The Providence of Fire (83 page)

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.

“Holy Hull,” Talal breathed.

Valyn could only nod as the great balance of the log raft began to flex, then give way, the pilings that had originally blocked its passage suddenly and utterly obliterated. The riders who had been approaching the makeshift bridge just before it blew reined back their terrified mounts, scrabbling for the dubious safety of the shore while logs the size of a man's leg still clattered to earth, stabbing into the mud, cracking open on the harder ground beyond.

Laith let out a savage whoop, the sound lost in the greater chaos. “Gwenna, you vicious, redheaded
genius
!” he cheered. “That's our demo woman!” he shouted, seizing Valyn by the shoulder in his celebration, stabbing his finger at the wreckage of the bridge. “
She
did that!”

“But how?” Valyn asked slowly. “Where is she?”

Talal's face was sober. “The charge was triggered from beneath. You can see from the blow pattern.”

“Which means she went under,” Valyn said, staring at the insane mass of splintered logs, huge, jagged shards with the whole pent-up weight of the angry river behind them. The east channel was a churning wreckage of blasted bodies and spinning trunks. The channel had become Ananshael's own sword. If Gwenna were there, and she had to be … “She's dead,” Valyn said. The words left him hollow. “Gwenna's dead.”

Laith stared for a second, then shoved him away. “You don't know that.”

“We don't know
anything,
” Valyn spat, “but use your fucking
eyes
.” He stabbed a finger at the river. “Could
you
swim that out?”

“We don't
know,
” Laith insisted. Then more quietly, “Even if she is dead, she did what she needed to do.”

“Part of it,” Valyn amended, pointing toward the center bridge. It felt like a heartless thing to say, but having too much heart in the middle of a battle was just a way to get dead. “She blew the dam, but the Urghul can still cross from the east island to the west.”

Talal was staring through the long lens. “At a quick count, I put about three hundred on the east island.”

“Making it an even fight at the bridge,” Valyn said.

“An even fight,” Talal said quietly, “except that it's three hundred of Long Fist's best and bravest against a bunch of loggers and a half dozen of il Tornja's scouts.”

The new battle line was already forming up at the west end of the central bridge, just a hundred paces from the base of their tower. The loggers had erected another hasty barricade there as well, a waist-high wall of logs with archers spread out on either side. It was a good position. They could rake the Urghul on the bridge with arrows as they crossed, and the bridge itself made it difficult for the mounted riders to come at them more than two abreast.

A good spot,
Valyn amended silently,
in the middle of a disastrous fucking mess
.

It had taken the Urghul less than an hour to cross the eastern channel and seize half the village. The loggers were making a good show of it, but they were poorly armed and, judging by their dangerously ragged ranks on the near shore, close to breaking. Gwenna's sacrifice had won them a momentary respite from the full weight of the Urghul force, but even that respite might not matter. As he watched, one rider managed to cross nearly the whole center span, crumbling just as he reached the barricade, an arrow in his eye. Annick's work, no doubt, but Annick couldn't shoot them all.

“Fuck this,” Laith said. “I'm going down.”

“Il Tornja—” Valyn began.

“Il Tornja is
your
'Kent-kissing obsession,” the flier spat. “
You
kill him.”

All at once, Valyn's shame and helplessness, his resolve and uncertainty boiled over in a burning wash of black fury. Since the Wing was formed back on the Islands, Laith had done nothing but go with his gut, flying his way, fighting his way, ignoring orders when it suited him, and to Hull with whatever it did to the rest of the Wing. The son of a bitch seemed to think that just because he was quick with a joke and a pat on the back, everything would work out, that people would overlook all the damage caused by his recklessness. Valyn wanted to seize the flier by the throat and pound some discipline into him, and he half rose, moving toward him, when Talal put a hand on his shoulder.

“It might be best,” the leach said quietly. “Two of us should be enough to finish il Tornja, and Annick and Pyrre could use some help down there, someone else to put a little backbone into the local folk.”

Valyn remained in his half crouch for a moment, then spat over the edge of the tower and sat back. He looked at the flier and shook his head.

“Good luck,” he said, voice cold as the dark water lapping the cliff below.

Laith considered him warily. “What do you want me to tell them down there? About you? What do you want me to tell Annick?”

Valyn hesitated. “Tell them I'm dead,” he said finally.

The flier locked eyes with him a moment, then snorted in disgust. “Yeah, that fits. You might as well be.”

*   *   *

It might have been a page from one of the textbooks back on the Islands, something from a chapter on morale, about the power of a single determined warrior to stiffen the resolve of an entire unit. Laith reached the bridge at a crucial point, just as a knot of horsemen were about to breach the barricade, and he threw himself into the fight with a fury, vaulting over the logs, hamstringing the first two horses, and splitting the skull of one of the fallen riders. Without glancing back to see who was following, the flier pressed on across, sliding between the horses, slitting tendons and throats with equal ease.

Annick and the other archers covered him, and moments later Pyrre appeared at his side. It seemed impossible that the two of them could hold the span against hundreds, but the Urghul were used to fighting on the wide steppe where they could use the speed of their horses and the length of their spears. The narrow space of the bridge worked against them, as did the darkness, and the constant rain of arrows. Laith and Pyrre turned back the assault, and then, while the Urghul withdrew in dismay, they retreated behind the barricade.

Valyn watched it all through the long lens, his stomach churning with a bilious mix of worry, fierce pride, and bitter resentment. Once again Laith had ignored orders and broken ranks, choosing to do just what suited him. He was a rogue, a renegade, a 'Shael-spawned menace … but then why, looking down on the vicious fight, did Valyn feel like the fraud and the failure? Professionals held to the mission. That mantra had been drilled into him ten thousand times. Professionals didn't go needlessly off script. And yet, lying on the cold roof, so close to the fight and so far away, he felt anything but professional. He wanted to scream, but the mission dictated silence, so he held his peace and watched.

Seven times the Urghul came, and seven times the villagers held them, Laith and Pyrre at the forefront, swords and knives a moonlit scribbling of quicksilver. Pyrre moved like a shadow between the mounted riders, never seeming to hurry, always just beneath the attacker's thrust, just to the side of it, pivoting or twisting to slide her knife into a neck or rib cage with all the delicacy of a dancer. Laith, on the other hand, was a whirlwind of blades, a maelstrom of savage hacking and slicing, a storm come among the Urghul. Valyn had seen the flier fight before, hundreds of times, but never like this. Laith moved as though possessed, unflagging, untiring, as though he could hold the bridge for days, months, as though nothing could cut him down.