The Providence of Fire (60 page)

“An alliance then,” Kiel said finally.

Kaden hauled his mind back to the present.

“Adare gives il Tornja legitimacy,” the historian continued, “while the
kenarang
provides her with military power and expertise, the imprimatur of victory in battle. And if they are sharing a bed once more…”

“Heirs,” Kaden concluded, shaking his head. He hadn't expected to recognize Annur, had expected the city to seem strange, confusing, indifferent to his return. He had not anticipated, though, finding it so fully turned against him, had not thought to find the conspiracy that led to his father's death so deeply rooted and flourishing.

Emotions buzzed inside him like wasps: anger, sadness, confusion. But he'd spent eight years learning to set aside his emotions, and he did so. He tried to remember what he knew of Adare from his childhood. She'd been an impetuous girl, impatient with the dresses and decorum that came with her station, impatient, it seemed to him now, with childhood itself. The one time he could remember his sister paying any actual attention to him was on the day he left for Ashk'lan. She had stood on the imperial docks, lips tight, eyes burning.

“Bid farewell to your brother, Adare,” their mother had said. “He is a child now, but when he returns, he will be a man, and ready to take the reins of the empire.”

“I know,” was all Adare had said before kissing him coolly on both cheeks. She never said farewell.

Kiel's eyes were fixed intently on the air between them, as though scrutinizing some shape or pattern no one else could see. After a long time, his gaze focused and he turned to Morjeta.

“Can you paint?” he asked.

She nodded. “Not as well as some of my fellow
leinas,
but it is one of Ciena's arts.”

“Ran il Tornja,” he said. “Tarik Adiv. I'd like to see what they look like.”

Kaden glanced at the man, suddenly grasping his intent. “You're wondering…”

Kiel nodded. “As you told me back in the Dead Heart, there were
ak'hanath
at your monastery, which means my people are involved.”

Morjeta frowned, then nodded. “I can make a passable likeness of both men, but it will take some time.”

“I'll paint Adiv,” Kaden said.

He volunteered as much for the excuse to plunge into something familiar as to expedite the process, and for a few heartbeats after Morjeta produced the necessary materials he did nothing but sit, brush in hand, staring at the fine blank vellum. It seemed a lifetime since he had contemplated something as clean, as straightforward as an empty page, more than a lifetime, as though he'd dreamed the endless hours seated on the rock ledges of Ashk'lan. Finally he dipped the brush into the porcelain saucer of ink.

As the bristles moved over the fine parchment, he felt the knots of his mind loosen. For the first time since fleeing the Bone Mountains, he settled into a rhythm he actually understood, the wetting and clearing of the brush, the faint pressure of the bristles on the page, the easy, fluent movements of the wrist and fingers. He let all thought of Adare and Annur drain from his mind, all worry about the Unhewn Throne, all the faint tangles of grief for his father. Instead, he filled his head with the image of the Mizran Councillor, his blindfold, the shock of hair, the angle of his chin. After the first strokes, even the sense of the man
as
a man faded. There was only light and shadow, hollow and form, teased out in dark ink on a light page. He found himself adding details, unnecessary details, as the painting neared its conclusion—the stiff collar, the mountains behind—until there was nothing left to draw and he reluctantly laid down his brush.

Kiel rose to consider the painting.

“No,” he said after just a moment. “I don't know him.”

“I'm almost finished,” Morjeta said, eyeing Kaden above her own canvas. “Where did you learn to paint?”

Kaden shook his head. The effort of explanation seemed too massive, like trying to unearth a buried stone for which he couldn't even find the edges.

The
leina
studied him a moment longer, dark eyes abrim with curiosity, then gave an eloquent shrug. “There,” she said, turning back to her own portrait, rotating it so that everyone could see. “It's finished.”

She had painted a bold figure with a strong chin and high cheekbones, lips open in a partial smile revealing a row of perfect teeth. Kaden had expected a stern, severe face, on the order of Micijah Ut or Ekhard Matol, a military man with a mind for tactics and blood. Morjeta's il Tornja, however, looked sly, almost jocular, as though he were on the verge of breaking into laughter.

Kaden frowned. “He doesn't look like Csestriim.”

“Csestriim?” the
leina
asked, blanching, eyes going wide. “Are you mad?” Then she met Kaden's gaze and dropped her eyes, bowing until her face almost touched the table. “A thousand apologies, Your Radiance…” she began.

Kaden raised a hand to cut her off, but at his side Kiel had gone utterly still.

“The expression is deceiving,” he said, voice low but certain. “Over the thousands of years, he has learned to smile.”

Kaden turned, feeling his heart kick in his chest. “You know him?”

The Csestriim nodded, but didn't speak. For a few heartbeats, everyone just stared, first at Kiel, then at the page, then back.

“And?”
Triste said finally.

“Like me, he has worn many names. The first was Tan'is.”

“Why did he kill my father?” Kaden demanded. “Why does he hate the Malkeenians?”

Kiel turned to him, eyes like wells. “Hate is a creature of the human heart. Those of us who gave birth to you are strangers to Maat's embrace. The general you call Ran il Tornja does not hate you any more than you would hate a stone, the sky.”

“So what does he want?”

“He wants,” the Csestriim said, measuring the words as he spoke them, “what he has always wanted. Victory.”

“Victory over
whom
?”

“Your race.”

“Well, he's getting pretty close,” Kaden said. “From the sound of it, he already more or less controls Annur.”

Kiel pursed his lips, then shook his head slowly, almost ruefully. “You do not understand. Victory, to il Tornja, is not a momentary matter of draping himself in garlands or sitting atop a throne.”

“It's not just any throne,” Kaden pointed out. “Annur is the most powerful empire in the world.”

“Annur is an eyeblink.”

“Hundreds of years of uninterrupted rule are an eyeblink?”

Kiel smiled. “Yes. Il Tornja's goals are deeper. Older. He is still fighting the war that we entrusted to him thousands of years ago.”

“When will he stop?”

“When you are gone.”

Kaden spread his hands in protest. “Why me?”

The historian frowned. “Your language is imprecise. Not just
you,
Kaden. All of you.”

Kaden stared. “All of Annur?”

“All of humanity.”

 

31

The day after the first Kwihna Saapi, as the Urghul folded their
api
and began to break camp, Gwenna knew she had been right. The blood-drenched spectacle wasn't just some arbitrary ritual carried out in accordance with the chieftain's whim or the phases of the moon: it was a particular sacrifice begging Meshkent's favor as the Urghul rode to war.

Long Fist's army had since crossed the White River north of the confluence, avoiding the Annurian forts to the east. The rafts ferrying the horses and their riders were ridiculous, precarious craft, crudely lashed and awkwardly balanced, but there were hundreds of them, hundreds upon hundreds, the numbers alone betraying months of preparation; Gwenna felt sick to her stomach when she saw them lined up along the shore. Long Fist didn't need rafts to defend his land. He needed them to attack.

By the time they'd crossed the river, the shaman had dropped all pretense of their “honored guest” status. Their tent was ringed with guards each night, and they weren't allowed out except in the evening, when they were forced to take part in the bloody nighttime rituals.

It had taken hours for Gwenna's hands to stop shaking after killing the first young soldier. After three more nights of blood and murder, she'd managed to bring her hands under control, but something inside her, something invisible, still trembled as though diseased. She felt like a fool; eight years she'd trained for this, trained to kill with blades and explosives, bows and bare hands, trained until she could choke someone twice her size with one arm or poison an entire legion. She had felt prepared, more than prepared, but when it came time, she found that while her hands could kill, nothing had prepared her mind for the horror. She couldn't shake the memory of the sick, soft give of the stick driving home, the weight of the first young man as he slumped forward, his slick, warm blood on her hands.

And the killing didn't end when Gwenna stopped. Each night, Annick had her turn between the fires, and Pyrre. There seemed to be no end to Long Fist's prisoners: Annurian legionaries, Urghul thieves, and, since they'd crossed the river, a handful of thick-fisted loggers, Annurian citizens living beyond the edge of the empire itself. None were any match for the Kettral or Skullsworn, a fact that filled Gwenna with both relief and disgust. After a while, the Urghul started trying to delay the killing, to draw out the pain, depriving the women of any weapons whatsoever. It didn't work. Annick always went straight for the eyes, accomplishing with her fingers what Gwenna had done with the stick, while Pyrre crushed the windpipe of every adversary with a single, casual blow of her stiffened fingers.

The fights were bad enough, but they were nothing next to the cutting and screaming that followed. Long Fist himself, arms drenched past the elbows in gore, had personally hacked the hearts from a dozen young soldiers staked into the earth. The shaman had a way with his knife, managing to avoid all the major arteries, to keep the victims alive even as he lifted the still-beating heart clear of the ribs, squeezing it in his fist. Unsurprisingly, Balendin had also taken to the work, eyes bright as he drank in the terror of his captives, hands horribly slow and sure as he flayed them, thin strips of skin pliant beneath his knife. It was one thing to hear about the worship of Meshkent in some lecture hall back on the Islands, something else to witness it. Something else to take part.

Worse, the horror of the nightly sacrifices was only a prelude to what would happen on a much broader scale during any actual invasion. If the Urghul broke across the frontier, there'd be a lot more screaming on a lot more altars all across northern Annur. The nightmares woke Gwenna at night, her blacks drenched in a heavy sweat. She'd wanted to try to break free as soon as she realized the army was moving, but Pyrre had talked her down. The assassin's attitude toward her captivity had soured significantly after the Kwihna Saapi began—evidently she preferred to murder on her own schedule—but she pointed out, to Gwenna's frustration, that any escape on the steppe would be short-lived. No trees meant no cover, and no cover meant that the Urghul could ride them down like dogs. Now that they were past the river and starting to move south, however, Gwenna was about finished waiting.

“That,” she said, stabbing a finger past the tent wall, past the Urghul camp beyond, over the wet broken ground and the dark trees fringing the horizon to the west, “is the start of the Thousand Lakes. Annur.”

“It's not Annur,” Pyrre corrected her, picking flakes of dried blood off her hands and flicking them into the fire. The evening's sacrifices had only just ended, and while Gwenna wished she could swim herself clean in the ocean, the assassin treated the human blood on her hands the same way she might a little honest mud. “It's not Annur until south of the Black. This is just…” She frowned with distaste. “… buggy.
But,
” she continued, raising her hands to forestall Gwenna's boiling objection, “we finally have some trees. I'd say that some point in the next few days would be a good time to bid our farewells, before we outlast our welcome and Long Fist decides to dispose of us more thoroughly.”

The Skullsworn's words made Gwenna queasy. They
were
prisoners inside the
api,
inside the camp, but for some reason, Long Fist and Balendin continued to allow them their own tent, to speak to them with mock solicitude. The whole thing seemed like a trap, but Gwenna couldn't see any point to it, not when the Urghul already had them trapped.

“Why hasn't he done it already?” she demanded, grinding her knuckles into her palm. “We're the most dangerous prisoners he has. Why aren't we tied up like the rest?” She gestured vaguely to the comforts of the
api
. “Why aren't we
dead
?”

“A hedge,” Annick suggested, not looking up from the bison haunch she was busy butchering. “In case Valyn comes back. Or in case he decides we might be useful.”

“Maybe,” Pyrre said, picking at the dirt on her pants with a fingernail. She'd been forced to kill three men just an hour earlier, but she seemed most concerned about the damage to her clothing. “But I suspect it's simpler than that.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we're not dead because Long Fist needs us alive.”

“For what?” Gwenna spat. “Fun?”

Pyrre looked up, lips pursed as though ready to make some crack, then paused. “How does a man become a chief?” she asked finally. “A chief of
anything,
let alone a million Urghul?”

“Kills the people who want to kill him,” Gwenna said. “That's what I'm
saying
. Long Fist's a fool to leave us alive.”

Pyrre shook her head. “If he tried to kill everyone dangerous, he'd never get done killing. There's always someone who wants to murder a chief. Long Fist can't protect against them all. His position isn't fully secure.”