A Magic of Dawn

Niente

The waters of Munereo Bay swarmed with ships anchored together so densely that it seemed a person might walk entirely across the great bay without getting wet. Their sails were furled and lashed on their masts, and they huddled together under a low sky with the clouds racing west. Fleeting shafts of dusty sunlight pierced the clouds and slid over the bay, sparkling on the distant waves and the bound white cloth on their masts.

Niente had never in his life seen so many ships gathered in one place, had only once before seen so many warriors of the Tehuantin gathered together.

He heard a gasp from his side as his son Atl came alongside him. “By Axat’s left tit,” he breathed, the profanity loud in the chill morning air, “that is something new in the world.”

“It certainly is,” Niente told the young man. He blinked, trying unsuccessfully to clear his blurred vision-even his remaining eye’s sight was beginning to fail. They were standing on a hill outside the city walls, not far from the main road down to the harbor. The road was thick with soldiers, marching down to the boats. The few hundred nahualli, the spellcasters that would be accompanying the invasion force, were gathered in their own group a little farther down the hill, just off the road. They would be among the last to board the ships, just before Tecuhtli Citlali and his High Warriors.

Behind Niente and Atl, the thick walls of Munereo were still pockmarked and stained by the vestiges of the battle that had raged here a decade and a half ago, when the Holdings forces had been defeated by the army of Tecuhtli Zolin, Citlali’s predecessor. Niente had been here for that battle, had seen the black sand roar and the stones fly, had helped to sacrifice the defeated Easterner leaders to Axat. And he had sailed with Tecuhtli Zolin from this very harbor across the sea to the Holdings itself.

So long ago. It felt like another lifetime to Niente.

A lifetime he was now forced to revisit if he wanted to achieve the vision he’d glimpsed in the scrying bowl. How many of these warriors will die for this? How many souls will be sent to the underworld because of what I’m doing? Axat, please tell me that I can do this, that it will be worth the guilt my own soul will have to bear. Help me.

“Taat?”

Niente shook himself from reverie. “What?”

“I thought you said something.”

“No,” he answered. At least I hope not. No one could know this vision. Not yet. “I was clearing my throat; the air this morning is hard on my lungs.” He gestured out toward the ships and the bay. “Tomorrow, we’ll be sailing toward the sun when it rises.”

“And there will be good winds,” Atl said, and the confidence in his voice made Niente turn to his son, his eyes narrowing.

“You know this?” he asked.

Atl smiled briefly, like the touch of sun through the clouds on the ships below. “Yes,” he answered.

“Atl-” Niente began, and his son lifted a hand.

“Stop, Taat. Here, I’ll finish it for you. ‘Look at me. Look at how Axat has scarred me. Leave the scrying to some other nahualli. Axat is hardest on those to whom She gives Sight.’ I’ve heard it all. Many times.”

“You should look at me,” Niente persisted. He touched his blind, white eye, stroked the sagging muscles of the left side of his face, the ridges of scarred, dead skin: a mask of horror. “Is this what you want to look like?”

Atl’s gaze swept over Niente’s face and departed once more. “That took many years, Taat,” he said. “And the oath of the nahualli binds us to do what Axat asks of us. And your scrying got you that also.” He pointed to the golden band around Niente’s right arm.

“You musn’t do this,” Niente persisted. “Atl, I mean it. When I’m gone, do as you wish, but while I live, while I’m your Taat and the Nahual…” He put his hand on Atl’s shoulder. The contrast of their skin startled him: his own was loose, painfully dry, and plowed with uncountable tiny furrows; Atl’s was smooth and bronzed. “Don’t call on Her,” he finished. “That’s my task. My burden.”

“It doesn’t have to be yours alone.”

“Yes, it does,” Niente said, and the words came out more sharply than he’d intended, snapping Atl’s head back as if he’d been slapped. The young man’s eyes were slitted, and he shot a glance of raw fury at Niente for a moment before turning his head slightly to stare deliberately out toward the bay. “Take care of him,” Xaria had told him before they left. “He loves you, he respects you, and he admires you. He wants so much to make you proud of him-and I worry that he’ll do something foolish in the effort…”

Xaria didn’t understand. Neither did Atl, and he could tell neither of them. He couldn’t allow Atl to use the scrying spells, not because of the cost of them-though that was signficant-but because he knew that Atl had the Gift as he did, and he could not let Atl see what he saw in the bowl. He could not. If Atl saw what he saw, Niente could lose the Long Path. Axat’s glimpses of the future were fickle, and easily changed. “I’m sorry,” he said to Atl. “But it’s important.”

“I’m certain it is,” Atl said, “because the Nahual is always right, isn’t he?” With that, Atl gave a mocking obeisance to Niente and stalked away toward the other nahualli even as Niente stretched out his arm toward him. Niente blinked; through his remaining eye, he saw Atl stride into the group.

He could feel them all, staring back up the hill toward him and wondering: wondering if Atl would soon challenge his Taat as Nahual, wondering if perhaps they should do it first.

Their gazes were appraising and challenging and without any mercy or sympathy at all.