Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

  “What does this have to do with the arrows?” Gwenna demanded. “With Manker’s?”

  “It’s not all about cities and armies,” Talal replied. “For years, I’ve puzzled over Balendin’s well. I’ve seen him do some things … frightening things. Things I could never manage, not without an ocean of iron surrounding me. Other times—” He shook his head. “—nothing.”

  “Could he change an arrowhead?” Valyn asked. “An arrow in flight? From a mile away?”

  The leach nodded. “He has the skill and, if his well is running deep enough, the power, too.”

  “The skill is different from the power?” Gwenna asked, her face puzzled.

  “Of course. A leach’s strength is like physical strength, a gift—or a curse—from Bedisa. Having a deep well is like being large and well-muscled. Imagine Gent.”

  “I’d rather not,” Gwenna shot back.

  “The point is, Gent’s strength is only useful to a certain degree if he doesn’t train, doesn’t study how to use that strength. A smaller man—or a woman—could take him down through superior skill. There are leaches with enormous power who never understand what to do with that power. They’re just as likely to hurt themselves as they are to achieve anything useful.”

  “And you don’t have enormous power,” Valyn put in.

  Talal nodded. “All the Kettral leaches study and practice, but I’ve had to work harder than most. I’ve certainly had to work harder than Balendin.”

  “And when are we going to get to the part,” Laith asked with exaggerated patience, “where you tell us what the ’Shael-spawned asshole’s well is?”

  Talal paused, then spread his hands ruefully. “I didn’t realize it, because some people claim they don’t even exist. I’m almost certain the Eyrie’s never had one before, but I think Balendin is an emotion leach.”

  The statement sounded dramatic, but Valyn just shook his head in perplexity.

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Annick asked.

  “He doesn’t draw his power from iron or water or sunlight, or anything like that. His well is emotion, human emotion.”

  For a while the five of them sat in silence, trying to make sense of the idea.

  “That sounds,” Gwenna said finally, her face screwed into a frown, “like bullshit.”

  “Unfortunately not,” Talal said. “Emotion leaches are horribly powerful, and horribly unpredictable. I’ve read some of the old codices, the ones cataloging the known leaches in Annurian history and earlier. The trouble is, an emotion leach doesn’t simply draw from an existing well, he needs to create his well. He has to manipulate people in order to have any power at all.”

  “But how do Amie and Ha Lin figure into this?” Valyn asked.

  “It’s not just them,” Talal replied. “It’s everyone Balendin has ever come in contact with. He leaches his power from emotion, other people’s emotion. Specifically, emotion that’s directed at him.”

  “And that’s why,” Gwenna concluded, punctuating her syllables with a finger stabbed repeatedly into the table, “he was such a ’Kent-kissing bastard all the time.”

  Talal nodded. “A leach’s well shapes who he is to a frightening degree. Once you get used to the power, you start to need that power, and you’ll do more and more to get it. When I’m without iron, I feel … nervous, naked. I can only imagine how Balendin feels without emotion.”

  “Why not take a more amiable approach?” Laith asked, pursing his lips. “Make a lot of really good friends? Maybe fall in love a few times—a girl in every port, that sort of thing.…”

  “A lot easier to evoke hatred than love,” Annick said. “Quicker. More reliable.”

  They turned to look at her, but she averted her face from the lantern and seemed to have no more to say.

  “Annick’s right,” Talal continued after a moment. “You can’t evoke love on command the way you can hatred, and a leach without a well is vulnerable.”

  Valyn shook his head in amazement. “That time in the ring, when he and Yurl beat up on Lin and me—he was taunting her the whole time, making her hate him.”

  Talal nodded grimly. “He needed her hatred if they were going to win.”

  The horror of it all socked Valyn in the gut like a fist. “That’s why he tortured Amie,” he said slowly. “He needed her fear, her terror, to knock down Manker’s. That’s why they were in that garret—there was a clear line of sight from across the bay.”

  “Could you even do that?” Gwenna demanded. “Take down a big building like that?”

  “Think about Amie’s fear,” the leach replied leadenly. “He set up the whole thing—the dark room, the ropes hanging from the ceiling, the long slices of the knife beneath her skin—to dredge just about every ounce of her terror.”

  “And the attack on Lin,” Laith said, recoiling. “While Yurl was beating her, taunting her, Balendin could have leached off the residual rage, could have used it to change the arrowhead.”

  “The tampering would explain why the first two shots flew wide,” Annick confirmed, lips tight. “Those are not shots I would have missed, but a change in arrowhead requires a change in aim.”

  “And the knots,” Valyn said, his mind spinning. “Balendin was on the ship. He was one of the people who tossed me over, taunting me the whole time.”

  “It would be enough,” Talal replied. “To tangle a basic knot, a quick burst of anger would be enough.”

  For a while they just looked at each other, aghast and amazed.

  “What about the Trial?” Valyn asked finally. “What about Ha Lin?” He could hear his own voice freighted down with anger and pain. “Why did she have to die?”

  Talal spread his hands helplessly. “I’ll bet she didn’t even have anything to do with you. You remember what it was like down there. I was pressed to the limit, and I’m better with my blades than Balendin. I had my well, even if it was only shallow. If he was going to survive, he needed power, which meant he needed emotion. He may have been planning it as far back as the attack on the bluffs—capture Ha Lin, goad her, leach off her, and then kill her.”

  “Holy Hull,” Gwenna muttered. “Meshkent, Ananshael, and sweet, holy Hull. And now he’s off the Islands.”

  The realization hit Valyn like a bucket of ice. He’d been so busy looking backward, trying to make sense of the past months, that he’d nearly forgotten what started them down the path in the first place. Balendin was not only free; he was also away.

  “Who did Shaleel say assigned them their mission?” he demanded, slamming a hand down on the table.

  “What does that matter?” Laith asked.

  “Who?”

  “She assigned it herself,” Annick replied, voice hard.

  Valyn’s skin prickled, waves of cold and nausea rolling over him in great, heady swells. “We’ve got to go,” he said. “We’ve got to gear up, get the bird, and go.”

  Talal raised a hand to slow him down. “You heard what she said. We’re grounded. We can’t leave the Islands. We so much as touch a flatbow, we’re all traitors.”

  “That’s the point!” Valyn erupted. “That’s exactly what Baledin wanted. Shaleel is the commander for operations in northeastern Vash.”

  “So?” Laith said, trying to catch up. “What’s in northeastern Vash?”

  “Ashk’lan,” Valyn growled. “My brother. Kaden. The Emperor.”

  41

  It was all well and good for Adiv to joke about the talks that Kaden could have with Triste “over the pillow,” but now that dinner was over, he found himself suddenly and acutely nervous. It didn’t help that his head was muddled with wine, and it certainly didn’t help that once they stepped out of the refectory door, all four men had looked at him expectantly.

  “Your pavilion awaits,” Adiv said with a generous sweep of his arm, as though Kaden couldn’t see the ’Kent-kissed thing perfectly well from where he stood. The fact that the servants had erected it smack-dab in the middle of the main square made him cringe. If i
t wasn’t enough that his special dinner had deprived the monks of their own meal, now they couldn’t look out the windows of their own sober cells without staring at the palatial opulence of his overgrown tent. White canvas walls, immaculate as if they had been woven the day before, practically glowed in the light of the setting sun. Pennons fluttering from the central pole overtopped even the roof of the dormitory, Ashk’lan’s largest building.

  Akiil is never going to let me live this down, Kaden thought ruefully.

  “A fitting pavilion for the Emperor and his lovely consort,” Adiv said, the shadow of that mocking grin lurking around his lips.

  Kaden knew how this was supposed to work, of course. Despite his eight years away from the Dawn Palace, he still remembered his father’s concubines, a dozen or so quiet, graceful women who slipped through the marble halls in silent satin shoes, eyes demure and downcast. When still very young, he had asked his mother about those women. She had put down her carefully buttered bread and looked at him for a while, lips pursed tight.

  “They are concubines,” she said finally.

  “What’s concubines?” he had asked, perplexed.

  “Women who … comfort a man when his wife cannot.”

  Kaden had rolled that idea around in his head for a while. It didn’t sound like a bad thing, although something in his mother’s bearing had him on edge.

  “Do you have concubines,” he had asked, “to comfort you when father is away?”

  She had laughed then, a short bitter laugh. “It is a man’s prerogative.”

  Kaden considered that. “Will I have concubines someday?” he asked.

  His mother never took her eyes from him. “Yes. I suppose you will, Kaden.”

  Well, he thought, glancing over at Triste, evidently this is the day. Whatever education his mother had neglected, Akiil had more than made up for, regaling Kaden almost nightly with tales of the delicious, foul-mouthed whores from the Perfumed Quarter. Triste, however, was no whore, and Akiil’s stories had neglected the finer points of romantic etiquette.

  The abbot, as though sensing Kaden’s discomfort, said softly, “You are welcome, of course, to spend your last night in your own cell, putting your things in order.”

  Adiv laughed good-naturedly. “What things? A few robes? He would shame the servants not to sleep in the pavilion they have labored to set up.” He turned to Kaden with a more deferential tone. “Your Radiance, you are the Emperor. Today or tomorrow, you must accept the trappings as well as the title.”

  Kaden looked from the two monks wrapped in their coarse robes to the councillor who would be his right hand in the months to come. He wished that Nin could accompany him to the capital—despite the old monk’s lack of “practical” knowledge or political training, Kaden would have welcomed his steady, familiar wisdom—but the wish was a childish one, and he put it out of his mind. There was nothing to do but to take a deep breath and nod. Adiv and Ut evidently understood this as a dismissal, bowing low, fingers to their foreheads.

  “Until the morning then, Your Radiance,” Adiv said. “Micijah will keep guard here, in the square.”

  Kaden shook his head dubiously. “I’ve lived here for eight years without protection.”

  Adiv’s tone stiffened. “You are the Emperor now, Your Radiance, and the Aedolian Guard does not take chances with the Emperor.” Kaden found himself wondering if the man actually had eyes underneath the blindfold, or if they had been plucked out. The thought of the raw red sockets seeping blood beneath the cloth made him shiver.

  Kaden acquiesced with a nod. There was the matter of Pyrre and Jakin Lakatur. Tan had insisted that the two were not merchants, that they had come for some sinister purpose. Now that they knew who Kaden was and where he was sleeping, perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have someone watching the pavilion after all. He realized, with a sickening lurch, that his days as an anonymous acolyte were over. The sooner he accepted the burdens of his new office, the easier it would be for everyone.

  And then, of course, there was the ak’hanath. The surprise he had felt at the arrival of the Annurians, the grief at the news of his father’s death, the glasses of wine at dinner had pushed the creature to the back of his mind. It was hard to worry about a monster he’d never seen, a thing that, by Tan’s own admission, should have been wiped out thousands of years earlier. And yet, as the cold night wind picked at his skin, he felt a shiver of dread. There was something out there, something capable of killing a man. It hadn’t attacked inside the walls of the monastery, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t. Perhaps he would sleep better with the Aedolian outside.

  As Adiv bowed his way out of the square, the abbot approached. “We will speak in the morning, Kaden. Until then, rest, and try to clear your mind.”

  Tan looked at Triste swaying slightly on her feet, then turned away without a word.

  “Until the morning,” the abbot repeated, not unkindly, and the two monks turned down the gravel path to the dormitory.

  Eager to put off entering his new lodgings, Kaden stared out over the shapes of the mountains, dark and slumbering in the moonlight. He could hear the rushing of the White River in the canyon below, the distant crack and rumble of rocks, loosened from the icy grip of winter, crumbling from the cliffs to smash themselves to pieces on the ground below. The Bone Mountains were a hard place, and for the past eight years he had thought longingly of Annur, wishing something would happen to end his exile and bring him home. The low, drafty buildings of the monastery were just a world he had to endure—and endure it he had, although not without a constant spark of resentment. Now that the time had come to leave, however, he found that he had developed more of a connection to Ashk’lan than he could have known. When he thought about the crowded, vibrant chaos of Annur, the squares filled with vendors, the streets packed with thousands of people, he realized that he would miss the cold, clear nights, the sight of the sun rising over Lion’s Head to the east. He laughed softly to himself. He might even miss running the Circuit of Ravens, although he wasn’t about to bet on that.

  He turned around to face the central square of the monastery. A few monks went about their business with heads bowed, silent as shadows in their dark robes. They paid no more mind to the enormous tent that had abruptly sprouted in their midst than they might to a stone wren scratching at the gravel. He had come to admire these men, Kaden realized, had come to appreciate their calm and unflappable resolve.

  A flickering light in the deepening darkness drew his eye. Ut was walking a circuit around the pavilion, one hand resting on the pommel of his sword, the other holding a torch aloft. A sudden gust of wind blew the light to a blaze, illuminating the southern buildings of the quad, and Kaden realized with a start that Pyrre Lakatur stood in the window of the guest quarters, looking down at him. The woman’s eyes held neither the jocularity of her first arrival nor the deference that had marked her behavior since the Aedolian almost took off her head. They were the eyes of a cat, still and focused, as it crouches by the pond. Yes, perhaps it was good after all that Ut would be standing guard. Kaden wondered if the Aedolian ever slept, then decided that was for him to figure out. He glanced over at Triste shivering silently beside him. He had his own problems to attend to.

  42

  As he pushed back the canvas flap that served as a door to the tent, the delicate scent of incense wafted over him. The servants had been as busy with the interior of the pavilion as they had with the outside, and now it glowed like something out of his childhood memories. Dozens of paper lanterns—red, gold, green—cast playful shadows onto the floor. Delicate tapestries from Mo’ir hung from the walls while intricate woven rugs covered the packed earth.

  His eyes barely flickered over them, fixing instead on the wide bed that dominated the space, a bed decked in silk and strewn with plump pillows. He cast about for a chair or bench, but the servants who had carted the entire kit up the mountain evidently considered lamplight more important than seating. There was nowhere to g
o, nothing to turn to except that enormous bed. Triste froze just inside the door, but he did his best to appear casual, approaching the mattress, running his hands over the cashmere blankets gingerly.

  “Well,” he said, “at least it’s big.…”

  Triste did not respond.

  Kaden turned, casting about for one of Heng’s jokes to ease the tension, but all thought of joking vanished when his eyes fell on her.

  She stood trembling just inside the door, her dress pooled on the carpet at her feet. She wore nothing beneath. Involuntarily, almost instinctively, Kaden drank in the sight of her: slender legs, satin skin, the full curve of her breasts. In Annur, outside the temple of Ciena, stood a marble statue of the goddess herself, the incarnation of physical perfection, the apogee of human pleasure. He had overheard men joking about that statue, about what they’d like to do with the goddess if they could get her alone, and on one outing, Kaden and Valyn had spent some time furtively staring at the idol, intrigued by a beauty they could only just apprehend. Compared to Triste, however, the marmoreal curves and elegant proportions seemed awkward, almost misshapen.

  He groped for the Shin exercises he had spent so many years mastering, exercises that would cool the heat and bring reason to the chaos cluttering his mind. It was no good. Triste was slender, fragile even, but that fragility drew him with more force than knotted cord, and for the space of a few heartbeats, he was frightened of himself, frightened of what he might do to her. He tried to avert his eyes, but he could no more look away than he could stop his own heart.

  Suddenly, with a small cry in the back of her throat, Triste threw herself at him, propelled, he realized, by wine and fear rather than lust. She crashed awkwardly into his chest, knocking him backward, and they collapsed on the bed in a tangle of limbs. Kaden tried to pull away, but she clung to him, desperately ripping at his robe.