“This is the way of Annurian justice,” Kaden said. “All cases are decided by a council of seven.”
“This is the way of cowards,” Gabril said. “Your father watched this ‘trial,’ but he did not speak. When my father died, your father watched, but he did not wield the knife. When they dragged me from the hall, I swore I would see your father dead, and now I have.
“You come to me offering ‘condolences’ for my father’s murder? Then I will tell you this: I rejoice in the murder of yours. I came to see Sanlitun dead, to witness the life drained from his bones. I am only sorry I did not plant the knife in his beating heart myself.”
He considered Kaden for several heartbeats, then raised his cup, eyes intent above the rim, waiting.
Kaden said nothing. Anger flared, but he extinguished it, then crushed out the sparks of pride and shame as well. He had not come to trade barbs with the son of a dead traitor. To lose himself in a dispute with Gabril the Red was to forget the greater threat posed by Ran il Tornja and Adare, to abandon his best hope of blocking their attack. Kaden revolved Gabril’s story in his mind, searching for a crack, a fracture, a way in.
“You saw my father laid in his tomb months ago,” he said finally. “Why have you remained in this city you so clearly loathe?”
Gabril’s eyes narrowed. “My comings and goings are mine, and not yours to question.”
“Then I take back the question,” Kaden said. There was a shape to the verbal dance, but one he could discern only imperfectly. “You offered me a tale, and I will offer you one in return.”
Gabril hesitated. “Speak,” he said finally, “and I will hear your words.”
“Your father,” Kaden began, choosing his course carefully, “Gabril the Gray, hated the empire.”
The First Speaker nodded curtly. “Bedisa creates all the world’s people as equals. To set one man above the rest, to steal from the others their own voices, this is an abomination.”
Kaden had expected as much. Kiel had already explained to him the Mo’iran system of tribal rule, in which all men and women, regardless how poor, had a voice and a vote at the council fires. The Csestriim had explained the political processes of the Western Deserts efficiently and clearly, but Kaden wanted to hear Gabril himself say the words. Everything hinged on the Speaker.
“Surely,” Kaden pressed, “some people are more capable than others? Some see further and deeper into the heart of important matters.”
“And those people,” Gabril said, “speak first and last at the fires. But to silence the voices of others is cowardice and injustice both. It turns men and women to beasts.”
“The people of Annur are hardly beasts.”
“Your empire has made them docile. Compliant. Incurious. Your family turns the people into goats, then you strut among them as though you were lions, preying on the weak, devouring them.”
Gabril’s voice was tight but controlled, his fury carefully reined. Any doubt Kaden had about the Speaker’s hatred of the empire had vanished.
“Your father believed this, too,” Kaden replied, “and so he worked in secret to bring down the empire. To set in its place a—”
“Circle of Speakers,” Gabril said defiantly. “And he would have succeeded, had he not been betrayed. He was not alone in his desire to hear many voices about the fire.”
“As you said, you came to Annur to see my father brought low—”
“To see him dead,” Gabril said, cutting him off. “To see the great lion gutted.”
Kaden ignored the gibe. “But you have stayed to continue your father’s work.”
Gabril’s lips tightened. His hand dropped to one of the blades at his belt. Kaden schooled his body to stillness even as he locked gazes with the Speaker.
“You’re still here,” he said, pushing ahead with a story based in part on Kiel’s description of Mo’iran culture, partly on Morjeta’s assessment of Gabril’s activities in the city, and partly on pure hunch, “because the other aristocrats are here, all the dispossessed nobility from across the empire, in a single city. What better place to continue the work of your father? What better city in which to labor toward the destruction of Annur?”
Kaden fell silent, spread his hands, and waited.
“I had intended,” Gabril said, drawing his knife after a pause, “to allow you to depart unharmed.”
“And now?”
“Now, I will not repeat the errors of my father. I will see you dead before you can overturn the great work.” He rose to his feet, slipped the other knife from his belt, and set it on the table in front of Kaden. The steel was dark as coal save for the edge, which gleamed in the sunlight. Kaden made no move to reach for it.
“I offer you the choice your father never offered mine,” Gabril said, gesturing toward the knife. “To die a man.”
“I didn’t come here to fight you,” Kaden said.
“Then you will die a beast.”
“And you are certain that killing me will best serve your work?”
“You are the Emperor,” Gabril responded, as though that settled everything.
Kaden raised his eyebrows. “Am I?” He fingered the rough fabric of his coat, then ran his hand over the tabletop between them. “The clothes on my back are my only clothes. This wooden table is worth more than all my possessions.”
“When you return to your palace—”
“I cannot return to my palace. When my father died, others took his place.”
Gabril hesitated, then shook his head.
“And so one lion has replaced another. You have lost your empire and come to me thinking I will help you regain it. You judged me poorly.”
“It is you,” Kaden replied evenly, “whose judgment has gone awry.”
Gabril narrowed his eyes. “You tell me in my own ears that this is wrong, that others have not killed your father and stolen your empire?”
“So far you are right.”
“And yet you would have me believe that you do not want it back?”
“No,” Kaden said, taking up the knife before him, turning it back and forth, watching the sunlight play off the honed edge. It felt good in his hand, solid and strong. With an easy, fluid gesture he slammed the point into the table, watched it quiver. “I am not my father,” he said, “and I am not my sister. I do not want my empire back. I want it destroyed.”
38
After a decade spent studying small-team tactics and training to fight in Wings of five or six, it was easy to forget just how impressive a full Annurian field army really was. As a child, Valyn had seen legions march down the Godsway of the capital, rank after perfect rank, pennants held high, spears precisely angled toward the sky. He remembered the pageantry, but had forgotten the sheer mass of men and metal, the sense that an entire city had taken up arms. As he studied the encamped Army of the North from behind a small copse of trees, however, he found himself struck anew by the sight. None of the individual soldiers could match the rankest Kettral cadet, of course, but that was missing the point; the army was never intended for the precise work of the Kettral. Where the Kettral relied on timing and precision, the army was a creature of mass and momentum, slow to start up but near impossible to stop.
What they were doing here, however, buried in the dense forests of the Thousand Lakes, Valyn still couldn’t say. The two Annurian riders had been carrying a message for the kenarang all right, but the ’Kent-kissing thing proved to be written in some sort of cipher, a long string of meaningless letters and numbers that neither Valyn, Talal, or Laith had the faintest idea how to unravel. Both Annurians claimed ignorance of the contents, and Valyn believed them—there was little point in encoding a message if the meat of it could be extracted from the bearers at the point of a knife. All the messengers could give him was a destination, Aats-Kyl, a logging town at the southern tip of Scar Lake, and so Valyn and his diminished Wing rode southwest instead of south, following miserable tracks through dense northern forests of balsam and pine to Aats-Kyl.
If il Tornja was planning an assault on the steppe, he’d certainly chosen an indirect route, but then, maybe that was the point.
“Looks like the entire Army of the North,” Talal observed.
Valyn nodded, running the long lens up and down the arrow-straight rows of tents. The Annurians had pitched their camp a little outside of the town proper, on a series of fields that might have been planted with squash or beans. Whatever the crop, it was destroyed now, the labor of an entire season ground back into the mud by the boots of the army.
He tried to estimate numbers, a task made easier by the fact that the Annurians always laid out camp in a neat grid, rank upon rank of taut white legionary tents divided into four quarters. At the center of each quarter stood a complex of larger pavilions: mess hall, blacksmith, quartermaster, and medical. A quick count of tents suggested twenty thousand men; more, if they were double-bunking to drop their carry weight on the march. It was a huge force, but Valyn couldn’t help but compare it to the nomadic encampment north of the White. Where the Urghul army had flowed from one hill to the next, their api and campfires sprawling over the steppe nearly as far as the eye could see, the Annurian force fit neatly into a single row of fields.
Valyn paused, squinted through the lens at the far side of the camp. He wasn’t high enough to get a good view, but it seemed that the soldiers there were armored differently from the rest. Occasionally, as the men worked in the setting sunlight, he caught a bright flash that looked more like bronze or gold than steel. It hardly made sense. The legions were too practical to spend money on ornamentation, but then, Valyn was quickly discovering that there was a lot he never learned on the Islands. The strange armor could have been one of a hundred things, and Valyn let it go, shifting his long lens to look over the town itself.
It was larger than he’d expected, maybe a thousand houses, almost all of them log-built cabins, stables, and sheds, some with stone chimneys, some with simple holes in the roof where the smoke could escape. That smoke hung over everything, a thick haze that Valyn could feel scratching at his throat, that he could taste on the back of his tongue. He had forgotten the stench of cities and villages in his years on the Islands, where the near-constant salt wind off the ocean scoured the archipelago night and day. The men and women of Aats-Kyl, however—mostly loggers, judging from the mills at the edge of the village—seemed not to notice the reek of dung and rot, smoke and cut pine, that lay on their town like ash.
A few thin dogs scrounged scraps outside the doors, and a single sow, evidently escaped from her pen, rooted at the foot of a small well. The streets were mostly dirt, though recent rain and the passage of men and horses had turned them to mud. Valyn picked out two large buildings that looked like temples—to what god or goddess, he couldn’t say—and a proud, three-story structure of chinked logs and fieldstone, half hall, half tower, near the town’s center. Even that building, however, was overtopped by the dam, a huge embankment of earth, stone, and wood to the north of the town, at the south end of Scar Lake. Valyn turned his attention to the structure, staring through the long lens.
The sun had already settled into the serrated tops of the firs, but close to two hundred men—Annurian legionaries, judging from their uniforms—were hard at work by torchlight, digging through the earthen dam. Their commanders had them on a quick rotation, each group working no longer than two hours before a second marched in to take its place and the first returned to the camp. Valyn had been studying them since just after noon, and the pace never flagged. They showed all intentions, in fact, of working straight through the night, though with what goal in mind, he couldn’t say. There were Kettral who specialized in hydraulic analysis—diverting rivers, destroying aqueducts, poisoning groundwater—but even Valyn could tell that a gap in the dam would flood the river below. The town was high enough that it would probably survive, but he couldn’t see why anyone would take the risk.
“Something’s put an ember up their asses,” Laith observed.
It was the kind of comment the flier would have made a month earlier, but all levity was drained from the words. Instead of glancing over slyly as he spoke, he refused to meet Valyn’s eyes, keeping his gaze fixed on the town. It had been that way since their botched attack on the messengers four days earlier. Part of Valyn missed his friend’s banter, but an even larger part welcomed the new solemnity; it relieved him of having to joke, to smile, to fake happiness or humor. They had come all this way to kill the man who had killed his father, and as long as he focused on that single fact, as long as he focused on the relevant tactics and dangers, the goal would fill his mind, pushing back the memory of the men he had already murdered. It kept him going, but it didn’t leave anything left over for smiling.
“The Urghul,” Talal said. “It has to be the Urghul.”
Valyn nodded. “Long Fist was massing for something,” he agreed. “That was clear as rain.”
“Which means,” the flier observed acidly, “that our dear friend the shaman has fucked us.”
Valyn revolved the idea as he considered the army once more. At the center of the camp flew a massive banner emblazoned with the Annurian sun. Beneath the banner, a dozen soldiers were hard at work erecting a huge pavilion. Something that large could only belong to il Tornja, and Valyn panned back and forth with the lens, searching in vain for some sign of the man.
When he and his Wing rode out from the Urghul camp ten days earlier, Valyn had expected to travel all the way to Annur, to have to find the kenarang in his own palace and kill him; even for the Kettral, it had seemed a nearly impossible task. Something, however, had flushed il Tornja into the open. It made for an opportunity, but put Valyn on his guard at the same time. It also meant delaying even further his reunion with Kaden, but Kaden would have to fend for himself awhile. Clearly, events had outpaced Valyn since he quit the Islands. There were new stones on the board, and sticking obstinately to an outdated plan was a quick way to get dead.
“An Annurian army on the move could mean one of several things,” he said slowly, passing the long lens to Talal. “It certainly doesn’t exonerate il Tornja for my father’s death. For any of the deaths. In fact, it squares with what Balendin told us.”
Laith stared at him. “An Annurian army headed north means that someone to the north is misbehaving, and unless you think the actual thousand lakes have sloshed out of their beds to march south, that means the Urghul.”
“But according to Long Fist,” Talal observed quietly, “this is all a part of il Tornja’s strategy. It’s easier to justify a transition to military command if there’s a war that needs fighting. He could have murdered Sanlitun and provoked the Urghul, all with the ultimate goal of consolidating his own position.”
“Which means there’ll be more than just one death to lay at his feet,” Valyn added. “If the kenarang’s forcing a major battle just to keep his seat on the throne, he’ll be killing thousands. Tens of thousands, Urghul and Annurian alike.”
“I’m not sure I want to start laying deaths at feet,” Laith replied. “Not given what we’ve been up to recently.”
“Valyn,” Talal began, long lens fixed on one of the gates in the palisade ringing the town, where a dirt road spilled out into the fields beyond. Valyn had studied it earlier. It was an obvious attack point, and though the loggers had built squat towers to either side, an experienced siege team would force it easily. Valyn squinted. Figures on horseback were emerging from between the wooden walls.
“Who is it?” he asked, turning to Talal.
“What does your sister look like?” the leach asked.
Valyn shook his head. “I don’t know. Tall. Thin. I haven’t seen her in ten years. I was hoping to find a way to talk to her in Annur. . . .”
“You might get the chance a little early,” Talal said, passing the lens back to Valyn and gesturing toward the valley. “I can’t be certain, but that sure looks like a woman with burning eyes.”
Valyn stared at the leach, then reached over for the
lens. There were half a dozen riders, followed by a dozen or so men on foot. It took him a moment to find the range and focus, but when he finally managed it, a figure on horseback leapt into view. She sat her horse proudly, back straight as a spear, but it was clear within heartbeats that she wasn’t really comfortable on her mount; she rode the poor creature as though it were a palanquin, not swaying at all to accommodate the beast’s gait, sitting hard and low in her saddle, as though her legs could no longer hold her up.
Adare.
Despite the long years, he recognized his sister at a glance. Even without Intarra’s eyes, he would have known her. She was older, of course, a woman instead of a girl, but she had the same lean build, the same angularity to her features, the same honey-pale skin—shades lighter than either Valyn’s or Kaden’s, except . . . He squinted through the lens. It was hard to be certain at the distance, but it looked as though a delicate tattoo ran down one side of her face, a few graceful lines that seemed to glow in the sunlight, starting beneath her hair and swirling down her neck into her robes.
He shifted the lens to consider those robes more fully. His sister finally seemed to have shed the dresses she spent her childhood cursing. The golden cloth of her clothing was rich enough for any princess’s gown, but cut in the austere style of an imperial minister, trimmed at the collars and shoulders with black. The shifting fashions of the Dawn Palace, the subtle social signaling of wardrobe, had never much interested Valyn, but Adare’s clothes spoke of authority, even command. That, and the armed men escorting her.
“What in Ananshael’s sweet name,” he muttered, lowering the long lens, “is Adare doing with an army on the march?”
“Does it matter?” Laith asked. “This is what we wanted, right? She can tell us what’s going on. Forget the old plan. We go to her first, see if Long Fist’s been selling us shit and calling it fruit. Then, if it still comes to taking down the regent, it might help to have a little royalty on our side.”
“Valyn is royalty as well,” Talal pointed out.
Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire: Page 53