Then the vortex was gone, vanished, and Niente was holding only an empty length of wood. He could see the other nahualli staring or dropping their staffs in alarm. “Niente!” Tototl shouted from the cobble, his spear still raised. Niente showed him his staff.
“I have nothing,” he said in amazement. “The magic has been taken from all the nahualli. Tototl, I saw this… I told you…”
“You’re still alive,” Tototl grunted. “We stay. We fight!”
He lifted the spear again. Niente saw the strangest sight then: an old man with a silver nose, rushing toward Tototl. He brandished not a sword but a cane as he shouted at the High Warior, and yet…
Niente felt the threat of that stick. Tototl saw the man also, but he did nothing, only smiled. Niente shouted as the man thrust the tip of his cane toward Tototl, and he leaped between them, trying to knock away the cane with his staff, but he wasn’t strong enough. The cane touched Niente’s own body.
The impact was like the fist of Axat. He thought he saw Her face above him, nodding as he fell. Niente saw a carved bird flying away in front of Her.
A last gift…
Sergei saw the warrior’s vicious spear thrust pierce Allesandra’s armor. He saw her mouth open in silent surprise and shock, saw the warrior use the spear’s shaft to pull Allesandra down from her horse. He stood over her, yanking the spear from the Kraljica’s body with blood spattering as he prepared to thrust down again at her prone figure. He shouted something toward an ancient Westlander spellcaster standing near him.
Sergei had stopped himself. Something felt strange: a furious cold wind swirled in the Avi, and the fury of the spells all around seemed to have stopped.
Sergei shook himself. He limped toward Allesandra, cane in one hand, his rapier in the other. Another Westlander sprang from his left side, and he thrust underneath the man’s cut, the thin blade of the rapier finding a gap between the bamboo slats of his armor and sliding into his abdomen. The Westlander doubled over, falling, the motion taking the sword from Sergei’s grasp. He left it there; he had no strength to hold it. “No!” he shouted at the warrior standing over Allesandra. He brandished his cane at the man, who looked at him and seemed to nearly laugh.
Sergei prayed that he remembered the word that Varina had taught him, that he would pronounce it correctly, that the spell she said she’d placed within the cane would actually work. “Scaoil!” he cried, and he plunged the brass ferrule of his cane toward the warrior.
But as he did so, the ancient spellcaster moved with surprising speed for his evident age, interposing himself between Sergei and the warrior, waving his spell-staff. The cane struck the spellcaster instead. In the instant the cane touched him, the ferrule seemed to explode. A loud, percussive sound nearly deafened Sergei. The blast sent splinters of his cane flying, it sent the old spellcaster flying backward in a spray of blood and gore, dying if not already dead. A red carved bird flew up from the spellcaster’s ripped pouch and landed again on the old man’s chest. He grasped the bird, seemed to whisper to it, then his head fell to one side.
The red-painted warrior dropped his spear from his hand as he stared at the body of the spellcaster, lying in the Avi near the wounded Allesandra.
Time stopped then for Sergei. The warrior stood, the cool rictus of battle fury still on his face. Sergei thought that the man would reach to his side and draw his sword, that he would cut Sergei down in the next instant. There were no gardai who would save him, no sparkwheelers close enough.
He wondered what death would feel like.
But the warrior stared at the spellcaster’s body and he shook his head. He shouted something that Sergei did not understand: a prayer, a curse, a query. He stepped back and away from Sergei: one step, another, then another. Then he turned completely, and he roared a command that echoed in the street. The warriors in the Avi began to give ground, slowly at first, then more quickly. Sergei saw Brie and Talbot pursuing them with the sparkwheelers, but he called to them. “Wait! The Kraljica…”
He bent down to her. “Sergei,” she said. “It hurts…”
“I know,” he told her. A few gardai had gathered around-bloody and battered and appearing dazed. They stared at the Kraljica, at the shattered body of the spellcaster.
“Help me,” Sergei told them. “Help me get her back to the palais. ..”
Jan, with the chevarittai and a few of the war-teni, fought a rear action to protect their retreat, engaging the mounted warriors and keeping the Westlander foot troops away from the the stragglers. In his role in command of the Firenzcian army, Jan had rarely needed to coordinate a full-scale retreat, but he’d been on the other side of one many times, and he knew a retreat was often the most dangerous time for the troops as the advancing force could pick off the stragglers, sending arrows and spells to decimate and even obliterate the rearmost companies. Too often, the advancing army could often overtake their demoralized and exhausted foe and inflict terrible casualties.
Retreat might allow the commander to fight another day, but it also might lead to a total and ignominious defeat. They were not even falling back to fortifications, but to an open and unprotected city.
The Westlander spellcasters hurled spells at them that their war-teni had little time and little energy to deflect. Their archers barbed the very sky with arrows. Their mounted troops-thankfully few-dashed toward the back of the running gardai, picking them off. The front ranks of their army pushed forward at a full charge. Jan could glimpse, through the smoke and confusion of the battlefield, the banners of the Tehuantin commander: a winged serpent flying on rippling, bright green cloth. Most of the spells seemed to come from the group around that banner.
Jan was exhausted and in terrible pain. His fingers longed to release the weight of heavy Firenzcian steel, the hilt of his sword already slippery with blood. He swayed in his saddle, nearly falling from the horse as spell-lightning hissed and boomed directly in front of him, causing his warhorse to rear. He settled the animal.
“Hirzg!” he heard someone call, and a chevaritt to his right pointed to a quartet of mounted warriors about to run down a group of gardai.
Jan sighed. He forced his fingerss to tighten on his sword. He ignored the pain searing his chest. He kicked his horse into a gallop toward the warriors.
You aren’t going to survive this. This is going to be your last battle.
The thought came to him as a certainty. A prophecy. He shivered even as he shouted encouragement to the chevarittai, even as they pounded toward the warriors.
Then…
A wave of intense cold washed over him, as if winter had come early; as it passed, even with the fury of their charge, he realized that the constant rain of spells from the Tehuantin forces had stopped. The warriors ahead of them had realized it as well. They’d pulled up their horses, looking back toward their own lines. Jan worried that the spellcasters were preparing another mass spell like the war-storm. But instead, a visible wave rushed across the land from east to west, one that caused Jan to pull back on the reins in amazement. They could all see it: in the shimmering air, in the dust it raised from the ground as it moved. Where the pulse touched the advancing front line of the Westlanders, the warriors were tossed and thrown back even though it left their own people untouched. Jan heard screams and wails, then a greater single voice.
“Go! This is Cenzi’s Gift. Go!”
The shout seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere.
Jan felt a sudden faint hope. A war-teni’s fireball went screaming overhead toward the Tehuantin. There was no response to the spelclass="underline" no deflection, no impotent explosion far above. The fireball shrieked death and plowed into the Westlanders ranks, exploding untouched. Another followed, and another-all of them went through. The hope within him surged, and his injuries no longer mattered. “Turn!” he shouted to the troops, to the offiziers. “Turn! Follow me!”