Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (38 page)

The rigors of the Trial had done nothing to smooth the smugness from Yurl’s handsome face, but his smile soured when he found Valyn staring back at him. He tried to hold the gaze, then cursed under his breath and turned away.
My eyes,
Valyn realized. He’d seen them that morning in a mirror, but had been too wrung out to feel anything about the change. They had been brown; now they were black. It was a simple fact. Others, however, seemed to find them unsettling. He filed the observation away as something that could be useful at some point.

“Before we light the pyre,” Shaleel said, “those of you who wish may approach the body.”

Valyn waited for the line to form, then took his place at the end. Some of the soldiers took only a moment, touching Lin’s hand or saying a few words, prayers or farewells that he couldn’t hear. When Sami Yurl reached the bier, he grinned, then chucked Lin under the chin playfully. Valyn slowly unclenched his hand. Lin was dead. Yurl couldn’t hurt her any longer. His time would come soon enough.

Gwenna pressed something into Lin’s hands, Laith whispered a few phrases in her ear, a sad smile on his face, and Gent tucked his favorite knife into her belt. When Balendin stepped forward, wolfhounds at his heels, he just looked for a long time, silent as Lin herself, then turned away.

Valyn found himself before the bier. He glanced over his shoulder, as though someone watching might tell him what to say, but the assembled faces were cool and quiet, ghostlike above their black uniforms. He turned back to the body. The wounds that had killed his friend—a half dozen slashes across her stomach and chest—were covered now by a clean, black tunic. After he first carried her out of the cave, Valyn had run his finger’s over those gashes, trying to understand how a life could have seeped away through a few slices. They were ugly, nasty rents, but surely they couldn’t have killed her. Surely you had to rip a larger hole in the body, had to spill out more of the guts, had to crush more of the bone, in order to drive the life out of it.

He shook his head.
Evidently not.
Lin’s face was sallow and waxen.
Dead a day and a half,
he thought, then cursed himself for the clinical calculation. This wasn’t an exercise, wasn’t a cadet’s battlefield drill. It was supposed to be a chance at a final farewell, but there were no such chances. He should have said his farewells days ago, should have been saying them every day of every year. It struck him, as he looked down at the cold corpse, at his own body beside it, that the Kettral wore blacks, not to blend with the darkness, but to be ready, always, for the funeral.

There seemed little point in speaking, but he took her hand gently, closing his eyes as he held it between his own. This was the time to offer a prayer, but what god would he pray to? Hull, whose trial she had died trying to complete? Ananshael, who had killed her? Maybe Meshkent was most appropriate, but then, the Lord of Pain had already released her from his claws. Valyn opened his eyes, tracing the fingers one by one, the back of the knuckles, the wrist.…

He paused. Whoever had cleaned her up had done a good job—the blood had been scrubbed away, the wounds sutured with fine thread. On her wrist, however, just beneath the protruding bone, ran an angry red line of abrasions. He stared. Among all her other, more serious wounds, it would be easy to miss, the most insignificant scratch, but now that he’d seen it, he couldn’t pull his eyes away: a faint line of herringbone impressions dug into the flesh, the kind of impression left by Liran cord, the kind of impression that had marred Amie’s wrists when they cut her down from the rafter weeks before.

His breath stuck in his throat. Somewhere out over the harbor a gull cawed. He could hear the waves sucking at the sand, lisping the same malevolent syllable over and over. His eyes flicked back to her wrist, back to the faint abrasion, trying to make sense of it. He wanted to lean over, to look closer, but he was surrounded, all eyes upon him. How long had he been standing there, holding her hand? He had no idea. How much longer could he stay without raising eyebrows, raising suspicions? As subtly as he could, he pulled back the sleeve of her tunic. He had assumed her wounds came from the slarn, and in his grief he had not thought to examine them. Now, however, as he studied one of the rents in her flesh, he could see that the edges were clean, not jagged. His heart went cold inside him. Something that might have been fear or rage squirmed beneath his skin. Steel had parted Ha Lin’s flesh, good steel. She may have fought the slarn in the darkness, but one of the newly minted Kettral had killed her.

And it wasn’t easy for them,
a part of him noted with grim satisfaction. Given the number and arrangement of wounds, it was clear that Lin had fought back, fought hard.

“You were a warrior,” he murmured so quietly no one else could hear. The words sounded both right and meager.

With elaborate care, he returned her hand to her chest. Lin hadn’t just died. Somewhere in the cave, somewhere so far beneath the earth the entire deed was blotted by darkness, someone had battled her to a standstill, then bound her wrists. The same person who had tortured Amie in the tiny garret and left her body hanging for the flies had got to Lin as well, had murdered her, a quarter mile from the end of the Trial.

He forced himself to turn, to walk a few steps from the pyre, and resume his place among the other soldiers.
One of you,
he thought, eyeing the faces.
It was one of you.
His eyes flickered to Annick. He hadn’t spoken to her since the infirmary, but he hadn’t forgotten the look of rage and death that flashed across her face when he asked about Amie. If she had been involved in the girl’s death, then she was implicated in Ha Lin’s as well.

The blaze caught quickly, the age-old scent of burning wood mingling with the sickening smell of charred flesh as the tongues of flame licked hungrily upward, gnawing through bier and body both. Valyn stared into the shifting flame and shadow, stared at the ruddy sparks, stared at the sudden gout of brilliant yellow flame that exploded from Lin’s hand—the special starshatter that Gwenna had tucked there in her own bizarre tribute. He stared until his eyes watered with the smoke, until they burned, but he refused to close them or to back away from the flame.

27

“Dead,” Kaden said flatly, trying to make sense of the word.

“Slaughtered,”
Akiil amended, forcing a hand through his dark hair. “Just like the goats.”

Kaden turned the idea over in his mind. Serkhan Khandashi had mostly kept to himself, spending his days on the trails beyond the monastery, studying trees. He always claimed he was preparing to write a treatise on the flora of eastern Vash, but no one had ever seen him set brush to parchment. Kaden hadn’t known the man well, but the thought that he could just
cease,
could go from a curious, quiet observer of the world to a scattered heap of decaying meat, made him faintly queasy.

“I thought the monks guarding the goats were in groups,” he said, putting down his spoon on the rough table. The bowl of turnip soup in front of him no longer seemed so appetizing, and the large refectory hall, normally so welcoming, struck him as cold and austere. A chill spring wind sliced through the open windows, rustling the sleeves of his robe, tugging at the meager fire that flickered on the hearth, stealing away any warmth it might have offered.

“They
were
in groups,” Akiil responded.

“Then what happened?”

“No one knows. The monks were all hidden, remember? When it came time to switch shifts, Allen found what was left of Serkhan scattered over half the eastern slope.”

“And the other monks didn’t hear anything?”

Akiil squinted at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You know the spring wind in the mountains. Half the time, you can’t hear your own footsteps.”

Kaden nodded, staring dully out one of the low, small windows. The sun was falling down toward the west, and already Pta’s gems, the brightest stars in the northern sky, were visible, hanging in a glimmering necklace above the peaks. He pulled his robe tighter around him to guard against the gusts that blew through the chinks in the casement.

It had been more than a week since Tan had Akiil dig him out of the hole, and although his appetite had started to return, painful sores covered his elbows and hips, and it was still difficult to hobble from the refectory to the meditation hall to his bed and back. Worse, his mind felt … blinded somehow, as though he had looked too long at a bright light. He still wasn’t sure what had happened to him inside that hole—the final days, in particular, seemed like a dream, or a story read from some musty tome—but he was glad to be free. He had a feeling that if Tan had left him buried much longer, his mind might have drifted away like one of those clouds. That, he suspected uneasily, might have been the point.

As it turned out, Tan hadn’t cut short the penance out of concern for Kaden’s mental state. It seemed as though, after Serkhan’s death, he considered it too risky to leave his pupil buried to the neck in earth. Evidently, if Kaden was to be killed, Tan wanted the pleasure of doing it himself.

Akiil, for his part, was ready to leap out of his skin with excitement. He kept picking up and putting down his spoon, gesturing with it toward Kaden and then toward the world outside, thumping his finger on the table to emphasize his points, and generally ignoring his rapidly cooling bowl of stew. He was always complaining that nothing ever happened at Ashk’lan, and now that excitement had arrived, he seemed to accept Serkhan’s death as the necessary price.

“Why now?” Kaden asked slowly. “I found the first goat over a month ago, and monks have been all over the trails since then. It could have attacked anyone.”

Akiil nodded, as though he’d been anticipating this question. “The way I figure it, the thing never wanted to kill a person. It stuck to goats as long as we let it, but then we penned the goats, all of them except the ones we set out as bait. It couldn’t get to those, and so it had no choice. Serkhan became dinner.”

Kaden winced at the crack. “The man is
dead,
Akiil. Show some respect.”

His friend waved off the remark. “You’re a terrible monk, you know that? Don’t you listen to
anything
you’re taught? Serkhan stopped being Serkhan when whatever it is tore him apart. The statement, ‘Serkhan is dead,’ doesn’t even make
sense.
Serkhan was. Now he is not. You can’t respect something that’s not.”

Kaden shook his head. Leave it to Akiil to ignore Shin teaching until it suited him. The tough thing was that his friend was right. The monks weren’t callous, exactly, but they didn’t make any more allowance for grief than they did for the other emotions—it was clutter, all of it, an obstacle to the
vaniate.
When a brother died, there was no funeral, no procession of mourners, no eulogy or scattering of ashes. Several monks conveyed the corpse to one of the high peaks and left it there for the rain and the ravens.

Kaden had learned all that the hard way. He could recall the moment in excruciating detail, despite the passage of the years. He had spent the morning in the potting hall, seated on one of the three-legged stools in the back corner, his attention focused on the lip of the ewer he was turning. Four times he had bungled the vessel, earning sharp words and sharper strokes from his
umial.
In his determination, he didn’t even notice the young monk, Mon Ada, until he stood directly before him, a narrow wooden cylinder in his hands, leather thongs dangling where they had been cut loose from the bird’s leg. Pigeons couldn’t carry any great weight and the letter was terse:
Your mother has died. Consumption. She went quickly. Be strong. Father.

Kaden had kept his face still, set aside the note, and somehow finished the lip of the ewer. Only when Oleki dismissed him did he climb to the top of the Talon to weep in solitude. He had seen one of the monks at the monastery die of consumption and he remembered the fever and chills, the skin pale as milk, the bright red as the man coughed pieces of his own lung into the cloth. He did not go quickly.

After spending a night on the Talon, Kaden went directly to Scial Nin’s quarters to ask permission to visit his mother’s grave. The abbot refused. The next day Kaden turned eleven.

With an effort of will he hauled his mind back to the present. His mother was dead and so was Serkhan.

“Respect or no respect,” he said, “you’re acting like this is just all part of a game. Doesn’t it make you even a little bit scared?”

“Fear is blindness,” Akiil intoned, raising an admonitory finger and arching an eyebrow. “Calmness is sight.”

“You can skip the sayings—I learned them the same year you did.”

“Evidently not well enough.”

“A man was
ripped apart,
” Kaden insisted. He still felt dazed and a little detached from the world after his ordeal in the hole. The fact that Akiil refused to acknowledge the seriousness of Serkhan’s death only made him feel more confused. “I’m not arguing we should be running around in a terror, but the situation seems to warrant more than … excitement.”

Akiil stared at him for a while. “You know what the difference is between us?”

Kaden shook his head wearily. For the most part, years living with the monks had dulled his friend’s bitterness about a childhood spent grubbing scraps in the Perfumed Quarter. For the most part.

“The difference,” Akiil continued, leaning over the table, his stew forgotten, “is that I saw a dozen men torn to pieces every
month
back in the Quarter. The Tribes got some of them. Some of them wandered down the wrong alley on the wrong night. Some of them were whores, cut up and tossed out because that’s what some men like to do, and some of them were men, lured in by whores, then strangled or stabbed, flung on the midden without their sack of coin, naturally.”

“It doesn’t make it right,” Kaden said.

“It doesn’t make it
anything,
” Akill shot back. “It is what it is. People die.
Everyone
dies. Ananshael is always busy. You think the
Shin
taught me to scoff at death?” He scowled. “I learned that lesson on the streets of our beloved empire.”