by Gail Dayton
How far had he rolled from the breach? Stone looked through his veiled vision up the glacis. He was no more than halfway down, but could he make the climb back up? No witches were left to set him on fire or make the earth itself move beneath his feet. So he only had to face climbing back over the cold bodies of his onetime comrades.
Fox was up there. Had to be up there. Stone would do anything for his brodir. Spitting once more, calling on his god with it, he started back up, doing his best not to step on the bodies. Desperately, he tried to reconstruct events. Through the breach, kill the crone, fire the houses, next street.
They’d checked the dead archer. They’d fired that house. They left the house. There was a child. An Adaran child. Boy or girl, Stone couldn’t tell. Never could when they were that young, especially the way Adarans dressed them alike. The child was huddled in a doorway, terrified, staring at them with witchy pale eyes, waiting for death.
But they didn’t make war on children. “Run!” Fox shouted.
“Hide.” Stone opened the door behind the child, shooed it inside. Fox had marked the door when it was shut again, designating the building “Not for burning.” It was far enough from the wall that they had discretion as to which building to burn, and it was—hopefully—far enough from those already burning that the wood inside the stone walls wouldn’t catch. And then…Stone paused in his climb, pulled his hand back from the corpse it touched to wipe it on his filthy jacket.
And then, the air around them had exploded, the sun had gone dark and the world had come to an end.
Except that it obviously hadn’t. The same sun—at least Stone thought it was the same one—still shone overhead. The same wind blew past him on its way inland from the ocean. The same bodies still lay in the same breach of the same wall around the same Adaran city.
Not…exactly the same bodies. He’d noticed it on his climb, but only now began to piece together what he saw. There were more bodies. Hundreds had fallen in the charge on the breach, but some of these dead men wore badges from divisions Stone knew were not scheduled to advance until the walls had been taken.
Many of the bodies bore no marks at all. Others looked as if their heads had exploded, or their hearts had burst, or their internal organs simply decided to crawl out through their skin. Perhaps the world had ended after all.
End of the world or not, he had to find Fox. Something drove him upward, a desperate need to find what he was searching for. And what would that be but his partner? Stone tried calling his name again, quietly this time, for he sensed movement on the walls above and inside the city. Did Tibre hold it, or had the Adarans driven off the assault with their witch magic?
He reached the place where he had regained his senses, as near as he could tell, and began turning bodies over. Most Tibrans had hair some shade of yellow, but Fox’s was brighter than most, with a hint of red in the sunlight. Stone concentrated on those bodies with the brightest hair.
“Fox!” He called in a hoarse whisper, looking for some faint motion, some response. Fox had sworn to do his best to live. He couldn’t be dead.
His desperation growing, Stone searched through the gray-and-red-clad fallen there in the breach. His breath rasped louder in his ears with every step he took. His vision dimmed then cleared at whim. He called to his partner, sometimes forgetting to keep his voice quiet. Body by lifeless body, he worked his way through the breadth of the breach, from one broken wall to the other.
On the south side, where ladders had been propped for warriors to reach the Adaran witches and wipe them from existence, Stone saw yet another head covered in bright curls. Heart pounding in his chest, he rushed toward it, tripping over the corpses in his path.
Fox lay on his side, curled around the base of a ladder. His face looked peaceful. No, happy. A faint smile curved his lips. Stone’s vision blurred again and he wiped the wetness from his cheeks. He was afraid to touch him. Afraid to discover his partner had found Khralsh’s welcome.
Swallowing hard, Stone set his hand on Fox’s shoulder and tugged. Fox rolled to his back, his arm falling limp to the rubble beside him. Blood pooled on the ground from a gaping wound in his thigh. A man could bleed out in minutes from such a wound. It wasn’t bleeding now.
Stone swiped his sleeve across his face again and, fingers shaking, touched his partner, searching for a heartbeat. He could feel nothing through the short, padded jacket. Stone ripped it open, sending bone buttons flying, and laid his hand flat over Fox’s heart. Even the shirt could interfere, so Stone opened that as well. Nothing.
“Damn you.” Stone pounded on the silent chest, weeping openly now. “You swore to live. You swore to try! You broke your oath! You broke—”
The grief took him over and he sank back on his heels, crying out his pain to whatever god would hear him. He curled over until his forehead touched the rock where he knelt, and let the tears come, let them mingle with Fox’s blood on the ground. Tears and blood, the most precious thing a man could offer the warrior god.
He was still there when the Adaran patrol came. They tossed the bodies of the Tibran dead—including Fox—down the slope where what was left of the Tibran Fifth Army could collect them and burn them. They put Stone in shackles and marched him away. He didn’t care. He had nothing left to care about.
Aisse lay bleeding in the mud and dung of the cattle pens, waiting for the farmer to return and finish his punishment. Likely, it would finish her as well. Dawn had broken while she lay here and bled, and with the sun came a whisper of hope.
She could see her bag, the one she’d packed so carefully, lying tossed aside just beyond the rough rails of the pen. The tin cup was bent nearly flat, the biscuit crushed to powder, but perhaps the cup could be reshaped and the dirt brushed from the dried beef.
She dug her fingers into the mud and pulled herself forward. It hurt. Ulili, it hurt. But she moved. Focused wholly on the bag, she crept toward it bit by painful bit.
“Where do you think you’re going, witch?” The farmer’s harsh voice made her cry out.
But she couldn’t stop, couldn’t give up. Not until she had no breath left with which to whisper a prayer, no mind left with which to hope.
The farmer snatched her up by the hair and dragged her over the fence, the rough boards scraping her battered body mercilessly. “If you got life enough to move, you got life enough to feel this.” He raised his fist, but before he let it fly, screams echoed through the camp. Screams coming from masculine throats.
He dropped Aisse in the dirt, spinning to face the noise, his face going pale. “What—”
She didn’t care what caused the screams. He’d let her go. She stretched her arm out and forced her pain-racked fingers to close around the leather of her bag.
“Achz preserve us,” the farmer whispered, and took off at a run toward the battlefront. Though what he thought he could do, Aisse didn’t know. He was Farmer caste, not Warrior. But he’d left her blessedly alone.
Aisse dragged the bag close and clutched it to her chest as she crawled the few feet to her cup. It took her several minutes to fumble it into the bag, then she worked her way to the discarded beef. She didn’t try to clean it. She didn’t know whether she still had teeth strong enough to chew it. But she pushed as much of it as she could gather into the bag. Once that was done, she began to crawl the long, endless distance toward the cover of the trees outside camp.
The sun climbed higher in the sky while she crawled. At first, she flinched at every noise, tried to hide from the sound of running footsteps. But she couldn’t move fast enough to hide, and the footsteps always ran past, toward the city. Voices shouted one to the other about witches and evil and death magic. She didn’t care. As long as no one tried to stop her, they could blather about anything they liked. She was getting away.
Finally, she felt the cool shade fall across her head. Then her shoulders, her back, her legs. She kept going. She needed to find a place to hide. With so many dead—she’d understood that much, that thou
sands had died—they surely wouldn’t try to find her. They had more important things to do. But she didn’t want anyone stumbling across her accidentally and finishing the job the farmer had started.
Aisse crept off the path already formed by people walking to the nearby branch of the river. The trees were short compared to the high forests of her home, and most of the fallen wood had been collected and burned in fires over the last week. But down near the rivulet, she found a tree whose roots had been undermined by seasonal floods. The brown tangle had left a gap big enough to hide her.
She filled her bent cup with water and drank. Then she crawled into the tangle of roots. Her passage left marks in the sandy grit of the bank, but if she tried to erase them, she’d only leave more. Aisse curled into a ball and prayed that no one would find her. And if they did, she prayed for a quick death. She wouldn’t go back.
“Are you hurt?” Kallista whispered, searching Torchay for signs of injury.
He shook his head. After a moment, he stood. They huddled together on the city wall, staring out at what Kallista had wrought.
Nothing moved on the walls of Ukiny. After a time, a crow fluttered up and landed with caution. No arm waved it away. It cawed and pecked at the body where it stood.
Nothing moved on the plain west of the city, as far as the beginning of the white tents in the Tibran camp. The misty wave seemed to have lost power just there, for Kallista thought she could see wounded attempting to crawl back to safety.
On the waters of Ukiny Bay, Tibran ships sat at crazy angles, their masts snapped and splintered. They’d all been anchored closer to the city than the camp had been. Some ships had already sunk, the rest sinking or so damaged they’d never sail before next spring.
Within the city, Kallista could hear shouting, some of it joyous, some frightened. The mist hadn’t harmed Torchay. Could it have been so selective as to kill only Tibrans, leaving Adarans untouched?
“My gloves, Torchay. I need my gloves.”
“Yes, Captain.” He pulled them from his belt and helped her put them on, both of them fumbling at the task with shaking hands.
“Don’t be afraid of me, Torchay.” She fought to keep the quaver from her voice. “Please don’t be afraid of me now.”
“I am afraid for you. That’s a different sort of thing. Blessed One, Kallista, what happened?”
“I don’t know. I don’t—You heard what I said. And then there was power. So much—” She shivered and Torchay wrapped his arms around her, sharing his warmth as he had before. Her shivers weren’t due to cold this time, but still his presence stopped them.
“It sounds almost as if…” His voice came hesitant, fearful. “Could you have been…marked?”
Terrified, Kallista stared at him. “That’s just legend. Children’s stories. It isn’t real.”
“Isn’t it?” Torchay looked over her head at the devastation on the plains below.
Kallista shivered again. Or perhaps it was more of a shudder. “Isn’t it supposed to leave an actual mark? Something you can see? Or feel?”
Torchay’s hand that had been absently stroking the nape of her neck came down to claim her hand. He carried it back up to where he’d been touching her. “What do you feel?”
There, beneath her untidy queue, she felt a faint raised ridge on her skin. Her fingertips followed it down to a sort of knot, where another ridge intersected the first. Cold gripped her heart.
“Can you see it?” She held her hair up, out of the way, while Torchay bent to look.
“Yes,” he said. Nothing more.
“Well? What does it look like?”
“A scar. A red, raised scar.” He paused and his fingers touched. He traced along her spine, then perpendicular to it. “North. South. East. West.” He touched the point where the lines crossed, where Kallista had felt the knot. “And a rose in the center. It’s a perfect Compass Rose.”
She dropped her hair, pressed it down over the mark, over Torchay’s hand. “Maybe it was there already.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Kallista, I’ve braided your hair almost every day for nine years. It wasn’t there.”
CHAPTER FOUR
“Oh, sweet heaven, Torchay.” Kallista had reached the end of her strength. She’d poured it all out and had nothing left for her precious control. A tear trickled down her cheek. “I’m a soldier. Nothing more. I don’t want this.”
All she’d ever wanted was an ordinary life. An ilian of her own. Family. Friends. But from the day her magic first woke when she was thirteen, and she killed one of the family’s supper chickens with an out-of-control lightning bolt, she’d been destined for the military.
Her dreams had shrunk from love and family to duty and comrades. And now, even that threatened to be taken from her. Punishment for finding a friend.
On his feet again, Torchay carefully wiped the tear away with his thumb. “Nevertheless.”
“I’d rather have a friend.”
“Is that what you’re fretting about?” His northern mountains accent came out as he teased. “You’ve still got that. You’ll not get rid of me so easily.”
“Naitan. Are you injured?” One of the regular Adaran troops put his head above the walkway, standing on a Tibran ladder. “General Uskenda has ordered every able-bodied soldier to assemble in the West Gate Square as soon as possible.”
Kallista nodded stiffly. “Tell the general I’ll be there. I am unharmed. My troop—” She took a deep breath. “I believe the rest of my troop is dead.”
The soldier nodded back, trying to stare at all the bodies surrounding her without appearing to do so. “Thank you, Captain.”
She hoped to put in an appearance at the assembly point and be dismissed to go check on her naitani in the tower. There was a chance, albeit a very faint one, that they yet lived. But the general spotted her quickly and gestured her to approach.
It had been a vain hope anyway, Kallista thought as she worked her way through the forming ranks. The blue and black she and Torchay wore made them stand out in the sea of dun-brown infantry tunics like flowers in a field of dead grass.
General Huyis Uskenda was in the midst of taking reports and giving orders when Kallista reached her side, and she didn’t stop. Kallista edged closer, hoping to hear something of the battle as a whole.
“They’re all dead,” the captain of the lone troop of cavalry was saying, her white rank ribbons lying limp and blood-spattered against the shoulders of her gray uniform. “Every Tibran in the city. They hadn’t penetrated as far as the Mother Temple, so I didn’t have to ride the whole city.
“They’re all dead on the plain too, at least what my troopers and I could see on a quick patrol. There may be survivors near the camp. We didn’t ride that close because I know for certain there are survivors in the camp. They took potshots at us from the tents with those hand cannon of theirs.”
“Good, good.” Uskenda nodded, the layered red ribbons of rank on her brown tunic so thick they looked like fringe.
Uskenda was better than the usual run of general, her mind sharp enough to adapt to freakish enemy tactics without panicking and still young enough to walk farther than from her bed to the dinner table. Promotion in the Adaran army was based on seniority. Those who lived long enough to achieve a general’s rank tended to cling to it until they died at their posts, whether they could still do the job or not.
This explained why Kallista was merely a captain at her age of thirty-four years, though promotion did tend to be a bit quicker among the naitani. She shuddered to think of some of the generals she’d served under who might have been assigned to defend this city. Uskenda was indeed a godsend in comparison.
“What about Adarans?” The general turned to an aide, a young man attached to her staff. “Did that…whatever it was…slaughter our people as well as the Tibrans?”
“No, General.” He referred to his notes on the scraps of paper in his hand. “We sent
out patrols immediately after—”
“I know that. Don’t tell me what I already know. Are our people dead?”
“No, General,” he repeated. “The citizens within the range of the…weapon…for the most part seem to have taken no harm, according to those patrols. The first Adarans we’ve found dead so far have all been known criminals. Thieves. Extortionists. That sort of thing.”
Kallista leaned unobtrusively on her bodyguard as her knees threatened to buckle in relief. When Torchay had survived the dark magic, she’d begun to hope, but had been afraid to trust it.
General Uskenda nodded and turned her piercing gray glare on Kallista. “Well, Captain? What exactly did happen? What sort of—” she eyed the blue of Kallista’s tunic “—of North magic was that?”
“I…can’t say.” Not because it was a naitani secret, but because she didn’t know. However, generals—most of those she’d known—preferred secrets to ignorance.
The general snorted. “Never knew any North magic to behave like that.”
“No, General.” Not one of the naitani in the North Academy when Kallista was attending had shown any magic resembling what she had just done. No instructor had ever mentioned the possibility of anything like it. And as a mature naitan with well-established magic, Kallista should not have been able to do it. No naitan had more than one gift. Sometimes the gift manifested itself in different ways, like Iranda being able to both light and burn, but it was always the same gift.
“No?” Uskenda raised a gray-streaked eyebrow. “Are you saying you didn’t just single-handedly wipe out an army?”
“That’s not—” Kallista came to hard attention. “No, General. The enemy was destroyed by magic, and I did cast the magic. But—” She tried to keep her voice from sounding as distraught as she felt, but feared she failed. “I don’t know what it was that I did—other than casting the magic—and I don’t know how I did it.”
The general hmmphed again, staring at her as if she could tell that Kallista kept secrets. “Very well. Maybe the naitani at the temple will know. Report for investigation.”