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

by Brian Staveley

  The road north had given Adare plenty of occasions to doubt whether elevating the old woman to Mizran Councillor had been the wisest decision. On the one hand, Nira had ruled an empire of her own for centuries, which gave her hundreds of years more experience ruling an empire than anyone else Adare knew. On the other, that empire had ended in a morass of war, grief, and ruin. So, maybe not such a good model after all.

  It had been nine days since Annur, nine days of forced march through terrain that had shifted from open farmland, to low hills, to thick pine forests, dotted with bogs and streams. Without the imperial road—a mind-boggling feat of engineering comprised of stone bridges, wide flagstones, and ditches on either side to channel away the runoff—the army would have been helplessly mired days earlier, as soon as they entered the Thousand Lakes. As it was, the Sons could travel only so fast on a road built more for commerce than military transport. Adare found herself simultaneously exhausted by their pace and chafing at the lack of progress, worried about what might be transpiring ahead of her in the darkness of the primeval forest, and behind, in the capital she had so hastily abandoned. In fact, the farther she marched from Annur, the more she doubted her decision. Facing il Tornja and meeting the Urghul threat—if there even was an Urghul threat—had seemed crucial back in the capital, but what had she sacrificed in order to march north? What opportunities had she destroyed?

  “If I’m going to sit the Unhewn Throne,” she said, trying to keep her voice level, “there are forms to be observed, rituals. And I can’t observe them here, stuck in the middle of a ’Kent-kissing forest.”

  Nira blew out her cheeks. “Sometimes, girl, I’d swear you were denser than my brick-headed brother.” She waved a hand at Oshi, who was staring at the palms of his hands as though they were intricate maps, oblivious to the movement of his horse beneath him. “You get a throne by taking it, not by asking for it.”

  “I can’t just take it,” Adare protested. “Allegedly, I have il Tornja’s support, and that means I’ve got the army, too, but leaving aside the fact that the bastard murdered my father, that I intend to see him executed the moment we catch up with him, it is the historical precedent that makes a person Emperor.”

  “A historical precedent,” Nira replied, “that is just going to bugger you right up your pretty puckered arse. Yer history is all about men, your ritual is about men. Unless you’re plannin’ to strap on a terra-cotta cock and go back to Annur thwackin’ people in the face with it—which I don’t recommend—ya need to tip the whole board full of history directly into the piss bucket and start over. You need people to see you, not the man you’re not.”

  Adare shifted to try to relieve the chafing in her thighs, the ache in her lower back. “But the authenticity,” she said, “comes from those rituals. It comes from history. Otherwise, what makes the Emperor the Emperor?”

  Oshi turned, something about the question having snared his attention. “Ants,” he said, “have an empress.” He smiled broadly, encouragingly. “The little soldiers—they all serve her.”

  “Unhelpful, you dolt,” Nira snapped. “Ants do what they do because it’s built into ’em. They can’t not follow the empress.” She turned back to Adare. “People, though . . . people’ll follow anyone, anything. I wandered through a village once, a long while back, where the folk were led by a ’Kent-kissing tree; asked it questions, thought they heard answers in the creaking branches and the rustling leaves.”

  “Annurians aren’t savages . . .” Adare began, but Nira cut her off with a hoot.

  “Savages, is it? That tree was one a’ the best kings I ever saw.” She gestured to the dark boughs of the pines. “A tree doesn’t start wars. Tree doesn’t raise taxes to build palaces. A tree doesn’t kill the people who refuse to bow down.” A sad note had crept into her voice, and her eyes had slipped away from Adare, first to the woods, then to Oshi where he swayed in his saddle, light as a bundle of old cloth. “Could do a lot worse than a tree,” she concluded quietly.

  “Well, I’m not a tree,” Adare said. “And I need the people to accept me as Emperor. I didn’t have time for a coronation before leaving Annur, didn’t have time for the hundred little ceremonies before and after, which means that right now I’m . . . nothing. I’m not even the Minister of Finance anymore; il Tornja filled the role with someone else after I disappeared for Olon. The Sons of Flame think I’m Intarra’s prophet, or her saint, but a saint’s a far cry from an emperor. A saint doesn’t actually rule.”

  Nira fixed her with that shrewd gaze once more, all traces of her previous melancholy gone. “Ya know how ya get to run an empire, girl?”

  Adare shook her head in frustration. “That’s what I’ve been asking.”

  The old woman poked her in the chest with the stick. “You run it.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “You see what needs doing, and ya do it. Everything else follows: the throne, the taxes, the title. I’ve watched a lot of folk try ta rule a lot of land. I’ve watched men cling ta their fancy titles while their people and their realms just . . . slipped away, and I’ve watched men who couldn’t give a watery shit for the names and the titles rule half a continent. Ya just do what needs doing, and the people will figure out all on their own that you’re the ’Kent-kissing Emperor.”

  Before Adare could respond, Fulton kicked his horse forward, forcing his way between her and a small group of men and women rounding a bend in the road, emerging from the trees a hundred paces or so ahead of them. Two other Aedolians, part of the full guard Fulton had recruited back in Annur, nudged their horses forward until they were flanking her.

  “Keep well back, my lady,” Fulton said grimly, limbering his sword in its sheath.

  Adare hesitated a moment, then shook her head.

  “It’s a family,” she said.

  There were two men, one old, one young, both bearded, both carrying axes in their hands. Behind them, a group of barefoot children slogged doggedly ahead, chivvied along by three women dressed all in leather and fur. The children, obviously weary and bedraggled, perked up at the sight of the approaching army, shouting and pointing. The oldest, a girl of ten or so, attempted to dart forward, but her father caught her by the elbow, dragging her off the road along with the rest of the family.

  When Adare reined in alongside them, she realized that the younger of the two men was wounded, his arm slashed viciously from the elbow to the wrist. Someone had made a feeble attempt to bind the cut, but the dirty cloth had soaked through with blood and pus.

  “Best hurry,” he said, jerking his head to the north.

  “Why?” Lehav demanded, pulling in his horse beside Adare.

  The soldier had initially been reluctant to march north, pointing out that while il Tornja was gone, they could occupy Annur itself, install Adare on the Unhewn Throne, rehabilitate Intarra’s Church, and spread word of the kenarang’s treachery, word that would make it all but impossible for him to return. It was a tempting vision, but a false one. As Nira pointed out, “Ya ain’t gonna last long running an empire if the first thing ya do is ta sit still while the Urghul take a shit all over it.”

  The words rankled, but the woman was right. If the Urghul posed a legitimate threat, Adare needed to be a part of the solution, regardless of the kenarang’s treachery. More, as she pointed out to Lehav, if the Sons of Flame were to win the trust of the empire’s population, they, too, would need to march north.

  The logger spat into the mud. “Urghul,” he said curtly. The smallest child began sobbing. “Burned our house, field, and half our forest. Killed anyone couldn’t run.”

  Adare stared. “This far south?”

  “Nah, we’re from up north. Way up past the north end of Scar Lake. Thought about stopping in Aats-Kyl, but the army camped there ain’t gonna stop what’s comin’—I’ll tell you that for free.” He glanced down the ranks of the Sons of Flame. “Hope you got more where these came from.”

  “What is the army doing?” Adare asked. “The
one in Aats-Kyl?”

  “Didn’t stop to ask,” he replied. “Been talkin’ to you too long as it is.”

  The logger started to move, but Lehav brought him up short.

  “One more question, friend. The army in Aats-Kyl: which way is it facing?”

  The logger shook his head. “Not facing any ’Kent-kissing way at all.”

  “They’re not dug in for an attack from the south?”

  “What would they do that for? Just got done tellin’ you—the Urghul are comin’ down from the north.”

  Adare waited until the loggers were well behind them to turn to Nira and Lehav.

  “Sounds like the Urghul really are coming.”

  As she said the words she realized that she’d been praying ever since leaving Annur that the whole thing was a trick, a hoax. If il Tornja had lied about the threat, it would just be one more crime to hang around his neck when the time came. She could fight him, hopefully kill him, and have done with it. The handful of filthy farmers, however, that gash across the arm, changed everything.

  “The family could have been trumped up,” Lehav observed, jaw tight. “A few coins in their pocket to play a part, to make us complacent.”

  Nira chuckled. “It’d be a good trick.”

  “I’d prefer to be the one playing the tricks,” Adare said, trying not to glare at the woman.

  “And I’d prefer to have a brother who wasn’t busted in the head,” Nira replied. “Turns out, though, that preferrin’ don’t have much to do with things.”

  Lehav, as was his habit, ignored the old woman entirely. “We’ll know more when the scouts return.”

  The scouts, as it turned out, confirmed the logger’s account, at least the latter part of it. The men had come across no sign of the Urghul, but they insisted that the Army of the North was peacefully encamped just to the east of Aats-Kyl and that more refugees were headed south, some on the main road, some on the crooked forest tracks.

  “The kenarang hasn’t barricaded the road?” Lehav pressed. “No earth walls?”

  The lead scout shook his head. “There’s just the normal palisade around the camp itself, the kind of thing every army on the march puts up. There are a few score men working on the dam, but the rest are just encamped.”

  “The dam?” Adare said, shaking her head. “Why would they be working on the dam?”

  “No idea,” Lehav replied grimly. “And I don’t like not having an idea.” He turned back to the scouts. “You swept the forest? It’s dense on either side of the road. . . .”

  The scout nodded wearily. “Went up on the east, came back on the west. Nothing. No ambush, no snipers. Nothing but hemlock and deer shit. Up near the village we got close enough to listen to a couple men chopping wood at the edge of camp. They know we’re coming, know we’re close, but they think we’re coming to help them.”

  Lehav frowned. “Maybe we are.”

  It was late afternoon when they finally broke from the damp shadows of the pines into ruddy sunlight. For the first time in days, Adare could see more than a few dozen paces, although the world was so bright that for a moment she wasn’t sure just what she was looking at. She blinked, shaded her eyes with her hand. They’d reached a lake, she realized, a wide lake stretching north so far she couldn’t see the opposite shore. Sun shimmered like golden coins on the surface.

  “Scar Lake,” Nira said, “and Aats-Kyl.”

  A good-sized town of log homes with roofs of turf and shingle had forced back the forest at the south end of the lake. A tall palisade of rough logs ringed the town, wooden towers at the corners. Outside the wall, a rugged patchwork of fields held back the forest, wet ground drained by a ragged network of ditches. Even at a distance, Adare could smell the wood-smoke rising from the stone chimneys, could hear the farmers urging their horses and oxen over the broken ground. Farmers around Annur had begun plowing weeks earlier, but here, with the cold wind scudding down over the Romsdals, planting seemed to come late.

  “Well,” Adare said, considering the town, “no one’s tried to kill us yet.”

  “Give it time,” Lehav replied.

  “Where does the road go from here?”

  “It doesn’t,” Fulton said grimly. As the day wore on, he had guided his horse closer and closer to her, checked his broadblade more and more often. Now, he kicked the creature forward a few paces, putting himself between her and the settlement below.

  “What’s past here?” she asked.

  “Forest tracks and logging camps. Trees.”

  And the Urghul, Adare thought, trying to come to grips with the nature of the threat all over again. She’d left Olon expecting to battle il Tornja in the streets of Annur and instead she found herself in a forest on the very edge of the empire preparing to hold off an Urghul attack. Not for the first time she prayed that she was making the right decision, that she wasn’t committing some idiotic mistake that would doom them all.

  To her marginal relief, there was no sign of the horsemen, no indication that they’d even come close. Just as reassuring, the Army of the North clearly hadn’t deployed to meet her own force, either.

  A good ’Kent-kissing thing, she thought, given the size of the army.

  The men were encamped, all of them, across several of the largest fields, tents and cook fires laid out in a grid so neat it might have been carved in the earth with a straightedge. Despite Adiv’s urgency back in Annur, despite the harried march north, despite the refugees on the road south, none of the soldiers in the camp looked to be in much of a hurry. No one seemed to be drilling or fortifying. Knots of men clustered outside their tents, some seated, some lying down, heads propped on their helmets. She could smell the smoke of the cook fires and burning grease hazing the air, as though the whole camp were set up for a festival rather than a war.

  Anger and confusion rose inside her. She and Lehav had been flogging the Sons northward for days, Adiv’s account of a full-scale Urghul invasion ringing in their ears. Every night she’d prayed to Intarra to hold the horsemen back for one more day, just one more day. Meanwhile, il Tornja had his men lolling about in the sun.

  She squinted, trying to make the camp out more clearly. Something wasn’t right. No one had attacked them. No one looked likely to attack them. Those facts alone should have calmed her nerves, but clearly there was more to the situation than she understood.

  “What are they doing?” she asked, jaw tight.

  “Looks like they’re resting,” Nira replied. “Maybe there isn’t such a hurry with this Long Fist, after all.”

  As Adare watched, an Annurian rider emerged from the nearest gate of the town, and came cantering up the road. Fulton drew his sword well in advance of the man’s approach, then leveled it at him as he drew near. The messenger, a gaunt, balding soldier with peeling skin on his scalp, pulled up short at the sight of Fulton’s sword, took a deep breath, then turned to Adare and bowed low in his saddle, face pressed against the withers of his horse.

  “Your Radiance,” he began. The imperial title made Adare shift uncomfortably in her saddle. It was no surprise that Adiv had sent ahead word of her demands, but hearing the words spoken by an Annurian legionary was another matter altogether. On the ride north she had begun to grow accustomed to the Sons calling her prophet. Some even went so far as to touch the hem of her robes as she passed, or to pray outside her tent each night. The reverence was both uncomfortable and disconcerting, but at least it was her own. When soldiers used the imperial title, a part of her wanted to look over her shoulder for her father.

  “The kenarang instructed me to escort you into Aats-Kyl,” the messenger was saying. “A pavilion is being erected for you in the camp itself.” He nodded toward a bustle of activity close to the center of the Annurian camp. “But the kenarang has suggested that you meet in town to discuss your defense of the empire. He has requisitioned the finest tavern, if you would care to follow me.”

  “I’m not sure she would,” Fulton said, voice hard. His sword rema
ined leveled at the man’s throat.

  The rider swallowed uncomfortably. He was clutching the reins as though they might offer some protection if the Aedolian lunged with his blade. “I’m sorry?”

  “I think,” Fulton replied, speaking very slowly, “that Her Radiance would prefer to meet on ground of her own choosing.”

  “But,” the man replied, glancing over his shoulder in confusion, “the kenarang’s orders . . .”

  “It’s all right,” Adare said, pushing past Fulton. “Lower your sword.”

  It was a risk, going into the town, maybe a foolish one, but then, the whole ’Kent-kissing expedition was a risk. If il Tornja wanted her dead, he wasn’t trying very hard. He could have had her killed before she fled the Dawn Palace or after she returned to Annur. He could have set men to ambush her on the forest road. Instead, his own army lounged in the northern sun. None of it made any sense. He had murdered her father, had admitted to murdering her father, and yet the man seemed unconcerned that she might come to extract her revenge.

  He’s in for an unpleasant surprise, she thought grimly.

  It was tempting to refuse the offer to parley, to insist that the kenarang meet her in a place of her own choosing, as Fulton suggested. And yet, as she squinted down into the camp below, she could already see that scores of soldiers had stopped in their work, shading eyes with their hands as they stared up at her. If the scouts were to be trusted, the Army of the North believed she had come to help, and if the Urghul were really massing to the north, they would need to present some kind of unified front.