Free The Fortress of Glass by Drake David

could do that'd make a difference.
    If Ilna'd been alone, she'd have taken lengths of yarn out of her left sleeve and begun knotting a pattern. She smiled wryly. Her powers were considerable but they didn't rise to ripping large rocks out of the sky, so that wouldn't have helped either.
    The work made her feel more content, though.
    She wasn't alone. She was responsible for Merota, and though the girl was putting a brave face on it she was understandably terrified. Ilna wasn't going to fill her last moments of life with the knowledge she'd just abandoned a frightened child.
    She, Merota, and Chalcus had been seated on a middle row of the bleachers, down at the right end. The rows beneath them-three; she'd counted them off on her fingers as she stepped up-were the seats of the island nobility who were going to march up to the pyre and throw on incense. The rows above-two more-were nobles as well, but seated higher because they were less important and didn't have any duties during the funeral except to be part of the spectacle. They were rich farmers for the most part, judging by their talk and gaudy tastelessness.
    Those folk were the problem now. They were trying to get to the ground, and in their panic they probably wouldn't have cared if that meant trampling a small woman and the ten-year-old girl in her charge.
    They cared when Chalcus jumped onto his seat and faced them, though, sword and dagger drawn. One fellow tried to push through anyway; Chalcus' left hand moved too quickly to see. The panicked local clapped his hands to his face and sprang back, three long gold chains dancing as he fell on the bleachers. Blood from his slit nostril flickered in the air.
    Ilna's smile grew minusculy wider: Chalcus understood duty also. If she was about to die, and it certainly seemed that she was, she was fortunate to do it at the side of a man in the best sense of the word.
    The sling-stone-the meteor, since Merota was educated and doubtless knew the right word-exploded high in the sky. Ilna's face was bent down but she felt the flash on the backs of her hands. She braced herself because she remembered what'd happened when the earlier meteor hit the sea, but the shockwave this time was beyond anything she'd imagined.
    Clutching Merota with one hand, Ilna turned an unintended cartwheel. The bleachers, raw wood beneath a drape of red muslin like the steps up the pyre-had flexed down and then sprung back again. She tried to grab Chalcus-for the contact rather than because it'd help in any material way-but he was spinning off in a different direction.
    Ilna, Merota, and several handfuls of other spectators crashed down onto the bleachers together; boards broke. The whole structure collapsed in a tangle of splinters and torn cloth.
    Ilna jumped to her feet. The back of her right wrist was skinned, but she wasn't really injured.
    "Merota, are you hurt?" she said. The girl wrapped her arms around Ilna's torso and sobbed into the bosom of her tunic.
    People were shouting and crying, but only a few of them had real injuries. A splinter as long as sword blade had run through a middle-aged woman's right calf. She stared at it in shocked amazement; Chalcus, glancing first to see that Ilna and Merota were all right, knelt at the victim's side. He sheathed the sword he hadn't lost in the tumult, then used the dagger to cut a length off his sash for a bandage or tourniquet.
    Ilna looked around plaza. The troops who'd been formed by battalions in a semicircle around the bleachers had fallen like ten-pins, their armor and weapons clattering. Now they were picking themselves up and dressing their ranks. Some soldiers were gray-faced with fear, but instead of running they trusted their safety to discipline and their fellows just as they'd been trained to do.
    Ilna supposed that sort of training was useful-for people who couldn't simply overcome their fears by will power. She was afraid of many things: afraid of failure; afraid of making a fool of