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

by Brian Staveley

  Then he raised his eyes.

  It was hard for Kaden to articulate, even to himself, what he saw there. Kiel’s eyes were certainly less striking than his own blazing irises, less arresting than Valyn’s blackened gaze. They were ordinary eyes, and yet, Kaden realized as the man studied him, they did not match the body. That body had been rent and battered by years of unrelenting questioning, and when the prisoner moved, it was clear that things had been torn and shattered inside. The eyes, however, were unbroken.

  Kiel glanced briefly at Matol, considered Kaden for half a heartbeat, then turned to Tan.

  “Rampuri,” he said, his voice quiet and lean, like smoke in the air after the fire has been doused. Kaden had to resist the urge to lean forward. “I have not seen you in a very long time.”

  Tan nodded, though the monk did not speak.

  “I thought you had forgotten me down in my quiet cell. I almost came to miss the company afforded by torture.”

  “We did not bring you up for further torture,” Tan said.

  Kiel pursed his lips. “Is it time, finally, to die?”

  “It’s time,” Matol cut in, shards of impatience edging his voice, “to do what you’re told.”

  The prisoner glanced down at his bound hands, over his shoulder at the armed guard standing behind him.

  “It would seem you’ve given me very little choice. Perhaps you could tell me how long I’ve been in my cell?”

  “Not long enough,” Matol replied. “But you’ll have plenty more time to stare at the darkness once we’ve finished here.”

  Kiel considered his interlocutor for a long moment, seemed about to say something more, then turned his attention unexpectedly to Kaden.

  “Rampuri and Ekhard I know, but you and I have not met, though I knew your father well. . . .”

  Matol’s fist took Kiel in the gut before he could finish speaking, doubling him over.

  “Keep your mouth shut and your lies to yourself, or I’ll see you spend the next twenty years in a box instead of a cell.”

  After a long fit of coughing, the prisoner straightened slowly, then caught Kaden’s eye for the barest fraction of a heartbeat.

  I knew your father well.

  Kaden struggled to make sense of the claim. It seemed unlikely, beyond unlikely, but then, what did Kaden really know about his father? Growing up, he had admired Sanlitun with a child’s mindless admiration, worshipped him absolutely but ignorantly. Only after he was sent away, years after, did he begin to realize how slenderly he had known the man, how little he understood what drove him, what he wanted or feared.

  Kaden had taken strength, through the most dire of his monastic trials, in thinking that his suffering at the hands of the Shin was the same suffering his father had experienced decades before, that the running and digging, carrying and fasting, were actually bringing him closer to Sanlitun, despite the gulf of miles between them, that one day, when Kaden returned to Annur, they would sit down together, one man with another, not just to learn the necessary apparatus of government, but to really talk for the first time.

  That possibility had shattered like old crockery when Adiv’s treacherous delegation arrived in Ashk’lan. There would be no reunion. No discussion. No meeting as men. Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian remained remote as the graven statue of him that looked down sternly on the Godsway. Kaden had no idea if his father had preferred water or wine, let alone whether or not he would have conferred with the Csestriim. He considered the prisoner once more, the begrimed face, the unwavering eyes. Would Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian have broken bread with such a creature? There was just no way to know.

  “May I ask,” Kiel said quietly, when he’d straightened up, “why I am here?” He gestured to the doors leading into the torture cells. “Are you certain it’s not for more pain?”

  “There is another prisoner,” Tan replied. “One we want you to see.”

  A look that might have been curiosity crossed Kiel’s haggard face. “One of my kind? Who?”

  “That,” Tan said, “is what you are here to tell us.”

  It was almost possible, in the dim light of the low-ceilinged cell, to believe that Triste was just resting, that the heavy wooden chair to which she’d been chained was just another chair, that the lanterns had been turned low to accommodate an easier sleep. As Kaden’s eyes adjusted, however, he could make out the steel manacles binding her wrists and ankles, the streaks of tears on her grimy face, thin lacerations running the length of her arms. Clearly she had been flogged or whipped.

  “Couldn’t you give her a cloak?” he asked.

  Matol snorted. “Are all you Shin so tenderhearted?” Then, as though to a small child, “This is how torture works. You start on the mind well before you begin with the body.”

  Kaden couldn’t pull his eyes from that body, from the angry strips of red where the flesh had broken. Horror welled up inside him. The Shin had taught him to deal with emotion, but never in the face of such savagery. When he finally managed to look away from the wounds, he found that Triste had opened her own eyes, that she was staring at him silently in the flickering light.

  “Kaden,” she said quietly. His name in her mouth sounded like a plea and an accusation both, and he realized that she had been watching him stare.

  He opened his mouth to respond, but no response came. He had no comfort to offer, no promise of reprieve. He still wasn’t entirely sure why he had been summoned. “I’m here,” he said finally, the words weak on his tongue. “I’m here.”

  “How touching,” Matol observed. “He’s here, which means we can get started again. But first . . .” He motioned curtly, and the two guards holding Kiel shoved him forward as Matol himself reached out, seized Triste by the hair, and twisted her head viciously around.

  “Look,” he demanded, shaking her roughly by the hair. “Look.”

  Silent convulsions racked her body. Kaden still wasn’t sure what the older men hoped to achieve. It seemed to him that even if Triste and Kiel were both Csestriim, even if they did know each other, they would have the good sense to conceal the fact. On the other hand, the shock of recognition after what might be thousands of years was something you would notice, at least in a human. Did the Csestriim feel surprise? It was too late to ask Tan now. He considered Kiel’s face, carving the moving image for later scrutiny.

  The Csestriim, for his part, showed nothing more than a bland curiosity, raising an eyebrow.

  “A beautiful young woman,” he observed quietly.

  “Are you with them?” Triste asked, hope and fear tangled in her voice. “What do you want?”

  “No,” Kiel replied, “I am not with them. And I imagine you and I want similar things: freedom, light.”

  “Help me,” Triste begged.

  “I wish I could,” he said, raising his tied hands, “but as you see, I am powerless to help myself.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “This is what they do,” he replied. “But you can take solace in this: Ananshael is stronger than Meshkent; in the end, death will release you from the pain.”

  Triste’s voice, so lost and baffled just a heartbeat before, went suddenly hard as steel. “Do not presume to lecture me on the ministrations of Meshkent.” She set the words before her like knives, sharp and precise.

  Kiel’s eyes widened. He tilted his head to one side, evidently interested for the first time in his fellow prisoner. Triste stared defiantly back at him, turned her gaze to Matol, then back to Kiel. She had barely moved, but everything had changed. The terrified girl of moments before had molted away like a dead skin.

  “Tell me,” Kiel said quietly. “Tell me about your pain.”

  Triste repeated the word slowly. “Pain.” She might have been savoring a bloody cut of meat.

  “Yes,” Kiel said again. “When did you first encounter pain?”

  Triste laughed, a full-throated, opulent, predatory laugh that made something deep inside Kaden quail. The sound went on and on, filling the tiny ro
om, pressing back against the walls, battering at the stone itself until, abruptly, it was not laughing, but sobbing once again.

  “Please let me go,” she whispered, voice ragged. “Please just let me go.”

  Matol glanced at Tan. “Anything?”

  Tan paused, then shook his head. “Only more of what we have already seen.”

  “What about you?” the Ishien commander asked, turning to Kaden. “What do you make of that luscious burst of defiance?”

  Kaden took a deep breath, looked inward at the saama’an of the preceding moments, trying to make sense of what he had just witnessed. That shift in Triste’s tone, the sudden strangeness in her eyes, the careening between poise and panic . . . He’d seen something like it back in Ashk’lan, in goats with brain rot. A creature in the advanced stages would stand placidly for hours, empty, angular pupils fixed on the horizon, unresponsive to gentle stroke or vicious strike, to food or speech. Then, with no provocation at all, with no warning, that strange, animal gaze would focus abruptly and the goat would attack anything that moved, charging, thrashing with its hooves, hooking the horns over and over. The diseased creatures had always discomfited Kaden, something about their lack of consistency, of continuity. He had felt the same queasiness in his stomach during Triste’s transformation, but he couldn’t say that to Matol, not if he ever hoped to convince the man to set Triste free.

  “I think she’s exhausted,” he said finally, keeping his voice level, matter-of-fact. “I think she’s terrified. You want to see a Csestriim, and so that’s what you find. All I see is a frightened young woman who has done nothing to deserve this. I see you breaking a friend of mine.”

  It was several leagues wide of the truth, but the Ishien commander didn’t seem to notice. He just spat onto the stone floor.

  “What in ’Shael’s name have the Shin been teaching you?”

  “To observe,” Kaden replied.

  “Obviously not.”

  He turned abruptly from Kaden, gestured to the guards to pull Kiel back into the shadows, then focused once more on Triste.

  “Too bad for you,” he said, addressing the woman. “I thought we’d try something new, but it looks like we’re back to doing things the old-fashioned way.”

  He waved a hand, and another guard, one who had been standing in the shadows, stepped forward. Smirking, he handed over a wooden box. It clanked ominously when Matol set it on the rough table next to the slab. He flipped the lid, and paused for a moment, looking from Triste to the tools and back again.

  “Do you have any requests?” he asked, arching an eyebrow. “I’ll tell you what—you can pick the body part, and I’ll pick the tool.”

  Triste shook her head weakly in protest. “No,” she pleaded. “Please, no.”

  “No?” He pursed his lips. “You want to pick the tool and I pick the body part? We can do it that way if you want, but I don’t recommend it. Better for you to pick the body part.”

  “Kaden,” Triste panted, twisting in the chair, pulling against her restraints until blood trickled, black and thick, down the flesh of her wrists.

  “Yes,” Matol agreed amiably. “That’s Kaden. Although it’ll be harder to recognize him after we go to work on your eyes.”

  Kaden turned to Tan. “You have to stop this.”

  The monk shook his head. “What Matol does is necessary. The girl is not what you think.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I think—” Kaden began, but Matol’s scream cut him off.

  “One more fucking WORD about stopping and I will chain you to the wall behind her and burn off your sad little cock just for the fucking FUN of it. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME?”

  “No,” Kaden said, forcing himself to stand straight, to meet the man’s eye. “I do not understand. I don’t understand either your obsession, which looks like blindness, or your methods, which don’t work.”

  “Kaden,” Tan cut in, voice sharp with warning. “You are not here to judge.”

  Kaden shook his head. “What am I here for?”

  “You were here,” Matol said, voice rising, neck bulging, “to tell us something fucking useful. AND YOU FAILED!”

  “I told you what I saw, but you are unable to listen.”

  Matol looked ready to seize him by the throat, to hurl him to the ground and choke the life out of him. And then, with horrifying suddenness, the snarl vanished. The tendons in his neck and hands loosened. He was smiling, a wide, toothy smile. The emotional swings were almost more frightening than the rage itself. It seemed as though something had come loose inside the man, unlatched, like a stable door blasted open by a storm, hung on a single, rusted hinge, slamming open and shut, open and shut, over and over and over.

  “You could help,” Matol suggested finally, waving a long serrated blade in Kaden’s direction. He frowned at the blade, then seemed to think better of it. “Now that I think about it, never mind. You’d probably just fuck it up. Take off a whole leg or a tit or something and have her bleed out.”

  “Observe,” Tan murmured to Kaden. “Enter the vaniate if you must.”

  Kaden tried to still his pulse enough to find the trance, but the sick twist in his gut nagged at him until he thought he would be ill. Matol hemmed and hawed for a while, fiddled with a vicious variety of blades, hooks, and small vises, before tossing everything back in the box and selecting a lamp from its hook on the wall instead.

  “Fire,” he grinned. “Sometimes I get so carried away with the tools that I forget about fire.”

  With a practiced motion he unscrewed the base from the glass shield until the naked flame, hissing and reeking of low-grade oil, licked at the air. Triste’s eyes widened. She started to moan.

  “Please,” she begged. “I’ve told you everything.”

  “You have not,” Matol replied, testing the flame with his finger, then wincing at the heat.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know where you learned to read Csestriim script.”

  Triste’s eyes took on a desperate, hunted look. “In the temple,” she managed. “They taught me everything, everything but the high mysteries. Every leina learns languages, sometimes more than a dozen.” She was babbling, terrified. “Men come from all over Eridroa and Vash, all over the world. . . .”

  Matol shook his head. “You told me earlier that you didn’t know where you learned it.”

  “I forgot! There was so much I learned—music, dancing, language. They taught me a little. I remember now, a few words when I was very young!”

  She twisted against her bonds as she spoke. Observe, Kaden told himself. Just observe. He threw himself into the Carved Mind, etching the strokes of the saama’an as the scene unfolded, using the discipline as a shield against what was taking place.

  “You’re claiming that the whores of Ciena taught you ‘just a few words’ of the Csestriim tongue in case . . . what? In case a creature everyone else in the world believes was destroyed thousands of years ago wanders in hankering for a fuck?” He laughed a long mirthless laugh at the absurdity of the notion. “Manderseen,” he said at last, gesturing toward the smirking guard, “hold the lamp here while I take this young lady’s hand.”

  The Ishien guard stepped forward, smirk broadening into a grin. Matol took Triste’s wrist almost gently in his larger, scarred hard, then pulled it toward the flame. The girl let out a low wail as the fire lapped at her skin, her fingers scrabbling like the legs of some tormented creature. “Please,” she moaned, body convulsing, legs thrashing, as though the movement could carry her hand from the fire. “Please!” Her voice rose and rose into a high, horrible keening.

  Observe, Kaden told himself, forcing his hands to his side. There was nothing he could do, and besides, he’d burned himself more severely on several occasions working in the kitchens back at Ashk’lan. Of course, this was only the beginning.

  Matol released her hand finally. Two of the fingers were red and blistered, the kind of burn that would only heal after a night in an ice buck
et and a week in wrappings. Triste tried to pull it to her chest, but the shackle would not permit her. Her eyes were still open, but she wasn’t focused on anything beyond the looming horror of her own pain.

  “It looks like real fright,” Kaden murmured to Tan. “She’s not faking it.”

  To his surprise, the monk actually seemed to consider his words, then shook his head. “Keep watching.”

  “How did you use the kenta?” Matol asked, passing his own hand back and forth through the flame idly, quickly enough to avoid a burn.

  “I don’t know,” she panted. “I’d never seen a kenta.” There was something strange about the way she said the word, and Kaden filed it away for further consideration. “I’d never even heard of one before a couple of days ago. I just . . . I fell and I came out the other side.”

  “You see,” Matol said, turning to the other two Ishien. “The girl is perfectly innocent. She simply fell.”

  The one named Manderseen chuckled. “Maybe we should let her go.”

  “Maybe,” Matol replied, pretending to consider the notion. Then he shook his head. “Nah. Let’s hurt her some more.”

  What happened next took place too quickly to comprehend. Kaden was focused on the scene as Matol reached for her wrist, his mind sketching the saama’an. It wasn’t until later, however, when he had a chance to fully scrutinize the vision, that he really saw what had happened. Even then it didn’t make sense.

  Triste, practically gibbering with terror a moment before, twisted as Matol reached for her. The manacle didn’t afford much freedom, but as his hand started to close, she lashed out and caught his wrist instead. The movement was precise, almost too quick to see, like a serpent darting from a bush. Matol didn’t have a chance to register surprise before she pulled, a savage tug somehow strong enough to yank the man off his balance, tumbling him half on top of her, forcing Manderseen to drop the lantern with a curse and fall backward. Triste leaned close to the Ishien commander, her lips by his ear.