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

by Brian Staveley

  The first blow landed just above Gwenna’s ear, a flash of bright red pain. She turned, shocked, thinking that one of the Urghul had leapt into the gully, only to discover the young legionary staring at her, a stick in each hand, knuckles white.

  “I’m sorry,” he cried. A splash of vomit soiled the front of his tunic and stained the rough dirt before him. Tears, whether of remorse or terror, slicked his cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he sobbed again, and then, with a mindless fury, started raining down the blows.

  It took Gwenna a moment to adjust, and the sticks connected twice more, once just above the eye, the other a glancing blow to the shoulder. The pain was sharp but shallow, the sort of pain she’d felt a thousand times before when smashing a finger between an anchor and the gunwale, or ripping free a blackened toenail, or taking a stunner to the shoulder. Gwenna herself would be hard-pressed to kill someone quickly with those sticks, and the panicked young legionary was striking out madly in his terror, blindly. She raised her hands, blocked two blows in quick succession, timed the third, caught the stick before it could connect, twisted out and away, breaking the man’s grip, and then she had a weapon of her own.

  The soldier paused, stunned, staring at his empty hand in mute incomprehension. He raised his eyes to Gwenna and moaned, a pitiful, helpless sound, before redoubling his attack. With one weapon already in hand it was a trivial matter to defend against the fresh assault. She swatted aside a blow aimed for her chest, inclined her head to slip beneath a high swing, leaned back as far as the earth would allow, inviting the youth to overextend, and then she had the second stick as well. It was easy, so pathetically easy.

  The Urghul were shrieking like seabirds, a high keening sharp as a point driving straight through Gwenna’s ears and into her brain. The twin fires had grown even larger, the one in front scorching her face, the one behind burning through her blacks. The unarmed soldier spread his hands wide in supplication.

  “I’m sorry,” he cried. “I didn’t want to hit you. Please. Please. You’re Kettral. I’m just a legionary. You’re the ’Kent-kissing Kettral! Please.”

  Gwenna held her attack for a moment. She had slipped into a high Elendrian guard without even thinking about it—an absurd gesture. The idiot buried across from her had probably never even heard of the Elendrian guard. He was just an Annurian soldier captured while serving his empire, while trying to do his job. His only preparation for the Urghul would have been lurid tales told in the mess hall and barracks. No one had trained him for this.

  Gwenna glanced up at their captors, at the uncountable flashing blue eyes, the pale faces glistening with sweat. Firelight lurched over the bones of the dead and the flesh of the living alike, plunging some figures into shadow, garishly illuminating others. Blood throbbed in her ears, flame on her face. There was no way out, no escape.

  “Ah, fuck,” she muttered.

  “No,” the soldier said, shaking his head slowly, seeing the decision in her eyes.

  Gwenna gritted her teeth, then lashed out high and right. The feint worked, drawing the legionary’s guard wide, and she took the opening. The Urghul wanted pain, an agony built from a thousand punishing blows, to feed their sick god.

  Well, she thought as she plunged the tip of the stick through the soldier’s eye, driving it deep, deeper, twisting the weapon as the youth spasmed, jerked, then slumped forward, utterly still, the fuckers will have to settle for death.

  Her throat was raw as she wrenched the stick free. She was screaming, she realized, but the sound was lost in the awful sheet of Urghul screams. She was sobbing, but the heat of the fire had seared away her tears.

  28

  Kaden crashed out of the kenta soaked and gasping for breath, lungs heaving in great desperate gulps of clean air, limbs leaden and useless. His mind registered only that he had moved from a frigid wet darkness into a warm day brilliant as the sun, and for a few heartbeats he allowed himself to simply lie on the soft grass, still swaddled in the vaniate, drinking in the sweet sea breeze. A few feet away he could hear Triste retching onto the ground, her body struggling to force out the salt water at the same time as she was trying to breathe. Kiel’s own breaths were quieter, more measured, and after a moment Kaden could hear the Csestriim rising to his feet.

  “Quickly,” he said, keeping his voice low. “This is only the hub linking the gates, and Rampuri Tan will not kill all of them.”

  “They can’t follow,” Triste gasped. “Not the way we came.”

  “They will not have to. When they have dealt with Tan, they will realize where we went, and they will come through the gate after us. We have to be well gone from here when that happens.”

  Kaden nodded, rising unsteadily to his feet. He recognized the island, the ring of slender arches around the perimeter, although it felt like years since he had last stood upon it. Since then . . . He shook his head, cutting off the thought. Best not to think on the past, on what it would mean for the Ishien to deal with Tan. The vaniate wavered. Best to move forward.

  He glanced around the green sward. The gate from Assare, he knew, but the writing above the others meant nothing.

  “Which way?”

  “Annur?” Kiel asked.

  Kaden nodded.

  The Csestriim indicated an arch a dozen paces distant. Kaden helped Triste to her feet, helped her stumble across the rough ground, watched her vanish as she stepped once more into the kenta, then followed her through, moving from bright light into a dry, dusty darkness. For a moment he just stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust. When they did not, he let the vaniate slough away. His limbs were still weak from the lack of air, still trembling. His burning irises illuminated little more than his hand before his face.

  “Where are we?”

  “Underground,” Kiel replied. “In a section of Annur long forgotten. The Ishien know of this place, but no one else.”

  “Let’s go,” Triste said, her voice tight as a bowstring. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Follow precisely in my footsteps,” Kiel replied. “The Ishien have set traps around this gate, and there are other dangers in the forgotten tunnels beneath the city.”

  The three of them spent the next hour winding their way through nearly absolute darkness. At several junctures, Kaden caught sight of stacks of bones—femurs, skulls, heaps of fingers dry and brittle as kindling—stretching back into the cavernous black. Triste kept a hand on Kaden’s shoulder. He could feel her trembling, though whether with cold or fear or the lingering pain of the wounds the Ishien had inflicted he wasn’t sure. Kiel showed no hesitation as he moved through the darkness.

  “How can you see?” Triste asked at one point.

  “I don’t need to see,” the Csestriim replied. “I have the map in my head.”

  “That’s impossible,” she replied.

  “Ask Kaden.”

  Kaden tried to imagine the vast network of tunnels, discovering to his surprise that he’d been making a map of his own since they left the kenta, some diligent portion of his mind toiling away marking each branch, each fork, each cavern through which they passed.

  “Memory,” Kiel said, “is a skill like anything else. It can be honed.”

  The words were true enough, but when they finally shoved aside a slab of stone and stepped blinking from the darkness into blinding light, Kaden discovered anew the limits of his memory. They stood in a green leafy cemetery wedged between walls and buildings atop a low hill. While Kiel muscled the stone slab back into place, Kaden just stared. That the Ishien were behind them, he had no doubt. They needed to be away from the graveyard, and fast, but for the space of a few heartbeats, he found himself unable to move, nailed to the spot as he breathed in the sea salt and smoky air of Annur.

  His memories of the city, sketched in his young mind before he’d ever heard of the Shin or the saama’an, were bright but static: the looming red walls of the Dawn Palace, the crystalline spike of Intarra’s Spear, the pale green of the copper roofs and the dark green of the ca
nals, the white of the statues along the Godsway, and the bottomless blue of the Broken Bay, stretching away to the east. The shapes, too, he remembered, a jumbled geometry of warehouses and palaces, straight streets and crooked alleyways. Everything else, he had forgotten: the noise, the smell, the press of bodies. The heat.

  Even in the relative tranquillity of the graveyard, he could feel the city moving around him like some great, feverish beast, and when they slipped through the gate and into the streets, he felt as though Annur had swallowed him whole. The clatter of carts over the flagstones, the clop of hooves, the shouting of drivers and pedestrians jostling for space on the surrounding streets all but obliterated the rustle of the wind-tossed leaves.

  Kaden half-expected everyone they passed to stop, stare, exclaim. After all, the three of them, though mostly dry, were still wearing the same mismatched, tattered garb in which they’d fled the Ishien. In Ashk’lan, someone would have noticed instantly, but Annur was not Ashk’lan. This city of a million souls threw her own cloak over them, an anonymity thicker than any wool, while she veiled the eyes of the passers-by in their own busy indifference.

  Eyes safely hidden inside the hood of his cloak, Kaden walked through the streets as though in a dream, a stranger exploring the maze of his own memories. After the vast, cool emptiness of Ashk’lan, where half the world was sky, the city felt almost unbearably present. The reek of sizzling oil, of garlic, of peppers and frying fish made him feel as though he was half choking, while the constant tolling of gongs and bells made it hard to sort his thoughts into any type of order.

  For a while he just followed Kiel, keeping his eyes down to hide his gaze and to limit the riot of color and motion battering at his mind. Outside the vaniate, he could feel for the first time what had happened back in those final awful moments in the Dead Heart. That Rampuri Tan was dead or a prisoner of the Ishien there could be no doubt, and yet questions and doubts, like so many carrion crows, circled and circled. Had Kaden himself, through some idiotic slipup, caused the attack? He went over the events again and again, studying in his mind the scenes in his cell, in the corridors beyond. Had he made too much noise? Had he botched the timing? There was no way to know. There was only the fact: Tan was gone while he, Kaden, was free, walking the streets of Annur.

  He risked a quick glance up at the chaos of those streets, then ducked his head, questioning once more the wisdom of sending him away to Ashk’lan for training. What he had in common with the impatient, reckless people jostling him he had no idea, no idea how he would talk to them, or make sense of their answers. They were Annurians, and he the Emperor of Annur, but they might have been exotic birds, or apes for all Kaden understood them.

  Finally, Kiel pulled Kaden and Triste into a narrow alleyway off the main street. It stank of rotted food and urine, but Kaden welcomed the shadows, the relative quiet, the respite.

  “We should be safe,” the Csestriim said. “We’re a mile from the graveyard, and we’ve left no trail to follow.”

  Kaden looked up. People—dozens, hundreds—swarmed past the narrow entrance to the alleyway, but no one so much as glanced in their direction. They could have been invisible.

  “Where are we?” Kaden asked.

  “Old Sticks,” Kiel replied. “A small quarter wedged between the Silk Canal and the Fourth. There used to be some small-scale banking and a market for fresh flowers.” He shrugged. “That was fifteen years ago.”

  Kaden grimaced. He’d never heard of Old Sticks, never known that there was such a thing as a market for fresh flowers. He’d returned, finally, to his city, to the center of his empire, to discover that he was a stranger in his own land.

  “The monk,” Triste said, glancing toward the head of the alley. The bruising on her face, the burns on her hands, looked worse, much worse outside of the Dead Heart, in the full light of day. “Do you think he followed us? Do you think he made it out?” Kaden thought of Tan’s naczal pressed against Triste’s throat, of Tan ordering her tied up like livestock, and he wondered if she hoped he had escaped the Ishien or not.

  “He couldn’t follow,” Kaden said. “Not the way we went.”

  “Rampuri Tan is a formidable hand with his spear,” Kiel said, “but not that formidable.”

  “So he is dead,” Triste said dully.

  “He is beyond our reach,” Kaden replied, trying to move past his own tumult of emotion, to focus on the dirt beneath his feet, the stench of the air.

  Triste studied him for a moment, then nodded. “All right,” she said. “Where do we go now?”

  Kiel shook his head. “I kept a few rooms near here,” he said. “I thought perhaps they would still be empty, but we passed them four streets back. It looks as though someone new is living there.”

  “In your rooms?” Kaden asked. “How could they just move in?”

  Kiel shrugged. “Fifteen years is a long time to be gone.”

  Kaden shook his head, trying to imagine fifteen years among the Ishien, fifteen years locked in the darkness, the only thing waiting beyond the steel door, pain. It could drive a man mad, but then, Kiel was not a man. Kaden turned to face the Csestriim.

  “What now?”

  Kiel met the stare. “You are the Emperor.”

  “For you, I mean. We were tied together during the escape, but we are not any longer. Why are you still with us? With me?”

  The Csestriim looked past Kaden to the mouth of the alley, where men and women, oxen and children, jostled in the bright light of the sun. “Your history,” he said finally.

  Kaden raised his brows. “My history?”

  “Not just yours. That of your whole race.” He paused, frowned, then went on. “As I told you, I was the historian of my people. I have spent a very long life in the study of cities and nations, wars and brief periods of fitful peace.”

  “You said you knew my father,” Kaden insisted. “That you worked with him.”

  Kiel nodded. “I chronicled his life, or a part of it—his time on the Unhewn Throne.”

  “But why?” Kaden demanded, coming back to his original question. Clearly the historian had no part in his father’s death—he had been imprisoned in the Dead Heart for almost two decades—and yet he was Csestriim, built from the same flesh, his mind patterned on the same alien thoughts as the creatures who had burst into Assare millennia earlier to murder the children. “Why would you chronicle us? Humans? Why would you help me?”

  To his surprise, Kiel smiled. “You are interesting. Your race is interesting, even more so than my own. Humans are unpredictable, self-contradictory. Where our history was a long account of reasoned debate, yours is ablaze with error and ambition, regret and hope, love and loathing, all the things we cannot feel, all animating your every decision. Most of my kind wanted to see you crushed from the start, but I . . . I was curious. I remain curious.” He shrugged. “As for why I would help you, in particular: as I said, you are the Emperor of Annur. I can come no closer to the unfolding of history.”

  Kaden watched the man a moment, then nodded slowly. It made a strange sort of sense. More, he realized he wanted to trust the historian, wanted another person on his side, someone who understood something of the empire he was supposed to rule.

  “Thank you,” he said. “For helping us break free.”

  Kiel frowned. “We are free, but not secure. We still have not decided our next step.”

  “The chapterhouse,” Kaden said. “The Shin branch where we agreed to meet Valyn. We’ve missed the meeting by weeks, but he could be waiting there. He could have left a message, instructions, a warning.”

  The Csestriim nodded. “I know the place. It’s near here, but the Ishien know it, too.”

  “The Ishien don’t know where we are,” Kaden said.

  “By now they know we’ve escaped.”

  Triste shook her head. “There were at least twenty gates back on that island. We could have gone through any of them.”

  Kaden blew out a long breath. “But we did nothing t
o cover our tracks. Matol will be able to follow us.”

  “And Tan knows where we planned to meet Valyn,” Triste said reluctantly, picking at a nasty crescent scab on the back of her wrist. “If he told Matol, the bastard doesn’t need to track us.”

  Kaden hesitated, staring out the end of the alley, watching the wagons and water buffalo, the men and women flowing by like a current.

  “We have to go,” he said, “now. The Ishien, if they even know where we’re going, will take time to follow us here, time to get to the chapterhouse. I just need a few minutes to find out if Valyn’s been there.”

  “It’s a risk,” Kiel observed.

  “Everything’s a risk,” Kaden said. “Waiting will only make it worse.”

  The Shin chapterhouse didn’t look like much: a narrow brick face—maybe ten paces wide and three stories high—crammed between two larger buildings at the border of a small cobbled square in one of Annur’s quieter quarters. Nothing marked it as a chapterhouse, which wasn’t surprising; the monks Kaden knew had never been much for crests or sigils. There was just the blank brick, the blank wooden door, and several windows on the upper floor, all firmly shuttered.

  The rest of the elm-fringed square hummed with quiet activity—people hanging laundry out of windows, men and women bartering in the rough wooden stalls of a market, two water buffalo with noses buried in a stone trough—but around the chapterhouse there was nothing, no one, no ornament, not even flowers in the bare gravel fronting the structure. The place might have been abandoned, save for the tenuous line of smoke rising silently into the sky. There was no sign of Valyn, but then, Kaden’s brother would hardly be lounging in the shade in front of the temple with his kettral leashed to a tree. A score of other buildings fronted the square—houses and shops, a wine store with bottles racked high in front of it, a stately old mansion that had seen better days, windowpanes broken, front yard unkempt, utterly uninhabited by the look of it. There was no way to search them all hoping to find Valyn. The only way to know if he had visited the Shin was to knock.