Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

He stepped up on the privy, ready to climb back through the canvas, then paused, turning to face Adare. Her eyes blazed.

“One more thing,” he said. “Kaden isn’t dead. The throne is his. And when this is all over, you’re going to give it back.”

“Black suits or no black suits,” declared Trevor Larch, the massive man with a huge brown beard who served as the mayor of Andt-Kyl, “it doesn’t matter.”

He already towered over the Flea, and, as though to emphasize both his words and his height, he took a step closer, stabbing a finger into the Wing leader’s chest. It was the last thing they needed. Long Fist was out there somewhere, driving his blood-mad horsemen across the Black, and here they were, wrangling with the head man of some no-account town on the puckered asshole of the empire. Worse, it seemed as though half the town had turned out in the central square to see the huge bird land and watch the ensuing showdown.

“We’re more’n capable of taking care of our own up here”-poke-“so why don’t you fly on south”-poke-“back where you came from.”

The Flea didn’t say anything. Didn’t move. “’Sides,” the mayor went on, puffed up with his obvious success, “don’t know what shit-eating bureaucrat decided it was a good idea to let women do the fighting, but I’ll tell you one thing and I’ll say it once so listen hard.”

“I’m listening,” the Flea said quietly.

Larch frowned at the tone, then raised his voice loud enough that the whole crowd could hear. “I’ve been running this town twenty-three years, I don’t take orders from anyone, and certainly not,” he concluded, stabbing a thick finger at Gwenna, “from some wench half my age who thinks carrying a sword makes her a man.” He chuckled at the thought. “I’d fuck her maybe,” he said, spreading his arms, getting some chuckles from the crowd, “but not follow her.” He turned back to the Flea, poked him in the chest again. “You got that?”

The Flea nodded, then stabbed him in the neck.

Larch dropped like a sack of rocks, blood spattering the dirt of the central square. Gwenna could only stare. There had been no warning, no escalation. Just stillness followed by death followed by stillness. Then Pyrre started laughing.

“All right,” she said, “maybe we could learn to work together.”

The people of Andt-Kyl took a few more heartbeats to believe what they saw, and then another man, this one shorter but even broader than Larch, came at the Flea with a long knife and a roar.

The Flea killed him, too.

Gwenna reached over her shoulder for her blades, but Newt stopped her with a firm hand.

“Don’t make it a fight,” he murmured.

Gwenna stared, first at the Flea, then at the Aphorist. “He’s the one doing all the killing,” she hissed.

“Killing isn’t fighting,” Newt replied. “These poor folks, they’ve never seen anything like this. Don’t know what to make of a man on a bird stabbing their mayor. Don’t know how to respond. If we draw, though…” He pursed his lips. “Starts to look like a brawl, and in these log towns, if there’s one thing they know, it’s brawling.”

It went against every instinct Gwenna had, but she lowered her hand. None of the other Kettral had so much as twitched. The Flea glanced down at the corpses at his feet, then over the crowd. When he spoke, the words didn’t sound loud, but he pitched his voice to carry.

“The Urghul are coming. You’re going to stop them.”

That sent an eddy of confusion and discontent through the crowd. Several straggling refugees from the tiny hamlets to the northeast had already stumbled into Andt-Kyl, cradling wounds and bringing stories of burned farms and murdered families. Somehow, though, the townspeople weren’t alarmed. They seemed to think it was a matter of raiding parties, rather than an entire army bearing down upon them.

“ You stop them,” someone shouted from the crowd. “You’re the fighters. We’re just here for the lumber.”

“You won’t be here at all,” the Flea said, “after the horsemen come through. They will kill most of you and keep the rest to sacrifice slowly, with steel and fire, to Meshkent. They will burn your town to ash. People at the south end of Scar Lake, all the way in Aats-Kyl, will hear you screaming.” He shrugged. “You could run, but they’d ride you down. They might pass by if you hide in the marsh. It’s been a long time since I was in a log town, but I didn’t take logmen for a bunch of runners and hiders.”

“We’re not running,” said a young man, thinner than Larch had been, but quite a bit taller than the Flea. He held a hooked peavey in one hand, the tool’s steel spike bright in the sunlight, but he leaned on it rather than using it as a weapon. “We’re not running, but we’ve got a way of doing things here, and killing the mayor ain’t it.”

The Flea eyed the peavey, then the man holding it. “What’s your name, son?”

“Bridger,” he replied.

The Flea nodded. “Good name.” He looked over the people assembled, pointed at an old woman in greasy wool near the front. “What do you think of Bridger, here, mother?”

She frowned at the question, glanced over her shoulder for support, found none, then looked back at the Flea. “Good man.”

“He get in fights?”

“Not much. Tends to keep to hisself. Quiet feller.”

The Flea nodded. “I like quiet fellers. Bridger, you’re the mayor.”

Bridger frowned. “You can’t just make me mayor.”

“Just did. Pursuant to Emergency War Measure Fifty-six.”

Gwenna leaned over to Newt. “What in ’Shael’s name is War Measure Fifty-six?”

The Aphorist shrugged. “Something about taxation on grain, I think.”

“So it doesn’t…”

“Nope.”

Bridger looked confused, but the Flea just patted him gently on the shoulder. “You’re in charge of the town, Gwenna’s in charge of you. If Gwenna dies, it’s Annick, but try not to let Gwenna die.”

“What about her?” the young man asked, nodding toward Pyrre.

“That’s General Pyrre. Listen to her, too.”

“Where are you going?”

The Flea pointed up into the shifting clouds. “Find some help.”

“Help?”

“From down south.”

“What if they don’t come in time?”

The Flea shrugged. “Ask Gwenna. Like I said, she’s in charge.”

* * *

Gwenna was tempted to stay on top of the beacon tower. The square stone structure stood atop a cliff on Andt-Kyl’s western island, overlooking the lake. According to Bridger, the loggers lit fires in the wide stone pit at the tower’s top to guide ships to the town’s docks on stormy days. Gwenna didn’t give a shit about the ships, but the tower offered an excellent vantage of the entire area. Just as importantly, it gave her a tiny measure of isolation.

After all the languages and tactics, the demolitions and archery, the conditioning and swordplay, Kettral training hadn’t left much time for useful tips on how to lead six hundred rough frontier loggers in the defense of their town. Even on the Islands, Gwenna hadn’t made a name for herself in the areas of charm and persuasion, and now that she suddenly found herself in charge of a baffled and restive local population, she almost wished she could just fight the Urghul alone. At least atop the tower, there was only Bridger and Annick to deal with. Pyrre was down below with the townspeople, maybe flirting with them, maybe killing them. Gwenna tried not to think about it, focusing, instead, on the local topography. That, at least, she had trained to understand.

Loggers had built Andt-Kyl at the small delta where the Black dumped into Scar Lake, a rough little town of log houses, log bridges, log temples, and log docks spread over two rocky islands at the river’s mouth. It was clear at a glance why the Flea had chosen the spot to bottle up the Urghul. The horsemen would have to cross three separate forks of the river, each running dark and deep. The network of bridges linking the islands to each other and to the shores on either side would be easy to control and, where necessary, to destroy.