Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(81)

So why doesn’t he look afraid? she wondered nervously.

The Dawn Palace was calibrated to overawe even the most jaded potentates. At its heart, Intarra’s Spear loomed over the entire city, an impossibly tall tower of clear stone driven deep into the bedrock by some hand older than history. At the base of the Spear stood the Hall of a Thousand Trees. The longest and highest hall in the Palace was also one of the first, an echoing edifice of redwood and cedar, the huge pillars of which had taken ten thousand slaves a dozen years to haul across Eridroa from the slopes of the Ancaz. Polished and oiled golden trunks stretched upward in row after row, branches ramifying as they had in life to support the ceiling. The space had been built on a scale to humble even the Emperor who ruled it from his seat on the Unhewn Throne, and yet Uinian appeared unconcerned, bored, even smug.

His small dark eyes flitted from the Aedolians lining the walls to the benches where the Sitters would hear the charges and evidence against him followed by his own defense. He licked his lips, although the movement struck Adare as anticipatory rather than nervous; then he turned his eyes to her. She knew the power of her own gaze, the unnerving effect her burning irises had on those who tried to meet them, and yet the Chief Priest seemed no more unsettled by these than he did by the hall itself. He considered her cooly as she walked past him to take her seat, the faintest hint of a smirk playing at the corner of his mouth, then nodded.

“My lady,” he said. “Or should I say, Minister? Can one be both a lady and a Minister?”

“Can one be both a murderer and a priest?” she replied, rage like fire running under her skin.

“My Lady Minister,” he replied, raising a fluttering hand to his chest in mock horror, “I fear you refer to me.”

Adare clamped down on her response. They had not spoken loudly, and yet already some of those gathered for the trial had turned to watch the exchange. There was a legal process to be followed, and it did not involve sparring with the accused. Such sparring was beneath the dignity of an imperial minister and besides, in moments her father’s murderer would face a justice far more implacable than any of Adare’s barbs. She bit into a fingernail, then remembered her post, the hundreds watching, and returned the hand forcefully to her lap. That Uinian should pay for his crimes before the day’s end was clear to her, and yet Adare spent enough time studying history to know that Annurian justice, for all its glory, could sometimes fail.

The selection of the Sitters was the most important thing. They were chosen at random every day by bureaucrats trained specially for the task, dozens of groups of seven to sit on the dozens of trials that would take place, each group composed, as decreed by Terial himself, of the Seven: a mother, a merchant, a pauper, a prelate, a soldier, a son, and a dying man. Terial had believed that a group so comprised was fit to pass justice on even the empire’s most august citizens, and yet it was possible, through fraud and bribery, to meddle with the composition of the group.

I went over all the potential Sitters myself, she thought. What did I miss? What does he know?

The reverberation of two great gongs broke the silence, echoing right down into Adare’s teeth. It was the first time she had heard that sound, the presage to an imperial entrance, since the death of her father, and for a moment, she expected Sanlitun himself to stride through the twenty-foot doors and into the chamber in his simple robes of state. When Ran il Tornja appeared instead, she felt the sharp twist of loss all over again. It seemed impossible that her father was truly gone, that she would never again sit across the stones board from him or ride at his side. The philosophers and priests dickered over what happened when Ananshael took a soul, but all their theological and doctrinal hairsplitting didn’t make a thimble of difference. Her father was gone, and the kenarang, decked out in a riding cloak worth its weight in gold, ruled Annur now, at least until Kaden returned.

In cases of high treason, the Emperor himself played the role of accusing magistrate, and so, with Sanlitun dead, the role fell to the regent. That worried Adare. Il Tornja was clearly a brilliant general, and yet, by his own admission, he had no interest in or aptitude for the subtler maneuverings of politics. Of course, this was a legal rather than a political affair, and il Tornja had seemed genuinely interested in seeing Uinian’s head parted from his shoulders, but having someone more shrewd, more deeply versed in the nuances of the Annurian legal code, would have been a comfort.

“I know you’re worried,” he had said to her the night before as they met over cups of ta in the Iris Pavilion to discuss the trial.