The Emperor's blades

12

“Come on, Kaden!” Pater said, tugging at Kaden’s belt in an effort to hurry him along the trail. “They’re going to be starting already. Hurry up!”

“Starting what?” Kaden asked for the third time.

Sometimes it seemed like the boy was all bright blue eyes and bony elbows. Normally Pater’s enthusiasm made Kaden smile, but today he was hot and frustrated and in no mood for the small child tugging and pawing at his robe.

He had spent half the morning taking apart a small stone hut, and his Shin composure was beginning to fray. Under the best of circumstances, the work would be laborious and time consuming; the rough blocks of granite had a way of shredding his palms and pinching his fingers until they turned black and blue. And these were not the best of circumstances. After all, he had just finished building the ’Shael-spawned thing only a day earlier. It was all part of Tan’s “instruction,” of course. For almost two weeks, ever since the incident at the pool, the monk had had Kaden lugging stones from all over the mountain, laying them into place, checking to see that the walls were true and plumb, then hauling more rocks. Tan never told him what the building was for, but Kaden had assumed it was for something. No sooner had he finished it, however, straightening from the placement of the final piece, than Tan nodded impassively.

“Good,” the monk had said. “Now, take it down.” He turned away as if to depart, then looked back over his shoulder. “And I don’t want to see a pile of rubble here. Each of these stones is to go back exactly where you found it.”

Kaden had just about reconciled himself to spending the next week and a half lugging the stones back up the steep paths and replacing them in their earthen divots when Pater arrived, breathing hard and waving him away from the work with a small hand. Tan had sent him, evidently-something about a meeting in the refectory, a meeting of all the monks. The abbot rarely called such an assembly, and Kaden felt his curiosity quicken.

“Why does Nin want the meeting?” he asked patiently.

Pater rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. They don’t tell me anything. Something about that goat you found.”

Kaden’s stomach twisted uncomfortably. It was almost a month since he’d come across the mangled carcass, and he’d done his best to put it out of his mind. After notifying Nin and the others, there wasn’t much else to do, and Tan had kept him busy. Sometimes, however, as he was lugging a rock down from high in the mountain passes, he would feel the skin on his neck prickle and look back. There was never anything to be seen. Now, however, if Nin was calling a meeting …

“Has something happened?” he asked.

Pater just pulled harder. “I don’t know. Come on!”

Clearly he wasn’t going to get anything else out of the small boy, and so Kaden slowed his breathing and stilled his impatience. It wasn’t far back to the main buildings of the monastery.

On a normal morning, the rough square would be quietly busy with monks going about their labors: novices hauling water in heavy iron pots for the afternoon meal, acolytes hurrying on errands for their umials, older monks strolling the paths or seated beneath the junipers, shaved heads bent beneath their cowls as they followed their own private devotions to the Blank God. On a normal morning, the low drone of chanting from the meditation hall would hang on the breeze, a bass rumble beneath the percussive striking of axe against block as acolytes split wood for the fires. While the monastery was rarely lively, it always felt alive. Today, however, Ashk’lan lay empty and silent beneath the harsh glare of the spring sun.

The inside of the refectory was another matter. Nearly two hundred bodies were crammed into the space, the oldest and most respected monks seated on benches near the front of the hall, novices standing on tiptoe in the back. The scent of wool, smoke, and sweat hung heavy in the air. Shin discipline obviated any real commotion-monks who had trained to sit silent and cross-legged in the snow for hours weren’t likely to get rowdy-but the group was as animated as Kaden could remember. Dozens of quiet conversations buzzed at the same time, and everyone seemed curious and alert. He and Pater squeezed in at the rear of the hall and nudged the wooden doors shut behind them.

Akiil stood a few paces away, and Kaden caught his friend’s eye as he sidled through the crowd with Pater in tow.

“How’s that palace you’re building coming along?” Akiil asked.

“Glorious,” Kaden replied. “I might move my capital here when I finally ascend the throne.”

“And give up that glitzy tower back in Annur that your family is so fond of?”

“Nothing wrong with a little honest stonework,” Kaden replied, then gestured toward the front of the hall. “What’s going on?”

Akiil shrugged. “Not sure. Altaf found something.”

“Something?”

“Spare me a lecture on the importance of specificity. No one tells me anything. All I know is Altaf, Tan, and Nin have been locked up in the abbot’s study for most of the morning.”

“Tan?” Kaden raised an eyebrow. That explained why his umial hadn’t been around to berate him. “What’s he doing with them?”

Akiil fixed him with a long-suffering glare. “As I just explained, no one tells me shit.”

Kaden was about to press harder when Scial Nin had stepped out in front of the assembled monks.

“I can’t see,” Pater whispered.

Kaden hefted the boy up onto his shoulders.

“Three weeks ago,” the abbot began without preamble, “Kaden came across something … unusual.”

He paused, allowing a silence to settle over the refectory. Scial Nin was around sixty, thin as a post, brown as a juniper trunk, and lean as old mutton. He no longer had to shave his head, which had gone naturally bald, and the corners of his eyes were deeply creased from squinting at objects in the distance. When Kaden first arrived at the monastery, he had thought the abbot elderly, even frail. Hours of laboring up steep trails in the man’s wake, however, had disabused him of that notion. Nin’s age and slight frame belied a vigor that appeared in his step when he ran, and resonated in his voice when he spoke, carrying clear and strong to the back of the hall.

“He found a goat slaughtered by an unknown creature. Two brothers and I investigated, but we were able to come to no conclusions. Since then, three more of our goats have gone missing. Rampuri and Altaf have found two of these, each far from its normal grazing range, each beheaded. Each with the skull split open and the brain missing. Recently, they found a crag cat in the same condition.”

No one spoke, but the air hissed with a collective intake of breath. This was news to Kaden, and from the looks on the faces of the rest of the monks, it was the first they were hearing about it as well. Kaden glanced over at his friend. Akiil grimaced and shook his head. It was one thing to take down a goat, even brutally, but crag cats were natural predators. Even a brindled bear would have trouble bringing one to ground.

“The first animal was killed eight miles from here, but each successive carcass has been found closer. We had hoped, initially, that whatever found the goats was a migratory predator, killing then moving on. It seems, however, that this thing has come to stay.”

Nin let that thought sink in, then continued. “It’s not hard to see why. The Bone Mountains don’t offer much in the way of game, especially in the winter. Our flock makes comparatively easy prey. Unfortunately, we need those goats to survive. The best solution open to us seems to be to hunt down this predator and kill it.”

Akiil raised an eyebrow at that. Hunting might be something the monks could manage, but killing wasn’t part of the Shin discipline. They knocked down a few dozen goats each year for the refectory pots, of course, but that was hardly preparation for whatever was tearing apart the monastery’s livestock. Kaden wasn’t even sure what Nin expected them to kill the creature with. Each of the monks carried a simple knife hanging from the belt of his robe-a short-bladed, all-purpose tool that one could use to trim back bruiseberries or skewer a chunk of mutton in the evening stew-but it wasn’t likely to be much good against any kind of predator. Kaden tried to imagine attacking a crag cat with the pathetic blade and shuddered.

“The first step,” Nin went on, “is finding the thing. It took us the better part of two weeks to come across a track-evidently the creature prefers to stick to the rocks-but Rampuri found one finally. He has painted several copies.”

“So there weren’t any tracks to memorize,” Kaden said under his breath, thinking back to that first, brutal session with his umial, feeling resentful and vindicated at the same time.

“You’re not a complete failure after all,” Akiil replied with a smirk.

“Shhh,” Pater hissed from atop Kaden’s shoulders, batting him on the head with a small, imperious hand.

Nin was passing a few scrolls to the monks sitting in the front row. “I’d like to know, first, if anyone has seen these tracks before.”

He waited patiently for the scrolls to circulate slowly toward the back of the room. Kaden watched as each monk took the paper, memorized it, then passed it on to his neighbor. The novices required more time, careful to make sure they etched the correct details on their memories, and a few minutes passed before the paintings reached the back. Someone handed a parchment to Akiil, who held it out where those around him could consider it.

Kaden wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting: a variant on a crag cat print maybe, or something with the broad paws and deep claws of a bear. What he found himself staring at, however, was unlike any animal track he’d encountered. It wasn’t made by a paw or pad-that much was clear. He couldn’t even tell how many feet the thing had.

“What in ’Shael’s name is that?” Akiil asked, turning the parchment in an effort to make sense of it.

The painting showed a dozen indentations, the kind of marks a medium-sized stick might make if driven repeatedly into the ground-a sharp stick. None of them measured more than two inches across, but the spacing suggested a creature the size of a large dog. Kaden looked closer. Half those marks appeared to be divided in two by a thin line, as though the foot, or whatever it was, was split.

“Cloven,” Akiil observed. “Maybe some sort of hoof.”

Kaden shook his head. A cleft would be wider, separating the two toes-the whole point of a cloven hoof was to offer the animal stability; it was what allowed the goats to keep their footing on the uneven terrain. Besides, the shape of the prints was wrong. They didn’t look so much like hooves as they did like claws with the pincers squeezed shut. Reluctantly, he called to mind the saama’an of the goat’s mutilated carcass, studying the severed neck, the shattered skull. Claws could inflict those sorts of wounds-big claws, at least. An uneasy chill tickled his spine. What kind of creature the size of a goat had twelve pincered legs?

“Now that you’ve had a chance to see the paintings,” Nin said, “has anyone come across tracks like these before?”

“I’m not convinced that they are tracks,” Serkhan Kundashi said, stepping forward from the wall. “Looks like the scratching of a stick on the ground.”

“There was no stick,” the abbot replied.

“I’ve lived in these mountains for thirty years,” said Rebbin, the overseer of the refectory. “I’ve cooked everything there is to cook, and I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The abbot nodded grimly, as though he had been expecting as much. He opened his mouth to continue when someone near the front spoke up.

Kaden couldn’t see over the crowd, but from the slow, gentle voice, it had to be Yerrin, the hermit. Although Yerrin wore Shin robes and followed the Shin discipline, he kept himself apart from the rest, sleeping in a cave halfway to the Circuit of Ravens, appearing unexpectedly two or three times a month to scrounge food from the refectory or a scrap of thread from the storeroom. The man was dirty but kind. He had named every tree and half the animals in the high mountains, and sometimes Kaden would run into him on a ledge or in a narrow defile checking on “his friends” as he called them, splinting branches broken in a hailstorm, or gathering fallen leaves for his bedding. Kaden hadn’t expected to see him here.

“I know these tracks,” Yerrin said. The hall fell to absolute silence as everyone strained to hear the quiet voice. “Or tracks much like them.” He paused, as though gathering his thoughts, then went on. “My friends leave these tracks around my cave.”

“Who are your friends?” Nin asked, voice patient but firm.

“Why, the frost spiders, of course,” Yerrin replied. “They come for the ants, who live in their great dirt mound.”

Kaden tried to make sense of this. He had studied spiders, of course, all kinds of spiders, including the frost spider. He hadn’t been aware that they left tracks.

“These aren’t quite like the footprints my friends leave,” Yerrin added genially. “There are more legs.”

“And the thing is the size of a large dog,” Serkhan interjected, pointing out what Kaden thought was the obvious objection. “Spiders don’t grow to that size.”

“True,” the hermit agreed. “True. Still, the world is wide. I have many friends, but there are many more to make.”

Kaden glanced over at Rampuri Tan. The man was standing in the shadows at the far end of the hall. It was hard to see the look on his face, but his eyes shone bright in the dimness.

“Well,” Scial Nin concluded, once it was clear that Yerrin had nothing more to say. “We cannot let the creature destroy our flocks. We have little chance of following it. That means we will have to lure it to us. Rampuri has suggested that we stake out goats a half mile from the monastery. Several monks will wait in the rocks to watch for some sign of this creature. As for the rest of you, no one is to leave the central square alone. Novices and acolytes are forbidden to leave the monastery at all without an accompanying umial.”

That got a response. Chalmer Oleki, Kaden’s old teacher, rose from his bench in the first row. He was the oldest of the Shin, half again as old as the abbot, and his voice was reed-thin when he spoke. “This thing has killed goats, yes. It is a problem for us, yes. But do you believe it would come against grown men?”

Scial Nin opened his mouth, but it was Tan who answered, stepping forward from the shadows. Kaden had always found his umial menacing, even before being forced to study under the man. In the past, however, something had held that menace in check. Tan had reminded him of a vast, silent slope of snow high on a peak, poised to break loose in avalanche at the first peal of thunder, or like a sword, still and suspended at the height of its arc, held indefinitely by some myserious power. There was nothing strange in Tan’s movement now, nothing more than a simple step forward, and yet Kaden shivered, as though the small movement marked a change, a tip in a balance long held.

“When you know nothing about a creature,” the monk ground out, his voice hard as a rock slide, “expect it has come to kill you.”