The Providence of Fire (63 page)

“They changed you somehow,” Kaden said quietly. “The young gods changed the Csestriim into … us.”

Kiel nodded. “It was only a suspicion at first. The facts fit. We had theory and evidence, but no proof. Then they came down. Here. They breathed their own immortal forms into human bodies, all to help you in your fight against my people.”

“And you killed them?” Triste demanded, utterly aghast.

“Only two,” Kiel said. If he was taken aback by the girl's horror, he didn't show it. “Like you, they were a threat. A foe.”

“Akalla,” Kaden said, tasting the strange syllables. “Korin.”

Kiel nodded. “Those were the names they took. I do not know their provenance.”

“And so they're just … what? Gone?”

Kiel pursed his lips as though considering a thorny question of translation. “Perhaps not fully or forever. Gods are not Bedisa's creation. Ananshael cannot unknit them. Even the young gods are … larger than us, more complete than this creation.” He shook his head. “Really, the language does not serve in discussing them.”

“So you
didn't
kill them,” Kaden said, frustration fraying the fabric of his calm.

Kiel met his gaze for a moment, then held up a hand, studying it in the lamplight. “Tan'is destroyed the flesh while they were trapped inside, before they could be released. The gods may be eternal, without end or limit, but their touch on this world is not. That is what Tan'is killed—their hold on and influence over those born into their thrall.”

“But,” Kaden said, “if what we are, if the makeup of our minds and hearts comes from the touch of the young gods, there must have been an effect.…” He trailed off, trying to understand what such an effect might be, trying to hold the notion in his head.

“There was.”

The historian paused, so long this time that Kaden wondered if he had given up trying to explain.

“Imagine you are blind,” he said finally. “That you were born blind. That all your life you have lived in darkness among others like you. If you were suddenly and momentarily shown color, how would you explain it to your sightless race? What words would you use? What formulations of logic or reason? Analogy fails. Induction and deduction fail. This is the best I can do—

“Your ancestors, the first among you, felt differently about the world. Not just differently, but more. It was as though the stones and rivers, the sea and sky, the physical world and the transcendent notions that emanate from it were as crucial to those first, broken Csestriim children as their own human families, their own selves. They would die to avoid unnecessary destruction. They acted and spoke as though the earth itself were a part of them, woven into the fabric of their minds. This world of cities and roads—” He gestured to the walls of the chamber and beyond. “Your ancestors would not have recognized it. They would have loathed it.”

“And after you killed the gods?” Kaden asked, voice thin as the last smoke from a spent fire.

“You changed.

“The bodies of the gods died as all bodies die: a hole hacked in the flesh, a break in Bedisa's perfection where the life drained out. I would have expected their deaths to be different from our own in some way. Greater or louder. They were gods, after all. But they were bound and drugged, both of them, and Tan'is killed them with a knife no longer than my hand.

“It took me a century to be sure of the effect, decades upon decades walking among your kind, posing as one of you, asking the same questions over and over:

“‘
What is this? What is this?'

“I always met with the same reply,
‘It is rock. It is water. It is air.'

“‘
And what do you feel about the rock and the water? What do you feel about the air?'

“‘
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.'
”

For a long time Kaden could not bring himself to speak. He struggled to conceive the magnitude of Kiel's claim, of the loss. The Shin trained a lifetime to scrub out human emotion, and none ever succeeded, not completely, not perfectly. If Kiel was right, however, Ran il Tornja had managed just that, at least a portion of it, with two cuts of the knife. What would happen if everyone in the empire—everyone in the
world—
all at once lost hope and courage, fear and love? It was like looking down to find the once-solid ground nothing but an illusion. A dream.

Kiel watched him, eyes blank as shells. Only when Kaden finally nodded did he continue.

“Tan'is resolved to destroy the rest of the new gods, to capture and kill them individually, or to strike directly at Ciena and Meshkent. He believed—not without warrant—that the elimination of those two would cripple the others, that the new gods were in some way dependent on or emergent from their parents.”

Kaden stared. “Was he right?”

“We don't know,” Kiel replied evenly. “We began to lose the war then, and when it was clear that your kind would defeat us, those gods who had taken your side … departed. They slipped clear of their adopted flesh. Their influence remains, but they are gone.”

“Holy Hull,” Triste breathed quietly.

“Yes,” Kiel agreed. “Like Hull. The god himself remains remote, unmanifest, but we know his darkness.”

“I should have left you in the Dead Heart,” Kaden said finally, the words loose before he could call them back. “I should have left you to rot.”

“You would not have escaped without me,” Kiel replied. “Even if you had won free somehow, you are not prepared to face il Tornja. He will destroy you without my help. He may destroy you in spite of it.” He shook his head. “I was accounted a good mind among my people, but Tan'is was always the better strategist, the better tactician.”

Kaden stared. “You killed two of our gods, and now you're talking about
helping
me?”

Kiel nodded. “As I said, my goals are not those of Tan'is. He seeks a return to the past. I am more interested in chronicling the present.”

The Csestriim fell silent. Kaden stared at him a moment, then turned to Triste. She met his eyes with her own wide, wild gaze, then shook her head helplessly.

“I don't know, Kaden,” she said. “He helped us. He keeps helping us. He's
here,
right?”

Kaden blew out a long, unsteady breath. “All right. If you want to help, help. What about Ran il Tornja? What is he doing?”

“As I told you before,” Kiel replied, “he has not abandoned his charge. The gods are gone, beyond his reach, but he seeks another way to destroy you. Has sought one for many thousands of years.”

“And the fact that he's taking action now…” Kaden began, trailing off as the horror hit him.

Kiel nodded. “It is impossible to be certain of the movings of another mind, but it would seem that our lost general has finally found what he seeks.”

 

33

“No, no, no, you're missin' the point, ya ox's ass,” Nira said, smacking her cane against her palm, causing her horse to start. “Ya don't
need
ta sign the papers, and swear the oaths, and have yer tits anointed with the holy oils, and whatever all other little bits a' theater yer family's been parading around the last few hundred years. Ya just
do
it.”

Adare took a firm rein on her temper. She was exhausted. Exhausted from riding from dawn until well past dusk every day since Annur. Exhausted from trying to anticipate il Tornja's next deception. Exhausted from second-guessing herself. Exhausted from wondering if she had overstepped in claiming the throne, a throne never intended for her, a throne for which she might be killed, or even worse, forced to kill good people, Annurian citizens who would rise up against her, refusing to accept a female Emperor. Exhausted from telling Fulton over and over to back off, to give her space to talk in private, to think. Exhausted from sitting appropriately upright in her saddle when she wanted to collapse over the cantle. Exhausted from the sickness that twisted in her gut every morning, a result, no doubt, of the miserable camp food. Exhausted from worrying about the scars laid into her skin, from trying to wring some sense from the events at the Everburning Well. And exhausted from Nira's endless tirade of acerbic counsel, Nira, who, despite her advanced age, seemed the only person in the long muddy ranks with any energy left.

The road north had given Adare plenty of occasions to doubt whether elevating the old woman to Mizran Councillor had been the wisest decision. On the one hand, Nira
had
ruled an empire of her own for centuries, which gave her hundreds of years more experience ruling an empire than anyone else Adare knew. On the other, that empire had ended in a morass of war, grief, and ruin. So, maybe not such a good model after all.

It had been nine days since Annur, nine days of forced march through terrain that had shifted from open farmland, to low hills, to thick pine forests, dotted with bogs and streams. Without the imperial road—a mind-boggling feat of engineering comprised of stone bridges, wide flagstones, and ditches on either side to channel away the runoff—the army would have been helplessly mired days earlier, as soon as they entered the Thousand Lakes. As it was, the Sons could travel only so fast on a road built more for commerce than military transport. Adare found herself simultaneously exhausted by their pace and chafing at the lack of progress, worried about what might be transpiring ahead of her in the darkness of the primeval forest, and behind, in the capital she had so hastily abandoned. In fact, the farther she marched from Annur, the more she doubted her decision. Facing il Tornja and meeting the Urghul threat—if there even
was
an Urghul threat—had seemed crucial back in the capital, but what had she sacrificed in order to march north? What opportunities had she destroyed?

“If I'm going to sit the Unhewn Throne,” she said, trying to keep her voice level, “there are forms to be observed, rituals. And I can't observe them here, stuck in the middle of a 'Kent-kissing forest.”

Nira blew out her cheeks. “Sometimes, girl, I'd swear you were denser than my brick-headed brother.” She waved a hand at Oshi, who was staring at the palms of his hands as though they were intricate maps, oblivious to the movement of his horse beneath him. “You get a throne by taking it, not by asking for it.”

“I can't just take it,” Adare protested. “Allegedly, I have il Tornja's support, and that means I've got the army, too, but leaving aside the fact that the bastard murdered my father, that I intend to see him executed the moment we catch up with him, it is the historical precedent that makes a person Emperor.”

“A historical precedent,” Nira replied, “that is just going to bugger you right up your pretty puckered arse. Yer history is all about
men,
your ritual is about
men
. Unless you're plannin' to strap on a terra-cotta cock and go back to Annur thwackin' people in the face with it—which I don't recommend—ya need to tip the whole board full of history directly into the piss bucket and start over. You need people to see
you,
not the man you're not.”

Adare shifted to try to relieve the chafing in her thighs, the ache in her lower back. “But the authenticity,” she said, “
comes
from those rituals. It comes from history. Otherwise, what makes the Emperor the Emperor?”

Oshi turned, something about the question having snared his attention. “Ants,” he said, “have an empress.” He smiled broadly, encouragingly. “The little soldiers—they all serve her.”

“Unhelpful, you dolt,” Nira snapped. “Ants do what they do because it's built into 'em. They can't
not
follow the empress.” She turned back to Adare. “
People,
though … people'll follow anyone, anything. I wandered through a village once, a long while back, where the folk were led by a 'Kent-kissing
tree;
asked it questions, thought they heard answers in the creaking branches and the rustling leaves.”

“Annurians aren't savages…” Adare began, but Nira cut her off with a hoot.

“Savages, is it? That tree was one a' the best kings I ever saw.” She gestured to the dark boughs of the pines. “A tree doesn't start wars. Tree doesn't raise taxes to build palaces. A tree doesn't kill the people who refuse to bow down.” A sad note had crept into her voice, and her eyes had slipped away from Adare, first to the woods, then to Oshi where he swayed in his saddle, light as a bundle of old cloth. “Could do a lot worse than a tree,” she concluded quietly.

“Well, I'm not a tree,” Adare said. “And I need the people to accept me as Emperor. I didn't have time for a coronation before leaving Annur, didn't have time for the hundred little ceremonies before and after, which means that right now I'm … nothing. I'm not even the Minister of Finance anymore; il Tornja filled the role with someone else after I disappeared for Olon. The Sons of Flame think I'm Intarra's prophet, or her saint, but a saint's a far cry from an emperor. A saint doesn't actually rule.”

Nira fixed her with that shrewd gaze once more, all traces of her previous melancholy gone. “Ya know how ya get to run an empire, girl?”

Adare shook her head in frustration. “That's what I've been asking.”

The old woman poked her in the chest with the stick. “You run it.”

“Meaning what?”

“You see what needs doing, and ya do it. Everything else follows: the throne, the taxes, the title. I've watched a lot of folk try ta rule a lot of land. I've watched men cling ta their fancy titles while their people and their realms just … slipped away, and I've watched men who couldn't give a watery shit for the names and the titles rule half a continent. Ya just do what needs doing, and the people will figure out all on their own that you're the 'Kent-kissing Emperor.”