Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (55 page)

“And now?” he asked. “Who has governed Annur since my father’s death? Who is taking care of my sister and of the needs of the empire?”

Adiv nodded as though he had been anticipating the questions. “Your sister needs no taking care of. She is a shrewd young woman, and your father’s last testament elevated her to the head of the Ministry of Finance. As for the governance of Annur, it falls to Ran il Tornja,” the councillor replied. Kaden shook his head. Another name he had never heard.

“Il Tornja had only just become the provincial commander of the garrison in Raalte when you left. That’s why his name is unfamiliar,” Adiv said. “I first met him when he was raised to Commander of the Army of the North, and then worked closely with him when your father raised him to
kenarang
and recalled him to Annur.”

Kenarang.
It was an ancient title, dating all the way back to the golden age, when the Atmani ruled Eridroa from their capital far to the south, before they went mad and destroyed it all. The Annurians had borrowed some of the old Atmani terminology, hoping the hoary names and titles might lend their rule an air of antiquity that it had lacked when Terial hui’Malkeenian first cobbled together the empire out of the shambles of the republic using only his sword and the strength of his will. The
kenarang
was the highest military rank in the empire, overseeing the four field generals. It was strange, Kaden thought, that two men he had never known, Tarik Adiv and this Ran il Tornja, occupied the two highest posts below the Emperor himself.

“How did the provincial commander of Raalte come to be
kenarang
in less than eight years?” he asked. His mind was still aching, trying to make sense of it all, and he stared at his palms as though he might find some answer there.

“Micijah can answer that question better than I,” Adiv responded. “I have no more than a bureaucrat’s understanding of the military.”

At first Kaden thought Ut might not say anything at all. Then he shifted in his seat, the steel plates of his armor grinding against one another in a way that made Kaden wince.

“While soldiers from Nish to Channary played politics, il Tornja won battles, and important ones,” he said finally. “The Urghul dogs were getting restless, and it didn’t take long for Sanlitun, bright were the days of his life, to realize what he had in his provincial commander. He raised il Tornja to command the Army of the North, and only barely soon enough. A month after the appointment, the rabble came at us in waves, crossing the White River in force for the first time. The cohorts from Breata and Nish were still a thousand miles to the west, whimpering about defending us from an emboldened Freeport.” Ut’s mouth twisted in a snarl. “If your father had let me have my way, I would have put every captain’s head on a spike.” For a moment the large soldier was speechless, trapped inside his rage. After years with the monks, Kaden had almost forgotten just how disfiguring anger could be; Ut’s emotion was even uglier than he remembered. Finally the Aedolian spoke again, his voice tight and clipped.

“Raalte can’t field more than five thousand foot and no horse. Il Tornja’s company was tired and undermanned when the rabble came. Most generals would have crumbled, but the
kenarang
isn’t most generals. He split his force in four,
four,
and slaughtered them, nailed the head of every tenth Urghul—man or woman—to a post along the west bank of the river.” Ut chuckled grimly, as though satisfied with the memory. “The eastern tribes won’t trouble us again for some time.

“After the victory, your father named il Tornja
kenarang.
Even Ewart Falk couldn’t object. He had the good sense to kill himself, at least.”

It was by far the longest speech Kaden had heard from Ut since the Aedolian arrived in Ashk’lan.

“Ran il Tornja is a good man,” Adiv appended after a moment. “Your father trusted him and so should you. He is serving as regent presently and will look after your sister and your empire both until you arrive.”

Suddenly Kaden felt extremely weary, as though he had raced the Circuit of Ravens a dozen times with Pater on his back. Men he didn’t know were running his father’s empire—
his
empire now, he reminded himself—making decisions and giving orders he could only barely begin to understand. He had eight years of history and politics to catch up on in what would be a trip of little more than two months, and hundreds, maybe thousands of new names to learn: atreps and ministers, envoys and captains on the frontier. If Ut and Adiv were to be believed, the empire had come to a dire pass and, Intarra help him, it would be his hands on the reins as soon as he sat down on that cold stone throne.

He reached for the empty calm that the Shin had spent eight years trying to teach him, reached for the tranquillity that would allow him to see the world with clear eyes, to judge it truly. It eluded him. He could feel his heart thudding dully in his chest, could trace the thoughts chasing one another like feral cats in his mind, and for the moment, he could control none of it. Scial Nin had said he was close to reaching the
vaniate,
and yet, as he sat there, trying to make sense of the past, trying to comprehend the future, he felt almost like that small lost boy who had left Annur for some unknown monastery in the mountains all those years ago.

40

“What,” Gwenna demanded, squaring up across the table from Annick, one hand on her belt knife, the other thrusting out an accusatory finger, “the fuck?”

The fact that she’d waited until the entire Wing was back in their bunkhouse with the door firmly closed was something of a minor miracle, and Valyn had little hope of controlling the outburst now. In fact, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. After weeks of lurking, pondering, guessing, and second-guessing, he just wanted the ’Kent-kissing truth. If Annick really
had
murdered Amie, then she was almost certainly implicated in Lin’s death as well. If she hadn’t—well, then, maybe she could at least tell him what she was doing over on Hook the day the girl died. He was enraged over Yurl’s maneuvering—there was no telling how long they might be confined to the Islands—and yet, there was a strange sort of relief in the fact that everything was coming to a head.

“Slow down,” he growled. “Everyone just slow down.” He gestured to the chairs around the low table. “Take a seat. Yurl’s out to screw with us somehow—we all know him well enough to realize that. There are some hard questions we need to ask ourselves, questions
I
want answered, but we’re not going to start ripping each other apart with our bare teeth like dogs.”

“Teeth’s about all they left us,” Laith observed sourly, jerking his head to the empty scabbards on his back.

“Teeth is all I’ll need if I find out he’s lying,” Gwenna said, her mouth twisting into a snarl as though she were preparing to make good on her threat.

“Yurl can wait,” Talal interjected. “We need to have our own conversation first.”

“Agreed,” Valyn said. “We’ve all got questions, and we’re going to ask them one by one. And we’re going to get to the bottom of the answers.” That last comment was intended for Annick, and he fixed her with a stare. Before the Trial, her eyes had made him nervous, but now, after a long silence, the sniper was the one to look away. She was smaller than he remembered, sitting slumped in her seat, as though without her bow she was just a child once more, angry but lost.

“First,” Valyn said, “and most important—”

“Did you kill the fucking girl?” Gwenna cut in, rounding on Annick, leaning in so close that the sniper must have been able to feel her breath on her cheek. “That’s all we need to know.”

Annick’s fingers twitched, but she did not look up. “No,” she replied curtly. “I didn’t.”

If only it were as easy as that,
Valyn thought to himself bleakly.
If only you asked honest questions and people gave you honest answers.

“But you met her,” Laith said, his usual good humor evaporated. He leaned forward angrily, hungrily.
Perhaps,
Valyn thought,
Amie was more than just a dockyard whore to him after all.
Laith had patronized a dozen girls over on Hook over the years, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have some sort of feeling for any of them. “Rianne told us her sister was meeting a soldier at Manker’s the morning it collapsed,” the flier continued. “The morning she was murdered. You were the only Kettral there.”

“I met her,” Annick replied with obvious reluctance, “but I didn’t kill her.”

“Why?” Valyn demanded, reining in his impatience and anger. “Why did you meet her?”

The sniper looked to the window, as though there were some escape beyond the thin pane of glass. Emotions flitted across her face as quickly as clouds before a storm. She was trapped, Valyn realized, and trapped creatures were dangerous, unpredictable. His hand drifted to his belt knife, and out of the corner of his eye, he caught Talal shifting to put the table between himself and the girl. Annick was a terror with her bow, but now she seemed vulnerable, almost naked. Her eyes flicked from one face to the next, as though looking for support. When she found none, her lips tightened.

“Why?”
Valyn demanded again.

She opened her mouth to speak, shut it, then returned her gaze to the window. “For the same reason anyone else met her. For the same reason Laith did.”

“But…,” Gwenna said, shaking her head in confusion. “You’re … Oh.”

The sniper’s chin was set in a rigid line. She refused to respond.

Talal spread his hands. “All right,” he said matter-of-factly. “She was a whore. You paid her for her services.”

Valyn turned to Laith. “You … knew Amie. You ever hear anything about this? About her going with women?”

The flier shook his head slowly. “She always seemed happy enough with the cock—”

Annick rounded on him in a flash, drawing her knife and putting it to his throat before the rest of them could so much as twitch. The flier held up his hands slowly.
Idiot,
Valyn cursed himself. Fast was fast, regardless of the weapon.

“All right,” he said warily. “All right. Annick—just relax.”

“She
wasn’t
happy with it,” the sniper hissed into Laith’s stunned face. “Not with your coin, not with your ’Kent-kissing cock. But she was poor, and so she took both and put a brave face on it.” It was more words together than Valyn had ever heard Annick utter. Her face was flushed with anger, the tendons of her neck straining beneath the skin.

“All right,” Laith said slowly, nodding. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”

“You didn’t realize, because you didn’t
care.
Whenever you got drunk and needed a hole to stick it in, you’d take the ferry over. It didn’t matter who. You fucked her
sister
as many times as you fucked Amie.”

The flier took a deep breath, then shook his head slowly, deliberately, careful not to slice his flesh on the knife. “I did care,” he said, “but maybe not in the right ways. There are a lot of kinds of caring. I didn’t love her, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like her. I paid her for sex, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t gentle with her. You cared about her more; I can see that. Believe me, though, when I tell you I want to find whoever killed her as badly as you do.”

The sniper stared at him for another tense moment, then nodded, slid the belt knife back into her sheath, and sagged back into her seat. Talal let out a long, ragged breath.

“’Shael on a stick,” Gwenna muttered. “The whole fucking lot of you are insane.”

For a while they just sat there, Annick staring blankly out the window, Gwenna lost, now that her fury had no direction, Valyn struggling to make sense of the new information, to fit it in with everything else he knew or suspected. For the hundredth time, he wished he could talk things over with Lin, but Lin was dead. The four soldiers in the room were his Wing now. He wasn’t sure he could trust them, but he was certain he couldn’t trust anyone else.

The leach was the first to pick up the thread of the rapidly unraveling conversation. “I have some experience keeping secrets, and I, for one, believe Annick. She couldn’t have predicted Shaleel’s arrival or Yurl’s accusation. The emotion we just saw is difficult to fake.”

“What are you?” Gwenna asked, “a professional masker?” For once, there was more weariness than challenge in her voice.

“I’m a leach, and a leach learns to lie early on. He learns it, or he dies. I may be wrong, but I believe what Annick tells us.” He eyed the others, as though welcoming them to disagree. When no one spoke, he pushed ahead, his voice quiet but firm. “But we still need to sort this out, and we’ll sort it out quicker if we work together.”

The sniper hesitated, then turned back to the room. “Fine,” she replied brusquely. “Let’s work.”

Valyn caught Talal’s eye, nodded his thanks, then turned back to Annick.

“Did you see Amie that morning?”

“For about an hour,” she responded. “We took our normal room in a boarding house a few doors down from Manker’s.” The confusion and desperation she had shown moments ago were gone, like strong currents frozen under the winter ice.
She may not have killed Amie,
Valyn thought to himself,
but she’s still dangerous.

“Not the building where Lin and I found her?” he asked carefully.

“No. That’s all the way across the harbor.”

“Did she say what she was going to do when you left her?” he pressed.

“Make money,” Annick replied grimly. “Down at the docks.”

“Whoring.”

“Yes, whoring. That was the last I saw of her.”

“Well,” Laith said after a long pause. “We’ve ruled out one person that
didn’t
kill her, but that still leaves a few hundred more who might have. Now that we know it wasn’t Annick, we’re not even sure it was a soldier.”

Valyn ground his teeth silently. There was more to the story—the marks on Amie’s wrists, the same impressions on Ha Lin’s corpse. His Wing didn’t know any of that, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to share it. After Lin’s death, he had trusted no one, nursing his suspicions in guarded silence, vowing to work alone until he had ferreted out both Lin’s killers and his father’s. Working alone, keeping his own council, he was unlikely to be betrayed.
And just as unlikely to learn anything new.
He’d been fighting his private war since Ha Lin’s death. Fighting it, and losing it.