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.”
He eyed Kaden squarely. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to die. But I’m not going to start sobbing every time someone stumbles over a body.”
“All right,” Kaden said, “I understand. You watch my back, I’ll watch yours, and let the crows feast on the rest. Still, something is out there killing monks and, in case you haven’t been paying attention, we are monks.”
“We’ll be careful.”
“Knowing you, that seems unlikely. What does Scial Nin plan to do?” It was frustrating getting all his news secondhand from Akiil, but he was too weak to move around the monastery on his own.
“No idea,” his friend responded. “Nin’s locked up in his study with Altaf and Tan again—worse than a bunch of elderly whores, those three.”
Kaden ignored the aside. “What are the rest of the monks doing?” Despite the Shin reserve, he had noticed a vague disquiet hanging over the monastery.
“Nin’s still allowing us outside the monastery, but only in groups of four now.”
“Well that’s not sustainable. How will the goats graze? Who’s going to haul clay or water?”
“Look on the bright side,” Akiil responded with a grin. “No running up Venart’s, no carrying rocks down the mountainside for some umial, no hunting for squirrel tracks all over the ’Shael-spawned peaks. If we had a flagon of ale and a couple of girls to tickle, this would be almost as good as a week back in the Quarter.”
“Except something out there is trying to kill us,” Kaden pointed out, exasperated by his friend’s levity.
“Were you not listening just a minute ago?” Akiil demanded, his face turning serious once more. “Something’s always trying to kill you. And I’m not just talking about the Quarter. Ananshael is everywhere, even in that Dawn Palace of yours.”
Kaden fell silent. The palace in which he had been raised was a fortified paradise: gardens of ailanthus, cherry blossom, and spreading cedar surrounded by impregnable golden walls. Even there, however, he had never scampered around without his Aedolian guardsmen a few paces behind. The men had seemed like friends or kindly uncles, but they were not uncles. They were there because they were needed, and they were needed because Akiil was right: Death walked even in the halls of the Dawn Palace.
A fresh gust of wind blew in as a robed figure opened the door, then closed it crisply behind him. It was Rampuri Tan, Kaden realized, and a jagged nail of apprehension scraped over his flesh. Maybe he’s just here for the evening meal, he thought. Surely it was too early for another penance. Surely the man didn’t mean to return him to that live burial. Tan ignored the nods from the other seated monks, striding across the flags of the floor with his broad, silent steps until he loomed over Kaden’s table. He considered his pupil.
“How are you feeling?” he asked finally.
Kaden had heard that question enough times now not to fall into the trap. “This body is sore and weak, but it breathes and moves well enough.”
Tan grunted. “Good. Tomorrow at dawn we resume your training. Find me at the trail to the lower meadow.”
Kaden squinted, trying to make sense of the direction. “I thought the abbot was insisting on groups of four.”
“Akiil will come as well,” Tan replied flatly.
The fact that the man didn’t even bother to glance over at Akiil as he delivered the news seemed to rankle Kaden’s friend, and with an ostentatious show of deference Akiil rose from his seat and spread his hands in mock supplication.
“I would love to attend you, Brother Tan, but our abbot was quite clear that four was the number, and I’m sure I couldn’t possibly disobey—”
Tan’s broad hand caught him flat across the face, knocking him backward into the table, where he upended the bowl of stew. A look of shock, then rage raced across Akiil’s face as the liquid spread across the table, then began to patter into a small pool on the stone floor. The older monk didn’t blink. “Three will be adequate. I will see you both at dawn.”
“He—
,” Akiil began after Tan had closed the door behind him. The stew had splashed over his robe, and he wiped it away in short, angry motions.
“He will tie you to a pitch pine and leave you for the ravens,” Kaden interjected. “You think Yen Harval is a tough umial, think again. Look at this,” he continued, gesturing to his sunken cheeks and skeletal arms. “This is what happened to me, and I’ve been doing everything in Ae’s power to obey the man. Now, sit down and don’t do anything to make it worse.”
Akiil nodded and sat, but there was something new, and sharp, and defiant in his gaze that worried Kaden.
28
The morning dawned bright and cold. Frost limned the needles of the junipers, and a thin pane of ice slicked the surface of the water in the bucket outside the refectory door. Kaden rapped at it, slicing the skin across his knuckles and dripping a thin line of scarlet as he reached in to scoop some over his hair and face. The icy water trickled down his back beneath his robe, but he was glad for the sensation—it woke him, and he wanted to be well awake for whatever Rampuri Tan had prepared.
“Why don’t you ever remind me that ‘early summer’ up here doesn’t necessarily mean ‘warm’?” Akiil asked, joining him at the bucket. He dipped his hands, ran them through his scraggly black hair, then cupped them and blew into the palms.
The sun hadn’t yet cleared the peaks to the east, but light filled the sky, limpid and spreading. Kaden and Akiil weren’t the only ones up; a low hum emanated from the meditation hall—older monks about their morning devotions—while novices and acolytes lugged full pails of water across the paths of the courtyard.
“It’ll be hot enough by noon,” Kaden responded, although he could feel his skin rising in bumps beneath his robe. “Come on. Tan doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
The two crossed the small square, sandaled feet crunching the gravel, breath feathering out in front of them. Normally Kaden liked this time of day, at least once he’d had a chance to come fully awake. Morning sounds were crisper somehow, morning light more gentle. Today, however, something tickled the hair on the back of his neck. As he and Akiil followed the rough path beyond the outskirts of the monastery, his eyes kept darting to corners and hollows where the low sun had not yet driven out the night’s lingering shadow.
Tan waited in one of those shadows, standing silently beneath the large boulder marking the trail down to the lower meadow, his hood pulled up to shield his face from the morning chill. Akiil looked like he might walk right past until Kaden brought him up short with a discreet tug on the robe.
When the two had paused, the older monk stepped out from the shelter of the overhanging rock. Only then did Kaden notice the long staff he held at his side. No, he realized with a jolt of surprise, not a staff, a spear. The weapon looked a little like the polearms carried by the Palace Guard back in Annur, but unlike those, Tan’s spear stiffened into leaf-shaped blades at either end. The entire thing looked as though it had been forged from a single piece of steel, although that much steel would be difficult for any man to wield effectively, even someone as strong as Tan. As the older monk joined the two acolytes, however, he swung the double-ended spear at his side casually, as though it weighed no more than a dry cedar branch. An unstrung longbow hung on his back, but bows were common enough around Ashk’lan. Someone had to put food in the refectory pots. The strange spear, on the other hand …
“What’s that?” Akiil asked, excitement warring with caution in his voice. He didn’t sound at all certain that Tan wouldn’t spit him on the end of the weapon simply for asking, but he was willing to take the chance.
Kaden’s umial examined the spear as though considering it for the first time.
“A naczal,” he said, pronouncing the strange word in a sibilant hiss.
Akiil looked at what should have been the butt end skeptically, eyeing the graceful blade where it gouged the dirt. “Looks pretty easy to chop off a toe. Do you know how to use it?”
“Not as well as those who made it,” Tan replied.
“Who made it?” Kaden asked.
Tan considered the question. “It is a Csestriim weapon,” he said finally.
Akiil’s mouth dropped open. “You expect us to believe you’re lugging around a three-thousand-year-old spear?”
“What you believe is a subject of indifference to me.”
Kaden considered the naczal. As children, he and Valyn had marveled over the dark smoke steel of a Kettral blade, the grudging way it refused to reflect the light. At first glance, Tan’s spear looked similar, but where the Kettral steel appeared to have been forged in a deep smoke, coated with the ashes and eddies, the naczal might have been made from smoke. It looked solid enough, hard as any steel, but somewhere deep in the shaft, drifting across the surface of the blades, it seemed to roil and smolder, as though heat and ash from an extinguished blaze had been frozen in the air, then hammered into shape.
“Where did you get it?” Kaden asked.
“I brought it with me.”
“Why?” Akiil demanded. “Seems like overkill for slaughtering goats.”
“If you wait until you need a weapon,” Tan replied, “it is often too late to acquire one.”
“What about us?” Akiil asked. “What do we get?”
“My protection.”
“I’d rather have one of those.”
“Then you are a fool,” Tan replied. “We’re going to the South Meadow. Now, run.”
The South Meadow wasn’t much of a meadow at all, at least not by the standards of the imperial heartlands, where rich farms stretched for unbroken acres over the soft earth. It was, however, one of the few places in the mountains where the haphazard tufts of grass were stitched into an unbroken blanket that was, if not exactly lush, at least softer than the dirt and gravel immediately surrounding Ashk’lan. The White River, which roared and leapt through the canyons above and below, grew sluggish here, dividing into a wet skein that was home to frogs, flowers, and buzzing flies. It would have made an altogether more inviting site for the monastery than the grim plateau carved out of the rocks miles above. Which was, Kaden supposed, why the first Shin had refused to build there.
At the north end of the meadow the mountains resumed their dominion, sweeping upward in ramparts and splinters of granite. The trail to the monastery wound through those rocks, climbing over a thousand feet in a little less than half a mile, a tortuous ascent over shattered boulders and the groping roots of junipers. It was one of the steepest sections, and Kaden had a pretty good feeling he knew what Tan intended.
“Today’s study,” his umial began once they had reached the soft grass, “is in kinla’an. The ‘Flesh Mind.’”
Akiil’s mouth quirked as though he were going to make some sort of crack.
Tan turned to face him, and the former thief schooled his face back to careful blankness. Akiil was rash, not stupid.
Over his years at the monastery, Kaden had spent countless days practicing saama’an and beshra’an. The latter—“Thrown Mind”—was what allowed him to track his goat to its demise all those weeks earlier. Kinla’an, however, he had never heard of.
“Do all the Shin study the Flesh Mind?” he asked carefully.
Tan shook his head. “The monks pick and choose the training that suits them. They have not entirely forgotten the importance of kinla’an, but few umials emphasize it.”
“Let me guess,” Akiil said. “You’re one of the few.”
“You will run the trail,” Tan began, ignoring the crack and gesturing with the blade of his strange spear, “up to the sharp bend. Then you will return.”
Kaden eyed the terrain. It was steep, but no more than a quarter of a mile. He’d been running more than that since his first day at the monastery. Even hobbled as he was after the week of immobility, the task sounded suspiciously sedate. That worried him. He glanced at Tan’s face, but the older monk revealed nothing. Instead, he freed his bow, strung it, and nocked an arrow.
“You’re goin
g to shoot at us while we’re running?” Akiil asked. It was supposed to be a joke, but Kaden wasn’t so sure. His umial had come close to killing him enough times to take any threat seriously.
“I’ll be halfway up the trail,” Tan replied. “If anything … threatens you, the bow will be useful.”
“I wonder,” Kaden began hesitantly, “if we shouldn’t be doing something … else. Whatever slaughtered those goats killed Serkhan, and it just seems strange for us to be training as though nothing happened.”
Tan stared at him. “You’re surprised that your training continues.”
“Well,” Kaden replied after a moment, unsure how to hedge, “yes.”
“And instead of training, you think you should be doing what?”
Kaden spread his hands helplessly. “I’m not sure. It’s just that no one seems to know what’s happening. We’re not sure of things.”
Tan chuckled, a dry, barren sound. “We are not sure of things,” he repeated slowly, as though tasting the words. “That much is clear. As for training…,” he continued, skewering Kaden with his gaze, “we use the time we have. There is no other.”
The answer was cryptic at best, and Kaden waited for more. Instead of elaborating, the monk raised the spear and pointed to the trail with one of the blades. “Go.”
They took the hill at a moderate pace, quick enough to avoid Tan’s wrath, but not so fast that cold muscles would cramp or tear. There weren’t many places around Ashk’lan where you could safely ignore your footing, but this particular stretch of trail demanded the utmost concentration, and Kaden found himself dropping into the kind of relaxed focus so common to his exercise in the high peaks. His knees, cold and stiff, protested at first, and his calves immediately caught fire, but halfway up the slope, his body found its rhythm and by the top of the prescribed pitch he felt warm and ready, better than he had since Tan stuck him in the hole, in fact, and he took a deep breath of the cool air, savoring it in his lungs.
Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades Page 30