Enéas cu’Kinnear
ENÉAS 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 Enéas 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 Enéas 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. . . . Enéas
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 Cénzi knows
there’ll be no calming the sea with this.” The wind-téni 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 Enéas
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-téni 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, Enéas knew: the
Moitidi of the sky were powerful and contemptuous of the Ilmodo and
the attempts of the wind-téni to calm their fury.
“A bad one?” Enéas
asked her.
The deck lifted as
they rose on the next wave, then dropped abruptly as Stormcloud raced down the slope beyond. Enéas
wrapped an arm around the rail as water sluiced over the deck; the
wind-téni only shifted her weight easily and naturally. “I’ve seen
worse,” she answered, but to Enéas’ 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
téni?”
Enéas 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, Enéas’ 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-téni the sign of Cénzi. “May
Cénzi 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. Enéas 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-téni
struggled to keep the worst of the furious winds away from the
fragile vessel that was their ship. Enéas prayed also, his knotted
hands clasped to his forehead, asking Cénzi 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.
Cénzi’s Voice. Enéas 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 Cénzi for
giving him that peace.