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Chaol Westfall, former Captain of the Royal Guard and now Hand to the newly crowned King of Adarlan, had discovered that he hated one sound above all others. Wheels.
northeastern, sand-blasted deserts. The mosaics that interrupted the green marble had been assembled by craftsmen from Tigana, another of the khagan’s prized cities at the mountainous southern end of the continent.
Each portrayed a scene from the khaganate’s rich, brutal, glorious past: the centuries spent as a nomadic horse-people in the grassy steppes of the continent’s eastern lands; the emergence of the first khagan, a warlord who unified the scattered tribes into a conquering force that took the continent piece by piece, wielding cunning and strategic brilliance to forge a sweeping empire; and then depictions of the three centuries since—the various khagans who had expanded the empire, distributing the wealth from a hundred territories across the lands, building countless bridges and roads to
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Two tasks. He had two tasks while here, and he still was not certain which one would prove the more impossible: Convincing the khagan and his six would-be heirs to lend their considerable armies to the war against Erawan … Or finding a healer in the Torre Cesme who could discover some way to get him walking again. To—he thought with no small ripple of disgust—fix him.
Fix. Even if that’s what he was beseeching the legendary healers to do for him, the word still grated, made his gut churn.
Strips of white cloth—from silk to felt to linen—had been hanging from countless windows and lanterns and doorways. Likely because of some official or distant royal relation dying recently, Nesryn had murmured. Death rituals were varied and often a blend from the countless kingdoms and territories now governed by the khaganate, but the white cloth was an ancient holdover from the centuries when the khagan’s people had roamed the steppes and laid their dead to rest under the watchful, open sky.
