Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

  At the last moment, Adiv fled into the darkness, Annick’s arrow clattering into the rock where he had stood. If Balendin was concerned about the disappearance of his final remaining ally, he didn’t show it. In fact, the leach was grinning.

  “The problem with confederates,” he said, gesturing at the fallen bodies, “is that you never quite know how far you can trust them.” He nudged one of the dead Aedolians with a toe. “Although I hate to cast doubt on the noble Micijah Ut, I half suspect he intended to murder us when this whole business was wrapped up. He really doesn’t seem to relish his job in quite the way we do.”

  Annick loosed another arrow, but Balendin flicked a contemptuous finger, and it flew wide into the night. Kaden still held the flatbow, his finger on the trigger, but its bolts would prove no more useful than the sniper’s arrows. Talal, Valyn thought angrily. We need Talal. But the leach was only now recovering from the adamanth, rolling groggily on the ground, trying to stumble to his knees.

  Balendin considered the sight for a moment. “I hope you realize,” he said, addressing Talal, “that as a fellow leach, I hold you in the highest esteem. We happy few, so reviled by the world, yet so blessed by the gods—we should stick together. So you understand it pains me that I have to do this—”

  A stone the size of Valyn’s fist flew through the night, hurled by some invisible force, striking Talal squarely between his eyes and dropping him to the earth.

  “And now,” Balendin added, turning smugly to Annick, “just because I’m getting tired of swatting down your arrows.” Another stone leapt from the ground, hovered, revolving in the air before the leach, then whistled through the night, striking Annick with an audible crack and cutting a ragged gash across her forehead. She dropped, knees unstrung.

  “Balendin,” Valyn ground out, fighting for time, “you can’t win.”

  The leach laughed, the sound rich with acid and amusement.

  “No one ever said you weren’t bold,” he replied, shaking his head, “just that you weren’t too bright.”

  Three more stones dropped Laith, Gwenna, and Triste like beef at the slaughterhouse, eyes glazed, hands limp on their weapons. Valyn had no idea if any of them were still breathing, no idea if they were even alive.

  “I just cannot tell you how much I regret losing such delectable emotion,” Balendin said, then shrugged. “But they have to go sometime, and with the hate rolling off you, I still feel like I could rip the top off this mountain.”

  “What did you do to them?” Valyn demanded, sickened by the possibilities.

  The leach shrugged. “Nothing permanent. Not yet. I like to give Yurl the illusion that he controls the Wing, and he sometimes has some … unusual ideas about military protocol. Especially when it comes to female captives. Hard to say which one will give him the most pleasure. This delightfully treacherous young bitch,” he said, indicating Triste with a jerk of his head, “is clearly the best catch, but then, there’s always something satisfying about fucking an angry woman into sobbing submission.”

  Kaden took half a step forward, the flatbow aimed directly at Balendin’s chest.

  “Who are you?” he asked. They were the first words he’d spoken all night.

  Valyn stared. If his brother was frightened to be facing a Kettral-trained leach, he didn’t show it. He looked at Balendin the way a butcher might consider a cut of meat, as though wondering how best to start carving. The veterans back on the Islands were cool, collected, but this … it was as though Kaden had never even heard of fear.

  “I,” the leach responded, evidently enjoying his moment, “am Balendin Ainhoa, Kettral leach serving on the Wing of one Sami Yurl, himself serving the Emperor of Annur, Kaden hui’Malkeenian.” He winked. “I guess that’s you. At least, for a little while longer. I imagine we’ll have some trouble deciding whether you watch your brother die, or whether he watches you, but, as they say, it all works out in the end.”

  If the threat bothered Kaden, he didn’t show it. Those bright, calm eyes just bored into the leach, and for the first time since the start of the showdown, Valyn saw Balendin’s confidence falter.

  “As I’m sure your brother will tell you,” the leach continued, “I’ve developed something of a reputation for killing people slowly, strip by strip.”

  “We all have our hobbies,” Kaden replied. He could have been discussing farming techniques.

  Balendin grimaced.

  It’s not working, Valyn realized. Kaden doesn’t feel it. He doesn’t feel the fear, the anger. He had no idea how it was possible, but his brother didn’t seem to feel anything.

  Then, in a flash, he understood what had to happen. “Kaden!” he began, “you have to—,” but his brother had already pivoted toward him, drawing that short knife of his, raising it in a quick motion as Balendin started to shout. Valyn met his brother’s eyes, those icy, distant flames, as Kaden closed on him. He doesn’t feel love, either, he realized as Kaden hammered the knife down with a savage thrust straight at Valyn’s head, or sorrow, or regret.…

  * * *

  Kaden glanced down at his brother’s body, bleeding and crumpled at his feet. Deep in the vaniate, everything the Shin taught him seemed so much easier, more natural, as though this final skill enabled all the rest. He had wanted to know the leach’s well and so he had cast his mind into the youth’s head, abandoning himself to the beshra’an as he listened to the conversation hum around him. It hadn’t been difficult then, to determine that he drew his power from emotion. It almost seemed obvious. Then it was just a matter of knocking Valyn unconscious. Some distant part of his mind hoped he hadn’t killed him, but that, too, would serve the purpose.

  Kaden raised his eyes to the leach once again.

  “I’m going to murder you,” Balendin panted, eyes desperate, darting.

  Kaden remembered what it felt like to be afraid, but only vaguely, the way you remember a story from your childhood, events so distant, they may not have really occurred.

  “Unlikely,” he replied, hefting his flatbow and leveling it at the youth’s chest. He’d never used the weapon before, but the saama’an of Valyn’s mimed instruction filled his head, and he released the catch and slid his finger onto the trigger.

  “Even without my well, I’m still Kettral. You’re just a fucking monk. You don’t know shit about—”

  Kaden squinted and pulled the trigger. The mechanism worked as he had anticipated. The bolt tore into the leach, and with a shriek of rage and pain, Balendin Ainhoa tumbled from the low ledge into the vast darkness of the night.

  Kaden turned back to the crumpled form of his brother, knelt down, and pressed a finger firmly to his neck. He hadn’t known how hard he had to strike—he’d never knocked someone out with the pommel of his knife before—and so he’d erred on the side of caution, hitting him as hard as he could.

  “Valyn,” he said, his own voice cold and distant in his ears. He slapped his brother roughly on the cheek. “Valyn, wake up.”

  It took longer than he would have expected, but after thirty breaths, Valyn’s eyes flashed open. He lunged forward, snatched Kaden by the wrists, and hurled him backward onto the scree. Kaden went limp. He couldn’t fight a Kettral, not hand to hand, and he could only hope that Valyn understood the situation before he killed him. His brother was snarling, forcing him down, reaching for his belt knife, his eyes inches from Kaden’s own.

  His eyes, Kaden realized, staring. Someone burned away all the color in his eyes. He hadn’t noticed before, not in the darkness, not with his focus on Balendin and the approaching Aedolians, but Valyn’s eyes, eyes that had always been oddly dark, had grown darker still. They looked like holes burned into nothingness.

  “Balendin’s gone,” Kaden said, his voice calm despite the blade suddenly pressed up against his throat.

  “Kaden,” Valyn gasped, searching the surrounding darkness, groping in the dirt for one of his blades. “Where? Where did he go?”

  Kaden gestured to the flatbow. “I sh
ot him. He went over the cliff.”

  For a long time Valyn just stared, then he nodded, then laughed. “Holy Hull,” he breathed, rocking back onto his heels, freeing Kaden. He let out a loud whoop. “Sweet ’Shael on a stick! How did you do it?”

  “I aimed, then pulled the trigger.”

  Valyn shook his head. “No, the emotion thing. I’ve been training for battle for years, and I was drowning in anger, and fear, and shit, Kaden … even now you look like you’ve been reading a somewhat dull book.”

  “The Shin. They taught me … some skills.”

  “I guess they fucking did!” Valyn burst out, catching his brother in a huge hug. Kaden did not return the gesture.

  “Don’t we need to be moving?” he asked instead. “I’m not clear on the tactics here, but haste seems at a premium.”

  Valyn let him go. “Well, don’t get all mushy on me now,” he muttered.

  The next few minutes were a whirlwind of activity: Valyn slapping the others awake, everyone clutching their heads, then searching desperately for lost weapons, shadows darting through the darkness.

  “Kaden,” Valyn gestured, “you’re with me on the bird. It’s the safest place for now, especially if Yurl doubles back. Talal, can you delve yet?”

  The leach’s eyes were still glazed, but he rose unsteadily to his feet. “I can go,” he said. “I don’t know … I don’t know about a kenning. But I can go.”

  Valyn glanced from Talal to the darkness, then back again, as though wrestling with some decision. When he spoke, however, his voice was sure.

  “You’re staying here. And Triste. And Gwenna.”

  “Bullshit,” the red-haired woman snapped, stepping forward.

  “This is not the time, Gwenna,” Valyn replied. “Talal is busted up worse than he knows, and I’m not leaving him alone. You’re staying.”

  Gwenna opened her mouth to argue, then looked over at Talal, who was leaning unsteadily against a boulder. “If you get yourselves killed,” she hissed, turning back to Valyn, “I will come down there and kick the shit out of your corpses.”

  “Agreed,” Valyn said.

  And then they were running down the short slope to the kettral.

  “Step into this,” Valyn shouted, gesturing at a harness. Kaden did as he was told, staring as the bird gathered itself in a great burst of power and leapt into the air. Under other circumstances, the flight would have been terrifying and exhilarating both, but deep inside the vaniate, Kaden felt only calm, distance, as though he were no more than the wind rifling his robes, no more than the snow on the peaks, or the silent clouds scrubbing the sky.

  “Pyrre will be down there,” he shouted, pointing toward the southeast. “She said she’d keep the others busy as long as she could.”

  “What are you doing with a Skullsworn?” Valyn shouted back.

  Kaden spread his hands, at a loss about how to explain. “I’m not sure. She’s on our side.”

  Valyn shot him a strange look, but nodded.

  It didn’t take long to find the assassin. The enemy Wing had her pinned down in a dead-end canyon about a mile and a half from the site of the Aedolian camp. One of the attacking Kettral had lit a couple of long tubes that looked like sticks, but that burned with a bright, incandescent light, illuminating the entire scene. The blond youth that Kaden took to be the Wing leader had Pyrre hemmed in, his people arranged in a loose semicircle, blocking off any escape. No one, however, had yet dared to step into the lethal circle of the woman’s spinning steel.

  “Why haven’t they taken her yet?” Valyn bellowed in Kaden’s ear. “I don’t care how good she is—one arrow and she’s down!”

  Kaden shook his head. “They think Tan and I made it to the cave. They need to capture Pyrre alive, to question her.”

  Kaden had taken the assassin at her word when she insisted that it was a lot trickier to capture a foe than to kill her. After all, Pyrre was the one getting either captured or killed. Valyn nodded, as if it all made sense.

  He flicked a few quick signs to the dark-skinned youth on the far talon, and moments later, the bird dipped into a steep approach. The girl with the bow, she couldn’t have been much more than fifteen, was hanging out into the darkness—ever since Kaden first cut her loose, she seemed to have been aiming or shooting at something—and as they fell on the circle of soldiers from above, she drew and fired, drew and fired, three shots in quick succession, and three of the Kettral collapsed into the dust—dead so quickly, they never had time to clutch at their necks. I never saw a man die before last night, Kaden realized. I didn’t think it would be so easy.

  Ut turned at the last moment, just in time for the arrow to glance off his breastplate, falling away into the darkness. The other youth, the Wing leader, dived into the darkness, and then the bird was upon them, shrieking an earsplitting cry, and Valyn was leaping free of the talons, rolling as he hit the ground, a knife in one hand, short sword in the other.

  * * *

  There hadn’t been much time for elaborate tactics, but the plan had seemed like a good one to Valyn: Take down the Wing’s sniper, flier, and demolitions man first, and then they could deal with the more conventional threats of Ut and Yurl. Valyn’s own Wing could have dropped, of course. It would be nice to have Laith and Annick at his back, but he liked having them in the air better; the altitude gave Annick a better range of attack. As his feet hit the ground, however, he realized the flaw: Ut and Yurl had fled outside the blazing light of the flares, into the darkness. The air support he had counted on was no good if the members of his Wing couldn’t see what was going on. He was on his own.

  “That,” came a voice from behind, “is an exceptionally large bird you’ve got.”

  Valyn spun to find himself face-to-face with the knife-wielding woman—Pyrre, Kaden had called her. Skullsworn. Valyn eyed the assassin, gauging her quickly. She was breathing heavily, and her clothes were sliced open in a dozen places—whether from this fight or something earlier, it was hard to tell—but she seemed strangely relaxed. The fact that Yurl hadn’t managed to take her spoke well for her abilities, that and the blood on her blades.

  “They went that way,” she said, pointing with one of her long knives. “I’ve got a score to settle with the unpleasant gentleman in all the armor, but you’re welcome to kill the other one.”

  Valyn considered the offer. Pyrre had helped Kaden, but he didn’t like the idea of relying on an assassin he’d never met before to guard his back. Of course, there wasn’t much to like, and every moment he delayed was a moment Yurl could be slipping farther away or honing an ambush. “All right,” Valyn replied, nodding warily. “Ut’s yours. Yurl’s mine. Just don’t fuck up.”

  Pyrre smiled an easy smile. She didn’t look like a murderer. “I could have used that advice a few days ago, before we got ourselves chased into these miserable mountains.”

  “Good luck,” he said.

  “And with you,” Pyrre replied. “Be careful. That bastard is good.”

  Valyn nodded grimly. For weeks now, for months, he’d been biding his time, waiting for just this opportunity, a chance to face Yurl one on one. So much the better that they had flown beyond imperial borders, past the aegis of law and the ambit of Annurian justice, into these unnamed peaks, where there were no trainers or regulations, no blunted blades or codes of conduct, no one to cry foul or stop the fight. It was just what Valyn had longed for, and yet the stark fact remained: Yurl was better with his blades. He was faster and he was stronger. When it was all settled, any blood on the ground was likely to be Valyn’s. It was folly to chase after him, and for a moment Valyn hesitated. He could go back for the rest of his Wing. The other man was alone now, on foot in hostile terrain with minimal provisions. It was pride and folly to pursue him alone. There is wisdom, Hendran wrote, in waiting.

  But Valyn was through waiting. The man who had brutalized Ha Lin, who had tried to murder his Wing, to slaughter his brother, to end the Malkeenian line, was only a few paces away.
Valyn had tried playing by the rules. For as long as he could remember, he’d tried to weigh his options, to think before acting, to make the wise choice. It had all ended in ashes: Lin dead, himself and his Wing traitors in exile. Yurl might kill him, but what did that matter? He would die eventually, either on the point of a blade or in his bed, and something inside him was stirring, a part of his mind older than conscious thought, quicker and more savage, whispering to him, rasping the same malevolent syllable over and over: death, death, death. Whether the death was his own or Sami Yurl’s no longer seemed to matter.

  * * *

  The sword came hard at his head—so fast, he barely had time to knock it aside. Were it not for the residual light of the flares flickering behind him, Valyn would have missed it entirely, and as he stumbled backward, trying to regain his balance, Yurl stepped from behind an outcrop.

  The other Wing leader’s grin was gone. “You killed my men, Malkeenian.”

  “As if you cared,” Valyn said, trying to gain time, to see a way through the other man’s guard.

  “It’s an insult,” Yurl replied, swords flashing out as he spoke, one high, one low, probing, pressing. Valyn parried and launched a quick riposte, but Yurl swatted it down contemptuously. “You are an insult,” he continued, circling as he spoke. “Valyn hui’Malkeenian, son of the Emperor, Kettral Wing commander.” He sneered. “And any day I chose, I could have cut you down like grass.”

  The swords whistled at Valyn again, a double-wing attack that folded into something else at the last minute. Valyn leaned back, tried to create space to parry just as the steel bit beneath his ribs. The wound wasn’t deep, but the blood was flowing.

  “This is my point,” Yurl said, dropping his upper blade to gesture languidly at the wound.