Gail Dayton – The Compass Rose (страница 8)

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.