Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Despite the size of the room, despite the gaping windows and shattered roof open to the sky, the space was suddenly too small, too full, bursting with the heat of raised voices and the blind straining of untrammeled emotion. Kaden struggled to watch it all without letting it overwhelm him. Was this how people lived? How they spoke? How could they see anything clearly in the midst of that raging torrent?

Triste opened her mouth, but no words came out. After a mute moment, she shoved her way past Annick, out into the hallway, back the way they had come.

“Watch out for the stairs,” Pyrre called after her cheerfully.

* * *

Triste returned sooner than Kaden expected, tears dry, one hand hugging herself around the waist, the other holding a sword. Kaden remembered impressive weapons from his childhood-jewel-crusted ceremonial swords; the long, wide blades of the Aedolians; businesslike sabers carried by the palace guard-but nothing like this. This sword was made from steel so clear it might not have been steel at all but some sliver of winter sky hammered into a perfect shallow arc, then polished to a silent gloss. It was right .

“What,” Valyn asked, turning from the darkness beyond the window as Triste’s too-large boots scuffed the stone, “is that?”

“Sweet ’Shael, Val,” Laith said. He and Talal had returned to the front chamber after checking the whole floor. “I think you’re a good Wing leader and all, but it worries me when you don’t recognize a sword.”

Valyn ignored the flier. “Where did you find it?” he asked, crossing to Triste.

She waved a vague hand toward the hallway. “In one of the rooms. It was covered up with rubble, but I saw the glint off it. It looks new. Is it one of ours?”

Valyn shook his head grimly.

“So we’re not the only ones flying around the ass end of nowhere,” Laith observed. The words were casual, but Kaden noticed that the flier drifted away from the open doorway, eyes flitting to the shadows in the corners.

Valyn put a hand in front of Kaden, drawing him away from the sword, as though even unwielded the weapon could cut, could kill.

“Annick,” he said, “back on the window. Gwenna and Talal, when we’re finished here, I want another sweep of this floor.”

“They just swept the floor,” the demolitions master observed.

“Sweep it again,” Valyn said, “eyes out for rigged falls and double binds.”

“What about bad men hiding in the corners?” Laith asked.

Valyn ignored him.

None of it meant anything to Kaden, and after a moment he turned back to the sword. “Does that style of blade look familiar?” He asked. There might be a clue in the provenance of the sword, but he didn’t know enough about weapons to say.

“I’ve seen things similar,” Valyn replied, frowning. “Some of the Manjari use a single-sided blade.”

“It’s not Manjari,” Pyrre said. She hadn’t moved, but she had stopped sharpening.

“Maybe something from somewhere in Menkiddoc?” Talal suggested. “We know practically nothing about the entire continent.”

“We’re in the Bone Mountains,” Valyn pointed out. “Menkiddoc is thousands of miles to the south.”

“It’s not from Menkiddoc,” Pyrre added.

“Anthera is close,” Kaden pointed out.

“Antherans like broadblades,” Valyn replied, shaking his head curtly. “And clubs, for some inexplicable reason.”

“It is not Antheran.” This time, however, it was not Pyrre who spoke.

Kaden turned to find Tan in front of the kenta, a robed shadow against the darker shadows beyond, the naczal glinting in his right hand. For all his size, the monk moved silently, and none of them had heard him as he reentered the room. He stepped forward. “It is Csestriim.”

For what seemed like a long time a tight, cold silence filled the room.

“I guess you didn’t die on the other side of the gate,” Gwenna observed finally.

“No,” Tan replied. “I did not.”

“Want to tell us what you found?”

“No. I do not. Where did you find the blade?”

Valyn gestured down the hall as Kaden tried to put the pieces together in his mind.

Tan had said earlier that the script above the door was human, but ancient. This was a human building, a human city, but the Csestriim had created the kenta, created one here, in the center of a city filled with bones. The sword looked new, but then, so did Tan’s naczal . It could be thousands of years old, one of the weapons used when …

“The Csestriim killed them,” Kaden said slowly. “They opened a gate right here in the middle of the city, bypassing the walls, bypassing all the defenses.” His thought leapt outside of itself, into the emotionless minds of the attackers. Through the beshra’an it was all so clear, so rational.

“They came through, probably at night, killing the children first because the children were humanity’s best weapon against them. They started here, at the top.…” The memory of the small skeletons on the stairs flared up in his mind. “Or some of them did,” he amended. “The Csestriim set the trap first, then drove the children down, stabbing them as they fled, cutting them down on the stairs or in the hallways, then doubling back to kill those who had hidden behind doors or under beds.” He slipped from the mind of the hunters into the fear of the hunted. “Most of the children would have been too terrified to do anything, but even those who tried to escape…” He gestured helplessly. “Where would they go? We’re halfway up the cliff.” He glanced to the window, living the screaming, the slaughter. “Some would have jumped,” he said, his heart hammering at the thought. “It was hopeless, but some would have jumped anyway.”

Trembling with the borrowed terror of children millennia dead, he slipped out of the beshra’an to find half a dozen pairs of eyes fixed upon him.

“What is this place?” Talal asked finally, gazing about the room.

“I told you earlier,” Tan replied. “It is Assare.”

Valyn shook his head. “Why haven’t we heard of it?”

“Rivers have changed their course since people last drew breath here.”

“Why is it here ?” Kaden asked. He tried to dredge up what little he’d overheard about urban development during his childhood in the Dawn Palace. “There’s no port, no road.”

“That was the point,” Tan replied, seating himself cross-legged beside the sword. The monk considered it for several heartbeats, but made no move to reach out. Kaden waited for him to continue, but after a moment the monk closed his eyes.

Laith stared at Tan, looked over to Kaden, then back again before spreading his hands. “That’s the end of the story? Csestriim came. They killed everyone. Dropped a sword … time for a nice rest?”

If the gibe bothered Tan, he didn’t show it. His eyes remained closed. His chest rose and fell in even, steady breaths.

To Kaden’s surprise, it was Triste who broke the silence.

“Assare,” she said, the word leaving her tongue with a slightly different lilt than Tan had given it. She, too, had sunk to the floor beside the blade, her eyes wide in the lamplight, as though staring at a vision none of them could see. “‘Refuge.’”

“More leina training?” Pyrre asked.

Triste didn’t respond, didn’t even glance over at the woman. “Assare,” she said again. Then, “Ni kokhomelunen, tandria. Na sviata, laema. Na kiena-ekkodomidrion, aksh.”

Tan’s eyes slammed silently open. His body didn’t so much as twitch, but there was something different about it, something … Kaden searched for the right word. Wary. Ready.

Triste just stared at the blade, those perfect eyes wide and abstracted. She didn’t seem to realize she had spoken.