The Emperor's blades

28

The morning dawned bright and cold. Frost limned the needles of the junipers, and a thin pane of ice slicked the surface of the water in the bucket outside the refectory door. Kaden rapped at it, slicing the skin across his knuckles and dripping a thin line of scarlet as he reached in to scoop some over his hair and face. The icy water trickled down his back beneath his robe, but he was glad for the sensation-it woke him, and he wanted to be well awake for whatever Rampuri Tan had prepared.

“Why don’t you ever remind me that ‘early summer’ up here doesn’t necessarily mean ‘warm’?” Akiil asked, joining him at the bucket. He dipped his hands, ran them through his scraggly black hair, then cupped them and blew into the palms.

The sun hadn’t yet cleared the peaks to the east, but light filled the sky, limpid and spreading. Kaden and Akiil weren’t the only ones up; a low hum emanated from the meditation hall-older monks about their morning devotions-while novices and acolytes lugged full pails of water across the paths of the courtyard.

“It’ll be hot enough by noon,” Kaden responded, although he could feel his skin rising in bumps beneath his robe. “Come on. Tan doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

The two crossed the small square, sandaled feet crunching the gravel, breath feathering out in front of them. Normally Kaden liked this time of day, at least once he’d had a chance to come fully awake. Morning sounds were crisper somehow, morning light more gentle. Today, however, something tickled the hair on the back of his neck. As he and Akiil followed the rough path beyond the outskirts of the monastery, his eyes kept darting to corners and hollows where the low sun had not yet driven out the night’s lingering shadow.

Tan waited in one of those shadows, standing silently beneath the large boulder marking the trail down to the lower meadow, his hood pulled up to shield his face from the morning chill. Akiil looked like he might walk right past until Kaden brought him up short with a discreet tug on the robe.

When the two had paused, the older monk stepped out from the shelter of the overhanging rock. Only then did Kaden notice the long staff he held at his side. No, he realized with a jolt of surprise, not a staff, a spear. The weapon looked a little like the polearms carried by the Palace Guard back in Annur, but unlike those, Tan’s spear stiffened into leaf-shaped blades at either end. The entire thing looked as though it had been forged from a single piece of steel, although that much steel would be difficult for any man to wield effectively, even someone as strong as Tan. As the older monk joined the two acolytes, however, he swung the double-ended spear at his side casually, as though it weighed no more than a dry cedar branch. An unstrung longbow hung on his back, but bows were common enough around Ashk’lan. Someone had to put food in the refectory pots. The strange spear, on the other hand …

“What’s that?” Akiil asked, excitement warring with caution in his voice. He didn’t sound at all certain that Tan wouldn’t spit him on the end of the weapon simply for asking, but he was willing to take the chance.

Kaden’s umial examined the spear as though considering it for the first time.

“A naczal,” he said, pronouncing the strange word in a sibilant hiss.

Akiil looked at what should have been the butt end skeptically, eyeing the graceful blade where it gouged the dirt. “Looks pretty easy to chop off a toe. Do you know how to use it?”

“Not as well as those who made it,” Tan replied.

“Who made it?” Kaden asked.

Tan considered the question. “It is a Csestriim weapon,” he said finally.

Akiil’s mouth dropped open. “You expect us to believe you’re lugging around a three-thousand-year-old spear?”

“What you believe is a subject of indifference to me.”

Kaden considered the naczal. As children, he and Valyn had marveled over the dark smoke steel of a Kettral blade, the grudging way it refused to reflect the light. At first glance, Tan’s spear looked similar, but where the Kettral steel appeared to have been forged in a deep smoke, coated with the ashes and eddies, the naczal might have been made from smoke. It looked solid enough, hard as any steel, but somewhere deep in the shaft, drifting across the surface of the blades, it seemed to roil and smolder, as though heat and ash from an extinguished blaze had been frozen in the air, then hammered into shape.

“Where did you get it?” Kaden asked.

“I brought it with me.”

“Why?” Akiil demanded. “Seems like overkill for slaughtering goats.”

“If you wait until you need a weapon,” Tan replied, “it is often too late to acquire one.”

“What about us?” Akiil asked. “What do we get?”

“My protection.”

“I’d rather have one of those.”

“Then you are a fool,” Tan replied. “We’re going to the South Meadow. Now, run.”

The South Meadow wasn’t much of a meadow at all, at least not by the standards of the imperial heartlands, where rich farms stretched for unbroken acres over the soft earth. It was, however, one of the few places in the mountains where the haphazard tufts of grass were stitched into an unbroken blanket that was, if not exactly lush, at least softer than the dirt and gravel immediately surrounding Ashk’lan. The White River, which roared and leapt through the canyons above and below, grew sluggish here, dividing into a wet skein that was home to frogs, flowers, and buzzing flies. It would have made an altogether more inviting site for the monastery than the grim plateau carved out of the rocks miles above. Which was, Kaden supposed, why the first Shin had refused to build there.

At the north end of the meadow the mountains resumed their dominion, sweeping upward in ramparts and splinters of granite. The trail to the monastery wound through those rocks, climbing over a thousand feet in a little less than half a mile, a tortuous ascent over shattered boulders and the groping roots of junipers. It was one of the steepest sections, and Kaden had a pretty good feeling he knew what Tan intended.

“Today’s study,” his umial began once they had reached the soft grass, “is in kinla’an. The ‘Flesh Mind.’”

Akiil’s mouth quirked as though he were going to make some sort of crack.

Tan turned to face him, and the former thief schooled his face back to careful blankness. Akiil was rash, not stupid.

Over his years at the monastery, Kaden had spent countless days practicing saama’an and beshra’an. The latter-“Thrown Mind”-was what allowed him to track his goat to its demise all those weeks earlier. Kinla’an, however, he had never heard of.

“Do all the Shin study the Flesh Mind?” he asked carefully.

Tan shook his head. “The monks pick and choose the training that suits them. They have not entirely forgotten the importance of kinla’an, but few umials emphasize it.”

“Let me guess,” Akiil said. “You’re one of the few.”

“You will run the trail,” Tan began, ignoring the crack and gesturing with the blade of his strange spear, “up to the sharp bend. Then you will return.”

Kaden eyed the terrain. It was steep, but no more than a quarter of a mile. He’d been running more than that since his first day at the monastery. Even hobbled as he was after the week of immobility, the task sounded suspiciously sedate. That worried him. He glanced at Tan’s face, but the older monk revealed nothing. Instead, he freed his bow, strung it, and nocked an arrow.

“You’re going to shoot at us while we’re running?” Akiil asked. It was supposed to be a joke, but Kaden wasn’t so sure. His umial had come close to killing him enough times to take any threat seriously.

“I’ll be halfway up the trail,” Tan replied. “If anything … threatens you, the bow will be useful.”

“I wonder,” Kaden began hesitantly, “if we shouldn’t be doing something … else. Whatever slaughtered those goats killed Serkhan, and it just seems strange for us to be training as though nothing happened.”

Tan stared at him. “You’re surprised that your training continues.”

“Well,” Kaden replied after a moment, unsure how to hedge, “yes.”

“And instead of training, you think you should be doing what?”

Kaden spread his hands helplessly. “I’m not sure. It’s just that no one seems to know what’s happening. We’re not sure of things.”

Tan chuckled, a dry, barren sound. “We are not sure of things,” he repeated slowly, as though tasting the words. “That much is clear. As for training…,” he continued, skewering Kaden with his gaze, “we use the time we have. There is no other.”

The answer was cryptic at best, and Kaden waited for more. Instead of elaborating, the monk raised the spear and pointed to the trail with one of the blades. “Go.”

They took the hill at a moderate pace, quick enough to avoid Tan’s wrath, but not so fast that cold muscles would cramp or tear. There weren’t many places around Ashk’lan where you could safely ignore your footing, but this particular stretch of trail demanded the utmost concentration, and Kaden found himself dropping into the kind of relaxed focus so common to his exercise in the high peaks. His knees, cold and stiff, protested at first, and his calves immediately caught fire, but halfway up the slope, his body found its rhythm and by the top of the prescribed pitch he felt warm and ready, better than he had since Tan stuck him in the hole, in fact, and he took a deep breath of the cool air, savoring it in his lungs.

“Well,” Akiil said when they’d reached the bend, “you think we’re done?”

While they ran, Tan climbed to the midpoint of the trail and settled himself atop a large boulder, spear at his side, bow in hand. Kaden supposed he should have found his umial’s presence reassuring, but the monk looked distant, distant and small. A longbow could cover the range, but whoever was shooting it would have to be pretty skilled in order to hit anything in particular. It was all well and good to make the most of training, but that training wouldn’t be much use if the two acolytes ended up with their heads rent from their bodies.

“Where do you think he got that spear?” Akiil asked, squinting down toward the meadow.

“Good question,” Kaden replied. His conversation in the abbot’s study came back to him, and for what must have been the hundredth time, he wondered how much to share with Akiil. Later, he told himself. Easier to recall a loosed falcon than a spoken word. He could always talk with his friend about Nin’s stories once he had them sorted out in his own mind. “It’s not the first time Tan’s mentioned the Csestriim,” Kaden said. “I think he knows more about them than he lets on.”

Akiil snorted. “I didn’t figure him for a lover of legends.”

“Maybe they’re not legends.”

“You see any Csestriim running around back in Annur?” the youth asked with a raised eyebrow. “If the Csestriim ever were real, they’re dead as last week’s dinner.”

When Kaden didn’t respond, he nodded, as though that settled the point. “Any rate, it’s a nasty-looking piece of steel. Think he knows how to use it?”

Serkhan’s bloody face loomed in Kaden’s mind. “I hope so.”

The two spent the next hour running up and down the quarter-mile pitch. What began as a light morning exercise gradually grew more strenuous. Tan allowed no rest, waving them on each time they passed him with a barely perceptible gesture. The steep grade seared Kaden’s atrophied calves, and the descent ground away at his thighs until his legs wobbled when he stood still. The air, so cold when he first scrubbed his face in the bucket, had warmed as the sun rose, and now it burned in his lungs. He’d gone on longer runs, of course, much longer, but none with his umial watching.

“Watch your footing,” Tan said each time they passed him. “Learn the trail.”

Akiil wisely waited until they reached the upper or lower bends to complain, although he availed himself of each opportunity.

“I don’t care what kind of fancy word Tan’s got for this-it’s running up and down a ’Kent-kissing mountain, pure and simple.”

“That’s something to be grateful for,” Kaden responded. “Usually when Tan tries to teach me something new, it hurts a lot more.”

“I don’t know how I got roped into this,” Akiil snapped. “He’s your umial.”

“Someone must have noticed your extraordinary potential.”

Kaden was starting to think they’d go on all day like that: Tan urging them to watch the trail, Akiil griping, his own legs groaning and his lungs burning the entire way up and down. It was hard work, but preferable to freezing himself unconscious in Umber’s Pool, or waiting for Tan to bury him alive. He’d begun to accept the soreness, to welcome it as he’d learned in his long years at Ashk’lan, when Tan brought the two of them up short.

“Now,” the monk said curtly, “your study begins.”

From somewhere in his robe he produced two lengths of black cloth-they might have been the hem of an old monk’s habit torn into strips. With a fluid motion, he dropped down from his boulder, landing more lightly than Kaden would have expected, given his size.

“You will wear these,” he said, looping the cloth over Kaden’s eyes and a good portion of his nose as well, cinching the strip into a knot behind his head. There was a pause while he did the same for Akiil.

“Continue,” he said when the blindfolds were affixed.

Kaden frowned.

“Continue what?” Akiil asked.

“Running,” Tan replied flatly. “Up to the bend and back, as before.”

It was impossible. Kaden had barely been able to keep his footing on the rough trail with his eyes open. With the blindfold on, he wasn’t sure he could even find the trail, let alone follow it.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Akiil replied.

Kaden winced at the crisp sound of a hand striking flesh.

“I am not kidding.”

The whole thing was absurd, but Kaden wasn’t about to earn himself a bruise to match Akiil’s. He could start, at least. It wouldn’t take his umial long to see that the task was ludicrous.

The first ascent must have lasted the better part of an hour. Kaden couldn’t be sure, as he had no way to track the sun in its arc across the sky. He fell about every third step, and by the time he reached the bend, he could feel the blood running down his shins from nasty gashes on both knees, sticky as sap between his toes. A dozen times he was convinced he had lost the path entirely, and Akiil insisted on following something that turned out to be a dry streambed for a dozen or so laborious paces before they came to a rough cliff and were forced to turn back.

Kaden tried to summon a saama’an of the trail, but found that he could recall only pieces and chunks: a root here, a sharp rock there, fragments of glances lodged in his mind from the morning’s labor. The Carved Mind was a powerful tool, but always before he had used it to form a small and static image: a kestrel’s wing, the leaf of a bloodwood. Trying to recall a quarter-mile of rocky path seen at a quick lope was like trying to hold five gallons of water in your arms.

“I can’t see it,” he said when they finally arrived back at Tan’s rock, sweating, bruised, and bleeding. “I should have learned the terrain, but I didn’t.”

There was only silence, and Kaden wondered suddenly if Tan had left them, abandoned his post on the boulder and returned to the monastery. The thought that he and Akiil might have been stumbling around the trail for the past hour with blindfolds over their eyes while something capable of ripping out a monk’s stomach roamed the peaks made him catch his breath, and for a moment he was tempted to remove the blindfold.

His umial responded finally. “If you didn’t learn it earlier, then you will have to learn it now.”

“How can we learn it if we can’t see it?” Akiil asked.

“See with your feet,” Tan responded. “Learn with your flesh.”

“Kinla’an,” Kaden concluded wearily. The Flesh Mind. The whole thing was starting to make sense. At least, as much as anything else he’d learned.

“Kinla’an,” the older monk agreed, as though that concluded the matter.

The second ascent was, if anything, more laborious than the first. Rocks gouged into already bruised skin, the sun blared down, hot and invisible, and Kaden twice struck his toe so hard that he thought it might have broken. Learning by sight, he was used to. He had developed dozens of strategies and tricks over his years of practice in saama’an. This endless groping in the void, however, seemed designed to drive him mad.

At first he tried to make a sort of map, plotting each jutting corner, each winding root as though it were a figure inked on parchment. That seemed the sensible way to go about it, the method most in keeping with his earlier studies, but it proved almost impossible. Without the initial visual impression, the images simply wouldn’t stick. They were like shadows, or dark clouds, shifting and mercurial. He would sketch a patch of ground in his mind only to find a certain rock missing, or twice as close as he’d expected. He couldn’t keep track of whether he had covered ten paces or twenty. He couldn’t tell one twisted root from the next. From time to time, he heard Akiil curse or mutter some imprecation, but the thief had fallen behind, and Kaden toiled on in his own floating void.

By the time he had descended to the meadow and then climbed to the boulder, he was on his hands and knees, palms bloody from pawing at the rocks, knees shredded by the gravel.

“What are you doing?” Tan asked.

Kaden stifled a laugh that he recognized as slightly insane. “Trying to learn the trail.”

“With your hands?”

“I thought if I could get a sense of it with my hands, I could make a sort of map, something I could memorize for next time.”

“Do you run on your hands?” Tan asked.

The question was clearly rhetorical, and Kaden didn’t respond.

“Do you drink with your eyes? Do you breathe with your feet?” The older monk paused, and Kaden could picture him shaking his head. “Get up.”

Kaden rose unsteadily to his feet.

“Walk the trail,” the monk said flatly.

“But I can’t see it,” Kaden replied, “not even in my mind.”

“Your mind,” Tan spat. “Still obsessed with that fine, elegant mind of yours. Forget your mind. Your mind is useless. Your body knows the trail. Listen to it.”

Kaden started to object, then stopped abruptly when he felt the chill, sharp steel of the spear head nudging his mouth shut.

“Stop talking. Stop thinking. Follow the trail.”

Kaden took a deep breath and turned from the darkness to the darkness, rotating in the blank void like a star turning in a starless night, and prepared to mount the path once more.

The next two dozen ascents passed in a strange sort of fugue. He continued to step, to stumble, to feel his ankles buckling under him when his foot came down on unexpected terrain, but here and there, for a few paces at a time, he found that he could walk almost normally. Then his thoughts would rise, like a hungry tide at the palace docks. I’m at that short dogleg! I just need to turn left, step off the fallen cedar and-and he would step off the trail, tumbling into a low ditch or cracking his head on a sharp, overhanging bough. Despite Tan’s injunction, he had developed a rough map of the path, but it led him astray more often than not, and he certainly couldn’t rely on it for the details of footing or the intricacies of minor directional changes. His body, however, did seem to know some of those things, and more often he found himself responding unconsciously: a patch of gravel led him to step a little higher over a small rock shelf. A slight declivity urged him to take a few unmeasured paces. It was a painful process still, and he shuddered to think what his face, hands, and knees would look like when Tan finally allowed him to take off the blindfold, but he felt as though he had developed some tenuous grasp on the concept of kinla’an.

“It’s nighttime, you know,” Akiil muttered when they ran into each other at the top of the trail.

Kaden stopped and raised his head. His friend was right, he realized. He was warm from the labor of climbing and falling, but the air was cool, and the daytime sounds of the birds had given way to the silent winging of bats.

“Your ’Kent-kissing umial has kept us here all day,” Akiil continued.

“Are you getting the hang of it?” Kaden asked. It felt strange to talk to another person after so many hours of silent, blind groping, like meeting a ghost, or addressing a fragment of his own mind.

“Am I getting the hang of it?” Akiil responded, incredulity tingeing his voice. “The only thing I’m going to hang is you. Or maybe that sadist who calls himself a monk. Or maybe both.”

Kaden grinned, but before long, he had turned back to the trail and was floating in that strange, vast landscape of shapeless forms in which his mind drifted while his body stumbled and fell. Climb and descend. Up and down.

When he reached the boulder for what must have been the hundredth time, Tan, who had been silent for hours, broke into the void.

“Stop. Take off your blindfolds.”

It took Kaden a long time to work free the knot with his sliced and bloody fingers. When the cloth finally fell away, he squinted at the brightness, unable to make out much more than his umial’s dark form and the vague shapes of the cliffs and peaks.

“It’s another day,” he said dumbly.

“Morning,” Tan replied. “The sun broke just an hour ago. You would have felt it, had you been paying attention.”

Akiil had managed to free himself from his own blindfold, and he squinted about, as though trying to make sense of his surroundings.

“Beshra’an, I can understand,” Kaden said. “And saama’an. It’s useful to be able to track, to be able to remember.”

Akiil grunted skeptically.

“What is the point,” Kaden pressed, “of this? Of kinla’an?”

Tan studied him before responding. “There are three reasons,” he said at last. “First, relying on the body allows you to let go of the mind-this brings you a step closer to the vaniate. Second, the Shin understand the vaniate, but they never put it to use. Our predecessors did not learn the emptiness simply in order to bask in it. They used it as a tool. Running or fighting-your body moves more quickly without the weight of thought pressing down upon it.”

Akiil looked like he was going to object, then scowled and looked away. The bruise where Tan struck him earlier had purpled impressively, puffing out his cheek and partially closing one eye.

“What’s the third reason?” Kaden asked cautiously.

Tan paused. “Bait.”

“Bait?” Kaden responded, trying to make sense of the word. “You mean for-”

“You were alone. Blindfolded. Unarmed. I hoped that whatever killed Serkhan would come for you.”

“Holy Hull!” Akiil exploded, rounding on the monk, his hands balled into fists. “What if it had?”

“I would have shot it,” Tan replied.

“Well, I’m fucking glad it never showed up!”

“Don’t be.”

Kaden shook his head. “Why not?”

“I was standing motionless on that boulder. An animal would never have noticed me. It would have taken the opportunity to attack.”

“Maybe the thing just isn’t down here today. Maybe it’s up in the high mountains.”

“And maybe,” Tan replied grimly, “it’s smarter than we realized. Maybe it saw the bow and spear. Any beast can kill. Maybe this thing we face can plan.”