Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

And to Valyn’s shocked relief, it did not. Hour after hour the Urghul went about their bloody sport without making anything but a few abortive efforts at crossing: two or three idiotic attempts to swim horses, a bizarre push to build a bridge by tossing a dozen logs into the channel and watching them bump up pointlessly against the old bridge pilings. By the time the sun began to set, the Urghul had made no real offensive at all.

And then they did.

An hour was all it took, half an hour, for the logs to build up. Valyn and his Wing could only watch, appalled, realizing along with the townsfolk what the Urghul intended. Somewhere, probably miles to the north, they’d found the timber that the townspeople had been logging all winter long. There would have been huge piles of it stacked at the side of the river, just waiting for the full summer floods to carry it down into Scar Lake. It wouldn’t take more than a few dozen riders to loose it all, thousands upon thousands of logs. With so much weight in the river, there was no need for an engineer. The current built the bridge, forcing the logs up against the remnants of the old pilings and holding them in place.

In minutes the horsemen had gone from riding idly up and down the far bank to a full-blown charge across the precarious and shifting raft. The foremost riders foundered on the loosely packed logs, the legs of their panicked, screaming mounts plunging into the gaps. The river had turned into a deadly chaos of shifting trunks and thrashing, dying beasts, but the unseated Urghul pressed forward on foot, voices and spears both raised in defiance.

Valyn’s eyes fixed on one woman with streaming braids and blood smeared over her face like paint. Her horse was gone, but she was darting forward, leaping nimbly from trunk to trunk, watching the logs, judging their movement, choosing her line. In other circumstances he would have admired her poise, her patience-she would have made good Kettral material. Problem was, she’d nearly crossed the channel. A few more well-timed leaps and she’d be into the mud flats on the near side. As though sensing this herself, she paused atop the shifting dam and turned back, waving her fellow warriors on, mouth pried wide with a scream he could see, could almost hear, like a fine file drawn over glass.

Then an arrow took her through the shoulder, spinning her halfway around, sending her tumbling into a gap between the logs. Valyn watched as the trunks, forced on by the current, closed around her chest. She thrashed desperately, heedless of the arrow wound, trying to claw her way free, but there was no freedom to be had. The river flowed on implacably, crushing her, then folding her under into the dark, invisible current.

If the dam had remained so precarious, the loggers would have had a shot, but it was clear even in the gathering gloom that both the logs and the water were working with the Urghul. More trunks piled up, stacking closer and closer together, until the horsemen were crossing in groups of three and four, sometimes keeping their saddles until the far bank. Valyn shifted the long lens to Annick. Her right arm was a blur as she aimed and shot, aimed and shot, too fast for Valyn himself to spot the relevant targets. Her face was turned away from him, but he could imagine her blue eyes gone gray as slate in the twilight, the hard set of her jaw. The mud flats gave her and her archers time, but the Urghul had numbers to spare and more. With the dam firming up, even Annick couldn’t hold them forever.

“Where in ’Shael’s sweet name is Gwenna off to?” Laith muttered.

Valyn turned to find her darting north between the houses, away from the fight. Didn’t seem like Gwenna to run away.

“Getting more archers, maybe,” Talal said.

“What archers?” Valyn asked, shaking his head. “Everyone who can hold a bow is already on that barricade.”

“We’ve got to go down,” Laith said.

Valyn shook his head. “And do what ? You don’t even have a bow.”

“I’ve got a pair of swords,” Laith spat. “I’ve got my fucking fists.”

“Your fists aren’t going to turn that tide,” Valyn growled. “Gwenna has her mission, and we have ours.”

“They need to fall back,” Talal murmured. “They’ve lost the far channel. They need to fall back to the western island and blow the central bridges.”

Valyn turned back to the battle. At a glance, it wasn’t obvious that the leach was right. Just a handful of riders had actually reached the barricade, and those were dispatched quickly enough by arrows and axes. As Valyn watched, Pyrre stepped from nowhere onto the highest log of the barrier, swung onto a horse behind the rider like a young woman going for a gallop with her gallant, hugging him close around the chest. Valyn caught a glimpse of steel in the starlight, and the man crumpled forward, then off, tumbling to the ground. Pyrre shrugged into better position on the horse’s back, then kicked the mount north along the far side of the barricade, alone among the mass of Urghul. She charged directly into two more riders, leapt free as the horses went down in a tangle of thrashing limbs and hooves, landed atop the piled logs, then dropped down once more to cut the throats of the struggling Urghul.

It still looked like the villagers might hold, unless you glanced over to the far bank and saw the army pressing forward, unnumbered, spilling endlessly out of the shadows between the trees. The loggers were tough, but they weren’t trained soldiers. Everyone had a breaking point, and when they broke, it would be a slaughter.

“Annick will pull them back,” Valyn said, praying that it was true. The sniper had a good mind for tactics, but it wasn’t at all clear she cared whether a few hundred loggers died on Urghul spears. She might have decided on some coldhearted sacrificial gambit known only to herself. “Annick will pull them back.”

Talal pointed. “There.”

The villagers were withdrawing. Not a rout, but a purposeful, single-file retreat westward through the village square and over the bridges joining the two islands. Annick stayed. Pyrre stayed. A few dozen hard-looking men and set-jawed women stayed, too, loosing arrows grimly into the massing horsemen, holding them while the others pulled back. The retreat seemed to take days, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes before the loggers from the barricade had backed across the middle bridges onto the western island.

Meanwhile, scores of Urghul had gained the bank of the eastern island, their horses wallowing up through the mud flats or rearing at the barricade. That barricade was high enough to hold off the mounted riders for a few more moments, but it was going to be a close thing for those covering the retreat. A few Urghul had already dismounted to haul haphazardly on the logs. When they’d pried open a gap, the island was lost.

“Gwenna better have those central bridges rigged,” Valyn said, his whole body tight as a bent bow. He ached to be down there, fighting shoulder to shoulder with his Wing against the Urghul tide, doing his part to hold back the menace. His fist clenched and unclenched mindlessly, searching for something to seize, to smash. Everything about holding his own position felt wrong, but if he descended, all reasonable hope of killing il Tornja went straight into the shitter. He could feel the claws of rage and readiness sunk deep in his flesh, tearing at him, but it was this moment that he had trained for. Discipline, Hendran wrote, is the mind’s leash on the body.

“She’d better have those bridges rigged,” he said again, forcing his fist to relax.

The explosion came, all right, a dull roar tearing through the damp fabric of the night, low at first, then abruptly sharp and percussive, a thousand thousand awful rents and ruptures piled on one another until Valyn felt he might go deaf with the sound. The middle bridges, however, didn’t move, and it took him a heartbeat to realize that the explosion had come from the easternmost channel, from the packed dam of floating logs. Even as he stared, whole trunks, ten men high, were tossed into the air like so much kindling, raining down on the mud flats and the river alike, sending up great gouts of gray-white froth and spray, crushing Urghul and shattering their horses.