Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Long Fist’s army had since crossed the White River north of the confluence, avoiding the Annurian forts to the east. The rafts ferrying the horses and their riders were ridiculous, precarious craft, crudely lashed and awkwardly balanced, but there were hundreds of them, hundreds upon hundreds, the numbers alone betraying months of preparation; Gwenna felt sick to her stomach when she saw them lined up along the shore. Long Fist didn’t need rafts to defend his land. He needed them to attack.

By the time they’d crossed the river, the shaman had dropped all pretense of their “honored guest” status. Their tent was ringed with guards each night, and they weren’t allowed out except in the evening, when they were forced to take part in the bloody nighttime rituals.

It had taken hours for Gwenna’s hands to stop shaking after killing the first young soldier. After three more nights of blood and murder, she’d managed to bring her hands under control, but something inside her, something invisible, still trembled as though diseased. She felt like a fool; eight years she’d trained for this, trained to kill with blades and explosives, bows and bare hands, trained until she could choke someone twice her size with one arm or poison an entire legion. She had felt prepared, more than prepared, but when it came time, she found that while her hands could kill, nothing had prepared her mind for the horror. She couldn’t shake the memory of the sick, soft give of the stick driving home, the weight of the first young man as he slumped forward, his slick, warm blood on her hands.

And the killing didn’t end when Gwenna stopped. Each night, Annick had her turn between the fires, and Pyrre. There seemed to be no end to Long Fist’s prisoners: Annurian legionaries, Urghul thieves, and, since they’d crossed the river, a handful of thick-fisted loggers, Annurian citizens living beyond the edge of the empire itself. None were any match for the Kettral or Skullsworn, a fact that filled Gwenna with both relief and disgust. After a while, the Urghul started trying to delay the killing, to draw out the pain, depriving the women of any weapons whatsoever. It didn’t work. Annick always went straight for the eyes, accomplishing with her fingers what Gwenna had done with the stick, while Pyrre crushed the windpipe of every adversary with a single, casual blow of her stiffened fingers.

The fights were bad enough, but they were nothing next to the cutting and screaming that followed. Long Fist himself, arms drenched past the elbows in gore, had personally hacked the hearts from a dozen young soldiers staked into the earth. The shaman had a way with his knife, managing to avoid all the major arteries, to keep the victims alive even as he lifted the still-beating heart clear of the ribs, squeezing it in his fist. Unsurprisingly, Balendin had also taken to the work, eyes bright as he drank in the terror of his captives, hands horribly slow and sure as he flayed them, thin strips of skin pliant beneath his knife. It was one thing to hear about the worship of Meshkent in some lecture hall back on the Islands, something else to witness it. Something else to take part.

Worse, the horror of the nightly sacrifices was only a prelude to what would happen on a much broader scale during any actual invasion. If the Urghul broke across the frontier, there’d be a lot more screaming on a lot more altars all across northern Annur. The nightmares woke Gwenna at night, her blacks drenched in a heavy sweat. She’d wanted to try to break free as soon as she realized the army was moving, but Pyrre had talked her down. The assassin’s attitude toward her captivity had soured significantly after the Kwihna Saapi began-evidently she preferred to murder on her own schedule-but she pointed out, to Gwenna’s frustration, that any escape on the steppe would be short-lived. No trees meant no cover, and no cover meant that the Urghul could ride them down like dogs. Now that they were past the river and starting to move south, however, Gwenna was about finished waiting.

“That,” she said, stabbing a finger past the tent wall, past the Urghul camp beyond, over the wet broken ground and the dark trees fringing the horizon to the west, “is the start of the Thousand Lakes. Annur.”

“It’s not Annur,” Pyrre corrected her, picking flakes of dried blood off her hands and flicking them into the fire. The evening’s sacrifices had only just ended, and while Gwenna wished she could swim herself clean in the ocean, the assassin treated the human blood on her hands the same way she might a little honest mud. “It’s not Annur until south of the Black. This is just…” She frowned with distaste. “… buggy. But, ” she continued, raising her hands to forestall Gwenna’s boiling objection, “we finally have some trees. I’d say that some point in the next few days would be a good time to bid our farewells, before we outlast our welcome and Long Fist decides to dispose of us more thoroughly.”

The Skullsworn’s words made Gwenna queasy. They were prisoners inside the api, inside the camp, but for some reason, Long Fist and Balendin continued to allow them their own tent, to speak to them with mock solicitude. The whole thing seemed like a trap, but Gwenna couldn’t see any point to it, not when the Urghul already had them trapped.

“Why hasn’t he done it already?” she demanded, grinding her knuckles into her palm. “We’re the most dangerous prisoners he has. Why aren’t we tied up like the rest?” She gestured vaguely to the comforts of the api . “Why aren’t we dead ?”

“A hedge,” Annick suggested, not looking up from the bison haunch she was busy butchering. “In case Valyn comes back. Or in case he decides we might be useful.”

“Maybe,” Pyrre said, picking at the dirt on her pants with a fingernail. She’d been forced to kill three men just an hour earlier, but she seemed most concerned about the damage to her clothing. “But I suspect it’s simpler than that.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we’re not dead because Long Fist needs us alive.”

“For what?” Gwenna spat. “Fun?”

Pyrre looked up, lips pursed as though ready to make some crack, then paused. “How does a man become a chief?” she asked finally. “A chief of anything, let alone a million Urghul?”

“Kills the people who want to kill him,” Gwenna said. “That’s what I’m saying . Long Fist’s a fool to leave us alive.”

Pyrre shook her head. “If he tried to kill everyone dangerous, he’d never get done killing. There’s always someone who wants to murder a chief. Long Fist can’t protect against them all. His position isn’t fully secure.”

“The bastard looks pretty secure when he’s hacking out hearts.”

“That’s because,” Pyrre said, “no one can imagine him dead.”

“I’ve been imagining it since I met him,” Gwenna snapped, irritated with the assassin’s roundabout platitudes. “In fact, I’m about to do some more imagining right now.”

“ You can imagine it,” Pyrre said, “but they can’t. When the Urghul look at him, they don’t see a man; they see a legend. All you need is a blade to kill a man.” She snorted. “All you need is fingernails, as you so ably demonstrated this evening. But a legend-a legend is unkillable, and he wears his own legend-uniter of the tribes, the man who made his own sacrifice to Meshkent, the one who plans to destroy Annur-just the same way he wears that bison skin. It’s a symbol of his power, his strength.”

“You’re saying he lets us wander around free because he believes his own bullshit?” Gwenna demanded, shaking her head. “That’s even stupider than I thought.”

“I’m saying that we are part of his legend: two Kettral and a Skullsworn tamed by the great chief to fight before his fires.”