Read The Legend of Broken for Free Online

the money that trades hands among the gamblers in attendance creates new fortunes, revealing newly favored souls, and punishing those who have lost their zeal. The sentek has tried hard to accept this reasoning; at the very least, he has kept himself from openly stating that the youths who spend their hours in sport or gambling would be better off serving their kingdom and their god in the army. But recently this self-control, this keeping his questions to himself, has become a difficult chore. For of late, the priests of Kafra—whom Arnem has ever obeyed faithfully—have asked of him something that he cannot give:
    They have asked for one of his children.
    Arnem’s eyes are drawn ever farther left, to the smooth granite walls of the Inner City and the rooftops of the royal palace beyond. Home to the God-King, † his family, the Grand Layzin (highest of the priests of Kafra and the God-King’s right hand) as well as the beautiful high priestesses known as the Wives of Kafra, the Inner City has not been visited by any common citizen in the more than two centuries of Broken’s history, and remains the city’s supreme mystery—which is precisely why Arnem is reluctant to send the second-born of his sons to serve there, although such an act is expected of all families of even moderate stature in Broken society. Children who enter the service of the God-King are never permitted to see their families again; and a childhood spent in the alleys of the Fifth District long ago planted a powerful distrust of such secrecy in Arnem. Perhaps the service these children undertake is pious, and worthier than any life spent in Broken’s outer world; but it is Arnem’s experience that virtue, while it may sometimes need a veil, never requires utter obscurity.
    But was it not Oxmontrot who wanted it all this way? Oxmontrot, ‡ Broken’s founder, first king, and greatest warrior, and a hero to lowborn soldiers like Arnem. More than two centuries ago, Oxmontrot (himself lowborn, and able lead his people only after long years as a mercenary in the service of that vast empire that the citizens of Broken call
Lumun-jan,
† although scholars know it as
Roma
) had been labeled “Mad,” ‡ because of his ferocious determination, following his return home, to force the farmers and fishermen west of the Meloderna River valley and north of Davon Wood to carve a granite city out of the summit of Broken. Previously, the great masses of stone atop the mountain had been used by tribes dwelling below only as settings for human and animal sacrifices to their various gods. Yet the Mad King had also been shrewd, Arnem muses, on this night as so many: Broken had truly been the finest point from which to build a great state. From its summit, the people of the valleys and dales below could withstand onslaughts from the southeast, the east, and the north, while the remaining approaches to the kingdom were sealed by Davon Wood. No warrior of the Mad King’s time could find fault with the ambitious plan, nor has any since: for the sole enemies to have pierced the city’s defenses have been the Bane, and Arnem knows that not even Oxmontrot could have been expected to foresee what an unending problem that race of exiles would become …
    The fact that the Mad King had been a heathen, a Moon worshipper like the Bane, could not have helped his foresight in this regard, Arnem knows; yet despite his personal beliefs, Oxmontrot had presided over the building of the Inner City as a sanctum for his royal family, in his later years, and he had not opposed the introduction of the faith of Kafra and all its secret rituals into his city. Indeed, Broken’s founder had seen that the Kafran religion (brought home by several of his mercenary comrades in the service of the
Lumun-jani
) could be made to work to his kingdom’s advantage, precisely because it emphasized so strongly the perfection of the human form and the amassing of wealth. His new kingdom, like any