Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (20 page)

Relucantly, Valyn turned back to the corpse. Her ankles were tied, no doubt to keep her from kicking. His eyes settled on the knot: a peculiar double bowline with a couple of extra loops. He started to study it, then tore himself away.
You’re looking at the knot to avoid looking at the girl,
he realized, forcing himself to shift his gaze from her wrists to her face.

“All right,” he said brusquely, turning to the training he had spent so many years perfecting. “How did she die?”

Ha Lin didn’t respond. She stood in the center of the room, arms slack at her sides, head shaking silently, slowly as she considered the revolving corpse.

“Lin,” Valyn said, edging his voice with what he hoped was something of Adaman Fane’s characteristic growl. “What killed this girl? How long has she been dead?”

Ha Lin turned to him blankly. For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to respond at all, but after a long pause her eyes focused, and she shook herself, as though awakening from a deep sleep. Her lips hardened into a thin line and she nodded abruptly before crossing to the dangling corpse. She leaned in to sniff the wounds, then ran a finger along the major lacerations, probing the flesh.

“No scent of poison. No major arteries severed.” She bit her lip. “It looks like blood loss, pure and simple.”

“Painful,” Valyn added grimly. “And slow.” He reached above the girl’s head and cut the rope holding her up before easing her body to the floor. “Take a look at this,” he said, holding out the severed rope.

Lin squinted in the darkness. “The rope is from Li,” she said, the surprise clear in her voice. Li was on the other side of the world, months distant by sail. They made the best rope and steel in the world there, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that found itself into the hands of the sailors on Hook. The Kettral, on the other hand … the Kettral used Liran cord sometimes. It was too slick for the taste of most soldiers, but it was light and strong, and there were those who swore by it.

Valyn and Lin exchanged a bleak stare.

“When did she die?” he asked finally, breaking the silence.

Lin hunched over the body, sniffing the wounds once more.

“Hard to say. The rot looks almost two weeks advanced, but that could swing a few days in either direction, depending.”

“Must get pretty hot up here during the day,” Valyn agreed. “Body would decay faster.”

Lin nodded, then drove her fingers into one of the gashes, searched around for a minute before pulling out something white and glistening. “The skin might lie, but the bugs won’t.” She held up the writhing creatures for Valyn to inspect.

“Blood worms, still larval.”

Valyn took the worm, a sickening sluglike thing, and held it up to the fading light from the window. “It’s got its eyes just in.”

“But no segmentation yet. Which means less than eleven days.”

He nodded. “Six days to incubate. One to hatch. Four to grow the eyes.”

“She’s been dead for ten days, for almost exactly ten days.”

Valyn nodded. “Which means she died…” He counted back, then paused, turning first to the body, then to Lin.

She stared back at him, brown eyes huge in the lamplight. “Which means she died the same day Manker’s collapsed into the harbor.”

14

The soil of Hook, like that of all the Qirin chain, was rocky and unforgiving, and so it took Valyn and Lin the better part of two hours, working in shifts behind the pathetic shack in which Rianne and Amie had made their home, to hack a hole deep enough to bury the murdered girl. That was the easy part. Then they had to return to the horrible, reeking garret, wrap the corpse in a scrap of sailcloth they bought down by the docks, and carry her back to her grave. When the stones and thin soil were finally mounded up over the earth, then scattered with the few wretched petals Rianne had scrounged from the yellowweed behind the house, the moon had dipped toward the horizon, while the bright stars people called Pta’s gems hung directly overhead, cold, distant, and unpitying.

Valyn ached when he put down the shovel. Kettral training had prepared him for just about any kind of physical suffering, but there was something about digging a grave, an extra weight, as though the dirt tossed out of the hole were not just dirt, but something harder, heavier. He had seen plenty of bodies, had trained for years to kill people, but the corpses of the battlefield and the grown men he had seen there, armored for war and cut down in fury and rage, were different from the pale, flaxen-haired figure they had found mutilated in the tiny garret.

As Lin wrestled a rough headstone into place, Rianne continued to cry, low and quiet, as she had all night. Valyn turned to the girl. He wanted to say something wise, something comforting, but there just wasn’t a whole lot in the way of comfort to be had. The normal platitudes one offered in such situations seemed ridiculous and trite.
I’m sorry for your loss
? Rianne’s sister hadn’t been
lost;
she’d been strung up and hacked at like a slab of beef in a slaughterhouse, tortured horribly and left to die.
She’s gone to a better world
? What world? If there
was
a world after death, no one had come back from it with stories to tell. No, there wasn’t a ’Shael-spawned thing to say, and yet, he couldn’t just stand there staring at her.

“How about a drink?” he asked awkwardly. It was a soldier’s response to death, but it would have to do. “We’ll toast your sister.”

“A … a … alright,” she managed between choked-off sobs. “I’ve got some peach wine inside. It’s not very good, but Amie and I used to—” The memory of her sister strangled the end of the sentence, and as Valyn watched helplessly, Lin wrapped her arm around Rianne’s narrow shoulders.

“Your sister’s fine now,” she said quietly. “What happened to her was horrible, but it’s over.” As Rianne whimpered into her shoulder, Ha Lin raised her eyes to Valyn. “Why don’t you get that wine? We can share it in Amie’s memory. Pour some on her grave.”

Valyn nodded and turned toward the house, grateful for a momentary reprieve. The Kettral spent years training soldiers to get used to the dead; they didn’t say much, though, about dealing with the living.

The chipped crock of peach wine wasn’t hard to find. The sisters had only a few possessions: a single straw mattress, neatly covered with a tattered quilt, a trunk with one drawer missing. Two bowls and two spoons next to a wide tin washbasin. He imagined them sitting on the bed together, no more than children really, spooning up some kind of broth and telling each other stories to keep their lives at bay. He shook his head and pushed open the door, stepping back into the darkness.

They passed the bottle around, poured a swallow on the grave, then passed it around again. Lin asked Rianne if she wanted to say a few words about her sister.

“She took care of me,” was all Rianne could manage. “She was younger than me, but she took care of me.”

“It’s all right now,” Lin repeated quietly.

Valyn wanted to ask what, exactly, was all right about what had happened to Amie, but willed himself silent. Rianne’s life had turned dark enough without him dousing whatever light was left.

“Do you think Ananshael is kind to the dead?” she whispered after a while.

Lin glanced over at Valyn. People didn’t tend to think of the Lord of Bones as “kind.” It was hard to conceive of a god who ripped souls from bodies of the living, who parted parents from children and youths from their lovers, as anything other than fickle and malevolent. Macabre stories of the Skullsworn, the bloody priests of Ananshael, abounded: men and women who drank blood from goblets and strangled infants in their cribs. The Skullsworn were trained assassins, ruthless killers, and aside from the Kettral, probably the deadliest group on the two continents. If his chosen priests were any indication, it certainly did not seem that Ananshael would be kind.

On the other hand, Hendran had written that the last gift you could give to a suffering soldier was death. Valyn thought back to the corpse of Amie, dangling from her wrists in the garret, eyes straining from her skull. Perhaps, in the end, Ananshael had been kind to her after all. Perhaps he was no more vicious than a gardener trimming his trees, a farmer about his autumn harvest.

“‘Only the dead,’” Valyn said quietly, quoting the passage, “‘are at peace.’”

Rianne nodded. It seemed unlikely that she’d had occasion to study Hendran, but the sentiment seemed to make sense to her. When he considered the life she’d led, it wasn’t hard to see why. He hoisted the crock to his lips, took another swig, and passed it. For a while the three of them drank in silence, sitting on the cold earth, staring at the cold mound of stones that marked the termination of a life.

“Do you have any idea who did it?” Valyn asked finally. He hated to break the quiet, the illusion of tranquillity, but the question had been gnawing at his gut.

“No,” Rianne responded, shaking her head despondently. “I didn’t think anyone
could
…” She trailed off, but didn’t start crying again.

Tough girl,
Valyn thought, to pull herself together in the space of a single night. He’d seen Kettral cadets who took more time to get over their first battlefield examination.

“Did Amie say she was going to be meeting anyone?” Lin prompted. “Any … men?”

Rianne bit her lip and squinted into the darkness. “She said … Yes … She said she was going to see a soldier, but that was early in the day.”

Valyn and Lin exchanged a look.

“Kettral?” Valyn asked slowly, although the answer was obvious. Marriage was forbidden to the Kettral; a husband or wife was a liability, a distraction, a lever an enemy might use to manipulate or blackmail. Henderson Jakes, the founder of the Eyrie, had envisioned a cadre of elite soldiers dedicated to celibacy, the empire, and the art of war. He had to settle for two out of three. Young men and women willing to leap off massive birds into burning buildings at a mere nod from a commanding officer grew violently rebellious when required to abstain from sex. After six or eight soldiers had been marched to the gallows for fucking on night watch, fucking on recon, fucking while harnessed into one of the ’Kent-kissing birds (Valyn always found that one both implausible and impressive), resentment among the troops boiled over and it looked like Jakes might come to a violent and untimely end, along with the order he sought to found. Like any good tactician, Jakes knew when he had to give ground. The ban against marriage remained, but the prohibition regarding sex was lifted.

Hundreds of years later, whores and whorehouses abounded on Hook—a simple solution to an ancient problem. Valyn had visited a few himself, usually dragged along by Laith or Gent when they were in their cups. He always felt a little dirty afterwards, always knew he would go again when pressed. It seemed harmless enough, and after all, no one was forcing the women. Amie’s death, however …

“She was going to meet Kettral?” he asked again, his voice rougher than he’d intended.

Rianne nodded.

“Did she say who?”

“No,” she replied heavily. “Just that they were meeting at Manker’s. She seemed excited, which was strange. Being a whore—there are worse jobs—but it’s not something Amie enjoyed. She didn’t look forward to … seeing the men.”

Valyn’s heart thudded in his chest. It made a sick sort of sense; if anyone knew how to truss up a girl, how to silence her, murder her, and slip away without anyone the wiser, it was the Kettral. That’s what the Eyrie trained them for. And then, of course, there was the cord from Li to consider. The next question rose unbidden to his lips, but before he could ask it, a racket from the lane outside the shack brought him up short. Someone, two men by the sound of it—two drunken men were approaching the house, crowing out slurred lyrics as they came.

We wear the blacks when we attack,

From the moment we wake till we hit the sack.

Black as darkness, black as death,

We’ll wear the blacks to our final breath.

We march alongside Ananshael

And leave the widows to weep and wail.

You ask by whom this woe was sent?

The Lord of Pain and Cries: Meshkent.

“Kettral,” Valyn said, eyeing Lin.

She nodded tightly, removing her arm from Rianne’s shoulders to free up her right hand.

“Rianne!” someone bellowed merrily, pounding at the flimsy door out in front of the hut. “Amie! We come bearing coin and cock!”

“And flowers,” urged the other, deeper voice.

“And
be-au-ti-ful
flowers!”

“I’ll deal with this,” Valyn said, stepping through the back door of the house. He crossed the small space in a few strides, checking his twin blades as he went, then flung open the front door into the faces of two fellow cadets. Laith carried a bottle of wine in each hand and had struck a grandiose pose outside the door, head thrown back, hips thrust forward, arms wide in greeting. Gent stood half a step behind him, tunic unlaced halfway down his chest, a scraggly bouquet of island flowers held in one huge fist.

Both cadets reeled backwards, eyebrows drawn down as they tried to make sense of Valyn’s unexpected presence in the doorway. Then Laith burst into laughter.

“Well played, Valyn! Well played! And here we thought you spent all your evenings mooning over Lin!”

“What are you doing here?” Valyn demanded, feeling foolish even as the words left his lips. Amie and Rianne were whores. It didn’t take much calculation to figure out what might have drawn the two cadets, pounding on their door in the middle of the night.

Gent beamed drunkenly while Laith leaned forward with a conspiratorial grin. “Sometimes we come for the outstanding library, sometimes for the learned discussion of political affairs, but tonight”—he winked—“I think we’re more in the mood for a little tickle, if you know what I mean, provided you haven’t tired them both out. Amie!” he bellowed—so loud, Valyn’s ears rang. “Rianne! We come bearing coin and cock!”