The Providence of Fire (31 page)

“Has she said anything about my father? About Annur or the plot against my family?”

“No. As I said, we need more information.”

Kaden stared. “The Ishien have kept me penned in here for what … weeks? A month? And now they want help?”

“Yes.”

“Why would I help them? Why would I conspire with my jailers against Triste, who has done nothing but help me from the first night we met?”

“You will help,” Tan said, voice blunt as an ax, “because if you do not, you may never leave this cave.”

Kaden took a deep breath. Two. The monk had only said what Kaden himself had been thinking since the day he stepped through the
kenta
. And yet, hearing someone else speak the words made them real.

“The girl is not what you think,” Tan continued, “and even if she were, you cannot afford loyalty. Not here. Not among these men. You help no one, Triste included, if you die in an Ishien cell.”

Beneath his ribs, Kaden's heart bucked. He haltered it, soothed the animal part of him that wanted to kick, to bite, to flee, then nodded.

“Where do we go?”

“To the cells.”

The cells.
Which meant he'd be leaving this section of the Heart, that he'd be seeing new territory. It wasn't much, but it was more than he had now. Greater knowledge of the prison's layout might suggest the location of the exits, and it looked more and more likely that a time might come when he needed one of those exits.

“All right,” he said quietly, “I'll go.”

Tan held up a hand. “There is more.”

Kaden shook his head. “More?”

“The Ishien are bringing up another prisoner at the same time. They want to surprise the girl, to overwhelm her, to shock her into revealing something.”

“What prisoner?” Kaden asked, confused. “Why would Triste reveal anything to some poor soul the Ishien have locked up in their dungeons?”

“Because he is Csestriim,” Tan said after a long pause. “And he is dangerous.”

Kaden stilled his pulse, controlled his face. “They have a Csestriim. Is there anything else I should know?”

Tan nodded slowly. “The current leader of the Ishien is a man named Matol. Be careful of him. In his own way, he is as dangerous as the prisoner.”

*   *   *

“The bitch of it is,” Ekhard Matol explained, spitting onto the damp floor to emphasize his irritation, “that the Csestriim don't respond to torture the way we do.”

Though Tan claimed that Matol was the commander of the Dead Heart, he wore no uniform or mark of rank, dressing in the standard wool and leather, the garments moth-eaten and battered. He was short and thick, with fists like hammers, a nose like a chisel, and a badly pockmarked face. Physically he looked nothing like Trant—he must have been at least ten years older, for one thing—but the same air of unwholesome dampness clung to him, the same feral intensity burned in his eyes. And, like Trant and Tan, like all the Ishien Kaden had encountered, scars webbed his flesh.

Tan had led the way wordlessly through winding corridors, past two banded doors, past a trio of guards, then into the cramped antechamber beyond, a small room furnished with a low wooden table and a single chair, in which Matol sat. Kaden hadn't expected an apology for his earlier treatment, but the man didn't so much as acknowledge it. Kaden might have been a menial or slave, an insignificant underling who had been called upon to perform a task. That Matol spoke to him at all seemed an indulgence.

“What have you done to her?” Kaden asked, trying to keep his voice level, the question objective.

“The usual,” Matol replied with a shrug, gesturing to the door behind him, presumably the entrance to Triste's cell. “Slivers of glass under the fingernails. Thumbscrews. First-round stuff. We've left her alone for quite a while now, to give her a chance to heal up, to get her nice and complacent before we start again.”

Kaden's stomach twisted inside him, but he kept his expression even, his face calm.

“I don't want her hurt any further,” he said, trying to project something like his father's imperial authority.

Matol furrowed his brow, got slowly to his feet, then walked around the small table, pausing when his face was inches from Kaden's own. He smiled, the expression sharp as a blade, then whispered, “Maybe Rampuri didn't tell you. Maybe he forgot how we do things in the years he's been away, so let me fill you in.…” He took a deep breath, then screamed,
“WE ARE NOT YOUR FUCKING SUBJECTS!”

Kaden was accustomed to monastic disapproval, to the slow shaking of heads, and even to the brutal penance that often followed. This sudden explosion, however, was something else altogether, and he rocked back on his heels as though he'd been struck.

“Maybe not,” he replied finally, trying to steady himself. It wouldn't do to show he could be cowed by a fit of shouting. “But we are on the same side in a very old fight.”

Matol shrugged, his momentary fury utterly vanished. “Used to be, but the Ishien remembered their charge, held to their post, while you and your family abandoned it long ago.” He paused, as though waiting for Kaden to object, then pressed ahead. “When we're finished with this bitch, which might take some time, I'll have questions for you. I want to know about this plot against your family.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Not because I would care if the people of Annur rose up and gutted every living Malkeenian, but because this is how they
work,
the Csestriim. They find a structure, an order at the heart of our world, something
we
created, and then they go to work on it, chipping at the walls, undermining the foundation, until it crashes down, until we're crushed by the very thing we built.” He stared at Kaden, eyes wide and furious. Then, abruptly, he laughed. “Which is why I might need to keep you here for a year or ten. After all, if
we're
using you, then
they're
not.”

A chill ran up Kaden's spine.

He glanced over at Tan for some sign of tacit support, but the older monk's face betrayed nothing, and he made no move to speak. Kaden swallowed the insult and the fear both. Pride and fear were illusions—dangerous illusions, in this case. Here, hidden beneath tons of stone and sea, cut away from the cloth of society, a man like Matol could do whatever he wished. Kaden wasn't going to help Triste or Annur by insisting on his own honor.

This is why we have courts and laws,
he thought to himself.
This is why we have an emperor
.

When Kaden first learned of the Ishien, their mandate had sounded like a noble cause, like something pure. That single-minded purpose, however, stripped of the aegis of law and tradition, religion and the order religion brought, began to look very much like madness. For the Ishien, anything was justified if it might lead to the Csestriim. Any lie. Any torture. Any murder.

“Is there anything new from the girl?” Tan asked.

Matol snorted. “Same shit. Sobs, begs, whimpers, tells us she hasn't done anything wrong. Problem is, she doesn't squirm
right
.” He turned to Kaden, brows raised as though waiting for the obvious question. When Kaden held his peace, the man blew out an irritated breath and explained.

“The enemy
look
human, but they're not. They're not right,” he tapped his head with a grimy finger, “in
here
. When it comes to torture, they feel the pain—Meshkent has his bloody hooks in them, same way he does in the rest of us—but they don't feel the
fear
. They're older than the young gods. Kaveraa can't touch them.”

Kaden turned the claim over in his mind, trying to imagine what it might be like to encounter pain without the fear of pain. Like experiencing starvation without hunger.

“So what's the point?” he asked finally. “If you think Triste is Csestriim and Csestriim don't respond to torture, why are you driving shards of glass under her fingernails?”

Matol grinned. “Well, we weren't
sure
she was Csestriim, were we? And I didn't say they don't respond. I said they don't respond
right
. The old archives point out that you can usually tell a Csestriim spy from the
lack
of terror.”

“But Triste's terrified. You just said that. She begs and pleads.”

“Sometimes,” Matol acknowledged, then leaned in so close that Kaden could smell the fish on his breath as he hissed, “but she doesn't beg
right
.”

“You still haven't said what that means.”

The man paused, staring at some unseen point in the air as he marshaled his memories of pain and pleading. “There's a certain … shape to terror. A kind of writhing of the body, a rhythm to the screams. Everyone responds differently to fear and pain, but beneath the difference there's something human trying to shove its way out. If you know what to look for, you can recognize that thing, that
human
thing.”

Kaden shook his head. “How can you recognize it?”

Matol smiled, a wide vulpine smile. “Because I've been through it.” He raised his hands, and Kaden noticed for the first time that scars marred the ends of his fingers where the nails should have been.

“The pain,” Kaden said quietly.

The man nodded. “So someone
has
bothered to educate you about our ways.”

“It seems,” Kaden began slowly, “that what you do to yourselves is worse than what the Csestriim might do.”

Matol stared, teeth bright in the lamplight. “It seems that way, does it? It fucking
seems
that way?”

He looked away suddenly, studying the scars as though he'd never seen them before, as though they were something utterly alien and unknowable, then turned his glare back on Kaden.

“This, all of this, everything we know about pain—we
learned
it from the Csestriim, from their manuals, their books, from the hundreds of years of meticulous history in which they tortured and killed us. You think this is bad?” He shoved his scarred hands in Kaden's face. “You think this is
worse
than what the Csestriim might do? This is the fucking
mild
shit. This would have been a
relief
for our ancestors.”

Kaden forced himself to look at the scars for three heartbeats, forced himself to keep his face calm, impassive. That the Ishien were sick, broken, was growing clearer and clearer, but he could feel a hard truth in Matol's words, and unbidden, the memory of the skeletons in Assare filled his mind, the small, clutching hands, the skulls. If the Ishien were broken, it was the Csestriim who had shattered them.

“Enough talk,” Tan said, gesturing to the door.

Matol shook his head. “We're waiting for someone. Someone I want her to see.” He narrowed his lids, looking slyly from Tan to Kaden, then back. “I told Rampuri not to mention it, but I suspect he told you something about our other prisoner.” He stabbed Kaden roughly in the chest with an extended finger. “Didn't he?
Didn't
he?”

Kaden held his breathing steady. Inhale. Exhale. In and out.

“What other prisoner?”

*   *   *

At first glance, the other prisoner appeared neither deadly nor immortal.

The Shin warned their acolytes about the dangers of expectation, the power of anticipation to distort both sight and memory. Kaden had, accordingly, avoided putting a face to the Csestriim menace.
They don't look like monsters,
he reminded himself as he waited for the prisoner to be hauled up from the deeper dungeons.
They were able to pass as human.
Even the man's name was unremarkable: Kiel. It might have been the name of a baker, a fisherman.

He'd been shocked to discover that the Ishien already
had
a prisoner, one of the immortal beings they had hunted for so long, but once he accepted the notion, he thought he was prepared for anything. When the guards kicked open the door, however, and shoved their charge through, hands bound before him with a stout length of rope, Kaden realized he'd been expecting something after all, something harder, more formidable.

Kiel was an old man, stooped and hesitant, a faint limp marring his already uncertain gait. Scars puckered his face and hands—a delicate tracery of white lines punctuated by blunt, ugly weals, the result, Kaden surmised queasily, of heated steel. The Csestriim looked dark-skinned, but when he put a hand to his face to scrub the tangled hair from his eyes, Kaden realized that most of the darkness resulted from layers of filth and grime. The man's apparent age, too, was an illusion—cleaned and healthy he might look only halfway into his fourth decade. Even so, he was a far cry from the formidable monster Kaden had unknowingly expected.

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.