Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

  “No,” Tan said. “We died. Died by the thousands and the tens of thousands.”

  Nin nodded. “It was not our cunning or our courage, but our numbers that saved us, Kaden. As the strength of the young gods waxed, the Csestriim, who had borne few children to begin with, could bear no more. Oh, their women grew heavy and brought babes into the world, but they were human babes, born fully in the grip of Ciena, Meshkent, and the young gods descended from them, sharing our fears and our passions, our hatreds and our hope.

  “Our lives were short, no more than a blink to the foes we fought, but we were fertile. Fathers fought our battles, but it was our mothers who won the war. As the numbers of the Csestriim dwindled and ours grew, victory seemed certain.”

  “And then,” Tan said, “the kenta.”

  Kaden looked from his umial to the abbot and back again. He had never heard the word.

  “It means ‘gift’ in the Csestriim tongue,” Nin added, “but the kenta were no gift to the humans. The Csestriim leaches struggled for a thousand days and a thousand nights with powers even the old gods feared to confront, and they died in their efforts, but they created what our ancestors knew as the Death Gates.

  “War as men had known it, as we know it today, disintegrated. With the gates, the Csestriim could appear anywhere at any time, ranging thousands of leagues in the blink of an eye. We still outnumbered them, but our numbers were useless without a front. Time and again, human armies believed they had trapped a Csestriim force only for their foes to evaporate through one of the hidden gates. While the human legions hunted them in the mountains, hundreds of leagues from family and home, the Csestriim arrived in the hearts of their cities. They killed without mercy.

  “Crops were put to the torch, towns razed. Women and children thought safe, hundreds of miles from danger, were herded into temples and burned alive. What little restraint the Csestriim had to begin with vanished, for now they knew without a doubt that they fought for the very survival of their race.”

  “Why didn’t we destroy the gates?” Kaden asked.

  “We tried. Nothing availed. Eventually, men built fortresses around all those they could find, encasing many in stone and brick. Even those had to be guarded, lest the Csestriim break through to work their slaughter.

  “Why didn’t we just use the gates ourselves? Strike back at them with their own weapon?”

  “Foolishness like that,” Tan replied, “led to the deaths of thousands.”

  “People tried,” Nin continued. “Men, whole legions, stepped through the kenta and simply vanished. Because the openings of the gates were opaque, no one realized the loss. When exploratory parties failed to report, it was assumed that the Csestriim had ambushed them. Human generals sent more and still more men through to the rescue. It was weeks before we understood our error.”

  “Where did they go?” Kaden asked, aghast. “People don’t just vanish.”

  “This certainty of yours,” Tan replied, “it could kill thousands someday.”

  “It was only later,” Nin said, “that men learned the gates belonged to a power older than the Csestriim. They belong to the Blank God. He took the men.”

  Kaden shivered. Unlike Ananshael or Meshkent, the older gods didn’t involve themselves in the human world, and the Blank God was the oldest of the old. Despite the fact that Kaden had spent the last eight years in service of the ancient deity, he hadn’t really considered his power. Most of the monks seemed to think of and refer to him as an abstract principle rather than a supernatural force with desire and agency. The thought that the Blank God could touch the world, could swallow whole legions, was unsettling, to say the least.

  The abbot continued. “It’s not so surprising. When one uses the gates, the space separating here from, say, Annur, is not just shortened; it becomes nonexistent. One passes, quite literally, through nothing, and nothing is the province of our lord. Evidently, he resents the incursion on his territory.”

  The abbot broke off and for a long time the two older monks simply stared at Kaden, as though expecting him to finish the story.

  “There’s a way,” he said finally, testing the idea as he spoke it. “The Csestriim used the gates, so there is clearly a way.”

  Neither responded. Kaden stilled his heart and ordered his mind.

  “The vaniate,” he concluded. “It has something to do with the vaniate. If we master it, we become like the Csestriim, and the Csestriim could use the gates.”

  Nin nodded at last. “A person cannot become nothing, not completely. He can, however, cultivate a nothingness inside himself. It seems that the god will allow someone carrying the void to pass through his gates.”

  “The Keeper of the Gates,” Kaden said, thinking back to the start of the conversation. “That’s why I was sent here. Something to do with these gates.”

  Nin nodded, but it was Tan who spoke.

  “The Csestriim did not always slaughter their prisoners. Intrigued by our emotions, they kept a small number of us for study.”

  The words sounded strange coming from Rampuri Tan’s lips. Of all the monks at Ashk’lan, he seemed just about the least likely to have any appreciation of human feeling.

  “Some of those imprisoned,” Tan continued grimly, “did clandestine studies of their own—they watched, they listened, they learned about their captors. They were the first to discover the secret of the gates and, in so doing, the vaniate. They vowed to one another that they would escape, develop their new knowledge, and use it to destroy the Csestriim.”

  “They were the first Shin,” Kaden said slowly, the ramifications dawning on him.

  Tan nodded. “Ishien, in the old tongue: ‘those who avenge.’”

  “But what does this have to do with the empire, or with me?”

  The abbot sighed. “Patience, Kaden. We are coming to that. When the humans finally defeated the Csestriim, a large part of that final victory was attributed to the Ishien. Although the war was over, the Ishein continued to watch the gates, convinced that their enemies were not vanquished, only dormant.”

  “There were reasons,” Tan interjected, his voice hard. “Our people hunted down Csestriim for hundreds of years after the close of the war. Then we started to forget.”

  Nin acknowledged the point with a slight nod of his head. “As the years turned to centuries, the charge lost its urgency. Some began to forget the Csestriim altogether. Meanwhile, generations of Ishien had discovered the quiet joy of a life lived in pursuit of the vaniate. They began to venerate the Blank God for his own sake, not for revenge on a long-dead foe. They put aside their armor, their blades, and took up less … agonistic pursuits.”

  “Not all of us,” Tan said.

  “Even you, old friend, arrived here in the end. One cannot hunt ghosts forever.”

  Tan’s lips tightened, but he remained silent.

  “Our way is not easy,” the abbot continued, “and as the imperatives of the mission slipped, fewer and fewer young men joined the order. There were some, however, who had not forgotten our desperate fight for survival, and as the Shin diminished, as gate after gate was abandoned, these monks feared lest the Csestriim return.

  “It was at this point that your ancestor, Terial, took the throne of a teetering kingdom torn with civil war—”

  “—and at this point that the Shin abandoned their charge,” Tan added.

  “We did not abandon it. We passed it on. The Annurian state had grown too large for one man to control. Rebels and rival claimants rent the land. Terial had heard of the gates and realized the power they held for his own political ends. An Emperor who could instantly visit any corner of his empire need not fear rebellions of distant commanders or the misleading reports of provincial ministers. An Emperor able to use the gates could bring unity and stability to entire continents.”

  “He made a deal with the Shin,” Kaden said, the pieces falling into place.

  Scial Nin nodded. “If they would teach him the secret of the gates, the vania
te, he would commit his imperial resources to keeping those gates against the return of the Csestriim. The Shin, who had long ago lost both the ability and the will to carry out their original task, agreed. From that time on, all heirs to the Malkeenian line have trained here, with us. It is no coincidence that they have also enjoyed an unbroken line of succession.”

  “Keeper of the Gates,” Kaden said, repeating the old title, understanding it for the first time. “We’re guarding against the Csestriim.”

  “You should be,” Tan replied curtly. “But memory is short.”

  “There are those,” Nin said, nodding toward Kaden’s umial, “who believe the Shin should never have given over their charge, who believe that the Emperors neglect their responsibility.”

  Kaden turned back to Rampuri Tan. The man stood in the shadow, arms crossed over his chest, eyes dark in the dim light of the study. He didn’t move, or speak, or shift his gaze from his pupil.

  “You don’t believe they’re gone, do you?” Kaden asked quietly. “You’re not training me to be a monk or to rule an empire. You’re training me to fight the Csestriim.”

  For several heartbeats, Tan didn’t respond. That implacable stare bored into Kaden as though seeking out the hidden secrets of his heart.

  “It seems the Csesriim are dead,” the monk said at last.

  “Then why are you telling me this?”

  “In case they are not.”

  17

  “She lied,” Valyn insisted, slamming his fist down onto the table. “The ’Kent-kissing bitch lied.”

  “Fine,” Lin responded. “She lied. Saying it over and over again isn’t going to help.”

  “Although it is nice to get a firm grip on the facts,” Laith added, his voice too serious for the jest.

  It was late—most of the soldiers were racked in their bunks or out on night training somewhere—and the three of them had the long, empty mess hall to themselves. Most of the place lay shrouded in darkness—no point in wasting good oil lighting a room with no one in it—but down at the far end of the space, through the open door leading into the kitchens, Valyn could make out flickering lamps and the humming of Jared, the old night cook, as he went about his business grilling pork for the next day’s lunch and keeping the kettle of tea boiling for soldiers returning late from their training. Laith had kindled the lamp above their own table, although he kept the wick barely long enough for Valyn to see the features of his friends. The flier was pushed back on the back legs of his chair, gazing up into the rafters. Lin’s hair glistened in the lamplight, still damp from her long swim.

  She held up her hands in conciliation. “I’m not saying you’re wrong about Annick, but are you sure? You told me Fane held up the knot afterwards, that it was a normal bowline.”

  Valyn tensed, then forced himself to take a deep breath. She was just trying to help, trying to sort through the facts with him.

  “I managed to untie part of it before I blacked out,” he explained. “I panicked at the end, but I remember the knot clearly enough. It felt like a basic bowline, but it wasn’t. It had those two extra loops—the kind we found in the knot that was holding up Amie.”

  “Well,” Laith pointed out, lowering the front feet of his chair to the ground and pursing his lips, “there’s no rule that she has to give you an easy knot. It would be just like Annick to try to drown you on principle.”

  “It would,” Lin admitted. “But why would she lie about it?”

  Lin still wasn’t convinced that Annick was behind Amie’s death, and her refusal to accept the reality of the situation was starting to grate on Valyn. Normally Lin was objective and clear-sighted, but there was something about Amie’s murder that she couldn’t see past, as though, because of the nature of the violence, it had to have been committed by a man.

  “Because she knows,” he snapped. “That’s the only explanation. She knows we found Amie—everyone on Hook probably knows that by now. And if she’s got a brain in her head, she can figure out we were asking questions at the Black Boat.”

  “So … what?” Lin asked. “She decides to kill all four of us? And Rianne, too, for good measure? Even if she did kill Amie, that’s an insane way to cover it up.”

  “From Annick?” Laith asked, raising an eyebrow. “That actually sounds like a somewhat measured response.”

  “I don’t claim to have it all figured out,” Valyn went on. “All I’m saying is there’s too much coincidence here to ignore. She might even have something to do with—”

  Lin shot him a sharp glance and he cut himself off. He’d been about to say the sniper might have something to do with the plot against his own life, which meant she might know something about the death of his father, about threats to Kaden. Only he had told no one aside from Lin about the words of the dying Aedolian. It was a measure of his fatigue that he almost slipped in front of Laith.

  “Have something to do with what?” the youth asked.

  “My bow,” Lin supplied smoothly. “Cracked in the middle of my last sniper test. Valyn thinks someone sabotaged it.”

  Laith eyed one, then the other, then shrugged. “Trial’s coming up. It’s going to be people rather than bows cracking before the whole thing’s finished.”

  “Provided we make it to the ’Kent-kissing Trial,” Valyn added, turning to Lin. “All I’m saying is to go to the list. Then tell me if you don’t think Annick looks bloody as a slaughterhouse floor.”

  “All right,” Lin said, her eyes bright in the lamplight. “Let’s go to the list.”

  The Kettral were great believers in lists. The soldiers had lists for everything—checking over a bird before flight, setting a demolitions charge, boarding a ship—everything. Valyn could hear old Georg the Tanner’s voice droning on in the lecture hall: People make mistakes. Soldiers make mistakes. Everyone else on this ’Shael-spawned island is filling your tiny little heads with ideas about spontaneity, adaptation, thinking on the fly. He spat. Thinking on the fly is a good way to make mistakes. Lists do not make mistakes. Georg’s voice could put a roomful of cadets to sleep in a matter of heartbeats, but the man had flown missions well into his sixties, and Valyn tried to listen to what he had to say. You fools want to know how something gets added to the list? A soldier dies. Then we figure out why. Then we change the list. So learn the fucking list.

  Unfortunately, there was no list, no set of steps for ferreting out a traitor and a murderer, but a jolt of logical thinking couldn’t hurt.

  “First,” Valyn began, raising a finger, “we know that Amie was going to meet a Kettral the morning she was murdered. Second, she was meeting that person in Manker’s. Third, according to Juren, the only Kettral in Manker’s that morning was Annick. Fourth, Annick is a cold-blooded bitch.”

  “Your fourth observation seems more emotional than analytical,” Lin pointed out.

  “Fifth, the way Amie was killed suggests both Kettral professionalism and a complete absence of moral sentiment. Sixth, that strange bowline shows up in both the garret where Amie was killed and the boat where I was thrown overboard today. And seventh, Annick tries to drown me a day and a half after we find the body and start asking questions.”

  Oh, Valyn thought to himself, and finally, there’s a plot to kill my entire family and take over the throne.

  “When you put it like that, she doesn’t exactly come out looking like a priestess of Eira,” Laith observed.

  “All right,” Lin said, nodding hear head wearily. “I agree. It looks bad for Annick. But it still doesn’t make any sense. Why would she want to kill Amie? And why in such a horrible way?”

  “That’s the one I can’t answer.”

  “I suppose sheer unbuckled cruelty isn’t reason enough?” Laith asked.

  Valyn frowned. Maybe he was overthinking it. Even if Annick had killed Amie, maybe the murder had nothing to do with the plot against him. It seemed plausible that the sniper might just truss up someone and kill her for the practice. Only killing a whore who wasn’t much
more than a girl wouldn’t be much practice. And it still didn’t explain the knot that had almost drowned him earlier in the day.

  “I just think we need more information,” Lin said.

  Valyn nodded slowly. “And I know one place to start looking.”

  * * *

  In theory, rummaging through someone’s trunk was easy. Each of the five barracks was simply one long room, and the cadets weren’t permitted locks. The problem was, someone was always in the barracks, just back from a night run or catching a quick nap before Blood Time. Lin would have raised eyes and turned heads if she just started rifling through the sniper’s belongings, and so for a few days Valyn let the worry eat at his gut, tried to focus on his training, on his studies, and the upcoming Trial. Late each night, he would meet up with Laith, Gent, and Lin in their corner of the mess hall and exchange pointless observations and suspicions, marking time until Lin could find a way into Annick’s trunk.

  On this particular night, however, Lin was late. Valyn noted the moon through the window, measured it against the horizon, and shook his head.

  “Calm down,” Laith said. “Lin’ll be fine.”

  “I know,” Valyn replied, but he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Ha Lin outweighed Annick and she was the better fighter if it came to fists and knives. On the other hand, most confrontations were decided by one simple rule: The person to strike first was the one to walk away, and Valyn worried that, in the crucial moment, Lin might hesitate. Annick would not.

  “You ought to be concerned about yourself,” Laith added, gesturing with his glass. It was filled with water, but he waved it around as if it were a tankard and he were seated in an alehouse. “You’re the one slated to go against Annick in the sniper test tomorrow.”

  “Thanks for the cheerful reminder,” Valyn said.