Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

Valyn considered the woman, trying to figure her angle. He had always imagined the Skullsworn to be a sort of sinister mirror image of the Kettral-all blades and blacks and brusque efficiency. At the very least, he had expected the assassin-priests of the Lord of the Grave to be imposing. Pyrre, however, seemed more like a decadent atrep’s wife. The woman was elegant, almost flashy; rings sparkled on her fingers, a bright cloth band held back her hair, hiding the flecks of gray at her temples, and her tunic and leggings, though badly tattered by the violence of the preceding week, were cut of fine wool to flatter her form. She didn’t look like a killer, not at first glance, but the signs were there if you paid attention: the easy way she held her knives, switching readily between the standard grip and the Rabin; the way she always seemed to position herself, as now, with a cliff or boulder at her back; her apparent indifference to the bloodshed of the days before.

And then there was the way she smelled. Valyn still couldn’t put words to some of the things he could sense since emerging from Hull’s Hole. The slarn egg had changed him; the eggs had changed them all. That, evidently, had been the point of the final Kettral test, the reason all cadets were sent blind and bleeding into that endless cave on Irsk, scavenging the darkness for the eggs of those reptilian monsters. The eggs reversed the poison, but they did more, much more. Like the rest of the Kettral, any member of Valyn’s Wing could now see in the shadows and hear things at the edge of hearing. They were all stronger than they had been, too, tougher, as though some of the slarn’s wiry strength had been sewn into their flesh when they seized the eggs and drank. But only Valyn had found the dark egg, the one guarded by the king himself. Only Valyn drank the bilious tar while his body shook with the poison.

He was still struggling to understand what it had done to him. Like the others, he’d found his sight and hearing suddenly, if subtly, enhanced. He could hear small rocks clattering down the cliffside a hundred paces distant, could make out the pinions on the hawks that wheeled overhead … but there was more. Sometimes an animal fury clamped down on his heart, a savage desire, not just to fight and kill, not just to see the mission done, but to rend, to hack, to hurt . For the hundredth time, he remembered the slarn circling around and around him, eager claws scraping the stone. If they were now a part of his eyes and ears, were they also a part of his mind?

He set the question aside, focusing on the assassin. Smell wasn’t quite the right word. He could smell more acutely, to be sure-the woman’s sweat, her hair, even from two paces distant-but this vague sensation hovering at the edge of thought wasn’t that. Or it was that, but more . Sometimes he thought he was losing his mind, imagining new senses for himself, but the sensation remained: he could smell emotion now: anger, and hunger, and fear in all its infinite variation. There was the raw musk of terror and pinched hint of frayed nerves. Everyone in their battered group shared the fear, at least to some extent. Everyone but Rampuri Tan and the Skullsworn.

According to Kaden, Pyrre had come to Ashk’lan because she was paid to make the trip, to save his life, and she had rescued Kaden several times over. Despite an inclination to provoke Tan and the Kettral, she made a formidable ally. Still, how far could you trust a woman whose sole allegiance was to the Lord of the Grave? How far could you trust a woman who seemed, from both her smell and demeanor, utterly indifferent to death?

“I have a plan,” Kaden replied, glancing from Pyrre to Tan to Valyn.

Valyn stifled a groan.

* * *

The night before, after tethering the bird, walking the perimeter three times, and double-checking, to Gwenna’s great irritation, the flickwicks and moles she had hidden to guard both approaches to the pass, Valyn had climbed to the top of a large boulder, a jagged shard of rock set apart from the rest of the group. Partly he wanted the high ground, a spot with a clear view of everything below, and partly he wanted to be alone, to try to make sense of the events of the last few days, of his own role in the brutal fighting that had taken place. Kaden found him there just as night’s bleak stain leaked over the eastern peaks.

“Don’t get up,” Kaden said as he climbed the side of the rock. “If you start bowing now, I’ll throw you off the mountain.” His voice was quiet, ragged.

Valyn glanced over, hesitated, then nodded, returning his attention to the naked sword across his knees. His fight with Sami Yurl had left a tiny nick in the smoke steel halfway down the blade. He’d been at it with his stone for the better part of an hour, smoothing it out stroke by careful stroke.

“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing with the stone, “Your Rad-”

“Not that either,” Kaden groaned, perching cross-legged at the very lip of the boulder. “Save it for when someone else is listening.”

“You are the Emperor,” Valyn pointed out.

Kaden didn’t say anything. After a few licks of the stone, Valyn looked up to find his brother staring with those fiery eyes out over the valley below. The depths of the ravine were already sunk in shadow, but the setting sun had caught the far rim, drenching it in bloody light.

“I am,” Kaden said after what seemed like a long time. “Intarra help us all, I am the Emperor.”

Valyn hesitated, uncertain how to respond. During the fight two days earlier, Kaden had been cold as midwinter ice, calm and ready as any Kettral. That certainty, however, seemed to have vanished. Valyn had witnessed something like it on the Islands, had seen men and women, twenty-year veterans returning from successful missions, fall to pieces the moment they set foot back on Qarsh. There was something about being safe again, about being finally and undeniably alive after living so close to death, that made soldiers, good soldiers, soldiers who held it together for days or weeks under the most brutal circumstances, dance like madmen, collapse sobbing, or drink themselves nearly to oblivion over on Hook.

There’s no shame, the Kettral said, in crying in your own rack. The rest of the equation remained unspoken, axiomatic: you could cry all you wanted in your rack, provided you got up again in a day or two, provided that when you got up, you went back out, and that when you went back out, you were the baddest, fastest, most brutal motherfucker on the four continents. It wasn’t at all clear whether or not Kaden had that kind of resilience, that kind of resolve.

“How are you?” Valyn asked. It was a stupid question, but every conversation had to start somewhere, and Kaden looked like he might sit cross-legged the whole night without saying another word. “After what we ran into down there?”

Valyn had seen scores of dead bodies in the course of his training, had learned to look at the hacked-up limbs and crusted blood the way another man, someone not raised by the Kettral, might consider a side of beef or a plucked rooster. There was even a certain satisfaction to be had in studying the aftermath of violence and seeing answers in the wreckage. As Hendran wrote in his Tactics: The deader a man gets, the more honest he becomes. Lies are a vice of the living. That was true enough, but Kaden hadn’t been trained to pick over bodies, especially not the bodies of his friends and fellow monks. It must have been hard to encounter them-even from a distance-burned and cut to pieces.

Kaden took a long, slow breath, shuddered for a moment, then fell still. “It’s not the older monks that bother me,” he said finally. “They had all achieved the vaniate, had found a way to snuff out their fear.”