The Emperor's blades

14

The soil of Hook, like that of all the Qirin chain, was rocky and unforgiving, and so it took Valyn and Lin the better part of two hours, working in shifts behind the pathetic shack in which Rianne and Amie had made their home, to hack a hole deep enough to bury the murdered girl. That was the easy part. Then they had to return to the horrible, reeking garret, wrap the corpse in a scrap of sailcloth they bought down by the docks, and carry her back to her grave. When the stones and thin soil were finally mounded up over the earth, then scattered with the few wretched petals Rianne had scrounged from the yellowweed behind the house, the moon had dipped toward the horizon, while the bright stars people called Pta’s gems hung directly overhead, cold, distant, and unpitying.

Valyn ached when he put down the shovel. Kettral training had prepared him for just about any kind of physical suffering, but there was something about digging a grave, an extra weight, as though the dirt tossed out of the hole were not just dirt, but something harder, heavier. He had seen plenty of bodies, had trained for years to kill people, but the corpses of the battlefield and the grown men he had seen there, armored for war and cut down in fury and rage, were different from the pale, flaxen-haired figure they had found mutilated in the tiny garret.

As Lin wrestled a rough headstone into place, Rianne continued to cry, low and quiet, as she had all night. Valyn turned to the girl. He wanted to say something wise, something comforting, but there just wasn’t a whole lot in the way of comfort to be had. The normal platitudes one offered in such situations seemed ridiculous and trite. I’m sorry for your loss? Rianne’s sister hadn’t been lost; she’d been strung up and hacked at like a slab of beef in a slaughterhouse, tortured horribly and left to die. She’s gone to a better world? What world? If there was a world after death, no one had come back from it with stories to tell. No, there wasn’t a ’Shael-spawned thing to say, and yet, he couldn’t just stand there staring at her.

“How about a drink?” he asked awkwardly. It was a soldier’s response to death, but it would have to do. “We’ll toast your sister.”

“A … a … alright,” she managed between choked-off sobs. “I’ve got some peach wine inside. It’s not very good, but Amie and I used to-” The memory of her sister strangled the end of the sentence, and as Valyn watched helplessly, Lin wrapped her arm around Rianne’s narrow shoulders.

“Your sister’s fine now,” she said quietly. “What happened to her was horrible, but it’s over.” As Rianne whimpered into her shoulder, Ha Lin raised her eyes to Valyn. “Why don’t you get that wine? We can share it in Amie’s memory. Pour some on her grave.”

Valyn nodded and turned toward the house, grateful for a momentary reprieve. The Kettral spent years training soldiers to get used to the dead; they didn’t say much, though, about dealing with the living.

The chipped crock of peach wine wasn’t hard to find. The sisters had only a few possessions: a single straw mattress, neatly covered with a tattered quilt, a trunk with one drawer missing. Two bowls and two spoons next to a wide tin washbasin. He imagined them sitting on the bed together, no more than children really, spooning up some kind of broth and telling each other stories to keep their lives at bay. He shook his head and pushed open the door, stepping back into the darkness.

They passed the bottle around, poured a swallow on the grave, then passed it around again. Lin asked Rianne if she wanted to say a few words about her sister.

“She took care of me,” was all Rianne could manage. “She was younger than me, but she took care of me.”

“It’s all right now,” Lin repeated quietly.

Valyn wanted to ask what, exactly, was all right about what had happened to Amie, but willed himself silent. Rianne’s life had turned dark enough without him dousing whatever light was left.

“Do you think Ananshael is kind to the dead?” she whispered after a while.

Lin glanced over at Valyn. People didn’t tend to think of the Lord of Bones as “kind.” It was hard to conceive of a god who ripped souls from bodies of the living, who parted parents from children and youths from their lovers, as anything other than fickle and malevolent. Macabre stories of the Skullsworn, the bloody priests of Ananshael, abounded: men and women who drank blood from goblets and strangled infants in their cribs. The Skullsworn were trained assassins, ruthless killers, and aside from the Kettral, probably the deadliest group on the two continents. If his chosen priests were any indication, it certainly did not seem that Ananshael would be kind.

On the other hand, Hendran had written that the last gift you could give to a suffering soldier was death. Valyn thought back to the corpse of Amie, dangling from her wrists in the garret, eyes straining from her skull. Perhaps, in the end, Ananshael had been kind to her after all. Perhaps he was no more vicious than a gardener trimming his trees, a farmer about his autumn harvest.

“‘Only the dead,’” Valyn said quietly, quoting the passage, “‘are at peace.’”

Rianne nodded. It seemed unlikely that she’d had occasion to study Hendran, but the sentiment seemed to make sense to her. When he considered the life she’d led, it wasn’t hard to see why. He hoisted the crock to his lips, took another swig, and passed it. For a while the three of them drank in silence, sitting on the cold earth, staring at the cold mound of stones that marked the termination of a life.

“Do you have any idea who did it?” Valyn asked finally. He hated to break the quiet, the illusion of tranquillity, but the question had been gnawing at his gut.

“No,” Rianne responded, shaking her head despondently. “I didn’t think anyone could…” She trailed off, but didn’t start crying again.

Tough girl, Valyn thought, to pull herself together in the space of a single night. He’d seen Kettral cadets who took more time to get over their first battlefield examination.

“Did Amie say she was going to be meeting anyone?” Lin prompted. “Any … men?”

Rianne bit her lip and squinted into the darkness. “She said … Yes … She said she was going to see a soldier, but that was early in the day.”

Valyn and Lin exchanged a look.

“Kettral?” Valyn asked slowly, although the answer was obvious. Marriage was forbidden to the Kettral; a husband or wife was a liability, a distraction, a lever an enemy might use to manipulate or blackmail. Henderson Jakes, the founder of the Eyrie, had envisioned a cadre of elite soldiers dedicated to celibacy, the empire, and the art of war. He had to settle for two out of three. Young men and women willing to leap off massive birds into burning buildings at a mere nod from a commanding officer grew violently rebellious when required to abstain from sex. After six or eight soldiers had been marched to the gallows for fucking on night watch, fucking on recon, fucking while harnessed into one of the ’Kent-kissing birds (Valyn always found that one both implausible and impressive), resentment among the troops boiled over and it looked like Jakes might come to a violent and untimely end, along with the order he sought to found. Like any good tactician, Jakes knew when he had to give ground. The ban against marriage remained, but the prohibition regarding sex was lifted.

Hundreds of years later, whores and whorehouses abounded on Hook-a simple solution to an ancient problem. Valyn had visited a few himself, usually dragged along by Laith or Gent when they were in their cups. He always felt a little dirty afterwards, always knew he would go again when pressed. It seemed harmless enough, and after all, no one was forcing the women. Amie’s death, however …

“She was going to meet Kettral?” he asked again, his voice rougher than he’d intended.

Rianne nodded.

“Did she say who?”

“No,” she replied heavily. “Just that they were meeting at Manker’s. She seemed excited, which was strange. Being a whore-there are worse jobs-but it’s not something Amie enjoyed. She didn’t look forward to … seeing the men.”

Valyn’s heart thudded in his chest. It made a sick sort of sense; if anyone knew how to truss up a girl, how to silence her, murder her, and slip away without anyone the wiser, it was the Kettral. That’s what the Eyrie trained them for. And then, of course, there was the cord from Li to consider. The next question rose unbidden to his lips, but before he could ask it, a racket from the lane outside the shack brought him up short. Someone, two men by the sound of it-two drunken men were approaching the house, crowing out slurred lyrics as they came.

We wear the blacks when we attack,

From the moment we wake till we hit the sack.

Black as darkness, black as death,

We’ll wear the blacks to our final breath.

We march alongside Ananshael

And leave the widows to weep and wail.

You ask by whom this woe was sent?

The Lord of Pain and Cries: Meshkent.

“Kettral,” Valyn said, eyeing Lin.

She nodded tightly, removing her arm from Rianne’s shoulders to free up her right hand.

“Rianne!” someone bellowed merrily, pounding at the flimsy door out in front of the hut. “Amie! We come bearing coin and cock!”

“And flowers,” urged the other, deeper voice.

“And be-au-ti-ful flowers!”

“I’ll deal with this,” Valyn said, stepping through the back door of the house. He crossed the small space in a few strides, checking his twin blades as he went, then flung open the front door into the faces of two fellow cadets. Laith carried a bottle of wine in each hand and had struck a grandiose pose outside the door, head thrown back, hips thrust forward, arms wide in greeting. Gent stood half a step behind him, tunic unlaced halfway down his chest, a scraggly bouquet of island flowers held in one huge fist.

Both cadets reeled backwards, eyebrows drawn down as they tried to make sense of Valyn’s unexpected presence in the doorway. Then Laith burst into laughter.

“Well played, Valyn! Well played! And here we thought you spent all your evenings mooning over Lin!”

“What are you doing here?” Valyn demanded, feeling foolish even as the words left his lips. Amie and Rianne were whores. It didn’t take much calculation to figure out what might have drawn the two cadets, pounding on their door in the middle of the night.

Gent beamed drunkenly while Laith leaned forward with a conspiratorial grin. “Sometimes we come for the outstanding library, sometimes for the learned discussion of political affairs, but tonight”-he winked-“I think we’re more in the mood for a little tickle, if you know what I mean, provided you haven’t tired them both out. Amie!” he bellowed-so loud, Valyn’s ears rang. “Rianne! We come bearing coin and cock!”

“Shut it, you ’Kent-kissing idiots,” Valyn hissed, snatching them both by the blacks and dragging them inside.

Laith regained his balance first and peered blearily about him. “What’s wrong with you? Where’s Amie? Where’s Rianne?”

“Amie’s dead,” Valyn snapped, waiting to make sure the words had penetrated the haze of alcohol. “Someone hung her from a rafter and cut her to ribbons.”

The two cadets had seemed impressively drunk, but they sobered impressively quickly. Gent still wobbled some on his feet, and Laith’s eyes still twitched, but by the time Valyn had finished speaking, Gent was tossing his bouquet aside and both were reaching for their knives.

“Where?” Laith demanded, rotating to put his back toward Valyn and Gent, scanning the small, dark space of the cottage.

“Not here,” Valyn replied. “She was-” He stopped himself as Rianne’s words hit him: She was going to see a soldier. He eyed Gent and Laith, suddenly wary. He’d known them both for half his life. Laith flew too fast and drank too much, and Gent tore into other soldiers like a rabid bull in training exercises, but neither of them seemed capable of the violence inflicted on the dead girl. Besides, Amie had been dead for more than a week. If they were the ones to have killed her, they wouldn’t be likely to show up in the middle of the night, looking for a tumble.

“Not here,” he said again.

“When?” Laith asked.

“What about Rianne?” Gent rumbled, his voice hard.

“Almost two weeks ago,” Valyn replied. “But her sister just found the body tonight, tied up and cut up in a garret down by the harbor. Rianne’s fine. Or as fine as you’d expect, after finding her sister’s body. We just got finished burying Amie.”

“Shit and ’Shael,” Laith muttered, sheathing his belt knife and shaking his head. “Where is she?”

Valyn nodded through the back door.

Laith took a step toward it, then stopped to clumsily gather up the flowers Gent had dropped on the floor, rearranging them into a lopsided bouquet once more.

Rianne started crying once again when she saw the two cadets. Gent’s eyes flitted to the grave; then he turned to her with an awkward formality.

“Valyn told us what happened. You find the bastard, and we’ll kill him.” He concluded with a brusque nod, as though that settled everything.

Laith gathered Rianne in his arms. She started to resist, then sagged against him, snuffling. Another man might have felt awkward, comforting the whore he’d crossed the sound to bed, but Laith didn’t feel awkward about much. He kissed her hair as if she were his own sister and rocked her back and forth without saying a word.

Lin watched the two with hooded eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“Does it matter?” Laith responded quietly.

They locked gazes over Rianne’s head. Then Lin shook her head. “I suppose not.”

Over the next hour, the five of them drank the wine Laith had brought. As it turned out, the two cadets had been bedding the sisters off and on since they were old enough to fumble their pricks out of their pants. Valyn was surprised at the range of stories they remembered about the murdered girl, each one bawdier than the last. At first he thought the coarse tales would insult Rianne or set her on edge, but the truth was, she seemed strangely touched to find that someone else remembered something about her sister, and she laughed along with their jokes, her words more slurred as the night dragged on. The jugs went round and round and finally the poor girl lapsed into a drunken sleep, her head resting on Laith’s thigh.

The cadet ran a finger down her cheek, said her name once, then again louder. When it was clear she wasn’t waking up, he turned to Valyn.

“What in ’Kent’s name happened?”

It didn’t take long to recount the story, and no one seemed to feel like speaking when it was finished. Somewhere down the lane a dog was barking over and over, a trapped, desperate sound.

“Kettral, eh?” Laith asked finally, his voice uncharacteristically subdued.

“Not necessarily,” Lin replied, an edge to her voice. “Rianne said that Amie was looking forward to meeting a soldier that morning, but that doesn’t mean it was a soldier responsible for her death. Whores get slapped around all the time. When a man pays for a girl like cattle, you shouldn’t be surprised when he treats her like cattle.”

Valyn grimaced. “Getting her up all those stairs, tying her up the way we found her, keeping her quiet the whole time-”

“It’s not like Hook is a ’Kent-kissing monastery,” Lin said, cutting him off. “The place is a madhouse. Between sailors brawling down by the docks and the rest of the town getting drunk, you could slaughter an ox in the street at high noon and most people wouldn’t notice.”

“I’m just saying,” Valyn replied, “it doesn’t scream ‘amateur’-”

“It screams fucked up,” Gent rumbled.

“Of course it’s fucked up,” Lin snapped, her voice filled with venom. “The whole thing is fucked up. You’ve been … patronizing Amie for years? Since she was thirteen?”

“Leave it alone, Lin,” Laith replied. “We didn’t kill her. Besides, how old were you the first time you had a tumble? Twelve? Whores and soldiers both grow up fast.”

“She’s not grown up,” Lin snarled. “She’s dead.”

“And we’re trying to figure out who killed her,” Valyn said, trying to calm the two before Rianne woke to a full-blown brawl.

“Some sick bastard who likes to cut up his whores before he has his way with them,” Gent suggested.

Lin darted her eyes at the sleeping girl.

“She’s out,” Laith said, not ungently. “I’ve thought I had some good reasons to drink myself dark, but this…” He shook his head.

“So who?” Valyn persisted. “Lin and I were here on Hook the day she died. It was the day Manker’s collapsed. Sami Yurl was here, too.”

“Sounds like Yurl,” Gent said. “Force a girl. Hurt her.”

Lin looked like she was going to say something sharp, but she bit her lip. “No,” she said almost reluctantly. “He’d force a girl. Maybe even kill her. He’d certainly enjoy it. But the scene we found … the candles … the rope … the wounds-it was too…”

“Too private,” Valyn agreed after a moment’s thought. “Yurl likes to hurt people, to embarrass them, but he likes an audience.”

“Well,” Laith said, frowning, “it’s not like he’s the only one of our esteemed brothers in arms who enjoys causing pain.”

It was a casual remark, but it brought back Valyn’s conversation from the evening before. It seemed a week rather than a single night since he’d threatened Juren for information over at the Black Boat.

“Annick was on Hook the day Amie was killed,” he said abruptly. “The guy who looks after Manker’s saw her there in the morning.”

“She’s certainly a murderous bitch,” Laith replied speculatively.

“Manker’s,” Lin cut in, nodding. “Amie was going to Manker’s that same morning. That’s what Rianne said.”

“For what?” Laith asked.

“To meet a soldier.”

They exchanged a look.

“Well,” Gent said, “I don’t understand much about Annick, but she ain’t a man.”

Valyn waved the objection aside. “We don’t know that it was a man who killed Amie-we know it was a soldier.”

A light breeze had picked up off the harbor, heavy with salt and low tide. Somewhere close by, a man and woman were screaming at each other, either in the street or in one of the sad hovels like the one where Amie and Rianne lived. It went on for a few moments before the woman let out a sharp cry of pain, then fell silent.

“A woman wouldn’t do that to another woman,” Lin said finally.

“Kettral aren’t like other people,” Valyn said. “And Kettral women certainly aren’t like other women.” He tried to lighten the tone of the final comment, but there wasn’t much levity to be had.

“But why?” Gent asked, his blunt features screwed tight in concentration. “Why would Annick want to kill her? To do … that?”

“Why does that bitch do anything?” Laith replied. “She’s crazy as a blind fox in a locked henhouse.”

Though Annick was only fifteen years old, the hardened Kettral trainers joked that she had a rock for a heart and steel for a stomach. She ate by herself in the mess hall, trained by herself on the archery range, and if the rumor was true, slept with her bow lying beside her in her bunk. The idea that she might visit Manker’s for a cup of ale and some idle chatter seemed about as likely as a shark strolling out of the sea on its fins to ask for a bowl of soup.

“Annick might be crazy,” Valyn said quietly, “but she’s deliberate. She could do something like this.”

“We still don’t have any idea why,” Lin pointed out. “Annick went to a tavern and so now she’s a murderer?”

“Just because she’s a woman, she can’t be?” Laith demanded.

Lin opened her mouth, but before she could retort, Valyn interposed a hand.

“‘Assume nothing,’” he said. The first chapter of the Tactics. “If we figure everyone might be a murderer, we’re less likely to be disappointed.”