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Contents
PROLOGUE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
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19
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52
GODS AND RACES, AS UNDERSTOOD BY THE CITIZENS OF ANNUR
PROLOGUE
By the time Sioan reached the tower’s top, stepping from the last stair into the bitter chill of the night, the air in her lungs burned with a fury to match the fire raging in the streets below. The climb had taken hours—half the night, in fact. The guardsmen pacing her showed no visible strain, but then, the Aedolian Guard jogged the steps of Intarra’s Spear in full armor once a moon. Keeping pace with a middle-aged Empress and three small children proved no great difficulty. She, on the other hand, felt ready to drop. Each landing invited her to stop, to sit, to lean against the wooden scaffolding that supported the stairs, close her eyes, and collapse into sleep.
I have grown too soft, she told herself again and again, self-reproach the only thing keeping her wobbling legs moving. I have become a soft woman living among soft things.
In truth, however, she worried more about her children than herself. They had all made the climb to the top of the Spear, but never with such urgency. A normal ascent might span two days, with breaks along the way for rest and refreshment, trays of food and generous mattresses laid out by an advance party of cooks and slaves. Those climbs were pleasant, celebratory; the children were too small for this furious charge. And yet Sioan’s husband had insisted. One did not refuse the Emperor of Annur.
This is their city, Sanlitun told her. The heart of their empire. This is something they must see. The climb will be the least of the difficulties they will one day face.
Not that he had to climb the ’Kent-kissing tower. A Kettral Wing, five hard-eyed men and women in black, had whisked the Emperor to the top of the Spear beneath their massive, terrifying hawk. Sioan understood the urgency. Flames tore through the streets, and her husband needed the vantage to command the response. Annur could not afford to wait while he mounted tens of thousands of steps.
The Kettral had offered to come back for Sioan and the children, but she refused. Sanlitun claimed the birds were tame, but tame was not the same thing as domesticated, and she had no intention of abandoning her children to the talons of a creature that could rend oxen to ribbons with a single swipe.
And so, as the Emperor stood on the roof giving orders to stop the city from burning, Sioan had labored up the stairs, inwardly cursing her husband for insisting they join him, cursing herself for growing old. The Aedolians climbed silently, but the children, despite their initial enthusiasm, struggled. Adare was the oldest and strongest, but even she was only ten, and they hadn’t climbed for long before she started to pant. Kaden and Valyn were even worse. The steps—a human construction built into the clear, ironglass shell of the ancient, impossible structure—were large for their short legs, and both boys kept tripping, purpling shins and elbows against the wooden treads.
For thirty floors, the wooden steps wound upward through level after level of administrative chambers and luxurious suites. The human builders of those chambers and suites had stopped at thirty floors. Though the shell of the tower stretched on above, so high that it seemed endless, only the stairs continued, spiraling up inside the vast emptiness, up and up, thin and trembling, suspended in the center of the impossible glass column. Hundreds of paces higher, the staircase pierced the solitary prison level—a single floor built of solid steel—then continued higher still. During the day, it was like climbing through a column of pure light. At night, however, the surrounding void was disorienting, even frightening. There was only the winding stair, the encompassing dark, and beyond the walls of the spear itself, the angry blaze of Annur burning.
For all her husband’s insistence on haste, the city would burn whether or not the four of them were there to watch, and Sioan urged the children to stop each time they reached a landing. Adare, however, would fall down dead before she disappointed her father, and Valyn and Kaden, miserable though they were, trudged on grimly, shooting glances at each other, each clearly hoping the other would quit, neither willing to say the words.
When they emerged, finally, from the trapdoor, all three looked ready to fall over, and though a low wall ringed the top of Intarra’s Spear, Sioan put her arms out protectively when the wind gusted. She need not have worried. The Aedolians—Fulton and Birch, Yian and Trell—ringed the children, guarding, even here, against some constant, unseen threat. She turned to her husband, the curses ready on her tongue, then fell silent, staring at the blaze destroying the city below.
They had seen it from inside the Spear, of course—the furious red refracted through the glass walls—but from the impossible height of the tower’s top, the streets and canals might have been lines etched on a map. Sioan could extend a hand and blot out whole quarters—Graves or Lowmarket, West Kennels or the Docks. She could not, however, blot out the fire. The report, when she started climbing, had put it on the very western edge of Annur, a vicious conflagration confined to half a dozen blocks. During their interminable ascent, however, it had spread, spread horribly, devouring everything west of the Ghost Road and then, fanned by a quick wind off the western sea, lapped its way east toward the far end of the Godsway. She tried to calculate the number of houses burned, the lives lost. She failed.
At the sound of the trapdoor clattering shut, Sanlitun turned. Even after years of marriage, his gaze still gave her pause. Though Adare and Kaden shared their father’s burning irises, the fire in the children’s eyes was warm, almost friendly, like the light from a winter hearth or the gaze of the
sun. Sanlitun’s eyes, however, burned with a frigid, unwavering flame, a light with no heat or smoke. No emotion showed on his face. He might have spent half the night watching the stars chart their course through the dark or the moonlight ribbing the waves rather than fighting a conflagration that threatened to consume his city.
Sanlitun considered his children, and Sioan felt Adare straighten at her side. The girl would collapse later, in the privacy of her own chambers, but now, in the presence of her father, legs trembling with the strain of the climb, she refused to lean on her mother. Kaden’s eyes were wide as plates as he stared at the city below. He might have been alone on the roof, a child of seven facing the blaze all by himself. Only Valyn took her hand, sliding his small fingers into her grip as he looked from the fire to his father, then back.
“You arrived in time,” the Emperor said, gesturing to the dark blocks of the city.
“In time for what?” Sioan demanded, her anger threatening to choke her. “To watch ten thousand people burn?”
Her husband considered her for a moment, then nodded. “Among other things,” he replied quietly, then turned to the scribe at his side.
“Have them start another fire,” he said. “The full length of Anlatun’s Way, from the southern border of the city to the north.”
The scribe, face intent, bent to the task, brushing the words over the parchment, holding the sheet in the air a moment to dry, rolling it quickly, tucking it into a bamboo tube, then slipping it into a chute running down the center of the Spear. It had taken Sioan half the night to ascend the ’Shael-spawned tower; the Emperor’s orders would reach the palace below in a matter of moments.
The command away, Sanlitun turned to his children once again. “Do you understand?” he asked.
Adare bit her lip. Kaden said nothing. Only Valyn stepped forward, squinting against the wind and the fire both. He turned to the long lenses cradled in their brackets against the low wall, lifted one, and put it to his eye. “Anlatun’s Way isn’t burning,” he protested after a moment. “The fire is still blocks to the west.”
His father nodded.
“Then why . . .” He trailed off, the answer in his dark eyes.
“You’re starting a second fire,” Adare said. “To check the first.”
Sanlitun nodded. “The weapon is the shield. The foe is the friend. What is burned cannot burn again.”
For a long time the whole family stood in silence, staring at the blaze eating its way east. Only Sioan refused a long lens. She could see what she needed to see with her own eyes. Slowly, implacably, the fire came on, red and gold and horrible until, in a straight line across the western end of the city, a new set of fires burst out, discrete points at first, spreading together until an avenue of flame limned the western edge of the broad street that was Anlatun’s Way.
“It’s working,” Adare said. “The new fire is moving west.”
“All right,” Sioan said abruptly, understanding at last what her husband wanted them to see, what he wanted them to learn; desperate, suddenly, to spare her children the sight and the knowledge both. “They have witnessed enough.”
She reached out to take the long lens from Adare, but the girl snatched it away, training it on the twin fires once more.
Sanlitun met his wife’s glare, then took her hand in his own. “No,” he said quietly. “They have not.”
It was Kaden, finally, who realized.
“The people,” he said, gesturing. “They were running away, running east, but now they’ve stopped.”
“They’re trapped,” Adare said, dropping her long lens and spinning to confront her father. “They’re trapped. You have to do something!”
“He did,” Valyn said. He looked up at the Emperor, the child’s hope horrible in his gaze. “You already did, right? An order. Before we got here. You warned them somehow. . . .”
The boy trailed off, seeing the answer in those cold, blazing eyes.
“What order would I give?” Sanlitun asked, his voice soft and unstoppable as the wind. “Thousands of people live between those two fires, Valyn. Tens of thousands. Many will have fled, but how would I reach those who have not?”
“But they’ll burn,” Kaden whispered.
He nodded slowly. “They are burning even now.”
“Why,” Sioan demanded, not sure if the tears in her eyes were for the citizens screaming unheard in their homes so far below, or for her children, staring, horrified, at the distant flames. “Why did they need to see this?”
“One day the empire will be theirs.”
“Theirs to rule, to protect, not to destroy!”
He continued to hold her hand, but didn’t look away from the children. “They will not be ready to rule it,” he said, his eyes silent as the stars, “until they are willing to see it burn.”
1
Kaden hui’Malkeenian did his best to ignore both the cold granite beneath him and the hot sun beating down on his back as he slid forward, trying to get a better view of the scattered stone buildings below. A brisk wind, soaked with the cold of the lingering snows, scratched at his skin. He took a breath, drawing the heat from his core into his limbs, stilling the trembling before it could begin. His years of training with the monks were good for that much, at least. That much, and precious little else.
Valyn shifted at his side, glancing back the way they had come, then forward once more.
“Is this the path you took when you fled?” he asked.
Kaden shook his head. “We went that way,” he replied, pointing north toward a great stone spire silhouetted against the sky, “beneath the Talon, then east past Buri’s Leap and the Black and Gold Knives. It was night, and those trails are brutally steep. We hoped that soldiers in full armor wouldn’t be able to keep up with us.”
“I’m surprised they were.” “So was I,” Kaden said.
He levered himself up on his elbows to peer over the spine of rock, but Valyn dragged him back.
“Keep your head down, Your Radiance,” he growled.
Your Radiance. The title still sounded wrong, unstable and treacherous, like spring ice on a mountain tarn, the whole surface groaning even as it glittered, ready to crack beneath the weight of the first unwary foot. It was hard enough when others used the title, but from Valyn the words were almost unbearable. Though they’d spent half their lives apart, though both were now men in their own right, almost strangers, with their own secrets and scars, Valyn was still his brother, still his blood, and all the training, all the years, couldn’t quite efface the reckless boy Kaden remembered from his childhood, the partner with whom he’d played blades and bandits, racing through the hallways and pavilions of the Dawn Palace. Hearing Valyn use the official title was like hearing his own past erased, his childhood destroyed, replaced utterly by the brutal fact of the present.
The monks, of course, would have approved. The past is a dream, they used to say. The future is a dream. There is only now. Which meant those same monks, the men who had raised him, trained him, were not men at all, not anymore. They were rotting meat, corpses strewn on the ledges below.
Valyn jerked a thumb over the rocks that shielded them, jarring Kaden from his thoughts. “We’re still a good way off, but some of the bastards who killed your friends might have long lenses.”
Kaden frowned, drawing his focus back to the present. He had never even considered the possibility of long lenses—another reminder, as if he needed another reminder, of how poorly his cloistered life at Ashk’lan had prepared him for this sudden immersion in the treacherous currents of the world. He could paint, sit in meditation, or run for days over rough trail, but painting, running, and meditation were meager skills when set against the machinations of the men who had murdered his father, slaughtered the Shin monks, and very nearly killed him as well. Not for the first time, he found himself envying Valyn’s training.
For eight years Kaden had struggled to quell his own desires and hopes, fears and sorrows, had fought what felt lik
e an endless battle against himself. Over and over the Shin had intoned their mantras: Hope’s edge is sharper than steel. To want is to lack. To care is to die. There was truth to the words, far more truth than Kaden had imagined when he first arrived in the mountains as a child, but if he had learned anything in the past few days, days filled with blood, death, and confusion, he had learned the limits to that truth. A steel edge, as it turned out, was plenty sharp. Clinging to the self might kill you, but not if someone put a knife in your heart first.
In the space of a few days, Kaden’s foes had multiplied beyond his own persistent failings, and these new enemies wore polished armor, carried swords in their fists, wielded lies by the thousands. If he was going to survive, if he was to take his father’s place on the Unhewn Throne, he needed to know about long lenses and swords, politics and people, about all the things the Shin had neglected in their single-minded effort to train him in the empty trance that was the vaniate. It would take years to fill in the gaps, and he did not have years. His father was dead, had been dead for months already, and that meant, prepared or not, Kaden hui’Malkeenian was the Emperor of Annur.
Until someone kills me, he added silently.
Given the events of the past few days, that possibility loomed suddenly, strikingly large. That armed men had arrived with orders to murder him and destroy the monastery was terrifying enough, but that they were comprised of his own Aedolian Guard—an order sworn to protect and defend him—that they were commanded by high-ranking Annurians, men at the very top of the pyramid of imperial politics, was almost beyond belief. In some ways, returning to the capital and sitting the Unhewn Throne seemed like the surest way to help his enemies finish what they had started.
Of course, he thought grimly, if I’m murdered in Annur, it will mean I made it back to Annur, which would be a success of sorts.
Valyn gestured toward the lip of the rocky escarpment that shielded them. “When you look, look slowly, Your Radiance,” he said. “The eye is attracted to motion.”
That much, at least, Kaden knew. He’d spent enough time tracking crag cats and lost goats to know how to remain hidden. He shifted his weight onto his elbows, inching up until his eyes cleared the low spine of rock. Below and to the west, maybe a quarter mile distant, hunched precariously on a narrow ledge between the cliffs below and the vast, chiseled peaks above, stood Ashk’lan, sole monastery of the Shin monks, and Kaden’s home.
Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire: Page 1
