Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (9 page)

Valyn turned, dropping his hand to his belt knife while Lin pivoted to put her back to his, settling into the low ready guard the Kettral used as their standard defensive position. His eyes flicked over the street, the alleys, the rooftops in quick succession, reading terrain and evaluating threat. The garish façades of the rickety structures stared back at him, red, and green, and blue, windows and open doors gaping like missing teeth. A dozen yards away, a dog perked up its ears at the strange sound, its bone momentarily forgotten. A few scraps of dingy curtain blew in the light breeze. An alley gate creaked idly on its hinges. Aside from that—nothing. The noise had probably come from the harbor—some drunken idiot who forgot to throw the catch on a winch and let his load go tumbling to the deck.
Jumping at shadows,
Valyn thought to himself. All the talk of plots and murders must have put them both on edge.

Then, just as he was about to straighten up, Manker’s gave a low, horrible groan. The crack of splintering timber sent the dog bolting away as the alehouse’s roof sagged in on itself, crumpling like wet paper, shedding slate tiles that fell in a deadly rain onto the street. The whole thing lurched toward the bay, then teetered horribly on its stilts. The people inside began to scream.

“The door!” Lin yelled, but Valyn was already moving. The two of them had spent enough time studying demolitions to know what happened to anyone trapped inside a building when it collapsed. People would be crushed or worse, drowned when the structure finally sloughed into the bay, dragging those pinned inside beneath the waves.

The whole building had peeled away from the alley, leaving a gap of several feet between the crumbling dirt of the lane and the listing doorway. Valyn glanced down—twenty-five feet or so to the water—a trivial distance, except for the jagged ends of the shattered stilts thrusting up like pikes. Anyone who tumbled into the space risked getting impaled on those splintered ends or ground into the murky water when the building finally collapsed. A hand appeared on the doorframe, groping desperately from the darkness within. Valyn swore once and vaulted the gap.

He caught the low lintel of the door with one hand, steadied himself, then reached through the door with his other to catch the wrist. He hauled, and Juren emerged, coughing and swearing. Blood poured from a nasty gash across his bald scalp and his ankle twisted sickeningly as he put weight on it, but other than that, the man appeared to be unharmed.

“Stay there,” Valyn said. “I’ll hand the others out to you. You can steady them before they jump over to Lin.” He jerked his chin to indicate his companion, who waited warily on the bank a few paces away.

The man flicked his eyes toward the interior of the tavern. Something had arrested the slow, inevitable collapse, but over the screams of the injured, Valyn could still hear the cracking of posts and beams warped past their tolerance.

“Fuck that,” Juren spat, his lips curled into a desperate rictus. He gathered his weight on his good leg, then leapt for the far bank.

“You shit-licking coward…,” Lin began, yanking the man painfully to his feet by the ear as soon as he hit the bank.

“Leave it, Lin,” Valyn bellowed. “I need you over here.”

Ha Lin snarled, backhanded Juren across the face, measured the gap at a glance, then leapt, alighting on the opposite side of the doorframe from Valyn.

“You or me?” she asked, peering in through the door.

“I’m stronger,” Valyn said. “I’ll drag them to you. You get them across.”

Lin eyed the gap. “Right.” She caught Valyn’s gaze, hesitated, then waved him ahead. “Work fast.”

He nodded, then stepped inside.

It was even worse than he had anticipated. Manker’s had been a gloomy den before the collapse, and the buckling ceiling and slumping walls had almost entirely blocked the few windows. Wreckage lay everywhere—ceiling timbers, busted tables, chunks of lath and plaster cracked from the crumbling walls. Half a dozen small fires—kindled, no doubt, when the lanterns smashed against the dry timber—licked at the jumble of broken beams, illuminating a thousand scattered shards of glass. Valyn paused, trying to get his bearings, trying to get his ’Kent-kissed
footing
on the floor, which sloped as precipitously as the deck of a clipper under full sail. People were shouting, moaning, crying for help, but at first he couldn’t even see them in the fitful gloom.

“’Shael take it,” he swore, shoving a board out of his way with one hand, trying to shield his eyes from the dust and debris.

He almost tripped over the first body—a thin, sallow man, his chest staved in by one of the collapsing timbers. Valyn dropped to a knee and put his fingers to the man’s neck, checking for a pulse, though he knew what he would find. As he rose, he heard a woman’s voice sobbing nearby. Salia—the serving girl.

She was trapped beneath a fallen rafter, but seemed alert and uninjured, if terrified. He took a step toward her, and the entire structure shrieked, pitching another few feet toward the bay.

“Val,” Lin shouted from the door. “Time to get out. The whole thing’s going down!”

He ignored the warning and crossed the few remaining steps to the trapped girl.

“Are you hurt?” he asked, dropping to one knee and running his hands along the beam, trying to discover what held her down.

Salia looked up at him, her dark eyes terrified, reflecting the fires that raged all around them now, singeing his face and her dress.

“My leg,” she gasped. “Don’t leave me.”

“Valyn,”
Lin bellowed. “Extract
now.
You’ve got
no
time.”

“I’m coming,” he shouted back, looping a hand beneath the girl’s armpit and pulling. She screamed at the pain, the piercing howl of a trapped animal, bit down on her lip, and fainted.

“Son of a whore,” Valyn swore. She was held up somehow, but in the dusty murk, he couldn’t see where. Somewhere to his left, a beam crashed down from the ceiling and the whole tavern listed a few more degrees. He ran his hands around Salia again, searching for the obstruction. “Slowly,” he told himself. “Slowly.” If there was one thing he’d learned as a cadet, it was to act deliberately, even when the stakes were high. “Especially when the stakes are high, you fool,” he muttered.

As his fingers brushed past her waist, he found the problem—her dress had snagged on a wide splinter of wood. He yanked at it, but it held firm.

“Valyn, you stupid son of a bitch!” Lin shouted. There was fear in her voice now, fear and anger. “Get the
fuck out
!”

“I’m moving!” he called back, slipping his belt knife from the sheath and hacking away the snagged portion of the dress.

The girl came free all in a lurch. He dropped the knife, grabbed her by the dress and the hair, and dragged her across the floor toward the dim outline of the door, where Ha Lin was gesturing furiously.

“Go,” he shouted. “Get across! I’ll throw her to you!”

Lin snarled, froze in an anguish of indecision, then nodded and disappeared.

When Valyn pulled the unconscious girl through the doorway, he found, to his horror, that the gap had grown to almost a dozen feet. He could jump it, but Salia was still unconscious, draped limply over his shoulder.

Lin read the situation instantly, shook her head, then stepped right to the edge of the yawning crevasse.

“Throw her,” she said, gesturing.

Valyn stared at the gap, aghast. Salia couldn’t have been three quarters of his weight, but there was no way he could toss her the full distance. He glanced down. The jagged pilings bristled like spikes.

“I can’t,” he shouted back.

“You have to! Now, fucking
throw
her! I’ll catch her wrists.”

It was impossible. Lin knew it as well as he did.
Which is why she wants me to do it,
Valyn realized in a rush. Salia was dead weight. He could make the jump alone, but just barely. As long as he held on to the unconscious girl, he was trapped on the wrong side of the gap, pinned to a burning, teetering shell that would drag him to his death. He saw it all clear as day, but what could he do? Drop the unconscious girl and leave her to die? It was the right choice, the mission-responsible choice, but this wasn’t a ’Kent-kissing mission. He couldn’t just …

“I’ll jump with her,” he shouted, preparing to sling Salia across his back. “I think I can make it.”

Lin’s eyes widened with horror. Then they hardened.

Before Valyn understood what was happening, she had her belt knife out, was cocking her arm, then throwing. Valyn watched, stunned, as the bright blade flashed end over end in the sun, then buried itself in Salia’s neck with a sudden gush of hot, bright blood. The girl’s lips parted in something that might have been a cry or a moan, but more blood choked it off.

“She’s dead,” Lin shouted. “You can’t save her now, Valyn! She’s fucking
dead.
Now,
jump
!”

Valyn stared at Salia, at the hilt of the knife pressed up against her neck.
She’s dead.
Beneath him, the building shuddered and groaned. He let out a roar of rage, dropped the corpse, and leapt. His feet hit the crumbling verge, and Lin caught him by the wrists, dragging him to safety.

He shrugged her off and spun back toward the tavern. Salia was gone, tumbled down into the gap. Flames licked up through the open door. Inside, people were still screaming, trapped as fire consumed the tarry timbers. A hand appeared on the sill, bloody and burned. It flailed, trying to find purchase, then fell away. Finally, the entire building trembled, sloughed away from the shore, and then, as though exhausted, crushed beneath its own weight, collapsed inward and sank into the bay.

7

Adare hui’Malkeenian tried to keep her face still as the soldiers, resplendent in their full plate, dragged open the thick cedar doors to the tomb of her murdered father.

If you hope to play a part in this empire,
Sanlitun had told her time and time again,
you must learn to divorce your feelings from your face. The world sees what you allow it to see, judges you according to what you reveal.

“The world” seemed an apposite term for those who observed her now—tens of thousands of Annur’s citizens gathered in the Valley of Eternal Repose to see a great man laid to his rest in this narrow, treeless vale lined with the tombs of her ancestors. It would not do to weep before them, regardless of her grief. She already looked out of place, a young woman seated amidst the clutch of aging High Ministers, all of them men.

The position on the raised podium was rightfully hers twice over—once by dint of her royal birth and, most recently, as a result of her elevation to Minister of Finance, an elevation spelled out in her father’s testament. It was an important post, nearly as important as the
kenarang
or Mizran Councillor, and one for which she had been preparing for the better part of her life.
I’m ready for this,
she told herself, thinking back over the thousands of pages she had read, the countless delegations she had welcomed for her father, the ledgers she had studied late into the night. She understood Annur’s finances better than the outgoing minister, and yet she was certain that, to those assembled in the valley, she did not look ready.

She would look, to many of the thousands of eyes that rested upon her, like a woman too long without a husband and children, attractive enough to invite marriage (even without her imperial titles), if perhaps too thin, tall, and honey-skinned in a city where the fashion ran to voluptuous, small women with darker complexions. Adare knew well enough that her straight hair emphasized the angularity of her face, making her look slightly severe. As a child, she had experimented with other styles. Now the severity suited her purposes; when the assembled throng looked up at her podium, she wanted people to see a minister, not a simpering girl.

Of course, those who stood close enough were unlikely to remember anything but her eyes, irises that burned like coals. Everyone used to say that Adare’s eyes blazed even more brightly than Kaden’s, not that it mattered. Despite the fact that she was two years older, despite her father’s careful tutelage, despite her familiarity with the policies and politics of the Annurian Empire, Adare would never sit the Unhewn Throne. As a child, she had once been innocent enough to ask her mother why.
It is a man’s seat,
the woman replied, ending the conversation before it began.

Adare had not felt the full heft of that statement until now, seated among these men, waiting for the bier carrying her father to make its progress up the long valley. Though she, like they, wore dark ministerial robes cinched around the waist with a black sash, though the golden chain of office hung around her neck as it did around theirs, though she sat shoulder to shoulder with these few who, beneath the Emperor himself, ruled the civilized world, she was not one of them, and she could feel their invisible doubts, their decorous resentment cold and silent as snow.

“This is a place heavy with history,” Baxter Pane observed. Pane served as Chief Censor and Minister of Custom. Though, or perhaps because, his post was less significant than Adare’s, he was among those who had questioned her ascension most openly. “History and tradition.” That last word sounded like an accusation in his mouth, but gazing out over the Valley of Eternal Repose, Adare could not disagree. From Alial the Great’s stone lions to her own father’s façade, a rising sun in bas-relief above the doorway into darkness, she could trace the sure hand of the Malkeenian line.

“The problem with tradition,” observed Ran il Tornja, “is that it takes so much ’Kent-kissing
time.
” Il Tornja was the
kenarang,
the empire’s commanding general, and evidently some sort of military genius. The Ministerial Council, at any rate, had respected him enough to raise him to regent while Annur waited for Kaden’s return.

“Surely you bury your soldiers when they are killed in battle?” she responded pointedly. Il Tornja was, after Adare, the youngest person on the podium, perhaps somewhere in his mid-thirties. More important, he had been the only one who seemed to accept her appointment to Finance. He might make a natural ally, but she couldn’t help bristling at his tone. “Surely a general looks after his fallen men.”