Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (11 page)

“Why did they choose you in the first place?”

If the man took offense at the question, he didn’t show it. “Well, they had to pick someone.”

“They could have picked someone
else.
”

“Truth is,” he said with a wink, “I think they tried. There were votes and votes and votes. You know they lock you into that ’Shael-spawned hall until you come up with a name?” He blew out a long, irritated breath. “And there’s no ale. I’ll tell you that. Wouldn’t be so bad if there was ale.”

This man, the one who complains about a lack of ale during the conclave, is the one the ministers chose as regent?

“At any rate,” the
kenarang
continued, heedless of her dismay, “I don’t think many of them much
wanted
me. In the end, I think they picked me because I
don’t
have any plans for the governance of this fine empire.” He frowned apologetically. “I’m not saying I’m going to shirk my duty. I’ll see to what needs doing, but I know my limits. I’m a soldier, and a soldier shouldn’t overstep himself when he’s not on the battlefield.”

Adare nodded slowly. There was a certain perverse logic to the decision. The various ministries were always jockeying for position: Finance with Ethics, Agriculture with Trade. No regent would actually try to seize power for himself, but the months during which Kaden was away would provide plenty of time to tip some very delicate scales. Il Tornja, on the other hand—the man was affable, a war hero, and perhaps most crucially, indifferent to political maneuvering.

“Well,” she replied, “the delegation left for Kaden just after my father’s death. If they have good winds to the Bend, they could be back in a matter of months.”

“Months,” il Tornja groaned. “At least it’s not years. What’s Kaden like?”

“I barely know my brother. He’s been in Ashk’lan for half his life.”

“Learning to run all this?” il Tornja asked, gesturing vaguely, presumably at the vast empire stretching away outside the walls of the tomb.

“I certainly hope so. The boy I knew liked to run around the palace waving a wooden stick in place of a sword. Hopefully he will shine as brightly as my father.”

Il Tornja nodded, looked over at the body of Sanlitun, then back at Adare. “So,” he said, spreading his hands. “Uinian. You plan to hold the knife yourself?”

Adare raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“The priest murdered your father. Once you go through the show of the trial, he’ll be condemned. What I wonder is, will you kill him yourself?”

She shook her head. “I hadn’t considered the question. There is an executioner—”

“You ever kill a man?” he asked, cutting her off.

“I haven’t had much occasion.”

He nodded, then gestured to the bier. “Well, it’s
your
grief, and I don’t mean to tell you how to handle it. Ananshael has your father now, and Ananshael won’t give him back. Still, when the time comes, you may find it helps if you execute the bastard yourself.” He held her gaze a moment longer, as though to be sure she had understood, then turned on his heel and left.

Only then, when she was finally alone, did Adare allow herself to turn to her father’s bier. Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian’s body had been scrubbed, dried, and dressed by the Sisters of Ananshael, his mouth and nose stuffed with sweet-smelling herbs to keep off the stench of the rot.
Even Intarra’s favor can’t hold off the Lord of Bones.
The Emperor was dressed in his finest robes of state, his strong hands folded across his chest, fingers interlaced. Despite his pallor, he looked almost like the father she had known. If he had cried out or struggled in his final moments, the Sisters had smoothed his features until they were as stoic and somber in death as they had once been in life.

His eyes, however, those fiery eyes were closed.
I never saw him sleep,
she realized. She must have, surely, maybe when she was only a small child, but if so, those memories had dissolved. Every recollection she had of him involved that blazing gaze. Without it, he seemed smaller somehow, quieter.

Tears streamed down her cheeks as she took his hand. She had hoped for some message when his testament was read the week prior, some final note of love or comfort. But then, Sanlitun was never effusive. His only bequest to her was Yenten’s
History of the Atmani,
“that she might better appreciate our history.” It was a fine book, but just a book nonetheless. His true gift had been her appointment to the head of the Ministry of Finance, his belief that she was capable of the job.

“Thank you, Father,” she murmured. “You will be proud. If Valyn and Kaden are equal to their fate, then so am I.”

Then, anger welling inside her, she pulled the knife from the belt at his side.

“And, when the time comes for Uinian to die, I
will
wield the knife myself.”

8

“I think Tan’s trying to kill me,” Kaden said, straightening up from the bundle of tiles he had just hoisted up onto the dormitory roof and wiping the sweat from his brow.

Down below, Phirum Prumm was huffing with the effort of muscling the next load into place and hitching it to the rope. Kaden’s back and hands ached from the repetitive labor, but compared with the rigors of Rampuri Tan’s training, retiling the roof after the winter ice damage felt like a holiday. At least he could find the occasional moment to straighten from his task and knuckle the sore muscles without getting whipped.

“Quit whining,” Akiil retorted, hunkering down to get a good grip on the tiles, then hauling the whole crate up with a grunt. Kaden had no idea how his friend could work with the mop of black curls hanging down over his eyes—by tradition he should have cropped his scalp like the rest of the monks, but a tradition wasn’t exactly a rule, and Akiil was extremely adept at balancing on the fine line between the two. “The first month with a new
umial
is always the worst. Remember when Robert made me carry those stones for the new goat shed down from the Circuit of Ravens?” He groaned at the memory.

“I don’t think this is so bad,” Pater protested as Akiil dropped the bundle at his feet. The boy perched on the roof’s apex, like a small gargoyle set against the austere background of the snowy peaks beyond. He was barely eight, a novice still, and had yet to experience a truly brutal
umial.

“Of
course
you don’t,” Akiil responded, pointing an admonitory finger at the boy. “While the rest of us are lugging and lifting, all you have to do is sit there!”

“I’m
placing
them,” Pater protested, his brown eyes round and aggrieved. He held up a loose tile by way of demonstration.

“Oh,
placing,
” Akiil replied, rolling his eyes. “How demanding. My apologies.”

“This is just work,” Kaden pointed out as he wrapped his hands around the thick rope and began to haul. “Since I started with Tan, I haven’t gone a single day without a beating. He’s running out of unbroken skin.”

“Just work?” Akiil demanded, fixing him with an incredulous glare. “
Just
work? Work is an affliction, my friend, a potentially
fatal
affliction.”

Despite the pain of his wounds, Kaden suppressed a smile. Carrying rocks and hefting tiles probably
did
feel like murder to Akiil. The young acolyte had been at Ashk’lan as long as Kaden, but the Shin ethic and way of life weren’t rubbing off on him as quickly as many of the older brothers would have liked. Scial Nin, the abbot, and some of the
umials
held out hope for the youth, but in most ways, he was little changed from the nine-year-old thief who had arrived from the gritty Perfumed Quarter of Annur so many years before.

Kaden had been at Ashk’lan for only a few months when Blerim Panno—the Footsore Monk, they called him—trudged into the main yard, brown robe ripped around the hem but otherwise looking no worse for the long walk from the Bend. The three boys who trailed behind him, however, the three boys who would soon be novices, appeared battered and uncertain. All limped on badly blistered feet, all slumped beneath the weight of the canvas sacks they carried on their backs, and of the three, only Akiil bothered to look around him, those brown eyes of his assessing the cold stone buildings of Ashk’lan with a shrewd gaze that had reminded Kaden of Edur Uriarte, his father’s Minister of Finance. When that gaze landed on
him,
however, the new boy stiffened, as though pricked by the point of an invisible dagger.

“Who’s he?” Akiil had asked Panno suspiciously, his vowels long and broad, almost incomprehensible to Kaden, who had grown up around the mellifluous, aristocratic accent of the imperial court.

“His name is Kaden,” Panno replied. “He is also a novice.”

Akiil had shaken his head. “I know them eyes. He’s some kind of prince or lord or something. Nobody told me there’d be no princes or lords here.” He spat the titles venomously, as though they were curses.

Panno had laid a calm hand on his shoulder. “That’s because there
are
no princes or lords here. Only Shin. Kaden may have come from the Malkeenian line and one day he may return to it, but now, here, he is a novice, just like you.”

Akiil measured Panno with his eyes, as though testing the truth of his words. “Meaning he don’t get to boss me around none?”

Kaden had bristled at the suggestion. He wanted to object that he didn’t boss people around even when he
wasn’t
in a monastery, but Panno replied before he could fashion a retort.

“Here he is learning to obey, not to command.” He turned to Kaden, as if by way of illustration. “Kaden, please run down to the White Pool and fetch some cold fresh water for our brothers. They have walked a good distance since dawn, and must be thirsty.” Kaden had scowled at the injustice of the command, and Akiil, seeing the scowl, smiled his wide, dirty smile. It was not an auspicious start to their friendship.

After eight years, however, an unlikely camaraderie had grown up between the son of the Emperor and the thief from the Perfumed Quarter. As Blerim Panno had promised, the Shin ignored all differences in rank and rearing, and over time it became possible to forget that the parents Akiil had never known were hanged by the law of Kaden’s father, that someday, if they went back to their former lives, Akiil might be put to death at the order of a scroll carrying Kaden’s own sigil.

“Anyway,” Akiil continued, stretching his neck and rubbing a sore forearm, “your sob stories are a heap of pickled pig shit. I don’t see Tan hounding you now.”

“The benefits of group labor,” Kaden replied, passing the next crate of tiles to his friend. “As long as I’m stuck doing monastery work, Tan lets me off from my training.”

“Well,” Akiil said, shoving the load toward Pater and sitting down on the roof with a contented sigh. “I guess we want to stretch this job out as long as we can.”

Kaden looked down into the courtyard. Late afternoon sun illuminated the stone buildings and stunted trees, warm in spite of the patches of dirty snow squirreled away in the corners. A few monks trod the gravel paths, their heads bowed in contemplation, and a pair of stray goats cropped the meager spring shoots in the shadow of the meditation hall, but Scial Nin, who had assigned them to the roofing project, was nowhere to be seen.

“That’s the last of them,” Phirum shouted up from below. “You want me to come up?”

“We’ll take care of it,” Akiil shouted back. “We’re almost done.”

“We are?” Kaden asked, eyeing the remaining crates skeptically, then glancing back down into the courtyard. The Shin provided severe penance for shirkers, although Akiil never seemed to learn that lesson, and Pater was picking up on the older youth’s bad habits.

“Quit looking over your shoulder,” Akiil said, settling back against the dark tiles. “No one’s going to come hunting for us up here.”

“You confident enough about that to risk a whipping?”

“Of course!” the youth replied, lacing his fingers behind his head and closing his eyes. “It was one of the first things I learned back in the Quarter—people never look up.”

Pater scampered down from the crest of the roof, the bundle of tiles forgotten. “Is that Thieves’ Wisdom?” he demanded. “
Is
it, Akiil?”

Kaden groaned. “Pater, I’ve told you before that ‘Thieves’ Wisdom’ is just a fancy name Akiil gives to his pronouncements. Which are usually wrong, by the way.”

Akiil fixed Kaden with a glare through one half-open eye. “It
is
Thieves’ Wisdom, Pater. Kaden has just never heard of it because he spent his young life being pampered in a palace. Be thankful you have someone here who is willing to look after your education. Besides,” he added, rushing on before Kaden could protest, “Tan’s been keeping Kaden so busy, we haven’t had a chance to talk to him about the goat he lost.”

Akiil’s words brought the
saama’an
of the slaughtered goat unbidden to Kaden’s mind, and with it the chill, creeping fear pricking the skin between his shoulder blades. It was sloppy thinking, letting someone else’s words dictate the contents of his thought, and he dismissed both the image and the emotion. Still, the afternoon sun was warm, the breeze carried the sharp scent of the junipers, and it wouldn’t hurt to rest for just a few minutes before searching out his
umial
once more. After a final glance out over the monastery, he settled down onto the tiles beside his friends.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“You tell
me,
” Akiil responded, rolling onto one elbow. “I know the goat was slaughtered. I know you didn’t find any tracks—”

“And the
brain
,” Pater burst in. “Something ate the brain.”

Kaden nodded. He’d been over the events more times than he cared to admit, but couldn’t add much more to the scene. “That’s about it.”

“A leach,” Pater said, shoving between the two youths to gesture with a small but insistent hand. “A leach could have done it!”

Akiil dismissed the absurd suggestion with a lazy wave. “Pater, what would a leach be doing wandering around the Bone Mountains at the ass end of winter?”