object was incredibly exhausting, Karl. You won’t be able to imagine just how exhausting until you try it yourself. The process took me three full turns of the glass, and afterward I had to rest for another day to recover. Even now, I still feel the drain on my energy, and I wonder what else it might have cost.” She bit her lower lip, brushed stray wisps of whitened hair behind her ears. “You said that Archigos Ana claimed that old Mad Mahri gave her an enchantment that could literally stop time?”
Karl nodded. “That’s what she told me-it was how she snatched Allesandra from her vatarh. And Mahri was able to switch his body for mine, when I was in the Bastida. His magic…”
“… was utterly beyond ours, then,” she finished for him. “I know. The reports from the war in the Hellins hint at the same. The nahualli of the Westlanders can do more than we can, but… I’ve just proved that their X’in Ka is no more god-driven than the Ilmodo, no matter what they claim or believe.” She pointed to the glass ball. “If I can do this, then my bet is that we can also learn to do the same with more potent spells. It’s just a matter of learning the right formulae to bind the Scath Cumhacht to the physical object. It can be done. We can do it.”
Karl remembered Mahri, who had befriended him and Ana when they thought they were lost, and who had turned out to be not ally, but enemy. Mahri’s ravaged, one-eyed, and furrowed face swam before him as he gazed at Varina. He lifted the glass ball again. “So anyone could have done this spell…” His voice trailed off. The explosion.. . the great flash of terrible light… Ana’s torn body… Magic without hearing or seeing anyone casting the spell… Maybe you’ve been wrong; maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong direction… “Could what happened to Ana have been…?” Karl couldn’t finish the question. It remained lodged in his throat, heavy and solid.
But both Varina and Mika nodded in answer.
“Yes,” Mika told him. “That’s the rest of what we wanted to talk about. Varina and I have already had the same thought. Westlander involvement can’t be ruled out in Ana’s death, and frankly, what happened there makes it seem likely to me. But why, Karl? Why not assassinate the Kraljiki or the Regent, who are directly responsible for the war? Why kill Ana, of all people?”
Because it would be revenge for Mahri. Revenge. That, he could understand. “Right now, I don’t know,” Karl hedged. “But someone here in Nessantico does, I’m certain, and I’m going to find that person.” He took a long breath. They were both staring at him, and he hated the pity he saw in Mika’s eyes, and the deep empathy in Varina’s. “But that’s for later,” he told them. “For now, I want you to teach me this nahualli trick. Let me see how it works.”
Varina seemed to start to say something, then closed her mouth. Mika glanced at her, at Karl. “I think I’ll leave that to the two of you,” he said. “Alia wanted me to bring some lamb home for dinner, and the butcher will be closing his shop soon.” He made his farewells quickly and left them.
For too long after the door shut, neither of them spoke. When they did speak, it was together.
“I’m really sorry about the other day…”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said…”
They laughed, a little uneasily, at the collision of apologies. “You first,” Karl told her, but she shook her head. “All right,” he said. “I’ll start then. You said that my… affection for Ana had blinded me. I’ve been thinking about that, and-”
“Stop, Karl” she said. “Don’t say anything. I was angry and I said things that I had no right to say. I’d… I’d like you to forget them.”
“Even if they were true?”
Her cheeks reddened. “You loved Ana. I know that. Whatever relationship the two of you had…” She shrugged. “It’s not my concern.” She stepped forward, in front of him, close enough that he could see the flecks of color in her pupils and the fine lines at their corners. She reached down and closed his fingers around the glass ball he was still holding, both her hands cupping his. “I can show you how to enchant this. You just have to be patient because-”
“Varina.” She stopped and looked up at him. “You shouldn’t be putting so much of yourself into this.”
Her lips tightened as if she wanted to say something. Then her hands pressed against his again and she looked down. “… because it’s difficult, and you have to think differently about the whole process. But once you make the shift, it all makes sense,” she said. “You have to imagine the ball as an extension of yourself…”
Eneas cu’Kinnear
It had been three days since his capture. In that time, the Westlander army had continued marching northeast, and Eneas had walked with them. He remained close to Niente-which he’d learned was indeed the name of the nahualli who had healed him. “No one will restrain you,” Niente said to Eneas at the start of their trek. “But if you are found wandering without me, the warriors will kill you immediately. It’s your choice.”
They were moving in the direction of Munereo. The days were filled with nothing but walking. Eneas stayed close to the nahualli, but he also watched carefully for an opportunity to escape-that was his duty as a soldier. Whatever Niente had done to his leg had healed his injuries completely; his ankle felt stronger than it had ever been. If there was a chance to slip away, well, it wouldn’t be an injury that impeded him.
It wouldn’t be easy. All those of the nahualli caste walked together in the middle of the army, surrounded on all sides by the tattooed and scarred soldiers of the Westlanders, well-protected. That spoke of the value that the Tehuantin placed on the sorcerers. Each of the nahualli carried a walking stick or staff: carved with animal figures and highly polished, most of them showing long use. Once, when they had paused for the midday meal, Eneas reached out to touch Niente’s staff, curious as to what it might feel like. Niente snatched the stick away.
“This is nothing for you, Easterner,” he said-quietly, but with a sharp edge in his voice. “Let me give you a warning: you touch a nahualli’s staff at your peril. Don’t do it again.”
Niente conversed with the other nahualli, but always in the Tehuantin language; if any of them, like Niente, also spoke Eneas’ language, they never displayed the skill. For the most part, the other nahualli ignored his presence at the side of Niente, their gazes sliding past him as if he were no more than a horse or a tent-pack. Twice a day, a low-caste warrior would hand Eneas a bowl of the mashed root-paste that seemed to be the staple food for the army; he ate it quickly and hungrily-it was never quite enough to satisfy the hunger fed by the long marches. Niente had also given him a waterskin, which he filled in the abundant small lakes and streams around the hilly region.
The army moved through the meandering valleys like a solid river, the verdant steep walls of the landscape containing them. And at night, when the army camped…
It was the lowest-caste warriors who always erected the nahualli’s tents-the nahualli themselves seemed to do little physical labor. Niente supervised the placement of several dozen casks in his personal tent each night, marked with symbols burned into the wood. There were four symbols that Eneas could discern. Niente didn’t seem overly concerned with most of them, but the ones marked with what looked like a winged dragon he watched carefully as they were placed, grimacing whenever one of the warriors set the cask down too hard, and scolding them when they did so. That first night, Niente opened several of the casks-he didn’t object when Eneas sidled closer to look over the nahualli’s shoulder. One cask was filled with chunks of what looked and smelled like burnt wood, another with a white powder, yet another with bright yellow crystals. Eneas peered most closely into the dragon-marked casks, to see that it was filled with a gray-black thick sand, glistening a bit in the moonlight.
He remembered that sand, strewn in circles on the ground. The thunder, the flash, the pain…
Each night, close together in the tent, Niente would sit erect and chant for a few turns of the glass at least, his eyes closed, while Eneas lay near him. Sometimes he would sprinkle one of the ingredients from the casks on the ground between them while he chanted. Eneas could feel the power of the Ilmodo in the air, causing the hair on his neck to rise and prickling his skin, and he prayed to Cenzi while Niente cast his spells, trying to offset with his prayers the heretical use of the Ilmodo. All around them there would be silence: none of the other nahualli were chanting as Niente did, and Eneas wondered at that. He also wondered at how-afterward-he seemed to feel a warmth inside himself, as if the sun’s radiance were filling his own lungs. Whatever spell Niente was casting, Eneas seemed to be affected by it.
He wondered if Niente felt the same warmth and energy, but the nahualli always seemed more exhausted than exhilarated by his efforts, and the man moaned as he slept, as if he were in pain and when he awoke in the morning, there were new lines on his face, like an old apple.
