The Emperor's blades

35

For two days Kaden remained in the cellar of the meditation hall, toiling with a shovel and pickaxe in the rocky soil. Tan had said he wanted the cellar deeper, but he hadn’t specified by how much. Kaden took the omission to mean he had a lot of work ahead of him. He had rolled the huge hogsheads of vinegar and weak beer out of the way, stacking them in the far corner, then set to work on the task. The ground was stony and unyielding. Often he would spend hours trying to find the edges of a boulder, then further hours levering it out of the earth with various picks and prybars. The solitary, monotonous work provided labor for his back and hands, but allowed his mind to wander over the events of the last week.

Pyrre and Jakin Lakatur weren’t merchants; that much was clear, and their arrival had something to do with Kaden. It seemed as though, however improbably, the intrigue of the imperial court had found its way to Ashk’lan, a thought that made Kaden shiver despite his labors. The silk-hung corridors of the Dawn Palace had seen both spies and assassins over the centuries, and here, a thousand leagues from his father’s court, Kaden had no Aedolian Guard to protect him.

What information a spy might hope to glean from Kaden, however, he had no idea. Despite the fact that he stood to inherit the Unhewn Throne, after eight years at Ashk’lan, he knew less about politics than the most incompetent footling. Pyrre and Jakin weren’t likely to have undertaken a trek of a thousand leagues just to watch him run up and down Venart’s Peak and turn bowls in the clay shed.

Assassination struck him as the more likely possibility, troubling though it was. Something was happening back in Annur, something with his father, and it wouldn’t be the first time a rival faction had attempted to strike at the Emperor through his children. During their early childhood, Kaden and Valyn were abducted from the Dawn Palace by Armel Herve, the malcontent atrep of Breata. For weeks they shivered in one of the man’s freezing tower chambers, each night terrified that they would be executed with the sunrise. Then the Kettral came.

Kaden, four years old at the time, had only scattered memories of the event: screaming, blood, fire, and, in the midst of the chaos, three men in black, shadows within shadows, smoke-steel blades flickering as they cut souls from bodies. Kaden could still feel the strong arm around his waist as the closest soldier gathered him up, holding him tight as the great bird took flight, lifting them into the air and away from the dark, fetid room.

From the moment they collected their wits, Kaden and Valyn both vowed that they would grow up to join the ranks of their heroes. They raced around the tapestry-hung halls of the palace swinging wooden replicas of the short Kettral swords, driving the poor palace staff to distraction. Valyn had made good on the dream, taking ship for the mysterious Qirin Islands on the same day that his brother was packed off to the monastery. After eight years training with the Kettral, Valyn would have nothing to fear from Pyrre and Jakin.

“But you’re not Valyn, are you?” Kaden muttered to himself as he drove the shovel into the earth, squinting in the dim light of the lantern. “And you’re not Kettral either.” The realization of his own helplessness galled him, but there seemed no remedy for it. He had trained in painting and patience, the one he could see no use for, the other he needed far more than he had. There was no telling how long Tan intended him to skulk in the cellar-doubtless until any trace of danger had passed.

On the third morning, just as he was finally wrenching a stone the size of his torso out of the hole, Tan came for him.

“Leave it.”

Kaden straightened, resisting the urge to knead the ache in his lower back. If he sees that, he’ll probably decide I need to spend the rest of the year hauling rocks and clearing out cellars.

Tan, however, paid no attention to either the rock or the back. His eyes were on Kaden’s face. “Let’s go,” he said after a long pause. “There are more than merchants here to see you.”

The older monk led Kaden out the back door of the hall and into a narrow passageway between the buildings. After so many days in the cellar, Kaden had to squint against the afternoon brilliance, and it was only after his eyes adjusted that he could see the pail of water sitting on the stone step and the clean robe beside it. Tan gestured to them.

“You’re going to want to get cleaned up,” he said, his face blank as stone.

“Who’s here?” Kaden asked.

Tan pointed at the pail once more. When Kaden realized he wasn’t going to get any answers, he plunged his head into the cold water, then began scrubbing the grime from between his fingers. It took more than a few minutes to scour away the worst of the dirt, digging deep beneath his fingernails, scrubbing with rough gravel scooped from the ground until he thought he might end up taking off the flesh with the grime. Tan clearly had no intention of letting him go anywhere before he’d finished, so he went as fast as he could. When the worst of it had been scoured away, he pulled the clean robe over his head.

“All right,” he said. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere, yet,” Tan replied. “We are going to take a look at these visitors of yours from the window of the hall.”

“Why don’t we just go out to meet them?” Kaden asked, curiosity overwhelming his deference.

There was iron in the monk’s voice when he replied. “From the hall, we can look at them without them looking at us. It might be time you started thinking about more than pots and the vaniate.”

Kaden almost fell over. Since becoming his umial, Tan had drilled him relentlessly in nothing but the vaniate. Everything Kaden had undertaken, from morning prayer to afternoon labor to the bare slab on stone on which he lay down at night, had been devoted to that goal. There were subsidiary challenges, of course-saama’an, ivvate, beshra’an, kinla’an-but they were all just rungs on the ladder. He stared at his umial in perplexity, but Tan steered him firmly back into the meditation hall to a window overlooking the central square.

Two men seemed to be arguing with the abbot while a small crowd of monks gathered around at a respectful distance. Kaden’s breath caught at the splendid figures they cut. Eight years among the Shin had accustomed him to shaven heads and plain, brown robes. A leather belt was an extravagance; leather sandals, a preposterous luxury. These newcomers, however strode directly out of the pomp of his childhood.

The taller of the two wore full plate armor, burnished steel shining so brightly Kaden wanted to avert his eyes. The golden sun of the imperial throne gleamed from his breastplate as well as from the massive shield that rested at his feet. The grip and pommel of the largest broadblade Kaden had ever seen extended up behind the man’s head. He carried his helmet beneath one arm, a single concession to the heat of the day. Even from a distance, Kaden could make out deep blue eyes in a face that might have been hammered out on an anvil, not a handsome face, but a familiar one. Micijah Ut, he realized, a small smile creeping onto his face.

“Aedolian,” Tan said softly.

Kaden looked over at the other monk, wondering for the thousandth time about the life he had led before arriving at the monastery. The golden knots on Ut’s shoulders identified him clearly as a member of the Emperor’s personal bodyguard, of course, but the Aedolian Guard rarely left the capital. How would Tan recognize the insignia?

“The commander,” Tan added.

Kaden glanced back to those knots. Four, he realized with a start. When he left the Dawn Palace, Crenchan Xaw had been First Shield, and though Xaw seemed almost as old as the empire itself, he had run the guard with unerring competence since well before Kaden was born. Whenever Kaden and Valyn tried to slip away on one of their childish adventures, it was Xaw who caught them, Xaw who harangued them about their responsibility to the empire, and Xaw who turned them over a chair and caned them, heedless of their demands to be set free, of their protestations that they were princes, that he had to obey them. Once, when the brothers were still very young, they had foolishly complained to their father about his First Shield’s treatment. Sanlitun had only laughed and resolved to pay Crenchen Xaw an extra stipend “for educating as well as guarding his sons.” The old man was dead now; the fact that Micijah Ut wore the four golden knots of the First Shield could mean nothing else. Although Kaden had spent almost all his young childhood at war with the old commander, he felt a hollowness in the pit of his stomach, a dull ache that the Shin would dismiss as illusion but that he still recognized as sorrow.

When Kaden departed from the capital, Micijah Ut had been one of four commanders directly beneath Crenchen Xaw. As leader of the Dark Guard, he was charged with watching over the royal family between the midnight bell and dawn. Kaden remembered him well, a stiff, formal man who lacked the charm of many of the other Aedolians. He walked his nightly rounds in full armor, even inside the Dawn Palace, his face turned down in a perpetual frown, barely illuminated in the lamplight. Valyn and Kaden had always found him intimidating, despite the fact that he was there to protect them.

After eight years at Ashk’lan, however, Kaden was a child no longer, and in all that time, Micijah Ut was the first person he had seen from his old life. Despite Tan’s admonition to wait and observe, Kaden felt an itching to step outside and batter the block of a man with his questions. In fact, he could hardly have asked for a better emissary than his father’s own First Shield to clear up whatever was happening back in the Dawn Palace. Whatever secrets Pyrre Lakatur was keeping, they wouldn’t last long now that Ut was here. Kaden turned toward the door of the hall, but Tan held him back, redirecting his attention to the scene outside.

With his free hand, the Aedolian was gesturing firmly at the abbot, almost poking him in the chest with his finger. When the wind fell, Kaden could hear his voice, an iron monotone that sounded more accustomed to command than negotiation. “… irrelevant. He is here because of the needs of the Unhewn Throne, and now the Unhewn Throne is…” A gust snatched away the end of the sentence.

Kaden frowned. The Ut he knew had been distant and difficult to know, hard as cast iron in his convictions, but never rude, never bullying. Whatever brought him here had both strained and hardened him.

The second man appeared content to let his companion do the talking. Kaden couldn’t see his face, but long dark hair tied with red silk hung loosely down his back. Despite the rigors of travel and the unpredictable weather of the mountains, he wore a finely tailored red silk coat, buttoned up the center in the style of the highest-ranking imperial ministers, a low collar ringing his neck. Sunlight flashed on the man’s golden cuffs, and Kaden blinked. Only the Mizran Councillor, the highest ranking nonmilitary minister, wore gold at both his cuffs and his collar. This man was one of a half dozen in the entire empire who outranked the Aedolian at his side.

Suddenly the councillor turned his head, and Kaden drew in his breath in surprise. The strip he had taken for a band to hold back hair was, in fact, a thick blindfold completely covering the man’s eyes. In spite of it, he looked directly at the window where Kaden stood, then put a hand on the soldier’s arm, as though to calm him. Unlike Ut, the Mizran was a complete stranger-he must have been extremely talented to have risen through the baffling ranks of the imperial bureaucracy in the eight short years since Kaden had left Annur. Once again the wind died, and this time Kaden could hear the councillor’s voice, smooth as the silk he wore.

“Patience, my friend. He will come. Tell me,” he said, addressing himself to the abbot, “how old is the monastery?”

“Almost three thousand years,” Nin replied. If he was uncomfortable hosting two of the most powerful men in the world, he didn’t show it. In fact, he spoke with the same measured patience that he used when addressing novices in his study.

“And yet,” the man mused, “there are maps in the imperial library, recovered from the Csestriim, I believe, showing a fortress here long before that time. Of course, such maps are often the unreliable children of rumor and mythology.”

“The place was chosen,” the abbot replied, “for the preexisting foundations, among other reasons. Someone built here long before us. I cannot say if it was the Csestriim. It was not a large structure-as you can sense, perhaps, there is little space-but judging from the foundations the walls were thick and strong.”

“Nevariim?” the councillor asked, tilting his head to the side speculatively.

The abbot shook his head. “In the stories I read, the Nevariim never built fortresses. They didn’t build at all-it was one of the reasons the Csestriim were able to destroy them.”

The man in silk waved a hand dismissively. “Ah well, stories, stories. Who’s to say what to believe? There are plenty back in the capital who would claim the Nevariim didn’t exist at all.”

“I admit,” Nin replied, “we have little knowledge of such things here.”

As the wind picked up, carrying away the two voices, Tan looked over at Kaden. “Do you know them?”

“The Aedolian is named Micijah Ut,” Kaden responded. “He once commanded the Dark Guard and now, evidently, has risen to the rank of First Shield.” He returned his gaze to the other, sorting through his memories. “But the man in the silk … no. I don’t know him.”

In the few minutes they had paused to gaze down on the scene, Kaden’s excitement had cooled, like bathwater left too long standing. Micijah Ut seemed different, transformed somehow, and the other man was a complete stranger. Moreover, he felt a growing unease as he considered the rank of the two. His father would not have sent the commander of his personal guard and his highest minister all the way across Vash for a social visit. Something was awry here, badly awry.

“All right,” Tan said finally. “Let’s go see what the First Shield of the Aedolian Guard and the empire’s Mizran Councillor want with a boy who hasn’t even learned to paint.”