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

by Brian Staveley

  “I’m the deader,” Valyn said, considering the contours a moment more, then pointing, “right there. Four horses most likely means two riders, with two remounts.”

  Laith nodded. “You want to go with a V or a half-hatch?” Once the flier got his griping and theatrics out of the way, he actually liked to fight. Not as much as he liked to fly, but then, there wasn’t much flying to be had without a bird.

  “Half-hatch,” Valyn said, indicating a gnarled trunk and a waist-high line of scrub on the far side of the road.

  “It’s going to be tight,” Talal said, turning an ear toward the drumming hooves.

  Valyn nodded.

  “What’s the play?” Laith asked.

  “After the halt,” Valyn said, spinning out the possibilities as he spoke, “I’ll take the dismount. . . .”

  “If there’s a dismount,” Talal said.

  “No dismount, and we ditch it,” Valyn said. “We let them ride.”

  “You take the dismount,” Laith urged, waving a hand impatiently, “then—”

  “Spark and bang,” Valyn replied. He glanced at Talal.

  “Yeah,” the leach replied. “I can manage it.”

  “All right then. Standard. One moves for the bridle. The other takes him down. Don’t worry about sound. We’ve got to be five miles from the river by now. Just make sure he doesn’t bolt.”

  “And if there are more?” Talal asked.

  Valyn paused to listen to the drumming hooves. It was tricky to unthread the different gaits, but the horses were close now. He was all but certain there were only four beasts. “Four men means no remounts,” he said, “and that pace without remounts would be idiocy.”

  Laith nodded, then turned to jog into position.

  Talal hesitated.

  “Say it or stow it,” Valyn said. “They’re almost on us.”

  “Seems right,” the leach said after a moment. “Standard protocol. Four horses. Two men.” He turned to follow Laith.

  Valyn realized the approaching soldiers had buggered the ’Kent-kissing protocol the moment the horses hammered into view.

  Four horses. Four men.

  Either they had a remount not far to the south or they were utter fools. It hardly mattered. Valyn lay just to the side of the road. Had there been even a little cover, his blacks might have concealed him—the men were riding hard, and couldn’t expect a body here, near the very fringe of the empire—but then, Valyn had chosen his spot precisely for the lack of cover. A dead-man ambush wasn’t much good if the mark rode by without noticing the deader. Cursing under his breath, he rolled toward the low gully a few paces distant, but the soldiers were on him before he was halfway there, the leader calling out to his companions over the clatter of hooves, all of them hauling up short, horses blowing.

  “Stand and show yourself,” one of the soldiers called out. The command was followed by the uneasy scrape of steel over leather as the men freed their swords.

  Valyn rolled slightly onto his side, slipping his belt knife from its sheath as he tried to recalibrate tactics. Three on four made perfectly acceptable odds for the Kettral, especially in an ambush, but you had to be willing to cut some throats.

  “It’s an Urghul, Kidder,” another soldier said, voice high and tight. “A ’Kent-kissing scout.”

  “What’s he doing here then?” A third voice. “Where’s his horse?”

  Valyn risked a glance at the riders. As he suspected, they wore the light leather armor of legionary messengers. The leader’s horse was out in front, but the other three were clustered tight together. Laith and Talal were on the far side of the road, which meant two of the four men were partially shielded from attack. If the first man dismounted, if Valyn could take him down quickly enough, he might be able to hamstring the nearer horse, which would solve one of the problems. . . .

  “Stand,” the closest rider said again, “in the name of the regent, or I will ride you down.”

  “No,” Valyn moaned, raising a hand, “please. No. I’m wounded. I’m Annurian. Legion.”

  “Sound like an Urghul to you, Arin?”

  “They don’t all talk nonsense,” Arin replied stubbornly. “Maybe this one’s a spy.”

  “All the legion up this way is tied to the forts,” the leader, Kidder, said carefully, turning back to Valyn. “Are you with the Thirty-second?”

  Valyn hesitated. Legionary deployments were constantly shifting—generals didn’t want their men to get too comfortable in a single place—and the Kettral rarely bothered studying the latest configuration. There was nothing to do but throw the dice.

  “Tenth,” he groaned. “Please. I’m hurt.”

  Kidder reined in his horse. “Tenth’s way west in the Romsdals,” he said guardedly. “What’re you doing here?”

  Valyn paused. The longer they talked, the more time Talal and Laith had to shift position and rethink tactics, but a large part of the success of the ambush relied on surprise. Even as they spoke, the other riders were spreading out, staring worriedly into the surrounding terrain.

  “Messenger,” he moaned. Paused. “The Urghul hit me. My partner’s dead.”

  His mention of the Urghul caused some consternation, the other men circling warily. It seemed, however, to earn him some trust with the leader, who dismounted after a moment, then approached slowly, sword drawn. He stopped a couple of paces from Valyn, blade leveled between them.

  “What’s your message?” he asked.

  Valyn shook his head weakly. “For the garrison commander . . .”

  “Where’s your horse?”

  “South,” Valyn moaned. “Maybe a mile. I crawled. . . . Please.”

  The man glanced over his shoulder, and in the short moment his head was turned, Valyn rolled to his feet, knocked the sword aside by the flat, then struck out at the soldier’s neck with the heel of his hand. It wasn’t a killing blow, wasn’t intended to do much more than stagger the man for a few heartbeats, but Valyn felt something crunch, and the Annurian sagged, gagging. There was no time to think about what he’d done, not while the other riders were in play, and Valyn stepped forward, twisted the long blade free of the soldier’s grip, then spun away, slashing through the neck of the nearest horse. He needed three mounts, not four.

  The beast recoiled, then, before its rider could leap free, collapsed thrashing. The soldier screamed as his leg broke, and then Valyn was on him, knocking him unconscious with the sword’s pommel.

  That made two down. He turned to find that Laith had already knocked a third clear of his saddle. The fourth, however, the one farthest from the center of their attack, had broken free, and was hammering up the road to the north, his companions forgotten. Valyn cursed and cast about for one of the two remaining horses. The beasts were panicked, rolling their eyes and snorting, and when Valyn edged close to the nearer of the two, it reared up, lashing out with a hoof. He sidestepped the blow, trying to come in close, but the animal pivoted, keeping him at bay.

  “Talal!” he called. The whole thing was a goat fuck already, but if the last rider got away they’d have half a legion on them by the time the sun rose.

  The leach stood a dozen paces off, chin lifted, eyes fixed on the rapidly retreating figure. As Valyn watched, Talal made a slight gesture with his left hand, like swatting a fly away from his fingers, and, with a scream, the horse collapsed, front legs buckling abruptly. The rider, suddenly free of the saddle, soared through the air, arms scrabbling at nothingness, then hit headfirst with a vicious crunch. Talal went after him, but it was already over. Though the horse thrashed furiously, lost in pain and panic, the slumped shape of the man beneath remained horribly still.

  Valyn took a deep breath, then turned back to the scene at hand. The first soldier was bent double, straining to haul breath through his shattered windpipe as he clawed at the dirt with one hand. The man trapped beneath the horse lay still, but it was clear from the awkward angle of his body that his leg was broken. A heavy horrible stone settled in Valyn’s
gut. In just heartbeats his neat ambush had spiraled utterly out of control. The men down weren’t traitors or barbarians; they were Annurians, soldiers of his own empire, loyal troops following orders as best as they were able, and for that loyalty Valyn had attacked them, crippled at least one for life, and possibly killed another.

  “Is he alert?” Valyn asked roughly, turning to Laith. The flier had the fourth soldier pinned to the earth, a knee in the small of his back.

  “For now,” he replied, lacing the man’s wrists with a length of light cord. He glanced over his shoulder at the surrounding violence. His eyes showed bleak in the moonlight. “Holy Hull. What did we do?”

  “We did what we had to,” Valyn replied, trying to shackle his own nausea and horror.

  “Had to?” Laith demanded, gesturing at the bodies with a hand. “How did we have to do this?”

  “It’s done, Laith,” Talal said quietly, rejoining the two of them. “It went wrong, but we all did it, and we can’t take it back.”

  “What about him?” Valyn asked, nodding toward the soldier up the road. Talal had slit the horse’s throat, and both beast and man lay still.

  The leach shook his head. “The fall snapped his neck.”

  Valyn stared at the shadowy forms of man and horse, then turned his back on them, crossing instead to the soldier with the injured windpipe. The Annurian knelt on his hands and knees, hacking out a shattered sound, half cough, half retch, his body quivering in the still air. For a moment, Valyn could do nothing but watch. Between the moon’s light and his own eyes, he could see everything, even the details—the small tattoo of a mouse behind the soldier’s ear, the scarring across his right knuckles, the uneven patch where someone had hacked away too much hair with a belt knife. The man had managed to crawl maybe a dozen paces, no goal beyond escaping his own terror.

  “Crushed,” Talal said, joining him.

  “Maybe not,” Valyn replied.

  “It’s crushed,” the leach said again, quietly but firmly.

  “Someone could treat it. Remember Vellik back on the Islands? He busted his throat in a botched barrel drop, and it healed up all right.”

  “They got Vellik into the infirmary in less than an hour, and even still, he can barely talk now. I know how to patch up a lot of things, but this . . .” He spread his hands. “It’s just a question of fast or slow.”

  The man finally turned his head at the sound of their voices. He was young, maybe a year or two older than Valyn. He raised a weak hand in a gesture that might have been pleading or accusation, his jaw working around the mangled wreckage of his words.

  Valyn blew out a long, uneven breath. Talal was right. The only kindness now was the knife’s kindness, and yet Valyn hesitated, feeling for the first time what it meant to command the Wing. With all the swimming and language study, flight training and demolitions work back on the Islands, it was easy sometimes to forget that this was what he had trained his whole life to do. Kettral was just a polite word for killer. Of course, he wasn’t supposed to be killing Annurian soldiers, but then, killing was killing. No one wanted to die.

  Valyn forced himself to look at the wounded soldier; the least he could do was meet his eyes. The legionary held the stare. What did he see, looking into the darkness of Valyn’s vacant irises? Valyn read fear and pain, smelled the hot burn of terror on the air. Maybe the messenger had been following their conversation, maybe not, but one way or another, he knew that his death had arrived.

  Which makes every heartbeat a cruelty, Valyn thought bleakly.

  Then, before he could think further, he buried his knife in the soldier’s neck, ripping furiously through the windpipe and arteries, then tearing up through the muscle until the blade snagged on bone. Hot blood soaked his blacks, and Valyn’s own breath came hot and ragged in his throat. The soldier sagged against him, head canting off at an obscene angle, eyes blank, mouth hanging open.

  “Holy Hull, Val,” Laith muttered. “You didn’t need to take his whole head off.”

  Valyn stared at the body for a moment, then jerked his knife free. The corpse collapsed.

  “He’s fucking dead, isn’t he?” he demanded, knuckles white with clutching the blade. “Let’s see what the other two have to say. Let’s see if all this was worth anything.”

  30

  Morjeta’s personal chambers comprised a suite of breezy, high-ceilinged marble rooms with tall narrow windows three times Kaden’s height, where gossamer curtains fluttered with the breeze. After gesturing them in, the leina shut the heavy wooden door behind her, turned a key in the lock, then crossed to the windows, brushing aside the curtains, leaning far enough out to see the stonework on either side.

  “Can we—” Triste began, but her mother cut her off with a tense shake of the head, waving them ahead into yet another room, this one away from the windows. A wide bed draped with fine silk stood against one wall. A pair of long, upholstered divans faced it across a rich, thickly piled rug. The leina shut the door behind them, slid a pair of locks into place, put her ear to the wood for several heartbeats, then finally turned.

  “Please,” she said, gesturing to the divans, “be seated. I apologize for my haste in leading you here, but sometimes it seems Ciena loves secrets as much as she loves pleasure.”

  “Can we talk in this room?” Triste asked.

  Morjeta nodded. “There are listening holes in the other chambers, but I’ve found them here. Plugged them.”

  She turned from her daughter to Kaden and Kiel, her gaze more forth-right than it had been in the garden pavilion. If that look were calibrated to put Kaden at his ease, it failed. He felt like a goat sized up before the slaughter, and had to keep himself from tugging his hood even farther over his head.

  “Of course,” Morjeta continued, “there are already at least a dozen people who know you’re here.” She ticked them off on a manicured finger. “The guards outside Relli’s shop, Relli herself, Yamara, who greeted you, and any of the other women or men we passed on the way here. How crucial is your secrecy? Like the scent of lilac on the spring air, word is already wafting through the temple halls.”

  Kaden hesitated, then pushed back his hood. “Important,” he said.

  The leina’s eyes widened as she saw his burning irises, and her lips pursed. “Oh,” she said, staring for a moment before rising from her seat and dropping into a low curtsy. “Be welcome in Ciena’s innermost heart, Your Radiance.”

  “Rise,” Kaden replied, gesturing, “rise.” Again he felt the weight of that single syllable, one he’d be forced to utter the rest of his life. Provided, he amended silently, that I have a life ahead of me. “I hope, someday, to sit the throne of my ancestors, but I expect someone else has beaten me to it. For now, please call me Kaden. Any further ceremony is only likely to get us all killed.”

  Morjeta paused, then nodded as she rose. “As you say, Kaden.” She hesitated. “If I may ask, how—”

  “It was a trap,” Triste burst out. “Tarik Adiv took me to Ashk’lan. . . .”

  “As a gift,” her mother said, grief clouding her eyes. “I have not forgiven myself.”

  Triste waved aside the objection. “Please, Mother. Anything you could have done would have ended in more misery for us both. The point is not that Adiv took me, but why he took me. He was laying a trap for Kaden.”

  “Why?” Morjeta demanded. “Why did he need you?”

  “He needed me,” Triste replied grimly, “for bait.”

  Kaden watched the girl, studying her face for some hint that she was lying, for an echo of the fierceness she had shown in the dark chambers of the Dead Heart. There was nothing. Just a young woman, frightened and angry.

  Morjeta let out a long, slow whistle, then turned to a silver tray and the ewer perched upon it, poured out four crystal goblets of chilled wine. She passed them to the men first, then to Triste. Kaden noticed the trembling of her hand when she raised her own, the depth of her first sip.

  “What is happening?” she as
ked, shaking her head, then tipping the cup to her lips once more.

  “We had hoped,” Kaden replied, “that you might be able to tell us.”

  “I explained to Kaden,” Triste said, “how the leinas hear everything, everything to do with Annur’s powerful and wealthy.”

  Morjeta grimaced slightly, though the expression looked like something she had practiced in a mirror, calculated to express coquettish displeasure rather than genuine irritation. “Not everything,” she said, “but it’s true enough. Lust is a great loosener of tongues, and men and women both tend to spill their secrets in the strong grip of the goddess.” She blew out a breath and spread her hands. “Tarik Adiv returned to the Dawn Palace weeks ago.”

  Kaden stared. The timing suggested that the leach could also use the kenta, although that would mean . . . He stopped himself, Tan’s voice in his mind: Speculation.

  “How?” he asked.

  “The Kettral,” Morjeta replied. “He arrived at night, and landed atop the Spear, but people saw the bird.” She looked down, smoothing the fabric of her gown against her legs as she turned to Triste, bright tears pricking the corners of her eyes. “I’ve tried to see him,” she said. “Tried to find out where you were. I’ve gone in person half a dozen times, humbling myself in the Jasmine Court. I’ve sent letters. . . .” She shook her head. “Nothing. From what the other leinas tell me, he’s been cloistered almost constantly with the kenarang.”

  “Ran il Tornja,” Kaden said. He’d suspected as much. Micijah Ut had praised the general to the stars, and if anyone was in a position to suborn Kettral and Aedolians both, to murder an emperor in his own capital, it would be Annur’s military commander.

  Morjeta nodded. “He’s been serving as regent since your father’s death.”

  “It fits,” Kiel said, nodding. “He can act as regent for a while, then move onto the throne itself.”

  “Why not just seize the throne right away?” Triste asked.