Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire:

by Brian Staveley

  “You can’t kill her,” he said finally.

  “Of course not,” the monk replied. “We need to know more. But this changes things.”

  “What things?”

  “The Ishien,” Tan replied. “I was wary of this course of action to begin. I am doubly so now.”

  Kaden considered the response. In all the time he had known the older monk, Tan had never seemed really wary of anything: not Scial Nin, not Micijah Ut or Tarik Adiv, not even the ak’hanath.

  “You’re concerned,” he said slowly, “about what the Ishien will think of Triste. About the fact that she passed through the kenta.”

  “We don’t need to go,” she protested. “We can walk back through the gate.”

  “When I want you to talk,” Tan said, pressing the blade against her neck firmly, “I will tell you.”

  Triste opened her mouth to protest, then thought better of it, sagging back onto the grass, exhausted and defeated. Kaden wanted to comfort her somehow, to assure her that everything would be all right, but, when he searched for the words, found he had no comfort to offer. If she was what Tan claimed, his comfort would mean less than nothing.

  “What will the Ishien do if they decide she is Csestriim?” Kaden asked.

  The monk frowned. “The Ishien are unpredictable. In their long fight against the Csestriim, they have carved away much that made them human, not least of which is their own ability to trust. The Ishien believe the Ishien. Everyone else is a fool or a threat.”

  “But you were one of them,” Kaden said. “Will they listen to you?”

  “It will depend almost entirely on who leads them.”

  “Who does lead them?”

  Tan frowned. “A northerner named Bloody Horm, but he has been gone from the Heart for decades.”

  “Gone?” Kaden asked, shaking his head.

  “Hunting Csestriim,” Tan replied, “among the Urghul or the Eddish. What matters is who leads the Ishien now, in his stead.”

  He paused, considering Triste. She watched him with frightened eyes, the way a hare watches the hunter when he comes to pluck it from the trap. “Regardless, bringing her may purchase a measure of respect. Fewer Csestriim walk the world than in the past. The Ishien find them very rarely.”

  “She’s not some sort of token for us to barter,” Kaden said.

  “No. She is far more dangerous than that.”

  “I’m not what you think,” Triste said quietly, hopelessly. “I don’t know how I walked through that gate, but I’m not what you think.”

  Tan watched her for a while. “Perhaps,” he said finally, then turned to Kaden. “You should remain here. It will be safer. I will bring the girl and speak with the Ishien.”

  Kaden stared at the windswept island. “Safer?” he asked, raising his brows. “Any one of your Ishien could walk through these gates at any time. If they will distrust me arriving with you, they might murder me if they find me here unexpectedly.” He shook his head. “No. I started this. I will see it through. Besides, I need the Ishien. You might learn what I need to know, but I need to talk to them, to forge some sort of relationship.”

  He had no idea how Triste had passed the kenta, no idea how Tan’s former brothers would respond to her sudden arrival or his own, no idea what he would do if it turned out Triste was lying, but the old fact remained: the Csestriim were involved in the plot against his family, they had killed his father, which made Kaden Emperor. He didn’t rule Annur—not yet—but he could do this.

  “I’m going,” he said quietly.

  Tan studied him for half a dozen heartbeats, then nodded. “There is no safe path.”

  “Please,” Triste begged quietly. “Before I came through the gate, you were trying to convince Kaden not to go.”

  “It is because you passed the kenta that I changed my mind.”

  “Why?” she whispered.

  “There is no other place where I am more likely to learn the truth about you.”

  Triste turned to Kaden, eyes wide and frightened.

  “Kaden . . .”

  He shook his head. “I need to know, Triste. If it’s not true, I’ll see you free, I’ll take you away myself. I swear. But for my father, for my family, I need to know.”

  The girl turned away, body sagging in defeat.

  Tan gestured to Kaden. “Take the belt from your robe. Bind her. Use the slaughter knot.”

  “And her feet?”

  “A short hobble. We are not going far.”

  Kaden glanced around himself once again. The kenta through which he had entered was not the only one on the island. Dozens of the slender, delicate gates ringed the periphery, as though the entire block of land had once supported an enormous tower. He imagined some awful storm toppling the structure—buttresses and corbels, ramparts and flutings, all of it—into the sea, leaving only the doors, dozens of stone arches open as silent mouths.

  “These are the gates,” he said, shaking his head even as he slipped the belt from his robe. “This is what Nin described: the gates kept by the Malkeenian kings.” For the first time, he started to understand the power such gates could bring. To move from one end of the empire to the other in a few strides . . . it was little wonder Annur had remained stable over the centuries while other kingdoms fragmented and fell. An emperor who could cross from northern Vash to western Eridroa in a handful of steps would be almost a god. He half expected to see his father emerge from one of the kenta, chin bent toward his chest in that way he had when he was thinking. But no . . . Sanlitun was dead. The gates were Kaden’s responsibility now.

  “Work,” Tan said, gesturing toward Triste.

  Kaden knelt beside her, knees pressing into the damp earth. She met his gaze, even as he rolled her onto her stomach, his hands rougher than he had intended. He was used to trussing up sheep and goats, not men or women, and his belt dug deep into her soft flesh as he pulled it tight.

  “Leave a loop,” the older monk said. “To guide her.”

  “You’re enjoying this,” she said, disgust thick in her voice.

  “No,” Kaden said quietly. “I’m not.”

  She clenched her jaw as he pulled the rope tight, but refused to look away. “I didn’t spend my whole life in Ciena’s temple without learning something about men. Ministers or monks—you’re all the same. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? Strong.” Kaden couldn’t tell if she was about to sob or snarl.

  He started to respond, to insist that the whole thing was just a precaution, but Tan cut him off.

  “Do not attempt to argue with her. Finish the work and have done.”

  Kaden hesitated. Triste glared at him, tears standing in her eyes, then looked away. Not, however, before he had carved a saama’an of the rage and fear, the betrayal etched in her expression. He took a deep breath, then twisted the cloth once more before finishing the knot. A goat could slip free of such a loose knot, but Triste was not a goat, and he refused to cinch the rope any tighter. Still, the whole thing felt wrong. I’m not hurting her, he reminded himself. And if Tan’s right, all this is crucial. The thinking was sound, but he could feel what the Shin called the “beast brain” prowling, agitated, inside the steel cage of reason.

  He straightened from his task, then, at the monk’s direction, pulled her to her feet. She swayed unsteadily. Tan’s naczal never left her neck.

  “That way,” he said, gesturing with his head toward a gate on the far side of the island. “The girl first.”

  “You don’t need to do this,” Triste began. She ignored Kaden, spoke through him to the older monk as though he didn’t exist. And for all the good I’m doing her, I suppose I don’t. He was surprised to realize the thought stung, and he went to work on the emotion, grinding it out as one would grind a stray ember from the hearth beneath a heel. Tan did not respond, just pressed slightly with that spear of his until Triste stumbled forward.

  “Which one leads to the Dawn Palace?” Kaden asked carefully.

  Maybe the older monk was r
ight, maybe Triste was Csestriim, and evil, and bent on some nefarious purpose; in that case, Kaden would do what was necessary. Could he bring himself to kill her? He tried to imagine it, like butchering a goat, a quick pull on the knife, blood urgent as breath, a final spasm, and it would be done. If it turned out that Triste was in some way responsible for the slaughter at the monastery, for the deaths of Akiil and Nin, for Pater, for his father, he thought he could do it. But if she was not, if it were Tan whose vision was clouded, well then, the time might come when acquiring his own knowledge of the network of gates would prove crucial. “Are they marked in some way?”

  “None leads to the Dawn Palace,” Tan replied. “Nin spoke the truth about the Malkeenians and the kenta, but the Csestriim built more than one network. Your lineage knows nothing of this island, these gates. Nor do the Shin.”

  Kaden frowned. “Then how do you . . .”

  “The knowledge of the Ishien is older than that of the Shin, more complete.”

  The monk stopped them in front of one arch identical to the rest. Up close, Kaden could see the script carved into the keystone, a word or words; it was hard to be certain how many. Evidently there were scholars back in Annur who could read those sharp angles as though they’d been raised on the language, but Kaden, of course, had been afforded no opportunity to study with the scholars of Annur.

  He eyed the arch, curiosity and caution warring within him, but it was Triste who spoke.

  “Where does it lead?”

  “You cannot read it?” Tan asked.

  The girl bit her lip but refused to respond.

  “You choose a strange time to begin your deception,” the monk observed. “You read a similar language in Assare.”

  “I’m not Csestriim,” Triste insisted. “Even if I can read it.”

  “What does it say?” Tan pressed.

  “Tal Amen?” Triste said finally. “No. Tal Amein.”

  Kaden shook his head.

  “The Still . . . Self?” she translated, squinting as she did so. “The Missing Heart?”

  “The Dead Heart,” Tan said finally.

  Fear slicked a chill finger along Kaden’s spine. The arch looked like the rest of the arches: slender, still, almost inviting. Through the open space he could see the black-tailed seabirds darting into the waves, sunlight shattering off the broken panes of the sea. There was no telling what lay on the other side, but Tan’s translation promised something less inviting than this lost island.

  “The Dead Heart,” Kaden said, trying out the words. “What is it?”

  “It is dark,” Tan said. “And cold. Hold your breath as you step through the kenta.”

  “Who goes first?”

  “She does.” The monk nudged Triste forward with his naczal. “If the guards decide to loose their shafts, better her chest for the broadheads.”

  11

  The Flea was waiting.

  Even as Valyn rolled to his feet, shielding his head with one hand from the rubble still raining down from above, retrieving with the other the blade he had tossed away from himself while falling, even as he scanned the room for his Wing through the kicked-up haze of smoke and stone dust, even as he tried to slow the hammering in his chest, to see the scene clearly, to fucking think, he knew something was wrong.

  It’s too bright, he realized, squinting about him, flexing his left elbow, which felt badly bruised but not broken. It’s lit.

  The realization punched him in the gut. He had fallen from near total darkness into a chamber hung with lanterns. Even in the smoke, he could see Talal lurching to his feet across the room, see Laith pressing a hand against the side of his head. The flier’s twin blades lay on the ground just a pace away, but a pace, in a tight spot like this, might as well have been a mile. Gwenna had made the jump, too, and Annick, all according to plan, and yet, as Valyn’s eyes adjusted to the light, his stomach soured further. The light came from Kettral lanterns, tactical lanterns almost identical to his own, three spread around the perimeter of the room.

  He squinted.

  His Wing was not alone. There were other figures in Kettral black, figures Valyn recognized all too well from his long years on the Islands, men and women with blades out and bows drawn, arrows trained on his chest.

  “Just stop, Valyn, before someone gets hurt.”

  The Flea’s voice, again, although this time it was coming, not from above, but from one of the exterior windows. A moment later, the Wing leader stepped through, down into the room, nodding as he surveyed the rubble.

  “Rigging the floor was smart,” he said. “Risky, but smart.”

  “A man who takes no risk will rot,” the Aphorist observed.

  The Flea’s demolitions master, a short, ugly man with a long, ugly beard and bright eyes, slouched against a doorway on the far side of the room, flatbow pointed at Gwenna. “Valyn was right to trust the girl. She knows her work.”

  “Fuck off, Newt,” Gwenna snarled at him. She had sheathed her swords before blowing the floor, and crouched empty-handed, eyes fixed on the Aphorist. “I’ll bugger your ugly ass with a starshatter before this is over.”

  A few paces away Sigrid sa’Karnya made a harsh rattling noise deep in her throat. Despite her pale skin, the Flea’s leach was the most beautiful soldier on the Islands, a stunning blond woman from the northern coast of Vash, but the priests of Meshkent had cut out her tongue years earlier, and aside from hand sign, the only language remaining to her was a set of guttural hacks and scrapings.

  “My gorgeous friend here,” the Aphorist translated affably, “takes issue with your language.”

  “Tell your gorgeous friend that I’ll go to work on her next,” Gwenna spat.

  Sigrid didn’t respond. She just fixed the younger woman with those bright blue eyes and dragged the tip of her belt knife—the only weapon she had bothered to draw—along the inside of her own arm. A line of dark blood welled up behind the steel. She pointed the blade, still dripping, at Gwenna’s throat. Gwenna wasn’t afraid of much, but Valyn saw her swallow heavily. Back at the Eyrie, Sigrid’s reputation for beauty was matched only by the stories of her cruelty, and though the Flea had been a fair, if demanding trainer, the rumors surrounding his Wing were much darker.

  “How did you know?” Valyn coughed. His head throbbed, and he could taste blood, hot and bitter on the back of his tongue. He felt the dark anger rising inside him, anger at Gwenna for blowing the floor before his order. Anger at himself for failing to outthink the Flea. Jaw clenched, he waited for the wave of fury to pass. No one was dead. That was the important part. Despite the explosion, despite all the drawn steel, no one was dead. There was still time to talk, to negotiate. It was still possible the Flea wasn’t trying to kill them at all, that they could work something out. Valyn just needed to keep the arrows from flying a little bit longer. “How’d you know we were going to blow the floor?”

  The Flea shook his head. “We’ve been doing this a long time, Valyn.” He sounded weary rather than triumphant. “You did well, with the camp and the escape. Against a lot of other Wings, you’d be free now, and we’d be cursing as we dusted off our blacks.”

  Valyn smiled bleakly. “But we’re not up against the other Wings.”

  The Flea shrugged. “Like I said, we’ve been doing this a long time.” He gestured toward Annick. “Now tell your sniper to put down her bow. Then we can talk.”

  Aside from Valyn’s own drawn blade, Annick was the only one who had managed to bring a weapon to bear: her string was drawn, the arrow’s point fixed on the Flea. If it bothered the other Wing’s commander to stand a finger’s twitch from death, he didn’t show it. His lined face didn’t show much of anything.

  There were plenty of vets back on the Islands who looked like Kettral from their boots to their brains, all muscle and jaw. Not the Flea. Short and dark, middle-aged and pockmarked, with gray hair hazing his scalp, he’d always looked to Valyn more like a farmer stomping in after a long day in the fields than the most success
ful Wing commander in the history of the Eyrie.

  “We shouldn’t disarm,” Annick said. “Not after last time.”

  “I wasn’t there last time,” Blackfeather Finn interjected in his deep, urbane baritone, “but a precise observer would be obliged to note that you’re not exactly armed in this situation.” The Flea’s sniper sat reclining against the doorframe, flatbow cradled in the crook of his arm. He might have been the Flea’s opposite—tall, olive-skinned, clean somehow despite the rigors of the mission, and almost preposterously handsome. He smiled apologetically, teeth white in the lamplight. “Annick and Valyn are the only ones actually holding weapons—for which I commend them—and even Valyn is missing one of his blades.”

  “Who else is here?” Valyn asked, ignoring the sniper, trying to see the whole picture, to formulate some kind of plan. “What other Wings?”

  “There’s a few looking,” the Flea acknowledged, “but this is a big range of mountains. Guess we’re the only ones that found you.”

  So it was five against five if it came to a fight. The sudden brightness of the lanterns dazzled, and Valyn squinted, trying to make sense of the room. No sign of Chi Hoai Mi, the Flea’s flier. So five on four, maybe, giving Valyn’s Wing the numbers, not that the numbers were worth a steaming pile of shit, not when you were pinned down and exposed. Not when you were fighting other Kettral.

  Slow down, Valyn reminded himself. No one’s fighting yet.

  The Flea sucked something out of his teeth and nodded toward Annick again. “So. About putting down that bow . . .”

  “You understand,” Valyn said, studying the other Wing leader for any hint of his intentions, “that it’s a risk. You’ve got the drop on us as it is. If you’re lying . . .” He shook his head. “You’re asking me to take an awful chance. To put my Wing in danger.”