The Providence of Fire (24 page)

“There'll be two straps,” Valyn said, heart hammering as the bird approached. “Get a hold of the lower of the two.” He turned to the group. “We're all underneath, which means three to a talon. Talal and Laith, you're with Gwenna.…”

“I can make the grab myself,” she growled, but her face was as pale as the stone, and it looked as though simply standing was an effort.

“Just make sure she gets on the bird. Annick and Pyrre with me on the far talon. Remember we're on the edge of a fucking cliff, so blowing the grab's not an option, dropping is not an option. Get on and stay on, I don't care if your shoulder rips out of the socket. You fall”—he waved a hand toward the darkness—“you're gone.”

“It's all well and good to talk about it,” Laith said, gesturing furiously, “but we've got to
move
if we're going to make it.”

Valyn laid a hand on his flier's arm. “Not yet.”

“What in Hull's name are you waiting for?”

Valyn stared at the bird until his eyes hurt. Had he misgauged the situation? There were so many variables, so many things that could go wrong. If he'd made the wrong assumption about one of them, then the rest …

Then the second bird appeared, above and behind the first.

“Oh,” Laith said, staring.

“Tell me it's Chi Hoai,” Valyn said, voice tight. The flier could recognize the various kettral far better than Valyn ever would. “Tell me that second one is the Flea's bird.”

“It is.” Laith sucked a worried breath between his teeth. “She's going to tear Yurl's bird out of the air.”

Valyn blew the second whistle just as Chi Hoai struck. She had the height and the angle both, and her own kettral seized Yurl's by the back of the neck. The lower bird shrieked as claws sank into her neck and shoulders, as the hooked beak plunged again and again, savaging her eyes. A kettral could slice through a horse with those talons. Valyn had watched them hunt back on the Islands, watched them snap the heads off of sheep and carry off whole cows in their claws. Yurl's bird twisted in midair, screaming as she tried to fight, but the fight was over, or as good as. Chi Hoai was already pulling her own mount back.

Then Suant'ra hit.

She smashed down from above like a ton of falling rock, silhouette blocking the stars, stabbing at the other kettral with her beak, raking the wings with her talons. Chi Hoai's bird shrieked, her own prey forgotten, and rolled in the air, trying to come to grips with her assailant. The two tumbled from view, tearing furiously at each other. For a moment Valyn could only stare. The whole thing had worked as he'd planned—the bait, the attack, the counter—until 'Ra disappeared. If all the birds were gone, they were stranded. The Flea's kettral might be dead, but the Flea himself was very much alive.

“Into the tunnels,” Valyn shouted, pointing with his blade. It wasn't what he'd hoped, but hoping too hard was a good way to get dead. Once inside the actual cliff, they could disappear. They could figure out later how in 'Shael's sweet name they were going to get out of the mountains without 'Ra. If they lived that long.

Laith, however, was shaking his head. “No!” he shouted. “We have to wait for the grab!”

“'Ra's
gone
!” Valyn said, taking him by the blacks and shoving him toward the cliff.

The flier shoved back. “She's not gone. She had the speed and the elevation. She's just tangled up! We have to wait for the extract!”

A flatbow bolt struck just at Valyn's feet, raising a line of sparks as it skittered away across the ledge.

“They have the range,” Pyrre observed, shifting to put Valyn between herself and the orphanage.

“I know my bird, Val,” Laith said, lips drawn back in a snarl. “I know her. You gave her every chance and
she will win.
We just need to hold for a few more heartbeats.”

“There's no cover,” Talal said. “We can't hold here.”

“The tunnels,” Valyn said, grabbing Gwenna under the arm.
“Now.”

As he said the last word, however, a great winged shape rose up over the ledge, screamed once at the stars, and came to rest on the very lip.

“That's 'Ra!” Laith yelled, surging forward.

Even in the moonlight, Valyn couldn't be sure, but Laith was already running. As Hendran wrote:
Sometimes the good leader has to quit leading and trust his men.

Valyn swallowed a curse, hauled Gwenna around, almost passed out as the bolt in his shoulder grated against the bone, and then, with a brief prayer that everyone else was doing the same thing, ran as hard as he fucking could.

 

12

Cold like a fist to the heart. Sudden, frigid darkness pressing against his chest, on his face, in his unseeing eyes. The
vaniate
shivered a moment, then sloughed away like a violently molted skin, and when Kaden opened his mouth to shout, icy brine forced its way down his throat, into his lungs, strangling him.
Underwater,
he realized. Too late to call back his squandered breath.

He started to grope for the gate, to try to haul himself back through into the light and the air, then realized that to enter the
kenta
in such a state of agitation invited an annihilation even swifter than that offered by the sea. He forced his body to stillness, willing his mind to follow. Dim lights flickered around the edges of his vision, but whether they were real or the product of a mind starved for air he couldn't be certain. His body convulsed while his lungs tried to heave a breath where there was no breath to be had. Panic prowled the edge of thought, hungry, circling closer as the cold clamped down.

Breathe,
he told himself,
and then follow the breath
. He raised a hand to his mouth, feeling for the bubbles as they trickled through his fingers, forcing himself to wait a moment to be sure. Then, with legs like lead, he kicked for the surface.

He broke from the relative silence of the water into chaos. Someone was thrashing a few feet away, and men were bellowing—two or three voices piled on one another:
Stop … Kill them now … Put the bow down
. The air was almost as frigid as the water and only slightly brighter. A few torches gave off more smoke than light, illuminating what seemed to be a stone chamber, a small grotto carved out by the sea. Kaden twisted in the water, mind desperately sifting the various shadows, searching for the source of the voices, for a place to haul himself to safety. A quick, hard blow caught him on the lip, driving his face back under the surface. He came up, the lights spinning across his eyes, mouth filled with blood and brine. Triste was still tied, he realized, tied and drowning.

He caught her beneath the arms.

“Still,” he gasped, trying to hold her up. “Be still.”

A moment later Rampuri Tan's shaven head breached the water and with it, his voice:

“Memory,” he ground out, as though intoning the opening passage to some lost ritual, “is the heart of vengeance.”

Triste finally stopped her flailing elbows, and Kaden took a moment to seize a full breath. The passage through the
kenta
had practically drowned him, but the older monk spoke with his normal implacable force.

The other voices fell silent. Someone cursed. Then:

“And vengeance is the balm of memory.”

“I am Rampuri Tan.”

“I am Loral Hellelen.”

“Keep your bows on the girl,” Tan said, hoisting himself from the water onto a small stone shelf, ignoring the sodden weight of his robe as he stood. “She is more than dangerous.”

“And the other?”

Kaden still couldn't see the speaker, but he stroked weakly toward the rim where Tan had emerged, dragging Triste behind him.

“He is with me,” Tan replied. He had not relinquished his
naczal
when he stepped through the
kenta,
and the blade glinted in the dusky light. “Watch the girl.”

By the time Kaden reached the low shelf, his muscles had gone rigid with cold. It was all he could do to hold on to the stone with one hand while keeping Triste's head above the water. He could feel her trembling beside him, shivering uncontrollably. Wet hair plastered her skin, and her lips had gone a blue so dark they looked black in the smoky light.

“Kaden,” she whispered between chattering teeth.

Before he could respond, two men lunged from the shadows, seized her by the elbows, and lifted her, shaking, from the water.

“Careful,” he said. “She is tied. You could hurt her.”

The guards ignored Kaden, dragging Triste roughly onto the stone shelf while he hauled himself, sodden and shivering, into the cold air.

Only after he had coughed the last salt water from his lungs, then straightened, could he finally take in his surroundings. When he first passed through the gate he thought himself submerged in the ocean somewhere, but now he could see that they had surfaced inside a large chamber, perhaps fifteen paces across, walls and ceiling cut from the same undressed stone. In the center, the black waters of a pool glistened in the torchlight. The place reminded him faintly of Umber's, back in the Bone Mountains, but where Umber's Pool was open to the wide arc of the sky, this room was dark and cold, cut off from everything by the cave's roof.

The Ishien, too, were nothing like the monks he remembered. Despite Tan's warning, Kaden had expected them to look vaguely familiar. Instead of robes, however, the three men in the chamber, two of whom pinned Triste roughly against a wall, wore greasy leather jerkins and sealskin. None had shaved their heads, and though only one had a proper beard, a week's worth of stubble obscured the jawlines of the others. Most striking, the Ishien were clearly warriors; each wore a short sword at the hip and carried a loaded crossbow. The speaker had leveled one of those crossbows directly at Tan.

“Rampuri,” he said, the word ringing like a curse.

“Point your weapon at the girl, Hellelen,” Tan responded.

“I will point my weapon where I please.”

Kaden stilled his shivering and tried to read the scene. Loral Hellelen looked to be around Tan's age, a tall, wiry Edishman with a rough blond braid running halfway down his back. He might have been handsome once, but a cadaverous hollowness had gouged away his cheeks and sunk his eyes in pits so dark they looked bruised. Kaden watched those eyes carefully. They glittered in the torchlight, bright, almost feverish. Hellelen's finger stroked the trigger to the crossbow.

“It was a foolish gamble, stepping through that gate after twenty years.”

Kaden glanced over at Tan. No one at Ashk'lan had ever called Rampuri Tan a fool, but if the older monk was nonplussed, it didn't show.

“Only a gamble if the old ways have slipped.”

“Don't speak to me of slipping,” the blond man shot back. “It was you who left your post.”

“And I have returned.” Tan gestured toward Triste with his
naczal
. “Perhaps with one of the Csestriim. She passed through the gates. Untrained. Unprepared.”

Confusion registered in Hellelen's eyes, then shock. After a moment's hesitation, he shifted his crossbow from Tan, pointing it instead at the young woman pinned against the wall. “She is too young to be Csestriim.”

Tan shook his head. “She is a woman grown, though the clothes obscure the fact.”

“And she passed the
kenta
.”

Tan nodded.

“We don't know what it means,” Kaden added quietly, careful to keep his voice level, reasonable. “She might be Csestriim, or she might be … something else.”

Hellelen glanced in his direction, narrowed his eyes at the sight of Kaden's own blazing irises, then snorted. “Ah. The princeling.”

“He is the Emperor now,” Tan observed.

“Not here, he's not,” Hellelen spat. “This isn't your palace,” he said, “and we're not your monks. If I have a question for you, I will ask it. If I do not ask, keep your imperial mouth shut or, however short your sojourn in the Dead Heart might be, you will spend it inside a cell.”

Kaden glanced over at Triste where she stood trembling against the cold stone wall, arms trussed behind her, crossbow bolts leveled at her heart and head.

“This doesn't make sense,” he said. “Triste has
helped
me, has helped
us,
at every step. We'd be dead without her. Even if she is Csestriim, I want her to be treated well.”

Hellelen sucked air between his teeth. “You think you know the Csestriim?” he demanded, voice like a file running over steel.

Kaden shook his head.

“You think you understand how they think? You want to walk in here and start
lecturing
us, lecturing
me
on what does and does not make sense?” He took a step toward Kaden, sudden fury scribbled across his eyes, the crossbow swinging around to point at Kaden's heart. “I will show you—”

The words cut off as Tan slid the haft of his spear between them, blocking the Ishien's approach.

“Hellelen,” he said quietly, “you would do better to focus on this creature,” indicating Triste, “rather than lecturing the Emperor of Annur. If she is Csestriim, she is involved in a plot to destroy the Malkeenian line.”

“The Malkeenian line,” Hellelen snorted, “long ago abandoned its post.” He stared at Kaden. “Do you even know what those gates are for?”

“I do,” Kaden replied. “They are a tool. One that can be used to hold together an empire and to fight the Csestriim both.”

“Let me guess which one you're more concerned with.” Hellelen shook his head in disgust. “I heard how someone gutted your father. What happened? The same men come after you?”

“It may be more than men,” Kaden replied. “As you say, we face the same foe.”