Brian Staveley - The Emperor's blades

He opened his eyes.

Almost overhead now, the kettral shrieked. They’re close, he realized, but they’re too late.

Then he saw the eyes. At first he wasn’t sure what they were: glowing bloodred orbs, at least a dozen, some the size of apples, others no larger than Annurian copper coins, floating up the slope below. As they drew closer, he could make out the irises, pulsing with crooked veins, dilating and contracting, and then he understood. The ak’hanath had come.

He should have been terrified, and yet the realization carried no fear. The creature was a fact-no more, no less-like the fact that night had fallen, or that Pyrre stood, staring, at his side. Like the fact that people would die tonight. It was strange, he realized, this lack of feeling. He used to feel something. Only minutes ago, before he had freed the bird inside him, his mind had been a welter of emotions: fear and confusion and hope. Inside the vaniate, however, there was only a great, blank calm.

The ak’hanath was larger than he had expected, almost the size of a female black bear, but it skittered up the rocky slope more quickly than any bear, claws clicking over the stones, chitinous legs flexing and unflexing, causing the eyes at the joints to bulge under the strain. A dozen paces off it paused, turned back in forth in the darkness as though sniffing for something, then let out a thin but piercing wail just at the edge of hearing. Twice more the creature uttered its unnatural scream and then, from father down the slope, an answering call.

“Two,” Tan observed as the second horror approached.

As it drew near, the first ak’hanath raised wicked, slicing pincers, as though testing the air, clicking them open and shut spasmodically. One of those things could hack through the skull of a goat. They had killed Serkhan back at the monastery. Facts. Just more facts.

Kaden turned to Tan. “Is it too late?”

“Not if I kill them.”

“About that,” Pyrre interjected, hefting a small stone and hurling it at one of the creatures. It flew true, striking one of the eyes with a sick, popping sound. The ak’hanath spasmed a moment, let out another high-pitched shriek, then sidled farther up the slope. Kaden could make out the tiny limbs around its mouth twitching feverishly. “Any advice?” She might have been asking about the best local wine.

“Leave them to me,” the monk replied. “You have your own part to play.”

“You don’t want help?”

“The ak’hanath are trackers, not killers, although these-” The monk frowned. “-they differ from those I have studied.”

“They seemed like they were doing plenty of killing back there in Ashk’lan,” the assassin pointed out, crushing two more eyes with two more thrown stones. The spiders were agitated now, thrashing violently, and they had resumed their approach.

“In Ashk’lan, they had not come up against someone who knew how to fight,” the monk replied, stepping forward to meet the foe.

Even from inside the vaniate, everything seemed to happen at once. The closest creature, still a few paces distant, crunched itself into a ball, then sprang. Kaden had watched crag cats attack-they were the fastest animals in the mountains, quick enough to take down a deer in full flight, but even at its fastest there was something relaxed, almost languorous in the cat’s motion. The ak’hanath moved with the violence of a mechanical device tightened past tolerance in an explosion of grasping claws and slicing arms.

Tan’s naczal, somehow, was there to meet it, smashing the creature aside as the monk rolled with the blow, coming back to his feet in a fighting crouch the like of which Kaden had never seen. The strange Csestriim spear spun above his head in quick, looping arcs.

“Stay behind me,” he said to Kaden, not taking his eyes from the creature.

Pyrre had kept up her assault with the rocks-she would have run out of knives long before the creatures ran out of eyes-but the effort of the attack didn’t seem to wind her.

“I never expected to find a Shin monk fighting dharasala style,” she said, a new note of respect in her voice. “And in the old forms, too.”

“I wasn’t always a monk,” Tan replied, and then it was his turn to attack.

He darted between the two spiders, swinging the spear in a great overhead arc. For a moment Kaden thought the man had missed his target, then realized the true intention behind the blow as each end of the naczal connected with one of the ak’hanath . In the cool space of the vaniate, Kaden wondered how long Tan must have studied with the weapon, how carefully he must have trained. Had he learned those skills among the Ishien, or were they older still, a remnant of some prior life Kaden couldn’t begin to imagine?

Tan stood almost between the spiders now, in what seemed an impossible position, too close to maneuver, surely too close to bring his long spear to bear. And yet, with short, savage motions, Tan was striking them, each blow counting double as it connected with the creature before and behind. More, when the spiders thrust back against his blade, metal scraping against shell and ichor, he was able to use the strength of one against the other, allowing the naczal to pivot in his hand. The creatures were landing their own blows, vicious cuts and snaps, but the monk was able to keep them away from his head and chest, driving his own attack harder, harder, until, with a great plunging motion he was able to force the spear between the flailing arms and into the gullet of the first ak’hanath . As the thing spasmed and screamed, he ripped the blade free, wrenching it overhead in a crushing arc that staggered his remaining foe, then stepped in close to finish it.

For a hearbeat, the mountainside was still and quiet save for the sound of the monk’s breath rasping in his chest.

“You’re hurt,” Pyrre said, stepping forward, but Tan held up a hand to keep her back.

“Nothing fatal.” He glanced down at his robes. “Though the creatures should not have been so large, nor so strong.”

“When this is all finished,” the woman said, giving the monk a hard, appraising look, “you’re going to have to tell me where you learned to fight.”

“No,” Tan replied. “I won’t.”

Before the assassin could respond, a clicking and screeching broke the silence beyond their small circle. At first Kaden thought that Tan had failed to kill one of the creatures, but both spiders lay still, their horrid red eyes dimmed by death. Down the slope, however, fifty paces away and closing, more eyes floated through the night, dozens of eyes, scores.

“They brought more,” Tan observed, a hint of weariness in his voice.

“How many?” Kaden asked, trying to sort through the glowing red orbs into individual spiders.

“Looks like ten, maybe a dozen. They weren’t at the monastery all these months. We would have seen them. They must have come with the Aedolians.”

“You can’t fight a dozen of them,” Pyrre said.

“Can, or cannot,” Tan replied, “it is what needs to be done.” He turned to Kaden. “You can both still escape them if you break free. They followed the others here; they cannot track you in the vaniate .”

“You’re going to die here, monk,” Pyrre observed.

“Then your god will be glad,” Tan replied. “Go now, both of you. The time has come to make good on our words.”

And then the monk was moving forward, the naczal swinging above his head. A part of Kaden knew he should be frightened, horrified. But fear and horror-they were like distant lands he had heard of but never visited. Tan would live, or he would die. Either way, Kaden’s own role was clear. He was to run. As his umial ducked and stabbed, sliced and hacked at the fetid tide rolling over him, as Rampuri Tan fought for his life against something dark and unnatural, something that should have been wiped from earth millennia earlier, as the old monk struggled for the very survival of his pupil, Kaden turned into the darkness and ran.