by Gail Dayton
“Hamonn isn’t moving. Don’t think he’s dead, but I don’t know. Don’t know about Beltis either. Someone’s moving beyond them, so I assume Kadrey and his naitan are unhurt.” He didn’t like reporting incomplete information, but his captain needed something and that was the best he had.
“Go check on Hamonn. See if Beltis is hurt. I need her with me.”
Torchay flattened himself over her as another ball hit close by. “When it’s safe.”
“Go now. By the time it’s safe, the battle will be over. That’s an order, Sergeant.”
When she said that, it meant she was beyond reasoning with. He had no choice but to obey, or risk her doing almost anything. Torchay rose onto hands and knees, but remained in place, his body still shielding hers. “Do not move from this spot.”
They’d fought this battle out their first year or so together, but he still held his breath every time he went on one of her errands, until he returned and found her again where he’d left her.
“I won’t. Now go.” Her shove sent him scooting on hands and feet to the pair under the debris behind them.
Torchay moved the worst of the stones off the older man and checked for a pulse. He found it, strong and steady. “Trooper? Beltis, are you injured?” He leaned close to hear any response over the cannon fire.
“I’m fine.” Her voice came muffled from beneath her guard. “Is Hamonn—”
“Breathing and well enough, given that he has a lump the size of my fist on the back of his head.” Torchay probed the injury and was rewarded with reaction.
Hamonn tried to shove him away. He might have groaned but no one could hear it in the crash of a cannonball nearby. So close that bits of rock blasted from the wall spun into Torchay’s face, making tiny cuts on his forehead and cheeks. Too close.
He looked up to see where it had hit in time to see the parapet above his captain begin to crumble. “Kallista!”
Torchay bellowed her name and scrambled to reach her. She was moving, getting out of the way, but not fast enough.
An enormous stone capping the structure plummeted down, striking her a glancing blow before it bounced off the town side of the walk. More stones followed. Torchay dove forward to keep them off her. He didn’t quite succeed.
A fist-size stone hit her head, leaving a cut oozing blood in the fine, pale skin of her forehead. With a cry, Torchay covered her head with his hands, ignoring the battering they took. He scooted forward until he could get his head over hers. His was undoubtedly harder, could take more of a beating. But the rocks had stopped falling. The entire parapet lay on the walkway around and over them.
Torchay shoved the rocks away from her, leaving streaks of blood on their chalky surface. His hands bled from a score of cuts, and at least one finger was likely broken. He used them to cup his captain’s face and turn it up to the full moon’s light. He bent his head till his beak of a nose brushed her small straight one, and he felt her breath stir against his skin. “Blessed One,” he whispered in gratitude.
“Is she dead?” Both young naitani peered over his shoulder, but it was Beltis who spoke.
It took Torchay a few moments before he realized Beltis sounded strange because she wasn’t shouting. The bombardment had stopped. Instantly alert, Torchay looked toward the breach and saw Hamonn, slightly the worse for wear, peering around what was left of the crumbled breastworks.
“They’re coming!” he shouted.
One of Iranda’s bubbles burst into bright light high above the city wall, illuminating all that lay below. Torchay made note of it. The captain would want to know so she could commend her later for her prompt and proper action.
“They’re coming!” Hamonn beckoned with a wave of his arm, but the two naitani still hovered.
“Go.” Torchay shoved at the yellow-clad girl. Adessay would follow her lead, if she only would.
“Is she dead?” Beltis asked again.
“No, but if she were, you’d still have to take command. You’re ranking naitan. It’s your duty to protect them.” He jerked his head in the direction of the city and wished he hadn’t. He’d taken a few too many stones to the head himself. “The enemy is coming.”
He could see them over the broken wall, rushing forward in waves, hopefully to break against Ukiny’s walls like the ocean on the shore. But like the ocean, they would pour through any gap they found.
“Naitan.” Hamonn had returned from the hole in the wall to kneel in front of his charge. He held his hands out, palm up. “I accept your gloves.”
Beltis stared at him half a second, then stripped off her gloves and laid them in Hamonn’s upturned hands. “Adessay.” Her voice cracked like a whip. “Come with me, Trooper. We have an army to stop.”
CHAPTER THREE
Beltis had to pick her way through the rubble that had felled Kallista, rather than striding decisively, but she was moving. The young North naitan removed his gloves, handed them to his guard and followed, his blue tunic less noticeable in Iranda’s light than Beltis’s yellow.
Fire exploded in the plain below, turning half the lead Tibran rank into human torches. Rock tumbled down the steep slope of the glacis, mowing down the ranks behind. From the tower on the far side of the breach in the wall, more magic came, causing vines and brambles to grow instantaneously in the field, impeding the enemy’s rush. Satisfied the naitani were doing their duty, Torchay turned to his own.
His muscles quivered from holding his weight off his captain for so long. He pushed himself up, gravel and dust cascading from his back, and went to his knees beside her. That she had not yet regained consciousness worried him. He had no East magic, no healing in his touch, but he had the best nonmagical medical training available. A bodyguard needed to be able to tend his naitan if he failed in his first duty and allowed her an injury.
Torchay cleared the area around his captain, blocking out the shouts and screams of battle. The youngsters seemed to be holding their own, so far. He straightened her limbs, checking for injury, working his way carefully toward her torso and head. She didn’t wake under his probing, even when he pressed on bruises he knew had to hurt.
She’d been struck in the head at least once, but he wouldn’t have thought that blow enough to render her unconscious this long.
Someone screamed. Beltis. Torchay looked up to see Hamonn clutch his chest as if arrow struck, but no shaft protruded. He staggered, then fell from the wall into the shattered hole where the breach had been forced.
“They have hand cannon,” Kadrey shouted back at Torchay as he pulled both naitani down behind the broken walls. “Long, with knives on the end like pikes, but firing tiny missiles. As bad as archers.”
Beltis screamed again, rising to her knees to fling fire at the enemy. Looking grim, Adessay crawled up beside her. Worried, Torchay turned his attention back to his own naitan. He had to wake her if he could.
She looked ghost white in the eerie light. Kallista usually appeared more pale than she actually was because of the contrast with her hair, so dark a brown it was almost black. But this paleness seemed extreme. Gently, Torchay slipped his hands around her neck to feel along her spine.
He loosened her queue, knowing she wouldn’t like it, but the tight weave of hair kept him from feeling her skull, finding injury there. When he found the lump, she flinched and gasped. Torchay grinned. A lump usually meant the swelling was expanding outward, rather than in against the brain. And she responded to pain.
He found no other injuries, save for the cut on her forehead and the second lump forming beneath it. He cleaned it with water from his bottle and a cloth from his pack.
“They’re coming!” Kadrey shouted.
“Stop. Hurts.” The captain moved her head away from his ministrations.
“I’m finished.” The cut was as clean as he could make it here. Torchay took her hand in his. “Squeeze.”
“Still hurts. Why?” She opened her eyes to slits, squinting against the bright illumination.
“You got smacked on the head with a great huge rock. Blame it for your headache, not me.”
“No. Why squeeze?” Her hand lay limp as yesterday’s fish.
“So I know you can. You might wiggle your toes while you’re at it.” That enormous boulder had barely brushed her, but Torchay’s stomach made fear-knots over what that light blow could have done.
“Oh.” She promptly squeezed his hand tight enough to hurt and waggled both feet up and down. Then she tried to roll over and sit up.
Torchay pushed her back down, realizing far later than he should have that the scuffling and shouting he heard were right on top of them. He ducked beneath the knife-on-a-pole of the nearest Tibran and buried a blade in his heart. He pulled it out and threw it at the head appearing over the wall at the breach. He just had time to see the hilt quivering in the dead man’s eye socket before the next crisis was upon him.
He drew the long knife from its sheath down his back beneath his tunic and slashed across the neck of the first man rushing them, then lunged forward onto one knee and thrust it into the gut of the man behind him. That gave them a little space of time before the next enemy reached them.
Torchay stood, bringing his naitan up with him. Holding her close, inside his protection, he surveyed the situation. Beltis lay draped over the parapet, the blood pouring from her neck denying any hope she might yet live. Adessay and his guard sprawled in a small heap, both of them gutted. Probably by the first man Torchay had just killed.
More soldiers in padded gray jackets and loose red trousers rushed down the walkway toward them, and yet more climbed onto the wall beyond.
“We should fall back.” Torchay tried to draw the captain toward the town side of the wall.
“Where to?” She was already stripping off her gloves, thrusting them at him.
“Anywhere. Somewhere safer than this.”
“And where is that?”
He could feel the hair-raising tingle of magic being called. Before he could tuck her gloves into his belt, lightning flashed from her hands. The massive blue-white spark leaped from man to man to man until all of them lay twitching on the walk a few moments before they fell still, their hearts stopped.
More of them climbed over the parapet, up ladders from town where shrill wavering screams tracked the progress of the Tibran sack of Ukiny. Kallista let her lightning fly in huge, jagged horizontal sheets, half toward the men on the wall, half toward the breach where countless more hordes poured through. She stood with her arms outstretched in supplication to the Source of Magic.
Again and again and again, she called on the One for power, until she was blind and deaf with it, sensing the enemy as much as seeing them. Bodies lay piled on the wall five and six deep, and still they came. They climbed over their fellows in the breach and burst onto the city streets, held back now only by Kallista’s lightning and the occasional rooftop archer.
“You can’t call enough magic to kill them all.” Torchay crouched beside her, head swiveling as he attempted to watch in all directions. “There are too many of them. We must fall back.”
“I can’t!” Kallista could hear the screams of the innocent as they died, smell the smoke of homes being burnt. She couldn’t save herself while they suffered. She could see gray and red on the tower where she’d stationed the rest of her troop. They had to have fallen like Beltis and Adessay.
“Kallista!” Torchay grabbed her waist with both hands, breaking her concentration. “Your death won’t save them.”
Sweet Goddess, he was right. But she couldn’t just give up. She lifted her hands high, calling yet again on the One, the Mother and Father of All, Giver of Life, Source of Magic. “Do something!” she screamed. “They are your children! Save them. Use me—whatever you want! Whatever you need. I’ll do anything, if you’ll just save your people. What kind of Goddess are you?”
The wind rushed past from the sea as it had since time began. The sun crept above the eastern horizon, casting the dead into pale shadows behind the wall, painting their spilled blood brilliant scarlet and crimson and dark, dull, brown. For a moment, Kallista waited to be struck down for her defiance.
Then power filled her in a turbulent rush, enough power to fill deep oceans, to shift whole mountains and build a hundred cities. It permeated her, deep into each strand of hair, every shred of callused skin on her feet. She screamed, and power poured in through her open mouth. She couldn’t contain it all. She had to rid herself of it somehow. Kallista threw her hands wide, as if throwing lightning from her fingertips, and the magic exploded from her.
Not in bright sparks, but as a shock wave of darkness, a sort of black mist, roiling out in all directions from where she stood at the epicenter. It settled over the landscape, clinging like some dark dew to everything it touched. And Tibrans began to die.
Some of them screamed, clawing at their faces as if it burned. Others just dropped in their tracks. Others—she couldn’t see clearly. A few turned and ran when they saw the opaque fog approach, but it moved as fast as the lightning she threw. There was no escape.
Panicked, Kallista tried to call it back, but the magic refused to answer. Would it kill everything it touched? She looked down at Torchay where he knelt by her side, head bent, saw the dark glitter clinging to the burnished red of his hair. She tried to brush it off, and it melted away like the mist it resembled, leaving nothing behind. Not even dampness.
Torchay turned his face up to hers, his eyes as wide and frightened as she knew her own must be. “What did you just do?”
In the high mountain pass on the southern edge of the Mother Range, huddled over a feeble fire just at dawn, the trader lifted his head. He sensed something. A new thing, strange and powerful—and oh so seductive. He straightened, searching with all his senses. Was he finally to discover what he had been seeking for so long?
When it hit him, bowing him backward in a spine-cracking convulsion, he shouted for sheer joy. Incredible power rushed through him, recognizing him, welcoming him, promising him his every dream fulfilled. It left him as quickly as it had come, but this time it left him filled with hope, with eager purpose, rather than anxious desperation.
No, not this time. This was as like his previous experience as the sun was like the moon. It was promise kept. It pulled at him, compelled him onward, sped his steps. His heart’s desire awaited him, and the faster he traveled, the sooner he would have it.
He picked himself up from the dirt where he lay, his traveling companions hovering in a fearful circle around him. “Move, you sluggards!” he bellowed. “I want to be on my way before the sun reaches the treetops.”
He hurt. All over, but especially his head. And there was dirt in his mouth. And his mouth was too dry to spit. Stone tried anyway. He succeeded in getting rid of some of it. He wiped his hand on his pants and scraped more of the grit off his tongue with his fingers.
Where was he? What had happened? They’d made it through the breach, somehow alive and—Khralsh, his head hurt.
Ocean was gone, incinerated by an Adaran witch. He’d taken his partner, Moon, with him. River, Wolf, Snow—too many to name—had fallen to arrows or worse. But he and Fox had made it through. He was certain of that. They’d crossed into the city, cleared the houses nearest the wall, which were mostly cleared already save for a screeching crone who’d brained him with a broom and died on Fox’s bayonet. They’d reloaded, fired the houses and left them burning to advance to the next street.
Stone had killed the archer shooting at them from the roof and reloaded, then they’d checked the house. Empty. The dead archer was a woman. That had shocked him, but Fox reminded him she was dead now, paying the price of her blasphemy in the afterlife. They’d clattered back down the stairs and set the place alight. Then…
He scrubbed a hand across his face. The light hurt his eyes, even though they were still closed. It wasn’t supposed to be light, was it? Wait—yes, the sun had come up. He remembered that. It had just risen over the city walls when…When w
hat?
Stone spit more dirt from his mouth, beginning to have enough spit to do it. He should get up. Find where they’d called muster. Report in. But lifting his head seemed more than he could accomplish. He tried opening an eye and managed that. It was hard to see, his vision veiled, blurred somehow.
This didn’t look like the city. Unless the city had crumbled around him. Was that what had happened? Stone opened his other eye. How could the sunlight hurt when everything seemed so dim? He lay over white stone rubble. Big rocks, little rocks, grit, gravel, bloody body parts…mighty Khralsh, he was in the breach.
Stone tried to scoot off the dead but there were too many of them. They carpeted the ground, layers deep, their limbs flopping bonelessly as he struggled to escape them. Heads lolled. Wounds gaped open. Stone’s hands slipped and he fell face first into some poor soul’s bloated entrails.
Retching his empty stomach even emptier, he slid farther down the slope only to fetch up against the brittle black corpse of one of the fire-witch’s victims. Stone recoiled in horror, scrambling, rolling, crawling on his belly until he reached a bare rock promontory jutting from the sea of bodies. There, he curled into a tight ball and shivered uncontrollably.
What was wrong with him? He was a warrior. Death was no stranger to him. He’d climbed across bodies to capture a city numberless times before. He’d been on burial detail, collecting bodies from the battlefield and lining them up in rows to record their names before consigning them to pyres of Khralsh’s flames. Granted, he’d never before seen men burst into spontaneous flame without a torch or spark to set the blaze, but fire was fire. It was natural. Not like…What? Why couldn’t he remember?
Had it been so awful that his mind wiped the memory blank? And where was Fox?
Stone uncurled from his tight knot, just a little. Fox had been with him, he knew. Fox was always with him, just as he was always with Fox. So where was he now?
“Fox!” He tried to shout, but his throat was raw, his voice a weak, raspy, croaking thing.
