those black-and-gold eyes, then opened her beak and screeched triumphantly. Locke winced at the noise.
“Oh yes, Master Lamora,” said the Falconer. “Yes, I’d say you do have one hell of a fucking problem.”
Interlude
The Throne in Ashes
Therim Pel was once called the Jewel of the Eldren; it was the largest and grandest of the cities that the lost race of ancients left to the men who claimed their lands long after their disappearance.
Therim Pel sat at the headwaters of the Angevine River, where they poured in a white torrent from the mountains; it sat beneath their craggy majesty and was surrounded by rich fields for two days’ ride by fast horse in any other direction. In the autumn, those fields would be swaying with stalks of amber—a bounty fit for the seat of an empire, which Therim Pel was.
All the cities of the south knelt before the Therin Throne. The engineers of the empire built tens of thousands of miles of roads to weave those cities together. The empire’s generals manned them with patrols to put bandits down, and maintained garrisons at smaller towns and villages to ensure that commerce and letters could flow, without interruption, from one end of the empire to the other—from the Iron Sea to the Sea of Brass.
Karthain and Lashain, Nessek and Talisham, Espara and Ashmere, Iridain and Camorr, Balinel and Issara—all those mighty city-states were ruled by dukes who took their crowns of silver from the hands of the emperor himself. The few dukes who remain in present times may wield great power, but they are self-declared; the high lineages dating back to the time of the Therin Throne have long been severed.
The Therin Throne entered into decline when the Vadrans appeared from the north. A raiding sea-people, they took the Throne protectorates on the northern half of the continent; they named the seven great rivers that flowed to the northern sea their Seven Holy Marrows, and they discouraged the Throne’s efforts to reclaim its territory by smashing every army it sent north. Weakened, the Therin Throne could not sustain the effort, and so it was diminished. Diminished, but not broken.
It took the Bondsmagi of Karthain to do that.
The Bondsmagi were newly formed in the city of Karthain; they were beginning to expand the reach of their unique and deadly guild to other cities, and they showed little sign of catering to the angry demands of the emperor in Therim Pel. He insisted that they halt their activities, and they are said to have replied with a short letter listing the prices for which His August Majesty could hire their services. The emperor sent in his own royal circle of sorcerers; they were slain without exception. The emperor then raised his legions and marched on Karthain, vowing to slay every sorcerer who claimed the title of Bondsmage.
The emperor’s declaration of war was a test of resolve for the new guild’s rules. For anyone who dared to harm a Bondsmage, they had publicly vowed reciprocity that would be awful to behold.
During his march to Karthain, the emperor’s soldiers managed to kill about a dozen.
Four hundred Bondsmagi met the emperor’s legions just to the east of Karthain; the sorcerers condescended to offer a pitched battle. In less than two hours, one-third of the emperor’s forces were slaughtered. Strange mists boiled up from the ground to mislead their maneuvers; illusions and phantasms tormented them. Flights of arrows halted in the air and fell to the ground, or were hurled back upon the archers who had loosed them. Comrade turned upon comrade, maddened and misled by sorcery that could chain a man’s actions as though he were a marionette. The emperor himself was hacked to pieces by his personal guard. It is said that no piece larger than a finger remained to be burned on a pyre afterward. The empire was soundly defeated—its surviving generals routed, their remaining soldiers scampering like message-runners for Therim Pel.
But the affair did not end there. The Bondsmagi in conclave decided to enforce their rules, and to enforce them in such a fashion that the entire world would shudder at the thought of crossing them, for as long as men might have memories.
They worked their retribution on the city of Therim Pel.
The firestorm they conjured was unnatural. Four hundred magi, working in concert, kindled something at the heart of the empire that historians still fear to describe. It is said that the flames were as white as the hearts of the stars themselves; that