The Emperor's blades

11

Gwenna spent half the morning diving into the jumbled wreckage of Manker’s. She must have been half fish, the way she could hold her breath, and a couple of times she stayed under so long, Valyn thought she’d gotten herself stuck in the treacherous underwater maze of collapsed beams and joists. Once, he even stripped his tunic to dive in after her, but just as he was approaching the water, she broke the surface, twenty paces from where she went down, scowling and shaking the salt water from her hair.

A few passersby, men and women going about whatever dubious activity passed for their business, stopped to watch the scene with sullen curiosity. One old man in a battered sailor’s coat went so far as to ask if Valyn and Gwenna were checking over the corpses for jewelry, then cackled at his own suggestion, exposing a mouthful of rotting teeth. Valyn felt exposed. He’d suggested coming at night, but Gwenna had pointed out acerbically that it was hard enough to see anything in the murk of the bay at high noon. If Manker’s had been rigged, and if whoever rigged it just happened to walk by, it would be more than obvious that Valyn had his suspicions. Still, there wasn’t much to do but grit his teeth while Gwenna worked. It took all morning, and by the time she finally hauled herself out of the water, her lips were blue and she was trembling.

“Well,” she said, tilting her head to one side and wringing the water from her hair as though twisting the head off a chicken, “if someone rigged the ’Shael-spawned place, they used some kind of explosive I’ve never heard of.”

“How likely is that?” Valyn asked carefully.

“How likely are you to mistake your cock for your balls tomorrow morning?”

Valyn stared down into the murky water. A few charred beams thrust up from the surface while a skim of detritus sloshed around between the posts, jetsam from the ruined tavern that the tide had not yet managed to flush out to sea. None of the local residents had made any effort to clear away the wreckage, but that was the way on Hook. Several years earlier, fire had gutted an entire row of houses a few streets over. After scavenging the burned-out husks for anything valuable, the citizens of the island had left the places to rot.

“What’d you find down there?” Valyn asked.

“Bodies,” Gwenna replied curtly. “More than a dozen.”

Valyn watched the shifting waves, imagining the terror of people trapped between burning beams, dragged down below the surface and drowned. “Bad way to go.”

She shrugged. “They were bad people.”

Valyn paused. The inhabitants of Hook were a rough lot, no doubt about that: cutpurses who had pushed their luck too far on the mainland, pirates too tired or broken to haul anchor or reef sail, gamblers running from debts, whores and swindlers looking to mop up what little coin anyone had left. They were desperate and dangerous, almost to a man, but desperate didn’t seem quite the same thing as bad.

“Did you check over the corpses?” he asked.

“Just one.” Gwenna shrugged. “He owed me money. Wasn’t doing him any good.”

“What about the structure?” he asked, taking a step closer and lowering his voice. The dirt street was empty for the moment, but too many shutters hung loose around them. Too many doors creaked open on their hinges in the sea breeze.

“Nothing.”

“You’re sure?”

She glared at him. “The building was held up by forty-eight pilings. I checked every single one. No singeing, no impact scars, no explosive remnants. If someone rigged this building, I want to find the bastard and beat his secrets out of him.”

Valyn wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. On the one hand, the fact that the alehouse had collapsed under its own decrepit weight meant that no one had tried to kill him, at least not yet. On the other, there had been something strangely comforting about believing an attack had already taken place. He’d been trained to deal with real threats and concrete dangers; bringing a roof down on someone’s head was about as real as it got. He could handle munitions and rigged demolitions almost as well as blades or bare-fisted fighting. Nebulous schemes, however, inchoate plots and faceless assassins-it was impossible to come to grips with those. Given the choice, he would have fought his assailants straight out, toe to toe, blade to blade. But he wasn’t given the ’Kent-kissing choice. There wasn’t much to do but grit his teeth and watch his back as he tried to focus on his training once more.

* * *

While he’d been lamenting his father and chasing phantoms, Hull’s Trial had drawn steadily closer, and as the bleak list of names engraved on the Stone of the Fallen outside the barracks reminded him, a cadet could die on the Islands easily enough without the need of a shadowy conspiracy. He resumed his long, predawn swims, redoubled his evening runs around the coast, and returned to his study of tactics and strategy with a vengeance. The bright days of early spring gave way to heavy rains that soaked his blacks the moment he stepped out the door. After eight years of training, time felt suddenly, precariously short. There were maps to learn, languages to practice, diagrams of fleets and fortresses to pore over, and, of course, there was always fighting to be had.

Qarsh had a number of training rings where cadets and veterans alike could work up a good sweat running through forms or hammering each other into the dust with blunted blades. The simplest were just squares of earth vaguely delineated by a few pounded stakes strung with ropes. Past the west end of the compound, however, not far from the Eyrie’s main landing field, overlooking a rocky expanse that swept down toward the sea, was the only true arena on the Islands-a shallow, wide circle a pace or so deep set into the earth and ringed with stones.

Valyn arrived just before seventh bell, stripped to the waist and sweating like a bull from his run around the perimeter of the island. It was a full week since Gwenna’s investigation of Manker’s, and though he had not forgotten the Aedolian’s warning or his grief over his father’s murder, the imperatives of training provided some kind of distraction from the looming threat-time to shut up and buckle down, as the Kettral liked to say-and there was nothing to focus the mind like three feet of steel whistling toward your forehead.

Late each afternoon, from seventh to eighth bell, was set aside for a session the Eyrie referred to as “Individual Close Combat.” The cadets dubbed it, simply, Blood Time. If you somehow managed to make it through the morning without the proper complement of bruises and lacerations, Blood Time would make sure you went to bed sore. The setup was simple: two cadets in a wide, low ring just to the west of the armory and forge. Whoever asked for mercy first, lost. Sometimes the fights took place with blunted blades, sometimes with knives or cudgels, sometimes with bare fists. One of the trainers was always there, in theory to make sure everyone followed the few rules. In practice, however, the older soldiers tended to heap fuel on the fire, hurling insults and gibes from the edge of the ring. Sometimes there was betting.

Forty or fifty Kettral surrounded the ring, vets and cadets alike, some stretching out sore muscles, others windmilling the blood into their arms in great looping circles, others chatting quietly in small knots. Valyn spotted Ha Lin, Gent, Laith, and Talal on the far side, and circled over to them, taking the time to catch his breath.

“My point is,” Laith was saying, hands spread as he tried to reason with Gent, “that the hammer is a ridiculous weapon. Useless.”

“It’s useless if you can’t lift it,” Gent argued, eyeing the flier’s thin arms skeptically.

“It’s a carpenter’s tool, for ’Shael’s sake. There’s a reason every Kettral carries two swords strapped across his back and not two hammers. Val,” he said, turning to appeal to the new arrival. “Talk some sense into this ox.”

“Don’t bother,” Lin interjected, raising a hand in warning. “They’ve been at it since sixth bell and left sense behind a long time ago.”

“We’re fighting with hammers today?” Valyn asked, glancing toward the arena apprehensively. The trainers loved nothing more than throwing unexpected twists into daily training, and a hammer was a dangerous weapon to spar with.

“Not that I know of,” Lin replied, eyes flashing. “But don’t worry. If we are, I’ll be gentle with you.”

“That’s what the whores on Hook always tell me,” Laith cut in with a wink. “Don’t believe her, Val. Or,” he added, considering the two of them, eyes narrowed in sly appraisal, “a pretty girl like Ha Lin, maybe you don’t want her to go easy on you.…”

Lin took a casual swipe at the flier with her belt knife, but Valyn could see the flush rising to her cheeks. He wanted to think of something to say, something quick and clever that would catch her eye and make her laugh, but Laith was the one with the lines, and before Valyn could find the right words, a round of raucous laughter cut through the air from across the ring. Lin turned toward the sound, her face twisting into a scowl.

Sami Yurl, along with his small cabal. Plenty of the cadets were nasty and strong-you had to be both, to some degree, to survive on the Islands-but Yurl’s lot was the worst, a handful of brutal young men who had signed on to become Kettral, not out of any great love for the empire, but because it satisfied some itch, a cruel glee derived from pain, and power, and killing. Meshkent’s Minions, they called themselves, though most of Meshkent’s most ardent worshippers lay beyond the boundaries of Annur. Regardless, the name suited them well enough; Valyn had little doubt that if they were promoted to full Kettral, they would inflict enough misery to make the Lord of Pain proud. He was also sure that most of them would sell the others to Manjari slavers for a handful of coin, but you needed someone to watch your back on the Islands, and over the years, the cadets had fallen into loose alliances.

Valyn frowned and turned back to Lin. “Try to stay away from Yurl today. We’re just three weeks from the Trial, and if something goes wrong-”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she snapped.

The blond youth caught them staring, and nudged one of his companions in the ribs. The two shared a rough laugh, and then Yurl returned his gaze to Lin and licked his lips ostentatiously.

“Keep laughing, you bastard,” Lin murmured in a voice almost too low for Valyn to hear. “You just keep laughing.”

The first fight of the afternoon was an ugly brawl between two of the younger cadets. It went right to the dirt and ended with the larger of the boys holding his eye and crawling for the edge of the ring. After that, a tedious, probing dance between a pair of kids with blades took up what seemed like half the afternoon. Most of the older youths and the trainers jeered and coached from the sidelines while Valyn waited impatiently for the fights that mattered, for the ones he needed to study. Finally one of the kids landed a lucky blow, the other collapsed in a heap, and Jordan Arbert, the senior trainer, decided it was time for some real combat.

“Somebody get that ’Shael-spawned idiot out of my ring,” he growled. “Take him to the infirmary. There’s a batch of would-be soldiers here who think they’re ready to stand for Hull’s Trial. I want to see a few matchups before I place my bets about who survives. Now, who do I want?” he mused, looking over the crowd.

Valyn reached over his shoulder to ease his training blades in their scabbards, twisted his head to one side to stretch out a knot in his neck.

“So many options! How about we mix things up a little today? Two on two-see if you murderous bastards can actually manage to cooperate.” The trainer smiled a sinister smile. “I’m going to go with Yurl and Ainhoa on one side. That’s a nasty little pair.”

Valyn had to agree. Although Balendin Ainhoa was a part of Yurl’s circle, they could not have looked more different. Where Yurl was well-muscled and handsome, the very image of well-heeled Annurian nobility, Ainhoa looked like a savage straight out of the Hannan jungles. The feathers of seabirds hung among his long, dark braids, rings of ivory and iron pierced his ears, and blue ink snaked up his arms. Rumor had it that Balendin had ended up on the Islands after the people in his town-some tiny settlement on the western coast of Basc-discovered that he was a leach. When they came for him, he killed half the mob and fled, stealing and murdering the whole way, until the Kettral were called in to deal with the problem. They dealt with it by recruiting him.

Anywhere else in the Annurian Empire, a leach would have been strung up, stabbed, or strangled on sight. Valyn had grown up believing such men and women were abominations, that their powers were unholy and evil. He remembered old Crenchan Xaw, commander of the Aedolian Guard, waggling his knife as he made the point: They steal from the world around them, leach the power right out of the earth. No man should be able to twist and tangle the laws of nature to suit his will. Xaw was not alone in his convictions. Everyone hated leaches. Everyone hunted them. Everyone except the Kettral.

The Eyrie was always looking for an edge. It wasn’t enough that they had the birds, not enough that they controlled the few mines from which the fabled Kettral munitions were made. It wasn’t enough that their soldiers were better trained and better equipped than any fighting force in the world. Eyrie Command wanted leaches, too, even killers like Balendin. Especially killers.

Valyn had been appalled when he first arrived on the Qirins to discover he would be fighting alongside such perversions of nature. It had taken months to overcome the most basic revulsion and years to grow comfortable around the strange breed of men and women. As it turned out, reports of both their power and their evil were greatly overblown. They didn’t mutter incantations, for one thing, or drink the blood of infants. More important from a tactical standpoint, every leach had a different well, a different source from which he drew his power-granite, water, blood, anything-the secret of which he guarded as closely as his life. Without the presence of his well, he was no more powerful than the next man, a fact that could even the scales considerably. The problem was, if you didn’t know a leach’s well, you didn’t know when you had to be careful.

Balendin motioned his twin wolfhounds-freakish slavering creatures that followed him everywhere-to stillness as he stepped into the ring. They sat like sentinels just outside the stones, jaws gaping, panting audibly in the afternoon heat. The leach glanced skyward, where his tamed hawk circled overhead. The bird let out a piercing shriek, as though aware of his gaze.

“’Kent-kissing thing reminds me of a vulture,” Lin said.

“It’s just a bird,” Valyn replied.

“Maybe,” Laith said, turning to Talal. “I don’t suppose you’ve managed to figure out the bastard’s well.”

Talal shook his head somberly.

“You train with him at least twice a week. How hard can it be? There’s only so much stuff in the world!”

“Harder than you think,” Talal replied. “We’re even more wary of each other than we are of the rest of you. Everyone has their disguises,” he said, gesturing to the bracelets encircling his own dark wrists.

“You’re telling me your well’s not copper or gold?” the flier asked.

“I’m not telling you anything-but look at Balendin. The feathers, the rings, the ink … And that’s just what he has on him. It could be something all around us-moisture or salt. Stone or sand.”

“It could be those ’Kent-kissing beasts,” Valyn added, eyeing the wolfhounds warily. “He brings them with him everywhere.”

“Could be,” Talal acknowledged. “Leaches have had animal wells in the past. Rennon Pierce, the raven leach, had an entire flock that perched on his eaves and soared above him when he moved.”

“And you wonder why everyone wants to string you bastards up,” Gent grumbled. “No offense meant, Talal, but the whole thing is sick, filthy.”

Talal eyed the larger cadet, his eyes hooded and inscrutable. Then he turned back to Valyn. “People have been speculating about Balendin’s hawk and his hounds since the day he arrived. Maybe they’re on to something. And maybe he’s playing us. It’s almost impossible to know.”

“Besides,” Laith said wryly, “it’s not like it should matter in the arena anyway.”

According to the rules, while in the ring, Balendin was restricted to the use of his body and blades, just like anyone else; the Eyrie believed in developing “the whole soldier,” and had no interest in training a group of men and women who would be useless on the battlefield the moment their wells ran dry. The reality, however, was slightly different. As long as a leach could work subtly, could twist the world around him without anyone noticing, his intervention was permitted. Kettral commanders could ferret out this kind of meddling if they tried, but they never tried-cadets needed to learn to fight in all circumstances, needed to grow comfortable fighting any foe.

“That’s one pair,” Arbert mused. “Any thoughts about who I ought to pit against them?”

The cadets erupted in a chorus of suggestions. Between the rigors of training and the exhaustive study, there wasn’t much leisure for entertainment on the Islands, and most of the assembled soldiers waited each day for Blood Time the way men and women back in Annur looked forward to a well-laid table at dinner.

Arbert held up a hand for silence, but before he could speak, Lin stepped into the ring.

“’Shael on a stick,” Valyn muttered beneath his breath.

“I’ll fight them,” she said flatly, not taking her eyes from the two.

Sami Yurl smirked.

Arbert chuckled. “All by yourself? Hardly seems fair.” He turned to the crowd. “Anyone want to join her?”

The group shifted uncomfortably, some gazing off toward the barracks, others out toward the open ocean. Sami Yurl was a self-involved bastard, but he was also quick with his blades, and brutal in the ring. And then there was the leach to consider.

“Unnatural,” Gent grumbled, eyeing Balendin warily. The huge cadet wasn’t afraid of much, but he held a fear of leaches matched only by his loathing of them.

“I’d step up,” Laith said, grinning at Valyn, “but I don’t want to deprive you of an opportunity for gallantry.”

Valyn sighed. It looked as though his return to the ring was going to be a little more exciting than he’d expected. He couldn’t leave Lin on her own, and he’d been aching to put a fist in Sami Yurl’s face since the scene over in Manker’s. One-on-one he’d have little chance, but Balendin’s bladework was mediocre. If they were able to take the leach out of the arrangement quickly, they could both concentrate on Yurl. And besides, he thought ruefully, no one else is volunteering.

“I’ll do it,” he said, stepping over the low rope.

The fight began poorly. Valyn would have preferred to square off against Yurl while Lin faced Balendin, but the leach managed to engage him first, leaving Lin to defend herself. She was a full head shorter than her opponent, and certainly weaker as well, but she was savvy. As Yurl’s blades snaked in and out, slicing, probing, she fought elbow to elbow with Valyn, refusing to be drawn off her guard by a series of clever gambits.

When Valyn first arrived on the Islands, he had thought bladework was all about strength, technique, and courage. The reality was far more pedestrian. Although those qualities all mattered, they paled before the necessity of discipline, the ability to wait, to watch, and to avoid mistakes. The first step in winning, Hendran wrote, is to avoid losing. While Valyn battered back the leach’s attacks, Lin held her own at his side, playing a tight, cautious game, her breathing heavy but steady. Valyn felt himself smile. If Lin could just hold Yurl off for a while longer, he would find an opening, and then they could both press Yurl.

Then the leach started talking.

“I never understood,” he began in a laconic voice that belied the sweat dripping from his forehead, “why the Kettral let women fight.”

Valyn swatted aside a thrust and forced him back a couple of paces, but the youth kept up his taunts.

“I know all the stated justifications, of course: women can pass unnoticed where a man would draw attention, they’re often underestimated by a foe, but it just doesn’t add up. For one thing,” he observed, “they’re small and weak. For another, they’re a distraction. Here I am in the ring. I should be focusing on my bladework, and all I can think about is ripping the pants off this bitch.”

Lin growled at Valyn’s side as she parried a sweeping overhand slice.

“Ignore him,” Valyn said. “He’s just trying to get in your head.”

“Actually,” Balendin countered with a leer, “I’d be more interested in getting inside something else. What do you say, bitch?” he demanded. “I’ll go easy on you here, as long as I can make you moan later.…”

Sami Yurl chuckled-a low, nasty sound-and took a step back, flamboyantly dropping his guard.

“Leave it…,” Valyn started to say, but Lin wasn’t going after Yurl. Instead, she used the opening to drive at Balendin, cutting across Valyn’s line of attack and breaking formation to drive the leach back.

For a second Valyn thought she was going to batter him straight into the ground, so great was the fury of her blows, but as she forced her way forward, her foot twisted on the packed sand beneath her, and she went down with a scream of rage and frustration.

Balendin grinned and, with a feline grace, leapt over her crumpled body to engage Valyn once again. The leach wasn’t the strongest blade, but he knew how to tie up an opponent, and Valyn found himself pushing forward but unable to drive his enemy back.

Behind the screen, Sami Yurl took a step toward Lin. She swung at him with one of her swords, but he parried the blow easily. Then, in a rush, he was on top of her, driving her face into the dirt while she screamed. Valyn tried to keep his mind on his own fight-he couldn’t help Lin if he, too, ended up sprawled out on the ground, but it was hard not to hear her shrieks of rage, and he felt his own anger rising, hot and bloody. Yurl had straddled her, and instead of ending the struggle with a blow to the back of the neck, he was reaching down between her legs, trying to force her thighs apart as she thrashed and writhed.

It’s a trap, Valyn realized grimly. Yurl wants you to rush. The knowledge was as clear as it was irrelevant. He couldn’t just trade ineffectual blows with Balendin while Lin was screaming. ’Shael take it, he spat. Then, with a roar, he launched himself forward, hammering the leach back with a flurry of savage attacks. For a moment he thought it was going to work. Balendin gave ground, falling back with a look of alarm on his face, opening a path to Sami Yurl. Valyn stepped into the gap, but somehow, in his haste, he tripped, stumbled over what had seemed flat ground, and then he was falling. He had time to twist, to try to raise his guard, but the leach was too fast. The blunted blade came down on his forehead like midnight.

* * *

“That son of a whore,” Lin cursed as she savagely scrubbed the blood from her cheek. Instead of reporting to the infirmary as protocol dictated, she and Valyn had made the walk down to the harbor, away from the chatter and stares of the central compound, in order to clean their wounds. “That ’Shael-spawned, ’Kent-kissing bastard.”

“It was Balendin,” Valyn said, probing the gash on his forehead. It would leave a scar, but then, he had plenty of those already.

“I know it was Balendin,” Lin snapped. “When I went for him, my ankle twisted as though I’d stepped in mud. Mud. We haven’t had rain in days.”

Valyn nodded. “Same for me. Something tangled my feet. I went down before I even realized what was happening.”

“Gent’s right,” Lin muttered. “Somebody ought to string them up. Every ’Kent-kissing leach on the two continents.”

Valyn eyed her carefully. “Even Talal?”

“’Shael can have Talal,” she spat back. “Oh, he’s nice enough,” she rushed on before he could interrupt, “but how can you trust him? How can you trust any of them? I don’t care if the Eyrie wants another edge.”

Valyn wasn’t quite sure he agreed with her, but after the afternoon’s ordeal, he wasn’t about to argue further.

“The bitch of it is,” Lin went on, “to anyone watching that fight, it looked like they actually won.”

“They did win,” Valyn observed.

“They cheated.”

“It doesn’t matter. We’re the ones who ended up facedown in the dirt. I want to smash out a few of Yurl’s teeth as badly as you do, but we’ve got to look at the thing straight on. There aren’t going to be any rules to hide behind when we start flying missions.”

“Spare me the ’Kent-kissing lecture,” she said, spitting a bolus of blood into the waves, then checking a tooth with her tongue. “It’s bad enough to lose to Yurl and Ainhoa without you scouring the wound with sanctimony.”

Valyn had been about to put a hand on her shoulder, but he leaned back now, stung by Lin’s bitterness.

“Don’t bark at me. I’m not the one who broke formation.”

She glared at him, then groaned in frustration. “I’m sorry, Val. I’m just burned because I’m sure that from the side of the ring, it looked like I slipped, like I just collapsed. People are probably still laughing about it back there.”

Something about the words bothered Valyn, and he looked out to sea, running them over again. His head still ached from the blow, and it took him a while to collect his thoughts. “What did you just say?” he asked.

“It looked like I just collapsed!” Lin said. “Nobody realized what really happened.”

Collapsed.

“Like Manker’s,” he said quietly.

“I like to think I’m a little more graceful than a termite-ridden alehouse.”

“I’m not talking about you or the alehouse. I’m talking about what brought you both down.”

Lin’s head shot up, and she stared at him, eyes bright and angry. “Holy Hull,” she breathed. “A fucking leach.”