The Providence of Fire (17 page)

Nira waited for her to respond, then grimaced, glancing around at the milling crowd. “C'm'ere,” she muttered, lowering her voice, gesturing to the far side of the wagon where a crush of squealing black pigs had forced away the pilgrims. Adare didn't move.

“Come
over
here, ya willful little slut,” she pressed, glaring. “'Less ya want me saying what I got to say right out here in the open, which I'm thinking ya don't.”

Adare hesitated. What she
wanted
was to slip away from the woman as quickly as possible, but slipping away didn't seem to be an option. Worse, there was something knowing in Nira's tone, something almost accusatory, that pricked up the hairs on the back of her neck. After a moment more Adare nodded, then followed, clutching at her dress, trying to keep it clear of the press of muddy pigs. When they had stepped far enough around the wagon that the sideboard obscured the closest pilgrims, Nira rounded on her.

“Listen,” she hissed, voice low, eyes shifting vigilantly over Adare's shoulder. “You want to leave your palace and play poor little blind girl, I'm sure you have your reasons.”

Fear took Adare by the throat. “I'm not—” she began.

Nira waved down the objection. “Quit it. I'm not in the secret-trading trade and I'm not looking to join it now. A girl's got a right to her lies—'Shael knows I've learned that lesson a few dozen times over—but,” she continued, stabbing Adare squarely in the chest with a bony fingertip, driving her back against the rough wood of the wagon, “you look likely to step squarely in the shit without any pushing on my part.” She shook her head, jabbed at the mud with her cane, and muttered angrily under her breath. “I've got enough to do keeping Oshi's cracked nut in one piece, and now I've got you, too.”

“You don't have—” Adare began, heart slamming against her ribs.

“Oh, 'Shael's shit I don't,” the woman snapped, raising her voice once more. “Without me, you'd be fucked up the arse with a thick, crooked dick before we slipped past the city walls. Now toss your sack on the wagon and move outta my way before I get cross.”

 

8

Valyn stood by the window, cold wind scouring his face, staring out into the night. He had insisted on taking first watch, and the rest of his Wing, accustomed to catching fragments of rest whenever, wherever, converted their coats and packs into makeshift blankets and pillows, arranged weapons for easy access, then dropped abruptly into sleep. The others weren't far behind, and by the time the first stars were glittering overhead only Kaden remained awake. He sat cross-legged just a pace away, gazing out over the low lintel of the same window. For a long while neither said a word.

“What's the point in standing watch,” Kaden asked finally, “when you can't see anything?” He gestured toward the window. “I feel like I'm looking into the bottom of an iron pot.”

Valyn hesitated. He hadn't told Kaden about his experience in Hull's Hole, hadn't told him about the slarn egg or the strange abilities it had conferred, hadn't told him … anything really.

“Why are
you
still awake?” he countered. “The plan was to get some sleep before you have to step through that thing.”

Kaden glanced toward the
kenta
and nodded, but made no move to lie down. “I don't think a little more sleep is going to tip the balance one way or the other.”

“Those gates are really all over the empire?”

“And beyond it, evidently. They're many thousands of years older than Annur. The boundaries of the empire weren't even imagined when the Csestriim built them.”

“But Father knew about them,” Valyn pressed. “He used them?”

Kaden spread his hands. “That's what the Shin told me.”

“Where is it?” Valyn asked. “The gate in Annur?”

“I don't know. I never saw anything like this. Never
heard
of it before the abbot explained it all to me.”

“How do people not know?” Valyn wondered, staring at the gracile arch. “How could Father cross half the world in a heartbeat without anyone
suspecting
?”

“I've thought about that a lot,” Kaden said. “It wouldn't be as obvious as you think. Say the Emperor steps through a gate from Annur to … oh … Ludgven. The people in Ludgven don't know that he was in Annur. All they know is that the Emperor arrived unexpectedly. One of the chroniclers could piece it all together later, someone who kept detailed notes and a careful calendar, but it would have been difficult to keep good notes about Father's coming and going. Half the time even
we
didn't know where he was, and we lived in the palace.”

Valyn nodded slowly. Sanlitun had disappeared for days at a time when they were children. “Meditating,” their mother told them. “Praying to Intarra for guidance.” Valyn had never understood the need for all that prayer and contemplation. As he pondered the use of the gates, however, Sanlitun's self-imposed austerity began to look far less arbitrary. As Hendran wrote:
Be a rumor. Be a ghost. Your foes should not believe in your existence.
The Emperor of Annur couldn't afford to recede entirely into rumor, but their father had kept himself so aloof from the day-to-day business of the empire that he could well have disappeared for days without anyone noticing.

“All those years,” Valyn said, shaking his head. “All those years, and we had no idea.”

“We were children.”

“We were children.” Valyn exhaled slowly, watching his breath mist in the cold night air. “There was a lot I wanted to ask him.”

Kaden remained silent such a long time that Valyn thought he had faded off to sleep. When he glanced over, however, he found his brother's eyes still open, still burning, twin embers in the darkness.

“What does it feel like?” Kaden asked finally. “The grief, I mean.”

Valyn tried to make sense of the question. “For Father?”

“For anyone.”

Valyn shook his head. “You tell me. You just saw your entire monastery destroyed.”

“I did,” Kaden replied, not taking his eyes from the darkness. “I did. There was a little boy, Pater … I watched as Ut stabbed him through the chest.”

“So why are you asking me about grief? Seems like there's plenty to go around.”

“I'm asking because the monks train it out of you. I felt it when Pater died, felt like my legs might just give way beneath me, but now…” He shook his head slowly. “You learn to set it aside, to move past it.”

“Sounds like a 'Kent-kissing blessing to me,” Valyn replied, more bitterly than he'd intended. Just the memory of Ha Lin's limp body as he carried her from the Hole, of the wounds running down her arms, of her hair brushing his skin, made his breath stick in his chest. “Sometimes, when I think about it too much, I feel like my muscles have torn clean off the bones, like someone snapped all the tendons and ligaments holding me together. I
wish
I could move past it.”

“Maybe,” Kaden replied. “And maybe it's not real if you can toss it aside like a cracked cup.”

“
Fuck
real,” Valyn spat. Blood throbbed at his temples. His knuckles ached. Memories flooded over him: of Balendin laughing as he recounted Lin's torment on the West Bluffs, of blood gushing from the knife in Salia's neck, of Yurl groveling in front of him in the darkness, hands lopped from his arms. He would have yanked the bastard back from death, out of Ananshael's iron grip, just so he could stab him again and again, a thousand times over, so he could split his skull open.…

Breath rasped in his lungs. Sweat streamed down his back, cold in the cold night air. Kaden was staring at him, he realized, eyes wide with confusion or concern.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Valyn?”

Valyn focused on his brother's eyes, on his voice, vision and sound braided into a cord that was drawing him up, up from the bottom of a deep well where he had been drowning.

“I'm all right,” he said finally, voice ragged, wiping his brow with a sleeve.

“You don't look it.”

Valyn chuckled grimly. “‘All right' is relative.”

He started to say something more, a few more words to ease the tension, when something, the faintest sound at the very edge of hearing, brought him up short. Kaden stared at him.

“What is—”

Valyn cut him off with a raised hand. He could hear the various members of his Wing sleeping—Talal's light snore, Gwenna's constant shifting—he could hear the lisp of the wind over the stone, even the rumble and hiss of the waterfall as it plunged off the cliff a few hundred paces to the north. But there was something more, something else. He closed his eyes, straining for the sound. It was hard to hear past his own pulse thudding in his ears, and for a moment he thought he'd imagined it. Then it came again—a soft scuff of fabric over stone. Someone outside the window, someone climbing, quieter than the wind.

Without thinking, Valyn took Kaden by the shoulder, hauling him back into the room while putting his own body between his brother and the gaping windows. Climbing meant Kettral, and though he had no idea how they'd managed to track him through the mountains, a part of him had been prepared for this moment. He slid a blade from the sheath over his shoulder as he pushed Kaden deeper into the room, offering up a brief thanks to Hull that his brother had the good sense to move with him, to remain silent.

The scuffing was gone, but there was a strange smell on the air, the faintest hint of smoke. Not woodsmoke, not a hearth or campfire. Woodsmoke didn't taste like that, didn't sting the nasal passage in quite the same way. This was a different smell, more dangerous, one familiar from a thousand training missions.…

“Cover up,” Valyn shouted, shattering the night's quiet. “Explosives incoming.”

Even as he said the words, he was dragging Kaden to the floor, then throwing his own body on top as he covered his ears with his hands. He couldn't know what sort of munitions their attackers were lighting, but if the explosion didn't kill them all, the first moments after would prove crucial. He wanted to be able to hear, to see. Kaden went completely still beneath him, and Valyn shifted to shield as much of his brother as possible. Something clattered to the floor behind them. He squeezed his eyes shut just before the world went white, opening them only when the initial elemental fury had passed, subsiding into a more prosaic mess of shouts and screams.

They were alive. He'd felt the blast, but no shrapnel had ripped through his flesh. He wasn't on fire. That meant they were using smokers. Smokers and flashbangs.
So they're not trying to kill us, at least not yet.
On the other hand, it wasn't looking much like a diplomatic mission. The whole point of smokers and flashbangs was to force the foe into panic and error. Which meant the first step was not to panic, not to rush. There was time. Not much, but time.

Slowly,
Valyn told himself silently.
Slowly.

If he raised his head more than a foot above the floor the smoke blinded and choked him, but there was still a hand's breadth of relatively clean air beneath the pall, and Valyn dropped back down into it. He could see his Wing's tactical lanterns—both still lit—and the shapes of the rest of the group moving in the fickle illumination. It was hard to be sure who was who, but Valyn could pick apart the voices now—Triste screaming, Gwenna and Laith cursing, Talal and Annick nearly silent as they moved over the floor. Of their attackers, Valyn could hear nothing.

“That other Kettral Wing?” Kaden asked, shifting beside him. “The Flea?”

“Might be,” Valyn said, working the problem through from a dozen angles at the same time. The attackers hadn't simply blown up the building, which would have been easy enough. Either they wanted prisoners or, better yet, they had seen the carnage in the mountains, had sorted through the bodies and realized what it meant.

Be on our side,
Valyn prayed silently.
Please, Hull, let them be on our side.

“What should—” Kaden began.

“Stay quiet,” Valyn hissed, “and get down below the smoke.”

He glanced over the room once more, counted bodies. Pyrre was missing, he realized, although where the assassin had gone, Valyn had no idea. His Wing was handling the attack as they'd been trained, staying low, crawling toward the walls in order to follow them to doors, windows, cleaner air. The problem was that whoever tossed the smokers was probably waiting at those very doors and windows, and rigging the stairs had cut off their own most obvious escape route.

The most obvious escape route,
Valyn thought, checking the distance to Gwenna's charges,
but not the only one.

He patted his belt pouch for the Kettral whistles. There was no way of knowing if their birds were still in the air, but if he and his Wing could win free of the building, the ledge was large enough for a grab.

If,
he reminded himself.
You're not
on
the 'Kent-kissing ledge, and you've got four people who've never even
contemplated
a grab-and-go.

It was a grim fucking position, no doubt about it, and likely to get a whole lot grimmer.

A few feet away, Triste had risen to her hands and knees. Blind with the smoke and her own confusion, she was crawling frantically but aimlessly, trying to shout but choking each time she drew a breath. It wouldn't be long before she passed out. Worse, she might remain conscious long enough to stand and stumble out one of the low windows. Valyn started toward her, then checked himself.
Prioritize
. Kaden was the Emperor, which meant Valyn needed to get Kaden to safety first, even if Triste fell to her death.