Rocks dug into his shoulder and chest, sharp stones tore at his blacks, and the miserable drainage along which he was dragging himself proved too narrow for the bent bow of the arbalest, which caught on a corner and gouged at his stomach. Kettral were trained in all manner of ranged weapons, but nothing could beat an arbalest for sniping. Unlike a normal bow, you could fire it from a prone position, and the only movement necessary, once you’d cranked it all up, was a twitch of the finger. Of course, it meant you had to haul the ’Kent-kissing thing around.
Compounding his problems, Valyn had no idea where Annick was. He hadn’t expected to, of course. It was more than enough work trying to stay low and keep out of sight of the spotters without expecting to hunt down his competition as well. In any other contest, he wouldn’t have given half a toad’s turd for the location of the other sniper, but this wasn’t any other contest. Annick was out there, and she was hunting him as surely as she was hunting the bell. Despite what he’d told Laith the night before, Valyn’s shoulder blades itched at the thought. His only consolation was that the sun, the heat, and the ground would be as tough on her as they were on him.
Best get on with it, then.
He’d been counting on the meager ravine to carry him within shooting distance, had been following it half the morning, making reasonably good time—a pace or two every few minutes. Unfortunately, the groove had grown shallower and shallower as he moved uphill, until it provided no real cover at all. He had only to raise his head the barest fraction of an inch to see the wooden structure of the spotters’ tower and the bright smudge of the bell hanging from it five hundred paces distant. Still too far off to make the shot, too far by a good stretch.
He considered doubling back. It was the right call, all other factors being equal, but all other factors were definitely not equal. It wasn’t enough to move silently into position; he needed to move quickly, too. In front of him stretched about eight paces of sparse cover—some loose scrub and a patch of dune grass—but if he could make it through those without being spotted, he could hunker down behind a line of boulders, maybe even follow them close enough. It was risky, but then, everything the Kettral did was risky, just being Kettral in the first place was risky. No one taught you to avoid risk on the Islands; they taught you how to assess it, how to gauge probabilities, how to deal with uncertainty.
At the moment, Valyn didn’t feel much like assessing and gauging. Annick was out there, and unless he was very lucky indeed, she wasn’t spending her time hemming and hawing over probabilities.
“’Shael on a stick,” he muttered, pushing himself up to his elbows and knees, then lunging forward in a mad scramble over the stone, trying to stay as low as possible and move quickly at the same time. It took him about fifteen heartbeats to worm through the dirt and gravel, and although his heart was pounding, each beat seemed to stretch on forever. He collapsed, finally, up against the back of a hefty limestone boulder, then rolled to his right, putting a leafy spray of firespike between him and the southern expanse of the area. Only once he’d managed to set up a reasonable amount of cover did he pause to catch his breath. The spotters hadn’t blown the whistle. Annick hadn’t shot him. He grinned to himself. Sometimes gambling paid off.
Over the course of the next hour, he wound his way closer and closer to the observation platform, maneuvering from shrub to low grass, from broken ground to gravelly berm. The bell was clearly visible when he raised his head far enough to get a look at it, as were the two instructors flanking it, scanning the terrain with their long lenses. Come on, Hull, he prayed, inching forward through the grit. Just a little closer. The arbalest he carried was bulky but powerful. If the wind died, he could hit the target from a little over a hundred paces. Just keep Annick busy for a little longer.
He was moving forward behind the cover of a slanted shoulder when someone let out a sharp curse from the spotting platform. He risked a quick look. One of the two trainers, Anders Saan by the sound of the voice, was holding a hand to his chest and swearing like a sailor.
“’Shael take it,” Valyn snarled, scrambling forward. Annick had the range and had already gone to work. A few moments later, the other trainer on the platform doubled over, black silhouette jerking as though stabbed. Stunner arrows wouldn’t kill you, and Annick was showing her respect for the trainers by aiming for their torsos rather than their heads. Still, the dull bolts packed a painful punch.
Valyn gritted his teeth. Annick would need to reload her arbalest before going after the bell. That meant cranking back the bow, fitting another bolt to the channel, and resuming her firing stance. There was a slim to vanishing chance that he could use the intervening time to get off a shot, especially now that the spotters were technically out of the exercise. It should take her at least forty seconds to—
An arrow shattered the stone inches from his head, then fell like a broken bird to the gravel. Valyn stared. Annick couldn’t have reloaded the arbalest that fast. There were cords to notch and ratchets to twist. No one could reload an arbalest that fast.
“Well, she did, you ’Kent-kissing fool,” he growled at himself, rolling hard to his left, trying to put some cover between himself and the general direction of the shooter. He tumbled into a small ravine just as another arrow clattered in the dirt above him.
An arrow.
An arbalest didn’t fire arrows; it fired bolts. Annick was able to reload so fast because she was using a regular bow, although how she managed that lying down, Valyn had no idea. It didn’t matter. She had him pinned, was undoubtedly moving to a new line of sight as he lay there, and would take another shot within the minute. The logical thing to do at this point was surrender. The sniper had clearly won the trial, could ring the ’Kent-kissing bell whenever she wanted, but something in Valyn kicked against the thought of giving up. For Annick, the game wasn’t over until she’d shot everyone on the field, and if the game wasn’t over, he could still win. He scrambled up the ravine on his hands and knees. He just had to reach the—
Another arrow scudded through the dirt right beside him. The girl was fast, but her normal accuracy was failing her. Valyn started to smile—it seemed even Annick had her off days—but as he crawled past the spent shot, his breath froze in his chest. A razor’s edge glinted, bright and vicious in the dust. The arrow was unblunted. A head like that would rip right through his chest and out the other side if Annick found her target.
With a bellow of rage and fear, he lurched to his feet. There was no playing now. No hiding. No ducking behind rocks and skulking through the brush. He had no idea how it was possible, not with both trainers watching the whole thing, but Annick was trying to kill him, had the range and angle already, could probably choose her shot.
He lunged ahead, darting back and forth over the jagged path. If he could reach the low gravel berm fifteen paces distant, he could make a reasonable stand, but fifteen paces was an eternity to a well-trained sniper. His heart hammered at his ribs, his lungs heaved, and he wrestled with the fear as he ran, forced it down into his legs, into his lungs, used it to drive him on. Five more paces. If he could just reach the berm—
The blow caught him high in the shoulder, right above the lung, driving him forward onto the gravel slope. First it was just the shock of the impact that hit him. Then the pain came, a savage tearing fire. He rolled to the side and looked down at the front of his jerkin. The arrow had punched directly through his body, tearing out the front of his chest. Blood coated the head and shaft. Son of a bitch, a real ’Kent-kissing arrow, he thought vaguely.
He tried to move his hands, tried to push himself to his knees, but failed. Fog filled his vision, but he could just make out a slender shape rising from the ground some hundred paces distant. Annick held the shortbow casually in one hand, another arrow nocked to the string. They saw her, Valyn thought groggily. Doesn’t she know that the trainers are looking at her? She raised the bow easily, almost casually, drawing and releasing in the same motion. A moment later, the clang of
the bronze bell reached Valyn, dim and tinny, as though heard underwater.
Only after she had lowered the bow did Annick glance toward him, turning her head with the curt, acute movement of a bird. Through the bloody haze that filled his vision, Valyn saw her eyes widen, but there was no joy, no celebration on that hard, child’s face.
19
Uinian IV did not look capable of murder, certainly not the murder of an old soldier like Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian. Where Adare’s father had been tall and strong, with powerful arms and hands, the Chief Priest of Intarra was nearly an albino, short and pale, thin-lipped and stoop-shouldered, with a head like a misshapen gourd. That her father lay dead in his cold tomb was pain enough, but that he should have been delivered to Ananshael by this pathetic wretch made Adare want to scream and sob at the same time. If Sanlitun had to die, he should have been cut down in battle, or swallowed by the raging sea. The chaos of war, the wrath of the depths: those were foes worthy of her father. Despite his post, Uinian struck her as a small, mean creature.
So why doesn’t he look afraid? she wondered nervously.
The Dawn Palace was calibrated to overawe even the most jaded potentates. At its heart, Intarra’s Spear loomed over the entire city, an impossibly tall tower of clear stone driven deep into the bedrock by some hand older than history. At the base of the Spear stood the Hall of a Thousand Trees. The longest and highest hall in the Palace was also one of the first, an echoing edifice of redwood and cedar, the huge pillars of which had taken ten thousand slaves a dozen years to haul across Eridroa from the slopes of the Ancaz. Polished and oiled golden trunks stretched upward in row after row, branches ramifying as they had in life to support the ceiling. The space had been built on a scale to humble even the Emperor who ruled it from his seat on the Unhewn Throne, and yet Uinian appeared unconcerned, bored, even smug.
His small dark eyes flitted from the Aedolians lining the walls to the benches where the Sitters would hear the charges and evidence against him followed by his own defense. He licked his lips, although the movement struck Adare as anticipatory rather than nervous; then he turned his eyes to her. She knew the power of her own gaze, the unnerving effect her burning irises had on those who tried to meet them, and yet the Chief Priest seemed no more unsettled by these than he did by the hall itself. He considered her cooly as she walked past him to take her seat, the faintest hint of a smirk playing at the corner of his mouth, then nodded.
“My lady,” he said. “Or should I say, Minister? Can one be both a lady and a Minister?”
“Can one be both a murderer and a priest?” she replied, rage like fire running under her skin.
“My Lady Minister,” he replied, raising a fluttering hand to his chest in mock horror, “I fear you refer to me.”
Adare clamped down on her response. They had not spoken loudly, and yet already some of those gathered for the trial had turned to watch the exchange. There was a legal process to be followed, and it did not involve sparring with the accused. Such sparring was beneath the dignity of an imperial minister and besides, in moments her father’s murderer would face a justice far more implacable than any of Adare’s barbs. She bit into a fingernail, then remembered her post, the hundreds watching, and returned the hand forcefully to her lap. That Uinian should pay for his crimes before the day’s end was clear to her, and yet Adare spent enough time studying history to know that Annurian justice, for all its glory, could sometimes fail.
The selection of the Sitters was the most important thing. They were chosen at random every day by bureaucrats trained specially for the task, dozens of groups of seven to sit on the dozens of trials that would take place, each group composed, as decreed by Terial himself, of the Seven: a mother, a merchant, a pauper, a prelate, a soldier, a son, and a dying man. Terial had believed that a group so comprised was fit to pass justice on even the empire’s most august citizens, and yet it was possible, through fraud and bribery, to meddle with the composition of the group.
I went over all the potential Sitters myself, she thought. What did I miss? What does he know?
The reverberation of two great gongs broke the silence, echoing right down into Adare’s teeth. It was the first time she had heard that sound, the presage to an imperial entrance, since the death of her father, and for a moment, she expected Sanlitun himself to stride through the twenty-foot doors and into the chamber in his simple robes of state. When Ran il Tornja appeared instead, she felt the sharp twist of loss all over again. It seemed impossible that her father was truly gone, that she would never again sit across the stones board from him or ride at his side. The philosophers and priests dickered over what happened when Ananshael took a soul, but all their theological and doctrinal hairsplitting didn’t make a thimble of difference. Her father was gone, and the kenarang, decked out in a riding cloak worth its weight in gold, ruled Annur now, at least until Kaden returned.
In cases of high treason, the Emperor himself played the role of accusing magistrate, and so, with Sanlitun dead, the role fell to the regent. That worried Adare. Il Tornja was clearly a brilliant general, and yet, by his own admission, he had no interest in or aptitude for the subtler maneuverings of politics. Of course, this was a legal rather than a political affair, and il Tornja had seemed genuinely interested in seeing Uinian’s head parted from his shoulders, but having someone more shrewd, more deeply versed in the nuances of the Annurian legal code, would have been a comfort.
“I know you’re worried,” he had said to her the night before as they met over cups of ta in the Iris Pavilion to discuss the trial.
“You’re a soldier,” she replied bluntly, “not a legal scholar.”
He nodded. “And one thing I’ve learned as a soldier is when to listen to the people I command. I’ve been over this thing a dozen times with Jesser and that finicky bastard, Yuel. What in ’Shael’s name is his job, anyway?”
“Chronicler of Justice. It’s the highest legal post in the empire.”
“Well, he’s been going at me hammer and tongs for days now. I can repeat my speech to the Sitters forward and backwards, could probably translate it into Urghul if you wanted. I didn’t realize my first days as regent would be spent drilling like a grass-green recruit.”
It should have been a comfort. Annur knew no finer legal minds than Jesser and Yuel, and the case against Uinian appeared relatively straightforward—an Emperor murdered in the heart of the Temple of Light during a secret meeting with the Chief Priest. If Ran il Tornja had the good sense to follow their counsel to the letter, she would see Uinian divested of his office, blinded, and put to death before the sun set.
Before il Tornja settled into his own wooden seat, he knelt respectfully to the Unhewn Throne looming in the shadows behind him. The throne would remain vacant until Kaden’s return, but even empty it drew eyes and hushed voices, as though it were a sleeping and dangerous beast. It was older than the hall that had been built around it, older than the Dawn Palace itself, older than memory, a mass of black stone jutting from the bedrock, thrice the height of the tallest man. Near the very top, eons of wind and weather had carved a seat perfectly fitted to the human form. The rock itself afforded no simple way to reach that seat, and one of Adare’s forebears had commissioned a gilded staircase to aid the Emperor in his ascent. Before the staircase, however, if the writings of Ussleton the Bald were to be believed, before Emperors, before Annur itself, the primitive tribes of the Neck had once chosen their chiefs through a bloody melee, hundreds of men struggling to climb the stone and ensconce themselves while cutting down their foes with bright bronze blades. In the flickering torchlight Adare could see red beneath the lapidary black, a reminder of the generations of blood that had seeped into the indifferent stone.
If il Tornja was intimidated, he didn’t show it. After paying his respect, he turned to cast an eye over the assembled crowd—hundreds of ministers and bureaucrats, curious merchants and aristocrats come to see justice served and one of the city’s mighty brought low�
�then sat in his own wooden chair before waving a hand to silence the tolling of the gongs.
“We gather,” he began, his voice carrying through the hall, “to find truth. In this we call upon the gods, and most especially Astar’ren, Mother of Order, and Intarra, whose divine light illuminates the darkest shadows, to guide us and gird our strength.” The formula was rote, the opening to every judicial proceeding from the Waist to the Bend, but il Tornja delivered it clearly and forcefully.
He has the voice of a battlefield commander, Adare realized, hope swelling inside her for the first time. The man seemed, if not precisely regal, then capable and confident, equal to the day’s work. She allowed herself to skip past the present for a moment, to consider the future. The conviction and execution of the Chief Priest would throw the Temple of Light into disarray. Not only would she have revenge for her father’s death, she could use the chaos to see the rival order gutted and brought low. Not that we’ll eliminate them, of course. The people need their religion, but those legions will have to go—
“Uinian,” il Tornja continued, cutting into her thoughts, “fourth of that name, Chief Priest of Intarra, Keeper of the Temple of Light, stands accused before this assembly on two counts: Treason in the Highest Degree and Murder of a Government Official, both capital offenses. As regent, I will present the facts as they are known, while Uinian himself will speak in his defense. The Seven Sitters, guided by their own reason and the illumination of the gods, will speak to the man’s guilt or innocence.”
He turned to Uinian. “Do you have questions at this time?”
Uinian smiled a thin-lipped smile. “None. You may proceed.”
Adare bit nervously at the corner of her lip. It was hardly the priest’s position to tell the governing magistrate when he could or could not proceed.
Il Tornja, for his part, simply shrugged. If he was unsettled or put out by Uinian’s posture, he didn’t show it.
Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades Page 21
