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

by Brian Staveley

  “Your monk friend doesn’t seem to think too highly of the plan, and he’s the one who spent some time with these bastards, right?”

  Kaden blew out a long breath. “Rampuri Tan was one of the Ishien before he came to the Shin. For years.”

  “And then he left,” Valyn pointed out, letting the last word hang in the air a moment. “Doesn’t speak too highly of this private war of theirs.”

  “It’s not a private war,” Kaden replied. “Not anymore. Not if the Csestriim killed our father.”

  “All right,” Valyn said. “I take the point. So let’s fly there together. My Wing can watch your back while you learn what you need to learn, then we all go to Annur together.”

  Kaden hesitated, then shook his head. “I don’t know how long I’ll be with the Ishien, and I need you back in Annur as soon as possible. We don’t know the first thing about what’s going on in the capital.”

  “We know that that priest, Uinian, is locked up for Father’s murder,” Valyn replied.

  “But what does that mean?”

  Valyn found himself chuckling bleakly. “Well, either Uinian did it or he didn’t. Maybe he’s Csestriim, and maybe he’s not. If he is involved, either he acted alone, or he didn’t. My guess is that he had some sort of help—that would explain his ability to turn Tarik Adiv and Micijah Ut, to suborn at least a Wing of Kettral, but then again, maybe they all had a sudden upwelling of religious sentiment.” He shook his head. “It’s tough to see the situation clearly from atop this rock.”

  “That’s why I need you in Annur,” Kaden said. “So that when I return, I’ll have some idea what I’m up against. Time is crucial here.”

  Valyn watched his brother. The first stars blazed in the eastern sky, but Kaden’s eyes burned brighter, the only true light in the great dark of the mountains. There was something in the way he sat, in the way he moved or didn’t move, something Valyn could apprehend only dimly. . . .

  “That’s not the only reason,” Valyn said finally. “You want us in Annur, but that’s not all. There’s something else.”

  Kaden shook his head ruefully. “I’m supposed to be the one who’s good at noticing things.”

  “What is it?” Valyn pressed.

  Kaden hesitated, then shrugged. “There are gates,” he said finally. “Kenta. I should be able to use them. It’s why I was sent here in the first place, but I need to test them. I need to know.”

  “Gates?”

  “A network of them, made by the Csestriim thousands of years ago and scattered across both continents.” He hesitated. “Maybe beyond both continents for all I know. You step through one kenta and emerge from a different one hundreds of miles distant. Thousands of miles. They were a Csestriim weapon, and now they are entrusted to us, to the Malkeenians, to keep and to guard.”

  Valyn stared for a moment. “Slow down,” he said finally, trying to make sense of the claim, to comprehend the full scope of the implications. Ancient Csestriim gates, portals spanning continents—it sounded like insanity, but then, pretty much everything since leaving the Islands had seemed insane. “Go back and tell it from the start.”

  Kaden remained silent a moment, gathering his thoughts, and then, as Valyn listened in disbelief, explained it all: the Blank God and the Csestriim leaches, the war against the humans and the founding of the empire, the vaniate—some strange trance that the Shin had somehow learned from the Csestriim, that Kaden himself had learned from the Shin—and the annihilation that threatened anyone who attempted to use the gates without achieving it. According to Kaden, Annur itself hinged on the network of kenta, hinged on the ability of the emperors to use them. The concept made tactical and strategic sense. The Kettral enjoyed a crushing advantage over their foes because the birds allowed them to move faster, to know more, to turn up suddenly where no one expected them to be. The gates, if they were real, would prove even more powerful. If they were real. If they actually worked.

  “Have you seen one?” Valyn asked. “Have you seen anyone use one?”

  Kaden shook his head. “But there’s a kenta near here in the mountains, one that leads to the Ishien. I asked Tan about it earlier.”

  Valyn spread his hands. “Even if it’s real, even if it does what the monk claims, it could kill you.”

  “Obliterate is more like it, but yes.”

  Valyn slid his sword back into its sheath, tucked the small stone into a pouch at his belt. The wind was cold, sharp, the stars like shards of ice scattered across the clear night.

  “I can’t let you do it,” he said quietly.

  Kaden nodded, as though he had expected the answer. “You can’t stop me.”

  “Yes, I can. The whole thing is worse than foolish, and I know something about foolish.” He ticked off the problems on his fingers. “Your monk is, at best, a mystery; these gates have the power to destroy entire armies; and the Ishien, given what little we know about them, sound like obsessive maniacs. It is a bad decision, Kaden.”

  “Sometimes there are no good decisions. If I’m going to thwart the Csestriim and rule Annur, I need the Ishien, and I need the gates.”

  “You can wait.”

  “While our foes consolidate their power?” Kaden turned to watch him. Valyn could hear his brother’s breathing, could smell the dried blood on his skin, the damp wool of his robe, and beneath it, something else, something hard and unbending. “I appreciate you trying to keep me safe,” he said quietly, laying a hand on Valyn’s shoulder, “but you can’t, not unless we live here in the mountains forever. Whatever path I take, there is risk. It comes with ruling. What I need from you most is not safety, but support. Tan doubts me. Pyrre challenges me. Your Wing thinks I’m an untrained, guileless recluse. I need you to back me.”

  They locked eyes. The plan was madness, but Kaden didn’t sound mad. He sounded ready.

  Valyn blew out a long, frustrated breath. “What happened to sitting on this rock while the Csestriim rule Annur?”

  Kaden smiled. “You convinced me not to.”

  “The plan,” Kaden said, facing down the group with more poise than Valyn would have expected, “is that Tan and I are going to the nearest kenta—he says there is one in the mountains northeast of here. We will all fly there, Tan and I will use the gate to reach the Ishien, and the rest of you will fly on to Annur. Once you’re in the city, you can contact my sister, Adare, and learn what she knows. Tan and I will meet you in the capital, at the Shin chapterhouse.”

  “In my experience,” Pyrre drawled, “plans tend to be a little heavier on the ‘hows’ and the ‘if, thens.’ ”

  “Why don’t we all just take this fucking kenta thing?” Gwenna demanded. Valyn’s Wing had greeted Kaden’s explanation of the gates first with amusement, then skepticism, then wariness, and though Valyn himself understood the response, shared it, in fact, he had promised Kaden his support.

  “Gwenna . . .” he began.

  “No, really!” she said, rounding on him. “If these things are real, we could save a whole lot of Hull’s sweet time using them. They eat less than birds and I can’t imagine they shit at all. . . .”

  “The kenta would destroy you,” Tan said, cutting through her words.

  Pyrre raised an eyebrow. “How frightening. They sound like fascinating artifacts, but this is all beside the point. My contract stipulates I keep Kaden safe. Playing nursemaid for his brother might be entertaining, but it’s not what I crossed half of Vash to accomplish.”

  Valyn ignored the jibe. “The Emperor has decided,” he said. “It is ours to obey.”

  The words were true enough, but they did little to allay his misgivings. Orders, he reminded himself. You’re following orders.

  Orders hadn’t been too much trouble for him back on the Islands—he had been a cadet then, and the men and women telling him what to do had earned their scars dozens of times over. Kaden, on the other hand, might be the rightful Emperor, but he was no soldier; he had none of the training, none of the instincts. Letting
him get involved with the reconnaissance of Ashk’lan at an immediate, tactical level had been a mistake. Valyn’s mistake. Not only had Kaden interfered with a crucial decision, he had put himself in harm’s way to do so. And Adiv was alive. Valyn forced down the thought along with his mounting anger.

  Kaden was the Emperor, and Valyn hadn’t flown two thousand miles just to undermine his brother’s nascent authority.

  “I have told you before,” Tan said, shaking his head slowly, “the Ishien are not like the Shin.”

  “As I recall,” Kaden replied, “no one is like the Shin.”

  “You thought your training hard?” the older monk asked. “It was a pleasant diversion compared with what the Ishien endure. They have a different path and different methods, methods that lead to unpredictable results. It is impossible to know how they would respond to our arrival.”

  “You were one of them once,” Kaden pointed out. “They know you.”

  “They knew me,” Tan corrected. “I left.”

  “If you don’t want the imperious young Emperor to go through the mysterious gate,” Pyrre opined, flipping a knife in the air and catching it without opening her eyes, “then don’t show him where the gate is.”

  Kaden turned to the Skullsworn. “Why does it matter to you what course I follow?”

  She flipped the knife again. “As I’ve explained, I was paid to keep you safe. No one’s stuck a blade in you yet, but I wouldn’t call this”—she waved her knife at the surrounding peaks—“safe.”

  On that point, at least, she and Valyn agreed.

  “I release you from your contract,” Kaden said.

  She chuckled. “You can’t release me. I understand that you’ve had a very exciting promotion, but I serve a god, not an emperor, and Ananshael is quite clear about the honoring of contracts.”

  “And what,” Valyn asked finally, unable to hold on to his silence any longer, “are the exact terms of your contract? To protect Kaden at Ashk’lan? To escort him back within the borders of Annur? Or is it a permanent thing—you have to follow him around the rest of his life, making sure no one sticks a knife in his back while he’s eating braised duck or making love to his future empress? I’m not sure the Aedolians—let alone the empress—will appreciate a Skullsworn lurking around the halls.”

  Pyrre laughed a warm, throaty laugh. “One could be forgiven, after the recent performance of the Aedolian Guard, for thinking the new Emperor might prefer a change of personnel.” She looked over at Kaden with that half smile of hers, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. When he didn’t respond, she shrugged. “Sadly, I won’t be fluffing his imperial feather bed or massaging his radiant buttocks. My task is to see him back to the city of Annur, to ensure that he reaches the Dawn Palace safely. After that, our time together, sweet though it has been, is finished.”

  Valyn studied the woman, trying to see past the careless façade, the casual bravado, past the very real fact of the ’Kent-kissing knife she kept flipping and flipping.

  “Who hired you?” he asked.

  She raised an eyebrow. “That would be telling.”

  “It’s time to do some telling,” Valyn said, shifting to put a little more space between himself and the Skullsworn.

  She noticed the movement, caught her knife, and smiled. “Nervous?”

  “Cautious,” Valyn replied. “A Skullsworn shows up in the Bone Mountains, just about as far as you can get from Rassambur without hiring a ship, claiming she has come to guard an emperor when the whole world knows the Skullsworn pay no fealty to any state, kingdom, or creed but their own sick worship of death.”

  “Sick,” she replied, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. “Sick. How uncharitable. There are priests and priestesses of Ananshael who would kill you for those words.” She tapped the blade of her knife speculatively against her palm. “Are you interested in seeing how your Kettral training holds up against someone more skilled than those cumbersome Aedolians?”

  Valyn measured the ground between them. The woman hadn’t moved, hadn’t even bothered to sit up, but a quick flick of the wrist would send that blade straight at his chest, and he didn’t have any illusions about his ability to snatch daggers out of the air. She didn’t smell scared. She smelled . . . amused.

  “I am interested,” he said, keeping his voice level, his anger in check, “in understanding why you are here. In knowing who hired a Skullsworn to guard an Annurian emperor.”

  She watched him carefully, almost eagerly, as though she were hoping he might reach for his blades, then shrugged and put her head back against the rock, closing her eyes.

  “You haven’t guessed?” she asked.

  Valyn had plenty of guesses, but none of them made much sense. The Skullsworn were assassins, not saviors.

  “My father,” Kaden said quietly. “Sanlitun hired you.”

  Pyrre pointed at him without opening her eyes.

  “He’s not quite as hopeless as he looks, this new Emperor of yours.”

  Valyn glanced over at Kaden. “Why would Father send Skullsworn?”

  “Maybe because the ’Kent-kissing Aedolian Guard turned out to be filled with traitors and idiots,” Gwenna observed. “The men he sent to warn you got themselves killed, and the ones who came for Kaden came to kill him.”

  “It makes sense,” Kaden said. “A strange sort of sense. He didn’t know who was a part of the conspiracy, and so he tried to protect each of us in a different way. He sent his most trusted Aedolians after you, but one of them must have let the plan leak. For me, he decided to send people who weren’t involved with imperial politics at all.”

  Valyn blew out a long, slow breath. It did make sense. It also spoke to Sanlitun’s level of desperation. The Skullsworn, after all, had been hired in the past to murder Annurian emperors.

  He shook his head. “Well, it’s a good fucking thing whoever we’re fighting against didn’t hire their own batch of Skullsworn.”

  Pyrre chuckled. “They did. Who do you think killed the boatload of Aedolians dispatched to warn Valyn?”

  Valyn stared. “You bastards are fighting on both sides of this thing?”

  “Kill her,” Gwenna said. “Let’s just kill her and be done with it.”

  The assassin didn’t even open her eyes at the threat. “I like meeting a young woman with a decisive cast of mind,” she said. “I’d prefer not to offer you to the god just because you’re feeling rash. And yes, we are, as you point out, on both sides, but only because to a worshipper of Ananshael, these sides don’t matter. There are the living, and the dead. If a contract involves killing, and there is enough gold involved, we will take the contract, the keeping of which is an act of holy devotion. I am obliged to see Kaden to Annur, even if it means opening the throats of other priests and priestesses in the process.”

  “In that case,” Kaden said, “my plan is the best for you, too. I get back to Annur faster, which means your work is over sooner.”

  Pyrre waved an admonitory finger at him. “In theory.”

  “The assassin is irrelevant,” Tan cut in.

  “The assassin takes issue with that statement,” Pyrre shot back, “and she points out once again that if you don’t want your precocious young leader to go through your secret gate, you could simply avoid showing him said gate.”

  For a moment Tan actually seemed to consider the suggestion, then shook his head. “Though his mind moves like a beast’s, he is not a beast. To pen him would only delay the inevitable. He must reach these decisions on his own.”

  “I’m just waiting for you all to figure it out,” Valyn said firmly, “but let’s be really clear on one point: Kaden is the Emperor of Annur. He rules here, and if there’s too much more talk about ‘penning,’ or ‘beasts,’ then either you”—he pointed at the assassin—“or you”—at Tan—“are going to end up dead in the bottom of a ravine.”

  “How spirited,” Pyrre said, flipping her knife again, “and fraternal.”

  Tan ignored the warning
altogether, and not for the first time Valyn found himself wondering about the monk’s past. That Pyrre seemed indifferent to the presence of a Wing of Kettral made a certain sense—the Skullsworn supposedly left behind all fear of death in the process of their initiation. The monk, on the other hand, was an utter enigma. Evidently he’d destroyed a number of the freakish Csestriim creatures—ak’hanath, Kaden called them—in the fighting days earlier, but as Valyn never saw the things alive, he wasn’t sure how difficult that would be. The monk carried his spear as though he understood how to use it, but there was no telling where he had learned. Perhaps among these Ishien that Kaden was so eager to visit.

  “There’s really only one question,” Kaden said. “Will the Ishien help me?”

  Tan considered the question. “Possibly.”

  “Then we go.”

  “Or they might not.”

  “Why? Their war is against the Csestriim, as is mine.”

  “But their path is not yours.”

  Kaden seemed about to respond, then took a deep breath, held it for a while before exhaling slowly as he gazed over the mountains. Partly, Valyn felt sorry for his brother. He himself had spent enough time trying to corral an unruly Wing that he understood the frustrations of thwarted command. Kaden had it even worse. At least Valyn’s Wing, for all their difficulty, were as young and green as he was. Rampuri Tan had been Kaden’s instructor, his teacher until the destruction of Ashk’lan, and wrangling the monk looked about as easy as hauling a boulder uphill. Tan appeared as indifferent to Kaden’s imperial title as he did to Valyn’s military rank and training. If the older monk was going to be convinced, it would be for reasons Valyn would never fathom.

  “Then what do you suggest?” Kaden asked, showing impressive restraint.

  “Fly me to the kenta,” Tan replied. “I will visit the Ishien, learn what they know, while you return to the capital with your brother. We will all meet in Annur.”