She caught just a glimpse of them: Kaden and Triste running side by side, Valyn a few paces ahead, his axes naked and bloody in his hands, and then, while the bird was still forty feet up, something hard and viciously strong slammed into its side.
Gwenna’s world went upside down, turned right side up, and then she was hanging in her harness, twisting as the wind tore at her. The bird was screaming, Talal was tangled in his straps, while over on the far talon, Annick was trying to drag herself back into something resembling proper position.
“Another bird,” Gwenna shouted, as she got her feet under her, craning her head in an effort to see past Allar’ra’s wing. “Someone’s got another fucking bird.”
It only made sense, but when she scanned the sky for a second kettral, she found only a few high clouds, smoke drifting from the chimneys, and the wide, unblemished blue. Then, even as she searched, something smashed into the bird again.
“There’s no second kettral,” Talal shouted. “A kenning.” He was stabbing his finger down, not up. “It’s a kenning.”
Gwenna took half a heartbeat to absorb the information.
“New plan,” she said. “We drop-”
Another vicious blow hammered into Allar’ra, smashing him so hard that his right wing grazed the wall of a long stone building, and then they were peeling away to the east.
“Jak, you son of a bitch,” Gwenna cursed.
“He’s right,” Talal shouted, shaking his head. “We’re too easy a target up here.”
“I understand that,” Gwenna spat. “Which is why I need him to put the fucking bird down. We’ll do this on foot.”
She reached for the leather strap, but at some point in the violence it had torn free. Whatever plan she had, there was no way to communicate it to Jak, no way to do anything but hang in the harness and hope that Valyn could get the other two clear of the army somehow, hope that Gwenna’s own bird wouldn’t be slammed straight out of the air, shattered on the streets below. As she twisted in her straps, another blow hit the bird. Allar’ra opened his beak to scream, and then Quick Jak was nudging the creature lower, so low they were skimming along one of the wider city streets, windows and balconies whipping by to either side.
The moments that followed comprised the most terrifying flying of Gwenna’s life. She had no idea where the attacks against Allar’ra were coming from, no idea if they could be blocked or turned aside, no idea of anything, really, except that some leach they couldn’t even see was kicking the living shit out of them. She couldn’t communicate with Jak, but that hardly mattered now. He was doing the only thing he could-getting them low enough to hide, to stay alive.
An adult kettral had a wingspan of at least seventy feet, which didn’t leave much room for flying, even in Annur’s largest streets. Gwenna could feel the creature straining under its own weight, trying to rise above the buildings without fully spreading its wings. And then, when they were just clear of the highest roofs, the leach hit them again, knocking the bird a few paces sideways in the air.
’Ra screamed his rage and frustration. Gwenna had no way of knowing how badly the bird was hurt. That they were still in the air at all seemed like a ’Kent-kissing miracle, one that only an idiot would trust any longer than necessary. Jak seemed to agree. He gave the bird its head, letting it climb for seven or eight powerful wingbeats, and then they fell into another steep glide, ’Ra’s wings tucked halfway back against his sides, the city’s streets rushing up at them all over again. It was desperate flying, getting high enough to keep air speed, then dropping down to hide below the rooflines, soaring through streets so tight than any error meant all of them were going to end up as stains against the side of some tenement or temple. It was madness and genius all at the same time, and it kept them alive.
When they finally burst out of the final street into the wide-open space of Annur’s lower harbor, nothing hit them. Quick Jak guided the bird cautiously higher, then higher still. Nothing.
Gwenna glanced over at Talal. “We safe here?”
The leach spread his hands helplessly. “No idea. I couldn’t do something like that even if the whole world turned to steel.”
Great, Gwenna thought as Jak banked the bird north and west, back toward their improvised command center. An unknown leach of incalculable power who is not on our side.
* * *
Adare felt like a condemned woman climbing to her death as she mounted the stone stairs of the tower. There was no gibbet at the top, of course-just the bare stone with a clear view out to the north, but that view, in its way, was worse than any hangman’s noose. A noose might mean death for a single woman, but the Urghul army that waited-that might spell the doom of all Annur. And that was forgetting all about the disaster she’d left behind, the two brothers she’d abandoned in Kegellen’s tunnels.
She was still winded from the sprint through the city, a mad rush in which she’d barely managed to stay on her feet. The gamble had worked, at least for her. Whatever method il Tornja’s soldiers were using to track her through the underground labyrinth, it stopped working as soon as she split off from the rest of the party. Kegellen had dispatched a dozen men alongside Adare, but there had been nothing for them to do besides run and look menacing. She would have found more relief in the escape if the implications hadn’t been so obvious: the army wasn’t searching for her. As Kaden had suggested, the men were looking for him and Triste.
As she climbed the stairs, Adare stared south, where the huge, golden-winged kettral had disappeared. Gwenna and the three soldiers with her had proven themselves more than competent. If anyone had a chance to snatch Kaden and Triste out of the clutches of il Tornja’s army, it was a Kettral Wing with a bird. The plan was working, they had made the right call, and yet something inside Adare felt sick, soiled, cowardly. She’d run as fast as she could as long as she could in an effort to get to the Kettral quickly, to save the people she’d left behind, but that didn’t change the basic fact: she had run.
And there’s nothing you can do about it now, she told herself viciously. Whatever triumph or tragedy was playing out to the south, a contest compared to which the war with the Urghul was some pedant’s marginalia, she could do nothing to affect it. Either Gwenna would get to Kaden and Triste in time, would carry them to the Spear in time to perform the obviate, or she would not. Adare’s job now was making sure that if the others succeeded, if il Tornja didn’t manage to annihilate the very gods, that those humans who remained might inherit something other than the Urghul’s savage kingdom of agony and ash.
As she reached the tower’s top, Nira’s voice jerked her from her thoughts.
“If ya were pickin’ times to fuck off and disappear,” the old woman said, “this was a pretty shit pick.”
The old woman stood alone at the tower’s top, wind tearing at her tangled gray hair. Even as she turned to face Adare, she leaned heavily on her cane, as though the weight of her hundreds of years had settled down on her all at once. Her eyes were still bright, but sunken deep in their sockets. When her gaze settled on Adare, it felt like the gaze of someone in a portrait, someone once strong, determined, resilient, but long since dead.
“What’s going on?” Adare asked.
“Aside from an army a’ Urghul gettin’ ready to turn your nice shiny city into a stable?”
Adare took the final stairs two at a time, then stopped, staring north over the devastation she had visited on her city to the Urghul army beyond. For the better part of the year she’d been near the front, just a few dozen miles from the most brutal fighting, but not since Andt-Kyl had she actually seen more than a few of the horsemen at a time. The sight filled her with both dread and fascination. They poured over the low hills, more and more and more, until it seemed they would fill all the fields north of the burned barricade she had created.