Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“I grew up in the Quarter,” Lehav said finally. “Not too far from where I found you. Didn’t know my father, barely knew my mother-the swelling pox killed her when I was six-raised my younger brother myself for three years, until someone put a rusty chisel through his eye and tossed him into the canal.…”

Adare opened her mouth to say something, but no words came, and the soldier waved her to silence.

“A kid in the Quarter…” he went on, voice flat. “You learn early on to kill, to steal, to fuck, or to hide. Hopefully all four, if you want to stay alive. Even those skills won’t save you if you don’t know when to do what. My brother could steal and hide, he could fuck and kill, but he made a mistake somewhere. I never learned what it was, but he read someone wrong, stole when he should have killed, killed when he should have fucked. The point is, back in the Quarter we didn’t see so much of your father’s fine justice.

“I was lucky. Smarter and stronger than most of the others, but mostly lucky. The day I joined up with the legions, I thought I’d finally made it, got out for good. Three meals a day, free clothes, nice bright spear, and a cause to fight for. I held on to that spear and that cause all the way down to the Waist, where I spent six years killing jungle tribesmen who had even less than the poor bastards back in the Quarter.” He shrugged, the indifference of the gesture belying the words. “I was good at it, kept moving up the ranks until I commanded an entire legion.”

He shook his head. “I never regretted killing the men and women. They’re beasts down there, worse than beasts. A wolf will kill you, gnaw the marrow from your bones, but the jungle tribes? They’ll take the skin off a man one strip at a time. They’ll pull every tooth in your mouth while you choke on your own blood. They need to be put down, and I was good at putting them down. When we started burning villages, though, when we started putting spears in children…” He broke off, staring at nothing.

“That’s when you quit.”

“That’s when I found a purer cause,” he said finally, staring at her.

Adare watched him for a long time, trying to find a shape for her thoughts. “Intarra’s light burns bright,” she said finally, “but we live here, on the earth, in the mud.”

“That’s no reason not to reach for her flame.”

“And in this world,” Adare replied quietly, “there is no fire without fuel. No flame without ash.” She shook her head. “I am not a goddess, but I am a princess of Annur, and Annur is real. It is here. My hands are bloody, but unlike those of the goddess we both serve, I can do real work with them. I can hold a sword or a scepter. I can help people, real people right now, but not without the Sons.”

Lehav watched her awhile, then looked over at the candle. The soft wax had folded over his notch and the flame wavered in the cool draft.

“All right,” he said finally.

Adare let out a long, unsteady breath. “All right.”

He turned back to her. “I can save you, but your men, those Aedolians … they killed eleven of the Sons.”

“No,” Adare said, jarred from her tiny moment of relief. “They were only trying to help me. They were doing what they swore to do.”

Lehav laughed grimly. “We’ve all sworn to do something. They killed my men. If I am to have any credibility before my people … if we are to have any credibility, they have to burn.”

Adare felt as though a stone were blocking her throat.

“They are good men,” she managed finally.

“As you said,” Lehav replied slowly, “there is no flame without ash.”

I know a way out.

In the long undifferentiated darkness of his imprisonment, Kaden revolved the words in his mind, listening to them as though they were a faint strain of music in the silence, studying them as he might a glimmer of light in the endless shadow. Again and again he went back to the saama’an, the perfectly carved memory of those final moments in Triste’s cell when the Csestriim had met his eyes, then mouthed those five words.

I know a way out .

It was a baffling claim, horrible in the hope it offered, maddening because Kaden could make no sense of it. When the Ishien slammed shut the door of his cell, turned the key in the lock, Kaden had waited for a thousand heartbeats before standing, before exploring with fingers and palms the rough stone extent of his prison. His burning eyes offered a pathetic measure of light, enough to avoid walking into a wall if he moved slowly, and so he shuffled painstakingly around the tiny chamber. There was little to learn. The walls were damp. The wooden door felt heavy. In the corner, a small hole no larger than Kaden’s hand opened into unmeasured darkness below.

It was a meager consolation, but the cell did not offer any other, and as the sound of retreating boots echoed to silence, he began to realize just what he had risked in trying to defend Triste. What he had risked, and how badly he had failed. Panic prowled his mind on velvet feet, and for a while it was all he could do to keep from hurling himself at the door, from screaming into the darkness. Instead, he found the middle of the room as well as he could, sat cross-legged on the stone floor, and closed his eyes, replacing the darkness of the world with his own inner darkness, the emptiness of the cell with a greater emptiness. When he finally emerged from the vaniate, the fear remained, but it was a small thing, a distant scream like far-off smoke against a vast, silent sky.

Methodically, he set about exploring his cell again, running his hands systematically over the stone, testing the privy hole, reaching up for the invisible ceiling. He went to the door last, hoping it would offer some recourse that the rest of the stone had refused. Steel or iron banded the thick wooden slab, metal cold and pitted beneath his fingers. A small slot opened at the very bottom, barely the height of his hand-for food perhaps. He found a keyhole narrower than his finger halfway up, briefly allowed himself to imagine that he might pick the lock and break free, then squashed the hope. He had no tools, nothing but his robe, and even if he had, he knew nothing about locks, nothing about escape.

Only when he had exhausted the other possibilities did he finally speak.

“Hello?” he asked, voice little more than a whisper. Even that was enough to crack the brittle shell of the vaniate . “Triste? Are you there?” He hesitated. “Kiel?”

The darkness lisped his own syllables back to him, but there was no response. He tried again, raising his voice, then again and again, over and over until he was bellowing, pounding his fists on the door’s indifferent steel. When he gave up, the silence clamped down once more, closing on the cell like a vise.

It might have been a day before the first meal arrived-maybe two-there was no way to tell, no mechanism to divide the time, to part one chill, invisible day from the next. There was silence, then bootheels on the stone beyond the door, a wooden trencher shoved beneath, bootheels retreating, then silence once more. Kaden felt sick, dizzy, but he forced himself to eat.

After each meal, he returned to the center of the floor, emptied himself, and entered the vaniate . If he could do nothing else, he could continue his training. After moving in and out of the trance scores of times, he changed position, lowering himself into a flat plank, toes and palms on the floor, body rigid, then reached for the emptiness once more. It eluded him, but he held the pose, held it until his shoulders shook and the muscles of his stomach rebelled, dumping him onto his face. He lay still for a few exhausted breaths, then, without moving, took hold of the trance. When he found it, he let it go, then raised himself into the plank once more. Tried, as his body trembled, to find that space beyond the body.