Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Kaden narrowed his eyes. “Someone else?”

She grimaced, wrestling with the unspoken words. “Someone else … inside me. She could read the writing in Assare.…”

“She was the one who spoke after breaking Matol’s hand back in the Heart,” Kaden said. He summoned to mind the girl’s words. “ ‘ Stoppered to your cries will be my ears, and dried to dust the wide lake of my mercy.’ ”

Triste shuddered.

“Do you remember saying that?” he pressed.

“I don’t…” She hesitated. “I’m not sure. It’s like something I dreamed and then forgot.”

“It doesn’t sound like you,” Kiel observed. “Different syntax. Different idiom.”

Triste looked from Kaden to Kiel, then back again. “What does it mean ?” she asked. “How can I not be myself?”

Kaden shook his head. The Shin would have torn apart the question as predicated on incoherence. The very words I and self were mired in error, referring to nothing more than illusion, a shifting amalgamation of senses and perceptions with no core, no foundation, no indivisible essence. And yet, the thing that made the illusion so deceptive, so persuasive, was its very coherence. For Triste’s self to shift, to shatter … the monks had never spoken of such a thing.

“This other … aspect,” Kiel said carefully, “she seems to emerge only under certain conditions.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The flight through the mountains. The attack in Assare. Your assault on Matol. Conditions of extreme stress.”

“Like my mind is broken,” she said. “Like something broke it.”

Kiel nodded, but Kaden shook his head.

“Broken suggests two halves from a shattered whole,” he said, then indicated her with a vague hand, “but there’s nothing missing from you now. You’re a whole person. And what Kiel’s calling the other aspect doesn’t seem like an aspect. She’s confident, angry. She seems to have a memory of her own, abilities of her own. There might be some bleeding between the two of you, but you both seem whole, distinct. Like another soul was somehow planted in your body.”

The whole thing seemed impossible if Kaden paused to consider it, but Triste’s eyes blazed.

“Who is she?”

Kiel shook his head. “It doesn’t seem like you can know. There may be some … seepage between the two of you, but not enough for you to remember or understand.”

Triste’s lips tightened. “Ask her.”

Kaden shook his head. “That’s what they were doing back at the Heart,” he said. “That was the whole point of the torture. Matol demanded to know who you were a dozen times, and all he ended up with was a broken hand.”

“But,” Kiel pointed out, “Matol was a foe. Tan was a foe. Maybe she would talk to us. To you.”

“ Ask her,” Triste said.

“All right,” Kaden said, frowning. “The next time she … emerges, I’ll ask.”

Triste shook her head grimly. “Now.”

“It won’t work,” Kiel said. “You can’t just call her out.”

“Yes,” Triste said, seizing the knife from Kaden’s belt and pressing it to her stomach, “I can.”

Kaden and Kiel both started forward, but she was already driving the knife into her flesh, slowly but steadily, the cloth of the robe and the skin beneath parting under the pressure. Her face twisted in pain and Kaden extended a hand, but Kiel held him back.

“Come out here, you bitch,” she spat, voice hoarse and ragged. “Get the fuck out. ”

“She’ll kill herself,” Kaden said, body tight as a bowstring.

“It is her mind,” Kiel replied, “and her body. Her choice.”

Kaden hesitated. The first inch of the knife had disappeared, and blood soaked her dress, drenching the gruesome fabric. Her lips had gone dark as night, and her eyes rolled in her head, but she kept her white-knuckled grip on the knife, the slow, relentless pressure.

It’s over, Kaden thought, horrified at what he had allowed to happen. It’s over.

Then the knife stopped, and her eyes, rather than lolling blankly in their sockets, went abruptly sharp as nails, driving into Kaden.

“Fools,” she spat, voice strong as a great river in full flood. “You must keep this child from her idiocy. If she destroys this body, you will, all of you, suffer beyond your paltry imagining.”

Kaden stared. “What…” he began.

Triste shook her head impatiently. “Your world teeters. My husband, power-maddened, roams nearly at will. An ocean of misery rises, and I am trapped,” she glanced down at her body, “inside this flesh.”

Kaden found himself shrinking before that gaze. He wanted to close his eyes, to cover his ears, to flee. Instead, he forced himself to lean closer.

“Who are you?” he asked softly.

The woman looked at him a moment, and then, to his surprise, released the knife, raised a hand, and ran a finger along his cheek. “The monks worked hard to cut you off from me, Kaden hui’Malkeenian. But you are a man, and even the Great Emptiness cannot sever you utterly from my touch.”

A welter of emotions rose up in Kaden, fear and wonder undiluted by his years of training, the feelings taking him in their grip as powerfully as they had when he was a small child. There was something new there, as well, something hot and cold at once, burning from the tip of her finger where it touched his skin down through his heart into his very core, filling him with heat.

“Who are you?” he asked again, his voice a husky whisper.

“I am the joy in your heart,” she said, smiling grimly, “and the pleasure in your loins. I am the mother of everything you have labored to deny.”

She held Kaden’s gaze a moment, then glanced off to the side, as though listening to a new wind approaching across the water. “She is as strong as she is foolish, this vessel of mine,” she said with a grimace, then locked her eyes on Kaden once more. “The obviate, ” she said, voice bent with urgency. “You must perform it. Keep her safe until the obviate, for if she dies while I am trapped inside, my hand will vanish from this world and you will sink beneath a wide sea of suffering.”

“Who are you?” Kaden asked again, although a terrible thought was growing inside him.

The woman smiled, the moment suspended seemingly forever, then plunged her face into her hands, sobbing. When she spoke again, it was with Triste’s voice, trembling and terrified.

“Who is she?” she moaned. “Holy Hull, who is she?”

Kaden shook his head, the answer too large to voice.

It was Kiel who replied. “She is your goddess,” he said gently. “The one you have named Ciena.”

Triste stared. “That’s impossible.”

“No,” he said. “The gods took human form during the Csestriim wars.”

“But why?” Kaden asked, his voice hoarse. “Even if it’s true, why now?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“What does it mean ?” Triste demanded.

“It means,” Kiel replied, staring at the blank wall, “that something interesting has begun.”

Triste glanced down at her blood-slick hands, then up at the Csestriim, her eyes wide, terrified. “Interesting?” she demanded, voice fraying with panic. “How is this interesting ? It’s horrifying !”

The Csestriim studied her awhile, then nodded. “Yes. That seems accurate. For those of you who can feel horror, it will be horrifying.”

Seamless dark.

Cold. Then creeping heat.

Low hum of insects.

Lapping water.

Pain like a blanket.

Then, worse than the pain, memory.