Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(207)

Valyn let him go. “Well, don’t get all mushy on me now,” he muttered.

The next few minutes were a whirlwind of activity: Valyn slapping the others awake, everyone clutching their heads, then searching desperately for lost weapons, shadows darting through the darkness.

“Kaden,” Valyn gestured, “you’re with me on the bird. It’s the safest place for now, especially if Yurl doubles back. Talal, can you delve yet?”

The leach’s eyes were still glazed, but he rose unsteadily to his feet. “I can go,” he said. “I don’t know … I don’t know about a kenning. But I can go.”

Valyn glanced from Talal to the darkness, then back again, as though wrestling with some decision. When he spoke, however, his voice was sure.

“You’re staying here. And Triste. And Gwenna.”

“Bullshit,” the red-haired woman snapped, stepping forward.

“This is not the time, Gwenna,” Valyn replied. “Talal is busted up worse than he knows, and I’m not leaving him alone. You’re staying.”

Gwenna opened her mouth to argue, then looked over at Talal, who was leaning unsteadily against a boulder. “If you get yourselves killed,” she hissed, turning back to Valyn, “I will come down there and kick the shit out of your corpses.”

“Agreed,” Valyn said.

And then they were running down the short slope to the kettral.

“Step into this,” Valyn shouted, gesturing at a harness. Kaden did as he was told, staring as the bird gathered itself in a great burst of power and leapt into the air. Under other circumstances, the flight would have been terrifying and exhilarating both, but deep inside the vaniate, Kaden felt only calm, distance, as though he were no more than the wind rifling his robes, no more than the snow on the peaks, or the silent clouds scrubbing the sky.

“Pyrre will be down there,” he shouted, pointing toward the southeast. “She said she’d keep the others busy as long as she could.”

“What are you doing with a Skullsworn?” Valyn shouted back.

Kaden spread his hands, at a loss about how to explain. “I’m not sure. She’s on our side.”

Valyn shot him a strange look, but nodded.

It didn’t take long to find the assassin. The enemy Wing had her pinned down in a dead-end canyon about a mile and a half from the site of the Aedolian camp. One of the attacking Kettral had lit a couple of long tubes that looked like sticks, but that burned with a bright, incandescent light, illuminating the entire scene. The blond youth that Kaden took to be the Wing leader had Pyrre hemmed in, his people arranged in a loose semicircle, blocking off any escape. No one, however, had yet dared to step into the lethal circle of the woman’s spinning steel.

“Why haven’t they taken her yet?” Valyn bellowed in Kaden’s ear. “I don’t care how good she is—one arrow and she’s down!”

Kaden shook his head. “They think Tan and I made it to the cave. They need to capture Pyrre alive, to question her.”

Kaden had taken the assassin at her word when she insisted that it was a lot trickier to capture a foe than to kill her. After all, Pyrre was the one getting either captured or killed. Valyn nodded, as if it all made sense.

He flicked a few quick signs to the dark-skinned youth on the far talon, and moments later, the bird dipped into a steep approach. The girl with the bow, she couldn’t have been much more than fifteen, was hanging out into the darkness—ever since Kaden first cut her loose, she seemed to have been aiming or shooting at something—and as they fell on the circle of soldiers from above, she drew and fired, drew and fired, three shots in quick succession, and three of the Kettral collapsed into the dust—dead so quickly, they never had time to clutch at their necks. I never saw a man die before last night, Kaden realized. I didn’t think it would be so easy.

Ut turned at the last moment, just in time for the arrow to glance off his breastplate, falling away into the darkness. The other youth, the Wing leader, dived into the darkness, and then the bird was upon them, shrieking an earsplitting cry, and Valyn was leaping free of the talons, rolling as he hit the ground, a knife in one hand, short sword in the other.

*

There hadn’t been much time for elaborate tactics, but the plan had seemed like a good one to Valyn: Take down the Wing’s sniper, flier, and demolitions man first, and then they could deal with the more conventional threats of Ut and Yurl. Valyn’s own Wing could have dropped, of course. It would be nice to have Laith and Annick at his back, but he liked having them in the air better; the altitude gave Annick a better range of attack. As his feet hit the ground, however, he realized the flaw: Ut and Yurl had fled outside the blazing light of the flares, into the darkness. The air support he had counted on was no good if the members of his Wing couldn’t see what was going on. He was on his own.