And then it began.
Kaden had spent years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains, unseen atop the granite spire of the Talon, watching crag cats hunt. They had struck him as perfect predators, flowing over the stone like winter shadows, silently pacing their prey, moving from ledge to boulder so smoothly they seemed otherworldly, like creatures culled from a dream of hunting. He’d watched them stand utterly still for an hour, then uncoil all at once, leaping a dozen paces in a single, unerring strike. Death, Kaden thought, must be like that: perfect, patient, waiting one moment, striking the next, unstringing tendons so quickly, so precisely, that the dying thing-a bear, a mountain goat-was gone before the carcass struck the stone. Those crag cats, however, for all their perfection, all their silent, predatory grace, seemed clumsy, slow, almost comically awkward when Kaden compared them to the creature Valyn had become.
Valyn didn’t attack the soldiers blocking the street to the north; attack wasn’t the right word. An attack implied a fight, implied some defense-if only feeble, notional-on the part of those attacked. The Annurian soldiers had no defense. They might as well have stood at the ocean’s verge, trying to hold back the steel-gray sea with their feeble spears. When Valyn was still twenty paces distant, he hurled his axes, one then the other. Kaden could barely follow the flashing blur of the vicious wedges tumbling end over end, but in the moment it took for both to find their marks, Valyn had already slipped knives from inside his blacks and hurled those, too, at the line of men. The sound reached Kaden a moment later-four sick wet thwacks, steel hacking into unready flesh.
The line of soldiers shuddered as the four men at the center collapsed into their own agony. Valyn didn’t break stride.
Between him and the Annurians, an ironmonger’s wagon laden with pots and heavy pans had skewed across the street. The mules, panicked by the scent of blood, were bellowing, stamping, hauling their groaning load in different directions. The bearded ironmonger hesitated a moment, torn between the need to protect his goods and the awful realization that there could be no protecting them, not against the madness coursing through the street. As the baffled merchant hurled himself to the dirt, Valyn leapt over the wagon, stripping two heavy iron pans from the load as he passed, hit the ground with a shoulder, rolled to his feet, knocked aside the arrows flying at his face, and then he was among the legionaries, caving in faces and shattering arms, bellowing at Kaden and Triste to follow.
It was only a few dozen paces, but by the time they caught up, the legionaries were dead, blood chugging out onto the earth through ragged, ugly wounds, and Valyn was holding his axes once again.
“Let’s go,” he growled. “And this time, try to keep up.”
There was a moment early on in all the blood-slick madness when Kaden caught a glimpse of a golden-winged bird. The creature screamed, careened through the sky as though it were a huge puppet yanked by vicious, invisible strings, and then it was gone, vanished behind the rooftops. He ran on, waiting for the kettral to reappear even as dozens of men wielding spears and swords flooded into the street behind them.
“Where is it?” he shouted.
“Gone,” Valyn said. “Can’t make the grab.”
Even as he spoke, another knot of armored men erupted from a side alley a dozen paces ahead. Valyn, already charging, charged harder. Kaden had never seen any human being move so fast, had never seen anything move that fast. Valyn wielded the axes as though they were part of his own flesh, as though he’d been born holding them, and the Annurians could find no defense that availed against that brutal steel. Valyn went over their guard or under, found holes in whatever feeble attacks were thrown up, sometimes just slammed straight through a raised blade, shattering it or knocking it aside as though three feet of sharpened sword were no more than a reed.
“Come on,” he growled, gesturing through the hole he’d carved. Blood spattered his face.
The flight that followed was madness. Not since the Aedolians had come to Ashk’lan to kill him had Kaden run so hard. This time, too, the Annurian soldiers were his foes. This time, too, Triste ran at his side, her breathing ragged, but steady. This time, too, he understood the stakes, how it would only take a single misstep, a twisted ankle, and the race would be over. It was all the same, and yet it was not the same at all.
There had been a hope of escaping the Aedolians back in the Bone Mountains where the terrain favored the monks. Kaden enjoyed no such advantage on the streets of Annur. Worse, il Tornja’s soldiers weren’t trailing along somewhere behind, they were everywhere, lunging out of doorways and alleys, appearing at intersections, calling out to one another in ear-shivering blasts on their horns. Were it not for Valyn, the Annurians would have killed both Kaden and Triste a dozen times over, but Valyn, somehow, was everywhere.
When Annurians came on horseback, he killed the horses. When they came with spears, he rolled beneath the shafts and cut the arms from the attackers. Once, when Kaden rounded a corner to find two legionaries leveling flatbows at his chest, Valyn lunged in front. An ax flew end over end into the face of one of the bowmen. Kaden couldn’t see what happened next. Or he saw it, but his mind couldn’t work through the fact. There was an arrow. A flying arrow. Then there was not. It looked as though Valyn had snatched it from the air, but that was impossible. There was no time to dwell on it. Valyn had reached the other bowman, caved in his throat, retrieved the first thrown ax, and was waving them on again.
His look brought Kaden up short. Despite the blood bathing his arms, soaking the tattered cloth of his clothes, Valyn didn’t look like a man fighting for his life. He looked … glad.
No, Kaden thought. Not glad. Something else.
There was no time to ponder words. Even as he paused, the Annurians were closing.
“Come on, Kaden,” Triste said, dragging him forward by the wrist. “Come on.”
Kaden met her eyes, saw the fear and determination there, and he ran.
The red walls of the Dawn Palace nearly proved their undoing. They’d come at the fortress from the west and south, working their way through the streets until they burst from one final crowded lane into the open space before the walls and the short bridge leading to the Water Gate.
The Water Gate was nothing compared to the towering Godsgate that opened west onto Annur’s main thoroughfare. It was an entrance for minor ministers, deliveries of food and wine, workers come to repair roofs or walls. It was a small gate, but it was blocked by a steel portcullis, and for all Valyn’s ability to hack his way through human flesh, his axes would do nothing to get them past that grille.
“West,” Valyn said, checking his momentum before he reached the short bridge over the moat. “We’ll go in the Great Gate.”
Even as the words left his lips, however, a knot of twenty or thirty soldiers, half bearing loaded flatbows, marched out from a side street at the double to block the way west.
“East,” Kaden gasped. “The harbor.”
But there were men to the east, too, spreading out in a tight cordon across the street.
Valyn hefted his axes, as though testing their weight. “We’ll go through them.”