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

by Brian Staveley

  “Then what?” Vennet asked finally. “No more empire? Back to the good old days when we all ran our own kingdoms?”

  “We did not all have kings, Vennet,” Gabril said.

  Vennet smiled a broad, contemptuous smile. “Of course. You desert dwellers will be overjoyed to return to your savage customs.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that you consider his customs savage,” Kaden said, taking a small step to put himself between Gabril and the bearded man, “as I have drawn heavily upon them in my remaking of the empire.”

  For several heartbeats no one said anything. Wind gusted through cracks in the warehouse walls, tugging at the lantern flames.

  “Making it into what?” Vennet asked finally.

  “A republic,” Kaden replied. “A government of shared responsibility.”

  Tevis threw his hands in the air. “ ’Shael save us, a republic? Meaning every filthy, dirt-grubbing peasant has a say and a stake?”

  “It would be inefficient,” Kaden said quietly, “to bring every filthy, dirt-grubbing peasant to the capital for the sake of governance. I propose something more limited.”

  Kegellen narrowed her eyes. “A council,” she said, tapping a finger against her fleshy lips. “You want to have a council.”

  Kaden nodded.

  “A council?” Tevis spat, lips drawn back in a sneer. “Of whom?”

  “You,” Kaden replied. “You will provide the spine. Plus representatives from those atrepies who are not here in the city.” He gestured over his shoulder to Kiel, who slipped the rolled parchment into his hand. Kaden held the scroll up to the light, but made no move to unfurl it.

  Vennet snorted. “What is that?”

  “A document,” Kaden replied, “setting out the new laws, prerogatives, and responsibilities. A constitution.”

  Kaden could never have come up with the thing on his own. After eight years in the Bone Mountains, he knew maybe one Annurian law in a hundred, and had almost no sense of the governing structures of foreign states and nations. He remembered from his childhood that Freeport and the cities north of the Romsdals formed a federation, that the Manjari had an empire like the Annurians, but with an empress instead of an emperor, and that the Blood Cities all insisted on their own independence, alternately fighting and trading with the others. It was an absurdly small base of knowledge for the drafting of a constitution that would govern a polity the size of Annur.

  Gabril had proven useful, outlining the traditions of his people, as had Morjeta, whose training in the Temple of Pleasure had afforded her a surprising amount of time for the study of politics. In the end, though, it was Kiel who put it together. The historian seemed to know every detail of every human culture since the fall of the Csestriim. He anticipated the general problems of human governance, the specific problems posed by a transition from empire to republic, and provided plausible solutions to both. Morjeta and Gabril had both stared at the historian with increasing awe as they worked and reworked the document.

  “How do you know all of this?” the First Speaker demanded at one point.

  Kiel smiled. “It is my work.”

  His raised his brows. “You memorized every detail, every name and date?”

  “Yes,” he replied mildly, then gestured them back to the scroll.

  Kaden had insisted on one thing only: that the document be simple. It was going to prove difficult enough to convince a score of suspicious, scheming nobles to put aside their historical rifts and grievances without presenting them with a five-hundred-page treatise. Kiel resisted, arguing that any lapses or oversights would lead, eventually, to the fragmentation and dissolution of the government, and the historian saw lapses and oversights everywhere. He wanted to address each possible contingency, outlining solutions to debacles ranging from assassination of council members to double taxation on long-distance merchants.

  “I have studied republics, Kaden,” he said, shaking his head. “They start with the noblest of intentions, and they tear themselves to shreds.”

  “How long does that take?” Kaden asked. “The shredding?”

  Kiel spread his hands. “There are dozens of scenarios. Decades, sometimes. Maybe a couple of centuries. Not long.”

  Triste laughed out loud at that. “If we make it through the next few months, I think we’ll all be happy. Come next summer, Kaden can start worrying about deflation and price-fixing and whatever else it is you’ve been talking about.”

  “Come next summer,” Kiel replied, “Kaden will not be in charge. Not if we are successful.”

  “One page,” Kaden said, cutting off the conversation. “We’re doing this to deny power to Adare and il Tornja, not as some experiment in the founding of a political utopia.”

  “While we are doing one—” Kiel began.

  Kaden shook his head, held up one finger. “One page.”

  And so, as he stood in the damp warehouse, flanked by piled crates and musty barrels, ringed with hostile, baffled stares, it was one page that he held up.

  “This,” he said quietly, “is the constitution I propose for Annur, an Annur ruled, not by an emperor, but by representatives from the various atrepies, people familiar with and dedicated to the traditions, history, and interests of their people.”

  For a moment there was silence, the calculation of possibility and risk.

  A slender, ink-skinned woman with red nails and a shaved scalp—Kaden took her for Azurtazine, from the southern island of Basc—shook her head. “How many?” she asked carefully. “How many representatives?”

  “Forty-five,” Kaden replied. “Three from each atrepy.”

  Azurtazine pursed her lips. “To be chosen how?”

  “By you,” he said, “each for his or her own territory.”

  Kiel had protested endlessly against the method, arguing that the nobles would scheme to promote their family and friends, then use their newfound power to crush both their political and personal foes. The new system, he pointed out, would be hopelessly tied to the interests of the few and the rich.

  The point was a good one, but there was no chance that these remnants of an old world order, families who had spent hundreds of years hoarding their grievances and counting their slights, would allow any government in which they were forced to share power over their own restored lands. Doubtless there were better systems, but il Tornja and Adare would not be fighting the Urghul forever, and by the time they returned, the fledgling republic needed to be established firmly enough to deny them power.

  “It seems like you’re giving up a lot,” Triste had said, shaking her head as she studied one of the final drafts.

  Kaden almost laughed. “That’s the point. I can’t match anyone strength for strength, blow for blow. Not Adare. Not il Tornja. Not the assembled nobles.”

  “Then how do you control them? How do you win?”

  The vision of Gabril in his shadowrobe danced through Kaden’s mind, of the attacking guardsman lunging forward, of his spear piercing the cloth, missing the body inside, then driving into the flesh of the other soldier. If the Shin had bothered to fight, that was how they would do it.

  “There might be more strength,” he had said, staring at the drying ink on the parchment, “in simply standing aside.”

  Faced with the sharp glares of Annur’s nobility, he was starting to question that decision. They could well have been a pack of hungry, late-winter wolves stumbling upon a deer carcass, snarling and sizing each other up, wondering who was going to get a bloody haunch, who was going to starve in the blood-soaked snow.

  “And what,” Kegellen asked, still twisting those bangles as she eyed him, “will your role be in this great enterprise? Or do you long to return to a contemplative life in the mountains?” She smiled brightly, but her dark eyes were shrewd. Kaden forced himself to meet her gaze, to deliver the words as he had practiced them.

  “I will be your servant,” he said, voice level.

  Kegellen laughed, her cheeks and chins jiggling with levity.
“How delightful! A strong young thing—with burning eyes, no less!—to rub my aching feet and pour my wine.” She glanced about her, false irritation flickering across her face. “And speaking of wine—why did no one think to bring any?”

  Kaden ignored the last question. “The council will vote on every law, deciding on the direction of the republic and upon the surest paths to reach our collective goals. I will not be a part of the council. As Servant of the Annurian Republic,” he went on carefully, “I will not have a vote, nor will I have a veto over what you decide. My only role will be administrative. I will call the meetings, and I will see to it that the laws you set in place are executed according to the spirit in which you intended them.”

  Fifteen sets of eyes watched him. Kaden forced himself to breathe easily, steadily.

  “Why?” Kegellen asked slowly, lower lip turning out in a frown. “Why would you want this? You could be Emperor.”

  “I spent most of the last ten years beyond the borders of Annur,” Kaden replied. “I saw another way.”

  “Great,” Tevis snorted. “Another way. How enlightened. Or maybe it’s that you lost your power already, let your sister seize it, and now you’re trying to claw back any pathetic bit that you can.”

  Tevis’s crack struck close to the bone, but Kaden had prepared for it.

  “You’re right,” he replied evenly. “My sister and the kenarang have taken power for themselves. They tried to see me killed, and, if we succeed in what we are doing, they will try to kill you, too.”

  The revelation had the intended effect—shocked faces, indignant exclamations—but Kaden rode right over them.

  “You are right about Adare,” he continued, “but you are wrong about me. If I wanted power, I would hardly offer myself as your servant.

  “Right now, Adare and the kenarang are in the north. When they return, they will either find their power kept nicely warm by their minions here in the city while the rest of you keep meeting in damp warehouses by the docks, or they will find a republic, a ruling council led by you, deciding the fate of Annur.” He shrugged. “Whatever happens, I have no intention ever to sit the Unhewn Throne.”

  For a long, tantalizing moment, he thought he had them. Oil hissed in the lamps. Somewhere lost in the darkness above, birds shuffled on the rafters. No one spoke. No one moved. Kaden watched the faces, willing them to see the opening, the chance at power, to lunge. Tevis was nodding, licking his lips. Azurtazine studied him appraisingly, breathing out slowly between pursed lips. They all saw the risk, but their conspiracy had always been dogged by risk. They had all dreamed of an opportunity like this, but none had dared hope for it. Kaden waited, his face calm, eyes still, his hand extended with the parchment. He had them. They would take it.

  Then Tevis shook his head.

  “I want more.”

  Kaden frowned. “More what?”

  “More representatives on the council. Six from Nish. We hold the northern passes through the Romsdals. We keep the Ghost Sea swept of pirates. I want more.”

  “The council is based on equal representation,” Kaden began, but Tevis cut him off.

  “We’re not all equal.” He flicked a contemptuous thumb at a short man with wide-set eyes. “Channary? Hanno? They were added to the empire in the last century. They’re barely even atrepies.”

  Kaden felt his stomach cave even as the chorus of voices rose in fury, smashing the silence into shards. The shouts and recriminations washed over him.

  “Si’ite provides the silver . . .”

  “The population of Kresh is three times that of . . .”

  “Aragat deserves more seats . . .”

  “. . . more votes . . .”

  “More power . . .”

  He shut out the words. It was obvious he had already lost, and the protestations, for all their difference, were all the same: a litany, the power of which he had long ago forgotten, a desperate string of syllables stronger than any prayer, the ancient, ineluctable chant of humanity itself: I want . . . I want . . . I want . . .

  41

  It took longer than Valyn had expected to reach Andt-Kyl. The Thousand Lakes, as it turned out, was comprised of a lot more than just lakes; the whole region was a maze of bogs, swamps, streams, and ponds. What solid ground there was seemed crammed with pines and balsams, the dark trunks so close that in most places you couldn’t see ten paces through the heavy needles. The western “road”—so named because it ran north vaguely parallel to the west coast of Scar Lake—was little more than a network of muddy tracks, crude bridges, and hastily bucked logs laid side by side over the deepest swamps. Even dry, it would have made for rough going, and it was anything but dry.

  The land itself had slowed them to an agonizing slog, and the land wasn’t the only problem. The Thousand Lakes was dotted with small logging villages, some built on high ground, others on teetering stilts, all of them directly athwart the submerged track. Passing through would be simple enough, except that someone was sure to notice their passage, someone who might talk to il Tornja’s scouts, who, in turn, would tell the kenarang about three soldiers in Kettral blacks, three young men evidently unattached to any unit, one with coal-dark skin, another with burned-out eyes. . . . It wouldn’t take a brilliant military mind to recognize their descriptions.

  Valyn’s meeting with Adare, far from reassuring him, had been both surprising and unnerving. Her insistence on the kenarang’s loyalty to Annur, her willingness to pardon his flagrant murder of the Emperor, and her veneration for the man’s military mind all set Valyn’s teeth on edge. Worse, the discovery that Long Fist was on the march made it pretty ’Kent-kissing clear that he was just using Valyn as a tool in his own war, one in which he aimed to overrun Annur itself. Which meant that Gwenna and Annick weren’t guests at all; they were prisoners. Valyn and Laith and Talal had been over it two dozen times already, but the ugly fact was that, without a bird, there was nothing they could do for the two women. The best hope, in fact, lay in killing il Tornja, in hoping that after the kenarang was dead they could find some way to go after their Wing mates, to free them.

  The fact that he had left them, abandoned them, gnawed viciously at Valyn, but for all the hours he’d spent rehearsing the decision, he couldn’t see a way around it. He’d joined the Kettral expecting to fight on the side of justice and imperial order, but the last few months had disabused him violently of that notion. Instead, he was caught between conflicting evils; any damage he did to one would make him complicit in the crimes of the other.

  And yet, standing aside, refusing to take part, was nothing but a coward’s course, and so Valyn dug down until he came to something like bedrock: Ran il Tornja had murdered his father and suborned the empire. The agreement Valyn had hammered out with Adare seemed like the best available: he would let the kenarang stop the Urghul, but then he would see him dead. All of which meant, of course, that il Tornja couldn’t know Valyn was near, was waiting for him. It would be tough enough to kill him unsuspecting, and Valyn had no intention of giving the man an advance warning.

  And so, over Laith’s strenuous objections, they detoured around every town, wading through frigid, chest-deep bogs, swatting away biting flies that seemed to grow large as birds, holding their blades above their heads in a futile effort to keep them dry, slogging forward straight through the night and all the next day at a pace so slow they’d barely reached the northern end of the lake by dusk. It was a pretty weak showing for three soldiers trained to cover distance quickly and quietly—fifty miles in a full day—but it was enough. No one had seen them pass, which meant, when il Tornja did arrive, he’d have no idea they were waiting.

  “Well,” Laith said, holding the branches aside with one hand so that he could get a view out over the northern arm of the lake to the small village straddling the Black River, “looks like the Urghul move almost as fast through the forest as they do on the steppe.”

  Valyn’s stomach slipped. “Have they taken the town?” he demanded, peeri
ng through the gathering gloom as he slipped the long lens from his pack.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Talal replied after a moment.

  Valyn nodded slowly. Bonfires raged on the far bank, but the town itself looked unscathed, no burning buildings lighting the sky, no furious ringing of alarms, no smoke, no screaming. He raised the long lens to his eye, focused it. The horsemen on the far bank snapped into view, hundreds of them, thousands, and more in the trees.

  “What are the bastards waiting for?” Laith demanded.

  Valyn shook his head. “Can’t see. If the people in town aren’t idiots, they’ll have burned the far bridge, but I don’t have the angle to be sure.” He shifted the long lens back to the town. The eastern sky had already purpled to black, but Valyn could make out the details clearly enough: rough log buildings similar to those in Aats-Kyl, all piled onto two islands nestled in the forking arms of the Black River. Docks stretched out into the lake from the eastern island, and on the southernmost tip of the western one, built directly out of a rocky cliff, stood a tall, stone tower—probably for signaling boats coming up from the south. When the wind dropped, he could hear hammers or axes echoing from the wall of dark firs fronting the eastern shore of the lake.

  The villagers were busy running back and forth, some with weapons, others lugging logs, still others carting what must have been food and valuables west over the central bridge, onto the nearer of the two islands, trying to get them as far from the horsemen as possible. Valyn tracked a few figures—mostly loggers in rough leather and wool—then paused, grinding his teeth.

  “Il Tornja’s scouts are here.”

  Talal nodded. “Not unexpected.”

  “But a pain in the ass nonetheless,” Laith said.

  Valyn frowned. “Means we’ll have to take care in setting up shop. If they’re sticking to protocol, they’ll be sending men back two, three times a day. We can’t let the kenarang know we’re here.”