The Emperor's blades

36

For the better part of three days, Valyn’s Wing spent every spare hour in the gear shop trying to redesign the harness and buckle system for Suant’ra’s talons. The work did not go smoothly. Although everyone seemed to accept the fundamental premise-that they needed a quicker and more efficient way to detach from the bird if they were going to make drops at Laith’s speed-each member of the team had a different idea of the form that new system should take.

Gwenna was all for simple hand loops and no backup belts.

“And if you can’t hold on to the ’Kent-kissing thing,” she argued, stabbing a finger at Valyn, “maybe you ought to get dumped in the drink.”

Talal shook his head. “That’d be fine for short runs, but do you want to be hanging from hand loops all day? And what if we need to retreat with someone wounded?”

Annick was even blunter. “No. I need two hands to shoot.”

They had, strewn over the table in front of them, a baffling array of buckles, straps, hooks, catches, harnesses, rope, even an old leather saddle, although what they were supposed to do with that was anyone’s guess. There was enough gear in the shop to rig a dozen systems-and yet, none of them could figure a way to make it all fit, to put the pieces together in a way that was actually useful. Gwenna kept her hands busy tying knots, lashing hook and eye pieces to lengths of leather, while Talal held up one piece at a time, gravely considering each in turn. None of it was getting them anywhere.

At first Laith just sat back in his chair, regarding the whole conversation with a faintly concealed grin. He’d brought a firefruit from the mess hall, and seemed more concerned with trying to spit the seeds into the rubbish bin than he was with their abortive engineering project.

“You’re the one who’s been flying this ’Shael-spawned bird the past decade,” Valyn said. “You have anything to add?”

“Careful how you talk about my bird,” Laith said, spitting another seed toward the bin. Missing. “Women come and go, but Suant’ra’s been true to me for years.”

“How romantic. Do you have any ideas that might help?”

The flier shrugged. “I’m up there on her back. I wish you all the best, but it seems like what happens down on the talons is your problem.”

“It’s our fucking problem,” Gwenna snapped, “because you never learned to fly your bird the right way.”

“The right way?” Laith mused. “I prefer to think there’s not just one right and wrong, but rather, a great palate of options, each-”

“Oh, for Hull’s sake,” Valyn broke in. “Leave off with the horseshit for half a second.” He considered his friend carefully. Laith had a good mind, but as long as he considered the whole exercise irrelevant to his own role, he wasn’t likely to use it. Of course, if something happened to make him care …

“What about,” Valyn suggested innocently, “putting two soldiers on the bird’s back? As Laith’s pointed out, it’s easier riding up there.”

Talal opened his mouth to object, then, seeing what Valyn intended, shut it quietly.

“Two?” Laith spluttered, dropping all four feet of his chair onto the floor. “Where would the second one go?”

“Right behind you, I thought. They could hang on to your waist.”

“Any idiot hanging on to my waist while we’re flying maneuvers is just going to pull me off!”

“Luckily,” Talal slipped in, “we’re not idiots.”

Annick rolled her eyes at that.

“All I’m saying,” Valyn continued, pressing his success, “is that we need to keep all options on the table. If we can’t figure a way to get all four of us below, maybe we need to put an extra person on top.”

After that, Laith tossed the remainder of his firefruit in the trash and started confronting the problem in earnest.

At the heart of the matter was the trade-off between speed and security. It was easy to arrange a quick drop-it just meant you didn’t have much holding you in place during the gut-wrenching maneuvers leading up to it. On the other hand, all the buckles and knots of the conventional system made for great security-you could fall fully asleep dangling from the bird’s talons-but inefficient drops.

“What we need,” Laith burst out after they’d been going around and around for the better part of an hour, “is to stop screwing around with buckles. Why can’t the things just explode off?”

Gwenna pursed her lips, then nodded slowly.

“No,” Valyn said, stopping her before she could get started. “We’re not going to rig charges to ourselves or our buckles.”

“A very small charge,” Gwenna suggested, her green eyes bright, “if handled carefully, could do the job. We’d just need a slow-burn wick attached to-”

“No explosives,” Valyn said, setting his fist firmly on the table. “We may be the worst ’Kent-kissing Wing on the Islands, but at least we still have all our fingers.”

“For now,” Laith added.

“I’m sorry, my most exquisite and sublime commander,” Gwenna shot back. “I’ll attempt not to speak out of turn in the future. Perhaps His Lordship would like to put a gag in my mouth?”

Valyn would have liked nothing better, but he was trying to bring the Wing together, not browbeat them into submission.

“I’ve got something I could put in your mouth,” Laith suggested, managing to look innocent and depraved at the same time. “Might keep us both out of trouble.”

Gwenna smiled back compliantly, but her words were barbed. “I’d like that,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed my meat soft and tender. It’s easier to chew.”

Annick snorted, whether with amusement or disgust Valyn had no idea.

“We could try going in slower,” Talal suggested quietly. “It’s what the other Wings do.”

Laith rolled his eyes. “You sound like my grandmother, ’Shael rest her soul. We had horses, but she always insisted on walking, said that if Bedisa had intended us to gallop around the globe, Bedisa would have made us with four legs and hooves. Anyway, if I went in any slower, everyone with a bow could take a shot at you. We might as well just hang dead meat from ’Ra’s talons.”

“It’s what the other Wings do,” Annick pointed out. “It’s the protocol.”

“Aren’t you the one who hammers her own arrowheads?” Laith demanded. “Since when do you give a whore’s heart for protocol?”

“Wait,” Valyn cut in, trying to focus on the words he’d just heard. “Hold on a second.”

The rest of the group stared at him for several long moments.

“You have something to say?” Laith asked finally. “Or you just need to take a shit?”

“Hooks,” Valyn replied, fixing on the idea. “Meat hooks.”

As a child, he’d been morbidly fascinated with the larder deep in the cellars of the Dawn Palace, where rows on rows of slaughtered pigs, cows, and sheep had been dressed and hung from frightening steel hooks. He and Kaden used to sneak down there, daring each other to snuff the lantern and wander in the darkness, hands stretched out before them to fend off the carcasses. It was where he had first learned about hearts, and brains, and livers, where he first understood that if you cut a body and bled it dry, the creature died. It did not seem an auspicious place to be gleaning combat ideas, but then, they didn’t have much else to work with.

“We use hooks instead of buckles.”

Annick squinted, tilted her head to the side as though calculating, then nodded once. “Good.” The sniper was a thorn in his side, but she was fast.

The rest of the Wing wasn’t so quick. “Hooks where?” Gwenna demanded.

“High,” Valyn responded, warming to his idea. “High on ’Ra’s talons, a little above our heads. We toss a loop of rope from our belts over the hooks, and our weight holds us in place.”

Laith shook his head. “You’ll have the same problem you’ve got with the buckles-you can’t release the loop from the hook with your weight on it.”

Valyn smiled. “That would be a problem … if you bothered to follow standard drop protocol.”

“Ah,” Talal chimed in, understanding spreading across his face. “As the angle of our descent gets steeper and steeper, the loop will slip closer to the lip of the hook.”

Valyn nodded. “When we’re in a near-vertical dive, the loop will slide right off. We drop. We don’t ever need to touch a thing.”

“It’s clever,” Gwenna replied with a frown, “but it means we all drop at the same time.”

“Not if we change the angles of the hooks slightly,” Laith countered. “First to drop has the shallowest angle, the last, the most severe. As ’Ra stoops harder, you’ll fall off one by one.”

Talal nodded. “It makes so much sense,” he marveled. “Why don’t any of the veteran Wings do this?”

“Because their fliers follow orders,” Valyn responded, eyeing Laith appraisingly. “The hooks wouldn’t work at shallower attack angles. The attack angles we’re supposed to adhere to.”

“This mean we get to quit following orders?” Gwenna asked with a smirk.

For the first time, Valyn found himself smiling in return. It was a small step, really-smaller than small. They hadn’t even built a mock-up of the system, hadn’t come close to testing it, and yet, for the first time, he thought he understood the Flea’s words: Command the Wing you have, not the one you want. For the first time, they’d demonstrated that they could work in concert to solve a common problem. Who knows, he thought to himself with a small smile, we might turn out all right after all.

Then the door to the shop slammed open.

Daveen Shaleel stepped into the room, followed immediately by Adaman Fane and the other four members of his Wing, all decked out in full combat kit.

“Don’t tell me,” Laith groaned. “You want us to swim around Qarsh underwater.”

Valyn started to chuckle, but the sound died in his throat. The soldiers in the door weren’t laughing. They weren’t even smiling. In fact, Valyn realized, his stomach tightening suddenly, they’d taken up standard assault positions just inside the room, as though they were getting ready to clear an enemy compound. He took a step forward, toward Shaleel, trying to formulate the right question. Fane’s blade brought him up short, whispering out of its sheath to point directly at Valyn’s throat.

“Less moving,” the man said grimly. “More listening.”

Shaleel took in the scene at a glance, then turned to Valyn. She seemed as calm as a housewife going about her chores, but steel edged her voice when she spoke.

“Valyn hui’Malkeenian,” she began, transfixing him with her gaze, “your Wing is hereby suspended from all training and combat missions. You will retain your freedom of movement on Qarsh itself, but you are forbidden to leave the island, forbidden to bear arms, and forbidden to have any substantive contact with other Wings, commanders, or cadets until the completion of our inquest.”

Valyn had never heard the words before, but they carried the ring of legal formula.

“What inquest?” he demanded, angry despite Fane’s blade in his face. “What are you talking about?”

“As you and your Wing are all aware,” Shaleel continued, “Kettral code forbids unauthorized assault on civilians, imperial or otherwise. It has come to my attention in the past hour that a member of your Wing may be implicated in just such an assault.”

“What?” Valyn asked, trying desperately to follow the conversation, to gain his footing. “Who? And how did this ‘come to your attention’?”

“Sami Yurl,” Shaleel replied. “According to him, a young woman over on Hook was murdered several weeks ago-a whore named Amie, no surname. Yurl presented us with compelling evidence that suggests your sniper-” She indicated Annick with a nod of her head. “-was involved.”

“Sami Yurl? That vat of pickled pig’s shit?” Gwenna burst out, rising from her chair. “Why would you listen to him about anything?”

“Take your people in hand, Commander,” Shaleel said, never shifting her eyes from Valyn’s face, “or they may get themselves hurt.”

“You can talk to me, you know,” Gwenna said, taking a step forward. “I’m right here.”

“Gwenna,” Valyn snapped, surprised at the edge of command in his own voice. “Not now.”

For a moment, he thought she was going to defy him, but Talal put a hand on her shoulder and, after a final spasm of anger, Gwenna cursed and threw herself back into her chair.

A hole opened in Valyn’s stomach. He wanted to scream that it was impossible, that Yurl had played him, played Shaleel, played the whole ’Kent-kissing lot of them. He wanted to bellow that Annick was innocent, but he couldn’t. For all he knew, Yurl was right.

“Where is he?” Valyn managed. “I want to talk to him, personally.”

Shaleel shook her head. “I sent Yurl’s Wing out this morning-their first mission. Besides, the code forbids such contact until the inquest is finished.”

“Why all of us?” Laith demanded. At least he had remained in his seat, but he was leaning forward hungrily, his hand on his belt knife. “If Annick’s the one you’re worried about, why don’t you just lock her up and leave us out of it?”

“I will chalk up the impertinence of your question to your shock, soldier,” Shaleel replied evenly. “The Eyrie has found it … prudent, to detain an entire Wing in the event of an inquiry into the conduct of one of its members. We don’t want any ill-conceived ‘rescues’ or ‘last stands.’ Wing loyalty is a powerful thing.” She eyed the lot of them up and down, “Although in your case, it doesn’t appear to be a problem.”

“Blades and bows,” Fane said. “We’ll take them all.”

“Possession of any weapon aside from a belt knife between now and the end of the inquest,” Shaleel added, “will be construed as treason. Until we sort this out, the five of you should consider yourselves civilians.”