The Providence of Fire

by Brian Staveley

  The forty-six steps were the longest of his life, but by the time he reached the upper landing, the tunnel had stopped shaking. He could hear the last stones smashing against the floor below, but the sound was muted, partly by distance, partly by a louder, more strident noise shoving it aside, drowning it out. Men were screaming in the hallway ahead, shouting and sobbing, voices bright with desperation. Kaden took a step forward, slipped, caught himself, then looked down. The stone was awash in blood. A few paces off, a soldier lay crumpled against the wall. Beyond him another, then another.

  Dread mounting, Kaden limped ahead, forcing down the pain in his chest, trying to still the battering of his heart, trying to think. They were in the Dawn Palace, or beneath it. Adiv had marshaled his men, but someone was killing those men. Kiel had proven himself capable with the naczal, but it wasn’t Kiel. Kaden stared at another corpse as he passed. The face had been utterly smashed, features caved into the back of the skull. No weapon could do that.

  Triste. It had to be. When Adiv tried to tear down the tunnel, she had held it up. Like her father, she was a leach, a powerful leach, and something inside her had snapped.

  He redoubled his pace, following the corridor around one corner, then another, pushing past dozens of bodies until the dank, cold scent of the stone began to give way to fresh air. He rounded a final bend and pulled up short. Thirty paces away, silhouetted by the bright blaze of the noonday sun, arms outstretched as though eager for some terrible embrace, Triste stood in an arch leading outside. Beyond her, Kaden could make out fire and smoke, could hear screams, but Triste herself remained motionless as stone. As Kaden stared, Adiv stepped from an alcove halfway down the corridor. He didn’t spare a glance for Kaden. All his attention was focused on his daughter, and as he moved, the bare knife in his hand glinted with reflected sunlight.

  Kaden threw himself into a lurching run. There was no point shouting a warning any more than there was trying to cover the sound of his approach—the violence beyond the doorway was deafening even inside the hall. It was a race, pure and simple, with Triste’s life as the prize, and though Kaden knew nothing about fighting, nothing about war or politics, nothing about leaches or their powers, he knew how to run. He’d been running his whole life, running hungry, running in the dark, running hurt, and so, gritting his teeth, he ran.

  He hit Adiv a few paces from the entrance, a few paces from Triste, slamming him to the floor. Agony scoured his back, but he ignored the agony. He had only moments, less than moments, before the leach turned on him and tore him apart. Kaden found the knife, tried to pull it to Adiv’s throat. He was stronger than the councillor, but the other man had an animal’s desperate tenacity, and Kaden could get no purchase on the handle.

  He grimaced; then, steeling himself against the pain, he wrapped his fingers around the blade itself, feeling the keen edge bite into his flesh, tendon, bone. He ignored the blood and sudden stupid uselessness of the fingers, forcing the knife closer to Adiv, wrapping his legs around the leach’s torso, dragging it closer, and closer.

  The councillor cursed, snarled something, and suddenly Kaden felt himself losing the fight, as though a great invisible hand had lent its strength to Adiv’s struggle. He was losing. He had no idea how to fight back against a kenning. Then, abruptly, the man went limp. Kaden stared, then shoved the leach aside to find Kiel standing over them, naczal buried in the councillor’s back. A momentary surge of exultation flared up in him, but Kiel’s expression doused it.

  “Quickly,” he said, reaching down to help Kaden to his feet. “It’s Triste.”

  Kaden shook his head. “What?”

  “She’s killing them.”

  “Killing who?”

  “Everyone.”

  By the time Kaden reached the doorway, it was all over. People were still sobbing, screaming, flames still lapped the sky, but Triste had dropped her arms. She stood like a marionette, as though her whole body were suspended by a single, impossibly thin string.

  “Triste?” he said carefully, setting a hand gently on her shoulder.

  She turned to him, eyes blank as cloud, but didn’t respond.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” The words were dark, leaden. “I don’t know.”

  There was no fear in her tone, no worry, just a deep, unplumbed helplessness. Kaden took her face in his hands, looked into her eyes. There was nothing to see, and when he let his hands fall, she crumpled to the floor, folding in on herself. Kaden started to kneel, but Kiel waved him forward, toward the arch.

  “You had best look,” he said.

  Kaden hesitated, then limped from shadow into sunlight. For a long time he had no idea what he was looking at. Kiel claimed the kenta let out inside the Dawn Palace, and the guardsmen below certainly seemed to confirm the idea, but Kaden didn’t recognize the blackened, blasted courtyard before him. There were a few twisted trees, all on fire, scores of corpses, dozens more wounded and dying. The walls enclosing the small space were scorched, and at least one building was fully ablaze. It was only when he turned that he saw the twin towers, Yvonne’s and the Crane, flanking him, while above and behind them, like a bright point lodged in the belly of the sky, stood Intarra’s Spear.

  He turned back to the courtyard. There was nothing to see but horror. Nothing to hear but the keening of the wounded and the clattering boots of more guardsmen drawing near. Kaden watched them burst into the small square, level their spears, then pause. He raised his eyes slowly, straightened his back. He had returned to his palace, to the home of his father, of his family. If he were going to die here, he would die with his eyes open. He would die on his feet.

  The commander of the guards stared. Then, to Kaden’s shock, dropped to his knees. Behind him, his men shifted in confusion. The air was thick with smoke and warped by the heat of the still-burning flames, but if he could see them, they could see him, and one by one, they saw. One by one, they fell to their knees, pressed foreheads against the bloody stone. For what seemed like a long time there was only the crackling of flame, the sobs of the mangled. Then, like the low rumble of a flooded river, the voices came:

  “All hail the Scion of Light, the Long Mind of the World, Holder of the Scales, and Keeper of the Gates.”

  Kaden felt like choking, like vomiting. He wanted to fall to the stones and weep. But the Shin had taught him to stand even when his body flagged. They had taught him to look at the world without weeping.

  “All hail,” the voices continued, rising above the wind, above the flame, “he who holds back the darkness. All hail the Emperor.”

  50

  Adare stood at the end of the dock, back to the still-burning desolation of Andt-Kyl’s eastern island, eyes on the small boats quartering through the waves. There were half a dozen of them, and they’d been at it all morning, back and forth, back and forth, dropping their weighted nets, trolling the bottom, then pulling them up slick and glistening with small fish. They kept those fish, tossing them into wooden barrels before lowering the nets once more. Adare chafed at the delay, the distraction, but she could hardly fault them. She had given the fisherman of Andt-Kyl this task, had asked it of them at a time when such asking was hard. Their town still smoldered. Many of their dead remained unburied. The wounded—both the screaming and the silent—needed tending. And still she had asked these men to go out in their small boats, to trawl for bodies.

  “You will want to search for your mothers and fathers swept into the lake, for your brothers and sisters,” she had said, then added silently, shamefully, And for my own.

  The fishermen had just glanced at each other, looked out over the waves, then nodded. Half of Andt-Kyl was in flames, including storerooms and root cellars stocked with the last of the winter’s provisions, food intended to carry the townsfolk through to the harvest. It made a certain sense to take to the boats. The living would need to eat, and these men knew their business; they could do their usual work while they searched for the dead.


  Adare stood on the docks all morning staring south, staring until her eyes ached with the strain, a stone settling in her stomach every time they pulled another sodden body from the water. She could tell, even half a mile distant, whether the corpse belonged to a logger or to one of the Urghul. The horsemen were stripped of valuables, then tossed unceremoniously into the hold to be burned ashore later—no sense dragging the same corpse out of the water a dozen times. The dead of Andt-Kyl, however, were laid gently on the decking. The living fishermen hovered over them, as though they were spirits slipping clear of the wet flesh. Adare couldn’t hear anything at that distance, but from the angle of the heads, the stillness of the poses, she could imagine them praying.

  She had tried to pray herself.

  Intarra, she began, over and over, Lady of Light, please …

  That same invocation, again and again. She never got any further. There was no way to know if the goddess was listening, if she cared, if she was even real, but none of that was the obstacle, not the true obstacle. There was always doubt in matters of faith, doubt that had never before, even at Adare’s most skeptical, stopped her from praying. No, the reason she could not finish her prayer here, now, staring out over the blue-gray waves of the lake, watching the men in the small boats haul up struggling fish and the calm, unstruggling dead, was not a problem of the goddess, but of Adare herself. She couldn’t end the prayer because she didn’t know what to pray for.

  Her brother was dead. She had killed him, or helped to. Valyn, she said silently, the name like a nail lodged in her mind. He was her brother, and she had killed him. The truth scalded, but it was the truth, and so, rather than turning away from the lake, rather than burying herself in the thousands of other matters that needed her attention, rather than drinking until she dropped, or talking until she forgot, or working with her hands until exhaustion delivered her into sleep, she stood at the end of the dock, rehearsing what she had done, saying over and over the name of a dead brother, trying and failing to pray.

  “Your Radiance.”

  Lehav’s voice behind her. The scuff of his boots on the wooden dock. She closed her eyes, measured out the last moments of her solitude in his approaching steps.

  “The town?” she asked, when he paused at her shoulder. “Do they know yet how many died?”

  “It’s a mess,” he replied grimly. “It’s hard to know anything. Maybe half.”

  Half a town killed. Was that a victory, against the might of an Urghul army? A failure?

  “What about the Sons?”

  “We took a beating. Not as bad as the Army of the North. I heard you were atop the signal tower.”

  Adare nodded, still not looking at him.

  “That was foolish,” he said.

  Before the battle she would have bridled at the comment, would have argued the point loudly and long, as she had done with Fulton. Fulton, who was dead. Dead because she had insisted on seeing the battle up close. She shook her head slowly.

  “It seemed important.”

  A cold wind blew through the long pause that followed, nicking the waves, fueling the fires behind them.

  “I will leave you,” Lehav said finally. He did not leave.

  Adare took a long, unsteady breath.

  Intarra, she prayed inwardly, Lady of Light. She had tried so many times already to compose this prayer, had failed so many times that when the last words came, they surprised her: Lady of Light, forgive me.

  She couldn’t have said for what transgression she was begging forgiveness. She had failed her father and made common cause with his killer, had taken a leach as her councillor, had raised up an army to fight against armies of Annur, had stolen a throne from one brother and slid a knife between the ribs of another.…

  It had all seemed so necessary.

  Forgive me, she prayed again, again without entrusting the prayer to speech.

  Sunlight shattered on the waves. It burned her eyes. Behind her, the flames still raged. Forgiveness, it seemed, lay far from the providence of fire. She watched a moment longer as the fishermen hauled another quiet body from the lake, then turned to Lehav.

  He was studying her—his prophet, chosen of Intarra, Emperor of Annur—with dark, uncertain eyes.

  “Let’s go,” said Adare hui’Malkeenian before he could speak again. “There is work to be done.”

  51

  For a while, Kaden considered it.

  He hadn’t expected to end the day in the Dawn Palace, hadn’t expected to be heralded as the Emperor of Annur, but then, as the Shin said, To expect is to err.

  When he emerged into the burning square at the center of the Dawn Palace, when the guardsmen knelt before him, intoning the ancient formula that had preceded all Malkeenian rulers for generations, it seemed harder to refuse the honor than to accept it. Whatever play Adare had made for the throne, she was hundreds of miles away in Raalte and had made no formal declaration of her own intent. The citizens of Annur were confused, and Kaden, standing at the center of the empire, was best situated to turn that confusion to his advantage. It looked suddenly, shockingly simple to take the throne and declare himself his father’s heir.

  In the end, it was that very simplicity that made him hesitate. Ran il Tornja was not a simple thinker. Neither was Adare. Winning a single battle meant little in the larger war, and seizing the Unhewn Throne was a far cry from holding it. A single man, even a man inside the walls of the Dawn Palace, was too easy to topple, too easy to kill. They would expect him to seize the reins of power, and they would have plans in place to handle him when he did so. The events of the last day had seen Adiv killed and his force of loyalists gutted, but Kaden had no doubt that there were still people in the palace—ministers, guards, concubines—who would plant a blade in his back at a word from the kenarang, not to mention the enemies he would make with the members of his newly formed council.

  Of course, even the ceding of imperial power was not a straightforward matter. Kaden spent the rest of the night just setting in motion the most basic wheels: sending messengers to the various nobles of the council; talking down the dozens of ministers who gathered like ill-fed ravens, baffled that Kaden would surrender his titles and fearful that any transition would mean an end to their sinecures; reassuring the palace guard; arranging to conclusively seal off the kenta chamber; seeing to it that the scores of people killed by Triste’s fury were properly washed, wrapped, and transported out of the palace for burial; instructing the palace staff to clean the wreckage strewn about the Jasmine Court; and then finally, just as the tip of Intarra’s Spear began to glow with the pale light of the unrisen sun, collecting his newly forged council in the Hall of a Thousand Trees, unfurling the constitution before the sight of the entire court, and administering the oaths to defend and uphold the fledgling republic against all foes.

  When the audience was finally over, Kaden felt ready to collapse on his feet, and there were still hundreds of questions to answer, thousands of tasks, tiny and enormous, that had to be addressed if the Annurian Republic were to have any hope of survival.

  Kaden wiped his face with his hands as he exited the hall, as though he could scrub the weariness from his eyes, the cobwebs from his thoughts. Kiel and Gabril walked at his side.

  “There is something you should know,” the Csestriim said quietly, glancing over at Kaden as though gauging his readiness to hear a difficult truth.

  Kaden stared at him, then waved him on.

  “In preparing Adiv’s body for the fires his blindfold was removed,” Kiel said. “He could see. He has eyes.”

  “Just like any other man.” Kaden shook his head.

  “No,” Kiel responded. “Not just like any other man. Tarik Adiv shared your burning irises.”

  Kaden stopped walking. For a long time he didn’t move. There seemed no point. There were a thousand tasks ahead of him, none of which he understood.

  “A relative,” he said finally.

  Kiel nodded. “Your family is old. Th
ere are many branches. Intarra’s touch is strongest upon your own, but there are others.”

  Kaden had never considered the notion before, but it made a certain sense. If Sanlitun had known, he might have given Adiv a high post in the government out of some kind of loyalty. And Adiv himself … how would he have felt after a lifetime hiding his eyes while the Malkeenians flaunted their own? Bitter enough to turn on an emperor who had favored him? Bitter enough to kill? Kaden shook his head. More questions and no answers.

  “I should go to my father’s study,” he said. “Look over his papers before the council meets again. What do I have, a few hours?”

  “What you should do,” Kiel said, “is sleep.”

  Gabril nodded. “Work without rest and you will achieve nothing.”

  The First Speaker and the Csestriim had not left his side since the Great Gate was thrown open and the council admitted to the deafening tolling of the gongs. Kaden was grateful for the support, more than grateful, but after hours of talking, negotiation, and reassurance, he longed for a few hours of silence, of solitude.

  Gabril, as though sensing his thoughts, patted him on the shoulder. “Come. We will see you to your chambers, and I will command the watch at your door myself.” If the First Speaker was exhausted after the long night, he didn’t show it. But then, the First Speaker hadn’t spent the afternoon fighting for his life against Adiv, Matol, and the Ishien. Kaden started to accept, then shook his head.

  “There’s Triste, too,” he said. “I have to see her.”

  In the chaos following his emergence from the kenta, in his urgency to see the council installed before any opposition could coalesce, Kaden had allowed the girl to be led away, her eyes blank, baffled, and hopeless. The palace guards had wanted to kill her on the spot, but Kaden stopped them, insisting on her imprisonment instead. In truth, he had no idea what to think about her final bloody massacre, no idea how to feel about it. Certainly she had saved his life, both by holding up the tunnel as Adiv sought to tear it down, and by killing the soldiers under the leach’s command. It seemed, however, that something inside the girl had snapped, some cord tethering her mind to the world. He had walked among the bodies in the Jasmine Court, had looked at their faces. There were ministers among the number, and courtiers, one old woman, and at least three children. They couldn’t all have been a part of Adiv’s plot. They weren’t all supporters of Adare and il Tornja.