Pyrre ignored Gwenna entirely. Instead, she smiled at Balendin, rolled languorously onto her stomach, then stretched upward like a waking cat. The top buttons of her shirt hung open, and the pose left little to the imagination.
“I remember Valyn going on about that at some length,” she said. “The thing is, I also have a somewhat flexible notion of political loyalty. I certainly wouldn’t want to let something so petty as ‘treason’ come between me and a kindred spirit.” She trailed a few fingers along her arm, then nodded to Balendin’s tattooed biceps and wrists. “I like your art. Is there more under that shirt?”
Gwenna felt like her head was going to explode, but before she could say anything, Annick cut into the conversation, her voice clipped, professional.
“Why are you here, Balendin? Why did Long Fist free you?”
The leach allowed his eyes to linger on Pyrre for a moment. Then he let out a long sigh as he turned to the sniper.
“Annick, just because I had to string up your little slut doesn’t mean you should be so sour about everyone else’s fun.” He spread his arms. “The world is wide, and there are plenty more whores in it.”
The sniper barely twitched, the motion so quick and curt that Gwenna could have missed it, save for the small knife whipping through the air toward Balendin’s throat . . . then knocked aside by some invisible shield. The leach smiled indulgently.
“Long Fist has requested that I leave you unharmed, so I’ll make believe that you just slipped while cutting your meat.”
Annick’s lips tightened, her hand flexed, as though wanting another weapon, but she refused to take the bait.
“Now,” he said after a long pause, “where should I begin the story of my miraculous survival and sudden rehabilitation? In the mountains, perhaps . . .”
“It’s not a fucking mystery,” Gwenna spat. “You staggered out of the Bones, and the Urghul picked you up the same way they did us. You want us to be impressed that you got caught by a bunch of horse-fucking savages?”
Balendin’s eyes narrowed. “I would point out,” he said slowly, “that you, also, were captured by those same horse-fucking savages.”
“I didn’t say I was proud of it. I certainly wouldn’t flaunt the fact. You’re stuck here, same as us.”
“Oh, Gwenna,” the leach replied slowly, smiling once more. “I understand your frustration, but unlike you poor ladies, I am hardly stuck here.” He shook his head slowly, watching her expression through the smoke, his eyes bright. “You’re right, of course, that we were both captives of our nomadic friends, and for a time, Long Fist trusted me no more than he did you. Since then”—he shrugged—“our stories have diverged. While you wait here, tacit prisoners, Long Fist has invited me to join him. He has . . . elevated me. To a position of some importance. The man is a savage, but even a savage understands the value of someone with my talents, with my knowledge.”
Gwenna suppressed a shudder. Despite Long Fist’s claims about his friendship with Sanlitun, about the purely defensive nature of his army, she didn’t trust him, didn’t like his collection of scars or the satisfaction he obviously derived from the suffering of his people. She had, however, considered him a relatively objective threat, a foe of the empire, perhaps, but not a particularly unusual one. For Long Fist to ally with Balendin, however, for him to join forces with a leach who had tried his best to murder two members of the Malkeenian line—that suggested something far darker.
“What does Long Fist want with you?” she asked.
Pyrre groaned ostentatiously. “Why,” she asked, arching her neck to get a better look at Balendin over the fire, “do we have to waste time on something so dull? Gwenna,” she added, flicking a dismissive hand. “Annick. Why don’t you two walk around the camp a few hundred times. Make some nice new friends.”
Gwenna stared. “Why don’t you fuck yourself, you Skullsworn bitch? You know he’s a leach, right? You know he tried to kill Kaden, who you were hired to protect.”
Pyrre made a silent, coquettish O with her mouth. “A leach. How exotic.” She didn’t take her eyes from Balendin. “As for fucking myself, Gwenna, it is sometimes a necessary expedient. Not, however, when there are promising alternatives.”
Balendin tossed the woman a vulpine, toothy smile in response, but then, to Gwenna’s surprise, shook his head.
“Unfortunately, those alternatives will have to wait. The Kwihna Saapi is about to begin.”
“What is that?” Annick asked.
“A ceremony,” Balendin replied. “Long Fist requests your presence.”
“And by requests,” Gwenna said, “you mean demands.”
Balendin grinned. “Yes. I mean demands.”
The Kwihna Saapi, whatever the fuck it turned out to be, was to take place in a narrow gully between low hills where a meager trickle of water had, over the centuries, worn through the gentle flesh of the earth to reveal the bones of the limestone beneath. Wind and rain had corrugated the rock, gouging out runnels and pockets in which generations of Urghul had set the bones of their slaughtered foes—a femur shattered just below the joint, a cracked skull, a pile of small bones that might once have been fingers or toes spilling from a low shelf—as though the pockmarked earth were disgorging its hoard, vomiting up shards so old it was difficult to tell if the bleached and pitted shapes were rock or bone.
More worrisome than the stony gorge were the tens of thousands of Urghul waiting on the slopes above it. Most crouched flat-footed, clustered in knots of five or six, but those along the gully’s edge stood, the points of their long lances angled down, as though to keep anything from escaping. Long Fist had taken a place of honor at the very lip of the gully, where he lounged on a travois supported by his own bloody warriors.
Balendin led Gwenna, Annick, and Pyrre to the lip of the stony defile.
“A holy place,” he said, then, with no warning, shoved Gwenna over the lip.
The fall was only half a dozen feet, and she landed on her feet, curses tumbling from her lips. She spun to find the leach smiling down at her.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll see that your friends have an outstanding view.”
Both women were watching her. Pyrre looked curious. Annick looked like Annick. Balendin waited a moment, then led them to Long Fist’s travois.
The limestone walls were low, no taller than Gwenna herself. Climbing free would be a trivial matter were it not for the Urghul with their lances lowered at her chest. Gwenna considered seizing one of the weapons, then discarded the idea. She still wasn’t sure what was to happen here, and she didn’t intend to die in a heroic last stand if she didn’t have to. Instead, she took a moment to look around.
The low stone walls blocked her escape to the east and west, while at either end of the short gully, maybe twenty paces apart, roared massive twin fires, though the sun had not yet set. Someone had dug two narrow holes about five feet apart, similar to long-campaign shit-pits, although what they were for, Gwenna couldn’t say. The mounds of excavated earth stood piled neatly and silently beside the holes.
A holy place, Balendin had said just before shoving her off the low stone wall into the makeshift arena.
A killing place, Gwenna thought grimly.
In a strange way, she was almost relieved. She had no idea what game Long Fist was playing, no clue why he would lavish her with food and liquor all day only to hurl her into a pit in front of what looked to be his entire ’Kent-kissing army, but one thing was clear: something was happening, and that was better than sitting on her hands in a tent arguing with Pyrre and being ignored by Annick.
Just too bad that it looked like the something was likely to kill her.
At either end of the gully, men and women beyond the flames continued to heap fuel on the crackling monsters. Even paces away, even in the stiff breeze, Gwenna could feel the heat on her face. She tried to dredge up something from her training, some little fact that might save her life. She knew plenty about Urghul mounted fighting t
actics and weapons use, but her eyes had tended to glaze over when the trainers droned on about the dull theological details. Balendin had called whatever was coming the Kwihna Saapi. Gwenna had never heard the second word, but Kwihna meant Meshkent, and Meshkent meant pain.
The whole thing had the feel of a ring or arena—the bounded enclosure, the circle of expectant faces, and, oh yeah, the piles of fucking bones strewn everywhere. The place stunk of a fight, and, just as she was scanning the ground, the Urghul shoved someone else into the narrow gully.
Gwenna rocked back and forth, testing her legs. Weeks tied to the horse hadn’t done her any good, but it was no use worrying about that now. The hay, as the Kettral liked to say, was in the barn, and Gwenna offered up a silent thanks to all the bastards back on the Islands—Adaman Fane and Daveen Shaleel, Plenchen Zee and even the Flea—for the long years of brutality, the relentless insistence on perfection. She might not know shit about the ’Kent-kissing Kwihna Saapi, but this was looking like a fight, and she knew a lot about fighting.
Then the young man straightened, and Gwenna’s eagerness drained away. She had expected an Urghul, one of the young taabe or ksaabe. It was an Annurian, however, who faced her, a young man maybe a year or two older than Gwenna, still dressed in the filthy rags of his legionary uniform. Another prisoner. Gwenna had assumed they were the only ones, but the camp was enormous. Long Fist could have a whole legion of Annurians tied up and staked out on the steppe and she never would have noticed. The young soldier looked both baffled and terrified, gaping first at the roaring fires, then at the crowd of Urghul, only turning to Gwenna when the other sights seemed ready to drive him to his knees.
“What’s going on?” he breathed.
Gwenna’s lips tightened, but before she could reply, Long Fist, draped in a huge bison cloak, rose from his seat and stepped to the edge of the gully. He held two stout sticks in one hand, each no wider around than Gwenna’s thumb. He gestured with them to the holes.
“Step in.”
“Go fuck yourself,” Gwenna replied.
She had no idea what the holes were for, but you didn’t fight from a hole.
“Step in,” Long Fist said, unperturbed, “or I will have your arm removed.” He gestured to the young warriors with their long spears. “I give you this choice.”
“What happened to being an honored guest?” she demanded.
He smiled. “The Kwihna Saapi is an honor.”
“Well aren’t I just tickled,” she muttered, stepping into the hole.
The earth came to the middle of her thighs and, as she looked up toward the Urghul chief for some further sign, a pair of young riders leapt down from the stone wall, crude shovels in hand, and began filling in the earth around her.
Gwenna forced herself to remain still, to think. The Annurian in the other hole had already surrendered to panic. He was trying to hoist himself from the small pit, half screaming, half begging, thrashing with both hands at the shovel and the youth wielding it, trying ineffectually to knock aside the dirt. He managed to get one leg out when three more Urghul jumped down from the stone wall and, to the ululation and cheering of the crowd, shoved him into the hole once more and held him there, writhing and biting, while the dirt piled up around him. When the work was done, Gwenna found herself immobilized in the earth facing the terrified young man across from her.
He was all forehead and ear and wide, baffled eyes set in a pimply face.
“Quit thrashing,” she said. She couldn’t think with him carrying on, and besides, the Urghul were clearly enjoying the show.
“What are they going to do?” he moaned. “What’s happening? What are they going to do?”
“Do I look like a scholar of obscure Urghul ass-fuckery?” she snapped. His panic was starting to dig at her, to creep, cold and lizardlike up her neck, over her skin, to bore into her belly. “What are you doing here?” she asked, more to distract herself from the fear than anything else. “How did these bastards get you?”
He stared, as though he himself didn’t know the answer to the question.
“Were you scouting?” Gwenna pressed. “Some mission north of the White?”
“I’m not a scout,” he protested. “I’m a ’Kent-kissing infantryman, barely even that. I been in the legion only four months. The Urghul hit us at the L-fort three nights back.” He stared back up at the ring of faces and started scrabbling at the earth again. “What’re they gonna do to us?”
“The L-fort?” Gwenna demanded, ignoring the last question. “They came south?”
“Yes,” he wailed. “ ’Bout a million of them. The whole fort’s gone.”
Gwenna took a deep breath, then another, trying to still her rising panic. Long Fist had shattered one of the forts south of the river, one of the forts intended to keep the Urghul out of Annur. He hadn’t just turned on the Kettral; he had turned on the whole ’Kent-kissing empire. So much for his defensive army. . . . Gwenna would have worried about Valyn and the others—they’d left the camp more or less convinced by Long Fist’s promises of allegiance—but whatever miserable shitpile Valyn found himself in, her own predicament was looking quite a bit worse.
The soldier’s jaw was quivering. “They’re gonna hurt us, ain’t they?” His eyes locked on Gwenna’s, then flickered down to her blacks. “You’re not in the legion,” he breathed, comprehension hitting him like a hammer. “You’re Kettral.”
The words were horrible with hope.
“Can you break us free?”
Gwenna shook her head, furious at that hope, powerless to explain that the legends extended only so far.
“But you’ll do somethin’, right? Right? I mean . . . the Kettral!”
“What I’ll do,” Gwenna said, “is keep my eyes open and my mouth shut.”
It came out more harshly than she’d intended, but she couldn’t bear the desperate trust in the young man’s eyes, the irrational faith. She wanted to shout that the Kettral weren’t gods, that they couldn’t work miracles, and even if they could, she herself was a pretty shit Kettral. She didn’t have Annick’s discipline or Talal’s cool or anything, really, other than an ability to blow shit up. If I could save you, she wanted to scream, I’d be saving you.
“Just shut up,” she snapped instead, although she’d just gotten done saying it. “Just be ready.”
Whatever that meant. Half buried in the earth they could neither flee nor fight. It was like being bound to a dock piling waiting for the tide to come in. The Urghul who packed the earth around them had retreated, climbing back up the low stone walls to leave Gwenna and the soldier alone at the bottom of the gully. The sun had slipped behind the hills to the west, and though a smear of red and orange still lit the sky, most of the light came from the enormous fires, a fickle, inconstant illumination that sketched the shards of bone one moment and plunged them into shadow the next. Above them the Urghul had risen to their feet, shaking weapons and jeering something incomprehensible in their strange melodic tongue, an entire bloody nation gathered to watch her suffer, men and women thick as wheat on the surrounding slopes. Gwenna wished she understood the words, then thought better of it.
Just blood, probably, and death, and doom, and blah, blah, blah.
The cacophony rose and rose, an unholy and discordant chant, until Long Fist swept his sticks down in a curt motion. The screaming stopped at once, the sound severed as though with a sharp knife. Firelight danced in the thousands of eager eyes.
The shaman spoke briefly in Urghul. Gwenna caught a few references to Kwihna, and maybe the words for “fight” and “die.” She pivoted at the waist, testing her range of motion, wondering what direction the attack would come from. Maybe it would be warriors. Maybe dogs. There was no way to guess.
“Now,” Long Fist said, addressing them, “you will fight. One wins. One dies.” He smiled a slow, easy smile.
Gwenna stared, first at the Urghul, then at the other prisoner, whose face was streaked with sweat and blanched with panic. No dogs
, then.
The two sticks clattered to the ground between them.
“Swords,” the Urghul said, gesturing magnanimously.
But they were not swords. They weren’t even weapons—too blunt for effective stabbing, too light for a swift killing blow. Given enough time you could maybe beat someone to death with them, striking over and over, aiming for the throat, the eyes, but it would be a nasty process, slow and messy. Which, Gwenna realized, was the whole ’Kent-kissing point. The Urghul hadn’t assembled for a fight. This wasn’t a test of bravery or martial prowess, it was a sacrifice, the whole thing—buried legs, spindly sticks—designed to draw out the struggle, to prolong the pain.
A sacrifice to Meshkent.
“No,” Gwenna said. She crossed her arms over her chest and locked eyes with the Urghul chieftain. “I’m not taking part in your bloody bullshit.”
Long Fist smiled. “Yes, you are. The other Annurians”—he waved a hand over his shoulder, the gesture suggesting scores of unseen prisoners—“I will cut out their beating hearts, but you are a fighter. You will fight.”
The legionary was trembling, his breath coming in quick gasps, as though some unseen hand were frantically working the bellows of his lungs. He’d probably never seen battle or blood before the horsemen swept down on his fort.
“What happened to wanting to avoid war?” she demanded.
Long Fist just smiled.
The crowd was growing restless. A knot of men barely older than Gwenna were leaning over the edge of the stone wall, shouting at the prisoners and brandishing spears. Another small group seemed to be taunting the chief himself, although it was hard to be sure. The noise rolled over her, jeers and chanting like autumn breakers dashing themselves on the rocks. Gwenna met Annick’s eyes for a moment, hoping to see some encouragement or solidarity there, but the sniper’s face might have been chiseled from stone.
Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire: Page 40