The Providence of Fire

19

I know a way out.

In the long undifferentiated darkness of his imprisonment, Kaden revolved the words in his mind, listening to them as though they were a faint strain of music in the silence, studying them as he might a glimmer of light in the endless shadow. Again and again he went back to the saama’an, the perfectly carved memory of those final moments in Triste’s cell when the Csestriim had met his eyes, then mouthed those five words.

I know a way out.

It was a baffling claim, horrible in the hope it offered, maddening because Kaden could make no sense of it. When the Ishien slammed shut the door of his cell, turned the key in the lock, Kaden had waited for a thousand heartbeats before standing, before exploring with fingers and palms the rough stone extent of his prison. His burning eyes offered a pathetic measure of light, enough to avoid walking into a wall if he moved slowly, and so he shuffled painstakingly around the tiny chamber. There was little to learn. The walls were damp. The wooden door felt heavy. In the corner, a small hole no larger than Kaden’s hand opened into unmeasured darkness below.

It was a meager consolation, but the cell did not offer any other, and as the sound of retreating boots echoed to silence, he began to realize just what he had risked in trying to defend Triste. What he had risked, and how badly he had failed. Panic prowled his mind on velvet feet, and for a while it was all he could do to keep from hurling himself at the door, from screaming into the darkness. Instead, he found the middle of the room as well as he could, sat cross-legged on the stone floor, and closed his eyes, replacing the darkness of the world with his own inner darkness, the emptiness of the cell with a greater emptiness. When he finally emerged from the vaniate, the fear remained, but it was a small thing, a distant scream like far-off smoke against a vast, silent sky.

Methodically, he set about exploring his cell again, running his hands systematically over the stone, testing the privy hole, reaching up for the invisible ceiling. He went to the door last, hoping it would offer some recourse that the rest of the stone had refused. Steel or iron banded the thick wooden slab, metal cold and pitted beneath his fingers. A small slot opened at the very bottom, barely the height of his hand-for food perhaps. He found a keyhole narrower than his finger halfway up, briefly allowed himself to imagine that he might pick the lock and break free, then squashed the hope. He had no tools, nothing but his robe, and even if he had, he knew nothing about locks, nothing about escape.

Only when he had exhausted the other possibilities did he finally speak.

“Hello?” he asked, voice little more than a whisper. Even that was enough to crack the brittle shell of the vaniate. “Triste? Are you there?” He hesitated. “Kiel?”

The darkness lisped his own syllables back to him, but there was no response. He tried again, raising his voice, then again and again, over and over until he was bellowing, pounding his fists on the door’s indifferent steel. When he gave up, the silence clamped down once more, closing on the cell like a vise.

It might have been a day before the first meal arrived-maybe two-there was no way to tell, no mechanism to divide the time, to part one chill, invisible day from the next. There was silence, then bootheels on the stone beyond the door, a wooden trencher shoved beneath, bootheels retreating, then silence once more. Kaden felt sick, dizzy, but he forced himself to eat.

After each meal, he returned to the center of the floor, emptied himself, and entered the vaniate. If he could do nothing else, he could continue his training. After moving in and out of the trance scores of times, he changed position, lowering himself into a flat plank, toes and palms on the floor, body rigid, then reached for the emptiness once more. It eluded him, but he held the pose, held it until his shoulders shook and the muscles of his stomach rebelled, dumping him onto his face. He lay still for a few exhausted breaths, then, without moving, took hold of the trance. When he found it, he let it go, then raised himself into the plank once more. Tried, as his body trembled, to find that space beyond the body.

Each time the slot in the door opened, he spoke to the person beyond, always to no avail. Somewhere beyond the Dead Heart the great wheels of the world turned, seas sloshed in their basins, green shoots pushed up through the earth, men and women struggled, laughed, and died, and yet Kaden’s cell might have been the throne room of the Blank God, a shrine to emptiness, blackness, and silence.

Then Tan came.

A rattle in the lock preceded the monk, then a lamp, the dim light so bright to Kaden’s atrophied sight that it seemed someone had bored a hole in the nothingness. Bored a hole, or set it ablaze. When he could see, finally, he found his umial standing before him, Shin robe gone, exchanged for the boiled leather and sealskin of the Ishien.

“How long?” Kaden asked, voice rusted.

“Long enough,” Tan replied. “I could not come sooner.”

“What is happening?”

The monk shook his head. “Idiocy. Idiocy and fanaticism.”

Kaden glanced at the closed door. “Are you here alone?”

“There are three guards in the corridor beyond. I persuaded them to stay behind. I said you would be more tractable if I came in alone.”

“Tractable,” Kaden said, the word bitter in his mouth.

“Matol wants to use you against Triste,” he said. “He wants you to go to her alone. To see what she will reveal to you.”

“Where is she now? Is she all right?”

“She is alive,” Tan replied, as though that were the same thing. “After the last interrogation, the Ishien moved her here, to give her time to recuperate before they start again. That was five days ago.”

Kaden shook his head helplessly. “She won’t tell me anything more than she’s told them.”

The monk nodded tersely. “I agree. I am not here to do Matol’s work.”

“So,” Kaden replied, studying the monk carefully, “why are you here?”

Tan glanced over his shoulder, then beckoned Kaden farther into the small cell. When his spoke, his voice was low as the scuff of leather over stone.

“It was a mistake to come to the Heart. The Ishien know nothing about the plot against your family. They have learned nothing from Triste. They follow a pointless path while the empire reels.”

Kaden stared. “You’ve had word of the empire? Of my brother?”

“Nothing of Valyn, but Ishien returning through the kenta say that your sister has disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Kaden asked, suddenly sick.

“She may be dead. She may be imprisoned. The Ishien do not know, nor do they appear to care.”

“And you do?” Kaden asked. After so long locked in the seamless darkness, the sudden wash of light and words threatened to overwhelm him. “I thought you were indifferent to politics.”

“I am,” Tan replied. “This goes beyond politics. The Csestriim have struck at the heart of Annur. I cannot fathom their reasons, but one thing is clear: they will use the chaos, they will exploit the disorder, and I will not give them that advantage. You need to return to Annur. You need to take your place on the Unhewn Throne.”

Hope bloomed inside Kaden, flowered a moment before he crushed it out. He gestured to the slick stone walls, the weight of rock above their heads, to the massive iron door. “The Ishien seem to have other ideas.”

“I am finished,” Tan said, “with the ideas of the Ishien. They are not the order I left more than a decade ago.”

“So … what? We just walk out?”

Tan shook his head. “You listen poorly. Three men wait beyond this door. They trust me little more than they do you. You will leave when they aren’t watching you.”

“How?”

The monk reached inside his jerkin, sliding free first an old, rusted key, then a short knife, the blade no longer than Kaden’s finger. It wasn’t a weapon-he could imagine someone using it to cut the heads off fish-but it looked sharp.

“Where did you get the key?”

“Perhaps you forget,” Tan replied, “that I lived here a long time before I left for the mountains.”

“All right,” Kaden said, measuring his breathing, stilling the sudden excitement moving inside. “You leave, then I take the key-”

“Listen,” Tan said, cutting him off, “before you talk.” He waited, silent and unmoving, until Kaden nodded. Then he extended his arm. “Find my pulse.”

Confused, Kaden reached out, taking the older monk’s wrist in his hand. After a few moments he found the vein, then the steady beat of the blood pent up inside. The pulse was slower than his own, regular as the drip in the back of his cell, as though it had beaten out the same silent rhythm for months, for years.

“Match it,” Tan said.

Kaden nodded once more, closed his eyes, then slowed his own heart, parsing each beat until it mapped perfectly onto the low, slow tidal thrum of his umial’s heart.

“Done,” he said finally.

“You can hold it there?” Tan asked, pinning him with a stare.

Kaden hesitated. Shin training was filled with exercises of pulse and breathing. Once, when he had barely turned eleven, he counted every heartbeat for two days. Still, there were limits. “Not if I have to run.”

“There will be no running, not if all goes as I plan.”

“And what, exactly, is the plan?”

“At eighty-six thousand beats, use the key to leave your cell.”

“Eighty-six thousand?”

“A day. You will leave the cell and walk to a small alcove just outside. Wait there until the guard comes, then step from the alcove and kill him.”

Kaden’s heart jumped for two beats, and with an effort he slowed it to the same steady pulse.

“How?” he asked.

“Just as you would kill a goat,” Tan replied. “A single cut across the neck.”

Kaden shook his head, fear and confusion clawing at his calm.

“The Ishien are warriors,” he protested.

“The Ishien will expect you to be in your cell, unarmed and helpless. They know that I am dangerous, and so they have sent extra guards. You…” He shook his head, a single curt gesture. “They do not fear you.”

“Then what?” Kaden asked, putting from his mind for the moment the vision of the knife clasped tight in his grip, of warm flesh folding back beneath the blade.

“The guard who brings your food is also the one who watches the door to this branch of the prison. When he is dead, the way will be clear. You will wait for another four thousand heartbeats, then go.”

“Go where?”

Tan slid the knife along the inside of his own arm, raising a slender trail of blood. It was black in the lamplight, like pitch or shadow. He dipped a finger into the blood, then turned to the wall, sketching a map over the rough stone. As Kaden watched, the monk inked a tree of corridors and stairwells, the branches ramifying across the wall.

“Here,” he said finally, pointing to a small room off a long, straight hall, “is your cell. And here”-another, much larger room-“the harbor.”

“The harbor?” Kaden asked, shaking his head.

“The Ishien need supplies, and not everything can be transported through the kenta. There is an underground harbor carved by the sea. You will go there.”

“Won’t it be guarded?”

“At the mouth, yes,” Tan replied. “But they will not expect anyone to be leaving. You will climb aboard the vessel tied up to the stone wharf, hide among the barrels, and wait. I will join you. When the tide turns, the ship will sail, and we will be gone.”

“What about the body?” Kaden asked, sweat dampening his palms. “The guard I’m supposed to kill?”

“The guards’ shifts do not match the tides,” Tan replied. “By the time his relief arrives, we will have sailed. At the moment, there are no other boats moored in which they might follow.”

Kaden frowned. It seemed a tenuous plan-sneaking through the halls of the Dead Heart, finding the hidden harbor, climbing aboard a ship and staying out of sight until they were well beyond reach of the fortress.

“What about the kenta?” Kaden asked. “Why don’t we use that?”

“Do not be a fool. The Ishien guard the kenta chamber more carefully than any other place in the Heart.” He gestured to the bloody map. “Do you have it?”

Kaden considered the lines and curves for a moment, the boxes and branches, then nodded. Tan scrubbed at the lines with the heel of his hand until nothing remained on the stone but a ruddy stain. When he was finished, he handed the knife and key to Kaden.

“What about the pause?” Kaden asked. “Why do I have to wait between killing the guard and moving to the harbor?”

“To allow the men changing shifts above to reach their posts. The Ishien follow predictable patterns. Waiting four thousand heartbeats will give you the best chance of finding the halls above empty.”

Kaden digested this. “Doesn’t sound like a sure thing.”

“It is not. If you encounter anyone, keep your head down and your eyes hidden.”

“What about Triste? Where is she? How do we get her out?”

“We do not.”

Kaden took a long, slow breath. “They will kill her.”

“Most likely.”

“We can bring her with us. If the ship can hold two, it can hold three.”

Tan shook his head. “No. The risk is too great. The girl is not what she seems, you witnessed enough to understand that, and you have not witnessed the tenth part of it. She is dangerous and she is unpredictable.”

“What about trying to learn something from her?” Kaden demanded. “Something about the Csestriim? About the conspiracy?”

“Slow your heart,” Tan growled. “The timing is crucial.”

Kaden checked his pulse, slowed it a fraction, then continued, his voice little more than a hiss. “She has answers.”

“She does,” Tan replied, “but none she will reveal to us. Matol has pushed her hard, even harder than I would have.” He shook his head. “She cannot help us.”

Kaden started to protest, but Tan raised a hand.

“The corridors above should be empty if you keep to the timing, but as you have observed, should be is not will be. Alone, dressed in the Ishien garb, you have every chance of passing unremarked. With Triste in tow, you would be noticed instantly. The risk is too great and it offers scant reward.”

He turned before Kaden could object further, opened the door and stepped through.

“You have the count?” he asked, without looking back over his shoulder.

Kaden listened to the slow tattoo inside his chest. “I have it,” he replied.

“Do not make a mistake. There will not be another chance.”

* * *

It wasn’t a mistake. Mistakes were errors of ignorance or neglect, ineptitude or poor planning. Mistakes were miscalculations or errors in judgment. This was something else altogether, something worse.

More like a fully flowered act of madness, Kaden thought as he felt his way down the long corridor, knife held before him as though it could keep back the limitless dark.

He had counted off ten thousand heartbeats, forcing himself to silence and stillness in the center of his cell, before moving. As Tan had promised, the key turned in the lock, though the steel protested with a scream that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. By the vague light in his eyes, he could make out the outlines of the wall, the shallow standing pools. He moved slowly, carefully, but the quieter he forced himself to be, the more the halls around him seemed to stir. Air lisped uneasily through the passages, drafts rasping over the uneven stone. The plinking of water seemed to come from everywhere at once. Behind it, or below it, a sound that might have been the wash of waves and tides thrummed through the rock, so low it was impossible to be sure if the sound was real or only in his mind.

The doors lining the hall were heavy wood banded with iron, some locked, some hanging open, all of them identical-wood and iron, wood and iron.

Take him below, Matol had snarled. Lock him up with the Csestriim.

Which meant Kiel was locked up somewhere along the endless corridor. Kiel, who knew a way out. Perhaps it was folly, stupidity, to insist on trying to see Triste freed, but of all Annur’s uncounted millions, she was the only one in the Dead Heart, the only one he could help. As Tan claimed, she was dangerous-that much was clear-but she had helped Kaden, and he would be ill-fit to govern an empire if his first act was to abandon her to the unending torture of the Ishien. If Kiel was here, if he knew another way out, maybe he could free Triste, too.

After a hundred paces or so, Kaden came to a different sort of door. The original framing had been chiseled away, the banded wood replaced with a great slab of steel hung on hinges as thick as Kaden’s wrists. Five wide steel bars set into metal brackets held the thing shut-enough weight to pen an enraged bull. Dripping salt water had left long, weeping stains on the metal, gnawing the surface to pits and long flakes of rust, and though the door itself looked ready to crumble, when Kaden pushed a tentative hand against it, he might have pressed on the stone wall itself. There was no telling how thick the metal was, but clearly the rust had done nothing to compromise its strength.

He took a long, slow breath, turning his focus from the hallway to his own mind. Fear clung there, spiked and recalcitrant as a mountain burr lodged in the cloth of a new robe, though whether that fear was for Matol and Ishien, who could come looking for him at any moment, or for the man beyond the door, Kaden couldn’t say. He worked at the emotion, prying it looser and looser with each breath. He needed clarity when he heard what the prisoner had to say. He needed calm.

Here is the floor, he told himself, feeling the rough stone, cold and slick beneath his bare soles.

Here is the light from my eyes.

The future held perils, but he did not live in the future.

Here is the latch, he said, moving the metal catch to open the small, barred window set into the steel door. Here is the window into the darkness.

Through the narrow open slot, he heard the rustle of cloth against cloth, then a wet, unhealthy cough, the noise growing closer as the prisoner approached.

“Another visit?”

Kaden heard the voice first, the same spare articulation he remembered from his encounter with Kiel days earlier. Then the man’s begrimed face appeared in the narrow slot, squinting as his eyes moved from utter darkness to the meager light of Kaden’s own eyes. Kiel glanced at him, then past, into the hallway beyond.

“Where are Rampuri and Ekhard?”

Kaden shook his head. “I am alone.”

“Good,” Kiel murmured after a moment. “You understood. You trusted me.”

“No,” Kaden cut in. “I do not trust you.”

Kiel paused. “And yet you are here.…”

“Because I was taught to look before judging. To listen.”

The prisoner made a sound that Kaden recognized, after a moment, as a chuckle. “I’m glad to learn that the Shin are still so rigorous. And Scial Nin? Is he still the abbot?”

“Scial Nin…” Kaden began, then paused. The fact that Kaden needed him, that they shared the same foe, didn’t make the Csestriim any less dangerous. Kaden needed answers to his questions, not to spend time spinning yarns about a life long left behind.

“You know a way out?” Kaden asked.

Kiel nodded.

“How? Where?”

The Csestriim shook his head slowly. “Opening this door would be a generous gesture.”

“I’m not here to be generous,” Kaden said.

“Then perhaps you should not be here at all,” the man said. “The Malkeenians I knew understood the value of generosity. Of trust. Of mutual support.”

Kaden stared, dazed. “What Malkeenians?” He forced his heart to keep the same steady time, his lungs to rise and fall in deep, measured breaths.

“Your father, for one.”

Kaden shook his head. “Tan told me you would lie.”

Kiel raised an eyebrow. “As with all zealots, Rampuri Tan’s zeal distorts his vision of the world. I have given him no reason to distrust me.”

“I’ve seen the reason,” Kaden said. “I’ve been to Assare, to the orphanage where the bones are piled up like wood.”

“Ah, Assare,” Kiel said, blowing out a long, slow breath. “What a mistake that was.”

“A mistake?” Kaden asked. “You murdered hundreds of children, an entire city of people, and it was a mistake?”

“I was not there,” Kiel replied, “but yes, I call it a mistake. How would you term it?”

Kaden searched for the word. “A massacre.” He shook his head. “An abomination.”

“Abomination,” Kiel said slowly, as though tasting the sounds. “It seems as though Scial Nin and his monks did not succeed with you. Not completely. Although,” he said, spreading his hands, “you passed the kenta to come here.”

Kaden nodded, realizing only as he did so that the statement was a trap, a trick. Kiel hadn’t known how he arrived until Kaden himself nodded. Irritation pricked at him like a bluethorn.

“You said you knew my father,” Kaden said, trying to return the conversation to safer ground.

The Csestriim nodded. “We were … not friends, but something analogous.”

“Prove it.”

Kiel considered him awhile. “That will be difficult. You’ve been with the Shin since you were a child.”

“I remember him well enough,” Kaden said, suddenly resentful of the idea that this inhuman creature claimed to know Sanlitun better than he had himself.

“All right then,” Kiel said. “Do you remember what he used to say about ruling his empire? The strongest leader is the one who does least.”

Kaden had heard his father voice that idea or something similar dozens of times, but, after a moment, he shook his head. “All that shows is that you were in the Dawn Palace. Or that you knew someone who knew someone in the Dawn Palace.”

Kiel cocked his head to the side. “Fair enough. How about the formation that he kept on the ko board in his study whenever he wasn’t playing. The Fool’s Fortress.”

Kaden’s mind filled with the tiny cluster of stones.

“He kept it there,” Kiel went on, “to remind him of the weakness built into any perception of strength, to remind him that confidence sows the seeds of its own destruction.”

“I never heard him say that,” Kaden said.

“You never heard him say a lot of things,” Kiel replied. “You couldn’t have been more than ten when he sent you away.”

“It still doesn’t prove anything, doesn’t prove that he knew you, that he trusted you.”

For a long time the prisoner remained silent, staring out through the bars of the cage at a life Kaden could neither see nor comprehend. Finally, he focused on Kaden once more, a smile tugging the corners of his mouth.

“Your leg,” he said, “there is a small mark shaped like a crescent moon on the inside of your right thigh.”

Kaden resisted the urge to reach down and touch the small, dark spot.

“How do you know that?”

“I was there,” the prisoner replied. “At your birth. You burst from between your mother’s thighs with plenty of vigor, but for a long time you were silent-you didn’t cry, didn’t scream, just stared at the world around you with those burning eyes.” He shook his head at the memory. “The midwives were terrified that you were going to die, but your father calmed them. ‘This child understands the road he must travel. He is already practicing silence.’ And, in time, you began to cry in the way of all human children.”

Kaden stared, dumbfounded. He had never heard the story, not from his parents or his sister. Certainly not from the Shin. He had no way of knowing if it were true, but he did bear the crescent mark on his thigh. All his life it had been there.

“Why were you at the birth?”

“As historian,” Kiel replied. “It is what I do, what I am for. It is how I came to know your father in the first place.”

Kaden tried to make sense of the claim. All he had heard of the Csestriim involved war and slaughter, with a few vague references to their cities. “You were a historian?” he asked. “A Csestriim historian?”

Kiel nodded. “Your language is imprecise, but I believe you would say The Historian. I chronicled my people’s age-long war with the Nevariim, then the war with your kind. I was there for the reign of the Atmani-both the brilliant beginning and the tragic end. And I’ve been there for the centuries during which your own family has ruled.”

For a while Kaden just stared, then shook his head. “Still not good enough. There must have been half a dozen people at my birth.”

“There were eight,” Kiel said.

“Any one of them could have spread the story of the mark on my leg.”

The prisoner shook his head quietly. “At some point, Kaden, you must trust. It is this ability that the Ishien have lost. You must have realized already that they are nothing like the monks among whom you were raised. They found a different path to the blankness, one that has broken them. We showed them how, of course, inadvertently, when this was still a prison and we were still testing your people. We showed them how, but they perfected the technique.”

Kaden’s memory filled with Trant’s account, the tale of men gouging eyes, cutting off fingers, ripping out teeth, all in the awful cold and darkness, all to achieve their twisted version of the vaniate. This was the place to which he had dragged Triste. The horror of it settled on him like ice while a distant part of his mind, one untouched by either Kiel or the Ishien, continued to count, measuring out the heartbeats, cataloging them, keeping the dark passage of time.

“Your way out,” Kaden said. “Can we take Triste?”

Kiel hesitated, then nodded. “If you can break her free. And me.”

Kaden took a deep breath and ordered his thoughts while the Csestriim watched, silent, through the thin slot in the door.

“And how do I do that?” Kaden asked finally.

“The guard has the key. You start by killing him.”