Brian Staveley - The Emperor's blades

The lash took him across the shoulders again. The first two blows had split open the robe, and Kaden could feel the switch tearing into his bare skin.

“This is what it is,” Tan replied. “Call it a test if you like, but the name is not the thing.”

Kaden suppressed a groan. Whatever eccentricities Tan might possess, he spoke in the same infuriating gnomic pronouncements as the rest of the Shin.

“I don’t remember anything else,” Kaden said. “That’s the entire saama’an. ”

“It’s not enough,” Tan said, but this time he withheld the lash.

“It’s the entire thing,” Kaden protested. “The goat, the head, the pools of blood, even a few stray hairs that were stuck on a rock. I copied everything there.”

Tan did hit him for that. Twice.

“Any fool can see what’s there,” the monk responded dryly. “A child looking at the world can tell you what is in front of him. You need to see what is not there. You need to look at what is not in front of you.”

Kaden struggled to make some kind of sense out of this. “Whatever killed the goat isn’t there,” he began slowly.

Another lash.

“Of course not. You scared it away. Or it left on its own. Either way, you wouldn’t expect to find a wild animal hunkered over its prey if it heard or scented a man approaching.”

“So I’m looking for something that should be there, but isn’t.”

“Think in your mind. Use your tongue when you have something to say.”

Tan followed the words with three more sharp blows. The gashes wept blood. Kaden could feel it running down his back, hot, and wet, and sticky. He had had worse beatings before, but always for a major mistake, a serious penance, never in the course of a simple dialogue. It was becoming more difficult to ignore the lacerating pain, and he struggled to keep his mind on the subject at hand. Tan wasn’t going to stop whipping him out of mercy; that much was clear.

You need to see what is not there.

It was typical Shin nonsense, but like much of that nonsense, would probably turn out to be true.

Kaden scanned the saama’an. Every part of the goat was accounted for, even the intestines, which lay piled in sloppy blue-white ropes beneath the creature’s abdomen. The brain was gone, but he had painted the broken skull clearly, showed where it was scooped out. What else would he expect to see? He’d been tracking the goat, followed it to the canyon, and …

“Tracks,” he said, realization coming with the word. “Where are the tracks of whatever killed it?”

“That,” Tan said, “is a very good question. Were they present?”

Kaden tried to remember. “I’m not sure. They’re not in the saama’an … but I was focused on the goat.”

“It seems that those golden eyes of yours don’t see any better than anyone else’s.”

Kaden blinked. He’d never had a umial mention his eyes before-that was too close to mentioning his father or his birthright. The Shin were profoundly egalitarian. Novices were novices; acolytes were acolytes; and full brothers were all equal before the Blank God. Kaden’s eyes, however, were unique. Tan had called them “golden,” but in fact, the irises blazed. As a child, Kaden had stared at his father’s eyes-all Annurian Emperors shared them-marveling at the way the color seemed to shift and burn. Sometimes they raged bright as a fire caught in high wind; others, they smoldered with a dark, red heat. His sister, Adare, had the eyes, too, though hers seemed to spark and snap like a blaze of green twigs. As the oldest of the Emperor’s children, Adare rarely focused her bright gaze on her younger brothers, and when she did, it was usually in a flash of irritation. According to the family, the burning eyes came from Intarra herself, the Lady of Light, who had taken human form centuries or millennia earlier-no one seemed quite sure-to seduce one of Kaden’s forebears. Those eyes marked him as the true heir to the Unhewn Throne, to Annur itself, an empire that sprawled across two continents.

The Shin, of course, had no more interest in empires than they did in Intarra. The Lady of Light was one of the old gods, older than Meshkent and Maat, older even than Ananshael, Lord of Bones. Upon her depended the arc of the sun in the sky, the heat of the day, the numinous glow of the moon. And yet, according to the monks, she was a child, an infant playing with fire in the vast mansion of emptiness, the unending and eternal void that was home to the Blank God. One day Kaden would return to Annur to claim his place on the Unhewn Throne, but while he lived at Ashk’lan, he was just another monk, expected to work hard and obey. The eyes certainly weren’t saving him from Tan’s brutal interrogation.

“Maybe the tracks were there,” Kaden concluded weakly. “I can’t be sure.”

For a while Tan said nothing, and Kaden wondered if the beating was about to resume.

“The monks have been too easy on you,” Tan concluded finally, voice level but hard. “I will not make that mistake.”

Only later, as Kaden lay awake in his bunk, breathing shallowly to try to ease the pain of his inflamed back, did he realize what his new umial had said: “the monks.” As though Rampuri Tan were not one of them.

Even with the salt-sharp breeze gusting in off the sea, the bodies stank.

Adaman Fane’s Wing had found the ship on a routine patrol two days earlier, sails rent and luffing, dried blood on the rails, the crew cut to pieces and left to rot on the decks. By the time the cadets arrived, the searing springtime sun had started its work, bloating bellies and pulling skin tight over knuckles and skulls. Flies crawled in and out of dead sailors’ ears, foraged between slack lips, and paused to rub their mandibles over desiccated eyeballs.

“Any theories?” Ha Lin asked, nudging the nearest body with her toe.

Valyn shrugged. “I think we can rule out a cavalry charge.”

“Very helpful,” she shot back, lips pursed, almond eyes skeptically narrowed.

“Whoever did this, they were good. Take a look here.”

He squatted to peel back the crusted cloth from a nasty stab puncture just below the fourth rib. Lin knelt beside him, licked her little finger, then slid it into the wound up to the second knuckle.

A stranger meeting Ha Lin on the street might mistake her for a carefree merchant’s daughter on the cusp of womanhood: buoyant and blithe, brown skin tanned from long hours in the sun, glossy black hair pulled back from her forehead and gathered in a leather thong. She had a soldier’s eyes, though. For the past eight years, she’d been through the same training as Valyn, the same training as all the cadets on the deck of the doomed vessel, and the Kettral had long ago hardened her to the sight of death.

Still, Valyn couldn’t help but see her for the attractive young woman she was. As a rule, the soldiers avoided romantic entanglements on the Islands. Whores of both sexes were cheap over on Hook, and no one wanted a lover’s quarrel between men and women trained to kill in dozens of ways. Nonetheless, Valyn sometimes found his eyes straying from the exercise at hand to Ha Lin, to the quirk of her lip, the shape of her figure beneath her combat blacks. He tried to hide his glances-they were embarrassing and unprofessional-but he thought, from the wry grin that sometimes flickered across her face, that she had caught him looking on more than one occasion.

She didn’t seem to mind. Sometimes she even looked back with that bold, disarming stare of hers. It was easy to wonder what might have evolved between them if they’d grown up somewhere different, somewhere that training didn’t subsume an entire life. Of course, “somewhere different” for Valyn hui’Malkeenian meant the Dawn Palace, which had its own rules and taboos; as a member of the imperial family, he couldn’t have loved her any more than he could as a soldier.