With an effort, Gwenna shifted her eyes from the bird to the five men who stood on the dock just in front of it. Despite their Kettral blacks, the Kettral swords buckled over their backs, the Kettral bows held ready in their hands, Gwenna recognized none of them. They’d formed up in a standard diamond wedge, and it was clear why: twenty feet in front of them lay a dozen bodies. A few were still feebly convulsing, twitching, trying to drag themselves clear. Most were perfectly still, the flesh slack, mangled, tossed aside.
The situation was as obvious as it was ugly: the mob came for the men with the bird, tried to attack, then ended up flattened by a few flickwicks. The five Kettral-if they were Kettral-had a good position. Any halfway decent sniper could take them down, but it didn’t look like there were many snipers in the disoriented mass. Most people, clearly rousted from their beds by the growing fire, were barely clothed. Aside from the Kettral, only one man that Gwenna could see carried a weapon-a sailor, judging from his gait. The man lugged a bare saber, but was otherwise naked, his cock swinging in the wind; interrupted while pissing, or fucking, or sleeping off his drunk. He didn’t look like much of a threat, especially not to a Wing of Kettral.
Gwenna shifted her eyes back to the men on the dock. The one in front, a tall, wide son of a bitch with a shaved head and skin almost as pale as hers, was raising a hand. He smiled smugly, as though he were a popular atrep preparing to address a gathering of his most fervent supporters.
If he expects to make a speech, Gwenna thought, he’s going to be disappointed.
Between the fire and the mob she could barely make out voices a few feet away. When the Kettral opened his mouth, however, the words emerged hard-edged and clear, as though he were speaking directly into her ear.
Which meant that one of them was a leach. Gwenna hadn’t expected a milk run when Kaden asked her to go back to the Islands. It had been obvious, even from Annur, that there would be blood on a lot of blades before the whole thing was over. This, however, was looking worse and worse. She gritted her teeth.
“Your town is a shithole,” the man began, smiling all the time as though offering the most fulsome praise. “It is a shithole, but we didn’t want to burn it down.”
The mob surged forward at that, men and women bellowing their rage and shame. They’d almost reached the dock when one of the soldiers raised a starshatter above his head. The fuse was already burning-a hot, bright point of light against the darkness beyond. The crowd trembled, hesitated, then recoiled, as though the whole mass were a single creature, one that had learned through hard discipline to avoid that horrible, brilliant light.
The speaker smiled even more widely, white teeth bright in the fire.
“So, as a gesture of good faith…” He extended one hand, palm up, slowly and dramatically toward the western portion of the town. “… we have only burned half of it. At least for now.”
There were shouted protests. Accusations. Screamed curses.
“No one here did nothing ta you!”
“My husband’s dead. He’s dead! He’s dead!”
“If you didn’t want to burn the town, then why did you burn it, you bastards?”
The speaker put a cupped hand behind his ear at this last question.
“Why?” He cocked his head, as though to hear better. “Did someone ask why?” He waited a moment, through a few more curses and questions, then nodded vigorously. “Ah, I think I understand the difficulty. Elsewhere in the world, this would not be a problem. Elsewhere people have a notion of law, crime, and consequence. Here on Hook, however, you have been … deprived of such notions.”
He leaned back on his heels, tucked his thumbs into his leather belt, and smiled even more widely. He wasn’t much to look at-a wide, heavy face, lips that twisted up cruelly whenever he wasn’t talking-but the son of a bitch had the voice of a trained orator-rich, and strong, and supple. He had the voice, and obviously he liked to use it.
“It’s not your fault, of course,” he went on. “No people can be expected to circumscribe their own … baser impulses without the outside imposition of law, of order. Formerly, the Eyrie let you all run amok because it suited their purposes to have you disordered, fragmented. A grievous lapse,” he said, shaking his head. “A lamentable lapse. Fortunately, we are here to introduce you to these notions. This,” he went on, leveling a steady finger at the flames, “is justice.”
For a few moments, the mob just stared, first at the man in Kettral blacks, then at the flames consuming their miserable homes. To Gwenna’s ear it was all a lot of horseshit, long on talk and short on explanation. On the other hand, no one was trying to kill the bastard anymore, so he had to be doing something right. In fact, when Gwenna turned to scrutinize the faces around her, she found them filled with fear and resentment, but no confusion. Protest they might, but they understood why the men in black were burning their homes. She shifted her attention back to the dock.
“When you harbor dissidents,” the leader said, allowing himself a flourish of rhetorical anger, “this is what happens. When you take rebels into your miserable cellars and hovels, we will burn them down.” He spat onto the dock. The gesture looked fake, somehow, like a performance he’d rehearsed back in the barracks. “You should be grateful. The shacks we burned weren’t fit for the rats you shared them with. Try to do better when you rebuild. And when those creeping vermin come to you again begging for help and hiding, remember that I’ll pay a gold Annurian sun for every head. On the other hand, the next time a field of our yellowbloom is burned, I’ll be back to torch a dozen more houses.” He shrugged. “Your choice.”
The mob started to growl once more, but another voice cut through the rumbling discontent.
“You want a head, you bastard?”
Gwenna spun to find a woman standing on a flight of low stone steps almost directly behind her. She was tall, taller than Gwenna herself, long limbed and dark skinned, hair shaved down to the scalp. She was fine-featured, almost aristocratic in her face and bearing, but though she spoke with chin raised and her dark eyes flashing, Gwenna could smell the fear on her, a bone-deep fear held just barely in check. At first glance, in the night and fickle firelight, she appeared unarmed. As the mob stared, however, she pulled a blade from over her right shoulder. A short weapon, smoke steel and carried in the Kettral style. Despite the blade, however, the woman wasn’t dressed like the men on the docks.
Instead of blacks, she wore a sleeveless tunic and dark breeches, practical enough in the hot island weather, but a little too loose for good fighting attire. She knew how to hold the sword, which was more than you could say for most of the idiots swaggering around Hook, and had chosen her position well-high ground, back to a building, double escape routes-except for an open right flank, where a long alley offered a perfect angle of attack. It took less than a heartbeat to see it, but seeing was the easy part. What did it mean? The woman defying the Kettral on the dock was almost Kettral herself, but imperfect, like someone who’d been spying on the Eyrie for years without taking part in any of the actual training.
“If you want a head,” she shouted again, voice fraying on the sharp edge of her growing panic, “then why don’t you come and take mine? I’m not hiding in a cellar, you murdering bastards. I’m right here. You want my head? Come and take it.”
She had the attention of the men on the dock-that was pretty fucking obvious. Her sudden appearance had scraped the condescending smile off their leader’s face, and two of the soldiers behind him had half raised their bows. It was a pointless gesture; the woman could step back into the open doorway the moment they put an arrow in the air. The men on the dock seemed to understand this, and neither bothered trying to get off a shot.