his sword and kicked his horse forward. The chevarittai gave a cry of fury and followed him, the gardai infantry rising in a black-and-silver wave to meet the Westlanders.
They crashed together in a flurry of swords, spears, and pikes.
Jan had fought the legions of Tennshah. These Westlanders were equally ferocious as fighters, but they were also far more disciplined. He could hear their own offiziers calling out crisp orders in their language, and their spellcasters were embedded in their midst, wielding staffs that crackled and flared with spells. He remembered that much from the last time. Jan hacked with his sword at a sea of brown faces painted in red and black, and wherever one fell to him, another sprang up to take his place. They were being pushed slowly back, and still the Westlanders kept coming. Jan realized that they couldn’t hold here on this side of the river-if they were pushed much closer to the river, there could be no orderly retreat; they’d be slaughtered.
“Back!” he shouted. “To the bridge! To the bridge!”
The offiziers took up the cry; the flag-bearers waved their signal flags, the cornets shrilled their call. The Firenzcian troops, disciplined and precise as always, gave ground grudgingly and as they had been trained to do, allowing the archers and war-teni to cover their retreat and carrying away their wounded wherever possible.
The dead they left.
Here, there were two bridges crossing the Infante, a half-mile apart. The northern bridge, along the Avi a’Nostrosei, had already been destroyed. The one over the Avi a’Certendi still remained. The Infante could be forded but not easily, since its current was swift and there were deep pools that only the locals knew. The archers and war-teni were first over the bridge as the foot troops and chevarittai held back the Westlanders, the offiziers hurrying them across toward ramparts that had been erected on the far side. Jan stayed with his men, his armor blood-splattered and dented, the gray Firenzcian steel of his sword stained with gore, until the bridge was cleared and the archers had re-formed on the far side.
“Break away!” he called finally when he heard the horns from the far side of the Infante, and they rushed toward the bridge. Jan turned again there, keeping back the warriors who pursued them, howling. The ground was thick with bodies around him and the chevarittai. A spellcaster gestured with his stick, and the chevaritt alongside Jan went down with a scream and the smell of brimstone, but the spellcaster was cut down himself in the next moment. Most of the infantry was across. “Across!” Jan shouted. “Chevarittai, across!” They turned their horses; they fled. The hooves of the war-steeds pounded on the planks of the bridge, and Jan gestured to the war-teni who were waiting on the far side. The Tehuantin pursued, too closely. Already, the warriors were on the western end of the bridge.
“Now!” Jan cried as he reached ground on the far side. “Take it down!”
“Hirzg, not before we’re behind the ramparts,” someone said, and Jan stood up in his stirrups, furious, and roared.
“Take it down now!”
The war-teni chanted; fire began to crawl the wooden support beams. The flames licked at the paper that wrapped the black sand lashed there.
The explosions flung pieces of the bridge high in the air, huge, rough-cut beams tumbling end over end, the bricks and stones of the pilings slicing through the air. Warriors and gardai alike were struck. One of the bricks slammed into Jan, the impact unhorsing him. He heard his horse scream as well, an awful sound. As he fell, he saw the center of the bridge collapse, falling into the Infante with a huge splash, taking a mass of Westlander warriors with it.
Then he hit the ground. For a moment, everything went black around him. When he came back to consciousness, he saw faces above him and hands. “Hirzg, are you hurt?”
Jan let them pull him to his feet. His chest ached as if his horse had fallen on him, and the armor was heavily indented where the brick had struck him. His chest burned with every inhale; he had to sip the air as he shook off the hands. His horse was thrashing on the ground, a plank embedded in the creature’s side.
The bridge was down. The sun was already sinking to the level of the trees, throwing long shadows over the battlefield. The Westlanders had retreated back from the water’s edge to be out of arrow range. Jan limped to his horse. One of the stallion’s front legs was broken, and blood gushed from the long wound along its flank. “My sword?” he asked, and someone handed it to him. Kneeling down alongside the horse, he patted its neck. “Rest,” he said. “You’ve served well.” Grunting with pain, he raised the sword high and brought it down hard, slicing deep into the neck. The horse tried to stand one last time, then went still. The world seemed to dance around Jan, the edges of his vision darkening again. He forced himself to stand, leaning on the sword.
“Get the lines formed behind the ramparts,” he said to those around him. “Tend to the wounded and set the watches. Send the a’offiziers to me, and get word to the Starkkapitan and the Commandant of what’s…” Happened here… The words were in his mind, but they didn’t seem to come out. The darkness was moving too fast even though the sun was still visible in the sky.
He felt himself falling.
There weren’t enough nahualli with Niente to create a war-storm. Ahead of them, in the golden light of late afternoon, they could see the Easterner troops arrayed on the hillsides on either side of the road. Their own numbers appeared to be significantly greater than that of the Easterners unless they had troops hidden in reserve on the far slope.
Tototl sniffed in disdain.
“This is all they bring against us?” he said, and the warriors closest to them chuckled. “Uchben Nahual, it’s time to do as we’ve discussed.”
Niente inclined his head to Tototl and turned his horse, riding back to where the other nahualli were sheltered in the midst of the warriors. He’d had them fill their spell-staffs the night before as usual, so that they could perform this spell at need and still be rested for the battle. They could not create the war-storm, but they could create cloud enough to mask them. That was what they did now, their mass chant pulling power from the X’in Ka, the energy rising into the air and becoming visible. Wisps of cloud began to sway in front of the warriors, from the road to nearly the banks of the river, a fog that thickened and became dense, a wall shaped by the nahualli so that the Easterners could no longer see them. This wall would not need to move with the troops, nor would it need to generate the lightnings of the war-storm. Niente gestured when he could no longer see the Easterner troops ahead of them nor the hills on which they stood, and the nahualli stopped their chant.
Niente swayed on his feet, as if he’d run from here to the river and back: the payment for the chant and his channeling of the energy, but he forced himself to stay upright, even though a few of the younger nahualli collapsed, panting. Using the X’in Ka this way-creating the spell without giving yourself time to recover from the effort-was costly; Niente didn’t understand why the Easterner spellcasters usually performed their magic this way, rather than storing the spells to be released later. “Get up,” he told them. “Take up your spell-staffs. There’s still a battle to be fought.”
With the fog-wall shutting off sight of the Easterner troops, Tototl shouted his orders, gesturing to the lesser warriors and the High Warriors in charge of them. Two companies slid away to the left, toward the river-they would outflank the Easterners and come upon them from the side and rear. Tototl waited as the flanking arm moved away and Niente rode back to him. “If this is all that is between us and the city, we’ll be there by evening, Uchben Nahual,” Tototl said. “It would seem that your son has seen well-sending us across the river was the path to victory. They weren’t prepared for this. We will push through their city and come upon the rest of their army from the rear as Citlali and Nahual Atl attack them from the front. We will crush them between us like a shelled nut between stones.”
The comment only made Niente scowl. He’d tried to use the scrying bowl the night before: everything was confusing, and powers moved on the side of the Easterners that he could not clearly see while the Long Path eluded him entirely. Tototl seemed to find Niente’s irritation amusing-he laughed. “Don’t worry, Uchben Nahual,” he said. “I still have faith in you. Is your spell-staff full?”
Niente lifted the staff, the ebony hardwood he’d carved so carefully decades ago with the symbols of power. His hands over the long years had polished the knobbed end and the middle of the staff to a gleaming satiny finish. The staff felt like part of him; he could feel the energy within, waiting for the release words to burst forth in fury and death. Yet even as he displayed the staff to Tototl and the warriors and nahualli around him gave a shout of affirmation, Niente felt little but despair.
There was no life in this victory, if victory it was to be. No joy. Not if it were to lead to the place he’d once glimpsed.
