The Providence of Fire

37

Kaden prepared, as he approached the high-walled estate of Gabril the Red, for disbelief or fury, a fist in the face or a knife in the gut. He tried to run through various scenarios, to anticipate what the young nobleman might say or do, but the future proved as blank and inscrutable as the limestone walls of Gabril’s mansion. Annurian law stipulated that no one, regardless of wealth or rank, could build a fortress inside the city. Early emperors had learned that lesson the hard way, and since the empire’s second century, private dwellings were required to have a certain number of windows and a gate in every exterior wall. Moats were illegal, hoardings atop the walls were illegal, arrow loops were illegal. Gabril the Red’s estate complied with the letter of the law. Barely.

The windows fronting the street were tall and graceful, arched at their peaks, but so slim Kaden would have had to turn sideways to slide through them. The main gate was open, but guarded by half a dozen men in long desert robes. More guards patrolled the top of the wall, each one with a spear or a bow ready to hand. The place wasn’t a fort, not exactly, but Kaden was under no illusions. Inside those walls, Gabril could kill him a dozen times over and no one would ever know.

Kiel and Triste had tried to join him. He had refused. They argued of course, Kiel pointing out that, even after a decade and a half in an Ishien cell, he understood the political realities of the city better than Kaden, Triste arguing more passionately but less coherently that they had to stick together, to help each other. Kaden, however, had observed that Gabril might well greet their impromptu embassy with a blade, and if there was dying to be done, better one person than three. In the end, they couldn’t force him to bring them along, and so it was Morjeta who slipped him out of Ciena’s temple through another hidden tunnel, who led him through wide streets lined with stately bloodwoods, who pointed discreetly toward this fortress that was not a fortress, and murmured, “The estate of Gabril the Red.”

Kaden nodded, considering the place from inside his hood’s shadow.

“He is dangerous,” Morjeta continued, laying a delicate hand on Kaden’s arm. “Not just because he can fight, but because he can think.”

Kaden studied the woman. She was frightened. He could see the tension in her neck, in the rise of her shoulders. She was frightened, but she held that fear in check. The whole thing might have been a Shin exercise, and he took a moment to slow his own heart, to cool his skin.

“Dangerous and smart? That’s the point, right? That’s why we came here.”

Morjeta hesitated, then nodded. “When it is over, return to this place and I will take you back to the temple.”

Kaden didn’t point out that when it was over, he might not have the ability to go anywhere.

When he stepped through the graceful arch of the palace walls, however, and pushed back his hood to show his eyes, when he stated his name and asked to see the First Speaker of Rabi, the white-robed guard just raised his brows, then nodded, escorting him into a wide interior courtyard. Flowering vines perfumed the breeze, and a large fountain tossed a spray of water ten feet into the air. It was a simple, graciously proportioned space, ideal for the lazy sipping of chilled ta on a warm summer day. There was, however, nothing lazy about the fight unfolding on the wide flagstones.

Three soldiers with long spears were attacking a man, if the figure engulfed in the black robe was a man, pressing him from different angles, probing with their weapons, testing his defenses. At the sight of Kaden, the sparring stopped, and the servant who had ushered him in crossed to the robed figure, murmuring something to him. The robe turned-Kaden couldn’t see the man’s face inside the voluminous hood-considered him a moment, then a hand emerged from the dark folds, flicking the servant away.

So, Kaden thought, schooling himself to stillness, Gabril the Red enjoys making people wait. He filed the thought away as the fight resumed.

The soldiers with the spears immediately redoubled their attacks, weapons slashing and plunging into the robe at their center. Of the man inside the cloth, there was no sign. His hands, his legs, even his head were lost in the swirl of fabric. A shadowrobe, Kaden realized. Holy Hull, he’s a shadowrobe.

He’d grown up on stories of the desert warriors, enjoying them almost as much as tales of the Kettral. Many people considered the desert warriors to be leaches, but Kaden and Valyn had found an old codex in the palace library once, the pages filled with illustrations and diagrams, showing just how a skilled shadowrobe could use the huge, flapping cloak to hide his movements, to disguise the location of his body.

Kaden and Valyn had spent days using old blankets as robes, trying to perfect the techniques, to mimic hips with their hands, to make elbows look like shoulders, to twist their bodies so that what seemed from the outside to be the center of mass was nothing more than empty air. According to the book, men and women sometimes went mad fighting shadowrobes. Kaden never believed that; for all Valyn’s efforts, it was always easy to tell his hands from his head, to see his skinny ankles darting about beneath the cloth. Watching Gabril, however … Kaden shook his head. Fighting a shadowrobe looked like trying to attack the wind.

The spears appeared to be tearing the First Speaker apart, stabbing again and again into the great flapping garment, burying themselves in the shifting folds of cloth. Blunted edges or no, those thrusts could kill, and as Kaden stared he saw one of the spear points stab right through the center of the robe, then emerge from the other side, the steel bright in the sunlight. The hooded figure did not fall.

Kaden looked closer. The faces of the three attackers were drawn in concentration, their panting audible even at a distance. Though the men obviously knew how to handle their weapons, though they had the numbers, their faces were grim. Great hacking slices that seemed sure to take off a shoulder thwacked harmlessly into fabric that gave way in soft billows. Suddenly, with no warning he could perceive, a short knife flashed out from beneath the robe, the pommel slamming up into the jaw of the closest soldier. Before the body hit the stone, the hand and knife were both gone, disappearing back into that flowing shadow.

At the sight, one of the remaining men lunged forward with a furious cry. His spear passed through a fold of cloth, punched out the other side, and into the shoulder of one of his comrades. As the wounded man fell behind him, the shadowrobe flowed forward, well inside the reach of the spear, and then that furtive blade was out again, pressing against the soldier’s throat. The unrobed man cursed, dropped his spear, and raised his hands in surrender. For a long time, the blade at his throat didn’t move. Kaden watched, wondering if he was about to see a man die. Then, with a flicker like a fire-cast shadow darting when the wind rises, the blade was gone.

His foes forgotten, the cloaked figure turned to Kaden, then lowered his hood. Black hair lay plastered against his skull, and his face ran with sweat, but he didn’t appear to be breathing hard. For a while, he said nothing, just looked. Then he waved a hand at his servant.

“Take our visitor to the study overlooking the acacia tree. I will decide his fate when I have bathed.”

* * *

“I have come,” Kaden said carefully, “to offer my condolences for the death of your father.”

Gabril the Red said nothing, studying Kaden from behind steepled fingers the way a hawk perched on a high branch might study a rabbit, his stillness the stillness of a predator poised to strike. He had taken his time in bathing, and with his face scrubbed and sleek black hair knotted behind his head, he bore little resemblance to the sweating shadowrobe from the courtyard. He looked like a young, well-heeled nobleman, not a warrior. Only a long, fine scar, light across his dark cheek, and the bright knives glittering in their red sheaths at his belt, hinted at the earlier violence.

“Murder,” Gabril said finally. The word was sharp with the accent of the Western Desert, vowels polished, consonants pitted as though by the scouring sand.

Kaden raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

“You should,” Gabril replied. “You talk of my father’s ‘death’ as though Gabril the Gray choked on the pit of a date or wandered from the well with no water. This is not the truth of the matter.”

“He was executed,” Kaden said, “in accordance with Annurian law.”

“He was murdered,” Gabril replied, “by your father.”

Kaden slowed his pulse, loosened the muscles of his shoulders and back. The Shin had trained him in all manner of techniques to control his own fear and rage, but they had said nothing about how to calm others-one more way in which they had left him ill prepared to rule an empire, one more deficit he would have to make up on his own, provided Gabril left him alive long enough.

The First Speaker eyed Kaden appraisingly. “You are not dead, as they say in the streets, but you are not Emperor. You return months after Sanlitun was set in the earth, and you come here, to me, your eyes hidden in this hood. Why? You must know what passed between our fathers.”

Kaden considered what he knew of the young man seated across the table, searching for a hook, a handle. As a child, he had grown up with stories of the desert tribes of Mo’ir, tales filled with vengeance, violence, and blood. He and Valyn had imagined every man and woman a shadowrobe, every meeting a duel to the death. According to Kiel, however, the stories were almost all wrong, the figment of an Annurian imagination obsessed with the exotic. Not that there weren’t shadowrobes in the west, not that Mo’ir’s history lacked its own share of blood, but if Kiel were to be believed, the tribes valued eloquence over violence, insisting on speech before every fight. Kaden had wagered his life on that insistence, but, face-to-face with Gabril, the words he had prepared seemed inadequate.

“I am not my father,” he said quietly. “Just as you are not yours.”

Gabril studied him for a long time, then raised a hand. A robed servant stepped silently from behind a wooden screen.

“Ta,” Gabril said, not bothering to look at the man. “Two cups.”

They waited in silence as the servant arranged a clay kettle, steeped the leaves, then poured the steaming liquid into twin clay cups. Kaden hesitated, eyeing the vessel warily.

“Drink,” Gabril said, gesturing. “If I kill you, I will use a knife.”

It was a slender reassurance, but Kaden lifted the cup to his lips, sipping gently at the bitter, unsweetened ta. Gabril raised his own cup, drank deeply, then set it gently back on the tabletop.

“The first time I journeyed to your city,” he said, “I was eight. I did not want to come, but my father was in chains, and we do not allow a person-man or woman-to die without witness.”

Kaden nodded, unsure how to respond.

“I went to your palace, inside your red walls, and I watched while seven of your citizens, men and women unknown to me or my father, men and women whose only sight of sand was a thin strip along the shores of your sea, decided his death.”

“This is the way of Annurian justice,” Kaden said. “All cases are decided by a council of seven.”

“This is the way of cowards,” Gabril said. “Your father watched this ‘trial,’ but he did not speak. When my father died, your father watched, but he did not wield the knife. When they dragged me from the hall, I swore I would see your father dead, and now I have.

“You come to me offering ‘condolences’ for my father’s murder? Then I will tell you this: I rejoice in the murder of yours. I came to see Sanlitun dead, to witness the life drained from his bones. I am only sorry I did not plant the knife in his beating heart myself.”

He considered Kaden for several heartbeats, then raised his cup, eyes intent above the rim, waiting.

Kaden said nothing. Anger flared, but he extinguished it, then crushed out the sparks of pride and shame as well. He had not come to trade barbs with the son of a dead traitor. To lose himself in a dispute with Gabril the Red was to forget the greater threat posed by Ran il Tornja and Adare, to abandon his best hope of blocking their attack. Kaden revolved Gabril’s story in his mind, searching for a crack, a fracture, a way in.

“You saw my father laid in his tomb months ago,” he said finally. “Why have you remained in this city you so clearly loathe?”

Gabril’s eyes narrowed. “My comings and goings are mine, and not yours to question.”

“Then I take back the question,” Kaden said. There was a shape to the verbal dance, but one he could discern only imperfectly. “You offered me a tale, and I will offer you one in return.”

Gabril hesitated. “Speak,” he said finally, “and I will hear your words.”

“Your father,” Kaden began, choosing his course carefully, “Gabril the Gray, hated the empire.”

The First Speaker nodded curtly. “Bedisa creates all the world’s people as equals. To set one man above the rest, to steal from the others their own voices, this is an abomination.”

Kaden had expected as much. Kiel had already explained to him the Mo’iran system of tribal rule, in which all men and women, regardless how poor, had a voice and a vote at the council fires. The Csestriim had explained the political processes of the Western Deserts efficiently and clearly, but Kaden wanted to hear Gabril himself say the words. Everything hinged on the Speaker.

“Surely,” Kaden pressed, “some people are more capable than others? Some see further and deeper into the heart of important matters.”

“And those people,” Gabril said, “speak first and last at the fires. But to silence the voices of others is cowardice and injustice both. It turns men and women to beasts.”

“The people of Annur are hardly beasts.”

“Your empire has made them docile. Compliant. Incurious. Your family turns the people into goats, then you strut among them as though you were lions, preying on the weak, devouring them.”

Gabril’s voice was tight but controlled, his fury carefully reined. Any doubt Kaden had about the Speaker’s hatred of the empire had vanished.

“Your father believed this, too,” Kaden replied, “and so he worked in secret to bring down the empire. To set in its place a-”

“Circle of Speakers,” Gabril said defiantly. “And he would have succeeded, had he not been betrayed. He was not alone in his desire to hear many voices about the fire.”

“As you said, you came to Annur to see my father brought low-”

“To see him dead,” Gabril said, cutting him off. “To see the great lion gutted.”

Kaden ignored the gibe. “But you have stayed to continue your father’s work.”

Gabril’s lips tightened. His hand dropped to one of the blades at his belt. Kaden schooled his body to stillness even as he locked gazes with the Speaker.

“You’re still here,” he said, pushing ahead with a story based in part on Kiel’s description of Mo’iran culture, partly on Morjeta’s assessment of Gabril’s activities in the city, and partly on pure hunch, “because the other aristocrats are here, all the dispossessed nobility from across the empire, in a single city. What better place to continue the work of your father? What better city in which to labor toward the destruction of Annur?”

Kaden fell silent, spread his hands, and waited.

“I had intended,” Gabril said, drawing his knife after a pause, “to allow you to depart unharmed.”

“And now?”

“Now, I will not repeat the errors of my father. I will see you dead before you can overturn the great work.” He rose to his feet, slipped the other knife from his belt, and set it on the table in front of Kaden. The steel was dark as coal save for the edge, which gleamed in the sunlight. Kaden made no move to reach for it.

“I offer you the choice your father never offered mine,” Gabril said, gesturing toward the knife. “To die a man.”

“I didn’t come here to fight you,” Kaden said.

“Then you will die a beast.”

“And you are certain that killing me will best serve your work?”

“You are the Emperor,” Gabril responded, as though that settled everything.

Kaden raised his eyebrows. “Am I?” He fingered the rough fabric of his coat, then ran his hand over the tabletop between them. “The clothes on my back are my only clothes. This wooden table is worth more than all my possessions.”

“When you return to your palace-”

“I cannot return to my palace. When my father died, others took his place.”

Gabril hesitated, then shook his head.

“And so one lion has replaced another. You have lost your empire and come to me thinking I will help you regain it. You judged me poorly.”

“It is you,” Kaden replied evenly, “whose judgment has gone awry.”

Gabril narrowed his eyes. “You tell me in my own ears that this is wrong, that others have not killed your father and stolen your empire?”

“So far you are right.”

“And yet you would have me believe that you do not want it back?”

“No,” Kaden said, taking up the knife before him, turning it back and forth, watching the sunlight play off the honed edge. It felt good in his hand, solid and strong. With an easy, fluid gesture he slammed the point into the table, watched it quiver. “I am not my father,” he said, “and I am not my sister. I do not want my empire back. I want it destroyed.”