The Providence of Fire (55 page)

His memories of the city, sketched in his young mind before he'd ever heard of the Shin or the
saama'an,
were bright but static: the looming red walls of the Dawn Palace, the crystalline spike of Intarra's Spear, the pale green of the copper roofs and the dark green of the canals, the white of the statues along the Godsway, and the bottomless blue of the Broken Bay, stretching away to the east. The shapes, too, he remembered, a jumbled geometry of warehouses and palaces, straight streets and crooked alleyways. Everything else, he had forgotten: the noise, the smell, the press of bodies. The heat.

Even in the relative tranquillity of the graveyard, he could feel the city moving around him like some great, feverish beast, and when they slipped through the gate and into the streets, he felt as though Annur had swallowed him whole. The clatter of carts over the flagstones, the clop of hooves, the shouting of drivers and pedestrians jostling for space on the surrounding streets all but obliterated the rustle of the wind-tossed leaves.

Kaden half-expected everyone they passed to stop, stare, exclaim. After all, the three of them, though mostly dry, were still wearing the same mismatched, tattered garb in which they'd fled the Ishien. In Ashk'lan, someone would have noticed instantly, but Annur was not Ashk'lan. This city of a million souls threw her own cloak over them, an anonymity thicker than any wool, while she veiled the eyes of the passers-by in their own busy indifference.

Eyes safely hidden inside the hood of his cloak, Kaden walked through the streets as though in a dream, a stranger exploring the maze of his own memories. After the vast, cool emptiness of Ashk'lan, where half the world was sky, the city felt almost unbearably present. The reek of sizzling oil, of garlic, of peppers and frying fish made him feel as though he was half choking, while the constant tolling of gongs and bells made it hard to sort his thoughts into any type of order.

For a while he just followed Kiel, keeping his eyes down to hide his gaze and to limit the riot of color and motion battering at his mind. Outside the
vaniate,
he could feel for the first time what had happened back in those final awful moments in the Dead Heart. That Rampuri Tan was dead or a prisoner of the Ishien there could be no doubt, and yet questions and doubts, like so many carrion crows, circled and circled. Had Kaden himself, through some idiotic slipup, caused the attack? He went over the events again and again, studying in his mind the scenes in his cell, in the corridors beyond. Had he made too much noise? Had he botched the timing? There was no way to know. There was only the fact: Tan was gone while he, Kaden, was free, walking the streets of Annur.

He risked a quick glance up at the chaos of those streets, then ducked his head, questioning once more the wisdom of sending him away to Ashk'lan for training. What he had in common with the impatient, reckless people jostling him he had no idea, no idea how he would talk to them, or make sense of their answers. They were Annurians, and he the Emperor of Annur, but they might have been exotic birds, or apes for all Kaden understood them.

Finally, Kiel pulled Kaden and Triste into a narrow alleyway off the main street. It stank of rotted food and urine, but Kaden welcomed the shadows, the relative quiet, the respite.

“We should be safe,” the Csestriim said. “We're a mile from the graveyard, and we've left no trail to follow.”

Kaden looked up. People—dozens, hundreds—swarmed past the narrow entrance to the alleyway, but no one so much as glanced in their direction. They could have been invisible.

“Where are we?” Kaden asked.

“Old Sticks,” Kiel replied. “A small quarter wedged between the Silk Canal and the Fourth. There used to be some small-scale banking and a market for fresh flowers.” He shrugged. “That was fifteen years ago.”

Kaden grimaced. He'd never heard of Old Sticks, never known that there
was
such a thing as a market for fresh flowers. He'd returned, finally, to his city, to the center of his empire, to discover that he was a stranger in his own land.

“The monk,” Triste said, glancing toward the head of the alley. The bruising on her face, the burns on her hands, looked worse, much worse outside of the Dead Heart, in the full light of day. “Do you think he followed us? Do you think he made it out?” Kaden thought of Tan's
naczal
pressed against Triste's throat, of Tan ordering her tied up like livestock, and he wondered if she hoped he had escaped the Ishien or not.

“He couldn't follow,” Kaden said. “Not the way we went.”

“Rampuri Tan is a formidable hand with his spear,” Kiel said, “but not that formidable.”

“So he is dead,” Triste said dully.

“He is beyond our reach,” Kaden replied, trying to move past his own tumult of emotion, to focus on the dirt beneath his feet, the stench of the air.

Triste studied him for a moment, then nodded. “All right,” she said. “Where do we go now?”

Kiel shook his head. “I kept a few rooms near here,” he said. “I thought perhaps they would still be empty, but we passed them four streets back. It looks as though someone new is living there.”

“In your rooms?” Kaden asked. “How could they just move in?”

Kiel shrugged. “Fifteen years is a long time to be gone.”

Kaden shook his head, trying to imagine fifteen years among the Ishien, fifteen years locked in the darkness, the only thing waiting beyond the steel door, pain. It could drive a man mad, but then, Kiel was not a man. Kaden turned to face the Csestriim.

“What now?”

Kiel met the stare. “You are the Emperor.”

“For you, I mean. We were tied together during the escape, but we are not any longer. Why are you still with us? With me?”

The Csestriim looked past Kaden to the mouth of the alley, where men and women, oxen and children, jostled in the bright light of the sun. “Your history,” he said finally.

Kaden raised his brows. “My history?”

“Not just yours. That of your whole race.” He paused, frowned, then went on. “As I told you, I was the historian of my people. I have spent a very long life in the study of cities and nations, wars and brief periods of fitful peace.”

“You said you knew my father,” Kaden insisted. “That you worked with him.”

Kiel nodded. “I chronicled his life, or a part of it—his time on the Unhewn Throne.”

“But
why
?” Kaden demanded, coming back to his original question. Clearly the historian had no part in his father's death—he had been imprisoned in the Dead Heart for almost two decades—and yet he was Csestriim, built from the same flesh, his mind patterned on the same alien thoughts as the creatures who had burst into Assare millennia earlier to murder the children. “Why would you chronicle
us
? Humans? Why would you help me?”

To his surprise, Kiel smiled. “You are interesting. Your race is interesting, even more so than my own. Humans are unpredictable, self-contradictory. Where our history was a long account of reasoned debate, yours is ablaze with error and ambition, regret and hope, love and loathing, all the things we cannot feel, all animating your every decision. Most of my kind wanted to see you crushed from the start, but I … I was curious. I remain curious.” He shrugged. “As for why I would help
you,
in particular: as I said, you are the Emperor of Annur. I can come no closer to the unfolding of history.”

Kaden watched the man a moment, then nodded slowly. It made a strange sort of sense. More, he realized he
wanted
to trust the historian, wanted another person on his side, someone who understood something of the empire he was supposed to rule.

“Thank you,” he said. “For helping us break free.”

Kiel frowned. “We are free, but not secure. We still have not decided our next step.”

“The chapterhouse,” Kaden said. “The Shin branch where we agreed to meet Valyn. We've missed the meeting by weeks, but he could be waiting there. He could have left a message, instructions, a warning.”

The Csestriim nodded. “I know the place. It's near here, but the Ishien know it, too.”

“The Ishien don't know where we are,” Kaden said.

“By now they know we've escaped.”

Triste shook her head. “There were at least twenty gates back on that island. We could have gone through any of them.”

Kaden blew out a long breath. “But we did nothing to cover our tracks. Matol will be able to follow us.”

“And Tan knows where we planned to meet Valyn,” Triste said reluctantly, picking at a nasty crescent scab on the back of her wrist. “If he told Matol, the bastard doesn't
need
to track us.”

Kaden hesitated, staring out the end of the alley, watching the wagons and water buffalo, the men and women flowing by like a current.

“We have to go,” he said, “now. The Ishien, if they even know where we're going, will take time to follow us here, time to get to the chapterhouse. I just need a few minutes to find out if Valyn's been there.”

“It's a risk,” Kiel observed.

“Everything's a risk,” Kaden said. “Waiting will only make it worse.”

*   *   *

The Shin chapterhouse didn't look like much: a narrow brick face—maybe ten paces wide and three stories high—crammed between two larger buildings at the border of a small cobbled square in one of Annur's quieter quarters. Nothing marked it as a chapterhouse, which wasn't surprising; the monks Kaden knew had never been much for crests or sigils. There was just the blank brick, the blank wooden door, and several windows on the upper floor, all firmly shuttered.

The rest of the elm-fringed square hummed with quiet activity—people hanging laundry out of windows, men and women bartering in the rough wooden stalls of a market, two water buffalo with noses buried in a stone trough—but around the chapterhouse there was nothing, no one, no ornament, not even flowers in the bare gravel fronting the structure. The place might have been abandoned, save for the tenuous line of smoke rising silently into the sky. There was no sign of Valyn, but then, Kaden's brother would hardly be lounging in the shade in front of the temple with his kettral leashed to a tree. A score of other buildings fronted the square—houses and shops, a wine store with bottles racked high in front of it, a stately old mansion that had seen better days, windowpanes broken, front yard unkempt, utterly uninhabited by the look of it. There was no way to search them all hoping to find Valyn. The only way to know if he had visited the Shin was to knock.

“Stay here,” Kaden said. “I'll be fast.”

“What should we do if the Ishien come?” Triste asked. She looked as though she were trying to watch every direction at once, trying to study every stranger.

Kaden shook his head. “I don't know.”

“There is a way out,” Kiel said, “from inside.”

“A back door?”

“A
kenta,
” the Csestriim replied.

Triste blanched. “Matol and Tan could be in there already! They could be waiting for him!”

“No,” Kiel said. “It's a different network. My people built more than one, in case the first were destroyed or compromised.”

“And the island we just came from…” Kaden asked, absorbing the new information, trying to work through the implications.

“That is one hub, a hub controlled by the Ishien. The gates lead various places—Assare, the Dead Heart, the catacombs from which we just emerged.…”

“And what about this?” Kaden asked, nodding toward the chapterhouse.

“This is your network,” Kiel replied. “The imperial network. The one entrusted to your family. The Ishien know of it, but they do not patrol it. It does not connect directly to the Dead Heart. If you hear any struggle or violence, you can escape through the
kenta
. It's in the deepest basement.”

Kaden frowned. “Where does it lead?”

“To another hub, an island much like the one we just left.”

“And once I'm on the island?”

“Take the second gate to your right. It will bring you to a flooded area beneath the docks of Olon. Once in the city, you should be able to lose yourself in the crowd.”

Kaden stared, trying to imagine the escape. He could point to Olon on a map, but that was about it. He had no sense of the climate or culture, the manners of the local people.

“If I flee to Olon,” he said, “I'll be hundreds of miles from Annur, with no way to get back.”

“Which, I assume, is preferable to the Dead Heart,” Kiel said. “It is only a precaution.”

Kaden took a deep breath, then nodded.

“Remember, the
second
gate to your right. Not the first one.”

“Where does that lead?”

“The Dawn Palace,” Kiel replied. “If you burst through there, you'll be filled with arrows before you hit the ground.”

*   *   *

The monk who greeted Kaden at the door, a dark-skinned man with dark eyes, graying hair, and a slight limp, glanced once at his eyes, once at his clothes, then nodded as though in response to some interior question, gesturing him inside with a slight motion of his hand. Kaden was ready with a bushel of explanations—who he was, where he had come from, what he wanted—but the monk said nothing, escorting him to a small chamber with a wooden stool, an earthenware ewer, and a single cup on a low table. He filled the cup with clear water, passed it to Kaden, then straightened.

“Wait here, brother, while I bring Iaapa.”

Without another word, the monk slipped out the door on bare, silent feet, leaving Kaden alone holding the rough cup. Urgency pressed down on him like the air before a storm, heavy and pregnant. It was possible Matol and his men were outside even as he waited, watching the chapterhouse, preparing to enter, possible they had already captured Kiel and Triste.…