A Magic of Nightfall (13 page)

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Authors: S. L. Farrell

BOOK: A Magic of Nightfall
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He found his sword half-buried in the mud an arm’s length away. He shoved the filthy blade into the scabbard lashed to his belt. Grimacing, he crawled toward the flames, half-dragging himself around the destrier.
Part of him screamed warning. He was moving toward the enemy; they would kill him if they saw him. The a’offiziers all spoke of how the Westlanders had walked the battlefield after Lake Malik, how they’d killed all the gardai who were still alive but crippled or badly wounded. Those who were only slightly injured they’d taken captive. The whispers of what they’d done to them were far, far worse.
The bonfire—immense and furious—crackled at the bottom of the slope, and gathered around it were Westlanders: thousands of them, while smaller fires dotted the landscape past the great conflagration where they were encamped. Enéas saw a group of horses lashed together to one side of the bonfire, a bit away from those seated around the flames.
If he could not walk, he could still ride.
The journey seemed to take ages. The stars wheeled around the Sailing Star, the moon rose to zenith and began to fall, the rippers continued their long bloody feast. Exhausted, Enéas rested behind the shield of a pile of logs. The horses nickered nearby; he could smell them and hear their restless movements. The singing was louder now, a low-pitched and dissonant melody, the words they were chanting strange and unknown: a thousand voices, all singing together. The drone was maddeningly loud; the music vibrated in his chest and seemed to make the ground itself shake. He could see the Westlanders: skin bronzed like those from Namarro, their bamboo armor set with iron rings clashing as they sang and swayed. The massive logs of the pyre collapsed, sending sparks roaring upward.
One of the Westlanders at the front of the ranks rose to his feet and strode forward, raising bare muscular arms. Like the others, he wore a bamboo helmet adorned with bright, long feathers. A large, beaten silver plate lay on his chest from a chain around his neck, adorned with painted figures: that identified the man as one of the Westlander offiziers. His singing faded as he proclaimed something in a loud voice. Two more Westlander warriors came forward from the darkness on the other side of the fire, dragging between them the bloodied form of a man. The head lifted as they came into the firelight, and even at his distance Enéas recognized A’Offizier ca’Matin. He’d been stripped to the waist, and now they forced him to his knees in front of the Westlander offizier. Enéas heard ca’Matin praying to Cénzi, his face staring up at the sparks, the stars, and the moon, anywhere but at the Westlander.
The Westlander spoke to ca’Matin as he removed an odd device from a pouch on his belt. Enéas squinted, trying to see it as the offizier held it up, displaying it to the gathered troops. A short, curved barrel like the horn of a bull gleamed the color of ivory, the device set in a wooden handle. The offizier proffered the device to ca’Matin, handle foremost. When ca’Matin took it, his hands shaking visibly, his face uncertain, the warrior turned the ivory horn—Enéas heard a distinct, metallic
click
—and stepped back. He made a gesture as if he were reversing the device, then touching the tip of the horn to his abdomen. Ca’Matin shook his head, and the Westlander offizier sighed. His face seemed almost sympathetic as he took the instrument and reversed it in ca’Matin’s hands. He nodded encouragingly as he pushed ca’Matin’s hands back. The horn touched ca’Matin’s stomach.
There was a flash that illuminated the entire landscape as if by a lightning stroke, and a booming thunderclap that drowned out Enéas’ involuntary cry and sent the horses whinnying nervously and pulling against their hobbles. Ca’Matin’s eyes and mouth went wide, though his expression seemed strangely ecstatic to Enéas, as if in his final moment Cénzi had touched him with glory.
Ca’Matin toppled, the device falling from his hands. His stomach was a bloody cavity, torn open as if a clawed fist had ripped him apart. Gore and blood spattered the ground underneath him, as well as the legs of Westlanders around him. The Westlander offizier raised his hands again, as the singing began once more. With a strange reverence, the two soldiers who had brought ca’Matin to the fire now wrapped his body in a cloth dyed with bright colors set in geometric patterns. They hurried the bundled corpse away into the shadows.
Enéas forced himself to move again, more desperately now. He didn’t know what sorcery had been forced on ca’Matin, but he had to find a way back to Munereo: to warn them.
Help me do this, Cénzi. . . .
He began to crawl toward the horses. If he could pull himself up on one and throw his injured leg over . . . They might pursue him, but he knew this land as well as the Westlanders, perhaps better, and night would cover him.
He was to the horses now. These were captured Nessantican destriers, fitted with the livery he knew well, and more importantly, still harnessed with their bits and saddles. They were slower than the Westlanders’ own steeds, but hardier. If he could get enough of a head start, the Westlander horses might tire before they could catch him.
With Cénzi’s help . . .
Enéas unhobbled the legs of a large gray, keeping the animal between himself and the fire. The destrier nickered, showing the whites of her eyes in the moonlight, and Enéas whispered softly to her. “Shh . . . shh . . . It’s all right . . . You’ll be fine . . .” He grasped at the straps of the saddle and pulled himself upright, keeping weight off his injured ankle. He took the reins in one hand, stroking the animal’s neck. “Shh . . . Quiet, now . . .” He would have to balance himself at least partially on his bad ankle to get a foot into the stirrup; gently, he put the foot on the ground and slowly gave it weight, biting his lower lip in his teeth at the pain. He could do it, for a moment. That was all it would take. . . .
He lifted his good foot and put it in the stirrup. A wave of knife cuts lanced from his ankle up his leg as for a moment it held all his weight, and the agony nearly made him faint. Desperately, he swung the bad leg over the horse’s spine, almost crying out as the ankle slammed against the animal’s thick body on the other side. But he was on the destrier now, half-laying on the mount’s thick, muscular neck. He flicked the reins, kicking with his good leg. “Slow . . .” he told the gray. “Very slow now. Quietly . . .”
The gray tossed her head, then began to walk away from the other horses, heading back up the slope and away from the firelight and the encampment. The singing of the Westlanders covered the sound of iron-clad hooves on the ground. As soon as he was in the darkness again, as soon as he could put the shoulder of one of these hills between himself and the Westlanders, he could kick her into full gallop.
He was beginning to dare to think it was possible.
He nearly didn’t notice the shape that moved to his left, the fragment of darkness that suddenly lifted and hurtled itself at him. He caught only a glimpse of a grim face before the man struck him from the side and bore him off the saddle. Light flared behind his eyes as he struck the ground, and Enéas screamed with the pain of his tormented leg, twisted underneath him. He heard the destrier galloping away, riderless, and then the shadow of a Westlander warrior was standing over him, his arm raised, and Enéas fell again into the dark.
Allesandra ca’Vörl
“
I
WOULD LIKE TO APOLOGIZE for my wife, A’Hïrzg. She . . . well, the subject of the Witch Archigos always upsets her. They have a . . . history together, after all. Still, she should not have been so outspoken at dinner last night, especially toward you as the host.”
Allesandra nodded to Archigos Semini. They were seated on a viewing platform high on a slope behind the Hïrzg’s private estate—the palais at Stag Fall, well outside Brezno. They faced east, the platform overlooking a wide, long meadow of tall grass dotted with wildflowers. There, below them, they could see a cluster of figures and horses: Fynn, Jan, and several others. On either side of the meadow, in the tall fir forest, drums echoed from the flanks of the steep, verdant hills that formed the landscape: the sound of the beaters, herding their prey toward the meadow and the waiting Hïrzg.
Behind Allesandra on the balcony, servants bustled about with drinks and food as they set a long table for dinner. Otherwise, Allesandra and the Archigos were alone; all the other favored ca’-and-cu’ who would be dining with them that evening were with the Hïrzg’s party in the meadow. Allesandra had little desire to be in such close proximity with her brother for that long. She wasn’t certain why Semini had remained behind at the palais—Francesca was in the meadow with the others.
“Please believe me when I say that I took no offense, Archigos,” Allesandra told the man. “Even though I have far more sympathy for Archigos Ana, I understand how your wife might feel that way.”
She glanced at Semini and saw him smile. “Thank you,” he told her. “That’s kind of you.” He glanced carefully at the servants, then pitched his voice low enough that they couldn’t overhear. “Between the two of us, A’Hïrzg, I wish that I could have convinced your vatarh to name you as his heir. That boy—” he pointed with his chin down to the gathering in the meadow, “—would be a perfectly adequate Starkkapitän for the Garde Civile, but he hasn’t the vision or intelligence to be a good Hïrzg.”
“I do believe I hear the Archigos speaking treason.” Allesandra kept her gaze carefully away from him, her attention on Jan astride his horse next to Fynn. She wondered whether she could believe what ca’Cellibrecca was saying, and she wondered why he would voice it aloud to her. He had a reason for doing so, she was certain: Semini was not a man for accidental statements. But what was the reason? What did he want, and how would it benefit him?
“Did I perhaps speak what is also in
your
heart, A’Hïrzg, even if you don’t dare say it aloud?” Semini answered in the same hoarse, low whisper. He turned toward her. “My heart is here, in this country, A’Hïrzg Allesandra. I want what is best for Firenzcia. Nothing more. I have given my life in service to Cénzi, and in service to Firenzcia. I shared your vatarh’s vision of a Holdings where Brezno, not Nessantico, was the center of all things. He nearly achieved that vision. He
would
have accomplished that, I’m convinced, if it hadn’t been for the heretical sorcery of the Witch Archigos.”
There was hatred in his voice, genuine and heated. And also a strange satisfaction.
Vatarh would have succeeded if Ana hadn’t taken me hostage, if she hadn’t snatched me away from Vatarh and used me to end the war.
As long as Allesandra remained in Nessantico, as long as her vatarh refused to pay the demanded ransom, his defeat was still incomplete. There was still hope that the results might change, and it had taken him a decade and more to lose that hope.
That’s what she’d told herself. That’s what Ana had told her. Ana had never spoken an unkind word against Hïrzg Jan; she had always cast him in as sympathetic a light as she could, even when Allesandra fumed and raged against his slowness to ransom her.
Allesandra caught her breath, her hand going to her throat, to the cracked globe of Cénzi around her neck.
Ca’Cellibrecca evidently misinterpreted the thought behind the gesture. “Ah, I see we share our opinion of Ana ca’Seranta. That creature kept the Holdings from falling apart entirely under that one-legged fool Justi—and now, at last, she’s gone, praise Cénzi.” His voice softened even further as he leaned close to Allesandra. “Now would be the time for a new Hïrzg to achieve what your vatarh could not . . . or it would be if we had a Hïrzg—or Hïrzgin—worthy of the task. Someone who was
not
Fynn. There are those in Nessantico who believe that, A’Hïrzg. People you might not suspect of harboring such thoughts.”
The clamor of the beaters was coming closer in the valley beneath them. The riders were stirring restlessly, and Allesandra saw Fynn signal to Jan to nock his bow. “What are you saying to me, Archigos?” she asked, watching the tableau beneath them.
“I am saying that you are currently the A’Hïrzg, but we both know that’s a temporary situation. But if Fynn were . . .” He hesitated. The drums crashed loudly below, and now they could hear a thrashing under the shade of the trees to the right. “. . . somehow no longer the Hïrzg, then you would become Hïrzgin.” Another pause. “As you should have been.”
The drums and shouting grew louder, and suddenly a stag emerged from the tree line several dozen strides from the Hïrzg’s party. The beast was magnificent, with antlers the span of a person’s arms and shoulders easily a tall man’s height or more. The pelt was a stunning reddish brown with a flash of white under the throat. The stag cantered out from the brush, then caught the scent of the hunting party. Allesandra felt herself holding her breath, looking at the gorgeous creature; alongside her, she heard Semini mutter: “By Cénzi, look at that gorgeous beast!”
The stag stopped, glaring at the riders momentarily before taking an enormous leap and bounding away from them toward the far end of the meadow. At the same moment, they saw an arrow speed away from Fynn’s bow, the
twang
of the bowstring following belatedly to their ears. The stag went down with its rear legs in a tangle, the arrow embedded in its hindquarters. Then it pushed itself up once more and began running.
Jan had kicked his horse into motion with Fynn’s shot, and now he raced after the wounded stag, controlling to his horse with his legs alone as he drew back the string of his bow. At full speed, he loosed his own arrow with the stag only a few bare strides from reaching the cover of the forest once more.

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