The Providence of Fire (70 page)

“He was executed,” Kaden said, “in accordance with Annurian law.”

“He was murdered,” Gabril replied, “by your father.”

Kaden slowed his pulse, loosened the muscles of his shoulders and back. The Shin had trained him in all manner of techniques to control his own fear and rage, but they had said nothing about how to calm others—one more way in which they had left him ill prepared to rule an empire, one more deficit he would have to make up on his own, provided Gabril left him alive long enough.

The First Speaker eyed Kaden appraisingly. “You are not dead, as they say in the streets, but you are not Emperor. You return months after Sanlitun was set in the earth, and you come here, to me, your eyes hidden in this hood. Why? You must know what passed between our fathers.”

Kaden considered what he knew of the young man seated across the table, searching for a hook, a handle. As a child, he had grown up with stories of the desert tribes of Mo'ir, tales filled with vengeance, violence, and blood. He and Valyn had imagined every man and woman a shadowrobe, every meeting a duel to the death. According to Kiel, however, the stories were almost all wrong, the figment of an Annurian imagination obsessed with the exotic. Not that there
weren't
shadowrobes in the west, not that Mo'ir's history lacked its own share of blood, but if Kiel were to be believed, the tribes valued eloquence over violence, insisting on speech before every fight. Kaden had wagered his life on that insistence, but, face-to-face with Gabril, the words he had prepared seemed inadequate.

“I am not my father,” he said quietly. “Just as you are not yours.”

Gabril studied him for a long time, then raised a hand. A robed servant stepped silently from behind a wooden screen.

“Ta,”
Gabril said, not bothering to look at the man. “Two cups.”

They waited in silence as the servant arranged a clay kettle, steeped the leaves, then poured the steaming liquid into twin clay cups. Kaden hesitated, eyeing the vessel warily.

“Drink,” Gabril said, gesturing. “If I kill you, I will use a knife.”

It was a slender reassurance, but Kaden lifted the cup to his lips, sipping gently at the bitter, unsweetened
ta
. Gabril raised his own cup, drank deeply, then set it gently back on the tabletop.

“The first time I journeyed to your city,” he said, “I was eight. I did not want to come, but my father was in chains, and we do not allow a person—man or woman—to die without witness.”

Kaden nodded, unsure how to respond.

“I went to your palace, inside your red walls, and I watched while seven of your citizens, men and women unknown to me or my father, men and women whose only sight of sand was a thin strip along the shores of your sea, decided his death.”

“This is the way of Annurian justice,” Kaden said. “All cases are decided by a council of seven.”

“This is the way of cowards,” Gabril said. “Your father watched this ‘trial,' but he did not speak. When my father died, your father watched, but he did not wield the knife. When they dragged me from the hall, I swore I would see your father dead, and now I have.

“You come to me offering ‘condolences' for my father's murder? Then I will tell you this: I rejoice in the murder of yours. I came to see Sanlitun dead, to witness the life drained from his bones. I am only sorry I did not plant the knife in his beating heart myself.”

He considered Kaden for several heartbeats, then raised his cup, eyes intent above the rim, waiting.

Kaden said nothing. Anger flared, but he extinguished it, then crushed out the sparks of pride and shame as well. He had not come to trade barbs with the son of a dead traitor. To lose himself in a dispute with Gabril the Red was to forget the greater threat posed by Ran il Tornja and Adare, to abandon his best hope of blocking their attack. Kaden revolved Gabril's story in his mind, searching for a crack, a fracture, a way in.

“You saw my father laid in his tomb months ago,” he said finally. “Why have you remained in this city you so clearly loathe?”

Gabril's eyes narrowed. “My comings and goings are mine, and not yours to question.”

“Then I take back the question,” Kaden said. There was a shape to the verbal dance, but one he could discern only imperfectly. “You offered me a tale, and I will offer you one in return.”

Gabril hesitated. “Speak,” he said finally, “and I will hear your words.”

“Your father,” Kaden began, choosing his course carefully, “Gabril the Gray, hated the empire.”

The First Speaker nodded curtly. “Bedisa creates all the world's people as equals. To set one man above the rest, to steal from the others their own voices, this is an abomination.”

Kaden had expected as much. Kiel had already explained to him the Mo'iran system of tribal rule, in which all men and women, regardless how poor, had a voice and a vote at the council fires. The Csestriim had explained the political processes of the Western Deserts efficiently and clearly, but Kaden wanted to hear Gabril himself say the words. Everything hinged on the Speaker.

“Surely,” Kaden pressed, “some people are more capable than others? Some see further and deeper into the heart of important matters.”

“And those people,” Gabril said, “speak first and last at the fires. But to silence the voices of others is cowardice and injustice both. It turns men and women to beasts.”

“The people of Annur are hardly beasts.”

“Your empire has made them docile. Compliant. Incurious. Your family turns the people into goats, then you strut among them as though you were lions, preying on the weak, devouring them.”

Gabril's voice was tight but controlled, his fury carefully reined. Any doubt Kaden had about the Speaker's hatred of the empire had vanished.

“Your father believed this, too,” Kaden replied, “and so he worked in secret to bring down the empire. To set in its place a—”

“Circle of Speakers,” Gabril said defiantly. “And he would have succeeded, had he not been betrayed. He was not alone in his desire to hear many voices about the fire.”

“As you said, you came to Annur to see my father brought low—”

“To see him dead,” Gabril said, cutting him off. “To see the great lion gutted.”

Kaden ignored the gibe. “But you have
stayed
to continue your father's work.”

Gabril's lips tightened. His hand dropped to one of the blades at his belt. Kaden schooled his body to stillness even as he locked gazes with the Speaker.

“You're still here,” he said, pushing ahead with a story based in part on Kiel's description of Mo'iran culture, partly on Morjeta's assessment of Gabril's activities in the city, and partly on pure hunch, “because the other aristocrats are here, all the dispossessed nobility from across the empire, in a single city. What better place to continue the work of your father? What better city in which to labor toward the destruction of Annur?”

Kaden fell silent, spread his hands, and waited.

“I had intended,” Gabril said, drawing his knife after a pause, “to allow you to depart unharmed.”

“And now?”

“Now, I will not repeat the errors of my father. I will see you dead before you can overturn the great work.” He rose to his feet, slipped the other knife from his belt, and set it on the table in front of Kaden. The steel was dark as coal save for the edge, which gleamed in the sunlight. Kaden made no move to reach for it.

“I offer you the choice your father never offered mine,” Gabril said, gesturing toward the knife. “To die a man.”

“I didn't come here to fight you,” Kaden said.

“Then you will die a beast.”

“And you are certain that killing me will best serve your work?”

“You are the Emperor,” Gabril responded, as though that settled everything.

Kaden raised his eyebrows. “Am I?” He fingered the rough fabric of his coat, then ran his hand over the tabletop between them. “The clothes on my back are my only clothes. This wooden table is worth more than all my possessions.”

“When you return to your palace—”

“I cannot return to my palace. When my father died, others took his place.”

Gabril hesitated, then shook his head.

“And so one lion has replaced another. You have lost your empire and come to me thinking I will help you regain it. You judged me poorly.”

“It is you,” Kaden replied evenly, “whose judgment has gone awry.”

Gabril narrowed his eyes. “You tell me in my own ears that this is wrong, that others have not killed your father and stolen your empire?”

“So far you are right.”

“And yet you would have me believe that you do not want it back?”

“No,” Kaden said, taking up the knife before him, turning it back and forth, watching the sunlight play off the honed edge. It felt good in his hand, solid and strong. With an easy, fluid gesture he slammed the point into the table, watched it quiver. “I am not my father,” he said, “and I am not my sister. I do not want my empire back. I want it destroyed.”

 

38

After a decade spent studying small-team tactics and training to fight in Wings of five or six, it was easy to forget just how impressive a full Annurian field army really was. As a child, Valyn had seen legions march down the Godsway of the capital, rank after perfect rank, pennants held high, spears precisely angled toward the sky. He remembered the pageantry, but had forgotten the sheer mass of men and metal, the sense that an entire city had taken up arms. As he studied the encamped Army of the North from behind a small copse of trees, however, he found himself struck anew by the sight. None of the individual soldiers could match the rankest Kettral cadet, of course, but that was missing the point; the army was never intended for the precise work of the Kettral. Where the Kettral relied on timing and precision, the army was a creature of mass and momentum, slow to start up but near impossible to stop.

What they were doing here, however, buried in the dense forests of the Thousand Lakes, Valyn still couldn't say. The two Annurian riders had been carrying a message for the
kenarang
all right, but the 'Kent-kissing thing proved to be written in some sort of cipher, a long string of meaningless letters and numbers that neither Valyn, Talal, or Laith had the faintest idea how to unravel. Both Annurians claimed ignorance of the contents, and Valyn believed them—there was little point in encoding a message if the meat of it could be extracted from the bearers at the point of a knife. All the messengers could give him was a destination, Aats-Kyl, a logging town at the southern tip of Scar Lake, and so Valyn and his diminished Wing rode southwest instead of south, following miserable tracks through dense northern forests of balsam and pine to Aats-Kyl. If il Tornja was planning an assault on the steppe, he'd certainly chosen an indirect route, but then, maybe that was the point.

“Looks like the entire Army of the North,” Talal observed.

Valyn nodded, running the long lens up and down the arrow-straight rows of tents. The Annurians had pitched their camp a little outside of the town proper, on a series of fields that might have been planted with squash or beans. Whatever the crop, it was destroyed now, the labor of an entire season ground back into the mud by the boots of the army.

He tried to estimate numbers, a task made easier by the fact that the Annurians always laid out camp in a neat grid, rank upon rank of taut white legionary tents divided into four quarters. At the center of each quarter stood a complex of larger pavilions: mess hall, blacksmith, quartermaster, and medical. A quick count of tents suggested twenty thousand men; more, if they were double-bunking to drop their carry weight on the march. It was a huge force, but Valyn couldn't help but compare it to the nomadic encampment north of the White. Where the Urghul army had flowed from one hill to the next, their
api
and campfires sprawling over the steppe nearly as far as the eye could see, the Annurian force fit neatly into a single row of fields.

Valyn paused, squinted through the lens at the far side of the camp. He wasn't high enough to get a good view, but it seemed that the soldiers there were armored differently from the rest. Occasionally, as the men worked in the setting sunlight, he caught a bright flash that looked more like bronze or gold than steel. It hardly made sense. The legions were too practical to spend money on ornamentation, but then, Valyn was quickly discovering that there was a lot he never learned on the Islands. The strange armor could have been one of a hundred things, and Valyn let it go, shifting his long lens to look over the town itself.

It was larger than he'd expected, maybe a thousand houses, almost all of them log-built cabins, stables, and sheds, some with stone chimneys, some with simple holes in the roof where the smoke could escape. That smoke hung over everything, a thick haze that Valyn could feel scratching at his throat, that he could taste on the back of his tongue. He had forgotten the stench of cities and villages in his years on the Islands, where the near-constant salt wind off the ocean scoured the archipelago night and day. The men and women of Aats-Kyl, however—mostly loggers, judging from the mills at the edge of the village—seemed not to notice the reek of dung and rot, smoke and cut pine, that lay on their town like ash.

A few thin dogs scrounged scraps outside the doors, and a single sow, evidently escaped from her pen, rooted at the foot of a small well. The streets were mostly dirt, though recent rain and the passage of men and horses had turned them to mud. Valyn picked out two large buildings that looked like temples—to what god or goddess, he couldn't say—and a proud, three-story structure of chinked logs and fieldstone, half hall, half tower, near the town's center. Even that building, however, was overtopped by the dam, a huge embankment of earth, stone, and wood to the north of the town, at the south end of Scar Lake. Valyn turned his attention to the structure, staring through the long lens.