Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (29 page)

As a child, Adare had marveled at the scope and the color, but now, as she dismounted from her palanquin with what seemed like half of Annur crowded about, it was the armed soldiers ringing the walls and flanking the tall doors that drew her eye and stoked her fears. Il Tornja had insisted that a thousand guardsmen accompany the odd procession from the Palace to the temple, more than twice the number of the waiting Sons of Flame, probably enough to overwhelm them if it came to an open battle. Of course, if it came to blood, there was also the mob to consider. In addition to the hundreds formally attached to the trial, thousands more had gathered—some from curiosity, others indignation—and already rumors and anger had grown ripe in the restive crowd.

A battle on the Godsway,
Adare thought.
Sweet ’Shael, my father’s barely cold in his tomb and already the empire is pulling apart at the seams.

If il Tornja was concerned, he didn’t show it. The
kenarang
sat his horse in a casual half slouch, clearly more comfortable there than he had been back in the Palace. He might have been out for a ride in the country, only there was something in his eyes Adare had not noticed before, something alert and predatory, as he surveyed the crowd.

Uinian, for his part, looked triumphant. He raised his manacled hands to the mob in a gesture of blessing or defiance.
With the wrong words, he could start a riot right now.
And yet, after what seemed like an eternity, he turned to enter the temple.

The inside of the Temple of Light was, if anything, more impressive than the exterior. The light flooding through those tall windows danced on the surface of vast reflecting pools, scribbling bright shapes on the walls and pillars. Worshippers had dropped coins into those pools: copper flames, silver moons, even a few golden Annurian suns from the most wealthy.
Another source of revenue for Uinian,
Adare thought, only now fully realizing the extent of the priest’s reach and influence,
and another one we do not tax.
Each of those suns could keep a soldier in armor for the better part of half a year, a soldier who might well choose to fight against the Unhewn Throne.

The Aedolians accompanying the party had ringed off a small space in the center of the temple, holding back the press of those eager to witness a death or a miracle, and it was into this space that Adare stepped along with il Tornja, the other ministers, and Uinian himself.

“Here,”
the Chief Priest said, casting a defiant smile to the crowd, “I will face my Trial.”

Of course. The entire vault of the temple was a glass and crystal hymn to light—panes and facets reflecting and refracting a thousand hues—but the most striking sight of all was the enormous lens set into the ceiling directly above the nave.

Old Semptis Hodd had explained the principles of lenses to Adare when she was only a child, showing her how she could use a circle of carefully ground glass to ignite a small fire in the Palace courtyard. Adare had wanted to see how some ants would stand up to the treatment, but her tutor refused, assuring her that they would burn as readily as the grass but insisting that a princess should not sully herself with such crass pursuits. Adare was glad now that she had spared the ants, but she wished she’d paid more attention to Hodd’s lectures on lenses.

There, on the floor at the center of the nave, a square foot of stone glowed a sullen red, shivering the air above it where the lens began to focus the noon rays of the sun. The effect would not last long; the sun would peak, then start her slow descent, and the stone would cool. For about ten minutes, however, that beam of liquid light could boil water, char wood, or blacken flesh in an instant, and it was there that for centuries priests had made offerings to Intarra.

“This,” Uinian said, gesturing to the smoldering stone, “is where I will face my goddess.”

A collective gasp went through the crowd.

He can’t survive it,
Adare told herself.
It’s impossible.

Il Tornja looked skeptical. “It’s not a flame.”

Uinian shook his head in scorn. “This is the pure kiss of Intarra. If you doubt her power,” he continued, stripping the amice from his shoulders in one fluid motion and hurling it into the light, “observe!” The cloth caught flame in midair before landing in an ashen heap on the stone. A stir of excitement ran through the mob. Adare thought she might be sick.

“No!” she shouted, stepping forward. “The regent is right. This is
not
a flame. The man has demanded Trial by Flame. Let there be a
flame.
”

“How little the princess understands,” Uinian sneered, “of the nature of the goddess. Of the many forms she may take. When I step into her burning sight and do not burn, the world will know who is the
true
servant of Intarra. Your family claims descent from the goddess, but her ways are ineffable. Her favor has shifted. And without her favor, you are what? Not divinely ordained protectors, but simple tyrants!”

The heat lapped at Adare’s face, and sweat slicked the flesh beneath her robes.

“You dare call us tyrants,” she spat back. “You? Who murdered the rightful Emperor?”

Uinian smiled. “The test will tell.”

He will fail,
Adare said, repeating the inner mantra again and again.
He will fail.
But the man had mocked and manipulated the entire process thus far. That searing heat was not a flame, and the smile had not left his lips.

“I will not accept this,” Adare insisted, raising her voice over the growing noise of the crowd. “I do not accept this trial.”

“You may forget, woman,” Uinian replied, his own voice vicious, scornful, “that
you
are not the goddess. Your family has ruled for so long that you demand too much.”

“I demand obedience to the law,” Adare raged, but someone was already taking her by the shoulder gently but firmly, drawing her back. She struggled to escape, but she was no match for the hands that held her. In a fit of fury, she rounded on the person. “Release me! I am a Malkeenian princess and the Chief Minister of Finance—”

“—and a fool if you think you can change anything here,” il Tornja murmured, voice low but hard. His grip felt like steel as he held her back. “This is not the time, Adare.”

“There is no
other
time,” she spat. “It has to be
now.
” She writhed in the
kenarang
’s grasp, unable to free herself but turning back toward the priest nonetheless. A thousand eyes fixed on her; people were shouting and yelling, but she ignored them. “I demand your life!” she screamed at Uinian. “I demand your life in return for the life of my father.”

“Your demands mean nothing,” he replied. “You do not rule here.” And then he turned and stepped into the light.

Uinian IV, the Chief Priest of Intarra, the man who had murdered the Emperor and taken her father, did not burn. The very air ran liquid with luminous heat, and yet the priest himself merely spread his arms, raised his face to the radiance as he might to a warm rain, letting it wash over him. For an eternity he stood there, then stepped, finally, from the rays.

Impossible,
Adare thought, slackening in il Tornja’s grip.
It’s not possible.

“Someone killed Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian,” Uinian declared, triumph writ large across his face, “but it was not I. The Goddess Intarra has declared me unsullied by sin, just as she once declared Anlatun the Pious, while those who thought to bring me low—” He stared pointedly from Ran il Tornja to Adare. “—have been checked, and humbled. I can only pray to the Lady of Light that they remember this humility in the dark days to come.”

20

The morning sun blazed through the window, bright and unyielding. With a grunt, Valyn raised a hand to his eyes, shielding them from the glare. The entire room was white: white walls, white ceiling, even the wide pine boards of the floor had been scoured, sanded, and scrubbed so many times, they were bleached of all color. The place smelled of the strong alcohol the Kettral used to scrub out wounds and the herbal poultices they plastered on after the cleaning was done. Valyn would have preferred to move his bed into the cool shadow at the side of the room, but Wilton Ren, the medic on duty, had given him strict instructions about staying still and calm, instructions he would have happily ignored save for the lance of pain that drove through his chest every time he so much as shifted.

According to Ren, they’d dragged him in, pulled the arrow, stitched the wound, and bandaged it, all while he was unconscious. When he finally woke, after a day and a night, his first thought had not been for the puncture in his shoulder or the one who fired the arrow, but for Ha Lin. Whatever went wrong on the sniper field, he’d survived it. He had no such assurances about Lin’s meeting with Balendin. Valyn tried to drag himself out of bed half a dozen times, reaching the door before he collapsed on his final effort. That was where Ren found him.

“Look,” the man grumbled, hauling him up and depositing him back in the bunk, “I’m the medic here. People bust an arm, they come to me. Lose an eye, they come to me. Crack their fool heads on a barrel drop—they come to me. If there was something wrong with your friend, I’d have heard about it. Now,” he said, eyeing Valyn appraisingly. “You can stay in that ’Shael-spawned bed on your own, or I can go get a nice length of stout rope and keep you there.” Although Ren was well into his fifth decade and hadn’t been out of the infirmary in half that time, he had a neck like a bull, arms thicker than Valyn’s legs, and a scarred face that suggested he’d be just as happy to beat his patient into unconsciousness as to heal him. Despite the man’s rough delivery, however, his words calmed Valyn. Qarsh was a small island. If Lin was hurt, the news would travel quickly.

He knew he ought to be thankful about his own injury. The arrow was a through-shot, missing all the main arteries and organs, missing his lung by the space of a finger. The medics had gotten to the wound quickly enough to clean it out with some sort of fluid that burned like acid, but that seemed to have stopped any infection. With a little bit of rest, Ren said, he’d make a full recovery. That kind of luck didn’t come around too often, and a soldier was supposed to appreciate it when it did, but Valyn was in no mood to be appreciative. Once he got past his immediate concern for Ha Lin, the reality landed on him like a stone: Annick had
shot
him, had drawn a bow in broad daylight in front of two trainers and put an arrow through his chest.

When Ren came in with a bowl of broth, Valyn beckoned him over. His voice was too weak to do much more than whisper, but the words came out harsh and hard.

“Did they get her?”

“Get her?” Ren replied, setting the bowl on the bedside table. “Get who?”

“Annick!” he rasped. “The girl who fucking shot me!”

The medic shrugged. “Didn’t take much getting. She seemed as surprised as anyone else that the arrow wasn’t a stunner.”

Valyn stared. “How could she be surprised? She’s the one who shot it! She shot three of them!”

“But only the one that hit you had a chisel point. The other two were stunners.”

“No,” Valyn said, shaking his head at the memory of the arrow scudding through the dirt beside him. Seeing the point on the
second
arrow was what started him running in the first place. “No. At least two had live heads.”

“You can tell it to Rallen,” Ren replied with a shrug. “The Master of Cadets is holding an inquiry. Looks like she’s going to be nailed for combat negligence. There’ll be a review of her conduct, and she’ll be suspended right up until Hull’s Trial.”

The words hit Valyn like a hammer.

“Combat negligence,” he managed. “And in the meantime, she’s walking around free?”

“Where d’you want her to be?”

Valyn’s mouth hung open. “How did she explain the fact that she had even
one
live head in a training contest?”

“Said something happened to the head. Said the arrow that hit you was supposed to be a stunner, but that she must have got it wrong somehow.”

“I’ll say something happened to the ’Kent-kissing head,” Valyn erupted. He tried to sit up, but pain blazed through his wound and he subsided weakly on the cot, exhaling between clenched teeth. “What happened to the head is that she switched a stunner for a razor.”

“Look,” Ren said, wagging the spoon at him. “I don’t know all the details, but we’re on the Islands. You’re with the Kettral. This isn’t a sewing circle. Give men and women bows and swords and tell them to start leaping off birds and blowing things up, and every so often someone catches an unhealthy bit of sharp steel somewhere it doesn’t belong. I’ve been here a while and I’ve seen it before. A stunner and a chisel don’t look all that different, especially when you’re in the middle of a fight.”

“And Rallen is buying this?” Valyn asked, amazed into something like acceptance.

“Rallen’s seen it before, too. It’s a training accident. Not worth sacrificing the best sniper in the class for.”

Valyn shook his head, unable to respond.

Ren clapped him on the shoulder with a hard, callused hand. “Look, kid. I know how it feels. You took an arrow through the chest. You’re angry. But there’s such a thing as plain old shit luck. You may be the son of the Emperor, but not everything’s a plot against you.”

The medic stumped out the door, leaving Valyn with those words spinning in his head.
Not everything’s a plot against you.
It was tempting to believe that, to believe that the whole thing was just a horrible mistake with a surprisingly fortunate outcome, but there was the Aedolian to consider. The ship was coming to take him away from the Islands. To keep him safe. According to the murdered man, anyone could be involved in the plot, anyone at all.

*   *   *

Annick came just before the evening meal. Valyn was staring out the window, trying to decide if the boat in the middle distance was an imperial sloop or a trading vessel when the door swung open soundlessly. He looked over to find the sniper standing still and silent in the doorway, the ever-present bow in her hand. He realized, with a twist of fear, that it was strung.