She relaxed back into the bed. “A certain general once told me,” she said with a smile, “that you need to know when to plan, and when to act. Well, I’m acting finally, and realizing I have a taste for it.”
“So be it,” he replied before crossing the room, sticking his head out the door, and murmuring something to the slave just beyond.
A few minutes later, the man returned and passed a thick leather-bound codex through the gap in the door. Ran hefted it in his hand, flipped a couple of pages, then shrugged and tossed it onto the bed beside her. It landed with a thump.
“One chapter ought to put you right to sleep. Worse than these ’Shael-spawned petitions.”
“Just because you’re an ignorant soldier doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t appreciate some high-minded thought from time to time.”
“I should have stayed an ignorant soldier,” he replied, lowering himself back into the desk chair with a groan and turning to the stack of parchment. “Ut and that bastard Adiv had best hurry up with your brother or I’ll have plunged the empire into darkness before they get back.”
Adare ignored the complaint and wriggled up in the bed until she had her back against the wall and the great book propped up on her knees. For a while, she just considered the cover. Her father had taught her so much, and this book would be, in a way, his final lesson. She opened it, perused the first page, then flipped ahead, trying to get a sense of the scope. Some maps, some tables—the sort of reading a man like Ran couldn’t stand but that she found fascinating. Another map, another inventory. She was about to flip back to the start to begin reading in earnest when she turned another page to find a loose leaf of paper tucked deep into the spine. Curious, she drew it out and unfolded it, then froze. It was her father’s hand.
She glanced up furtively, but Ran was still at his desk, his back to her, scratching away with his quill at some page or other. She flipped the paper over, but there was writing on one side only.
Adare.
You are reading this, and so I am dead and my gambit has succeeded. I could not place this note in my testament, because our foes were certain to read that testament before you, to alter it if necessary.
Months ago, I learned of a conspiracy arrayed against me, against the Malkeenian line, most likely against Annur itself. As I write, there have already been four attempts on my life. They were all subtle, probing, and unsuccessful, but I have been unable to track the beasts to their lair and each day they are testing, learning. It will not be long before they succeed and I am dead.
Rather than allowing my attackers to dictate the time and place, I plan to use this life of mine as a stone to be played on the board, a stone that may turn the tide of this silent battle we wage. As yet I do not know our foes’ identities, but I have theories and suspicions. I have arranged secret meetings with those I mistrust, meetings I will attend without the protection of my Aedolians or the knowledge of the councillors. I will give these schemers the opportunity to strike me down with impunity, and I will leave a record of these meetings to you, that you will know whom to fear and fight after I am gone.
Adare reeled. A list followed, a dozen or so appointments with times, places. Her father had met with Baxter Pane and Tarik Adiv, Jennel Firth and D’Naera of Sia. He had met on ships in the harbor and in alehouses by the White Market, in secret chambers of the Dawn Palace, and beyond the boundaries of the city. There were more than a dozen names on his list, powerful men and even a few women, but her eyes fell down the page to the only one that mattered:
On the evening of the new moon, I will meet with the kenarang, Ran il Tornja, in our family’s private chapel in the Temple of Light.
The evening of the new moon. The Temple of Light. She had been certain Uinian was responsible for her father’s death, had seen the man torn apart for his transgression, had reveled in his destruction. She stared, first at the page before her, then at the naked back of the kenarang, of her lover, as he sat toiling over his papers. Sweet ’Shael, she thought, shivers running over her naked flesh. Sweet, holy Intarra, what have I done?
When the most paralyzing horror had passed, she turned her eyes back to the page.
I do not intend to die without a fight, Adare. Perhaps I shall win, though I find it unlikely. The foe we face is both sly and strong, thwarting me at each pass. I will bring my sword to these meetings, but you are my last blade. You, and Kaden, and Valyn. If you feel, any of you, that you have been hammered hard, it has been that you might better hold an edge.
Heed what I write here, Adare. Heed it, though it may implicate someone you have known a long time, someone you trust. You cannot bargain with this foe, cannot reason with him, cannot find an accommodation. Whoever it is, you must stop at nothing to bring him down. I have dispatched people to warn and protect Kaden and Valyn, but you alone are privy to this final letter.
The final lines were not a declaration of love or an expression of sorrow in the face of imminent death. Neither would have been Sanlitun’s way. His last words to her were hard and practical:
Resist faith. Resist trust. Believe only in what you touch with your hands. The rest is error and air.
Adare raised her eyes from the page. Blood pounded in her ears, burned beneath her skin. Her own breath sounded ragged in her chest. She folded the paper neatly along the creases and tucked it back into the book, flipping a few pages to conceal it. Ran sat at his desk still, grumbling over whatever work lay before him. She could still feel his seed warm against her thigh.
The man shifted in his chair, then turned.
She forced a smile onto her face.
“Bored of that book already?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Looking for something a little more … engaging?” He winked.
She wanted to scream, to run, to pull the blankets over her head, to bury herself in the bed, in the very earth. She wanted to flee the room, to race back to her chambers in the Crane where the Aedolians stood guard over her door. All at once, she felt like a girl again, lost, and frightened, and confused. But she was not a girl. She was a princess, a minister, and maybe the last living Malkeenian.
I am a blade, she told herself.
The man before her had murdered her father, manipulated her, and escaped justice. She forced herself to meet his eye and let the blanket slip from her shoulders, revealing her naked breasts.
“Only if you think you can handle it,” she replied.
50
Kaden sat cross-legged on a jagged escarpment above the Aedolian camp, ignoring the bite of the wind and the exhausted ache of his feet and shoulders, following the two kettral with his eyes as they quartered the sky. At this distance, it was difficult to judge their scale—they might have been ravens or hawks wheeling on the thermals, the kind of birds he had spent countless hours observing from the ledges above Ashk’lan. In fact, if he didn’t glance back over his shoulder at the piled corpses of the traitorous guardsmen, if he kept his mind from the bloody edges of his memory, he might have been back at the monastery, seated on one of the jagged ledges, waiting for Pater or Akiil to jar him from his thoughts and drag him back for the evening meal. It was a pleasant delusion, and he lingered in it awhile, luxuriating in the lie, until a flash of sun on steel caught his eye: the birds were returning, and as they drew closer, as he made out the small figures perched on the talons, it became impossible to believe that they were normal birds of prey.
Valyn had taken his own kettral—Suant’ra, Kaden reminded himself—and that of the defeated Wing to search for Balendin and Adiv, neither of whose bodies had been found. The birds had been in the air the better part of the day, circling farther and farther from the camp, until Kaden was certain their quarry had eluded them. It should have been impossible; both men were wounded, at least slightly, without food or water, and on foot in treacherous country. But, as the Shin would say: There is no should; there is only what is. The two traitors had already proved themselves as unpredictable as they were dangerous, and who was Kaden to say that
they didn’t have further powers at their disposal, powers as yet unrevealed? Neither the leach nor the councillor had frightened Kaden while he was inside the vaniate, but now that he had let the trance lapse, the thought that they were out there somewhere, wandering the mountains, filled him with unease.
He watched as the two birds approached the ridge, considered the black-clad figures as they leapt from the talons, dropping a dozen feet or so to the rubble and coming up unharmed. They were young, this Wing of Valyn’s, younger than the Kettral Kaden remembered from his childhood—or was that only a trick of memory? Despite their age, the four soldiers under Valyn’s command moved with a confidence and economy that could only come from long years of training, checking weapons and gear unconsciously, touching hands to hilts, scanning the surrounding terrain, running through a hundred habits built up over the years. Even the youngest of the lot, the Wing’s sniper, seemed steadier, deadlier, than some of the Aedolians around whom Kaden had grown up. And then there was Valyn.
After gesturing to Laith to tie up the bird, Valyn looked around the camp, spotted Kaden on the ledge, and turned up the slope toward him. He was not the boy Kaden remembered from their childhood duels in the Dawn Palace. He had grown up and out, filling his broad shoulders in a way that Kaden never would, wearing the blades on his back as though they were a part of him, keeping his jaw clenched tight most of the time, and fingering the scars on his hands and arms as though they were good luck. It was the eyes, however, that had changed most of all. Unlike Kaden, Sanlitun, or Adare, Valyn had always had dark eyes, but nothing like this. These were holes into some perfect darkness, wells from which no light escaped. It wasn’t the scars or the swords that made Valyn seem dangerous; it was the depth of those eyes.
His boots crunched over the scree, and when he reached Kaden, he paused, gazed out at the peaks beyond, then grimaced.
“I’ve got no idea where those bastards went. There should have been something, some kind of track.…” He trailed off. A nasty gash on his lower lip had opened up, and he spat blood over the edge of the cliff. The wind whipped it out and away, flinging it into the gulf.
“Sit down,” Kaden said, gesturing to the rock. “You’ve been flying all day.”
“For all the ’Kent-kissing good it did us,” Valyn replied. Still, after a moment, he lowered himself to the ledge with a groan.
“I feel like someone’s been beating me with the blunt edge of a board for the past week,” he said, twisting his head, stretching the muscles of his neck. He balled his hands into fists, cracked the knuckles, then frowned at the palms as though he’d never seen them before. “Every part of my body hurts.”
Kaden smiled wearily. “I thought you Kettral lived for this sort of thing. Martial valor, godlike endurance, the daily cheating of Ananshael—”
“Nah,” Valyn replied, plucking at his torn, sweat-stained blacks. “I mostly got into it for the clothes.”
“You should have been a monk. It’s hard to beat a wool robe.”
Valyn chuckled, and the two stared out over the mountains and valleys, side by side, companions in the simplicity of silence. Kaden would have remained there all day if he could, all year, enjoying the low rush of water, the sound of the wind knifing between the passes, the sun warm on his cool skin. He knew these things, understood them in a way he had ceased to understand his own brother, ceased to understand himself.
“So,” Valyn said after a long while, “what do I call you now?”
Kaden kept his eyes on the far mountains as he revolved the question. During the long flight from the monastery, he hadn’t had a chance to grieve for his father or consider his new station in life. After eight years with the Shin, he wasn’t even sure he knew how to grieve anymore. The fact that he was Emperor of Annur, sole sovereign over two continents, leader of millions, felt like just that, a fact; the truth had not penetrated to any organ that could actually feel it. A part of him wanted to make a joke, to laugh it off with a wry remark, but the impulse felt wrong, somehow, unfair to the monks who had died, to Valyn’s Wing, who had flown all this way to rescue him, to his father, who also had spent long years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains and now lay cold in his tomb.
“I suppose it’s ‘Your Radiance’ now,” Valyn continued, shaking his head. “That’s the protocol, right?”
Kaden stared at the blazing orb of the lowering sun. He wondered if his eyes looked like that.
“It is,” he replied finally. Then he turned to Valyn. “But when we’re not around others … When there’s just the two of us … I mean someone’s got to use my name, right?”
Valyn shrugged. “It’s up to you. Your Radiance.”
Kaden closed his eyes against the honorific, then forced himself to open them once more. “What happened with the other Wing leader?” he asked. “With Yurl?”
He’d seen the body—a carcass, really—gutted, the hands hacked away, eyes bulging with an expression that could only have been terror. It was a savage killing, purposeless in its violence.
Valyn grimaced, met his eyes, looked away, and for a moment Kaden caught a glimpse of the child he had known a decade earlier—uncertain but unwilling to show it, trying to put a bold face on his confusion.
“There was a girl, Ha Lin…,” he began, then trailed off, fingering a nasty scab on the back of his hand, ripping it free in a wash of blood without even glancing down. When he looked back at Kaden, his eyes were hooded again, unreadable. He looked like a soldier. More than a soldier, Kaden thought, a killer.
“All I could think was, Not again. I wasn’t going to let him hurt anyone else. Never again.” He clenched his fists, and blood flowed from the wound, puddling on the stone.
“But his hands…,” Kaden said, slowly. “Was it necessary?”
“Fuck necessary,” Valyn replied, voice hard and brittle as steel too long hammered.
Kaden considered his brother for a long time, trying to read the tight cords running beneath his skin, the unconscious grimace, the nicks and scars that marked his face and hands. It was like studying a scroll in some long-forgotten language. Rage, Kaden reminded himself. This is rage, and pain, and confusion. He recognized the emotions, but after so many years among the Shin, he had forgotten how raw they could be.
Finally, he reached out and placed a hand over Valyn’s fist. The monks weren’t much for physical contact, and the sensation was odd, something remembered from a childhood so distant, it might have been a dream. At first Kaden thought his brother would pull away, but after a dozen heartbeats he felt the fist relax.
“What happened?” Kaden asked. “What happened to you?”
Valyn snorted. “Got a week?”
“How about the short version?”
“I learned to kill people, saw some people killed, fought some nasty beasts, drank some nasty stuff, and came out with black eyes, powers I don’t understand, and enough rage to burn a city to the bones.
“What about you?” he asked, the question more challenge than inquiry. “You’re not exactly the bookish monk I’d been expecting. I thought you were going to murder me last night.”
Kaden nodded slowly. If Valyn had changed in the years apart—well, then, so had he. “The short version?”
“We can delve into details later.”
“I got hit, cut, frozen, and buried. Men I trusted killed everyone I knew, and then, for a few minutes, I figured out how to stop caring about any of it.”
Valyn stared at him. Kaden met the gaze. The silence stretched on and on until, without warning, Valyn started laughing, slowly at first, almost morbidly, then with more abandon, his body shaking on the narrow ledge until he was wiping away tears. Kaden watched for a while, confused, detached, until some childish part of him, something buried deep inside his mind awoke and responded. Then he was laughing, too, gasping in great breaths of air until his stomach hurt.
“Holy Hull,” Valyn choked, shaking his head. “Holy fucking Hull. We should have stayed in the palace and kept pla
ying with sticks.”
Kaden could only nod.
* * *
“It’s not over,” Tan said.
Kaden turned to find the monk climbing the short steep slope to where they sat, Pyrre a foot or so behind him. For a few pleasant minutes, the brothers had sat side by side, laughing at horror, trying to recollect something of their past, but the past was gone, finished, and the future loomed. A hundred paces back, in the dubious shelter of the pass, the rest of the group was making preparations to move out; Laith checked over the bird while the sniper and the red-haired girl sorted through the weapons of the dead Aedolians. Triste was shoving something that might have been food into a large sack.
As Tan drew alongside, he reached into his robe, then flicked something out onto the ledge. It rolled toward Kaden, bumping up against his leg before coming to rest.
Valyn looked up at the monk, then picked up the small red orb, squeezing it between his fingers until it bulged like a grape.
“What is this?”
“An eye,” Kaden said, the mirth gone out of him as quickly as it had come. The memory of the ring of ak’hanath circling tighter and tighter, bloody eyes flickering in the moonlight, chilled him. How Tan had emerged from that fight at all, he couldn’t say, though the battle had taken its toll: the monk’s robe was cut to tatters, his body bruised. A long gash ran from his scalp to his jaw, and Triste had spent the better part of the day washing out the long rents in his flesh, binding them with bandages made from the uniforms of the dead Aedolians.
“Must’ve been an ugly bastard,” Valyn said, considering the eye a moment longer, then flicking it toward Kaden, “but at least it had eyes.” Something dark and haggard passed across his gaze.
Kaden caught the sphere, turned it until he could consider the pupil in the fading light—a dark, ragged slash, like something hacked out of the iris with a knife.
“How are your wounds?” he asked, looking up at Tan.
The monk moved stiffly, but his face betrayed no pain, and he waved a hand as though the question didn’t warrant an answer. Kaden wondered briefly if the man had found a way to live inside the vaniate.
Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades Page 55