The Emperor's blades

13

Once he was actually standing in front of the ruined tavern again, Valyn wasn’t sure what he had hoped to see. Most of the place had disappeared beneath the murky water in a tumble of broken beams and waterlogged walls, and even if there had been something to look at, the sun was already dipping toward the horizon-a sullen, red orb-and the light was too poor to see much beyond the skeletal outlines.

The certainty he had felt immediately following his fight in the ring had faded like the afternoon light. It was possible that a leach had been behind the destruction of Manker’s-there were probably more leaches on the Islands than anywhere else in the empire. It was possible that the whole thing had been part of a plot directed at him, at his family, part of an ongoing coup. The shit part of it was that just about anything was possible. He needed something concrete, something solid to explore, and a leach’s kenning would leave even less trace than Kettral explosives. That meant turning to people, people who might have noticed something unusual, seen something they didn’t expect.

“Only four made it out,” he said, frowning. Juren, of course, and three others who had clawed their way clear of the wreckage.

“Four out of twelve,” Lin replied with a shrug. “Not bad, considering the whole thing dropped straight into the bay. Better odds than you’d get on the losing side of most battles.” The gash on her cheek had scabbed over, but the indignity of their defeat in the ring still seemed raw and ragged. The Kettral devoted countless hours to tourniquets, splints, medicinal herbs, and bandages. No one said much, however, about the humiliation of having your face ground in the dirt while a fellow soldier thrust a rough hand up between your legs and a few dozen others looked on.

“It wasn’t a battle,” he said, his mind jumping back to the image of Salia, hot, bright blood leaking from the wound in her neck. “The people in there were just drinking. They didn’t sign on.”

“No one ever signs on to get killed.”

“You know what I mean.”

Lin fixed him with a hard stare. “You mean you feel guilty.”

Valyn shrugged. “Sure. Someone comes after me and these poor bastards get crushed? I thought we were supposed to be protecting the citizens of Annur.”

Lin spread her hands. “I’d hardly call the scum from Manker’s ‘citizens.’ Most of them would be strung up or cut down within a day if they showed their faces back on the mainland.”

“It doesn’t mean they deserved to die.”

“Spare me the guilt, Valyn. It’s self-indulgent. It’s a waste of time. You didn’t kill them. You tried to save them. You’re noble. Is that what you want to hear? You’re a fucking prince.”

Lin’s cheeks were flushed, her eyes ablaze. Valyn swallowed a sharp retort and began to put a hand on her shoulder instead. She jerked back.

“Let’s find the bastards who did this,” she said curtly, refusing to meet his eyes. “Let’s just find them.”

Valyn started to respond, then, trying to cool his own anger, turned away. Dilapidated buildings hung over the muddy street, paint peeling, roofs sagging, thresholds rotting into the dirt beneath uneven doors. Despite the bright colors, they all looked about ready to give up and tumble into the harbor alongside Manker’s. Maybe he and Lin were imagining the whole thing. Everything falls apart eventually, he thought, glancing over once more at his friend. Maybe the tavern just gave up.

On the other hand, his father had been killed. It was possible the plot went no further than a single disgruntled priest, but Valyn wasn’t ready to believe that just yet. If there were people on the Islands responsible, he wanted them found. He wanted them dead.

“Juren was one of the ones who made it,” he said, breaking the silence. “Laith says he’s holed up at the Black Boat, drinking himself straight to ’Shael while he waits for his leg to heal.”

“Who’s Juren?”

“That thug Manker used to pay to watch over the place.”

Lin’s face hardened. “The first one to jump clear. The one who refused to help.”

Valyn nodded. “He’s not much good to anyone else now, not with a busted leg.”

“Then he should have plenty of time to talk.”

The common room of the Black Boat was poorly lit and cavernous, far too large for the number of chairs and tables scattered haphazardly around the floor. When Valyn had first arrived on the Islands, the Boat was the most prosperous alehouse on Hook, with wine all the way from Sia, blowsy whores hanging from the balconies, and music every night. In the intervening years, however, the owner had died, one of his sons had stabbed the other in a dispute over the property, and the place had fallen into gradual decline. Only half a dozen or so people were at the tables now, and after looking up, eyes heavy with drink and boredom, they returned to their muttered conversations and games of dice.

Juren sat by the bar, his splinted leg propped on a chair, a half-empty glass of wine beside him, and a half-full jug beside that.

“Mind if we join you?” Valyn asked, pulling up a chair.

The man darted them a bloodshot glare. He opened his mouth as though to suggest that he did mind, then took another look at their blacks and the Kettral-issue blades at their belts and thought better of it. He scowled. “Suit yourself.”

“Juren, right?” Lin asked brightly, settling herself on the chair with a grim smile.

The man grunted.

“You used to work for Manker, didn’t you?” she went on. “You were there the day the place collapsed.”

“S’how I got this busted leg,” he replied, waving a hand at the limb. “Manker bit it along with his shithole. Bastard owed me two weeks of pay.”

Valyn shook his head in commiseration. “Bad luck, friend. Bad luck. Listen, we just got paid-why don’t you let us top off that jug for you?”

Juren brightened momentarily, then narrowed his eyes. “What d’you want to drink with me for? I seen you often enough. I even seen you over at Manker’s the day it dropped. You Kettral are usually too good to rub elbows with the likes of me.”

Valyn suppressed a grimace. “Not our decision, friend. Command’s got regulations. Security and all that.”

Juren snorted. “Right. Security ’n’ all that.” Despite having served as Manker’s hired muscle, he didn’t look like he thought all that much of security.

Lin took the newly filled wine jug and topped off the man’s glass before filling two more.

“I remember you now,” she said, nodding as though at the memory. “You made it to the doorway first.”

The man edged back on his stool, putting a little more space between them.

“You made it to the doorway,” she continued, voice deceptively level, “and then, instead of helping get anyone else out … you jumped.”

“What are you, the town constables?” he asked, licking his lips furtively. “I came to Hook t’get away from this shit.”

“By ‘this shit,’” Valyn said, leaning in until he could smell the sour wine on the man’s breath, “I can only assume you mean things like courage and human decency.”

“Don’t lecture me,” Juren snarled, pushing him back with a meaty hand. “I don’t get paid no tall stacks of gold to risk my life. I did what I had to do. That’s why I’m alive.”

“Oh no,” Lin said, airily. “We’re not going to lecture you. We’re just going to ask you a few questions.”

“Fuck your questions.”

She pursed her lips and looked over at Valyn.

Valyn was rapidly tiring of the man’s attitude. There were faster ways to get answers out of a drunken brawler than plying him with wine, and he and Lin had spent years mastering just about all of them.

“Look, friend,” he began, tapping conspicuously at his belt knife. “The questions are going to be easy. Don’t make them complicated.”

“Actually,” Lin went on with a vicious smile, “I don’t mind if you make them complicated.”

Juren scowled, then spat over his shoulder onto the floor. “What questions?”

“Did you see any other Kettral in the tavern that day?” Valyn asked. “Maybe in the morning, or just before we got there?”

“It was just you two,” Juren grumbled. “You two and that slick, gold-haired bastard. The one that broke the wineglass.”

Valyn considered the claim. Sami Yurl was perfectly capable of plotting, of murder, and he had been in the alehouse. On the other hand, Yurl was no leach. Maybe he was wrapped up in the thing somehow, but it didn’t seem possible that he’d brought down Manker’s all on his own.

“No one in the morning?” Lin pressed. “No other Kettral?”

The thug wrinkled his brow as though fighting through a haze of wine. “Yeah. Yeah, there was someone else-short, crop-haired girl. Wore the same blacks as the rest of you lot. Eyes like nails. She didn’t stay long.”

“Looked about fifteen years old?”

“How’n Hull’s name should I know?” the man snapped. “She barely talked.”

“Annick,” Valyn said, glancing over at Lin.

She grimaced and nodded. Annick Frencha was the best sniper among the cadets, one of the best snipers on the Islands, despite the fact that she had yet to pass Hull’s Trial. The girl was a mystery. She seemed to have no need or desire for human contact, and despite her size, she was every bit as brutal as Yurl or Balendin. Valyn had watched her working with her bow once in the fields to the north of the compound. She had shot a rabbit through the foot at a hundred paces, and the creature was shrieking-a terrified, unearthly sound-as it tried to drag itself to safety. Annick cocked her head to the side before loosing a second arrow. This one transfixed the rabbit’s back leg. Hitting the creature at all at that distance was impressive, but Valyn started to suspect that she was missing its heart on purpose. “Why don’t you kill it?” he’d asked. Annick had looked at him with those icy eyes of hers. “I want a moving target,” she replied, nocking another arrow to the string. “If it’s dead, it doesn’t move.” Valyn had little trouble believing that Annick would destroy a tavern and the people inside it just to accomplish her objective. But then she, like Yurl, was no leach.

“How about a tall guy, ink on the arms, feathers in the hair?” Lin asked.

“Nah,” Juren replied, waving away the suggestion. “Nobody like that.”

“He’s always got a couple of wolfhounds with him,” she added.

“I told you. There wasn’t no one like that there.”

Valyn was about to ask what Annick was doing at Manker’s when the door burst open. He dropped a hand to his belt knife. People who slammed open doors weren’t usually looking for a quiet evening of cards, and he readied himself for some drunken sailor, half-dead on rum and swinging a busted bottle. Instead, a young woman stumbled into the room. She wore a grimy, red, low-cut dress a few sizes too big for her small frame, and a cheap ribbon in her mousy hair. Tears streamed like rain down her white cheeks, and her baffled brown eyes shone in the meager lamplight.

“Amie’s dead,” she sobbed. “They took ’er, and they sliced ’er up, and now she’s dead!”

Valyn scanned the room. He had no idea who the girl was, who Amie was, or what in ’Shael’s name was going on, but it didn’t sound pretty. Usually the locals had enough sense to leave the Kettral out of their vendettas and turf wars, but if he’d learned one thing on the Islands, it was that fear and rage made people unpredictable. Whatever the girl was talking about, it sounded bad. He glanced over at Lin. It didn’t seem like they were going to get much more out of Juren. There were a few more survivors that he wanted to hunt up, and he had neither the time nor the inclination to get caught up in some asinine local brawl at the Black Boat.

His friend, however, hadn’t moved. She was just staring at the girl, lips parted, but silent.

“You know her?” Valyn asked.

She nodded. “Rianne. She’s a whore. Works down by the docks, mostly, but she and her sister have a little garden on the hill above town. I used to buy firefruit from her in the spring.”

“Who’s Amie?” Valyn asked warily, keeping an eye on the seated patrons. Everyone was watching Rianne. No one had risen, but whispered conversations were starting up at a few of the tables, and men were easing back in their seats, freeing up the knives and cutlasses tucked in their belts, eyeing one another cautiously. None of the other patrons were Kettral, but evidently they, too, had learned the hard way to distrust surprises. Valyn measured the distance to the door, the gap between him and the other tables, running through a half dozen tactical responses if things went ugly.

“Amie was her sister,” Lin replied. Her eyes remained fixed on Rianne. She seemed oblivious of the tension in the room.

Rianne took a couple of steps forward, her bony hands beggared before her as though she were holding up an invisible body. The people at the nearest tables leaned back in their chairs, giving her space. She stared helplessly from one face to the next, as though searching for something, the nature of which she had long ago forgotten. Then she saw Lin.

“Ha Lin,” she whispered, dropping to her knees on the rough wooden floor. “You have to help me.” Valyn wasn’t sure if the posture was part of the plea, or if she simply lacked the strength to stand. “You’re a soldier. You’re Kettral. You can find them! Please.” She raked a hand through her tangled hair. Dark streaks lined her face, tears smeared with the charcoal she used to darken her eyes. “You have to help me.”

All eyes swiveled to the two soldiers.

“Not our concern,” Valyn murmured to his friend, tossing a couple of coins on the bar and getting ready to step past the kneeling woman.

Lin fixed him with an angry glare. “Whose concern is it?”

“Her father’s,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his voice low, trying to turn Lin away from the prying stares. “Her brother’s.”

“She doesn’t have a father. Or a brother. She and Amie were alone.”

“How in Hull did they end up on Hook?”

“Does it matter?” Lin snapped.

Valyn took a deep breath. “We can’t do this now,” he ground out. Rianne’s situation sounded horrible, tragic, but there was no way they could chase down every killer on Hook, no way they could defend every dockyard whore. Besides, even if they found the man responsible, the Eyrie explicitly forbade unauthorized violence against civilians. There were a thousand reasons to step past the girl, offer a polite condolence, and return to Qarsh. “This isn’t why we’re here.”

Lin stepped in close, close enough that he could smell the sea salt in her hair, opened her mouth to say something, and then looked over her shoulder, as though noticing the other patrons for the first time. Her lips tightened.

“So much for protecting the innocent people of Annur.”

Valyn swallowed a curse. All eyes were on him now, furtive, feral glances over the rims of tankards, calculating stares from the far end of the room. The whole thing was horseshit. They’d come to the Boat to get answers out of Juren, to learn something about the conspiracy to kill Valyn, to try to thwart a plot to overthrow the entire fucking empire. Evidently all it took to knock them off the scent was a sailor’s whore with a sob story. In fact, once you started thinking about plots, Rianne’s sudden, unexpected appearance looked pretty suspicious. He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again.

Quarrel if you must, Hendran wrote, but do so out of sight. Open division emboldens a foe.

Valyn had no idea what to make of the girl’s sudden arrival, but arguing about it with Ha Lin in the middle of a crowded tavern seemed like a poor way to proceed. Juren wasn’t going anywhere with his busted leg. Any secrets about the collapse of Manker’s would still be there to uncover a day later, a week later. There’s time, he thought to himself.

Besides, Lin had a point. Assuming Rianne was telling the truth, she, like Valyn, had lost family. She, like Valyn, wanted answers. Unlike Valyn, however, she was no Kettral. She lacked the tools to solve her own mystery, lacked the training to rectify a wrong. The memory of the corpses from Manker’s came back to him, bodies broken and bloated with water. Whatever else was going on, the Kettral were supposed to protect people, to guard citizens and defend the helpless. That, as much as the swords and the birds, was why Valyn had stepped onto the boat eight years earlier.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked warily.

* * *

The room was a cramped garret on the fourth story of a tall, narrow building next to the harbor. A rickety staircase spiraled up tightly, the ceiling so low Valyn had to crouch, boards so warped and twisted that each time they groaned beneath his weight he wondered if the whole thing was going to crumble, dumping him into the cellar. If someone wanted to kill me, he thought grimly, this is the place to do it. The sun had set while they were still in the Black Boat, and inside the building the only light came from Rianne’s small storm lantern, a weak, flickering flame that did little more than carve furtive, jerking shadows from the darkness.

Valyn didn’t like the feel of that darkness. For all that Hull was the patron god of the Kettral, for all the midnight training missions, for all the blindfolded practice assembling and breaking down arbalests and munitions, the close, claustrophobic dark of the stairwell felt alien and unfriendly. Shadows were supposed to be allies of the soldier, but this inky black was menacing and palpable-a cloak for any would-be assassin.

He glanced over his shoulder at Rianne. The girl had practically dragged them down the dusty street, but as they approached the building she grew suddenly reluctant, as though overwhelmed with dread at the thought of what waited above.

“What is this place?” Valyn asked her, trying to be gentle, trying to dampen his own apprehension.

She scrubbed a tear away. “It’s nothing.”

“Who owns it?”

“No one. Used to be a boarding house, but it’s been abandoned better’n four years now.”

“And your sister was here?” he asked, confused. “What was she doing?”

Rianne dropped her red-rimmed eyes. “We took ’em here, sometimes,” she mumbled. “The men.”

Valyn frowned. “Why didn’t you just take them home?”

Rianne stopped on the stairs ahead of him, and turned until the lantern was shining directly into his eyes. He could smell her cheap perfume, and underneath, a sharper, more desperate smell of fear, hunger, exhaustion. “Would you?” she asked dully.

They climbed the remainder of the stairs in silence. As they neared the garret, Valyn noticed a new smell. It was the same as on the ship, the same as on every battlefield he’d ever studied, only those bodies had all been outside, washed by the rain and bleached by the sun before he got a look at them. As Lin shoved open the rickety door, the cloying, pent-up scent of death and rot threatened to choke him, and he stopped for a second, forcing down the bile in his throat. Rianne had started sobbing again.

“It’s fine,” he said. “You don’t need to come in with us. Why don’t you wait downstairs?”

She nodded feebly, handed him the lantern, and turned back into the darkness.

Once Valyn stepped into the cramped, peeling attic, he was glad he’d sent her away. There was only one body, but the sight was as disturbing as any tableau of battlefield carnage. Someone had stripped the murdered girl of her clothes-they were tossed in an untidy heap in the corner-and then hung her by her wrists from the low rafters. The corpse had bloated and rot had set in badly, but Amie looked as though she had been even younger than her sister-maybe sixteen, blond, pale, probably pretty. Festering red gashes ran the length of her slender torso, her arms, her legs, all deep enough to paint her skin with runnels of blood, but none severe enough to kill quickly. Tightening flesh curled back from the wounds. The rope groaned as she twisted, moved by some slight, unseen breeze.

Valyn sucked in an angry breath, clenched his hand into a fist, and turned away. Outside the narrow window, the night was calm and cool. Across the harbor he could see the lights of the Black Boat and the other alehouses, as well as the dark gaping hole where Manker’s had been. People were walking on the streets of Hook, laughing and arguing, going on about their lives, heedless of the girl who had been tied up, murdered, and left to rot in an abandoned attic.

“Sons of bitches,” Lin breathed behind him. She was angry, Valyn could hear that clearly enough, but there was a faint current of something else behind the anger-fear, and confusion.

He turned back to the room, trying to find something concrete, some particular detail upon which he could focus his training. There wasn’t much to look at. A thin tick mattress stuffed with reeds lay heaped in the corner, evidently kicked out of the way during the assault. A three-legged stool squatted beneath the window, and a wooden shelf along one wall supported a few candles that had burned down to the nubs, splattering the warped floor with tallow. He considered those for a while. Candles were relatively expensive-fat had to be cut, rendered, then cast around the wick. They were a necessity, of course, for those who worked by night, but the poor and thrifty would never waste the excess drippings. Rianne’s lantern, like most of the lanterns on Hook, was fed by cheap fish oil, and gave off an inconstant light that was as smoky as it was rank. He wondered if the candles had belonged to Amie, if she had intended to scrape the tallow off the floor later, or if her murderer had brought them, planning ahead to ensure he had plenty of light by which to perform his grisly work.

Relucantly, Valyn turned back to the corpse. Her ankles were tied, no doubt to keep her from kicking. His eyes settled on the knot: a peculiar double bowline with a couple of extra loops. He started to study it, then tore himself away. You’re looking at the knot to avoid looking at the girl, he realized, forcing himself to shift his gaze from her wrists to her face.

“All right,” he said brusquely, turning to the training he had spent so many years perfecting. “How did she die?”

Ha Lin didn’t respond. She stood in the center of the room, arms slack at her sides, head shaking silently, slowly as she considered the revolving corpse.

“Lin,” Valyn said, edging his voice with what he hoped was something of Adaman Fane’s characteristic growl. “What killed this girl? How long has she been dead?”

Ha Lin turned to him blankly. For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to respond at all, but after a long pause her eyes focused, and she shook herself, as though awakening from a deep sleep. Her lips hardened into a thin line and she nodded abruptly before crossing to the dangling corpse. She leaned in to sniff the wounds, then ran a finger along the major lacerations, probing the flesh.

“No scent of poison. No major arteries severed.” She bit her lip. “It looks like blood loss, pure and simple.”

“Painful,” Valyn added grimly. “And slow.” He reached above the girl’s head and cut the rope holding her up before easing her body to the floor. “Take a look at this,” he said, holding out the severed rope.

Lin squinted in the darkness. “The rope is from Li,” she said, the surprise clear in her voice. Li was on the other side of the world, months distant by sail. They made the best rope and steel in the world there, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that found itself into the hands of the sailors on Hook. The Kettral, on the other hand … the Kettral used Liran cord sometimes. It was too slick for the taste of most soldiers, but it was light and strong, and there were those who swore by it.

Valyn and Lin exchanged a bleak stare.

“When did she die?” he asked finally, breaking the silence.

Lin hunched over the body, sniffing the wounds once more.

“Hard to say. The rot looks almost two weeks advanced, but that could swing a few days in either direction, depending.”

“Must get pretty hot up here during the day,” Valyn agreed. “Body would decay faster.”

Lin nodded, then drove her fingers into one of the gashes, searched around for a minute before pulling out something white and glistening. “The skin might lie, but the bugs won’t.” She held up the writhing creatures for Valyn to inspect.

“Blood worms, still larval.”

Valyn took the worm, a sickening sluglike thing, and held it up to the fading light from the window. “It’s got its eyes just in.”

“But no segmentation yet. Which means less than eleven days.”

He nodded. “Six days to incubate. One to hatch. Four to grow the eyes.”

“She’s been dead for ten days, for almost exactly ten days.”

Valyn nodded. “Which means she died…” He counted back, then paused, turning first to the body, then to Lin.

She stared back at him, brown eyes huge in the lamplight. “Which means she died the same day Manker’s collapsed into the harbor.”