The Vacant Throne Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Part I - Amenkor

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II: - At Sea

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part III: - Venitte

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Be sure to read all three novels in

  JOSHUA PALMATIER’s

  THE THRONE OF AMENKOR:

  THE SKEWED THRONE (Book One)

  THE CRACKED THRONE (Book Two)

  THE VACANT THRONE (Book Three)

  Copyright © 2008 by Joshua Palmatier.

  DAW Books Collectors No. 1427.

  DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  First Printing, January

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  .S.A.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This work is dedicated to

  my mom, Beryle Palmatier.

  (Pronounced like pearl, but with a B.)

  She gave me and my brothers

  the strength to accomplish anything

  we set our minds to,

  and the ability to dream big.

  I hope I’ve made her proud.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost, I want to thank all of the readers out there who took a risk and picked up The Skewed Throne, the first book by a new author. I hope you’ve enjoyed Varis and her companions throughout their journeys in the Throne books, and I hope that you continue to take risks on new authors in the future.

  There are certain friends that not only suffer through my first (and second and third and . . .) drafts, but also manage to somehow find it in their hearts after that to hang around and support me in my personal life. Or at least entertain me. *grin* They are Ariel Guzman, Jennifer Dunne, and Patricia Bray. Thanks for being there. And for bringing me chocolate. (Yes, they are my dealers. No, go find your own dealers.)

  My editor and agent, Sheila Gilbert and Amy Stout, are responsible for bringing you these books. They saw the potential . . . and then beat it out of me. After that, Debra Euler, Marsha Jones, and all of the others at DAW that work behind the scenes took care of the packaging. This is as much a labor of love for them as it is for me, and for that they have my thanks.

  And lastly, my partner, George. He’s now seen me struggle through two books, with all the stresses and joys that such a struggle encompasses. Here’s to all the future struggles to come.

  If you’d like to find out more about the Throne books, and other projects, check out my webpage at www.joshuapalmatier.comor my LiveJournal at jpsorrow.livejournal.com.

  Part I

  Amenkor

  Chapter 1

  I stood in the middle of a field of wheat, the bristly heads of grain pattering against my outstretched hands. The breeze that rippled through the stalks tugged at my hair, at the folds of my sweat-stained shirt. In the moment before dawn, the world was quiet, expectant.

  Then, far ahead over the fields, near the road that snaked down from the city of Venitte into the hills, a flare of light lit the darkness. Harsh and orange, the fire arched up into the sky, and I felt a tug of grief, a pain that bit deeper every time I felt it, still new and raw and fresh. It twisted in my chest, burned at the edges of my eyes, but I clenched my jaw as I watched the fire crest, begin a long descent, fall down and down—

  And explode among the trunks of olive trees. In the burst of light when it struck, I saw an army marching through the fields. A moment later I heard screams, faint with distance.

  The pain in my chest writhed.

  I’d moved before I’d made a conscious decision to move, pushed through the wheat toward the road. As I plowed forward, grain rattling against my legs, catching, holding me back, more fire bloomed and I marked its source, marked my targets. Then I reached the road, broke into a sprint, the screams from my fellow Venittians among the olive trees growing louder. Heart thundering in my chest, I stretched out with my mind, drew the Threads around me, wove them tight, bound them, twisted them, prepared. Ahead, the screams intensified, grew heated, broke into a rumbling roar of challenge and hatred and fear as the two armies met. Sunlight touched the surrounding hills and fields with a patina of gold, although I didn’t need the light. Through the Threads, I could see everything. The Venittians charged through the low, flattened branches of the olives, fire lancing out, roaring through their ranks, leaving behind charred bodies and burning trees, and in the backwash of light . . .

  The Chorl—skin tainted a faint blue, like winter sky, tattoos black in the dawn, faces contorted with rage. The Chorl—curved steel swords raised to the sky as they screamed in a harsh, ululating language.

  The Chorl—who had killed my wife and two daughters.

  Cold, hard-edged rage tingled through my skin, rippled out on the Threads I’d bound around me, and I slowed as I came at the battle from the side. No need to run. There were plenty of Chorl to kill. They’d invaded the Frigean coast two weeks before, invaded the city of Venitte. They’d come from the western sea with no warning, had attacked the port and overrun a significant portion of the city before anyone had known what was happening.

  But the Chorl themselves were not my targets. I would have attacked with the rest of the Venittian army if they had been. No, the attack was a diversion, the army bait. I wanted the Adepts, the ones wielding the Threads, the ones who’d thrown the fire that had killed so many in that initial attack on the city.

  The ones who had killed Olivia, who’d killed five-year-old Jaer and her older sister Pallin.

  I slid past the first of the Chorl, moving slowly, calmly, their piercing howls surrounding me as they tried to surge forward to the front of the battle. They broke around me as if I were a stone in their currents, not consciously realizing what they were doing, the Threads shunting them to one side while concealing me from their sight. I angled toward the back of their forces, focusing on the source of the fire that still arched up out of their ranks. The Chorl thinned. The road ended, and I was once again among wheat, the stalks trampled into the earth, broken and shattered. Ahead, a Chorl woman in a mud-splattered dress wove the Sight into a tight, blazing fireball and hurled it high into the air, her face strained with effort, sweat streaming down her cheeks, down the cold blue skin of her throat, where corded muscle stood out in stark relief. She was surrounded by ten Chorl warriors and two Chorl priests. The warriors were dressed in a riot of colors—blue, red, orange, green—over crude leather armor. Their eyes were locked on the battle behind me, their bodies tense, hands on the hilts of their swords. The priests were dressed in vibrant yellow-and-red robes and wore necklaces of shells. One carried a scepter of some type of reed and feathers. All of the men were covered in tattoos; on their fac
es, their necks, their hands. The woman wore five earrings in each ear, the gold glinting occasionally through the long strands of her black hair. She had no visible tattoos whatsoever, her skin flawless.

  I slipped through the ring of warriors without them noticing, one sidling away from me as I passed, and halted in front of the woman, looked up into her dark eyes, a surge of regret passing through me that there was only one Chorl Adept in this attack. This close, I could smell her sweat, could hear the priests chanting under their breath on either side of her, could feel the tension coursing around me on the Threads. It reeked of fear, of blood, of trampled wheat.

  I glared up into the woman’s face.

  Someone like this had stood on the Chorl ships that had entered Venitte’s harbor and attacked the fishing and trading ships, catching them unaware. Someone like this had flung fireball after fireball up onto the cliffs and houses that surrounded the harbor, had flung the fireball that had killed Olivia and Jaer and Pallin.

  Jaer. I felt again her charred skin as I clutched her small body to my chest, felt it flaking off beneath my touch.

  Only five years old.

  The pain stabbed into my chest again, and tears seared the corners of my eyes. The queasy rush of emotion closed off my throat with the hot, sickening taste of phlegm, and I flung out my arms to both sides, gathering more Threads to me as bitter rage flooded my mouth, stained my tongue. I could kill them all with a touch of my hand, could stop their hearts in their chests. They’d drop to the ground, dead before they even knew what had happened. I could send invisible needles of pain into their skin and flay them where they stood. I could call down lightning from the clear morning sky, or open up the earth beneath them and bury them alive. I could kill them all in a hundred different ways, using any or all of the Five Magics.

  I chose fire.

  In the moment before I ignited the Threads I’d woven around them all—the priests, the warriors, the Adept—the Chorl woman tensed. Through the tears blurring my eyes, I saw her frown, a fireball half formed before her. She sensed something. A ripple on the Threads, a disturbance on the ether. Or perhaps she’d heard the sob that had escaped me.

  It didn’t matter. I didn’t give her a chance to react.

  I let the fire loose, roared as I ignited the Threads that bound the twelve Chorl men and the Adept together. A roar of grief, of pain that would never end, formless and harsh and guttural. Eyes clenched shut, I felt the shock of the priests and warriors and the woman in the single breath before the fire struck them, before it consumed them, flinging them back with its force, scorching through clothing, through flesh, through bone, as the fire that had charred the flesh from Olivia and Jaer and Pallin had done. I poured all of my sorrow into it, all of my rage, all of the feelings of uselessness and despair I’d felt in the last two weeks as the peace of the Frigean coast collapsed under the Chorl onslaught. And when I felt the last breath of life flee, when the thirteen charred bodies lay around me in a grisly circle, I collapsed to my knees, panting, head bowed, tears still streaming down my face, hands clenched in fists at my sides.

  Because the pain still beat with my heart. It burned through my veins, prickled in my skin.

  I sobbed.

  I should have died with them. I should have died protecting Olivia, my body shielding her from the fire, not the other way around.

  I lifted my head, stared at the blackened bodies, felt the rage boil up again, bitter as ash, then turned to gaze up into the lightening sky.

  It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough.

  I stood slowly, rage settling around me. A calm rage filled with nothing but grief. With nothing but visions of Olivia on the veranda, held in my arms. Of the scent of her hair, the smoothness of her skin. Of the sounds of Jaer and Pallin shrieking in delight as they played around us.

  I turned, cloaked in memories, and waded into the Chorl forces from behind, trailing fire and death behind me.

  I woke with a gasp and an ache in my chest like a hand gently crushing the life from me. I tasted hot, fresh tears, realized that I’d been crying as I slept, my muscles stiff with tension, my body drained, overwhelmed by grief.

  But not my own grief. Someone else’s. The man in the dream; a man I knew.

  Cerrin.

  I dove beneath the river, hope surging forward, the dark room before me shifting subtly, becoming gray and partially visible with the Sight. I could see the edges of the bed I slept in, could see the settee where the Servant Marielle instructed me in writing and math, could see the tables and chairs and the bowl that contained water so I could wash my face. A breeze blew the curtains back from the doors leading out to the balcony, scented with ocean salt and spring night. The balcony overlooked the city of Amenkor. My city, for I was the Mistress.

  And we’d survived the winter . . . and an attack by the Chorl.

  But at a cost.

  I closed my eyes, reached out on the river toward the Skewed Throne, toward the symbol of Amenkor’s power. Cerrin had been a part of the throne, one of the personalities that had been trapped within it, one of the original seven Adepts that had created the throne almost fifteen hundred years before, when the Chorl had first attacked. If I’d been dreaming of him, had lived out one of his memories, then perhaps . . .

  The hope that quickened my heartbeat died.

  The throne wasn’t there. I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t feel it enfolding me with its power.

  Because it was dead. Because I’d destroyed it in order to save Amenkor from the Chorl. From their leader, the Ochean.

  I opened my eyes, pushed myself up and to the edge of the bed with a sigh. The tightness of grief in my chest had receded, but not much. I knew I wouldn’t sleep anymore, so I rose and moved across the room to the curtains, stepped out onto the balcony.

  As in the dream, the sky overhead was just beginning to lighten with dawn. If the balcony had faced east, I would have seen the eastern mountains lined with golden light.

  Instead, I stared down into the husk of what once had been Amenkor, watched the details of the damage done by the Chorl attack emerge as the sun rose. The watchtowers at the ends of the juts of land that protected the harbor were nothing more than heaps of broken stone. The Chorl had destroyed them first, stone and debris arching up and out into the darkness: our first warning that the Chorl had arrived. I shivered at the memory, at the raw power it had taken to destroy them. So much power it had left vortices in the eddies of the river for days afterward.

  Then the Chorl’s black ships had knifed into the harbor, where they’d been met by the trading ships, and the real battle had begun. What ships remained from that attack were anchored off the shattered piers, both Amenkor and Chorl ships alike. In their haste to retreat, harried by Amenkor guardsmen and militia, the Chorl had left some of their own ships behind. Small boats ferried men to and fro between them even now. The wharf itself had been utterly destroyed when the Chorl drove their ships into the docks.

  From there a clear path of destruction wound upward, from the wharf up through the lower city, through the twisting streets, through the marketplaces, to the gates of the outer wall of the palace. Buildings had been consumed by fire, stone walls collapsing under the heat. Hastily constructed barricades had been breached, the chairs and tables and crab traps used to make them tossed aside. The Chorl had destroyed everything as they came, might have razed the entire city in their fervor, but they’d been intent on reaching the palace, on reaching and seizing control of the throne.

  They’d almost succeeded. The gates to the three walls that surrounded the palace had been breached in the span of an hour, the Ochean and the Chorl Servants—the women like me that could wield the river; the women Cerrin had called Adepts in the dream— had blown the gates apart. Only Eryn, the previous Mistress, had been able to slow them, and only then with my help.

  I stared down at the jagged holes in the three walls, tasted again Eryn’s desperation to hold against the combined strength of the Ochean and
her Servants. They’d linked their powers somehow, so that the Ochean’s power had been augmented by her Servants.

  We’d never had a chance.

  But we’d prevailed in the end. After I’d killed the Ochean—and in the process destroyed the throne—Captain Catrell, Keven, and the rest of the guardsmen and militia had driven the Chorl back to their ships, had driven them back out to sea. The Chorl had retreated, and hadn’t been seen since.

  On the balcony, overlooking the blackened buildings and streets of Amenkor, I straightened, felt a tightness in my chest. We’d survived the winter, the late winter planting ready to be harvested in another few weeks, the early spring planting already in the ground. The shipment of grain from the northern city of Merrell—promised to us at the beginning of winter—had finally arrived over the treacherous northern road. The Dredge was intact, left untouched by the Chorl, as well as the eastern portions of the city.

  We were wounded, but we’d survived.

  I knew the Chorl would be back. They wouldn’t stop attacking the coast, couldn’t stop. Because they couldn’t return to their homeland. I’d seen it destroyed through the Ochean’s eyes when she’d attempted to seize control of the throne. The Chorl had simply retreated to the Boreaite Isles off the Frigean coast. To regroup, to plan. They couldn’t stay on the Isles forever. There were too many Chorl for the islands to support.

  But for now, the fact that we’d survived their initial attack was enough.

  I took one last long look out over the charred city, plans already forming in my mind. We’d had two weeks to burn the dead, to grieve, to clean up and take stock, to begin drilling the citizens in their own defense in case the Chorl returned. It was time to start building again.