Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (23 page)

“My stories!” Akiil sputtered. “Lies? I
protest
!”

“Is that part of the speech you practiced for the magistrate?”

Akiil shrugged, dropping the pretense. “Didn’t work,” he replied, gesturing to the brand—a rising sun—burned into the back of his right hand. All Annurian thieves were marked in such a way as punishment after their first offense. If half Akiil’s stories of picking pockets and pilfering wealthy homes were true, he was extremely lucky. A second offense called for a similar brand to the forehead. Men with the second brand had a hard time finding work, scarred, as they were, with the emblem of their misdeeds. Most returned to crime. For the third offense, the magistrates of Annur meted out death.

“Forget what you think about the Csestriim,” Kaden pressed, “you have to admit it’s strange that the Shin are pushing an idea based on the language and minds of an ancient race. It would be even stranger, actually, if the Csestriim
weren’t
real.”

“I think just about
everything
about the Shin is strange,” Akiil retorted, “but they put food on my plate two meals a day, a roof over my head, and no one has burned anything else into my flesh with a hot iron—which is more than I can say for your father.”

“My father didn’t—”

“Of course he didn’t,” Akiil snapped. “The Emperor of Annur is far too busy to see personally to the punishment of a minor thief.”

The years at Ashk’lan had blunted Akiil’s bitterness toward the social inequities of Annur, but once in a while Kaden would say something about slaves or taxes, justice or punishment, and Akiil would refuse to let it go.

“What’s the word from outside?” Kaden asked, hoping to change the subject. “Any more dead goats?”

Akiil looked ready to ignore the question and continue the argument. Kaden waited. After a moment he saw his friend take half a breath, hold it, then another half breath. The pupils of his dark eyes dilated, then shrank. A calming exercise. Akiil was as adept at the Shin discipline as any of the other acolytes—more so than most, in fact—provided he chose to exercise it. “Two,” he replied after a long pause. “Two more dead. Neither were the ones we staked out as bait.”

Kaden nodded, disturbed at the news but relieved to have avoided a fight. “So whatever it is, it’s smart.”

“Smart or lucky.”

“How are the rest of the monks dealing with it?”

“About the same way the Shin deal with everything else,” Akiil replied, rolling his eyes. “After Nin’s meeting, aside from the prohibition on acolytes and novices leaving the main buildings, people are still hauling water, still painting, still meditating. Honest to ’Shael, I swear that if a murderous horde of your Csestriim rode in on a cloud and started hacking off heads and mounting them on pikes, half the monks would try to paint them and the other half wouldn’t pay any attention at all.”

“None of the older monks are saying anything else about it? Nin, or Altaf, or Tan?”

Akiil scowled. “You know how it is. They tell us about as much as I’d tell a hog I was planning to slaughter for the pots. If you want to learn anything, you have to go look for yourself.”

“But you, of course, have scrupulously obeyed the abbot’s command to remain at the monastery.…”

Akiil’s eyes sparkled. “Of
course.
I may have lost my way from time to time—Ashk’lan is such a vast and complicated place—but I would never willingly disobey our revered abbot!”

“And when you lost your way, did you find anything?”

“Nah,” the youth replied, shaking his head in frustration. “If Altaf and Nin can’t track the ’Kent-kissing thing, I don’t have a chance. Still, I thought … sometimes you get lucky.”

“And sometimes you get unlucky,” Kaden said, remembering the savaged carcass, the dripping blood. “We don’t know what it
is,
Akiil. Be careful.”

*   *   *

The following evening Tan returned to the shed. Kaden stopped his work and looked up expectantly, hoping to read some clue about outside events in his
umial
’s weathered face. Tan knew more than the other monks. Kaden was certain of that. Trying to ferret out
what
he knew, however, was impossible. The sudden appearance of gruesomely mutilated corpses seemed to affect him no more than the discovery of a new patch of mountain bluebells. He closed the door behind him and looked with a critical eye over the dozen or so pots Kaden had thrown and fired.

“Have you made any progress?” Kaden asked after letting the silence stretch.

“Progress,” Tan said, pronouncing the word as though it were new to him.

“Yes. Have you found whatever killed the goats?”

Tan tapped against the outside of one of the pots with his fingernail, then ran a finger around the inside of the lip. “Would that be progress?” he asked without looking up from his inspection.

Kaden suppressed a sigh and, with an effort, stilled his breathing and lowered his heart rate. If Tan wanted to be cryptic, Kaden wasn’t going to be goaded into pestering him like a wide-eyed novice. His
umial
progressed to the next pot, rapped the rim with his knuckles, then scrubbed at some imperfection on the surface of the vessel.

“What about you?” Tan asked after he’d looked over half the pots. “Have you made any progress?”

Kaden hesitated, trying to find the hook hidden in the question.

“I’ve made these,” he replied guardedly, gesturing to the silent row of earthenware.

Tan nodded. “So you have.” He hefted one of the vessels and sniffed at the inside of it. “What is this one made out of?”

Kaden held back a smile. If his
umial
expected to trip him up with questions about clay, he was going to be sorely disappointed. Kaden knew the various river clays better than any other acolyte at the monastery. “That one’s black silt blended with beach red at a ratio of one to three.”

“Anything else?”

“A little resin to give it that hue.”

The monk moved on to the next pot. “What about this one?”

“White shallows clay,” Kaden responded readily, “medium grain.”
Pass this test,
he told himself silently,
and you may just get to see the sun again before winter.

Tan went down the line of pots, all dozen of them, each time asking the same questions:
What is this made out of? Anything else?
At the end of the row he frowned, looked at Kaden for the first time, then shook his head.

“You have not made progress.”

Kaden stared. He’d made no mistakes; he was sure of it.

“Do you know why I sent you here?”

“To make pots.”

“A potter could teach you to make pots.”

Kaden hesitated. Tan might whip him for his stupidity, but the beating he would receive for trying to bluff his way through the conversation would be even worse. “I don’t know why you sent me here.”

“Speculate.”

“To keep me from going up into the mountains?”

The monk’s eyes hardened. “Scial Nin’s command is not bar enough?”

Kaden thought back to his conversation with Akiil and schooled his face to stillness. Most of the Shin
umials
could smell deception or omission the way a hound scented a fox. Kaden himself hadn’t stepped foot out of the clay shed, but he wasn’t eager to land his friend a hefty penance.

“‘Obedience is a knife that cuts the cord of bondage,’” he responded, quoting the start of the ancient Shin maxim.

Tan considered him, silent, inscrutable. “Go on,” he said at last.

Kaden hadn’t been forced to recite the whole thing since he was a novice, but the words came back easily enough:

Obedience is a knife that cuts the cord of bondage.

Silence is a hammer that shatters the walls of speech.

Stillness is strength; pain a soft bed.

Put down your basin; emptiness is the only vessel.

As he uttered the final syllables, he realized his mistake. “The emptiness,” he said quietly, gesturing back toward the silent row of earthenware. “When you asked me what they were made out of, I was supposed to say ‘emptiness.’”

Tan shook his head grimly. “You know the words, but no one has made you feel them. Today we will rectify that. Come with me.”

Kaden rose reflexively from his stool, steeling himself for some new brutality, some hideous penance that would leave him battered or bleeding or bruised right down to the bone, all in the name of the
vaniate,
a concept no one had ever bothered to fully explain to him. He rose, then paused. For eight years he had run when the monks said run, painted when they told him to paint, labored when he was instructed to labor, and fasted when they refused him food. And for what? Akiil’s words from the day before came back to him suddenly:
They tell us about as much as I’d tell a hog.…
Training and study were all well and good, but Kaden wasn’t even sure what he was training
for.

“Come,” Tan said, his voice hard and unyielding.

Though Kaden’s muscles ached to obey, he forced himself to remain still. “Why?”

The older monk’s fist struck his cheek before he realized it was moving, splitting the skin and knocking him to the floor. Tan took a step forward, looming over him.

“Get up.”

Kaden rose unsteadily to his feet. The pain was one thing—he could handle pain—but his mind was blurry, dizzy from the blow.

“Go,” Tan said, pointing toward the door.

Kaden hesitated, then took a step back. The split skin of his cheek wept blood, but he forced himself to leave his hands at his side. He shook his head again. “I want to know why. I’ll do what you tell me, but I want to understand the point. Why do I need to learn the
vaniate
?”

It was impossible to read any emotion in the older monk’s eyes. He might have been staring at a carcass or a passing cloud. He might have been a hunter looming over his wounded prey, readying himself for the kill. Kaden wondered if the man would hit him again, would keep hitting him. He had never heard of an acolyte being murdered by his trainer before, but then, if Tan wanted to beat his pupil to death, who would stop him? Scial Nin? Chalmer Oleki? Ashk’lan lay more than a hundred leagues past the border of the Annurian Empire, past
any
civilized borders. There were no laws here, no magistrates, no courts of justice. Kaden watched his
umial
warily, trying to still the pounding of his heart against his ribs.

“Your ignorance is an impediment,” the monk concluded finally. He stood for one more moment in stillness before turning toward the door. “Perhaps your training will be more effective once you understand the urgency behind it.”

*   *   *

Scial Nin’s study hunched against the cliffs a few hundred paces from the main compound. The building looked like part of the mountain—dry stonework shaded by a gaunt, withered pine that shed its brown needles on the roof and ground alike. Kaden and Akiil tended to avoid the place—an acolyte or novice was usually called before the abbot only for an extreme infracation requiring an extreme penance—and, despite Rampuri Tan’s suggestion that Scial Nin would provide answers to his questions, Kaden now approached with some trepidation, following in the footsteps of his
umial.
Tan shoved the wooden door open without preamble, and suddenly reluctant, Kaden stepped over the threshold after him.

The inside of the room was dim, and he didn’t immediately notice Scial Nin seated behind a low desk, the surface of which was empty save for a single parchment—the painting, Kaden realized, of the tracks left by whatever was slaughtering the goats. If the abbot was surprised or irritated by the sudden entrance, he didn’t show it. He looked up from the paper, and waited.

“The boy wants answers,” Tan said brusquely, stepping to the side.

“Most people do,” Nin replied, his voice smooth and solid as planed oak. He considered the older monk, then turned his attention to Kaden. “You may speak.”

Now that he stood before the abbot, Kaden wasn’t quite sure what to say. He felt suddenly foolish, like a small child making trouble for his elders. Still, Tan had relented enough to bring him before the abbot; it would be a shame to squander the opportunity.

“I’d like to know why I was sent here,” he began slowly. “I understand the goal of the Shin: emptiness,
vaniate
. But why is that
my
goal? Why is it necessary in ruling an empire?”

“It’s not,” Nin replied. “The Manjari Emperors beyond the Ancaz Mountains pay no homage to the Blank God. The savages at the borders of your empire revere Meshkent. The Liran kings on the far side of the earth refuse to worship gods at all—they venerate their ancestors.”

Kaden glanced over at his
umial,
but Tan stood silent, his face like stone.

“Then why am I here?” he asked, turning his attention back to the abbot. “My father told me, just before I left, that the Shin could teach me things he could not.”

“Your father was a talented student,” Nin replied, nodding at the recollection, “but he had no experience as a
umial.
He would have had great difficulty with your training, even were there not an empire requiring his attention.”

“What training?” Kaden asked, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “Painting? Running?”

The abbot cocked his head to the side, looking at Kaden the way a robin might consider a spring earthworm.

“The Emperor has many titles,” he said at last. “One of the oldest and least understood is ‘Keeper of the Gates.’ Do you know what it means?”

Kaden shrugged. “There are four gates to Annur: the Water Gate, the Steel Gate, the Gate of Strangers, and the False Gate. The Emperor keeps them, guards them. He protects the city from her foes.”

“So most people believe,” Nin replied, “in part because it’s true: the Emperor
does
guard the gates of Annur and has for hundreds of years, ever since Olannon hui’Malkeenian built the first rough walls of the city from wood and wattle. There are other gates, however. Older. More dangerous. It is these to which the title refers.”