Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“There were benches,” Talal said. The leach had broken off from the group to check the darker corners. “And fountains pouring straight out of the cliff. The masonry is mostly worn away, but the water still flows.”

“They carved channels,” Triste pointed out, “and a pool.”

“Someone had a nice place here,” Laith said, gesturing to a large building that stood at the far end of the ledge.

Unlike the tunnels and rooms through which they had climbed, the structure was built rather than carved, a man-made fortress right on the cliff’s edge. No, Valyn realized, examining the tall windows, the wide, empty door, not a fortress. More like a palace. The building filled half the ledge, stretching up four or five stories to where the roof almost touched the sweeping expanse of granite above.

“Huge house,” the flier added, “and a private garden halfway up the cliff.”

“Where’s the kenta ?” Valyn asked, turning in a slow circle, uncertain what he was looking for.

“Inside,” Tan said.

Valyn nodded. “Suits me. Let’s get inside.”

“I thought you wanted a view,” the flier grumbled.

“I want to look,” Valyn said, “not get looked at. The palace has windows. The kenta is there. We set up shop in there.”

Even dilapidated, even crumbling, the inside of the structure lived up to the promise of its setting. Unlike the hoarded warren of low halls and tunnels below, the palace was high-ceilinged, the gracious windows admitting pools of moonlight along with the cool night air. It wasn’t built for fortification, but then, there wasn’t much need for fortification when you were seventy paces up a sheer cliff.

“Up,” Tan said, gesturing to the wide central staircase with its crumbling balustrade.

“I thought we were up,” Laith griped. “There’s such a thing as too much elevation, you know.”

“And this from the Wing’s flier,” Gwenna said.

“What do you suppose this was?” Kaden asked, running a hand along the stone.

Valyn shrugged. “King’s palace. Temple, maybe. Guild hall, if merchants ran the city.”

To his surprise, Triste shook her head. “An orphanage,” she said quietly, so quietly he wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.

“An orphanage?” Pyrre asked. Ever since landing, the assassin had seemed curious rather than concerned, but her hands didn’t stray far from the pommels of her knives. “I wish the people where I grew up took such good care of their orphans.”

Tan ignored the assassin, turning instead to Triste, his stare boring into her. “How do you know that?”

She glanced at Kaden for support, then pointed back the way they had come, to the doorway opening out onto the ledge. “Above the door. It’s carved there. No one else saw?”

Valyn shook his head. He really didn’t give a shit if the place was a warehouse or a whorehouse as long as it had good sight lines, redundant exits, and enough life left not to collapse abruptly on their heads. Rampuri Tan, however, had fixed the girl with that empty, unreadable stare of his.

“Show me,” he said.

“We’re going up,” Valyn said. “I want our perimeter established before full dark.”

Tan turned to him. “Then establish it. The girl is coming with me.”

Valyn bit off a sharp retort. The monk wasn’t a part of his Wing, not under his command. He could press the issue, but Rampuri Tan didn’t seem the type to respond to pressure, and every minute spent arguing was a minute of further vulnerability. Besides, there was something about the monk, something dangerous in the way he held that strange spear of his, in the flat calm of his stare. Valyn thought he could kill him if it came to blows, but he didn’t see any reason to test the theory.

“All right,” he snapped. “I’ll cover you. Let’s get this done quickly.”

They found the inscription just where Triste said, the words pitted and worn, half obscured by lichen. Valyn squinted at it, trying to make out the lettering before realizing the language was unfamiliar. Linguistic training on the Islands was extensive, but even the characters were alien-sharp and angular, no loops or curves, a script designed to be gouged rather than brushed. He glanced over at Triste, eyebrows raised. “You can read that?”

She was standing in the deep shadow, staring up at the lintel, shivering with the sudden night chill. “I don’t…” She shook her head, then abruptly nodded instead. “I guess.”

“What does it say?” Tan demanded.

She frowned, and for a moment Valyn thought she would admit that the words were foreign after all. Then, haltingly at first, she spoke, her voice oddly lilting and musical. “Ientain, na si-ientanin. Na si-andrellin, eiran.”

The phrases weren’t any more familiar than the shapes graven into the stone, and Valyn glanced over at Tan. The monk’s face, as always, was blank. Spending time around the Shin, Valyn was starting to realize how much he relied on subtle emotional cues. Narrowed eyes, whitened knuckles, tense shoulders-it was all a text he could read, one that signaled belligerence or submission, rage or calm. The monks, however, and Tan in particular, were blank pages, palimpsests scraped and scraped until they were utterly empty, utterly clean.

“What does it mean?” Valyn asked, as much to break the brittle silence as anything else.

Triste frowned, then translated, faltering only briefly. “A home for those who have no home. For those who have no family, love.”

Pyrre had joined them as Triste spoke, and the assassin glanced up at the words with pursed lips. “Would have saved some carving to just write Orphanage . Better yet, Kids. ”

“What language is it?” Valyn asked.

Triste hesitated, then shook her head.

“It is Csestriim,” Tan said finally. “More specifically, a dialect of the Csestriim speech used by the early humans.”

Valyn raised an eyebrow. “The priestesses of Ciena learn Csestriim?”

Triste bit her lip. “I’m not … I suppose I did. There were a lot of languages. The men … they come from all over. All over the world.”

“You mean you studied up in case you were called upon to pleasure a Csestriim?” Pyrre asked. “I’m impressed.”

“I wasn’t a leina, ” Triste replied. “I wasn’t initiated.…” She trailed off, still staring at the words as though they were vipers.

“All right then,” Valyn said finally, “the language lesson has been fun.” He glanced over the broad swath of stone, and the hair on his arms rose.

Across the ledge, a hundred paces from where he stood, inside the black yawning doorway through which they had first emerged from the cliff: a flicker of motion. No light, no noise, just a silent shape sliding across the darkness, gone so fast he couldn’t even be certain it was real. It could have been anything, a leaf caught in the night breeze, a fragment of cloth flapping. But there is no cloth here, he reminded himself. Gwenna and Annick had said as much. Only the hard things. Only the bones.

There were animals in the Bone Mountains, crag cats, bears, plenty of smaller, less dangerous creatures. Something might have found a convenient lair inside the cliff. Something might have followed them in. In either case, they were vulnerable standing in the entrance to the orphanage, silhouetted by the light of their lantern. Jumping at shadows was a good way to make mistakes, but so was standing around out in the open.

“Upstairs,” he said. “Laith and Gwenna, check the first floors. Talal, Annick, those above. Gwenna, rig the whole place.”

He glanced over his shoulder once more, to where he’d seen the motion. Nothing. The night was still, silent. Valyn turned back to the group. “Now.”