The Emperor's blades

10

The demolitions shed was just that: a shed tacked up from scrap lumber with a roof that looked like it wouldn’t keep out a decent rain. There wasn’t much point in building something more substantial, considering the place was blown up or burned down about every other year. Valyn approached with some trepidation. He’d spent a training rotation here, learning to craft and deploy the powerful munitions-starshatters, flickwicks, moles, lances-to which only the Kettral had access, but the place made most people a little uneasy. The low basin in which it was set looked like some sort of shattered desert, or the floor of a parched lake: a few charred remnants of plants stuck up from the broken soil, limestone chunks blasted from their bed bleached silently in the baking sun, while the sharp smell of nitre hung over everything. Aside from those cadets and Kettral whose training focused on demolitions, most people tended to avoid the entire area.

Valyn glanced over at Ha Lin, shrugged, then pushed open the rickety door. It groaned on its hinges as he stepped inside. The interior was dim but not dark. Daylight poured through cracks in the walls in a dozen places, and the thin sailcloth covering the windows admitted even more illumination. A row of battered workbenches ran down the center of the room, cleared off in some places, piled high with tools and instruments in others: alembics, retorts, vials, and tightly stoppered jars. As usual with the Kettral, nothing was standardized; the demolitions master for each Wing crafted his or her own munitions to fit his or her own needs and desires. There were basic recipes, of course, but most of them preferred to improvise, innovate, tinker. Valyn had seen starshatters that exploded in violet flame and moles that could rip a hole the size of a barn foundation out of the rock. Of course, such experimentation was not without risk.

During his own rotation in the shed, Valyn had watched a younger cadet, Halter Fremmen, light what looked like an innocuous candle. An errant gust of wind tugged at the flame until it caught the boy’s blacks, burning quickly through the fabric and then biting into his skin. Several of Halter’s friends had dragged him to one of the massive wooden tubs standing close by and forced him down into the water, but even beneath the surface, the flame continued to eat at the boy’s flesh with a bright, savage glow. Valyn had stood transfixed. He was trained to respond quickly and decisively to emergencies, but this … No one had spoken a word to him about how to handle a flame that could not be quenched. In the end, Newt, the demolitions master everyone called the Aphorist, had dragged the screaming boy outside and buried him in the sand. The sand extinguished the unnatural blaze, but not before it had taken the skin off half Halter’s body and melted one of his eyes in his face. He died three days later.

At first Valyn thought the shed was empty, but then he noticed Gwenna down at the far end, red hair obscuring her face, leaning over stock-still as she inserted something into a long tube with what looked like a pair of very narrow tongs. She didn’t greet them or look up. Not that he had expected her to, really. He hadn’t spoken to her since the day he learned of his father’s death, since the day she had practically bitten his head off about his unbuckled harness, and he had no idea if she still harbored the grudge. Knowing Gwenna, she probably did.

It wasn’t that Gwenna Sharpe was a bad soldier. In fact, she probably knew more about demolitions than any other cadet on the Islands. The problem was her temper. From time to time, one of the swaggering gallants over on Hook would find himself tempted by the bright green eyes and flaming red hair, by the supple, curvaceous body that she did her best to hide under her Kettral blacks. It never turned out well for him; Gwenna had tied her last would-be suitor to a dock piling and left him there for the tide. When his friends finally found him, he was sobbing like a baby as the waves washed over his face. Even Gwenna’s trainers joked that with a temper like that, she didn’t need any ’Kent-kissing munitions.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Valyn began as he reached the end of the table opposite Gwenna.

“Then don’t,” she replied, her eyes fixed on her work as she slid the slender tongs down the inside of the hollow cylinder. He stifled a sharp retort, clasped his hands behind his back, and schooled himself to patience. He wasn’t sure Gwenna would agree to help in the first place, and he didn’t want to make it any more difficult by irritating her right off the mark. Instead, he focused on the object of her attention, something that looked like a modified starshatter.

The tube was hollowed-out steel, twice the width of his thumb. Coated around the inside was some pitchlike substance he didn’t recognize. Gwenna withdrew the tongs, picked up a small shard of stone, and started to insert it. Ha Lin gasped.

“Don’t. Do. That,” Gwenna said, pausing, then sliding the tongs deeper.

“That’s claranth, isn’t it?” Lin asked, her voice tight. “Claranth and nitre?”

“Sure is,” Gwenna replied curtly.

Valyn stared. One of the first things that the Aphorist had taught his class of cadets was to always, always, always keep the two separate. “We like explosions here,” the man had joked, “but we like to control those explosions.” Unless Valyn had badly misunderstood something, if Gwenna so much as touched the content of the tongs to the side of the tube, someone would be sorting body parts out of the rubble. He started to reply, then thought better of it and held his breath instead.

“This is why,” Gwenna grated, sliding the tongs deeper, releasing the stone, then withdrawing them with a smooth, measured motion, “you shouldn’t interrupt.”

“Is it done?” Lin asked.

Gwenna snorted. “No, it’s not done. If I move it by half an inch, it’ll take the roof off this shed. Now, stop talking.”

Lin stopped talking, and the two of them watched in tense fascination as Gwenna reached for a vial of bubbling wax, grasped it with two gloved fingers, and upended it into the tube. There was a faint hissing, a whiff of acrid steam, and then a long pause.

“There,” Gwenna said finally, laying the tube down on the workbench and straightening up. “Now it’s done.”

“What is it?” Valyn asked, eyeing the thing warily.

“Starshatter,” she replied with a shrug.

“Doesn’t look like a normal starshatter.”

“I didn’t realize you’d become a demolitions master when I wasn’t around.”

Valyn bit his tongue. He was here to ask Gwenna for a favor, after all. Lin, remarkably, had kept her mouth shut, and if she could be civil, so could Valyn. “Isn’t it a little bit longer and thinner than the normal tube?” he asked, trying to sound interested.

“Marginally,” Gwenna said, scrutinizing the weapon, then scratching away an errant drop of wax with her fingernail.

“Why?”

“Bigger. Louder. Hotter.” She was trying to sound casual, but there was something in her voice, something Valyn had not expected to hear. It took him a moment to place it: pride. Gwenna was often so venomous, so closed off, that it was hard for him to imagine her feeling anything but rage or bile. The sudden revelation that she might actually take joy in some aspect of the world disarmed him, but just as he was starting to reassess his opinion of her, she rounded on him with a scowl. “You going to tell me what you want, or what?”

Now that it had come down to it, Valyn felt strangely hesitant. His fears, which Lin had done her best to fan, seemed bizarre and paranoid when he had to state them aloud.

Gwenna spread her hands impatiently.

“I assume you heard about Manker’s,” Valyn began tentatively. “The tavern over on Hook?”

“I know what Manker’s is,” Gwenna snapped. “I’ve given that bastard about half my pay for the watered-down swill he calls ale.”

“Well, then I assume you know it collapsed,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his own temper in check. “I was there, drinking, and it collapsed just after I stepped out the door.”

“How lucky for you.”

“Most of the people inside were killed. Crushed.”

“How sad for them.”

Lin pushed past Valyn, her own patience evidently nearing its end. “It might not have been an accident.”

That gave Gwenna pause. Her eyes flicked from Valyn to Lin, then back. He waited for her to laugh, to make some crack about the self-involved son of the Emperor thinking the whole world turned around him. Everyone else on the Islands needled him about his birth, even his friends, and Gwenna had never been one of his friends. She didn’t laugh.

“And you think it’s tied up with the death of your father.” Gwenna could be a bitch, but she wasn’t stupid.

Valyn nodded.

“Doesn’t do much good to stab the Emperor if his son plonks his own ass down on the throne a few days later.”

“I’m not the heir-”

“Spare me the fucking politics,” Gwenna replied, waving his objection aside. “I get the general idea.”

“And Manker’s…,” Lin pressed.

“You want me to look at it,” Gwenna said, wiping her hands on her blacks. “You want me to check it out.”

Valyn nodded carefully. “I don’t understand the munitions as well as you. I’m not sure if you could use them to bring down a building like that.”

“Of course you could knock over a building. That’s the whole point of the ’Kent-kissing things.”

“I know, but slowly like that? Without a visible explosion?”

Gwenna rolled her eyes. “You’re expected to lead a Wing someday and you don’t even understand the basics of munitions?”

“Look,” Ha Lin interjected, her lips tight. “We don’t spend all day in this little shed tinkering with matches and minerals-”

“You know more about this than we do,” Valyn said, cutting his friend off before the whole thing turned into a verbal sparring match. “You’re better than I am. You’re better than Lin is. You’re better than most of the ’Shael-spawned Kettral on the Islands. We could look, but maybe we’d miss something crucial.” If Gwenna wanted to be stroked, Valyn could grind out some compliments, although the fact that the words were true didn’t make them any easier to utter.

She scowled, then looked away, studying the wall of the shed. Valyn wondered if his strategy had backfired. Who knew how Gwenna’s mind worked? “Do you think you’d have time to do it?” he pressed. “I’d be happy to give you-”

“Money?” Gwenna snapped, her green eyes ablaze. “Your imperial favor?” she sneered.

Valyn started to reply but she cut him off.

“I don’t need anything from you. I’ll do it because I’m interested, because I want to know. Got it?”

Valyn nodded slowly. “Got it.”