The Providence of Fire (76 page)

Before she could respond, a shrill horn shivered the air to the east, then another, then another, then a thousand. An enormous flock of birds alighted, dark shapes wheeling in a great, swift circle, then flying west, south, and away. The horns kept on and on, coming and coming, until she thought they would drive her mad. When they finally stopped, however, the silence was even worse.

“Is that…” Bridger began.

“The Urghul,” Gwenna said. “I guess the Flea didn't get to Long Fist.”

It seemed as though she'd always known he wouldn't. Whatever the case, there was no time to worry about the older Wing Leader, not anymore.

“What do we do now?” Bridger asked.

“We fight. Make sure all the very old and young are off East Island and out of the way. Tell Annick to get the archers ready.” It was a pointless order. Knowing Annick, the men and women probably had their bows half drawn by the second horn. Still, saying something made Gwenna feel like she was doing something.

Bridger nodded, turned, then Gwenna stopped him.

“It's not that different,” she said.

He shook his head. “What's not?”

“Killing a man. Felling a tree. Just hit it with the ax until it goes down. Not that different.”

The logger smiled shakily. “Thank you, sir. We know how to hit things with axes, here.”

Gwenna turned back to the dark trees lining the eastern bank before he could see the lie in her eyes. Maybe she should have told him the truth, maybe he deserved that, but with Long Fist somewhere back in those dark shadows, the truth didn't look likely to do anyone a 'Kent-kissing bit of good.

 

40

“Neutral ground” turned out to be a dilapidated wooden warehouse down by the docks, a huge, cavernous place stacked ceiling high with crates and barrels, reeking of salt, and tar, and mold. Pulleys and tackle hung silently from the rafters overhead, ropes as thick as Kaden's wrist ending in great steel hooks. It was only the apparatus necessary to the movement and storage of heavy cargo, but late at night, in the flickering light of their storm lantern, the silent lengths of rope with their rusting tackle seemed morbid, menacing. Gabril had offered to host the secret meeting in his own palace, but the others had refused, insisting on neutral ground. That insistence, too, seemed menacing.

The three of them, Kaden, Kiel, and Gabril, paused just inside the door, allowing their eyes to adjust to the darkness.

“You must remember,” Gabril murmured, “that these people hate your empire, but their hatred bubbles up from different wells.”

“But you're all in agreement,” Kaden replied. “You see eye to eye on the basic issues?”

The First Speaker frowned. “For a long time we hoped to fight the same foe.”

“Not the same thing,” Kiel observed quietly.

“It is a bond,” Gabril said.

Kiel shook his head. “A tenuous one, and delicately balanced. I have seen it plenty of times.”

Gabril turned to stare at the Csestriim. They had been working together for days, since Kaden's visit to the First Speaker's palace, and the two had developed a delicate verbal dance, Gabril trying to ferret out Kiel's history while Kiel deftly deflected the questions, always turning the conversation away from himself.

“You claim to have seen a great many things,” the First Speaker said.

Kiel shrugged. “I watch carefully. The point here is that a common foe makes for a fragile foundation. A single shift in the balance and alliances crumble.”

“A shift?” Kaden asked. “We're about to take a sledge to the whole political edifice.”

“And we would do well to hope it doesn't fall upon us,” Kiel replied.

Gabril shook his head. “Hope is for fools, but your councillor is right. I have shared
ta
and unleavened bread with these men and women, but there are those here tonight who would stab me in an eyeblink. Or you, if they see an advantage.”

“Remind me what keeps us from getting stabbed?” Kaden asked.

“This,” Gabril said, tapping his skull with his fingernail. “These,” gesturing to his knives.

“And this,” Kiel added, patting the leather case at his side.

Kaden took a deep breath and nodded. The work of the last few days felt a flimsy aegis, a few words inked on parchment, but if those words failed, it seemed unlikely that Gabril's smarts or his skills with those knives would keep them safe.

*   *   *

The three of them were, by design, the last to arrive.
Better to be waited upon,
Gabril insisted,
than to wait.
Such blatant disrespect struck Kaden as an odd way to win a dozen suspicious nobles over to his side, but Kiel had agreed with the First Speaker, and so they had delayed their arrival enough that as they approached the center of the warehouse they found a small open circle from which the barrels and crates had been shoved aside. Someone had lit a few lamps around the perimeter and arranged a few of the lower crates as seats, but, with the towering stacks of merchandise on all sides, the space felt like the ill-lit bottom of a deep well.

The people there, most dressed in nondescript, deep-hooded cloaks like Kaden himself, sat or stood uneasily, as though trying to keep as much space between themselves as possible. A few held muttered conversations, but all conversation stopped when Gabril stepped into the circle of light.

For a moment, no one said anything. Then a wiry gray man, his face badly pitted by some childhood pox, leveled a finger at the First Speaker.

“You endanger us all by calling this meeting. Your notes—”

“—were coded,” Gabril said, shaking his head. “As they always are, Tevis.”

The man knocked the explanation aside with an impatient hand. “The tyrant could have broken our codes.…”

Gabril started to respond, but Kaden stepped forward into the lamplight. “The tyrant is right here,” he said, pushing back his hood, turning his head slowly, allowing everyone a nice long look at his eyes. For one heartbeat, two, three, there was no response. Then Tevis was reaching for the rapier at his side while two or three others broke out in exclamations, part fear, part anger.

“Traitor!” Tevis snarled at Gabril, his slender blade bare.

“You are startled,” Gabril said, laying his palms slowly on his knives, “and so I will allow you one chance to unsay what you have said.”

Tevis's eyes darted from Gabril to Kaden then back.

“What is he doing here? Where did he come from? Explain this!”

“I would have to imagine, Tevis,” a new voice drawled, “that the boy came here to do just that. Unfortunately, you waving your skinny little wand in his face seems to be … what is the word you educated folk use?
Impeding
the explanation? Is that it?”

Kaden tilted his head to consider a very fat woman reclining in the shadows. Unlike many of the others, she seemed to have made little effort to disguise her identity. She wore a sumptuous green dress, sparkling rings on every finger, golden bangles around her wrists, and a pendant necklace draped across her enormous bosom. Kaden guessed her to be somewhere in her mid-fifties, but she had the rich, smooth skin and hair of a much younger woman.

From Gabril's description, she could only be Kegellen, the sole person in the room not descended from nobility. According to the First Speaker, she was the Annurian
akaza,
the lord of the criminal underworld, absolute master of everything from smuggled goods to imperial bribery to assassination. She hardly looked the part, but then, Kiel hardly looked like an immortal Csestriim historian. The important thing was that she had power—more power, if Kiel and Gabril were right, than any of the assembled nobles, at least inside the city of Annur. She could be a crucial ally, if they could convince her.

Tevis rounded on the woman, rapier still drawn. “And the fact that you're here, defending him, is an indication of just how low this council has sunk.” He spat onto the dry dirt. “I swear to Intarra, Kegellen, if you lived in Nish, I would have seen you hung a dozen years ago.”

The fat woman just yawned, holding a puffy hand to her mouth. “A good thing, then,” she said as she lowered it, “that I don't live in Nish.” She turned her attention back to Kaden. “Now, Gabril, my beautiful boy, why don't you explain to this august assembly where you found our most noble Emperor? I promise Tevis will sit down and listen politely…”

“I will do no such—” the man began, but the woman talked right over him.

“… or I will have my ministers cut off his shriveled testicles and feed them to him in a broth of brandy and ginger.”

Tevis's eyes bulged. “You don't frighten me, you fat bitch,” he began, but another man, shorter, with a wide face and fleshy nose, hauled him hastily to a seat on one of the crates, whispering something furiously in his ear. Tevis glanced back at the woman, hesitated a moment, then shook off his companion. Rage twisted his face, but Kaden noted that he did not stand, nor did he speak again. The others watched the woman warily.

Kegellen ignored them all. “Now,” she said, spreading her hands in invitation, “Gabril, you delicious rock of a man, why don't you explain where you found yourself an emperor?”

Gabril shook his head. “The Malkeenian will speak for himself.”

Kaden breathed out a slow, quiet breath, then stepped forward. Gabril and Morjeta had warned him of the difficulties entailed in his plan, warned him dozens of times over, and while Kaden had understood those difficulties intellectually, the true challenge of what he faced was only now setting in. The nobles were already clawing at each other's eyes; there was every chance that the offer he'd come to make would lead to blood on the floor of the warehouse, but there was no going back now.

“My name is Kaden hui'Malkeenian, son of Sanlitun hui'Malkeenian, the Scion of Light, the Long Mind of the World, Holder of the Scales, and Keeper of the Gates. I am the heir to the Unhewn Throne.”

“Nice list,” said a tall, broad man with a huge, red-gold beard—Vennet, according to Gabril's description. “You come here to rub our faces in your pretty polished titles?”

Kaden fixed the speaker with his burning eyes, waiting until he looked away. “No, Vennet,” he said quietly. “I came here to tell you I am done with them.”

Glances darted like swallows in the dark silence that followed, men and women sizing up Kaden and then one another, tempted to see their own advantage in his words, but wary and uncertain.

Tevis narrowed his eyes. He had slipped his rapier back into its sheath, but kept one hand on the pommel.

“What do you mean by
done
?”

“Just that,” Kaden replied evenly. “I am giving up the titles. Giving up the Unhewn Throne.”

Kegellen pursed her lips, flicked absently at one of her dangling earrings with a fingernail. “Giving them,” she asked mildly, “to whom?”

Kaden shook his head. “To no one. Perhaps I misspoke. I said I was giving them up. What I meant was that I plan to destroy them.”

The air in the room went suddenly taut as the summer sky before a storm. Kaden shifted his eyes from one face to the next, watching the reactions, memorizing them—the twitch of an eyelid here, a jaw clenched, a fingernail picking nervously at a fleshy knuckle. Tevis's lips were drawn back in a half snarl, a cornered animal uncertain whether to attack or flee. Kegellen twisted a golden bangle absently around her wrist again and again, the motion as simple and repetitive as the moving meditations of the Shin.

“Then what?” Vennet asked finally. “No more empire? Back to the good old days when we all ran our own kingdoms?”

“We did not all have kings, Vennet,” Gabril said.

Vennet smiled a broad, contemptuous smile. “Of course. You desert dwellers will be overjoyed to return to your savage customs.”

“I'm sorry to hear that you consider his customs savage,” Kaden said, taking a small step to put himself between Gabril and the bearded man, “as I have drawn heavily upon them in my remaking of the empire.”

For several heartbeats no one said anything. Wind gusted through cracks in the warehouse walls, tugging at the lantern flames.

“Making it into what?” Vennet asked finally.

“A republic,” Kaden replied. “A government of shared responsibility.”

Tevis threw his hands in the air. “'Shael save us, a
republic
? Meaning every filthy, dirt-grubbing peasant has a say and a stake?”

“It would be inefficient,” Kaden said quietly, “to bring every filthy, dirt-grubbing peasant to the capital for the sake of governance. I propose something more limited.”

Kegellen narrowed her eyes. “A council,” she said, tapping a finger against her fleshy lips. “You want to have a council.”

Kaden nodded.

“A council?” Tevis spat, lips drawn back in a sneer. “Of whom?”

“You,” Kaden replied. “You will provide the spine. Plus representatives from those atrepies who are not here in the city.” He gestured over his shoulder to Kiel, who slipped the rolled parchment into his hand. Kaden held the scroll up to the light, but made no move to unfurl it.

Vennet snorted. “What is that?”

“A document,” Kaden replied, “setting out the new laws, prerogatives, and responsibilities. A constitution.”

Kaden could never have come up with the thing on his own. After eight years in the Bone Mountains, he knew maybe one Annurian law in a hundred, and had almost no sense of the governing structures of foreign states and nations. He remembered from his childhood that Freeport and the cities north of the Romsdals formed a federation, that the Manjari had an empire like the Annurians, but with an empress instead of an emperor, and that the Blood Cities all insisted on their own independence, alternately fighting and trading with the others. It was an absurdly small base of knowledge for the drafting of a constitution that would govern a polity the size of Annur.