A Magic of Nightfall

Eneas cu’Kinnear

Eneas stood at the stern of the Stormcloud, staring at the storm clouds that appeared to be rushing toward them from behind. The horizon was a foreboding black under the rising thunderheads, a rushing night pricked with intermittent flares of lightning. He could see the blurred sheets of rain lashing the ocean underneath the clouds and hear the grumbling of distant low thunder. The Strettosei had turned a dull gray green that was flecked with whitecaps from the rising wind; the canvas sheets of the two-masted ship booming and cracking as they filled with the gales and thrust the ship through the deepening waves. The bow lifted and sliced uneasily through the moving hills of water; the wild spray speckled the hair of the sailors and soaked the military bashta Eneas wore. He could taste brine in his mouth. The air around him seemed to have chilled drastically in the last few minutes as the first outrunners of the storm stretched toward them. The dipping and rolling of the deck underneath his feet was alarming enough that Eneas found himself clutching at the rail.

He could feel the storm. The energy of it seemed to resonate inside him, and his fingertips tingled with every lightning strike, as if they touched him from a distance.

Chasing us from the west-like the hordes of the Westlanders, crackling with the power of the nahualli. Pursuing us even as we flee, coming to us in our very homes… Eneas shuddered, watching the storm’s approach and imagining he could see the shapes of the Westlander warriors in the clouds, or that the thunderheads were the smoke of sacrificial fires. He wondered what had happened in the Hellins since they’d left. He wondered, and he worried at the omen of the storm.

“You’d best get below to your cabin, O’Offizier. I’ll do what I can, but Cenzi knows there’ll be no calming the sea with this.” The wind-teni assigned to the ship had come up alongside him, unheard against the protest of the sails, the shrill keening of the wind through the rigging, and the urgent calls of the ship’s offiziers to the sailors on deck. She was staring at the storm in the same manner that Eneas would gaze at an enemy force arrayed against him, gauging it and pondering what strategies might work best against it. The task of the wind-teni was to fill the sails of the ship when the natural winds of the Strettosei would not cooperate. They would also strive to calm the storms that raked the deep waters between the Holdings and the Hellins, but that was the harder task, Eneas knew: the Moitidi of the sky were powerful and contemptuous of the Ilmodo and the attempts of the wind-teni to calm their fury.

“A bad one?” Eneas asked her.

The deck lifted as they rose on the next wave, then dropped abruptly as Stormcloud raced down the slope beyond. Eneas wrapped an arm around the rail as water sluiced over the deck; the wind-teni only shifted her weight easily and naturally. “I’ve seen worse,” she answered, but to Eneas’ ears it sounded more like bravado than confidence. “But you never really know what’s behind the thunderheads until it gets here. Let me test it.” Her hands lifted and moved in a spell-pattern, and she chanted in the language of the Ilmodo, her eyes closed as she faced the storm.

Her hands dropped. Her eyes opened and she glanced at him. “O’Offizier, are you also a teni?”

Eneas shook his head, puzzled. “No. I’ve had some little training, but…”

“Ahh…” She paused, her eyes narrowing. “Perhaps that’s it.”

“What?” he asked.

“Just now, when I opened myself to the storm, I thought I felt.. .” She shook her head, and droplets flew from her spray-darkened hair. The first spatters of cold rain hit the deck like tossed stones. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Right now, I have to see what I can do with this. Please, you should go below, O’Offizier…”

The ship lurched again, and with it, Eneas’ stomach. Lightning crackled nearer, and he thought he could feel the strike in his very flesh, raising the hairs on his arms. He gave the wind-teni the sign of Cenzi. “May Cenzi be with you to still the storm,” he told her, and she returned the gesture.

“I’ll need Him,” she said. She faced the storm again, her hands now moving in a new spell-pattern and her chant longer and more complex. Eneas thought he could feel the power gathering around her; he retreated down the slick, sloping deck, holding onto whatever he could grab until he half-fell into the narrow stairwell leading to the cramped passenger compartments. There, he lay on his swinging hammock and listened to the storm as it broke around them, as the wind-teni struggled to keep the worst of the furious winds away from the fragile vessel that was their ship. Eneas prayed also, his knotted hands clasped to his forehead, asking Cenzi for the safety of the ship and for their safe return to Nessantico.

You will be safe… He thought he heard the words, but against the storm and against the vastness of the Strettosei, they were small and insignificant. His words might have been the the whisperings of a gnat.

The storm has been sent to speed you to your home… The thought came to him suddenly, in that low voice he’d thought he’d heard a few times since his escape from the Tehuantin. Cenzi’s Voice. Eneas laughed at that, and suddenly he didn’t fear the storm though the ship pitched and rolled and the wind screamed shrilly. His fear was gone and he felt a certainty that they would be safe.

He thanked Cenzi for giving him that peace.