The Providence of Fire

by Brian Staveley

  The sight sickened and saddened him, both for the victims and for Triste. Whatever fury had consumed her, whatever power had torn the lives from five or six score Annurians, it was clear that she understood it no better than anyone else. In the wake of the slaughter, he wanted nothing more than to sit with her, comfort her, try to understand just what had happened and how—but there was no time. Instead, he had seen her drugged with adamanth root, locked in a barred chamber inside the Crane, and placed under triple guard while he went about wrenching aside the final foundations of empire.

  Now, before he slept, he owed her a visit. Gabril seemed to have other thoughts on the matter, and his jaw tightened as Kaden changed course for the Crane.

  “Whatever your past with that woman, she is an abomination. She should be killed, not coddled.”

  “She’s hardly being coddled,” Kaden replied, his own voice harder than he’d intended. “She’s locked away.”

  “Allowing a known leach to live is hardly a way to build support for the republic,” Gabril said. “Especially a leach who only just now cut down hundreds of your subjects.”

  “They’re not my subjects anymore,” Kaden said. “And it will be the council, not me, who determines Triste’s fate. It doesn’t change the fact that she has been with me since this all started, has saved me more than once, and I intend to see her now, to offer her what comfort I can.”

  Gabril shook his head. “Then you go alone. I will be outside your quarters when you have finished with this folly.”

  “Not alone,” Kiel said. “I will join you, if you allow.”

  Kaden nodded wearily, watching the First Speaker turn on his heel and stalk across the courtyard.

  * * *

  At first Kaden thought the room was empty. Someone had drawn the heavy shutters without bothering to light the lamps, blocking out the faint blush of light seeping into the eastern sky. He could make out a small pallet at the far side of the room, two lacquered chairs, and a basin with water on a low table; the chamber was hardly a cell, but it was certainly a far cry from the other guest suites in the palace. The air was hot and stuffy, as though the window hadn’t been open for months.

  Kaden took a few tentative steps into the room as Kiel pulled the door shut behind them.

  “Triste?” he called.

  Silence.

  He crossed to the window, unlatched the shutters, and pushed them open. When he turned he saw her, crouched between the pallet and the wall, arms clutching her knees to her chest, eyes staring at nothing. Despite the bowl of water, she had made no effort to scrub the blood from her face or hands. It had dried and cracked, making it seem as though her skin was sloughing away. Her dress, too, was black and heavy with blood. She paid no attention to any of it, staring blankly at a section of wall a few paces distant.

  “Triste?” he said again, crossing toward her hesitantly. “Are you all right?”

  Her body convulsed, shaking with something that was part sob, part bitter laugh.

  “My mother is a traitor,” she said without shifting her eyes or raising her voice. “She sold me to my father, who was a traitor and a leach. I am a leach and I just murdered I don’t know how many people.”

  The bald statement of the facts brought Kaden up short. He wanted to offer some consolation, but had no idea what to say. As the silence stretched, she raised her eyes at last.

  “When will I be executed?” The words held no fear. If anything, there was a note of hope in her voice.

  Kaden shook his head slowly. “Triste … I … The council will decide, but I’m going to fight for you, fight to see you saved. Not all leaches are evil.”

  Her mouth dropped open in disbelief. “I saw the bodies, Kaden! The people I killed! A child with her head torn halfway off … A man holding his intestines in his arms … I slaughtered them.”

  Kaden hesitated, then nodded. “You killed them, but you didn’t mean to kill them. That’s important.”

  “I didn’t?” she asked, staring at him bleakly. “How do you know?”

  “Do you remember what happened?” Kaden asked. “In the tunnel, back on the island with the kenta?”

  She shook her head, a tiny defeated motion. “Parts. Glimpses. I remember fury. And blood.” She paused, tears streaking her blood-soaked face. “And power. I’m a leach. A leach. Just like the Atmani.”

  “Maybe you are,” Kaden said, “but there are worse things to be.”

  His years with the monks had ground out most reflexive aversion, but there was still something deep inside him, some vicious muscle trained in his early childhood, that recoiled at the thought. All the old words, like dumb fish rising to the light, floated into his mind: foul, twisted, loathsome. He looked at Triste, at the delicate arc of her neck, the fall of her hair onto her shoulders. It seemed cruel of Bedisa to weave something so vile into a being so beautiful.

  Put it away, he told himself, taming the feeling that crouched, muttering, inside of him. At every point since he’d met her, Triste had been kind and generous. When events came to a head, when she fell into the hands of the Ishien, it had been Kaden who failed her, not the other way around. If she was a leach, she was a leach.

  “It doesn’t change who you are,” he said, though as the words left his lips he remembered her pressing Matol up against the kenta, his hand at her throat, her lips pressed to his as she forced him struggling through the gate, remembered her standing, silhouetted, at the end of the corridor, her scream loud as the sun.

  She raised her head. Firelight reflected in her streaked tears as though she were crying flame. “Who am I?” she whispered, eyes boring into him, both defiant and desperate.

  Kaden shook his head helplessly, and for the first time, Kiel stepped forward, crouching a pace away from Triste, considering her carefully.

  “Tell me everything,” he said. “Start at the start.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” the Csestriim replied, “you want to learn the truth. I have lived a long time, and seen more than you know.”

  Triste glanced at Kaden, then back at Kiel, and then the words were tumbling out of her, like water spilling over the lip of Umber’s Pool back in the Bone Mountains, falling too fast and far to recall, pulled by a force as old and strong as the earth itself. Kiel listened in silence, nodding when Triste faltered, his face still as stone, eyes intent as she recounted it all: the flight through the mountains, her reading of the script in Assare, her impossible passage through the kenta and killing of Ekhard Matol, right up through her utter destruction of Adiv’s guard.

  “There’s something wrong with me,” she concluded finally, voice breaking. “Something awful and broken.” She had managed to dam up her terror and grief, but Kaden could hear them pressing behind her low voice, a massive weight barely restrained. “I know things,” she concluded. “Things I shouldn’t know. I can do things.…” She trailed off, staring out the window.

  Kiel glanced at Kaden, then returned his gaze to the girl.

  “A remarkable account,” he said. “Unique.”

  “I’m a leach,” Triste said, circling back to where they began.

  “Almost certainly,” Kiel replied. “It would explain your ability to match pace with Kaden and Tan in the mountains, not to mention the fact that you just held up a hundred tons of stone. You are not just a leach, but an extremely powerful one.”

  Triste nodded helplessly, but Kiel pressed ahead.

  “There is more.”

  Kaden nodded slowly. “Just being a leach wouldn’t allow her to pass the kenta, would it?”

  He hesitated, then shook his head. “No. Not that I’ve ever heard of.” He turned to Triste. “How did you feel when you stepped through the gate?”

  She frowned. “Terrified. Every single time. Confused and terrified.”

  Kiel nodded. “It should have destroyed you.”

  “And then there’s the languages,” Kaden said. “You didn’t learn them in the temple.”

  Triste sho
ok her head weakly. “I wanted to believe that, but … no.” She paused, gazing out at the blank sky, eyes wide and lambent as the moon. “It’s like there’s … someone else.”

  Kaden narrowed his eyes. “Someone else?”

  She grimaced, wrestling with the unspoken words. “Someone else … inside me. She could read the writing in Assare.…”

  “She was the one who spoke after breaking Matol’s hand back in the Heart,” Kaden said. He summoned to mind the girl’s words. “‘Stoppered to your cries will be my ears, and dried to dust the wide lake of my mercy.’”

  Triste shuddered.

  “Do you remember saying that?” he pressed.

  “I don’t…” She hesitated. “I’m not sure. It’s like something I dreamed and then forgot.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you,” Kiel observed. “Different syntax. Different idiom.”

  Triste looked from Kaden to Kiel, then back again. “What does it mean?” she asked. “How can I not be myself?”

  Kaden shook his head. The Shin would have torn apart the question as predicated on incoherence. The very words I and self were mired in error, referring to nothing more than illusion, a shifting amalgamation of senses and perceptions with no core, no foundation, no indivisible essence. And yet, the thing that made the illusion so deceptive, so persuasive, was its very coherence. For Triste’s self to shift, to shatter … the monks had never spoken of such a thing.

  “This other … aspect,” Kiel said carefully, “she seems to emerge only under certain conditions.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The flight through the mountains. The attack in Assare. Your assault on Matol. Conditions of extreme stress.”

  “Like my mind is broken,” she said. “Like something broke it.”

  Kiel nodded, but Kaden shook his head.

  “Broken suggests two halves from a shattered whole,” he said, then indicated her with a vague hand, “but there’s nothing missing from you now. You’re a whole person. And what Kiel’s calling the other aspect doesn’t seem like an aspect. She’s confident, angry. She seems to have a memory of her own, abilities of her own. There might be some bleeding between the two of you, but you both seem whole, distinct. Like another soul was somehow planted in your body.”

  The whole thing seemed impossible if Kaden paused to consider it, but Triste’s eyes blazed.

  “Who is she?”

  Kiel shook his head. “It doesn’t seem like you can know. There may be some … seepage between the two of you, but not enough for you to remember or understand.”

  Triste’s lips tightened. “Ask her.”

  Kaden shook his head. “That’s what they were doing back at the Heart,” he said. “That was the whole point of the torture. Matol demanded to know who you were a dozen times, and all he ended up with was a broken hand.”

  “But,” Kiel pointed out, “Matol was a foe. Tan was a foe. Maybe she would talk to us. To you.”

  “Ask her,” Triste said.

  “All right,” Kaden said, frowning. “The next time she … emerges, I’ll ask.”

  Triste shook her head grimly. “Now.”

  “It won’t work,” Kiel said. “You can’t just call her out.”

  “Yes,” Triste said, seizing the knife from Kaden’s belt and pressing it to her stomach, “I can.”

  Kaden and Kiel both started forward, but she was already driving the knife into her flesh, slowly but steadily, the cloth of the robe and the skin beneath parting under the pressure. Her face twisted in pain and Kaden extended a hand, but Kiel held him back.

  “Come out here, you bitch,” she spat, voice hoarse and ragged. “Get the fuck out.”

  “She’ll kill herself,” Kaden said, body tight as a bowstring.

  “It is her mind,” Kiel replied, “and her body. Her choice.”

  Kaden hesitated. The first inch of the knife had disappeared, and blood soaked her dress, drenching the gruesome fabric. Her lips had gone dark as night, and her eyes rolled in her head, but she kept her white-knuckled grip on the knife, the slow, relentless pressure.

  It’s over, Kaden thought, horrified at what he had allowed to happen. It’s over.

  Then the knife stopped, and her eyes, rather than lolling blankly in their sockets, went abruptly sharp as nails, driving into Kaden.

  “Fools,” she spat, voice strong as a great river in full flood. “You must keep this child from her idiocy. If she destroys this body, you will, all of you, suffer beyond your paltry imagining.”

  Kaden stared. “What…” he began.

  Triste shook her head impatiently. “Your world teeters. My husband, power-maddened, roams nearly at will. An ocean of misery rises, and I am trapped,” she glanced down at her body, “inside this flesh.”

  Kaden found himself shrinking before that gaze. He wanted to close his eyes, to cover his ears, to flee. Instead, he forced himself to lean closer.

  “Who are you?” he asked softly.

  The woman looked at him a moment, and then, to his surprise, released the knife, raised a hand, and ran a finger along his cheek. “The monks worked hard to cut you off from me, Kaden hui’Malkeenian. But you are a man, and even the Great Emptiness cannot sever you utterly from my touch.”

  A welter of emotions rose up in Kaden, fear and wonder undiluted by his years of training, the feelings taking him in their grip as powerfully as they had when he was a small child. There was something new there, as well, something hot and cold at once, burning from the tip of her finger where it touched his skin down through his heart into his very core, filling him with heat.

  “Who are you?” he asked again, his voice a husky whisper.

  “I am the joy in your heart,” she said, smiling grimly, “and the pleasure in your loins. I am the mother of everything you have labored to deny.”

  She held Kaden’s gaze a moment, then glanced off to the side, as though listening to a new wind approaching across the water. “She is as strong as she is foolish, this vessel of mine,” she said with a grimace, then locked her eyes on Kaden once more. “The obviate,” she said, voice bent with urgency. “You must perform it. Keep her safe until the obviate, for if she dies while I am trapped inside, my hand will vanish from this world and you will sink beneath a wide sea of suffering.”

  “Who are you?” Kaden asked again, although a terrible thought was growing inside him.

  The woman smiled, the moment suspended seemingly forever, then plunged her face into her hands, sobbing. When she spoke again, it was with Triste’s voice, trembling and terrified.

  “Who is she?” she moaned. “Holy Hull, who is she?”

  Kaden shook his head, the answer too large to voice.

  It was Kiel who replied. “She is your goddess,” he said gently. “The one you have named Ciena.”

  Triste stared. “That’s impossible.”

  “No,” he said. “The gods took human form during the Csestriim wars.”

  “But why?” Kaden asked, his voice hoarse. “Even if it’s true, why now?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “What does it mean?” Triste demanded.

  “It means,” Kiel replied, staring at the blank wall, “that something interesting has begun.”

  Triste glanced down at her blood-slick hands, then up at the Csestriim, her eyes wide, terrified. “Interesting?” she demanded, voice fraying with panic. “How is this interesting? It’s horrifying!”

  The Csestriim studied her awhile, then nodded. “Yes. That seems accurate. For those of you who can feel horror, it will be horrifying.”

  52

  Seamless dark.

  Cold. Then creeping heat.

  Low hum of insects.

  Lapping water.

  Pain like a blanket.

  Then, worse than the pain, memory.

  Laith holding the bridge, then falling.

  Gwenna and Talal standing as they hurled a starshatter into Balendin’s prisoners, then falling.

  Adare burying the bl
ade in his side, il Tornja slicing him across the face, all sight extinguished, then Valyn himself falling, smashing into the water at the tower’s base.

  Failure bitter as blood in his mouth, and the darkness, unrelenting and absolute, clamped down around him like a vise.

  Valyn raised his head from the mud, then let it fall. How he had washed up on the shore of the lake he couldn’t say. He remembered swimming, his body going through the dumb bestial motions that had been trained into the fibers of his muscle, remembered floating when he was too tired to swim, then swimming some more. Why, he had no idea. Habit. Stubbornness. Cowardice.

  He raised a trembling hand toward his eyes, desperate for the truth and terrified of it. The pain burned so bright he could almost see by it. He could endure the pain, but at the thought of a life lived in darkness—constant, unrelieved darkness blacker than the deepest pit of Hull’s Hole—his heart quailed.

  He slid the tips of his fingers over his eyes, yanked back at the stabbing pain, then forced his hand to the wound once more. The gash started at his temple and sliced clean across both eyes and the bridge of his nose. The skin wept blood and, when he steeled himself enough to test the eyeballs, he found that they were cut cleanly as half-sliced eggs. He jerked his hand away once more, rolled onto his side, vomited into the mud, and lay still.

  Fir needles sifted the wind.

  Smoke, thick and sickening.

  A twist in his innards where Adare had planted the knife.

  Though she had torn the blade free, he could feel the queasy shift of his own slick viscera.

  “Might as well know the worst,” he muttered. His own words felt lighter than ash in his ears, sounded like something already dead.