The Providence of Fire (50 page)

No,
he realized, shock blazing over his skin before he managed to snuff it out.
Not a sword, a spear.

A
naczal.

The first two men went down without a sound, one with a slit throat, the other stabbed through the chest. The third Rampuri Tan hamstrung. The Ishien fell, trying to bring his sword to bear as Tan shattered his skull. Hellelen stood a moment longer, lips pulled back in a snarl. He feinted right, danced left, but Tan ignored both motions, lashing out with one end of his spear, then spinning it in a great, vicious arc that hacked halfway through Hellelen's neck. The monk didn't even watch the body slump to the floor, turning instead to Kaden.

“You are a fool,” he said.

“There's a way out,” Kaden insisted, stabbing a finger at the pool behind them.

It was less than no explanation. It didn't explain Kiel or Triste, didn't begin to tell how the motionless water could lead to safety, but after a glance at the dark surface, Tan seemed to understand.

“You are trusting your life to a Csestriim,” he said grimly.

“There was no other choice,” Kaden spat. “I'm not leaving Triste.”

“We are not all what you fear,” Kiel said quietly. “I am not Tan'is. Not Asherah.”

The monk locked gazes with the prisoner, then shook his head curtly. “It hardly matters now. The dice are already thrown.”

“Stay close to us,” Kaden said. “In the tunnels.”

“No,” Tan replied. “There is no time. I will cover your retreat.”

“You don't have to—” Kaden began, but even as the words left his lips, Matol charged around the corner, a dozen Ishien flanking him, then skidded to a stop at the sight of his quarry. He paused, flexed his free hand, then smiled.

“I will flay the skin from each of you piece by dripping piece.”

“You are welcome to try,” Tan said, turning toward him, the
naczal
light in his hands. “Go, Kaden.”

“I don't—”

“Go.”

The
vaniate
came grudgingly, but it came at last. While Tan held back the Ishien, his spear bright and faster than thought, Kaden found the trance, dropped into it as though into a deep well while Matol roared, bodies crumpled, and blood ran over the stone.

“Follow closely,” Kiel said, then stepped into the pool.

The last thing Kaden saw before the water folded over him was Rampuri Tan, his teacher and tormentor, the last and hardest of the Shin monks, fighting desperately, viciously, trying to hold back the Ishien for another heartbeat, and another, and another, fighting to buy Kaden time to escape. In the blankness of the
vaniate,
Kaden watched as the monk fought and staggered, watched, but could not care.

*   *   *

The darkness of the flooded levels of the Dead Heart was cold, absolute, and crushing. Even deep inside the
vaniate,
Kaden could feel fear prowling the edges of his mind like a winter-starved wolf, could feel his muscles wanting to buck, kick, thrash. Normally he would have taken deep, long breaths to quell the faint agitation, but there was no breath to be had in the watery maze, and so he counted the beats of his heart instead, feeling the muscle contract and relax, contract and relax, and he moved forward with careful strokes of his arm, measured kicks of his legs below the knee, keeping one hand fixed firmly on Triste's ankle.

Her flesh was so cold beneath his touch that she might have been dead already, drowned beneath the great weight of water and stone, save for the occasional jerk or spasm when Kiel bumped her up against some hard, invisible corner. Kaden tried to envisage the darkness around them as halls and rooms, corridors and entryways, the normal architecture of human habitation, but it was no good. There was only the darkness, and the cold, and the salt, and the stone. It didn't feel like the world at all, but like the weightless, shapeless dreamscape of nightmare.

For all his recent training with the
vaniate,
the trance felt tenuous, as though a sharp jolt might shatter it. He tried not to think what would happen if he slipped from the calm into the relative clamor of his own mind. The
vaniate
was keeping him alive during the slow, creeping passage, but more important, it would allow him to pass the
kenta
at the end. Without it, the gate would annihilate him.

Feel the water on your face,
he reminded himself.
Feel the wet cold on your skin. This is the world. The future is a dream.

Around his eight hundredth heartbeat, Triste began to twist and jerk. At first the motions were just spasms, like the twitch of a leg from one on the edge of slumber. Within a few dozen heartbeats, however, she had begun to thrash and flail, kicking her legs madly as the panic seized her, heel striking Kaden in the head, the eyes, over and over as he struggled grimly to hold on to her ankle and the
vaniate
both.

Kaden's own chest felt tight and his lungs burned. Triste couldn't have much longer. Her body was rebelling, the instinct to tear her way free of danger crushing whatever part of her reason that tried to resist. It was making Kiel's work harder, although the Csestriim labored on, hauling her down the invisible corridor, moving, if anything, even faster than he had, although it was difficult to gauge speed in the darkness. There was only the water, the cold, Triste's terror, the rough stone, and the awful empty airlessness searing Kaden's own chest, the sluggish weight of muscles barely able to move.

They were going to die down there, all three of them, their bodies vanished inside a fortress that had, itself, vanished from the world. Sadness beckoned, like faint sunlight seen from beneath deep water. Kaden turned away from it. If he followed that light long enough, he would burst from the
vaniate,
and he had no desire to face his own slow suffocation outside the trance.

The pain is just pain
.
The pressure of the water is just pressure. Listen to the movement of your heart. It is only a muscle. It is only meat
.

He repeated the words until his mind swam in the darkness with his body. It was a good place to die, a peaceful place. He let the darkness pour into him, fill him, flood him, until there was no line between his own flesh and the surrounding sea, until the ocean thrummed in him like his own heart, until, with an awful wrenching jerk, gravity seized him, hauling him, dazed and baffled, into the wide awful air and the blinding light of the sun.

Alive,
Kaden thought.
I'm alive
.

Deep inside the
vaniate,
the thought brought him no joy. No sorrow. It was a fact, nothing more.

 

26

Hundreds of years earlier the walls of Annur had actually ringed the city; torches had blazed in the guard towers punctuating their length while armed men walked the parapets, spears in hand. It had been generations, however, since any foe posed a plausible threat to the capital, and Annur had long ago burst its seams. The houses and warehouses, stables and temples spilled out into the countryside, eating up the open fields and burying the walls behind entire neighborhoods—Newquarter, Canal, Fieldstreets—all of them utterly exposed. From the fields, Adare stared at the city's outermost buildings—a motley collection of stone granaries and stilted teak houses built over the canals and streams—dread gnawing at her guts.

Water buffalo cropped the early summer grass, ducks scrabbled for scraps in the dusty roads, two cranes balanced in the shallows of a trash-choked canal, beaks darting for fish, but there were no people. There should have been wagons on the roads and farmers in the surrounding fields, the chatter and hum of men and women going about their lives. Instead, there was stillness, silence, a hot sun stuck in the sky as though nailed there. The citizens of these outlying quarters of Annur were gone, or hiding, neither of which did anything to alleviate Adare's fear.

No army had met them on the long march north. At first, Adare had felt relieved by that, then surprised, then worried. Lehav had set a brutal pace, and the Sons had outdistanced all the wagons on the road. Still, dozens of canal boats had slipped past them, gliding effortlessly on the current, all packed with deckhands gaping at the army, all headed for Annur. For all their haste, there was no way they had stolen a march on il Tornja, and their approach—a straight shot up the canal road—left him with a number of ways to respond.

Each day, Adare expected her own scouts to return with news of an Annurian army camped athwart the road. Mostly, she had dreaded the word, but at least a battle on the road might take place well clear of the city. The armies would churn the fields to mud, ruining the season's crop, but if a crop was all that came to ruin as a result of her revolution, Adare would count herself lucky. The fact that the
kenarang
had not already opposed them terrified her. If he chose to make his stand in the cramped streets of the capital itself, houses would burn, shops and businesses. Men and women, Annurians, would die.

What's your plan, you bastard?
she wondered, standing in her stirrups, trying to peer into the shadowed gaps between the buildings.
What's your angle?

“Looks like he's aiming to meet us at the walls,” Lehav said, squinting through his long lens. “Good.”

Adare stared.
“Good?”

He nodded. “The old walls are at least ten blocks back, packed between houses and shops. We'll see what the scouts have to say about the fortification of the streets, but city fighting should give us the advantage. The legions train to fight on open ground, but the Sons have been drilling street warfare since before Uinian's death.”

“To fight us,” Adare said, studying him. “To fight the throne.”

“This fight's been a long time coming,” he said, meeting her gaze.

Adare clenched her hands around the reins of her horse. Her old general had murdered her father, her new general had been scheming for years to fight her empire, and her only councillor was a half-crazed leach. The fact that she was still alive seemed nothing short of miraculous, and the odds of remaining so loomed longer by the moment.

“If we go to the streets,” she said, “people will die. I've read about siege warfare. Houses will burn. Businesses. Whole quarters of the city could be destroyed.”

Lehav fixed her with a hard stare. “You came here to start a war. Or did you forget?”

Before Adare could respond, two riders cantered out of the city, hooves of their horses raising a nervous tattoo on the earth. Lehav raised the long lens again, watched for a moment, then grunted. “Ours.”

The men reined up before them, bowing in their saddles to Adare, then turning to Lehav.

“Defenses?” he asked.

The older of the two—a short man with a lopsided mouth and ears that looked nailed to the side of his broad head—frowned, then jerked a thumb back over his shoulder.

“Nothin', Commander. No folks in the streets, but no soldiers either.”

Lehav frowned, then glanced over at the other scout. “And you?”

“Same. No army. No sign of an army. There's no one at all on these streets here, but you get five or six blocks in and it's packed with folks, same as any other day, like they don't even know that we're here.”

“An ambush,” Fulton said. The guardsman had remained still as stone throughout the conversation, mounted on his own gray gelding just behind Adare's left shoulder, but he nudged the beast forward now. “Ran il Tornja will have his men inside the shops and houses. Once you commit your force to the streets, they'll close in behind you, cut your own army into pieces. Take you apart one block at a time.”

Lehav nodded. If he was irritated by the Aedolian's comment, he didn't show it. “They can't block every street,” he said. “We'll march west, come in through the Stranger's Gate—”

Fulton raised a hand, cutting him off, then pointed past them all, toward the city. “You may be spared the march.”

Adare pivoted in her saddle to find another knot of riders emerging from the buildings, maybe a dozen men on horses gleaming with silk and bronze. Unlike the scouts, the new party rode at a stately walk, pennons snapping at the breeze above, pennons stitched with the rising sun of Annur.

“Who is it?” Adare asked.

Lehav trained the long lens on the group. “Palace guards, squared up in a standard protective knot.”

“Who are they protecting?”

He shook his head. “I don't know him. He has long hair and…” He paused, squinting. “Looks like a blindfold over his eyes.”

Adare took a deep breath, held it a moment, then let it out, trying to order her thoughts.

“The Mizran Councillor,” Fulton ground out. “Tarik Adiv. Part of the delegation to retrieve Kaden.”

She nodded grimly. “Looks like he's back.”

Fulton and Lehav positioned themselves between Adare and the approaching horsemen. She glanced over her shoulder, reminding herself that an army stood at her back, then tried to keep her back straight and her hands steady on the reins as she watched the men approach.

When Adiv was still ten paces distant, he dismounted. Then, to her shock, he bowed low, lower than he ever had when she was merely a princess. It was hard to interpret that bow—something short of the obeisance owed to an emperor, and yet more than her own collection of titles warranted, certainly more than Adare had expected. Adiv was il Tornja's man. He had no reason to bow to her.

“Keep your distance,” Fulton said, stepping in front of Adare, broadblade naked in the morning light.

Adiv simply smiled. “Your loyalty does you credit, Aedolian, but I have no desire to harm the princess. Quite the opposite, actually.” He cocked his head to the side in that way he had, as though he were studying her through that heavy blindfold. “The regent has asked that I escort you to the Dawn Palace with all due respect.”