The Dead Heart was unlike any fortress Kaden had ever encountered: no curtain walls or gates, no crenellations or arrow loops. The twisting passages and low ceilings, the utter lack of windows, suggested that the whole thing was underground, hacked out of the stone itself, lit by smoky lanterns and smokier torches, the air cold and damp, freighted with salt and sea. At junctures in the passageway, Kaden could sometimes make out the dull susurrus and slosh of the waves. When that faded, there was nothing but the scrape of boots, the irregular drip of water into cold pools, and everywhere the sensation of weight, of thousands of tons of rock pressing down from above, silent and invisible.
Only when they finally reached a narrow hall filled with long tables and reeking of salt and stale smoke did Trant finally stop, gesturing Kaden to a bench while he filled two battered trenchers with steaming white fish, then seated himself across the table. For a while Kaden thought the man intended to eat in silence, sucking soft flesh from the bones, prodding at his meal with filthy fingers as though it displeased him.
If Trant had a family name, it had not surfaced. Like the rest of the Ishien, he wore a heavy sealskin cloak over oiled leather over wool, and like the rest of the Ishien, a short blade hung at his hip. Matted, tangled hair hung halfway to his shoulders, and he had a habit of sweeping it from his eyes when he spoke. If he had bathed in the past week, the water had had little effect on the grime caked beneath his fingernails and into the wrinkles of his knuckles and wrists.
Back at Ashk’lan, Kaden would have been whipped for such slovenliness. Another reminder, if one were needed, that the Ishien were not the Shin. Where the monks were cold as winter granite, solid as a hard frost, these soldiers, Trant very much included, struck him as less . . . hale. Not that they were weak or enfeebled, but the reek of smoke and sea on their clothing, the hooded shadow in each gaze, the feral intensity to all speech and movement struck him as wrong, somehow. Unnatural.
Finally Trant looked up, found Kaden’s gaze upon him, and frowned.
“It’s an island,” he said, gesturing vaguely around by way of illustration. “The whole thing.”
Kaden blinked. “An island? Where?”
“No,” Trant replied, eyes sly above a mirthless smile. “No, no, no. Secrecy is survival. Do you know Kangeswarin? Of course you don’t. That’s something he said. Wrote. Secrecy is survival.” He intoned the words as though they were scripture. “The Order hasn’t kept its freedom this long just to come under the thumb of some upstart emperor now.”
“I have no interest in bringing you ‘under my thumb,’ ” Kaden responded, careful to keep his voice level. He had hoped for deference and prepared for defiance. Trant’s casual dismissal, however, the apparent indifference of everyone in the Heart, was not a response he had reckoned on. His whole purpose in visiting the Ishien was to learn what they knew, perhaps to forge an alliance, and here he was defending himself to a filthy, low-ranking soldier in the mess hall. “I am hardly an upstart,” he continued. “My father was Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian. I trained with the Shin, as have all those of my line. I have the eyes.”
Trant narrowed his own eyes, sucked at a morsel of fish stuck between crooked teeth. “The eyes,” he mused, as though he had not considered that. “You do. That’s true. You do have some eyes. Long time ago there were men could tell the Enemy by the eyes.”
“The Enemy?”
“Childkillers. Builders. Graveless. Call them what you want. The fucking Csestriim. Long time ago, there were some could tell the Csestriim by the eyes.”
Trant stared at a blank space of wall, as though expecting the Csestriim to materialize from it. Like a goat in the early stages of brainworm, his eyes twitched erratically. He seemed unable to still his hands. Kaden shifted uneasily in his seat.
“The Csestriim didn’t have burning eyes—” he began, but Trant cut him off, waving a hand.
“Yes, yes. I know. The Malkeenians. Intarra. The Emperor. I know.” He squinted. “Or it could be a trick. A kenning.”
“A trick?” Kaden asked, trying to find his balance in the conversation. “I’m not a leach. And why would I play a trick?”
Trant raised his eyebrows in surprise. “A thousand reasons. Ten thousand. Man might fake the burning eyes to milk coin out of fools. To seduce a noble lady. To seduce just about any silly-minded slut, at that. To stir up war. To avoid war. Just to lie. To lie. For the unbridled joy of deceit.” He paused, shaking his head, then bulled ahead. “A man might lie about his eyes,” he continued, voice rising, “to unseat an entire dynasty. To drive an empire to wreck and ruin.”
Kaden shook his head. “It is my empire. I have no desire to see it ruined. That is why I am here.”
“So you say,” Trant muttered, turning back to his fish. “So you say.”
“Are you so distrustful of everyone?”
Trant leaned back in his chair abruptly, dark eyes glittering in the lantern light. He seemed unable to hold a position for more than a few heartbeats. “More. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt because you came in with Tan.” He paused, waggled a finger across the table. “But you also brought the Childkilling whore.”
Kaden leaned back, caught off guard by the sudden hatred in the man’s voice, the sheer red boiling fury of it.
“Triste hasn’t killed any children,” Kaden replied, shaking his head.
“That you know of. That you know of. Tan said she was Csestriim.”
Kaden started to argue the point, then checked himself, remembering Tan’s tale of the Ghannans and their ships filled with orphans. Trant didn’t seem the type to be convinced through rational argument, and Kaden was no longer quite sure that the rational argument was on his side anyway. “Are you going to hurt her?” he asked instead.
“Me?” Trant asked, raising his eyebrows and poking himself in the chest as though to be sure of the question. “Am I going to hurt her? Oh no. No, no, no. I don’t hurt the prisoners. I’m not allowed to hurt the prisoners. That’s for the Hunters.”
“The Hunters?” Kaden asked, worry prickling the back of his neck.
Trant rapped a fist against the side of his head. “Trouble hearing? The Hunters, I said. The ones in charge. When there’s hurting to do, they do it. Been that way since before your empire. Since before the Atmani, even.” He nodded sagely, as though pleased with the order of things.
Kaden shook his head, trying to follow the baffling account. “What are you? What’s your role?”
“I’m a Soldier,” Trant said, pounding his chest with a fist. “Soldier, seventh rank.”
“How many ranks are there?”
Trant grinned, revealing a row of brown teeth. “Seven.”
“Will you ever be promoted?” Kaden asked. “To Hunter?”
The Ishien stared at him as though he’d gone mad. “It’s not a rank,” he said, shaking his head. “Hunter’s not a fucking rank.”
“What is it?” Kaden asked, taken aback.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” Trant said, leaning far over the table, eyes wide. He waved Kaden closer with his knife, close enough that Kaden could smell the reek of his rotting teeth. “It’s a blessing, is what it is. A blessing.”
Kaden hesitated. All the talk of Hunters and Soldiers seemed to be making Trant more and more agitated. He rocked front and back, as though seated atop a lame horse, and watched Kaden with febrile intensity. Suddenly, the wisest course seemed to be finishing the meal in silence, saying and doing as little as possible to disturb Trant further. But then, if Kaden was going to forge any kind of trust with the Ishien, if he was going to convince them to work with him, to share what they knew, he needed to understand them, and at the moment, the only person who could explain the workings of the Dead Heart was Trant.
“What makes the Hunters Hunters?” Kaden asked finally, carefully. “How do you decide?”
“Decide?” Trant laughed bleakly, scratching suddenly at a vicious scar on his forearm. “We don’t decide any more than you decided to have t
hose eyes. Some men have it inside them. It. The blessing. Some don’t. Just . . . don’t.” He paused, eyes darting off toward the roof, as though reliving something. “Learned that clearly enough in the purging.” He seemed, abruptly, to be talking about himself.
“The purging?”
Trant sucked in a great breath, then bared his teeth. “The purging. The passage, we call it, sometimes. Sometimes just the pain.” He shivered, his whole body trembling. “The ’Kent-kissing pain. It’s how they sort the Hunters from the Soldiers, how they see who has the gift.”
“What is it? The purging or passage?”
“What? What? It’s what it fucking sounds like, is what. Pain on top of pain piled on pain. Weeks of cutting and burning,” he continued, almost shouting as he pulled open his jerkin. A web of scars stretched across his chest, old, brutal wounds that had healed poorly. Kaden jerked back, but Trant was too absorbed in his account to notice. “Cutting,” he said again, drawing the word out as though tasting it, “and burning, and breaking. The fucking breaking. Drowning. And cold. Again and again, over and over until you shatter,” he said, stabbing at his own skull with a finger. “Until you break up here.” He shivered himself still, then turned his eyes on Kaden. “The pain,” he said again, more quietly, as though that explained anything.
Kaden stared for a moment, corralling the horror stampeding through his chest, taming it. “Why?” he asked finally.
Trant shrugged, abruptly and utterly indifferent to the torture he had just relived so vividly. “Sometimes what breaks off,” he said, “is the feelings.” He snapped a bone off the fish carcass, sucked at it. “You know—love, fear, fucking hope. Sometimes the pain chips them right off. At least, it does for the ones with the gift. The ones who can use the gates. Those are the ones in charge, the Hunters.”
For a while Kaden just watched the man eat. When Tan warned him, when he explained that the Ishien were nothing like the Shin, Kaden had thought he was talking about differences in culture and outlook, changes in the methods and modes of training. Even after arriving in the Dead Heart, after seeing Loral Hellelen and the others, after having a loaded crossbow pointed at his chest, the gap had seemed wide, but bridgeable. Now . . .
Kaden tried to make sense of what Trant had just described. Clearly the Ishien had their own way of achieving the vaniate—if it even was the vaniate—a way that had nothing to do with meditation and discipline, silence and persistence. It sounded as though they were tortured, all of them, brutally tortured, and those few who went numb as a result became the leaders, while the rest . . . Kaden watched Trant suck broth from his wooden bowl. The man hummed a tuneless song, the same few notes over and over.
Then another thought struck Kaden like a blow across the face.
“And Tan . . .” he said.
Trant looked up from his bowl, nodding eagerly as broth dripped off his unshaven chin.
“Um-hmm,” he said. “Yes. Yes. Rampuri Tan was a Hunter. Almost as tough as Bloody Horm, least in some ways. A Hunter.”
Kaden exhaled slowly, measuring his pulse. “Will you talk to them for me?” he asked. There didn’t seem to be more than a few score men in the entire fortress. Kaden had heard enough to understand that Trant didn’t make the decisions, but he would have access to the people who did. “Your commander needs to know that Triste helped me to escape. She deserves some decency.”
“Oh. Decency. Oh. The Emperor wants to talk about decency.” Trant dropped his voice and his eyes both, muttering to himself, but no sooner did Kaden lean in than he started upright, slashing a rigid hand through the air between them. “Do you know . . . Do you know what the Enemy did to us?”
For a moment he just snarled wordlessly, lost in his rage. “You hear about the Atmani all the time—Roshin, Dirik, Rishinira, the other three. . . . Everyone tells stories about the fucking leach-lords, about how they killed people and shattered the fucking world, but let me tell you this . . . the Atmani were nothing next to the Csestriim. They were leaches, sure. Somehow they were immortal, at least till someone put a knife in them. But at least they were human. Everyone talks about the Atmani and no one’s warning anyone about the Csestriim. It’s like everyone just forgot.
“With the Csestriim it wasn’t just killing, it was slaughter. You know, murder. Kids. Thousands of kids.”
He leaned across the table, eyes bulging from their sockets. “They. Tried. To. End. Us.
“So when you talk to me about decency, you know, about treating that bitch you brought with decency, what I say is fuck decency.”
“Triste might not be Csestriim,” Kaden said, trying to keep his compass in the maelstrom of emotion. “She has feelings. Fears and hopes.”
“No,” Trant said, body suddenly still, voice quiet. “That’s what she wants you to think. They know how all this works.” Grinding a finger into his temple. “They know how to use it against us. You understand? You understand what I’m telling you?”
Kaden started to protest, then stopped himself. Worry about Triste nagged at him like a cracked rib, but for the moment there was nothing he could do. He didn’t know where she was, didn’t even really know where he was, and, though the Dead Heart appeared surprisingly empty, there were still enough men with bows and blades to keep him neatly penned wherever they wished.
Learn first, he told himself, then act.
“Scial Nin told me about the Ishien,” he said, trying to change the subject. “You were the first monks, the predecessors of the Shin.”
Trant snorted. “Not monks.” He frowned, turning back to his fish. “Not ever monks.”
“Then what?”
“Prisoners. Slaves. Beasts to be prodded, and poisoned, and gutted.” He punctuated each word by stabbing the fish with his knife. Abruptly, he pulled the blade from the bones and waved it around him. “This place, this fucking place, was our pen.”
Once more Kaden considered the heavy stone walls. “The Csestriim built this.”
Trant nodded. “Builders. Oh, the bastards were builders, all right.”
Kaden frowned. “Why? I thought they just wanted to destroy us. Why build prisons?”
“Ever see a cat?” Trant asked, then snapped his teeth at Kaden, clawed at the air. “They don’t just kill, no. Nope. Cats—they tease, they toy, they taunt. Same thing with the Enemy . . . they wanted to see what we’d do. It’s all here,” he insisted, waving his hand toward the walls. “All here. Scrolls, codices, all of it. They filleted some of us like fish, cut the eyelids off others. What’s wrong with us—that’s what they wanted to know. What’s wrong?” His lips twisted into a grimace. “It’s all here,” he muttered. “Bastards wrote it all down. It’s all here.”
Trant was staring at him wolfishly, and after a moment Kaden turned away to look at the chamber once more. The weight of the place had grown more oppressive, as though too much blood had soaked into the stone, as though history had its own stench that no amount of salt water could ever fully expunge. The Dead Heart wasn’t a fortress at all, it wasn’t even a prison; it was a grave, and the Ishien who stalked the halls were like the ghosts of men, still fighting a war they refused to let die. This was the place to which Kaden had insisted they come, the place to which he had unwittingly brought Triste. This charnel pit was Tan’s home. The chill of the air settled deeper into Kaden’s flesh, pricking at his clammy skin. He wasn’t a prisoner, not exactly, but it wasn’t at all clear that he could leave.
13
Night saved them, night and the heavy clouds that obscured their flight as they clutched the bird’s talons, rising free of the shattered city, then from the canyon itself, rising, rising, with what felt like agonizing slowness, until they were clear of the highest peaks, buried in darkness and cloud. Valyn had no idea whether Suant’ra had killed the Flea’s bird, no idea if Chi Hoai Mi was alive, or if the Flea himself was following. That fear kept him awake through the first part of the escape. The fear and the pain.
As the night wore on, however, as ’Ra
winged unevenly westward through the achingly cold night, it was all he could do to stay conscious in his harness, to brace himself against the buffeting gusts of the bird’s massive wings, to keep his numb fingers wrapped around the strap overhead. He couldn’t draw a bow, not with the quarrel buried in his shoulder, could barely even hold himself upright, and yet he was faring better than both Gwenna and Talal.
Gwenna slumped unconscious in her harness, having succumbed to her vicious head wound as soon as they were in the air. Annick had lashed her to ’Ra’s talon with a length of rope, which kept her from spinning free in the wind, but the slackness of her jaw and the way her eyes rolled back in her head had Valyn worried.
Talal was faring a bit better. An arrow had punched into his leg during the chaos of the grab, and though he was managing to stand on the far talon, Valyn could tell from the angle of the shaft that the steel head was buried close to the bone. Getting it out would prove both dangerous and time-consuming, and, in a best case, the wound would slow the leach.
Most worrisome of all, at least at the moment, was the fact that ’Ra herself was struggling, the normally effortless beating of her wings irregular and labored, her great body listing to port. Valyn had read about fights between wild kettral, but, aside from a few harmless skirmishes between hatchlings, he’d never witnessed one. How ’Ra could fly at all after trading blows with the Flea’s bird Valyn had no idea, but fly she did, albeit weakly. He couldn’t even guess where Sami Yurl’s bird had ended up in the chaos.
We’re alive, Valyn reminded himself. We got out.
At least, he hoped they had. There had been no sign of the Flea’s Wing since Assare. It was possible, more than possible, that Chi Hoai was dead, her kettral was crippled, and the rest of the Wing was stranded. On the other hand, the two birds hadn’t been out of sight for that long, not long enough to be certain of anything, and trusting to someone else’s failure made for shit strategy. And so, for hour after hour he stared east, vision blurred by his wind-whipped tears, searching in the stacked columns of cloud for some sign of pursuit. His eyes ached, but at least the effort took his mind off his own pain. Nerve-fraying as it was, staring into the empty darkness was better than looking at Gwenna’s limp form.
Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire: Page 19