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

by Brian Staveley

  Adare shook her head. “You’ve ignored your history, Councillor. Ashk’lan has stood for at least five hundred years. Perhaps much, much longer. Not once, in all that time, have the Urghul attacked.”

  “And not once,” he replied evenly, “in all that time, have the Urghul united under a single leader. Not once have they ridden, all together, against the empire itself.”

  “Unified?” Fulton asked, brow furrowed. “Doesn’t sound like the Urghul.”

  “It is not.”

  “Under whom?” Adare demanded.

  “A chieftain named Long Fist. Or a shaman. It’s not entirely clear. Our scouts rarely return, and though il Tornja has dispatched several Kettral Wings against the man, they have failed to find him, let alone eliminate him.”

  “But why would they attack a group of monks?”

  “Presumably,” Adiv replied, “they were not after the monks. I would suspect this is all a part of Long Fist’s plan. He aims to destabilize the empire by killing Sanlitun’s heir, then to strike in the ensuing confusion.” He hesitated, clasped his hands before him.

  “What?” Adare demanded.

  “There is more.”

  “I got that. What is it?”

  “Your brother,” Adiv replied after a pause. “Valyn. It looks as though he may have been involved.”

  Adare stared. Valyn. He would be a man grown by now, a Kettral in his own right, but all she remembered was the wiry, dark child who had raced about the Dawn Palace brandishing wooden swords. He’d been loud and reckless, irritating when there was work to be done, but never cruel.

  “Say more,” she growled quietly.

  Adiv spread his hands. “We can’t be certain, but he disappeared from the Islands in direct violation of orders. Ashk’lan was burned by the time we got there—clearly Urghul work, as I said. But . . . there were signs of Kettral presence as well. A smoke steel blade lost in the rubble.” He shook his head. “We can’t be certain, of course. No one actually saw your brother, but he is still missing. It would not be the first time siblings killed over the Unhewn Throne.”

  “No,” Adare said abruptly, the blood mounting to her face, fingers curling into claws. “No. The kenarang murdered my father. Murdered him and then made me his tool to cover the murder. I know, you fucking bastard. I know all of it.”

  Nira put a withered hand on her arm, but Adare shrugged it off. She was shouting, she realized, and though a faint voice in her mind told her she should keep her voice down, that no one was served by her strident accusations, the return to the palace had torn open the memory of her father’s death, of his body laid in the tomb, and she wanted nothing more than to find il Tornja and everyone else responsible, to slit their throats and tumble them, graveless, into some stagnant canal.

  If Adiv was taken aback by her rage, he didn’t show it. Instead, he nodded and reached forward, plucking a small scroll from the neck of a slender green vase at the center of the table.

  “The kenarang told me that you would say as much. He instructed me to give you this.”

  Adare took the scroll—fine vellum stamped with the rising sun of Annur—and turned it over warily in her hands.

  “What new lie is here?” she asked, running a finger over the wax impression.

  Adiv shook his head. “I am ignorant of its contents. It is for your eyes alone.”

  Frowning, Adare flicked open the wax seal with her nail, then scanned the contents, blood ablaze in her veins.

  Adare,

  You fled the palace believing I killed your father, and I can’t blame you. I did.

  The blunt admission was like a cold claw gripping her heart, and for a moment she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even see. Her father’s note was one thing, but this, the brutal, ineluctable truth of it . . . Breath burning in her lungs, she forced herself to read on.

  Please believe me when I tell you I didn’t want to do it. In almost every way, Sanlitun was an ideal emperor: pragmatic, honest, clever. His only real flaw was his relationship with the Urghul. For reasons I still cannot fathom, he trusted Long Fist, believed there could be an accord with the man. I fought the Urghul chief for years. I know him far better than your father ever did, and I assure you, Long Fist intends to see Annur destroyed.

  Again and again I tried to explain this to Sanlitun, but something blinded him to the urgency. In the end, my choice was between your family and the empire itself. Believe me when I say it was not a choice I wanted.

  You will distrust this note, as you should, but I ask only one thing. March north, in the tracks of my own army. When you catch us on the frontier, you can judge for yourself whether I have lied to you about the Urghul threat. If I have, better to have our battle there, where no citizens will die. If you decide that I have told the truth, however, you can join your army to mine. I promise you, when the contest comes, every spear will matter, every sword, every ’Kent-kissing fist.

  I am sorry for your father’s death. I liked the Emperor and I respected him, but he was only one man. Annur is millions.

  If, as my people tell me, you have Intarra’s favor, pray for us all. The darkness rides.

  Your Kenarang,

  Ran il Tornja

  When she’d finished reading, it was all she could do to keep her feet. She stared at the vellum, the lines and angles of the words shifting before her eyes. Only when the first tear hit the ink, blurring it, did she realize she was crying.

  “My lady?” Fulton asked, taking a step from his post by the door. “What does it say?”

  Adare took a deep, shuddering breath. “It says we march north.”

  Nira stared. “For what?”

  “To fight,” Adare replied.

  “Fight who?”

  “I haven’t decided yet,” Adare said grimly.

  Adiv nodded his support. “The kenarang said you would understand the urgency, that you would make the wise decision. He has instructed me to aid you in any way I can, to support you in every particular.” He spread his hands. “You need only speak.”

  For a long time, Adare said nothing. She studied the note in her hands, then the hands themselves. They should be trembling, she thought. She felt as though her whole body were trembling, caught in the grip of loss, and grief, and anger. Her hands, however, were still. She might have been testing a bolt of fine silk between her fingers rather than holding a message from the man who had murdered her father. She had come to Annur to start a war, only to be welcomed into her own palace. She had come home, returned to her place, but it was not hers, not fully, not yet.

  “You have heard,” Adare said, raising her eyes to the Mizran Councillor, “of the events at the Everburning Well?”

  Adiv nodded slowly. “I hear, in the murmurs from the south, the same word again and again: prophet. Would that I had eyes to see Intarra’s markings on your flesh.”

  Adare ran an absent finger along the burns on her wrist, tracing the ramifying swirls.

  “You will repeat the murmurs,” she said. “You will confirm them, here in the capital.”

  The man hesitated, then nodded. “Of course, my lady. Of course. Intarra has ever smiled upon your family, and if anyone deserves this title, it is you—”

  “That is not all,” Adare said, cutting him short.

  Adiv paused, pursing his lips.

  Now, Adare thought. The burns on her skin flamed, as though traced with a glowing knife. She could hear her heart in her ears, and wondered in brief amazement that the others couldn’t hear it, too. It has to be now.

  “I will march north,” she said, “and I will do what needs to be done, with the Urghul and il Tornja both. I will do this because there is no one else to see it through. My father is murdered, Kaden is murdered, and though Valyn may survive somewhere, I have the eyes. I will sit the Unhewn Throne. I will see Intarra’s justice done.”

  27

  Collateral.

  Even back on the Islands, Gwenna had hated the word. For one thing, the two meanings were always get
ting tangled up. She’d eavesdrop on veteran Wings in the mess hall just after they touched down, and collateral seemed to come up a lot. Trouble was, you couldn’t always tell whether they were talking about collateral as in hostage, or collateral as in some poor, miserable idiot who had nothing to do with anything and ended up dead anyway.

  ’Course, it didn’t help, the way that the former seemed to have a habit of becoming the latter. As far as Gwenna was concerned, the word was just a way to weasel around a hard truth. Instead of, “I had to grab the guy’s kid and put a knife to her throat to get him to cooperate,” you were encouraged to say, “We had collateral when we hit the target.” Instead of saying, “The kid got burned down with the building,” it was just “some collateral damage.”

  As much as she hated the word on the Islands, however, she was discovering that she liked it even less now that she—she, and Annick, and Pyrre—had become the ’Kent-kissing collateral.

  “Are we just going to sit here?” she demanded. It was a stupid question, but it felt good to say something. Talking wasn’t doing, but it was a long sight better than waiting with your thumb up your ass to see if the bloodthirsty, savage chief in whose care you got dumped intended to play nice, which, as far as Gwenna could tell, was exactly what they’d been doing for the past day.

  “Certainly not,” Pyrre said, raising her head from the far side of the fire. “I intend to drink heavily.”

  The assassin was making the most of the comforts of the api Long Fist had provided. Sprawled out on a mound of bison hides, half reclined, one hand playing idly with her hair, she might have been waiting on a servant to bring another pitcher of chilled juice. Only she wasn’t drinking juice. Gwenna had tried one gulp of the clear liquor in the skin and nearly spat out her own tongue. Pyrre just tipped back her head and shot a long stream into her mouth.

  “You shouldn’t be drinking,” Annick said, looking up from the bloody shank of bison she was cutting into strips, then drying over the fire. “We should be planning.”

  “I do love a good plan,” Pyrre agreed. “Why don’t you girls whip something up and let me know the details?” She frowned. “Hold on. A plan for what, now?”

  “Oh, for ’Shael’s sake . . .” Gwenna spat.

  The Skullsworn stopped her with an elegantly raised finger. “Have a care about how you invoke my god.”

  “A plan,” Annick said, ignoring the exchange, “for how to get out of here.”

  “And why,” Pyrre asked, raising her eyebrows, “do we want to get out of here?” She gestured to the fire, the sizzling meat, the bulging skin of liquor in her hands, then to the clean hides stretched over the poles above them, keeping in the heat, the light. “Admittedly, we got off to a rough start, but Long Fist is turning into a gracious host. Maybe it was just those boys of yours he didn’t like. . . .”

  If Long Fist didn’t like the men on the Wing, he was well rid of them. Valyn, Talal, and Laith had ridden out the day before, strapped with arms and laden with provisions, packs filled with anything that might kill—poisons, arrows, even a blowgun. It was an insane mission—going to kill the Annurian kenarang—but the shaman had made sure they had everything they might need to get it done. Everything, that was, except for half of the fucking Wing.

  “You will remain here, my honored guests,” he had said to the women—almost an afterthought. When Gwenna told him how she felt about that, told him that she intended to make her own decisions, he had only spread his arms in invitation: “Certainly you must decide your own fate: honored guest, captive, or corpse.”

  Valyn tried to step in then, but the ugly fact of the matter was that they had no leverage. They were free only because Long Fist had set them free, and for all the tall bastard’s talk of cooperation and mutual understanding, he wasn’t suffering from an overabundance of trust. Valyn’s word was all well and good, but Long Fist wanted something more substantial, more persuasive, and so Annick, Gwenna, and Pyrre had graduated from captives to honored guests.

  Honored guests. It was worse than collateral.

  “You should relax,” the assassin continued. “Life is an eyeblink. Try to enjoy some of the largesse spread before us.”

  “You’re so busy guzzling the rotgut,” Gwenna snapped, “that you might not have realized Long Fist’s largesse doesn’t include a single weapon. We’ve got one pathetic belt knife between us,” she said, gesturing to the slender blade Annick was using to saw at the meat. “A dull belt knife.”

  “Probably,” Pyrre said, “because the last time we had weapons, we tended to leave the sharp parts of them inside his soldiers. Besides,” she went on, eyeing Annick’s belt knife, “it’s simple enough to kill men with a belt knife. If we decide there’s a pressing reason to trade the meat, drink, and fire for an unwinnable fight.”

  “You were fighting hard enough when they had you tied up,” Gwenna snapped. “And the fight was even less winnable then.”

  The truth was, Pyrre made her all sorts of uncomfortable, and being uncomfortable made Gwenna mad. It wasn’t just that the Skullsworn was good at killing—everyone on the Islands was good at killing. The thing that really set Gwenna’s teeth on edge was Pyrre’s indifference, her obvious failure to give half a shit about all of the things Gwenna herself was ready to die for. Squaring off against an entire Urghul army was daunting enough without having the Skullsworn mocking her the whole way.

  “When I was tied up,” the assassin said with a shrug, “I was tied up. Now that we have—”

  Before she could finish her thought, the door to the tent flapped open and a man stepped inside. He was tall, bent nearly double to get through the opening. At first Gwenna thought it was Long Fist, but when he straightened, his smirk took her in the gut like a fist.

  Balendin Ainhoa.

  Just discovering the leach was alive had made her furious. In fact, one of the tricks she had for staying sane during the unbearable drive west had been to remind herself that Balendin was still out there, that she needed to stay alive herself, stay sharp, so that one day she could kill him. When Long Fist started taking fingers, it had looked as though he might assume that responsibility himself. It didn’t look that way anymore.

  The leach was no longer tied, no longer wearing the same stinking blacks in which he’d been captured, and though no one could put back his missing fingers, someone had provided him with clean cloth for bandages. He wore a dark bison cloak in the Urghul fashion over leather breeches and a tunic, a new set of necklaces draping his neck, a new array of rings on his fingers. The reversal was as terrifying as it was abrupt, and for a moment Gwenna sat speechless, trying to understand how things could have gone so wrong so quickly.

  As if reading her thoughts, Balendin smiled. “Happy to see me, Gwenna?” When she didn’t respond, he shrugged. “I’ve certainly missed you. I’ve had a lot of favorites over the years, but there’s never been anyone quite like the volatile Gwenna Sharpe for sheer, unbridled, uncooked, untamed, brute-stupid passion.”

  He paused, licked his lips. Annick had stopped cutting, one hand still on the haunch, the other holding the bloody knife loose between two fingers. Gwenna realized with horror that not only was the leach free and walking around, not only was he obviously the recipient of Long Fist’s sudden favor, he was undrugged. All trace of the adamanth was gone from his eyes, and the cocksure, predatory gleam was back.

  Gwenna fought down the urge to go after him. He was only a few paces off, standing with his arms crossed just inside the door to the api, but she’d seen enough of the leach’s power to know she wouldn’t make it even halfway.

  “You’re a sack of last week’s festering shit, Balendin,” she said instead. The words were a lousy substitute for a knife, but they were all she had. “Brave though, to come in here alone after the reaming we gave you in the mountains. Shame about the rest of your Wing—the bloody pieces are probably spread over a few square miles of mountainside by now. Shame about your fingers.”

  The leach frowned. H
e was thinner than he had been on the Islands, Gwenna realized. He’d always been lean, a whip rather than a club, sinew and muscle twisted around a slender frame, the fine, elegant bones of his face clear under sun-darkened skin. Now, though, by the shifting light of the fire, she could see that his cheeks had gone from gaunt to cadaverous. The dark braids draping his shoulders looked thinner and oilier than she remembered, while the tattoos snaking his arms had crumpled slightly as the skin slackened with the shrinking muscle beneath. None of that made him any less dangerous if he had access to his well once more.

  “Gwenna, Gwenna, Gwenna,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve just walked back into your life, free and whole. . . .” He glanced at his hands ruefully. “Well, almost whole. In any case, you’ve spoken five sentences to me, and already you’ve made three mistakes.” He held up a finger. “First, it takes no bravery to face you; I could pin you to the dirt and burn this tent down without blinking. Second, you didn’t have anything to do with my very temporary setbacks; the fire-eyed fuck got the drop on me the first time, and the Urghul found me the second. Finally, while the bones bleaching in the mountains were, technically, my Wing, you’re wrong in thinking I care that they’re dead. I was always so much better than them, my goals were so much more . . . capacious. Are you familiar with the word capacious?” He smiled. “It means large.”

  From across the tent, Pyrre raised a hand. She was looking at the leach with frank interest.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’m so sorry to interrupt. We’ve met several times, but under such unfortunate circumstances that we’ve never been properly introduced. My name is Pyrre Lakatur.”

  Balendin raised his eyebrows and sketched a small bow. “And I am—”

  “He’s the miserable fuck who murdered Lin and tried to kill Valyn,” Gwenna cut in. She knew she should have held her peace, waited for Balendin to play his hand, but she couldn’t just sit by while the leach and the Skullsworn traded pleasantries as though they were sizing each other up in some tavern. She had no idea where Balendin came by his clothes and rings, no idea why he was free, no idea why he seemed so fucking smug, but the whole situation frightened her, and she hated being frightened. “He was with those Aedolians,” Gwenna said, trying to make Pyrre understand the danger. “He’s a ’Kent-kissing traitor.”