Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(191)

She had stepped over the wooden balustrade and approached as closely as she dared to Uinian in his pillar of liquid light. Even at half a dozen paces, she felt the cloth of her cloak burning against her flesh, smelled the singeing silk. She turned her gaze to the Chief Priest. His face was twitching, his lips squirming with the effort of speech, but he would speak no more today—the paralytic had seen to that. Sheets of sweat poured off his brow. Adare favored him with a grim smile of her own.

“This is for my father,” she murmured before turning back to the congregation.

“The difference between the miracle of the holy man and the kenning of the leach, is that the holy man relies on his goddess, while the leach trusts only himself. The leach, through his own foul machinations, twists the world around him, he himself does the work. The holy man need not raise a finger.” Adare shifted to meet the eyes of those closest to her one by one, willing them to see the distinction, to understand. “This is what the goddess reminded me. She can rain down her favor, weave her protective shroud over one who is distracted. Even one who is asleep.

“At the moment he is simply immobilized, and so his kenning still holds.”

A man in the foremost pew lurched to his feet, murder in his eyes, but one of the Aedolians brought him down with a quick blow to the head.

Quickly now. They’re ready to break.

“Now,” she pressed on, “I will prick him with a different dart, one that brings on a gentle, dreamless sleep. If Intarra loves this man, she will watch over him and you may do what you will with me for forsaking the sanctity of this place and the holiness of your priest. If, however, if he is a leach…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “If he is a leach, he cannot weave his kenning while asleep. The fire of the goddess will wash over him. It will consume him.”

Uinian’s hands, outstretched in benign acceptance, had stiffened into claws. The tendons of his neck strained beneath the skin, and his eyes bulged in their sockets. He’s terrified, Adare realized, the satisfaction running through her veins like strong wine. The man who murdered my father is terrified, and soon he will be dead.

She raised a finger and the assassin’s second dart hummed through the air, burying itself in the priest’s neck.

With what must have been a desperate effort, Uinian forced his mouth open a crack, but instead of words, his tongue lolled out, frothing and red between his lips. A shudder ran through his chest, convulsing up through his neck, and his eyes rolled back in his head. As he dropped, slowly, to his knees, his garments, so white and pristine, began to smoke, then char. Then his entire body burst into flame as he toppled from the beam of light.

With a howl, the crowd closed around them like the sea.





47





For the rest of the day they had pressed east, past the Tower, past Buri’s Leap and the Harpies, past the Black and Gold Knives, dropping into valleys and scrambling through passes no wider than their shoulders until they were in a region of peaks Kaden had never seen before. In the early morning, Pyrre pushed them hard, but as the day wore on, the assassin began to flag and the monks’ long years in the mountains started to show their value. Tan kept the pace, never slowing, even when the others stumbled or paused for breath. How Triste managed to keep up, Kaden had no idea. On the steeper sections, he put a hand on her lower back, helping her up the scree and talus, but for the most part, she climbed and ran on her own, face drawn with the exertion, chest heaving as she gasped the thin air, but she ran. No one had forgotten what happened to Phirum when he began to fall behind.

They didn’t stop until the sun hung just above the western peaks, a bleary red smudge on the darkening sky. They had just crested the steepest ridge yet, a great wall of granite running north and south as far as the eye could see, when Tan finally called the halt. Triste collapsed into a heap on the rocks, shuddering with exhaustion and falling asleep almost instantly. She had lost the second of her light shoes crossing a river, and her feet were an excruciating mess of slices, blisters, blood, and bruises that made Kaden wince just looking at them. It seemed a miracle that she could continue to stand, let alone run.

Wearily, he peered over the ridgeline to the east. The terrain made his heart sink: rank on rank of mountains and ridges stretching away toward the horizon. He started to say something, to point out that they couldn’t possibly cross all of them, but Pyrre and Tan were looking west, studying a saddle they had passed through maybe an hour earlier. It had been a brutal climb and an even more brutal descent, interrupted by a few paces of level ground where Kaden had wanted nothing more than to sprawl out on the earth and surrender himself to slumber. He had suggested they stop there for the night, but Tan was having none of it.