Gail Dayton – The Compass Rose (страница 12)

“He’s not my ilias.” It seemed as if she had to force the words past her cottony tongue. Or maybe it was her brain that was cottony. “He’s my friend. I mean, my bodyguard.”

“Bodyguard, ilias.” The woman waved a dismissive hand. “All the same. Like aspects of the One.”

She ushered Kallista into a small room containing a large bed, and pushed her onto it. “Rest. You too.” She pushed Torchay after Kallista. “Sleep. I will speak with those I must. When you wake up, we’ll talk.”

Something was wrong here. Kallista had to think for a wide space of time before she knew what it was. “Torchay doesn’t sleep with me,” she mumbled. “Not in the same bed. He’s my bodyguard.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” the prelate said as she was closing the door. “Of course he does. Now sleep.”

The word must have held magic, for instantly Kallista fell into unconsciousness. She fought it. There was something she needed to do, warnings she needed to give, but her body wouldn’t release her from its exhaustion.

She wandered in dreams through shining landscapes and blurring fogs, hunting something. Abruptly, she flew through the air, images blurring below her until she stood in the soot-blackened street before the broken wall around Ukiny.

The sun high in the sky near blinded her with its brilliance. Men and women swarmed the breach, clearing away rubble, stacking the salvageable stone near the wall in the space left after the Tibrans had burned the houses built against it. A small trickle of gravel spilled from the southern edge of the wall still standing.

“Back away,” Kallista shouted. “It’s unstable. It’s going to fall!”

But no one moved. No one seemed to hear her. When the wall gave way, sending massive stones and piles of rubble crashing down, shouts and screams of warning came too late. The workers couldn’t escape. The rock fell and they were beneath it.

“Quickly! Move the rock. Get it off before it crushes them. Adessay—” But he was dead. He couldn’t help. Kallista ran forward to pull people out of danger.

“Kallista!” Torchay called to her, drew her back, and she was lying fully dressed in a too-soft bed in a too-dark room with Torchay gripping her shoulders.

“A dream,” she breathed, rubbing her hands down her face. “It was just a dream like any other.”

“Not exactly like,” Torchay said, releasing her cautiously, as if he thought he might have to grab hold again. “I could always wake you from the others.”

“You woke me from this one.” Kallista let drowsiness claim her.

“Not till you were damned good and ready. Not till I shook you five turns and called your name five more.”

“Lie down. Go back to sleep.” She tugged at his sleeve and reluctantly, he did as she bid him.

“It’s not proper,” he grumbled. “I can take the floor. Or out in the corridor.”

“Too far away. And there isn’t any floor in this room. The bed’s too big. Big enough for two more bodies beside ours.”

“You didn’t want me here before.”

“Changed my mind. I need you to wake me from the dreams.”

He lay quiet a moment and Kallista thought he had gone to sleep. As much as he ever slept. He woke at the slightest noise. Then he spoke. “Nightmares aren’t part of a bodyguard’s duty.”

“I know.” Kallista grinned, knowing he couldn’t see it in the dark. “But they are in the Handbook of Rules for Friends. Right after ‘See that your friend gets back home after drinking all night.’”

Torchay turned his back to her. “Go to sleep.”

Kallista turned over and settled her back against his, as they slept in the field while hunting bandits. “Yes, Sergeant.”

She slept the sun around before waking early and alone on the second morning. A smiling acolyte in the yellow-trimmed white of a South naitan-in-training led her to the baths on the floor below. Kallista paddled about in company with a trio of chubby toddlers and their pregnant minder before being escorted firmly but politely to breakfast in the prelate’s office with her hair dripping down her back. There she not only found the green-robed elder, but Torchay looking entirely too comfortable. The first finger on his left hand wore a white-bandaged splint, but it didn’t seem to interfere with his ease.

“Eat, child.” The woman indicated a tray near overflowing with food.

Torchay picked up the plate and began filling it, ignoring Kallista’s sour look.

“I am sorry, Mother,” she said. “I don’t know your name.”

“Mother is fine. Mother Edyne, if you insist on more.”

Kallista took the food Torchay handed her and began to eat, discovering an appetite she hadn’t recognized.

“Your guard has told me what he observed that morning,” Mother Edyne said without waiting. “Tell me what you experienced.”

Over sweet buns, early melon and steaming cha brewed from leaves shipped over the southern mountains from the lands beyond, Kallista told her. When she had finished, the prelate frowned.

“This magic…” Mother Edyne shook her head. “It has frightened people. It smells of the mysteries of the West. That is why I’ve kept you here, you know. So that their fear would have no target.”

“No, I didn’t know that.” Kallista shuddered. No one had been found with West magic in over fifty years. “But I am a North naitan. I’ve always been North. Not West.”

“I admit it puzzles me.” Edyne peered at Kallista, her eyes sharp green. “Have you found a mark somewhere on your body? One that you did not have before.”

Kallista felt Torchay’s gaze on her as she lied. “No. Nothing like that.”

The magic she had already was enough to bear. She didn’t want more. Maybe if no one knew, it would just go away. She reached back and combed her hair down closer over her neck. She didn’t have to wear a queue. It wasn’t regulation for officers the way it was for other ranks. She could grow her hair longer.

“Hmm,” the prelate considered. “Has there been anything else? Any sign of other magic? Foreseeing perhaps? That has always been the most common sort of West magic.”

“No, Mother Edyne.” The dream had been merely a dream. Nothing more than that. It couldn’t have been anything more.

Kallista could feel Torchay’s agitation rising off him in waves. Next, Mother Edyne would be claiming that was a sign of West magic, and not part of knowing him so well for so long.

“Well, that’s that, I suppose.” Mother Edyne stood and the other two scrambled to their feet with her. “No, no. Stay. Finish your meal. And then I suppose you must return to your duties. Unless there is something more you wish to tell me?”

Kallista widened her eyes, doing her best to look as if not only did she have no secrets at this moment, but she had never had any secret in her entire life. “No, Mother. Nothing.”

“Very well.” She motioned them back into their chairs and let a hand rest on each head as she passed from the room. “Be well, my children.”

When the door was closed and Mother Edyne gone, Torchay drew his little blade and stabbed it through a melon slice. “And why,” he asked through clenched teeth, “did you not tell the prelate the truth?”

Kallista hunched her shoulders, embarrassed by her fear and by the lies she’d told to cover it. What she had done terrified her. She didn’t wish it undone. Ukiny would have been taken and thousands more dead or enslaved if she had not done it. But she feared the consequences of her impulsive request.

Already, according to Mother Edyne, people whispered. West magic involved the unexplained and the unexplainable. It dealt with hidden things and with endings, including the ultimate ending: death. No wonder people feared it.

“I’m sure it’s temporary.” Kallista focused on the last of her meal, unable to meet his eyes. “Now that the enemy has been cut down to a reasonable size, I’ll have no need for such a magic. Why bother the prelate with it?”

“When the One gives a gift, She rarely takes it back.”

“But a onetime event is more common—more likely than my having permanent magic from two Compass points.”

“You have the mark.”

She refrained from smoothing her hair down over her neck only through sheer force of will. “Legend. Fable. Nothing more.”

Torchay growled, a sound of utter disgust. She’d heard it countless times.

“Besides,” she said, risking a glance in his direction, “talk is already circulating. I have no doubt word is already flying to the Barbs. How much quicker would they come to investigate if the Mother Temple here added its weight to the gossip?”

The Order of the Barbed Rose believed an ancient and stubborn heresy, that West magic was evil, and that if it and all its practitioners were eliminated, death itself could be eliminated. The Order had been suppressed for centuries and yet could not be entirely crushed. The fear of death and the will to conquer it was too strong. Even the One’s promise of life eternal after physical death was not enough to quell this persistent falsehood.

Everyone feared the Barbs. Their secret membership fanned out through all Adara, investigating any magic that seemed the least bit out of the ordinary. It occurred to Kallista now that perhaps true West magic hadn’t been seen in so long because the Barbs had somehow found a way to identify those rare ones so gifted and eliminate them before or as their power manifested.