Brian Staveley - The Emperor's blades

I am a blade, she told herself.

The man before her had murdered her father, manipulated her, and escaped justice. She forced herself to meet his eye and let the blanket slip from her shoulders, revealing her naked breasts.

“Only if you think you can handle it,” she replied.

Kaden sat cross-legged on a jagged escarpment above the Aedolian camp, ignoring the bite of the wind and the exhausted ache of his feet and shoulders, following the two kettral with his eyes as they quartered the sky. At this distance, it was difficult to judge their scale-they might have been ravens or hawks wheeling on the thermals, the kind of birds he had spent countless hours observing from the ledges above Ashk’lan. In fact, if he didn’t glance back over his shoulder at the piled corpses of the traitorous guardsmen, if he kept his mind from the bloody edges of his memory, he might have been back at the monastery, seated on one of the jagged ledges, waiting for Pater or Akiil to jar him from his thoughts and drag him back for the evening meal. It was a pleasant delusion, and he lingered in it awhile, luxuriating in the lie, until a flash of sun on steel caught his eye: the birds were returning, and as they drew closer, as he made out the small figures perched on the talons, it became impossible to believe that they were normal birds of prey.

Valyn had taken his own kettral-Suant’ra, Kaden reminded himself-and that of the defeated Wing to search for Balendin and Adiv, neither of whose bodies had been found. The birds had been in the air the better part of the day, circling farther and farther from the camp, until Kaden was certain their quarry had eluded them. It should have been impossible; both men were wounded, at least slightly, without food or water, and on foot in treacherous country. But, as the Shin would say: There is no should; there is only what is . The two traitors had already proved themselves as unpredictable as they were dangerous, and who was Kaden to say that they didn’t have further powers at their disposal, powers as yet unrevealed? Neither the leach nor the councillor had frightened Kaden while he was inside the vaniate, but now that he had let the trance lapse, the thought that they were out there somewhere, wandering the mountains, filled him with unease.

He watched as the two birds approached the ridge, considered the black-clad figures as they leapt from the talons, dropping a dozen feet or so to the rubble and coming up unharmed. They were young, this Wing of Valyn’s, younger than the Kettral Kaden remembered from his childhood-or was that only a trick of memory? Despite their age, the four soldiers under Valyn’s command moved with a confidence and economy that could only come from long years of training, checking weapons and gear unconsciously, touching hands to hilts, scanning the surrounding terrain, running through a hundred habits built up over the years. Even the youngest of the lot, the Wing’s sniper, seemed steadier, deadlier, than some of the Aedolians around whom Kaden had grown up. And then there was Valyn.

After gesturing to Laith to tie up the bird, Valyn looked around the camp, spotted Kaden on the ledge, and turned up the slope toward him. He was not the boy Kaden remembered from their childhood duels in the Dawn Palace. He had grown up and out, filling his broad shoulders in a way that Kaden never would, wearing the blades on his back as though they were a part of him, keeping his jaw clenched tight most of the time, and fingering the scars on his hands and arms as though they were good luck. It was the eyes, however, that had changed most of all. Unlike Kaden, Sanlitun, or Adare, Valyn had always had dark eyes, but nothing like this. These were holes into some perfect darkness, wells from which no light escaped. It wasn’t the scars or the swords that made Valyn seem dangerous; it was the depth of those eyes.

His boots crunched over the scree, and when he reached Kaden, he paused, gazed out at the peaks beyond, then grimaced.

“I’ve got no idea where those bastards went. There should have been something, some kind of track.…” He trailed off. A nasty gash on his lower lip had opened up, and he spat blood over the edge of the cliff. The wind whipped it out and away, flinging it into the gulf.

“Sit down,” Kaden said, gesturing to the rock. “You’ve been flying all day.”

“For all the ’Kent-kissing good it did us,” Valyn replied. Still, after a moment, he lowered himself to the ledge with a groan.

“I feel like someone’s been beating me with the blunt edge of a board for the past week,” he said, twisting his head, stretching the muscles of his neck. He balled his hands into fists, cracked the knuckles, then frowned at the palms as though he’d never seen them before. “Every part of my body hurts.”

Kaden smiled wearily. “I thought you Kettral lived for this sort of thing. Martial valor, godlike endurance, the daily cheating of Ananshael-”

“Nah,” Valyn replied, plucking at his torn, sweat-stained blacks. “I mostly got into it for the clothes.”

“You should have been a monk. It’s hard to beat a wool robe.”

Valyn chuckled, and the two stared out over the mountains and valleys, side by side, companions in the simplicity of silence. Kaden would have remained there all day if he could, all year, enjoying the low rush of water, the sound of the wind knifing between the passes, the sun warm on his cool skin. He knew these things, understood them in a way he had ceased to understand his own brother, ceased to understand himself.

“So,” Valyn said after a long while, “what do I call you now?”

Kaden kept his eyes on the far mountains as he revolved the question. During the long flight from the monastery, he hadn’t had a chance to grieve for his father or consider his new station in life. After eight years with the Shin, he wasn’t even sure he knew how to grieve anymore. The fact that he was Emperor of Annur, sole sovereign over two continents, leader of millions, felt like just that, a fact; the truth had not penetrated to any organ that could actually feel it. A part of him wanted to make a joke, to laugh it off with a wry remark, but the impulse felt wrong, somehow, unfair to the monks who had died, to Valyn’s Wing, who had flown all this way to rescue him, to his father, who also had spent long years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains and now lay cold in his tomb.

“I suppose it’s ‘Your Radiance’ now,” Valyn continued, shaking his head. “That’s the protocol, right?”

Kaden stared at the blazing orb of the lowering sun. He wondered if his eyes looked like that.

“It is,” he replied finally. Then he turned to Valyn. “But when we’re not around others … When there’s just the two of us … I mean someone’s got to use my name, right?”

Valyn shrugged. “It’s up to you. Your Radiance.”

Kaden closed his eyes against the honorific, then forced himself to open them once more. “What happened with the other Wing leader?” he asked. “With Yurl?”

He’d seen the body-a carcass, really-gutted, the hands hacked away, eyes bulging with an expression that could only have been terror. It was a savage killing, purposeless in its violence.

Valyn grimaced, met his eyes, looked away, and for a moment Kaden caught a glimpse of the child he had known a decade earlier-uncertain but unwilling to show it, trying to put a bold face on his confusion.

“There was a girl, Ha Lin…,” he began, then trailed off, fingering a nasty scab on the back of his hand, ripping it free in a wash of blood without even glancing down. When he looked back at Kaden, his eyes were hooded again, unreadable. He looked like a soldier. More than a soldier, Kaden thought, a killer .