Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire:

by Brian Staveley

  “Isn’t he too far off?”

  “No.”

  “Take the shot, Annick,” Valyn said, turning to Kaden. “She’ll make it. Don’t ask me how.”

  “Stand by,” the sniper responded after a pause. “He’s passing behind some rock.”

  Kaden looked from Annick to Valyn, then to the small defile where Adiv had disappeared. After hours of lying on their bellies, waiting and watching, things were abruptly going too fast. He had expected the long wait to be followed by conversation, deliberation, a review of the facts and exchange of ideas. Suddenly, though, with no discussion at all, a man was about to die, a traitor and a murderer, but a man all the same.

  The Kettral didn’t seem concerned. Gwenna and Valyn were staring over the rock; the demolitions master eagerly, Valyn silent and focused. Laith was trying to make a wager with Talal.

  “I’ll bet you a silver moon she kills him with the first shot.”

  “I’m not betting against Annick,” the leach replied.

  The flier cursed. “What odds will you give me to take the other side? Ten to one for her to miss?”

  “Make it fifty,” Talal said, resting his bald head against the rock, considering the sky.

  “Twenty.”

  “No,” Kaden said.

  “Fine. Twenty-five.”

  “Not the bet,” Kaden said, putting a hand on Valyn’s shoulder. “Don’t kill him.”

  Valyn turned from the valley below to look at Kaden. “What?”

  “Oh for the sweet love of ’Shael,” Gwenna growled. “Who’s running this Wing?”

  Valyn ignored Gwenna. Instead, his black eyes bored into Kaden, drinking the light. “Adiv’s behind all this, Your Radiance,” he said. “He and Ut. They’re the ones that killed the monks, that tried to kill you, not to mention the fact that they’re clearly involved in our father’s murder. With Ut gone, Adiv is the ranking commander down there. We kill him, we take a head off the beast.”

  “I have him again,” Annick said.

  “Don’t shoot,” Kaden insisted, shaking his head, trying to order his thoughts. Years earlier, while attempting to recapture a goat, he’d lost his footing above the White River, plunging down the rocks and into the current. It was all he could do to breathe, to keep his head above the roiling surface, to fend off the jagged boulders as they loomed up before him, all the time knowing that he had less than a quarter mile to pull himself clear of the torrent before it plunged him over a cliff. The immediacy of the moment, the inability to pause, to reflect, the absolute necessity of action had terrified him and when he finally caught hold of a fallen limb, clawing his way up and out, the feeling left him shaking on the bank. The Shin had taught him much about patience, but almost nothing of haste. Now, with the eyes of the entire Wing upon him, with the coal-smudged point of Annick’s arrow fixed on Adiv, he felt that awful, ineluctable forward rush all over again.

  “A few more seconds,” Annick said, “and he’ll be in the camp. It’ll be more difficult to take him then.”

  “Why?” Valyn demanded, staring at Kaden. “Why do you want him alive?”

  Kaden forced his eddying thoughts into a channel, the channel into speech. There would be no second chance to say what he had to say. The arrow, once loosed, would not be called back.

  “We know him,” he began slowly. “We need him. Back in Annur we can observe who he talks to, who he trusts. He’ll help us to unravel the conspiracy.”

  “Yeah,” Gwenna snapped, “and maybe he’ll murder a few dozen more people on the way.”

  “I’m losing him,” Annick said. “Decide now.”

  “Oh for ’Shael’s sake,” Laith grumbled. “Just kill him already. We can sort out the details later.”

  “No,” Kaden said quietly, willing his brother to see past the present, to understand the logic. “Not yet.”

  Valyn held Kaden’s gaze for a long time, jaw tight, eyes narrowed. Finally he nodded. “Stand down, Annick. We have our orders.”

  2

  Plan might be too noble a word,” Pyrre said, reclining against a large boulder, head back, eyes closed even as she spoke, “but I’d like to think we had some sort of vague inclination.”

  They’d made it back from the monastery easily enough, rejoining the rest of the group in the hidden defile where they’d set up camp. The other Kettral were checking over their weapons, the two monks sat cross-legged on the rough stone, while Triste fingered the long scab on her cheek, her wide eyes darting from one person to the next as though unsure where to look, who to trust.

  Valyn studied the girl a moment, surprised all over again at the course of events that had led such a fragile, arresting young woman to this place, tangling her up in the same snare with soldiers and monks. She was a concubine, Kaden had said. Adiv had offered her to Kaden as a gift, one intended to distract the new emperor while the Aedolians made ready to murder him. Evidently, Triste wasn’t a part of the plot, but she was plenty distracting all the same. Valyn felt like he could watch her forever, but then, she wasn’t the one who needed watching. With an effort, he shifted his gaze to Pyrre Lakatur.

  Valyn considered the woman, trying to figure her angle. He had always imagined the Skullsworn to be a sort of sinister mirror image of the Kettral—all blades and blacks and brusque efficiency. At the very least, he had expected the assassin-priests of the Lord of the Grave to be imposing. Pyrre, however, seemed more like a decadent atrep’s wife. The woman was elegant, almost flashy; rings sparkled on her fingers, a bright cloth band held back her hair, hiding the flecks of gray at her temples, and her tunic and leggings, though badly tattered by the violence of the preceding week, were cut of fine wool to flatter her form. She didn’t look like a killer, not at first glance, but the signs were there if you paid attention: the easy way she held her knives, switching readily between the standard grip and the Rabin; the way she always seemed to position herself, as now, with a cliff or boulder at her back; her apparent indifference to the bloodshed of the days before.

  And then there was the way she smelled. Valyn still couldn’t put words to some of the things he could sense since emerging from Hull’s Hole. The slarn egg had changed him; the eggs had changed them all. That, evidently, had been the point of the final Kettral test, the reason all cadets were sent blind and bleeding into that endless cave on Irsk, scavenging the darkness for the eggs of those reptilian monsters. The eggs reversed the poison, but they did more, much more. Like the rest of the Kettral, any member of Valyn’s Wing could now see in the shadows and hear things at the edge of hearing. They were all stronger than they had been, too, tougher, as though some of the slarn’s wiry strength had been sewn into their flesh when they seized the eggs and drank. But only Valyn had found the dark egg, the one guarded by the king himself. Only Valyn drank the bilious tar while his body shook with the poison.

  He was still struggling to understand what it had done to him. Like the others, he’d found his sight and hearing suddenly, if subtly, enhanced. He could hear small rocks clattering down the cliffside a hundred paces distant, could make out the pinions on the hawks that wheeled overhead . . . but there was more. Sometimes an animal fury clamped down on his heart, a savage desire, not just to fight and kill, not just to see the mission done, but to rend, to hack, to hurt. For the hundredth time, he remembered the slarn circling around and around him, eager claws scraping the stone. If they were now a part of his eyes and ears, were they also a part of his mind?

  He set the question aside, focusing on the assassin. Smell wasn’t quite the right word. He could smell more acutely, to be sure—the woman’s sweat, her hair, even from two paces distant—but this vague sensation hovering at the edge of thought wasn’t that. Or it was that, but more. Sometimes he thought he was losing his mind, imagining new senses for himself, but the sensation remained: he could smell emotion now: anger, and hunger, and fear in all its infinite variation. There was the raw musk of terror and pinched hint of frayed nerves. Everyone in their battered group
shared the fear, at least to some extent. Everyone but Rampuri Tan and the Skullsworn.

  According to Kaden, Pyrre had come to Ashk’lan because she was paid to make the trip, to save his life, and she had rescued Kaden several times over. Despite an inclination to provoke Tan and the Kettral, she made a formidable ally. Still, how far could you trust a woman whose sole allegiance was to the Lord of the Grave? How far could you trust a woman who seemed, from both her smell and demeanor, utterly indifferent to death?

  “I have a plan,” Kaden replied, glancing from Pyrre to Tan to Valyn.

  Valyn stifled a groan.

  The night before, after tethering the bird, walking the perimeter three times, and double-checking, to Gwenna’s great irritation, the flickwicks and moles she had hidden to guard both approaches to the pass, Valyn had climbed to the top of a large boulder, a jagged shard of rock set apart from the rest of the group. Partly he wanted the high ground, a spot with a clear view of everything below, and partly he wanted to be alone, to try to make sense of the events of the last few days, of his own role in the brutal fighting that had taken place. Kaden found him there just as night’s bleak stain leaked over the eastern peaks.

  “Don’t get up,” Kaden said as he climbed the side of the rock. “If you start bowing now, I’ll throw you off the mountain.” His voice was quiet, ragged.

  Valyn glanced over, hesitated, then nodded, returning his attention to the naked sword across his knees. His fight with Sami Yurl had left a tiny nick in the smoke steel halfway down the blade. He’d been at it with his stone for the better part of an hour, smoothing it out stroke by careful stroke.

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing with the stone, “Your Rad—”

  “Not that either,” Kaden groaned, perching cross-legged at the very lip of the boulder. “Save it for when someone else is listening.”

  “You are the Emperor,” Valyn pointed out.

  Kaden didn’t say anything. After a few licks of the stone, Valyn looked up to find his brother staring with those fiery eyes out over the valley below. The depths of the ravine were already sunk in shadow, but the setting sun had caught the far rim, drenching it in bloody light.

  “I am,” Kaden said after what seemed like a long time. “Intarra help us all, I am the Emperor.”

  Valyn hesitated, uncertain how to respond. During the fight two days earlier, Kaden had been cold as midwinter ice, calm and ready as any Kettral. That certainty, however, seemed to have vanished. Valyn had witnessed something like it on the Islands, had seen men and women, twenty-year veterans returning from successful missions, fall to pieces the moment they set foot back on Qarsh. There was something about being safe again, about being finally and undeniably alive after living so close to death, that made soldiers, good soldiers, soldiers who held it together for days or weeks under the most brutal circumstances, dance like madmen, collapse sobbing, or drink themselves nearly to oblivion over on Hook.

  There’s no shame, the Kettral said, in crying in your own rack. The rest of the equation remained unspoken, axiomatic: you could cry all you wanted in your rack, provided you got up again in a day or two, provided that when you got up, you went back out, and that when you went back out, you were the baddest, fastest, most brutal motherfucker on the four continents. It wasn’t at all clear whether or not Kaden had that kind of resilience, that kind of resolve.

  “How are you?” Valyn asked. It was a stupid question, but every conversation had to start somewhere, and Kaden looked like he might sit cross-legged the whole night without saying another word. “After what we ran into down there?”

  Valyn had seen scores of dead bodies in the course of his training, had learned to look at the hacked-up limbs and crusted blood the way another man, someone not raised by the Kettral, might consider a side of beef or a plucked rooster. There was even a certain satisfaction to be had in studying the aftermath of violence and seeing answers in the wreckage. As Hendran wrote in his Tactics: The deader a man gets, the more honest he becomes. Lies are a vice of the living. That was true enough, but Kaden hadn’t been trained to pick over bodies, especially not the bodies of his friends and fellow monks. It must have been hard to encounter them—even from a distance—burned and cut to pieces.

  Kaden took a long, slow breath, shuddered for a moment, then fell still. “It’s not the older monks that bother me,” he said finally. “They had all achieved the vaniate, had found a way to snuff out their fear.”

  Valyn shook his head. “No one escapes fear. Not really.”

  “These men would have surprised you,” Kaden said, turning to look at him, face sober, composed. “The children, though, the novices especially . . .” He trailed off.

  The wind had picked up as the sun set. It whipped around them, scrabbling at hair and clothes, tugging Kaden’s robe, threatening to rip him off the rock. Kaden didn’t seem to notice. Valyn searched for something to say, some comfort he might offer, but found nothing. The Shin novices were dead, and, if they were anything like everyone else, they had died in pain and terror, baffled, confused, and suddenly, utterly alone.

  “I wonder,” Kaden said quietly, “if I shouldn’t let them have it.”

  It took Valyn a moment to find his bearings in the shifting conversation, but when he did, he shook his head curtly.

  “The Unhewn Throne is yours,” he said firmly, “as it was our father’s. You can’t surrender it because of a handful of murders.”

  “Hundreds,” Kaden replied, voice harder than Valyn expected. “The Aedolians killed hundreds, not a handful. And the throne? If I’m so desperate to sit on top of a chunk of rock, there are plenty.” He gestured into the night. “I could stay right here. The view is better and no one else would be killed.”

  Valyn glanced over his blade, ran a finger along the edge, feeling for the nick.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  Kaden laughed helplessly. “Of course I’m not sure, Valyn. Let me list for you the things I know for sure: the print of a brindled bear, the color of bruiseberries, the weight of a bucket of water . . .”

  “All right,” Valyn said. “I get it. We’re not sure about anything.”

  Kaden stared at him, the fire in his irises so bright it had to hurt. “I know this: the Aedolians came for me. The monks died because of me.”

  “That’s the truth,” Valyn replied, “but it’s not the end of the truth.”

  “You sound like a monk.”

  “The killing is aimed at you right now, but it won’t stop with you. Let me tell you something I know: men are animals. Look anywhere you want: Anthera or the Blood Cities, the jungle tribes of the Waist, look at the fucking Urghul, for ’Shael’s sake. People kill to get power, they kill to keep power, and they kill if they think they might lose it, which is pretty much always. Even if you and I both stay out of it, even if we both die, whoever came after us will keep coming. They’ll find the next threat, the next worrisome voice, the next person with the wrong name or the wrong skin. Maybe they’ll go after the rich for their coin or the peasants for their rice, the Bascans because they’re too dark or the Breatans because they’re too pale—it doesn’t matter. People who will murder monks will murder anyone. I trained with bastards like this. They won’t back off because you give up. They’ll come on harder. Do you get that?”

  Valyn fell silent, the words drying up as suddenly as they had come. He was panting, he realized. Blood slammed in his temples and his fingers had curled into fists so tight they hurt. Kaden was watching him, watching him the way you might watch a wild animal, wary and uncertain of its intent.

  “We’ll find him,” Kaden said finally.

  “Find who?”

  “The Kettral leach. Balendin. The one who killed your friend. We’ll find him, and we’ll kill him.”

  Valyn stared. “This isn’t about me,” he protested. “That’s my point.”

  “I know,” Kaden replied. Somehow, the uncertainty had sloughed off of him. There was a distance in those burnin
g eyes again, as though Valyn was seeing them from miles away. “I know it isn’t.”

  They sat awhile, listening to a rockfall farther down the ridgeline. It sounded like a series of explosions, like Kettral munitions, only louder, boulders the size of houses loosened by winter ice losing their hold, shattering to pieces on the rocky slopes below.

  “So,” Valyn said warily, “no more bullshit about sitting the fight out on a piece of rock in the middle of the mountains.”

  Kaden shook his head.

  “Good. Now what’s the plan?”

  Valyn had heard it once already, the outlines at least, but he hoped to Hull that a day and a night had been enough for Kaden to change his mind. That hope shattered after a glance at his brother.

  “The way I told you,” Kaden replied. “We split up. Tan and I go to the Ishien—”

  “The Ishien,” Valyn said, shaking his head. “A group of monastics even more secretive and strange than your Shin monks. A cadre of fanatics that you’ve never even met.”

  “They know about the Csestriim,” Kaden replied. “They hunt the Csestriim. It’s what they do, why their order was founded. All those old stories about centuries of war, about humans fighting for their lives against armies of immortal, unfeeling warriors—most people think it’s all just myth. Not the Ishien. For them, the war never ended. They are still fighting. If I’m going to survive, if we are going to win, I need to know what they know.”

  Valyn bore down on the stone, scraping it over the steel more roughly than he’d intended. He and his Wing had risked everything to come after Kaden, had thrown away their place on the Islands and their years of training both. Already they had been betrayed, captured, and almost killed, and there was a very real chance that by the time the whole thing had played out, more than one of them would be dead. That part was fine. They all understood the risks, had all accepted years earlier that they might die defending the Emperor and empire. To let Kaden wander off, however, to be ordered to stand aside while he threw himself into danger, was both stupid and insulting. The whole thing set Valyn’s teeth on edge.