Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (72 page)

“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.”