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

by Brian Staveley

  “You understand,” he said, considering Adare bluntly over the rough wooden table, “that many of the faithful, probably most, will want to see you burned.”

  “I am a Malkeenian princess,” Adare replied, trying to keep her voice steady. “Hundreds saw me on the bridge. If you kill me, you will have a brief civil war followed by the annihilation of your faith.”

  Lehav shrugged. “The faithful would call your death justice, justice for Uinian. As for the rest, we are all in Intarra’s hands.”

  “Intarra didn’t take such good care of Uinian.”

  Lehav frowned, but he didn’t respond, his silence leaving Adare to wonder if she had scored a point or sealed her own doom. If the man decided to kill her, the cramped, windowless room was as good a place as any. Aside from the two soldiers who had dragged her in moments before, no one knew that she was there. The heavy stone walls would blot out her screams. Her blood would drain out readily enough through the rough iron grate set into the floor.

  He’s not going to kill you, she told herself firmly, suppressing a shudder. Not here, at least.

  “What were you doing in Annur?” Adare asked, trying to seize back some scrap of initiative. “Why did you disguise yourself? Join the pilgrimage?”

  Lehav raised an eyebrow. “It would seem that I should be asking the questions, and you should be answering them.”

  “And yet, so far all you’ve done is threaten me.”

  “No. It is you who threaten us,” the soldier said, voice quiet, but hard. “You struck at Uinian, at our priest in the heart of our temple—”

  “Uinian was a ’Kent-kissing leach,” Adare cut in, suddenly furious in spite of her fear. “He lied to you, to his entire congregation, and you all believed him. You should thank me for unveiling him, for seeing him killed.”

  Lehav studied her. “That much, perhaps, is true. Unfortunately for both of us, you didn’t stop there, did you?”

  “The Accords,” Adare said, watching him warily.

  “Accords.” He shook his head. “What a sweet little word. Like calling a knife to the gut a tickle.”

  “The Accords were intended to find a new balance between Intarra’s Church and the Unhewn Throne, one that—”

  Lehav cut her off without raising his voice. “The Accords were laws, laws you made, to humiliate the Church, cut off her revenue, and destroy the force that defended her. The new Chief Priest is your puppet, and this balance you describe is the balance of a tyrant with her boot on the throat of a conquered foe.” His raised his brows. “Do I have it more or less right?”

  Adare hesitated, trying to see past both her anger and her fear. When she planned for this moment, she had imagined Ameredad to be either a religious zealot, ignorant of the serpentine twists of imperial politics, or a shrewd opportunist like Uinian, a man more interested in his own glory and advancement than the fate of the thousands who followed him. Apparently, her imagination had failed her. She could stick with her rehearsed speech, but that speech looked likely to see her burned before a vengeful mob. She took a deep breath, marshaled her thoughts, then nodded.

  “You have it right,” she said. “The Accords were a play to cut your Church off at the knees.”

  The man leaned back in his chair, clearly surprised.

  “And you’ve come here now, why?” he asked slowly. “To finish what you started?”

  Adare shook her head. “To fix it. To make it right.”

  “To make it right,” Lehav said, looking past Adare to the map on the wall. He frowned, as though the layout of the streets and alleyways displeased him. “It doesn’t make sense. You could retract the Accords from the Dawn Palace. Retract or amend them. You didn’t need to come here to meet with me. You certainly didn’t need to walk all this way with a blindfold over your eyes.” He turned back to her, fixing her with a hard stare. “You are still lying, and each lie brings you closer to your death.”

  The words were mild, but then, Adare had never heard the soldier raise his voice. She was reminded of his warning to the canal rats back in the muddy ruts of the Perfumed Quarter, the way he didn’t threaten so much as offer alternatives. He’d been willing to leave her then, willing, before learning she shared his faith, to let her be raped and killed without even knowing who she was. How much more readily would he let her go to the fires now?

  “I am not lying,” she said slowly, “but there is more.”

  He watched her for a moment, then, in a fluid motion, drew his belt knife. The blade gleamed in the fickle lights of candle and lantern, and for a moment he considered the steel, turning it back and forth, watching the flame and shadow play over it.

  Adare stared, still as a cobra in the grip of the wooden flute’s soft song. He’s not going to burn me, she realized. He’s not going to wait that long. She imagined the wide map with her blood splattered across it.

  Lehav, however, just gestured with the point of his knife toward a thick candle on the edge of the table, then flicked his wrist, scoring a line in the wax a finger’s width from the top.

  “You have until that line to talk,” he said, “and then we are finished.”

  Adare tried to collect her thoughts. There wasn’t much wax remaining above the notch, and the case she had to put before the soldier was a complex one. There would be no second chances and there could be no missteps.

  “Ran il Tornja murdered my father.”

  Lehav’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t speak. Adare glanced at the candle, then plunged ahead.

  “The kenarang is at the center of a conspiracy to remove the Malkeenian line from power.”

  “I serve Intarra,” Lehav said, “not the Malkeenian line.”

  “You might want to rethink that position. My family is not il Tornja’s only target. We might not even be his main one. He wants your Church gone, destroyed, scrubbed from the face of the empire.”

  “Why would the kenarang concern himself with domestic matters of religious freedom?”

  “Because he wants to be emperor, not kenarang, and he understands that there are only two entities with the power to resist him.” She held up two fingers. “My family, and your Church.” She frowned. “I should say, we had the power to resist him, but he has already stripped most of that away. I did not draft the Accords alone, nor was I the sole author of the strike against Uinian. Who do you think brought me to your temple in the first place? Who do you think told me that your Chief Priest killed my father?”

  Lehav studied her over steepled fingers. “So you allowed yourself to be used. If this is true.”

  “I was a fool,” Adare agreed, shoving down her pride. “I spent years hearing about Uinian’s hatred for my family, and when the time came, I believed what I was told.”

  “And your judgment was further impaired when you made yourself the kenarang’s whore.”

  Adare stifled a sharp retort. Though she had hoped word of her romantic liaison would remain in the Dawn Palace, she hadn’t really expected as much.

  “My personal mistakes are beside the point here. . . .”

  “It seems to me that they are exactly the point,” Lehav replied. “Even if I accept every article of your tale, look what I am left with: you admit that you were a willing participant in the murder of my priest. . . .”

  “A leach,” Adare insisted.

  Lehav waved the interruption aside. “You admit that you spent time in the bed of the kenarang, the man behind both Uinian’s murder and your father’s, and you admit conspiring to ruin Intarra’s one true Church with your Accords. Even if you are honest, you have proven yourself a fool and a foe to the faithful. Why would I do anything but burn you?”

  “Because if you burn me, you will fail,” Adare said bleakly. “Il Tornja will have turned his two chief foes against each other, and he will win.”

  “We will face il Tornja when the time comes,” Lehav said. “This city is better defended than you realize.”

  Adare thought back to the pairs of soldiers blocking the a
lleyways above, to the warren of streets and ruins. It could well prove the end of an Annurian legion, especially if the local population sided with the Sons of Flame. Il Tornja would have to raze the place to dislodge them, and razing an Annurian city would be insanity for a usurper of the throne. Not since Terial the Short laid siege to Mo’ir three centuries earlier had an Annurian emperor attacked his own citizens, and that hadn’t ended well for Terial.

  “I have an army,” Lehav continued. “I have a growing stock of weapons and armor. I have a fortified position, and the tactical and strategic experience to properly defend it. You have . . . what? The dress on your back, and a sad story about the murder of one tyrant at the hands of another. You want something and you can give nothing. You are a highborn beggar, nothing more.”

  Adare smiled. “I have the eyes.”

  “I am far from convinced,” Lehav replied, “of the divinity of those eyes.”

  “That’s a shame. There are three players in this game: my family, your Church, and the kenarang. We each have our followings. If you burn me tomorrow, il Tornja will spin an outraged tale of your treachery. He will explain in great detail and with even more righteous anger how you abducted and murdered me. The millions of Annurians loyal to my family, instead of siding with you, will become his followers. You might hold Olon, but if you attempt to leave it, you will find yourself awash in a sea of enemies. For every mile you travel, men will lame your horses and burn their fields to deny you food. They will tear up the roads before you and drive away their livestock.” Adare shook her head. “Il Tornja won’t even need his legions. Which means you will stay here, trapped with your few followers on this sad, decaying island until you starve or the kenarang destroys you at his leisure.”

  Lehav frowned. “Well, that’s a dire tale. And you offer what, to prevent it?”

  “Legitimacy. With me at your side, il Tornja won’t be able to brand you traitors. Lovers of Intarra and loyal citizens of the empire alike will unite behind us. It will be the kenarang, not the Sons of Flame, who finds himself trapped behind the walls of his city.”

  “Loyal citizens of the empire,” the soldier said, scorn in his voice as he repeated the words.

  Adare stared. “My father was a capable Emperor and a just man. For every disgruntled priest during his reign, there were fifty farmers and merchants, nobles and soldiers, all grateful for the peace and prosperity he brought. What is it about Annur that makes you hate it?”

  The soldier studied her from across the table. Adare tried to remain still, to keep her face calm, but now that her words were spent, fear flowed in to fill the space left behind, and she realized she was clutching at the fabric of her dress, wringing it desperately between her fingers. With an effort she loosed the cloth, then smoothed it, running her hands over the wrinkles again and again.

  “I grew up in the Quarter,” Lehav said finally. “Not too far from where I found you. Didn’t know my father, barely knew my mother—the swelling pox killed her when I was six—raised my younger brother myself for three years, until someone put a rusty chisel through his eye and tossed him into the canal. . . .”

  Adare opened her mouth to say something, but no words came, and the soldier waved her to silence.

  “A kid in the Quarter . . .” he went on, voice flat. “You learn early on to kill, to steal, to fuck, or to hide. Hopefully all four, if you want to stay alive. Even those skills won’t save you if you don’t know when to do what. My brother could steal and hide, he could fuck and kill, but he made a mistake somewhere. I never learned what it was, but he read someone wrong, stole when he should have killed, killed when he should have fucked. The point is, back in the Quarter we didn’t see so much of your father’s fine justice.

  “I was lucky. Smarter and stronger than most of the others, but mostly lucky. The day I joined up with the legions, I thought I’d finally made it, got out for good. Three meals a day, free clothes, nice bright spear, and a cause to fight for. I held on to that spear and that cause all the way down to the Waist, where I spent six years killing jungle tribesmen who had even less than the poor bastards back in the Quarter.” He shrugged, the indifference of the gesture belying the words. “I was good at it, kept moving up the ranks until I commanded an entire legion.”

  He shook his head. “I never regretted killing the men and women. They’re beasts down there, worse than beasts. A wolf will kill you, gnaw the marrow from your bones, but the jungle tribes? They’ll take the skin off a man one strip at a time. They’ll pull every tooth in your mouth while you choke on your own blood. They need to be put down, and I was good at putting them down. When we started burning villages, though, when we started putting spears in children . . .” He broke off, staring at nothing.

  “That’s when you quit.”

  “That’s when I found a purer cause,” he said finally, staring at her.

  Adare watched him for a long time, trying to find a shape for her thoughts. “Intarra’s light burns bright,” she said finally, “but we live here, on the earth, in the mud.”

  “That’s no reason not to reach for her flame.”

  “And in this world,” Adare replied quietly, “there is no fire without fuel. No flame without ash.” She shook her head. “I am not a goddess, but I am a princess of Annur, and Annur is real. It is here. My hands are bloody, but unlike those of the goddess we both serve, I can do real work with them. I can hold a sword or a scepter. I can help people, real people right now, but not without the Sons.”

  Lehav watched her awhile, then looked over at the candle. The soft wax had folded over his notch and the flame wavered in the cool draft.

  “All right,” he said finally.

  Adare let out a long, unsteady breath. “All right.”

  He turned back to her. “I can save you, but your men, those Aedolians . . . they killed eleven of the Sons.”

  “No,” Adare said, jarred from her tiny moment of relief. “They were only trying to help me. They were doing what they swore to do.”

  Lehav laughed grimly. “We’ve all sworn to do something. They killed my men. If I am to have any credibility before my people . . . if we are to have any credibility, they have to burn.”

  Adare felt as though a stone were blocking her throat.

  “They are good men,” she managed finally.

  “As you said,” Lehav replied slowly, “there is no flame without ash.”

  19

  I know a way out.

  In the long undifferentiated darkness of his imprisonment, Kaden revolved the words in his mind, listening to them as though they were a faint strain of music in the silence, studying them as he might a glimmer of light in the endless shadow. Again and again he went back to the saama’an, the perfectly carved memory of those final moments in Triste’s cell when the Csestriim had met his eyes, then mouthed those five words.

  I know a way out.

  It was a baffling claim, horrible in the hope it offered, maddening because Kaden could make no sense of it. When the Ishien slammed shut the door of his cell, turned the key in the lock, Kaden had waited for a thousand heartbeats before standing, before exploring with fingers and palms the rough stone extent of his prison. His burning eyes offered a pathetic measure of light, enough to avoid walking into a wall if he moved slowly, and so he shuffled painstakingly around the tiny chamber. There was little to learn. The walls were damp. The wooden door felt heavy. In the corner, a small hole no larger than Kaden’s hand opened into unmeasured darkness below.

  It was a meager consolation, but the cell did not offer any other, and as the sound of retreating boots echoed to silence, he began to realize just what he had risked in trying to defend Triste. What he had risked, and how badly he had failed. Panic prowled his mind on velvet feet, and for a while it was all he could do to keep from hurling himself at the door, from screaming into the darkness. Instead, he found the middle of the room as well as he could, sat cross-legged on the stone floor, and closed his eyes, replacing the darkness of t
he world with his own inner darkness, the emptiness of the cell with a greater emptiness. When he finally emerged from the vaniate, the fear remained, but it was a small thing, a distant scream like far-off smoke against a vast, silent sky.

  Methodically, he set about exploring his cell again, running his hands systematically over the stone, testing the privy hole, reaching up for the invisible ceiling. He went to the door last, hoping it would offer some recourse that the rest of the stone had refused. Steel or iron banded the thick wooden slab, metal cold and pitted beneath his fingers. A small slot opened at the very bottom, barely the height of his hand—for food perhaps. He found a keyhole narrower than his finger halfway up, briefly allowed himself to imagine that he might pick the lock and break free, then squashed the hope. He had no tools, nothing but his robe, and even if he had, he knew nothing about locks, nothing about escape.

  Only when he had exhausted the other possibilities did he finally speak.

  “Hello?” he asked, voice little more than a whisper. Even that was enough to crack the brittle shell of the vaniate. “Triste? Are you there?” He hesitated. “Kiel?”

  The darkness lisped his own syllables back to him, but there was no response. He tried again, raising his voice, then again and again, over and over until he was bellowing, pounding his fists on the door’s indifferent steel. When he gave up, the silence clamped down once more, closing on the cell like a vise.