Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“Quickly,” he said, reaching down to help Kaden to his feet. “It’s Triste.”

Kaden shook his head. “What?”

“She’s killing them.”

“Killing who ?”

“Everyone.”

By the time Kaden reached the doorway, it was all over. People were still sobbing, screaming, flames still lapped the sky, but Triste had dropped her arms. She stood like a marionette, as though her whole body were suspended by a single, impossibly thin string.

“Triste?” he said carefully, setting a hand gently on her shoulder.

She turned to him, eyes blank as cloud, but didn’t respond.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” The words were dark, leaden. “I don’t know.”

There was no fear in her tone, no worry, just a deep, unplumbed helplessness. Kaden took her face in his hands, looked into her eyes. There was nothing to see, and when he let his hands fall, she crumpled to the floor, folding in on herself. Kaden started to kneel, but Kiel waved him forward, toward the arch.

“You had best look,” he said.

Kaden hesitated, then limped from shadow into sunlight. For a long time he had no idea what he was looking at. Kiel claimed the kenta let out inside the Dawn Palace, and the guardsmen below certainly seemed to confirm the idea, but Kaden didn’t recognize the blackened, blasted courtyard before him. There were a few twisted trees, all on fire, scores of corpses, dozens more wounded and dying. The walls enclosing the small space were scorched, and at least one building was fully ablaze. It was only when he turned that he saw the twin towers, Yvonne’s and the Crane, flanking him, while above and behind them, like a bright point lodged in the belly of the sky, stood Intarra’s Spear.

He turned back to the courtyard. There was nothing to see but horror. Nothing to hear but the keening of the wounded and the clattering boots of more guardsmen drawing near. Kaden watched them burst into the small square, level their spears, then pause. He raised his eyes slowly, straightened his back. He had returned to his palace, to the home of his father, of his family. If he were going to die here, he would die with his eyes open. He would die on his feet.

The commander of the guards stared. Then, to Kaden’s shock, dropped to his knees. Behind him, his men shifted in confusion. The air was thick with smoke and warped by the heat of the still-burning flames, but if he could see them, they could see him, and one by one, they saw. One by one, they fell to their knees, pressed foreheads against the bloody stone. For what seemed like a long time there was only the crackling of flame, the sobs of the mangled. Then, like the low rumble of a flooded river, the voices came:

“All hail the Scion of Light, the Long Mind of the World, Holder of the Scales, and Keeper of the Gates.”

Kaden felt like choking, like vomiting. He wanted to fall to the stones and weep. But the Shin had taught him to stand even when his body flagged. They had taught him to look at the world without weeping.

“All hail,” the voices continued, rising above the wind, above the flame, “he who holds back the darkness. All hail the Emperor.”

Adare stood at the end of the dock, back to the still-burning desolation of Andt-Kyl’s eastern island, eyes on the small boats quartering through the waves. There were half a dozen of them, and they’d been at it all morning, back and forth, back and forth, dropping their weighted nets, trolling the bottom, then pulling them up slick and glistening with small fish. They kept those fish, tossing them into wooden barrels before lowering the nets once more. Adare chafed at the delay, the distraction, but she could hardly fault them. She had given the fisherman of Andt-Kyl this task, had asked it of them at a time when such asking was hard. Their town still smoldered. Many of their dead remained unburied. The wounded-both the screaming and the silent-needed tending. And still she had asked these men to go out in their small boats, to trawl for bodies.

“You will want to search for your mothers and fathers swept into the lake, for your brothers and sisters,” she had said, then added silently, shamefully, And for my own.

The fishermen had just glanced at each other, looked out over the waves, then nodded. Half of Andt-Kyl was in flames, including storerooms and root cellars stocked with the last of the winter’s provisions, food intended to carry the townsfolk through to the harvest. It made a certain sense to take to the boats. The living would need to eat, and these men knew their business; they could do their usual work while they searched for the dead.

Adare stood on the docks all morning staring south, staring until her eyes ached with the strain, a stone settling in her stomach every time they pulled another sodden body from the water. She could tell, even half a mile distant, whether the corpse belonged to a logger or to one of the Urghul. The horsemen were stripped of valuables, then tossed unceremoniously into the hold to be burned ashore later-no sense dragging the same corpse out of the water a dozen times. The dead of Andt-Kyl, however, were laid gently on the decking. The living fishermen hovered over them, as though they were spirits slipping clear of the wet flesh. Adare couldn’t hear anything at that distance, but from the angle of the heads, the stillness of the poses, she could imagine them praying.

She had tried to pray herself.

Intarra, she began, over and over, Lady of Light, please …

That same invocation, again and again. She never got any further. There was no way to know if the goddess was listening, if she cared, if she was even real, but none of that was the obstacle, not the true obstacle. There was always doubt in matters of faith, doubt that had never before, even at Adare’s most skeptical, stopped her from praying. No, the reason she could not finish her prayer here, now, staring out over the blue-gray waves of the lake, watching the men in the small boats haul up struggling fish and the calm, unstruggling dead, was not a problem of the goddess, but of Adare herself. She couldn’t end the prayer because she didn’t know what to pray for.

Her brother was dead. She had killed him, or helped to. Valyn, she said silently, the name like a nail lodged in her mind. He was her brother, and she had killed him. The truth scalded, but it was the truth, and so, rather than turning away from the lake, rather than burying herself in the thousands of other matters that needed her attention, rather than drinking until she dropped, or talking until she forgot, or working with her hands until exhaustion delivered her into sleep, she stood at the end of the dock, rehearsing what she had done, saying over and over the name of a dead brother, trying and failing to pray.

“Your Radiance.”

Lehav’s voice behind her. The scuff of his boots on the wooden dock. She closed her eyes, measured out the last moments of her solitude in his approaching steps.

“The town?” she asked, when he paused at her shoulder. “Do they know yet how many died?”

“It’s a mess,” he replied grimly. “It’s hard to know anything. Maybe half.”

Half a town killed. Was that a victory, against the might of an Urghul army? A failure?

“What about the Sons?”

“We took a beating. Not as bad as the Army of the North. I heard you were atop the signal tower.”

Adare nodded, still not looking at him.

“That was foolish,” he said.

Before the battle she would have bridled at the comment, would have argued the point loudly and long, as she had done with Fulton. Fulton, who was dead. Dead because she had insisted on seeing the battle up close. She shook her head slowly.