Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

  “I don’t know anything about your Csestriim horror,” she said, “but this bird is really going to put a hitch in our plans. On foot, those troops are an hour away. By wing…” She spread her hands.

  “Will they come for us immediately?” Triste asked. She had woken when the assassin dragged her under the overhang, and was propped on her elbows, staring off into the gathering gloom, fear and defiance warring in her voice.

  Pyrre produced a long lens from her pack, peered through it for a while, then shook her head slowly. “It doesn’t look like it,” she replied. “The sun’s just set, and Adiv’s a crafty one. He knows that now that they have the bird, we can’t possibly outdistance them. He’ll wait for the morning, for full sunlight. Then they’ll come.”

  Kaden looked from Tan to the Skullsworn, then back. “So we’ve got one night,” he said finally. “What do we do?”

  Pyrre shrugged. “We’re not spoiled for choice. Normally, I’d recommend spending your last coins on a favorite meal or a good whore, but I don’t think you monks tend to carry much coin, and you seem to be lacking in whores. Mostly lacking, anyway.” She smiled at Triste with this last comment.

  “I’m not a whore,” the girl snapped.

  The assassin raised her hands in surrendur. “Me, I’m exhausted. There’s just time to enjoy a good sound sleep.”

  Kaden stared as Pyrre Lakatur rolled onto her back, locked her fingers behind her head, and closed her eyes.

  “That’s it?” he asked, amazed. “You cross an entire continent to save me, and then just give up?”

  “Everyone thinks that Rassambur is all about learning to knife people in the belly and poison their soup,” the assassin responded without opening her eyes. “What you really learn there is a pretty basic lesson: Death is inevitable. The god comes for us all.”

  “What about back at Ashk’lan? When you fought Ut? You didn’t seem so resigned then!”

  “Then, there was a chance. Now…” Pyrre shrugged. “I’ve been running for a day and a night. We all have. The traitors behind us have five times our numbers as well as a Kettral Wing, not to mention, if your sour master here is to be believed, the evil pet creature of an ancient and immortal race that could track you across moving water by moonlight. Tomorrow, we’ll fight, and I will give some of them to the god, but we will not win. And so, for now, I will enjoy a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.”

  Kaden turned his attention to his umial. “I assume you’re not content to lie down and die, too?”

  The older monk shook his head. “No, but the way is not clear. I must think.”

  And then, as if they were back on the ledges of Ashk’lan, Rampuri Tan shifted into a cross-legged position and gazed out across the valley toward the west, chest rising and falling so slowly, the movement was almost imperceptible. The monk’s eyes remained open, but the sharp focus had left them, as though he were dreaming. Or dead, Kaden reflected grimly.

  He considered Tan for a while longer, then took the long lens from where it lay beside Pyrre, training it on the enemy soldiers once more. “There’s got to be something,” he muttered, studying the Kettral as they exchanged handshakes with the Aedolians. The leader was a blond youth, tall and well-built, dressed all in blacks like the rest of his Wing. The short Kettral swords crisscrossed his back. Valyn and I used to play with wooden swords like that. They had pretended to be great warriors, but when the men came for them on the morrow, when Pyrre “gave a few to the god,” Kaden doubted he would manage to land a single blow. Bitterness welled up inside him, hot and sour. He allowed the emotion its flood, then shunted it aside. Bitterness would do him no more good than regret.

  Look at the men, he told himself. Find a solution.

  The newcomer commanded a standard five-man Wing, only … Kaden peered through the long lens once more. One of them—the flier, it looked like—was a woman, middling height with short blond hair. The only other Kettral he could get a good view of was a lanky soldier with feathers in his long hair and ink running up his arms. It was a strange look for a warrior, but after everything Kaden had seen in the past week, he was numb to strangeness.

  As the two talked vigorously with Ut and Adiv, Kaden lowered the glass. Night already smudged the sky. Maybe the assassin was right. Maybe it was time to accept the inevitable. Beshra’an, saama’an, kinla’an, even the vaniate—they all seemed frivolous and inconsequential pursuits in the face of all that steel.

  “What’s that?” Triste asked, pointing at something in the distance.

  Kaden squinted. A dark shape was moving across the gathering gloom high above the mountain peaks. He raised the lens to his eye once more, and a second bird burst into view, winging in hard and fast.

  “’Shael take it,” he swore.

  “Take care,” Pyrre murmured without opening her eyes. “That’s my god you’re invoking.” The woman rooted awkwardly beneath her back, tossed aside a sharp rock, then settled once more.

  “They’ve got a second bird,” Kaden said. “You want to see?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “We don’t know who these new ones are.”

  “We don’t know who any of them are except for Adiv, who’s a bastard, and Ut, who’s a much bigger bastard with a very large sword. Their names don’t matter. What matters is that they want to kill you and they are setting up to make a very thorough job of it.”

  “We might learn something.”

  “We will learn that there are five of them with two swords apiece. Making ten swords, if you’re keeping count. They will also carry belt knives and at least two will have bows, maybe all five. By my count, that gives them rougly fifteen more weapons than we have, not counting, of course, whatever explosives they’ve brought.”

  “You’ve studied the Kettral.”

  “I’ve studied everyone I might have to kill,” Pyrre replied, “and they will be harder to kill than most. I don’t need to look at them to know that.”

  “Well, I want to see,” Triste said, wriggling forward on her elbows, shouldering past the drowsing assassin.

  She raised the glass, frowned, then slowly shifted it, following the bird as it approached. Kaden watched it with his naked eye, squinting as it landed. He could make out the dismounting soldiers, shadows in the gathering dusk, but nothing more.

  “The new soldiers don’t seem to be getting on as well as the first ones did,” she said after few moments.

  “Meaning what?” Kaden asked.

  “I’m not sure. There seems to be some sort of standoff. Here.”

  Kaden took the long lens and trained it on the far pass. It took him a minute to sort out the new Kettral from those already there.

  “This Wing has a woman, too,” he said, “long red hair. And … two women, although the second one doesn’t look like she’s much older than you.”

  “Is she wearing blacks?” Pyrre asked.

  Kaden nodded. “And she’s carrying a bow. The thing is practically as big as she is.”

  “Don’t let her size fool you,” the assassin replied. “A killer doesn’t always look like a killer. The girl may be young, but if she’s flying missions for the Eyrie, she can probably put an arrow through your eye at three hundred paces. You know, the Kettral tried to clear out Rassambur once—one of your revered ancestors decided he didn’t like the idea of a church of Ananshael up in the Ancaz. They sent ten Wings, ten veteran Wings…”

  The assassin continued talking, but Kaden had ceased to hear the words. He had brought the long lens around to the commander of this second Wing—a tall, sun-darkened youth with short hair, a grim set to his mouth, and eyes dark as pools of pitch. At first he’d been paying more attention to the youth’s altercation with Micijah Ut. The two were arguing about something, the Aedolian had his blade drawn, and other soldiers were drifting toward their commander as though sensing a fight. Kaden was about to take another look at the bird when something drew him back to that face. The sun had all but set and the light was poor, and at fi
rst he thought the shadows were playing tricks on him, but then the commander chopped downward with a hand, a curt, exasperated gesture, and Kaden knew. The eyes were darker, somehow, and bleaker. The mischievious boy had become a man grown, with a man’s height and a soldier’s build, but Kaden knew that gesture and he knew the face, even after eight years. He struggled to make sense of what was happening on the far pass, but even as he watched he felt the cold blade of betrayal take him through the gut. He lowered the glass.

  “It’s Valyn,” he said, his voice hollow. “It’s my brother.” He set the long lens down wearily and lay back against the rough stone. It seemed, suddenly, that the assassin was right, that lying down and getting some rest before the end was all they could hope to do. “At least now we know who’s behind this whole mess.”

  “Your brother?” Pyrre asked, suddenly interested, propping herself up on one elbow. “Are you sure?”

  Kaden nodded wearily. “I spent half my life racing around the Dawn Palace with him. He’s bigger now and there’s something … more dangerous about him, but it’s him.”

  The assassin picked up the long lens and peered through it for quite a while, pursing her lips as she watched.

  “Well,” she said finally, a grin spreading over her face. “If the reception he just received is any indication, it looks like he’s on our side.”

  Kaden shook his head. “Why would you say that?”

  “Once again, I find myself underwhelmed by the Shin powers of observation. Micijah Ut, may Ananshael gnaw the flesh from his overlarge bones, has just stripped your brother’s Wing of their weapons. His men are currently trussing them up. The woman with the red hair and the beguiling figure just took a bite out of one of their ears, and, if your brother’s face is anything to go by, he’d like to go quite a bit beyond ears.”

  A sudden, fierce hope leapt in Kaden’s chest. “They’re fighting?”

  “Well, they tried, but it was a pretty one-sided fight. Teeth against steel doesn’t make for a great matchup.”

  “But they’re not with the rest of them,” Kaden said. “They’re not part of it.”

  “The good news is,” Pyrre continued, as though she hadn’t heard the question, “a bird like that should be able to fly us all out of here.”

  “The bird is there,” Rampuri Tan said. His eyes were sharp, focused. He had left whatever trance he entered far behind. “We are here. A valley and over a dozen armed men separate us.”

  “Well,” Pyrre said, “I was still on the good news. You’ve jumped ahead.”

  “That’s the end of it?” Triste demanded, anger creasing her brow. “That’s all you have to say?”

  “Oh, no,” the assassin replied, turning to her. “There’s more good news: I have a plan.”

  Kaden narrowed his eyes. There was a barb in this bait—he just couldn’t see it.

  “Your plan?” Tan ground out.

  “Now we come to bad news.” Pyrre put down the glass, drew one of those long, cruel knives of hers, and turned to Triste. “The bad news is that the plan involves sacrifice, and in this unfair world, some of us will be called upon to sacrifice more than others.”

  Kaden lunged for the woman’s wrist at the last moment, trying desperately to stop the knife, but he was only a monk, not even a monk, while Pyrre Lakatur was a priestess of Ananshael, assassin, Skullsworn, trained to follow the ways of her bloody god in the unholy halls of Rassambur, so quick, so precise, that Triste barely had time to scream before the blade bit down.

  48

  Valyn had rubbed his wrists bloody and just about torn his shoulder from its socket trying to wrench a hand free from the ropes binding his wrists behind his back. He knew all the tricks for escaping a slaughter-knot, but then, so did the people who trussed him up in the first place—that was the problem with fighting other Kettral.

  His body ached from the strain, but the physical pain was nothing beside the searing, lacerating guilt. In his eagerness to save his brother, he had led his Wing directly into harm’s way, had ignored the signs, spurned sensible caution, and now, unless he figured some way to cut them all loose, they were going to die here in the shadow of an unnamed mountain at the end of the world. It would have been bad enough to fall with a blade in each hand and a ready curse on the tongue, but this … trussed up like a pig for the butcher. The shame was far, far worse than the pain.

  Keep working, he told himself. Keep thinking. As long as you’re alive, the fight isn’t truly over.

  Escape, however, seemed unlikely. The Aedolians had halted for the night in the notch of a long, serrated ridge, hundreds of paces above the land before or behind. It was a good place with excellent lines of sight, easily defended from either direction, although difficult to retreat from if a fight went against them. That seemed unlikely. The only other people for a hundred leagues in any direction had been the monks, and, if Micijah Ut was to be believed, his men had killed all of them. Kaden was out there somewhere, scrambling through the darkness, but Kaden was fleeing. That left Valyn and his Wing, and they were thoroughly incapacitated, trussed up and then dumped in a rough jumble of scree right at the center of the notch. Even if they managed to cut their way loose, they were still trapped between the rock to the north and south, and the men guarding the pass to the east and west. A few boulders offered some meager cover, but they would be easy to flank, and …

  And before you start thinking tactics you’ve got to get out of these ’Kent-kissing ropes.

  The task seemed next to impossible. Yurl and Ut both knew their business. They’d taken down Valyn’s crew by the book, seeing to Talal first. None of them knew the leach’s well, but they didn’t take chances: Yurl put a knife to his throat, and then Hern Emmandrake, his master of demolitions, handed him a cloth soaked with adamanth. Talal tried to jerk away when they pressed the sodden material to his nose and mouth, but within moments he slumped into a limp heap, the cloth draped over his face, while Yurl looked on, grinning smugly.

  “Now,” he said, “we can see to making the rest of you comfortable.”

  It didn’t take long for his Wing to truss them up like livestock for the slaughter, binding them hand and foot, with an extra loop around the throat to discourage struggling. Gwenna managed to take a chunk out of the ear of one of the Aedolians, but all it gained her was a cuff across the face that split open both lips and half closed one of her eyes. The hurt did nothing to tame her, but once they’d stuffed a dirty rag in her mouth, she could neither curse them nor snap off their faces, and after a few minutes of futile struggle, she sagged back against the ground, green eyes blazing with silent rage. Despite the bleakness of their situation, however, Valyn felt a moment of relief at being shoved to the sharp gravel of the pass rather than killed outright. It’s a mistake. Yurl’s got no reason to keep us alive except to gloat. Then, in a sickening surge of anger and disgust, he realized why they had been spared.

  Balendin.

  The leach approached, sauntering into the light of the fire as though he were a provincial nobleman strolling into his manicured grounds. He paused in mock surprise when he saw the prisoners, tsked at them disapprovingly while waggling a raised finger, then dropped into a squat a few paces away, satisfaction shining in his eyes. His dogs were nowhere to be seen, but that falcon rode on his shoulder; it cocked its head to one side and fixed Valyn with a hungry glare.

  “So flattering,” Balendin began, winking at Valyn as he spoke, “for all of you to care so very much about me.”

  “I’m going to kill you, leach,” Annick said. It was an unlikely threat. Valyn’s whole Wing was incapacitated, but Annick looked particularly vulnerable in the flickering firelight. The rough bonds emphasized the slenderness of her arms, her child’s figure; she might have been some lost girl tied for a slaver’s ship, except for her eyes, sharp and malevolent. “I’m going to put two arrows in your gut,” she went on, ignoring the blood seeping from the gash on her forehead, “and another one in that filthy, lying mouth of yours.”
The threat shouldn’t have been credible, coming from someone in her position, yet it made Balendin hesitate.

  The leach actually seemed to consider the risk, then waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t think so, although you have no idea how much I appreciate the sentiment.” He closed his eyes and tilted back his head, as though letting a warm rain wash over his face. “All that hatred, that rage, that beautiful … feeling!” He licked his lips and smiled. “It’s a gift, you know—this human capacity for feeling. Some animals have it, but only faintly, faintly. The shadow of a shadow. That delicious hatred of yours—” He licked his lips. “—as I said, you have no idea what it means to me.”

  We’re helping him, Valyn realized grimly. All our rage just makes him more powerful. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and tried to calm his feelings. Without a well, Balendin was just like them, just another Kettral-trained soldier, and considerably worse with either a bow or a blade than most. If Valyn could just find some sort of calm.…

  “She tried not to squeal, you know,” the leach continued, his tone casual, conversational, while the corners of his mouth twisted up in a slight grin as he turned to Valyn. “Your friend Ha Lin, I mean. The one with the whore’s ass.” He whistled a low appreciative whistle and shook his head. “Wish I could have done more with it, that day on the West Bluffs, but I was busy. Besides, you know Yurl,” he added, jerking his head toward where the Wing commander stood, a dozen paces away, engrossed in conversation with Micijah Ut. “He wanted to do most of the beating himself. Spent a good half hour with his knee on her throat, prodding her with the tip of his belt knife. Barely let me get in a few punches.” He shrugged. “Must be something about growing up the child of privilege.”

  “You ’Shael-spawned son of a whore,” Valyn ground out, twisting helplessly against his bonds. “You fucking pig, you’d better hope Annick kills you before I get there.”

  “Aaah,” Balendin said, closing his eyes in contentment. “That’s more like it.” He leaned closer to Valyn. “You know,” he continued, “it’s amazing. I think you feel more powerfully about your friend’s suffering than she did.”