The Providence of Fire

12

Cold like a fist to the heart. Sudden, frigid darkness pressing against his chest, on his face, in his unseeing eyes. The vaniate shivered a moment, then sloughed away like a violently molted skin, and when Kaden opened his mouth to shout, icy brine forced its way down his throat, into his lungs, strangling him. Underwater, he realized. Too late to call back his squandered breath.

He started to grope for the gate, to try to haul himself back through into the light and the air, then realized that to enter the kenta in such a state of agitation invited an annihilation even swifter than that offered by the sea. He forced his body to stillness, willing his mind to follow. Dim lights flickered around the edges of his vision, but whether they were real or the product of a mind starved for air he couldn’t be certain. His body convulsed while his lungs tried to heave a breath where there was no breath to be had. Panic prowled the edge of thought, hungry, circling closer as the cold clamped down.

Breathe, he told himself, and then follow the breath. He raised a hand to his mouth, feeling for the bubbles as they trickled through his fingers, forcing himself to wait a moment to be sure. Then, with legs like lead, he kicked for the surface.

He broke from the relative silence of the water into chaos. Someone was thrashing a few feet away, and men were bellowing-two or three voices piled on one another: Stop … Kill them now … Put the bow down. The air was almost as frigid as the water and only slightly brighter. A few torches gave off more smoke than light, illuminating what seemed to be a stone chamber, a small grotto carved out by the sea. Kaden twisted in the water, mind desperately sifting the various shadows, searching for the source of the voices, for a place to haul himself to safety. A quick, hard blow caught him on the lip, driving his face back under the surface. He came up, the lights spinning across his eyes, mouth filled with blood and brine. Triste was still tied, he realized, tied and drowning.

He caught her beneath the arms.

“Still,” he gasped, trying to hold her up. “Be still.”

A moment later Rampuri Tan’s shaven head breached the water and with it, his voice:

“Memory,” he ground out, as though intoning the opening passage to some lost ritual, “is the heart of vengeance.”

Triste finally stopped her flailing elbows, and Kaden took a moment to seize a full breath. The passage through the kenta had practically drowned him, but the older monk spoke with his normal implacable force.

The other voices fell silent. Someone cursed. Then:

“And vengeance is the balm of memory.”

“I am Rampuri Tan.”

“I am Loral Hellelen.”

“Keep your bows on the girl,” Tan said, hoisting himself from the water onto a small stone shelf, ignoring the sodden weight of his robe as he stood. “She is more than dangerous.”

“And the other?”

Kaden still couldn’t see the speaker, but he stroked weakly toward the rim where Tan had emerged, dragging Triste behind him.

“He is with me,” Tan replied. He had not relinquished his naczal when he stepped through the kenta, and the blade glinted in the dusky light. “Watch the girl.”

By the time Kaden reached the low shelf, his muscles had gone rigid with cold. It was all he could do to hold on to the stone with one hand while keeping Triste’s head above the water. He could feel her trembling beside him, shivering uncontrollably. Wet hair plastered her skin, and her lips had gone a blue so dark they looked black in the smoky light.

“Kaden,” she whispered between chattering teeth.

Before he could respond, two men lunged from the shadows, seized her by the elbows, and lifted her, shaking, from the water.

“Careful,” he said. “She is tied. You could hurt her.”

The guards ignored Kaden, dragging Triste roughly onto the stone shelf while he hauled himself, sodden and shivering, into the cold air.

Only after he had coughed the last salt water from his lungs, then straightened, could he finally take in his surroundings. When he first passed through the gate he thought himself submerged in the ocean somewhere, but now he could see that they had surfaced inside a large chamber, perhaps fifteen paces across, walls and ceiling cut from the same undressed stone. In the center, the black waters of a pool glistened in the torchlight. The place reminded him faintly of Umber’s, back in the Bone Mountains, but where Umber’s Pool was open to the wide arc of the sky, this room was dark and cold, cut off from everything by the cave’s roof.

The Ishien, too, were nothing like the monks he remembered. Despite Tan’s warning, Kaden had expected them to look vaguely familiar. Instead of robes, however, the three men in the chamber, two of whom pinned Triste roughly against a wall, wore greasy leather jerkins and sealskin. None had shaved their heads, and though only one had a proper beard, a week’s worth of stubble obscured the jawlines of the others. Most striking, the Ishien were clearly warriors; each wore a short sword at the hip and carried a loaded crossbow. The speaker had leveled one of those crossbows directly at Tan.

“Rampuri,” he said, the word ringing like a curse.

“Point your weapon at the girl, Hellelen,” Tan responded.

“I will point my weapon where I please.”

Kaden stilled his shivering and tried to read the scene. Loral Hellelen looked to be around Tan’s age, a tall, wiry Edishman with a rough blond braid running halfway down his back. He might have been handsome once, but a cadaverous hollowness had gouged away his cheeks and sunk his eyes in pits so dark they looked bruised. Kaden watched those eyes carefully. They glittered in the torchlight, bright, almost feverish. Hellelen’s finger stroked the trigger to the crossbow.

“It was a foolish gamble, stepping through that gate after twenty years.”

Kaden glanced over at Tan. No one at Ashk’lan had ever called Rampuri Tan a fool, but if the older monk was nonplussed, it didn’t show.

“Only a gamble if the old ways have slipped.”

“Don’t speak to me of slipping,” the blond man shot back. “It was you who left your post.”

“And I have returned.” Tan gestured toward Triste with his naczal. “Perhaps with one of the Csestriim. She passed through the gates. Untrained. Unprepared.”

Confusion registered in Hellelen’s eyes, then shock. After a moment’s hesitation, he shifted his crossbow from Tan, pointing it instead at the young woman pinned against the wall. “She is too young to be Csestriim.”

Tan shook his head. “She is a woman grown, though the clothes obscure the fact.”

“And she passed the kenta.”

Tan nodded.

“We don’t know what it means,” Kaden added quietly, careful to keep his voice level, reasonable. “She might be Csestriim, or she might be … something else.”

Hellelen glanced in his direction, narrowed his eyes at the sight of Kaden’s own blazing irises, then snorted. “Ah. The princeling.”

“He is the Emperor now,” Tan observed.

“Not here, he’s not,” Hellelen spat. “This isn’t your palace,” he said, “and we’re not your monks. If I have a question for you, I will ask it. If I do not ask, keep your imperial mouth shut or, however short your sojourn in the Dead Heart might be, you will spend it inside a cell.”

Kaden glanced over at Triste where she stood trembling against the cold stone wall, arms trussed behind her, crossbow bolts leveled at her heart and head.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Triste has helped me, has helped us, at every step. We’d be dead without her. Even if she is Csestriim, I want her to be treated well.”

Hellelen sucked air between his teeth. “You think you know the Csestriim?” he demanded, voice like a file running over steel.

Kaden shook his head.

“You think you understand how they think? You want to walk in here and start lecturing us, lecturing me on what does and does not make sense?” He took a step toward Kaden, sudden fury scribbled across his eyes, the crossbow swinging around to point at Kaden’s heart. “I will show you-”

The words cut off as Tan slid the haft of his spear between them, blocking the Ishien’s approach.

“Hellelen,” he said quietly, “you would do better to focus on this creature,” indicating Triste, “rather than lecturing the Emperor of Annur. If she is Csestriim, she is involved in a plot to destroy the Malkeenian line.”

“The Malkeenian line,” Hellelen snorted, “long ago abandoned its post.” He stared at Kaden. “Do you even know what those gates are for?”

“I do,” Kaden replied. “They are a tool. One that can be used to hold together an empire and to fight the Csestriim both.”

“Let me guess which one you’re more concerned with.” Hellelen shook his head in disgust. “I heard how someone gutted your father. What happened? The same men come after you?”

“It may be more than men,” Kaden replied. “As you say, we face the same foe.”

He glanced over to where Triste shivered against the wall. Guilt stabbed at him, sharp and jagged as a stone caught in a sandal. He set the pain aside. It was already clear the Ishien cared nothing for pain, Triste’s or his own.

“The girl is at the center of it,” Tan said. “At the center of your fight, and Kaden’s. You may find you have more in common with the Emperor than you think.”

Hellelen watched her awhile, then spat onto the stone. “I knew the Shin were weak, but you, Rampuri? I didn’t realize you were so eager to scrape before a throne.”

Tan ignored the gibe, and after a few heartbeats Hellelen turned back to Triste, staring at her awhile, then blowing out a long, slow breath between his teeth. “A female, is it?” He prodded her cheek with the tip of the crossbow bolt. “We could learn much from a female.” His voice had gone tight with something that sounded like anger or hunger. “You’re certain she is Csestriim?”

“You listen poorly,” Tan replied. “Nothing is certain, but the signs are there. We can discuss them in more detail once she is secure. Take her to a cell.”

Hellelen narrowed his eyes. “You’re not in charge here, monk.” He spat the last word. “You were never in charge.”

Kaden recognized the disgust in Tan’s gaze from moments in his own training. “I will tend to her myself, then, while the rest of you bicker. Stand well back. She is faster and stronger than she appears.”

“What about your beloved sovereign?” Hellelen demanded. “He is to simply wander free through the Heart?”

Kaden wanted to object. He never expected to command the Ishien, but as the Emperor of Annur, he shared with them a common task: the guarding of the gates. He had hoped for civility at least, for mutual respect. He had hoped that he would have some say in Triste’s treatment. But, as the Shin were fond of saying, You cannot drink hope. You cannot breathe it or eat it. It can only choke you.

Coming to the Ishien was starting to look like a mistake, and a grave one at that, but there was little he could do to correct his decision while standing unarmed and heavily guarded beside the frigid pool. Maybe Triste was Csestriim, and maybe she was not. Either way, she deserved to be treated decently, gently, until she proved herself a threat. He wanted to say that one more time, but it was pointless. He had no traction in the situation, no leverage. With an effort, he stifled his fear and anger, slid all expression from his face, then stepped back.

Tan fixed Hellelen with a stare. “Kaden is my pupil,” he said, “not my sovereign. I would tell you to leave him free, but, like a child, you dislike being told.”

* * *

The Ishien didn’t shut Kaden in a cell, but they didn’t trust him, either. Trant’s presence was evidence enough of that. Hellelen had ordered the other man to “escort and guide” Kaden while the rest of them, Tan included, bustled off down a different corridor, dragging Triste roughly behind.

“Escort and guide” sounded welcoming enough, but when Kaden asked to follow the others, Trant refused. When he asked where Triste had been taken, Trant said he didn’t know. When he asked to see the commander of the fortress, Trant muttered that the commander was busy. Kaden chafed to know what was going on, to begin unraveling even a part of the tangled conspiracy that had killed his father, but Trant didn’t know the answers, and he wouldn’t let Kaden near anyone who did. There was little to do aside from follow, and so Kaden followed, misgivings mounting.

The Dead Heart was unlike any fortress Kaden had ever encountered: no curtain walls or gates, no crenellations or arrow loops. The twisting passages and low ceilings, the utter lack of windows, suggested that the whole thing was underground, hacked out of the stone itself, lit by smoky lanterns and smokier torches, the air cold and damp, freighted with salt and sea. At junctures in the passageway, Kaden could sometimes make out the dull susurrus and slosh of the waves. When that faded, there was nothing but the scrape of boots, the irregular drip of water into cold pools, and everywhere the sensation of weight, of thousands of tons of rock pressing down from above, silent and invisible.

Only when they finally reached a narrow hall filled with long tables and reeking of salt and stale smoke did Trant finally stop, gesturing Kaden to a bench while he filled two battered trenchers with steaming white fish, then seated himself across the table. For a while Kaden thought the man intended to eat in silence, sucking soft flesh from the bones, prodding at his meal with filthy fingers as though it displeased him.

If Trant had a family name, it had not surfaced. Like the rest of the Ishien, he wore a heavy sealskin cloak over oiled leather over wool, and like the rest of the Ishien, a short blade hung at his hip. Matted, tangled hair hung halfway to his shoulders, and he had a habit of sweeping it from his eyes when he spoke. If he had bathed in the past week, the water had had little effect on the grime caked beneath his fingernails and into the wrinkles of his knuckles and wrists.

Back at Ashk’lan, Kaden would have been whipped for such slovenliness. Another reminder, if one were needed, that the Ishien were not the Shin. Where the monks were cold as winter granite, solid as a hard frost, these soldiers, Trant very much included, struck him as less … hale. Not that they were weak or enfeebled, but the reek of smoke and sea on their clothing, the hooded shadow in each gaze, the feral intensity to all speech and movement struck him as wrong, somehow. Unnatural.

Finally Trant looked up, found Kaden’s gaze upon him, and frowned.

“It’s an island,” he said, gesturing vaguely around by way of illustration. “The whole thing.”

Kaden blinked. “An island? Where?”

“No,” Trant replied, eyes sly above a mirthless smile. “No, no, no. Secrecy is survival. Do you know Kangeswarin? Of course you don’t. That’s something he said. Wrote. Secrecy is survival.” He intoned the words as though they were scripture. “The Order hasn’t kept its freedom this long just to come under the thumb of some upstart emperor now.”

“I have no interest in bringing you ‘under my thumb,’” Kaden responded, careful to keep his voice level. He had hoped for deference and prepared for defiance. Trant’s casual dismissal, however, the apparent indifference of everyone in the Heart, was not a response he had reckoned on. His whole purpose in visiting the Ishien was to learn what they knew, perhaps to forge an alliance, and here he was defending himself to a filthy, low-ranking soldier in the mess hall. “I am hardly an upstart,” he continued. “My father was Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian. I trained with the Shin, as have all those of my line. I have the eyes.”

Trant narrowed his own eyes, sucked at a morsel of fish stuck between crooked teeth. “The eyes,” he mused, as though he had not considered that. “You do. That’s true. You do have some eyes. Long time ago there were men could tell the Enemy by the eyes.”

“The Enemy?”

“Childkillers. Builders. Graveless. Call them what you want. The fucking Csestriim. Long time ago, there were some could tell the Csestriim by the eyes.”

Trant stared at a blank space of wall, as though expecting the Csestriim to materialize from it. Like a goat in the early stages of brainworm, his eyes twitched erratically. He seemed unable to still his hands. Kaden shifted uneasily in his seat.

“The Csestriim didn’t have burning eyes-” he began, but Trant cut him off, waving a hand.

“Yes, yes. I know. The Malkeenians. Intarra. The Emperor. I know.” He squinted. “Or it could be a trick. A kenning.”

“A trick?” Kaden asked, trying to find his balance in the conversation. “I’m not a leach. And why would I play a trick?”

Trant raised his eyebrows in surprise. “A thousand reasons. Ten thousand. Man might fake the burning eyes to milk coin out of fools. To seduce a noble lady. To seduce just about any silly-minded slut, at that. To stir up war. To avoid war. Just to lie. To lie. For the unbridled joy of deceit.” He paused, shaking his head, then bulled ahead. “A man might lie about his eyes,” he continued, voice rising, “to unseat an entire dynasty. To drive an empire to wreck and ruin.”

Kaden shook his head. “It is my empire. I have no desire to see it ruined. That is why I am here.”

“So you say,” Trant muttered, turning back to his fish. “So you say.”

“Are you so distrustful of everyone?”

Trant leaned back in his chair abruptly, dark eyes glittering in the lantern light. He seemed unable to hold a position for more than a few heartbeats. “More. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt because you came in with Tan.” He paused, waggled a finger across the table. “But you also brought the Childkilling whore.”

Kaden leaned back, caught off guard by the sudden hatred in the man’s voice, the sheer red boiling fury of it.

“Triste hasn’t killed any children,” Kaden replied, shaking his head.

“That you know of. That you know of. Tan said she was Csestriim.”

Kaden started to argue the point, then checked himself, remembering Tan’s tale of the Ghannans and their ships filled with orphans. Trant didn’t seem the type to be convinced through rational argument, and Kaden was no longer quite sure that the rational argument was on his side anyway. “Are you going to hurt her?” he asked instead.

“Me?” Trant asked, raising his eyebrows and poking himself in the chest as though to be sure of the question. “Am I going to hurt her? Oh no. No, no, no. I don’t hurt the prisoners. I’m not allowed to hurt the prisoners. That’s for the Hunters.”

“The Hunters?” Kaden asked, worry prickling the back of his neck.

Trant rapped a fist against the side of his head. “Trouble hearing? The Hunters, I said. The ones in charge. When there’s hurting to do, they do it. Been that way since before your empire. Since before the Atmani, even.” He nodded sagely, as though pleased with the order of things.

Kaden shook his head, trying to follow the baffling account. “What are you? What’s your role?”

“I’m a Soldier,” Trant said, pounding his chest with a fist. “Soldier, seventh rank.”

“How many ranks are there?”

Trant grinned, revealing a row of brown teeth. “Seven.”

“Will you ever be promoted?” Kaden asked. “To Hunter?”

The Ishien stared at him as though he’d gone mad. “It’s not a rank,” he said, shaking his head. “Hunter’s not a fucking rank.”

“What is it?” Kaden asked, taken aback.

“I’ll tell you what it is,” Trant said, leaning far over the table, eyes wide. He waved Kaden closer with his knife, close enough that Kaden could smell the reek of his rotting teeth. “It’s a blessing, is what it is. A blessing.”

Kaden hesitated. All the talk of Hunters and Soldiers seemed to be making Trant more and more agitated. He rocked front and back, as though seated atop a lame horse, and watched Kaden with febrile intensity. Suddenly, the wisest course seemed to be finishing the meal in silence, saying and doing as little as possible to disturb Trant further. But then, if Kaden was going to forge any kind of trust with the Ishien, if he was going to convince them to work with him, to share what they knew, he needed to understand them, and at the moment, the only person who could explain the workings of the Dead Heart was Trant.

“What makes the Hunters Hunters?” Kaden asked finally, carefully. “How do you decide?”

“Decide?” Trant laughed bleakly, scratching suddenly at a vicious scar on his forearm. “We don’t decide any more than you decided to have those eyes. Some men have it inside them. It. The blessing. Some don’t. Just … don’t.” He paused, eyes darting off toward the roof, as though reliving something. “Learned that clearly enough in the purging.” He seemed, abruptly, to be talking about himself.

“The purging?”

Trant sucked in a great breath, then bared his teeth. “The purging. The passage, we call it, sometimes. Sometimes just the pain.” He shivered, his whole body trembling. “The ’Kent-kissing pain. It’s how they sort the Hunters from the Soldiers, how they see who has the gift.”

“What is it? The purging or passage?”

“What? What? It’s what it fucking sounds like, is what. Pain on top of pain piled on pain. Weeks of cutting and burning,” he continued, almost shouting as he pulled open his jerkin. A web of scars stretched across his chest, old, brutal wounds that had healed poorly. Kaden jerked back, but Trant was too absorbed in his account to notice. “Cutting,” he said again, drawing the word out as though tasting it, “and burning, and breaking. The fucking breaking. Drowning. And cold. Again and again, over and over until you shatter,” he said, stabbing at his own skull with a finger. “Until you break up here.” He shivered himself still, then turned his eyes on Kaden. “The pain,” he said again, more quietly, as though that explained anything.

Kaden stared for a moment, corralling the horror stampeding through his chest, taming it. “Why?” he asked finally.

Trant shrugged, abruptly and utterly indifferent to the torture he had just relived so vividly. “Sometimes what breaks off,” he said, “is the feelings.” He snapped a bone off the fish carcass, sucked at it. “You know-love, fear, fucking hope. Sometimes the pain chips them right off. At least, it does for the ones with the gift. The ones who can use the gates. Those are the ones in charge, the Hunters.”

For a while Kaden just watched the man eat. When Tan warned him, when he explained that the Ishien were nothing like the Shin, Kaden had thought he was talking about differences in culture and outlook, changes in the methods and modes of training. Even after arriving in the Dead Heart, after seeing Loral Hellelen and the others, after having a loaded crossbow pointed at his chest, the gap had seemed wide, but bridgeable. Now …

Kaden tried to make sense of what Trant had just described. Clearly the Ishien had their own way of achieving the vaniate-if it even was the vaniate-a way that had nothing to do with meditation and discipline, silence and persistence. It sounded as though they were tortured, all of them, brutally tortured, and those few who went numb as a result became the leaders, while the rest … Kaden watched Trant suck broth from his wooden bowl. The man hummed a tuneless song, the same few notes over and over.

Then another thought struck Kaden like a blow across the face.

“And Tan…” he said.

Trant looked up from his bowl, nodding eagerly as broth dripped off his unshaven chin.

“Um-hmm,” he said. “Yes. Yes. Rampuri Tan was a Hunter. Almost as tough as Bloody Horm, least in some ways. A Hunter.”

Kaden exhaled slowly, measuring his pulse. “Will you talk to them for me?” he asked. There didn’t seem to be more than a few score men in the entire fortress. Kaden had heard enough to understand that Trant didn’t make the decisions, but he would have access to the people who did. “Your commander needs to know that Triste helped me to escape. She deserves some decency.”

“Oh. Decency. Oh. The Emperor wants to talk about decency.” Trant dropped his voice and his eyes both, muttering to himself, but no sooner did Kaden lean in than he started upright, slashing a rigid hand through the air between them. “Do you know … Do you know what the Enemy did to us?”

For a moment he just snarled wordlessly, lost in his rage. “You hear about the Atmani all the time-Roshin, Dirik, Rishinira, the other three.… Everyone tells stories about the fucking leach-lords, about how they killed people and shattered the fucking world, but let me tell you this … the Atmani were nothing next to the Csestriim. They were leaches, sure. Somehow they were immortal, at least till someone put a knife in them. But at least they were human. Everyone talks about the Atmani and no one’s warning anyone about the Csestriim. It’s like everyone just forgot.

“With the Csestriim it wasn’t just killing, it was slaughter. You know, murder. Kids. Thousands of kids.”

He leaned across the table, eyes bulging from their sockets. “They. Tried. To. End. Us.

“So when you talk to me about decency, you know, about treating that bitch you brought with decency, what I say is fuck decency.”

“Triste might not be Csestriim,” Kaden said, trying to keep his compass in the maelstrom of emotion. “She has feelings. Fears and hopes.”

“No,” Trant said, body suddenly still, voice quiet. “That’s what she wants you to think. They know how all this works.” Grinding a finger into his temple. “They know how to use it against us. You understand? You understand what I’m telling you?”

Kaden started to protest, then stopped himself. Worry about Triste nagged at him like a cracked rib, but for the moment there was nothing he could do. He didn’t know where she was, didn’t even really know where he was, and, though the Dead Heart appeared surprisingly empty, there were still enough men with bows and blades to keep him neatly penned wherever they wished.

Learn first, he told himself, then act.

“Scial Nin told me about the Ishien,” he said, trying to change the subject. “You were the first monks, the predecessors of the Shin.”

Trant snorted. “Not monks.” He frowned, turning back to his fish. “Not ever monks.”

“Then what?”

“Prisoners. Slaves. Beasts to be prodded, and poisoned, and gutted.” He punctuated each word by stabbing the fish with his knife. Abruptly, he pulled the blade from the bones and waved it around him. “This place, this fucking place, was our pen.”

Once more Kaden considered the heavy stone walls. “The Csestriim built this.”

Trant nodded. “Builders. Oh, the bastards were builders, all right.”

Kaden frowned. “Why? I thought they just wanted to destroy us. Why build prisons?”

“Ever see a cat?” Trant asked, then snapped his teeth at Kaden, clawed at the air. “They don’t just kill, no. Nope. Cats-they tease, they toy, they taunt. Same thing with the Enemy … they wanted to see what we’d do. It’s all here,” he insisted, waving his hand toward the walls. “All here. Scrolls, codices, all of it. They filleted some of us like fish, cut the eyelids off others. What’s wrong with us-that’s what they wanted to know. What’s wrong?” His lips twisted into a grimace. “It’s all here,” he muttered. “Bastards wrote it all down. It’s all here.”

Trant was staring at him wolfishly, and after a moment Kaden turned away to look at the chamber once more. The weight of the place had grown more oppressive, as though too much blood had soaked into the stone, as though history had its own stench that no amount of salt water could ever fully expunge. The Dead Heart wasn’t a fortress at all, it wasn’t even a prison; it was a grave, and the Ishien who stalked the halls were like the ghosts of men, still fighting a war they refused to let die. This was the place to which Kaden had insisted they come, the place to which he had unwittingly brought Triste. This charnel pit was Tan’s home. The chill of the air settled deeper into Kaden’s flesh, pricking at his clammy skin. He wasn’t a prisoner, not exactly, but it wasn’t at all clear that he could leave.