Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (19 page)

Read Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades Online

Authors: Brian Staveley

Tags: #Fantasy, #General, #Fiction

BOOK: Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades
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“Fuck your questions.”

She pursed her lips and looked over at Valyn.

Valyn was rapidly tiring of the man’s attitude. There were faster ways to get answers out of a drunken brawler than plying him with wine, and he and Lin had spent years mastering just about all of them.

“Look,
friend,
” he began, tapping conspicuously at his belt knife. “The questions are going to be easy. Don’t make them complicated.”

“Actually,” Lin went on with a vicious smile, “I don’t mind if you make them complicated.”

Juren scowled, then spat over his shoulder onto the floor. “What questions?”

“Did you see any other Kettral in the tavern that day?” Valyn asked. “Maybe in the morning, or just before we got there?”

“It was just you two,” Juren grumbled. “You two and that slick, gold-haired bastard. The one that broke the wineglass.”

Valyn considered the claim. Sami Yurl was perfectly capable of plotting, of murder, and he
had
been in the alehouse. On the other hand, Yurl was no leach. Maybe he was wrapped up in the thing somehow, but it didn’t seem possible that he’d brought down Manker’s all on his own.

“No one in the morning?” Lin pressed. “No other Kettral?”

The thug wrinkled his brow as though fighting through a haze of wine. “Yeah. Yeah, there was someone else—short, crop-haired girl. Wore the same blacks as the rest of you lot. Eyes like nails. She didn’t stay long.”

“Looked about fifteen years old?”

“How’n Hull’s name should I know?” the man snapped. “She barely talked.”

“Annick,” Valyn said, glancing over at Lin.

She grimaced and nodded. Annick Frencha was the best sniper among the cadets, one of the best snipers on the Islands, despite the fact that she had yet to pass Hull’s Trial. The girl was a mystery. She seemed to have no need or desire for human contact, and despite her size, she was every bit as brutal as Yurl or Balendin. Valyn had watched her working with her bow once in the fields to the north of the compound. She had shot a rabbit through the foot at a hundred paces, and the creature was shrieking—a terrified, unearthly sound—as it tried to drag itself to safety. Annick cocked her head to the side before loosing a second arrow. This one transfixed the rabbit’s back leg. Hitting the creature at all at that distance was impressive, but Valyn started to suspect that she was missing its heart on purpose. “Why don’t you kill it?” he’d asked. Annick had looked at him with those icy eyes of hers. “I want a moving target,” she replied, nocking another arrow to the string. “If it’s dead, it doesn’t move.” Valyn had little trouble believing that Annick would destroy a tavern and the people inside it just to accomplish her objective. But then she, like Yurl, was no leach.

“How about a tall guy, ink on the arms, feathers in the hair?” Lin asked.

“Nah,” Juren replied, waving away the suggestion. “Nobody like that.”

“He’s always got a couple of wolfhounds with him,” she added.

“I
told
you. There wasn’t no one like that there.”

Valyn was about to ask what Annick was doing at Manker’s when the door burst open. He dropped a hand to his belt knife. People who slammed open doors weren’t usually looking for a quiet evening of cards, and he readied himself for some drunken sailor, half-dead on rum and swinging a busted bottle. Instead, a young woman stumbled into the room. She wore a grimy, red, low-cut dress a few sizes too big for her small frame, and a cheap ribbon in her mousy hair. Tears streamed like rain down her white cheeks, and her baffled brown eyes shone in the meager lamplight.

“Amie’s dead,” she sobbed. “They took ’er, and they sliced ’er up, and now she’s dead!”

Valyn scanned the room. He had no idea who the girl was, who Amie was, or what in ’Shael’s name was going on, but it didn’t sound pretty. Usually the locals had enough sense to leave the Kettral out of their vendettas and turf wars, but if he’d learned one thing on the Islands, it was that fear and rage made people unpredictable. Whatever the girl was talking about, it sounded bad. He glanced over at Lin. It didn’t seem like they were going to get much more out of Juren. There were a few more survivors that he wanted to hunt up, and he had neither the time nor the inclination to get caught up in some asinine local brawl at the Black Boat.

His friend, however, hadn’t moved. She was just staring at the girl, lips parted, but silent.

“You know her?” Valyn asked.

She nodded. “Rianne. She’s a whore. Works down by the docks, mostly, but she and her sister have a little garden on the hill above town. I used to buy firefruit from her in the spring.”

“Who’s Amie?” Valyn asked warily, keeping an eye on the seated patrons. Everyone was watching Rianne. No one had risen, but whispered conversations were starting up at a few of the tables, and men were easing back in their seats, freeing up the knives and cutlasses tucked in their belts, eyeing one another cautiously. None of the other patrons were Kettral, but evidently they, too, had learned the hard way to distrust surprises. Valyn measured the distance to the door, the gap between him and the other tables, running through a half dozen tactical responses if things went ugly.

“Amie was her sister,” Lin replied. Her eyes remained fixed on Rianne. She seemed oblivious of the tension in the room.

Rianne took a couple of steps forward, her bony hands beggared before her as though she were holding up an invisible body. The people at the nearest tables leaned back in their chairs, giving her space. She stared helplessly from one face to the next, as though searching for something, the nature of which she had long ago forgotten. Then she saw Lin.

“Ha Lin,” she whispered, dropping to her knees on the rough wooden floor. “You have to help me.” Valyn wasn’t sure if the posture was part of the plea, or if she simply lacked the strength to stand. “You’re a soldier. You’re Kettral. You can find them! Please.” She raked a hand through her tangled hair. Dark streaks lined her face, tears smeared with the charcoal she used to darken her eyes. “You
have
to help me.”

All eyes swiveled to the two soldiers.

“Not our concern,” Valyn murmured to his friend, tossing a couple of coins on the bar and getting ready to step past the kneeling woman.

Lin fixed him with an angry glare. “Whose concern
is
it?”

“Her father’s,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his voice low, trying to turn Lin away from the prying stares. “Her brother’s.”

“She doesn’t
have
a father. Or a brother. She and Amie were alone.”

“How in Hull did they end up on Hook?”

“Does it matter?” Lin snapped.

Valyn took a deep breath. “We can’t do this now,” he ground out. Rianne’s situation sounded horrible, tragic, but there was no way they could chase down every killer on Hook, no way they could defend every dockyard whore. Besides, even if they found the man responsible, the Eyrie explicitly forbade unauthorized violence against civilians. There were a thousand reasons to step past the girl, offer a polite condolence, and return to Qarsh. “This isn’t why we’re
here.

Lin stepped in close, close enough that he could smell the sea salt in her hair, opened her mouth to say something, and then looked over her shoulder, as though noticing the other patrons for the first time. Her lips tightened.

“So much for protecting the innocent people of Annur.”

Valyn swallowed a curse. All eyes were on him now, furtive, feral glances over the rims of tankards, calculating stares from the far end of the room. The whole thing was horseshit. They’d come to the Boat to get answers out of Juren, to learn something about the conspiracy to kill Valyn, to try to thwart a plot to overthrow the entire fucking empire. Evidently all it took to knock them off the scent was a sailor’s whore with a sob story. In fact, once you started thinking about plots, Rianne’s sudden, unexpected appearance looked pretty suspicious. He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again.

Quarrel if you must,
Hendran wrote,
but do so out of sight. Open division emboldens a foe.

Valyn had no idea what to make of the girl’s sudden arrival, but arguing about it with Ha Lin in the middle of a crowded tavern seemed like a poor way to proceed. Juren wasn’t going anywhere with his busted leg. Any secrets about the collapse of Manker’s would still be there to uncover a day later, a week later.
There’s time,
he thought to himself.

Besides, Lin had a point. Assuming Rianne was telling the truth, she, like Valyn, had lost family. She, like Valyn, wanted answers. Unlike Valyn, however, she was no Kettral. She lacked the tools to solve her own mystery, lacked the training to rectify a wrong. The memory of the corpses from Manker’s came back to him, bodies broken and bloated with water. Whatever else was going on, the Kettral were supposed to protect people, to guard citizens and defend the helpless. That, as much as the swords and the birds, was why Valyn had stepped onto the boat eight years earlier.

“What do you want us to do?” he asked warily.

*   *   *

The room was a cramped garret on the fourth story of a tall, narrow building next to the harbor. A rickety staircase spiraled up tightly, the ceiling so low Valyn had to crouch, boards so warped and twisted that each time they groaned beneath his weight he wondered if the whole thing was going to crumble, dumping him into the cellar.
If someone wanted to kill me,
he thought grimly,
this is the place to do it.
The sun had set while they were still in the Black Boat, and inside the building the only light came from Rianne’s small storm lantern, a weak, flickering flame that did little more than carve furtive, jerking shadows from the darkness.

Valyn didn’t like the feel of that darkness. For all that Hull was the patron god of the Kettral, for all the midnight training missions, for all the blindfolded practice assembling and breaking down arbalests and munitions, the close, claustrophobic dark of the stairwell felt alien and unfriendly. Shadows were supposed to be allies of the soldier, but this inky black was menacing and palpable—a cloak for any would-be assassin.

He glanced over his shoulder at Rianne. The girl had practically dragged them down the dusty street, but as they approached the building she grew suddenly reluctant, as though overwhelmed with dread at the thought of what waited above.

“What is this place?” Valyn asked her, trying to be gentle, trying to dampen his own apprehension.

She scrubbed a tear away. “It’s nothing.”

“Who owns it?”

“No one. Used to be a boarding house, but it’s been abandoned better’n four years now.”

“And your sister was here?” he asked, confused. “What was she doing?”

Rianne dropped her red-rimmed eyes. “We took ’em here, sometimes,” she mumbled. “The men.”

Valyn frowned. “Why didn’t you just take them home?”

Rianne stopped on the stairs ahead of him, and turned until the lantern was shining directly into his eyes. He could smell her cheap perfume, and underneath, a sharper, more desperate smell of fear, hunger, exhaustion. “Would you?” she asked dully.

They climbed the remainder of the stairs in silence. As they neared the garret, Valyn noticed a new smell. It was the same as on the ship, the same as on every battlefield he’d ever studied, only those bodies had all been outside, washed by the rain and bleached by the sun before he got a look at them. As Lin shoved open the rickety door, the cloying, pent-up scent of death and rot threatened to choke him, and he stopped for a second, forcing down the bile in his throat. Rianne had started sobbing again.

“It’s fine,” he said. “You don’t need to come in with us. Why don’t you wait downstairs?”

She nodded feebly, handed him the lantern, and turned back into the darkness.

Once Valyn stepped into the cramped, peeling attic, he was glad he’d sent her away. There was only one body, but the sight was as disturbing as any tableau of battlefield carnage. Someone had stripped the murdered girl of her clothes—they were tossed in an untidy heap in the corner—and then hung her by her wrists from the low rafters. The corpse had bloated and rot had set in badly, but Amie looked as though she had been even younger than her sister—maybe sixteen, blond, pale, probably pretty. Festering red gashes ran the length of her slender torso, her arms, her legs, all deep enough to paint her skin with runnels of blood, but none severe enough to kill quickly. Tightening flesh curled back from the wounds. The rope groaned as she twisted, moved by some slight, unseen breeze.

Valyn sucked in an angry breath, clenched his hand into a fist, and turned away. Outside the narrow window, the night was calm and cool. Across the harbor he could see the lights of the Black Boat and the other alehouses, as well as the dark gaping hole where Manker’s had been. People were walking on the streets of Hook, laughing and arguing, going on about their lives, heedless of the girl who had been tied up, murdered, and left to rot in an abandoned attic.

“Sons of bitches,” Lin breathed behind him. She was angry, Valyn could hear that clearly enough, but there was a faint current of something else behind the anger—fear, and confusion.

He turned back to the room, trying to find something concrete, some particular detail upon which he could focus his training. There wasn’t much to look at. A thin tick mattress stuffed with reeds lay heaped in the corner, evidently kicked out of the way during the assault. A three-legged stool squatted beneath the window, and a wooden shelf along one wall supported a few candles that had burned down to the nubs, splattering the warped floor with tallow. He considered those for a while. Candles were relatively expensive—fat had to be cut, rendered, then cast around the wick. They were a necessity, of course, for those who worked by night, but the poor and thrifty would never waste the excess drippings. Rianne’s lantern, like most of the lanterns on Hook, was fed by cheap fish oil, and gave off an inconstant light that was as smoky as it was rank. He wondered if the candles had belonged to Amie, if she had intended to scrape the tallow off the floor later, or if her murderer had brought them, planning ahead to ensure he had plenty of light by which to perform his grisly work.

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