A Magic of Nightfall

Eneas cu’Kinnear

If he were dead, the afterlife wasn’t anything like the one the teni had promised to the faithful.

Eneas’ afterlife was illuminated by dim, ruddy light, and it stank of rotting flesh and brimstone. The ground on which he lay was wet and hard, with fists of stone that poked into his back. The teni had always said how all a person’s bodily ills would be healed when he finally rested in Cenzi’s arms, that those who had lost limbs would have them restored, that there would be no more pain.

But Eneas’ breath rattled in his lungs, and when he tried to move, the agony made him cry out.

He heard wings flapping in response, punctuated with hoarse squawks of alarm. Eneas blinked, and the redness moved with his eyelids. He slowly lifted a protesting hand and wiped at his eyes. The red filter cleared somewhat, and he realized that he’d been looking through a film of sticky blood at a moonlit landscape, his head on muddy ground. An umber mountain lifted a scant finger’s distance from him. He blinked again, squinting: a fallen, dead horse: his destrier. Cenzi, you left me alive. As the realization came to him, two clawed feet appeared at the summit of the equine mountain, followed by another irritated squawk, and Eneas moved his gaze to see one of the Hellins’ carrion birds, the creature soldiers called rippers: ugly birds with a wingspan of two mens’ height or more, great hooked beaks set in a featherless, spectrally-white face, expressionless eyes like black marbles, and curved talons to rip open the corpses on which they preferred to feast. There was nothing like these beasts in the Holdings.

The bird stared at him as if contemplating a fine meal set before it. Eneas propped himself up on his elbows; it was the closest he could manage to sitting up; the bird screeched in annoyance and flapped off. Eneas could feel the foul wind stirred by its wings.

Not dead. Not yet. Praise Cenzi.

He tried to remember how he’d come to be here, but it was a muddle in his head. He remembered talking to A’Offizier ca’Matin, and the start of the charge, the rush downhill toward the Westlander force. Then… then…

Nothing.

He shook his head to shake loose the memory. That was a mistake. The world whirled around him, the redness returned, and pain shot through his temples. He caught himself before he fell back down to the ground again and waited for the earth to stop spinning. Again, he pushed himself to a full sitting position and touched his head tentatively; his hair was crusted with dried blood and his fingers could feel the jagged outline of a long, deep cut. Eneas started to feel sick. He let his hand drop, closed his eyes, and took long, slow sips of air until the nausea passed, reciting the Prayer of Acceptance to calm himself. He opened his eyes again, looking carefully around.

There were rippers everywhere; in the dim moonlight, the field seemed alive with them, the ground humped with the black hills of Eneas’ fallen companions and their horses. The sickening, wet, tearing sound the birds made as they fed on the bodies was one he knew would haunt his nightmares forever. Far off, down the slope on which he sat, Eneas could see the gleam of a campfire, and around it the dark shapes of people moving. There was another sound, fainter: singing?

The figures outlined in the flame wore feathered devices on their heads, Eneas saw. They were Westlanders, then. “Tehuantin,” as they called themselves. All the bodies around him wore the gold-trimmed uniforms of Nessantico, black with blood and dim moonlight rather than the brilliant blue they should have been.

We lost. We were slaughtered here, and those in Munereo may not know the outcome yet. Cenzi, is that why You saved me, so I could warn them…?

Eneas tried to move; his legs didn’t want to cooperate, and he realized that one leg was still trapped underneath the horse he’d been riding. As silently as he could, he pushed at the carcass, shoving against it with his good leg, and eventually the leg came free. His ankle was swollen and tender; he wasn’t certain he could walk on it.

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. Eneas 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, Eneas 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 Eneas 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. Eneas heard ca’Matin praying to Cenzi, 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. Eneas 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-Eneas 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 Eneas’ 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 Eneas, as if in his final moment Cenzi 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.

Eneas 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, Cenzi… . 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 Cenzi’s help…

Eneas 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 Eneas 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 Eneas 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 Eneas fell again into the dark.