A Magic of Dawn by S. L. Farrell Page B

was reconciliation. Go to war, and you will find peace. That was what the god Axat seemed to be saying to him. The images surrounded him, warm and gentle, and he basked in their heat . . .
    “Taat Niente?” Father Niente.
    The query was accompanied by a touch on his shoulder that broke his concentration, and Niente grudgingly lifted his head from the futures swimming in the bowl’s waters. The emerald light illuminating his face faded with the spell’s passing, and his soul returned to the city with a shudder. He was standing atop the Teocalli Axat, the high, stepped pyramid that was the temple of the moon-god Axat. The Teocalli Axat wasn’t the highest structure in the city—that honor belonged to the Calli Tecuhtli, the House of the King, though the Teocalli Sakal, the sun-god’s temple, was only a few spans lower. Still, from the summit on which Niente stood, all of Tlaxcala was laid out before him: the canals that served as streets glistening straight as spears and crowded with acal, the small, paddled watercraft used for transportation within the island city; the huge plazas bustling with people on their unguessed errands; the market with its thousands of stalls. Beyond the market rose the Calli Tecuhtli, its facade decorated with the bleached skulls of vanquished warriors. Out beyond the city and the lake in which it sat, the great valley was ringed by snow-capped peaks, with a trail of fuming ash wind-smeared across the summit of the volcano Poctlitepetl and its neighboring mountains. The sun had already slid behind the slopes though the western sky was still ablaze, the flanks of the lower clouds touched with the colors of burning while the east was a deep purple in which the first stars glimmered.
    The magnificent view from the summit of Teocalli Axat never failed to stir Niente, never failed to make his heart beat harder in his chest. He loved this land. His land. And he was grateful to Axat for giving him hope that it could become the seat of a greater empire yet.
    “Taat?” Father.
    He turned finally to the young man, panting from his long climb up the steps of the temple, his arms crossed over his chest—Niente’s son. “I hear you, Atl,” he said. “It’s later than I thought. I’m sorry. Did Xaria send you?”
    Atl grinned at him. “Na’ Xaria says if you don’t get home soon, she’ll throw your supper to the dogs and you can fight them for it. She also said that you’d be sleeping with the dogs as well.”
    Niente smiled in return. The expression pulled at the scars of his face. He knew what that face looked like, knew what his decades of casting Axat’s spells and peering into the scrying bowl had cost him, as it had cost every nahualli who utilized Her power so deeply. His left eye was a white, blind horror, his mouth sagged on that side also, as if his flesh had melted there. Ridged, hard scars furrowed his face and body; his muscles wobbled in sacks of skin as if they had shriveled inside him. He appeared at least two hands of years older than he was.
    But none of the other nahualli would dare to challenge him and try to wrest the title of Nahual from him. No. He was the famous Nahual Niente, whose spells had driven the army of the Easterners from their cousins’ land along the coast, who had accompanied Tecuhtli Zolin across the Great Sea to the Easterners’ land, the empire of the Holdings, who had burned their great capital city, and who had warned Tecuhtli Zolin of the consequences of his pride even when the Tecuhtli had refused to listen to him. He was Nahual Niente, who with Tecuhtli Citlali had razed the last Easterners’ fortress in the Hellins—the city of Tobarro—to the ground and ended the Holdings’ occupation of the Hellins forever.
    He was Nahual Niente whose fame approached and even exceeded that of the great Mahri.
    No, the nahualli were content to let Axat take Niente when She would. They were content to watch his body burn slowly away at her bidding, a little