Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“I’ll show you pain, bitch.”

The two remaining Ishien moved toward the kenta and their commander, but Kiel was faster, stepping forward to block them, raising the naczal .

“I’ll show you pain like you’d never believe,” Matol snarled, dropping his sword, wrenching his hand free and scrabbling with it at her throat.

“You would be shocked, you weak little man, at what I believe.”

Matol’s fingers closed around her neck, but Triste just smiled, pulling him closer, then pressing her lips to his. Kaden stared as she wrapped him in her embrace, her eyes closed with something like rapture as she moved against him, hip to hip, mouth to mouth, like lovers in desperate ecstasy. The Ishien was still choking her even as his mouth opened to her kiss, responding to some animal call older than thought, older than hate. Triste clutching at his free arm, pressing it back, back through the space of the kenta …

Matol jerked as though stabbed, tried to shout, to pull away, but Triste’s hand was locked on the back of his neck. He yanked his arm from the kenta, only there was no arm left, just a blank slab of flesh with two circles of bone at the center, butchered as though with an impossibly sharp cleaver. Bone and flesh. Then blood in a fountain.

Triste pulled back a moment, smiling as Matol flailed. “Don’t think about the pain,” she cooed, “think about the pleasure. You thought you had burned it out of your soul, but I am returning it to you.” Then her lips were on his again, questing, probing, her chest pressed up against his chest as she forced him toward the gate once more. He took a step back, his leg passed the invisible plane, and he buckled, as though someone on the far side had kicked his foot out from under him.

Triste held him up, pulling him into her lips, her arms, her horrible embrace. The leg was gone. Both Matol and Triste were soaked in blood, and still she didn’t let him go. Matol writhed inside her arms, but it was no longer clear he was trying to escape, no longer clear that he could. As Kaden stared, shock scratching at the edge of the vaniate, Triste slammed the Ishien leader up against the post of the kenta, forcing her body against his, sliding a hand down his breeches even as she pivoted him against the stone once more, pivoted him into the hungry emptiness of the gate. Matol’s spine arched, his head craned back, his whole body convulsed, a series of awful, bone-wracking spasms, and then, finally, Triste let him fall. There was little left but the head and a sliver of torso. He looked more like a side of bloody beef than a man. Triste was drenched, as though she had stood for hours in a rain of blood, but she paid no attention to the red streaming down her face, dripping from her fingers. She stared at Matol, her face hard and unreadable, then licked the blood from her lips.

“Triste?” Kaden said, his mind still scrambling to make sense of what he’d seen.

She shook her head, eyes huge and blank. “What?”

Then, before he could respond, the Ishien were pouring through the gate on the far side of the island. There were at least a dozen, all in boiled wool and leather, all carrying blades and bows. A few faces Kaden recognized, others he did not. The numbers were what mattered. Triste could hardly yank all of them from the vaniate, could hardly drive all of them through the gates.

“Here,” Billick called, gesturing. “Ring them in.”

As the Ishien spread out, Kaden watched all chance of freedom slip away. No sorrow came with the realization of failure. No fear.

“Bring them down with bolts and arrows,” the Ishien went on. “To the legs only. I want them crippled, not dead.”

He glanced once at the mangled smear of flesh that had been Matol, then hefted his blade, as though testing its weight. They were taking their time, choosing their shots, but it wouldn’t be long before the arrows flew.

“Behind the kenta, ” Kiel said, gesturing.

Kaden understood, retreating behind the gate with Triste just before the first hum of the bowstrings. A half-dozen arrows streaked toward them … then vanished into the emptiness of the kenta . The gate was a shield, but it was immobile. Even as he watched, the Ishien were spreading out, moving to the flanks. Over his shoulder, just a few paces behind, the island dropped away, cliffs plunging straight down into the shattered rocks and spray below. There would be no escape there.

“We have to go through,” he said.

“The palace archers,” Triste said, lips drawn back in a smile or a snarl. Face and hair dripping blood, she might have been some figure from nightmare, but inside the vaniate Kaden was beyond all nightmare.

“We’re behind the gate now,” Kaden said, mind humming. “We’ll come out on the opposite side, putting the kenta between us and the palace guards. It’ll shield us.”

He glanced at Kiel, and the Csestriim nodded. “Until they adjust,” he murmured.

“They’re not taking me,” Triste said, eyeing the Ishien with something like hunger. “They will never take me.”

“Our odds on the other side of the gate are slim,” Kiel said.

“They’re slim either way,” Kaden said. “Right now, confusion is our friend.”

Before they could debate the matter further, Triste loosed a defiant scream, then hurled herself through the kenta .

Kaden hesitated, probing the boundary of the vaniate . It flexed beneath his mind’s touch, like the surface of a pool of water when a leaf settles upon it, but the trance held. He took one more look at the Ishien, then followed.

The stone chamber was in chaos. Men were shouting orders at one another, waving weapons, pointing bows. The sound redoubled as Kaden emerged through the gate, reverberating off of the walls and low ceiling, the cries of anger, fear, and confusion battering him from all directions. The crossbowmen loosed another volley that passed harmlessly into the kenta . Kiel lowered the blade of the naczal, leveling it inches from the gate.

“The Ishien have a hard choice,” he said, voice calm as though discussing the evening meal. “We’re waiting on this side, the guards on the other, and they know it.”

“There’s only three of us,” Kaden said.

“But we are here, ” Kiel replied. “Which gives us an edge.”

For a few heartbeats, nothing happened. The palace soldiers struggled to reload and crank their weapons while their commander shouted pointless orders. Kaden scanned the tiny space for some escape, but there was nothing to find. The chamber was only ten paces across, and seemed to be far underground, the only exit a narrow corridor blocked by a line of soldiers and crossbowmen with swords at their hips.

The corridor or the kenta. The soldiers or the Ishien. There were no good choices. Kaden reached behind him, took a torch from its sconce on the wall. It was a foolish weapon, but felt better than facing all that steel with nothing in his hands.

“We wait for the Ishien,” he said. “They’ll absorb some of the attack. When they come through, we have to force our way back through the kenta, hope we can slip past whomever they left on the island.”

Kiel nodded, but Triste didn’t move. She was staring, bloody eyes fixed on something in the corridor, a shape moving in the darkness. Kaden squinted. It looked like another soldier, a lone man arriving from the barracks or halls above. Then he stepped forward into the light.

“My father,” she snarled, hands balled into fists.

As usual, Adiv’s blindfold did nothing to hinder the sense that he was looking at you, looking straight through you. The councillor studied them, then waved a hand at the soldiers under his command. “Advance,” he said, voice hard. “Kill them.”