The Providence of Fire (29 page)

“They're past,” Annick said finally.

Valyn glanced up, shielding his face with his hand, following the shape of the retreating bird.

“They were too high for me to make out,” the sniper continued.

Valyn squinted. The bird
was
high, but he could see the pinions, the shading of the wings and tailfeathers, his eyes keen even in the full daylight. He let out a long, slow breath.

“The Flea,” he said. “It was the Flea.”

 

14

Adare returned from the evening's sermon both weary and wary. The days were long enough—waking before dawn, walking half a dozen miles, a brief stop for lunch, then another five or six miles—without having to listen to some petty priest for the first half of the night. When the caravan finally halted, Adare wanted nothing more than to roll into her blankets and pass out. Nira, however, had pointed out that Adare was dumber than a dead ox for skipping sermons while posing as a pilgrim, and so, night after night, she went, stumbling over the uneven ground in the gathering gloom, squinting to see through the blindfold, trying to avoid the dark shapes of the wagons, all to sit on the fringes of the fire, juggling the contradictory hopes that the others would note her attendance without paying her any special attention.

It hardly made for easy listening. One night the young priest lectured on the sinful excesses of the Malkeenians. Another on the ideal of an Intarran state, free from secular meddling. The most recent harangue—an extended eulogy for Uinian IV—struck even closer to home. It was impossible to read the faces of her fellow pilgrims in the flickering firelight, but the mood was clear enough. She thought she had managed to kill both the priest and his reputation when she revealed him to be a leach, but while the man stayed dead, his good name was proving frighteningly resilient. Most people hadn't been at the temple on the day Uinian burst into flame, the day his own congregation tore his burning body apart. They knew what they believed, and regarding the Malkeenians in general and Adare more particularly, they were willing to believe the worst. By the time the tirade was over, Adare had worried a gash in the side of her thumb with a nervous fingernail.

She picked her way back slowly through the wagons and cook fires, wanting nothing more than a few bites of Nira's fish, a few moments warming herself over the flames, then sleep. As soon as she returned to the cook fire, however, she realized something was wrong. The old woman had spent every night for the past two weeks over an iron pan, grilling up carp from the canal with pepper and rice purchased along the road, muttering over her cooking as though the words were spice. Now, however, she stood atop the wagon, peering into the darkness. Her hair, a white haze around her head, had broken free from her bun. The cane trembled in her hands.

“Oshi,” she shouted, voice twisting up at the end, then cracking. “Oshi!”

As Adare approached the wagon, the old woman turned to her.

“He's gone,” she said. “I came back to the fire, and he was gone.”

Adare hesitated. Oshi's mind was far more feeble than she had initially realized, but the madness was easy to overlook. It usually manifested quietly, in endless, absorbed silences, or bouts of soft weeping. When he ranted, he ranted gently, muttering over and over again in his scratched voice to the birds or the wagon or his own fingernails. Whenever he grew particularly distressed, Nira was always there with a hand on his shoulder and sip from her crockery jar, the combination of which calmed the lost old man. Evidently something had gone amiss.

“We'll find him,” Adare said. She squinted, trying to make out the scope of the pilgrims' camp. It was large, but not impossibly so. Maybe forty or fifty fires and as many wagons spread over a couple of acres. “He can't have gone far,” she said, gesturing. “We'll split up. Check the camp—”

“I've checked the camp,” Nira snarled. “Twice. He's gone, and no one saw him go.”

Adare drew back at the woman's tone. She had grown accustomed to the harsh language, but this was something new, something harder and sharper.

“How long were you away from him?” she asked carefully.

Nira took a deep, shuddering breath. “I left just before dark. Needed to pick up some fish. I told him to stay by the fire, which he generally does.”

Since sunset, then. A fit man could have run a couple of miles, but Oshi was not a fit man. The canal bounded them a few hundred paces to the west, which meant he could go north or south along the road, or east into the fields.

“Has he done this before?” Adare asked.

“Not for a long, long time.”

Before Adare could reply, Lehav stepped around the wagon, a hand on the pommel of his sword. She couldn't make out his eyes, but there was something alert in his posture, something ready. Two pilgrims flanked him, both obviously fighters, one still carrying a shank of dripping meat.

Lehav glanced from Adare to Nira, then back.

“I heard shouting,” he said.

Adare nodded. She wanted Lehav's attention even less than she wanted to sit through the nightly sermons, but shying away now would look odd. Besides, if he could assist in finding Oshi, so much the better.

“We need your help,” she said, hesitated, then wrung her hands, hoping the gesture might look suitably pathetic.

One of the men—a short, heavily muscled brute with a frog's mouth—leered at her, then turned to Lehav.

“Lady needs your help, Captain. Pretty little thing, all flushed and outta breath. Reckon you oughta give her some … help.” Adare could see his tongue in the firelight flicking between his lips like a pink, feral creature.

“I'm not a captain, Lodge,” Lehav said absently, glancing over the wagon. “Left the legions a long time ago.”

“Sure thing, Captain,” the frog replied, grinning.

“Knock it off, jackass,” said the soldier to Lodge's right, slapping him across the back of the head roughly. “The young woman's a pilgrim, like us. Not some silly, savage slut from the frontier.”

Lodge frowned, but fell silent.

Lehav ignored the exchange entirely. If he felt any desire to spring to Adare's defense, he didn't show it. The fact that he'd saved her back in Annur sometimes tempted Adare to think of him as an ally. It was a dangerous temptation.

“What do you need?” he asked, fixing her with a stare.

“Oshi's wandered off,” she said, trying to keep her voice high and frightened. “You know the old man? Nira's worried about him.”

Lehav shifted his gaze from Adare to Nira. “I've heard you talking,” he said, the mildness of his voice belying the edge in his words. “I've heard your heresies.” He shook his head. “I don't know why you joined this pilgrimage, but if you're worried about your brother, you can find him yourself.”

Adare started to protest, but Lehav cut her off with a quick chop of his hand.

“It's bad company you keep, Dorellin. Sinful company. River blindness is one thing; make sure you aren't blinded to Intarra's light at the same time.”

Before she could respond, the soldier turned on his heel and stalked off into the night, his two companions following.

It was a measure of Nira's fear that she didn't curse him, didn't even seem to register his departure.

“It's all right,” Adare said. “We don't need him. The two of us can check the road, one north and one south. We'll be faster than your brother.”

“Ya can't even see at night, not beyond the fires, not with that thing wrapped over your eyes.”

“I'll move slowly. I'll call out.”

Nira hesitated, then nodded curtly, anger and confusion yielding to something like her customary stony resolve. “I'll go south.”

“We'll find him, Nira,” Adare said, laying a hand on the older woman's arm. She was surprised to find her trembling. “He hasn't been gone that long, and out here it's just fields and the canal—he can't get into too much trouble.”

She turned and hitched up her robe, but Nira stopped her.

“Wait,” she said, voice low. Adare turned back, and the woman grasped her wrist with one clawlike hand, skewering her with a level gaze. “If you find him … be careful.”

“I'll make sure he doesn't hurt himself,” Adare assured her.

Nira shook her head. “Don't be careful
for
him, you fool. Be careful
of
him.”

Oshi's arms were twigs. His neck didn't look capable of holding up his bald head. And yet the old woman's voice burned with a fierce urgency, and she refused to release Adare's wrist.

“When you find him,” she pressed, “bring him directly to me.
To me
. And try to keep him calm.”

“It'll be all right,” Adare said, pulling away gingerly, suddenly worried. “It will be all right.”

*   *   *

Adare waited until she was beyond the ambit of the fires, then pulled off her blindfold. It was a risk, probably a foolish one, but something in Nira's tone, in the old woman's trembling arm, made her want to hurry, and she couldn't hurry with the muslin wrapped over her eyes. She kept the knot in the cloth, ready to pull it back on if someone approached. Then she started running.

It was hard to gauge distance in the darkness, but from the ache in her calves and the turning of the stars in the sky, Adare figured she must have backtracked on the road at least two miles, calling out Oshi's name occasionally, alternately scanning the open ground sloping down to the canal and peering into the growing stalks to the east. Night and moonlight had leached away the green fecundity of the fields, leaving only gray stems and the shadows between them. If Oshi had wandered even a little way from the road, if he had fallen among the ripening crops, Adare might pass within a few paces without noticing him. She told herself, when she finally turned back, that the old man had gone a different direction, that Nira had already found him, but when she returned to the sprawling camp she found Nira standing by the side of the road, alone.

“Anything?” Adare asked, though the answer was clear enough.

Nira shook her head. Her jaw was tight, the skin stretched taut across her knuckles where she gripped her cane.

“We must find him.”

“It'll be easier when the sun rises,” Adare pointed out.

“It will be too
late
when the sun rises,” Nira snapped.

“Too late for what?”

“To help him,” the woman replied quietly.

Adare looked over the camp. Searching for one man in the darkness was a fool's errand, especially if he was too mad to hear his own name when they called it. Especially if he didn't want to be found. It was clear, however, that Nira intended to keep looking until she collapsed from exhaustion, and in the world outside the walls of the Dawn Palace, she was the closest thing Adare had to an ally.

“We haven't searched down by the canal,” Adare pointed out.

“I can see clear ta the water from here.”

“He could be just over the bank. Could have fallen in.”

Nira hesitated, then nodded. “You go north along the bank. I'll go south.”

Halfway to the canal, Adare started to lose hope. Though the ground was uneven, riddled with divots and small depressions, it offered no place a grown man might disappear. She pressed on anyway, partly out of stubbornness and partly just to see the thing through. There was no telling if there might be a thin sandbar where the current had undercut the shore. It seemed unlikely, but there was no way to rule it out without looking.

She was almost to the water when she heard the sound. At first she thought it came from the deckhands on one of the canal vessels, a few men up late drinking plum wine and singing at the moon. When the breeze dropped, however, she realized it wasn't singing at all, but a high, thin keening, a human voice, ragged and tremulous as a harp string tightened to the breaking point. The language was unfamiliar, if it was a language at all and not simply the raw expression of grief and confusion. The voice sounded close by, but Adare couldn't see anyone, nor any trees or bushes that might obscure a person. Shoulders tightening, she moved down the bank.

She almost walked directly into the pit. No, she realized, pausing on the rim, peering down into the shadow below, not a pit, a foundation. It was small, maybe fifteen paces across, and the large stones at the lip had mostly tumbled inward. The few that remained teetered precariously, cracked and covered with moss, hidden by the tall grass and uneven ground. Down at the bottom, a few paces below her, Oshi crouched in the corner, golden robes ripped and begrimed, palms pressed to his ears as though to drown out the sound of his own voice.

“Nira,” Adare called, looking over her shoulder for the old woman. She was searching the canal bank a little way to the south, and Adare had to call once again, more loudly, to get her attention. “He's here!” she said, gesturing toward the yawning hole in the earth. She turned back to find Oshi staring at her. He had fallen silent, worrying his upper lip with his teeth, and begun rocking back and forth in a quick, convulsive rhythm.

“Oshi,” Adare called down to him. Nira's warning flitted through her mind, but the man was clearly lost, helpless, maybe even injured. “Oshi, why don't you come back to the wagons?”

His eyes darted from her, to the ragged clouds above, to his own palms, which he held before his face as though they were ancient and inexplicable artifacts. Adare took a deep breath, picked out a collapsed section of wall where she could scramble down into the pit and, awkwardly clutching the lantern, slid down into the foundation, landing off-balance, but managing to keep her feet. She turned to find Oshi glaring at her.

“What happened to my tower?” he breathed, gouging at the dirt between the stones. His voice rose, “Who wrecked my tower?”

Adare considered the foundation. It may have once supported a slender tower, but farmers had long ago carted off the stone for their own walls and houses. How Oshi found it in the first place she had no idea, or how he had clambered down the uneven walls without hurting himself.