He followed her finger. They were still too far off to make out more than a dull orange smudge, but the flame wasn’t large, probably a cook fire kindled in the predawn. Which meant Urghul. Valyn tightened his grip on the strap, leaning out into the dark for a better view. His trainers might have skipped an analysis of the eastern tribes, but he’d learned enough about the nomadic horsemen to be wary.

Unlike the other polities surrounding Annur—the Manjari Empire, Anthera, Freeport, and the Federated Cities—the Urghul had no government, which meant no law, no significant trade, and no respite from the constant blood feuds, vicious intertribal vendettas lasting dozens of years at a time. Evidently, it was all a part of their worship of the Lord of Pain. The Annurians knew the god as Meshkent, but the Urghul had a different name, one in their own language: Kwihna, they called him, the Hardener. There were no cities on the steppe, but over the millennia the Urghul had erected hundreds of altars to their god, some massive stone tablets, others little more than piled cairns where they carried out their savage worship of pain and blood sacrifice.

Valyn tried to remember the occasions for such sacrifice: the full moon, the new moon, solstices and storms, floods and famines, all requiring breathing bodies to offer up to the god. Gent had demanded to know how there were any of the bastards left after so much blood and burnt offering, but according to Daveen Shaleel, there were more Urghul than most people realized—maybe a million in small tribes, taamu, they called them, scattered across the enormous grasslands. Valyn always found that number unsettling. Although the population of the empire itself ran into the tens of millions, the legions rarely fielded more than half a million soldiers, and those were spread all over the border. The Urghul, on the other hand, had no dedicated military; every man, woman, and child was a fighter. Consummate horsemen, physically and mentally toughened by a hard life in a hard place, well-blooded through constant conflict, they could pose a serious threat to Annur, if they ever stopped fighting amongst themselves.

More to the point, they posed a serious threat to Valyn’s Wing. Cadets weren’t kept formally apprised of Kettral missions, but there was always buzz in the training yard and the mess hall, enough that Valyn knew the Eyrie had been flying missions over the steppe nearly every month for the past several years. Who the target was, or why an empty chunk of grassland without cities or towns was so important, he had no idea, but it hardly mattered now. The Urghul immediately below might not have encountered Kettral, but they would have heard tales of great birds dropping out of the sky bearing men and women dressed in black. The odds of a welcome parade were not high.