Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“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.