The Providence of Fire (2 page)

“You arrived in time,” the Emperor said, gesturing to the dark blocks of the city.

“In time for
what
?” Sioan demanded, her anger threatening to choke her. “To watch ten thousand people burn?”

Her husband considered her for a moment, then nodded. “Among other things,” he replied quietly, then turned to the scribe at his side.

“Have them start another fire,” he said. “The full length of Anlatun's Way, from the southern border of the city to the north.”

The scribe, face intent, bent to the task, brushing the words over the parchment, holding the sheet in the air a moment to dry, rolling it quickly, tucking it into a bamboo tube, then slipping it into a chute running down the center of the Spear. It had taken Sioan half the night to ascend the 'Shael-spawned tower; the Emperor's orders would reach the palace below in a matter of moments.

The command away, Sanlitun turned to his children once again. “Do you understand?” he asked.

Adare bit her lip. Kaden said nothing. Only Valyn stepped forward, squinting against the wind and the fire both. He turned to the long lenses cradled in their brackets against the low wall, lifted one, and put it to his eye. “Anlatun's Way isn't burning,” he protested after a moment. “The fire is still blocks to the west.”

His father nodded.

“Then why…” He trailed off, the answer in his dark eyes.

“You're starting a second fire,” Adare said. “To check the first.”

Sanlitun nodded. “The weapon is the shield. The foe is the friend. What is burned cannot burn again.”

For a long time the whole family stood in silence, staring at the blaze eating its way east. Only Sioan refused a long lens. She could see what she needed to see with her own eyes. Slowly, implacably, the fire came on, red and gold and horrible until, in a straight line across the western end of the city, a new set of fires burst out, discrete points at first, spreading together until an avenue of flame limned the western edge of the broad street that was Anlatun's Way.

“It's working,” Adare said. “The new fire is moving west.”

“All right,” Sioan said abruptly, understanding at last what her husband wanted them to see, what he wanted them to learn; desperate, suddenly, to spare her children the sight and the knowledge both. “They have witnessed enough.”

She reached out to take the long lens from Adare, but the girl snatched it away, training it on the twin fires once more.

Sanlitun met his wife's glare, then took her hand in his own. “No,” he said quietly. “They have not.”

It was Kaden, finally, who realized.

“The people,” he said, gesturing. “They were running away, running east, but now they've stopped.”

“They're trapped,” Adare said, dropping her long lens and spinning to confront her father. “They're
trapped
. You have to
do
something!”

“He did,” Valyn said. He looked up at the Emperor, the child's hope horrible in his gaze. “You already did, right? An order. Before we got here. You warned them somehow.…”

The boy trailed off, seeing the answer in those cold, blazing eyes.

“What order would I give?” Sanlitun asked, his voice soft and unstoppable as the wind. “Thousands of people live between those two fires, Valyn. Tens of thousands. Many will have fled, but how would I reach those who have not?”

“But they'll burn,” Kaden whispered.

He nodded slowly. “They are burning even now.”

“Why,” Sioan demanded, not sure if the tears in her eyes were for the citizens screaming unheard in their homes so far below, or for her children, staring, horrified, at the distant flames. “Why did they need to see
this
?”

“One day the empire will be theirs.”

“Theirs to rule, to
protect,
not to destroy!”

He continued to hold her hand, but didn't look away from the children. “They will not be ready to rule it,” he said, his eyes silent as the stars, “until they are willing to see it burn.”

 

1

Kaden hui'Malkeenian did his best to ignore both the cold granite beneath him and the hot sun beating down on his back as he slid forward, trying to get a better view of the scattered stone buildings below. A brisk wind, soaked with the cold of the lingering snows, scratched at his skin. He took a breath, drawing the heat from his core into his limbs, stilling the trembling before it could begin. His years of training with the monks were good for that much, at least. That much, and precious little else.

Valyn shifted at his side, glancing back the way they had come, then forward once more.

“Is this the path you took when you fled?” he asked.

Kaden shook his head. “We went that way,” he replied, pointing north toward a great stone spire silhouetted against the sky, “beneath the Talon, then east past Buri's Leap and the Black and Gold Knives. It was night, and those trails are brutally steep. We hoped that soldiers in full armor wouldn't be able to keep up with us.”

“I'm surprised they were.”

“So was I,” Kaden said.

He levered himself up on his elbows to peer over the spine of rock, but Valyn dragged him back.

“Keep your head down, Your Radiance,” he growled.

Your Radiance.
The title still sounded wrong, unstable and treacherous, like spring ice on a mountain tarn, the whole surface groaning even as it glittered, ready to crack beneath the weight of the first unwary foot. It was hard enough when others used the title, but from Valyn the words were almost unbearable. Though they'd spent half their lives apart, though both were now men in their own right, almost strangers, with their own secrets and scars, Valyn was still his brother, still his blood, and all the training, all the years, couldn't quite efface the reckless boy Kaden remembered from his childhood, the partner with whom he'd played blades and bandits, racing through the hallways and pavilions of the Dawn Palace. Hearing Valyn use the official title was like hearing his own past erased, his childhood destroyed, replaced utterly by the brutal fact of the present.

The monks, of course, would have approved.
The past is a dream,
they used to say.
The future is a dream
.
There is only now.
Which meant those same monks, the men who had raised him, trained him, were not men at all, not anymore. They were rotting meat, corpses strewn on the ledges below.

Valyn jerked a thumb over the rocks that shielded them, jarring Kaden from his thoughts. “We're still a good way off, but some of the bastards who killed your friends might have long lenses.”

Kaden frowned, drawing his focus back to the present. He had never even considered the possibility of long lenses—another reminder, as if he needed another reminder, of how poorly his cloistered life at Ashk'lan had prepared him for this sudden immersion in the treacherous currents of the world. He could paint, sit in meditation, or run for days over rough trail, but painting, running, and meditation were meager skills when set against the machinations of the men who had murdered his father, slaughtered the Shin monks, and very nearly killed him as well. Not for the first time, he found himself envying Valyn's training.

For eight years Kaden had struggled to quell his own desires and hopes, fears and sorrows, had fought what felt like an endless battle against himself. Over and over the Shin had intoned their mantras:
Hope's edge is sharper than steel. To want is to lack
.
To care is to die.
There was truth to the words, far more truth than Kaden had imagined when he first arrived in the mountains as a child, but if he had learned anything in the past few days, days filled with blood, death, and confusion, he had learned the limits to that truth. A steel edge, as it turned out, was plenty sharp. Clinging to the self might kill you, but not if someone put a knife in your heart first.

In the space of a few days, Kaden's foes had multiplied beyond his own persistent failings, and these new enemies wore polished armor, carried swords in their fists, wielded lies by the thousands. If he was going to survive, if he was to take his father's place on the Unhewn Throne, he needed to know about long lenses and swords, politics and people, about all the things the Shin had neglected in their single-minded effort to train him in the empty trance that was the
vaniate
. It would take years to fill in the gaps, and he did not have years. His father was dead, had been dead for months already, and that meant, prepared or not, Kaden hui'Malkeenian was the Emperor of Annur.

Until someone kills me,
he added silently.

Given the events of the past few days, that possibility loomed suddenly, strikingly large. That armed men had arrived with orders to murder him and destroy the monastery was terrifying enough, but that they were comprised of his own Aedolian Guard—an order sworn to protect and defend him—that they were commanded by high-ranking Annurians, men at the very top of the pyramid of imperial politics, was almost beyond belief. In some ways, returning to the capital and sitting the Unhewn Throne seemed like the surest way to help his enemies finish what they had started.

Of course,
he thought grimly,
if I'm murdered in Annur, it will mean I made it
back
to Annur, which would be a success of sorts.

Valyn gestured toward the lip of the rocky escarpment that shielded them. “When you look, look slowly, Your Radiance,” he said. “The eye is attracted to motion.”

That much, at least, Kaden knew. He'd spent enough time tracking crag cats and lost goats to know how to remain hidden. He shifted his weight onto his elbows, inching up until his eyes cleared the low spine of rock. Below and to the west, maybe a quarter mile distant, hunched precariously on a narrow ledge between the cliffs below and the vast, chiseled peaks above, stood Ashk'lan, sole monastery of the Shin monks, and Kaden's home.

Or what remained of it.

The Ashk'lan of Kaden's memory was a cold place but bright, scoured clean, an austere palette of pale stone, wide strokes of snow, vertiginous rivers shifting their glittering ribbons, ice slicking the north-facing cliffs, all piled beneath a hard, blue slab of sky. The Aedolians had destroyed it. Wide sweeps of soot smudged the ledges and boulders, and fire had lashed the junipers to blackened stumps. The refectory, meditation hall, and dormitory stood in ruins. While the cold stone of the walls had refused to burn, the wooden rafters, the shingles, the casings of the windows and broad pine doors had all succumbed to the flame, dragging sections of masonry with them as they fell. Even the sky was dark, smudged with oily smoke that still smoldered from the wreckage.

“There,” Valyn said, pointing to movement near the northern end of the monastery. “The Aedolians. They've made camp, probably waiting for Micijah Ut.”

“Gonna be a long wait,” Laith said, sliding up beside them. The flier grinned.

Before the arrival of Valyn's Wing, all Kaden's knowledge of the Kettral, of Annur's most secretive and deadly soldiers, came from the stories he had lapped up as a child, tales that had led him to imagine grim, empty-eyed killers, men and women steeped in blood and destruction. The stories had been partly right: Valyn's black eyes were cold as last year's coals, and Laith—the Wing's flier—didn't seem at all concerned about the wreckage below or the carnage they had left behind. They were clearly soldiers, disciplined and well trained, and yet, they seemed somehow young to Kaden.

Laith's casual smile, his obvious delight in irritating Gwenna and provoking Annick, the way he drummed on his knee whenever he got bored, which was often—it was all behavior the Shin would have beaten out of him before his second year. That Valyn's Wing could fly and kill was clear enough, but Kaden found himself worrying, wondering if they were truly ready for the difficult road ahead. Not that he was ready himself, but it would have been nice to think that
someone
had the situation in hand.

Micijah Ut, at least, was one foe Kaden no longer needed to fear. That the massive Aedolian in all his armor had been killed by a middle-aged woman wielding a pair of knives would have strained belief had Kaden not seen the body. The sight had brought him a muted measure of satisfaction, as though he could set the weight of steel and dead flesh in the scales to balance, in some small part, the rest of the slaughter.

“Anyone want to sneak into their camp with Ut's body?” Laith asked. “We could prop him up somewhere, make it look like he's drinking ale or taking a leak? See how long it takes them to notice the fucker's not breathing?” He looked from Valyn to Kaden, eyebrows raised. “No? That's not why we came back here?”

The group of them had returned to Ashk'lan that morning, flying west from their meager camp in the heart of the Bone Mountains, the same camp where they had fought and killed the men chasing them down, Aedolians and traitorous Kettral both. The trip had occasioned a heated debate: there was broad agreement that someone needed to go, both to check for survivors and to see if there was anything to be learned from the Annurian soldiers who had remained behind when Ut and Tarik Adiv chased Kaden into the peaks. The disagreement centered on just
who
ought to make the trip.

Valyn didn't want to risk bringing anyone outside his own Wing, but Kaden pointed out that if the Kettral wanted to make use of the snaking network of goat tracks surrounding the monastery, they needed a monk familiar with the land. Rampuri Tan, of course, was the obvious choice—he knew Ashk'lan better than Kaden, not to mention the fact that, unlike Kaden, he could actually
fight
—and the older monk, despite Valyn's misgivings, seemed to consider his participation a foregone conclusion. Pyrre, meanwhile, argued that it was stupid to return in the first place.