The Emperor's blades

21

One could be forgiven, Kaden thought, for believing that Tan might go easier on him now that the whole mystery of the kenta had been revealed. After all, the older monks had finally taken him into their confidence, had explained to him secrets to which only a few people in the empire, only a few people in the whole world were privy. One could be forgiven for thinking that the conversation in the abbot’s study constituted a graduation of sorts, an acknowledgment that he had moved from being an acolyte to … something more. One could be forgiven, he thought unsmilingly, but one would be wrong.

As they departed from the small stone hut, Tan turned, blocking the narrow path. Kaden was tall, but the older monk overtopped him by half a head, and it took an effort of will not to retreat a step.

“The vaniate is not something you can learn like mathematics or the names of trees,” he began, voice barely more than a growl. “You cannot study it. You cannot commit it to memory. You cannot pray that a god will deliver the wisdom to you in your sleep.”

Kaden nodded, uncertain where the conversation was leading.

His umial smiled bleakly. “You are quick to agree. You fail to understand that the emptiness does not simply grow inside you like a plant. Think of the hollow of the bowls you just completed. You had to drive your fingers into the clay. You had to force the hollowness upon it.”

“It feels more like guiding than forcing,” Kaden ventured, made bold by the abbot’s confidence and his newfound knowledge. “If you push too hard, the bowl is ruined.”

Tan regarded him for a long, uncomfortable moment, his stare pointed as a nail. “If you learn one thing under my tutelage,” the older monk said slowly, “it will be this: Emptiness exists only when something else has been gouged away.”

And so it was that Kaden found himself on a bare patch of ground sandwiched between the rear wall of the refectory and a low band of cliff, shovel in one hand, a half-dug hole in front of him. A few feet away Tan sat cross-legged in the shade of a juniper. His eyes were closed, his breathing steady, as though he slept, but Kaden knew better. He wouldn’t have bet money that his umial ever really slept.

The monk had instructed him to dig a hole straight down, two feet wide and as deep as Kaden was tall. The scent of stewed onions and hearty brown bread hung on the breeze, and through the refectory windows Kaden could hear the murmured conversation of the other monks, the scraping of benches, the clink of wood on clay as they filled their bowls. His stomach grumbled, but he forced hunger from his mind and turned his attention to the task once more. Whatever was in store, it would only go worse if Tan thought his pupil was shying away from the work.

The ground was hard and rocky, desiccated as stale bread, more gravel than earth. Time and again Kaden had to lower himself into the hole to claw at a large stone with his bare hands, scraping away at the outline until he could drive a couple of fingers beneath and pry the thing from its socket. The going was slow. He ripped two fingernails out of their beds, and his hands were cut and bleeding, but by the evening bell Kaden had hacked a hole out of the earth to roughly the right dimensions.

Tan stood when the work was complete, walked to the edge of the small pit, nodded once, and gestured toward the hole. “Get in.”

Kaden hesitated.

“Get in,” the older monk said again.

Kaden lowered himself gingerly into the hole. Once he’d found his footing on the uneven bottom, he could just peer over the lip. The faces of a few of the younger monks peered out the open windows of the refectory. Penance was a commonplace at Ashk’lan, but Tan had never had a pupil before, and evidently they took some sort of interest in Kaden’s fate. They didn’t have to wait long to satisfy their curiosity. The monk hefted the shovel and, without regard for Kaden’s eyes or ears, started tossing earth back into the hole.

It took him a tenth of the time to fill the hole that it had taken Kaden to dig it. When Kaden lifted a hand to brush the dirt from his eyes Tan shook his head.

“Keep your arms at your sides,” he said without breaking the steady rhythm of pitching and shoveling.

As the dirt inched above Kaden’s chin, he started to object. A fresh shovelful caught him square in the open mouth, and before he could finish coughing or spitting, Tan had packed the earth up to just below his nose. Jagged stones gouged into his flesh in a dozen places. The heavy dirt might have been lead, and he felt the panic rise inside him. He couldn’t move his arms or legs, couldn’t even take a full breath. He might die here, he realized. If his umial threw just a few more shovels of earth over his head, he would suffocate beneath the gravelly soil, unable to breathe, to move, to scream.

He closed his eyes and let his mind float. Fear is a dream, he told himself. Pain is a dream. The rising flood of panic inside him subsided. He took a shallow breath through his nose, concentrating on the feel of the air in his lungs. With his eyes still closed, he held the breath for seven heartbeats, then exhaled slowly, relaxing his body as the air escaped. The fear drained out through his feet, through his fingertips, leaching into the soil around him until he was calm once more. The mind learned from the body, and if he kept his body still, if he refused to struggle, he could keep his mind still as well.

He opened his eyes to find Tan regarding him with a steady, low-lidded gaze. Kaden thought his umial might speak, if only to taunt him or make some final, gnomic command. Instead, the monk hefted the shovel over his shoulder and turned away without a word, leaving his pupil buried to his upper lip in the hard and unyielding soil.

For a while Kaden was alone. The sounds of the refectory rose, then fell as the monks departed from the evening meal, bound for the meditation hall or the solitude of their own cells. The large stone building blocked any view of the setting sun, but gradually the sky darkened from blue to bruised, and the night wind came, cold and biting, down off the mountains to blow grit and dirt in his face.

For a long time, all Kaden could think about was the pressure, the constant, enveloping sense of weight against his flesh, constricting his chest whenever he tried to take a breath. It was impossible to move, even to shift, and the muscles of his legs and lower back soon began to spasm, protesting against the confinement. As the air and the earth chilled, he found himself shivering uncontrollably.

Calm, he told himself, taking a shallow breath. This is not a knife in the gut or a noose around the neck. It is not torture. It is only earth. Valyn probably endures far worse every day of his training.

When he finally managed to still the quivering of his body, the fear came. He had not really thought about the mangled goat for some time. Whatever was killing the flock had yet to venture within miles of the monastery, and yet … the saama’an of the shattered skull grew unbidden in his mind. Here, immobile, buried to the lip in earth, Kaden would make easier prey than the most decrepit goat. The thing had not attacked a man, but Tan and Scial Nin had insisted it might be dangerous, insisted the acolytes and novices travel in pairs.

It was almost full dark when Kaden heard the quiet crunch of gravel behind him. It was impossible to turn. He could barely shift his head at all, and the effort sent a stabbing pain down his neck and into his back. It could be Tan, he told himself, trying to believe that his umial had returned to dig him out, and yet, it seemed unlikely that the older monk would release him before the night bell. Kaden opened his mouth to shout, to demand to know who was approaching, but dirt poured in, thick on his tongue, threatening to gag him. His heart strained against the weight of the earth, heedless of his attempts to slow it.

The steps drew closer, then halted behind him. Kaden managed to cough, clearing the grit from his throat, but he still couldn’t speak. A hand came down on his scalp, pulling his head back, back, until he was staring at the night sky. Someone was crouching over him, a shock of curling hair-

Akiil.

Kaden felt his limbs go slack and watery with relief. Of course. His friend would have heard about the penance. He would be here to gloat.

“You look terrible,” the boy announced after considering Kaden briefly.

Kaden tried to reply and got another mouthful of dirt for his trouble.

Akiil let go of his head and came around in front of Kaden, lowering himself to the dirt. “I’d dig you out a bit,” he said, gesturing toward the brimming earth, “but Tan told me if I moved so much as a pebble, he’d bury me right beside you and leave me for longer. The heroic thing would probably be to dig you out anyway-loyalty between friends, and all that.” He shrugged in the moonlight. “I’ve learned to be wary of heroism.”

He squinted, as though trying to make out Kaden’s expression. “Are you glaring at me?” he asked. “It looks like you’re glaring, but with those burning eyes of yours, it’s hard to tell glaring from just looking. Maybe you have to piss. Speaking of which, how do you piss while you’re in there?”

Kaden silently cursed his friend for reminding him of the growing pressure in his bladder. It appeared that one of the parts of his pupil that Tan intended to carve away was his dignity.

“Sorry I brought it up,” Akiil said. “And don’t be angry. I’m sure there’s a good reason for this. Just think-with such a concerned umial, you’re getting a real jump on your training.” He nodded encouragingly. “Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that our fates our tied. As long as you’re buried there, Tan wants me sitting behind you-in case a bird tries to shit on your head or some such.” He frowned. “Actually, there were no specific instructions about what to do if a bird shits on your head, but Tan wants me here, watching over you.”

He patted Kaden on the head as he rose. “I’m sure you’ll find that a comfort. Just remember-whatever you’re going through, I’m right here with you.”

“Akiil,” Tan said, his voice cutting through the darkness. “You are there to watch, not to talk. If you speak another word to my pupil, you will join him in the earth.”

Akiil didn’t speak another word.

For seven days, Kaden remained in the hole, baking in the noontime heat, shivering in his coffin of earth as the sun dropped beneath the steppe to the west and the stars swung up in a wheeling canopy of cold, distant light. He had been relieved to learn that he would not be left alone, but Akiil’s companionship, if it could be called that, provided scant comfort. At Tan’s insistence, he sat silently outside Kaden’s field of vision, and after the first day Kaden almost forgot he was there.

Instead, a thousand tiny trials filled his mind, minuscule problems he could not address that grew to maddening proportions. An itch on his thigh, for instance, that he once would have scratched absently and been done with, dogged him for two days. A cramp in his immobilized arm drove a spike of pain up his shoulder and into his neck. Tan’s digging had disturbed a nearby anthill, and the insects crawled over his face, into his ears and nose, into his eyes until he felt as though the creatures were everywhere, burrowing through the soil and swarming over his skin.

Every two days, someone brushed aside the earth covering his mouth and poured a cup of water onto his lips. Kaden lapped at it greedily, even going so far as to suck at the moist soil when the water was gone, a decision he always bitterly regretted when, hours later, he found his mouth plagued with grit that he could not spit out. He managed to tumble into a few hours of sleep late each night, when the monks had retired to their cells and the central square was still, but even his sleep was dogged by dreams of captivity and crushing confinement, and he woke haggard and exhausted each morning to find his nightmares real.

By the end of the first day, he thought he might go insane. By the fourth, he found himself hallucinating about water and freedom-vivid waking visions in which he splashed and danced in one of the cool mountain streams, whirling his arms and kicking his legs like a madman, slurping up great gulps of water, and sucking in endless breaths of clean, uncluttered air. When the monks came with his water, he found it difficult to tell if they were real or not, and stared the way one might at an apparition or a ghost.

On the eighth day, he woke to a cold dawn, the sky gray as slate, the light of the sun faint and watery over the eastern peaks. Several monks were up and about their morning ablutions, moving across the square, the only sound their bare feet crunching on the gravel of the paths. For a few heartbeats Kaden’s mind moved with a clean clarity he thought he had lost days before. Tan will leave me here, he realized. He will leave me here forever if I don’t learn what he wants me to learn. The thought should have filled him with desperation, but thoughts had lost all urgency. He felt as though reality was slipping from his grasp, and since his reality was a coffin of hard rock and unyielding soil, he was happy to let it go. After all, Kaden could suffer, but if Kaden wasn’t there, there was no suffering.

For a while he watched a thin white cloud, light as air and impossibly far away. When it scudded beyond the range of his vision, he looked instead into the wide gray blank of the sky. The empty sky, he thought idly to himself. A heaven of nothingness. Without that space, the cloud could not sail past. Without it, the stars could not turn in their orbits. Without that great emptiness, the trees would wither, the light dim, while the men and beasts walking and crawling over the earth, moving effortlessly through the great void of the heavens, suffocated under an unfathomable weight, just as he, now, was slowly suffocating. Kaden stared into the sky until he felt he might fall upward, plummeting away from the earth into the bottomless gray, dwindling to a thin point, then to nothing.

Two days later, Tan broke him from his daze. Kaden hadn’t seen his umial since the penance began, and he raised his eyes in perplexity, trying to make some sense of the robed figure above him.

“How do you feel?” the monk asked after a long silence, squatting down to scoop away the dirt covering Kaden’s mouth.

Kaden considered the question, revolving it in his mind like a strange, smooth stone. Feel. He knew what the word meant, but had forgotten how to connect it to himself. “I don’t know,” he replied.

“Are you angry?”

Kaden moved his head slightly in the negative. It occurred to him that he had reason to be angry, but his imprisonment was a fact. The earth around him was a fact. Thirst was a fact. It made no sense to be angry at facts.

“I could leave you here until the new moon.”

The new moon. Kaden had watched the moon each night, watched as the passage of time pared away sliver after lucent sliver. It was gibbous now, just fuller than half. The new moon was still a week off. Days earlier, the thought would have filled him with dread, but he could no longer muster the strength for dread. He could not even muster the strength to respond.

“Are you ready for me to dig you out?” Tan pressed.

Kaden stared at the man, at the puckered scars running down the sides of his scalp. Where did he get those scars? he wondered idly. Everything about the monk was a mystery. There was no point trying to guess the right answer to the question. Tan would release him or he would not, according to whatever arcane thoughts goverened his mood.

“I don’t know,” Kaden replied, his voice raw and ragged in his throat.

The older monk considered him for a while longer, then nodded.

“Good,” he said, then gestured to Akiil. “Dig,” he added, gesturing to the earth around Kaden.

The sensation was strange and unsettling at first. As the pressing weight that had held him, had crushed him, for so many days began to disappear, he felt as though he were falling, endlessly falling. As the gravel crunched beneath the steel, Kaden felt something trickle back into him: thoughts, he realized. Emotions.

“You’re letting me out?”

“It would have been better to leave you in another week,” Tan replied, “but circumstances have changed.”

Kaden squinted, trying to make sense of the words. “Circumstances?” The earth was packed around him. The sky spread above him. The sun carved its ineluctable arc through the blue. Those were the circumstances. What could have changed?

A cloud passed in front of the sun, casting the monk’s face into deep shadow.

“I’d leave you here longer, but it’s no longer safe.”