Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

He turned the empty pits of his eyes on her. “I don’t need to count them, Adare. That is what I have tried to tell you. This thing you call thought, call reason, this plodding, deliberative mental process-it is … unnecessary to my kind.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Thought and reason were the essence of the Csestriim. All the histories agree.”

He bent his face into a smile. “Ah. The histories.” He raised a hand, held up two fingers. “How many?”

Adare stared. “What?”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

She shook her head. “Two.”

“How do you know?”

“I just-”

“Did you count?”

“Of course not. I just … see them.”

The kenarang nodded. “In the same way, I just see”-he waved a hand at the slaughter taking place behind him-“all this.”

For a while all she could do was watch dumbly as the men screamed and the blood flowed. Il Tornja’s claim was too big, like being told there was another sky behind the sky.

“So we won?” she asked at last.

In an instant, the kenarang slipped back into his habitual wry smile. The horrifying emptiness drained from his eyes. “We?” he asked, amusement in his voice. “Yes, Your Radiance. We won.”

The words should have been a relief, but when she thought a moment about what they meant, about what this general of hers could do, about how tenuously Adare herself understood the kenning that bound him to her will, his victory seemed suddenly sharp and cold, a knife in the dead of winter pressed against her ribs.

The armies arrived too late.

Not too late to fight the Urghul-there was fighting aplenty when the legions and the Sons of Flame finally caught the horsemen between them, streets washed in blood, men and women locked in furious battle just about everywhere Valyn looked-but too late to make a difference for Gwenna and Talal.

The vanguard of il Tornja’s army arrived a little over an hour after the two Kettral set off the starshatter, killing half of Balendin’s prisoners and maiming most of the rest. It was a horrific, gruesome spectacle, bodies and parts of bodies strewn about like meat in an untidy abattoir. Valyn had watched one man cradling his own severed leg as though it were a baby, weeping into his lap until he bled out and died. Of Gwenna and Talal there was no sign. It was possible they’d escaped, or been crushed beneath the remnants of the wall. Valyn had scanned the bloody ground for them, sweeping the long lens back and forth, staring at corpse after corpse, his heart growing heavier and heavier inside his chest.

The blast worked. That much was clear. It didn’t kill Balendin, didn’t even seem to hurt him, but it severed his connection with his well, and, as he turned in shock to stare at the rising smoke, at the mangled wreckage of his prisoners, the two bridges sagged, then collapsed into the dark water beneath, carrying dozens of riders with them.

Not that that ended the fight. If anything, the violence redoubled with the collapse of the bridges. Thousands of Urghul had forced their way onto the westernmost island before the spans went down, twice that number remained on the eastern island, and the far bank teemed with the rest of the enormous force. The trapped riders fought with a renewed savagery, understanding that their only hope of survival lay in a crushing victory, and the Annurian forces, outnumbered and exhausted from their march, reeled beneath the assault, struggling to form up in the unfamiliar terrain. It looked altogether possible that, despite the fallen bridges, despite the arrival of the imperial armies, the Urghul would still win.

Then il Tornja arrived on the roof of the signal tower.

Valyn had taken up the position initially because it offered the best sight lines over the town. From the tower, he could see both armies, consider their deployment, then choose the best angle of attack when the time came. That the kenarang might use the ’Kent-kissing thing as his command center had seemed too much to hope.

Valyn had watched, gut tight, as il Tornja rode down the muddy street, guards behind and before him. It was tempting to take the shot then. To kill the general in the midst of so much swirling chaos seemed almost trivial, and Valyn went so far as to level the wound-up flatbow and sight in on the man’s forehead. It was Laith who stopped him. Laith and Gwenna and Talal. As far as Valyn knew, all three of them were dead somewhere in the twisted wreckage, all to hold back the Urghul. Finishing the battle was il Tornja’s job, and Valyn would be shipped to ’Shael before he undercut his Wing’s sacrifice. He eased his finger off the trigger. Adare said the man was a genius, and judging from the madness below he was going to need to be.

For most of the morning, Valyn lay still, hidden on the roof of the tower just a few feet from the kenarang, listening as he wove his inscrutable web. Despite a lifetime of military training, most of the orders made no sense at all to Valyn. Il Tornja abandoned points he could have held and held points he should have abandoned. He would send a runner with one message, then, moments later, contradict it with another runner or a signal arrow. He sent directives to let cornered Urghul escape, and more than once he gave direct orders that led to the capture of his own soldiers. And he killed men, killed them by the scores and by the hundreds, sacrificing entire units to Urghul traps that he could see clearly from the rooftops, sending men into fights they couldn’t possibly win, demanding that they hold positions they couldn’t possibly hold. It was insanity, utter insanity. And it worked.

Valyn had no idea how, but as the sun labored steadily higher, the Annurians began to win. There was no single victory that could account for it, no stunning charge or heroic stand. At least, not if you ignored the circle of death that surrounded Annick and Pyrre for hour after hour until they were pressed back behind a building and Valyn lost sight of them. In fact, he was hard-pressed to make any sense at all of the individual scenes of brutality and suffering playing out below.

He could, however, see the larger pattern as it emerged. The Annurians were pushing back the Urghul. Nothing startled the kenarang, nothing shocked him. Not the collapse of an entire company of archers, not the Urghul pressing up against the tower itself, not even Adare’s unexpected arrival on the tower roof. Valyn tried to catch the man’s smell. The world was awash in mud and blood and terror, but from il Tornja-nothing. He smelled like stone. Like snow. Like emptiness.

When the kenarang finally announced that the battle was over, all Valyn could do was stare. Men still screamed and died in the streets below, buildings still burned, steel still smashed against naked steel. It looked anything but over, and yet he could hear il Tornja rising to his feet below, could hear the messengers and signalmen departing down the stairwell, the trapdoor clattering shut behind them.

So, he thought, breathing out a slow, even breath, it is time .

He put his ear to the roof, listening to the people below. Adare and il Tornja continued to talk, and he could hear the Aedolian breathing, the grating of his armor as he shifted in place. The attack would have to be quick and brutal. Unfortunately, the kenarang had moved to the other side of the floor below. Valyn considered changing position before he struck, but the roof was warped and creaky. Any movement now would give him away. Striking from his current position would mean going through the Aedolian, but Valyn could cut his way through a guardsman. He would have preferred not to kill the man, but he would have preferred a lot of things.