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

by Brian Staveley

  He looked up, scanning the windows above. Smoke poured out of them in great, gray billows. That, at least, would give them a little cover as they fled across the ledge. It was impossible to say just where the Flea’s Wing was, whether or not Gwenna’s starshatters had killed anyone, but once Valyn’s Wing ventured farther out onto that ledge they would be ducks for anyone with a bow and a clear shot.

  “Where’s ’Ra?” Laith hissed at Valyn.

  “It’s a whistle, not a ’Kent-kissing leash,” Valyn snapped, scanning the darkness for some sign of the bird. “And I’m not calling ’Ra.”

  The flier stared. “Are you insane? How do you expect to get out of here?”

  Valyn ignored the question.

  “There,” he said after a moment. The bird was little more than a silent smudge on the darkness. She was coming in at a low angle—standard blind-grab posture—that would put her right over the center of the ledge.

  “I’m waiting for the next instruction,” Pyrre said.

  Talal stared at her, evidently realizing the problem for the first time.

  “Tell me it’s just like mounting a horse,” the assassin went on, then frowned, “although I was never much good with horses.”

  “There’ll be two straps,” Valyn said, heart hammering as the bird approached. “Get a hold of the lower of the two.” He turned to the group. “We’re all underneath, which means three to a talon. Talal and Laith, you’re with Gwenna. . . .”

  “I can make the grab myself,” she growled, but her face was as pale as the stone, and it looked as though simply standing was an effort.

  “Just make sure she gets on the bird. Annick and Pyrre with me on the far talon. Remember we’re on the edge of a fucking cliff, so blowing the grab’s not an option, dropping is not an option. Get on and stay on, I don’t care if your shoulder rips out of the socket. You fall”—he waved a hand toward the darkness—“you’re gone.”

  “It’s all well and good to talk about it,” Laith said, gesturing furiously, “but we’ve got to move if we’re going to make it.”

  Valyn laid a hand on his flier’s arm. “Not yet.”

  “What in Hull’s name are you waiting for?”

  Valyn stared at the bird until his eyes hurt. Had he misgauged the situation? There were so many variables, so many things that could go wrong. If he’d made the wrong assumption about one of them, then the rest . . .

  Then the second bird appeared, above and behind the first.

  “Oh,” Laith said, staring.

  “Tell me it’s Chi Hoai,” Valyn said, voice tight. The flier could recognize the various kettral far better than Valyn ever would. “Tell me that second one is the Flea’s bird.”

  “It is.” Laith sucked a worried breath between his teeth. “She’s going to tear Yurl’s bird out of the air.”

  Valyn blew the second whistle just as Chi Hoai struck. She had the height and the angle both, and her own kettral seized Yurl’s by the back of the neck. The lower bird shrieked as claws sank into her neck and shoulders, as the hooked beak plunged again and again, savaging her eyes. A kettral could slice through a horse with those talons. Valyn had watched them hunt back on the Islands, watched them snap the heads off of sheep and carry off whole cows in their claws. Yurl’s bird twisted in midair, screaming as she tried to fight, but the fight was over, or as good as. Chi Hoai was already pulling her own mount back.

  Then Suant’ra hit.

  She smashed down from above like a ton of falling rock, silhouette blocking the stars, stabbing at the other kettral with her beak, raking the wings with her talons. Chi Hoai’s bird shrieked, her own prey forgotten, and rolled in the air, trying to come to grips with her assailant. The two tumbled from view, tearing furiously at each other. For a moment Valyn could only stare. The whole thing had worked as he’d planned—the bait, the attack, the counter—until ’Ra disappeared. If all the birds were gone, they were stranded. The Flea’s kettral might be dead, but the Flea himself was very much alive.

  “Into the tunnels,” Valyn shouted, pointing with his blade. It wasn’t what he’d hoped, but hoping too hard was a good way to get dead. Once inside the actual cliff, they could disappear. They could figure out later how in ’Shael’s sweet name they were going to get out of the mountains without ’Ra. If they lived that long.

  Laith, however, was shaking his head. “No!” he shouted. “We have to wait for the grab!”

  “ ’Ra’s gone!” Valyn said, taking him by the blacks and shoving him toward the cliff.

  The flier shoved back. “She’s not gone. She had the speed and the elevation. She’s just tangled up! We have to wait for the extract!”

  A flatbow bolt struck just at Valyn’s feet, raising a line of sparks as it skittered away across the ledge.

  “They have the range,” Pyrre observed, shifting to put Valyn between herself and the orphanage.

  “I know my bird, Val,” Laith said, lips drawn back in a snarl. “I know her. You gave her every chance and she will win. We just need to hold for a few more heartbeats.”

  “There’s no cover,” Talal said. “We can’t hold here.”

  “The tunnels,” Valyn said, grabbing Gwenna under the arm. “Now.”

  As he said the last word, however, a great winged shape rose up over the ledge, screamed once at the stars, and came to rest on the very lip.

  “That’s ’Ra!” Laith yelled, surging forward.

  Even in the moonlight, Valyn couldn’t be sure, but Laith was already running. As Hendran wrote: Sometimes the good leader has to quit leading and trust his men.

  Valyn swallowed a curse, hauled Gwenna around, almost passed out as the bolt in his shoulder grated against the bone, and then, with a brief prayer that everyone else was doing the same thing, ran as hard as he fucking could.

  12

  Cold like a fist to the heart. Sudden, frigid darkness pressing against his chest, on his face, in his unseeing eyes. The vaniate shivered a moment, then sloughed away like a violently molted skin, and when Kaden opened his mouth to shout, icy brine forced its way down his throat, into his lungs, strangling him. Underwater, he realized. Too late to call back his squandered breath.

  He started to grope for the gate, to try to haul himself back through into the light and the air, then realized that to enter the kenta in such a state of agitation invited an annihilation even swifter than that offered by the sea. He forced his body to stillness, willing his mind to follow. Dim lights flickered around the edges of his vision, but whether they were real or the product of a mind starved for air he couldn’t be certain. His body convulsed while his lungs tried to heave a breath where there was no breath to be had. Panic prowled the edge of thought, hungry, circling closer as the cold clamped down.

  Breathe, he told himself, and then follow the breath. He raised a hand to his mouth, feeling for the bubbles as they trickled through his fingers, forcing himself to wait a moment to be sure. Then, with legs like lead, he kicked for the surface.

  He broke from the relative silence of the water into chaos. Someone was thrashing a few feet away, and men were bellowing—two or three voices piled on one another: Stop . . . Kill them now . . . Put the bow down. The air was almost as frigid as the water and only slightly brighter. A few torches gave off more smoke than light, illuminating what seemed to be a stone chamber, a small grotto carved out by the sea. Kaden twisted in the water, mind desperately sifting the various shadows, searching for the source of the voices, for a place to haul himself to safety. A quick, hard blow caught him on the lip, driving his face back under the surface. He came up, the lights spinning across his eyes, mouth filled with blood and brine. Triste was still tied, he realized, tied and drowning.

  He caught her beneath the arms.

  “Still,” he gasped, trying to hold her up. “Be still.”

  A moment later Rampuri Tan’s shaven head breached the water and with it, his voice:

  “Memory,” he ground out, as though intoning the opening passage to
some lost ritual, “is the heart of vengeance.”

  Triste finally stopped her flailing elbows, and Kaden took a moment to seize a full breath. The passage through the kenta had practically drowned him, but the older monk spoke with his normal implacable force.

  The other voices fell silent. Someone cursed. Then:

  “And vengeance is the balm of memory.”

  “I am Rampuri Tan.”

  “I am Loral Hellelen.”

  “Keep your bows on the girl,” Tan said, hoisting himself from the water onto a small stone shelf, ignoring the sodden weight of his robe as he stood. “She is more than dangerous.”

  “And the other?”

  Kaden still couldn’t see the speaker, but he stroked weakly toward the rim where Tan had emerged, dragging Triste behind him.

  “He is with me,” Tan replied. He had not relinquished his naczal when he stepped through the kenta, and the blade glinted in the dusky light. “Watch the girl.”

  By the time Kaden reached the low shelf, his muscles had gone rigid with cold. It was all he could do to hold on to the stone with one hand while keeping Triste’s head above the water. He could feel her trembling beside him, shivering uncontrollably. Wet hair plastered her skin, and her lips had gone a blue so dark they looked black in the smoky light.

  “Kaden,” she whispered between chattering teeth.

  Before he could respond, two men lunged from the shadows, seized her by the elbows, and lifted her, shaking, from the water.

  “Careful,” he said. “She is tied. You could hurt her.”

  The guards ignored Kaden, dragging Triste roughly onto the stone shelf while he hauled himself, sodden and shivering, into the cold air.

  Only after he had coughed the last salt water from his lungs, then straightened, could he finally take in his surroundings. When he first passed through the gate he thought himself submerged in the ocean somewhere, but now he could see that they had surfaced inside a large chamber, perhaps fifteen paces across, walls and ceiling cut from the same undressed stone. In the center, the black waters of a pool glistened in the torchlight. The place reminded him faintly of Umber’s, back in the Bone Mountains, but where Umber’s Pool was open to the wide arc of the sky, this room was dark and cold, cut off from everything by the cave’s roof.

  The Ishien, too, were nothing like the monks he remembered. Despite Tan’s warning, Kaden had expected them to look vaguely familiar. Instead of robes, however, the three men in the chamber, two of whom pinned Triste roughly against a wall, wore greasy leather jerkins and sealskin. None had shaved their heads, and though only one had a proper beard, a week’s worth of stubble obscured the jawlines of the others. Most striking, the Ishien were clearly warriors; each wore a short sword at the hip and carried a loaded crossbow. The speaker had leveled one of those crossbows directly at Tan.

  “Rampuri,” he said, the word ringing like a curse.

  “Point your weapon at the girl, Hellelen,” Tan responded.

  “I will point my weapon where I please.”

  Kaden stilled his shivering and tried to read the scene. Loral Hellelen looked to be around Tan’s age, a tall, wiry Edishman with a rough blond braid running halfway down his back. He might have been handsome once, but a cadaverous hollowness had gouged away his cheeks and sunk his eyes in pits so dark they looked bruised. Kaden watched those eyes carefully. They glittered in the torchlight, bright, almost feverish. Hellelen’s finger stroked the trigger to the crossbow.

  “It was a foolish gamble, stepping through that gate after twenty years.”

  Kaden glanced over at Tan. No one at Ashk’lan had ever called Rampuri Tan a fool, but if the older monk was nonplussed, it didn’t show.

  “Only a gamble if the old ways have slipped.”

  “Don’t speak to me of slipping,” the blond man shot back. “It was you who left your post.”

  “And I have returned.” Tan gestured toward Triste with his naczal. “Perhaps with one of the Csestriim. She passed through the gates. Untrained. Unprepared.”

  Confusion registered in Hellelen’s eyes, then shock. After a moment’s hesitation, he shifted his crossbow from Tan, pointing it instead at the young woman pinned against the wall. “She is too young to be Csestriim.”

  Tan shook his head. “She is a woman grown, though the clothes obscure the fact.”

  “And she passed the kenta.”

  Tan nodded.

  “We don’t know what it means,” Kaden added quietly, careful to keep his voice level, reasonable. “She might be Csestriim, or she might be . . . something else.”

  Hellelen glanced in his direction, narrowed his eyes at the sight of Kaden’s own blazing irises, then snorted. “Ah. The princeling.”

  “He is the Emperor now,” Tan observed.

  “Not here, he’s not,” Hellelen spat. “This isn’t your palace,” he said, “and we’re not your monks. If I have a question for you, I will ask it. If I do not ask, keep your imperial mouth shut or, however short your sojourn in the Dead Heart might be, you will spend it inside a cell.”

  Kaden glanced over at Triste where she stood trembling against the cold stone wall, arms trussed behind her, crossbow bolts leveled at her heart and head.

  “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Triste has helped me, has helped us, at every step. We’d be dead without her. Even if she is Csestriim, I want her to be treated well.”

  Hellelen sucked air between his teeth. “You think you know the Csestriim?” he demanded, voice like a file running over steel.

  Kaden shook his head.

  “You think you understand how they think? You want to walk in here and start lecturing us, lecturing me on what does and does not make sense?” He took a step toward Kaden, sudden fury scribbled across his eyes, the crossbow swinging around to point at Kaden’s heart. “I will show you—”

  The words cut off as Tan slid the haft of his spear between them, blocking the Ishien’s approach.

  “Hellelen,” he said quietly, “you would do better to focus on this creature,” indicating Triste, “rather than lecturing the Emperor of Annur. If she is Csestriim, she is involved in a plot to destroy the Malkeenian line.”

  “The Malkeenian line,” Hellelen snorted, “long ago abandoned its post.” He stared at Kaden. “Do you even know what those gates are for?”

  “I do,” Kaden replied. “They are a tool. One that can be used to hold together an empire and to fight the Csestriim both.”

  “Let me guess which one you’re more concerned with.” Hellelen shook his head in disgust. “I heard how someone gutted your father. What happened? The same men come after you?”

  “It may be more than men,” Kaden replied. “As you say, we face the same foe.”

  He glanced over to where Triste shivered against the wall. Guilt stabbed at him, sharp and jagged as a stone caught in a sandal. He set the pain aside. It was already clear the Ishien cared nothing for pain, Triste’s or his own.

  “The girl is at the center of it,” Tan said. “At the center of your fight, and Kaden’s. You may find you have more in common with the Emperor than you think.”

  Hellelen watched her awhile, then spat onto the stone. “I knew the Shin were weak, but you, Rampuri? I didn’t realize you were so eager to scrape before a throne.”

  Tan ignored the gibe, and after a few heartbeats Hellelen turned back to Triste, staring at her awhile, then blowing out a long, slow breath between his teeth. “A female, is it?” He prodded her cheek with the tip of the crossbow bolt. “We could learn much from a female.” His voice had gone tight with something that sounded like anger or hunger. “You’re certain she is Csestriim?”

  “You listen poorly,” Tan replied. “Nothing is certain, but the signs are there. We can discuss them in more detail once she is secure. Take her to a cell.”

  Hellelen narrowed his eyes. “You’re not in charge here, monk.” He spat the last word. “You were never in charge.”

  Kaden recognized the disgust
in Tan’s gaze from moments in his own training. “I will tend to her myself, then, while the rest of you bicker. Stand well back. She is faster and stronger than she appears.”

  “What about your beloved sovereign?” Hellelen demanded. “He is to simply wander free through the Heart?”

  Kaden wanted to object. He never expected to command the Ishien, but as the Emperor of Annur, he shared with them a common task: the guarding of the gates. He had hoped for civility at least, for mutual respect. He had hoped that he would have some say in Triste’s treatment. But, as the Shin were fond of saying, You cannot drink hope. You cannot breathe it or eat it. It can only choke you.

  Coming to the Ishien was starting to look like a mistake, and a grave one at that, but there was little he could do to correct his decision while standing unarmed and heavily guarded beside the frigid pool. Maybe Triste was Csestriim, and maybe she was not. Either way, she deserved to be treated decently, gently, until she proved herself a threat. He wanted to say that one more time, but it was pointless. He had no traction in the situation, no leverage. With an effort, he stifled his fear and anger, slid all expression from his face, then stepped back.

  Tan fixed Hellelen with a stare. “Kaden is my pupil,” he said, “not my sovereign. I would tell you to leave him free, but, like a child, you dislike being told.”

  The Ishien didn’t shut Kaden in a cell, but they didn’t trust him, either. Trant’s presence was evidence enough of that. Hellelen had ordered the other man to “escort and guide” Kaden while the rest of them, Tan included, bustled off down a different corridor, dragging Triste roughly behind.

  “Escort and guide” sounded welcoming enough, but when Kaden asked to follow the others, Trant refused. When he asked where Triste had been taken, Trant said he didn’t know. When he asked to see the commander of the fortress, Trant muttered that the commander was busy. Kaden chafed to know what was going on, to begin unraveling even a part of the tangled conspiracy that had killed his father, but Trant didn’t know the answers, and he wouldn’t let Kaden near anyone who did. There was little to do aside from follow, and so Kaden followed, misgivings mounting.