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

by Brian Staveley

  Despite the chill on the afternoon air, the shaman wore a sleeveless tunic of bison hide. Dozens of necklaces ringed his neck, leather thongs threaded through bone, some short, some long. They shifted and clacked whenever he changed position. He wore his blond hair long, but instead of tying it back, in the fashion of the Urghul warriors, he let it hang free in a pale cascade reaching halfway to his waist. A poor tactical decision if it came to a fight, but Long Fist didn’t appear worried about a fight. He nodded as Valyn and the others approached, not a greeting, but a gesture of satisfaction, the smile revealing a perfect row of white teeth, the upper canines of which looked to have been sharpened.

  “So,” he said, spreading his hands wide, as though inviting Valyn to sit at a bountiful feast. Only there was no feast. Nowhere to sit.

  “What did they do?” Valyn asked, jerking his chin toward the bearers of the makeshift throne.

  Long Fist raised an eyebrow. “They were brave,” he replied.

  Valyn shook his head. “And for some reason you didn’t like that?”

  “Quite to the contrary,” the chief replied, running a finger along the ribs of the kneeling man, “their bravery pleased me greatly, and so I have extended them this honor.”

  Valyn blew out a long, ragged breath. “Remind me not to please you.”

  Long Fist shrugged. “You are a soft man from a soft world. You would not understand.”

  “Oh, I think I get it well enough. It makes you feel strong to hurt others. People like you aren’t so uncommon.”

  “On the contrary,” the shaman replied, showing his teeth in a predatory smile. “People like me are extremely uncommon, and this,” he said, gesturing to the bent and bloody bearers of his seat, “is not for me. It is for them.”

  “What horseshit.”

  Long Fist turned to Huutsuu. “Perhaps you would attempt to enlighten our guest.”

  She nodded. “You worship weak gods, and so you are weak. All peoples have the gods they deserve.” As though that clarified anything.

  “We worship civilized gods,” Valyn replied. “I’ve studied your history, your worship. It is bloody and savage. Bestial.”

  “Civilized,” Long Fist said, holding a hand before him, palm up, as though weighing the word, feeling its heft. “Savage. Like a horse with blinders, you see only what your language allows you to see. This is the danger of relying too heavily on words.”

  “The words represent things,” Valyn replied. “Law. Prosperity. Peace.”

  The chief shook his head, bemused. “More words. More confusion. Consider your law—what is it except a shield for the weak?”

  “That’s the point. We protect those who need protection.”

  “Infants need protection,” Long Fist replied patiently, “but men and women grown? To protect them, to force your protection upon them, to assume that they need or desire that protection, is to strip them of their own nobility. You call us savage. You say we are like beasts. I say it is you with your law and your prosperity that makes swine of men, makes cattle of women, reduces them to cowed conformity. Kwihna would raise their eyes once more, would ennoble their hearts.”

  “I see how Kwihna ennobles,” Valyn said, gesturing to the kneeling figures, trying to hold on to his side of the argument. For all the chieftain’s scorn for words, he wielded them deftly as weapons, twisting meaning and changing context until Valyn found himself utterly wrong-footed, defending rather than attacking. “It looks great—as long as you’re the one sitting on the litter and not the one holding it up.”

  “Surely,” the man replied, pulling open his tunic slowly to reveal his chest, “you do not believe that I would allow others to claim an honor that I myself refused.”

  Valyn suppressed a shudder. Someone had carved a tangled web of jagged, puckered slashes into his white skin, scores of lines, hundreds of them, a cloak of glabrous, glistening scar laid over his flesh. On either side of his chest, toward the pits of his arms, large healed punctures, like old spear wounds, gouged the muscle. Following Valyn’s gaze, the shaman nodded. “It was here,” he said, pressing a fingertip into one of the shallow divots, “and here that they put the hooks. For one full moon I hung suspended by the steel while every morning the tribe gathered, every man and woman, even the children, gathered to drag their knives across my flesh, to participate in my sacrifice.”

  Valyn tried to gauge the claim. It seemed almost physically impossible. Almost. If none of those knives had severed an artery, if someone had provided the shaman with water, if the wounds were smeared periodically with coagulant, a man could survive. Something had left the scars. Valyn imagined hanging from those hooks like a beast after a botched slaughter, skin peeling away in strips, flies in the wounds, tongue swollen so fat beneath the steppe sun that every breath was a struggle against strangulation.

  “You didn’t die,” he pointed out.

  “Of course not,” Long Fist replied, shrugging his tunic shut. “I made my sacrifice to Kwihna, not to Wakarii.”

  “Wakarii?”

  “The Coward’s God. The Lord of the Grave.”

  It was the first time Valyn had heard Ananshael referred to as a god for cowards, but he wasn’t interested in debating theology. “What do you want?” he asked. “Why did your people tie us up and drag us halfway across the steppe?”

  Long Fist gazed up at the shifting clouds, as though the answer to the question was scrawled across the wind. “What do I want?” he mused. “I suppose that what I want is to know whom to help, and whom to destroy.”

  “I volunteer for the former,” Balendin said, stepping forward, managing an awkward bow over his bound hands.

  Long Fist considered the leach for a moment. “I recognize Valyn from his eyes and from his father’s description.” Valyn stared at the mention of his father, but Long Fist pressed ahead as though he’d said nothing surprising. “Huutsuu informs me that these others are the prince’s warriors. . . .”

  “Not all of us,” Pyrre said.

  The chieftain raised an eyebrow, studied the assassin for a moment, then turned back to Balendin as though she had not spoken. “You, however. You were captured separately.”

  The leach shrugged. “Different Wing. We’re all Kettral.”

  “You fickle, traitorous fuck,” Gwenna spat, shouldering her way forward. She glared at Balendin for a heartbeat, as though deciding whether or not to tackle him, then turned to Long Fist. “You should kill him. You can’t keep him drugged forever, and whatever he tells you now, when he comes undrugged you’ll wish to Hull he was dead.”

  “I do not wish,” Long Fist replied, “I pray. And I do not pray to Hull. More, I do not kill men until I know what use they might have.”

  Balendin smiled. “Oh, I’m useful. I can promise you that.”

  Long Fist merely nodded, considering the leach once more, then gesturing to someone behind them with one extended finger. A young ksaabe, barely older than Valyn, came running with a wooden pipe. She set it in the shaman’s outstretched hand, then retreated. Long Fist took a long drag, held it a moment, then exhaled slowly, the smoke wreathing his face.

  “I have questions,” he said finally.

  “You can bugger yourself with your questions,” Laith replied, spitting at the shaman’s feet.

  Long Fist took another long puff on his pipe, staring at the flier from behind the cloud of smoke.

  “If you speak to me like that again, I will cut out your tongue.” The words were level, matter-of-fact, as though he were discussing a new bowstring or the morning rain.

  Laith looked ready to snap, but Valyn spoke into the ensuing silence before the flier could respond.

  “What are your questions?”

  “First,” the shaman raised a finger, “what are you doing on my steppe?”

  Valyn had expected the question, but he responded carefully. Balendin might know nothing about the Flea, about Assare and the kenta, and Valyn didn’t intend to give him any extra information. “My Wing was fo
rced down after a fight in the mountains.”

  Long Fist glanced at Huutsuu, and she nodded.

  “A fight,” he mused. “You killed the monks?”

  Valyn blinked. He hadn’t expected the shaman to know anything about Ashk’lan, but then, the Shin had traded with someone. For all he knew, the eastern Urghul tribes had frequented the monastery before its destruction. The real question was how Long Fist felt about the monks. The fact that Ashk’lan, perched above the eastern steppe, had never been destroyed spoke volumes. Valyn took a deep breath, then plunged.

  “No. We killed the men who killed the monks.” He nodded contemptuously toward Balendin. “His Wing. And others.”

  Long Fist raised an eyebrow. “Your own men. You killed other Annurians.”

  “Traitors,” Valyn amended, anger at the memory shoving aside fear and caution both.

  “And your brother? He is dead?”

  Valyn hesitated. “No.”

  “My comrades,” Balendin said, shrugging as he spoke, “were more zealous than skilled. As you can see, I’m no friend of Valyn, his family, or his empire.” He smiled slowly. “Which could make me very useful to you.”

  The leach wasn’t even trying to disguise his treachery, which, Valyn had to admit, might well prove the shrewd decision, given the frayed relations between Annur and the Urghul. The horsemen might respect the monks, but they loathed the empire. If Long Fist were looking for an ally, who better than a Kettral-trained leach, one with an intimate knowledge of Annur’s military?

  “As I recall,” Valyn said, turning to face Balendin, “it was you yourself who underestimated my brother, who nearly died at his hands.” He nodded toward the leach’s shoulder. “How’s that bolt puncture?”

  “Healing nicely, thank you for asking,” Balendin replied. “As for your brother, I’m looking forward to cutting out those fancy eyes of his the next time we meet.”

  Long Fist seemed half bored, half amused by the exchange.

  Gwenna, however, rounded on Valyn, eyes ablaze. “Are we going to keep talking?” she demanded. “Or do you want me to kill him?”

  It was an implausible threat. Balendin snorted, but he took half a step back all the same. He’s nervous, Valyn realized, tasting the fear on the air. Normally, the leach would have been feasting off Gwenna’s rage, bathing in the power that came from her emotion, but drugged as he was with adamanth root, her fury brought him no strength.

  “Stand down, Gwenna,” Valyn said. He wanted Balendin cut to pieces as much as she did, probably more, but he didn’t intend to make a spectacle of his Wing in front of the Urghul chieftain.

  “Why?” she demanded, glaring at him, then jerking her head at Long Fist. “So we can please this bloody son of a bitch? When we finish Balendin, we ought to start on him.”

  Valyn tensed, ready for some sort of retribution, but Long Fist just raised his brows.

  “Such hatred,” he said. “Before you kill a man, you should be sure he is not your brother.”

  “My brothers are all in the legions,” Gwenna spat. “On the frontier. Keeping you bastards out.”

  “You see?” Long Fist said, looking past Gwenna to Huutsuu. “This is what most Annurians believe.”

  “What?” Valyn demanded. “What do we believe?”

  The shaman spread his hands. “That my people are trying to invade your empire.”

  Valyn frowned, then nodded to the sprawling camp. “What’s all this then? We’ve got to be all the way into the Blood Steppe, probably just a few days from the White, and you’ve put together a ’Kent-kissing army.”

  “A defensive army,” Long Fist replied. “Protection against your predatory war chief.”

  Valyn shook his head. “War chief?”

  “Ran il Tornja,” Talal said quietly. They were the first words the leach had spoken, and the Urghul chief turned an appraising eye on him, then nodded.

  “This is his name. My army, as you call it, is no more than a shield against his depredations.”

  “There’s a guy back on the Islands,” Laith observed, “Great Gray Balt. He loves his shield—beaten twenty men to death with it.”

  Long Fist nodded. “More than twenty will die if Ran il Tornja comes across the White. But I have no longing for this fight.” He pointed at Valyn with the stem of his pipe. “Your father understood this. I wonder . . . do you?”

  “What do you know of my father?” Valyn demanded, the chieftain’s earlier words coming back to him.

  “More than you. We met yearly to reestablish our common border, to discuss our common goals. I sparred with him just ten moons past.”

  Valyn felt the ground shift beneath him. Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian had less than nothing in common with this savage. The ideals of the empire were diametrically opposed to those of the Urghul. And yet . . . Valyn’s father had tried to exercise restraint regarding the steppe nomads. Until the last few years, imperial policy had called for a hard border at the White River, no intervention to the north.

  “Met him? Where?”

  “East of here. A place sacred to the Urghul.”

  Valyn shook his head. “A lie. It would have taken him months to make the trip and months to return. The whole court would have noted his absence.”

  Long Fist smiled. “Such certainty.”

  Even as he spoke Valyn realized his error: the kenta. He had never heard of the gates before fleeing the Islands, but according to Kaden, the whole point of the Shin training was to allow the Emperor access to the kenta, to provide him with the keys necessary to oversee all Annur. If there was a gate buried in the Bone Mountains, there could be a gate stuck in the middle of the steppe, a lone arch somewhere on a wind-beaten hill, an indestructible span of something that was neither stone nor steel. A primitive people like the Urghul would likely hold such a place sacred.

  For the hundredth time, Valyn wished he had known his own father better. Would Sanlitun have traveled alone across half the length of a continent to parley with some blood-soaked barbarian chief? He tried to dredge up his childhood memories, but could snag only fragments and shards: Sanlitun sitting the Unhewn Throne, a finger extended in judgment; Sanlitun teaching him to hold a blade, rapping Valyn on the knuckles again and again, insisting on a looser grip; Sanlitun seated cross-legged on the roof of Intarra’s Spear, gazing out over the ocean, indifferent to the wind tearing at his hair or the vast city sprawled below him, focused on something Valyn could neither see nor comprehend, something terribly distant. All of Valyn’s memories were like this: he could make out the lines of his father’s face, the burning eyes, the set of his shoulders, while the thought and emotion beneath remained opaque, unknowable.

  “Your father had no desire for war with the Urghul. We are different peoples with different ways. He was content to leave it so. But there are factions within your empire who think differently.” He nodded toward Balendin. “Obviously.”

  The leach shifted uncomfortably, opened his mouth to respond, but Valyn spoke into the pause.

  “So, if you and my father were such great friends, if you’ve got such respect for the empire, why am I tied up? Why have your people been beating my Wing for the better part of a month?”

  Long Fist tilted his head to the side.

  “Huutsuu has given me to understand that it is you who surprised her, that you have killed many of my warriors during the long ride west.”

  “We killed them,” Valyn spat, “because—”

  The chieftain waved his objection aside with a languid hand.

  “I understand. You are warriors. It is forgiven.”

  He gestured, and Huutsuu stepped forward, knife in hand.

  Despite the word forgiven, Valyn half expected the woman to plunge the steel into his stomach, and he shifted to put space between them, raising his hands in defense. She snorted in disgust.

  “Stop moving. I am freeing you.”

  Valyn stared as she sliced the rawhide cord binding his wrists, his elbows, trying to make sense of his
sudden liberty. Before he could rub the blood back into his hands, the rest of his Wing was likewise free. Even Pyrre seemed subject to Long Fist’s sudden, shocking amnesty. The assassin smiled at Huutsuu as the Urghul woman cut her free, then sketched a curtsy, as though they were nobles at a ball.

  “I can’t help but notice,” Balendin said, when all the cords but his had been cut, “that I’m still tied up. I hope it is an oversight.”

  Long Fist turned those cat-calm eyes on the leach.

  “By all means, feel hope if it gives you strength. I will remind you, however, that you have already admitted to your part in this plot to kill your Emperor.”

  Balendin licked his lips, a quick, furtive motion. He glanced over at Valyn, as if for support, but Valyn just smiled. He had no idea what was going on, no idea what game Long Fist was playing, but he was free for the first time in weeks, free when he’d expected to be tortured or killed, while Balendin remained bound, stinking of fear and desperation. Valyn allowed himself a moment to bask in the feeling.

  “Why don’t you say a little more,” he suggested, “about how you tried to kill my brother?”

  Long Fist nodded. “Yes. Say more.”

  Balendin shook his head warily. “What do you want to know?”

  The chieftain spread his hands, almost an invitation. “Who sent you to kill the Emperor?”

  The leach shook his head again. “That would be telling.”

  “You can tell now,” Long Fist replied casually, “or when I hold your still-beating heart in my fist.”

  “Go on,” Valyn said. “You already turned on your empire and your order. One more betrayal shouldn’t be a huge weight on your conscience.”