Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

  “Well,” Akiil said when they’d reached the bend, “you think we’re done?”

  While they ran, Tan climbed to the midpoint of the trail and settled himself atop a large boulder, spear at his side, bow in hand. Kaden supposed he should have found his umial’s presence reassuring, but the monk looked distant, distant and small. A longbow could cover the range, but whoever was shooting it would have to be pretty skilled in order to hit anything in particular. It was all well and good to make the most of training, but that training wouldn’t be much use if the two acolytes ended up with their heads rent from their bodies.

  “Where do you think he got that spear?” Akiil asked, squinting down toward the meadow.

  “Good question,” Kaden replied. His conversation in the abbot’s study came back to him, and for what must have been the hundredth time, he wondered how much to share with Akiil. Later, he told himself. Easier to recall a loosed falcon than a spoken word. He could always talk with his friend about Nin’s stories once he had them sorted out in his own mind. “It’s not the first time Tan’s mentioned the Csestriim,” Kaden said. “I think he knows more about them than he lets on.”

  Akiil snorted. “I didn’t figure him for a lover of legends.”

  “Maybe they’re not legends.”

  “You see any Csestriim running around back in Annur?” the youth asked with a raised eyebrow. “If the Csestriim ever were real, they’re dead as last week’s dinner.”

  When Kaden didn’t respond, he nodded, as though that settled the point. “Any rate, it’s a nasty-looking piece of steel. Think he knows how to use it?”

  Serkhan’s bloody face loomed in Kaden’s mind. “I hope so.”

  The two spent the next hour running up and down the quarter-mile pitch. What began as a light morning exercise gradually grew more strenuous. Tan allowed no rest, waving them on each time they passed him with a barely perceptible gesture. The steep grade seared Kaden’s atrophied calves, and the descent ground away at his thighs until his legs wobbled when he stood still. The air, so cold when he first scrubbed his face in the bucket, had warmed as the sun rose, and now it burned in his lungs. He’d gone on longer runs, of course, much longer, but none with his umial watching.

  “Watch your footing,” Tan said each time they passed him. “Learn the trail.”

  Akiil wisely waited until they reached the upper or lower bends to complain, although he availed himself of each opportunity.

  “I don’t care what kind of fancy word Tan’s got for this—it’s running up and down a ’Kent-kissing mountain, pure and simple.”

  “That’s something to be grateful for,” Kaden responded. “Usually when Tan tries to teach me something new, it hurts a lot more.”

  “I don’t know how I got roped into this,” Akiil snapped. “He’s your umial.”

  “Someone must have noticed your extraordinary potential.”

  Kaden was starting to think they’d go on all day like that: Tan urging them to watch the trail, Akiil griping, his own legs groaning and his lungs burning the entire way up and down. It was hard work, but preferable to freezing himself unconscious in Umber’s Pool, or waiting for Tan to bury him alive. He’d begun to accept the soreness, to welcome it as he’d learned in his long years at Ashk’lan, when Tan brought the two of them up short.

  “Now,” the monk said curtly, “your study begins.”

  From somewhere in his robe he produced two lengths of black cloth—they might have been the hem of an old monk’s habit torn into strips. With a fluid motion, he dropped down from his boulder, landing more lightly than Kaden would have expected, given his size.

  “You will wear these,” he said, looping the cloth over Kaden’s eyes and a good portion of his nose as well, cinching the strip into a knot behind his head. There was a pause while he did the same for Akiil.

  “Continue,” he said when the blindfolds were affixed.

  Kaden frowned.

  “Continue what?” Akiil asked.

  “Running,” Tan replied flatly. “Up to the bend and back, as before.”

  It was impossible. Kaden had barely been able to keep his footing on the rough trail with his eyes open. With the blindfold on, he wasn’t sure he could even find the trail, let alone follow it.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Akiil replied.

  Kaden winced at the crisp sound of a hand striking flesh.

  “I am not kidding.”

  The whole thing was absurd, but Kaden wasn’t about to earn himself a bruise to match Akiil’s. He could start, at least. It wouldn’t take his umial long to see that the task was ludicrous.

  The first ascent must have lasted the better part of an hour. Kaden couldn’t be sure, as he had no way to track the sun in its arc across the sky. He fell about every third step, and by the time he reached the bend, he could feel the blood running down his shins from nasty gashes on both knees, sticky as sap between his toes. A dozen times he was convinced he had lost the path entirely, and Akiil insisted on following something that turned out to be a dry streambed for a dozen or so laborious paces before they came to a rough cliff and were forced to turn back.

  Kaden tried to summon a saama’an of the trail, but found that he could recall only pieces and chunks: a root here, a sharp rock there, fragments of glances lodged in his mind from the morning’s labor. The Carved Mind was a powerful tool, but always before he had used it to form a small and static image: a kestrel’s wing, the leaf of a bloodwood. Trying to recall a quarter-mile of rocky path seen at a quick lope was like trying to hold five gallons of water in your arms.

  “I can’t see it,” he said when they finally arrived back at Tan’s rock, sweating, bruised, and bleeding. “I should have learned the terrain, but I didn’t.”

  There was only silence, and Kaden wondered suddenly if Tan had left them, abandoned his post on the boulder and returned to the monastery. The thought that he and Akiil might have been stumbling around the trail for the past hour with blindfolds over their eyes while something capable of ripping out a monk’s stomach roamed the peaks made him catch his breath, and for a moment he was tempted to remove the blindfold.

  His umial responded finally. “If you didn’t learn it earlier, then you will have to learn it now.”

  “How can we learn it if we can’t see it?” Akiil asked.

  “See with your feet,” Tan responded. “Learn with your flesh.”

  “Kinla’an,” Kaden concluded wearily. The Flesh Mind. The whole thing was starting to make sense. At least, as much as anything else he’d learned.

  “Kinla’an,” the older monk agreed, as though that concluded the matter.

  The second ascent was, if anything, more laborious than the first. Rocks gouged into already bruised skin, the sun blared down, hot and invisible, and Kaden twice struck his toe so hard that he thought it might have broken. Learning by sight, he was used to. He had developed dozens of strategies and tricks over his years of practice in saama’an. This endless groping in the void, however, seemed designed to drive him mad.

  At first he tried to make a sort of map, plotting each jutting corner, each winding root as though it were a figure inked on parchment. That seemed the sensible way to go about it, the method most in keeping with his earlier studies, but it proved almost impossible. Without the initial visual impression, the images simply wouldn’t stick. They were like shadows, or dark clouds, shifting and mercurial. He would sketch a patch of ground in his mind only to find a certain rock missing, or twice as close as he’d expected. He couldn’t keep track of whether he had covered ten paces or twenty. He couldn’t tell one twisted root from the next. From time to time, he heard Akiil curse or mutter some imprecation, but the thief had fallen behind, and Kaden toiled on in his own floating void.

  By the time he had descended to the meadow and then climbed to the boulder, he was on his hands and knees, palms bloody from pawing at the rocks, knees shredded by the gravel.

  “What are you doing?” Tan asked.

/>   Kaden stifled a laugh that he recognized as slightly insane. “Trying to learn the trail.”

  “With your hands?”

  “I thought if I could get a sense of it with my hands, I could make a sort of map, something I could memorize for next time.”

  “Do you run on your hands?” Tan asked.

  The question was clearly rhetorical, and Kaden didn’t respond.

  “Do you drink with your eyes? Do you breathe with your feet?” The older monk paused, and Kaden could picture him shaking his head. “Get up.”

  Kaden rose unsteadily to his feet.

  “Walk the trail,” the monk said flatly.

  “But I can’t see it,” Kaden replied, “not even in my mind.”

  “Your mind,” Tan spat. “Still obsessed with that fine, elegant mind of yours. Forget your mind. Your mind is useless. Your body knows the trail. Listen to it.”

  Kaden started to object, then stopped abruptly when he felt the chill, sharp steel of the spear head nudging his mouth shut.

  “Stop talking. Stop thinking. Follow the trail.”

  Kaden took a deep breath and turned from the darkness to the darkness, rotating in the blank void like a star turning in a starless night, and prepared to mount the path once more.

  The next two dozen ascents passed in a strange sort of fugue. He continued to step, to stumble, to feel his ankles buckling under him when his foot came down on unexpected terrain, but here and there, for a few paces at a time, he found that he could walk almost normally. Then his thoughts would rise, like a hungry tide at the palace docks. I’m at that short dogleg! I just need to turn left, step off the fallen cedar and—and he would step off the trail, tumbling into a low ditch or cracking his head on a sharp, overhanging bough. Despite Tan’s injunction, he had developed a rough map of the path, but it led him astray more often than not, and he certainly couldn’t rely on it for the details of footing or the intricacies of minor directional changes. His body, however, did seem to know some of those things, and more often he found himself responding unconsciously: a patch of gravel led him to step a little higher over a small rock shelf. A slight declivity urged him to take a few unmeasured paces. It was a painful process still, and he shuddered to think what his face, hands, and knees would look like when Tan finally allowed him to take off the blindfold, but he felt as though he had developed some tenuous grasp on the concept of kinla’an.

  “It’s nighttime, you know,” Akiil muttered when they ran into each other at the top of the trail.

  Kaden stopped and raised his head. His friend was right, he realized. He was warm from the labor of climbing and falling, but the air was cool, and the daytime sounds of the birds had given way to the silent winging of bats.

  “Your ’Kent-kissing umial has kept us here all day,” Akiil continued.

  “Are you getting the hang of it?” Kaden asked. It felt strange to talk to another person after so many hours of silent, blind groping, like meeting a ghost, or addressing a fragment of his own mind.

  “Am I getting the hang of it?” Akiil responded, incredulity tingeing his voice. “The only thing I’m going to hang is you. Or maybe that sadist who calls himself a monk. Or maybe both.”

  Kaden grinned, but before long, he had turned back to the trail and was floating in that strange, vast landscape of shapeless forms in which his mind drifted while his body stumbled and fell. Climb and descend. Up and down.

  When he reached the boulder for what must have been the hundredth time, Tan, who had been silent for hours, broke into the void.

  “Stop. Take off your blindfolds.”

  It took Kaden a long time to work free the knot with his sliced and bloody fingers. When the cloth finally fell away, he squinted at the brightness, unable to make out much more than his umial’s dark form and the vague shapes of the cliffs and peaks.

  “It’s another day,” he said dumbly.

  “Morning,” Tan replied. “The sun broke just an hour ago. You would have felt it, had you been paying attention.”

  Akiil had managed to free himself from his own blindfold, and he squinted about, as though trying to make sense of his surroundings.

  “Beshra’an, I can understand,” Kaden said. “And saama’an. It’s useful to be able to track, to be able to remember.”

  Akiil grunted skeptically.

  “What is the point,” Kaden pressed, “of this? Of kinla’an?”

  Tan studied him before responding. “There are three reasons,” he said at last. “First, relying on the body allows you to let go of the mind—this brings you a step closer to the vaniate. Second, the Shin understand the vaniate, but they never put it to use. Our predecessors did not learn the emptiness simply in order to bask in it. They used it as a tool. Running or fighting—your body moves more quickly without the weight of thought pressing down upon it.”

  Akiil looked like he was going to object, then scowled and looked away. The bruise where Tan struck him earlier had purpled impressively, puffing out his cheek and partially closing one eye.

  “What’s the third reason?” Kaden asked cautiously.

  Tan paused. “Bait.”

  “Bait?” Kaden responded, trying to make sense of the word. “You mean for—”

  “You were alone. Blindfolded. Unarmed. I hoped that whatever killed Serkhan would come for you.”

  “Holy Hull!” Akiil exploded, rounding on the monk, his hands balled into fists. “What if it had?”

  “I would have shot it,” Tan replied.

  “Well, I’m fucking glad it never showed up!”

  “Don’t be.”

  Kaden shook his head. “Why not?”

  “I was standing motionless on that boulder. An animal would never have noticed me. It would have taken the opportunity to attack.”

  “Maybe the thing just isn’t down here today. Maybe it’s up in the high mountains.”

  “And maybe,” Tan replied grimly, “it’s smarter than we realized. Maybe it saw the bow and spear. Any beast can kill. Maybe this thing we face can plan.”

  29

  Wing Selection felt like a twisted cross between a holiday ball and an execution. Most of the older Kettral certainly treated it like a holiday. Someone had rolled a couple of casks of ale into the main training arena—the Eyrie loosened the strict prohibition against alcohol on Qarsh for the event—and the grizzled veterans brought their own tankards. Most of them had been going at the liquor with a will since midmorning, staking out seats on the stone walls ringing the space, tossing back and forth taunts and insults with the careless cheer of men and women who narrowly avoided death day in and day out, but who, for the space of a few hours, could afford to let down their guard and enjoy the discomfort of others.

  “Hey, Sharpe,” one of the men bellowed down at Gwenna. It was Plenchen Zee—thick as a barrel but damned near impossible to kill, if the stories were true. Someone had sliced out one of his eyes, and he’d taken to filling the cavity with all sorts of unsettling things: stones, radishes, eggs. Today a ruby bulged jauntily from the socket. “I’ve got a spot on my Wing for a lady like you.” He waggled his tongue while raising his eyebrows.

  Gwenna turned on her bench to fix him with a glare. “If you’re looking for a whore, I’d recommend Sami Yurl. I’m in demolitions.”

  “You might want to watch your tongue,” Yurl snapped from a few rows away. He had no visible scars from the Trial, his blond hair was as carefully coiffed as ever, but his eyes were angry, sullen at the unexpected slight. “If you’re assigned to my Wing, I just might have to cut it out.”

  Zee roared with laughter at the exchange, oblivious of or indifferent to the undercurrent of real hatred running beneath the words. This was the part of Wing Selection that felt like an execution. Sometime between the emergence of the cadets from Hull’s Hole and now, two days later, a cabal of commanders and trainers had put their heads together to decide which cadets would go where. Their decisions were final and not open to appeal. Some of the newly minted K
ettral would be assigned to veteran Wings, filling gaps left by those who had been killed flying missions; others would comprise original Wings of their own. Despite the barrels brimming with ale, the Annurian banners flapping against the sky, the tables around the edge of the arena piled with shanks of lamb, braised haddock, and a dozen kinds of fruit, some assignments today would turn out to be death sentences.

  “’Shael on a stick,” Gent muttered, glancing over his shoulder, “I hope I don’t get stuck with Zee.”

  “I think he’s got eyes only for Gwenna,” Laith replied with a shrug.

  “Good. The soldiers on his Wing don’t live that long.”

  “Could be worse,” Laith said. “At least Zee’s a vet. He’s been out there. He’s been tested. Valyn here’s going to get four cadets, and he’s green as the summer grass. You want to talk about a shitty draw—”

  “I’m sitting right here, asshole,” Valyn snapped. He felt both the excitement and the anxiety of his friends, but both were tempered by the angry ache lodged inside his chest. Lin should have been with them, swapping jests and gibes, her dark eyes bright as she waited for her assignment. Not long ago, he’d thought the chances were good that she might even end up on his Wing. It would be logical—

  He cut the thought short. She was gone. Someone sitting in the arena had killed her, someone who had just been raised to the rank of full Kettral, someone who might end up assigned to his own Wing.

  Laith, sensing the shift in mood, put a hand on Valyn’s shoulder. “You can’t have her back, Val,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically sober. “But that doesn’t mean you can’t go on. We’re all going to die at some point—at least she went quickly, still young and strong.”

  Valyn shook his head. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t alone in his sorrow. Laith and Gent, half the ’Kent-kissing class, had liked and admired Lin. He didn’t have a monopoly on his mourning. On the other hand, half the class hadn’t kissed her just before the Trial. Half the class hadn’t let her be beaten blue and bloody on the West Bluffs. Half the class didn’t know that she’d been murdered down in the Hole. He carried that knowledge alone. He wasn’t sure he would have felt any better if she had died honestly in the normal rigors of the test, but at least he wouldn’t be nagged by guilt, by the crushing burden of knowledge. Laith and Gent had said their good-byes, shed their tears, and let Lin go. Valyn couldn’t stop hashing and rehashing events, eyeing with suspicion everyone who crossed his path, plotting an inchoate revenge.