Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire:
Page 8
“This is Assare,” Tan replied. “The first human city.”
Gwenna let out a bark that might have been laughter. Valyn started to ask Tan how he knew all this, why the place didn’t appear on any imperial maps, but night was nearly upon them, and they hadn’t moved to any reliable cover. Gwenna and Annick were good scouts, but Valyn wanted the group holed up in a full defensive position before the darkness thickened further. He could see and move well enough in full darkness—in fact, it gave him a distinct advantage—but the other members of his Wing hadn’t reaped quite the same benefit from their own time in Hull’s Hole, and the rest of the party, the ones who weren’t Kettral, would be essentially blind.
“Fine. We can talk about it later. Right now,” he pointed to the cliff face, “we’re going inside and up, someplace in front, with windows; I want to be able to keep eyes on the valley.”
Laith raised an eyebrow, then jerked a thumb at Tan. “This guy says the city’s older than dirt and you want to set up camp in a crumbling cliff? What about something less likely to fall on our heads?”
“I want the high ground,” Valyn replied.
“For what? Hunting rats?”
Valyn bit back a sharp retort. “Yes, for hunting rats. It’s a cliff, Laith. Cliffs don’t just fall over.”
The flier gestured to the scree scattered across the valley floor, some boulders the size of small houses.
“The cliff is sound,” Tan said. “And the kenta is inside.” As if that settled the whole matter.
“That’s what we came for,” Valyn said. “Now move. Light’s wasting and we’re standing out here like geese.”
The Kettral set out at a light jog, while Pyrre and the monks fell in a few steps behind. Valyn had crossed half the distance before he realized that Triste wasn’t following. She still stood in the broad, grassy clearing, staring around, eyes wide as lanterns in the crepuscular light, the too-large clothes clutched tight about her in one hand.
“Triste,” Valyn called. “Let’s go.”
She seemed not to have heard him, and he turned back, cursing beneath his breath. It was bad enough when his own Wing questioned his decisions—at least they were capable fighters and good tactical thinkers—but if he had to play wet nurse to this girl all the way back to Annur . . . The thought evaporated as she turned to face him, face baffled, as though lost in the slow depths of dream.
“Triste,” he said, studying her. “Triste.”
Finally she focused on him. Tears welled in her eyes, catching the gold of the fading light.
“Are you all right?” Valyn asked, putting a hand on her elbow.
She nodded, trembling. “Yes. I just . . . I don’t know. It’s such a sad place.”
“You’re cold. Tired. Let’s get inside.”
She hesitated, then turned toward the ancient city, allowing herself to be led.
From the outside, the cliff had appeared solid; the simple façade was chipped and worn, whatever once shuttered the windows long gone to dust, but the angles of the doorframe looked true, the crucial verticals more or less plumb. As they stepped beneath the engraved lintel, however, Valyn could see that here, too, time and decay had worked their quiet violence. Though the city’s bones were bedrock, the chiseling and carving of the builders had allowed in both the wind and the water. Small rivulets spilled over the rock, draining from some impossible height. The water ran cold and clear now, but in the winter it would freeze, and centuries of ice had shattered whole sections of stone, prizing them from the walls and ceiling. A rock the size of a horse blocked part of the passage, while smaller chunks made the footing treacherous.
Valyn pushed deeper into the cave, the smell of damp stone and lichen filling his nostrils. After twenty claustrophobic paces guarded by arrow loops and murder holes, the corridor opened out into a high, wide space—half natural cavern, half carved—evidently an entrance hall of sorts. Recessed sconces for torches grooved the walls, and a wide basin, cracked but graceful, sat in the center. It must have been welcoming once, if not exactly grand, but now it felt empty, cold, and too large to easily defend.
Doorways radiated outward, black rectangles in the lesser gloom, while wide stone stairs rose along the walls on each side. One route looked as likely as the other, and Valyn turned to Tan.
“Which way?”
No one replied.
“You all might enjoy sightseeing,” Valyn went on after a moment, glancing over at the others, “but there are a dozen doors off this hall, and we don’t have the people to guard them or the tools to seal them up. So, if you’re done admiring the architecture . . .”
“Valyn,” Kaden said finally. “Do you have some sort of light? I can barely see my hand in front of my face in here.”
Valyn almost snapped something impatient about getting up higher before they started worrying about lights, then realized that his brother wasn’t exaggerating. To Valyn’s eyes the room was dim, shadowy, but perfectly navigable. The others, however, were staring as though lost in utter darkness. The slarn, he realized, a chill passing through him as he thought back to the egg’s foul pitch thick in his throat.
“Sure,” he said, shoving aside the memory, sliding his tactical lantern from his pack, kindling it, then holding it aloft. The chamber looked even worse in the flickering light. Plaster had crumbled from the walls and ceiling, littering the ground and exposing the rough faces of the stone beneath. A few paces away, a section of floor had collapsed, yawning into the darkness of a cellar beneath. Evidently the builders had dug down as well as burrowing up, and the discovery that he stood atop a warren of rotten rock, the whole thing undermined with tunnels, did nothing to improve Valyn’s mood.
It’s held together for thousands of years, he told himself. It’ll last another night.
“There,” Tan said, pointing to the stairs on the left.
Valyn glanced at the monk, nodded, slipped one of his short blades from its sheath, and started up.
The stairs climbed gracefully around the perimeter of the entrance hall, and then, as they neared the ceiling, turned away from the room into a high, narrow passage. Valyn slid to the side to let Tan lead, counting the floors as they passed, trying to keep track of which way was out. The place reminded him uncomfortably of Hull’s Hole, and though he didn’t mind the darkness, all the winding back and forth, the rooms opening off to the sides, the branching of the corridors, played tricks with his mind. After a while he lost any sense of which doors led outward and which plunged deeper into the earth. When they reached an open chamber from which new passageways branched in all directions, he paused.
“I hope you know where you’re going, monk,” he said.
Kaden pointed. “Out is that way.”
“How do you know?”
His brother shrugged. “Old monk trick.”
“Tricks make me nervous,” Valyn replied, but Tan had already started down the corridor.
“He is right,” the man said over his shoulder. “And we are close to the kenta.”
As it turned out, the trick worked. After forty paces or so, they emerged from the tunnel onto a huge ledge. Fifty paces above them the cliff wall swept up and out in a smooth wave, a towering natural roof that would keep off the worst of the weather while allowing light and air to fill the space. After the cramped darkness inside the cliff, even the watery moonlight seemed bright, too bright. Valyn crossed to the lip, where the remains of a low wall protected against a fall of sixty or seventy paces. They had climbed above the blackpines, high enough to see out over the entire valley. Valyn watched the moonlight flicker like bright silver coins on the surface of the river below. A gust of wind snatched at him, but he didn’t step back.
“There were benches,” Talal said. The leach had broken off from the group to check the darker corners. “And fountains pouring straight out of the cliff. The masonry is mostly worn away, but the water still flows.”
“They carved channels,” Triste pointed out, “and a pool.”
Unlike the tunnels and rooms through which they had climbed, the structure was built rather than carved, a man-made fortress right on the cliff’s edge. No, Valyn realized, examining the tall windows, the wide, empty door, not a fortress. More like a palace. The building filled half the ledge, stretching up four or five stories to where the roof almost touched the sweeping expanse of granite above.
“Huge house,” the flier added, “and a private garden halfway up the cliff.”
“Where’s the kenta?” Valyn asked, turning in a slow circle, uncertain what he was looking for.
“Inside,” Tan said.
Valyn nodded. “Suits me. Let’s get inside.”
“I thought you wanted a view,” the flier grumbled.
“I want to look,” Valyn said, “not get looked at. The palace has windows. The kenta is there. We set up shop in there.”
Even dilapidated, even crumbling, the inside of the structure lived up to the promise of its setting. Unlike the hoarded warren of low halls and tunnels below, the palace was high-ceilinged, the gracious windows admitting pools of moonlight along with the cool night air. It wasn’t built for fortification, but then, there wasn’t much need for fortification when you were seventy paces up a sheer cliff.
“Up,” Tan said, gesturing to the wide central staircase with its crumbling balustrade.
“I thought we were up,” Laith griped. “There’s such a thing as too much elevation, you know.”
“And this from the Wing’s flier,” Gwenna said.
“What do you suppose this was?” Kaden asked, running a hand along the stone.
Valyn shrugged. “King’s palace. Temple, maybe. Guild hall, if merchants ran the city.”
To his surprise, Triste shook her head. “An orphanage,” she said quietly, so quietly he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.
“An orphanage?” Pyrre asked. Ever since landing, the assassin had seemed curious rather than concerned, but her hands didn’t stray far from the pommels of her knives. “I wish the people where I grew up took such good care of their orphans.”
Tan ignored the assassin, turning instead to Triste, his stare boring into her. “How do you know that?”
She glanced at Kaden for support, then pointed back the way they had come, to the doorway opening out onto the ledge. “Above the door. It’s carved there. No one else saw?”
Valyn shook his head. He really didn’t give a shit if the place was a warehouse or a whorehouse as long as it had good sight lines, redundant exits, and enough life left not to collapse abruptly on their heads. Rampuri Tan, however, had fixed the girl with that empty, unreadable stare of his.
“Show me,” he said.
“We’re going up,” Valyn said. “I want our perimeter established before full dark.”
Tan turned to him. “Then establish it. The girl is coming with me.”
Valyn bit off a sharp retort. The monk wasn’t a part of his Wing, not under his command. He could press the issue, but Rampuri Tan didn’t seem the type to respond to pressure, and every minute spent arguing was a minute of further vulnerability. Besides, there was something about the monk, something dangerous in the way he held that strange spear of his, in the flat calm of his stare. Valyn thought he could kill him if it came to blows, but he didn’t see any reason to test the theory.
“All right,” he snapped. “I’ll cover you. Let’s get this done quickly.”
They found the inscription just where Triste said, the words pitted and worn, half obscured by lichen. Valyn squinted at it, trying to make out the lettering before realizing the language was unfamiliar. Linguistic training on the Islands was extensive, but even the characters were alien—sharp and angular, no loops or curves, a script designed to be gouged rather than brushed. He glanced over at Triste, eyebrows raised. “You can read that?”
She was standing in the deep shadow, staring up at the lintel, shivering with the sudden night chill. “I don’t . . .” She shook her head, then abruptly nodded instead. “I guess.”
“What does it say?” Tan demanded.
She frowned, and for a moment Valyn thought she would admit that the words were foreign after all. Then, haltingly at first, she spoke, her voice oddly lilting and musical. “Ientain, na si-ientanin. Na si-andrellin, eiran.”
The phrases weren’t any more familiar than the shapes graven into the stone, and Valyn glanced over at Tan. The monk’s face, as always, was blank. Spending time around the Shin, Valyn was starting to realize how much he relied on subtle emotional cues. Narrowed eyes, whitened knuckles, tense shoulders—it was all a text he could read, one that signaled belligerence or submission, rage or calm. The monks, however, and Tan in particular, were blank pages, palimpsests scraped and scraped until they were utterly empty, utterly clean.
“What does it mean?” Valyn asked, as much to break the brittle silence as anything else.
Triste frowned, then translated, faltering only briefly. “A home for those who have no home. For those who have no family, love.”
Pyrre had joined them as Triste spoke, and the assassin glanced up at the words with pursed lips. “Would have saved some carving to just write Orphanage. Better yet, Kids.”
“What language is it?” Valyn asked.
Triste hesitated, then shook her head.
“It is Csestriim,” Tan said finally. “More specifically, a dialect of the Csestriim speech used by the early humans.”
Valyn raised an eyebrow. “The priestesses of Ciena learn Csestriim?”
Triste bit her lip. “I’m not . . . I suppose I did. There were a lot of languages. The men . . . they come from all over. All over the world.”
“You mean you studied up in case you were called upon to pleasure a Csestriim?” Pyrre asked. “I’m impressed.”
“I wasn’t a leina,” Triste replied. “I wasn’t initiated. . . .” She trailed off, still staring at the words as though they were vipers.
“All right then,” Valyn said finally, “the language lesson has been fun.” He glanced over the broad swath of stone, and the hair on his arms rose.
Across the ledge, a hundred paces from where he stood, inside the black yawning doorway through which they had first emerged from the cliff: a flicker of motion. No light, no noise, just a silent shape sliding across the darkness, gone so fast he couldn’t even be certain it was real. It could have been anything, a leaf caught in the night breeze, a fragment of cloth flapping. But there is no cloth here, he reminded himself. Gwenna and Annick had said as much. Only the hard things. Only the bones.
There were animals in the Bone Mountains, crag cats, bears, plenty of smaller, less dangerous creatures. Something might have found a convenient lair inside the cliff. Something might have followed them in. In either case, they were vulnerable standing in the entrance to the orphanage, silhouetted by the light of their lantern. Jumping at shadows was a good way to make mistakes, but so was standing around out in the open.
“Upstairs,” he said. “Laith and Gwenna, check the first floors. Talal, Annick, those above. Gwenna, rig the whole place.”
He glanced over his shoulder once more, to where he’d seen the motion. Nothing. The night was still, silent. Valyn turned back to the group. “Now.”
5
A dare spent the better part of the morning hunched beneath a bridge, pressed up against the stone pilings, teeth chattering in the brisk spring breeze, limbs trembling beneath her sodden wool robe, hair damp and cold on her nape, despite having wrung it out a dozen times over. She would have dried more quickly in the sun, but she couldn’t leave the shadows until she was dry. A drenched woman wandering the streets would draw attention, and when Fulton and Birch came looking, she didn’t want anyone to remember her passage.
Worse than the cold was the waiting. Every minute she waited was another minute during which the Aedolians could organize their pursuit, pur
suit she was ill equipped to handle. How long did wool take to dry? She had no idea. Every morning of her life, a slave had arrived with freshly laundered clothes, and every evening that same slave had removed the dirty garments. For all Adare knew, she could be crouched beneath the bridge all day, shivering, waiting.
She bit her lip. That wasn’t an option. By the time night fell, Aedolians would be scouring both banks of the Chute, searching for exit points, hunting beneath bridges. She needed to be well away by nightfall, by noon, and yet there was no way to wish the cloth dry. Instead, as she trembled and crouched, she tried to think through the next few hours, to anticipate the difficulties in her plan, the flaws.
Difficulties weren’t hard to come by. First, she had to find a route to the Godsway that wouldn’t get her beaten, robbed, or raped. She risked a glimpse out from beneath the bridge. It was impossible to say how far the current had carried her or where, exactly, she’d finally managed to claw her way out of the water, but the leaning tenements, the narrow streets, the stench of offal and rotten food, suggested one of the city’s slums, maybe even the Perfumed Quarter. Somewhere in the near distance she could hear a woman and man shouting at each other, one voice high and biting, the other a ponderous growl of rage. Something heavy smashed into a wall, shattering into pieces, and the voices fell silent. Nearer at hand a dog barked over and over and over.
With numb fingers, Adare slipped the damp blindfold from the pocket of her dress. She tied it in place. In the deep shadow of the bridge she couldn’t see much—her own hand when she waved it in front of her face, sunlight reflecting off the water of the canal before it slid beneath the stone arch, the vague shapes of rotted pilings. She’d known the cloth would hinder her ability to see, but she hadn’t remembered it being quite so bad when she’d practiced in the privacy of her chamber. After fiddling with it for a while, twisting it this way and that, she pulled it off entirely, untied it, then started the whole process over again.