The Providence of Fire

by Brian Staveley

  Something had transformed the Chute from a giddy little overflow suitable for childish games into a churning, roiling current thrashing over and into itself, tossing foam a dozen feet into the air. Adare clung more tightly to the rail. There were no children in sight.

  Autumn, she realized, her legs trembling from the frantic run and this new shock. She had seen the children swimming the Chute in early autumn, when the canals and the Basin itself sat at their lowest level. Now, though, it was the tail end of spring, and the current chewed ferociously at its banks like some hunger-maddened beast trying to break its bonds. Adare had learned to swim in the Emerald Pool back in the Dawn Palace. As a child, she had even prevailed upon her Aedolians to let her paddle around in the harbor on calm days. This, though—she wasn’t even sure she could swim in that furious current, certainly not in her exhausted state, not with the weight of the wool dress pulling her down. She started to climb back from the rail. She could keep running, outdistance her pursuit on foot, lose them in the alleys and side streets of Annur, hide out somewhere.…

  A shout from the base of the bridge froze her in place.

  Fulton and Birch had already reached the span, the younger Aedolian one pace in front of his companion, both of them bellowing something incomprehensible. Both were red-faced and sweating, but both looked ready to run another mile. She wouldn’t escape them on foot. She couldn’t. It was the Chute or nothing. Adare stared as they approached, paralyzed by her fear, her indecision.

  Do something, she snarled at herself, glancing once more at the raging current below. Do something!

  And then, with a cry that was half sob, half defiance, she was over, tumbling uncontrollably toward the thundering current.

  4

  “Well, that’s not on the ’Kent-kissing maps,” Gwenna shouted from her perch on the Kettral’s other talon, pitching her voice to carry above the wind’s fury.

  Valyn settled for a nod in response, not trusting himself to open his mouth without losing his tongue to his chattering teeth. Back in the Qirins it would be good swimming weather already, but late spring in the Bone Mountains would be called winter anywhere else, especially when you were flying three thousand paces up. Even Valyn’s heaviest blacks did little to blunt the biting wind.

  He squinted through frozen lashes, trying to make better sense of the valley beneath them, a gouge running east to west, so deep and narrow he could only see the bottom when they passed directly overhead. They’d been quartering this section of the peaks for the better part of the afternoon, searching the desolate gray stone and ice for some sign of Rampuri Tan’s lost city. The monk had given Valyn a rough idea where to look, but the details were hazy.

  “I have been there only twice,” Tan told him earlier, his tone suggesting Valyn was a fool for pursuing the issue, “and I never approached from the air.”

  Which meant a long and very cold grid search. The Kettral had the most accurate maps in the world—coastlines and rivers were easy to chart from atop a soaring bird—but no one had bothered to explore deep into the Bone Mountains. The granite spires and high, snowbound valleys were too rugged and remote to be of any military interest: no one was taking an army through the Bones, and, aside from a few rough mining villages far to the south, no one was living there either.

  Valyn would have said that large-scale habitation was impossible this far north, but he could just make out, carved into the sheer granite wall of the deep valley directly below, a series of rectangular holes and open ledges. The stonework was so ancient, so roughened by wind and weather, that it took him a moment to realize he was looking at stairs and chimneys, windows and balconies, all honeycombing the vertical side of the cliff. Assare, the dead city promised by Rampuri Tan.

  About time, Valyn thought, clenching his jaw against the cold. He reached over to tap Kaden on the arm, then pointed.

  Kaden took a firm hold on the overhead strap, then leaned out a little farther from the talon to get a better look. Despite his lack of training, he was handling these early kettral flights with surprising composure. Valyn himself had been terrified of the birds when he first arrived on the Islands, but Kaden, after asking a few straightforward questions about how best to mount, dismount, and position himself during flight, had endured the trip with no apparent anxiety, relaxing into the harness and watching the peaks with those impassive blazing eyes. When the bird completed a quarter pass over the valley, he turned back to Valyn and nodded.

  Things had gone less smoothly over on the bird’s opposite talon; Gwenna, irritated to be sharing a perch with Triste, spent half the flight prodding and repositioning the girl, frightening her while failing to make her either safer or more comfortable. It wasn’t Triste’s fault she didn’t know the first thing about the riding of massive birds.

  That she’d managed to stay alive, even to help when everything went into the shitter, said something about her resolve, her tenacity, but there were limits. The girl wasn’t Kettral; she was a priestess of the Goddess of Pleasure, and a childhood in Ciena’s temple learning about lutes, dancing, and fine wine had done little to prepare her for the rigors of Kettral travel.

  Of course, Valyn reminded himself, I’d look just as uncomfortable if someone demanded that I play the lute. They each had their weaknesses. The difference was, you didn’t die if you screwed up a passage on the lute.

  After a while, Gwenna gave up her half-assed attempts to help, abandoning Triste to swing in the cold wind. Valyn looked over, watching the girl huddle into herself, dangling miserably in her harness. She’d exchanged her shredded gown for the too-large uniform of one of the dead Aedolians, and though it hung on her like laundry flapping on a line, the ludicrous clothing did nothing to obscure her raven-dark hair or violet eyes. Next to Triste, the other women in the group looked dull, drab. Not that Gwenna was likely to give a shit about that. Clearly it was the girl’s incompetence she considered unforgivable.

  And Valyn didn’t even want to think about what was happening over on the other bird. They were lucky to have the second kettral, the one left behind when they’d killed Sami Yurl’s traitorous Wing—Suant’ra couldn’t have hauled the whole group on her own—but adding another bird forced Talal into a flier’s role, leaving Rampuri Tan and Pyrre to Annick’s dubious tutelage down below. At least Gwenna had bothered to berate Triste about her flying posture; as far as Valyn could make out, the sniper had neglected her charges entirely, her hard eyes fixed on the terrain below, bow half drawn, despite the frigid wind. Fortunately, both Rampuri Tan and Pyrre seemed to have found the knack of hanging in the harness while holding on to the straps above. They hadn’t plummeted to their deaths, at least, which was something.

  We’ll be down soon, Valyn reminded himself, squinting at the ground below, trying to figure out the best spot for the drop.

  It was clear why this valley, unlike the others, had been able to support human settlement: it was deeper, much deeper. Instead of the rough, V-shaped defiles that gouged the peaks all around, here the sheer granite walls fell away thousands upon thousands of feet, shadowing and sheltering a climate in the gorge below that was green rather than brown and gray, with real trees instead of the isolated and stunted trunks dotting the rest of the mountains. As they dipped below the upper rim, Valyn could feel the warmer, moister air. At the head of the valley, where the glaciers melted, a slender filament of waterfall tumbled over the lip, half hidden behind a veil of spray, shimmering, roiling, and reflecting the light, then splashing into a lake that drained out in a lazy river along the valley floor. Grass flanked the river; not the bunchy, ragged clumps he’d seen in the higher peaks, but real grass, green and even, if not particularly lush.

  It was the city itself, however, the drew Valyn’s eye, if city was even the right word. Valyn had never seen anything to compare to it. Stairs chipped from the stone face zigzagged from ledge to ledge, and while some of those ledges looked natural, as though huge shards of stone had simply peeled away, others were too regular, too
neat, evidently chiseled out over years or decades. Ranks of rough, rectangular holes pierced the wall— windows into interior chambers. Other, smaller apertures might have served as chimneys or sockets for some lattice of wooden scaffolding long rotted away. It was difficult to gauge the scale, but the highest windows opened out at least a hundred paces above the valley floor, far higher than the tips of the blackpines below. It was a staggering accomplishment. Valyn tried to guess how long such a place would take to build, how many men and women had labored for how many years to hack their mountain home from the rock, but he was a soldier, not an engineer. Decades maybe. Centuries.

  It was a beautiful spot. More importantly, you could defend it. The only approach into the gorge was from the east, up the horridly steep broken valley. Fifty men could hold the canyon mouth against an army with little need to do anything more than shove boulders down the scree. The flat land at the base of the cliffs offered plenty of space on which to graze animals and grow crops, and if an army somehow managed to force its way into the gorge, the city itself, adequately provisioned, looked capable of withstanding an indefinite siege. It was a good spot, a safe spot.

  So why is it dead?

  Rampuri Tan hadn’t told them shit about the place, which was probably a good thing, since Valyn was having trouble believing the little he’d already heard. Evidently, the kenta was down there, somewhere. Evidently Kaden and Tan could use it to travel halfway around the world in a single step. The whole thing sounded ludicrous, but after eight years training with leaches, after seeing what Talal and Balendin could do with their strange powers, after Valyn’s own experience in Hull’s Hole, he was less ready to dismiss Kaden’s story of the gates out of hand. Still, it would have helped to know what the ’Kent-kissing things looked like.

  Valyn had hoped he might get a description of what they were searching for—dimensions, features—but Kaden didn’t seem to know much more about the gates than the Csestriim bit, and all the monk would say was, “You find the city, and I will take us to the kenta.”

  “Well, here’s the city,” Valyn muttered, flexing his freezing sword hand to regain some motion while checking over his straps. He flicked a little hand sign at Gwenna: aided dismount, short perimeter check. She nodded impatiently, already loosening Triste’s buckles for the drop. Valyn signaled to Laith with a few tugs on the straps, and the flier banked Suant’ra slightly to bring her down right at the base of the cliff, a few dozen paces from the stairs and windows.

  This place had better be dead, Valyn thought, as the cracked stone loomed up beneath him.

  The drops went better than he could have hoped. Both monks followed instructions perfectly, as though they’d spent days memorizing them; Triste was almost light enough to catch; and Pyrre, who looked like she was going to bust her head open, tucked into the fall at the last minute and rolled to her feet chuckling. Annick and Gwenna didn’t wait for the others to regain their balance before darting off, blades out, to check the perimeter, one outward into the high grass, the other, after lighting a storm lantern, into the gaping mouth of the city itself.

  “As I often say after a night of drinking,” Pyrre remarked, glancing over to where Laith and Talal had landed the birds, “I would have enjoyed that more if we had done less of it.”

  “Long flights take a while to get used to,” Valyn replied, careful to hide the fact that he, too, felt stiff and sore from hanging in the harness, wind-chapped and cold right down in his marrow. The assassin claimed to be on their side, but so far, the people who were supposed to be on their side had proven astoundingly eager to kill them, and Valyn had no desire to reveal more to the woman than he had to. He turned instead to Rampuri Tan.

  “Tell me this is the place.”

  The monk nodded. “It is farther north than I realized.”

  “And this place is what, exactly?” Pyrre asked, tilting her head back to gaze up the looming cliff. “A part of Anthera?”

  “I don’t think it’s part of anything,” Kaden replied, turning slowly to take in the crumbling carved façade. “Not anymore.”

  Although there was at least an hour of daylight remaining in the high peaks, deep in the valley night was gathering already, and Valyn stared into the growing gloom, trying to fix the surrounding terrain in his mind: the waterfall, the small lake, the narrow river draining out to the east. Eons of rockfall had piled up in places along the cliff base, but a little farther out, stands of blackpine grew densely enough that he couldn’t see more than a hundred paces in any direction.

  He turned his attention back to the carved rock. A single entrance like a toothless mouth—the one through which Gwenna had disappeared—provided the only access at ground level, though a row of narrow slits glowered down on them from twenty or thirty feet above: arrow loops, scores of them. Rough carvings flanked the doorway, human shapes so eroded by wind and rain that Valyn could make out little more than the position of the bodies. Perhaps they had been triumphant once, but erosion had so twisted the forms that now they appeared frozen in postures of defeat or death. The remnants of rusted pintles protruded from the stone, but the hinges they once held were gone, as were the doors themselves, presumably rotted away. Whatever the place was, it had clearly been abandoned for a very long time.

  Laith was going over Suant’ra, checking her pinions for damage, then the leading edges of her wings. Yurl’s kettral waited a dozen paces off, feathers ruffled against the coming night, watching them all with one black, inscrutable eye. The birds would fly for anyone with the proper training, and in theory she wouldn’t know or care that Valyn and his soldiers had been the ones to destroy Sami Yurl’s Wing. That was the fucking theory, at least. Valyn hoped to Hull it was right.

  “A night’s rest will do them good, too,” Laith said, combing through ’Ra’s tailfeathers with his fingers.

  Valyn shook his head. “They’re not getting a rest.”

  The flier turned. “Excuse me?”

  “You have the call-and-command whistles for Yurl’s bird?” Valyn asked.

  “Of course. She wouldn’t be much good without them.”

  “I want them both in the air,” Valyn said. “Circling. Yurl’s bird can stay low, just above the trees, but I want ’Ra high. If we need to get out quick, we’ll call them.”

  Laith shook his head. “She’s tired, Val. They both are.”

  “So are we.”

  “And we’re going to get some sleep tonight. Even with the thermals in this canyon, it’ll be a strain to fly in circles half the night. The birds aren’t any use to us if they’re half dead.”

  “They’re even less use to us completely dead,” Valyn said. “We have to assume someone is following us. Hunting us. Another Kettral Wing, maybe two.”

  “Why do we have to assume that?”

  Valyn stared. “We went rogue. We disobeyed a direct order when we left the Islands. We slaughtered another Kettral Wing.…”

  “They tried to murder the Emperor,” Talal pointed out quietly as he approached the group.

  “No one knows that but us,” Valyn said. “As far as the Eyrie is concerned, we’re traitors.”

  “Unless they’re the traitors,” Laith said grudgingly. “Daveen Shaleel or the Flea or whoever. In which case we’re just as screwed.”

  Valyn blew out a slow breath. “I don’t think the Flea’s part of it.”

  “You just said you think the bastard is hunting us.”

  “I do,” Valyn said, “but I don’t think he’s part of the plot.” He paused, trying to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. “Think it through with me. Yurl and Balendin were bad, they were part of the conspiracy, and Shaleel sent them north.”

  “Ah,” Talal said, nodding.

  “Ah, what?” Laith demanded, looking from Valyn to the leach and back. “Someone spell it out for the idiot over here.”

  “If you were trying to murder the Emperor,” Valyn said, “and you could send Yurl or the Flea, who would you send?”

  “
Ah,” Laith said. “If the veteran wings were part of the plot, Shaleel would have sent them.” He brightened. “Good news! Whoever’s hunting us is on our side.”

  “But they don’t know that,” Valyn pointed out, “and they might fill us full of arrows before we can inform them.”

  “Bad news,” Laith said, spreading his hands. “The ups and downs are killing me. Still, if it’s all true, if we really are being stalked by the Kettral, that’s all the more reason to have the birds rested. Listen to me, Valyn. I know kettral. There are only two better fliers than me back on the Islands: Quick Jak and Chi Hoai Mi. Jak failed the Trial and, if you’re right, Chi Hoai’s hunting us, so I’m the best you’ve got and I’m telling you to rest them.”

  Valyn frowned into the darkness, trying to imagine he were the Flea. The thought was ludicrous, but he kept at it. “This isn’t a flying question, Laith, it’s a tactics question. If I were them, I’d want to take out our birds first. Ground us. Without wings, we’d be at their mercy. I’m not letting that happen.”

  Laith spread his arms wide. “Have you seen the mountains we’ve been flying over? The whole fucking Eyrie could be here flying search grids and odds are no one would find us.”

  “I’m not concerned about the whole Eyrie,” Valyn replied, keeping his voice level, “I’m concerned about the Flea. He and his Wing have a reputation, in case you weren’t paying attention back on the Islands, for making a total hash of the odds. Put the birds in the air. One high, one low.”

  Laith locked eyes with him, then threw up his hands. “You’re one worried son of a bitch, Valyn hui’Malkeenian.”

  “It’s your job to fly,” Valyn replied. “It’s my job to worry.”

  The flier snorted. “Here,” he said, tossing something overhand to Valyn. “If you’re going to worry, you may as well have one of the whistles. Yurl’s Wing had two.”