the chest plate of the man’s strange armor. He felt his blade enter flesh. It caught briefly, and Jan-grunting, feeling his mouth stretched in a rictus of fury-twisted and pushed, and the blade went suddenly in. The Westlander, impaled, still completed his strike, but the vambraces laced around Jan’s forearms took the brunt, though he thought that his right arm might have been broken by the blow. He tried to pull his sword from the man, but could not, and the man’s dead weight nearly pulled the weapon entirely from his grip, which had gone numb and dead itself…
… Another Westlander shrilled to his left, and Jan pulled desperately at his sword again, though he knew it would be too late. But another sword-a Firenzcian one-sliced across the man’s throat, nearly severing the head. Jan was spattered with hot blood…
… And hands were lifting him. “Are you all right, my Hirzg?” someone asked, and Jan nodded. His right hand was tingling, but seemed to have returned to life. He clenched the fingers, working them in the mailed glove, then reached down and pulled his sword free. He turned. ..
… he saw a trio of Westlanders gathered as a shield around another of the painted warriors, this one with a bird tattooed over his shaven skull and face. Sergei was there, his sword rising and falling, but the Firenzcian soldier next to him fell, his hand taken from his wrist. Jan rushed toward that gap, not thinking but only reacting…
… and somehow he was past the guard and in front of the bird-marked Warrior. The Westlander’s armor turned Jan’s first cut, and the hard bronze pommel of the man’s sword slammed into Jan’s chin underneath his helm. He went staggering backward, tasting blood…
… As he saw the bird-warrior parry Sergei’s attacking sword. ..
… as he charged again at the man, grimacing and grunting, and the Westlander couldn’t defend against both of them at once. It was Jan’s blade that slithered through, that found the chink between the rounded bands of the man’s armor and entered him. The Westlander gaped as if surprised. Jan heard a voice somewhere call out a strange name: “Tecuhtli!” as the man fell to his knees. Sergei’s sword followed Jan’s, striking the man in the neck and head. The bird-warrior went down onto the blood-spattered cobbles, facedown.. .
… and it was over except for the roaring of his pulse in his ears. Jan realized that he was breathing hard and fast, that his heart was pounding so furiously that it threatened to burst from his rib cage, that his leg and both arms ached, that he was liberally coated with gore, and that at least some of the blood was his own. He was standing wide-legged and bent over, breathing hard. His stomach heaved; he swallowed hard against the searing bile, forcing himself not to be sick. He felt Sergei’s hand clap him on his armored shoulders. He blinked, looking around him: there were at least a dozen bodies on the ground, some of them clad in the black-and-silver livery of Firenzcia. A few were still twitching; as Jan watched, those of the Garde Civile were dispatching those of the Westlanders who were still alive. There were streams of blood trailing from the bodies, and entrails spilled on the street like obscene sausages.
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.”
