Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Forgive me, Intarra, Adare begged, but the whole miserable bit of theater was not Intarra’s idea, not Intarra’s fault, and when the two soldiers had marched into their grave, it would not be Intarra who bore the awful weight in her chest day in and day out. It was all well and good to pray to the goddess, but Adare was the one with the hands, with the voice, and suddenly she realized she was screaming, lurching forward toward the Sons of Flame. With clumsy hands, she seized a spear from the nearest of the soldiers, the long shaft heavy and wet, unwieldy in her grip.

“No!” she bellowed, charging down the open path in the wake of the Aedolians. It was a foolish gesture, beyond foolish. She couldn’t save the men, and the simple act of defiance would see her burned as well, but, suddenly, it didn’t matter. She would die here, in the miserable fucking miracle of a well, but she would not be part of the murder of these men who had watched over her so long.

It’s on you now, Kaden, she thought grimly, brandishing the steel pointlessly above her head. On you, Valyn. And as for you, Intarra, you can fuck yourself, you miserable bitch.

And then, as if in response, Intarra spoke back.

Blinding light. Perfect black. Ringing like a million mouths, screaming, singing. Body instantly and utterly gone. Gone the rain. Gone the mob. Gone her own mind and will. Gone everything but a single voice, Fulton’s and then not Fulton’s, deeper, higher, fuller, broader, broad as the wide sky, broad as the stars, a woman’s voice but greater than any woman, as great as creation itself, uttering a single, ungainsayable syllable: Win.

Eight.

Or nine.

Valyn had lost track of how many times he, Pyrre, and his Wing tried to escape during the endless ride west.

Which made them zero for eight.

Or zero for nine.

In the last attempt, Valyn had dislocated his left shoulder in order to win free of his restraints, Pyrre had strangled two Urghul with her belt, and the rest of the Wing managed to steal half a dozen horses. Valyn had refused to include Balendin in the planning, but the leach was tied up right next to the rest of them, and when the time came to fight, he managed to rip out the throat of a ksaabe with his teeth and kick another one half to death. A reminder, if Valyn needed a reminder, that even drugged, even half starved, the leach was as dangerous as the rest of them. Not that it mattered.

There were thousands of Urghul, more joining the group every day. Even if the Kettral managed to break out of the constantly moving horde, which they hadn’t, there was nowhere to run but empty steppe. It was a bleak situation, no doubt, and their defiance earned them little more than busted faces and bruised ribs, but it was fight or die, and while Valyn had no illusions about the odds, he didn’t intend to be led to his slaughter like a sheep. When the ninth attempt to break free failed, he was already plotting the tenth.

Huutsuu, however, had other ideas. The woman rode up, surveyed the carnage, barked a few orders, and in a matter of moments the prisoners were separated, each dragged off by his or her own taabe or ksaabe . Old knots were retied and new restraints added at the elbows and knees, which meant an end to all walking and stretching. From that moment on, numbness alternated with screaming pain in Valyn’s legs and shoulders. He had to beg his taabe to pull down his pants whenever he needed to take a shit.

The ensuing days proved a repetitive itinerary of agony and endurance: struggling not to cry out each morning in the predawn dark as his nameless captor kicked him awake; refusing to wince as he was lashed across the back of the horse, tight cords biting into his bloody wrists and raw ankles; shivering in the icy rain or sweating beneath a brutal sun while the horse’s relentless gait bruised his ribs and battered the organs beneath; tucking his chin and holding his tongue whenever he was whipped across the back or shoulders; ignoring the famished ache that seemed to be boring a hole through his stomach.… And the days were the fucking good part. Every night, bound hand and foot and tethered to a stake, he shivered on the cold, broken earth, watching the flames of the surrounding campfires lap at the sky, listening to the strange cadences of chanting and song.

Valyn had his own chant and his own fire. His fire was the crackling rage inside him, a heat he fed with his hopes and vows, his shame and resolve, stoking it until it seared, even on the coldest nights. His chant was simple: Don’t quit. Don’t quit, you fuck. Don’t ever quit. He managed to break his captor’s nose one morning; to bite off a good portion of thumb on another, but, lashed tight as he was, there was no way to follow up the small victories, and each petty revolt ended with him curled on the ground, kicks and punches raining down. The struggle was pointless, but it was all he had, so he kept at it, looking for the openings, the little chances when he could get in his useless licks.

In between, the Urghul set an astounding pace, hammering westward from well before dawn until hours past dark, stopping only to switch horses, an excruciating process during which Valyn was untied, shoved to the ground, then, before he could do anything to stretch his legs, hurled onto another horse and lashed down once more. He tried to keep track of the days. There’d been at least ten when he was still with his Wing, and probably double that since they were separated. He had no idea where they were going, but there couldn’t be much steppe left.

Occasionally-when they crested a hill or rode along a ridgeline-he caught a glimpse of the entire Urghul strength. Each time, the sight of it staggered him like a fist to the face. The Eyrie trainers had described tribes of fifty or a hundred, little more than extended families, really, nothing like the group in which he rode. There must have been tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, the herd of horses stretching out over the steppe as far as he could see. There was no column, no order of march, just a pounding, thundering mass of horseflesh and riders flowing over the hills like a shifting blanket. No one set up tents, not anymore-the Urghul were in too much of a rush-and some nights, when Valyn could see out over the black hills, he felt as though he were adrift on the night sea, that each of the campfires was a star reflected in the chilly water, that, bound hand and foot as he was, he might sink beneath the surface and drown.

He tried to gauge numbers, to count fires or horses, but there was no way to keep track. Not that it mattered. Even when he was lashed to the horse’s back, even when he could see nothing but clods of dirt, sweaty flanks, and streaming tails, he could hear the sound clearly enough, a thunder louder and deeper than thunder, the very ground trembling with the Urghul passage. It was not a taamu that he rode with, not a tribe, but a whole people.

Old Fleck back on the Islands had insisted that the Urghul could manage fifty miles a day, riding hard. The figure had always struck Valyn as inflated, but he was starting to understand how it could be possible. The riders ate on their horses, pissed from their horses, slipped a knee through the crude girths and slept on their horses when necessary, yellow-white hair streaming behind them. Valyn had even seen some of the younger taabe and ksaabe leaping from the back of one cantering beast to another, as though the ground itself were anathema. At one point he caught sight of an enormous herd of bison darkening the plains to the north. The nearest beasts swung their stupid, noble heads ponderously toward the passing horses, and a few score riders peeled off, lances held high, voices eager in the morning air. The rest of the mass continued west, hammering relentlessly across the steppe.