It was impossible to be sure what had happened in the long days since he, Laith, and Talal rode south out of the Urghul camp, but the basic outlines were as clear as they were horrifying. As the flier suspected, Long Fist had double-crossed them. The Urghul chieftain had clearly decided there were better things to do with a Kettral-trained leach than cut him apart one joint at a time. Gwenna and the others, discovering the treachery, had managed to claw their way free, to get clear of the whole camp, to cross the Black, and arrive in Andt-Kyl in time to warn the town.

As for Balendin, the fact that he had turned on il Tornja, on Annur itself, wasn’t so surprising. Given his well, his reliance on awe and terror for any arcane power, it was little surprise that the leach had thrown his lot in with the Urghul. The casual cruelty of the horsemen, the endless sacrifice and brutality, gave him the perfect opportunity to inflict pain and reap his sick reward from the terror of his captives. Back on the Islands he’d been forced to keep his torture and murder circumspect, forced to choose his time and his victims. Here, he had them lined up by the dozen, by the hundred, all those horrified eyes fixed upon him as he flayed the prisoners, and burned them, and tore them apart. For the Urghul, all that pain was a great sacrifice to Kwihna, but Valyn knew better. The sacrifices Balendin made were to himself.

“He’s dangerous like this,” Talal said quietly, after the sixth or seventh broken corpse was tossed aside.

“He’s always been dangerous,” Valyn replied, remembering Amie strung up in the dark garret back on Hook. Remembering Ha Lin. “People have always been wary of him. Even on the Islands: wary, angry, or afraid.”

Talal shook his head. “That was nothing. This . . .” He sucked air between his teeth. “I have no idea what he can manage with the power. It must be flooding him.”

“He can have the ’Kent-kissing power,” Laith spat, “as long as it doesn’t help him across the river.”

And to Valyn’s shocked relief, it did not. Hour after hour the Urghul went about their bloody sport without making anything but a few abortive efforts at crossing: two or three idiotic attempts to swim horses, a bizarre push to build a bridge by tossing a dozen logs into the channel and watching them bump up pointlessly against the old bridge pilings. By the time the sun began to set, the Urghul had made no real offensive at all.

And then they did.