Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (50 page)

The Flea snorted. “You wanted rule-abiding, book-crunching professionals. That’s not what you got.”

“You can say that again.”

“Then stop commanding the Wing you wanted. Start commanding the Wing you have.”

Valyn puzzled over this for a moment. He’d spent the entire day trying to get Laith to follow barrel drop protocol, and he had failed. If anything, the flier had come in faster and harder than ever on that last run, frustrated at the repeated failures. Everything hinged on the speed and the angle: the order of buckle release, the placement of the barrel, the timing of the jumps. If he just let Laith continue to fly by the seat of his pants, they’d have to change everything, have to rework the barrel drop from the ground up. There were
reasons
the Kettral had instituted the protocol in the first place.

“I was a part of the group that picked the Wings,” the Flea said, breaking into Valyn’s thoughts.

Valyn stared at the man, aghast. “
You
helped select that team?” he asked, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

The Flea shrugged. His pockmarked face remained indifferent. “I didn’t select ’em, but I approved the list.”

“Why?”

“Thought they’d make a good Wing,” the commander replied simply.

Valyn opened his mouth to snap a quick response, then shut it. Either the man was taunting him, or there was something to the lesson.
Command the Wing you have, not the Wing you want.
It would mean throwing out the whole protocol and reworking the barrel drop entirely.

“So what you’re saying, sir—,” Valyn began, trying to work through the implications.

The Flea cut him off. “Can’t talk now. I gotta go.”

Valyn looked around, confused. “Where are you going?”

“Barrel drops,” the Flea grunted, gesturing over his shoulder toward the dim shape of a bird in the distance.

“Barrel drops like we did?”

“Hopefully a lot better than you did. Those were shittiest barrel drops I’ve seen since I was a cadet.”

Valyn tried to wrap his weary mind around it. “Why are you still doing them? What’s the twist?”

“No twist,” the Flea replied, picking idly at a callus on his thumb, seemingly unaware of the rapidly approaching bird.

“But they’re a novice exercise,” Valyn protested. He’d heard fables of the training the veteran Wings went through: rose-and-thorn scenarios, impossible point landings, high-speed multiple casualty extracts … “None of the veteran Wings do barrel drops.”

The Flea shrugged. “We do.”

It didn’t make sense. The Flea and his Wing were professionals. They were practically
gods.
It was like hearing that a master bladesman still practiced slicing vegetables for the dinner pot.

“How often?” Valyn asked, stepping back as the massive black bird swept in on close approach. Chi Hoai Mi, the Flea’s flier, was coming in fast and hard, faster than Laith, even, and seemingly low enough to knock her Wing’s commander from the cliff. The Flea didn’t even look over his shoulder at the approaching bird. He just raised one hand and seemed to contemplate Valyn’s question.

“Just about every day,” he replied, eyes abstracted, as though tallying up the days and weeks, the
years.
“Yeah,” he concluded, nodding as though that were settled. “Just about every day.”

The bird was upon them in a rush of wind that knocked Valyn back onto his heels. The Flea, however, just leaned forward slightly, snagged a leather loop that had appeared at the last moment, seemingly out of nowhere, and pulled himself effortlessly onto the talons. Before Valyn could make sense of the sight, Chi Hoai had put the bird into a steep bank and the whole Wing disappeared over the edge of the cliff.

35

For two days Kaden remained in the cellar of the meditation hall, toiling with a shovel and pickaxe in the rocky soil. Tan had said he wanted the cellar deeper, but he hadn’t specified by how much. Kaden took the omission to mean he had a lot of work ahead of him. He had rolled the huge hogsheads of vinegar and weak beer out of the way, stacking them in the far corner, then set to work on the task. The ground was stony and unyielding. Often he would spend hours trying to find the edges of a boulder, then further hours levering it out of the earth with various picks and prybars. The solitary, monotonous work provided labor for his back and hands, but allowed his mind to wander over the events of the last week.

Pyrre and Jakin Lakatur weren’t merchants; that much was clear, and their arrival had something to do with Kaden. It seemed as though, however improbably, the intrigue of the imperial court had found its way to Ashk’lan, a thought that made Kaden shiver despite his labors. The silk-hung corridors of the Dawn Palace had seen both spies and assassins over the centuries, and here, a thousand leagues from his father’s court, Kaden had no Aedolian Guard to protect him.

What information a spy might hope to glean from Kaden, however, he had no idea. Despite the fact that he stood to inherit the Unhewn Throne, after eight years at Ashk’lan, he knew less about politics than the most incompetent footling. Pyrre and Jakin weren’t likely to have undertaken a trek of a thousand leagues just to watch him run up and down Venart’s Peak and turn bowls in the clay shed.

Assassination struck him as the more likely possibility, troubling though it was.
Something
was happening back in Annur, something with his father, and it wouldn’t be the first time a rival faction had attempted to strike at the Emperor through his children. During their early childhood, Kaden and Valyn were abducted from the Dawn Palace by Armel Herve, the malcontent atrep of Breata. For weeks they shivered in one of the man’s freezing tower chambers, each night terrified that they would be executed with the sunrise. Then the Kettral came.

Kaden, four years old at the time, had only scattered memories of the event: screaming, blood, fire, and, in the midst of the chaos, three men in black, shadows within shadows, smoke-steel blades flickering as they cut souls from bodies. Kaden could still feel the strong arm around his waist as the closest soldier gathered him up, holding him tight as the great bird took flight, lifting them into the air and away from the dark, fetid room.

From the moment they collected their wits, Kaden and Valyn both vowed that they would grow up to join the ranks of their heroes. They raced around the tapestry-hung halls of the palace swinging wooden replicas of the short Kettral swords, driving the poor palace staff to distraction. Valyn had made good on the dream, taking ship for the mysterious Qirin Islands on the same day that his brother was packed off to the monastery. After eight years training with the Kettral, Valyn would have nothing to fear from Pyrre and Jakin.

“But you’re not Valyn, are you?” Kaden muttered to himself as he drove the shovel into the earth, squinting in the dim light of the lantern. “And you’re not Kettral either.” The realization of his own helplessness galled him, but there seemed no remedy for it. He had trained in painting and patience, the one he could see no use for, the other he needed far more than he had. There was no telling how long Tan intended him to skulk in the cellar—doubtless until any trace of danger had passed.

On the third morning, just as he was finally wrenching a stone the size of his torso out of the hole, Tan came for him.

“Leave it.”

Kaden straightened, resisting the urge to knead the ache in his lower back.
If he sees that, he’ll probably decide I need to spend the rest of the
year
hauling rocks and clearing out cellars.

Tan, however, paid no attention to either the rock or the back. His eyes were on Kaden’s face. “Let’s go,” he said after a long pause. “There are more than merchants here to see you.”

The older monk led Kaden out the back door of the hall and into a narrow passageway between the buildings. After so many days in the cellar, Kaden had to squint against the afternoon brilliance, and it was only after his eyes adjusted that he could see the pail of water sitting on the stone step and the clean robe beside it. Tan gestured to them.

“You’re going to want to get cleaned up,” he said, his face blank as stone.

“Who’s here?” Kaden asked.

Tan pointed at the pail once more. When Kaden realized he wasn’t going to get any answers, he plunged his head into the cold water, then began scrubbing the grime from between his fingers. It took more than a few minutes to scour away the worst of the dirt, digging deep beneath his fingernails, scrubbing with rough gravel scooped from the ground until he thought he might end up taking off the flesh with the grime. Tan clearly had no intention of letting him go anywhere before he’d finished, so he went as fast as he could. When the worst of it had been scoured away, he pulled the clean robe over his head.

“All right,” he said. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere, yet,” Tan replied. “We are going to take a look at these visitors of yours from the window of the hall.”

“Why don’t we just go out to meet them?” Kaden asked, curiosity overwhelming his deference.

There was iron in the monk’s voice when he replied. “From the hall, we can look at them without them looking at us. It might be time you started thinking about more than pots and the
vaniate.
”

Kaden almost fell over. Since becoming his
umial,
Tan had drilled him relentlessly in nothing
but
the
vaniate.
Everything Kaden had undertaken, from morning prayer to afternoon labor to the bare slab on stone on which he lay down at night, had been devoted to that goal. There were subsidiary challenges, of course—
saama’an, ivvate, beshra’an, kinla’an
—but they were all just rungs on the ladder. He stared at his
umial
in perplexity, but Tan steered him firmly back into the meditation hall to a window overlooking the central square.

Two men seemed to be arguing with the abbot while a small crowd of monks gathered around at a respectful distance. Kaden’s breath caught at the splendid figures they cut. Eight years among the Shin had accustomed him to shaven heads and plain, brown robes. A leather belt was an extravagance; leather sandals, a preposterous luxury. These newcomers, however strode directly out of the pomp of his childhood.

The taller of the two wore full plate armor, burnished steel shining so brightly Kaden wanted to avert his eyes. The golden sun of the imperial throne gleamed from his breastplate as well as from the massive shield that rested at his feet. The grip and pommel of the largest broadblade Kaden had ever seen extended up behind the man’s head. He carried his helmet beneath one arm, a single concession to the heat of the day. Even from a distance, Kaden could make out deep blue eyes in a face that might have been hammered out on an anvil, not a handsome face, but a familiar one. Micijah Ut, he realized, a small smile creeping onto his face.

“Aedolian,” Tan said softly.

Kaden looked over at the other monk, wondering for the thousandth time about the life he had led before arriving at the monastery. The golden knots on Ut’s shoulders identified him clearly as a member of the Emperor’s personal bodyguard, of course, but the Aedolian Guard rarely left the capital. How would Tan recognize the insignia?

“The commander,” Tan added.

Kaden glanced back to those knots.
Four,
he realized with a start. When he left the Dawn Palace, Crenchan Xaw had been First Shield, and though Xaw seemed almost as old as the empire itself, he had run the guard with unerring competence since well before Kaden was born. Whenever Kaden and Valyn tried to slip away on one of their childish adventures, it was Xaw who caught them, Xaw who harangued them about their responsibility to the empire, and Xaw who turned them over a chair and caned them, heedless of their demands to be set free, of their protestations that they were
princes,
that he had to
obey
them. Once, when the brothers were still very young, they had foolishly complained to their father about his First Shield’s treatment. Sanlitun had only laughed and resolved to pay Crenchen Xaw an extra stipend “for educating as well as guarding his sons.” The old man was dead now; the fact that Micijah Ut wore the four golden knots of the First Shield could mean nothing else. Although Kaden had spent almost all his young childhood at war with the old commander, he felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach, a dull ache that the Shin would dismiss as illusion but that he still recognized as sorrow.

When Kaden departed from the capital, Micijah Ut had been one of four commanders directly beneath Crenchen Xaw. As leader of the Dark Guard, he was charged with watching over the royal family between the midnight bell and dawn. Kaden remembered him well, a stiff, formal man who lacked the charm of many of the other Aedolians. He walked his nightly rounds in full armor, even inside the Dawn Palace, his face turned down in a perpetual frown, barely illuminated in the lamplight. Valyn and Kaden had always found him intimidating, despite the fact that he was there to protect them.

After eight years at Ashk’lan, however, Kaden was a child no longer, and in all that time, Micijah Ut was the first person he had seen from his old life. Despite Tan’s admonition to wait and observe, Kaden felt an itching to step outside and batter the block of a man with his questions. In fact, he could hardly have asked for a better emissary than his father’s own First Shield to clear up whatever was happening back in the Dawn Palace. Whatever secrets Pyrre Lakatur was keeping, they wouldn’t last long now that Ut was here. Kaden turned toward the door of the hall, but Tan held him back, redirecting his attention to the scene outside.

With his free hand, the Aedolian was gesturing firmly at the abbot, almost poking him in the chest with his finger. When the wind fell, Kaden could hear his voice, an iron monotone that sounded more accustomed to command than negotiation. “… irrelevant. He is here because of the needs of the Unhewn Throne, and now the Unhewn Throne is…” A gust snatched away the end of the sentence.