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

by Brian Staveley

  Nira hesitated, then spat on the floor.

  “You have a hundred words.”

  Adare didn’t pause. “He can fix you.”

  “Horseshit,” the old woman snarled. She looked past Adare at the kenarang. “Go ahead, try to ride her lie.”

  Il Tornja shook his head slowly. “I will not. I don’t know how to cure you.”

  Adare cursed him silently. Why he had chosen this particular moment, after a lifetime of lies, to cleave to the truth, she had no idea, but she pressed ahead regardless. “You might not know, but you have ideas.” If there was one thing she’d learned about Ran il Tornja, it was that the man had ideas. On politics. On war. On love. He might not know what had gone wrong with Oshi and Nira, but he’d had hundreds of years to wonder. “You have theories,” she said.

  He watched her from beneath hooded eyes, then chuckled. “I do,” he replied.

  “And now that you have the last two Atmani here,” Adare said, gesturing to Nira and Oshi, “it’s possible you can help them.”

  He hesitated. “There is always a possibility.”

  “Fuck possibility,” Nira growled. “It was possibility that broke us in the first place. I will have my revenge, and see an end to this.”

  The words were rock hard, sharp as chipped obsidian, but Adare could see something in the old woman’s face, the first crumbling of doubt.

  Adare tried to speak directly to that doubt, driving her argument into the hesitation like mason’s spikes hammered into a stone’s seam. “You can make that decision for yourself, Nira, but not for your brother.”

  “Don’t go lecturin’ me on what I can and can’t do. I’ve been makin’ his decisions since before your fucking empire was born, girl.”

  Adare nodded, meeting her eyes. “You’ve protected him all this time—for what? So you could find a man, kill him, then die? Did you keep going all these centuries just for this?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “There is another end to this story,” Adare said, praying to Intarra that the woman would see, would understand, that the long years had not burned out of her the capacity for hope.

  Nira stared at her, jaw set, then turned her eyes to the kenarang. For a long time she just watched him, studying the man’s face as though it were a page from a book in some barely remembered language.

  “I tried to fix it,” he said quietly. “The world we broke”—he gestured toward Adare—“building Annur was an effort to put it right.”

  “Annur can bugger itself bloody,” the old woman replied, lips drawn back from her jagged teeth.

  “Do we fight, sister?” Oshi asked again, staring at il Tornja with an almost rabid intensity. “Is it time at last?”

  Nira looked over at him, watched as her brother’s cheek twitched and his fingers clenched and unclenched around the grip of some unseen weapon. He shook as though palsied, and though he had stopped speaking, his lips continued to shape silent words. Slowly, moving for the first time since Adare met her with a weariness appropriate to her age, Nira raised a hand and set it gently on Oshi’s shoulder. “No,” she said quietly. “Not yet.”

  Then, as abruptly as it had bloomed, the collar of flame around the kenarang’s neck seemed to . . . twist. The air around it went strange, dark, and then it vanished. Nira sagged against her brother, the strength drained from her legs, but her voice was strong when she spoke, her eyes bright.

  “The collar isn’t gone,” she said. “Just hidden. It will move with you, shift with you, travel with you so readily you don’t even know it’s there. You’ll be the freest slave in the world, but you’ll be my slave. At a word from me, at a thought, it will tighten and end you.”

  Il Tornja cocked his head to the side. “Using your power like this, Rishinira . . .”

  The woman hacked a jagged laugh out of the air. “Will do what? Make me insane?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Then you’d better figure out a way to make me better again before I lose my mind. A little more encouragement for you to help my brother. Ya don’t want a crazy woman holding your leash, I can promise you that.” She turned to Adare. “You think you need him? Use him. But when you’re not using him to save your little empire, he will be working to fix my brother, bending all his long life’s learning to making right what he has broken.” She raised her eyebrows. “Isn’t that how it will be?”

  The kenarang nodded, a thoughtful, measured gesture.

  “Good,” Nira said. “Because the day you stop trying to heal us, the day you forget your leash and turn on us, is the day I cut you into a dozen pieces and leave you for the ravens.”

  Il Tornja took a step forward, tested the air in front of his throat with a hand, then another step.

  “You could be bluffing,” he observed.

  Nira’s smile was like a knife. “Test it.”

  To Adare’s surprise, he chuckled, shaking his head ruefully, as though he’d just lost a few suns in a hand of cards. “I’ll take your word for it. Now,” he went on, turning to Adare as though the two of them were just wrapping up a somewhat dull bureaucratic function, “there is much to prepare. My men have erected a pavilion for you in the center of the camp. You’ll be comfortable there, and more importantly, safe. The first thing—”

  “Where,” Adare demanded, cutting him off, “are the Urghul?”

  He grimaced. “By now? Most likely a day or two from the northern end of the lake.”

  Adare hesitated. “So, at least three or four days from us, right? Isn’t that good news?”

  “Hardly. Long Fist crossed north of the confluence, well north of our last garrison. It looks like he’s headed around the north end of the lake. He’s still got the Black River to get past, which he’ll almost certainly do at Andt-Kyl, but Andt-Kyl is far from here and we need to get there first. If he crosses before we arrive, it’s over. He won’t be able to move quickly through the forest, but he won’t have to. There are no more choke points after Andt-Kyl. He can split his army in ten, send them all in different directions. There’ll be bodies hanging from the branches from the Ghost Sea to the Romsdals.”

  Adare stared, aghast. “So what are we doing here? Why aren’t you marching north?”

  He crossed to the fire and held his hands a moment in front of the blaze before answering. “You see the terrain we’ve been moving through?” he asked at last. “Bogs. Swamps. Streams. Firs so tight you can’t slide between them?”

  Adare nodded.

  “North of here, it’s all like that, and no good road through it. There’s a forest track up the west coast of the lake, but an army this size would churn it to mud. We’d be weeks picking our way, and we don’t have weeks.”

  “So you’ve decided to do a little civil engineering instead?” Adare demanded. “Nine out of every ten men you have are sleeping in a ’Kent-kissing field right now! They could at least try the western track.”

  The kenarang smiled. “There’s a quote from Hendran’s Tactics that I’m fond of. Chapter fourteen: ‘Never fight,’ I believe it says, ‘when you can rest.’ ”

  37

  Kaden prepared, as he approached the high-walled estate of Gabril the Red, for disbelief or fury, a fist in the face or a knife in the gut. He tried to run through various scenarios, to anticipate what the young nobleman might say or do, but the future proved as blank and inscrutable as the limestone walls of Gabril’s mansion. Annurian law stipulated that no one, regardless of wealth or rank, could build a fortress inside the city. Early emperors had learned that lesson the hard way, and since the empire’s second century, private dwellings were required to have a certain number of windows and a gate in every exterior wall. Moats were illegal, hoardings atop the walls were illegal, arrow loops were illegal. Gabril the Red’s estate complied with the letter of the law. Barely.

  The windows fronting the street were tall and graceful, arched at their peaks, but so slim Kaden would have had to turn sideways to slide through them. The main gate was open, but guarded
by half a dozen men in long desert robes. More guards patrolled the top of the wall, each one with a spear or a bow ready to hand. The place wasn’t a fort, not exactly, but Kaden was under no illusions. Inside those walls, Gabril could kill him a dozen times over and no one would ever know.

  Kiel and Triste had tried to join him. He had refused. They argued of course, Kiel pointing out that, even after a decade and a half in an Ishien cell, he understood the political realities of the city better than Kaden, Triste arguing more passionately but less coherently that they had to stick together, to help each other. Kaden, however, had observed that Gabril might well greet their impromptu embassy with a blade, and if there was dying to be done, better one person than three. In the end, they couldn’t force him to bring them along, and so it was Morjeta who slipped him out of Ciena’s temple through another hidden tunnel, who led him through wide streets lined with stately bloodwoods, who pointed discreetly toward this fortress that was not a fortress, and murmured, “The estate of Gabril the Red.”

  Kaden nodded, considering the place from inside his hood’s shadow.

  “He is dangerous,” Morjeta continued, laying a delicate hand on Kaden’s arm. “Not just because he can fight, but because he can think.”

  Kaden studied the woman. She was frightened. He could see the tension in her neck, in the rise of her shoulders. She was frightened, but she held that fear in check. The whole thing might have been a Shin exercise, and he took a moment to slow his own heart, to cool his skin.

  “Dangerous and smart? That’s the point, right? That’s why we came here.”

  Morjeta hesitated, then nodded. “When it is over, return to this place and I will take you back to the temple.”

  Kaden didn’t point out that when it was over, he might not have the ability to go anywhere.

  When he stepped through the graceful arch of the palace walls, however, and pushed back his hood to show his eyes, when he stated his name and asked to see the First Speaker of Rabi, the white-robed guard just raised his brows, then nodded, escorting him into a wide interior courtyard. Flowering vines perfumed the breeze, and a large fountain tossed a spray of water ten feet into the air. It was a simple, graciously proportioned space, ideal for the lazy sipping of chilled ta on a warm summer day. There was, however, nothing lazy about the fight unfolding on the wide flagstones.

  Three soldiers with long spears were attacking a man, if the figure engulfed in the black robe was a man, pressing him from different angles, probing with their weapons, testing his defenses. At the sight of Kaden, the sparring stopped, and the servant who had ushered him in crossed to the robed figure, murmuring something to him. The robe turned—Kaden couldn’t see the man’s face inside the voluminous hood—considered him a moment, then a hand emerged from the dark folds, flicking the servant away.

  So, Kaden thought, schooling himself to stillness, Gabril the Red enjoys making people wait. He filed the thought away as the fight resumed.

  The soldiers with the spears immediately redoubled their attacks, weapons slashing and plunging into the robe at their center. Of the man inside the cloth, there was no sign. His hands, his legs, even his head were lost in the swirl of fabric. A shadowrobe, Kaden realized. Holy Hull, he’s a shadowrobe.

  He’d grown up on stories of the desert warriors, enjoying them almost as much as tales of the Kettral. Many people considered the desert warriors to be leaches, but Kaden and Valyn had found an old codex in the palace library once, the pages filled with illustrations and diagrams, showing just how a skilled shadowrobe could use the huge, flapping cloak to hide his movements, to disguise the location of his body.

  Kaden and Valyn had spent days using old blankets as robes, trying to perfect the techniques, to mimic hips with their hands, to make elbows look like shoulders, to twist their bodies so that what seemed from the outside to be the center of mass was nothing more than empty air. According to the book, men and women sometimes went mad fighting shadowrobes. Kaden never believed that; for all Valyn’s efforts, it was always easy to tell his hands from his head, to see his skinny ankles darting about beneath the cloth. Watching Gabril, however . . . Kaden shook his head. Fighting a shadowrobe looked like trying to attack the wind.

  The spears appeared to be tearing the First Speaker apart, stabbing again and again into the great flapping garment, burying themselves in the shifting folds of cloth. Blunted edges or no, those thrusts could kill, and as Kaden stared he saw one of the spear points stab right through the center of the robe, then emerge from the other side, the steel bright in the sunlight. The hooded figure did not fall.

  Kaden looked closer. The faces of the three attackers were drawn in concentration, their panting audible even at a distance. Though the men obviously knew how to handle their weapons, though they had the numbers, their faces were grim. Great hacking slices that seemed sure to take off a shoulder thwacked harmlessly into fabric that gave way in soft billows. Suddenly, with no warning he could perceive, a short knife flashed out from beneath the robe, the pommel slamming up into the jaw of the closest soldier. Before the body hit the stone, the hand and knife were both gone, disappearing back into that flowing shadow.

  At the sight, one of the remaining men lunged forward with a furious cry. His spear passed through a fold of cloth, punched out the other side, and into the shoulder of one of his comrades. As the wounded man fell behind him, the shadowrobe flowed forward, well inside the reach of the spear, and then that furtive blade was out again, pressing against the soldier’s throat. The unrobed man cursed, dropped his spear, and raised his hands in surrender. For a long time, the blade at his throat didn’t move. Kaden watched, wondering if he was about to see a man die. Then, with a flicker like a fire-cast shadow darting when the wind rises, the blade was gone.

  His foes forgotten, the cloaked figure turned to Kaden, then lowered his hood. Black hair lay plastered against his skull, and his face ran with sweat, but he didn’t appear to be breathing hard. For a while, he said nothing, just looked. Then he waved a hand at his servant.

  “Take our visitor to the study overlooking the acacia tree. I will decide his fate when I have bathed.”

  “I have come,” Kaden said carefully, “to offer my condolences for the death of your father.”

  Gabril the Red said nothing, studying Kaden from behind steepled fingers the way a hawk perched on a high branch might study a rabbit, his stillness the stillness of a predator poised to strike. He had taken his time in bathing, and with his face scrubbed and sleek black hair knotted behind his head, he bore little resemblance to the sweating shadowrobe from the courtyard. He looked like a young, well-heeled nobleman, not a warrior. Only a long, fine scar, light across his dark cheek, and the bright knives glittering in their red sheaths at his belt, hinted at the earlier violence.

  “Murder,” Gabril said finally. The word was sharp with the accent of the Western Desert, vowels polished, consonants pitted as though by the scouring sand.

  Kaden raised his eyebrows. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You should,” Gabril replied. “You talk of my father’s ‘death’ as though Gabril the Gray choked on the pit of a date or wandered from the well with no water. This is not the truth of the matter.”

  “He was executed,” Kaden said, “in accordance with Annurian law.”

  “He was murdered,” Gabril replied, “by your father.”

  Kaden slowed his pulse, loosened the muscles of his shoulders and back. The Shin had trained him in all manner of techniques to control his own fear and rage, but they had said nothing about how to calm others—one more way in which they had left him ill prepared to rule an empire, one more deficit he would have to make up on his own, provided Gabril left him alive long enough.

  The First Speaker eyed Kaden appraisingly. “You are not dead, as they say in the streets, but you are not Emperor. You return months after Sanlitun was set in the earth, and you come here, to me, your eyes hidden in this hood. Why? You must know what passed between our fathers.
”

  Kaden considered what he knew of the young man seated across the table, searching for a hook, a handle. As a child, he had grown up with stories of the desert tribes of Mo’ir, tales filled with vengeance, violence, and blood. He and Valyn had imagined every man and woman a shadowrobe, every meeting a duel to the death. According to Kiel, however, the stories were almost all wrong, the figment of an Annurian imagination obsessed with the exotic. Not that there weren’t shadowrobes in the west, not that Mo’ir’s history lacked its own share of blood, but if Kiel were to be believed, the tribes valued eloquence over violence, insisting on speech before every fight. Kaden had wagered his life on that insistence, but, face-to-face with Gabril, the words he had prepared seemed inadequate.

  “I am not my father,” he said quietly. “Just as you are not yours.”

  Gabril studied him for a long time, then raised a hand. A robed servant stepped silently from behind a wooden screen.

  “Ta,” Gabril said, not bothering to look at the man. “Two cups.”

  They waited in silence as the servant arranged a clay kettle, steeped the leaves, then poured the steaming liquid into twin clay cups. Kaden hesitated, eyeing the vessel warily.

  “Drink,” Gabril said, gesturing. “If I kill you, I will use a knife.”

  It was a slender reassurance, but Kaden lifted the cup to his lips, sipping gently at the bitter, unsweetened ta. Gabril raised his own cup, drank deeply, then set it gently back on the tabletop.

  “The first time I journeyed to your city,” he said, “I was eight. I did not want to come, but my father was in chains, and we do not allow a person—man or woman—to die without witness.”

  Kaden nodded, unsure how to respond.

  “I went to your palace, inside your red walls, and I watched while seven of your citizens, men and women unknown to me or my father, men and women whose only sight of sand was a thin strip along the shores of your sea, decided his death.”