The Emperor's blades

38

I’m not ready.

The thought plagued Kaden like the fragment of an inane tune reeling about in his head. I’m not ready. He sat in the same chair from three nights before, and as on that night, the abbot sat silently behind his desk. A small fire burned on the hearth, filling the room with the scent of smoke and juniper while keeping the mountain chill at bay. Outside the windows, Kaden could hear the bleating of goats as Phirum Prumm and Henter Leng shepherded them toward the pens for milking. Nothing was different, but everything had changed. The old monk hadn’t begun falling to his knees or calling him Your Radiance, a fact for which Kaden was profoundly grateful, but there was a new distance in Nin’s steady blue gaze, as though the old abbot had already let him go.

“I guess I won’t make a good monk after all,” Kaden began at last, laughing weakly.

“Life is long,” the abbot replied, “and the paths through it are many.”

Kaden shook his head at the absurdity of the past hour. “I’m not ready.”

There. He had said it, and having said it, the other words came out in a rush, as though the stopper had been pulled from the base of a large cask. “I haven’t learned anything. I don’t know anything. You’ve trained me to be a monk, not an Emperor.”

The old man raised an eyebrow at the outburst, but that was all. A week prior, the rant would have earned Kaden five laps on the Circuit of Ravens or a night on the Talon, and he found himself wishing the abbot would snap at him as he had in the past, tell him to stop being a child, to master his emotions, then send him out to haul water from the black pool. But you don’t send an Emperor to haul water, Kaden thought, and indeed, Nin’s response was calm and measured.

“As I have already explained, you were not sent here to become a monk.”

Kaden opened his mouth to respond, then closed it when he found he had nothing to say.

“I’m doubly sorry for your loss,” the old monk began after a time. “First, because every son should have a chance to know his father, not as a child knows his protector, but as a man knows another man. More pressingly, however, I worry for the empire. As you have observed, Sanlitun died before he could complete your education. He would have taught you the intricacies of politics, intricacies of which we know nothing here. Annur is the most powerful empire since the fall of the Atmani. The fates of thousands, millions, depend on your knowledge.”

“And the gates,” Kaden added, glancing out the window as though there were some escape in the serrated mountains beyond. “I still haven’t learned the vaniate. I can’t use the gates.”

The abbot nodded somberly. “You’re close, very close, but close is irrelevant. If you tried to pass the kenta without achieving the vaniate-” He shook his head, gestured to the air around them with one mottled hand.

“The Blank God,” Kaden concluded.

“The Blank God.”

Kaden hesitated before his next question. “Is there one here?” He asked finally. “A kenta? Could I see it?”

The abbot shook his head. “The Ishien used to build their fortresses by the gates in order to guard them, but Ashk’lan … we don’t know who laid the foundations, but there is no kenta. If there were, your father could have visited you whenever he pleased. Many have been lost, but to the best of my knowledge, there is not a Csestriim gate within a hundred leagues of here.”

“So … what?” Kaden asked. “I have to return to Annur-it’ll take months, even if we travel by ship from the Bend-and Adiv says I don’t have months.”

“It’s unusual,” Nin replied. “Both your father and his father completed their training here. Perhaps we could convince Rampuri Tan to accompany you.”

Kaden stifled a desperate laugh, but Scial Nin caught the expression.

“You find the idea troublesome?” he asked.

“I’m just trying to imagine holding court while buried up to my nose in gravel,” Kaden replied. “My subjects might have difficulty looking up to me if I’m constantly scouring the privy.”

“It will be difficult,” the abbot agreed, nodding his bald head, “and yet, I can see no other way.”

“What about Akiil?” Kaden asked, remembering his friend for the first time.

Nin raised an eyebrow. “What about him?”

“Can he…” Kaden trailed off. It was one thing for Rampuri Tan to accompany the delegation. It was quite another to expect Akiil to simply leave the monastery. Monks were free to come and go as they chose, but Akiil was still an acolyte. Until he completed his training, he was bound to the Bone Mountains. “Never mind.”

“Do not grasp things so tightly,” the abbot suggested, his voice a shade more gentle than normal. “You must be prepared to let go of homes, friends, family, even yourself. Only then will you be free.”

“The vaniate,” Kaden said wearily.

The abbot nodded.

“Tell me something,” Kaden continued after a long silence. “Do you really believe that there are Csestriim out there, lurking somewhere, plotting?”

“I believe,” the abbot replied, “what I can observe. What I observe is that the world is ruled by men-good men and bad, desperate men and those with principles. I may be wrong-Ae knows it would not be the first time-but I see no Csestriim.”

“But Tan-”

Before Kaden could finish the sentence, the door burst open, and as though summoned by the mention of his name, Rampuri Tan strode into the room, a parchment in one hand, the strange naczal spear in the other. Sweat beaded his forehead, and his jaw was tight.

The abbot looked over. “Kaden and I were speaking in private, brother,” he began, voice severe.

“It will have to wait,” Tan replied curtly. “Altaf caught a glimpse of what’s been killing the goats. Down in the lower meadow. He painted it.”

The monk slapped the parchment down on the table and spread it open. Kaden struggled to make sense of the image-black lines slashed across the page in a jumble of limbs and claws. The smith had drawn something like a spider-eight legs, heavy carapace, segmented body-except whatever killed the goats was too big to be a spider.

“What’s the scale on this?” the abbot asked.

“It’s the size of a large dog.”

And the size was the least of it. The creature looked like something out of the depths of nightmare, with legs like blades or shears, savage hacking members designed by some cruel god to cut and to crush. Worse, dozens of eyes, glassy orbs the color of spilled blood, protruded from it everywhere, even from the limbs, as though they had been grafted on by some unholy kenning. Kaden had studied a thousand species during his time at Ashk’lan, creatures as strange as the albino stream crab and the flame moth, plants he couldn’t have dreamed up in a year of dreaming. They had been bizarre, but not unnatural. If Altaf’s painting was anything to go by, there was something wrong about this creature. Something twisted.

“I’ve never come across anything like it,” the abbot said after a long silence, steepling his fingers and turning his gaze to the other monk.

“That’s because it should have been extinct thousands of years ago,” Tan replied.

“I gather you know what it is?” Nin asked.

“If I’m right,” the monk said grimly, “and I hope I am not, it is an abomination. An abomination and an impossibility.”

Kaden frowned. The word abomination wasn’t part of the Shin lexicon. It implied hatred, emotion.

Tan grimaced at the painting, as though trying to accept what he saw, then went on. “What Altaf has drawn looks like an ak’hanath.” He indicated the serrated legs, the claws. “A creature of the Csestriim.”

Kaden drew in a sharp breath.

“So they are still around,” he said. Then, when no one responded, “But we won. Remmick Ironheart killed the last of the Csestriim on the fields of Ai.”

“Maybe,” Tan said.

“Maybe,” Nin acknowledged with a weary nod.

“And now that Altaf has seen this thing,” Kaden interjected, “this ak’hanath, you think the Csestriim have returned.” It was impossible, like hearing that the young gods had come to walk the earth once again.

“It’s hard to say,” Nin said. For once, he almost looked his age, his eyes weary beneath his weathered brow. “I believe what I can observe, and I have not observed everything. Perhaps your umial is mistaken. Perhaps he is correct, but even so, a Csestriim creature does not mean that the Csestriim themselves still walk the earth. Certainty is hard to come by.”

“Certainty is impossible,” Tan added, a flat, hard light in his eyes. “The world is a shifting, dangerous place. Those who wait for certitude before they act almost always wait too long.”

“But what is it?” Kaden asked, returning his gaze to the painting with horrified fascination.

“The Csestriim made them,” Tan replied. “No one is quite sure how. Bedisa weaves the souls of all living things, spinning them into existence at their birth, but the ak’hanath were not born. They were made.” He paused. “It should not have been possible.”

“Made?” Kaden asked. “Made for what?”

“To sniff out,” Tan said, his eyes hardening, “to track. To harry, and to hunt.”