Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“I have no idea where Kaden is,” Adare snapped, “and I can’t afford to wait for him. None of us can. If you come with me, you’ll see every important player in this empire. If your Csestriim is there, we’ll find him.”

Nira narrowed her eyes, clicked her teeth together. “And if I come with ya, if I’m your councillor, the kenarang might put both of our heads on a sharp stick.”

“Sometimes in order to get what you want you have to take a risk.”

Nira laughed at that, a quick, brittle sound like sticks snapping. “Seems to me it’s you ought’a be worrying about risk, girl. Ya just pestered two of the most hated people in the long history of this rotten world to join your cause.” She laughed again. “Two leaches. Two crazy leaches.”

Adare shot a glance at Oshi, lowering her voice. “Only one of you is crazy.”

Nira grinned a wide, yellow-toothed grin. “Call it one and a half.”

Long Fist-priest and shaman, the only chief to unite the Urghul tribes in a land and history littered with ambitious, bellicose chiefs-was the tallest man Valyn had ever seen: at least a couple inches taller than Jack Pole back on the Islands, who was a head taller than Valyn himself. Unlike most extremely tall men, however, who tended to move in a series of gangly lurches, as though all their ligaments had gone slack, Long Fist carried himself with the languid grace of a cat, every motion of his approach a coiling or uncoiling, as though the deliberation with which he moved were a soft pelt sliding over sinew.

Valyn had yet to see a chair among the Urghul. Instead, the chief seated himself upon a modified travois, thick buffalo hide stretched between a wooden frame, each end of the thing borne on the bare backs of two kneeling Urghul, a man and a woman, their elbows and palms planted in the earth, faces inches from the dirt. They seemed, at first glance, to be balancing it; then Valyn noticed the blood on their backs, weeping from beneath the travois, and realized with a sick lurch that the frame was barbed, held in place by the steel hooks driven into their pale flesh. The shaman was not a small man, and the pain of those hooks must have been excruciating, but neither the man nor the woman moved. Valyn could not see their downturned faces.

For all the attention Long Fist paid his bearers, he might have been perched on a ledge of stone or a wooden stool. Instead, he was speaking in a voice too low for Valyn to make out, addressing a knot of older warriors, gesturing with a carefully extended finger toward something in the sprawling camp and shaking his head in the slow, menacing cadence of displeasure. Only after those warriors had been dismissed, jogging down the low slope toward whatever errand awaited, did the chieftain turn his eyes to Valyn. They were predatory, those eyes, deep bleak blue and patient as the sky. Valyn felt himself being measured, weighed, and judged, and he tried to meet Long Fist’s scrutiny with his own.

Despite the chill on the afternoon air, the shaman wore a sleeveless tunic of bison hide. Dozens of necklaces ringed his neck, leather thongs threaded through bone, some short, some long. They shifted and clacked whenever he changed position. He wore his blond hair long, but instead of tying it back, in the fashion of the Urghul warriors, he let it hang free in a pale cascade reaching halfway to his waist. A poor tactical decision if it came to a fight, but Long Fist didn’t appear worried about a fight. He nodded as Valyn and the others approached, not a greeting, but a gesture of satisfaction, the smile revealing a perfect row of white teeth, the upper canines of which looked to have been sharpened.

“So,” he said, spreading his hands wide, as though inviting Valyn to sit at a bountiful feast. Only there was no feast. Nowhere to sit.

“What did they do?” Valyn asked, jerking his chin toward the bearers of the makeshift throne.

Long Fist raised an eyebrow. “They were brave,” he replied.

Valyn shook his head. “And for some reason you didn’t like that?”

“Quite to the contrary,” the chief replied, running a finger along the ribs of the kneeling man, “their bravery pleased me greatly, and so I have extended them this honor.”

Valyn blew out a long, ragged breath. “Remind me not to please you.”

Long Fist shrugged. “You are a soft man from a soft world. You would not understand.”

“Oh, I think I get it well enough. It makes you feel strong to hurt others. People like you aren’t so uncommon.”

“On the contrary,” the shaman replied, showing his teeth in a predatory smile. “People like me are extremely uncommon, and this,” he said, gesturing to the bent and bloody bearers of his seat, “is not for me. It is for them.”

“What horseshit.”

Long Fist turned to Huutsuu. “Perhaps you would attempt to enlighten our guest.”

She nodded. “You worship weak gods, and so you are weak. All peoples have the gods they deserve.” As though that clarified anything.

“We worship civilized gods,” Valyn replied. “I’ve studied your history, your worship. It is bloody and savage. Bestial.”

“Civilized,” Long Fist said, holding a hand before him, palm up, as though weighing the word, feeling its heft. “ Savage . Like a horse with blinders, you see only what your language allows you to see. This is the danger of relying too heavily on words.”

“The words represent things,” Valyn replied. “Law. Prosperity. Peace.”

The chief shook his head, bemused. “More words. More confusion. Consider your law-what is it except a shield for the weak?”

“That’s the point. We protect those who need protection.”

“Infants need protection,” Long Fist replied patiently, “but men and women grown? To protect them, to force your protection upon them, to assume that they need or desire that protection, is to strip them of their own nobility. You call us savage. You say we are like beasts. I say it is you with your law and your prosperity that makes swine of men, makes cattle of women, reduces them to cowed conformity. Kwihna would raise their eyes once more, would ennoble their hearts.”

“I see how Kwihna ennobles, ” Valyn said, gesturing to the kneeling figures, trying to hold on to his side of the argument. For all the chieftain’s scorn for words, he wielded them deftly as weapons, twisting meaning and changing context until Valyn found himself utterly wrong-footed, defending rather than attacking. “It looks great-as long as you’re the one sitting on the litter and not the one holding it up.”

“Surely,” the man replied, pulling open his tunic slowly to reveal his chest, “you do not believe that I would allow others to claim an honor that I myself refused.”

Valyn suppressed a shudder. Someone had carved a tangled web of jagged, puckered slashes into his white skin, scores of lines, hundreds of them, a cloak of glabrous, glistening scar laid over his flesh. On either side of his chest, toward the pits of his arms, large healed punctures, like old spear wounds, gouged the muscle. Following Valyn’s gaze, the shaman nodded. “It was here,” he said, pressing a fingertip into one of the shallow divots, “and here that they put the hooks. For one full moon I hung suspended by the steel while every morning the tribe gathered, every man and woman, even the children, gathered to drag their knives across my flesh, to participate in my sacrifice.”

Valyn tried to gauge the claim. It seemed almost physically impossible. Almost. If none of those knives had severed an artery, if someone had provided the shaman with water, if the wounds were smeared periodically with coagulant, a man could survive. Something had left the scars. Valyn imagined hanging from those hooks like a beast after a botched slaughter, skin peeling away in strips, flies in the wounds, tongue swollen so fat beneath the steppe sun that every breath was a struggle against strangulation.