Only the Valiant

“More dangerous than just being less than them, when they come raiding?” Hendrik added. “We’ll learn to fight. You can teach us. And then…”

And then, they would not just be a rabble, Royce knew. They would be exactly what he needed them to be if he was truly going to beat Altfor and his men. They would be an army.

CHAPTER SIX

Dust tracked his prey through the night, seeing well enough in the dark that he needed only the starlight, following the signs that the world presented to him with equanimity. A spider’s web spun the wrong way had him split from the path. A tree whose knots looked like the ancient Gaath sign for travel told him that he was on the right route.

“Everything is right, because it cannot be other than as fate decrees,” Dust reminded himself as he walked. Such were the words that the priests in his home had taught him, until no part of him could deny the truth of them. “Against the power of fate, all are small. Who would swim against an ocean?”

The truth of it seemed like an absolute to Dust; was an absolute, since those who questioned the will of fate’s signs usually found themselves given up as sacrifices in his homeland, or provided as subjects on which to teach the Thousand Torments, or the many ways of death. Even so, he knew what the question was: if fate would happen as it must, why were the angarthim necessary? The answer was as well-worn as it was obvious.

“We are the tool through which fate corrects itself,” Dust said. “We are the balancing hand on the scale, the correcting push against chaos.”

He murmured these things like the prayers they were, along with other, older phrases as he walked. When the signs around him showed a place to rest, he sat cross-legged with his back against a tree and rested in a way that wasn’t quite sleep until the fatigue drained from his body. Ready to continue, he started to walk again, down toward a place where a large pit sat, surrounded by a kind of stand. Dust had seen fighting pits before, although he doubted that this one saw anything so elegant as the duels through which he had been trained.