The Emperor's blades

40

“What,” Gwenna demanded, squaring up across the table from Annick, one hand on her belt knife, the other thrusting out an accusatory finger, “the fuck?”

The fact that she’d waited until the entire Wing was back in their bunkhouse with the door firmly closed was something of a minor miracle, and Valyn had little hope of controlling the outburst now. In fact, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. After weeks of lurking, pondering, guessing, and second-guessing, he just wanted the ’Kent-kissing truth. If Annick really had murdered Amie, then she was almost certainly implicated in Lin’s death as well. If she hadn’t-well, then, maybe she could at least tell him what she was doing over on Hook the day the girl died. He was enraged over Yurl’s maneuvering-there was no telling how long they might be confined to the Islands-and yet, there was a strange sort of relief in the fact that everything was coming to a head.

“Slow down,” he growled. “Everyone just slow down.” He gestured to the chairs around the low table. “Take a seat. Yurl’s out to screw with us somehow-we all know him well enough to realize that. There are some hard questions we need to ask ourselves, questions I want answered, but we’re not going to start ripping each other apart with our bare teeth like dogs.”

“Teeth’s about all they left us,” Laith observed sourly, jerking his head to the empty scabbards on his back.

“Teeth is all I’ll need if I find out he’s lying,” Gwenna said, her mouth twisting into a snarl as though she were preparing to make good on her threat.

“Yurl can wait,” Talal interjected. “We need to have our own conversation first.”

“Agreed,” Valyn said. “We’ve all got questions, and we’re going to ask them one by one. And we’re going to get to the bottom of the answers.” That last comment was intended for Annick, and he fixed her with a stare. Before the Trial, her eyes had made him nervous, but now, after a long silence, the sniper was the one to look away. She was smaller than he remembered, sitting slumped in her seat, as though without her bow she was just a child once more, angry but lost.

“First,” Valyn said, “and most important-”

“Did you kill the fucking girl?” Gwenna cut in, rounding on Annick, leaning in so close that the sniper must have been able to feel her breath on her cheek. “That’s all we need to know.”

Annick’s fingers twitched, but she did not look up. “No,” she replied curtly. “I didn’t.”

If only it were as easy as that, Valyn thought to himself bleakly. If only you asked honest questions and people gave you honest answers.

“But you met her,” Laith said, his usual good humor evaporated. He leaned forward angrily, hungrily. Perhaps, Valyn thought, Amie was more than just a dockyard whore to him after all. Laith had patronized a dozen girls over on Hook over the years, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have some sort of feeling for any of them. “Rianne told us her sister was meeting a soldier at Manker’s the morning it collapsed,” the flier continued. “The morning she was murdered. You were the only Kettral there.”

“I met her,” Annick replied with obvious reluctance, “but I didn’t kill her.”

“Why?” Valyn demanded, reining in his impatience and anger. “Why did you meet her?”

The sniper looked to the window, as though there were some escape beyond the thin pane of glass. Emotions flitted across her face as quickly as clouds before a storm. She was trapped, Valyn realized, and trapped creatures were dangerous, unpredictable. His hand drifted to his belt knife, and out of the corner of his eye, he caught Talal shifting to put the table between himself and the girl. Annick was a terror with her bow, but now she seemed vulnerable, almost naked. Her eyes flicked from one face to the next, as though looking for support. When she found none, her lips tightened.

“Why?” Valyn demanded again.

She opened her mouth to speak, shut it, then returned her gaze to the window. “For the same reason anyone else met her. For the same reason Laith did.”

“But…,” Gwenna said, shaking her head in confusion. “You’re … Oh.”

The sniper’s chin was set in a rigid line. She refused to respond.

Talal spread his hands. “All right,” he said matter-of-factly. “She was a whore. You paid her for her services.”

Valyn turned to Laith. “You … knew Amie. You ever hear anything about this? About her going with women?”

The flier shook his head slowly. “She always seemed happy enough with the cock-”

Annick rounded on him in a flash, drawing her knife and putting it to his throat before the rest of them could so much as twitch. The flier held up his hands slowly. Idiot, Valyn cursed himself. Fast was fast, regardless of the weapon.

“All right,” he said warily. “All right. Annick-just relax.”

“She wasn’t happy with it,” the sniper hissed into Laith’s stunned face. “Not with your coin, not with your ’Kent-kissing cock. But she was poor, and so she took both and put a brave face on it.” It was more words together than Valyn had ever heard Annick utter. Her face was flushed with anger, the tendons of her neck straining beneath the skin.

“All right,” Laith said slowly, nodding. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize-”

“You didn’t realize, because you didn’t care. Whenever you got drunk and needed a hole to stick it in, you’d take the ferry over. It didn’t matter who. You fucked her sister as many times as you fucked Amie.”

The flier took a deep breath, then shook his head slowly, deliberately, careful not to slice his flesh on the knife. “I did care,” he said, “but maybe not in the right ways. There are a lot of kinds of caring. I didn’t love her, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like her. I paid her for sex, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t gentle with her. You cared about her more; I can see that. Believe me, though, when I tell you I want to find whoever killed her as badly as you do.”

The sniper stared at him for another tense moment, then nodded, slid the belt knife back into her sheath, and sagged back into her seat. Talal let out a long, ragged breath.

“’Shael on a stick,” Gwenna muttered. “The whole fucking lot of you are insane.”

For a while they just sat there, Annick staring blankly out the window, Gwenna lost, now that her fury had no direction, Valyn struggling to make sense of the new information, to fit it in with everything else he knew or suspected. For the hundredth time, he wished he could talk things over with Lin, but Lin was dead. The four soldiers in the room were his Wing now. He wasn’t sure he could trust them, but he was certain he couldn’t trust anyone else.

The leach was the first to pick up the thread of the rapidly unraveling conversation. “I have some experience keeping secrets, and I, for one, believe Annick. She couldn’t have predicted Shaleel’s arrival or Yurl’s accusation. The emotion we just saw is difficult to fake.”

“What are you?” Gwenna asked, “a professional masker?” For once, there was more weariness than challenge in her voice.

“I’m a leach, and a leach learns to lie early on. He learns it, or he dies. I may be wrong, but I believe what Annick tells us.” He eyed the others, as though welcoming them to disagree. When no one spoke, he pushed ahead, his voice quiet but firm. “But we still need to sort this out, and we’ll sort it out quicker if we work together.”

The sniper hesitated, then turned back to the room. “Fine,” she replied brusquely. “Let’s work.”

Valyn caught Talal’s eye, nodded his thanks, then turned back to Annick.

“Did you see Amie that morning?”

“For about an hour,” she responded. “We took our normal room in a boarding house a few doors down from Manker’s.” The confusion and desperation she had shown moments ago were gone, like strong currents frozen under the winter ice. She may not have killed Amie, Valyn thought to himself, but she’s still dangerous.

“Not the building where Lin and I found her?” he asked carefully.

“No. That’s all the way across the harbor.”

“Did she say what she was going to do when you left her?” he pressed.

“Make money,” Annick replied grimly. “Down at the docks.”

“Whoring.”

“Yes, whoring. That was the last I saw of her.”

“Well,” Laith said after a long pause. “We’ve ruled out one person that didn’t kill her, but that still leaves a few hundred more who might have. Now that we know it wasn’t Annick, we’re not even sure it was a soldier.”

Valyn ground his teeth silently. There was more to the story-the marks on Amie’s wrists, the same impressions on Ha Lin’s corpse. His Wing didn’t know any of that, but he wasn’t sure he was ready to share it. After Lin’s death, he had trusted no one, nursing his suspicions in guarded silence, vowing to work alone until he had ferreted out both Lin’s killers and his father’s. Working alone, keeping his own council, he was unlikely to be betrayed. And just as unlikely to learn anything new. He’d been fighting his private war since Ha Lin’s death. Fighting it, and losing it.

The final chapter of Hendran’s Tactics sprang to mind: Plan all you like, but remember: war is chaos, and at some point every soldier has to throw the dice. The old Wing commander must have had something figured out-he had supposedly died in his bed at the age of eighty-four. Of course, no one was trying to scrub his whole ’Shael-spawned family off the face of the earth. It didn’t matter. If Valyn didn’t solve some of the mysteries confronting him, he would live and die a prisoner on the island where he had trained for life as a soldier, sitting impotently by as some shadowy cabal killed first his brother, then his sister, and then, if they still thought he was important enough to bother with, Valyn himself. His Wing would probably die with him-a thought that had not crossed his mind before. Anyone thorough enough to plan the assassination of the Malkeenian line wouldn’t flinch at a few extra bodies, especially if those bodies might have known things they shouldn’t have. Talal and Annick, Gwenna and Laith, they were all in danger just because Eyrie Command had assigned them to his Wing. They were in mortal danger, and they didn’t even know the facts.

“I think Amie’s murderer was Kettral,” Valyn said at last. “And I think the same person captured Lin in the middle of the Trial-captured her, then killed her.”

For a while they just stared at him, Laith and Gwenna incredulous, Talal confused, Annick unreadable.

“It was the slarn,” Laith said. “You saw her wounds yourself. After you carried her out.”

“Something’s got all twisted here,” Gwenna agreed, “but Ha Lin died an honest death down there, a soldier’s death.”

“The slarn may have landed some of those blows,” Valyn agreed, trying to keep a rein on his anger, “but most of the slashes were made by good steel. Not just that: there were marks on her wrists, impressions from a rope.”

“A rope?” Talal asked. “Like she’d been bound?”

Valyn nodded grimly. “With Liran cord-you know that tight pattern. It’s different from what you find in any other kind of rope.”

“What does it have to do with Amie?” Annick asked, her voice tight.

“Amie was strung up with the same sort of cord. Ha Lin and I found her. We cut her down. It was one of the things that made us think her killer was Kettral.”

The conversation faltered as everyone tried to make sense of the new information, staring into the lantern on the table as though the flicker of the inconstant light held some sort of answer.

“Other people have access to Liran cord,” Laith pointed out after a while.

“Not that many,” Gwenna said. “Your standard dockyard thug isn’t going to waste something like that just to tie up a whore.” As the word left her lips, she seemed to realize her audience. She glanced over at Annick, and a flush rose to her cheeks. “I’m just saying,” she bulled ahead, “that Valyn’s right. It’s strange.”

“About Lin,” Talal pressed, shaking his head in dismay. “Are you sure about the marks? We were all so beat up after the Trial-” He gestured to his arms, his face. “I had dozens of cuts, scrapes, gashes.”

“Not to mention a slarn bite to the arm,” Laith agreed. “It was brutal down there. Lin was good, better than good, but any one of us, with a little bad luck…” He grimaced. “It could have happened, Val. It could have been just the slarn.”

“It could have,” Valyn replied, keeping his voice level, “but it wasn’t. I saw plenty of slarn wounds after the Trial, and I saw the slices on Lin’s body. They were different. I looked at her wrists just before they burned her, both wrists. Maybe it’s just a freak coincidence that Amie had the same marks, but we know one thing for sure: Only cadets went down in the Hole. One of the cadets killed Ha Lin, and I’d wager both my blades against a bucket of piss that whoever killed her killed Amie as well.”

“Holy Hull,” Laith muttered. “One of our own fucking cadets. Who?”

“I don’t know,” Valyn replied, “but there’s more.”

Once he’d told them the truth about Lin’s death, it only made sense to plunge into the whole thing, the Aedolian on the boat, the plot against him, everything. They stared, eyes filled with the lamplight, features fading in and out of the shadows as he spun the tale. It was impossible to believe, even as he told it. He half expected them to laugh when it was through. They didn’t laugh. Even Laith didn’t crack a joke.

“And that’s why you wanted me to look at Manker’s,” Gwenna said, slapping the table with her palm. “You weren’t just playing the paranoid prince. Someone actually was trying to kill you.”

“Manker’s?” Talal asked. Valyn had never seen the leach over on Hook. It was possible he never even heard about the collapse.

“An alehouse,” Annick replied.

“A shithole,” Laith amended, “but one I was fond of.”

“The Aedolian’s warning is what made me wonder about Manker’s,” Valyn agreed. “It was also what made me suspect Annick of trying to drown me during the sinking test, that and the strange knot she tied.”

“A double bowline,” the sniper said. “I told you before.” Her blue eyes bored into him, cold and defiant.

“So let’s get this straight,” Gwenna said, shaking her head. “Some poor bastard on a ship tells you the Kettral are trying to kill you. Then Manker’s collapses. Then it seems like Annick tries to drown you. Then Annick shoots you in the shoulder.”

“Annick shows up a lot in this story,” Laith added. “I’ll bet you were thrilled to have her on your Wing.”

“I didn’t try to kill him,” she said flatly.

“I’m not saying you did,” Laith replied, holding up both hands. “But someone’s doing a ’Kent-kissing good job of making it look that way.”

“Yurl,” Valyn growled. “It’s got to be Yurl. Let’s not forget he’s the reason we’re boxed up in here without a blade or a bow between us.”

“Yurl’s a pox-ridden asshole,” Laith replied, “but this seems a little over that pretty boy head of his.”

Talal frowned. “He is the one who told Shaleel about Annick and Amie. Maybe he wants to take us out of play for a while.”

“We’re out of play, all right,” Valyn agreed. “But it still doesn’t make sense. What do Ha Lin and Amie have to do with everything else, with the Aedolian, with the whole ’Kent-kissing plot?”

“Manker’s,” Annick replied flatly. “That’s the link.”

Valyn blew out a long, frustrated breath. “The place collapsed at the same time Amie was murdered, but that’s not much of a link. You said it already-the garret where we found her was on the other side of the bay.”

“You’ve almost died how many times now?” Gwenna asked irritably.

Valyn considered. “Manker’s. Drowning. Sniper contest.” He shrugged. “Four if you count the Trial itself.”

“All right,” Talal began, picking up the thread. “There’s the connection-two of the times women were attacked and killed. The first time, Amie. The last, Ha Lin.”

“The problem with fifty percent,” Laith observed, “is that it’s fifty percent.”

A shiver run up Valyn’s spine. “Seventy-five,” he said grimly.

Even after revealing everything else, he had planned to keep Lin’s beating a secret. It was foolish, irrational. She was dead and burned; telling the tale wasn’t a betrayal and the revelation couldn’t injure her pride any further. Still, the attack on the bluffs had shamed her, shamed her to the core, and he felt as though sharing the story would somehow violate a trust they had shared, would strip her secrets bare for everyone to stare at. Besides, it hadn’t seemed relevant until they started hashing through the connections.

“Yurl and Balendin attacked Ha Lin during the sniper trial, the one where Annick shot me. They lied to her, tricked her, then held her down, beat her bloody, tried to break her. That’s where she got those wounds before the Trial-not in some training exercise the way she claimed. They said it was payback for her willingness to take them on in the arena.”

Four pairs of eyes swiveled to him. “Those whoreson shit-licking bastards,” Gwenna swore, flexing and unflexing her hand as though itching for a sword.

“Where?” Annick asked, her voice calm, hard.

“The West Bluffs.”

“Overlooking the sniper test,” Talal concluded quietly.

“It’s something,” Valyn said, shaking his head in frustration. He felt like the truth was there, but just out of range, like a familiar tune at the very edge of one’s hearing. “I just don’t know what.”

“But how would beating Lin a mile away get Annick to shoot chisel points?” Laith asked.

“I didn’t shoot chisel points,” the sniper responded. “Those were my arrows, but the heads had been changed.”

Talal started. “Changed?”

“Changed,” Annick said. “This is the fourth time I’ve explained it to Valyn. Those weren’t my points. They weren’t the arrows I fired.”

“Maybe you made a mistake,” Laith suggested.

The sniper fixed him with a frosty stare. “I did not make a mistake.”

“Well, how in Hull’s name did they change midflight?”

“I don’t know.”

The leach took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Maybe I do.” He considered the table in front of him, gathering his thoughts. “Holy Hull, I think I understand.”

“Some kind of kenning?” Valyn asked, trying to catch up.

Talal nodded grimly. “It’s not Yurl. It’s Balendin.”

“You all want to keep chatting in code?” Gwenna demanded. “Or you going to fill the rest of us in? Try using complete sentences.”

“My well is iron,” Talal said, raising his eyes, looking from one to the next. “I told Valyn several days ago, but we’re a Wing, and you all deserve to know. Iron and steel.”

“Iron?” Laith asked, tapping his chin with a finger. “Not very exciting, is it? I thought the wells were all babies’ blood or boiled piss or something suitably vile.”

Talal shrugged. “If you have to be a leach, iron is a mediocre well to have. On the one hand, there’s never that much of it around. On the other, my power almost never runs dry. Especially if you’re a soldier, there’s usually something.” He took a deep breath. “Other leaches have more … complicated wells.”

“I knew it,” Laith said, sitting back in his chair and looking pleased. “Babies’ blood.”

Talal ignored him.

“Like Arim Hua?” Valyn asked. “The Sun Lord in all those stories?”

Talal nodded. “If the legends are true, Arim Hua’s well was sunlight. In the tales, he was fearsome during the day-he could raze cities, destroy armies-but nearly powerless at night. That’s how he was killed.”

“What does this have to do with the arrows?” Gwenna demanded. “With Manker’s?”

“It’s not all about cities and armies,” Talal replied. “For years, I’ve puzzled over Balendin’s well. I’ve seen him do some things … frightening things. Things I could never manage, not without an ocean of iron surrounding me. Other times-” He shook his head. “-nothing.”

“Could he change an arrowhead?” Valyn asked. “An arrow in flight? From a mile away?”

The leach nodded. “He has the skill and, if his well is running deep enough, the power, too.”

“The skill is different from the power?” Gwenna asked, her face puzzled.

“Of course. A leach’s strength is like physical strength, a gift-or a curse-from Bedisa. Having a deep well is like being large and well-muscled. Imagine Gent.”

“I’d rather not,” Gwenna shot back.

“The point is, Gent’s strength is only useful to a certain degree if he doesn’t train, doesn’t study how to use that strength. A smaller man-or a woman-could take him down through superior skill. There are leaches with enormous power who never understand what to do with that power. They’re just as likely to hurt themselves as they are to achieve anything useful.”

“And you don’t have enormous power,” Valyn put in.

Talal nodded. “All the Kettral leaches study and practice, but I’ve had to work harder than most. I’ve certainly had to work harder than Balendin.”

“And when are we going to get to the part,” Laith asked with exaggerated patience, “where you tell us what the ’Shael-spawned asshole’s well is?”

Talal paused, then spread his hands ruefully. “I didn’t realize it, because some people claim they don’t even exist. I’m almost certain the Eyrie’s never had one before, but I think Balendin is an emotion leach.”

The statement sounded dramatic, but Valyn just shook his head in perplexity.

“Meaning what, exactly?” Annick asked.

“He doesn’t draw his power from iron or water or sunlight, or anything like that. His well is emotion, human emotion.”

For a while the five of them sat in silence, trying to make sense of the idea.

“That sounds,” Gwenna said finally, her face screwed into a frown, “like bullshit.”

“Unfortunately not,” Talal said. “Emotion leaches are horribly powerful, and horribly unpredictable. I’ve read some of the old codices, the ones cataloging the known leaches in Annurian history and earlier. The trouble is, an emotion leach doesn’t simply draw from an existing well, he needs to create his well. He has to manipulate people in order to have any power at all.”

“But how do Amie and Ha Lin figure into this?” Valyn asked.

“It’s not just them,” Talal replied. “It’s everyone Balendin has ever come in contact with. He leaches his power from emotion, other people’s emotion. Specifically, emotion that’s directed at him.”

“And that’s why,” Gwenna concluded, punctuating her syllables with a finger stabbed repeatedly into the table, “he was such a ’Kent-kissing bastard all the time.”

Talal nodded. “A leach’s well shapes who he is to a frightening degree. Once you get used to the power, you start to need that power, and you’ll do more and more to get it. When I’m without iron, I feel … nervous, naked. I can only imagine how Balendin feels without emotion.”

“Why not take a more amiable approach?” Laith asked, pursing his lips. “Make a lot of really good friends? Maybe fall in love a few times-a girl in every port, that sort of thing.…”

“A lot easier to evoke hatred than love,” Annick said. “Quicker. More reliable.”

They turned to look at her, but she averted her face from the lantern and seemed to have no more to say.

“Annick’s right,” Talal continued after a moment. “You can’t evoke love on command the way you can hatred, and a leach without a well is vulnerable.”

Valyn shook his head in amazement. “That time in the ring, when he and Yurl beat up on Lin and me-he was taunting her the whole time, making her hate him.”

Talal nodded grimly. “He needed her hatred if they were going to win.”

The horror of it all socked Valyn in the gut like a fist. “That’s why he tortured Amie,” he said slowly. “He needed her fear, her terror, to knock down Manker’s. That’s why they were in that garret-there was a clear line of sight from across the bay.”

“Could you even do that?” Gwenna demanded. “Take down a big building like that?”

“Think about Amie’s fear,” the leach replied leadenly. “He set up the whole thing-the dark room, the ropes hanging from the ceiling, the long slices of the knife beneath her skin-to dredge just about every ounce of her terror.”

“And the attack on Lin,” Laith said, recoiling. “While Yurl was beating her, taunting her, Balendin could have leached off the residual rage, could have used it to change the arrowhead.”

“The tampering would explain why the first two shots flew wide,” Annick confirmed, lips tight. “Those are not shots I would have missed, but a change in arrowhead requires a change in aim.”

“And the knots,” Valyn said, his mind spinning. “Balendin was on the ship. He was one of the people who tossed me over, taunting me the whole time.”

“It would be enough,” Talal replied. “To tangle a basic knot, a quick burst of anger would be enough.”

For a while they just looked at each other, aghast and amazed.

“What about the Trial?” Valyn asked finally. “What about Ha Lin?” He could hear his own voice freighted down with anger and pain. “Why did she have to die?”

Talal spread his hands helplessly. “I’ll bet she didn’t even have anything to do with you. You remember what it was like down there. I was pressed to the limit, and I’m better with my blades than Balendin. I had my well, even if it was only shallow. If he was going to survive, he needed power, which meant he needed emotion. He may have been planning it as far back as the attack on the bluffs-capture Ha Lin, goad her, leach off her, and then kill her.”

“Holy Hull,” Gwenna muttered. “Meshkent, Ananshael, and sweet, holy Hull. And now he’s off the Islands.”

The realization hit Valyn like a bucket of ice. He’d been so busy looking backward, trying to make sense of the past months, that he’d nearly forgotten what started them down the path in the first place. Balendin was not only free; he was also away.

“Who did Shaleel say assigned them their mission?” he demanded, slamming a hand down on the table.

“What does that matter?” Laith asked.

“Who?”

“She assigned it herself,” Annick replied, voice hard.

Valyn’s skin prickled, waves of cold and nausea rolling over him in great, heady swells. “We’ve got to go,” he said. “We’ve got to gear up, get the bird, and go.”

Talal raised a hand to slow him down. “You heard what she said. We’re grounded. We can’t leave the Islands. We so much as touch a flatbow, we’re all traitors.”

“That’s the point!” Valyn erupted. “That’s exactly what Baledin wanted. Shaleel is the commander for operations in northeastern Vash.”

“So?” Laith said, trying to catch up. “What’s in northeastern Vash?”

“Ashk’lan,” Valyn growled. “My brother. Kaden. The Emperor.”