Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (15 page)

At first Valyn thought the shed was empty, but then he noticed Gwenna down at the far end, red hair obscuring her face, leaning over stock-still as she inserted something into a long tube with what looked like a pair of very narrow tongs. She didn’t greet them or look up. Not that he had expected her to, really. He hadn’t spoken to her since the day he learned of his father’s death, since the day she had practically bitten his head off about his unbuckled harness, and he had no idea if she still harbored the grudge. Knowing Gwenna, she probably did.

It wasn’t that Gwenna Sharpe was a bad soldier. In fact, she probably knew more about demolitions than any other cadet on the Islands. The problem was her temper. From time to time, one of the swaggering gallants over on Hook would find himself tempted by the bright green eyes and flaming red hair, by the supple, curvaceous body that she did her best to hide under her Kettral blacks. It never turned out well for him; Gwenna had tied her last would-be suitor to a dock piling and left him there for the tide. When his friends finally found him, he was sobbing like a baby as the waves washed over his face. Even Gwenna’s trainers joked that with a temper like that, she didn’t
need
any ’Kent-kissing munitions.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Valyn began as he reached the end of the table opposite Gwenna.

“Then don’t,” she replied, her eyes fixed on her work as she slid the slender tongs down the inside of the hollow cylinder. He stifled a sharp retort, clasped his hands behind his back, and schooled himself to patience. He wasn’t sure Gwenna would agree to help in the first place, and he didn’t want to make it any more difficult by irritating her right off the mark. Instead, he focused on the object of her attention, something that looked like a modified starshatter.

The tube was hollowed-out steel, twice the width of his thumb. Coated around the inside was some pitchlike substance he didn’t recognize. Gwenna withdrew the tongs, picked up a small shard of stone, and started to insert it. Ha Lin gasped.

“Don’t. Do. That,” Gwenna said, pausing, then sliding the tongs deeper.

“That’s claranth, isn’t it?” Lin asked, her voice tight. “Claranth and nitre?”

“Sure is,” Gwenna replied curtly.

Valyn stared. One of the first things that the Aphorist had taught his class of cadets was to always, always,
always
keep the two separate. “We like explosions here,” the man had joked, “but we like to
control
those explosions.” Unless Valyn had badly misunderstood something, if Gwenna so much as touched the content of the tongs to the side of the tube, someone would be sorting body parts out of the rubble. He started to reply, then thought better of it and held his breath instead.

“This is why,” Gwenna grated, sliding the tongs deeper, releasing the stone, then withdrawing them with a smooth, measured motion, “you shouldn’t interrupt.”

“Is it done?” Lin asked.

Gwenna snorted. “No, it’s not done. If I move it by half an inch, it’ll take the roof off this shed. Now, stop talking.”

Lin stopped talking, and the two of them watched in tense fascination as Gwenna reached for a vial of bubbling wax, grasped it with two gloved fingers, and upended it into the tube. There was a faint hissing, a whiff of acrid steam, and then a long pause.

“There,” Gwenna said finally, laying the tube down on the workbench and straightening up. “
Now
it’s done.”

“What is it?” Valyn asked, eyeing the thing warily.

“Starshatter,” she replied with a shrug.

“Doesn’t look like a normal starshatter.”

“I didn’t realize you’d become a demolitions master when I wasn’t around.”

Valyn bit his tongue. He was here to ask Gwenna for a favor, after all. Lin, remarkably, had kept her mouth shut, and if she could be civil, so could Valyn. “Isn’t it a little bit longer and thinner than the normal tube?” he asked, trying to sound interested.

“Marginally,” Gwenna said, scrutinizing the weapon, then scratching away an errant drop of wax with her fingernail.

“Why?”

“Bigger. Louder. Hotter.” She was trying to sound casual, but there was something in her voice, something Valyn had not expected to hear. It took him a moment to place it: pride. Gwenna was often so venomous, so closed off, that it was hard for him to imagine her feeling anything but rage or bile. The sudden revelation that she might actually take joy in some aspect of the world disarmed him, but just as he was starting to reassess his opinion of her, she rounded on him with a scowl. “You going to tell me what you want, or what?”

Now that it had come down to it, Valyn felt strangely hesitant. His fears, which Lin had done her best to fan, seemed bizarre and paranoid when he had to state them aloud.

Gwenna spread her hands impatiently.

“I assume you heard about Manker’s,” Valyn began tentatively. “The tavern over on Hook?”

“I know what Manker’s is,” Gwenna snapped. “I’ve given that bastard about half my pay for the watered-down swill he calls ale.”

“Well, then I assume you know it collapsed,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his own temper in check. “I was there, drinking, and it collapsed just after I stepped out the door.”

“How lucky for you.”

“Most of the people inside were killed. Crushed.”

“How sad for them.”

Lin pushed past Valyn, her own patience evidently nearing its end. “It might not have been an accident.”

That gave Gwenna pause. Her eyes flicked from Valyn to Lin, then back. He waited for her to laugh, to make some crack about the self-involved son of the Emperor thinking the whole world turned around him. Everyone else on the Islands needled him about his birth, even his friends, and Gwenna had never been one of his friends. She didn’t laugh.

“And you think it’s tied up with the death of your father.” Gwenna could be a bitch, but she wasn’t stupid.

Valyn nodded.

“Doesn’t do much good to stab the Emperor if his son plonks his own ass down on the throne a few days later.”

“I’m not the heir—”

“Spare me the fucking politics,” Gwenna replied, waving his objection aside. “I get the general idea.”

“And Manker’s…,” Lin pressed.

“You want me to look at it,” Gwenna said, wiping her hands on her blacks. “You want me to check it out.”

Valyn nodded carefully. “I don’t understand the munitions as well as you. I’m not sure if you could use them to bring down a building like that.”

“Of course you could knock over a building. That’s the whole
point
of the ’Kent-kissing things.”

“I know, but slowly like that? Without a visible explosion?”

Gwenna rolled her eyes. “You’re expected to lead a Wing someday and you don’t even understand the basics of munitions?”

“Look,” Ha Lin interjected, her lips tight. “We don’t spend all day in this little shed tinkering with matches and minerals—”

“You know more about this than we do,” Valyn said, cutting his friend off before the whole thing turned into a verbal sparring match. “You’re better than I am. You’re better than Lin is. You’re better than most of the ’Shael-spawned Kettral on the Islands. We could look, but maybe we’d miss something crucial.” If Gwenna wanted to be stroked, Valyn could grind out some compliments, although the fact that the words were true didn’t make them any easier to utter.

She scowled, then looked away, studying the wall of the shed. Valyn wondered if his strategy had backfired. Who knew how Gwenna’s mind worked? “Do you think you’d have time to do it?” he pressed. “I’d be happy to give you—”

“Money?” Gwenna snapped, her green eyes ablaze. “Your imperial favor?” she sneered.

Valyn started to reply but she cut him off.

“I don’t need anything from you. I’ll do it because I’m interested, because I want to know. Got it?”

Valyn nodded slowly. “Got it.”

11

Gwenna spent half the morning diving into the jumbled wreckage of Manker’s. She must have been half fish, the way she could hold her breath, and a couple of times she stayed under so long, Valyn thought she’d gotten herself stuck in the treacherous underwater maze of collapsed beams and joists. Once, he even stripped his tunic to dive in after her, but just as he was approaching the water, she broke the surface, twenty paces from where she went down, scowling and shaking the salt water from her hair.

A few passersby, men and women going about whatever dubious activity passed for their business, stopped to watch the scene with sullen curiosity. One old man in a battered sailor’s coat went so far as to ask if Valyn and Gwenna were checking over the corpses for jewelry, then cackled at his own suggestion, exposing a mouthful of rotting teeth. Valyn felt exposed. He’d suggested coming at night, but Gwenna had pointed out acerbically that it was hard enough to see anything in the murk of the bay at high noon. If Manker’s
had
been rigged, and if whoever rigged it just happened to walk by, it would be more than obvious that Valyn had his suspicions. Still, there wasn’t much to do but grit his teeth while Gwenna worked. It took all morning, and by the time she finally hauled herself out of the water, her lips were blue and she was trembling.

“Well,” she said, tilting her head to one side and wringing the water from her hair as though twisting the head off a chicken, “if someone rigged the ’Shael-spawned place, they used some kind of explosive I’ve never heard of.”

“How likely is that?” Valyn asked carefully.

“How likely are you to mistake your cock for your balls tomorrow morning?”

Valyn stared down into the murky water. A few charred beams thrust up from the surface while a skim of detritus sloshed around between the posts, jetsam from the ruined tavern that the tide had not yet managed to flush out to sea. None of the local residents had made any effort to clear away the wreckage, but that was the way on Hook. Several years earlier, fire had gutted an entire row of houses a few streets over. After scavenging the burned-out husks for anything valuable, the citizens of the island had left the places to rot.

“What’d you find down there?” Valyn asked.

“Bodies,” Gwenna replied curtly. “More than a dozen.”

Valyn watched the shifting waves, imagining the terror of people trapped between burning beams, dragged down below the surface and drowned. “Bad way to go.”

She shrugged. “They were bad people.”

Valyn paused. The inhabitants of Hook were a rough lot, no doubt about that: cutpurses who had pushed their luck too far on the mainland, pirates too tired or broken to haul anchor or reef sail, gamblers running from debts, whores and swindlers looking to mop up what little coin anyone had left. They were desperate and dangerous, almost to a man, but desperate didn’t seem quite the same thing as bad.

“Did you check over the corpses?” he asked.

“Just one.” Gwenna shrugged. “He owed me money. Wasn’t doing
him
any good.”

“What about the structure?” he asked, taking a step closer and lowering his voice. The dirt street was empty for the moment, but too many shutters hung loose around them. Too many doors creaked open on their hinges in the sea breeze.

“Nothing.”

“You’re sure?”

She glared at him. “The building was held up by forty-eight pilings. I checked every single one. No singeing, no impact scars, no explosive remnants. If someone rigged this building, I want to find the bastard and beat his secrets out of him.”

Valyn wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. On the one hand, the fact that the alehouse had collapsed under its own decrepit weight meant that no one had tried to kill him, at least not yet. On the other, there had been something strangely comforting about believing an attack had already taken place. He’d been trained to deal with real threats and concrete dangers; bringing a roof down on someone’s head was about as real as it got. He could handle munitions and rigged demolitions almost as well as blades or bare-fisted fighting. Nebulous schemes, however, inchoate plots and faceless assassins—it was impossible to come to grips with those. Given the choice, he would have fought his assailants straight out, toe to toe, blade to blade. But he wasn’t given the ’Kent-kissing choice. There wasn’t much to do but grit his teeth and watch his back as he tried to focus on his training once more.

*   *   *

While he’d been lamenting his father and chasing phantoms, Hull’s Trial had drawn steadily closer, and as the bleak list of names engraved on the Stone of the Fallen outside the barracks reminded him, a cadet could die on the Islands easily enough without the need of a shadowy conspiracy. He resumed his long, predawn swims, redoubled his evening runs around the coast, and returned to his study of tactics and strategy with a vengeance. The bright days of early spring gave way to heavy rains that soaked his blacks the moment he stepped out the door. After eight years of training, time felt suddenly, precariously short. There were maps to learn, languages to practice, diagrams of fleets and fortresses to pore over, and, of course, there was always fighting to be had.

Qarsh had a number of training rings where cadets and veterans alike could work up a good sweat running through forms or hammering each other into the dust with blunted blades. The simplest were just squares of earth vaguely delineated by a few pounded stakes strung with ropes. Past the west end of the compound, however, not far from the Eyrie’s main landing field, overlooking a rocky expanse that swept down toward the sea, was the only true arena on the Islands—a shallow, wide circle a pace or so deep set into the earth and ringed with stones.

Valyn arrived just before seventh bell, stripped to the waist and sweating like a bull from his run around the perimeter of the island. It was a full week since Gwenna’s investigation of Manker’s, and though he had not forgotten the Aedolian’s warning or his grief over his father’s murder, the imperatives of training provided some kind of distraction from the looming threat—
time to shut up and buckle down,
as the Kettral liked to say—and there was nothing to focus the mind like three feet of steel whistling toward your forehead.