Niente
THE VISION IN THE SCRYING BOWL troubled him. He could
feel Tecuhtli Zolin studying his face for any sign of what the
visions indicated, and he lowered his head even further into the
swirling blue mist rising from it.
A woman sat on a glowing throne, her face twisted by pain
and horribly scarred, one eye missing. An army moved through the
mist behind her . . . There, a boy and an older woman, and behind
them also an army, though with banners of black and silver, not the
blue and gold of the Holdings . . . A man wearing a necklace of a
shell, and with him—could it be?—a nahualli who looked like Talis,
though he was embracing a woman and child who were not Tehuantin,
but Easterners . . .
The images were
coming too fast, and Niente tried to still them with his mind,
trying to force them farther out in time, to show the wisps of the
future that might come. He prayed to Axat for clarity, he thought
of their own army and the ships riding on the river close by . .
.
The ships swayed in the midst of a storm, but the storm
rained fire down from the sky. Armies crawled over the land, and
there were the bright explosions of black sand, and smoke hung
heavy over trampled fields . . . But the mist seemed to divide in
twain—as sometimes happened when Axat wished to show two possible
outcomes. He saw a field littered with the bodies of Tehuantin
warriors, and a single ship of their fleet with tattered sails,
hurrying away westward into a falling sun as the other ships burned
in orange flame to the water . . . “Westward . . . home . . .” He
could almost hear the words in the wind . . .
But that vision closed, and the other came . .
.
In the second vision, there was a fierce and bloody battle
on the fields before the city, and the army of blue and gold
retreated behind the solid walls of a city . . . The same city now,
with broken walls, and through the smoke and the mist of the vision
it was difficult to see, but he thought he glimpsed the army of the
Tehuantin spilling through the breaches . . .
Another city lay beyond it, far greater, and it seemed to
beckon . . .
And there it was again . . . the image of a dead Tehuantin
warrior, with a nahualli lying next to him . .
.
“What is it you’re
trying to show me, Axat?” Niente asked, his voice
cracking.
“Nahual?”
Niente glanced up;
the mist spilled from the scrying bowl and died.
The Tehuantin
encampment was noisy and busy around them as a wan sun tried to
penetrate high, thin clouds. Niente found himself missing the
fiercer, warmer sun of his own land; this place was colder than he
liked, as if it leeched the heat from his blood. Tecuhtli Zolin
stared at him, the white of his eyes gleaming against the black
lines inscribed around the sockets, the red eagle on his skull
seeming to want to take flight. There was eagerness in his face.
Flanking him on either side were Citlali and Mazatl, and their
glances were no less eager. “What did the vision tell you?” Zolin
asked Niente. “What did it say?”
“Very little,” he
answered, and annoyance showed over the Tecuhtli’s face in a flash
of teeth.
“Very little,” he
said, mocking Niente’s tone. “Tecuhtli Necalli used to tell me how
your visions in the scrying bowl would give him strategies, guide
the way he placed the warriors and moved through the terrain. He
said you were Axat’s Nahual, showing us the way to victory. But all
you give me is ‘very little.’ ”
“I give you nothing,”
Niente told him, and Zolin scowled in response. “As I gave Tecuhtli
Necalli nothing also. I am only Axat’s conduit. I can relay what
Axat shows me, but it’s not my vision.
It’s Hers. All I have to give is what Axat offers. If you wish to
complain about how little that is, talk to Her.”
“Then tell me this
very little, Nahual,” he answered. He pointed eastward, to where
the outlier scouts had said that an army of the Holdings waited for
them, outside the city a half day’s march away. Niente had ridden
forward with Tecuhtli Zolin to see the city—far larger than the
mostly-abandoned villages through which they had marched in the
last several days, though not as elaborate or huge as the city in
the scrying bowl, this Nessantico where the Kraljiki lived. Still,
the city huddled behind its walls and spilling out beyond them was
easily half the size of Tlaxcala or the other great island cities
of the Tehuantin empire, and larger than either Munereo or
Karnor.
It seemed that the
Kraljiki would permit them to go no farther untested. If Zolin
wanted this city, he must fight for it. Niente knew that would
bother the Tecuhtli not at all.
“I glimpsed a
battle,” Niente told him. He closed his eyes, trying to remember
the scenes flashing past in the scrying bowl. “In Axat’s vision,
the army of the Holdings fought, but then fell behind the walls of
the city when we came upon them. I saw the walls broken, and
Tehuantin entering through . . .”
“Xatli Ket!” Niente stopped as Zolin uttered the
war cry of his caste—Citlali and Mazatl echoed the Techutli, and
the cry was taken up—fainter and fainter—by the other warriors
nearby. “Then Axat has shown you our victory,” Zolin said. He
slapped at the bamboo-slatted armor covering his
chest.
“Perhaps,” Niente
hurried to say. “But she also showed me our army and the fleet
destroyed, and a ship hurrying to the west. Tecuhtli, that is also
a possible future—a sign. If we return now, if we put our army on
the ships and return home, then that’s a future we will never face.
The Easterners will fear to ever come to our land again. We have
already shown them the consequences; there’s nothing left here to
prove.”
Zolin coughed a
derisive laugh. Citlali frowned, and Mazatl looked away as if in
disgust. “Retreat, Nahual?”
“Not retreat,” Niente
persisted. “To realize that we have given these Easterners their
lesson with the ruins of Munereo and Karnor, and to return home in
victory.”
“Victory?” Zolin spat
on the ground between them. “They would think they have won the victory, that we ran as soon as
we saw their army.”
“Tecuhtli, if we fall
here, what good does that do our people to lose their Techutli and
so many warriors and nahualli?”
“If we fall—and we
will not, Nahual, if you have seen your vision correctly—then our
people will find a new Techutli to lead them, and they will train
new nahualli in the ways of the X’in Ka, and we will be remembered
when Sakal takes us into His fiery eye. That is what will be done, no matter how very
little you help. Are you are frightened, Nahual Niente? Does the sight of this
Easterner army make the piss run hot down your legs?”
Citlali and Mazatl
laughed.
“I’m not frightened,”
Niente told them, and it was truth. It wasn’t fright that churned
his stomach, but a sense of inevitability. Axat was trying to warn
him, but She would not make Her message clear enough, or perhaps he
was so far from Her that the message was blurred and hard to
discern. “Tecuhtli, whatever you ask me to do, I will do. When you
ask me to interpret what I see in the scrying bowl, then I also do
that.”
Zolin sniffed. “Then
this is what I tell you to do, Nahual. Fill your spell-staff.
Prepare the black sand. Make your peace with Axat and Sakal, and
you will walk with me into the Easterners’ city—and beyond to the
throne of their ruler.”
Niente heard the
words, and bowed his head in acceptance. The
single ship, hurrying toward the setting sun . . . “I will
do that, Tecuhtli,” he said, the words heavy in his throat. “I will
prepare the nahualli. Give me enough time, and I will do what I
believe Axat wishes us to do.”