Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

  A small fire burned in the hearth, but that was the only welcoming thing about the room. Nin sat behind his bare wooden desk, fingers steepled under his chin, dark eyes fixed on him intently, as though Kaden were some new species of squirrel that he had found in one of his deadfalls. A few feet from the desk, Rampuri Tan stood staring out the small window into the night. He hadn’t said anything at all, hadn’t even looked at his pupil, and Kaden felt his stomach tighten, an uncomfortable sensation, given that his head was still pounding and his legs felt like water. He started to groan, then suppressed the sound out of habit—it would earn him no sympathy from the older monks.

  “Akiil?” he asked weakly, feeling like someone had scoured his mouth with coarse wool. His friend was not in the study. “Where is Akiil?”

  “He is not here,” the abbot replied evenly. Normally Kaden would have ground his teeth in silent frustration at the response, but the knives they had discovered leapt into his mind, along with the memory of the hand clamped over his mouth, cutting off his breath.…

  “The merchants,” he managed. “They’re—” What? he asked himself. Carrying knives? How was he going to explain the fact that he and Akiil were rummaging through their private belongings? “Who tried to kill us?” he asked instead. “Did you capture them?”

  The abbot looked away, gazing at an indeterminate point over Kaden’s left shoulder. Rampuri Tan shook his head, not turning from the window. Kaden looked from one to the other, but neither seemed willing to speak.

  “You did capture them, didn’t you?” he asked. He tried to stand, but his legs would have none of it, and he dropped back into the chair. Silence stretched out before them, bleak and cold as the night sky.

  When the abbot finally spoke, it was not to him. “You told me he was making progress.”

  Tan grunted.

  “I don’t see progress,” Nin continued. “I see a blind, impulsive boy tied so tightly to himself that he can barely move.”

  Normally the insult would have stung, all the more so for the flat, careless tone in which it was delivered. Memory of his assailants and worry for Akiil, however, left no space for wounded pride, and as Kaden lowered the pressure of the blood in his veins, he tried to make himself sound rational, unemotional.

  “Abbot,” he began quietly, amazed that his voice was so level—he felt like shaking and screaming all at the same time. “Clearly you know already, because you rescued me, but the merchants are not what they appear. One of them or both caught Akiil and me—”

  “How long,” the abbot interrupted with a raised hand, “has Tan been your umial?”

  “What does Tan have to do—”

  Without raising his voice, the abbot cut him off. “How long?”

  “Two months,” Kaden replied, mustering his patience.

  “And after two months, you still don’t recognize your own master when he is close enough to kill you?”

  Kaden looked in confusion from the abbot to Tan, who turned from the window, eyes inscrutable as always. “I came to check on you at the shed,” the monk began. “When you were not there, I tracked you and brought you here. Akiil is unharmed.”

  Kaden gaped.

  “You brought me! How did you track me?”

  “The Beshra’an. Your mind is a simple thing, although cramped to inhabit.”

  He ignored the insult. “What about the merchants? Why didn’t you just ask me to come? Why did you attack me?”

  “You would have argued,” Tan replied simply. “And the woman was approaching. There was no time.”

  Kaden took a firm grip on his emotions. He had been conscious for several minutes now, but things weren’t getting any clearer. Determined not to make a fool of himself again, he paused to consider this new information. Tan returned to his post at the window as if there were nothing left to discuss, but the abbot continued to look directly at him.

  “You didn’t send me to the clay shed as some kind of penance,” Kaden concluded after a time.

  “I might as well have,” Tan responded, “considering how poorly you have performed.”

  “But you didn’t,” Kaden replied doggedly. “If you had, there would be no need to knock me out in the dark, no need for this late-night conference. When you found me in the streambed, you would have simply sent me to haul water all night, or to sit on the Talon until dawn. But then we would have run into the merchants.

  “You weren’t trying to keep me from seeing them,” he went on, the realization seeping in slowly. “You wanted to keep them from seeing me.”

  He shivered beneath his robe. During his years at Ashk’lan, the maneuverings and machinations surrounding the imperial throne had faded to a distant memory. In fact, Kaden often wondered if he had been sent to the monastery, not for any particular education, but simply to keep him out of harm’s way until he was older. Was it possible that Annurian politics had found him even here?

  “This is about my father,” he said, feeling the truth of the statement as it left his lips.

  “Why,” the abbot responded slowly, “do you think anything is wrong with your father? Pyrre Lakatur said that the Emperor was strong as ever. Jakin agreed.”

  “I know,” Kaden replied. He took a slow breath. What he was about to reveal would earn him an even more severe penance, but the water around him was already boiling. He had to know the truth. “There’s something not right about Pyrre, about both of them. You obviously already know about the knives and the crossbow, but that’s not all. That first night, the night in the refectory, I was in the dovecote, watching.”

  Tan’s face hardened, but he did not speak. The abbot raised an eyebrow.

  “Pyrre wasn’t looking at you when she came in the door,” Kaden continued. “Then, when she answered the question about my father, something was…” He paused, the scene springing clearly into his mind once more. He examined the faces for the hundredth time: the woman’s easy smile, the casual wave of her hand, the angle of her head as she looked down the table at the gathered monks. Everything seemed normal. Kaden let out the breath he’d been holding. “Something was … not right,” he trailed off lamely.

  The abbot looked at him hard for a moment or two, then addressed Tan. “I take it back, friend. The boy has come a long way.”

  “Not far enough,” Tan responded without turning.

  The abbot leveled a bony finger at Kaden. “How many people in the world could have seen what he saw, even without being able to identify it? A few dozen?”

  “More than that,” Tan replied dismissively. “Meshkent’s high priests. Most emotion leaches. Any of the Csestriim—”

  The abbot laughed gently. “I’m talking about humans, my friend. I know that you have once again begun honing that old blade of yours, but the fact of the matter is, Csestriim have not been seen on this earth in millennia.” The abbot gave Tan a long, searching look that would have had Kaden squirming in his seat. His umial, however, simply shrugged. “There may be a handful of emotion leaches scattered around Annur,” Nin continued, “but no more than a handful. I doubt that even some of them would have seen what the boy saw.”

  Tan opened his mouth, but the abbot continued, forestalling any protest. “The Shin are trained from the moment they arrive in close, careful observation, and yet, who here noticed Pyrre Lakatur’s misstep? You and I. Maybe one or two of the older brothers.” He looked at Kaden almost sadly. “The boy would have made a fine monk.”

  “Noticed what?” Kaden asked. “What did I notice?”

  “There is more to being a monk than hunches and guesses,” Tan responded.

  “He did not guess. He observed.”

  “What did I observe?” Kaden asked again.

  Tan shook his head brusquely. “He is in a dangerous place. He sees enough to question, but not enough to know when to hold those questions.”

  “I understand that you’re telling me to stop asking,” Kaden said, stifling his frustration, “but I’m not going to stop asking. What did I see?�
��

  “A sliver of a pause,” the abbot replied, ignoring the outburst. “A few blinks more than normal. A slight tightening at the corner of her mouth.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Individually, those signs mean nothing.”

  “Taken together, they may also mean nothing,” Tan added.

  “But you don’t think so,” Kaden interrupted, a sick dread rising in his throat. “You think Pyrre is keeping something back. Why don’t we confront them? Demand to know about the weapons. Demand to know about my father?”

  He lapsed into silence as Tan turned from the window.

  “If I hadn’t found you, you might be dead now, instead of whining like a child in the abbot’s study.”

  Kaden stared incredulously.

  “Lies,” his umial continued. “Deception. These are not remarkable in a man or woman. They are even less remarkable in one who makes her living buying and selling. What is remarkable about Pyrre Lakatur is how well she lies. How ably she deceives.” The large monk approached until he loomed over his pupil. “The pricing of silk and the driving of wagons are the least of this woman’s training. Somewhere she has learned to suppress the most basic imperatives of the flesh. You may want to ask yourself, when you finish playing the impetuous prince, why a woman with such impeccable training comes here, to the end of the earth, dressed as a merchant. While you spend the following days digging out the cellar of the meditation hall, you may want to consider the goals of such a woman. What has she come here for? Who has she come here for?”

  34

  Whatever wary trust Valyn managed to establish with Talal, nothing had changed in the course of daily training. The Wing was halfway through its probationary period, halfway to flying its first real mission, and they still hadn’t managed to win a single contest. I’d be surprised if Command lets us stand guard over a vegetable stand, Valyn thought to himself grimly as he rolled over in his bunk, restless in the predawn darkness, let alone fly to northeastern Vash to hunt for Kaden.

  It wasn’t that the individual members of his Wing were incompetent. In fact, operating independently, each had shown moments of genius: Gwenna rigged and blew an entire bridge by moonlight in less than an hour; Talal swam the entire breadth of the Akeen Channel underwater; and Annick, of course, hadn’t missed a single target, regardless of distance, weather, or time of day.

  In spite of these successes, however, the Wing just could not manage to get out of its own way. Gwenna blew the bridge while Laith and Valyn were still crossing it, singeing half their clothes off and dumping them in the water; Talal emerged from the Channel only to take one of Annick’s stunners to the back of the head; and Annick’s perfect shooting only led her to grow more and more scornful of the Wing, as though she were the only professional in a group of children.

  Valyn rolled onto his back. It was still pitch black outside, and the early bell had yet to ring, but after a few hours of uneasy slumber, he had lain awake, staring at the bunk above him. He could analyze and condemn the mistakes of his Wing mates until he was blue in the face, but the real truth was that he was failing them. It was his responsibility to formulate each mission plan, his job to make sure his soldiers understood their roles, and his job to stave off personal problems before they became a threat to the integrity of the group. So far, he had done piss-poor work on all fronts.

  His mind drifted to the memory of Ha Lin—the banter, shared jokes, and easy camaraderie; the quiet, solid comfort he had felt when she was at his side or seated across the table. All these years, he’d never realized how much strength he drew from her, how much he had always assumed that she would always be there to bolster him. When he pictured commanding his own Wing, he’d imagined Lin there, quibbling with his small decisions but never doubting him, not really. He’d been unconsciously counting on her to back him up. Of course, when it really mattered, he had failed her.

  The low tolling of the morning bell broke into his bleak thoughts, and his feet hit the floor before the sound had faded from the air. If the past weeks were any indication, the day was bound to be another failure, but anything was better than lying in his bunk, gazing up into the incriminating darkness, worrying that he wasn’t getting it right, worrying that while he bungled his command, danger, swift but unknowable, was drawing closer and closer to Kaden, his brother, the Emperor.

  “Rise and shine,” he said, stomping into his boots before plucking a glowing ember from the fire to light the lamp.

  Gwenna cursed from the bunk above, but made no effort to rise, let alone shine.

  Valyn shrugged into his tunic and shouldered aside the door into the front room only to find Annick already awake and seated at the large table. She was fully dressed and oiling her bow with long, smooth strokes. For the hundredth time, Valyn wondered what went on behind those ice-cold eyes. He hadn’t had a chance to speak to her alone since before the Trial, since their encounter in the infirmary. Whenever he looked to have a word with her, there were others around or she had mysteriously melted away. She’d convinced him that she hadn’t tried to kill him during the sniper contest, but she was a riddle, and any riddle was dangerous. He shivered at the realization that she had managed to rise, dress, and go to work on her bow mere feet from him without making a sound, all in complete darkness. Why was Amie going to meet you? he wondered for the hundredth time. What are you hiding?

  Talal had rolled to his feet and slipped into his blacks while Gwenna grumbled herself halfway out of her bunk. Laith refused to budge.

  “Briefing in ten,” Valyn announced, stepping back through the door and kicking the pallet in an effort to jolt the flier into life.

  “’Shael’s sweet suckling whores,” Laith cursed, rolling away from the light. “Why don’t you just beat me bloody and light my hair on fire here? Save another Wing the trouble?”

  “I’m happy to light your hair on fire,” Gwenna growled. She was perched on the edge of her bunk, raking fingers through her own tangled mane. The light shirt in which she slept did nothing to conceal the curves of her breasts beneath, and Valyn looked away awkwardly. There was no mystery around the female form, not with the Kettral. He’d been eating, sleeping, swimming, and shitting next to his peers for eight years. Better get used to it, Fane used to say. You’re not going to be much use in a fight if you’re ogling the ass of the soldier next to you. Valyn was used to it, but he’d been sharing a barracks with men ever since he arrived on the Islands, and there was something a little distracting about walking into the bunkroom to find Gwenna or Annick bare-assed or halfway into her blacks. He shut his eyes and put a hand to his forehead, hoping Gwenna wouldn’t notice. Staring at her breasts wasn’t going to help his Wing any, and besides, it felt like a betrayal of Ha Lin.

  Idiot, he cursed himself. You had nothing to speak of with Lin, and Gwenna would just as soon gut you as kiss you. It was true, all of it, but he felt guilty just the same.

  Gwenna was still harassing Laith. “Maybe our royal leader would like me to rig your bed tonight. I’m sure I could arrange a little something to wake you up in the morning.”

  “You are an evil bitch,” Laith groaned, rolling over onto his back. “Why couldn’t Rallen have assigned Gent to this Wing?”

  “Because Gent is about as capable as a whore with the pox. At least if I blow you up, you’ll know I meant to do it.”

  “What?” the flier shot back. “Like the other day?”

  “You weren’t supposed to be on the bridge, you idiot.”

  “None of this is helping,” Talal said quietly. He sat on his own bunk, lacing up his boots.

  “Helping what?” Laith demanded. “It’s certainly helping to ruin my sleep.”

  “Good,” Valyn interjected, before the argument could go any further. “We’ve got a lot to work through today, and not much time to do it.” Technically, this was information for the briefing, but they hadn’t been doing anything else by the book. Why start now? he thought to himself.

  “What?” Annick asked. She had set aside her
bow and was looking over the fletching of her arrows. She didn’t bother to look up at Valyn when he turned.

  “Barrel drops,” he replied.

  “Oh, for ’Shael’s sake,” Gwenna groaned. “Again?”

  “Well, well,” Laith said, rising for the first time, picking his teeth absently with a finger. “I might go an entire day without a bruise after all.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Gwenna said. “It’s not so easy when you’re the one dropping instead of the one flying.”

  “The other Wings quit doing barrel drops a week ago,” Annick pointed out flatly.

  “Well,” Valyn responded with more heat than he had intended, “we haven’t.”

  “Who’s in charge of the training?” Talal asked quietly.

  “Not Fane,” Laith groaned from the bunk. “Not Fane again.”

  “The Flea will be overseeing today’s training,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his voice level.

  Silence reigned in the room as the soldiers eyed one another warily.

  “Well,” Gwenna snorted finally, dropping out of her bunk and fixing Valyn with those green eyes of hers. “Today, my illustrious lord commander, would be a good day to start getting things right.”

  * * *

  At least it’s sunny, Valyn thought to himself, closing his eyes and leaning back into his leather harness. Wind tugged at his hair and clothes, threatening to rip him from his perch on Suant’ra’s talons while the back draft from the great bird’s slow, powerful wing beats buffeted him from above.

  After eight years on the Islands, Valyn still marveled at the power and grace of the kettral. Without the kettral, there would be no Kettral. The creatures could cover ground faster than any horse, faster than a three-hundred-oar galley, soar over impregnable walls as though they were thin lines drawn on the dirt, land on towers, and outdistance any pursuit in a matter of minutes. If necessary, the bird herself could even fight, tearing through flesh and armor with her claws and beak as if they were cloth.