The Emperor's blades

31

“I want to know your well,” Valyn began, trying to keep his voice reasonable and firm at the same time.

It had been over a week since the disaster in the swamp, and he’d made next to no progress in pulling together his Wing. Gwenna was still insubordinate, Laith was still reckless, Annick was still … Annick, and Talal still refused to share the secret source of what little arcane power he possessed. Worse, Valyn continued to harbor doubts about the sniper and the leach; they both had secrets, and he was learning quickly not to trust anyone with secrets. It was impossible to tackle everything at once, but learning Talal’s well would help him in his command of the Wing and might just fit one more piece into the larger puzzle of Amie’s and Lin’s deaths.

Talal nodded guardedly. “I wondered when we would get to this.”

The two of them sat face-to-face across a scarred wooden table. They had their own barrack now, a narrow wooden building with bunks in the back, a large room devoted to weapons and gear on the side, and out front, the “ready room”-a small space with a cast-iron stove, five chairs, and a large wooden table around which the whole Wing could gather to sort equipment, study maps, or plan for the next mission. It wasn’t glamorous, but after the cavernous cadets’ barracks, it felt private and secure. Would feel even better, Valyn thought bleakly, if I shared it with anyone I trusted.

The other three members of his Wing were off at the mess hall, but Valyn had asked Talal to stay behind.

“I’m the commander of this Wing,” he began, careful to douse the heat in his voice. “I choose strategy and tactics based on our assets and liabilities. I’ve respected your privacy so far, but it’s killing us out there.”

For the first couple of days, he’d hoped he would be able to ferret out the leach’s well with a little well-timed observation. It seemed like a straightforward problem: Look around whenever Talal used a kenning, make a list of possible wells, then narrow that list at every future kenning until there was only one possibility left. The problem was, Talal didn’t rely on his strange powers as much as Valyn had expected. Unlike a lot of leaches, he was more than proficient with a blade, better than anyone on the Wing except Valyn, in fact, and he seemed to prefer conventional tactics to more exotic solutions. Worse, even when he did use a kenning, there were just too many possible wells to narrow it down. Valyn might rule out firespike and blood one day, but that still left a legion of possibilities: sea, salt, stone, light, shade, iron … A clerk with a ledger and a year of study might manage it, but not Valyn, not while he was trying to keep his Wing from falling apart.

“If you want me to keep the secret from the rest of the group,” Valyn urged, “I can do that.”

Talal shook his head almost reluctantly. “I can tell you before the mission whether I’ll have access to my well or not, can probably even tell you how strong it will be.”

“Not good enough,” Valyn snapped. “I need backup plans, contingencies. I need all the knowledge we’ve got in order to improvise on the fly.” And I need to know if you took down Manker’s, he thought grimly. I need to know if you killed Amie and Ha Lin. There was still nothing linking the destruction of the alehouse with the deaths of the two women, nothing but the timing of Amie’s murder, but Valyn hadn’t abandoned the suspicion that it was all part of a larger, more intricate plot.

“I’m not sure you realize what you’re asking for,” Talal said quietly.

“Information,” Valyn said, spreading his hands. “That’s all. Just information.”

Talal shook his head once more. “You don’t understand.”

“Enlighten me.”

The leach took a deep breath. “I grew up with the same fear of leaches that anyone felt. My uncle used to come over and frighten us with stories of the Atmani-bloodcurdling stuff. My father once walked three days just to see a leach hanged. He returned home with a smile on his face.” Talal’s eyes went distant as he spoke. “We-my brothers and I-were so angry we hadn’t been allowed to go. We begged for all the details. Did he have a forked tongue? Did he cry blood? Did he piss himself when he died?

“A week later, I had my first delving.” The leach’s eyes were far away, his face blank as he continued. “I was working late in my father’s shop. I’d mismeasured a tenon, ruined a whole evening’s worth of effort. I was cursing the thing, cursing myself, cursing the chair, when suddenly, the chairback shattered. At first I was busy just picking the splinters out of my flesh. Then I realized what had happened. What it meant.

“No one had seen it-if they had, I’d have been hanged or burned or stoned in the street before the sun rose-but I still felt the guilt, the disgust. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t tried to use it. I knew the stories. When you had a well, it came to possess you, to twist you. It unmade everything good inside you until you would stop at nothing to bend the world to your will.”

He paused, gazing at his palm as though searching for something written there, some explanation scrawled in the lines of his flesh. “I found a rope in the barn, tied a careful noose, pulled it tight around my neck, and stepped off the back of the wagon.”

He stopped, and raised his eyes to the bruised sunset beyond the grimy window.

“And?” Valyn asked, drawn in to the story in spite of himself.

Talal shrugged. “My father found me. Cut me down. He never did know why I’d done it. A couple men from the Eyrie came three weeks later.”

“How’d they know?”

“They’ve had time to learn what to look for,” Talal replied. “Unexpected outbursts, children gone missing in safe towns, suicides that don’t make sense.” He fixed Valyn with a level gaze. “I wasn’t unusual. No one wants to learn that they’re an abomination.”

“Your family?” Valyn asked cautiously.

“They think I’m just a soldier. It’s a lie, but it makes them proud.”

A silence hung between them, heavy and grim as lead. Valyn could hear laughter and roughhousing in the next barracks over and faintly, in the distance, the clink of spoons against bowls as the Kettral tucked into their meals over in the mess hall. The room in which he sat, however, was still and nearly dark.

“I’m not your family,” Valyn said finally. “I’ve spent half my life here, on the Islands. I don’t feel … that way about leaches.”

Talal met his eye, then smiled bleakly. “You’re a shitty liar, Valyn. You may make a good Wing leader someday, but you’re a shitty liar.”

Valyn took a deep breath. “It’s hard, knowing that someone else can do things you can’t, things you can’t even begin to understand. I won’t deny that, but we’re on the same Wing now. That should be a bond stronger than blood. We need to start trusting each other.”

Talal considered him soberly. “And when are you going to start trusting me?”

Valyn felt as though he’d been caught wrong-footed in a duel, attacking when he should have been looking to his defense.

“I do,” he protested weakly. “I trust you.”

“No,” the leach replied evenly. “You trust Laith a little, Gwenna less, and Annick and me not at all.”

Valyn leaned back in his chair. He thought he’d hidden his emotions, thought that he’d been distant and professional, the way a Wing commander was supposed to be. “Are you-?”

“Using a kenning?” Talal asked, his mouth quirked in a wry twist. “Looking into your mind?”

It sounded foolish, once the words were said aloud, but Valyn had no way to know what the leach could and could not do.

“No,” Talal said. “I’m watching. Listening. It’s pretty clear you’d rather bury a knife in my gut than work with me.” He shook his head. “I’m not Balendin, you know. He’s a lot stronger than I am. His well, whatever it is, runs incredibly deep, but that’s not the only difference.”

Valyn could only nod mutely.

“Let me ask you a question,” the leach asked after a long silence, “since you’re so intent on sharing secrets.”

Valyn shrugged his acquiescence.

“What happened to you? During the Trial? What happened to your eyes?”

I should have known it wouldn’t be easy to answer, Valyn thought to himself. Some of the cadets had emerged from the Hole gushing with stories, almost desperate to relate the minute details of their foray into the darkness. Talal was not one of them. Neither was Valyn. He had confided in no one about the black egg or his encounter with the slarn king. It was enough that he went into the cave poisoned and emerged cured. No one needed to know the details, certainly not a leach.

But then, he needed that leach to trust him. Much as Valyn hated to admit it, the youth had a point-there was no reason to share secrets with someone who refused to divulge his own. To get ground, Hendran wrote, it is sometimes necessary to give ground.

“I found a different egg.”

“Different?”

“Larger. A lot larger. And black.”

Talal’s eyes widened in the lamplight. “Slarn?”

Valyn nodded hesitantly. He was committed to the truth now, for good or ill. “I think so. The nest was the same.”

“A black slarn egg,” the leach mused, pursing his lips. Then, after a long hesitation: “You know they changed us, right?”

“Changed?” Valyn asked. For the second time, he felt the conversation slipping from his control. “What do you mean ‘changed’? Who?”

“The eggs. They cured the toxin, but there were … secondary effects.”

Valyn stared. This was the first he’d heard of it.

“At first I thought I was just exhausted,” the leach continued. “Thought I was imagining it.”

“Imagining what?” Valyn demanded, trying to keep his voice level as the memory from the cave filled his mind, the feel of the black slime slipping down his gullet as he emptied the contents of the shattered shell into his mouth.

Talal shrugged. “The dizziness. That passed in the first day or so. Then the night vision. The hearing.”

Valyn shook his head, lost.

“Listen,” Talal said, holding up a finger.

Valyn listened. The noises from the neighboring barracks had fallen silent, but there were other sounds: waves washing over the rocky beach, waves farther out breaking on the Gray Shoals. Had he been able to hear those before? To sort the soft sussuration of water on shingle from the sharper, more percussive striking of the long swells against the reef? He closed his eyes. He could hear the creak of rope against wood. Rigging, he realized, of the ships moored in the bay. And beneath that, the slow groaning of those ships’ timbers as they flexed with the roll and wash of the sea.

He opened his eyes but found he had no words.

“Better?” Talal asked, his eyebrows raised. “More acute? More precise?”

Valyn nodded. “Holy Hull. You think it was the slarn eggs that did this?” He paused to listen again. A door crashed open far away and he heard a high voice-he thought it was Chi Hoai Mi-laughing at someone inside.

The leach nodded. “It makes sense. The egg provides the food for the slarn before they hatch. It’s what makes them what they are-creatures that live in darkness, that thrive in darkness. They need better hearing, more sensitive touch. They may even have senses we’re unaware of. It comes from somewhere. Why not their food?”

“And now we’ve eaten that food as well,” Valyn concluded. Some of us more than others, he added silently, dread roiling in his stomach. If the eggs had permanent effects, there would be risks as well. There were always risks.

“They didn’t just send us down there as a test,” Valyn went on, amazed. “Even for the Kettral, a trial that could end in half the class dead and the other half crippled for life is a little severe. They needed to send us down into the Hole. Those eggs didn’t just cure us.”

“They changed us,” Talal agreed. “Not in major ways, but slightly.”

“That explains why our ’Kent-kissing instructors were always one step ahead,” Valyn realized, a jolt of indignation riding up his spine. “They always knew we were coming. The Hull-buggered bastards could hear us half a mile away.”

Talal nodded. He’d had more time to come to grips with the fact, and the corner of his mouth turned up in the tiniest grin. “They’re bastards,” he agreed, “but they’re clever bastards.”

“Who else knows about this?”

The leach shook his head. “Hard to say. Daveen Shaleel didn’t exactly trumpet the fact. I would imagine that most Wings are like us … maybe a few have realized. Maybe more. It’s possible some never will.”

“But you figured it out.”

Talal’s face went wary once more. “Something about being a leach, I guess. When you’ve worked with a well as long as I have, you … notice things. You notice the little changes.”

Abruptly, Valyn started to laugh. “Well, I’m glad you were able to explain it to me. Left to my own devices, I probably never would have thought beyond the foul taste of that ’Kent-kissing thing.…” The laughter shriveled in his throat. “But the egg I found-”

“-was different,” Talal concluded, nodding.

“I wasn’t supposed to eat that egg. No one in the Eyrie planned on it. No one knows what it does.”

“Well, it didn’t kill you.”

“Yet.”

“I’ll bet my blades it was what changed your eyes.”

Valyn nodded, comprehension and unease washing over him at once. “And there are other things-,” he murmured, breaking off as he remembered who he was talking to.

“-but you don’t want to tell me about them,” Talal finished, his expression unsurprised but sad.

Valyn took a deep breath. He was walking the narrowest of lines: Step too far to one side, and the leach would never lower his guard. Step too far to the other, and he’d give up more information than he gained.

“I can feel things,” he admitted reluctantly.

Talal leaned in closer.

“When I found Ha Lin,” Valyn continued, “I knew something was lying across the floor yards before I reached her.” He closed his eyes and let the memory wash over him, the whispering currents of air eddying over his skin, the faintest scent of her hair in his nostrils. He hadn’t noticed anything like that since leaving the cave, but then, since leaving the cave, he’d been overwhelmed with more ordinary sensations: a new Wing, training runs, arguments with Gwenna. Now, however, with his eyes shut, he let his breathing slow and just … waited.

There was a crack in the wall, he realized, a few feet above his head and to the left; the draft lifted the hairs along the back of his neck. He could hear the wick fizzling in the lamp. He could … he squeezed his eyes shut tighter … he wasn’t sure if he was seeing or feeling, but he knew right where Talal was sitting, even something about his posture.

The leach remained silent, still.

“I knew it was her,” Valyn went on, voice quiet, eyes still closed. “I didn’t believe it at the time. I didn’t want to believe it, couldn’t believe it. Lin.” He shook his head. “I knew. Even dead, even in the pitch dark, I knew her.”

There were tears in his eyes when he opened them, but he met the leach’s gaze defiantly. She was my friend, he told himself. There is no shame in weeping for her. They were the first tears he had allowed himself since finding her, and for a long time they just streamed down his cheeks, puddling quietly in the table’s ruts. After a while, they stopped. He wiped his cheeks roughly with a palm.

“If you speak a word of this,” he said, his voice ragged, “to anyone on the Wing, I’ll rip out your throat and we’ll make do without a leach.”

“Iron,” Talal replied, voice quiet but sure.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Iron,” the leach said again, gesturing to the knife at his belt, the rough bracelets around both wrists. “That’s my well. Of course, we don’t carry much iron, but there’s plenty of iron in steel, enough to do the job.”

Valyn put his palms flat on the table, trying to stow his own emotions and make sense of the claim. There was every chance the leach was lying to him, and no way to know for sure. He considered those dark, still eyes.

“Why isn’t it more powerful?”

Talal shrugged. “Not that much iron around most of the time-a few blades, a few arrowheads. Enough to work with, usually, but rarely enough to do anything impressive.”

“If we were going in after a fortified position,” Valyn asked warily, “could you bring it down?”

“Not a chance.”

“What about something that wasn’t built out of stone? Something less sturdy-like a wooden palisade?” Or an alehouse on stilts, he thought to himself. What about Manker’s?

Talal considered the question. “If there was a great deal of steel present-as there would be on a densely packed battlefield-maybe. And if the structure was already flawed in some crucial way.” He spread his hands. “Then I might be able to manage it. Or I might not.” He shook his head ruefully. “I’m sorry, Valyn. I’m sure you were hoping for more out of your Wing’s leach. Aacha could have knocked down a stone gatehouse when his well was running strong. Same with most of the leaches.” He frowned. “Bad luck. I’ve got enough power to get me hanged, but not enough to protect myself. It’s why I had to get so handy with the blades,” he said, gesturing over his shoulder to the twin swords sheathed across his back.

That fact, more than anything else, carried the question for Valyn. Soldiers gravitated to their strengths, as much as their trainers tried to beat the tendency out of them. Annick carried that bow of hers everywhere, Laith preferred to be on the bird’s back, and Gwenna never seemed happy unless she was blowing something up. Deception or no, it was hard to believe that Talal would have devoted so much time to his blades if he had a powerful, secret well to draw upon. Anything was possible, of course, but sometimes you had to play the odds.

“What about Balendin?” Valyn asked cautiously. “Could he knock down a building?”

Talal nodded slowly. “He hides his full strength pretty cleverly, but I’ve seen him manage some things.…” His eyes drifted with the memory, then snapped back. “He’s dangerous, and not just because he’s cruel.”

“Any new ideas about his well?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you have any guesses?” Valyn pressed, wary and impatient all at the same time.

“I’ve had about a thousand of them.”

“He keeps those dogs of his close-”

“That’s the obvious thing,” Talal agreed, “but the obvious thing isn’t usually the right one. We’ve all got our masks and disguises.” He gestured to the stone amulet hanging around his neck, to the gold hoops in his ears. “And then there’s the whole business of intentional deception. Before I started flying with you, I would avoid using my well on random days, even if it meant losing an exercise or contest, just to keep the others off my scent.” He grimaced. “It’s a bad way to live. Always lying. Always trying to lead people on.…”

Valyn had never considered it that way. In the stories, the leaches were always the villains, the nefarious meddlers behind the scenes, the ones pulling the strings, the ones making the world dance their own unnatural jig. He had never thought that their power might force them to dance.

“Thank you for telling me,” he said finally, awkwardly.

“I always figured I’d tell someone eventually,” Talal replied. “You keep something like that hidden for too long-” He shook his head slowly. “-there’s no telling what it might do to you, no telling what you might become.”