The Hand of the Sun King

by J. T. Greathouse

  “And to remind the people of imperial cruelty,” I said. “To stoke their hatred, before they accustom themselves to Sienese rule.”

  “That, too,” Frothing Wolf said, and returned her attention to the Sienese encampment. “Now tell me, Foolish Cur--which tent is Hand Usher’s?”

  That gave me pause. “He is well guarded,” I said.

  “As am I,” she said. “Yet he sends his assassins. Mine, I think, are just as capable.”

  I pointed--not to Usher’s tent, but to mine. “There. Though he is often out surveying the fortifications.”

  Frothing Wolf patted my shoulder, then led me back to the stairs.

  “Your guards will escort you back to your room,” she said. “Hopefully tomorrow morning we can toast to Hand Usher’s death, which may well buy us the time we need to make this siege more than a statement.”

  * * *

  For the rest of the day I paced the small room Frothing Wolf had given me. I knew, now, where to look for Oriole, and might have fought my way to him through the city, but what if I was wrong? I had no way to openly investigate the garrison yard without arousing suspicion. And Frothing Wolf’s assassins might discover that I had lied about the placement of Hand Usher’s tent, and return. At that moment I would have no choice but to kill her and hope that Oriole was still alive, somewhere.

  I waited for nightfall, and then--as though I was not under guard and had the freedom of the city--opened the door to my room and stepped into the hall. The two soldiers flanking it tensed and reached for their swords. I put up my hands and smiled sheepishly.

  “I need the latrine,” I said. “Care to show me the way?”

  “You have a chamber pot,” one said.

  “And which of you two will empty it? I’d rather not spend the night sleeping next to my own shit. Or is that how Frothing Wolf treats her allies?”

  “Been living too long in imperial palaces,” the other guard said.

  I crossed my arms, felt my heart thundering, tried to devise a secondary plan if this one failed. “Just take me to an alleyway or something,” I said. “And quickly.”

  The first guard rolled his eyes, but seemed to relax, and led the way.

  “Thank you,” I said, and followed, while the second fell into step behind me.

  We left the city hall and turned into a nearby abandoned alley, which stank with an acrid tang appropriate to my supposed needs. It was dark but for the distant light of a brazier in the street behind us.

  “Nearest thing to a latrine we’ve got,” the guard ahead of me said. “Now just don’t expect us to look away while--"

  In two steps of the Iron Dance I crouched, stepped backward, and threw an elbow upward into the throat of the guard behind me. He pawed at his neck and collapsed, while my left hand found the hilt of his sword and pulled it free. The guard ahead of me turned, drawing his own sword, but not quickly enough. With another step I stabbed at his eye. His orbital crunched like breaking porcelain, and with a rattling gasp he fell dead.

  I left the sword lodged in his skull. The other guard’s face had purpled above his crushed throat. He watched me with bloodshot, bulging eyes.

  My stomach turned as the life went out of him with a last, ragged spasm. I tried not to look at the brains and blood soaking the earth.

  With a shuddering breath I steeled myself and set off from the alleyway toward the garrison yard.

  Their corpses would be found before long, and the shroud of my deceptions would unravel. I had only until then to find Oriole.

  * * *

  The four guards at the garrison door eyed me with suspicion as I approached, doing my best to seem unhurried, thankful for the drizzling rain which would have washed any spattering of blood from my face.

  “Frigid Cub asked for my help with an interrogation,” I said, before any of them could speak. “There is a prisoner on the verge of death, she said, who might have held back valuable information despite her efforts.”

  “And how are you meant to help?” one of them said. “Are you some kind of doctor?”

  “Surely you were told about me,” I said, and showed the palm of my left hand. All four tensed at the sight of my tetragram. “Foolish Cur,” I continued. “The witch who was, for a time, Hand of the Emperor, and stole Sienese magic for the rebellion.”

  The lie cut through them, tempered by truth--for why else would a Hand of the Emperor approach them and reveal himself, rather than burn them all to ash with battle-sorcery? They waved me through without another word.

  The yard--where Iron Town’s garrison would drill and assemble--was a tiled square no wider than a hundred paces. The tiles were worn and poorly maintained, with shoots of grass growing from their cracks. Some bore fresh bloodstains as evidence of the garrison’s last stand against Frothing Wolf’s forces, perhaps, or merely evidence of torture.

  The dozen survivors of the garrison had been bound at wrist, elbow, and knee and made to sit in rows. My eyes swept over them, seeking Oriole in the torchlight and failing to find him, until my gaze settled on a post driven into the far corner of the yard. A young man slouched there, naked, mottled with bruises, his hair lank and wet with rain, his fingers broken and blackened, his limbs wrenched to horrid angles. He was held upright only by the shackles around his wrists.

  At first, I did not recognize him--the Oriole I knew, who I had last seen full of excitement and vigor, ready for his first taste of war--had nothing in common with this broken, disfigured youth. But I knew, the moment I saw him, with a sickening certainty.

  All at once, the horror of the violence I had done, the last two days without sleep and little food, all of it caught up to me. I felt weak, and terrified, and desperate, absurdly, for Doctor Sho, whose medicines had nursed me back from brokenness and could do the same for Oriole.

  He was still breathing. Short, shallow breaths that gurgled past his lips and rattled in his lungs. By the look of his bruises most of his ribs had been broken. His lungs, his stomach, even his intestines might have been punctured by those cracked and splintered bones.

  “Oriole,” I whispered, cupping his face in my hands, desperate for his eyes to open, to hear his voice. “It’s Alder. I’m here. Everything will be alright.”

  He answered only with labored breathing, muted by the drumming of the rain and the creak of his chains.

  “Oriole? Say something,” I said, voice growing frantic. “Open your eyes. Blink if it hurts too much to speak.”

  No response. If he did hear my voice, it was through too dense a fog of pain.

  Healing sorcery required direction. If I poured it into him without knowing what I wished to heal, his body--weak as it was--would go into shock. Like the songbirds who had died in my care. But he might die of his injuries before I could parse the ruin Frigid Cub had worked. Better to do what I could to stabilize him, then get him out of Iron Town, where Hand Usher and I could take the time required to heal him properly. I reached through the canon and put my hand to his chest.

  “So, you do know him.”

  I leapt to my feet and spun toward the voice, and in the same moment felt the cramping wake of veering. A dark, feathered blur flew over my head. When I turned to face it, Frigid Cub knelt behind Oriole, a knife in one hand pressed to the side of his neck.

  “Frigid Cub,” I said, mind churning for some lie, some line of attack, something to move that knife away from Oriole’s throat. “Your mother sent me. She wanted to make sure--"

  “No, she didn’t,” Frigid Cub said. “She’s had either Burning Dog or I watch your room since she left you. I followed you from the alleyway. Just…curious to see what you’d do, and why you snuck into Iron Town, if not to kill mother.”

  She pressed the tip of the knife to Oriole’s skin. A line of fresh blood trickled out, dribbling down his neck and cutting a rivulet through the dried gore caked to his chest. I lurched forward, fought to get myself under control. Could I put a spear of lightning through her face without the risk of hitting Ori
ole? It was possible--I had seen Hand Usher perform more difficult feats with battle-sorcery--but fear stayed my hand.

  “So, who is he to you?” Frigid Cub said. “What makes him so valuable that you would risk your life--and a chance to kill the notorious Frothing Wolf--to save him?”

  “The governor’s son,” I said.

  She shook her head. “You are Hand of the Emperor, which makes you more valuable than him, even if he comes from a good family. Come now, Foolish Cur,” she said, and pressed the knife deeper, drawing a thicker runnel of blood. “Be honest.”

  A moan bubbled from Oriole’s lips. I moved into the second channel and hurled a bolt of lightning into the ground, shattering tiles, stirring the other prisoners awake and into a terrified storm of shouting.

  “Your mother will have felt that,” I said. “She will come, fearing for your life, and when she steps through that gate I will spear her through the heart.”

  “No, she won’t,” Frigid Cub said, her eyes hardening. She flexed her jaw, rippling the scar beside her mouth. “She’ll flee, and fight another day, because your façade has crumbled, now, and the threat to her life is real.”

  “What a mother,” I snarled. “Willing to abandon her own daughter. I am good at lying, Frigid Cub. Much better than you. Let me take him and leave Iron Town, and I will let you, your mother, and your sister live.”

  “Didn’t she tell you, Foolish Cur?” Frigid Cub said, tensing. “The point of our fight is not to win, and certainly not to preserve our own lives. The point is to prove that the Empire, and its servants, can still be hurt.”

  “Wait,” I blurted. “Don't kill him. He's my friend.”

  Frigid Cub smiled, slow and cruel. “Finally, a sliver of the truth,” she said, and opened Oriole’s throat.

  Disbelief struck like an arrow. Frigid Cub lunged toward me, and the wake of her sorcery washed over me like the heat of a burning fever.

  I opened my hand. Lightning speared through the cloud of flame she conjured and hurled her to the ground. A second pulse of battle-sorcery blasted the tiles beneath her apart. The third charred her to a cracked and runny ruin.

  The howling in my mind drowned out thoughts of my mission to kill Frothing Wolf, of the siege, of anything but the wide wound in Oriole’s neck and the blood pooling at his feet. With Frigid Cub’s knife I smashed the lock that held his shackles closed, then, cradling him, lowered him to the ground. His skin was warm, but he was motionless, empty of breath.

  “No, no,” I stammered, and reached for the third channel of the canon.

  Oriole’s pallid flesh looked almost hale through the muting of my senses in the wake of my healing sorcery. I held my tetragram above his throat and willed that awful wound to close.

  A part of me remembered songbirds, dying in my hands, and urged caution.

  Another--that saw the blood on the tiles, on Oriole’s chest, pulsing from his throat--knew that caution was pointless.

  A crack like thunder sounded from the southern wall, the first explosion in the staccato percussion of Sienese grenades. I felt the chill in my lungs and the warmth on my skin in the wake of Hand Usher’s conjured lightning. He had felt my warning to Frigid Cub and the wakes of our battle and attacked, at last.

  Too late.

  I reached deeper into the canon of sorcery, drawing all I could from the third channel. It swept through me like a rapid, dragging me under, dousing my senses till the world became a smear of color and a slurry of muted sound and texture. I pressed my hand to Oriole’s wound--as though closing that small distance of empty air might make the difference--and poured magic into him.

  His heart had stopped. His wounds remained.

  I dredged for every scrap of power, and found the stone wall of the canon, the border of the magic the Emperor permitted his servants to wield. I hammered against it, a desperate scream burning in my throat. As a child, when I first touched sorcery, I had suffered no such boundary. My will had hovered above the pattern of the world. Reality had been mine to rewrite. Mine to shape. It would have been a small thing, with such power, to knit Oriole’s wounds--even the wounds of a corpse--and set his heart to beating, his lungs to pumping.

  But the canon could do nothing beyond the Emperor’s designs. And the Emperor did not share my wish to save Oriole's life.

  But I had other magic.

  Grasping for a strand of hope, I reached for my grandmother’s witchcraft. She had knit me back together the night I made myself an abomination.

  I felt the heat of fire, the ache and cramp of veering. Nothing else. No secret witchcraft of healing.

  How had she done it? Desperation became a howling anger. I knew too little. Had been denied every opportunity to truly learn. Hemmed in and limited by the designs of others, cut off from the power that could have saved my friend.

  Despair dug a hollow within me. All I could do was force more and more healing magic into him, like pouring water into a depthless void. The world blurred till there was nothing left but Oriole, his wounds, and the pitiful magic I continued to wield, hoping against hope that his wounds would knit, his bruises fade, his lungs fill and heart beat again.

  “Alder.” I heard a familiar voice, muted and softened, as though it flowed through water instead of air. A hand clamped down on my shoulder, then another cradled the side of my face and pulled my gaze away from Oriole. Hand Usher stared into my eyes. Even smeared and distorted as his expression was, I saw his panic.

  “Let go, Alder,” Hand Usher said. “He’s dead.”

  His words shattered against my disbelieving mind. I pulled away, reached for Oriole, threw myself against the walls of the canon. Knowing I could never break through. Hurling myself again and again regardless. Oriole's only hope, and mine, lay beyond, in the deeper power I had touched before my world was narrowed by pact and canon.

  “Alder!”

  I was deaf to him. And so, he found another way to reach me.

  Even muted by the wake of my own desperate magic, I felt his sorcery. A heavy wake, like a caught breath and a weight on my shoulders, not unlike transmission. Lights flashed in the corner of my eye. A tightness gripped my arms and legs, forcing my hands to my sides and my knees together. I collapsed beside Oriole. Still, I tried to work some impossible magic beyond the canon, only now my will felt slow, as though it were a leaden, senseless limb.

  “Stop, Alder,” Usher’s voice was harsh, full of command, and unimpeachable. “There is nothing to be done for him.”

  Only then did it become true to me. As I came to my senses, I saw the flickering ropes of iridescent light that bound my arms and legs. I stared at them, dumbfounded. The wake of Usher’s sorcery winked out of existence, and my bonds with it.

  “Alder.” Usher knelt and reached for me. “You’re alright now.”

  “What did you do to me?” I said, my voice a thin quaver.

  His face hardened. Only for an instant. “What you were doing was dangerous. The dead cannot be restored, Alder. You would have only killed yourself.”

  “What did you do?” I said.

  “I employed a sorcery you’ll learn, in time,” he said, and pulled me to my feet. “For now, tell me what happened here.”

  I tried to steady myself, and managed to keep my feet, but as my eyes drifted back toward Oriole a spasm shook me. I retched against an empty stomach.

  “You did everything you could,” Usher said, holding my shoulders to help me keep my feet.

  “No,” I said, and pried myself away from him, my grief catching flame, burning to anger. “No, we didn’t. We could have attacked this morning. We could have saved him.”

  Usher’s face hardened, but he did not answer my accusation. His eyes sought the charred ruin of Frigid Cub, who lay on broken tiles in a puddle of ashen mud.

  “Is that…?”

  “Her daughter,” I said. “I don’t know where Frothing Wolf is. There is another daughter, likely defending the tunnel.”

  Hand Usher had the tact and presen
ce of mind not to show any reaction to my failure. His gaze returned to Oriole, and a flicker of grief crossed his face.

  “We could have saved him,” I said again.

  He opened his mouth, as though to respond, then closed it. The rain fell and diluted Oriole’s blood, which flowed away in red, slick ribbons.

  “I will deal with Frothing Wolf, if she is still in Iron Town,” he said, and gestured toward the prisoners--the former imperial garrison. A half dozen soldiers moved among them, forcing shackles open with the points of their daggers. “Lead these men to our camp. There is still fighting, but the Nayeni will surrender without their witches.”

  “We could have--”

  “We could have,” Usher said firmly. “But we did not. And you and I will have to live with that mistake.”

  “That mistake?” My voice hitched. “Our mistake cost Oriole his life. Cost dozens of men their lives--”

  “There is always death in war.”

  “What war?” I was shouting now, my anger finding vent in raw-voiced words. “This was no war. A few hundred malcontented villagers and a town already on the brink of starvation, who we might have forced to surrender the day we arrived. Frothing Wolf would have escaped, but she escaped anyway, and Oriole would still be alive.”

  “And what action did you take to save him, these two days you have spent in the company of our enemies?” Usher snapped.

  I steadied myself, felt an itching in my witchmarks. One shield of lies had shattered in my battle with Frigid Cub. Time again to take up the other.

  “Do you think they would let a peasant volunteer, suddenly arrived during a siege, stand guard over their most valuable prisoner?” I said. “They gave me a posting on the wall. I abandoned it at the first opportunity, killed two men who questioned me, and reached Oriole's side while he yet lived, only to watch Frigid Cub cut his throat. More than can be said for you.”

  His face hardened, and I could only hope my impudence made my half-truths more convincing, spoken, as they were, without the veils of deference and propriety. “Your grief is understandable,” he said at last. “And I will overlook this disrespect. But you will do as you have been ordered, Hand Alder.”