The Providence of Fire

52

Seamless dark.

Cold. Then creeping heat.

Low hum of insects.

Lapping water.

Pain like a blanket.

Then, worse than the pain, memory.

Laith holding the bridge, then falling.

Gwenna and Talal standing as they hurled a starshatter into Balendin’s prisoners, then falling.

Adare burying the blade in his side, il Tornja slicing him across the face, all sight extinguished, then Valyn himself falling, smashing into the water at the tower’s base.

Failure bitter as blood in his mouth, and the darkness, unrelenting and absolute, clamped down around him like a vise.

Valyn raised his head from the mud, then let it fall. How he had washed up on the shore of the lake he couldn’t say. He remembered swimming, his body going through the dumb bestial motions that had been trained into the fibers of his muscle, remembered floating when he was too tired to swim, then swimming some more. Why, he had no idea. Habit. Stubbornness. Cowardice.

He raised a trembling hand toward his eyes, desperate for the truth and terrified of it. The pain burned so bright he could almost see by it. He could endure the pain, but at the thought of a life lived in darkness-constant, unrelieved darkness blacker than the deepest pit of Hull’s Hole-his heart quailed.

He slid the tips of his fingers over his eyes, yanked back at the stabbing pain, then forced his hand to the wound once more. The gash started at his temple and sliced clean across both eyes and the bridge of his nose. The skin wept blood and, when he steeled himself enough to test the eyeballs, he found that they were cut cleanly as half-sliced eggs. He jerked his hand away once more, rolled onto his side, vomited into the mud, and lay still.

Fir needles sifted the wind.

Smoke, thick and sickening.

A twist in his innards where Adare had planted the knife.

Though she had torn the blade free, he could feel the queasy shift of his own slick viscera.

“Might as well know the worst,” he muttered. His own words felt lighter than ash in his ears, sounded like something already dead.

Fingers slick with blood, he probed the wound, driving his hand in past the second knuckle, pushing through skin and muscle, hunting the worst until he passed out, darkness in his mind rising up to meet the great, encircling dark beyond.

When he came to, he knew he was going to die.

The contours of his wound were wrong. There was too much blood. The steel had sliced thin walls that were not to be sliced. He drew the knowledge around him like a warm cloak, closed bloody lids over the ruin of his eyes, and slept.

* * *

Cold.

Low call of an owl.

Dark beyond dark.

“Come on, ’Shael,” he muttered, teeth chattering. “Come on.”

Ananshael’s absence.

His whole body shaking, Valyn hauled himself from the frigid mud.

“There’s got to be a warmer place to die,” he groaned, crawling forward on hands and knees, groping blindly for some pile of leaves and needles, some swath of moss where he could lie down, finally, and quit.

No, he realized with a sudden shock. Not blindly.

As always, he could hear a thousand sounds, could feel the ten thousand strands of the air itself eddy around his scrabbling fingers, but there was more. His mind remained dark, but there were … layers to the darkness, shapes that were not shapes, form etched into the formless void left by his stolen sight.

Hemlock boughs?

Rotted pine?

The swift flick of a bat’s wing in passage?

He didn’t see them-there was nothing to see in the unending dark-he knew them.

Bruised and baffled, he tested the wound at his side. It continued to weep blood. It should have killed him, but he was not dead.

“How?” he demanded of the darkness.

No reply, just the slap of chop on the rock, the leaves shifting in the breeze, and beneath, the distant sobbing and cries left behind by the battle.

“How?” he demanded again, forcing himself to his feet.

As if in reply, threaded on the wind: the long, low cry of the owl.

Valyn closed his eyes and breathed. The wound at his side stretched, then tore, but he kept breathing in, hauling the cold night air into his lungs until he felt that he would burst, tasting it as it passed his tongue, drawing it through his nose, in and in, sifting the smells.

Moss and rotted leaves, balsam and wet rock, dead fish farther off, and smoke and steel and thousands of gallons of blood slicked on the lake. Deeper. Horseflesh, dead and alive, vomit and piss, festering wounds … Deeper. A thousand thousand hair-thin strands shifting and tangling until …

There.

Leather and sweat. Whisper of nitre. Anger.

Gwenna.

Copper and steel, wet wool and wariness.

Talal.

Blood and cold, resin and steel.

Annick.

Alive. All three. Though how he knew he could not say.

Lungs burning, he blew out the great breath, sagging into a pine’s jagged limbs.

When he had the strength, he tried a step, another, then tripped on an unseen snag and pitched forward. Pain like lightning up his arm. He stood again, stumbled a few steps, knew too late a tree stood in his way even as the broken branch bit into his shoulder, tossing him to the uneven ground.

It was pointless. The whole fucking thing was pointless. He couldn’t smell anyone, not at this distance. Certainly couldn’t sort his own Wing from the scents scribbled across his mind. He couldn’t see. His eyes were gone.

“You’re losing your mind,” he screamed, heedless of who might hear. “You don’t even know how to die.” His eyes wept hot blood. “Quit with the fucking bullshit. Just quit! Just lie down!”

Again, the owl’s cry.

He listened to it fade, then shook his head.

“I’m done,” he said dully, the rage gone, snuffed out. Everything hurt. Everything wanted to quit. His hands hung wooden and useless at his sides. “I’m through getting up. I’m done.”

He took a long, unsteady breath, stared at the dark shapes sculpted from the deeper darkness, clamped a hand over the wound at his side, and got up.