The Emperor's blades

26

Valyn rose early, bathed in the cold water from the sluice outside his barracks, shaved with his belt knife, then donned his best Kettral blacks. A stiffness had settled into his joints overnight, the rigid ache of muscles used past the limit of endurance, then left to tighten, and his legs protested as he limped between the buildings, past the mess hall, past command, across the great empty muster ground at the center of the compound, and up the trail toward the small rise overlooking the harbor. On a knoll a few hundred paces to the east, the spreading tenebral oak clawed at the sky with its gnarled limbs, but today the Kettral would pass by the shrine of their patron and pay homage to a different god. The soldiers referred to the stone ledge at the top of this small rise as Ananshael’s Table, and it was here that they commemorated their dead.

Others joined Valyn as he went, all Kettral now, a small stream of black flowing uphill. Gent walked a few paces ahead, favoring his left leg heavily. Gwenna followed half a dozen yards behind, her right arm in a sling. No one spoke. After the strain of the Trial, the weight of words was too great, their purpose too feeble.

For eight years, when Valyn had imagined this day, he had imagined celebration, laughter, backslapping, and, capping it all off, tankards upon tankards of beer over on Hook. This was the day they were finally Kettral; after eight years, this was the day they had proved themselves worthy successors to the line of iron men and women.

More recently-since the mysterious warning from the dying Aedolian-he had felt an even greater urgency to be done with the test. Those who survived the Trial were assigned to Wings in the roles for which they had trained, which meant, after a brief probational period, he would be commanding his own small group of soldiers and free, finally, to leave the Islands. Provided he was able to secure permission, he would be allowed to go after Kaden, to warn him. He’d thought about little else, over the preceding five weeks; certainly he had worried more for Kaden than he had for Ha Lin. Never in his worst foreboding had he imagined the Trial would prove her end.

Oh, she would be battered, maybe. He would be battered, too. That was all part of the fantasy-conjuring up the vicious but impotent wounds they would flash and flaunt, trading the stories of tests overcome, trials met, foes defeated. As it turned out, life with the Kettral didn’t line up very well with the stories. In the stories the soldiers traded gibes and offhand jests while dispatching the enemy with casual grace. In the stories the soldiers fucking lived.

He crested the low hill and stared at the bier. The gravelly limestone of the Qirins wasn’t suitable for burial, and although the Kettral spent countless hours in underwater training and missions, no one wanted to be laid to rest in the icy blue black of the ocean depths. They burned their dead, those whose bodies returned, here on this headland, on the sharp scrap of limestone thrust up through the earth like a bone tearing through flesh.

Someone must have built the bier in the night, while he and the rest of his cohort slept their own deathlike sleep, hammering the planks together with a carpenter’s care, although the whole thing was fashioned only for the flame. Like us, Valyn thought to himself. Trained, honed, drilled, and then … destroyed.

He forced himself to raise his eyes from the woodwork to the body atop it. Someone had taken the same care with Ha Lin that they had with the bier itself. She lay in her dress blacks, hands folded neatly across her chest, eyes closed, as though sleeping. The vicious gouges that marred her body, that had killed her in the end, were invisible now, hidden beneath the dark fabric. Her hair was combed back from her forehead in the way she used to wear it after climbing out of the waves after a long swim, and Valyn ached to step forward, to touch her face.

That was not, however, the way. Even in this, there was protocol to be observed, and he stood stiffly toward the side of the assembled group, his eyes fixed on Ha Lin’s smooth face, waiting for Daveen Shaleel to get on with it and make her speech. As he watched, a hand touched him lightly on the shoulder: Talal, another who had emerged from the Hole more battered than he had entered, his dark face somber.

“She would have made a good soldier,” he said quietly.

The anger came over Valyn all at once, hot and bright and unexpected. “She was a good soldier,” he snapped. “Better than the rest of this fucking lot,” he said, gesturing with a vague arm to the cadets who surrounded them.

Talal nodded, opened his mouth, then shut it again.

“What?” Valyn demanded, rounding on the leach. “What? You have some more insipid consolation to offer?” Despite the Eyrie’s tolerance, Ha Lin had never been able to bring herself to trust a leach, even Talal, and the fact that the youth stood before him now with no more than a few slashes and gouges while she lay dead on the hard wooden bier struck Valyn as some sort of crude final insult. “You went down into the Hole with your well and your kennings,” Valyn went on, gathering both speed and volume. “Protected by your secret, fucked-up powers. You might as well have had a dozen guards. We might as well have given you the egg right there on the island and skipped the ’Kent-kissing act. She went in there with nothing. With nothing.”

Talal’s face closed.

Gwenna laid a hand on Valyn’s arm, but he shook her off. “Get off me! All of you. Just get the fuck away from me.” He stepped away before he hit someone, giving himself space from the group and some air of his own, which he drank in deep gulps. His pulse raced, and it took him a moment to unclench his fist.

A few squalls chased along the southern horizon, dark smudges against the humid air. Now and again, a fork of lightning would lance down into the waves, followed long heartbeats later by the muffled thunder. Finally, Shaleel stepped in front of the bier. She considered Ha Lin for a long time, then turned to the assembled Kettral.

“Today we mark the loss of three of our number.”

Valyn had to keep reminding himself that Ha Lin wasn’t the only casualty. Nemmet and Quinn, a leach and a would-be flier, simply disappeared into the cavernous darkness. There were mutters that Fane, Sigrid, and the Flea had gone in looking for them once the Trial was over, but something-slarn, or rock fall, or the endless winding darkness itself-had simply swallowed the two cadets whole. Others had been luckier, but not lucky enough. Ferron found an egg, but lost his arm fighting free of a pack of slarn. Ennel had fallen from a ledge in the darkness and shattered his knee. The Eyrie would find jobs for them, of course, but neither would ever fly missions.

“When we arrive on these Islands,” Shaleel continued, “we give up the lives we might have led. We give up the comforts of home, the pleasures of peace and prosperity, the security of a life lived safely in the fold of the empire. In exchange we accept pain, and austerity, and, as this occasion reminds us, death. We give up our family, our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, blood of our blood, whom we may never see again. The men and women here become our family.”

Valyn looked over the assembled soldiers. Annick, without her bow for once, was looking out over the harbor, evidently more interested in the approaching weather than the funeral. Gwenna picked angrily at a long, ruddy scab running from her elbow to her wrist. Balendin, who wore new slashes across his face and hands, was eyeing Lin’s body with an inscrutable expression while Yurl managed to look smug and self-satisfied in spite of the bruise spreading across half his brow. Some ’Kent-kissing family, Valyn thought to himself grimly. Most of them he didn’t trust, and there were two he wanted to kill. Avenging the assault on Lin seemed pointless now, but then, the whole ’Shael-spawned endeavor had started to look a little pointless. Despite all his efforts, he was no closer to discovering the identities of the Kettral conspirators than he had been when Manker’s collapsed into the bay. One at a time he considered the various faces-Annick, Rallen, Yurl, Talal-each more unreadable than the last. He was supposed to be a warrior, a naked blade between the citizens of the empire and their foes, and yet all around him people kept dying, people he loved and those he barely knew. His stomach had twisted into a knot, torn between fury at his faceless enemy and disgust at his own failures.

The man still fighting last week’s battle will always lose to the man already fighting tomorrow’s, he reminded himself. He still had a couple weeks of training once they assigned him his new Wing, a couple weeks before he could go after Kaden. In the meantime, cutting down Yurl and Balendin was something concrete, something he could hold on to.

“Although we’ll never know what happened to Nemmet Rantin and Quinn Leng, we know that Ha Lin Cha, who lies before us now, completed the Trial. She went down into the darkness and she found there what she sought. That makes her Kettral.”

The words should have mattered. The title should have mattered. Even if only briefly, Ha Lin had achieved her goal, had completed her Trial. A month earlier, Valyn would have said it was better to die a Kettral than a mere cadet, but he wasn’t so sure anymore. Dead was dead. Ananshael had her now, and the Lord of Bones wasn’t likely to treat her any more gently because Daveen Shaleel had decided she earned a special title.

“We honor all three fallen soldiers as Kettral,” Shaleel continued.

“Ex-Kettral,” Yurl quipped with a grin. “Last time I checked, dead girls don’t fly missions.”

Valyn shifted his gaze to the youth. The hot rage blazed in his veins, his fingers curled into fists, but he forced himself to remain still, clenching those fists until his fingernails bit into his palms, tensing his muscles to still their trembling, forcing himself to draw even breaths as his heart clamored inside his ribs. For a long while he felt like he might explode just like one of Gwenna’s starshatters, but then, as quickly as the fit had come upon him, it passed. The heat had burned away, leaving a cold, implacable hatred.

The rigors of the Trial had done nothing to smooth the smugness from Yurl’s handsome face, but his smile soured when he found Valyn staring back at him. He tried to hold the gaze, then cursed under his breath and turned away. My eyes, Valyn realized. He’d seen them that morning in a mirror, but had been too wrung out to feel anything about the change. They had been brown; now they were black. It was a simple fact. Others, however, seemed to find them unsettling. He filed the observation away as something that could be useful at some point.

“Before we light the pyre,” Shaleel said, “those of you who wish may approach the body.”

Valyn waited for the line to form, then took his place at the end. Some of the soldiers took only a moment, touching Lin’s hand or saying a few words, prayers or farewells that he couldn’t hear. When Sami Yurl reached the bier, he grinned, then chucked Lin under the chin playfully. Valyn slowly unclenched his hand. Lin was dead. Yurl couldn’t hurt her any longer. His time would come soon enough.

Gwenna pressed something into Lin’s hands, Laith whispered a few phrases in her ear, a sad smile on his face, and Gent tucked his favorite knife into her belt. When Balendin stepped forward, wolfhounds at his heels, he just looked for a long time, silent as Lin herself, then turned away.

Valyn found himself before the bier. He glanced over his shoulder, as though someone watching might tell him what to say, but the assembled faces were cool and quiet, ghostlike above their black uniforms. He turned back to the body. The wounds that had killed his friend-a half dozen slashes across her stomach and chest-were covered now by a clean, black tunic. After he first carried her out of the cave, Valyn had run his finger’s over those gashes, trying to understand how a life could have seeped away through a few slices. They were ugly, nasty rents, but surely they couldn’t have killed her. Surely you had to rip a larger hole in the body, had to spill out more of the guts, had to crush more of the bone, in order to drive the life out of it.

He shook his head. Evidently not. Lin’s face was sallow and waxen. Dead a day and a half, he thought, then cursed himself for the clinical calculation. This wasn’t an exercise, wasn’t a cadet’s battlefield drill. It was supposed to be a chance at a final farewell, but there were no such chances. He should have said his farewells days ago, should have been saying them every day of every year. It struck him, as he looked down at the cold corpse, at his own body beside it, that the Kettral wore blacks, not to blend with the darkness, but to be ready, always, for the funeral.

There seemed little point in speaking, but he took her hand gently, closing his eyes as he held it between his own. This was the time to offer a prayer, but what god would he pray to? Hull, whose trial she had died trying to complete? Ananshael, who had killed her? Maybe Meshkent was most appropriate, but then, the Lord of Pain had already released her from his claws. Valyn opened his eyes, tracing the fingers one by one, the back of the knuckles, the wrist.…

He paused. Whoever had cleaned her up had done a good job-the blood had been scrubbed away, the wounds sutured with fine thread. On her wrist, however, just beneath the protruding bone, ran an angry red line of abrasions. He stared. Among all her other, more serious wounds, it would be easy to miss, the most insignificant scratch, but now that he’d seen it, he couldn’t pull his eyes away: a faint line of herringbone impressions dug into the flesh, the kind of impression left by Liran cord, the kind of impression that had marred Amie’s wrists when they cut her down from the rafter weeks before.

His breath stuck in his throat. Somewhere out over the harbor a gull cawed. He could hear the waves sucking at the sand, lisping the same malevolent syllable over and over. His eyes flicked back to her wrist, back to the faint abrasion, trying to make sense of it. He wanted to lean over, to look closer, but he was surrounded, all eyes upon him. How long had he been standing there, holding her hand? He had no idea. How much longer could he stay without raising eyebrows, raising suspicions? As subtly as he could, he pulled back the sleeve of her tunic. He had assumed her wounds came from the slarn, and in his grief he had not thought to examine them. Now, however, as he studied one of the rents in her flesh, he could see that the edges were clean, not jagged. His heart went cold inside him. Something that might have been fear or rage squirmed beneath his skin. Steel had parted Ha Lin’s flesh, good steel. She may have fought the slarn in the darkness, but one of the newly minted Kettral had killed her.

And it wasn’t easy for them, a part of him noted with grim satisfaction. Given the number and arrangement of wounds, it was clear that Lin had fought back, fought hard.

“You were a warrior,” he murmured so quietly no one else could hear. The words sounded both right and meager.

With elaborate care, he returned her hand to her chest. Lin hadn’t just died. Somewhere in the cave, somewhere so far beneath the earth the entire deed was blotted by darkness, someone had battled her to a standstill, then bound her wrists. The same person who had tortured Amie in the tiny garret and left her body hanging for the flies had got to Lin as well, had murdered her, a quarter mile from the end of the Trial.

He forced himself to turn, to walk a few steps from the pyre, and resume his place among the other soldiers. One of you, he thought, eyeing the faces. It was one of you. His eyes flickered to Annick. He hadn’t spoken to her since the infirmary, but he hadn’t forgotten the look of rage and death that flashed across her face when he asked about Amie. If she had been involved in the girl’s death, then she was implicated in Ha Lin’s as well.

The blaze caught quickly, the age-old scent of burning wood mingling with the sickening smell of charred flesh as the tongues of flame licked hungrily upward, gnawing through bier and body both. Valyn stared into the shifting flame and shadow, stared at the ruddy sparks, stared at the sudden gout of brilliant yellow flame that exploded from Lin’s hand-the special starshatter that Gwenna had tucked there in her own bizarre tribute. He stared until his eyes watered with the smoke, until they burned, but he refused to close them or to back away from the flame.