Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades

by Brian Staveley

Valyn started to lunge for the opening, then checked himself. It was a trap, just like in the arena, just like on the West Bluffs. Instead of pressing the weak guard, he took a step back, trying to ignore the blood sheeting down his side, trying to think. The blades might do the cutting, but as in all true swordplay, the real fight would be won or lost in the mind. Yurl’s words were as much a part of the thing as his footwork, those taunts as tactical as each feint and false position. Back on the Islands, Valyn always gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the distractions, fighting on in stubborn silence, refusing to be drawn in. Drawn in. He almost laughed. It was a ridiculous notion. He had fled the Eyrie, abandoned his training and his life to come here, to find Yurl and to stop him, to fight this fight. He hadn’t been drawn in; he had hurled himself.

  “You’re fucked, you know,” he said, jerking his head over his shoulder toward the flares. “Your Wing’s dead. The Aedolians are dead. Even if you kill me, you’re fucked.”

  A grimace twisted Yurl’s face. “Then I’ll have to settle for the joy of gutting you,” he said, sliding into a folding fan attack, the feint blade slicing up and across while the true thrust came from beneath. Valyn battered it aside, but Yurl moved into the space, pressing forward, forward, raining down blows from above, from the side, twisting through obscure Manjari forms Valyn scarcely recognized and could barely block. The assault seemed to last hours, and when it was finished, Valyn could feel his breath tight in his chest. Another wound seeped blood down his shoulder.

  “I’m going to kill you,” Yurl said, spitting onto the ground, “just the way I killed your little bitch down in the Hole when Balendin was done with her.”

  “You,” Valyn said, his heart a block of ice threatening to choke him.

  Yurl shrugged. “Along with the leach.”

  It was just more talk, more tactics, but Valyn could feel the rage rabid inside him. His teeth were bared as though he planned to leap on the other man and tear out his throat. Hot blood slammed behind his eyes in a frantic, murderous tattoo.

  “Too bad she’s not here to help you now,” Yurl continued with a shrug. “Might have made for a passably interesting fight.”

  Oh, Valyn realized, the memory striking him like a slap across the face. Oh.

  As the pain flared in his shoulder and side, he shifted to his left. He was losing blood, and with it, speed. Yurl’s next attack would come hard and fast, which meant Valyn had one play left, and suddenly, he knew what it had to be. A vision of Ha Lin’s smile ghosted through his mind. He was only ten years old when she first saved his ass, dragging him through the end of a long swim after his legs cramped, keeping his head above the slapping chop, alternately cursing and encouraging him, her pinched child’s face angry, stubborn, determined. That was the first time she’d bailed him out, but it wasn’t the last. Even now, even dead, the girl wouldn’t quit.

  With a roar, he threw himself into a bull’s horns lunge. It was a desperate gambit, an insane attack that left him open to all manner of riposte. Only, in order to riposte, Yurl would need to settle back, to set his leg, his left leg. As Valyn fell through the night, both blades outstretched, he could hear Ha Lin’s voice soft in his ear: I got in some shots of my own … the left ankle … maybe something you could work with.

  Yurl’s face twisted in confusion at the unexpected lunge. His step back was basic reflex, the kind of thing drilled into every Kettral over thousands of days in the arena, the motion trained and trained and trained until it was threaded into muscle and bone alike. His body obeyed the training flawlessly, sliding fluidly down and away, dropping him into the standard off-guard crouch as he swept aside the horns of Valyn’s attack, the horns that weren’t the true attack at all.

  Valyn rolled, ignoring the stone scraping over his wounds, lashing out with a foot at that flexed ankle. It was a feeble blow, off balance and poorly timed, but he connected just as Yurl was transferring his weight, loading the foot for the counterstrike. The ankle buckled. Yurl staggered, his own blade sliding just wide of Valyn’s neck, his face twisted with rage, and fury, and, beneath it all, another emotion blossoming, something new: the sweet, hideous flower of fear.

  “Lin told me you weren’t the only one to land some blows up on the bluffs,” Valyn said, dragging himself back to his feet.

  Yurl snarled wordlessly, dropped to a knee, struggled unsteadily to his feet, raised his blades once more, hesitated, then turned and stumbled into the deeper darkness beyond the light of the flares.

  The darkness, Valyn thought grimly, is my territory. Ever since the Hole, the darkness is my home.

  He closed his eyes and let the scents and sounds of the chill night wash over him. Yurl was out there—not far. Valyn could smell him—the sweat, and blood, and steel, and beneath it all, the acrid animal odor of fear. A feral smile tugged at his lips. Hendran would never approve of racing into the dark, but then, Hendran hadn’t gorged himself on the bilious tar of the black egg. He let out a low growl, turned away from the light, and slipped into the endless realm of shadow.

  There were a hundred smells: stone, and dirty snow, and the whisper of rain from the clouds above. A thousand currents of air tugged at his skin, teased the hair on his arms, on his neck. With some sense he knew but failed to comprehend, he could make out dozens of faintly adumbrated forms, echoes of shapes. Beneath his feet he could feel the stones grating against his boots. Bared swords held before him, he turned silently in the night, slowly, slowly.… He could feel it radiating from a few paces away—heat, where there should be no heat. Breathing. That same sick fear lacing the hard scent of the mountains. Yurl.

  He felt rather than heard the blade slicing through the darkness, felt the air eddy and part and, without a thought, flung himself into a rolling lunge as the steel hacked a huge arc out of the space above him, smashing sparks from the rock. Behind him, Yurl cursed, and Valyn turned silently to face his foe.

  The Wing commander had both blades drawn, holding them in front of him in the defensive half guard the Kettral had studied for fighting blind. He can’t see me, Valyn realized. He knows I’m here, but he can’t see me. Evidently Talal had been right. All slarn eggs conferred a benefit, but none so great as the great black monstrosity from which Valyn had drunk.

  A hundred paces off, the flares were still sputtering, and somewhere off to the left, Pyrre and Ut hacked at each other, the sharp sound of steel grinding against steel shattering the night again and again. Valyn could hear the Aedolian cursing and gasping, and beneath that the skullsworn’s quieter, quick breaths. None of it mattered. Yurl was before him now, fumbling blindly.

  “It’s over,” Valyn said.

  The gravel beneath Yurl’s feet crunched as he shifted. Again, there was a swirl of air, a whisper of breath, a hint of fear, and Valyn knocked his attacker’s sword aside. He felt at home, he realized, here in the great darkness, and closed his eyes, allowing the sounds and scents of the world to wash over him. His tongue flicked out, tasting the night.

  Hull, what did you do to me? he wondered, but it was too late for such questions. It had been too late for a long time now, he realized, for what seemed like forever. The strange alchemy in his blood wasn’t the whole story, either. Something in his heart had withered when he found Ha Lin’s body crumpled on the floor of the cave, some part of him that loved the light and hoped for the morning had broken. After all, when he carried his friend out into the sun, she was still dead. Better to stay in the darkness. Tears were running down his cheeks, blurring his vision, but then, he didn’t need his vision.

  “You can’t win,” Valyn said, following the echo of Yurl’s heat. “Drop your blades now, tell me what you know, and I’ll give you a clean death.”

  A clean death. Even as he said the words, he felt that they were a lie. He wanted to cut the youth down and tear him apart. He wanted Yurl to hurt, to cry out in the darkness and to have only his own agony for an answer.

  “Go to ’Shael,” the Wing leader snarled, lashing out with both sword
s at once in an attack the instructors back on Qarsh called the Windmill’s Vanes. It was either a very arrogant move, or a very desperate one. Valyn rolled to the side easily, dodging the blow. Even from two paces away, he could feel the labored breath, the panicked heat rolling off his foe, could taste the terror.

  It feels good, Valyn realized, some part of his brain recoiling at the thought even as he bared his teeth in a snarl and stepped forward.

  “Who’s behind the plot?” he demanded.

  “If I tell you, you’ll kill me,” Yurl replied, retreating through the darkness, his voice tight and desperate.

  With one quick, clean motion, Valyn lashed out. He felt the steel bite, severing flesh, then tendon, then bone, and half a heartbeat later, Yurl screamed and a sword clattered to the rocky ground. His wrist, Valyn thought, nodding to himself. There was blood on the air now, Valyn realized, inhaling deeply—sharp, coppery blood.

  “I’m going to kill you anyway,” he said, taking another step forward.

  “All right,” Yurl gasped. His other blade fell to the rock. “All right. You win. I surrender.”

  “I don’t want you to surrender,” Valyn replied. “I want you to tell me who’s behind the plot.”

  He sniffed the air, turned his cheek to the darkness to feel the breeze waft over his skin, then lashed out with his own sword once more, slicing clean through the youth’s other wrist. Somewhere far in the back of his mind, Hendran was arguing for tactical calm and useful prisoners, while even further back, other voices, his father, his mother, mouthed words like mercy, and decency. Valyn silenced them. His parents were dead now, and so was Hendran. Ha Lin had played by the rules, and she’d been humiliated, beaten, and murdered for her trouble. Mercy and decency were fine words, but they had no place here in the darkness, alone with his cornered quarry.

  Yurl let out a long, agonized cry, the keening of a trapped and desperate animal.

  “You can’t kill me!” he sobbed. “You can’t kill me. Not if you want to know who’s behind what happened here. You have to keep me alive!”

  “We’ll keep Ut alive,” Valyn growled, but as the words left his lips, he realized the sound of fighting behind him had disappeared. Where steel had echoed off steel, he could hear only the vast sweep of wind over snow and stone. Someone was dead. Valyn sniffed the air. Pyrre was moving toward him, the scent of her hair light on the night breeze. Balendin, Adiv, and now Ut, all gone. Yurl looked like the last prisoner available to them, but though Valyn knew it made sense, the blood coursed cold and dark through his veins. He didn’t want a prisoner.

  “No one else knows the whole thing,” Yurl moaned. He was on his knees now, sobbing desperately. “Please. You have to keep me alive.”

  “Tell me what you know,” Valyn said, “and I’ll take you back to the Eyrie for justice.” Another lie, tripping off his lips like song.

  “All right. It’s a plot … it’s…”

  “I know it’s a plot,” Valyn replied. “Who is behind it?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t know his name. But he’s Csestriim. I know that. He’s Csestriim.”

  Valyn paused. The Csestriim were ancient history, the last of them slaughtered more than a thousand years earlier. Yurl’s claim was insanity, and yet … groveling in the dirt, his hands lopped from his wrists, he couldn’t be lying.

  “What else?” Valyn pressed.

  “I don’t know anything else,” Yurl moaned. “That’s it. That’s all I know. Please, Valyn. I’m begging you.”

  Eyes still closed, Valyn stepped closer, close enough to press the point of his dagger against Yurl’s gut. The youth had pissed himself, and the scent of blood and urine mingled, sharp and acrid in the cool night air.

  “You’re begging me?” he asked, voice little more than a whisper.

  “I’m begging you,” Yurl sobbed.

  “What about Ha Lin? Did she beg you?”

  “I’m sorry about Lin. It’s not what you think. It was never what you thought.”

  “Did she beg you?” Valyn demanded, pushing the knife forward until it just broke the skin.

  “I don’t know! I can’t remember!” He pawed at Valyn with the bloody stumps, but Valyn brushed them away.

  “Not good enough,” he ground out, driving the knife a hair deeper. “Down in the Hole … did you help Balendin kill her?”

  “I didn’t,” Yurl babbled. “I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t—”

  Valyn shoved the knife a little more. “Still not good enough.”

  “Sweet Eira’s mercy, Valyn,” Yurl wailed, stretching out his lopped arms hopelessly, “what’s good enough for you? What’s fucking good enough?”

  Valyn considered the question. What’s good enough? Once, he would have known the answer. Before his father was murdered. Before he climbed the stairs to the airless attic where Amie’s body hung. Before he carried Lin from the dark mouth of Hull’s Hole. Justice? Revenge? He shook his head. Now …

  “I don’t know,” he replied, burying the blade to its hilt in Yurl’s guts, feeling the muscles clench helplessly around it, then twisting it free. “Maybe nothing’s good enough anymore.”

  The youth let out a long, ragged moan, then sagged to the ground. Valyn straightened, wiping the dagger on his blacks. In the cloud-draped pall of night, he couldn’t see the corpse, couldn’t see what he had done, but then, he didn’t need to see. He slipped the blades back into their sheaths. It was all around him on the midnight air—blood and offal, desperation and death. He could smell it, he realized with a shudder, part fear, part satisfaction. He could taste it.

  49

  The midnight gong tolled once, twice, three times, shivering the cool spring night, rousing Adare from where she coiled sleepily against Ran.

  “It’s late,” she murmured, wrapping an arm tighter around his waist.

  “Or early,” he replied, returning her embrace and adding a light kiss on her forehead. “The list of petitions that need reading before tomorrow’s audience is as long as my arm, and your little affair over at the Temple of Light didn’t make things any easier.”

  “Did I make your life difficult?” Adare asked with mock solicitude, propping herself up on one elbow. “I’m so sorry. How can I possibly atone?” She batted her lashes.

  Ran grinned, pulling her closer. “I can think of one or two ways.”

  She plunged into the kiss with a fierce abandon while a tiny part of her mind marveled at the situation. She hadn’t intended to sleep with il Tornja when she burst into his chambers with news of her success, hadn’t even allowed herself to consider the thought. Adare hui’Malkeenian had spent her entire life knowing that the most crucial contribution she could make to the empire would be the giving of her hand in marriage. An imperial marriage could avert a war, seal a crucial trade agreement, or cement an alliance with a powerful aristocratic house. The choice is not yours, her father had told her gently but firmly time and time again, any more than I choose when to go to war, or receive a delegation from the Manjari.

  She thought she had long ago accepted the constraints of her position and yet, as she had recounted the showdown with Uinian over a glass of Si’ite red, as she saw the admiration and then the hunger in Ran’s eyes, it suddenly seemed a small thing, less than nothing to fall into his arms. Only after, when they lay together, bodies pressed close in the tangled sheets, did she pause to reflect on the spectacular folly of what she had done. It had been folly, that much was clear, and yet it didn’t feel wrong. He’s not a stable boy, she reminded herself. He’s the kenarang, the ’Kent-kissing regent. Were they to marry, no one could accuse her of matching beneath her station.

  And so she had stayed while the night wore on, until it seemed pointless to return to her own chambers.

  “I will sleep here tonight,” she murmured, nestling her face into the firm flesh of his shoulder, “with you.”

  “You’re welcome to the bed,” il Tornja replied, “but you’ll be the only one sleeping.”

  He
kissed her once more on the forehead, then groaned as he rolled upright.

  “Where are you going?” she asked sleepily.

  “The horseshit associated with regency is never-ending,” he replied. “The sooner your brother gets back here, the better.”

  “You’re doing work now?”

  “I’m not going far,” he said, nodding toward the heavy wooden desk across the room. “If you get frisky, I’ll be right over there.”

  Adare grinned and fell back against the pillows, weariness and satisfaction washing over her in great soft waves. She felt good. Good to be in Ran’s bed. Good to have avenged her father. Good to have eliminated a threat to the Malkeenian line. For the first time in her life, she felt as though she had been truly tested, and she had passed the test. I’m sorry about Ran, Father, she thought, but you taught me well. I’m playing my part.

  The thought of her father brought back the memory of his final bequest, the gift that he mentioned in his testament: Yenten’s History of the Atmani. She tossed in the bed for a while, but sleep had left her, and finally she sat up.

  “Can you send one of your slaves to my chambers for a book?” she asked.

  “Am I keeping you up?” He turned and gestured to the lamp. “I can dim this a little if you want. We can’t have the Imperial Princess uncomfortable.”

  “The Imperial Princess is just fine, thank you. The Imperial Princess has a yen for some reading material. It’s Yenten’s History. My father left it to me.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “A little light reading.”

  “I’m not just a princess,” she replied, sticking out her chin. “I’m also the Minister of Finance.”

  “You know,” he said carefully, “that the gongs have already tolled midnight. Tongues will be wagging about how late you lingered with the kenarang.…”

  She stiffened. “You want me gone?”

  He raised a conciliatory hand. “I want you here. Tonight. Tomorrow night. And all the nights after that. I’m just asking if it’s wise.”