“I don’t know anything about your Csestriim horror,” she said, “but this bird is really going to put a hitch in our plans. On foot, those troops are an hour away. By wing…” She spread her hands.
“Will they come for us immediately?” Triste asked. She had woken when the assassin dragged her under the overhang, and was propped on her elbows, staring off into the gathering gloom, fear and defiance warring in her voice.
Pyrre produced a long lens from her pack, peered through it for a while, then shook her head slowly. “It doesn’t look like it,” she replied. “The sun’s just set, and Adiv’s a crafty one. He knows that now that they have the bird, we can’t possibly outdistance them. He’ll wait for the morning, for full sunlight. Then they’ll come.”
Kaden looked from Tan to the Skullsworn, then back. “So we’ve got one night,” he said finally. “What do we do?”
Pyrre shrugged. “We’re not spoiled for choice. Normally, I’d recommend spending your last coins on a favorite meal or a good whore, but I don’t think you monks tend to carry much coin, and you seem to be lacking in whores. Mostly lacking, anyway.” She smiled at Triste with this last comment.
“I’m not a whore,” the girl snapped.
The assassin raised her hands in surrendur. “Me, I’m exhausted. There’s just time to enjoy a good sound sleep.”
Kaden stared as Pyrre Lakatur rolled onto her back, locked her fingers behind her head, and closed her eyes.
“That’s it?” he asked, amazed. “You cross an entire continent to save me, and then just give up?”
“Everyone thinks that Rassambur is all about learning to knife people in the belly and poison their soup,” the assassin responded without opening her eyes. “What you really learn there is a pretty basic lesson: Death is inevitable. The god comes for us all.”
“What about back at Ashk’lan? When you fought Ut? You didn’t seem so resigned then!”
“Then, there was a chance. Now…” Pyrre shrugged. “I’ve been running for a day and a night. We all have. The traitors behind us have five times our numbers as well as a Kettral Wing, not to mention, if your sour master here is to be believed, the evil pet creature of an ancient and immortal race that could track you across moving water by moonlight. Tomorrow, we’ll fight, and I will give some of them to the god, but we will not win. And so, for now, I will enjoy a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.”
Kaden turned his attention to his umial. “I assume you’re not content to lie down and die, too?”
The older monk shook his head. “No, but the way is not clear. I must think.”
And then, as if they were back on the ledges of Ashk’lan, Rampuri Tan shifted into a cross-legged position and gazed out across the valley toward the west, chest rising and falling so slowly, the movement was almost imperceptible. The monk’s eyes remained open, but the sharp focus had left them, as though he were dreaming. Or dead, Kaden reflected grimly.
He considered Tan for a while longer, then took the long lens from where it lay beside Pyrre, training it on the enemy soldiers once more. “There’s got to be something,” he muttered, studying the Kettral as they exchanged handshakes with the Aedolians. The leader was a blond youth, tall and well-built, dressed all in blacks like the rest of his Wing. The short Kettral swords crisscrossed his back. Valyn and I used to play with wooden swords like that. They had pretended to be great warriors, but when the men came for them on the morrow, when Pyrre “gave a few to the god,” Kaden doubted he would manage to land a single blow. Bitterness welled up inside him, hot and sour. He allowed the emotion its flood, then shunted it aside. Bitterness would do him no more good than regret.
Look at the men, he told himself. Find a solution.
The newcomer commanded a standard five-man Wing, only … Kaden peered through the long lens once more. One of them—the flier, it looked like—was a woman, middling height with short blond hair. The only other Kettral he could get a good view of was a lanky soldier with feathers in his long hair and ink running up his arms. It was a strange look for a warrior, but after everything Kaden had seen in the past week, he was numb to strangeness.
As the two talked vigorously with Ut and Adiv, Kaden lowered the glass. Night already smudged the sky. Maybe the assassin was right. Maybe it was time to accept the inevitable. Beshra’an, saama’an, kinla’an, even the vaniate—they all seemed frivolous and inconsequential pursuits in the face of all that steel.
“What’s that?” Triste asked, pointing at something in the distance.
Kaden squinted. A dark shape was moving across the gathering gloom high above the mountain peaks. He raised the lens to his eye once more, and a second bird burst into view, winging in hard and fast.
“’Shael take it,” he swore.
“Take care,” Pyrre murmured without opening her eyes. “That’s my god you’re invoking.” The woman rooted awkwardly beneath her back, tossed aside a sharp rock, then settled once more.
“They’ve got a second bird,” Kaden said. “You want to see?”
“Not particularly.”
“We don’t know who these new ones are.”
“We don’t know who any of them are except for Adiv, who’s a bastard, and Ut, who’s a much bigger bastard with a very large sword. Their names don’t matter. What matters is that they want to kill you and they are setting up to make a very thorough job of it.”
“We might learn something.”
“We will learn that there are five of them with two swords apiece. Making ten swords, if you’re keeping count. They will also carry belt knives and at least two will have bows, maybe all five. By my count, that gives them rougly fifteen more weapons than we have, not counting, of course, whatever explosives they’ve brought.”
“You’ve studied the Kettral.”
“I’ve studied everyone I might have to kill,” Pyrre replied, “and they will be harder to kill than most. I don’t need to look at them to know that.”
“Well, I want to see,” Triste said, wriggling forward on her elbows, shouldering past the drowsing assassin.
She raised the glass, frowned, then slowly shifted it, following the bird as it approached. Kaden watched it with his naked eye, squinting as it landed. He could make out the dismounting soldiers, shadows in the gathering dusk, but nothing more.
“The new soldiers don’t seem to be getting on as well as the first ones did,” she said after few moments.
“Meaning what?” Kaden asked.
“I’m not sure. There seems to be some sort of standoff. Here.”
Kaden took the long lens and trained it on the far pass. It took him a minute to sort out the new Kettral from those already there.
“This Wing has a woman, too,” he said, “long red hair. And … two women, although the second one doesn’t look like she’s much older than you.”
“Is she wearing blacks?” Pyrre asked.
Kaden nodded. “And she’s carrying a bow. The thing is practically as big as she is.”
“Don’t let her size fool you,” the assassin replied. “A killer doesn’t always look like a killer. The girl may be young, but if she’s flying missions for the Eyrie, she can probably put an arrow through your eye at three hundred paces. You know, the Kettral tried to clear out Rassambur once—one of your revered ancestors decided he didn’t like the idea of a church of Ananshael up in the Ancaz. They sent ten Wings, ten veteran Wings…”
The assassin continued talking, but Kaden had ceased to hear the words. He had brought the long lens around to the commander of this second Wing—a tall, sun-darkened youth with short hair, a grim set to his mouth, and eyes dark as pools of pitch. At first he’d been paying more attention to the youth’s altercation with Micijah Ut. The two were arguing about something, the Aedolian had his blade drawn, and other soldiers were drifting toward their commander as though sensing a fight. Kaden was about to take another look at the bird when something drew him back to that face. The sun had all but set and the light was poor, and at first he thought the shadows were playing tricks on him, but then the commander chopped downward with a hand, a curt, exasperated gesture, and Kaden knew. The eyes were darker, somehow, and bleaker. The mischievious boy had become a man grown, with a man’s height and a soldier’s build, but Kaden knew that gesture and he knew the face, even after eight years. He struggled to make sense of what was happening on the far pass, but even as he watched he felt the cold blade of betrayal take him through the gut. He lowered the glass.