19
Uinian IV did not look capable of murder, certainly not the murder of an old soldier like Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian. Where Adare’s father had been tall and strong, with powerful arms and hands, the Chief Priest of Intarra was nearly an albino, short and pale, thin-lipped and stoop-shouldered, with a head like a misshapen gourd. That her father lay dead in his cold tomb was pain enough, but that he should have been delivered to Ananshael by this pathetic wretch made Adare want to scream and sob at the same time. If Sanlitun had to die, he should have been cut down in battle, or swallowed by the raging sea. The chaos of war, the wrath of the depths: those were foes worthy of her father. Despite his post, Uinian struck her as a small, mean creature.
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.
“You’re a soldier,” she replied bluntly, “not a legal scholar.”
He nodded. “And one thing I’ve learned as a soldier is when to listen to the people I command. I’ve been over this thing a dozen times with Jesser and that finicky bastard, Yuel. What in ’Shael’s name is his job, anyway?”
“Chronicler of Justice. It’s the highest legal post in the empire.”
“Well, he’s been going at me hammer and tongs for days now. I can repeat my speech to the Sitters forward and backwards, could probably translate it into Urghul if you wanted. I didn’t realize my first days as regent would be spent drilling like a grass-green recruit.”
It should have been a comfort. Annur knew no finer legal minds than Jesser and Yuel, and the case against Uinian appeared relatively straightforward—an Emperor murdered in the heart of the Temple of Light during a secret meeting with the Chief Priest. If Ran il Tornja had the good sense to follow their counsel to the letter, she would see Uinian divested of his office, blinded, and put to death before the sun set.
Before il Tornja settled into his own wooden seat, he knelt respectfully to the Unhewn Throne looming in the shadows behind him. The throne would remain vacant until Kaden’s return, but even empty it drew eyes and hushed voices, as though it were a sleeping and dangerous beast. It was older than the hall that had been built around it, older than the Dawn Palace itself, older than memory, a mass of black stone jutting from the bedrock, thrice the height of the tallest man. Near the very top, eons of wind and weather had carved a seat perfectly fitted to the human form. The rock itself afforded no simple way to reach that seat, and one of Adare’s forebears had commissioned a gilded staircase to aid the Emperor in his ascent. Before the staircase, however, if the writings of Ussleton the Bald were to be believed, before Emperors, before Annur itself, the primitive tribes of the Neck had once chosen their chiefs through a bloody melee, hundreds of men struggling to climb the stone and ensconce themselves while cutting down their foes with bright bronze blades. In the flickering torchlight Adare could see red beneath the lapidary black, a reminder of the generations of blood that had seeped into the indifferent stone.
If il Tornja was intimidated, he didn’t show it. After paying his respect, he turned to cast an eye over the assembled crowd—hundreds of ministers and bureaucrats, curious merchants and aristocrats come to see justice served and one of the city’s mighty brought low—then sat in his own wooden chair before waving a hand to silence the tolling of the gongs.
“We gather,” he began, his voice carrying through the hall, “to find truth. In this we call upon the gods, and most especially Astar’ren, Mother of Order, and Intarra, whose divine light illuminates the darkest shadows, to guide us and gird our strength.” The formula was rote, the opening to every judicial proceeding from the Waist to the Bend, but il Tornja delivered it clearly and forcefully.
He has the voice of a battlefield commander, Adare realized, hope swelling inside her for the first time. The man seemed, if not precisely regal, then capable and confident, equal to the day’s work. She allowed herself to skip past the present for a moment, to consider the future. The conviction and execution of the Chief Priest would throw the Temple of Light into disarray. Not only would she have revenge for her father’s death, she could use the chaos to see the rival order gutted and brought low. Not that we’ll eliminate them, of course. The people need their religion, but those legions will have to go—
“Uinian,” il Tornja continued, cutting into her thoughts, “fourth of that name, Chief Priest of Intarra, Keeper of the Temple of Light, stands accused before this assembly on two counts: Treason in the Highest Degree and Murder of a Government Official, both capital offenses. As regent, I will present the facts as they are known, while Uinian himself will speak in his defense. The Seven Sitters, guided by their own reason and the illumination of the gods, will speak to the man’s guilt or innocence.”
He turned to Uinian. “Do you have questions at this time?”
Uinian smiled a thin-lipped smile. “None. You may proceed.”
Adare bit nervously at the corner of her lip. It was hardly the priest’s position to tell the governing magistrate when he could or could not proceed.
Il Tornja, for his part, simply shrugged. If he was unsettled or put out by Uinian’s posture, he didn’t show it.
“You may choose your Sitters.”
This, too, was standard. Dozens of panels of Seven waited in chambers below, each sealed with a number. Uinian, now, would choose any number from one to twenty, and the Sitters associated with that number would be summoned to the room to judge him.
Only, he did not speak a number. Instead, his tongue flicking between his lips, he glanced over at Adare, then up into the shadowy space of the rafters.
“As this trial has already shown,” he said, his voice quieter than the regent’s, but sly, snaking throughout the hall, “men and women are much given to folly. I will not be judged by them.”
For the first time, il Tornja frowned and Adare’s stomach clenched.
“If he will not be judged,” Adare began, half-rising to her feet, “then let us send for the headsman at once. Annur is nothing if not an empire of law. It is this law that separates us from the savages offering blood sacrifice in the jungles and on the steppe. If this so-called priest would flaunt that law, let us be done with him.”
Hundreds of eyes turned to her. Il Tornja, too, met her gaze, raising a placating hand and nodding that he already understood the nature of her objection. Adare let the words trail off, retaking her seat with as much dignity as she could muster. The ministers flanking the regent looked on like buzzards in their black robes. The men had no sympathy for Uinian, but they had not stopped looking for weakness in Adare, either. It is no slight to you, Baxter Pane had argued, staring at her with those rheumy eyes of his, but women are not suited to the Ministry. They are too … fickle, too easily transported by their emotions.
Adare swallowed a curse. And here I am, allowing myself to be transported by my emotions.
The priest paused, allowing the sudden buzz that had attended her outburst to subside, clearly enjoying the confusion of the crowd and Adare’s own discomfort. Her father had tried to teach her to control her emotions, but it was a skill for which she had little talent.
“If you refuse the trial—,” il Tornja began, but Uinian cut him off.
“I do not refuse the trial. I refuse this trial. The Chief Priest of Intarra, the chosen of the goddess on earth, is not subject to the petty minds and manifest error of men and women.” He spread his arms wide, as though inviting all assembled to consider the very contents of his soul. “I refuse the judgment of the Seven Sitters and call instead upon the goddess herself to render her verdict. I demand, as is my ancient right, Trial by Flame.”
Adare half rose to her feet once more.