The Providence of Fire (9 page)

It has to be now,
she realized. Whether the Aedolians were innocent or not, whether someone was really following them or not, return meant discovery, and discovery meant failure.

My father is dead,
she reminded herself,
and I am his last blade.
Then, all in a burst, she yanked free.

Surprise twisted Fulton's features. “Minister…” he began, but before he could finish, Adare turned and darted west, deeper into the plaza, toward the canal that emptied into the Basin. She needed to get over the bridge spanning that canal, then to the narrow watercourse draining away to the west.
Just a few hundred paces,
she thought, feet pounding on the wide stones. Just a few hundred paces and she'd be safe.

“Birch!” the Aedolian bellowed. The younger guardsman spun around, stretching out an arm to stop her, but he was too slow, baffled into momentary hesitation by her unexpected flight.

Adare ducked to the left, felt the fabric of the dress twist between her legs, and for a moment she was falling, careening toward the broad paving stones. She caught herself with an outstretched hand, pain tearing up her thumb and into her wrist, stumbled a few steps, heard Birch cursing behind her, and then she was running again, the treacherous dress hiked up above her knees.

Men and women paused to stare as she raced by, faces looming up one after the next, a series of still portraits: a startled child with wide brown eyes; a canal hand holding a long hook, half his face maimed by a vicious scar; a blond Edishman with a beard braided halfway down his chest. Her hood had fallen back revealing her face, revealing her eyes. People began to point, to exclaim. A few children even ran behind her hollering “princess” and “Malkeenian.”

She risked a glance over her shoulder—whether for the Aedolians or her more mysterious pursuit, she wasn't sure. Fulton and Birch were charging after her, but they were a dozen paces back, and, with a flash of surprise, she realized that her plan, though battered, was actually working. The men were stronger than her by far, stronger and faster, but they wore a quarter of their weight in steel beneath those traveling cloaks. Adare had only her coin purse and the blindfold secreted beneath her robe.

Just a little farther,
she told herself.
A little farther and it won't matter who saw
.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been running, but suddenly she was almost there, almost to the narrow spillover people called the Chute. The Chute wasn't a proper canal. Unlike the half-dozen waterways that spread out from the Basin to the north, east, and west, all wide enough to permit the narrow canal vessels for which they had been dug, the side channel was barely six paces across, a miniature waterfall constructed to drain off the excess power of the canal's current so that the other channels snaking through the city might flow more placidly.

On other visits to the Basin and the Lowmarket, Adare had seen grinning, naked children riding the Chute. They would leap in from the bridge above, then let the frothing current carry them away west, out of sight between buildings cantilevered out over the water. It had looked easy, fun. As she hoisted herself onto the wide, low balustrade, however, she froze, staring in dismay at the water below. She had remembered a short drop, maybe a few paces, into a swift, refreshing current. Her memory, evidently, had failed her.

Something had transformed the Chute from a giddy little overflow suitable for childish games into a churning, roiling current thrashing over and into itself, tossing foam a dozen feet into the air. Adare clung more tightly to the rail. There were no children in sight.

Autumn,
she realized, her legs trembling from the frantic run and this new shock. She had seen the children swimming the Chute in early autumn, when the canals and the Basin itself sat at their lowest level. Now, though, it was the tail end of spring, and the current chewed ferociously at its banks like some hunger-maddened beast trying to break its bonds. Adare had learned to swim in the Emerald Pool back in the Dawn Palace. As a child, she had even prevailed upon her Aedolians to let her paddle around in the harbor on calm days. This, though—she wasn't even sure she
could
swim in that furious current, certainly not in her exhausted state, not with the weight of the wool dress pulling her down. She started to climb back from the rail. She could keep running, outdistance her pursuit on foot, lose them in the alleys and side streets of Annur, hide out somewhere.…

A shout from the base of the bridge froze her in place.

Fulton and Birch had already reached the span, the younger Aedolian one pace in front of his companion, both of them bellowing something incomprehensible. Both were red-faced and sweating, but both looked ready to run another mile. She wouldn't escape them on foot. She couldn't. It was the Chute or nothing. Adare stared as they approached, paralyzed by her fear, her indecision.

Do something,
she snarled at herself, glancing once more at the raging current below.
Do something!

And then, with a cry that was half sob, half defiance, she was over, tumbling uncontrollably toward the thundering current.

 

4

“Well, that's not on the 'Kent-kissing maps,” Gwenna shouted from her perch on the Kettral's other talon, pitching her voice to carry above the wind's fury.

Valyn settled for a nod in response, not trusting himself to open his mouth without losing his tongue to his chattering teeth. Back in the Qirins it would be good swimming weather already, but late spring in the Bone Mountains would be called winter anywhere else, especially when you were flying three thousand paces up. Even Valyn's heaviest blacks did little to blunt the biting wind.

He squinted through frozen lashes, trying to make better sense of the valley beneath them, a gouge running east to west, so deep and narrow he could only see the bottom when they passed directly overhead. They'd been quartering this section of the peaks for the better part of the afternoon, searching the desolate gray stone and ice for some sign of Rampuri Tan's lost city. The monk had given Valyn a rough idea where to look, but the details were hazy.

“I have been there only twice,” Tan told him earlier, his tone suggesting Valyn was a fool for pursuing the issue, “and I never approached from the air.”

Which meant a long and very cold grid search. The Kettral had the most accurate maps in the world—coastlines and rivers were easy to chart from atop a soaring bird—but no one had bothered to explore deep into the Bone Mountains. The granite spires and high, snowbound valleys were too rugged and remote to be of any military interest: no one was taking an army through the Bones, and, aside from a few rough mining villages far to the south, no one was living there either.

Valyn would have said that large-scale habitation was impossible this far north, but he could just make out, carved into the sheer granite wall of the deep valley directly below, a series of rectangular holes and open ledges. The stonework was so ancient, so roughened by wind and weather, that it took him a moment to realize he was looking at stairs and chimneys, windows and balconies, all honeycombing the vertical side of the cliff. Assare, the dead city promised by Rampuri Tan.

About time,
Valyn thought, clenching his jaw against the cold. He reached over to tap Kaden on the arm, then pointed.

Kaden took a firm hold on the overhead strap, then leaned out a little farther from the talon to get a better look. Despite his lack of training, he was handling these early kettral flights with surprising composure. Valyn himself had been terrified of the birds when he first arrived on the Islands, but Kaden, after asking a few straightforward questions about how best to mount, dismount, and position himself during flight, had endured the trip with no apparent anxiety, relaxing into the harness and watching the peaks with those impassive blazing eyes. When the bird completed a quarter pass over the valley, he turned back to Valyn and nodded.

Things had gone less smoothly over on the bird's opposite talon; Gwenna, irritated to be sharing a perch with Triste, spent half the flight prodding and repositioning the girl, frightening her while failing to make her either safer or more comfortable. It wasn't Triste's fault she didn't know the first thing about the riding of massive birds.

That she'd managed to stay alive, even to help when everything went into the shitter, said something about her resolve, her tenacity, but there were limits. The girl wasn't Kettral; she was a priestess of the Goddess of Pleasure, and a childhood in Ciena's temple learning about lutes, dancing, and fine wine had done little to prepare her for the rigors of Kettral travel.

Of course,
Valyn reminded himself,
I'd look just as uncomfortable if someone demanded that I play the lute.
They each had their weaknesses. The difference was, you didn't die if you screwed up a passage on the lute.

After a while, Gwenna gave up her half-assed attempts to help, abandoning Triste to swing in the cold wind. Valyn looked over, watching the girl huddle into herself, dangling miserably in her harness. She'd exchanged her shredded gown for the too-large uniform of one of the dead Aedolians, and though it hung on her like laundry flapping on a line, the ludicrous clothing did nothing to obscure her raven-dark hair or violet eyes. Next to Triste, the other women in the group looked dull, drab. Not that Gwenna was likely to give a shit about that. Clearly it was the girl's incompetence she considered unforgivable.

And Valyn didn't even want to think about what was happening over on the other bird. They were lucky to have the second kettral, the one left behind when they'd killed Sami Yurl's traitorous Wing—Suant'ra couldn't have hauled the whole group on her own—but adding another bird forced Talal into a flier's role, leaving Rampuri Tan and Pyrre to Annick's dubious tutelage down below. At least Gwenna had bothered to berate Triste about her flying posture; as far as Valyn could make out, the sniper had neglected her charges entirely, her hard eyes fixed on the terrain below, bow half drawn, despite the frigid wind. Fortunately, both Rampuri Tan and Pyrre seemed to have found the knack of hanging in the harness while holding on to the straps above. They hadn't plummeted to their deaths, at least, which was something.

We'll be down soon,
Valyn reminded himself, squinting at the ground below, trying to figure out the best spot for the drop.

It was clear why this valley, unlike the others, had been able to support human settlement: it was deeper, much deeper. Instead of the rough, V-shaped defiles that gouged the peaks all around, here the sheer granite walls fell away thousands upon thousands of feet, shadowing and sheltering a climate in the gorge below that was green rather than brown and gray, with real trees instead of the isolated and stunted trunks dotting the rest of the mountains. As they dipped below the upper rim, Valyn could feel the warmer, moister air. At the head of the valley, where the glaciers melted, a slender filament of waterfall tumbled over the lip, half hidden behind a veil of spray, shimmering, roiling, and reflecting the light, then splashing into a lake that drained out in a lazy river along the valley floor. Grass flanked the river; not the bunchy, ragged clumps he'd seen in the higher peaks, but real grass, green and even, if not particularly lush.

It was the city itself, however, the drew Valyn's eye, if
city
was even the right word. Valyn had never seen anything to compare to it. Stairs chipped from the stone face zigzagged from ledge to ledge, and while some of those ledges looked natural, as though huge shards of stone had simply peeled away, others were too regular, too neat, evidently chiseled out over years or decades. Ranks of rough, rectangular holes pierced the wall— windows into interior chambers. Other, smaller apertures might have served as chimneys or sockets for some lattice of wooden scaffolding long rotted away. It was difficult to gauge the scale, but the highest windows opened out at least a hundred paces above the valley floor, far higher than the tips of the blackpines below. It was a staggering accomplishment. Valyn tried to guess how long such a place would take to build, how many men and women had labored for how many years to hack their mountain home from the rock, but he was a soldier, not an engineer. Decades maybe. Centuries.

It was a beautiful spot. More importantly, you could defend it. The only approach into the gorge was from the east, up the horridly steep broken valley. Fifty men could hold the canyon mouth against an army with little need to do anything more than shove boulders down the scree. The flat land at the base of the cliffs offered plenty of space on which to graze animals and grow crops, and if an army somehow managed to force its way into the gorge, the city itself, adequately provisioned, looked capable of withstanding an indefinite siege. It was a good spot, a safe spot.

So why is it dead?

Rampuri Tan hadn't told them shit about the place, which was probably a good thing, since Valyn was having trouble believing the little he'd already heard. Evidently, the
kenta
was down there, somewhere. Evidently Kaden and Tan could use it to travel halfway around the world in a single step. The whole thing sounded ludicrous, but after eight years training with leaches, after seeing what Talal and Balendin could do with their strange powers, after Valyn's own experience in Hull's Hole, he was less ready to dismiss Kaden's story of the gates out of hand. Still, it would have helped to know what the 'Kent-kissing things
looked
like.

Valyn had hoped he might get a description of what they were searching for—dimensions, features—but Kaden didn't seem to know much more about the gates than the Csestriim bit, and all the monk would say was, “You find the city, and I will take us to the
kenta.
”