Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire:

by Brian Staveley

  “I’ll tell them,” Huutsuu replied, stepping out through the flap to her api, a massive bison hide draped over her shoulders and belted around her waist. The thing made her look larger, but slower. Had Valyn not witnessed her stabbing a man in the neck moments ago, had he not seen the sinew shifting beneath her bare skin, he would have underestimated this woman. It was a good lesson.

  Huutsuu gestured to the two Urghul Valyn had selected, barking something rough as she gestured to a patch of ground a little space off from the fire. They hesitated, anger and doubt scrawled across their faces, but they went.

  “Tie them if you want,” she said, crossing to the fire without a second glance, prodding with her finger at something in the large pot.

  Valyn took a deep breath, surveying the scene. Everything appeared under control. Talal and Laith had made a large pile of bows, knives, and spears; Annick stood a short way off, scanning the camp, bow in hand.

  Pyrre caught him watching her and smiled a wide, open smile. “Don’t worry,” she said. “My god accepts all sacrifice, but I’ve always felt that the unarmed make for meager offerings.”

  She knelt behind the two hostages, trussing them quickly with the length of cord Talal had tossed her. It looked safe. If the Urghul were going to fight, they would have done it already, when they still had their weapons and full numbers.

  “I apologize for this measure,” Valyn said, gesturing toward the tied Urghul.

  Huutsuu shrugged once more. “It is a while since we were Hardened. Kwihna will be pleased.”

  Valyn shook his head. “Hardened?”

  She nodded. “Through pain.”

  “No,” Valyn said. “We’re not here to harden you.”

  “Less ethnography, Val,” Laith cut in. “More medicine.”

  Valyn waved him down. “We’re here because we have wounds that need cleaning and cauterizing. We need food, and maybe horses as well.”

  Something dangerous flashed in Huutsuu’s eyes. “No horses.”

  Valyn started to point out that the woman wasn’t in a position to contest the point, then thought better of it. For all their success thus far, the situation had him edgy. Between his own pain, worry for his soldiers, wariness regarding the Urghul, and fear that the Flea would drop out of the sky, he felt like a flatbow cranked a turn too far, the whole apparatus so tight that a touch could snap the string or shatter the bow’s arc.

  The injured first, he reminded himself. Then the bird. Then food.

  Talal’s wound was straightforward enough, or it would have been if the clouds hadn’t opened up, pelting them with a vicious rain while lightning lashed the steppe a dozen miles distant. Valyn considered moving his Wing into the api, but that would leave them blind to what was going on outside. He could split the group, but splitting a small force was a piss-poor idea, no matter how complacent the enemy appeared. Which left them all out in the rain, close enough to the hissing fire that the heat taunted without doing anything to warm him. At least the sudden squall would limit the Flea’s visibility, if the bastard was even up there.

  Valyn tried to force aside his worries and focus on Talal’s injury. He wiped his forehead, blinking past the sheeting rain, then took hold of the arrow while Laith held the leach’s leg. The wet wood was slick in his hands, and each time he lost his grip he felt Talal’s body spasm beneath him, heard him groan through clenched teeth. Finally, his hands mired in blood, and rain, and mud, Valyn forced the arrow through, twisting it as best he could to avoid scraping the bone, bearing down viciously to get it out and over as quickly as possible. Talal growled low in his chest, straining against Laith’s grip, then went slack as the arrowhead burst out. He was panting, eyes wide, rain streaming down his face.

  “You all right?” Valyn asked.

  The leach expelled a long, shuddering breath between his teeth, then nodded. “Finish it.”

  Valyn broke the shaft with one quick motion, then yanked the remainder of the arrow free as Talal bit off a curse.

  Behind him, Huutsuu snorted. If the rain bothered her, she didn’t show it, leaning over the fire to get a better view of the injury. “You are warriors?” she asked.

  Valyn nodded curtly, taking the heated knife from Laith’s hand, then pressing the glowing metal to the exit wound. Talal twisted sharply, then passed out. Valyn breathed out slowly. Unconsciousness would spare the leach the pain of the second cauterization and keep him still while Valyn attended to the entry point.

  Huutsuu snorted again. “A warrior should face his pain.”

  “He faced it well enough,” Valyn snapped. “We’ve been flying all night.”

  “He fled,” the woman replied, waving a finger at the flier’s limp body. “Fled into the Softness.”

  Valyn pressed the knife to the entry wound, counting to eight silently, then rounded on Huutsuu.

  “We don’t want a fight,” he snapped, “but keep talking, and you’ll find out something about pain.”

  The woman regarded the glowing knife with scorn. “This is a small thing,” she replied, “for one who is tsaani three times over.”

  “What in ’Shael’s name is she talking about?” Valyn demanded of no one in particular.

  “Children,” Talal murmured, rousing from his stupor. “She’s had three children.”

  Valyn shook his head. He had no idea why that mattered. Between the driving rain and the pounding agony in his shoulder, all piled on the fatigue of a long night spent in the harness, he felt ready to snap.

  “I don’t give a shit how many kids she’s got.” He pointed at Huutsuu with the blade, then gestured toward the tied Urghul. “Over there. With them. Now.”

  She looked him up and down a long moment, then shook her head and stalked away.

  The sky had gone from black to a grudging gray. The serrated line of the eastern peaks still hid the sun, but the clouds were starting to clear. They’d be hard-pressed to finish tending wounds before full daylight, and Valyn still wasn’t sure what he planned to do then.

  “Laith,” he said, voice rough with urgency and weariness, “get this fucking thing out of my shoulder.”

  The bolt came out more easily than Talal’s arrow, although Laith needed to make a pair of slices in the surrounding skin in order to free the small barbs on the quarrel’s tip. Aware of Huutsuu’s eyes upon him, Valyn clamped down on his pain, refusing to cry out even as he felt the muscles of his shoulder pull, then tear. The searing agony of the hot knife threatened to plunge him into unconsciousness, but he clenched his jaw and forced back the fog on the fringes of his vision.

  “I’m good,” he said, when he trusted himself to open his mouth again. “I’m good. Go check on ’Ra. I can take care of Gwenna.”

  The demolitions master was by far the most worrisome case. She still had not regained consciousness, and in the meager dawn light her face looked even worse than it had in the dark, pale and waxen, her red hair plastered flat to the skin by the rain. The wool blanket was rapidly soaking through, and she was shivering, lips dark in her pallid face. Valyn ran a finger along the inside of her hand, but there was no response, no grip or reflex. There wasn’t much to do with head wounds but wait and hope, which meant they were going to have to get her warm. Which meant going in the api. Sometimes there just wasn’t a good option on offer.

  “Talal?” he asked, glancing over at the leach. “Any thoughts?”

  Talal frowned.

  “We’ve already moved her too much. It was a rough night, and with the two drops . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Valyn,” Laith cut in, all trace of levity vanished from his voice.

  Valyn turned, hand on his blade, half expecting to find the Flea facing him down. There was only Laith, though, Laith and the bird. Suant’ra had half extended her enormous wing for him, and Laith stood beneath it, hands above him, prodding the joint with both hands. His face was grim.

  “What?” Valyn asked.

  “Not good.” The flier t
ook a deep breath, then blew it out. “There’s serious damage to her shoulder—probably a patagial tear.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Valyn had sat through the lectures on kettral anatomy, they all had, but it was the flier’s responsibility to care for the birds in the field, and some of the more specific terminology had slipped.

  “Meaning she can’t fucking fly.”

  “She flew us here,” he pointed out. “She flew all night long.”

  “Which tells you something about how tough she is,” Laith snapped. “Most birds would have fallen out of the air. The damage is bad, and the long flight made it worse. The joint is swelling. By noon she probably won’t be able to get in the air at all.”

  Valyn glanced up at the kettral’s head. She was watching Laith, her huge, dark eye swiveling in its socket to follow him as he ran his hands beneath her feathers. He’d often wondered about the kettral, about what they thought and understood. Did ’Ra know she was injured? Was she frightened? It was impossible to read anything in those dark eyes.

  “How long for it to heal?” Valyn asked.

  Laith shook his head. “Weeks. Months. Maybe never.”

  “We don’t have weeks, let alone months,” Valyn said. “How many miles can she make each day like this?”

  “You’re not listening to me, Valyn,” Laith said. “She can’t fly at all, certainly not with us hanging off of her.”

  Valyn stared, the implications sinking in. Kettral training was all well and good, but it was the birds that made the warriors legendary. Without ’Ra they lost their mobility, the element of surprise, and a vicious fighter in the bargain. Without ’Ra, they were stranded on the ass end of the steppe with no good way to get back to Annur, or anywhere else, for that matter.

  “We have to stay,” Laith was saying, “set up a camp here while we tend her, pray she gets better.”

  “Bad idea,” Annick said. The sniper hadn’t taken her eyes off the Urghul prisoners, but she’d clearly been listening to the conversation. “Suant’ra is too easy to spot from the land or air. The Flea will come, or more Urghul.”

  Valyn nodded slowly. “We can’t hide her, and we can’t fight them all.”

  Laith stared, aghast. “So . . . what? You just want to leave her?”

  Valyn glanced east. The sun was just topping the peaks, etching the snow and ice with fire.

  “No,” he said finally. “I want her to leave us.”

  Laith started to object, but he held up a hand. “You said she could still fly before the swelling gets too bad, at least a little bit. Send her south, back toward the Islands. All the birds know how to get home, right?”

  “She won’t make it to the Islands,” Laith replied, fury and fear roughening his voice.

  “She doesn’t have to,” Valyn said. “She just needs to get away from us. Fifty miles. Even twenty. Far enough that anyone who finds her doesn’t find us, too.”

  “And what happens,” Laith demanded, “when someone finds her? When she can’t fly?”

  Valyn took a deep breath. “She’s not a pet, Laith. She’s a soldier. The same as you. The same as me. She’ll do what we’d do: fight until she has to retreat, retreat until she can’t, then fight one more time.” He tried to soften his voice. “She saved us, Laith, but she can’t help us anymore. Not now. All she can do is get us caught or killed, and I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Laith glared at him, mouth open but silent. To Valyn’s shock, there were tears in the flier’s eyes. For a few heartbeats, it seemed like he was going to keep arguing, to refuse, but finally he nodded, a quick jerk, like he hadn’t meant to make the motion.

  “All right,” he said, voice hoarse. “All right. I just need to strip the harnesses. Give her the best chance I can.”

  Valyn nodded. “I’ll help.”

  “No,” Laith barked. Then, more quietly, “No. I’ll do it.”

  It didn’t take long for him to remove ’Ra’s rigging—just a matter of a few knots and buckles, and she was clean. Even then, though, Laith didn’t let her fly, running his hands instead through the feathers over her throat, murmuring to her in syllables Valyn couldn’t understand. The bird remained statue-still, her head cocked at an angle as though listening to the flier. When Laith finally stepped back, she watched him for a moment, then lowered her head slowly, until it was level with the flier’s own. He put a hand on her beak, a curiously gentle gesture that covered the bloodstains from the earlier attack, smiled, then stepped back, gesturing to the sky.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “You fought well, now get out of here.”

  ’Ra bowed her head once, then launched herself into the air with a shriek, great wings moving raggedly as she struggled to gain height. Valyn watched, stomach in a knot, as she turned south, disappearing over a low line of hills.

  He turned back to Laith. “I’m sorry.”

  The flier met his eyes, gaze hard beneath the tears. “I hope you’ve got a fucking plan.”

  The plan, for the moment, was simple: rest. Gwenna still wasn’t awake, Talal looked like he might fall over at any moment, and Valyn himself felt like he’d been beaten with boards for the better part of a week. He felt vulnerable without the bird, stranded, almost naked, but he couldn’t see any other way. Without ’Ra they could wear bison hides over their blacks, and aside from their dark hair, dark skin—easy enough to cover with hats and hides—blend in with the horsemen. They wouldn’t fool other Urghul, of course, but no one looking from the air would see anything amiss. Even if the Flea wasn’t following, he’d been clear enough back in Assare that the Eyrie had sent multiple Wings after Valyn.

  And so, along with Laith and Talal, Valyn spent the better part of the morning erasing all signs of Suant’ra and the predawn fight. They mounded stone over the bodies of the two Urghul, raked out the bird’s claw marks from the soft earth, and moved the prisoners into the larger of the two api. The movement kept Valyn’s muscles from knotting too badly, and helped him to avoid thinking, at least for the moment, about the challenges ahead.

  They’d just about finished carrying Gwenna into the smaller tent when Annick spoke from the other side of the fire, her voice level as usual.

  “Keep working. Don’t look up.”

  Valyn suppressed the natural reaction, bending instead to throw a couple more logs on the cook fire.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Bird,” she said. “Approaching high and from the east.”

  It took an effort of will for Valyn to keep his hands away from his knives and blades, to squat down by the fire to prod at the contents of the rough kettle, but Annick had the better angle. Of course, the Kettral on the bird would probably expect a small group of Urghul to look up as they passed, but anyone scanning with a long lens would see his face, his features. Better to keep his eyes down and pretend he didn’t notice.

  “They’re past,” Annick said finally.

  Valyn glanced up, shielding his face with his hand, following the shape of the retreating bird.

  “They were too high for me to make out,” the sniper continued.

  Valyn squinted. The bird was high, but he could see the pinions, the shading of the wings and tailfeathers, his eyes keen even in the full daylight. He let out a long, slow breath.

  “The Flea,” he said. “It was the Flea.”

  14

  A dare returned from the evening’s sermon both weary and wary. The days were long enough—waking before dawn, walking half a dozen miles, a brief stop for lunch, then another five or six miles—without having to listen to some petty priest for the first half of the night. When the caravan finally halted, Adare wanted nothing more than to roll into her blankets and pass out. Nira, however, had pointed out that Adare was dumber than a dead ox for skipping sermons while posing as a pilgrim, and so, night after night, she went, stumbling over the uneven ground in the gathering gloom, squinting to see through the blindfold, trying to avoid the dark shapes of the wagons, all to sit on the
fringes of the fire, juggling the contradictory hopes that the others would note her attendance without paying her any special attention.

  It hardly made for easy listening. One night the young priest lectured on the sinful excesses of the Malkeenians. Another on the ideal of an Intarran state, free from secular meddling. The most recent harangue—an extended eulogy for Uinian IV—struck even closer to home. It was impossible to read the faces of her fellow pilgrims in the flickering firelight, but the mood was clear enough. She thought she had managed to kill both the priest and his reputation when she revealed him to be a leach, but while the man stayed dead, his good name was proving frighteningly resilient. Most people hadn’t been at the temple on the day Uinian burst into flame, the day his own congregation tore his burning body apart. They knew what they believed, and regarding the Malkeenians in general and Adare more particularly, they were willing to believe the worst. By the time the tirade was over, Adare had worried a gash in the side of her thumb with a nervous fingernail.

  She picked her way back slowly through the wagons and cook fires, wanting nothing more than a few bites of Nira’s fish, a few moments warming herself over the flames, then sleep. As soon as she returned to the cook fire, however, she realized something was wrong. The old woman had spent every night for the past two weeks over an iron pan, grilling up carp from the canal with pepper and rice purchased along the road, muttering over her cooking as though the words were spice. Now, however, she stood atop the wagon, peering into the darkness. Her hair, a white haze around her head, had broken free from her bun. The cane trembled in her hands.

  “Oshi,” she shouted, voice twisting up at the end, then cracking. “Oshi!”

  As Adare approached the wagon, the old woman turned to her.

  “He’s gone,” she said. “I came back to the fire, and he was gone.”

  Adare hesitated. Oshi’s mind was far more feeble than she had initially realized, but the madness was easy to overlook. It usually manifested quietly, in endless, absorbed silences, or bouts of soft weeping. When he ranted, he ranted gently, muttering over and over again in his scratched voice to the birds or the wagon or his own fingernails. Whenever he grew particularly distressed, Nira was always there with a hand on his shoulder and sip from her crockery jar, the combination of which calmed the lost old man. Evidently something had gone amiss.