Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

  Kaden nodded, disturbed at the news but relieved to have avoided a fight. “So whatever it is, it’s smart.”

  “Smart or lucky.”

  “How are the rest of the monks dealing with it?”

  “About the same way the Shin deal with everything else,” Akiil replied, rolling his eyes. “After Nin’s meeting, aside from the prohibition on acolytes and novices leaving the main buildings, people are still hauling water, still painting, still meditating. Honest to ’Shael, I swear that if a murderous horde of your Csestriim rode in on a cloud and started hacking off heads and mounting them on pikes, half the monks would try to paint them and the other half wouldn’t pay any attention at all.”

  “None of the older monks are saying anything else about it? Nin, or Altaf, or Tan?”

  Akiil scowled. “You know how it is. They tell us about as much as I’d tell a hog I was planning to slaughter for the pots. If you want to learn anything, you have to go look for yourself.”

  “But you, of course, have scrupulously obeyed the abbot’s command to remain at the monastery.…”

  Akiil’s eyes sparkled. “Of course. I may have lost my way from time to time—Ashk’lan is such a vast and complicated place—but I would never willingly disobey our revered abbot!”

  “And when you lost your way, did you find anything?”

  “Nah,” the youth replied, shaking his head in frustration. “If Altaf and Nin can’t track the ’Kent-kissing thing, I don’t have a chance. Still, I thought … sometimes you get lucky.”

  “And sometimes you get unlucky,” Kaden said, remembering the savaged carcass, the dripping blood. “We don’t know what it is, Akiil. Be careful.”

  * * *

  The following evening Tan returned to the shed. Kaden stopped his work and looked up expectantly, hoping to read some clue about outside events in his umial’s weathered face. Tan knew more than the other monks. Kaden was certain of that. Trying to ferret out what he knew, however, was impossible. The sudden appearance of gruesomely mutilated corpses seemed to affect him no more than the discovery of a new patch of mountain bluebells. He closed the door behind him and looked with a critical eye over the dozen or so pots Kaden had thrown and fired.

  “Have you made any progress?” Kaden asked after letting the silence stretch.

  “Progress,” Tan said, pronouncing the word as though it were new to him.

  “Yes. Have you found whatever killed the goats?”

  Tan tapped against the outside of one of the pots with his fingernail, then ran a finger around the inside of the lip. “Would that be progress?” he asked without looking up from his inspection.

  Kaden suppressed a sigh and, with an effort, stilled his breathing and lowered his heart rate. If Tan wanted to be cryptic, Kaden wasn’t going to be goaded into pestering him like a wide-eyed novice. His umial progressed to the next pot, rapped the rim with his knuckles, then scrubbed at some imperfection on the surface of the vessel.

  “What about you?” Tan asked after he’d looked over half the pots. “Have you made any progress?”

  Kaden hesitated, trying to find the hook hidden in the question.

  “I’ve made these,” he replied guardedly, gesturing to the silent row of earthenware.

  Tan nodded. “So you have.” He hefted one of the vessels and sniffed at the inside of it. “What is this one made out of?”

  Kaden held back a smile. If his umial expected to trip him up with questions about clay, he was going to be sorely disappointed. Kaden knew the various river clays better than any other acolyte at the monastery. “That one’s black silt blended with beach red at a ratio of one to three.”

  “Anything else?”

  “A little resin to give it that hue.”

  The monk moved on to the next pot. “What about this one?”

  “White shallows clay,” Kaden responded readily, “medium grain.” Pass this test, he told himself silently, and you may just get to see the sun again before winter.

  Tan went down the line of pots, all dozen of them, each time asking the same questions: What is this made out of? Anything else? At the end of the row he frowned, looked at Kaden for the first time, then shook his head.

  “You have not made progress.”

  Kaden stared. He’d made no mistakes; he was sure of it.

  “Do you know why I sent you here?”

  “To make pots.”

  “A potter could teach you to make pots.”

  Kaden hesitated. Tan might whip him for his stupidity, but the beating he would receive for trying to bluff his way through the conversation would be even worse. “I don’t know why you sent me here.”

  “Speculate.”

  “To keep me from going up into the mountains?”

  The monk’s eyes hardened. “Scial Nin’s command is not bar enough?”

  Kaden thought back to his conversation with Akiil and schooled his face to stillness. Most of the Shin umials could smell deception or omission the way a hound scented a fox. Kaden himself hadn’t stepped foot out of the clay shed, but he wasn’t eager to land his friend a hefty penance.

  “‘Obedience is a knife that cuts the cord of bondage,’” he responded, quoting the start of the ancient Shin maxim.

  Tan considered him, silent, inscrutable. “Go on,” he said at last.

  Kaden hadn’t been forced to recite the whole thing since he was a novice, but the words came back easily enough:

  Obedience is a knife that cuts the cord of bondage.

  Silence is a hammer that shatters the walls of speech.

  Stillness is strength; pain a soft bed.

  Put down your basin; emptiness is the only vessel.

  As he uttered the final syllables, he realized his mistake. “The emptiness,” he said quietly, gesturing back toward the silent row of earthenware. “When you asked me what they were made out of, I was supposed to say ‘emptiness.’”

  Tan shook his head grimly. “You know the words, but no one has made you feel them. Today we will rectify that. Come with me.”

  Kaden rose reflexively from his stool, steeling himself for some new brutality, some hideous penance that would leave him battered or bleeding or bruised right down to the bone, all in the name of the vaniate, a concept no one had ever bothered to fully explain to him. He rose, then paused. For eight years he had run when the monks said run, painted when they told him to paint, labored when he was instructed to labor, and fasted when they refused him food. And for what? Akiil’s words from the day before came back to him suddenly: They tell us about as much as I’d tell a hog.… Training and study were all well and good, but Kaden wasn’t even sure what he was training for.

  “Come,” Tan said, his voice hard and unyielding.

  Though Kaden’s muscles ached to obey, he forced himself to remain still. “Why?”

  The older monk’s fist struck his cheek before he realized it was moving, splitting the skin and knocking him to the floor. Tan took a step forward, looming over him.

  “Get up.”

  Kaden rose unsteadily to his feet. The pain was one thing—he could handle pain—but his mind was blurry, dizzy from the blow.

  “Go,” Tan said, pointing toward the door.

  Kaden hesitated, then took a step back. The split skin of his cheek wept blood, but he forced himself to leave his hands at his side. He shook his head again. “I want to know why. I’ll do what you tell me, but I want to understand the point. Why do I need to learn the vaniate?”

  It was impossible to read any emotion in the older monk’s eyes. He might have been staring at a carcass or a passing cloud. He might have been a hunter looming over his wounded prey, readying himself for the kill. Kaden wondered if the man would hit him again, would keep hitting him. He had never heard of an acolyte being murdered by his trainer before, but then, if Tan wanted to beat his pupil to death, who would stop him? Scial Nin? Chalmer Oleki? Ashk’lan lay more than a hundred leagues past the border of the Annurian Empire, past any civilized
borders. There were no laws here, no magistrates, no courts of justice. Kaden watched his umial warily, trying to still the pounding of his heart against his ribs.

  “Your ignorance is an impediment,” the monk concluded finally. He stood for one more moment in stillness before turning toward the door. “Perhaps your training will be more effective once you understand the urgency behind it.”

  * * *

  Scial Nin’s study hunched against the cliffs a few hundred paces from the main compound. The building looked like part of the mountain—dry stonework shaded by a gaunt, withered pine that shed its brown needles on the roof and ground alike. Kaden and Akiil tended to avoid the place—an acolyte or novice was usually called before the abbot only for an extreme infracation requiring an extreme penance—and, despite Rampuri Tan’s suggestion that Scial Nin would provide answers to his questions, Kaden now approached with some trepidation, following in the footsteps of his umial. Tan shoved the wooden door open without preamble, and suddenly reluctant, Kaden stepped over the threshold after him.

  The inside of the room was dim, and he didn’t immediately notice Scial Nin seated behind a low desk, the surface of which was empty save for a single parchment—the painting, Kaden realized, of the tracks left by whatever was slaughtering the goats. If the abbot was surprised or irritated by the sudden entrance, he didn’t show it. He looked up from the paper, and waited.

  “The boy wants answers,” Tan said brusquely, stepping to the side.

  “Most people do,” Nin replied, his voice smooth and solid as planed oak. He considered the older monk, then turned his attention to Kaden. “You may speak.”

  Now that he stood before the abbot, Kaden wasn’t quite sure what to say. He felt suddenly foolish, like a small child making trouble for his elders. Still, Tan had relented enough to bring him before the abbot; it would be a shame to squander the opportunity.

  “I’d like to know why I was sent here,” he began slowly. “I understand the goal of the Shin: emptiness, vaniate. But why is that my goal? Why is it necessary in ruling an empire?”

  “It’s not,” Nin replied. “The Manjari Emperors beyond the Ancaz Mountains pay no homage to the Blank God. The savages at the borders of your empire revere Meshkent. The Liran kings on the far side of the earth refuse to worship gods at all—they venerate their ancestors.”

  Kaden glanced over at his umial, but Tan stood silent, his face like stone.

  “Then why am I here?” he asked, turning his attention back to the abbot. “My father told me, just before I left, that the Shin could teach me things he could not.”

  “Your father was a talented student,” Nin replied, nodding at the recollection, “but he had no experience as a umial. He would have had great difficulty with your training, even were there not an empire requiring his attention.”

  “What training?” Kaden asked, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “Painting? Running?”

  The abbot cocked his head to the side, looking at Kaden the way a robin might consider a spring earthworm.

  “The Emperor has many titles,” he said at last. “One of the oldest and least understood is ‘Keeper of the Gates.’ Do you know what it means?”

  Kaden shrugged. “There are four gates to Annur: the Water Gate, the Steel Gate, the Gate of Strangers, and the False Gate. The Emperor keeps them, guards them. He protects the city from her foes.”

  “So most people believe,” Nin replied, “in part because it’s true: the Emperor does guard the gates of Annur and has for hundreds of years, ever since Olannon hui’Malkeenian built the first rough walls of the city from wood and wattle. There are other gates, however. Older. More dangerous. It is these to which the title refers.”

  Kaden felt a flame of excitement kindle inside him. He doused it. If the abbot saw a flicker of emotion, he was just as likely to send Kaden back to the clay shed as to continue his tale.

  “Four thousand years ago,” Nin continued, “perhaps longer, perhaps not so long—the archives are murky on the point—a new creature appeared on the earth. It was not Csestriim or Nevariim, god or goddess—those had all lived for millennia. The new creature was human.

  “Scholars and priests still debate our origins. Some say Ouma, the first mother, hatched from a giant egg and bore nine hundred sons and daughters, and from these we are descended. Others hold that Bedisa created us, an infinite supply of toys for her great love, Ananshael, to destroy. The Kindred of the Dark believe we arrived from the stars, borne through the blackness in ships with sails of flame. The theories are endless.

  “My predecessor in this post, however, thought that our parents were Csestriim. He believed that after thousands of years ruling the earth, the Csestriim, for reasons unknown, began to bear children who were … strange.”

  Kaden glanced over at his umial, but Tan’s face was an inscrutable mask.

  “Strange?” he asked. He’d always heard that the Csestriim and humans were implacable foes. The idea that they might be related, that the humans were descended from their enemies—it was bizarre beyond comprehension.

  “The Csestriim were immortal,” the abbot replied. “Their children were not. The Csestriim, for all their logical brilliance, felt no more emotion than beetles or snakes. The children they bore, the human children, were more fully in the grip of Meshkent and Ciena. Csestriim felt pain and pleasure, but humans cared about their own suffering and their bliss. Perhaps as a result, they were the first to feel emotion: love and hatred, fear, bravery. Alternatively, it could have been the birth of the young gods that led to human emotion. In either case, the Csestriim viewed this emotion as a curse, an affliction. There is a story claiming that when they saw the love that the first human twins bore each other, they tried to strangle them in their crib. My predecessor believed that Eira, the goddess of that love, hid the twins from their parents and spirited them away, west of the Great Rift, where they bore a race of humans.”

  “It sounds implausible,” Kaden said. For years the Shin had trained him to believe only what he could observe, to trust only what he could see, or smell, or hear. And now, contrary to all prior habit, the abbot was spinning stories like a masker back on one of the great stages in Annur. “How do you know this happened?”

  Scial Nin shrugged. “I don’t. It’s impossible to untangle myth from memory, history from hagiography, but one thing is certain: Before us, the Csestriim ruled this world, undisputed masters of a domain stretching from pole to pole.”

  “What about the Nevariim?” Kaden asked, drawn in to the saga in spite of himself. In all the old tales, the Nevariim were the heroic foes of the Csestriim, beings of impossible, tragic beauty who had warred against the evil race for hundreds of years before succumbing, finally, to Csestriim ruthlessness and guile. In the elaborate paintings of the storybooks Kaden and Valyn had pored over as children, the Nevariim always looked like princesses and princes, eyes flashing as they wielded their blades against the crabbed gray shapes of the Csestriim. If Nin thinks the storybooks are real, Kaden thought to himself, I might as well get the full story.

  It was not Nin, however, who replied. Instead, Tan shook his head slightly. “The Nevariim are a myth. Tales told by the humans to comfort themselves as they died.”

  The abbot shrugged once more. “If they did live, the Csestriim destroyed them long before our arrival. The records that remain of the Nevariim are few, scant, and contradictory. By contrast, your Dawn Palace is filled with annals that tell the story of our own fight with the Csestriim. They tell the tales of the long years of imprisonment, when we were held and bred like beasts in the stables of Ai. They tell of Arim Hua, the sun leach, who hid his power for forty seasons, waiting for the sun storms that only he could feel before bursting asunder the locked gates and leading our people to freedom. There are heart-wrenching lays of the lean years, when the snow fell deeper than the highest pines in the mountain passes and children ate the flesh of their parents to survive. Those were the years of the Hagonine Purges, when ou
r foes hunted us like beasts through the snow.”

  “Behind the abbot’s poetry there is one hard fact,” Tan said. “The Csestriim sought to annihilate us. We fought to survive.”

  Scial Nin nodded. “Men and women prayed then to gods both real and imagined.”

  “To the Blank God?” Kaden asked.

  The abbot shook his head. “The Blank God has no interest in humans or Csestriim, war or peace. His domain is much wider. Our ancestors prayed to more practical gods, desperate not for victory, but for respite, even a moment’s shelter. And then an amazing thing occurred: The gods heard our prayers. Not the old gods, of course; they walked their inscrutable ways as always, breaking and remaking worlds according to their ancient games, weaving webs of light and darkness, madness and law.

  “But there were new gods, unknown to the Csestriim, and they left their home to come here in human form, despite the risks, to fight at our side. You know their names, naturally: Heqet and Kaveraa, Orella and Orilon, Eira and Maat. Even Ciena and Meshkent came. They fought, and slowly our flight became our holding, our holding became battle, battles became war.”

  “It was not so easy as that,” Tan interjected. “We were overmatched, even with the help of the gods. The Csestriim were old past thought, immortal, implacable. Because they lived inside the vaniate, they felt no mercy, no fatigue, no fear of pain or death.”

  “In their own way,” Nin added, “they were more powerful than the gods. The gods could not be killed, of course, but a Csestriim blade could shatter their human form, cropping their power for eons to come, and so they kept to the shadows, weaving their power in secret, subtle ways, and aside from Heqet, none would take the field.”

  Kaden tried to make sense of it. He had heard versions of all the stories, of course, about how the young gods of courage and fear, love and hate, hope and despair had taken the part of the humans, but he had always assumed they were simply stories. Hearing them now, from the mouths of his abbot and his umial, filled him with an unexpected fascination. “But we survived,” he said. “We rallied and destroyed the Csestriim.”