Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

No, he realized, shock blazing over his skin before he managed to snuff it out. Not a sword, a spear.

A naczal.

The first two men went down without a sound, one with a slit throat, the other stabbed through the chest. The third Rampuri Tan hamstrung. The Ishien fell, trying to bring his sword to bear as Tan shattered his skull. Hellelen stood a moment longer, lips pulled back in a snarl. He feinted right, danced left, but Tan ignored both motions, lashing out with one end of his spear, then spinning it in a great, vicious arc that hacked halfway through Hellelen’s neck. The monk didn’t even watch the body slump to the floor, turning instead to Kaden.

“You are a fool,” he said.

“There’s a way out,” Kaden insisted, stabbing a finger at the pool behind them.

It was less than no explanation. It didn’t explain Kiel or Triste, didn’t begin to tell how the motionless water could lead to safety, but after a glance at the dark surface, Tan seemed to understand.

“You are trusting your life to a Csestriim,” he said grimly.

“There was no other choice,” Kaden spat. “I’m not leaving Triste.”

“We are not all what you fear,” Kiel said quietly. “I am not Tan’is. Not Asherah.”

The monk locked gazes with the prisoner, then shook his head curtly. “It hardly matters now. The dice are already thrown.”

“Stay close to us,” Kaden said. “In the tunnels.”

“No,” Tan replied. “There is no time. I will cover your retreat.”

“You don’t have to-” Kaden began, but even as the words left his lips, Matol charged around the corner, a dozen Ishien flanking him, then skidded to a stop at the sight of his quarry. He paused, flexed his free hand, then smiled.

“I will flay the skin from each of you piece by dripping piece.”

“You are welcome to try,” Tan said, turning toward him, the naczal light in his hands. “Go, Kaden.”

“I don’t-”

“Go.”

The vaniate came grudgingly, but it came at last. While Tan held back the Ishien, his spear bright and faster than thought, Kaden found the trance, dropped into it as though into a deep well while Matol roared, bodies crumpled, and blood ran over the stone.

“Follow closely,” Kiel said, then stepped into the pool.

The last thing Kaden saw before the water folded over him was Rampuri Tan, his teacher and tormentor, the last and hardest of the Shin monks, fighting desperately, viciously, trying to hold back the Ishien for another heartbeat, and another, and another, fighting to buy Kaden time to escape. In the blankness of the vaniate, Kaden watched as the monk fought and staggered, watched, but could not care.

* * *

The darkness of the flooded levels of the Dead Heart was cold, absolute, and crushing. Even deep inside the vaniate, Kaden could feel fear prowling the edges of his mind like a winter-starved wolf, could feel his muscles wanting to buck, kick, thrash. Normally he would have taken deep, long breaths to quell the faint agitation, but there was no breath to be had in the watery maze, and so he counted the beats of his heart instead, feeling the muscle contract and relax, contract and relax, and he moved forward with careful strokes of his arm, measured kicks of his legs below the knee, keeping one hand fixed firmly on Triste’s ankle.

Her flesh was so cold beneath his touch that she might have been dead already, drowned beneath the great weight of water and stone, save for the occasional jerk or spasm when Kiel bumped her up against some hard, invisible corner. Kaden tried to envisage the darkness around them as halls and rooms, corridors and entryways, the normal architecture of human habitation, but it was no good. There was only the darkness, and the cold, and the salt, and the stone. It didn’t feel like the world at all, but like the weightless, shapeless dreamscape of nightmare.

For all his recent training with the vaniate, the trance felt tenuous, as though a sharp jolt might shatter it. He tried not to think what would happen if he slipped from the calm into the relative clamor of his own mind. The vaniate was keeping him alive during the slow, creeping passage, but more important, it would allow him to pass the kenta at the end. Without it, the gate would annihilate him.

Feel the water on your face, he reminded himself. Feel the wet cold on your skin. This is the world. The future is a dream.

Around his eight hundredth heartbeat, Triste began to twist and jerk. At first the motions were just spasms, like the twitch of a leg from one on the edge of slumber. Within a few dozen heartbeats, however, she had begun to thrash and flail, kicking her legs madly as the panic seized her, heel striking Kaden in the head, the eyes, over and over as he struggled grimly to hold on to her ankle and the vaniate both.

Kaden’s own chest felt tight and his lungs burned. Triste couldn’t have much longer. Her body was rebelling, the instinct to tear her way free of danger crushing whatever part of her reason that tried to resist. It was making Kiel’s work harder, although the Csestriim labored on, hauling her down the invisible corridor, moving, if anything, even faster than he had, although it was difficult to gauge speed in the darkness. There was only the water, the cold, Triste’s terror, the rough stone, and the awful empty airlessness searing Kaden’s own chest, the sluggish weight of muscles barely able to move.

They were going to die down there, all three of them, their bodies vanished inside a fortress that had, itself, vanished from the world. Sadness beckoned, like faint sunlight seen from beneath deep water. Kaden turned away from it. If he followed that light long enough, he would burst from the vaniate, and he had no desire to face his own slow suffocation outside the trance.

The pain is just pain. The pressure of the water is just pressure. Listen to the movement of your heart. It is only a muscle. It is only meat .

He repeated the words until his mind swam in the darkness with his body. It was a good place to die, a peaceful place. He let the darkness pour into him, fill him, flood him, until there was no line between his own flesh and the surrounding sea, until the ocean thrummed in him like his own heart, until, with an awful wrenching jerk, gravity seized him, hauling him, dazed and baffled, into the wide awful air and the blinding light of the sun.

Alive, Kaden thought. I’m alive .

Deep inside the vaniate, the thought brought him no joy. No sorrow. It was a fact, nothing more.

Hundreds of years earlier the walls of Annur had actually ringed the city; torches had blazed in the guard towers punctuating their length while armed men walked the parapets, spears in hand. It had been generations, however, since any foe posed a plausible threat to the capital, and Annur had long ago burst its seams. The houses and warehouses, stables and temples spilled out into the countryside, eating up the open fields and burying the walls behind entire neighborhoods-Newquarter, Canal, Fieldstreets-all of them utterly exposed. From the fields, Adare stared at the city’s outermost buildings-a motley collection of stone granaries and stilted teak houses built over the canals and streams-dread gnawing at her guts.

Water buffalo cropped the early summer grass, ducks scrabbled for scraps in the dusty roads, two cranes balanced in the shallows of a trash-choked canal, beaks darting for fish, but there were no people. There should have been wagons on the roads and farmers in the surrounding fields, the chatter and hum of men and women going about their lives. Instead, there was stillness, silence, a hot sun stuck in the sky as though nailed there. The citizens of these outlying quarters of Annur were gone, or hiding, neither of which did anything to alleviate Adare’s fear.