“You’ll pardon me if that doesn’t ring true.” She leaned back in her chair, ran her hands through her hair, forced herself to focus on the heart of the matter. “Fine. A messenger. From the republic.”
“An offer to negotiate. To make peace. From the sound of it, they’re starting to understand that their government of the people isn’t working out.”
“How perspicacious of them. It only took nine months, the loss of two atrepies, the deaths of tens of thousands, and the specter of widespread starvation to bring the failure to their attention.”
“They want you back. An emperor on the Unhewn Throne again. They want to heal the rift.”
Adare narrowed her eyes, forced herself to breathe evenly, to think through the situation before speaking. It was tempting, so tempting. It was also impossible.
“There’s no way,” she said, shaking her head. “No way that forty-five of Annur’s most rich and vicious aristocrats are going to give up their newfound power. Even if the city were burning down around them, even if the palace was on fire, they wouldn’t change course. They hate me too much.”
“Well…” Il Tornja drew out the word with an apologetic shrug. “They don’t want to give up their power. Not exactly. They want you back as a sort of figurehead, but they want to keep making the laws, deciding the policy. They say bark, you woof obligingly-that sort of thing.…”
Adare slammed a palm down on the table, more violently than she’d intended.
Sanlitun squirmed in his crib, and she paused, waiting for his slow, shallow breathing to resume before speaking.
“Their fucking policies,” she hissed, “are destroying Annur, gutting the empire from the inside out. Their policies are killing people. And now they want me to be complicit in their shit?”
“As far as I understand it, they want you to be more than complicit. They want you to perch atop the pile and grin.”
“I won’t do it,” she said, shaking her head.
He raised an eyebrow. “There was a time, not so many months ago, when you thought there might be room to negotiate with the council, when you were sending the messengers to them.”
“Messengers that they imprisoned. Good men who might be dead now for all I know. I used to think the rift could be healed. Not anymore. It’s too late.”
Il Tornja frowned, as though tasting food gone slightly bad. “Too late is not a phrase that should ever pass an emperor’s lips.”
“I would think an emperor is served by facing the truth rather than running from it.”
“By all means! Confront the hard truths! Just do it in private. You don’t want to plant fear in the hearts of those who follow you.”
“I couldn’t plant fear in your heart if I was sowing it with a shovel.”
“I’m not talking about me.”
“You’re the only one here.”
“You have to practice your face, Adare,” he said. “All the time.”
She opened her mouth to object, but he raised his hands, forestalling her. “I didn’t come here to quarrel. I came here because this is an opportunity.”
“An opportunity for what? To give up everything we’ve been fighting for the past nine months? To let the idiots destroy what’s left of Annur?”
“It is Annur that I’m trying to save,” il Tornja said, suddenly grave. “I need you to go back. To heal the rift between the empire and the republic. I would not ask if it were not necessary.”
Adare frowned. “You’re losing,” she said finally.
The kenarang nodded, then shrugged. “Even genius has limits. My armies are stretched thin as yesterday’s smoke. The Urghul outnumber us, they fight beside an emotion leach, and are led by a god.”
“You still believe Long Fist is Meshkent,” Adare said, trying for the hundredth time to wrap her mind around the notion. Failing for the hundredth time.
“I’m more convinced than ever.”
“How do you know? Explain it.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Adare bridled at the remark. “Try.”
The kenarang spread his hands. “The … shape of his attacks. The rhythm of them.” He rose, crossing to the map. “He hit us here and here at exactly the same time. Then, half a day later, here, here, and here. All that time, another group was sweeping west, to arrive at Irfeth’s Ford just when the first group had retreated.”
Adare glanced at the map, the scattering of positions il Tornja had indicated. The events were clear enough, but the pattern-if there was even a pattern-meant nothing. He waved a conciliatory hand. “The human mind was not built for this.”
She stared at the rivers and mountains, the forests, the small lines indicating armies and positions, willing herself to find some shape in the attacks. “He did something smart?” she asked finally.
The general shrugged. “Not particularly.”
Adare suppressed a growl. “Then what?”
“He did something … inhuman.”
“Humans are all different,” Adare said, shaking her head. “There’s no such thing as a ‘human’ line of attack. A hundred generals would make a hundred different decisions.”
“No. They would not.” He smiled, a wide, bright smile. “Sometimes you forget, Adare, that I have fought against thousands of human generals. Two thousand and eight, if you care for the precise figure. You like to think you are unique, that each man and woman is different from the one before, but you are wrong. In all those battles, all those wars, I saw the same things, over and over, the same handful of little tricks, the same set of clumsy gambits and tactics played over and over again with tiny, irrelevant variation. I know the lineaments of a human attack, and this is not that. Long Fist is Meshkent. You can take my word for it. He wants to spread his bloody worship through Vash and Eridroa, and, much though it galls me to admit it, he is winning.”
“I thought you said he wasn’t brilliant.”
“He doesn’t need to be, when his army outnumbers mine twenty to one. I need more men, Adare. I need the Sons of Flame. And I need a secure southern front. At least until the war is over.” He smiled wolfishly.
Adare studied her general. The kenarang looked hungry. His eyes were fixed on her, lips parted just enough to show the shadow of teeth. He looked ready to smile or snarl, ready to bite. Of all his carefully cultivated human expressions, this one was easiest to believe. Beneath all the casual banter and bright buckles, Ran il Tornja was a predator, a killer, the greatest general Annur had ever known, and this killer’s face stretched across his features seemed right, true.
Nothing he shows you is true, she reminded herself.
He had peeled away one mask, that was all. This hunger and savagery was just one more face beneath all the other faces, a better, subtler act, one she wanted to believe. She could understand the brutal slashing and biting for power. She could control it. The truth of il Tornja, however, was no simple animal snarl. It was something else, something older and worse waiting beneath all the faces, something awful and inhuman, unfathomable as the space between the light of the stars.
Fear crept over her skin, raising the fine hairs on her arm. With an effort, she suppressed a shudder, forced herself to meet his eyes.
“And when it’s over?” she asked.
“Once Meshkent is defeated and the Urghul are driven back…” He smiled wider, pushed back until his chair was balancing on two legs, poised between falling and falling. “Well, then we can look into-how should we say it? The long-term viability of the republican experiment…”
“And by look into,” Adare said flatly, “you mean kill everyone who doesn’t want me back.”
“Well…” He spread his hands. “We could kill a few at a time until the others recall the golden glory of Malkeenian rule.”
Adare shook her head. “It feels wrong. The great emperors of Annur, the ones who presided over a peaceful empire, punished treachery and rewarded those who stayed loyal. I’ve read the Chronicles. Now you want me to turn a blind eye to the treason and idiocy of this ’Kent-kissing council?”