Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Gwenna shrugged. “Stuff that doesn’t rot: knives, pots, bracelets. Oh, and bones. A whole shitload of bones.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere. It’s like every poor bastard in the place was slaughtered as they sat down to breakfast.”

Valyn frowned and turned back to the monk. “All right, so we can see for ourselves it’s empty. Where are we? What killed the people who lived here?”

“This is Assare,” Tan replied. “The first human city.”

Gwenna let out a bark that might have been laughter. Valyn started to ask Tan how he knew all this, why the place didn’t appear on any imperial maps, but night was nearly upon them, and they hadn’t moved to any reliable cover. Gwenna and Annick were good scouts, but Valyn wanted the group holed up in a full defensive position before the darkness thickened further. He could see and move well enough in full darkness-in fact, it gave him a distinct advantage-but the other members of his Wing hadn’t reaped quite the same benefit from their own time in Hull’s Hole, and the rest of the party, the ones who weren’t Kettral, would be essentially blind.

“Fine. We can talk about it later. Right now,” he pointed to the cliff face, “we’re going inside and up, someplace in front, with windows; I want to be able to keep eyes on the valley.”

Laith raised an eyebrow, then jerked a thumb at Tan. “This guy says the city’s older than dirt and you want to set up camp in a crumbling cliff? What about something less likely to fall on our heads?”

“I want the high ground,” Valyn replied.

“For what? Hunting rats?”

Valyn bit back a sharp retort. “Yes, for hunting rats. It’s a cliff, Laith. Cliffs don’t just fall over.”

The flier gestured to the scree scattered across the valley floor, some boulders the size of small houses.

“The cliff is sound,” Tan said. “And the kenta is inside.” As if that settled the whole matter.

“That’s what we came for,” Valyn said. “Now move . Light’s wasting and we’re standing out here like geese.”

The Kettral set out at a light jog, while Pyrre and the monks fell in a few steps behind. Valyn had crossed half the distance before he realized that Triste wasn’t following. She still stood in the broad, grassy clearing, staring around, eyes wide as lanterns in the crepuscular light, the too-large clothes clutched tight about her in one hand.

“Triste,” Valyn called. “Let’s go.”

She seemed not to have heard him, and he turned back, cursing beneath his breath. It was bad enough when his own Wing questioned his decisions-at least they were capable fighters and good tactical thinkers-but if he had to play wet nurse to this girl all the way back to Annur … The thought evaporated as she turned to face him, face baffled, as though lost in the slow depths of dream.

“Triste,” he said, studying her. “ Triste. ”

Finally she focused on him. Tears welled in her eyes, catching the gold of the fading light.

“Are you all right?” Valyn asked, putting a hand on her elbow.

She nodded, trembling. “Yes. I just … I don’t know. It’s such a sad place.”

“You’re cold. Tired. Let’s get inside.”

She hesitated, then turned toward the ancient city, allowing herself to be led.

* * *

From the outside, the cliff had appeared solid; the simple façade was chipped and worn, whatever once shuttered the windows long gone to dust, but the angles of the doorframe looked true, the crucial verticals more or less plumb. As they stepped beneath the engraved lintel, however, Valyn could see that here, too, time and decay had worked their quiet violence. Though the city’s bones were bedrock, the chiseling and carving of the builders had allowed in both the wind and the water. Small rivulets spilled over the rock, draining from some impossible height. The water ran cold and clear now, but in the winter it would freeze, and centuries of ice had shattered whole sections of stone, prizing them from the walls and ceiling. A rock the size of a horse blocked part of the passage, while smaller chunks made the footing treacherous.

Valyn pushed deeper into the cave, the smell of damp stone and lichen filling his nostrils. After twenty claustrophobic paces guarded by arrow loops and murder holes, the corridor opened out into a high, wide space-half natural cavern, half carved-evidently an entrance hall of sorts. Recessed sconces for torches grooved the walls, and a wide basin, cracked but graceful, sat in the center. It must have been welcoming once, if not exactly grand, but now it felt empty, cold, and too large to easily defend.

Doorways radiated outward, black rectangles in the lesser gloom, while wide stone stairs rose along the walls on each side. One route looked as likely as the other, and Valyn turned to Tan.

“Which way?”

No one replied.

“You all might enjoy sightseeing,” Valyn went on after a moment, glancing over at the others, “but there are a dozen doors off this hall, and we don’t have the people to guard them or the tools to seal them up. So, if you’re done admiring the architecture…”

“Valyn,” Kaden said finally. “Do you have some sort of light? I can barely see my hand in front of my face in here.”

Valyn almost snapped something impatient about getting up higher before they started worrying about lights, then realized that his brother wasn’t exaggerating. To Valyn’s eyes the room was dim, shadowy, but perfectly navigable. The others, however, were staring as though lost in utter darkness. The slarn, he realized, a chill passing through him as he thought back to the egg’s foul pitch thick in his throat.

“Sure,” he said, shoving aside the memory, sliding his tactical lantern from his pack, kindling it, then holding it aloft. The chamber looked even worse in the flickering light. Plaster had crumbled from the walls and ceiling, littering the ground and exposing the rough faces of the stone beneath. A few paces away, a section of floor had collapsed, yawning into the darkness of a cellar beneath. Evidently the builders had dug down as well as burrowing up, and the discovery that he stood atop a warren of rotten rock, the whole thing undermined with tunnels, did nothing to improve Valyn’s mood.

It’s held together for thousands of years, he told himself. It’ll last another night.

“There,” Tan said, pointing to the stairs on the left.

Valyn glanced at the monk, nodded, slipped one of his short blades from its sheath, and started up.

The stairs climbed gracefully around the perimeter of the entrance hall, and then, as they neared the ceiling, turned away from the room into a high, narrow passage. Valyn slid to the side to let Tan lead, counting the floors as they passed, trying to keep track of which way was out . The place reminded him uncomfortably of Hull’s Hole, and though he didn’t mind the darkness, all the winding back and forth, the rooms opening off to the sides, the branching of the corridors, played tricks with his mind. After a while he lost any sense of which doors led outward and which plunged deeper into the earth. When they reached an open chamber from which new passageways branched in all directions, he paused.

“I hope you know where you’re going, monk,” he said.

Kaden pointed. “Out is that way.”

“How do you know?”

His brother shrugged. “Old monk trick.”

“Tricks make me nervous,” Valyn replied, but Tan had already started down the corridor.

“He is right,” the man said over his shoulder. “And we are close to the kenta .”

As it turned out, the trick worked. After forty paces or so, they emerged from the tunnel onto a huge ledge. Fifty paces above them the cliff wall swept up and out in a smooth wave, a towering natural roof that would keep off the worst of the weather while allowing light and air to fill the space. After the cramped darkness inside the cliff, even the watery moonlight seemed bright, too bright. Valyn crossed to the lip, where the remains of a low wall protected against a fall of sixty or seventy paces. They had climbed above the blackpines, high enough to see out over the entire valley. Valyn watched the moonlight flicker like bright silver coins on the surface of the river below. A gust of wind snatched at him, but he didn’t step back.