It wasn’t the cords of muscle standing out in his neck, or the way the veins in his scalp throbbed with the blood beneath, or the sound of his teeth grinding-so loud it seemed his jaw would have to crack. Valyn had seen all that before, seen it dozens of times over in different variations. The thing he had never seen before was the sheer, granitic determination in the Flea’s eyes. The Wing leader wasn’t looking at Newt or the stone he had to move. He wasn’t looking forward to the river or backward to the Urghul behind. He was looking at nothing, staring at the empty air a foot away from his face, his whole attention fixed so fully on that point he seemed to have forgotten his own body, which was bent to breaking beneath the load, forgotten the point of his awful labors, forgotten everything but that one goal, as though his entire life had been aiming at this single moment, this task beside which there was no other and after which nothing else mattered, this moving of the stone.
He failed.
He staggered, exhausted, reset his boots, tried to find new purchase. Newt shook his head.
“No good,” he gasped. “One man can’t … lift the world.”
“Fuck that,” the Flea growled as he threw his shoulder against the block.
Valyn was there in a single stride, hitting the rock from the same side, hitting it so hard he felt his shoulder lurch horribly in the socket. The stone didn’t budge.
“Get out,” the Aphorist said.
“When I die,” the Flea replied, his voice level, quiet despite the strain, “then you can start giving the orders.” He turned to the leach. “What can you do, Sig?”
She kept her hand on Newt’s forehead, but closed her eyes. The plinth shuddered, raining down gravel from where it leaned against the doorframe above. It shifted a few degrees, then fell still. Sigrid made an awful broken sound, some hacked-apart kind of howl.
“She cannot raise the whole weight,” Newt translated. “Not even … with my pain. All men must die, but this is … not your time. Get out.”
The Flea let go of the stone, crossed to kneel beside Sigrid.
“How much more?” he asked.
She looked up from the Aphorist. Tears stood in her blue eyes.
“No,” Newt groaned.
The Flea ignored him. “How much more?”
At their backs, fifty paces away but obscured by the fort’s crumbling buildings, the Urghul were howling. Valyn could hear the cracking of wood hauled aside, the crash of barricades thrown down. They were opening Balendin’s gap in the wall, finishing the work they’d begun almost a week earlier. It wouldn’t be long before the horses were able to pour through that gap, wouldn’t be long before they’d come hunting for survivors.
“This…,” Newt began.
“Is not your choice,” the Flea said. He kept his eyes on the leach. “Sig, I need you to tell me.”
She made a strange, mute gesture, a sort of slice across her arm.
The Flea’s face tightened. He nodded, slid his belt knife from the sheath, closed his eyes, then, in a decisive motion, scored the skin, notching a shallow V into the flesh. With the practiced motion of a cook in the kitchen, he flipped the knife, slid the steel beneath his own skin, then started peeling. Valyn stared. There had been a couple of classes on flaying back on the Islands. The accepted wisdom was that it wasn’t much use as torture-it hurt too much. Instead of saying useful things, flayed soldiers passed out or went mad. According to the Kettral trainers, no one could take the pain.
Evidently, the phrase no one did not include the Flea.
He tore free the ribbon of bloody skin, yanked it off the way he might have pulled a recalcitrant peel from an apple, then went at it again, carving away another strip quickly, but carefully, refusing to let the knife bite so deep it might sever a tendon or artery. Valyn understood it all at once: Sigrid needed pain-that was her well-and the Flea was giving it to her without gutting his own ability to fight. He might die later from gangrene or wet rot, but not today, not until they had escaped. Blood washed his arm. Valyn could see the red cords of twisted muscle laid bare, the filaments of veins.
“Is that enough?” the Flea asked.
Sigrid took the mutilated limb in her hand, then closed her eyes again. This time, when she put her free hand against the stone, it lurched. The leach groaned, a horrifying, broken sound deep in her chest. When she bared her teeth, they were bloody, as though she’d bitten open the inside of her cheek. The stone shifted up another inch, and Valyn lunged forward, seized the Aphorist beneath the armpits, pulling him from the wreckage.
“Clear,” he said. “He’s out.”
Sigrid didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes were still closed, her pale face bathed with sweat. She might have been bearing the weight of that massive stone on her own body, letting it crush her slowly into the dirt.
The Flea pulled his arm from her grip, her eyes snapped open, the slab dropped, and the whole wall shuddered with the weight.
“Go,” the Wing leader said, jerking his head toward the river as he hacked a length of cloth from the hem of his blacks, then began to bind the bloody arm. “Go.”
Valyn heaved the Aphorist onto his back, ignored the man’s stifled cry as his broken leg jolted, and began to move over the uneven ground, his eyes fixed on the spot a hundred paces distant where the grassy bank sloped down to the Haag. This far north, the river was barely fifty paces wide. There was a quiet eddy directly ahead, at the base of the bank, but beyond those calm shallows the current surged into a brown-white froth, churning through head-high standing waves and grinding over massive boulders.
The notion that any of them would be swimming that thing was ridiculous. The best that they could hope for was to stay afloat somehow, to keep from being sucked under, pinned beneath the river’s weight, and killed. There was no way the legionaries they’d left behind could have survived it. The Kettral spent their whole lives swimming, and Valyn wasn’t sure he could make it. Not that there was any choice.
He glanced over his shoulder. Sigrid stumbled forward as though in a daze. The Flea had her by an elbow, guiding her on, but he was losing blood despite his hastily bandaged arm, the rich dark skin of his face going gray, ashen.
“Problems for later,” Valyn muttered to himself.
He hitched Newt higher on his shoulder, turned back toward the river, then staggered to a halt. Urghul riders were pouring out of another gap in the southern wall, massing up between the Kettral and the river. They’d found a way through Mierten’s Fort, around it, over it-it didn’t matter-they were here, half a dozen of them, then a dozen, and more coming, lances leveled, faces alight at the sight of their cornered quarry. Valyn slid an ax free of his belt, started to shift the Aphorist around to give himself more room.
“Down,” Newt groaned. “Put me down. In a fight like this … a man needs all his arms.”
Valyn hesitated, then lowered the demolitions master. As he was drawing his second ax, Newt forced himself to his knees, grimaced, almost passed out, steadied himself against the ground with a hand, straightened again, then slipped two knives from the belt at his waist. Knives against mounted riders with spears. It seemed almost pointless, but the worst of the soldier’s pain seemed to have passed, and the Aphorist’s eyes were sharp and bright as he watched the riders form up for their attack.
The Flea reached them a moment later. He was carrying Sigrid now, cradling the tall woman in his arms as though she were a child. Her lids were open, but her eyes lolled back inside her skull. Gently, patiently, despite the horsemen bearing down upon them, the Wing leader laid her on the dirt, then straightened with a wince.