A Magic of Nightfall

The Battle Begun: Niente

The city lifted stone flanks on the low hills; its towers and spires and domes crowding the large island in the river’s center so that it looked like a barnacled rock. The metropolis had leaped far outside the confining girdle of its walls, magnificent and proud and unafraid, and the fields surrounding it were laden with grain and crops to feed its teeming inhabitants. This city… It was the rival of Tlaxcala, somewhat smaller but more crowded and compressed, the architecture strange. The cities of his home were dominated by the pyramids of the temples of Axat, Sakal, and the Four; here in Nessantico, what was most visible were the spires and towers of their great buildings and the gilded domes of their temples.

So foreign. So strange. Niente wanted nothing more than to see the familiar places again, and he feared he never would.

Niente looked at Nessantico and shivered, but this was not the reaction he saw in Tecuhtli Zolin. The Tecuhtli, instead, stood on the hill overlooking the river and the city, and he crossed his arms over his chest, a close-lipped smile playing on his lips. “This is ours,” he said. “Look at it. This is ours.”

Niente wondered if the man even noticed the thick lines of Easterner troops arrayed along the road, if he counted the boats that crowded the river, if he glimpsed the preparations for war all along the western periphery of the city.

“What do you say, Niente?” Zolin asked. “Will we rest tomorrow night in this place?”

“If it is Axat’s will,” he answered, and Zolin barked his laugh.

“It’s my will that matters, Nahual,” he said. “Don’t you understand that yet?” He didn’t give Niente time to answer-not that there was any answer Niente could have made. “Go. Make sure that the nahualli are ready, that the rest of the black sand has been prepared for the initial attacks. And send Citlali and Mazatl to me. We will begin this tonight. We will keep them awake and exhausted; then, when Sakal lifts the sun into the sky, we’ll come on them in a storm.” Zolin stared for a moment more at the city, then turned to Niente. Almost with affection, he placed his hand on Niente’s shoulder. “You will see your family again, Nahual. I promise it. But first, we must give the lesson of their folly to these Easterners. Go look in your scrying bowl, Niente. You’ll see that I’m right. You’ll see.”

“I’m certain I will, Techutli.”

But he already knew what he would see. He had glimpsed it this morning, even as they approached this place.

He had called upon Axat and he had looked into the bowl, and he would not dare look again.