Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Gwenna looked over the crew, trying to see something different, something that might give her hope. She cursed the Flea again for putting her in charge. She wasn’t a general. She was a demo master. She’d trained to blow things up, not to lead people, she-

“Oh, Holy Hull,” she breathed, staring at the dam. “Oh fuck.”

She tried to run through a dozen calculations at the same time-weight, force, flow, distance, density-and failed. It was impossible to say how deep the dam went, how tangled the logs were, what it would take to dislodge them, but it was suddenly, perfectly clear what she had to do.

“Annick,” she said, turning to the sniper. “Hold them here.”

The sniper blinked. “Where are you going?”

Gwenna waved at the bridge. “I’m going to blow it.”

“They’ll fill you with arrows before you get halfway across, and a starshatter on the surface…” She shook her head. “It won’t work.”

“I’m not going across,” Gwenna said. “I’m going under.”

She had the faint satisfaction of seeing Annick’s eyes widen a fraction. She waited for the sniper to tell her it was insane, impossible, that the water was too cold, the dam too wide, the explosives inadequate to the task. Instead the sniper just nodded. Not that that should have been surprising.

Gwenna took a deep breath, then turned away from the barricades. She was going to die, that much seemed clear, but this kind of mission, at least, she understood.

“If you don’t see anything by full dark,” she said, “it didn’t work.”

The sniper nodded again. Then, as Gwenna grabbed her pack of munitions, Annick extended a hand. For just a moment she looked small, girl-like, confused.

“Good luck, Gwenna,” she said quietly.

Gwenna wasn’t sure whether to cry or shit herself.

* * *

By the time she got to North Island, the Urghul were already trying to cross back at the logjam. She couldn’t make out much more than the shapes of men, women, and horses in the distance and thickening dark, but it looked as though Annick was holding them, Annick along with the mud flats on either side of the channel and the precarious nature of the dam itself. Still, the Urghul had the numbers. Sooner or later a group would reach the near bank, and then it would be villagers and their wood axes against mounted horsemen with spears. Gwenna tried not to think about that.

To the north, Bridger and his crews had managed to divert the majority of the logs into the central and western channels, but enough still slipped through the east that simply floating with the current would be treacherous. As Gwenna watched, two huge trunks nudged together almost gently, bumping and rolling with the current. A person trapped between them would be crushed.

Well, she muttered to herself, best not get trapped.

It took only a moment to ready her starshatters and drop her boots, then three times as long to get up the courage to actually dive into the swirling, black water. The icy cold knocked the wind from her immediately, and she swirled out into the main channel kicking and gasping, trying to get a full breath as her chest constricted with the cold. She’d known it wouldn’t be like the ocean around the Islands-the Black was fed directly from the glacial runoff from the Romsdals-but this … her teeth were already chattering, and her fingers felt fat and foolish. She’d always found water more frightening in the darkness, as though it were a great pool that went all the way down into the earth, a hungry pit with no bottom, and darkness was falling fast.

There was nothing for it but to stroke hard downstream, to try to conserve the meager heat she’d built running north by swimming south, and so, starshatters tucked into her belt, she kicked hard for the dam. Halfway there, a log almost took her head off. She dove at the last moment, coming up on the far side as it smashed up against a floating raft of trunks. From the water, the mounted Urghul loomed up in silhouette against the gray night sky. She tried to count them, but it was all she could do to stay clear of the shifting logs, to keep her head above water as her limbs turned to lead. Somewhere ahead, a horse screamed, and someone tumbled into the water, clawing for a moment at the dam, then sucked beneath.

And then, all at once, she was almost on top of it, the jagged logs crushed together, looming like teeth from the swirling surface. She caught a glimpse of bodies pressed up against twisted wreckage, riders pinned by the current, drowned, their faces just inches from the good air. It sounded like there was fighting on the island, but she had no way to see it. There was just time to raise the starshatters above the surface, light them with a flick of a hand, to suck in a huge breath, manage half a prayer to Hull, and then dive, kicking down, down, down into the frigid, perfect blackness of the river bottom.

The midnight gongs had long since tolled when Kaden, Kiel, and Gabril began the long walk back to the Temple of Pleasure. They walked in silence, partly because they couldn’t speak freely on the streets of Annur, partly because there was nothing to say. Kaden had played his gambit, and it had failed. He could still hear the chaos of the warehouse, the various nobles shouting over each other, accusing, condemning, demanding.… Such a scene would have been impossible among the Shin, but then, that was the problem; neither Kiel nor Kaden had anticipated the full extent of the aristocrats’ irrationality, the strength of the clutching grasp in which their emotions held them.

He kept his hood up and his head down as they moved through the winding streets, eyes fixed on his own feet and those of Gabril and Kiel, who led the way a few paces ahead. For once, he was grateful for the disguise-the hood let him stay silent, let him drift in his own thoughts. Those thoughts-visions of failure and futility-had consumed him so fully that he almost strode directly into Kiel’s back when the man stopped short. Kaden started to speak, but Kiel pushed him back, quietly but firmly, down the street from which they had just emerged.

When they finally stopped, Kaden raised his head carefully, glancing from Gabril to the Csestriim.

“What?” he asked quietly.

“The Ishien,” Kiel replied. “Two of them, waiting in the shadows just outside the cobbler’s shop.”

Kaden took a long breath, forcing himself to calm. “Did they see us?”

Kiel shook his head.

“Who,” Gabril asked, “are the Ishien?”

Kaden started to explain, then thought better of it. “Enemies,” he said curtly. “Do you know another way into the temple?”

Gabril frowned. “Several.” He glanced over his shoulder. “These enemies of yours, they can fight?”

Kaden nodded.

“How did they follow you?”

Kaden considered the question. Matol couldn’t have tracked them from the kenta in the catacombs all the way to the temple. The memory of the ak’hanath sprang to mind, of their twisted, unnatural legs, of the red eyes bulging from the joints. But Matol wasn’t Csestriim. He didn’t have ak’hanath . Which meant the beshra’an .

“They didn’t follow,” Kaden said. “They anticipated. There are only a few places in Annur I could go, only a few places to which I have any connection. They’ve probably got men watching all of them.”

“You did not tell me this,” Gabril said, jaw tight.

“I didn’t know they would pursue me so quickly.”

“We can discuss it further,” Kiel said, “when we’re inside the temple.”

Getting inside the temple proved easier said than done. Gabril led them to three more entrances before they found one-a low stable outside a modest palace-that was unwatched. By the time they’d murmured Morjeta’s passphrase to the pair of guards, descended through the long tunnel underground, and emerged into one of the small garden pavilions, Kaden wanted nothing more than to sleep. Dawn would be soon enough to fully confront the implications of his failure, both with the council and the Ishien, soon enough to start searching for another path. His mind felt battered by the strange tides of emotion: the hope, fear, anger, and despair. How most people lived with such emotions every day, with feelings a hundred times stronger, he had no idea. Even the residual tug of longing and loss was enough to disorder all hope of rational thought.