The smell hit him. Death. Two days of decay. Bron was digging now in an area that might have been a kitchen–the remains of a table on one side, smashed dishes, on the other side a potbelly stove tilted against the half-standing inner wall. Rotting eggs and insect-gnawed bread in the rubble. Breakfast? Preparations for a lunch basket?

Two bodies, a man and a woman. They were about his age or a few years older, and they were wrapped in each other’s arms, faces turned into each other’s necks. They had clung together when the shaking had begun, only to be crushed by a beam falling from the roof, landing across them both in the same instant. They had died together.

Bron couldn’t lift the beam, not with his hands alone. He dug out around them enough to determine that no one else lay with them in the debris. Perhaps they had been cooking together. Perhaps they had been enjoying their early morning meal before each began the work of the day. Perhaps they had been talking, smiling, love in their eyes as they looked at each other.

He paused, folding his hands into fists, and waited till the shaking passed over once again.

“Nyasha! Nyasha!” His throat was raw, his nerves ragged, every muscle aflame. His hands were sore and scratched, his arms quivering. And still there was the girl to find, the girl the entire town had forgotten.

Bron paused again, tilting his head. Was that a voice? Perhaps it had been the wind, or a cat, mewling across the street.

“Here,” it came again, soft and low and battered. “I’m here.”

“Nyasha?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

Her voice was weak, cracked, and barely audible, but he heard it. Bron’s body didn’t stop aching, and his bleeding hands didn’t stop burning, but they didn’t matter. He had to get her out. That was all.

Nyasha’s voice came from further back in the house, perhaps a bedroom area. The inner walls had held up better than the outer ones, for whatever reason, and Bron could see places where the walls and the roof leaned against each other, forming spaces underneath that would be almost sheltered, almost safe. He would have to be careful not to dislodge anything important.

“Keep talking to me,” he ordered. “I need to hear your voice so I know where to dig.”

“I’m here,” she said. “I was leaving my room when the blast came. I was in the doorframe between my room and the hallway. I think that’s what saved me. I’ve been trapped here for two days. There’s just a crack, and I couldn’t open it, but I saw the sun go down and come up again and go down and come up. I thought I would die here. Who are you? Why are you here? I don’t know your voice.”

He dug through shingles and latticework from the fallen roof, making a path toward her. “My name is Bron. I came from Jalseion seeking help at the Sanctuary. Dr. Burdock told me where to find you. Keep talking, Nyasha.”

“Dr. Burdock? I’m surprised he even remembered my name. He’s a good enough doctor, but sort of wibbly, you know? Like a catkin, all soft and fluffy, with his chubby face and his fuzzy beard and his spectacles. The children like him, though, the little children who come to the clinic. I think they like him because he looks at them, not through them….”

Her voice might have been fading, but he was pressing closer, and so he didn’t lose her. “All right, Nyasha, I’m almost there. Can you push against the stuff around you, to show me where you are? Be careful.”

The pile of wattle and plaster in front of him shifted, bulging out almost from the center. Bron managed a smile, tired and relieved. “There you are. I’ve found you, Nyasha.”

He reached into the ruin and drew her out like birthing a farm animal, weak and shaky and blinking in the sun. Her dark brown skin was almost white with plaster dust, and her large brown eyes darted this way and that, trying to take it in. She was even younger than he’d expected, perhaps two years younger than Calea had been when she’d become a Guide.

“Can you walk?” He kept his arm around her, feeling her tremble.

Nyasha nodded, more absently than purposefully. “My goodness, it sure is a beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Bron said solemnly.

“I never really noticed how nice the mountains look before.”

He looked with her, north, to the mountain range that separated Jalseion from Thyrion. The peaks had once been green and mist-covered, or so legend said, but since the world had become desert, people called them the Burnt Mountains. They were orange and dark yellow and reddish-brown in the morning light. And yes, certainly beautiful, though Bron had never thought to call them so anymore than Nyasha had. He and Calea would have to travel over or around them to get to Thyrion, and they were therefore a barrier, an obstacle.

“Yes, they look very nice,” he said. “Come now, let’s get you back to the clinic. You need to rest and eat.”

“And drink. I’m very thirsty.” Her cracked lips curved in a smile.

“That too.”

She almost tripped over her own feet, her long skirt, as he led her out of the ruin of her home. But the path he’d made through the rubble went back to the kitchen area, and there Nyasha ground to a halt, staring. The bodies of her parents. Bron winced and looked away, sorry he’d forgotten.

Nyasha said nothing. Did nothing. She just stood there and stared for a moment that could have been an hour.

Then he gently tugged her into a walk again. He took her out of the ruin and back to Calea and the doctor.

Bron walked through the small town of Averieom, head swiveling this way and that as he took it in. He’d never been outside Jalseion before, not even to this village just beyond the great city’s sphere of direct control. An hour and a half away by automobile, a full day on foot. Not far at all. Yet it might as well have been another world.

Most noticeable to him was the lack of visible damage. No marks of explosions, of shattered vehicles and obliterated generators and devices. A few of the houses seemed to rest a bit crookedly, shingles loose, shutters off one hinge. As if they were toys taken up by a gigantic toddler and shaken violently, then set down again. But the buildings here were constructed low to the ground, most only one story, none higher than three. No tall buildings like in Jalseion to be tilted and wrecked and ruined by the shrugging of the earth.

The Medical Sanctuary was on the edge of Averieom nearest Jalseion. He and Calea had gone straight there, passing only a few holdings on the outskirts. Now, as Bron moved toward the center of Averieom, he got a better feeling for the town. It was a lovely little village, he was beginning to think. A soft, safe place to live and work and raise a family. Dr. Burdock’s fear of imminent violence seemed almost laughable in the midst of such peace.

Then Bron turned onto Capital Street, and the young doctor’s anxiety began to make more sense. Small huddles of people gathered here and there, tense, wide-eyed, afraid. Bron avoided them instinctively, moving slowly and steadily, like a child treading softfoot to prevent waking an adult in drunken slumber.

He passed a grocery with every window broken in. The shelves inside were all but bare, and the owner stood amongst the desolation, leaning on a broom, her face curiously blank and contemplative. The butchery was the same, and the bakery. Other less essential stores were spared: bookstore, cobbler, milliner. The import shop, where they had sold technology from Jalseion, had been put to the torch.

When he passed the shoe shop, Bron glanced at his feet. Worn, comfortable boots looked back at him, ones that hadn’t belonged to him a day ago. On their way out of Jalseion, he had stopped just long enough to rob the dead to replace his and Calea’s blood-soaked clothing, his ruined footwear. He did not feel guilty about this. The needs of the living outweighed the claims of the dead. These were good boots and would last him a long time.

Nor had Calea seemed disturbed by the theft. That bothered him a bit more. It was another thing he had failed to protect her from, this breaking of custom and law and traditional respect for corpses. Calea had never much been one for respect, though, so perhaps it was not surprising.

His feet still hurt. They would heal.

In the center of Averieom was the town’s Well, now drained dry and abandoned. A small, shallow thing–Dr. Burdock had aptly described it as a pond. A twisted shell of a building crouched on the bank, blown apart by an explosion. No doubt it had housed the town’s generator, run by Averieom’s small contingent of Select. A distant part of Bron hoped that no one had been hurt in the blast, and another part of him knew that that was unlikely. Generators needed to be manned every hour of the day to keep the flow of power steady. But he saw no bodies, no blood. Another welcome change from Jalseion.

A few more turns, a short stop to ask directions of a weary-looking woman in a garden, and he found the street he was seeking. This area was almost exactly on the opposite side of Averieom from the Medical Sanctuary, and Hillock Street was closer to the edge of town than the middle. The houses here were shabby. Not a run-down sort of shabby, either–these houses had not once been fine, but now fallen into disrepair. They had never been fine. They had been built shabby.

It was not unlike The Grunt where Bron had been born and, until very recently, had lived.

He didn’t know what to expect at the Cormorin house. Dr. Burdock seemed convinced that the girl and her family had fled. “Back to Thyrion whence they came, perhaps,” he’d said with a wry twist of his lips, strange on his owlish face. Perhaps the house would be empty. Perhaps the inhabitants would be shut up inside, paralyzed with fear.

What Bron did not expect was a house crumbled and collapsed, folded inward on itself almost delicately, almost beautifully. A house of cards fallen at a heavy breath. Bron stopped for half a step. He looked around the street and saw and heard no one, no faces, no voices, no neighbors to offer help or explain to him why nothing had been done about this in the last two days. He double-checked the name on the painted sign near the street in front of the house, confirming that this was, indeed, the Cormorin home.

Then he went to the rubble and began to dig and to call. “Nyasha! Nyasha Cormorin!”

Muscles in his shoulders and across his back burned and ached as he dragged at rotten beams, boards with faded blue paint chipped and peeling, chunks of wattle and crumbling plaster. In the past two days, he had climbed ropes, lowered himself down sheer steps, and crossed deconstructed landscapes of broken buildings and bleeding people. He had pushed past many distressed citizens begging for help to rescue wives, husbands, children, neighbors, and he had ignored them all in his singular quest to reach Calea Lisan.

The collapse of this house must have happened at the very moment of the disaster, and Dr. Burdock was wrong. The Cormorins hadn’t left. They were buried. This time, he would not pass on. This time, he would not shut his eyes to a family in danger. He would find the girl he was seeking, dead or alive.

“Nyasha Cormorin! Nyasha!”

He didn’t know her parents’ names. He hadn’t thought to ask. He didn’t know if she had any siblings, any other family. It didn’t matter. He would dig them out.

Dr. Burdock rounded a corner and found them standing just inside the back entrance, leaning on the wall. A man in his forties, looking near dead from exhaustion, and in his arms was a young woman. One of her arms was hooked around his neck, holding herself up, and the other arm…

The other arm was missing. As well as the opposite leg. Dr. Burdock blinked and, after that glance, returned his gaze to her face. Crippled patients did not like overlong attention given to their deformities.

Her face was sharp, grim, and pale with emotion. Her fist was knotted, her lips thin. “Put me down, Bron,” she said, words ground out like stones rubbing against each other. “I didn’t want you to carry me, and you’ve defied me long enough.”

“Not until the good doctor tells me where to put you,” he replied, unbothered by her cold anger. It was as if this was the normal state of affairs between them.

“I…” Dr. Burdock blinked again, then finally swept a hand toward an exam room. “Please, in here.”

Bron moved inside and set Calea Lisan on the wooden table, then stood beside her, almost at attention, though he did not have the bearing of a military man. Guide Lisan pressed her fist against the table she sat on, holding herself rigidly still. They were both keeping themselves upright by will alone, he could see that at a glance. They must have traveled through the night to get here.

Dr. Burdock moved to the cabinet against the opposite wall, ready to fetch whatever supplies were necessary. “What can I do for you, Guide Lisan? What are your injuries?”

“Calea will do,” she said, lips twisting bitterly. “There is nothing left of Jalseion worth Guiding. As for my injuries, are they not obvious? It would be just my luck to find myself, against my will, in the care of yet another man too stupid to see what’s in front of his face.”

He turned toward her, careful to keep his face still. He must be professional. She is Select. She has had the same horrible shock as me. “Please show me, Calea.”

Bron opened his mouth to speak, but she held up her hand, forestalling him. “They’re gone. No need to mention it. I mean this, of course,” she said to Dr. Burdock, with a thick hiss of air, and gestured sharply to where her other arm should have been. “I need new prosthetics. Mine were…taken from me.”

“Madam…Calea…this is far outside my expertise. Everyone else has gone to the city to help with the rescue efforts. If you will wait here in Averieom for a few days, the other doctors will eventually return, and Dr. Randle…”

“That’s not good enough.” The words were rapped out, abrupt. Calea paused and took a breath. “They need not be perfect. Once we get where we are going and I have magic available to me again, I will re-create my old ones.”

“Calea, the magic is gone.” He turned a sob into a laugh. “The Well here in Averieom…more of a pond, it was, really…it’s drained….”

Shock flashed on her face. He kept going, unable to stop. She understood; she had to understand. No one else did.

“I felt it. Didn’t you feel it? The wells are empty. The magic is gone. Not that I was ever any great shakes at magic, poor little Eman, washed out of the Academy, almost bottomed out the Falsan scale, but I could feel it. I could touch it. I could change the temperature of objects at will…. Such a useful skill, wouldn’t you agree? If you ever needed a hot flannel, or a cold one, Eman Burdock was your man. So, I became a doctor. But I felt it. I felt the virtue go out of the world. The wells are empty. We are cold and alone and barren once more….”

Pain flared across his face. Someone had slapped him. Startled, Eman opened his eyes and looked up. Bron held his shoulders in a firm, painful grip, staring steadily into his eyes. Telling him to be silent, to stop babbling, to find his courage and be a man.

Behind him, Calea’s white face stood out against the whitewashed wall. She looked about to faint.

Dr. Burdock pulled in a breath. “I’m sorry. Please forgive my disgraceful behavior.”

She nodded, once, and Bron released his shoulders and stood back.

Dr. Burdock raised his hands to his face, pulling himself together. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I’m a generalist. I have never fashioned prosthetics.”

“Anything you could do would be helpful,” Bron said.

“I wouldn’t know where to start.” He paced away, waving a hand in the air to show the enormity of the task. “There would have to be measurements, mechanical tooling, a number of fittings. You’d have to stay here for several days while it was all worked out, and I don’t have the supplies to keep you. It’s dangerous here, anyway, perhaps especially for a Select from Jalseion. There is animosity in the people now, against the magic and magic-users who have failed them. And there could be vandals out there, brigands. It’s…”

He stopped. He was babbling again. He turned back to them, raising his chin. “It’s impossible.”

Calea snorted. “Impossible? You said you wouldn’t know where to start, then went on to list several steps. You obviously know something of the process.”

“Calea Lisan is one of the most promising Select of this generation,” Bron said. “She will be needed to figure out what happened and restore things to the way they were. You must help us.”

Dr. Burdock shook his head, even though they were making sense. If there was even a chance that Calea could fix this… Hope flared in his chest, as hard as he tried to shove it down. “Still…it’s too dangerous. The people…”

“I am a bodyguard of some skill,” Bron said. “I will keep you and this building safe until the prosthetics are finished. By then the unrest will have passed.”

That sounded far too optimistic to Dr. Burdock. But he found himself nodding along. “I… Yes, very well. I will do what I can.” This was why he was here, he reminded himself. Bron seemed like a very capable man. And a thin thread inside him latched on to the opportunity to share this empty place. It was too strange, being the only doctor in a campus of buildings that usually hummed with activity.

He turned away, mind running ahead to what he would need. “I’ll need to take measurements….” He sighed. “Too bad that little assistant isn’t here. She used to help Dr. Randle sometimes, but she hasn’t been in since the earthquake.”

“Assistant?” Bron’s hand was on his shoulder again, turning him around. “Who is she? She didn’t go to Jalseion?”

Dr. Burdock shook his head. “I haven’t seen her since… But everything has been disrupted, businesses, homes… I assume she and her family left, or else she surely would have come in. Nyasha loves working here. She’s helped all of us at various times.” He chuckled, hard, and it ripped at his chest. “She’s so young, not even an official student, but you know, she just started coming around here and wouldn’t leave, and eventually we started giving her jobs….”

“She can help,” Calea said. “She knows more than you.”

“On the subject of prosthetics, yes.”

“Tell me where she lives,” Bron asked. No, demanded. “I will fetch her.”

Dr. Eman Burdock was afraid to go out. This was a town fresh from calamity.

Two days ago, in the gray light just after dawn, there had been what felt like an earthquake. The flow of magical power had ceased, causing every light to go out, every mechanical device to stop functioning. Tiny little Averieom, best known for its medical school, its training and research, its nurses and doctors, had panicked. Dr. Burdock had stumbled out of his house into the street, shell-shocked, barely aware of what he was doing, and had run almost straight into a mob.

Most of the people were as shocked and afraid as he was. But a few thought they knew what was going on, and their muttering quickly grew louder until it became shouts and wails. “The Select did this to us!” they cried. “They cut off our power! They’re leaving us in the cold on purpose!”

“Why?” asked someone else in the crowd. It wasn’t Dr. Burdock; he was too dismayed to speak. “Why would they do that?”

“To teach us a lesson. To prove their power over us. Because they felt like it. Who knows? The Select have always looked down on us and treated us like children. This is just more of the same. Down with tyranny! Down with the Select!”

Some in the crowd protested. Most Averieans saw the Select as their benefactors. Technology from trading with Jalseion improved everyone’s lives. The liaison between the Jalseion Academy and the Averieom Medical Sanctuary kept this town relevant in the larger world and much better off than some villages. The flow of magic current from Averieom’s Well, facilitated by the Select, lit the lamps, heated their homes, and powered everything from transports to large manufactories to automated butter churns.

”We have no proof the Select had anything to do with this,” someone said. Dr. Burdock thought he recognized the voice of Lani Alver, the grocer on Capital Street. Count on her to be a voice of reason, he thought, though his shoulders refused to relax. “It could be an attack from Thyrion. It could be that there’s been some terrible accident and power will be restored soon.”

A ripple ran through the crowd, caused by a commotion on the opposite side of the press. Someone new had arrived, rousing the people to new heights of agitation.

“The Well is empty!”

It was a thin cry, completely unrecognizable in distress. Dr. Burdock’s breath stopped in his throat, and he could feel his eyes widening and widening. His knees locked, his hands froze into claws, and goose pimples crept to life across his shoulders, his arms, his neck.

He’d known it. Hadn’t he? He’d felt it, he had. The Well was empty. The magic was gone.

Other voices questioned, demanded proof. Other people could not bring themselves to believe the word of a single witness. Eman Burdock didn’t have to ask. He needed no more proof. He stumbled back until he hit a brick wall, cold and rough through his thin nightshirt, and he stood and he stared, and he knew.

The mob went wild, then. Eman stood against the wall, paralyzed by understanding and fear, as shop windows were smashed, as light poles were dragged down, as people scrambled and screamed and struck out in panic and fury. There should have been sparks when the light poles were pulled down, their wires snapped, but the air remained unshattered. He saw folks run by with burning brands, with goods stolen from Lani Alver’s grocery, from Ib Naro’s butcher shop, from the Busuns’ general store. The cries against the Select multiplied and grew, and voices of reason were drowned out, for this magical disaster must surely have a magical cause, and all must be laid at the feet of those agents of magic.

Eman stood still and made no attempt to stop them. He was a hare, nerveless and crippled under the eye of an eagle. All his tattered mind could manage was to pray, with little hope and less courage, that none of them would remember that he, too, had been Select.

The Well was empty.

He didn’t remember how he made it to the Medical Sanctuary. He was in the street; then he was leaning on the door, locked behind him. The entryway before him was dark, only dimly lit by the newly risen sun, by fire outside the window. He needed to find lamps for the windowless rooms inside the building. Or candles. Did they have any candles? A defunct technology from a forgotten age, only produced now for sentimentality, for cultural rituals and the love of nostalgia.

Instead, he hid in one of the exam rooms and did nothing else till the others arrived. It was a very cold stretch of time. Long, and cold, and empty, and alone.

A few hours later, when the town outside had been silent for some time, other members of the Sanctuary came to the building to regroup. They gathered in the entryway to discuss the situation. “Smoke is rising from Jalseion,” said Dr. Pemry, head of the Sanctuary. “It is our duty to assist our allies.”

Terror filled Eman’s chest, heavy as stones. “What, what about the damage to Averieom?” he forced out. “Surely we also have a duty to our home.”

Dr. Pemry looked at him with heavy eyelids, mouth small and disapproving behind his neatly trimmed beard. “Averieom’s damage is quite superficial.”

“Still, shouldn’t some of us stay here? Needy and injured will come to the Sanctuary for healing, as always.”

Every person in the circle of medical professionals looked to Dr. Pemry, and Eman knew he had made a point.

Their leader offered a slow nod, accepting, and Eman’s head felt like it would float off in relief. “Very well. We shall maintain a presence here, just in case.”

The others began to gather medical supplies, arrange transport, and organize themselves into teams for the search and rescue efforts. Eman helped where he could but never volunteered for a team. By the end of the day, he was the only doctor in Averieom.

Now, on the morning of the second day since the disaster, Dr. Burdock stood at a front window, peeking through the shade. The only time he’d left had been for a quick run, in the dead of night, to his house for food supplies. The running water still worked, so he would not have to worry about that.

What did worry him was outside. That crowd the first dawn had been people he knew. Friends, neighbors, patients. He had seen them looting stores owned by other neighbors, heard them calling death down on a group he belonged to. It had been horrifying to witness.

He knew he should be ashamed of his cowardice, but there was no room in him for shame. He would stay in here until it was safe. Until he could be sure that anger and panic no longer ruled his fellow citizens. If anyone was hurt and needed his help, they could come and he would do his best. But he would not put himself in danger.

In the past two days he had patched up various cuts and gashes, burns, and a broken limb or two, and heard a lot of gossip. The mood of the town was unsettled and confused. People were still afraid. That meant they could still turn on him.

A sudden thump and thud in the back of the clinic made Dr. Burdock start, nearly banging his head on the window. He whirled around, breath jumping in his throat. Maybe it was just the wind. A child throwing a ball against the wall. Something falling off an exam table.

More muffled noises, and these sounded like voices. Maybe not, then. Dr. Burdock ducked against the wall, hiding from the hallway leading back into the clinic building. More looters, vandals? Thieves looking for drugs and medical supplies? If they didn’t see him, he’d be able to get out….

And go where? He’d already run. This was supposed to be his sanctuary, too.

“Is anyone here?” A rough voice, strained and masculine, but not threatening. “We need medical assistance. I’m sorry to come in the back door, but it was closest to our path and we’ve journeyed far.”

A hand to his chest as if to calm his beating heart, Dr. Burdock moved slowly toward the voice. This was why he’d stayed at the clinic: to help the public in a way that would not endanger himself. He was a doctor. He must be a doctor.

“H…hello?” he called. “Who are you?”

“I am a bodyguard to the Select of Jalseion. I’ve brought Guide Calea Lisan for help.”

This is the second book of Bron and Calea.

Previously, in The Select’s Bodyguard, a Cataclysm emptied the city of Jalseion of magic from its central Well, resulting in the Select also losing all magic powers. Bron, bodyguard to Section Guide and Select scientist Calea Lisan, awoke to find his home collapsed on him. His only thought was to rescue his young charge, Calea, from her Tower home in the Wheel at the center of destruction. He crossed the flaming city to get to her.

Meanwhile, Calea, accustomed to magic to power one artificial arm and one artificial leg, was down to two working limbs and had to crawl her way to safety. When Bron found her, Calea insisted they go in search of a battery to power her limbs. Near her labs in the Academy, they discovered intruders attempting to steal Calea’s research and technology. Failing that, the intruders stole Calea’s artificial limbs…right off her body. Bron carried a weak Calea into the empty magic Well in the hopes of finding leftover magic. Though no form of physical magic was found, Calea mysteriously recuperated.

Now, Bron and Calea are on their way to Averieom to seek new limbs for Calea and discover whether magic still exists elsewhere in the world. Also, see the parallel storyline in The Fall of the House of Kyzer.