The Providence of Fire (30 page)

“Who destroyed my tower?”
he demanded once more, louder this time, rocking more violently. “Shihjahin? Dirik?
Who?
”

Adare took a step back.

The man was mad. Ranting. Shihjahin and Dirik were two of the Atmani, both a millennium and more in the ground. Oshi must have been paying close attention to the ancient structures fronting the canal, absorbing the long arguments between the pilgrims over the leach-lords who had built them. He'd come untethered from reality, from his own time, drifting back centuries upon centuries to an era of war and horror.

He had stopped rocking, stopped moving entirely. He sat straight up, still as a statue.

“Are you all right?” she asked hesitantly.

His eyes shifted to her, picked her over, then shifted away. Adare was about to step closer, to wrap an arm around his shoulders as she'd seen Nira do so many times, when he slapped his hands together, an imperious gesture, part summons, part warning, then spread his palms slowly. Adare realized to her horror that the air between them had caught fire, the squirming blaze a dozen times brighter than the meager light of her lantern. An icy sliver of fear pricked the back of her neck.

A leach. Nira's brother was a leach, and one descended partway into madness.

“Did Dirik send you?” he asked, voice gelid.

He flexed his fingers as he spoke, and the fire coalesced into a bright, burning web, malevolent red filaments pulsing. A leach. There was a whole ministry in the Dawn Palace—Purification—given over to the rooting out and hunting down of leaches, and each year dozens of young ministers were killed confronting their quarry. Adare's stomach squirmed inside her like a fish. She had faced down Uinian, but that was with il Tornja by her side and a trained assassin backing her play, all in the full light of day.

This … this was something else.

“Oshi,” she began, trying to speak slowly, quietly, the way she'd heard the kennel masters talk to their wounded dogs. “Oshi, it's just me. Dorellin.”

He frowned, flicked a finger, and a small web of flame broke off from the great ball spinning slowly between his hands.

“Your name doesn't matter,” he said, shaking his head. “It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. You are Dirik's knife. Or Ky's. Or Shihjahin's…” He trailed off as the scrap of flame rose and spread, stretching out like a net, floating, Adare realized, for her. She felt bile rise in the back of her throat, opened her mouth to scream, and vomited instead, her whole body trembling and weak. She glanced at the walls, but they looked higher, steeper than they had from above. She might have been standing at the bottom of a well.

“I will cut away the layers,” Oshi rasped, showing his teeth, “strip the skin from your face, flay the muscle from your bone, deeper and deeper, until I find out whose creature you are.”

The great web stretched wide just a pace in front of Adare, swaying like a snake, the strands shifting and flexing. Oshi started to ball his hands into fists. Adare sobbed once, paralyzed, and then Nira was there at the rim of the pit, cane brandished before her as though to beat back the horrible, writhing kenning.

“Roshin,” she snapped, voice laden with anger and grief, but hard, determined. “
Roshin!
Stop this at once.”

Roshin,
Adare thought, a tiny part of her brain still calm, curious, a stone unmoved by the buffeting terror. The fifth of the Atmani, the brother of … “Rishinira,” she breathed, turning to the small woman behind her. It was impossible. The Atmani were ancient history, practically myth, destroyed by their own madness and paranoia. The Deaths of the Undying were familiar tales, a favorite subject of painters for more than a thousand years: Dirik and Ky, wrapped in a fatal embrace, a desperate clutch that might have been love, save for his hand on her throat and her fingers gouging at his eyes. Chirug-ad-Dobar impaled on Shihjahin's lance, and Shihjahin's own stand, the lone leach atop his rocky hill, land boiling about him as his own armies closed in. They were dead, dead and gone.

Not all of them,
Adare reminded herself.

The fates of the youngest of the Atmani—Roshin and Rishinira—were unknown. Some historians claimed that they perished early in the civil wars that rent both the empire and the land itself. Others argued that they fell in the final siege of Hrazadin, their bodies broken and lost beneath the rubble. There were, naturally, a few dissenting voices, stubborn writers who insisted that the last of the Atmani had somehow escaped the violence and destruction engulfing half of Eridroa. Lian Ki's most famous painting,
Flight of the Immortals,
depicted two cloaked figures, tiny inside a frame filled with fire and destruction, picking their way across the blasted landscape toward the inky darkness of the horizon. Lian had cloaked their faces in shadow, and Adare stared at the woman behind her, then at the man.

“Roshin,” Nira said again, gesturing to the web. “Put it away. At
once
!”

“Rishi?” he said, confusion blooming in his dark eyes as he peered up at her. He gestured to the crumbling stone around him. “They destroyed it, Rishi. They destroyed everything.”

Nira grimaced. The web still hung before Adare, but it had withered, the fire fraying, fading to the sullen red of old coals.

“It is long over, Roshin,” the woman replied, eyes fixed on her brother. “They are gone now. They cannot hurt us anymore.”

“What about
her
?” Oshi wailed, stabbing a finger at Adare.

“She is a friend,” Nira replied.

“A friend,” the old man said quietly, as though testing an unfamiliar word. “Our friend?”

“Yes,” she replied. After a moment, the unnatural fire died, leaving its writhing lines seared on Adare's vision. The cellar hole fell into shadow as Oshi dropped his hands. With surprising agility, Nira clambered down the rough stone walls, dropping the last few feet to land beside her brother. “Here,” she said gently, sliding a bottle from somewhere in her robes, uncorking it with a thumb, then holding it to his lips. “Drink, Oshi. You will feel better.”

“Better?” he asked, baffled, peering into the darkness. “Will it ever be better?”

“Yes,” Nira said, tipping back the vessel. Some of the pungent liquid spilled down his chin, but he slurped at it greedily. “It will get better,” she murmured.

When he'd emptied the bottle, he settled slowly to the ground, then lapsed into sleep, leaning half against his sister, half against the rough wall behind him, lips twitching as though trying to form words.

Nira considered the foundation, then shook her head wearily. “I had forgotten this was here,” she said, partly to herself, partly to her sleeping brother. “After all these years, brother,” she went on softly, “and you were the one to remember.”

“What is it?” Adare breathed.

The woman turned to her, as though realizing for the first time that she was still there, eyes narrowing, hand closing protectively over Oshi's shoulder.

“A place that was pleasant for him, once,” she replied.

Adare just shook her head, uncertain how to respond.

“He was going to kill me,” she said finally.

“Yes,” Nira said. “He was.”

“Why?”

“His mind is gone. They destroyed it. They destroyed all of us.”

“Who?” Adare asked, trying to make sense of the elliptical statements. “Who destroyed you?”

“The ones who made us. Who made us what we were.” She grimaced. “What we are.”

“Atmani,” Adare breathed quietly.

For a long time, Nira didn't respond, not even to nod. She turned from Adare to gaze on her brother's sleeping face, on his chest, slowly rising and falling.

“You have trusted me with your secret, girl,” she said finally, not looking up, “and now you have mine. Betray it, and I will tear out your heart.”

 

15

It proved nearly impossible to track the passage of days inside the cold chambers of the Dead Heart. There was no sun or moon. There were no stars to follow in their circuit through the sky, nothing but smoke, and damp, and the constant stench of salted fish. Kaden was given his own small cell in which to sleep, but whenever he opened the door he found a guard outside—sometimes Trant, sometimes another of the Ishien. Each time, he demanded information about Tan or Triste, neither of whom he'd seen since arriving, and each time he was refused. His own impotence in the face of the armed soldiers was galling, but he couldn't think of any way around it. The Ishien had blades and bows; he did not. The Ishien had military training; he did not. He briefly considered trying to wrest a weapon from one of his guards, but could dream up no scenario in which such defiance ended in anything other than his own death or imprisonment.

While the guards allowed him to move freely between his cell and the mess hall, the rest of the fortress was off-limits. At first, Kaden tried spending more time at the long tables where the men ate, hoping he might learn something about Triste or the Csestriim. The Ishien, however, proved guarded to the point of paranoia. Some glared at him, clutching to their silence like a shield. Some screamed in his face. Most simply ignored him, moving around him as though he were no more than another wooden chair.

It was maddening not to know what was going on, either inside the Dead Heart or beyond. For all Kaden knew, Annur had fallen into the grip of some Csestriim tyrant while he wandered the subterranean halls. His frustration, however, was solving nothing, and so he crushed it out, gave up talking to the Ishien altogether, and started spending the majority of his time in his cell instead, cross-legged on the stone floor, practicing the
vaniate
.

The trance didn't seem important, not compared to Triste's imprisonment, or the uncertainty of Valyn's fate, or the murder of the Emperor of Annur. But Kaden couldn't do anything about Triste, or Valyn, or his own dead father. What he
could
do was practice the
vaniate
. He could make sure that if the time came when he needed it, he would be ready.

Despite having entered the trance several times in the Bone Mountains, he still found it surprisingly fickle and elusive. Some days he could fall into the emptiness after only a few breaths; others, the whole exercise proved impossible, like trying to grasp an air bubble under the water. He could see it, but not feel it. Touch it, but not hold on to it. When he closed his mind's fist around its shimmering absence, it slipped away.

With nothing else to occupy his hours he set about the task grimly, pausing each day only to eat a little fish, to use the crude latrine carved into the stone a few doors down, to sleep in brief stretches. There was no way to tell time in the sunless, starless dark of the Heart. He pushed himself until sleep claimed him where he sat, slept as long as his body allowed, and then when he woke to sharp stone against his cheek, or a pressure in his bladder, or the unremitting chill of the place, he would rise, blink away the exhaustion, square himself once more in the center of his cell, and close his eyes. It was a grim study, but it gave a shape to his shapeless days, and after a time he found he could slide in and out of the emptiness almost at will.

At least while motionless. With his eyes closed.

When he'd mastered that, he set about entering the trance with his eyes open. It was far more difficult, as though the world itself blocked him from the blankness, but he kept doggedly at it, determined to wrest some value from the long, dark days. He was in the middle of just such an effort, staring at the flame of his lone candle, willing away his self, when Tan pulled open the heavy wooden door, stepping into the space before Kaden could register surprise or alarm.

The older monk took in the scene at a glance, then nodded. “The emptiness comes more easily now.”

It was not a question, but Kaden nodded, grinding away his confusion, surprise, and irritation at Tan's unexpected arrival.

“You should be able to reach it running,” the monk said. “Fighting.”

“I'm still working on just keeping my eyes open.”

Tan shook his head. “Not anymore. Not now. Come with me.”

Kaden stared. “Where are we going? Where have you
been
?”

“With the Ishien. Trying to learn something about the girl.”

“While I've been a prisoner.”

“I warned you that we took a risk in coming here.”

“We?” Kaden asked. “It looks like you have the run of the place.”

“Does it?” Tan asked, fixing him with a stare. “Is that what you have decided after observing me so closely?”

“You're not locked in a cell.”

“Neither are you,” Tan said, turning to the door behind them, pulling it firmly shut. When he turned back to Kaden, he lowered his voice. “The Ishien distrust me for leaving, and they distrust me for returning. My position here is almost as tenuous as yours. Any support I offer you will weigh against me in their scales.”

He fell silent, but the rest was clear: Tan was the only link between Kaden and the outside world. If the Ishien turned on the older monk,
really
turned on him, they were all finished.

“All right,” Kaden said slowly, “I understand. How is Triste? What are they doing to her?”

Tan considered the question, gaze weighing, measuring. “They do not understand what she is.” Another pause. “Neither do I.”

“What do you mean?”

“What we've observed is inconsistent. We need more information.”

Kaden frowned. “And that's why you're here,” he said after a moment. “That's why you've come to me. Why they
sent
you to me.”

Tan nodded. “Triste knows you. She appears to trust you. The Ishien believe, as I do, that she might reveal something to you.”