The Providence of Fire

10

The smoke was gone, and the shouting, and the rough stone beneath his feet. Kaden had walked from darkness and chaos into daylight, the sun shining hot overhead, warming his face, his hands. But the sun was wrong. At Ashk’lan it never rose so high in the sky, not even during the summer solstice. And the wind: warm and wet as a cloth drawn steaming from the wash and heavy with salt. The sounds, too, wrong: a keen skirling of seabirds; a scrape like rough steel across stone that Kaden recognized, after a moment, as waves. Gone, the spice of juniper. Vanished, the chill stillness of the granite peaks.

In the emptiness of the vaniate he registered the impressions one after another but felt no alarm, no surprise. These were facts, nothing more, details of the world to be noted, tallied. This is the earth. This is the sky. No fear attended the strangeness of the sight, no excitement its novelty. Here are the small, fork-tailed birds darting into the waves. Here is the sea.

Kaden glanced back through the empty gate, half expecting to see smoke and madness, to hear the shouted orders and cries of dismay from which he had just fled. But there was no darkness. There were no shouts or cries. All he could see beneath the arch of the kenta was a long line of unbroken swells, swift and silent as they rode the ocean’s back. Altogether elsewhere-a thousand miles off … two thousand … a few steps through the kenta-Valyn was fighting for his life, fighting or captured, dying or dead. It was real, but it didn’t feel real. It might have been a dream, all of it. It might never have happened. The sun, the sea, the sky, all of it seemed too much, too present, and suddenly Kaden felt like he was falling, unmoored from the ground below, the sky above, cut free from his own self, and he turned, searching for something more steady than the gray sea’s sway.

He stood on a grassy sward a few paces from the edge of a large bluff where the ground plunged straight down-a hundred paces or more-into the gnawing surf. Waves battered the rock, flinging spray into the air. The too-high sun cast a crisp, foreshortened shadow of the kenta on the earth before him, and after a moment, Kaden realized he was on an island, the whole thing no more than a quarter mile around, edged with cliff on every side. Beyond, the ocean stretched unbroken to the horizon, where heat blurred the line between heavy air and the heavier water below.

Before he could take in more, a figure stumbled through the gate, lurching into him, knocking him to the grass, shattering the vaniate like crockery. Not Tan. Too small to be Tan. Fear flooded in, knife-bright and sudden. Someone had followed him through the gate. It should have been impossible, but the gate itself was already impossible. Someone was on top of him, fingernails scratching at his eyes, hands groping for his neck, searching for some purchase as he twisted beneath the weight. Confusion and anger followed the fear, and he twisted out from beneath his assailant, struggling to protect his face and throat, to bring his emotion under control once again, to wrest sense from the chaos.

Long hair. Skin like silk. A scream like an animal makes when the jaws of the trap snap shut. The smell of sandalwood.

“Triste!” he shouted, pivoting to bring his weight to bear. During his time with the Shin he had wrestled plenty of panicked goats to stillness beneath the shears, but the girl, lithe though she was, weighed more than a goat, and the strength in her slender limbs surprised him.

“Triste,” he said again, bringing his voice under control, stilling his own emotion and willing a similar stillness upon her. “You’re safe. Safe. You’re through the kenta. They can’t pass…”

The words melted away as the girl relaxed against his grip, staring up at him with those eyes of hers. Her nearness hit him like a slap, the press of her hips as she shifted beneath him, the rise of her chest as she struggled for breath. She was steady now, her panic drained away, and yet for the moment he did not release her wrists.

“How are you here?” he asked. The last he’d seen of her she’d been collapsed on the crumbling floor of the orphanage, overcome by smoke. Even awake, she shouldn’t have been able to pass through the gates. That, after all, was the whole point of his years of training. He heard Scial Nin’s words once more in his mind: Men, whole legions, stepped through the kenta and simply vanished. But then, here she was, skin warm as sunlight against his skin, full lips parted slightly as her panting slowed.

“Kaden,” she said finally, releasing a long, shuddering sigh. His name sounded strange on her lips, foreign, like an old dialect spoken only in prayer.

“How did you pass the kenta?” he asked again. Then, even more urgently, “Is Valyn all right?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I woke up coughing. It was dark. Someone tried to grab me and I ran … I fell … here.” She glanced around, awe and fear warring in her expression. “Where are we?”

Kaden shook his head. “Far away from where we were.”

Triste’s eyes widened, but before she could respond, Tan stepped through the gate. Where the girl had stumbled, desperate, panicked, as though flung from the violence of the far side, Tan moved quickly but deliberately. His eyes were cold as water dredged from a winter well, reptilian in their indifference, their distance. The vaniate, Kaden realized, wondering if his own eyes had looked like that.

The monk scanned the island, glancing over the ring of impossible gates as though they were so many withered junipers. He ignored both the wide sky and the encircling sea, but when he turned his attention to Kaden and Triste, something moved in those eyes, like the flicker of a great fish glimpsed through winter’s thickest ice. His pupils dilated a hair and then he swung the naczal spear around in a curt arc, bringing the blade to rest against the fluttering pulse at Triste’s throat.

“What are you doing?” Kaden demanded, shock jarring the words from his throat.

“Get off her,” Tan said quietly. “Move back.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Move back.”

“All right,” Kaden said, half disentangling himself from the girl’s limbs. He reached toward the spear, to block it or push it back, then hesitated. The smallest nick of the blade could kill Triste. “All right,” he said again, standing, raising his hands. Emperor he may have become, but even the harrowing events of the preceding week had not completely effaced the old obedience of an acolyte. Besides, there was something new in the monk’s voice, something sharp and dangerous. In all the months of Kaden’s excruciating tutelage, he had heard indifference and disdain daily, but never this deadly focus, not even when Tan had faced the ak’hanath. He studied the monk’s face, but couldn’t tell if he remained in the vaniate. That frigid stare of his pinned Triste to the grass where she lay sprawled, the Aedolian uniform clutched about her. The bright tip of the naczal pressed at her throat.

“What are you?” Tan asked, each syllable distinct.

She glanced from Kaden to the surrounding sea, then shook her head.

“I don’t know what you’re asking.…”

Tan flexed his wrist and the blade slid a finger’s width, smooth steel over smoother skin. A moment later, blood welled in its wake: three drops, hot beneath the hot sun.

“Stop,” Kaden said, stepping forward, his mind scrambling to make sense of the scene. Moments before, they’d been struggling to escape the trap that was the orphanage, all focus on the kenta and vaniate, and suddenly, when Kaden wanted nothing more than to ask about Valyn, about the unfolding fight, about whether his brother was still alive, Tan had decided to turn on Triste. It made no sense. Triste was on their side. She had helped them to escape, had fled alongside him from the Aedolians through the vertiginous passes of the Bone Mountains, had, when the time came, played her part perfectly in the ruse that allowed them to defeat Ut and Adiv. The livid slice Pyrre had taken out of her cheek was proof enough of that. Kaden shifted toward her, but Tan brought him up short.

“Don’t.”

“I’m not going to let you kill her,” Kaden said. His heart slammed against his chest. He struggled to bridle it, to bring it under control, along with his breath.

“It is not your choice,” Tan replied. “Even you can see that.”

Kaden hesitated. Triste’s blood stained the tip of the naczal.

“All right,” he said, stepping back a stride. “I can’t stop you, but I can urge you to wait. To think.”

“It is you,” Tan replied, “who would do well to think. You might think about how she came here. About how she passed the gate. Before you are so quick to defend her, think about what it means.”

Triste, for her part, hadn’t so much as twitched when the blade cut. Her panic from a minute before had vanished.

“What are you doing, monk?” she asked carefully. Tan had caught her in an awkward position, half lying, half seated, but her body showed no strain. Her voice, frayed with panic a moment earlier, didn’t waver. She might have been reclining on a divan in the Dawn Palace.

“What are you?” Tan asked again.

“I’m Triste,” she replied, though she did not sound like Triste. She sounded older, braver, more certain. Kaden stared, studying her face as she spoke. “We escaped from Ashk’lan together. We went to Assare. Someone was attacking us just before I fell through”-she gestured with the barest nod of her head-“your gate.”

“I know your story, but it crumbles here. The Blank God is exacting. He does not permit emotion, and yet you fell through thrashing and screaming.”

“Your theories are wrong and so you put a blade to my throat?” Triste asked, arching an eyebrow. “It’s somehow my fault that you don’t understand the kenta?”

It was wrong, Kaden thought. All wrong. He studied her face. Where was the girlish innocence, the terror, the utter confusion that had poured off her moments earlier? Why did Kaden himself feel a shudder of fear when he met her gaze?

“I understand the kenta,” Tan replied, voice flat as a file. “It is you I do not understand.”

“Tan,” Kaden began carefully, “maybe the gates have … weakened somehow over thousands of years. Maybe anyone can pass now. It’s possible they don’t work the way we think.”

The monk paused. Behind and below them, the waves continued to gnaw at the cliffs. Sweat had begun to soak Kaden’s robe.

“They have not weakened,” Tan said finally. “My order tests for such things. Only Shin can pass the gates, and Ishien. And Csestriim.”

“No,” Triste said, shaking her head despite the blade at her throat. The fear was suddenly back in her voice, blood-raw and rank, as though she was just now awakening to her predicament. “I’m not Csestriim.”

Kaden tried to sort and assemble the new information-Tan’s accusation, Triste’s confusion, her lightning-quick shifts from terror to steely defiance back to terror, the sheer impossible fact of the gates themselves. For the second time since stepping through the kenta, he felt he had come unmoored from reality, lost on this fragment of land adrift in the sloshing sea with a monk who was not a monk and a girl who might not be a girl locking eyes over the haft of a spear left behind by a long-extinguished race.

“Tan,” he began, “what we need to do is-”

“Be clear on one thing,” the monk cut in, his low voice driving through Kaden’s own like a chisel through clean wood. “You are Emperor of Annur, but we are not in Annur. The fact that you have entered the vaniate means no more than that: you have entered the vaniate. You still cannot see clearly, nor think carefully, nor kill quickly, and all three may be required, and soon. Your feelings still blind you to the facts of the world. You are not yet what you need to be.”

“Here is a fact,” Kaden said. “She helped me.”

“A single fir is not the forest.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning there is more to her tale than helping you. Much more.” Tan kept the naczal at Triste’s throat at he glanced over at Kaden. “Destroy what you believe.”

Destroy what you believe. Another Shin aphorism. Another monastic exercise on which Kaden had spent years.

You believe the sky is blue? What about night? Storm? What about clouds?

You think you are awake? How quaint. Perhaps you are dreaming. Perhaps you are dead.

Grimly, Kaden set to work. According to the story, Triste was meant as a distraction, a lure to hold Kaden’s attention while the Aedolians went about surrounding his tent and butchering the monks. If so, she had proven utterly superfluous. He tried to imagine the scene without her-the arrival of the imperial delegation, the feast, the vast pavilion … Triste wasn’t necessary for any of it.

And then there was her endurance through the high peaks, endurance to match a Skullsworn assassin and two monks who had spent their lives running in the mountains. Where would a girl raised on the velvet cushions of Ciena’s temple learn to run like that? Where did she learn the ancient script of Assare? How did she know anything about the ravaged city? And the kenta … how had she passed unscathed through a gate that should have annihilated her?

Kaden forced himself to consider Tan’s claim. According to Sami Yurl, the Kettral leader Valyn had slaughtered, the Csestriim were involved in the conspiracy against his family, a claim buoyed up by the presence of the ak’hanath. Would immortal creatures, creatures of godlike intellect and perfect reason, give their plot wholly over into the hands of men, flawed men like Tarik Adiv and Micijah Ut? Kaden stared at Triste, trying to see past his own initial conception, to shatter the lens of belief. She looked like a young woman, but the Csestriim were immortal; age did not touch them. And then there was the stony calm she had showed just a moment before, as though her mask had dropped.…

“Hundreds of years ago,” Tan said, speaking as though they were all seated around a table back in the Ashk’lan refectory, as though his spear wasn’t leveled at Triste’s neck, as though she wasn’t bleeding, the delicate red stream staining the collar of her tunic. She watched him with wary, animal eyes, body tensed to flee. “During the final years of Atmani rule, when the leach-lords and their massive armies clashed, turning farmland to mud, blood, and ash, obliterating entire cities, two Ghannans from the hills north of Chubolo risked their lives to save the local children.”

It wasn’t like Tan to linger over stories, but as long as the monk was talking, he wasn’t killing Triste, which meant Kaden could pause, could try to order his thoughts.

“The Ghannans,” Tan continued, “a man and woman, went from city to city, town to town, sometimes arriving even as the dust kicked up by the encroaching armies darkened the sky behind them. From their own fortune, they were able to supply wagons and food. They were able to promise ships waiting in Sarai Pol, ships that would take the children to Basc, where the fighting had not yet reached. Parents thrust infants into their arms, lifted sobbing toddlers into the beds of wagons, instructed the older children to care for the younger, then watched as the caravan departed, pushing east just ahead of the coming violence.

“As promised, the ships were waiting. And as promised, the children were whisked away before Roshin’s armies swept across eastern Ghan. As promised, they arrived in Ganaboa. They were saved. Then they disappeared.”

“What does this have to do with me?” Triste asked, eyes wide. “With anything?”

Kaden glanced at her, then turned back to the older monk. “Where did they go?”

“For a long time,” Tan replied, “no one knew. The wars of the Atmani threw the world into chaos for decades. Uncounted thousands died, first in battle, then of famine, of disease. People weren’t able to protect their own homes, to harvest their crops. Basc might have been on the far side of the world. Parents prayed for their children, a few scraped together the coin to go looking, but none found them.

“That took the Ishien. More than thirty years after the two strangers led the children away, fifteen Ishien finally managed to follow the trail to the southern coast of Basc. It is all jungle. Almost no one lives there, but tucked away in the hills they found a small cabin, and beneath the cabin, a warren of limestone caves, and in the caves, a prison, a vast prison.”

“The children?” Kaden asked.

Tan shrugged. “Were adults. Or dead. Or crippled. The Ghannans, on the other hand, the man and woman who had saved them all-those two had not aged a day.”

“Csestriim.”

Tan nodded.

Triste stared, aghast. “What did they want with the children?”

“To experiment,” the monk replied grimly. “To prod and to test. They want to know how we work, how we are put together, why we differ from them. They nearly destroyed us thousands of years ago, and while we have almost forgotten, those Csestriim that survive have never given up the fight, not for a single day.” He turned from Triste to Kaden, stare hard as a hammer. “Consider the patience, to wait decades, centuries for the upheaval necessary to lead away so many children. Consider the planning, to have the coin stockpiled, the ships waiting at anchor, the caves and the cells prepared. The Csestriim do not think in days and weeks. They work in centuries, eons. Those who survived did so because they are brilliant, and hard, and patient, and yet they look like you or me.” He nodded toward Triste. “Or her.”

“No,” Triste said, shaking her head once more. “I would never do something like that. I’m not one of them.”

The monk ignored her, fixing his attention on Kaden.

“This is not something separate, some idle vendetta of my own that will distract you from the answers you hunt. If she is Csestriim, she is a part of the plot against your family and your empire. Erase Adiv and Ut from your mind. This creature is the one carrying the truth.”

Kaden stared, first at the monk, then at Triste, trying to make sense of it. She didn’t look like an immortal, inhuman monster, but then, according to Tan, neither had the Ghannans who stole the children. Parents had entrusted their families to the Csestriim.… Destroy what you believe. It all came back to that.

“You can’t kill her,” he said finally.

“Of course not,” the monk replied. “We need to know more. But this changes things.”

“What things?”

“The Ishien,” Tan replied. “I was wary of this course of action to begin. I am doubly so now.”

Kaden considered the response. In all the time he had known the older monk, Tan had never seemed really wary of anything: not Scial Nin, not Micijah Ut or Tarik Adiv, not even the ak’hanath.

“You’re concerned,” he said slowly, “about what the Ishien will think of Triste. About the fact that she passed through the kenta.”

“We don’t need to go,” she protested. “We can walk back through the gate.”

“When I want you to talk,” Tan said, pressing the blade against her neck firmly, “I will tell you.”

Triste opened her mouth to protest, then thought better of it, sagging back onto the grass, exhausted and defeated. Kaden wanted to comfort her somehow, to assure her that everything would be all right, but, when he searched for the words, found he had no comfort to offer. If she was what Tan claimed, his comfort would mean less than nothing.

“What will the Ishien do if they decide she is Csestriim?” Kaden asked.

The monk frowned. “The Ishien are unpredictable. In their long fight against the Csestriim, they have carved away much that made them human, not least of which is their own ability to trust. The Ishien believe the Ishien. Everyone else is a fool or a threat.”

“But you were one of them,” Kaden said. “Will they listen to you?”

“It will depend almost entirely on who leads them.”

“Who does lead them?”

Tan frowned. “A northerner named Bloody Horm, but he has been gone from the Heart for decades.”

“Gone?” Kaden asked, shaking his head.

“Hunting Csestriim,” Tan replied, “among the Urghul or the Eddish. What matters is who leads the Ishien now, in his stead.”

He paused, considering Triste. She watched him with frightened eyes, the way a hare watches the hunter when he comes to pluck it from the trap. “Regardless, bringing her may purchase a measure of respect. Fewer Csestriim walk the world than in the past. The Ishien find them very rarely.”

“She’s not some sort of token for us to barter,” Kaden said.

“No. She is far more dangerous than that.”

“I’m not what you think,” Triste said quietly, hopelessly. “I don’t know how I walked through that gate, but I’m not what you think.”

Tan watched her for a while. “Perhaps,” he said finally, then turned to Kaden. “You should remain here. It will be safer. I will bring the girl and speak with the Ishien.”

Kaden stared at the windswept island. “Safer?” he asked, raising his brows. “Any one of your Ishien could walk through these gates at any time. If they will distrust me arriving with you, they might murder me if they find me here unexpectedly.” He shook his head. “No. I started this. I will see it through. Besides, I need the Ishien. You might learn what I need to know, but I need to talk to them, to forge some sort of relationship.”

He had no idea how Triste had passed the kenta, no idea how Tan’s former brothers would respond to her sudden arrival or his own, no idea what he would do if it turned out Triste was lying, but the old fact remained: the Csestriim were involved in the plot against his family, they had killed his father, which made Kaden Emperor. He didn’t rule Annur-not yet-but he could do this.

“I’m going,” he said quietly.

Tan studied him for half a dozen heartbeats, then nodded. “There is no safe path.”

“Please,” Triste begged quietly. “Before I came through the gate, you were trying to convince Kaden not to go.”

“It is because you passed the kenta that I changed my mind.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“There is no other place where I am more likely to learn the truth about you.”

Triste turned to Kaden, eyes wide and frightened.

“Kaden…”

He shook his head. “I need to know, Triste. If it’s not true, I’ll see you free, I’ll take you away myself. I swear. But for my father, for my family, I need to know.”

The girl turned away, body sagging in defeat.

Tan gestured to Kaden. “Take the belt from your robe. Bind her. Use the slaughter knot.”

“And her feet?”

“A short hobble. We are not going far.”

Kaden glanced around himself once again. The kenta through which he had entered was not the only one on the island. Dozens of the slender, delicate gates ringed the periphery, as though the entire block of land had once supported an enormous tower. He imagined some awful storm toppling the structure-buttresses and corbels, ramparts and flutings, all of it-into the sea, leaving only the doors, dozens of stone arches open as silent mouths.

“These are the gates,” he said, shaking his head even as he slipped the belt from his robe. “This is what Nin described: the gates kept by the Malkeenian kings.” For the first time, he started to understand the power such gates could bring. To move from one end of the empire to the other in a few strides … it was little wonder Annur had remained stable over the centuries while other kingdoms fragmented and fell. An emperor who could cross from northern Vash to western Eridroa in a handful of steps would be almost a god. He half expected to see his father emerge from one of the kenta, chin bent toward his chest in that way he had when he was thinking. But no … Sanlitun was dead. The gates were Kaden’s responsibility now.

“Work,” Tan said, gesturing toward Triste.

Kaden knelt beside her, knees pressing into the damp earth. She met his gaze, even as he rolled her onto her stomach, his hands rougher than he had intended. He was used to trussing up sheep and goats, not men or women, and his belt dug deep into her soft flesh as he pulled it tight.

“Leave a loop,” the older monk said. “To guide her.”

“You’re enjoying this,” she said, disgust thick in her voice.

“No,” Kaden said quietly. “I’m not.”

She clenched her jaw as he pulled the rope tight, but refused to look away. “I didn’t spend my whole life in Ciena’s temple without learning something about men. Ministers or monks-you’re all the same. Makes you feel good, doesn’t it? Strong.” Kaden couldn’t tell if she was about to sob or snarl.

He started to respond, to insist that the whole thing was just a precaution, but Tan cut him off.

“Do not attempt to argue with her. Finish the work and have done.”

Kaden hesitated. Triste glared at him, tears standing in her eyes, then looked away. Not, however, before he had carved a saama’an of the rage and fear, the betrayal etched in her expression. He took a deep breath, then twisted the cloth once more before finishing the knot. A goat could slip free of such a loose knot, but Triste was not a goat, and he refused to cinch the rope any tighter. Still, the whole thing felt wrong. I’m not hurting her, he reminded himself. And if Tan’s right, all this is crucial. The thinking was sound, but he could feel what the Shin called the “beast brain” prowling, agitated, inside the steel cage of reason.

He straightened from his task, then, at the monk’s direction, pulled her to her feet. She swayed unsteadily. Tan’s naczal never left her neck.

“That way,” he said, gesturing with his head toward a gate on the far side of the island. “The girl first.”

“You don’t need to do this,” Triste began. She ignored Kaden, spoke through him to the older monk as though he didn’t exist. And for all the good I’m doing her, I suppose I don’t. He was surprised to realize the thought stung, and he went to work on the emotion, grinding it out as one would grind a stray ember from the hearth beneath a heel. Tan did not respond, just pressed slightly with that spear of his until Triste stumbled forward.

“Which one leads to the Dawn Palace?” Kaden asked carefully.

Maybe the older monk was right, maybe Triste was Csestriim, and evil, and bent on some nefarious purpose; in that case, Kaden would do what was necessary. Could he bring himself to kill her? He tried to imagine it, like butchering a goat, a quick pull on the knife, blood urgent as breath, a final spasm, and it would be done. If it turned out that Triste was in some way responsible for the slaughter at the monastery, for the deaths of Akiil and Nin, for Pater, for his father, he thought he could do it. But if she was not, if it were Tan whose vision was clouded, well then, the time might come when acquiring his own knowledge of the network of gates would prove crucial. “Are they marked in some way?”

“None leads to the Dawn Palace,” Tan replied. “Nin spoke the truth about the Malkeenians and the kenta, but the Csestriim built more than one network. Your lineage knows nothing of this island, these gates. Nor do the Shin.”

Kaden frowned. “Then how do you…”

“The knowledge of the Ishien is older than that of the Shin, more complete.”

The monk stopped them in front of one arch identical to the rest. Up close, Kaden could see the script carved into the keystone, a word or words; it was hard to be certain how many. Evidently there were scholars back in Annur who could read those sharp angles as though they’d been raised on the language, but Kaden, of course, had been afforded no opportunity to study with the scholars of Annur.

He eyed the arch, curiosity and caution warring within him, but it was Triste who spoke.

“Where does it lead?”

“You cannot read it?” Tan asked.

The girl bit her lip but refused to respond.

“You choose a strange time to begin your deception,” the monk observed. “You read a similar language in Assare.”

“I’m not Csestriim,” Triste insisted. “Even if I can read it.”

“What does it say?” Tan pressed.

“Tal Amen?” Triste said finally. “No. Tal Amein.”

Kaden shook his head.

“The Still … Self?” she translated, squinting as she did so. “The Missing Heart?”

“The Dead Heart,” Tan said finally.

Fear slicked a chill finger along Kaden’s spine. The arch looked like the rest of the arches: slender, still, almost inviting. Through the open space he could see the black-tailed seabirds darting into the waves, sunlight shattering off the broken panes of the sea. There was no telling what lay on the other side, but Tan’s translation promised something less inviting than this lost island.

“The Dead Heart,” Kaden said, trying out the words. “What is it?”

“It is dark,” Tan said. “And cold. Hold your breath as you step through the kenta.”

“Who goes first?”

“She does.” The monk nudged Triste forward with his naczal. “If the guards decide to loose their shafts, better her chest for the broadheads.”