The Compass Rose. Gail Dayton

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 what?

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