The Providence of Fire (74 page)

He already towered over the Flea, and, as though to emphasize both his words and his height, he took a step closer, stabbing a finger into the Wing leader's chest. It was the last thing they needed. Long Fist was out there somewhere, driving his blood-mad horsemen across the Black, and here they were, wrangling with the head man of some no-account town on the puckered asshole of the empire. Worse, it seemed as though half the town had turned out in the central square to see the huge bird land and watch the ensuing showdown.

“We're more'n capable of taking care of our own up here”—poke—“so why don't you fly on south”—poke—“back where you came from.”

The Flea didn't say anything. Didn't move. “'Sides,” the mayor went on, puffed up with his obvious success, “don't know what shit-eating bureaucrat decided it was a good idea to let women do the fighting, but I'll tell you one thing and I'll say it once so listen hard.”

“I'm listening,” the Flea said quietly.

Larch frowned at the tone, then raised his voice loud enough that the whole crowd could hear. “I've been running this town twenty-three years, I don't take orders from anyone, and certainly not,” he concluded, stabbing a thick finger at Gwenna, “from some wench half my age who thinks carrying a sword makes her a man.” He chuckled at the thought. “I'd fuck her maybe,” he said, spreading his arms, getting some chuckles from the crowd, “but not follow her.” He turned back to the Flea, poked him in the chest again. “You got that?”

The Flea nodded, then stabbed him in the neck.

Larch dropped like a sack of rocks, blood spattering the dirt of the central square. Gwenna could only stare. There had been no warning, no escalation. Just stillness followed by death followed by stillness. Then Pyrre started laughing.

“All right,” she said, “maybe we
could
learn to work together.”

The people of Andt-Kyl took a few more heartbeats to believe what they saw, and then another man, this one shorter but even broader than Larch, came at the Flea with a long knife and a roar.

The Flea killed him, too.

Gwenna reached over her shoulder for her blades, but Newt stopped her with a firm hand.

“Don't make it a fight,” he murmured.

Gwenna stared, first at the Flea, then at the Aphorist. “He's the one doing all the killing,” she hissed.

“Killing isn't fighting,” Newt replied. “These poor folks, they've never seen anything like this. Don't know what to make of a man on a bird stabbing their mayor. Don't know how to respond. If
we
draw, though…” He pursed his lips. “Starts to look like a brawl, and in these log towns, if there's one thing they know, it's brawling.”

It went against every instinct Gwenna had, but she lowered her hand. None of the other Kettral had so much as twitched. The Flea glanced down at the corpses at his feet, then over the crowd. When he spoke, the words didn't sound loud, but he pitched his voice to carry.

“The Urghul are coming. You're going to stop them.”

That sent an eddy of confusion and discontent through the crowd. Several straggling refugees from the tiny hamlets to the northeast had already stumbled into Andt-Kyl, cradling wounds and bringing stories of burned farms and murdered families. Somehow, though, the townspeople weren't alarmed. They seemed to think it was a matter of raiding parties, rather than an entire army bearing down upon them.

“
You
stop them,” someone shouted from the crowd. “You're the fighters. We're just here for the lumber.”

“You won't be here at all,” the Flea said, “after the horsemen come through. They will kill most of you and keep the rest to sacrifice slowly, with steel and fire, to Meshkent. They will burn your town to ash. People at the south end of Scar Lake, all the way in Aats-Kyl, will hear you screaming.” He shrugged. “You could run, but they'd ride you down. They might pass by if you hide in the marsh. It's been a long time since I was in a log town, but I didn't take logmen for a bunch of runners and hiders.”

“We're not running,” said a young man, thinner than Larch had been, but quite a bit taller than the Flea. He held a hooked peavey in one hand, the tool's steel spike bright in the sunlight, but he leaned on it rather than using it as a weapon. “We're not running, but we've got a way of doing things here, and killing the mayor ain't it.”

The Flea eyed the peavey, then the man holding it. “What's your name, son?”

“Bridger,” he replied.

The Flea nodded. “Good name.” He looked over the people assembled, pointed at an old woman in greasy wool near the front. “What do you think of Bridger, here, mother?”

She frowned at the question, glanced over her shoulder for support, found none, then looked back at the Flea. “Good man.”

“He get in fights?”

“Not much. Tends to keep to hisself. Quiet feller.”

The Flea nodded. “I like quiet fellers. Bridger, you're the mayor.”

Bridger frowned. “You can't just make me mayor.”

“Just did. Pursuant to Emergency War Measure Fifty-six.”

Gwenna leaned over to Newt. “What in 'Shael's name is War Measure Fifty-six?”

The Aphorist shrugged. “Something about taxation on grain, I think.”

“So it doesn't…”

“Nope.”

Bridger looked confused, but the Flea just patted him gently on the shoulder. “You're in charge of the town, Gwenna's in charge of you. If Gwenna dies, it's Annick, but try not to let Gwenna die.”

“What about her?” the young man asked, nodding toward Pyrre.

“That's General Pyrre. Listen to her, too.”

“Where are you going?”

The Flea pointed up into the shifting clouds. “Find some help.”

“Help?”

“From down south.”

“What if they don't come in time?”

The Flea shrugged. “Ask Gwenna. Like I said, she's in charge.”

*   *   *

Gwenna was tempted to stay on top of the beacon tower. The square stone structure stood atop a cliff on Andt-Kyl's western island, overlooking the lake. According to Bridger, the loggers lit fires in the wide stone pit at the tower's top to guide ships to the town's docks on stormy days. Gwenna didn't give a shit about the ships, but the tower offered an excellent vantage of the entire area. Just as importantly, it gave her a tiny measure of isolation.

After all the languages and tactics, the demolitions and archery, the conditioning and swordplay, Kettral training hadn't left much time for useful tips on how to lead six hundred rough frontier loggers in the defense of their town. Even on the Islands, Gwenna hadn't made a name for herself in the areas of charm and persuasion, and now that she suddenly found herself in charge of a baffled and restive local population, she almost wished she could just fight the Urghul alone. At least atop the tower, there was only Bridger and Annick to deal with. Pyrre was down below with the townspeople, maybe flirting with them, maybe killing them. Gwenna tried not to think about it, focusing, instead, on the local topography. That, at least, she had trained to understand.

Loggers had built Andt-Kyl at the small delta where the Black dumped into Scar Lake, a rough little town of log houses, log bridges, log temples, and log docks spread over two rocky islands at the river's mouth. It was clear at a glance why the Flea had chosen the spot to bottle up the Urghul. The horsemen would have to cross three separate forks of the river, each running dark and deep. The network of bridges linking the islands to each other and to the shores on either side would be easy to control and, where necessary, to destroy.

“So why in Hull's name is Long Fist crossing
here
?” Gwenna muttered.

“The only spot, sir,” Bridger replied. He was handling the arrival of a Kettral Wing, the announcement of an Urghul army, the abrupt deaths of his mayor and constable, and his own elevation to the town's leading position about as well as could be expected, but he kept glancing at Gwenna warily when he thought she wasn't looking, and had settled almost immediately into referring to Gwenna and the others as “sir.” She had no idea what to make of that, but she figured they had more pressing business than sorting out the honorifics. “Half a mile north,” the young man was saying, “the Black bogs out. You could ride a thousand horses in there and not one of them would see the other side.”

“What about a hundred thousand horses?” she asked grimly.

He shook his head. “They can't get across up there, not unless they go all the way into the mountains, and then it's all black flies and balsams packed so close you can't see through 'em. There's a few log camps up there, but that's it.”

“Log camps?”

Bridger nodded. “A couple score men and ten thousand logs stacked up on the bank. We're late for the log drive this year. No bridges, though. No way across.”

“And south is the lake,” she said, looking out over the sheet of water to where it hazed into the sky at the horizon. “How long is it?”

“Not sure, exactly. Maybe fifty miles. Maybe more, with Aats-Kyl at the other end.”

“So that's why the Urghul are coming here.”

The logger looked at her. “Are there really a hundred thousand of them, sir?”

“Probably more,” she spat, then immediately regretted it. For all that Bridger looked like some bruised-knuckled logger—all sun-browned skin and ropy arms, bushy beard, and leather on top of wool on top of more wool—he couldn't have been much older than her. She tried to imagine how she would have responded if she'd never joined up with the Kettral, if she'd stayed home on her father's farm and then one day, out of the blue, discovered that an invading army was a few days out, that she was the first and only line of defense. She was tempted to say something reassuring, but then, the assurance would probably just be a lie. “There's plenty to kill us all a dozen times over, if we fuck up.”

His lips tightened, but he nodded. “Then we'd better not fuck up.”

*   *   *

The most obvious thing was to destroy the east bridge, the one connecting the larger and flatter of Andt-Kyl's two islands to the eastern bank of the Black. There was nothing on that far shore but half a dozen miserable farms, the owners of which did some bitching and some moaning on the subject until Pyrre explained about the Urghul and their love for pain and blood. That got almost everyone across the bridge, all except for one stubborn old bastard who sat on his porch with a pair of sharpened felling axes and a great crock of whiskey, who spat on Gwenna's blacks when she told him he had to move.

She started to go after the man, but Bridger held her back.

“Leave him be,” he murmured. “Pikker John'd rather die on his porch than run.”

“I'm here to make sure people don't die,” Gwenna said, furious at the old man's idiocy. She knocked Bridger's hand off her shoulder.

“Plenty of folks left to save,” the young man replied, gesturing back toward the village. “Lot of work to be done, sir, and if you're right about them horsemen, not much time to do it.”

They left Pikker John on his porch, honing his axes and taking the occasional pull on his crock. Gwenna told herself that at least the stubborn old bastard might kill one or two of the Urghul, but it felt like a failure. Long Fist hadn't even arrived and she'd already lost a man.

“We've got to blow this bridge,” she said, sizing up the wooden span after they'd crossed back to East Island. The decking didn't look like much, rough-sawn lumber tacked down with crude-cut nails, but the whole thing was held up by a dozen pilings, each as thick as a tree, sunk deep in the silt on either side of the channel.

“Blow it?” Bridger asked.

Gwenna grimaced. Kettral munitions weren't exactly a secret—there were too many stories swirling around the world for that—but the Eyrie tried not to spread word of the explosives any further than necessary.

“Like burning it,” Gwenna said, “only a lot faster.”

“I'll get it taken care of,” Bridger said.

“How?”

He smiled. “Those are logs. We're loggers.” He jerked a thumb at one of the half-dozen men who trailed him. “Banders—get a group. Cut it down.”

The man nodded, then trotted off.

“What about the pilings in the middle?” Gwenna asked. Most were sunk in the mud flats flanking the channel, but four plunged straight into the swift current of the water.

Bridger frowned. “Sunk those twelve years back,” he said, “when winter froze the river hard enough to work. Probably can't get at 'em now, but with the rest chopped and the decking out…”

“Good,” Gwenna said. “Do it.” She turned to Annick. “Think that'll hold them?”

The sniper looked at the river, the wide mud flats on either side, then into the dark trees beyond.

“For a while. They can build a new bridge.”

Gwenna frowned. She knew enough about bridge construction to understand how to destroy the things, but the time frame for building was a little murky. She turned to Bridger. “How long would that take? To rebuild?”

“Depends on the conditions, sir. And on how many bridges they've built.”

“Not many,” Gwenna said. “The Urghul are good at riding, shooting, and killing. Not much on engineering.”

“Could take weeks, then.”

Gwenna nodded. Il Tornja could march an army almost all the way from Annur in weeks. “And let's make sure that the conditions are particularly unpleasant. You have people in this town that can handle a bow?”

Bridger grinned. “This far north? If you're not logging, you're hunting. Got some women are better shots than the men. Kids can pull a bow, too.”

“Good. Bring them to Annick. She'll oversee the defense of the east fork.”

The sniper's jaw tightened. “I'm not certain I'm the best—”