01 - The Compass Rose by Gail Dayton Read Free Book Online Page A

the city walls when…When what?
    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.
    How far had he rolled from the breach? Stone looked through his veiled vision up the glacis. He was no more than halfway down, but could he make the climb back up? No witches were left to set him on fire or make the earth itself move beneath his feet. So he only had to face climbing back over the cold bodies of his onetime comrades.
    Fox was up there. Had to be up there. Stone would do anything for his brodir . Spitting once more, calling on his god with it, he started back up, doing his best not to step on the bodies. Desperately, he tried to reconstruct events. Through the breach, kill the crone, fire the houses, next street.
    They’d checked the dead archer. They’d fired that house. They left the house. There was a child. An Adaran child. Boy or girl, Stone couldn’t tell. Never could when they were that young, especially the way Adarans dressed them alike. The child was huddled in a doorway, terrified, staring at them with witchy pale eyes, waiting for death.
    But they didn’t make war on children. “Run!” Fox shouted.
    “Hide.” Stone opened the door behind the child, shooed it inside. Fox had marked the door when it was shut again, designating the building “Not for burning.” It was far enough from the wall that they had discretion as to which building to burn, and it was—hopefully—far enough from those already burning that the wood inside the stone walls wouldn’t catch. And then…Stone paused in his climb, pulled his hand back from the corpse it touched to wipe it on his filthy jacket.
    And then, the air around them had exploded, the sun had gone dark and the world had come to an end.
    Except that it obviously hadn’t. The same sun—at least Stone thought it was the same one—still shone overhead. The same wind blew past him on its way inland from the ocean. The same bodies still