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“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.”
“Now?”
“Of course now.” Uskenda’s scowl actually made Kallista shiver. “Do you think I mean next week? You decimated the Tibran army, you didn’t annihilate it. With their ships foundered, they’re trapped here. We’ve still got a city to defend. Our numbers might just be close to even now. If we can pin them here, keep them from shifting their cannon up the coast to Kishkim, where they’ve got another damn army but not so many cannon, maybe we can keep them from taking Kishkim and Ukiny. We need to know what you did and whether you can do it again.”
“Yes, General.” Kallista saluted and departed for the Mother Temple, Torchay shadowing her. She was so tired she could barely stand, much less walk straight, but General Uskenda was right. They weren’t out of danger.
Torchay took her arm, supporting her, though she knew he had to be at the end of his strength as well. “You need to rest,” he said. “Not answer a load of unanswerable questions.”
“I’m fine.” Kallista would have blamed Torchay’s insubordination on their “friend” conversation yesterday, save that he’d always been on the insubordinate side. Especially when it came to generals. She saved her breath for walking and keeping her eyes open.
Ukiny was large enough to have three temples. Two devoted themselves primarily to education and healing, though they also served their areas as worship centers. The other was the first temple in the city, the Mother Temple. It provided education and healing like the others, as well as local administrative needs. It sat in the center of a vast four-petaled square in the oldest section of Ukiny.
The worship hall, the central portion of the building, soared high above the more utilitarian sections. Tall arched windows of colored glass were set into white stone walls that hardly seemed the same material of which the city fortifications were built. Though Kallista hadn’t been inside the Mother Temple yet, she knew that corridors would lead from each of the four entrances to the sanctuary in the center. Every temple in Adara was built to the same plan, whether in the smallest village or the capital city.
Rooms to either side of the corridors conducted temple business; healing to the east, schools on the north, administration and records, including the city’s birth, death and marriage records in the south. To the west, the direction from which they approached, the rooms served as the temple’s library and archives. Centuries of records were stored in the rooms to either side of the black marble corridor they traversed.
The priests of each temple formed their own ilian—bound as mates by holy oath—and lived in a big house across the southern plaza from the temple. She’d been raised in such a house with a dozen parents and half a dozen sedili, her sisters and brothers in the ilian who were close in age. Memories swarmed Kallista’s mind as they entered the sanctuary. She was too tired to keep them at bay. She’d run tame with her sedili in the temple built of gray mountain granite shipped down the rivers that joined there in Turysh. She’d been the only one of them with magic. When her magic woke in the North the way it had, it had set her apart from her sedili even more.
“Wait here.” Torchay pushed her onto one of the benches against the wall in the worship center reserved for the old and infirm who couldn’t stand for long periods. “I’ll find the prelate.”
Kallista thought about protesting, reminding him that she was neither feeble nor aged, and was his superior besides, but at the moment she didn’t feel any of those things. Using her lightning often left her tired, but not drained like this. She leaned her head against the wall and watched the sunlight dance in the colored glass.
She traced its downward path till it sparkled on the floor mosaic, the compass rose depicted in every Adaran temple. A slash of blue tile lightning pointed north. To the east, the compass arm was a green twining vine. Yellow flame stretched south, a blackthorned briar pointed to the west, and in the center, uniting the four cardinal points was the red rose of the One.
The compass rose symbolized both the gifts of magic and the One Herself. Just as a rose had many petals yet formed a single flower, so the One had many aspects, yet was still One God, holding all that ever was and ever would be within Her being. All came from Her and all returned when its time was done.
Kallista had no idea how much time had passed before Torchay returned with a plump, smiling gray-haired woman dressed in a green robe over her loose white shirt and gray trousers. She struggled to her feet and bowed. “Honor to you, Mother. I am Kallista Varyl. I’ve been sent by General Uskenda to be examined—”
“Of course you have, dear. Come.” The woman put her arm around Kallista’s waist and guided her toward the leaf-and-vine-decorated entrance to the eastern corridor. “You’re exhausted. You should rest.”
“The general was most explicit that I be examined right away.” She had never failed in her duty and didn’t intend to begin now.
“How can I examine anything when you’re asleep on your feet? No, you come and rest, and your ilias with you.”
“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.
“I can deal with any Barb who comes calling,” Torchay said. “As could you. But do you really believe Mother Edyne would contribute to gossip in any way?”
She didn’t, but she shrugged her shoulders. “The fewer who know a thing, the easier it is to keep it secret.”
“Lying to a prelate has its own consequences.”
“I’ll risk it.” Kallista set her plate aside and stood. “We should report in.”
There were funerals to attend. Flames competed with the blaze of the setting sun as Kallista stood with General Uskenda and the honor guard in the plaza west of the Mother Temple. She let the tears flow, blaming them on the sun’s glare, and commended the souls of her entire troop, all five of the naitani and their five bodyguards, into the welcoming arms of the One. Never had she lost so many.
Never had the Adaran army and its naitani been cast into a battle of such size. They fought bandits. They patrolled remote mountain passes and distant, lawless prinsipalities. They did not fight pitched battles against massive armies. They’d never had to. Until now.
Kallista fought back her grief. So many bright young lives, so full of promise, ended here. Adara could not afford such losses. She feared that they would be facing many more such funerals if changes were not made. But Blessed One, did she have to be the one to change?
When the sun had set and the fires burned to embers, there were letters to be written, paperwork to be done. How could she write so many at once? How could she put it off?
The breeze, not so strong inside the city where it was broken by wall and building, stirred her hair. Kallista tucked it behind her ears yet again as they walked back to quarters.
“If you will not braid your hair,” Torchay said from his place at her shoulder, “you should cut it.”
“Oh, that will cover my neck so well.” She pulled her hair back from her face and held it with one gloved hand.
“Don’t cut the back. Just the front, so it can’t get in your face. Or you could—”
“This is not a time to be thinking about hair.”
“True.” He picked up his pace and took her elbow to escort her quickly through a crowd spilling out of a public house. “But it was noticed. Today it was taken as a sign of mourning for the death of your troopers. If you continue to wear it so, it could be taken as a sign of something else. Perhaps that you attempt to hide something.”
Kallista sighed. She was a soldier. That had been her duty, her destiny for twenty-one years. It kept things simple. She would rather things stayed that way, but the complications kept mounting. “We’ll work out some explanation later.”
The sun must have hurt her eyes more than she realized. They kept watering during the short walk, even as Torchay ushered her into their too-empty billet. The setting sun must bother his eyes as well, given the way he was blinking them.
