“Oh?” the man replied. “It’s nearly Third Call, Vajiki. Shouldn’t you be on your way to Temple? But no, I would have remembered seeing the Kraljica’s aide at Temple, or the dead Ambassador’s wife, or this owl-faced trained monkey you have with you.” He laughed at that, the others joining in. Varina felt her stomach muscles contract at the sound: this was deliberate. They knew who they were confronting.
“Don’t make a mistake here,” Varina said to them, looking from one to another, trying to see in any of their faces reluctance or fear. She saw neither. She glanced around for an utilino, for a garda, for anyone who might help, but the eyes of the other people strolling the Avi seemed to be elsewhere. If anyone noticed the confrontation, they ignored it. She had to wonder if that, too, was deliberate.
“Mistake?” the same young man said. He had pox scars mottling his cheeks, and he was missing one of his front teeth. “There’s no mistake. Nico Morel said there would be a sign-and the sign came, as he said it would. But you don’t believe in Cenzi and His signs, do you? You don’t believe that Cenzi speaks through the Absolute One.”
“This isn’t a discussion to have here, Vajiki,” Varina told him. “I would love to discuss it with Nico in person. Tell him that. Tell him that I will meet with him whenever and wherever he wants. But for now-let us pass.”
The pox-cratered man chuckled, the sound echoed by his companions. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think it’s time that the Numetodo were given a lesson.”
As the Morelli spoke, Varina saw his companions sliding around to surround them. “Don’t do this,” Varina said. “We don’t want to hurt anyone.”
In answer, the pock-faced man brought a cudgel from under his cloak. Raising his hand, he struck at Varina. The stick caught her on the side of the head, knocking her to the pavement before she could even bring her hands up to protect herself. She managed to get her hands up before she hit the cobblestones; the stones scraped and bloodied her palms, but still the impact knocked the breath from her. She felt something (a foot?) strike her side, and she felt more than saw the flash of a spell as Johannes shouted a release word. Talbot was casting a spell also, and so were others. She could taste the ash that her fall had kicked up. Blood was running into Varina’s eyes (had she cut her forehead also, or had the cudgel done that?) She tried to push herself up. Everything was confused, and her head was pounding so hard she could barely remember the release words for the spells that she-like most Numetodo-had prepared for defense. Something had dug hard into her side when she’d gone down: the sparkwheel she carried under her cloak. Blinking away the blood, caught in the tumult of the scuffle, she grabbed for it.
Another spell flashed and Varina smelled the ozone of the discharge as someone-one of the Morellis?-screamed in response. There were more spells going off; at least one of the Morellis must have been teni-trained, she realized. Somewhere distantly, someone was shouting and she heard the shrill of an utilino’s whistle.
Her own breath was the loudest thing in the world.
She had the sparkwheel out now. She cocked the hammer and rubbed at her eyes with her free hand. She saw the pocked-cheek man to her left, his cudgel up and about to come down on Johannes.
“No!” she shouted, and at the same time, her finger convulsed on the trigger.
The report was shrill, the sound echoing from the remnants of the city wall and rebounding, fainter, from the buildings up the Avi; the sparkwheel’s recoil tore her hand up and back, and at the same time, the pocked-face man grunted and fell, the cudgel flying from his hand as an invisible spear seemed to rip flesh, bone, and blood from his face. “Back away!” Varina shouted from her knees to those closest to her. Blinking, she brandished the now-useless sparkwheel, which was trailing smoke and the strange, astringent odor of black sand.
The command was unnecessary. With the weapon’s firing and the sudden, violent death of their leader, the others dropped their weapons and fled. Varina felt Talbot’s arms under her, lifting her up. There were people coming toward them, among them an utilino. “Can you stand, A’Morce? Johannes, she’s been hurt…”
“I’m fine,” she told them. She wiped at the blood again. There were three people laying on the Avi. One of them was groaning and struggling; the other two were eerily still. There was no doubt as to the fate of the pock-cheeked man. Varina turned her gaze quickly away from him. She was still holding the sparkwheel. Talbot noticed it; standing close to her so that the utilino and the others coming toward them could not see, he put it back under her cloak. “Better not to let anyone know,” he whispered. “Let them think we used magic.”
She was too confused, too hurt to argue. Her head was throbbing, and she kept wanting to look at the mangled face of the man she’d killed. “Talbot…” she said, but the world was lurching around her, and she could not stand.
That was the last she remembered for a time.
Niente
“It’s as if the ash has muddied everything, Taat,” Atl said. “I haven’t been able to see well since.” Atl’s voice was weary, his face was drawn, and he sagged in the chair in Niente’s little room on the Yaoyotl as if he’d run all the way across the great island of Tlaxcala.
Niente grunted. The ashfall had been so dense it seemed that the fleet moved through a solid fog. The sky had first turned a strange, sickening yellow before the ash had become so thick that it had turned day to night. Lightning and thunder furiously wrapped the expanding cloud, and the warm ash smelled of burning sulfur. The stuff was so fine and powdery that it had insinuated itself everywhere. Their clothing was full of it; it was in the food stores; it lingered in every pore of the wood despite the efforts of the sailors to clean it away. The sulfurous smell lingered as well, though by now they were all accustomed to it. The ash was also abrasive-one of the Tehuantin craftsmen had collected several pouches of the ash, saying that he could use it as a polishing agent.
And yes, the ash had tainted the purity of the water and the herbs that Niente used for the scrying bowl. Since the ashfall, Niente’s own attempts to glimpse the future had been nearly as clouded and useless as Atl’s.
He hoped they were still on the same path, the same route through the possibilities of the future that could lead to the Long Path he’d glimpsed. The Tehuantin fleet had entered the mouth of the A’Sele without any resistance from the Holdings navy, though he was certain that by now word must have come to Nessantico of what had happened and of the appearance of the Tehuantin ships. If Axat’s vision still held, then they would have linked the eruption of Mt. Karnmor with their arrival.
For now, the wind that touched his nearly bald skull and his ravaged face was cool and smelled of sweet, fresh water rather than salt. They moved through a jarringly monochrome landscape, the distant hills on either side gray when he knew they should have been green and lush. Streams of the finest ash floated by in the currents, heading out to sea and back toward its source. They moved through a landscape touched by death: Niente saw the carcasses floating past: birds, waterfowl, the occasional sheep or cow or dog, even-once or twice-a human body. This close to Karnmor, the devastation had been terrible. There were only a few gulls winging hopefully alongside them, far fewer than Niente remembered from his last visit here.
Atl tossed the water from the scrying bowl over the side of the Yaoyotl. That brought Niente back from reverie. “What did you see?” he asked his son. “Tell me.”
“The images came so fast and they were so dim…” Atl sighed. “I could hardly make them out. But-once I thought I saw you, Taat. You, and a throne that gleamed like sunlight.”
Niente felt himself shiver at that, as if the wind had suddenly turned as cold as the snowy summits of the Knife Edge Mountains. He had seen that moment also, and more. “You saw me?”