Brian Staveley - The Providence of Fire

“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.