The Providence of Fire by Staveley Brian

Author:Staveley, Brian [Staveley, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780765336415
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2015-01-13T08:00:00+00:00

25

Kaden could remember slaughtering his first goat, sliding his carefully honed knife along the neck as he held the warm, trembling creature beneath one arm. He remembered the way the hair parted, then the skin beneath, the pink flesh fresh and unblemished for half a heartbeat before the blood welled in a hot, wet gush and the legs went abruptly slack.

He was only ten years old at the time, but he remembered Chalmer Oleki standing at his shoulder, instructing him to lay down the knife, to take up the large crock for the blood, to hold it beneath the wound. “Blood and meat,” Oleki had pointed out. “A little bone. A little hair. But no soul.” He chuckled gently at the notion, a soft sound, like a stream running over smoothed rocks. He had shown Kaden how to gut the animal, lifting each organ in turn: “The heart. The brain. The belly. A creature is no more than this. You are no more than this.”

So, too, this man that Kaden was readying himself to kill.

It was surprising how easy it had been to create the opportunity. He stood in the darkness of the door across from his own cell, knife at the ready, and waited, counting down the final heartbeats, until the man came, carrying the trencher in one hand, the storm lantern in the other. When Kaden heard the door at the end of the hallway open, he closed his lids over his flaming irises and waited, listening, until the footfalls paused. When he opened his eyes, the guard was setting down the lantern, back turned to him.

It was a simple thing. One cut across the throat and it was done: brutal, but simple. As Kaden stood in the darkness, however, parsing the guard’s breaths, trying to measure the empty space between knife and neck, the most basic elements of the action suddenly seemed implausible, impossible. How would he cross the corridor? How would he pivot to bring that knife to bear? Should he move slowly, to avoid suspicion, or lash out all at once, murdering the man in one quick slice?

No, he reminded himself. Not murdering. “Murder” was a sloppy term, imprecise, laden with judgment and emotion. Killing. Killing described the action, nothing more. I’ve killed goats, Kaden reminded himself. I thought I’d killed that leach back at the saddle. Still, it was one thing to discharge a flatbow at Balendin from the still depths of the vaniate: a twitch of the finger, the reverberation of the spent bow, the brief whistle of the bolt in the air, and the man was gone, vanished off the side of the cliff. It hadn’t felt like killing. It hadn’t felt like anything. Cutting the guard’s throat would be harder, messier.

He considered the exposed flesh below the jaw. Here is the knife. Here is the neck.

In the end, it was a simple matter of three steps followed by an extension of the arm. The blade bit immediately, snagged for a moment on the tough cartilage of the trachea, then pulled through, slick and hot and wet.

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