Brian Staveley - The Emperor's blades

“I’m going to kill you anyway,” he said, taking another step forward.

“All right,” Yurl gasped. His other blade fell to the rock. “All right. You win. I surrender.”

“I don’t want you to surrender,” Valyn replied. “I want you to tell me who’s behind the plot.”

He sniffed the air, turned his cheek to the darkness to feel the breeze waft over his skin, then lashed out with his own sword once more, slicing clean through the youth’s other wrist. Somewhere far in the back of his mind, Hendran was arguing for tactical calm and useful prisoners, while even further back, other voices, his father, his mother, mouthed words like mercy, and decency . Valyn silenced them. His parents were dead now, and so was Hendran. Ha Lin had played by the rules, and she’d been humiliated, beaten, and murdered for her trouble. Mercy and decency were fine words, but they had no place here in the darkness, alone with his cornered quarry.

Yurl let out a long, agonized cry, the keening of a trapped and desperate animal.

“You can’t kill me!” he sobbed. “You can’t kill me. Not if you want to know who’s behind what happened here. You have to keep me alive!”

“We’ll keep Ut alive,” Valyn growled, but as the words left his lips, he realized the sound of fighting behind him had disappeared. Where steel had echoed off steel, he could hear only the vast sweep of wind over snow and stone. Someone was dead. Valyn sniffed the air. Pyrre was moving toward him, the scent of her hair light on the night breeze. Balendin, Adiv, and now Ut, all gone. Yurl looked like the last prisoner available to them, but though Valyn knew it made sense, the blood coursed cold and dark through his veins. He didn’t want a prisoner.

“No one else knows the whole thing,” Yurl moaned. He was on his knees now, sobbing desperately. “Please. You have to keep me alive.”

“Tell me what you know,” Valyn said, “and I’ll take you back to the Eyrie for justice.” Another lie, tripping off his lips like song.

“All right . It’s a plot … it’s…”

“I know it’s a plot,” Valyn replied. “Who is behind it?”

“I don’t know. Don’t know his name. But he’s Csestriim. I know that. He’s Csestriim.”

Valyn paused. The Csestriim were ancient history, the last of them slaughtered more than a thousand years earlier. Yurl’s claim was insanity, and yet … groveling in the dirt, his hands lopped from his wrists, he couldn’t be lying.

“What else?” Valyn pressed.

“I don’t know anything else,” Yurl moaned. “That’s it. That’s all I know. Please, Valyn. I’m begging you.”

Eyes still closed, Valyn stepped closer, close enough to press the point of his dagger against Yurl’s gut. The youth had pissed himself, and the scent of blood and urine mingled, sharp and acrid in the cool night air.

“You’re begging me?” he asked, voice little more than a whisper.

“I’m begging you,” Yurl sobbed.

“What about Ha Lin? Did she beg you?”

“I’m sorry about Lin. It’s not what you think. It was never what you thought.”

“Did she beg you?” Valyn demanded, pushing the knife forward until it just broke the skin.

“I don’t know! I can’t remember!” He pawed at Valyn with the bloody stumps, but Valyn brushed them away.

“Not good enough,” he ground out, driving the knife a hair deeper. “Down in the Hole … did you help Balendin kill her?”

“I didn’t,” Yurl babbled. “I didn’t mean to. It wasn’t-”

Valyn shoved the knife a little more. “Still not good enough.”

“Sweet Eira’s mercy, Valyn,” Yurl wailed, stretching out his lopped arms hopelessly, “what’s good enough for you? What’s fucking good enough?”

Valyn considered the question. What’s good enough? Once, he would have known the answer. Before his father was murdered. Before he climbed the stairs to the airless attic where Amie’s body hung. Before he carried Lin from the dark mouth of Hull’s Hole. Justice? Revenge? He shook his head. Now …

“I don’t know,” he replied, burying the blade to its hilt in Yurl’s guts, feeling the muscles clench helplessly around it, then twisting it free. “Maybe nothing’s good enough anymore.”

The youth let out a long, ragged moan, then sagged to the ground. Valyn straightened, wiping the dagger on his blacks. In the cloud-draped pall of night, he couldn’t see the corpse, couldn’t see what he had done, but then, he didn’t need to see. He slipped the blades back into their sheaths. It was all around him on the midnight air-blood and offal, desperation and death. He could smell it, he realized with a shudder, part fear, part satisfaction. He could taste it.

The midnight gong tolled once, twice, three times, shivering the cool spring night, rousing Adare from where she coiled sleepily against Ran.

“It’s late,” she murmured, wrapping an arm tighter around his waist.

“Or early,” he replied, returning her embrace and adding a light kiss on her forehead. “The list of petitions that need reading before tomorrow’s audience is as long as my arm, and your little affair over at the Temple of Light didn’t make things any easier.”

“Did I make your life difficult?” Adare asked with mock solicitude, propping herself up on one elbow. “I’m so sorry . How can I possibly atone?” She batted her lashes.

Ran grinned, pulling her closer. “I can think of one or two ways.”

She plunged into the kiss with a fierce abandon while a tiny part of her mind marveled at the situation. She hadn’t intended to sleep with il Tornja when she burst into his chambers with news of her success, hadn’t even allowed herself to consider the thought. Adare hui’Malkeenian had spent her entire life knowing that the most crucial contribution she could make to the empire would be the giving of her hand in marriage. An imperial marriage could avert a war, seal a crucial trade agreement, or cement an alliance with a powerful aristocratic house. The choice is not yours, her father had told her gently but firmly time and time again, any more than I choose when to go to war, or receive a delegation from the Manjari.

She thought she had long ago accepted the constraints of her position and yet, as she had recounted the showdown with Uinian over a glass of Si’ite red, as she saw the admiration and then the hunger in Ran’s eyes, it suddenly seemed a small thing, less than nothing to fall into his arms. Only after, when they lay together, bodies pressed close in the tangled sheets, did she pause to reflect on the spectacular folly of what she had done. It had been folly, that much was clear, and yet it didn’t feel wrong. He’s not a stable boy, she reminded herself. He’s the kenarang, the ’Kent-kissing regent. Were they to marry, no one could accuse her of matching beneath her station.

And so she had stayed while the night wore on, until it seemed pointless to return to her own chambers.

“I will sleep here tonight,” she murmured, nestling her face into the firm flesh of his shoulder, “with you.”

“You’re welcome to the bed,” il Tornja replied, “but you’ll be the only one sleeping.”

He kissed her once more on the forehead, then groaned as he rolled upright.

“Where are you going?” she asked sleepily.

“The horseshit associated with regency is never-ending,” he replied. “The sooner your brother gets back here, the better.”

“You’re doing work now?”

“I’m not going far,” he said, nodding toward the heavy wooden desk across the room. “If you get frisky, I’ll be right over there.”