The Providence of Fire (14 page)

Pyrre raised an eyebrow finally. “That was interesting.” The Skullsworn had been making a slow circuit of the room, peering up the chimneys, examining the masonry, running her fingers along the window casings. She paused to consider the gate. “I can't imagine my god approves.”

“Why not?” Kaden asked. “Dead is dead.”

She smiled. “But it makes a difference who does the killing.”

Valyn ignored the conversation, gesturing instead to the spot where Tan had disappeared. “We've got some real bastards back on the Islands, but that guy…” He shook his head, turning to Kaden. “I've just got to say it one more time: riding a bird sure has its risks, but it seems ten times safer than that thing.”

“That thing,” Kaden said again, trying to force some confidence into his voice, “is what I trained for.” If he couldn't use the
kenta,
then all his years with the Shin had been for nothing. His father had used the gates;
all
the Malkeenian emperors used the gates. If he failed here, well, maybe he wasn't cut from the right cloth. “I have few enough advantages as it is,” he added. “I can't afford to go tossing them away.”

Worry creased Valyn's brow, but after a moment he nodded, then turned to Talal.

“What's happening on the ledge?”

“Night,” the leach replied. “Wind.”

Valyn crossed to the window, glanced out, then turned back, scanning the room.

“All right, we're not going to be here long—one night for everyone to rest up. The monks leave in the morning. We're gone right after them, hopefully before dawn. In the meantime, let's do what we can to button the place up.”

The sniper glanced skeptically at the gaping windows, at the hole in the roof. “Unlikely,” she said.

“I don't love it either,” Valyn said. “But it's the best defensive position we've got and we do need rest, all of us. I want crossed cord on each window, and while we're at it, a belled horizon line straight across the outside face of the building.…”

“That's you, Annick,” Gwenna said. “I'm not climbing around on the wall of this wreck.”

“How's the cord supposed to protect us?” Kaden asked.

“It doesn't,” Valyn replied. “Not really. But if someone climbing trips the bells, we'll know they're here, and the cord on the window will slow them down.”

Kaden crossed to the window and leaned out. He couldn't see much in the darkness, but the wall of the orphanage dropped away forty feet or so to the broad ledge below. The masonry was crumbling, leaving gaps between the stones, but it hardly looked like something a human being could climb.

Annick studied Valyn for a heartbeat or two, then nodded, slipping out the window. If she felt uncomfortable hanging from her fingertips while standing on the tiny ledges, she didn't show it. In fact, she moved smoothly and efficiently over the stone, pausing every so often to free a hand and spool out the cord, then moving on. It was a simple solution, almost laughably simple, but when she was finished, Kaden could see how the thin line might tangle a climber or provide some warning.

“If it's other Kettral who are after us,” Annick observed, dusting off her hands and reclaiming her bow from where it leaned against the wall, “they'll expect the cord.”

Valyn nodded. “They'll expect everything we do. That's no reason to make it easier on them.”

“The sturdiest section of floor is over there,” Gwenna said, gesturing without looking up from her work stringing charges. “If you're going to hunker down in one spot, that's where I'd do it.”

Annick crossed to the area the demolitions master had indicated, then nudged at a pile of debris with the toe of her boot.

“Anything interesting?” Valyn asked.

“More bones,” she replied.

He shook his head. “Any sense of what killed these poor bastards?”

The sniper knelt, running a finger along the pitted surfaces.

“Stabbed,” she replied after a moment. “Blade nicked the third and fourth ribs in each case, probably ruptured the heart.”

She might have been talking about shearing goats, those blue eyes of hers glacially cold in the dim lamplight. Kaden watched as she went about her work, trying to read her curt movements, to see the sniper's mind in the constant sweep of her gaze, in her tendons as they flexed with the motion of her wrists, in the angle of her head as she turned from one rib cage to the next. What did she think, looking at those old, brittle bones? What did she feel?

The monks had taught Kaden to observe—he could paint any member of his brother's Wing with his eyes closed—but to understand, that was another matter. After so many years surrounded by the stone of the mountains and by men who might have been carved from that stone, he had little sense of how to translate words and actions into emotions; no idea, even, if his own attenuated emotions bore any resemblance to those of others.

He still felt fear, and hope, and despair, but the sudden arrival of the Aedolians and Kettral, the arrival of people who were
not
Shin, made him realize just how far he had traveled along the monks' path, how fully, in the course of those long, cold mountain years, he had filed smooth his own feelings. He was Emperor now—or would be if he survived—the ostensible leader of millions, and yet all those millions were animated by feelings he could no longer understand.

“What about down below?” Valyn asked, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder.

“Same,” Annick replied. “Most of the bones have gone to dust, but it's clear enough what happened. Quick work, efficient—no cuts to the arms or legs, no doubling up, every strike a kill. Whoever did this, they were good.”

She rose to her feet and shrugged as though that settled the matter.

Triste, however, was standing a few paces away, mouth open, staring. She had been silent since reading the script on the lintel, lost in her own thoughts or exhaustion as she followed the rest of the group up the stairs and down the long hallway. Annick's words seemed to jar her back into the present.

“Good?” she asked, her voice cracking as she spoke. “
Good
? What about this is good?” She spread her hands helplessly, gesturing to the small skulls, to the gaping doors leading back the way they had come. “Who would murder children?”

“Someone thorough,” Pyrre observed. The assassin was leaning against one of the window frames, arms crossed, tapping her foot idly, as though waiting for the rest of them to quit dithering.

“Thorough?” Triste demanded, aghast. “Someone goes through an orphanage stabbing kids in their sleep and you call it
good
? You call it
thorough
?”

Annick ignored the outburst, but Valyn put a hand on Triste's shoulder. “Annick was just making a professional assessment,” he began. “She doesn't mean that it was good.…”

“Oh, a professional assessment,” Triste spat, shrugging away from Valyn's touch. She was trembling, slender hands clenching and unclenching. “They murdered all these children and you want to make a
professional
assessment.”

“It's what we do,” Valyn said. His voice was level, but something raw and untrammeled ran beneath those words, something savage kept savagely in check. His irises swallowed the light. “It's how we stay alive.”

“But we
could
sing dirges,” Pyrre suggested. The assassin held a perfectly straight face, but amusement ghosted around her eyes. “Would you like to sing a dirge, Triste? Or maybe we could all just link hands and cry.”

Triste locked eyes with the older woman, and, to Kaden's surprise, managed to hold the gaze.

“You're loathsome,” she said finally, casting her glance over Annick, Valyn, and the rest. “Skullsworn, Kettral, Aedolians, you're all loathsome. You're all killers.”

“Well, we can't all be whores,” Gwenna snapped, glancing up from her charges.

Despite the size of the room, despite the gaping windows and shattered roof open to the sky, the space was suddenly too small, too full, bursting with the heat of raised voices and the blind straining of untrammeled emotion. Kaden struggled to watch it all without letting it overwhelm him. Was this how people lived? How they spoke? How could they see anything clearly in the midst of that raging torrent?

Triste opened her mouth, but no words came out. After a mute moment, she shoved her way past Annick, out into the hallway, back the way they had come.

“Watch out for the stairs,” Pyrre called after her cheerfully.

*   *   *

Triste returned sooner than Kaden expected, tears dry, one hand hugging herself around the waist, the other holding a sword. Kaden remembered impressive weapons from his childhood—jewel-crusted ceremonial swords; the long, wide blades of the Aedolians; businesslike sabers carried by the palace guard—but nothing like this. This sword was made from steel so clear it might not have been steel at all but some sliver of winter sky hammered into a perfect shallow arc, then polished to a silent gloss. It was
right
.

“What,” Valyn asked, turning from the darkness beyond the window as Triste's too-large boots scuffed the stone, “is that?”

“Sweet 'Shael, Val,” Laith said. He and Talal had returned to the front chamber after checking the whole floor. “I think you're a good Wing leader and all, but it worries me when you don't recognize a sword.”

Valyn ignored the flier. “Where did you find it?” he asked, crossing to Triste.

She waved a vague hand toward the hallway. “In one of the rooms. It was covered up with rubble, but I saw the glint off it. It looks new. Is it one of ours?”

Valyn shook his head grimly.

“So we're not the only ones flying around the ass end of nowhere,” Laith observed. The words were casual, but Kaden noticed that the flier drifted away from the open doorway, eyes flitting to the shadows in the corners.

Valyn put a hand in front of Kaden, drawing him away from the sword, as though even unwielded the weapon could cut, could kill.

“Annick,” he said, “back on the window. Gwenna and Talal, when we're finished here, I want another sweep of this floor.”

“They just swept the floor,” the demolitions master observed.

“Sweep it again,” Valyn said, “eyes out for rigged falls and double binds.”

“What about bad men hiding in the corners?” Laith asked.

Valyn ignored him.

None of it meant anything to Kaden, and after a moment he turned back to the sword. “Does that style of blade look familiar?” He asked. There might be a clue in the provenance of the sword, but he didn't know enough about weapons to say.

“I've seen things similar,” Valyn replied, frowning. “Some of the Manjari use a single-sided blade.”

“It's not Manjari,” Pyrre said. She hadn't moved, but she had stopped sharpening.

“Maybe something from somewhere in Menkiddoc?” Talal suggested. “We know practically nothing about the entire continent.”

“We're in the Bone Mountains,” Valyn pointed out. “Menkiddoc is thousands of miles to the south.”

“It's not from Menkiddoc,” Pyrre added.

“Anthera is close,” Kaden pointed out.

“Antherans like broadblades,” Valyn replied, shaking his head curtly. “And clubs, for some inexplicable reason.”

“It is not Antheran.” This time, however, it was not Pyrre who spoke.

Kaden turned to find Tan in front of the
kenta,
a robed shadow against the darker shadows beyond, the
naczal
glinting in his right hand. For all his size, the monk moved silently, and none of them had heard him as he reentered the room. He stepped forward. “It is Csestriim.”

For what seemed like a long time a tight, cold silence filled the room.

“I guess you didn't die on the other side of the gate,” Gwenna observed finally.

“No,” Tan replied. “I did not.”

“Want to tell us what you found?”

“No. I do not. Where did you find the blade?”

Valyn gestured down the hall as Kaden tried to put the pieces together in his mind.

Tan had said earlier that the script above the door was human, but ancient. This was a human building, a human city, but the Csestriim had created the
kenta,
created one here, in the center of a city filled with bones. The sword looked new, but then, so did Tan's
naczal
. It could be thousands of years old, one of the weapons used when …

“The Csestriim killed them,” Kaden said slowly. “They opened a gate right here in the middle of the city, bypassing the walls, bypassing all the defenses.” His thought leapt outside of itself, into the emotionless minds of the attackers. Through the
beshra'an
it was all so clear, so rational.

“They came through, probably at night, killing the children first because the children were humanity's best weapon against them. They started here, at the top.…” The memory of the small skeletons on the stairs flared up in his mind. “Or some of them did,” he amended. “The Csestriim set the trap first, then drove the children down, stabbing them as they fled, cutting them down on the stairs or in the hallways, then doubling back to kill those who had hidden behind doors or under beds.” He slipped from the mind of the hunters into the fear of the hunted. “Most of the children would have been too terrified to do anything, but even those who tried to escape…” He gestured helplessly. “Where would they go? We're halfway up the cliff.” He glanced to the window, living the screaming, the slaughter. “Some would have jumped,” he said, his heart hammering at the thought. “It was hopeless, but some would have jumped anyway.”

Trembling with the borrowed terror of children millennia dead, he slipped out of the
beshra'an
to find half a dozen pairs of eyes fixed upon him.