Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

About time, Valyn thought, clenching his jaw against the cold. He reached over to tap Kaden on the arm, then pointed.

Kaden took a firm hold on the overhead strap, then leaned out a little farther from the talon to get a better look. Despite his lack of training, he was handling these early kettral flights with surprising composure. Valyn himself had been terrified of the birds when he first arrived on the Islands, but Kaden, after asking a few straightforward questions about how best to mount, dismount, and position himself during flight, had endured the trip with no apparent anxiety, relaxing into the harness and watching the peaks with those impassive blazing eyes. When the bird completed a quarter pass over the valley, he turned back to Valyn and nodded.

Things had gone less smoothly over on the bird’s opposite talon; Gwenna, irritated to be sharing a perch with Triste, spent half the flight prodding and repositioning the girl, frightening her while failing to make her either safer or more comfortable. It wasn’t Triste’s fault she didn’t know the first thing about the riding of massive birds.

That she’d managed to stay alive, even to help when everything went into the shitter, said something about her resolve, her tenacity, but there were limits. The girl wasn’t Kettral; she was a priestess of the Goddess of Pleasure, and a childhood in Ciena’s temple learning about lutes, dancing, and fine wine had done little to prepare her for the rigors of Kettral travel.

Of course, Valyn reminded himself, I’d look just as uncomfortable if someone demanded that I play the lute. They each had their weaknesses. The difference was, you didn’t die if you screwed up a passage on the lute.

After a while, Gwenna gave up her half-assed attempts to help, abandoning Triste to swing in the cold wind. Valyn looked over, watching the girl huddle into herself, dangling miserably in her harness. She’d exchanged her shredded gown for the too-large uniform of one of the dead Aedolians, and though it hung on her like laundry flapping on a line, the ludicrous clothing did nothing to obscure her raven-dark hair or violet eyes. Next to Triste, the other women in the group looked dull, drab. Not that Gwenna was likely to give a shit about that. Clearly it was the girl’s incompetence she considered unforgivable.

And Valyn didn’t even want to think about what was happening over on the other bird. They were lucky to have the second kettral, the one left behind when they’d killed Sami Yurl’s traitorous Wing-Suant’ra couldn’t have hauled the whole group on her own-but adding another bird forced Talal into a flier’s role, leaving Rampuri Tan and Pyrre to Annick’s dubious tutelage down below. At least Gwenna had bothered to berate Triste about her flying posture; as far as Valyn could make out, the sniper had neglected her charges entirely, her hard eyes fixed on the terrain below, bow half drawn, despite the frigid wind. Fortunately, both Rampuri Tan and Pyrre seemed to have found the knack of hanging in the harness while holding on to the straps above. They hadn’t plummeted to their deaths, at least, which was something.

We’ll be down soon, Valyn reminded himself, squinting at the ground below, trying to figure out the best spot for the drop.

It was clear why this valley, unlike the others, had been able to support human settlement: it was deeper, much deeper. Instead of the rough, V-shaped defiles that gouged the peaks all around, here the sheer granite walls fell away thousands upon thousands of feet, shadowing and sheltering a climate in the gorge below that was green rather than brown and gray, with real trees instead of the isolated and stunted trunks dotting the rest of the mountains. As they dipped below the upper rim, Valyn could feel the warmer, moister air. At the head of the valley, where the glaciers melted, a slender filament of waterfall tumbled over the lip, half hidden behind a veil of spray, shimmering, roiling, and reflecting the light, then splashing into a lake that drained out in a lazy river along the valley floor. Grass flanked the river; not the bunchy, ragged clumps he’d seen in the higher peaks, but real grass, green and even, if not particularly lush.

It was the city itself, however, the drew Valyn’s eye, if city was even the right word. Valyn had never seen anything to compare to it. Stairs chipped from the stone face zigzagged from ledge to ledge, and while some of those ledges looked natural, as though huge shards of stone had simply peeled away, others were too regular, too neat, evidently chiseled out over years or decades. Ranks of rough, rectangular holes pierced the wall- windows into interior chambers. Other, smaller apertures might have served as chimneys or sockets for some lattice of wooden scaffolding long rotted away. It was difficult to gauge the scale, but the highest windows opened out at least a hundred paces above the valley floor, far higher than the tips of the blackpines below. It was a staggering accomplishment. Valyn tried to guess how long such a place would take to build, how many men and women had labored for how many years to hack their mountain home from the rock, but he was a soldier, not an engineer. Decades maybe. Centuries.

It was a beautiful spot. More importantly, you could defend it. The only approach into the gorge was from the east, up the horridly steep broken valley. Fifty men could hold the canyon mouth against an army with little need to do anything more than shove boulders down the scree. The flat land at the base of the cliffs offered plenty of space on which to graze animals and grow crops, and if an army somehow managed to force its way into the gorge, the city itself, adequately provisioned, looked capable of withstanding an indefinite siege. It was a good spot, a safe spot.

So why is it dead?

Rampuri Tan hadn’t told them shit about the place, which was probably a good thing, since Valyn was having trouble believing the little he’d already heard. Evidently, the kenta was down there, somewhere. Evidently Kaden and Tan could use it to travel halfway around the world in a single step. The whole thing sounded ludicrous, but after eight years training with leaches, after seeing what Talal and Balendin could do with their strange powers, after Valyn’s own experience in Hull’s Hole, he was less ready to dismiss Kaden’s story of the gates out of hand. Still, it would have helped to know what the ’Kent-kissing things looked like.

Valyn had hoped he might get a description of what they were searching for-dimensions, features-but Kaden didn’t seem to know much more about the gates than the Csestriim bit, and all the monk would say was, “You find the city, and I will take us to the kenta. ”

“Well, here’s the city,” Valyn muttered, flexing his freezing sword hand to regain some motion while checking over his straps. He flicked a little hand sign at Gwenna: aided dismount, short perimeter check . She nodded impatiently, already loosening Triste’s buckles for the drop. Valyn signaled to Laith with a few tugs on the straps, and the flier banked Suant’ra slightly to bring her down right at the base of the cliff, a few dozen paces from the stairs and windows.

This place had better be dead, Valyn thought, as the cracked stone loomed up beneath him.

The drops went better than he could have hoped. Both monks followed instructions perfectly, as though they’d spent days memorizing them; Triste was almost light enough to catch; and Pyrre, who looked like she was going to bust her head open, tucked into the fall at the last minute and rolled to her feet chuckling. Annick and Gwenna didn’t wait for the others to regain their balance before darting off, blades out, to check the perimeter, one outward into the high grass, the other, after lighting a storm lantern, into the gaping mouth of the city itself.