Ambassador?”
“Would I be here if I didn’t?” he answered, and hoped she couldn’t hear the lie.
Nico heard the lock to the house gates snick open under Rochelle’s ministrations; she grinned toward Nico as she slipped the thin pieces of metal back into their packet. “Easy,” she said, pushing the gates open; Nico slid inside ahead of her, but he felt her put a hand on his shoulder almost immediately. He glanced back at her from under the hood that masked his head, the cloak that disguised his green robes heavy around him.
“Something’s wrong here,” Rochelle said.
“What do you mean?”
“Listen,” she answered.
The street outside the gates was crowded with people leaving the city. They could hear their voices: the calls, the arguments, the cries of children too young to understand the panic of their parents and relatives. There were the creak and groans of the carts, the shuffling of feet on the pavement, the whistles of utilinos vainly trying to direct traffic and quell the inevitable confrontations. “There’s all this noise out there,” she told him. “But inside here-the staff should be scurrying around, getting things ready for whatever, but there’s nothing. The shutters to the windows are all closed and probably locked, and I don’t hear anything at all. It’s too quiet here.”
“What are you telling me?” His voice was a husk. He already knew the answer, could feel it in a despair that settled low in his stomach.
“I don’t think she’s there, Nico. I think she’s gone already. I’m sorry.”
Nico pushed past Rochelle, striding angrily toward the front doors of Varina’s house. It was locked, but rather than wait for Rochelle, he kicked hard at it and the wood around the lock cracked. He kicked again, and the door opened.
“Subtle,” Rochelle said behind him.
He ignored her, stepping into the marbled entranceway. He was certain now that Rochelle was right; the servants should have come running, perhaps ready to defend the house, but there was no one in sight. “Varina?” he called. He thought he saw a cat dart across the hallway ahead of him. Otherwise, there was no response. He heard Rochelle enter the house behind him; glancing over his shoulder, he saw that she was holding her knife, the blade naked in her hand. “We won’t need that,” he said.
“Probably not. But it makes me feel better.”
He shrugged. He walked slowly down the hallway, glancing into the reception rooms to either side. The furniture there was covered with sheets; the cat glared at him from atop a blanketed couch, then went back to licking its front paws. He continued to move through the house: the sunroom, a library, the kitchens-they were all the same, empty, with every indication that Varina didn’t expect to return here soon. He heard Rochelle calling him from upstairs, and he followed the sound of her voice. She’d put the knife in its sheath, and was standing at the door to what had to be a nursery. The furniture here, too, was covered. She opened the drawers of a dresser along one wall. “Empty,” she told him. “I told you-Serafina’s not here, Nico. The Numetodo’s taken her elsewhere.”
Nico was shaking his head. “Varina’s still here in the city. I can feel it.”
One eyebrow rose on Rochelle’s face. “Well, if she is, she’s not staying here, and the baby’s not here either.”
“She’s sent Sera away,” Nico said.
“I gathered that. So can Cenzi tell you where?”
He scowled at her, a warning about blasphemy on his lips, but he held it back. She seemed to realize it as well, holding up a hand. “All right, so you don’t know. What do we do now?” Rochelle asked, but Nico could only shake his head.
“I don’t know,” he told her. After his confrontation with Sergei, he’d hoped to take Sera, to leave the city with his daughter and his sister, and find a place to think and pray: to know what Cenzi wanted of him, to know how to assuage the guilt and pain he bore… He’d hoped-he’d prayed-that Cenzi would give him his daughter, but it seemed that Cenzi still had other plans for him. He looked upward. “Cenzi, what are You trying to tell me?”
He listened to the whispers in his head and in his heart, and his face grew grim. “I think it’s time for us to part for a while,” he told Rochelle.
The Storm’s Fury
In the late afternoon, the sun hung low in the west, but where there had been clear sky before, a storm had birthed itself across the River Infante. Thunderheads rose high in the sky, though these were clouds that lurked impossibly close to the ground. Underneath them, the army of the Tehuantin was cloaked in shadow, and the storm walked itself forward on jagged legs of flickering lightning. The black, roiling clouds stretched off southward along the front the Tehuantin had established. Jan’s horse shifted uneasily under him, nostrils flaring as low thunder growled like some great beast. There was a sharp odor in the air that wrinkled Jan’s nostrils.
“War-storm,” one of the chevarittai near Jan muttered. “The cowards-they won’t even give us a chance for honorable single combat first.” Jan nodded-he’d heard of the Tehuantin war-storms, called up by their spellcasters: a cooperative spell. The Westlanders had used them to great effectiveness when they’d last been here, as well as during their battles with the Holdings in the Hellins, but Jan had never seen one himself. He doubted he was going to enjoy the firsthand experience.
“Alert the war-teni,” he said, patting his horse’s neck to calm it. “We’re going to need them. The attack’s starting.”
Jan, with several companies of Firenzcian troops and chevarittai, was on the western side of the River Infante just below the village of Certendi. The bridge over the river was at their backs. On the eastern side of the river, he could see the earthen ramparts they’d built; he had little hope that they would be able to keep the western bank for long. Starkkapitan ca’Damont was farther downriver, with the remainder of the Firenzcian army; Commandant ca’Talin, with the Holdings’ Garde Civile, at the southern end of their line, near where the Infante joined with the A’Sele.
“Tell your men they must hold,” Jan told the chevarittai. He yanked on his horse’s reins, riding up and down just between the lines of infantry and archers. “Hold!” he told them all. “We need to hold here.” As the war-storm stalked forward, the rumbling of the great cloud growing louder and more ominous, the war-teni came up to the front. He gestured to the green robes. “Here’s where you begin to earn your forgiveness,” he told them. “There-that storm must come down.”
The storm lurched nearer with every breath. The air smelled of the lightning strikes but not of rain. Ahead of the troops, in what had formerly been a field planted with wheat and grain, Jan had placed entrapments for the Tehuantin warriors: sharpened iron spikes set in the ground, covered pits whose bottoms were festooned with wooden stakes, packets of black sand that Varina and her Numetodo had enchanted so that they would explode when someone stepped near them. But the storm was marching across the field, not yet the Westlander warriors. The lightning strikes tore at the ground, uprooting the stakes and exposing the pits, tossing earth everywhere and causing the black sand packets to explode harmlessly.
Jan cursed at the war-teni. “Now!” he shouted at them. “Now!”
The war-teni began their chants, sending the energy of the Ilmodo surging outward toward the false storm. With each spell that was released, the storm began to fall apart, and underneath, they could see the Tehuantin warriors hidden below, marching steadily toward them. “Archers!” Jan shouted, and behind him, bows creaked under tension, then a thin flurry of arrows arched upward, curving back down to rain upon the Westlanders. They snapped up shields. Jan saw several of the warriors fall despite the protection, though wherever one fell, another took up his place. To the south, the war-storm loomed over the ranks of the Holdings, and Jan heard cries of pain and alarm as the lightning tore at the soldiers there. But the storm was already falling apart-the power behind it released. Now, he heard the guttural shouts of the Westlander spellcasters; fireballs shrieked like angry Moitidi in their direction. The war-teni chanted their counter-spells; Jan saw several of the fireballs explode harmlessly above, but others came through, slamming into the ranks and spewing their fiery, terrible destruction and gouging holes in the lines. His horse reared in terror. “Move the lines forward! Fill the gaps!” Jan shouted as he tried to calm his mount. The offiziers shouted directions; signal flags waved.
Then, with a great shout, the warriors charged, and there was little time for thought at all. Jan unsheathed
