The Emperor's blades

34

Whatever wary trust Valyn managed to establish with Talal, nothing had changed in the course of daily training. The Wing was halfway through its probationary period, halfway to flying its first real mission, and they still hadn’t managed to win a single contest. I’d be surprised if Command lets us stand guard over a vegetable stand, Valyn thought to himself grimly as he rolled over in his bunk, restless in the predawn darkness, let alone fly to northeastern Vash to hunt for Kaden.

It wasn’t that the individual members of his Wing were incompetent. In fact, operating independently, each had shown moments of genius: Gwenna rigged and blew an entire bridge by moonlight in less than an hour; Talal swam the entire breadth of the Akeen Channel underwater; and Annick, of course, hadn’t missed a single target, regardless of distance, weather, or time of day.

In spite of these successes, however, the Wing just could not manage to get out of its own way. Gwenna blew the bridge while Laith and Valyn were still crossing it, singeing half their clothes off and dumping them in the water; Talal emerged from the Channel only to take one of Annick’s stunners to the back of the head; and Annick’s perfect shooting only led her to grow more and more scornful of the Wing, as though she were the only professional in a group of children.

Valyn rolled onto his back. It was still pitch black outside, and the early bell had yet to ring, but after a few hours of uneasy slumber, he had lain awake, staring at the bunk above him. He could analyze and condemn the mistakes of his Wing mates until he was blue in the face, but the real truth was that he was failing them. It was his responsibility to formulate each mission plan, his job to make sure his soldiers understood their roles, and his job to stave off personal problems before they became a threat to the integrity of the group. So far, he had done piss-poor work on all fronts.

His mind drifted to the memory of Ha Lin-the banter, shared jokes, and easy camaraderie; the quiet, solid comfort he had felt when she was at his side or seated across the table. All these years, he’d never realized how much strength he drew from her, how much he had always assumed that she would always be there to bolster him. When he pictured commanding his own Wing, he’d imagined Lin there, quibbling with his small decisions but never doubting him, not really. He’d been unconsciously counting on her to back him up. Of course, when it really mattered, he had failed her.

The low tolling of the morning bell broke into his bleak thoughts, and his feet hit the floor before the sound had faded from the air. If the past weeks were any indication, the day was bound to be another failure, but anything was better than lying in his bunk, gazing up into the incriminating darkness, worrying that he wasn’t getting it right, worrying that while he bungled his command, danger, swift but unknowable, was drawing closer and closer to Kaden, his brother, the Emperor.

“Rise and shine,” he said, stomping into his boots before plucking a glowing ember from the fire to light the lamp.

Gwenna cursed from the bunk above, but made no effort to rise, let alone shine.

Valyn shrugged into his tunic and shouldered aside the door into the front room only to find Annick already awake and seated at the large table. She was fully dressed and oiling her bow with long, smooth strokes. For the hundredth time, Valyn wondered what went on behind those ice-cold eyes. He hadn’t had a chance to speak to her alone since before the Trial, since their encounter in the infirmary. Whenever he looked to have a word with her, there were others around or she had mysteriously melted away. She’d convinced him that she hadn’t tried to kill him during the sniper contest, but she was a riddle, and any riddle was dangerous. He shivered at the realization that she had managed to rise, dress, and go to work on her bow mere feet from him without making a sound, all in complete darkness. Why was Amie going to meet you? he wondered for the hundredth time. What are you hiding?

Talal had rolled to his feet and slipped into his blacks while Gwenna grumbled herself halfway out of her bunk. Laith refused to budge.

“Briefing in ten,” Valyn announced, stepping back through the door and kicking the pallet in an effort to jolt the flier into life.

“’Shael’s sweet suckling whores,” Laith cursed, rolling away from the light. “Why don’t you just beat me bloody and light my hair on fire here? Save another Wing the trouble?”

“I’m happy to light your hair on fire,” Gwenna growled. She was perched on the edge of her bunk, raking fingers through her own tangled mane. The light shirt in which she slept did nothing to conceal the curves of her breasts beneath, and Valyn looked away awkwardly. There was no mystery around the female form, not with the Kettral. He’d been eating, sleeping, swimming, and shitting next to his peers for eight years. Better get used to it, Fane used to say. You’re not going to be much use in a fight if you’re ogling the ass of the soldier next to you. Valyn was used to it, but he’d been sharing a barracks with men ever since he arrived on the Islands, and there was something a little distracting about walking into the bunkroom to find Gwenna or Annick bare-assed or halfway into her blacks. He shut his eyes and put a hand to his forehead, hoping Gwenna wouldn’t notice. Staring at her breasts wasn’t going to help his Wing any, and besides, it felt like a betrayal of Ha Lin.

Idiot, he cursed himself. You had nothing to speak of with Lin, and Gwenna would just as soon gut you as kiss you. It was true, all of it, but he felt guilty just the same.

Gwenna was still harassing Laith. “Maybe our royal leader would like me to rig your bed tonight. I’m sure I could arrange a little something to wake you up in the morning.”

“You are an evil bitch,” Laith groaned, rolling over onto his back. “Why couldn’t Rallen have assigned Gent to this Wing?”

“Because Gent is about as capable as a whore with the pox. At least if I blow you up, you’ll know I meant to do it.”

“What?” the flier shot back. “Like the other day?”

“You weren’t supposed to be on the bridge, you idiot.”

“None of this is helping,” Talal said quietly. He sat on his own bunk, lacing up his boots.

“Helping what?” Laith demanded. “It’s certainly helping to ruin my sleep.”

“Good,” Valyn interjected, before the argument could go any further. “We’ve got a lot to work through today, and not much time to do it.” Technically, this was information for the briefing, but they hadn’t been doing anything else by the book. Why start now? he thought to himself.

“What?” Annick asked. She had set aside her bow and was looking over the fletching of her arrows. She didn’t bother to look up at Valyn when he turned.

“Barrel drops,” he replied.

“Oh, for ’Shael’s sake,” Gwenna groaned. “Again?”

“Well, well,” Laith said, rising for the first time, picking his teeth absently with a finger. “I might go an entire day without a bruise after all.”

“Speak for yourself,” Gwenna said. “It’s not so easy when you’re the one dropping instead of the one flying.”

“The other Wings quit doing barrel drops a week ago,” Annick pointed out flatly.

“Well,” Valyn responded with more heat than he had intended, “we haven’t.”

“Who’s in charge of the training?” Talal asked quietly.

“Not Fane,” Laith groaned from the bunk. “Not Fane again.”

“The Flea will be overseeing today’s training,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his voice level.

Silence reigned in the room as the soldiers eyed one another warily.

“Well,” Gwenna snorted finally, dropping out of her bunk and fixing Valyn with those green eyes of hers. “Today, my illustrious lord commander, would be a good day to start getting things right.”

* * *

At least it’s sunny, Valyn thought to himself, closing his eyes and leaning back into his leather harness. Wind tugged at his hair and clothes, threatening to rip him from his perch on Suant’ra’s talons while the back draft from the great bird’s slow, powerful wing beats buffeted him from above.

After eight years on the Islands, Valyn still marveled at the power and grace of the kettral. Without the kettral, there would be no Kettral. The creatures could cover ground faster than any horse, faster than a three-hundred-oar galley, soar over impregnable walls as though they were thin lines drawn on the dirt, land on towers, and outdistance any pursuit in a matter of minutes. If necessary, the bird herself could even fight, tearing through flesh and armor with her claws and beak as if they were cloth.

In taverns all across Vash and Eridroa, men told tales of the birds, whispering that they fed on human flesh. Most people had never seen one, of course-there were only a few score in the entire world, and the empire guarded them closely-but a good look at Suant’ra wouldn’t have done much to calm anyone’s nerves. She was clearly a predator, with all the attributes of her tinier cousins writ large: the hooked razor beak and raking talons; the long, packed pinions of jet and white that allowed her to ride the thermals or swoop at speeds that would drive a rider’s eyes into the back of her head. She was a bird of prey, all right, and a predator with a seventy-foot wingspan is a fearsome thing.

Flying around enjoying the breeze was all well and good, but it wasn’t much use unless you could get on and off of the bird’s talons quickly. The Kettral often landed in heavily patrolled areas, and a few extra seconds fiddling with straps and buckles could mean the difference between life and death. Barrel drops trained the Wing to disembark over water. It sounded easy enough: fly in low, unbuckle the safety straps, unhitch the barrel filled with weapons and gear (for which the exercise was named), and dive into the water. In practice, however, a barrel drop ranged somewhere between terrifying and deadly.

For one thing, a kettral could fly far faster than a galloping horse. When you hit the waves at that speed, they felt more like brick than water. For another, there were four bodies in play, along with a dozen or so straps and buckles; a collision with any of them could easily bruise a rib or slash a cheek. And then, of course, there was the barrel itself. Some situations didn’t require extra gear, and the Wing could drop in with only the weapons and clothes on their backs. Plenty of more complicated missions, however, called for disguises, extra munitions (that had to be kept dry), even food if the team needed to stay in the field for more than a few days. All of that went into the barrel, which could weigh upward of fifty pounds and hit the waves like a boulder plummeting down a steep hillside. Soldiers had been killed in barrel drops before, and Valyn was starting to think that someone on his Wing was going to be next.

The main problem was Laith. Unlike the four other members of the Wing, who crouched on the bird’s talons during flight, the flier sat in a modified harness on the kettral’s back, just behind her head. The view was better from there, and Laith could control Suant’ra far more easily than from any position below. As a result, the flier felt much the same control as a man on horseback might. The rest of his Wing, on the other hand, felt like cargo. During his years as a cadet, Laith had built up a reputation as a fearless flier, pressing himself and his birds up to and beyond their physical limits. Suant’ra was his creature; he had raised her and trained her, and sometimes the two seemed to share one mind. It made for impressive aerobatics when watched from the ground-impossible-looking loops and rolls and twists. Unfortunately, the two weren’t accommodating to passengers. The kettral were trained to fly with their talons down, and Suant’ra did this well enough, but Laith never seemed to care if anyone happened to be on those talons.

Valyn’s stomach leapt into his chest as his flier dropped the bird into the start of a dive. He glanced over to see Gwenna scowling and tightening her grip on the leather loop tied high on the bird’s talon. Maybe today’s the day we get it right, he thought to himself as Suant’ra gained speed, angling into a stoop. The bright blue of the ocean rushed up at him, filling his vision. Or, he amended as the wind threatened to tear the clothes from his body, maybe not.

All fliers tried to go into a barrel drop fast-quick entry and exit gave the enemy a briefer target of opportunity-but as with everything else, there was a standard protocol, an angle of attack, refined over the years and passed down to the junior Wings, designed to optimize the trade-off between speed and security. Laith didn’t much care for the protocol, and didn’t give a horse’s ass about optimization. In fact, he seemed determined to shatter his own Wing against the rapidly approaching waves. As the bird plummeted, Valyn felt his foot slip on the talon. Moments later, he was dangling in space, suspended by his harness and one hand on the safety loop. Whatever shout escaped from his throat was torn away by the screaming wind in his ears and ’Ra’s own piercing shriek.

Talal noticed Valyn’s predicament first and stretched out a hand to try to pull him in. At that speed, however, with the wind whipping around them and the blinding blue of the ocean rushing up, the gesture was futile.

“Unclip yourself!” Valyn screamed, gesturing furiously. The strain was wrenching his shoulder from its socket, but he couldn’t do anything about that now. If the others could manage to execute their parts of the plan, Valyn might be able to extricate himself. “Make your own drop!”

Gwenna already had the barrel swinging free of ’Ra’s talons and with a savage yank on the final hitch, she sent it plummeting directly into Valyn’s shoulder. He bellowed as the muscles of his upper arm tore under the strain, then bit into his own tongue as Laith hauled the bird level just feet above the slapping chop.

Annick hit the water first, skidded once on the surface, then plowed into the waves. Talal dropped next and Gwenna, evidently flustered from her effort to free the barrel, followed him too closely. The two tangled on impact in a desperate flurry of limbs.

That left Valyn. Laith was flying so low that Valyn’s boots slapped against the crests of the waves, each jolt sending a new flash of fire through his shoulder. Now that the bird had leveled out, he should have been able to regain his footing on the talon, but his left arm wasn’t functioning correctly, and the sea kept tearing at his boots. With his free hand he tried to unclip the buckle to his waistbelt, but the ’Shael-spawned thing had cinched tight when he weighted it, and no amount of tugging would pull it free. Valyn gritted his teeth. The drop was already a disaster. Talal and Gwenna were probably black-and-blue from their collision on landing, Ae only knew where the barrel was, and Valyn himself, the Wing’s commander, was being dragged farther from his Wing with every heartbeat. As he watched, the ocean started to pull away beneath him. Laith had guided the bird into a slow, steady climb, unaware that Valyn was still entangled in the straps beneath.

They had failed again. He had failed. There was nothing for it now but to let go of the wrist strap, take the agonizing weight off his shoulder, settle back into the harness, and wait for Laith to swing around to pick up the rest of the team. There wasn’t any other reasonable course of action.

Except they were supposed to be training for real missions, and if he were flying a real mission, he’d need to rejoin his Wing, regardless of the circumstances. He glanced down between his legs and swallowed heavily. ’Ra didn’t climb as fast as she stooped, but they were already a good forty paces up and gaining height with every breath. Valyn loosened the knife from his belt, then hesitated. He’d catch hell from Shar in the gear shop for slicing his harness, and without a controlled dive, he was going to hit that water like a stone. The impact might well tear his already battered shoulder right off.

“’Shael take it,” he muttered, severing the thick canvas with a single swipe of the blade and tumbling headlong toward the brutal waves below. “At least if it kills me, I won’t have to do it again.”

* * *

“Well, that was a goat fuck,” the Flea said quietly.

Valyn nodded stiffly, the motion sending a spike of pain down his neck and into his arm. He had flown six more drops with his Wing, hanging on desperately despite the damage to his shoulder, and each had gone more poorly than the last. He tried to tell Laith to slow down, to take a shallower angle, but the flier didn’t seem to understand the words slower or careful. For eight years, he’d been flying belly in the dirt, right at the limit, and two weeks of training failures hadn’t done much to alter his old, reckless habits. On the final run-through, Valyn, Gwenna, Annick, and Talal had been scattered across so much water that it had been quicker to simply swim it in rather than waiting for Laith to pick them up.

The Flea had watched the whole morning’s fiasco from a low headland overlooking the bay. When Valyn finally hauled himself out of the water, then made the short climb to the top of the cliff, soaked to the bone and bleeding from half a dozen scratches and abrasions, the older soldier didn’t say a word at first, just looked at him with those flat, measuring eyes. This, Valyn thought to himself, is not going to be good.

The Flea didn’t have problems with his own Wing. His Wing was a legend: Blackfeather Finn, the finest tournament archer in the world; Chi Hoai Mi, the fearless flier who carried with her a small silver cup from which she drank the blood of her slain foes; Newt the Aphorist and Sigrid sa’Karyna, the demolitions master as ugly as the leach was beautiful, the two of them the only people ever to escape from the Spire and the cruel priests of Meshkent; and, of course, the Flea himself.

When Valyn first arrived on the Islands, eight years old with eyes wide as saucers, he had asked the short, broad, slightly hunched soldier why people called him “the Flea.” The older man had cracked a crooked smile. “Because I’m small, black, and annoying,” he had responded to Valyn’s surprise and discomfort. It wasn’t until a week or so later that Valyn learned the real story.

The empire’s eastern frontier, the part that didn’t disappear into the Urghul steppe, butted up against the Blood Cities-dozens of independent city-states dotting southeastern Vash. Normally those cities spent their time warring against and betraying one another, and as a result, posed little threat to Annur. That changed when Casimir Damek rose to power.

Damek was a brilliant general, a master politician, and a leach who claimed to be a god. The Annurians ridiculed the notion, but after a series of improbable victories, the citizens of the Blood Cities believed, and for the first time in several centuries, the empire found itself facing a unified army led by a man whose powers, admittedly, seemed godly-generals struck down by arrows shot from a mile distant, geysers of earth routing cavalry, entire rivers diverted to drown his foes as they thrashed in their armor. In a single season, he destroyed the eastern imperial army and marched on the Bend with fifty thousand troops.

The Kettral were called in.

The Kettral, shockingly, failed.

Damek captured three Wings in quick succession, captured, castrated, mutilated, and decapitated them. It was the worst string of defeats in the history of the Eyrie. In his camp east of the Bend, the general boasted that he gave no more thought to the Kettral than he did to the fleas on his great gray mastiffs.

Four days later, he was dead.

On the Qirins, mission assignments were confidential. No one asked questions and no one made boasts. Within days, however, Anjin Serrata, a quiet, capable Wing commander who was known for nothing more than keeping his head down and his eyes up, acquired a new nickname: the Flea.

And that was just the beginning of the legend, Valyn reminded himself as he prepared for the tongue-lashing.

The Flea, however, didn’t say a word. He waited silently until the whole Wing assembled before dismissing them with a curt wave of his hand. Valyn hesitated, uncertain, then turned with the rest. The man’s voice brought him up short.

“Not you.”

So, Valyn realized. Here it comes. At least the commander wasn’t going to ream him out in front of his own people.

“A solid and thorough goat fuck,” the Flea said again once the others had left.

“Yes, sir,” Valyn responded wearily. “It was a mess.”

“What went wrong?” the man asked. He sounded curious rather than angry.

“What didn’t go wrong?” Valyn exploded. He shook his head. “We couldn’t get the ’Kent-kissing straps to release quickly enough, for one thing. And the angle of attack was all wrong-we kept slamming into each other, and the barrel almost took off Talal’s head two drops in a row. As it is, he’s going to need to get stitched up at the infirmary. You can see a little chunk of his skull when you pull the skin out of the way.” He grimaced. “It’s Laith’s flying,” he concluded reluctantly. “That’s the root of all the problems.”

The Flea picked absently at a new scar on his thumb, but didn’t respond.

“I know I’m the commander,” Valyn replied, raising his hands in surrender. “I know it’s my responsibility and I accept that responsibility. I’ve explained the standard protocol to Laith a dozen times, and I’ve gone over the reasons for it. He just can’t do it … won’t do it … I don’t know, but the bottom line is he comes in too fast and too hard. The rest of it all stems from that.”

The Flea frowned out over the waves, as though considering some indiscernible shape in the distance.

“You’re frustrated with your Wing,” he said finally.

Valyn bit down on the temptation to agree. “They’re my Wing, sir. We’ll work things out.”

The Flea nodded, but didn’t take his eyes from the horizon. “You’re commanding the wrong Wing,” he said.

Valyn’s eyes widened. He had no idea how the Wing selection process happened, but obviously the Flea did. “I didn’t choose them,” Valyn replied cautiously.

“That’s not what I mean. You’re trying to command the Wing you expected, the Wing you wanted.”

“Sir?” Valyn asked, shaking his head.

The Flea snorted. “You wanted rule-abiding, book-crunching professionals. That’s not what you got.”

“You can say that again.”

“Then stop commanding the Wing you wanted. Start commanding the Wing you have.”

Valyn puzzled over this for a moment. He’d spent the entire day trying to get Laith to follow barrel drop protocol, and he had failed. If anything, the flier had come in faster and harder than ever on that last run, frustrated at the repeated failures. Everything hinged on the speed and the angle: the order of buckle release, the placement of the barrel, the timing of the jumps. If he just let Laith continue to fly by the seat of his pants, they’d have to change everything, have to rework the barrel drop from the ground up. There were reasons the Kettral had instituted the protocol in the first place.

“I was a part of the group that picked the Wings,” the Flea said, breaking into Valyn’s thoughts.

Valyn stared at the man, aghast. “You helped select that team?” he asked, trying to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

The Flea shrugged. His pockmarked face remained indifferent. “I didn’t select ’em, but I approved the list.”

“Why?”

“Thought they’d make a good Wing,” the commander replied simply.

Valyn opened his mouth to snap a quick response, then shut it. Either the man was taunting him, or there was something to the lesson. Command the Wing you have, not the Wing you want. It would mean throwing out the whole protocol and reworking the barrel drop entirely.

“So what you’re saying, sir-,” Valyn began, trying to work through the implications.

The Flea cut him off. “Can’t talk now. I gotta go.”

Valyn looked around, confused. “Where are you going?”

“Barrel drops,” the Flea grunted, gesturing over his shoulder toward the dim shape of a bird in the distance.

“Barrel drops like we did?”

“Hopefully a lot better than you did. Those were shittiest barrel drops I’ve seen since I was a cadet.”

Valyn tried to wrap his weary mind around it. “Why are you still doing them? What’s the twist?”

“No twist,” the Flea replied, picking idly at a callus on his thumb, seemingly unaware of the rapidly approaching bird.

“But they’re a novice exercise,” Valyn protested. He’d heard fables of the training the veteran Wings went through: rose-and-thorn scenarios, impossible point landings, high-speed multiple casualty extracts … “None of the veteran Wings do barrel drops.”

The Flea shrugged. “We do.”

It didn’t make sense. The Flea and his Wing were professionals. They were practically gods. It was like hearing that a master bladesman still practiced slicing vegetables for the dinner pot.

“How often?” Valyn asked, stepping back as the massive black bird swept in on close approach. Chi Hoai Mi, the Flea’s flier, was coming in fast and hard, faster than Laith, even, and seemingly low enough to knock her Wing’s commander from the cliff. The Flea didn’t even look over his shoulder at the approaching bird. He just raised one hand and seemed to contemplate Valyn’s question.

“Just about every day,” he replied, eyes abstracted, as though tallying up the days and weeks, the years. “Yeah,” he concluded, nodding as though that were settled. “Just about every day.”

The bird was upon them in a rush of wind that knocked Valyn back onto his heels. The Flea, however, just leaned forward slightly, snagged a leather loop that had appeared at the last moment, seemingly out of nowhere, and pulled himself effortlessly onto the talons. Before Valyn could make sense of the sight, Chi Hoai had put the bird into a steep bank and the whole Wing disappeared over the edge of the cliff.