolin spat again, the expectoration close to Niente’s feet, marring the polished floor of the estate house he’d taken in Villembouchure. Looking down, Niente saw that the tiles all bore the glazed image of the same mountain as the mosaic on the wall. Zolin’s spittle formed a lake on the mountain’s flank. “You’re a frightened child yourself, Nahual. I’m not afraid of what you see in your bowl. I’m not afraid of these futures you say Axat sends you. They’re not the future, only possibilities.” His finger prodded Niente’s chest. “I tell you now, Nahual, you must make your choice.” Each of the last three words was another prod. The Tecuhtli’s dark eyes, wrapped in the swirl of the great eagle’s wings, glared at him like those of the great cats that prowled the forests of home. “No more words from you. No more prophecy, no more warnings. I want only your obedience and your magic. If you can’t give me that, then I am done with you. I will go on, whether you are Nahual or not. Decide now, Niente. As we stand here.”
Niente’s hand trembled near the haft of his spell-stick, dangling from his belt. He could pluck it up, touch Zolin with it before the warrior could fully draw his sword. The released spell would char the Tecuhtli’s body, send him flying across the room until he crumpled against the wall under the mosaic in a smoking heap. Niente could see that result, as clearly as a vision in the scrying bowl.
That would also end this. He ached to do it.
But he could not. That was not a vision that Axat had granted him. That path would lead to one of the blind futures, one he couldn’t guess-a future that might be far worse for the Tehuantin than those he had glimpsed in the bowl. He realized that knowing the possible futures was a trap as much as a benefit; he wondered whether that was something Mahri, too, had discovered. In a blind future, Citlali or Mazatl might continue to follow the steps of Zolin and fare worse. They might all die here, and no one from home would know their fate. In a blind future, certainly Niente would never see his family again.
He felt the smooth, polished wood of the spell-stick, but his fingertips only grazed it. They would not close around it.
“I will obey you, Tecuhtli,” Niente said, the words slow and quiet. “And I will follow you to the future you bring us.”
Varina ci’Pallo
Karl was sitting in the dark on the rear stoop of Serafina’s house in Oldtown, staring across the small garden planted there toward the rear of the houses a street over. His gaze seemed to be penetrating all the way to South Bank, far away. Above him, the moon was snagged in a lacework of thin, silver clouds through which the stars peered. A cup of tea steamed forgotten at his left side.
He was rubbing a small, flat, and pale stone between his forefinger and thumb.
Varina came up and sat beside him on the right-not quite close enough to touch, not far enough away that she couldn’t feel the warmth of his body in the night chill. Neither of them said anything. He rubbed the stone. She could hear faint, muffled music from the tavern down the street.
When the silence between them had stretched for more breaths than she wanted to count, she started to
