The Emperor's blades

50

Kaden sat cross-legged on a jagged escarpment above the Aedolian camp, ignoring the bite of the wind and the exhausted ache of his feet and shoulders, following the two kettral with his eyes as they quartered the sky. At this distance, it was difficult to judge their scale-they might have been ravens or hawks wheeling on the thermals, the kind of birds he had spent countless hours observing from the ledges above Ashk’lan. In fact, if he didn’t glance back over his shoulder at the piled corpses of the traitorous guardsmen, if he kept his mind from the bloody edges of his memory, he might have been back at the monastery, seated on one of the jagged ledges, waiting for Pater or Akiil to jar him from his thoughts and drag him back for the evening meal. It was a pleasant delusion, and he lingered in it awhile, luxuriating in the lie, until a flash of sun on steel caught his eye: the birds were returning, and as they drew closer, as he made out the small figures perched on the talons, it became impossible to believe that they were normal birds of prey.

Valyn had taken his own kettral-Suant’ra, Kaden reminded himself-and that of the defeated Wing to search for Balendin and Adiv, neither of whose bodies had been found. The birds had been in the air the better part of the day, circling farther and farther from the camp, until Kaden was certain their quarry had eluded them. It should have been impossible; both men were wounded, at least slightly, without food or water, and on foot in treacherous country. But, as the Shin would say: There is no should; there is only what is. The two traitors had already proved themselves as unpredictable as they were dangerous, and who was Kaden to say that they didn’t have further powers at their disposal, powers as yet unrevealed? Neither the leach nor the councillor had frightened Kaden while he was inside the vaniate, but now that he had let the trance lapse, the thought that they were out there somewhere, wandering the mountains, filled him with unease.

He watched as the two birds approached the ridge, considered the black-clad figures as they leapt from the talons, dropping a dozen feet or so to the rubble and coming up unharmed. They were young, this Wing of Valyn’s, younger than the Kettral Kaden remembered from his childhood-or was that only a trick of memory? Despite their age, the four soldiers under Valyn’s command moved with a confidence and economy that could only come from long years of training, checking weapons and gear unconsciously, touching hands to hilts, scanning the surrounding terrain, running through a hundred habits built up over the years. Even the youngest of the lot, the Wing’s sniper, seemed steadier, deadlier, than some of the Aedolians around whom Kaden had grown up. And then there was Valyn.

After gesturing to Laith to tie up the bird, Valyn looked around the camp, spotted Kaden on the ledge, and turned up the slope toward him. He was not the boy Kaden remembered from their childhood duels in the Dawn Palace. He had grown up and out, filling his broad shoulders in a way that Kaden never would, wearing the blades on his back as though they were a part of him, keeping his jaw clenched tight most of the time, and fingering the scars on his hands and arms as though they were good luck. It was the eyes, however, that had changed most of all. Unlike Kaden, Sanlitun, or Adare, Valyn had always had dark eyes, but nothing like this. These were holes into some perfect darkness, wells from which no light escaped. It wasn’t the scars or the swords that made Valyn seem dangerous; it was the depth of those eyes.

His boots crunched over the scree, and when he reached Kaden, he paused, gazed out at the peaks beyond, then grimaced.

“I’ve got no idea where those bastards went. There should have been something, some kind of track.…” He trailed off. A nasty gash on his lower lip had opened up, and he spat blood over the edge of the cliff. The wind whipped it out and away, flinging it into the gulf.

“Sit down,” Kaden said, gesturing to the rock. “You’ve been flying all day.”

“For all the ’Kent-kissing good it did us,” Valyn replied. Still, after a moment, he lowered himself to the ledge with a groan.

“I feel like someone’s been beating me with the blunt edge of a board for the past week,” he said, twisting his head, stretching the muscles of his neck. He balled his hands into fists, cracked the knuckles, then frowned at the palms as though he’d never seen them before. “Every part of my body hurts.”

Kaden smiled wearily. “I thought you Kettral lived for this sort of thing. Martial valor, godlike endurance, the daily cheating of Ananshael-”

“Nah,” Valyn replied, plucking at his torn, sweat-stained blacks. “I mostly got into it for the clothes.”

“You should have been a monk. It’s hard to beat a wool robe.”

Valyn chuckled, and the two stared out over the mountains and valleys, side by side, companions in the simplicity of silence. Kaden would have remained there all day if he could, all year, enjoying the low rush of water, the sound of the wind knifing between the passes, the sun warm on his cool skin. He knew these things, understood them in a way he had ceased to understand his own brother, ceased to understand himself.

“So,” Valyn said after a long while, “what do I call you now?”

Kaden kept his eyes on the far mountains as he revolved the question. During the long flight from the monastery, he hadn’t had a chance to grieve for his father or consider his new station in life. After eight years with the Shin, he wasn’t even sure he knew how to grieve anymore. The fact that he was Emperor of Annur, sole sovereign over two continents, leader of millions, felt like just that, a fact; the truth had not penetrated to any organ that could actually feel it. A part of him wanted to make a joke, to laugh it off with a wry remark, but the impulse felt wrong, somehow, unfair to the monks who had died, to Valyn’s Wing, who had flown all this way to rescue him, to his father, who also had spent long years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains and now lay cold in his tomb.

“I suppose it’s ‘Your Radiance’ now,” Valyn continued, shaking his head. “That’s the protocol, right?”

Kaden stared at the blazing orb of the lowering sun. He wondered if his eyes looked like that.

“It is,” he replied finally. Then he turned to Valyn. “But when we’re not around others … When there’s just the two of us … I mean someone’s got to use my name, right?”

Valyn shrugged. “It’s up to you. Your Radiance.”

Kaden closed his eyes against the honorific, then forced himself to open them once more. “What happened with the other Wing leader?” he asked. “With Yurl?”

He’d seen the body-a carcass, really-gutted, the hands hacked away, eyes bulging with an expression that could only have been terror. It was a savage killing, purposeless in its violence.

Valyn grimaced, met his eyes, looked away, and for a moment Kaden caught a glimpse of the child he had known a decade earlier-uncertain but unwilling to show it, trying to put a bold face on his confusion.

“There was a girl, Ha Lin…,” he began, then trailed off, fingering a nasty scab on the back of his hand, ripping it free in a wash of blood without even glancing down. When he looked back at Kaden, his eyes were hooded again, unreadable. He looked like a soldier. More than a soldier, Kaden thought, a killer.

“All I could think was, Not again. I wasn’t going to let him hurt anyone else. Never again.” He clenched his fists, and blood flowed from the wound, puddling on the stone.

“But his hands…,” Kaden said, slowly. “Was it necessary?”

“Fuck necessary,” Valyn replied, voice hard and brittle as steel too long hammered.

Kaden considered his brother for a long time, trying to read the tight cords running beneath his skin, the unconscious grimace, the nicks and scars that marked his face and hands. It was like studying a scroll in some long-forgotten language. Rage, Kaden reminded himself. This is rage, and pain, and confusion. He recognized the emotions, but after so many years among the Shin, he had forgotten how raw they could be.

Finally, he reached out and placed a hand over Valyn’s fist. The monks weren’t much for physical contact, and the sensation was odd, something remembered from a childhood so distant, it might have been a dream. At first Kaden thought his brother would pull away, but after a dozen heartbeats he felt the fist relax.

“What happened?” Kaden asked. “What happened to you?”

Valyn snorted. “Got a week?”

“How about the short version?”

“I learned to kill people, saw some people killed, fought some nasty beasts, drank some nasty stuff, and came out with black eyes, powers I don’t understand, and enough rage to burn a city to the bones.

“What about you?” he asked, the question more challenge than inquiry. “You’re not exactly the bookish monk I’d been expecting. I thought you were going to murder me last night.”

Kaden nodded slowly. If Valyn had changed in the years apart-well, then, so had he. “The short version?”

“We can delve into details later.”

“I got hit, cut, frozen, and buried. Men I trusted killed everyone I knew, and then, for a few minutes, I figured out how to stop caring about any of it.”

Valyn stared at him. Kaden met the gaze. The silence stretched on and on until, without warning, Valyn started laughing, slowly at first, almost morbidly, then with more abandon, his body shaking on the narrow ledge until he was wiping away tears. Kaden watched for a while, confused, detached, until some childish part of him, something buried deep inside his mind awoke and responded. Then he was laughing, too, gasping in great breaths of air until his stomach hurt.

“Holy Hull,” Valyn choked, shaking his head. “Holy fucking Hull. We should have stayed in the palace and kept playing with sticks.”

Kaden could only nod.

* * *

“It’s not over,” Tan said.

Kaden turned to find the monk climbing the short steep slope to where they sat, Pyrre a foot or so behind him. For a few pleasant minutes, the brothers had sat side by side, laughing at horror, trying to recollect something of their past, but the past was gone, finished, and the future loomed. A hundred paces back, in the dubious shelter of the pass, the rest of the group was making preparations to move out; Laith checked over the bird while the sniper and the red-haired girl sorted through the weapons of the dead Aedolians. Triste was shoving something that might have been food into a large sack.

As Tan drew alongside, he reached into his robe, then flicked something out onto the ledge. It rolled toward Kaden, bumping up against his leg before coming to rest.

Valyn looked up at the monk, then picked up the small red orb, squeezing it between his fingers until it bulged like a grape.

“What is this?”

“An eye,” Kaden said, the mirth gone out of him as quickly as it had come. The memory of the ring of ak’hanath circling tighter and tighter, bloody eyes flickering in the moonlight, chilled him. How Tan had emerged from that fight at all, he couldn’t say, though the battle had taken its toll: the monk’s robe was cut to tatters, his body bruised. A long gash ran from his scalp to his jaw, and Triste had spent the better part of the day washing out the long rents in his flesh, binding them with bandages made from the uniforms of the dead Aedolians.

“Must’ve been an ugly bastard,” Valyn said, considering the eye a moment longer, then flicking it toward Kaden, “but at least it had eyes.” Something dark and haggard passed across his gaze.

Kaden caught the sphere, turned it until he could consider the pupil in the fading light-a dark, ragged slash, like something hacked out of the iris with a knife.

“How are your wounds?” he asked, looking up at Tan.

The monk moved stiffly, but his face betrayed no pain, and he waved a hand as though the question didn’t warrant an answer. Kaden wondered briefly if the man had found a way to live inside the vaniate.

“The Csestriim have returned,” he said.

“Csestriim,” Valyn replied, sucking air between his teeth. “That’s what Yurl claimed. It’s tough to believe.”

“It is necessary to believe,” Tan replied. “Some of them have survived this long precisely because people failed to believe.”

“Adiv?” Kaden asked, voicing the question that had been on his mind all day as he watched the kettral circle and search. “You think he’s Csestriim?”

Tan considered him with a flat, disapproving stare. “Speculation.”

Valyn glanced from the older monk to his pupil and back. If he felt any deference toward Tan, Kaden couldn’t see it.

“I’m not sure what’s so wrong with speculation, and I have no ’Kent-kissing idea where those two bastards ended up, but I’ll tell you one thing-they’re not our problem anymore.”

Kaden frowned. “One of them might be Csestriim and the other is a Kettral-trained emotion leach who nearly destroyed your Wing.”

“And now we have two birds,” Valyn shot back. “Balendin and the minister are on foot with no food or water and no gear to speak of. We can be in the air by nightfall and out of this miserable maze of mountains you call home by morning. Of course,” he added grimly, “that brings us to our real problem-the Flea.”

Kaden looked over at Tan and Pyrre. The Skullsworn shrugged; Tan made no reply at all.

“What,” Kaden asked finally, turning back to Valyn, “is a flea?”

“The Flea is the best Wing commander in the Eyrie. He makes Yurl and me look like children, and his Wing is just as good as he is.”

“And he’s part of the plot?” Pyrre asked. Ut had left her with a light slice across the shoulder, but otherwise she seemed none the worse for wear. “Why can’t some of the really dangerous players be on our side for a while?”

“I have no idea if he’s part of the plot,” Valyn replied, his expression bleak, “but I’ll tell you this-he’s coming for us, sure as shit. He’s probably one day back, sent up as soon as my Wing went rogue. Yurl and Balendin were part of it, and we don’t know how far up the conspiracy goes.”

Pyrre shrugged. “If he’s not part of the plot, he’s not part of the problem. Kaden,” she said, making an exaggerated curtsy, “bright be the days of his life, rules the empire now, which means he waves his little finger and your Flea has to start bowing or kissing the dirt or whatever it is you Annurians do.”

“You don’t know much about the Flea,” Valyn said, “or about Kettral. It’s the mission that matters. My Wing disobeyed orders to come after you. As far as the Eyrie’s concerned, we’re traitors.”

“The Kettral serve the empire,” Pyrre replied, “which means they serve the Emperor, which means, they serve him.” She poked a finger at Kaden. “Working for Kaden is, by definition, not treachery.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Kaden said, thinking through this angle for the first time. “Imperial history has been pretty messy at times: brother fighting brother, sons killing fathers. Atlatun the Unlucky murdered his own father out of impatience. What was it, Valyn, four hundred years ago?”

Valyn shook his head. “If there wasn’t a battle involved, I didn’t study it.”

“There wasn’t a battle. Atlatun wanted to rule, but his father looked a little too healthy for his taste, so he stabbed him in the eye over the dinner table. The point is, despite being Atlatun’s heir and having Intarra’s eyes, he was executed for treason. The Unhewn Throne went to his nephew.”

“You didn’t kill your father,” Pyrre pointed out. She frowned. “You didn’t, did you?”

“No,” Kaden replied, “but no one in Annur knows that. Whoever is behind the conspiracy could be spreading whatever rumors they want. They could be claiming that Valyn and I cooked up a plot against our father together, that we paid that priest to kill him while we were out of the capital.”

“Until we know conclusively otherwise,” Valyn said, “we have to figure the Eyrie views us as traitors.”

“And how does the Eyrie handle traitors?” Kaden asked.

“They send people,” Valyn replied.

“The Flea.”

“His Wing might be in the mountains already.”

“The mountains are endless,” Pyrre said. “I’ve been running around the ’Kent-kissing things for the past week. The nine of us could have a parade with pennons and drums, and no one would find us.”

“You don’t know what they can do,” Valyn replied, eyeing the dusky sky as he spoke. “I trained with them, and I don’t know what they can do.” Kaden followed his brother’s gaze, searching above the snowy peaks for a hint of movement, for any suggestion of a dark bird bearing death on her wings.

“All I know is that he’s coming,” Valyn said. “I don’t know how he’ll do it, I’m not sure when, but he’s coming.”

“Then we will have to handle him,” Tan replied.

Kaden watched Valyn turn to his umial, incredulity playing across his face.

“Handle him? And just who in Hull’s name are you, old man? You’ve got the robe, but I’ve never heard of monks running around with gear like that,” he said, indicating the naczal in Tan’s left hand.

The monk met the gaze but refused to answer the question.

“All right,” Pyrre said, spreading her hands, “let’s take these birds, fly back to Annur, and set things straight. It’s not like they won’t know who you are-those ridiculous eyes have got to be good for something.”

“Who made you a part of this, assassin?” Tan asked grimly.

Pyrre cocked her head to the side. “After I saved the Emperor and killed that ox of an Aedolian, you expect me to walk out of here?”

“She’s coming,” Kaden said, surprised at the certainty in his own voice. “We’ve got two birds. That should be enough to take everyone.” He glanced over at Valyn.

Valyn nodded. “We can be in Annur in a week if we fly hard. If we stay ahead of the Flea. Maybe a little more.”

Kaden turned his gaze west, to where the sun had just sunk behind the icy peaks. Annur. The Dawn Palace. Home. It was tempting to think that they might simply mount the kettral, fly from the carnage, return to the capital, and avenge his father. It was tempting to think it might be so easy to set things right, but from somewhere, the old Shin aphorism came back to him: Believe what you see with your eyes; trust what you hear with your ears; know what you feel with your flesh. The rest is dream and delusion.

“… and stay well north, over the empty steppe,” Tan was saying.

“No.”

Three pairs of eyes turned to Kaden, boring into him.

“You don’t think the steppe is the best route?” Valyn asked. “It’ll keep us clear of the Annurian territory south of the White River-”

“I’m not going west at all. Not yet.”

Pyrre squinted. “Well, to the north, there’s a whole heap of ice and frozen ocean, south takes us right back toward any pursuit from the Eyrie, so-”

“And we can’t go east,” Valyn cut in. “Not that we’d have any reason to. Past the mountains there’s just Anthera, and we’d all be killed on sight if we landed there. Il Tornja authorized some pretty nasty operations over the border in the past few years. We’ve got to go west, got to get back to the capital.”

Pyrre was nodding. “How far north of the White do you think we need to fly to avoid these unsavory friends of yours?”

Kaden shook his head slowly, something hardening inside him. He didn’t know what was going on in Annur, and neither did anyone else. It was tempting to return, to believe that the people would hail his arrival, but that was the dream and the delusion. His foes had killed his father, had very nearly destroyed his entire family, and the only certainty remaining was that someone was hunting him, guessing at his movements, tracking.

He thought back to the early spring, to the long cold day he had spent tracking a lost goat through the peaks, inhabiting its mind, feeling for its actions, following its decisions until he ran it down. I will not be that goat; I will not be hunted. If the Shin had taught him anything, it was patience.

“The rest of you should fly west. Go to Annur to try to see what’s happening there as quickly as possible.”

“The rest of you?” Pyrre asked with a raised eyebrow.

Kaden took a deep breath. “I am going to visit the Ishien. Tan and I both.”

The older monk’s face hardened, but it was Valyn who spoke.

“And just who in ’Shael’s name are the fucking Ishien?”

“A branch of the Shin,” Kaden replied. “One that studies the Csestriim. One that hunts the Csestriim. If the Csestriim are involved in this, they might know something.”

“No,” Tan said finally. “The Ishien and the Shin parted ways long ago. You are expecting quiet monks and hours of contemplation, but the Ishien are a harder order. A more dangerous order.”

“More dangerous than the ak’hanath?” Kaden asked. “More dangerous than a contingent of Aedolian Guards come to kill me in my sleep?” He paused. “More dangerous than the Csestriim?”

“I don’t know shit about the Ishien,” Valyn interjected, “but I’m not letting you wander off without protection. You’re tougher than I’d expected, but you still need my Wing for cover.”

Tan shook his head. “You do not know what you ask for.”

“I am not asking,” Kaden replied, stiffening his voice. “Valyn, I need your Wing back in the capital and soon, to sort out what happened there before the trail goes cold.”

“Then we’ll go visit the Ishien first, and then we’ll all go to the capital.”

Kaden opened his mouth to try to explain it once more, then closed it. Perhaps he could convince his umial and the others, and perhaps he could not-that was beside the point. He never asked for his eyes, but they burned just the same.

“Tan and I are going,” he said once more. “The rest of you are returning to Annur. There is no more to the matter unless you would disobey your Emperor.”

Pyrre chuckled and opened her mouth to speak. For a moment Kaden thought he’d made a fool of himself. They were thousands of leagues from the Dawn Palace, lost in a labyrinth of mountains, fleeing from the people he had been born to command. Why should a Skullsworn, a renegade monk, and a Kettral Wing leader listen to him, a boy with one robe to his name?

Then, all in one motion, Valyn stood. Kaden rose stiffly to his feet as well, in time to see his brother touch a hand to his blades before kneeling and placing his knuckles to his forehead.

“It will be as you say, Your Radiance. I will make the birds ready at once.”

When Valyn finally raised those black eyes, Kaden could see nothing in them, not even his own reflection.