The Providence of Fire (51 page)

Fulton shook his head. “Not a chance.”

Adare put her hand on the Aedolian's arm, moving the sword from her path.

“I'm sure the regent is clever enough to know,” she said, careful to keep her voice low, level, “that I am here,
we
are here because of him. Where is Kaden? The last I saw you, you were bound north to retrieve him.”

Adiv winced. “I beg you, my lady, let us discuss these matters in the privacy of the palace. There is much you do not know. Events have outpaced you during your sojourn in the south.”

“Is my father still dead?” Adare demanded. “Has Kaden claimed his throne? Does Ran il Tornja still make a mockery of the Dawn Palace?”

Adiv shook his head gravely. “The Emperor, bright were the days of his life, is dead, of course. Kaden has not returned. The regent himself is gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Raalte. Marching hard with the Army of the North.”

“Raalte?” Adare frowned. It all made less than no sense. “To what end? Against whom?”

Adiv's lips tightened, and he took a step forward, approaching until the point of Fulton's sword lay against his chest. “We should not speak of this here, my lady,” he said, lowering his voice. “While you were away, the Urghul moved, attacking in force against our northern border. Il Tornja goes to turn them back.”

“An opportunity,” Lehav observed quietly. “If it is true.”

The Mizran Councillor turned his unseeing gaze on the soldier. “An opportunity to see Annur destroyed.”

“I don't serve Annur. I serve the goddess.”

“You may find that more difficult,” Adiv said pointedly, “if the Urghul take over. The only prayer will be a prayer of blood.”

“You understand,” Adare hissed, “that I know the truth. All of it. I came here to destroy the regent.”

Adiv grimaced. “A fact the Ministry of Truth has labored late into the night to obscure. Now, of all times, Annur needs unity, in appearance as well as fact.”

Adare stared. “How do you obscure an army of thousands marching up the canal road?”

She gestured over her shoulder to where the Sons of Flame waited, butts of their spears bedded in the earth, the shafts a forest of stark trees, denuded in the summer heat, as though struck by some awful blight. Sun flashed from the bronze of shields and breastplates, bright enough to blind.

Adiv followed her gaze, as though, despite his blindness, he could sense the weight of that army, the sheer mass of flesh and sharpened steel. “We told the citizens of Annur,” he said quietly, “that you were coming to help. That you went to Olon to reconcile the throne with the Church of Intarra. Which it seems you have.” He paused, then beggared his hands, imploring. “Annur needs you, my lady.”

“We're all well fuckin' aware of that,” Nira spat, kicking her horse forward. “Seems ta me, the question is whether it needs
you
.”

Adiv turned to face the old woman, brows rising behind his blindfold. “I don't believe I've had the pleasure.…”

Nira snorted. “Save it. The princess isn't goin' ta the palace.”

Fulton nodded. “I agree.”

“I can offer myself as surety,” Adiv said. “My life hostage against her safety.”

“The life a' one overdressed blind bastard against a princess?” Nira said. “Against a prophet? I don't think so.”

“Nira…” Adare said, putting up a hand.

“You made me councillor,” she snapped, “so I'm counselin'.”

“I'm going,” Adare said.

“My lady,” Fulton burst out.

Adare cut him off. “If the Mizran Councillor wanted me dead, he would hardly be offering himself as surety. I don't understand what's happening here, but if there is an opportunity to avoid open war in the streets of Annur, I will not be the one to turn it down. This is my city, these are my people.” She looked up, past Adiv, past the jumbled riot of houses and stables, to the great ironglass needle bisecting the sky, its impossible height bright with the sun's own light. “It is my palace. My empire.”

*   *   *

The outer neighborhoods of Annur may have been quiet, the people frightened inside their homes by the sight of an approaching army, but the streets of the city center were awash with the usual hum and clatter. Wagon-drivers goaded along their oxen and buffalo; shopkeepers hawked their wares from windows and doorways; porters shoved their way forward through the throng, some bent nearly double beneath bolts of cloth, baskets of firefruit or coal, loads of fresh-cut lumber still smelling of sap. Alone, Adare would have found it nearly impossible to move through the press, but then, she was hardly alone.

Adiv's guards ringed her in a loose net, along with Fulton, Nira, and Oshi, who rode at her side. Adiv himself rode in front of the procession, trusting to the crowd to part before the pennons flapping behind and above him. Lehav had remained behind with the Sons of Flame, the implicit threat of the army one more blade to hold at the Mizran's neck. By the time they reached the Godsway, word of her entry to the city had spread. Men and women had halted their conversation and commerce to stare, then bow their heads at her passage. If the Mizran Councillor intended to murder her, he had certainly picked a strange way to go about it, and as they progressed farther and farther into the city, Adare's confidence rose.

Nira, however, was less sanguine.

“He's a leach,” she hissed, leaning over in her saddle to speak almost directly in Adare's ear.

Adare stared. “Adiv?”

The old woman nodded. “Strong, too. Dangerous.”

“My father appointed him Mizran Councillor,” Adare said, shaking her head.

“Then your father appointed a leach.”

Adare studied Adiv's back, the knot in his blindfold. “How do you know?”

“Live a few hundred years, you pick up a few things.”

The revelation was a shock. Leaches were perversions, twisted creatures, and Nira's own identity, the awful powers she held in check, still chafed at Adare like a sharp stone in a shoe. For all that she had begged the woman to be her councillor, she still found herself stealing glances at her several times a day, found herself wondering if she had made an awful mistake, had invited a serpent into her home. In a way, Nira's identity made Adiv's less shocking, and yet the thought that a leach sat near the very top of the ziggurat of Annurian power, that he served the
kenarang,
that he, of all people, had been dispatched to the Bone Mountains to recover Kaden, set her heart hammering.

Nothing for it now,
she said, trying to sit straight in her saddle, to look unworried, imperial. Thousands of eyes were on her, and though she intended to see il Tornja's head parted violently from his shoulders, it would do no good to let the citizens of the capital read her fury on her face.

After a circuitous route through Annur's southern streets, they reached the Godsway. After Olon, where even the largest thoroughfares twisted unpredictably between towers and falling palaces, where to leave the main streets was to step into a labyrinth of alleyways so narrow that Adare could almost touch both walls with her hands, the Godsway felt more like a geological feature, a massive, sword-straight rift bisecting the city, than it did a road built by men. Storefronts lined both sides of the street, merchants and craftsmen selling everything from firefruit, to bright-plumed birds, to small, intricate altars of wood and stone. Down the center of the avenue, set on stone plinths twice her own height, huge statues of the young gods and the old watched over the city—Intarra and Hull, Pta and Astar'ren, Ciena and Meshkent and their children set one after the other. The people of Annur used the statues as they might any other landmark—“Go to the butcher just north of Eira.” “I'll meet you by Heqet's feet”—but Adare felt the stone gazes of the monuments as she rode beneath them, hard and unforgiving, and after glancing up a couple of times, she kept her eyes forward.

After the congestion of the city and the stares of the gods, it was a relief to finally approach the red walls of the Dawn Palace. Intarra's Spear loomed over it all, slate gray in the fading light, the top of the tower lost in cloud. Adare resisted the urge to crane her neck to peer up at the thing. It was her palace, after all, her home. It would not do to be seen gawking.

The huge cedar doors of the Godsgate remained closed, of course. No one, not even emperors, presumed to use the gateway ordained for the passage of the divine. The Great Gate beside it, however, was flung open wide, flanked by what must have been a hundred palace guards at stiff attention. She had fled the palace in the drab wool of a servant, but was returning in all the splendor of a Malkeenian princess. Somehow, it seemed too easy.

Adiv's men escorted them beneath the massive walls—thick as a house and banded with red iron—through the Jade Court and the Jasmine, passing along the Serpentine in the shadow of Yvonne's and the Crane, then through the shattered refraction cast by Intarra's Spear. They bypassed the Hall of a Thousand Trees, and the hanging staircase leading to the Floating Hall, ending, finally, in the Chamber of Scribes. It was an old name, and an inaccurate one. The scribes who once used the small complex of pavilions had been displaced centuries earlier by the upper echelon of an expanding bureaucracy, and the chamber itself was decorated like an atrep's palace rather than an austere scriptorium. Delicate Liran ivories stood in the wall niches, Rabin carpets splayed across the floor, and carved cedars from the Ancaz stood sentry in the corners.

When the slaves had set cool water and Si'ite wine in iced decanters on the table, Adiv sent them away with a negligent flick of his hand, shutting the door behind them.

“So,” Adare said, tongue dry in her mouth, palms slick, “what in 'Shael's name is going on?”

Adiv hesitated, then gestured to Nira and Oshi, to Fulton where he stood by the doors. “What I have to say is known only to a small circle. Do you really wish to enlarge it?”

“Yes,” Adare said stiffly, glancing at Oshi, hoping she wasn't making a mistake.

“As you wish, my lady,” the councillor replied, spreading his hands. “Wine?”

Adare shook her head curtly. “Answers.”

Adiv bowed his acquiescence. “As you say, my lady.”

“Where is Kaden?”

“Your brother is dead.” He shook his head slowly. “We arrived too late. The monks were slaughtered—”

“Horseshit,” Adare snapped, cutting through his words. “You expect me to believe that he just
happened
to die at the very same time as my father, that you crossed half of Vash with a contingent of soldiers and had nothing to do with his death? You expect me to believe that?”

Adiv pursed his lips. “No,” he said slowly. “In fact, I do not, nor do I blame you for your distrust. Nonetheless, it is the truth.”

“Who would kill a batch a' monks?” Nira demanded.

“The Urghul,” Adiv replied. “As you may know, Ashk'lan sits in the mountains overlooking the steppe. It is a remote place, and one vulnerable to the depredations of those blood-hungry savages.”

Adare shook her head. “You've ignored your history, Councillor. Ashk'lan has stood for at least five hundred years. Perhaps much, much longer. Not once, in all that time, have the Urghul attacked.”

“And not once,” he replied evenly, “in all that time, have the Urghul united under a single leader. Not once have they ridden, all together, against the empire itself.”

“Unified?” Fulton asked, brow furrowed. “Doesn't sound like the Urghul.”

“It is not.”

“Under whom?” Adare demanded.

“A chieftain named Long Fist. Or a shaman. It's not entirely clear. Our scouts rarely return, and though il Tornja has dispatched several Kettral Wings against the man, they have failed to find him, let alone eliminate him.”

“But why would they attack a group of monks?”

“Presumably,” Adiv replied, “they were not after the monks. I would suspect this is all a part of Long Fist's plan. He aims to destabilize the empire by killing Sanlitun's heir, then to strike in the ensuing confusion.” He hesitated, clasped his hands before him.

“What?” Adare demanded.

“There is more.”

“I got that. What
is
it?”

“Your brother,” Adiv replied after a pause. “Valyn. It looks as though he may have been involved.”

Adare stared.
Valyn.
He would be a man grown by now, a Kettral in his own right, but all she remembered was the wiry, dark child who had raced about the Dawn Palace brandishing wooden swords. He'd been loud and reckless, irritating when there was work to be done, but never cruel.

“Say more,” she growled quietly.

Adiv spread his hands. “We can't be certain, but he disappeared from the Islands in direct violation of orders. Ashk'lan was burned by the time we got there—clearly Urghul work, as I said. But … there were signs of Kettral presence as well. A smoke steel blade lost in the rubble.” He shook his head. “We can't be certain, of course. No one actually
saw
your brother, but he is still missing. It would not be the first time siblings killed over the Unhewn Throne.”

“No,” Adare said abruptly, the blood mounting to her face, fingers curling into claws. “
No.
The
kenarang
murdered my father. Murdered him and then made me his tool to cover the murder. I
know,
you fucking bastard.
I know all of it
.”

Nira put a withered hand on her arm, but Adare shrugged it off. She was shouting, she realized, and though a faint voice in her mind told her she should keep her voice down, that no one was served by her strident accusations, the return to the palace had torn open the memory of her father's death, of his body laid in the tomb, and she wanted nothing more than to find il Tornja and everyone else responsible, to slit their throats and tumble them, graveless, into some stagnant canal.