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

by Brian Staveley

  Hundreds of years earlier the walls of Annur had actually ringed the city; torches had blazed in the guard towers punctuating their length while armed men walked the parapets, spears in hand. It had been generations, however, since any foe posed a plausible threat to the capital, and Annur had long ago burst its seams. The houses and warehouses, stables and temples spilled out into the countryside, eating up the open fields and burying the walls behind entire neighborhoods—Newquarter, Canal, Fieldstreets—all of them utterly exposed. From the fields, Adare stared at the city’s outermost buildings—a motley collection of stone granaries and stilted teak houses built over the canals and streams—dread gnawing at her guts.

  Water buffalo cropped the early summer grass, ducks scrabbled for scraps in the dusty roads, two cranes balanced in the shallows of a trash-choked canal, beaks darting for fish, but there were no people. There should have been wagons on the roads and farmers in the surrounding fields, the chatter and hum of men and women going about their lives. Instead, there was stillness, silence, a hot sun stuck in the sky as though nailed there. The citizens of these outlying quarters of Annur were gone, or hiding, neither of which did anything to alleviate Adare’s fear.

  No army had met them on the long march north. At first, Adare had felt relieved by that, then surprised, then worried. Lehav had set a brutal pace, and the Sons had outdistanced all the wagons on the road. Still, dozens of canal boats had slipped past them, gliding effortlessly on the current, all packed with deckhands gaping at the army, all headed for Annur. For all their haste, there was no way they had stolen a march on il Tornja, and their approach—a straight shot up the canal road—left him with a number of ways to respond.

  Each day, Adare expected her own scouts to return with news of an Annurian army camped athwart the road. Mostly, she had dreaded the word, but at least a battle on the road might take place well clear of the city. The armies would churn the fields to mud, ruining the season’s crop, but if a crop was all that came to ruin as a result of her revolution, Adare would count herself lucky. The fact that the kenarang had not already opposed them terrified her. If he chose to make his stand in the cramped streets of the capital itself, houses would burn, shops and businesses. Men and women, Annurians, would die.

  What’s your plan, you bastard? she wondered, standing in her stirrups, trying to peer into the shadowed gaps between the buildings. What’s your angle?

  “Looks like he’s aiming to meet us at the walls,” Lehav said, squinting through his long lens. “Good.”

  Adare stared. “Good?”

  He nodded. “The old walls are at least ten blocks back, packed between houses and shops. We’ll see what the scouts have to say about the fortification of the streets, but city fighting should give us the advantage. The legions train to fight on open ground, but the Sons have been drilling street warfare since before Uinian’s death.”

  “To fight us,” Adare said, studying him. “To fight the throne.”

  “This fight’s been a long time coming,” he said, meeting her gaze.

  Adare clenched her hands around the reins of her horse. Her old general had murdered her father, her new general had been scheming for years to fight her empire, and her only councillor was a half-crazed leach. The fact that she was still alive seemed nothing short of miraculous, and the odds of remaining so loomed longer by the moment.

  “If we go to the streets,” she said, “people will die. I’ve read about siege warfare. Houses will burn. Businesses. Whole quarters of the city could be destroyed.”

  Lehav fixed her with a hard stare. “You came here to start a war. Or did you forget?”

  Before Adare could respond, two riders cantered out of the city, hooves of their horses raising a nervous tattoo on the earth. Lehav raised the long lens again, watched for a moment, then grunted. “Ours.”

  The men reined up before them, bowing in their saddles to Adare, then turning to Lehav.

  “Defenses?” he asked.

  The older of the two—a short man with a lopsided mouth and ears that looked nailed to the side of his broad head—frowned, then jerked a thumb back over his shoulder.

  “Nothin’, Commander. No folks in the streets, but no soldiers either.”

  Lehav frowned, then glanced over at the other scout. “And you?”

  “Same. No army. No sign of an army. There’s no one at all on these streets here, but you get five or six blocks in and it’s packed with folks, same as any other day, like they don’t even know that we’re here.”

  “An ambush,” Fulton said. The guardsman had remained still as stone throughout the conversation, mounted on his own gray gelding just behind Adare’s left shoulder, but he nudged the beast forward now. “Ran il Tornja will have his men inside the shops and houses. Once you commit your force to the streets, they’ll close in behind you, cut your own army into pieces. Take you apart one block at a time.”

  Lehav nodded. If he was irritated by the Aedolian’s comment, he didn’t show it. “They can’t block every street,” he said. “We’ll march west, come in through the Stranger’s Gate—”

  Fulton raised a hand, cutting him off, then pointed past them all, toward the city. “You may be spared the march.”

  Adare pivoted in her saddle to find another knot of riders emerging from the buildings, maybe a dozen men on horses gleaming with silk and bronze. Unlike the scouts, the new party rode at a stately walk, pennons snapping at the breeze above, pennons stitched with the rising sun of Annur.

  “Who is it?” Adare asked.

  Lehav trained the long lens on the group. “Palace guards, squared up in a standard protective knot.”

  “Who are they protecting?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know him. He has long hair and . . .” He paused, squinting. “Looks like a blindfold over his eyes.”

  Adare took a deep breath, held it a moment, then let it out, trying to order her thoughts.

  “The Mizran Councillor,” Fulton ground out. “Tarik Adiv. Part of the delegation to retrieve Kaden.”

  She nodded grimly. “Looks like he’s back.”

  Fulton and Lehav positioned themselves between Adare and the approaching horsemen. She glanced over her shoulder, reminding herself that an army stood at her back, then tried to keep her back straight and her hands steady on the reins as she watched the men approach.

  When Adiv was still ten paces distant, he dismounted. Then, to her shock, he bowed low, lower than he ever had when she was merely a princess. It was hard to interpret that bow—something short of the obeisance owed to an emperor, and yet more than her own collection of titles warranted, certainly more than Adare had expected. Adiv was il Tornja’s man. He had no reason to bow to her.

  “Keep your distance,” Fulton said, stepping in front of Adare, broadblade naked in the morning light.

  Adiv simply smiled. “Your loyalty does you credit, Aedolian, but I have no desire to harm the princess. Quite the opposite, actually.” He cocked his head to the side in that way he had, as though he were studying her through that heavy blindfold. “The regent has asked that I escort you to the Dawn Palace with all due respect.”

  Fulton shook his head. “Not a chance.”

  Adare put her hand on the Aedolian’s arm, moving the sword from her path.

  “I’m sure the regent is clever enough to know,” she said, careful to keep her voice low, level, “that I am here, we are here because of him. Where is Kaden? The last I saw you, you were bound north to retrieve him.”

  Adiv winced. “I beg you, my lady, let us discuss these matters in the privacy of the palace. There is much you do not know. Events have outpaced you during your sojourn in the south.”

  “Is my father still dead?” Adare demanded. “Has Kaden claimed his throne? Does Ran il Tornja still make a mockery of the Dawn Palace?”

  Adiv shook his head gravely. “The Emperor, bright were the days of his life, is dead, of course. Kaden has not returned. The regent himself is gone.”


  “Gone where?”

  “Raalte. Marching hard with the Army of the North.”

  “Raalte?” Adare frowned. It all made less than no sense. “To what end? Against whom?”

  Adiv’s lips tightened, and he took a step forward, approaching until the point of Fulton’s sword lay against his chest. “We should not speak of this here, my lady,” he said, lowering his voice. “While you were away, the Urghul moved, attacking in force against our northern border. Il Tornja goes to turn them back.”

  “An opportunity,” Lehav observed quietly. “If it is true.”

  The Mizran Councillor turned his unseeing gaze on the soldier. “An opportunity to see Annur destroyed.”

  “I don’t serve Annur. I serve the goddess.”

  “You may find that more difficult,” Adiv said pointedly, “if the Urghul take over. The only prayer will be a prayer of blood.”

  “You understand,” Adare hissed, “that I know the truth. All of it. I came here to destroy the regent.”

  Adiv grimaced. “A fact the Ministry of Truth has labored late into the night to obscure. Now, of all times, Annur needs unity, in appearance as well as fact.”

  Adare stared. “How do you obscure an army of thousands marching up the canal road?”

  She gestured over her shoulder to where the Sons of Flame waited, butts of their spears bedded in the earth, the shafts a forest of stark trees, denuded in the summer heat, as though struck by some awful blight. Sun flashed from the bronze of shields and breastplates, bright enough to blind.

  Adiv followed her gaze, as though, despite his blindness, he could sense the weight of that army, the sheer mass of flesh and sharpened steel. “We told the citizens of Annur,” he said quietly, “that you were coming to help. That you went to Olon to reconcile the throne with the Church of Intarra. Which it seems you have.” He paused, then beggared his hands, imploring. “Annur needs you, my lady.”

  “We’re all well fuckin’ aware of that,” Nira spat, kicking her horse forward. “Seems ta me, the question is whether it needs you.”

  Adiv turned to face the old woman, brows rising behind his blindfold. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure. . . .”

  Nira snorted. “Save it. The princess isn’t goin’ ta the palace.”

  Fulton nodded. “I agree.”

  “I can offer myself as surety,” Adiv said. “My life hostage against her safety.”

  “The life a’ one overdressed blind bastard against a princess?” Nira said. “Against a prophet? I don’t think so.”

  “Nira . . .” Adare said, putting up a hand.

  “You made me councillor,” she snapped, “so I’m counselin’.”

  “I’m going,” Adare said.

  “My lady,” Fulton burst out.

  Adare cut him off. “If the Mizran Councillor wanted me dead, he would hardly be offering himself as surety. I don’t understand what’s happening here, but if there is an opportunity to avoid open war in the streets of Annur, I will not be the one to turn it down. This is my city, these are my people.” She looked up, past Adiv, past the jumbled riot of houses and stables, to the great ironglass needle bisecting the sky, its impossible height bright with the sun’s own light. “It is my palace. My empire.”

  The outer neighborhoods of Annur may have been quiet, the people frightened inside their homes by the sight of an approaching army, but the streets of the city center were awash with the usual hum and clatter. Wagon-drivers goaded along their oxen and buffalo; shopkeepers hawked their wares from windows and doorways; porters shoved their way forward through the throng, some bent nearly double beneath bolts of cloth, baskets of firefruit or coal, loads of fresh-cut lumber still smelling of sap. Alone, Adare would have found it nearly impossible to move through the press, but then, she was hardly alone.

  Adiv’s guards ringed her in a loose net, along with Fulton, Nira, and Oshi, who rode at her side. Adiv himself rode in front of the procession, trusting to the crowd to part before the pennons flapping behind and above him. Lehav had remained behind with the Sons of Flame, the implicit threat of the army one more blade to hold at the Mizran’s neck. By the time they reached the Godsway, word of her entry to the city had spread. Men and women had halted their conversation and commerce to stare, then bow their heads at her passage. If the Mizran Councillor intended to murder her, he had certainly picked a strange way to go about it, and as they progressed farther and farther into the city, Adare’s confidence rose.

  Nira, however, was less sanguine.

  “He’s a leach,” she hissed, leaning over in her saddle to speak almost directly in Adare’s ear.

  Adare stared. “Adiv?”

  The old woman nodded. “Strong, too. Dangerous.”

  “My father appointed him Mizran Councillor,” Adare said, shaking her head.

  “Then your father appointed a leach.”

  Adare studied Adiv’s back, the knot in his blindfold. “How do you know?”

  “Live a few hundred years, you pick up a few things.”

  The revelation was a shock. Leaches were perversions, twisted creatures, and Nira’s own identity, the awful powers she held in check, still chafed at Adare like a sharp stone in a shoe. For all that she had begged the woman to be her councillor, she still found herself stealing glances at her several times a day, found herself wondering if she had made an awful mistake, had invited a serpent into her home. In a way, Nira’s identity made Adiv’s less shocking, and yet the thought that a leach sat near the very top of the ziggurat of Annurian power, that he served the kenarang, that he, of all people, had been dispatched to the Bone Mountains to recover Kaden, set her heart hammering.

  Nothing for it now, she said, trying to sit straight in her saddle, to look unworried, imperial. Thousands of eyes were on her, and though she intended to see il Tornja’s head parted violently from his shoulders, it would do no good to let the citizens of the capital read her fury on her face.

  After a circuitous route through Annur’s southern streets, they reached the Godsway. After Olon, where even the largest thoroughfares twisted unpredictably between towers and falling palaces, where to leave the main streets was to step into a labyrinth of alleyways so narrow that Adare could almost touch both walls with her hands, the Godsway felt more like a geological feature, a massive, sword-straight rift bisecting the city, than it did a road built by men. Storefronts lined both sides of the street, merchants and craftsmen selling everything from firefruit, to bright-plumed birds, to small, intricate altars of wood and stone. Down the center of the avenue, set on stone plinths twice her own height, huge statues of the young gods and the old watched over the city—Intarra and Hull, Pta and Astar’ren, Ciena and Meshkent and their children set one after the other. The people of Annur used the statues as they might any other landmark—“Go to the butcher just north of Eira.” “I’ll meet you by Heqet’s feet”—but Adare felt the stone gazes of the monuments as she rode beneath them, hard and unforgiving, and after glancing up a couple of times, she kept her eyes forward.

  After the congestion of the city and the stares of the gods, it was a relief to finally approach the red walls of the Dawn Palace. Intarra’s Spear loomed over it all, slate gray in the fading light, the top of the tower lost in cloud. Adare resisted the urge to crane her neck to peer up at the thing. It was her palace, after all, her home. It would not do to be seen gawking.

  The huge cedar doors of the Godsgate remained closed, of course. No one, not even emperors, presumed to use the gateway ordained for the passage of the divine. The Great Gate beside it, however, was flung open wide, flanked by what must have been a hundred palace guards at stiff attention. She had fled the palace in the drab wool of a servant, but was returning in all the splendor of a Malkeenian princess. Somehow, it seemed too easy.

  Adiv’s men escorted them beneath the massive walls—thick as a house and banded with red iron—through the Jade Court and the Jasmine, passing along the Serpentine in the shadow of Yvonne’s and the Crane
, then through the shattered refraction cast by Intarra’s Spear. They bypassed the Hall of a Thousand Trees, and the hanging staircase leading to the Floating Hall, ending, finally, in the Chamber of Scribes. It was an old name, and an inaccurate one. The scribes who once used the small complex of pavilions had been displaced centuries earlier by the upper echelon of an expanding bureaucracy, and the chamber itself was decorated like an atrep’s palace rather than an austere scriptorium. Delicate Liran ivories stood in the wall niches, Rabin carpets splayed across the floor, and carved cedars from the Ancaz stood sentry in the corners.

  When the slaves had set cool water and Si’ite wine in iced decanters on the table, Adiv sent them away with a negligent flick of his hand, shutting the door behind them.

  “So,” Adare said, tongue dry in her mouth, palms slick, “what in ’Shael’s name is going on?”

  Adiv hesitated, then gestured to Nira and Oshi, to Fulton where he stood by the doors. “What I have to say is known only to a small circle. Do you really wish to enlarge it?”

  “Yes,” Adare said stiffly, glancing at Oshi, hoping she wasn’t making a mistake.

  “As you wish, my lady,” the councillor replied, spreading his hands. “Wine?”

  Adare shook her head curtly. “Answers.”

  Adiv bowed his acquiescence. “As you say, my lady.”

  “Where is Kaden?”

  “Your brother is dead.” He shook his head slowly. “We arrived too late. The monks were slaughtered—”

  “Horseshit,” Adare snapped, cutting through his words. “You expect me to believe that he just happened to die at the very same time as my father, that you crossed half of Vash with a contingent of soldiers and had nothing to do with his death? You expect me to believe that?”

  Adiv pursed his lips. “No,” he said slowly. “In fact, I do not, nor do I blame you for your distrust. Nonetheless, it is the truth.”

  “Who would kill a batch a’ monks?” Nira demanded.

  “The Urghul,” Adiv replied. “As you may know, Ashk’lan sits in the mountains overlooking the steppe. It is a remote place, and one vulnerable to the depredations of those blood-hungry savages.”