The Emperor's blades

33

He woke in a hard wooden chair surrounded by stone walls. Someone had lit a few candles, and when he first tried to open his eyes, the light drove a spike of pain directly through his head. He closed them again with a slight groan. He didn’t know where he was, but when the memory of the attack came back to him, he tensed himself to run or fight. No one had bound his hands or feet, and through slitted eyelids he tried to locate the door. They couldn’t have carried him far. He was in Ashk’lan still-the rough granite walls were proof enough of that. If he could just …

“We took some pains to bring you here silently. Please do not ruin it with clamor.”

He knew that voice, dry and tough as rawhide, although for half a heartbeat he couldn’t place it.

“What is it in obedience that the young find so difficult?” the voice went on.

The abbot, he realized with a start, and in spite of the pain, forced his eyes open once more. He was seated in the center of Scial Nin’s study, the humble, one-room structure where Nin and Tan had revealed the secret of the kenta a few weeks earlier. Nin slept in a dormitory cell like the rest of the monks, but he was known to stay late in his study when occupied with important business. Generally, a visit to the abbot’s study did not augur well, and this episode was starting out far worse than usual, although Kaden’s head still throbbed too badly for him to make much sense of what was going on.

A small fire burned in the hearth, but that was the only welcoming thing about the room. Nin sat behind his bare wooden desk, fingers steepled under his chin, dark eyes fixed on him intently, as though Kaden were some new species of squirrel that he had found in one of his deadfalls. A few feet from the desk, Rampuri Tan stood staring out the small window into the night. He hadn’t said anything at all, hadn’t even looked at his pupil, and Kaden felt his stomach tighten, an uncomfortable sensation, given that his head was still pounding and his legs felt like water. He started to groan, then suppressed the sound out of habit-it would earn him no sympathy from the older monks.

“Akiil?” he asked weakly, feeling like someone had scoured his mouth with coarse wool. His friend was not in the study. “Where is Akiil?”

“He is not here,” the abbot replied evenly. Normally Kaden would have ground his teeth in silent frustration at the response, but the knives they had discovered leapt into his mind, along with the memory of the hand clamped over his mouth, cutting off his breath.…

“The merchants,” he managed. “They’re-” What? he asked himself. Carrying knives? How was he going to explain the fact that he and Akiil were rummaging through their private belongings? “Who tried to kill us?” he asked instead. “Did you capture them?”

The abbot looked away, gazing at an indeterminate point over Kaden’s left shoulder. Rampuri Tan shook his head, not turning from the window. Kaden looked from one to the other, but neither seemed willing to speak.

“You did capture them, didn’t you?” he asked. He tried to stand, but his legs would have none of it, and he dropped back into the chair. Silence stretched out before them, bleak and cold as the night sky.

When the abbot finally spoke, it was not to him. “You told me he was making progress.”

Tan grunted.

“I don’t see progress,” Nin continued. “I see a blind, impulsive boy tied so tightly to himself that he can barely move.”

Normally the insult would have stung, all the more so for the flat, careless tone in which it was delivered. Memory of his assailants and worry for Akiil, however, left no space for wounded pride, and as Kaden lowered the pressure of the blood in his veins, he tried to make himself sound rational, unemotional.

“Abbot,” he began quietly, amazed that his voice was so level-he felt like shaking and screaming all at the same time. “Clearly you know already, because you rescued me, but the merchants are not what they appear. One of them or both caught Akiil and me-”

“How long,” the abbot interrupted with a raised hand, “has Tan been your umial?”

“What does Tan have to do-”

Without raising his voice, the abbot cut him off. “How long?”

“Two months,” Kaden replied, mustering his patience.

“And after two months, you still don’t recognize your own master when he is close enough to kill you?”

Kaden looked in confusion from the abbot to Tan, who turned from the window, eyes inscrutable as always. “I came to check on you at the shed,” the monk began. “When you were not there, I tracked you and brought you here. Akiil is unharmed.”

Kaden gaped.

“You brought me! How did you track me?”

“The Beshra’an. Your mind is a simple thing, although cramped to inhabit.”

He ignored the insult. “What about the merchants? Why didn’t you just ask me to come? Why did you attack me?”

“You would have argued,” Tan replied simply. “And the woman was approaching. There was no time.”

Kaden took a firm grip on his emotions. He had been conscious for several minutes now, but things weren’t getting any clearer. Determined not to make a fool of himself again, he paused to consider this new information. Tan returned to his post at the window as if there were nothing left to discuss, but the abbot continued to look directly at him.

“You didn’t send me to the clay shed as some kind of penance,” Kaden concluded after a time.

“I might as well have,” Tan responded, “considering how poorly you have performed.”

“But you didn’t,” Kaden replied doggedly. “If you had, there would be no need to knock me out in the dark, no need for this late-night conference. When you found me in the streambed, you would have simply sent me to haul water all night, or to sit on the Talon until dawn. But then we would have run into the merchants.

“You weren’t trying to keep me from seeing them,” he went on, the realization seeping in slowly. “You wanted to keep them from seeing me.”

He shivered beneath his robe. During his years at Ashk’lan, the maneuverings and machinations surrounding the imperial throne had faded to a distant memory. In fact, Kaden often wondered if he had been sent to the monastery, not for any particular education, but simply to keep him out of harm’s way until he was older. Was it possible that Annurian politics had found him even here?

“This is about my father,” he said, feeling the truth of the statement as it left his lips.

“Why,” the abbot responded slowly, “do you think anything is wrong with your father? Pyrre Lakatur said that the Emperor was strong as ever. Jakin agreed.”

“I know,” Kaden replied. He took a slow breath. What he was about to reveal would earn him an even more severe penance, but the water around him was already boiling. He had to know the truth. “There’s something not right about Pyrre, about both of them. You obviously already know about the knives and the crossbow, but that’s not all. That first night, the night in the refectory, I was in the dovecote, watching.”

Tan’s face hardened, but he did not speak. The abbot raised an eyebrow.

“Pyrre wasn’t looking at you when she came in the door,” Kaden continued. “Then, when she answered the question about my father, something was…” He paused, the scene springing clearly into his mind once more. He examined the faces for the hundredth time: the woman’s easy smile, the casual wave of her hand, the angle of her head as she looked down the table at the gathered monks. Everything seemed normal. Kaden let out the breath he’d been holding. “Something was … not right,” he trailed off lamely.

The abbot looked at him hard for a moment or two, then addressed Tan. “I take it back, friend. The boy has come a long way.”

“Not far enough,” Tan responded without turning.

The abbot leveled a bony finger at Kaden. “How many people in the world could have seen what he saw, even without being able to identify it? A few dozen?”

“More than that,” Tan replied dismissively. “Meshkent’s high priests. Most emotion leaches. Any of the Csestriim-”

The abbot laughed gently. “I’m talking about humans, my friend. I know that you have once again begun honing that old blade of yours, but the fact of the matter is, Csestriim have not been seen on this earth in millennia.” The abbot gave Tan a long, searching look that would have had Kaden squirming in his seat. His umial, however, simply shrugged. “There may be a handful of emotion leaches scattered around Annur,” Nin continued, “but no more than a handful. I doubt that even some of them would have seen what the boy saw.”

Tan opened his mouth, but the abbot continued, forestalling any protest. “The Shin are trained from the moment they arrive in close, careful observation, and yet, who here noticed Pyrre Lakatur’s misstep? You and I. Maybe one or two of the older brothers.” He looked at Kaden almost sadly. “The boy would have made a fine monk.”

“Noticed what?” Kaden asked. “What did I notice?”

“There is more to being a monk than hunches and guesses,” Tan responded.

“He did not guess. He observed.”

“What did I observe?” Kaden asked again.

Tan shook his head brusquely. “He is in a dangerous place. He sees enough to question, but not enough to know when to hold those questions.”

“I understand that you’re telling me to stop asking,” Kaden said, stifling his frustration, “but I’m not going to stop asking. What did I see?”

“A sliver of a pause,” the abbot replied, ignoring the outburst. “A few blinks more than normal. A slight tightening at the corner of her mouth.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Individually, those signs mean nothing.”

“Taken together, they may also mean nothing,” Tan added.

“But you don’t think so,” Kaden interrupted, a sick dread rising in his throat. “You think Pyrre is keeping something back. Why don’t we confront them? Demand to know about the weapons. Demand to know about my father?”

He lapsed into silence as Tan turned from the window.

“If I hadn’t found you, you might be dead now, instead of whining like a child in the abbot’s study.”

Kaden stared incredulously.

“Lies,” his umial continued. “Deception. These are not remarkable in a man or woman. They are even less remarkable in one who makes her living buying and selling. What is remarkable about Pyrre Lakatur is how well she lies. How ably she deceives.” The large monk approached until he loomed over his pupil. “The pricing of silk and the driving of wagons are the least of this woman’s training. Somewhere she has learned to suppress the most basic imperatives of the flesh. You may want to ask yourself, when you finish playing the impetuous prince, why a woman with such impeccable training comes here, to the end of the earth, dressed as a merchant. While you spend the following days digging out the cellar of the meditation hall, you may want to consider the goals of such a woman. What has she come here for? Who has she come here for?”