Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Of course, he thought grimly, if I’m murdered in Annur, it will mean I made it back to Annur, which would be a success of sorts.

Valyn gestured toward the lip of the rocky escarpment that shielded them. “When you look, look slowly, Your Radiance,” he said. “The eye is attracted to motion.”

That much, at least, Kaden knew. He’d spent enough time tracking crag cats and lost goats to know how to remain hidden. He shifted his weight onto his elbows, inching up until his eyes cleared the low spine of rock. Below and to the west, maybe a quarter mile distant, hunched precariously on a narrow ledge between the cliffs below and the vast, chiseled peaks above, stood Ashk’lan, sole monastery of the Shin monks, and Kaden’s home.

Or what remained of it.

The Ashk’lan of Kaden’s memory was a cold place but bright, scoured clean, an austere palette of pale stone, wide strokes of snow, vertiginous rivers shifting their glittering ribbons, ice slicking the north-facing cliffs, all piled beneath a hard, blue slab of sky. The Aedolians had destroyed it. Wide sweeps of soot smudged the ledges and boulders, and fire had lashed the junipers to blackened stumps. The refectory, meditation hall, and dormitory stood in ruins. While the cold stone of the walls had refused to burn, the wooden rafters, the shingles, the casings of the windows and broad pine doors had all succumbed to the flame, dragging sections of masonry with them as they fell. Even the sky was dark, smudged with oily smoke that still smoldered from the wreckage.

“There,” Valyn said, pointing to movement near the northern end of the monastery. “The Aedolians. They’ve made camp, probably waiting for Micijah Ut.”

“Gonna be a long wait,” Laith said, sliding up beside them. The flier grinned.

Before the arrival of Valyn’s Wing, all Kaden’s knowledge of the Kettral, of Annur’s most secretive and deadly soldiers, came from the stories he had lapped up as a child, tales that had led him to imagine grim, empty-eyed killers, men and women steeped in blood and destruction. The stories had been partly right: Valyn’s black eyes were cold as last year’s coals, and Laith-the Wing’s flier-didn’t seem at all concerned about the wreckage below or the carnage they had left behind. They were clearly soldiers, disciplined and well trained, and yet, they seemed somehow young to Kaden.

Laith’s casual smile, his obvious delight in irritating Gwenna and provoking Annick, the way he drummed on his knee whenever he got bored, which was often-it was all behavior the Shin would have beaten out of him before his second year. That Valyn’s Wing could fly and kill was clear enough, but Kaden found himself worrying, wondering if they were truly ready for the difficult road ahead. Not that he was ready himself, but it would have been nice to think that someone had the situation in hand.

Micijah Ut, at least, was one foe Kaden no longer needed to fear. That the massive Aedolian in all his armor had been killed by a middle-aged woman wielding a pair of knives would have strained belief had Kaden not seen the body. The sight had brought him a muted measure of satisfaction, as though he could set the weight of steel and dead flesh in the scales to balance, in some small part, the rest of the slaughter.

“Anyone want to sneak into their camp with Ut’s body?” Laith asked. “We could prop him up somewhere, make it look like he’s drinking ale or taking a leak? See how long it takes them to notice the fucker’s not breathing?” He looked from Valyn to Kaden, eyebrows raised. “No? That’s not why we came back here?”

The group of them had returned to Ashk’lan that morning, flying west from their meager camp in the heart of the Bone Mountains, the same camp where they had fought and killed the men chasing them down, Aedolians and traitorous Kettral both. The trip had occasioned a heated debate: there was broad agreement that someone needed to go, both to check for survivors and to see if there was anything to be learned from the Annurian soldiers who had remained behind when Ut and Tarik Adiv chased Kaden into the peaks. The disagreement centered on just who ought to make the trip.

Valyn didn’t want to risk bringing anyone outside his own Wing, but Kaden pointed out that if the Kettral wanted to make use of the snaking network of goat tracks surrounding the monastery, they needed a monk familiar with the land. Rampuri Tan, of course, was the obvious choice-he knew Ashk’lan better than Kaden, not to mention the fact that, unlike Kaden, he could actually fight -and the older monk, despite Valyn’s misgivings, seemed to consider his participation a foregone conclusion. Pyrre, meanwhile, argued that it was stupid to return in the first place.

“The monks are dead,” she observed, “may Ananshael unknit their celibate souls. You can’t help them by poking at the bodies.”

Kaden wondered what it felt like to be the assassin, to worship the Lord of the Grave, to have lived so close to death for so long that it held no terror, no wonder. Still, it was not the bodies he wanted to go back for. There was a chance, however small, that the soldiers had captured some of the monks rather than killing them. It wasn’t clear what Kaden could do if they had, but with the Kettral at his back it might be possible to rescue one or two. At the very least, he could look.

Tan had dismissed the notion as sentimental folly. The reason to go back was to observe the remaining Aedolians, to ferret out their intentions; Kaden’s guilt was just further evidence of his failure to achieve true detachment. Maybe the older monk was right. A true Shin would have rooted out the coiling tightness that snaked about his heart, would have cut away, one by one, the barbs of emotion. But then, aside from Tan and Kaden himself, the Shin were dead: two hundred monks murdered in the night because of him, men and boys whose only goal was the empty calm of the vaniate burned and butchered where they slept to cover up an Annurian coup. Whatever waited at Ashk’lan, it had happened because of Kaden. He had to go back.

The rest was simple. Valyn commanded the Wing, Valyn obeyed the Emperor, and so, in spite of Tan’s objections and Pyrre’s, in spite of his own concerns, Valyn had bowed his head and obeyed, flying Kaden along with the rest of the Wing to discover what was left of his mountain home. They landed a little to the east, out of sight of the monastery, then covered the final miles on foot. The track was easy, mostly downhill, but the tension built in Kaden’s chest as they drew closer.

The Aedolians hadn’t bothered to hide their slaughter. There was no need. Ashk’lan lay well beyond the border of the empire, too high in the mountains for the Urghul, too far south for the Edish, too far from anywhere for merchants and traders, and so the brown-robed bodies had been left to litter the central courtyard, some burned, others cut down as they fled, dried blood staining the stones.

“Lots of monks,” Laith pointed out, nodding toward the monastery. “All pretty dead.”

“What about them?” Valyn asked, pointing toward a row of figures seated cross-legged on the far side of the ledge, staring out over the steppe. “Are they alive?”

Laith raised the long lens. “Nope. Stabbed. Right in the back.” He shook his head. “Not sure why they’re sitting there. No one tied them.”

Kaden looked at the slumped men for a moment, then closed his eyes, imagining the scene.

“They didn’t run,” he said. “They sought refuge in the vaniate .”

“Yeah…” the flier said, drawing out the syllable skeptically. “Doesn’t look like they found it.”

Kaden stared at the corpses, remembering the awesome emotional vacancy of the trance, the absence of fear, or anger, or worry. He tried to imagine what they had felt sitting there, looking out over the wide green steppe while their home burned a few paces behind them, watching the cold stars as they waited for the knife. “The vaniate might surprise you,” he said quietly.