Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

  After two weeks, Heng brought out Kaden’s bowl and cup with a smile. Before he returned them, however, he hefted the rock Kaden had been trying to drink from. “Your mind is like this rock: full, solid. Nothing else can fit inside. You pack it with thoughts and emotions and claim that this fullness is something to be proud of!” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. “How much you must have missed your empty old bowl!”

  Over the following years, Kaden had worked diligently at the skill, learning how to hollow a space out of himself, out of his own mind. He hadn’t mastered it, of course—most monks didn’t reach the vaniate until their third or fourth decades—but he had made progress. Memorization and recall, the saama’an, played a central role in the practice; they were the picks and levers with which the Shin pried away the self. Heng taught him that a packed mind resisted new impressions; it tended to force itself onto the surrounding world, rather than filling itself with that world. The inability to recall the shape of a thrush’s wing, for instance, indicated a mind transfixed with its own irrelevant ephemera.

  And mind was not the only obstacle. The body, too, came packed with aches, itches, pains, and petty pleasures. When a monk emptied his mind of thought and emotion, the voice of the body proved all too ready to fill the void. To silence that voice, the Shin stood naked in the baking sun, ran barefoot in the snow, sat in the same cross-legged position for days on end as the muscles cramped and the stomach twisted itself into knots. As long as the body impinged on the mind, vaniate was impossible. So, one by one, the Shin confronted the demands of the body, faced them down, and discarded them.

  The practice was not easy. Earlier in the year, Kaden had helped to carry the body of one of the acolytes from the bottom of a gorge. The boy, only eleven years old, had fallen to his death while trying to run away in the night. Such tragedies were rare, however. The umials knew the limits of their students, and the monk whose acolyte had fallen was subjected to severe penance. Still, the testers considered sliced feet, frostbitten hands, and broken bones an inevitable portion of a boy’s first five years at the monastery.

  The quest for the vaniate never ended, of course, and even the oldest monks admitted to difficulties. The mind was a clay pot set out in the rain. A monk could empty it daily and still the old hopes and worries, the body’s meager strengths and perennial pains pattered against the bottom, trickled down the sides, filling it once more. The life of the Shin was a life of constant vigilance.

  The monks were not cruel, exactly, but they made no allowances for the vagaries of human emotion. Love or hate, sadness or joy, these were cords that bound one to the illusion of self, and self, in the Shin lexicon, was a curse. It spread everywhere, obscuring the mind, muddying the world’s clarity. As the monks struggled to achieve emptiness, the self always seeped in, cold water in the bottom of a deep well.

  Kaden’s limbs felt like lead. The frigid snowmelt in Umber’s Pool had numbed his fingers and toes, chilled his core until it was an effort to lug each breath into his heavy lungs. He had never stayed in the pool so long so early in the season, and yet Tan showed no signs of relenting.

  “Emptiness,” the monk mused. “You could translate the word that way, but our language doesn’t map well onto such a foreign concept. Do you know where the word comes from?”

  Kaden shook his head helplessly. At the moment, there was nothing he could have cared about less than the etymology of some strange Shin obsession. Two winters prior, one of the younger monks, Fallon Jorgun, had died of cold when he broke his leg running the Circuit of Ravens, and water chilled a body far more quickly than air.

  “The Csestriim,” Tan replied at last. “It is a Csestriim word.”

  At any other point, Kaden would have pricked up his ears and paid attention. The Csestriim were nursery stories—a vicious, vanished race, who had walked the world when it was young, who had ruled that world before the arrival of humans and then fought ruthlessly to exterminate those same humans. Kaden had never heard them mentioned in conjunction with the vaniate. Why the Shin would want to master some skill of a long-dead, evil race, he had no idea, and with the heat inside of him leaking away, he couldn’t bring himself to care. The Csestriim were millennia gone, if they had ever lived at all, and if Tan didn’t let him out of the water, he was going to follow them shortly.

  “For the Csestriim,” the older monk continued, “the vaniate was not an arcane skill to be mastered. They lived in the vaniate. Emotion was as alien to their minds as emptiness is to ours.”

  “Why do you want me to learn it?” Kaden managed weakly. Breathing was difficult, and speaking felt nearly impossible.

  “Learning,” Tan said. “You care too much about learning. Studies. Progress. Growth.” He spat the words. “Self. Maybe if you stopped thinking about your learning, you might notice the world around you. You would have noticed me sitting in the shadows.”

  Kaden kept silent. He wasn’t sure he could have spoken anyway, not without biting off the end of his tongue. He’s made his point, he thought to himself, and now I can get out of this ’Shael-spawned water. He wasn’t at all sure his arms would be able to hoist him from the pool, but surely Tan would help to drag him out. The older monk, however, made no move to rise.

  “Are you cold?” he asked, as though the thought had just struck him.

  Kaden nodded vigorously.

  Tan watched with the detached curiosity a monk might reserve for the study of a wounded animal. “What feels cold?”

  “L-l-legs,” Kaden managed. “Ar-arms.”

  Tan frowned. “But are you cold?”

  There was some change in the inflection, but Kaden couldn’t make sense of it. The world seemed to be getting darker. Had the sun set so quickly? He tried to remember how late it was when he’d started down to the pool, but he couldn’t think of anything beyond the heavy stillness of his limbs. He forced himself to take a breath. There was a question. Tan had asked him a question.

  “Are you cold?” the monk said again.

  Kaden stared at him helplessly. He couldn’t feel his feet anymore. Couldn’t feel much of anything. The cold was gone, somehow. The cold was gone and he had stopped shivering. The water felt like … nothing, like air, like space. Maybe if he just closed his eyes for a moment …

  “Are you cold?” Tan said again.

  Kaden shook his head wearily. The cold had gone. He let his eyes slip shut. Nothingness surrounded him in a gentle embrace.

  Then someone was behind him, dragging him by the armpits out of the water. He wanted to protest that he was too tired to move, that he just wanted to go to sleep, but the person kept tugging until he was sprawled out on the ground. Strong hands bundled him in what must have been a robe or blanket; his skin was too numb to feel the texture. A blow struck his face, jarring him from his stupor. He opened his eyes to protest, and Tan slapped him again across the cheek, hard.

  “Hurts,” Kaden mumbled blearily.

  Tan paused. “What hurts?”

  “Cheek.”

  “Do you hurt?”

  Kaden tried to focus on the question, but it made no sense. The world was fog. The pain was a red line scribbled on nothingness.

  “Cheek.”

  “And you?” Tan pressed.

  Kaden opened his mouth, but for a long time words eluded him. “I don’t…,” he managed at last. What did the monk want? There was pain and there was darkness. That was all. “I’m not…,” he began, then let the words go.

  His umial paused, dark eyes bright and intense. “Good,” he said finally. “That’s a start.”

  9

  The shrine to Hull, Lord of the Darkness, patron god of all those who moved in the shadows, wasn’t a shrine at all, but a massive tenebral oak, gnarled black limbs stretching over a full quarter acre like arthritic fingers scratching at the sky. Hanging from every branch and twig—packed in so close that when Valyn first saw the tree, he took them for heavy black leaves—dangled bats, tens of thousands of bats, folded tight
in their wings, waiting silently for night. When darkness fell, they would take to the air together, a wheeling, darting, silent swarm harrying the sky, leaving the branches bare as bones. Even in summer, the tenebral had no leaves—the bats were its leaves. When they returned to roost just before dawn, the blood dripping from their fangs would soak the heavy earth around the roots, feeding the tree. Unlike its brethren, the tenebral had no need of the sun.

  Valyn had seen other tenebrals in the course of his training—they were rare, but grew scattered all over the continent of Eridroa. This tree, however, perching on a low hillside overlooking the Eyrie compound, was by far the largest he had ever come across. Down below, among the storage barns, bunkhouses, and training arenas, the Kettral had erected small shrines to several of the young gods: Heqet, God of Courage; Meshkent, Lord of Pain; even a tiny stone sanctuary dedicated to Kaveraa, in the hope that the Mistress of Fear might leave her worshippers untouched. It was here, however, at the foot of the ancient tenebral, that the Kettral worshipped most devoutly. Courage and pain were all well and good, but it was darkness that covered the soldiers as they winged in beneath their birds, darkness that cloaked them as they killed, and darkness that hung over their retreat like a cloak as they melted away into the night.

  Before and after every mission, the soldiers would leave an offering. There were no coins or gemstones littered among the roots, no candles or expensive silks. The Kettral knew how the tree survived. Valyn had spent years watching them wind their way up the narrow trail ground into the hillside, had watched them as they knelt and drew their blades, watched as they dragged the steel across warm flesh, squeezing blood onto the hungry roots. Whether Hull knew, or cared, was anyone’s guess. The old gods were inscrutable.

  When Valyn first arrived on the Islands, he had found the tree and the sodden ground beneath it unsettling, to say the least. Valyn’s line, the Malkeenian line, claimed descent from Intarra, and the Dawn Palace where he had passed his childhood was filled with light and air. Now, however, the dark, brooding tree suited his mood just fine. Though Manker’s had collapsed into the bay nearly a week earlier, he hadn’t been able to shake the image of Salia’s bloodied face from his mind. When he fell asleep, he found himself in the burning tavern all over again, heard her begging him not to leave her. When he woke, he expected to find her blood still spattered on his skin.

  He was furious with Ha Lin, and felt foolish for his fury. She had made the right call in a difficult situation. As Hendran wrote, Your ideals die, or you do. If Valyn had tried to make the jump with Salia draped unconscious across his back, he would have ended skewered on one of the jagged pilings. But it should have been my decision to make, he thought, balling his hand into a fist. In addition to the basic instruction, each Kettral cadet trained for a specialty: sniper, demolitions, flier, leach. Someone in command had decided early on that Valyn might have the skills to actually lead a Wing; if he passed the Trial, he would find himself in command of his own soldiers, and command required decision.

  Blood misted down from above. He ignored it. He hadn’t spoken with Lin since Manker’s, and he didn’t know what to say. Here, at least, in the gloomy shadow of the tenebral oak, he had time to think, to work through his feelings without saying or doing something that he could not take back. Except, as he gazed down the hill in the direction of the compound, he could see a slender shape moving up the track toward him.

  Ha Lin stopped just outside the reach of the tree’s branches, glancing up at the quiescent bats with a look of disgust. Valyn had no doubt that when the time came, she would pay homage to the god like everyone else, but she had never overcome her revulsion of the place. It was one of the reasons Valyn had chosen it—he thought the dark limbs and quiet susurrations of the shifting bats might keep her away. No such luck.

  Lin’s lips were pursed, and her eyes, normally so open and warm, were hooded as she looked at him. She must have come directly from a training rotation; mud coated her blacks while a small cut wept blood on her left cheek. Somehow, even battered and dirty, she managed to look poised, beautiful even. Which is part of the ’Shael-spawned problem, Valyn thought sourly to himself. He wouldn’t have had nearly so much trouble thinking what to say to Laith, or Gent, or even Talal.

  “How long are you going to sulk?” Lin asked finally, raising an eyebrow.

  Valyn gritted his teeth. “It was wrong to kill her.”

  “Valyn,” Lin said, “right and wrong are luxuries.”

  “They are necessities.”

  “Maybe for other people. Not for us.”

  “Especially for us,” Valyn insisted. “If we don’t have some sense of right and wrong, we’re no better than Skullsworn, killing for the sake of killing, murdering to please Ananshael.”

  “We’re not Skullsworn,” Lin replied, “but we’re not knights of Heqet either. We don’t ride around on white steeds, waving idiotically heavy swords and delivering noble challenges to our foes. Or maybe you hadn’t noticed. We’re Kettral, Valyn. We kill people. If we have our way, we poison them, or we stab them in the back. Maybe we shoot them when they aren’t looking, and if at all possible, we do it at night. It might not be noble, but it’s necessary. It’s what we trained for.”

  “Not serving girls,” he said stubbornly. “Not civilians.”

  “Yes, serving girls. Yes, civilians. If we have to. If they get in the way of the mission.”

  “There was no ’Kent-kissing mission. We were trying to get people out of that place alive.”

  “Maybe that’s what you were doing, but I was trying to keep you alive,” she spat back, her eyes bright and angry. “The girl was deadweight. She was killing you. I did what I had to do.”

  “There might have been another way.” He’d been over it a hundred times already. Maybe he could have forced his way out one of the other windows. Maybe he could have leapt to one of the adjacent buildings. It was academic now. Manker’s was gone, and Salia with it.

  “Of course there might have been another way. And you might have been killed. It’s all about odds, Valyn. You know that as well as I do.” Lin sighed deeply and slumped, as though the anger had gone out of her in a rush, leaving her weak and unsteady. “I always thought it would happen in battle,” she said after a long pause. “In a fight at least.”

  Valyn hesitated, suddenly wrong-footed. “Thought what would happen?”

  Lin met his eyes. “Salia was my first. My first kill.”

  On the Islands, most men and women celebrated their first kill the way civilians might celebrate an engagement or a birthday. As much as passing Hull’s Trial or flying a first mission, killing was a right of passage, a necessary step. Regardless of the training and the study, until you killed, you weren’t really Kettral. Lin was right, though. You didn’t expect your first to be an unconscious serving girl. You didn’t want that.

  Valyn blew out a long, slow breath. In his anger and guilt, he hadn’t even thought about how Salia’s death might have affected his friend. Although he’d held the girl as she died, Lin had thrown the knife. She had accepted the burden, and not for her own sake, but to protect him. From some forgotten corner of his mind, his father’s words came back to him, firm and uncompromising: You and Kaden will both be leaders someday, and when you are, remember this: Leadership isn’t just about giving orders. A fool can give orders. A leader listens. He changes his mind. He acknowledges mistakes. Valyn gritted his teeth.

  “Thank you,” he said. The words came out rougher than he had intended, but he said them.

  Lin raised her eyes, her face guarded, as though she expected some sort of trap.

  “You were right,” Valyn said, forcing the syllables out. “I was wrong.”

  “Oh, for Ananshael’s sake, Valyn!” Lin groaned. “You are so unbelievably proud. I have no idea why I—” She cut herself off. “I didn’t come up here so that you could tell me I was right. I came because I’m worried.”

  “Worried?”

  “Manker’s,”
she said, gesturing across the bay toward Hook. “It didn’t just fall down on its own.”

  Valyn frowned. He’d been gnawing at the same idea, but couldn’t be sure if his misgivings were the result of paranoia or healthy concern.

  “Buildings fall down,” he replied. “Especially old ones. Especially on Hook.”

  “An Aedolian warns you about a conspiracy, and then, a week later, a building that’s stood for decades just happens to collapse barely a minute after you step outside?”

  Valyn shrugged, trying to put down the disquiet festering inside him. “You squint hard enough, and everything starts to look suspicious.”

  “Suspicion keeps people alive,” Lin insisted.

  “Suspicion drives people insane,” Valyn countered. “If someone wanted me dead, there are more elegant ways to manage it than bringing down an entire building.”

  “Are there?” Lin asked, eyebrows raised. “Seems pretty elegant to me. An accident—one more hovel on Hook falls over, killing a dozen people. Nothing too unusual. Nothing to suggest an attack on the imperial family. It’s sure to Hull more elegant than cutting your throat.”

  Valyn grimaced. She was right. Again. He knew she was right, and yet, there were accidents to go around on the Islands. Just a week earlier, Lem Hellen had had his leg crushed beneath a huge boulder during a training rotation out on Qarn. If Valyn started looking over his shoulder at every turn, he’d never get a wink of sleep, never trust anyone.

  “There’s just no way to know,” he said, staring out over the sound. Hook’s colorful riot of tenements and huts was clear across the narrow strip of water. “I could spend a week poking through the wreckage and still have no idea.”

  “Maybe,” Lin began cautiously, “you’re not the one who should poke through the wreckage. You’ve been training to lead a Wing the past eight years, and I’ve been studying the fine art of the bow. Half a dozen of our brothers and sisters, however, have been learning to knock down bridges and blow up buildings.”