The Providence of Fire (26 page)

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.

He'd managed to do his job—Kaden was clear, Valyn's own Wing was alive—and yet all he felt, aside from the wracking pain in his shoulder, was a sick slosh of guilt and anger. Guilt for the injuries to Gwenna and Talal; anger at Pyrre for starting the fight and at himself for not stopping it; and yet more guilt for Blackfeather Finn.

They might be part of the plot,
he reminded himself.
They could have been keeping us alive for questioning, for torture.
It was possible, but the possibility didn't change the fact that a man Valyn had liked and admired was dead.

An hour out, he called a short stop. He hated to do it. Landing turned them into a grounded, stationary target, but they needed Laith on top of the bird, not strapped in beneath, they needed to regain something like a fighting configuration, and Valyn wanted at least a few moments to look over Talal's wound and Gwenna's.

“I'm fine,” the leach said, grimacing as he straightened his knee. “I'm not going to die of a leg wound.”

In fact, there were plenty of ways to die of a leg wound—the Eyrie medical archives were packed with them—but Valyn wasn't going to press the point. If the leach could stand, he could fly, and for the moment, flight was imperative.

Gwenna's case was more troubling. Valyn refused to light a lantern, but her normally pale skin looked even paler, ashen to his night eyes, and though she winced and cried out when he searched through the tangled mess of her hair for the wound, she didn't wake up. Blood had soaked into her curls, then frozen, and after a moment he hacked away several handfuls with his belt knife. She'd probably curse him for the decision when she woke, but waking was a prerequisite to the cursing. Her skull felt intact, though his fingers were too numb to be certain, and regardless, it was easy enough to wreck the brain without damaging the skull. In the end, all he could do was wrap her in a heavy blanket to keep off the worst of the chill, then strap her to the talon once more.

The rest of the flight was cold, long, and miserable. Laith hugged the valleys and passes, trying to keep them low enough that the ridgelines would hide them from pursuit, but not so low that they all got dead. The flier knew his business, but it was dark and they were belly-to-the-dirt. Valyn could see the cracks in the boulders, the small caches of snow secreted beneath the stones. A single mistake from Laith would leave them all smeared across the side of some granite cliff.

By the time they crested the final ridgeline, Valyn was nauseated from the pain in his shoulder, from peering endlessly into the darkness, from feeling his muscles clench every time they scraped over some jagged escarpment. It didn't help that light was starting to soak the eastern sky. In an hour the sun would be up, and then they would
really
have problems. The Kettral worshipped Hull for good reason: even wounded, even fleeing, Valyn's Wing had a chance as long as it stayed dark. With the arrival of dawn, however, they'd be visible from the ground and the air both. If the Flea could fly, if he had guessed their direction of travel, if he, too, had been pushing west through the night, he'd be able to spot them from twenty miles off. Farther, if he used a long lens. It was a lot of “ifs,” but then, the Flea had made a career out of turning “ifs” into “whens.”

Valyn scanned the grasslands unfolding below. Though the Kettral had flown plenty of missions north of the White River, especially in recent years, striking at various Urghul bands, most of the action happened nearly a thousand miles to the west, in the Blood Steppe and the Golden Steppe, where the nomadic tribes butted up against the boundary of the Annurian Empire. The vast, undifferentiated swath of land below, empty grasslands flowing into the jutting teeth of the Bone Mountains, was marked “Far Steppe” on the Eyrie maps, but Valyn couldn't remember much more about it. There were tribes this far east, but the Kettral trainers dismissed them as irrelevant—an omission Valyn regretted now. He was going to have to land—that much was clear. Gwenna and Talal required serious attention, and the bolt in his own shoulder would have to come out. Just as crucially, 'Ra needed to rest before she dropped out of the sky.

Pyrre prodded him in the shoulder, breaking his concentration.

He turned to face the woman. That she had survived the fight in Assare, the fight
she
had started, seemed grossly unfair, but then, there were no judges in battle, no one to adjudicate the dispute and keep everyone between the lines. Valyn had no idea what to do with her when they were finally clear of the mountains. He was tempted to simply leave her on the 'Kent-kissing steppe, but that was a decision that could wait.

She prodded him again, and he swallowed a curse.

“What?” he shouted, leaning so close to the assassin that her hair whipped at his face. If she was frightened to be flying a wounded bird above dangerous territory while pursued by a Kettral Wing, she didn't show it, didn't smell it. Valyn had yet to see the woman really scared.

“Fire,” she mouthed, pointing off to the northwest.

He followed her finger. They were still too far off to make out more than a dull orange smudge, but the flame wasn't large, probably a cook fire kindled in the predawn. Which meant Urghul. Valyn tightened his grip on the strap, leaning out into the dark for a better view. His trainers might have skipped an analysis of the eastern tribes, but he'd learned enough about the nomadic horsemen to be wary.