The Providence of Fire

46

Il Tornja tried to dissuade her.

“It’s going to be a brutal march, Adare,” he said, nodding out over the inky expanse of the lake. The sky was still full black, the stars undiminished by any hint of dawn, and yet the Army of the North and the Sons of Flame were already ranked in their marching columns, the men muttering to one another. They kept their voices low, in the way of people everywhere who speak before the sun has risen. “You can’t ride,” the kenarang went on. “The lake bottom won’t support a horse, and if you give up halfway there, Ameredad can’t spare more than a few men to guard you.”

She bristled at the talk of giving up. “These are my soldiers,” she replied stiffly. “They are marching to defend my empire. I will march with them.”

“There is little you can do when we reach the Urghul.”

“I can be there.” Adare didn’t know much about soldiering, but she’d read enough treatises on war to understand the importance of morale. “I can show them that I’m not going to hide while they lay down their lives.”

And, she added silently, I can keep an eye on you.

She’d been forced to make common cause with the kenarang, but that didn’t mean she trusted him, not even with Nira’s hidden noose of fire tight around his neck.

Csestriim. Her mind still bucked at the notion, refused to truly accept it. She’d read thousands of pages about the Csestriim-treatises penned by scholars had who pored over their ancient cities, speculation by philosophers, religious tracts, and fantastic tales-but for all the ink spilled, none of it had seemed real. The fact that il Tornja, her father’s killer, her former lover, the man who at that very moment stood at her side gazing north into the night, was thousands of years old, had worn hundreds of names and played dozens of roles through the millennia … it just seemed impossible.

“Adare…” he began.

“I’m going,” she said. “Seventy miles. Thirty-five a day…”

“More, with the convolutions of the shoreline.”

“I’m going.”

He nodded, as though he had anticipated her stubbornness. How much of what she’d done had he anticipated? The question made her flesh crawl. She had no answer.

“At least,” he pressed, “march with the Army of the North, with me.”

Adare hesitated. The plan, hammered out between il Tornja and Vestan Ameredad while Adare looked on, was to split the armies. Ameredad would take the Sons up the eastern shore of the lake while il Tornja and the Army of the North moved along the west. The division meant that if the Urghul did try to slide down the sides of the lake, there would be a force to meet them whichever route they chose. Better, if the two armies were able to match pace-a big if-they’d have a chance to catch Long Fist between them. The arguments made good sense, but the division worried Adare. Ideally she would have been able to keep an eye on both Ameredad and il Tornja, but then, the world wasn’t ideal.

“The Sons are mine,” she said.

Il Tornja nodded. “Understood. But you are Emperor now. Which means the legions are yours as well. It would do the men good to see you among them. Ameredad is more than capable of leading his own soldiers.”

Adare hesitated. It was a question, really, of who she could trust more. Or who she trusted least. Ameredad had nearly killed her, but of the two, il Tornja was by far the more dangerous. Which meant staying with il Tornja.

“All right,” she said finally, “I’ll stay with the legions.”

He nodded, then waved over a messenger.

“Inform the commander of the Sons of Flame that the Emperor has decided to march with the Army of the North.”

The man repeated the words back, saluted, then jogged east across the drying lake bed toward the assembled ranks of Intarra’s faithful. Adare wondered how Lehav would take the news, then decided it didn’t matter.

For a while they stood side by side in silence, an emperor who was not truly an emperor and a general who was far more than a general, watching the cold breeze ruffle the surface of the lake, shattering and shifting the reflected light of the stars.

“What happens if we don’t get there in time?” she asked.

Il Tornja shrugged. “Andt-Kyl is a choke point across the Black,” he replied. “It’s the one place we know the Urghul have to go. If they get past it … we could be hunting them all over the north, chasing them down while they burn towns and murder Annurians from Breata to Katal.”

“But the swamps,” Adare said. “The lakes. If we can’t move through this mess, how can they?”

“Oh, the terrain will slow them down for a while. It might take weeks for the army to break out of the Thousand Lakes, but they can split into dozens of bands, work their way through the wetlands at whatever pace they want. Once they break out onto solid, open ground, it’s over. They have a mounted army. We don’t.”

“Well then,” Adare said grimly, “we’d better get there in time.”

And so, as the sun rose through the trees and the cool wind gusted south across the lake, Adare marched north, Ran il Tornja at her side, Fulton stalking a pace back, the long ranks of the Army of the North strung out along the narrow strip of dry lake bed between the trees and the lapping water.

That water seemed to go on forever, stretching north to where it hazed with the horizon. Seventy didn’t look like much on the maps. Adare had covered ten times that distance since fleeing the Dawn Palace. Not, however, at the pace of the army quickstep, not hammering six or seven miles before the sun was even up. Her legs trembled, the arches of her feet ached, her shoulders had wound into a knot so tight it hurt to turn her head, and all she could see to the north was the endless line of dark firs marching away into the distance.

Rounding a sharp promontory sometime before dawn, she stumbled on the uneven stones littering the newly dried fringe of the lake. In a moment, Fulton was at her side, taking her elbow discreetly.

Adare shook him off.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”

“Of course, Your Radiance,” he murmured, dropping his hand but remaining at her shoulder.

For a while they walked in silence, listening to the thousands of boots crunching behind them, to the clank of steel on steel as soldiers shifted their weapons. Adare glanced over. The Aedolian was wearing a quarter his weight in armor, well more than the most heavily laden legionary, but if the strain bothered him, he didn’t show it. Hand on the pommel of his sword, eyes fixed resolutely ahead, he marched with all the strength of the younger men following behind. He was no longer as cadaverously thin as he had been in Olon, but the past months had left their marks on his face, in his graying hair.

“Thank you,” Adare said quietly, surprised that she had spoken.

He turned to look at her. “For what, Your Radiance?”

“For coming after me,” she replied. “For staying after … after what I did. At the Well…”

“No thanks are necessary, Your Radiance,” he replied. “We all have our duty. Yours is to rule. Mine is to make sure you stay alive to do so.”

“I just want you to know that I appreciate it-everything you’ve done for me.”

He watched her for a while. “Please do not take this the wrong way, Your Radiance,” he replied at last, “but it isn’t for you.”

Adare shook her head, confused.

It was a long time before Fulton spoke again. When he did, his voice was low, private, as though he’d forgotten she was there.

“I decided a long time ago what kind of man I wanted to be. I’ve sworn oaths to your family, but it is the promises a man makes to himself that he must keep.”

She waited for him to say more, but he turned his eyes north, picked up the pace slightly, and walked on in silence, leaving Adare to her pain and her pondering. She was jealous of it, she realized, this unwavering fidelity to one’s own code, the keeping of unspoken promises offered up in silence from the self to the self. She envied the Aedolian his ability to stay true to his convictions, and more, she envied him the convictions themselves. She had had convictions once, beliefs about justice and honor, right and wrong, but the slow turning of the world, like a mill wheel over grain, had ground them down to flour so fine that it slipped softly and silently between her fingers.

* * *

Dawn seemed a long time in coming. Valyn watched as the sky faded from black to bruise, from bruise to a wash of sallow yellow, dull as warmed-over wax, pale light suffusing the air above the serrated tops of the firs. By the time the sun finally rose, a blanched and pallid disc in the morning fog, the extent of the destruction below was already clear.

The eastern island, abandoned by the villagers the night before, still cracked and smoldered. The Urghul had put the homes, barns, and stables to the torch almost immediately, using the livid conflagration to light their assault on the central bridges. The houses had burned most of the night, white-hot at first, then orange, then red, glowing beams collapsing in on themselves every so often in a spray of sparks and a renewed hissing of embers. By morning the fires had ceded their light to the dull glow of the sun, but oily, acrid smoke still lingered in the air, and the hooves of the horses moving between the burned-out frames kicked up clouds of ash. Half a town destroyed in a single night. People’s homes, their history …

Valyn didn’t give a shit.

You could rebuild a house. An ax, a few good logs, a month to work-that was all it took. He stared at Laith’s leg. It jutted out from beneath a fallen horse, the dead flier and dead beast alike tumbled onto the mud flats when the villagers finally managed to bring down the second bridge. That was all he could see of his friend: a boot and a few feet of dirty cloth, the fabric so worn and filthy that it looked brown rather than black. There were scores of bodies down there, Urghul and Annurian, twisted in all the various poses of dead. Dancing with Ananshael, the Kettral called it. It didn’t look like dancing. It looked like death, and there was no rebuilding the dead, not with any number of axes or months.

That the loggers had brought down the bridge was just about the only bright spot in the murk of the morning. When Laith fell, the Urghul had redoubled their attack, heedless of the arrows rained on them, seemingly indifferent to the screaming of their horses as they crashed through the bridge rail and into the channel below. Even Pyrre was forced back behind the barricade, and for a few horrible minutes it looked as though the horsemen would break through. Then the loggers working beneath with their heavy felling axes managed to cut through the pilings and the whole western end of the span sagged, groaning as the wood bent beneath the strain, then snapped. It took half the barricade with it, but that didn’t matter. Without a bridge to cross, the Urghul had no way to press their attack, and so, sometime around midnight, they fell back onto the eastern island, regrouping for the dawn.

“Balendin’s there,” Talal said, pointing through the smoke toward what had been the town square. “He’s crossed the first channel.”

Valyn raised the long lens. Gwenna’s explosion had blasted out most of the log dam, but it was still possible to sneak across on foot, darting from one trunk to the next. The Urghul had been doing so all night, replenishing their numbers on the one island they held. It was a slow and painstaking process, one that forced them to leave their horses behind, but then, if they found a way to cross the central channel, it would be the numbers, not the horses that mattered.

Valyn focused on Balendin. There had been no sign of the leach all night. What he’d been doing during the last attack, Valyn had no idea, but there he was, arms stained past the elbows with blood, bison cloak wrapped around his shoulders, feathers in his hair twisting in the morning wind, eyes fixed firmly on the island to the west, where Valyn watched from atop his tower and the loggers prepared for the next assault.

Valyn shifted the long lens. “He brought his prisoners.”

Talal nodded silently.

The captives-dozens of them-knelt in ragged ranks across what had been the northern end of the town square. Their wrists were bound and rough rope noosed their necks, linking one to the next, preventing anyone from running. None of them looked likely to try. Most kept their eyes on the mud, as though by shirking the gaze of their captors they might somehow escape notice. The faces of those few who did look up were filled with terror rather than defiance. They watched Balendin as he paced back and forth in the square with all the mindless helplessness of livestock waiting their turn at the slaughter.

A wave of dark disgust rose inside Valyn.

“Almost a hundred of them,” he muttered, “and not one making any sort of play. Not one fighting back.”

Talal shifted his eyes from the square to Valyn.

“They’re not Kettral,” the leach said quietly. “They don’t know how to fight back.”

He was right, but that didn’t make the spectacle of several dozen men and women waiting meekly for their own horrific murders any easier to stomach. Valyn watched as two ksaabe cut an older man loose from the line, then dragged him forward to the center of the square. Balendin considered his captive for a moment, then smiled and drew his knife. The man began to pray, a frantic, repetitive plaint to Heqet that did nothing to stop the blade. Balendin took his right eye first, then his ear, then his shriveled cock.

“He’s gathering his power,” Valyn said, forcing himself to watch.

Talal nodded. “The question is: what’s he going to do with it?”

They didn’t need to wait long to find out. Balendin left his victim alive, barely-a defaced and disfigured creature thrashing weakly in the mud, a spectacle for the others to contemplate. Then he turned toward the center channel, raised one hand halfway, finger extended, and fixed his eyes on the shattered bridge. After a few heartbeats, it began to rise from the mud, twisting and contorting in midair like some massive wooden snake testing the morning breeze. The planks and logs shifted, grinding against one another, the whole thing undulating with Balendin’s uncertainty. The leach didn’t move. He didn’t even seem to breathe, and after a few more heartbeats the bridge settled into place.

“Holy Hull,” Valyn said.

Talal just stared.

The Urghul eyed the newly repaired bridge with trepidation, clearly as shocked and dismayed as the villagers on the west island. Then a horn began to sound, and another, and another, and the warriors began screaming, shaking spears and swords, swarming forward onto the resurrected decking.

“How long can he do that?” Valyn asked.

Talal hesitated. “I don’t know. With all those prisoners fueling his well?” He shook his head. “Balendin took down Manker’s tavern just drawing on one girl. Holding something up is harder than tearing it down, a lot harder, but he’s got nearly a hundred people there, all terrified of him. Plus the people of Andt-Kyl.” He shook his head. “He’s probably leaching off us, even. At this distance, he can feel our hate, our anger.”

“Annick…” Valyn began, but even as he watched, an arrow drove through the morning air toward the leach. Then, as though glancing off invisible steel, skittered away into the mud and rubble. Two more followed with no more effect. The corner of Balendin’s mouth turned up.

“He’s stronger than I realized,” Talal said. “A lot stronger.”

Valyn glanced down at the bridge. It was precarious, shifting and swaying with some unseen wind, and the Urghul couldn’t cross as quickly as they would have liked. With enough arrows and enough backbone, the loggers would be able to hold them for a while. A little while. He turned to the lake. No sign of il Tornja or Adare. No sign of either army. From atop the tower, he could see at least ten miles south along both banks, which meant there would be no relief that morning.

“We have to stop him,” Talal murmured.

“You can’t stop him,” Valyn said. “You can’t even get close to him.”

The leach frowned. “I don’t need to get close to him. I just need to get close to his well.”

Valyn hesitated. “The prisoners,” he said slowly.

“The prisoners.”

“You’re going to try to free them?”

“No,” Talal said, his face weary, defeated. “I’m going to try to kill them.”

* * *

“Gwenna.”

The pain woke her as much as the voice, pain like a blade buried low in her back.

“Gwenna.”

She shifted, cried out, then felt a strong hand clamp down on her mouth. When she tried to thrust it away, the pain lanced out into her wrist, shoulder, leg.

“It’s Talal. Don’t shout. The Urghul are right on top of us.”

Talal. So she wasn’t dead. That was a good thing. She tried to nod and the pain spiked up through her neck. She subsided against the mud and reconsidered. Maybe alive wasn’t such a good thing after all.

“Did we…” she began, then started coughing, the spasm wracking her so viciously that she passed out all over again.

When she came to once more, she could see more clearly. She was inside somewhere, planks overhead blotting the sun. She could hear water. When she turned her head a fraction she realized she was lying in the ’Kent-kissing water. Talal was cradling her head, eyes wide with concern.

“You blew the bridge,” he murmured. “It worked.”

“Well, thank Hull for that,” she said, her tongue fat and swollen in her mouth.

The leach grimaced. “There’s more. Balendin got across. And a lot of Urghul. They’re attacking the western island now.”

Gwenna forced herself up on one elbow. The pain gouged at her in a dozen places, but she ground her teeth and closed her eyes until it subsided.

“Where are we?”

“Under one of the docks,” he replied. “On the south shore of the eastern island.”

“Thanks for coming after me.”

He gave her a rueful smile. “I didn’t. We thought you were dead.”

“We?”

“Valyn and I.”

She stared, trying to think past the pain and confusion. Talal was there, and Valyn, probably Laith, too, all of them in Andt-Kyl.

“What are you doing here?”

Talal opened his mouth to explain, then shook his head. “There’s no time. I swam over because Balendin’s using the captives, using their terror to hold up the center bridge.”

Gwenna took a moment to absorb that. “All right,” she said, levering herself into a seated position. “How do we stop him?”

The leach glanced down at her leg. “You’re pretty beat up, Gwenna. That ankle’s broken, and I pulled a jagged length of wood out of your back before you woke up. Another inch to the left, and you’d be dead.”

She tested the flesh of her lower back weakly, finding a hastily wrapped field dressing. When she pressed down on the cloth, she almost passed out all over again.

“Just tell me the plan,” she growled.

Talal shook his head helplessly. “Kill the captives. Balendin has himself shielded, but if I can get to them, if I can kill even half, I doubt he’ll have the power to hold up the bridge.”

“Kill half of them?” Gwenna asked, shaking her head weakly. “How are you planning to do that?”

“They’re backed up to some burned-out buildings. I’ll make my way through the rubble, slip in behind them, and start cutting throats. The Urghul aren’t very well organized on this side. They don’t expect an attack on their prisoners.”

Gwenna stared, aghast. “They don’t need to be fucking organized! You might kill five or six, Talal … ten at the outside, and then they’ll be all over you. There’s no cover in that ’Kent-kissing square, nowhere to hide.”

Talal took a deep breath. “I know. But it’s this, or we lose the town. Il Tornja’s army is nowhere in sight. I don’t understand Balendin’s well nearly as well as I’d like, but even ten prisoners might make a difference. I have to try.”

“Well, fuck,” Gwenna said, shifting onto her knees. “I guess that makes two of us.”

“No,” Talal said, glancing at her broken ankle again. “You’ll just slow me down.”

“I might slow you down,” she replied, gritting her teeth, “but I’ve got the explosives.”

* * *

The armies were close-maybe nine miles off and marching at the double-but they might as well have been lazing around on the Godsway back in Annur for all the good they were able to do the people of Andt-Kyl. For the better part of an hour, Valyn had watched the Urghul swarm over Balendin’s unnaturally supported bridge, pressing forward against the crumbling barricade at the far end. Three times they’d made it across, only to be driven back by il Tornja’s scouts, Annick, and Pyrre, who seemed to be holding themselves in reserve to deal just with such breaches. Each time the Urghul managed to thrust through, the small knot of soldiers hammered them back, holding the line while the reeling loggers regained their footing and their confidence. They were saving the town, and with it the northern atrepies of the empire, while Valyn watched, hidden on the roof of the tower, holding to a discipline that felt crucial and evil at the same time.

He watched the Annurians beat back another attack, then cursed under his breath, jerking the long lens around to the south, studying the two armies once more. Judging from the standards, the Sons of Flame were to the east, while the Army of the North was working up the western shore. Il Tornja’s group was making better time than the Intarran troops, but not enough better.

“Just get here,” he muttered. “Just get here, you fucking bastard. Get here.”

The words, of course, changed nothing. The army could only march as fast as it could march, and Valyn could only watch, first the battle below, then the distant troops, running the numbers over and over in his head, hating the answer every time he arrived at it.

Since slipping over the side of the roof nearly an hour earlier, Talal had disappeared. Valyn thought he’d seen the leach out in the lake, swimming toward the eastern island, but he’d lost track of him amongst the bobbing logs and hadn’t been able to find him again. He swung the long lens over to Balendin. The corpses were piled around him now, eight or nine. As Valyn watched, one of the Urghul riders was gesturing urgently to the south. Balendin grimaced, then nodded, holding one hand out toward the central bridge as though to fix it in place, then turning toward the eastern shore. To Valyn’s horror, the loose raft of logs bobbing between the pilings began to pack tighter, stacked by some invisible force.

Sweat streaked Balendin’s face, but his jaw was set, and as Valyn stared the Urghul dragged out two more prisoners, a man and a woman, and began to tear the skin from their flesh. Balendin’s lips moved as he directed the hideous ritual, and from the far shore the Urghul began to stream across the dam, no longer afoot, but on horse, riding straight over the island toward the central bridge and the loggers beyond.

Valyn searched the burned-out rubble desperately for Talal, stared until his eyes watered and his hands had twisted into claws around the long lens. There was no one. Nothing. Nothing but smoke, and embers, and death.

* * *

The slowness hurt. It hurt because Gwenna could hear the loggers fighting for their lives on the far side of the bridge, the high, strident calls of people struggling and losing slowly. It hurt because she could glimpse, through the burned-out hulks of the buildings, the awful mutilation of Balendin’s captives, the blood, and piss, and terror that she and Talal were too slow to prevent. And it hurt because just plain moving fucking hurt, and moving slowly just drew out the pain.

The cover was for shit, and Urghul were everywhere, afoot, on horse. Most were charging west, from one of Balendin’s bloody bridges to the other, the endless parade of horseflesh and steel that couldn’t end in anything but death for the people of Andt-Kyl. Enough, however, had spread out over the island, searching for ’Shael only knew what, that Gwenna and Talal were forced to hunch in shadowy corners for minutes at a time, to drag their way under still-smoldering beams and through rubble-filled cellar holes, all of which also hurt.

Gwenna would have cursed the fact that she couldn’t actually stand on her broken ankle, but then, standing only would have got her killed quicker, and so she sucked up the pain, kept her belly in the mud and ash, and dragged herself forward on her elbows behind Talal.

It came as a shock when she lifted her head to find the hunched backs of the prisoners just a few paces off. She had no idea how long it had taken them to traverse the island-it felt like days-but the screaming and dying to the west meant the battle wasn’t over yet. They weren’t too late.

She turned her attention to the square. Balendin stood near the center, ringed with the dead and dying, his face a mask of rapture and rage, the vessels at his temples pulsing, sweat matting his hair to his scalp, slicking his cheeks. Gwenna ducked back down behind the low, broken wall that hid them from view.

“Why don’t we just shoot him?” she hissed.

Talal shook his head. “Annick tried. He’s shielded. We can’t get at him.”

Gwenna took a deep, shuddering breath. Between the pain, the disorientation, and the shock at finding herself alive at all, she hadn’t allowed herself to consider what they were coming to do. It was the logical tactical decision. The only decision, as far as she could see. And it meant murdering scores of Annurians.

“What about a starshatter?” she asked, pulling the last remaining munition from her belt. “Will his shield stop that?”

Talal spread his hands hopelessly. “I don’t know. I just … I don’t know.”

Gwenna’s stomach clenched, and she forced down the urge to vomit. She could take a chance on Balendin, but they would only get the one chance. She risked another glance over the wall. A young man, no older than her, was groveling at Balendin’s feet. His eyes were gouged out, and when he tried to scream the sound came out a gurgling, slithering mess. Someone had slit his tongue, she realized. And they were starting on his fingers.

“Sweet ’Shael,” she said, sliding back behind the wall. “I don’t know if I can do it.”

Talal nodded grimly, hesitated, then extended his hand. “You light the wick. I’ll throw it.”

“It doesn’t matter who fucking throws it,” Gwenna spat.

The leach didn’t flinch. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It does. You don’t have to do this alone. You light it. I’ll throw it. We came here together, and we’ll finish it together.”

Suddenly, for no reason Gwenna could understand, she found herself weeping, the tears hot as coals on her cheeks.

“All right,” she said, words choking in her throat. She fumbled for the striker, found it, made a flame, and pressed it to the wick. “Together,” she said, passing the starshatter to Talal.

He took it, stared a moment at the burning wick as though it were a snake, closed his eyes, and mouthed a silent prayer. Then, with a roar, he stood from behind the wall and hurled it into the center of the doomed captives.

With a roar.

The last thing Gwenna thought before the starshatter exploded, tearing through bone and flesh, rending the bodies of dozens of helpless people like so much rotten meat, was that, until that moment, she’d never heard Talal raise his voice.