The Providence of Fire by Brian Staveley Page A

face in here.”
    Valyn almost snapped something impatient about getting up higher before they started worrying about lights, then realized that his brother wasn’t exaggerating. To Valyn’s eyes the room was dim, shadowy, but perfectly navigable. The others, however, were staring as though lost in utter darkness. The slarn, he realized, a chill passing through him as he thought back to the egg’s foul pitch thick in his throat.
    â€œSure,” he said, shoving aside the memory, sliding his tactical lantern from his pack, kindling it, then holding it aloft. The chamber looked even worse in the flickering light. Plaster had crumbled from the walls and ceiling, littering the ground and exposing the rough faces of the stone beneath. A few paces away, a section of floor had collapsed, yawning into the darkness of a cellar beneath. Evidently the builders had dug down as well as burrowing up, and the discovery that he stood atop a warren of rotten rock, the whole thing undermined with tunnels, did nothing to improve Valyn’s mood.
    It’s held together for thousands of years, he told himself. It’ll last another night.
    â€œThere,” Tan said, pointing to the stairs on the left.
    Valyn glanced at the monk, nodded, slipped one of his short blades from its sheath, and started up.
    The stairs climbed gracefully around the perimeter of the entrance hall, and then, as they neared the ceiling, turned away from the room into a high, narrow passage. Valyn slid to the side to let Tan lead, counting the floors as they passed, trying to keep track of which way was out . The place reminded him uncomfortably of Hull’s Hole, and though he didn’t mind the darkness, all the winding back and forth, the rooms opening off to the sides, the branching of the corridors, played tricks with his mind. After a while he lost any sense of which doors led outward and which plunged deeper into the earth. When they reached an open chamber from which new passageways branched in all directions, he paused.
    â€œI hope you know where you’re going, monk,” he said.
    Kaden pointed. “Out is that way.”
    â€œHow do you know?”
    His brother shrugged. “Old monk trick.”
    â€œTricks make me nervous,” Valyn replied, but Tan had already started down the corridor.
    â€œHe is right,” the man said over his shoulder. “And we are close to the kenta .”
    As it turned out, the trick worked. After forty paces or so, they emerged from the tunnel onto a huge ledge. Fifty paces above them the cliff wall swept up and out in a smooth wave, a towering natural roof that would keep off the worst of the weather while allowing light and air to fill the space. After the cramped darkness inside the cliff, even the watery moonlight seemed bright, too bright. Valyn crossed to the lip, where the remains of a low wall protected against a fall of sixty or seventy paces. They had climbed above the blackpines, high enough to see out over the entire valley. Valyn watched the moonlight flicker like bright silver coins on the surface of the river below. A gust of wind snatched at him, but he didn’t step back.
    â€œThere were benches,” Talal said. The leach had broken off from the group to check the darker corners. “And fountains pouring straight out of the cliff. The masonry is mostly worn away, but the water still flows.”
    â€œThey carved channels,” Triste pointed out, “and a pool.”
    â€œSomeone had a nice place here,” Laith said, gesturing to a large building that stood at the far end of the ledge.
    Unlike the tunnels and rooms through which they had climbed, the structure was built rather than carved, a man-made fortress right on the cliff’s edge. No, Valyn realized, examining the tall windows, the wide, empty door, not a fortress. More like a palace. The building filled half the ledge, stretching up four or five stories to where the roof almost