Brian Staveley - The Emperor's blades

Forget it, he told himself angrily. He was there to focus on the exercise, not to spend the morning daydreaming about other lives.

“Professional,” Lin said appreciatively, evidently unaware that his mind had drifted. She pulled her finger out and wiped the crusted gore on her blacks. “Deep enough to burst the kidney, but not so deep as to get the blade stuck.”

Valyn nodded. “There are plenty more like that, more than you’d expect from amateurs.”

He considered the purpling contusion a moment longer, then straightened up and stared out over the slapping chop of the Iron Sea. After all the blood, it felt good to look at the unblemished blue for a minute, the wide expanse of the meridian sky.

“Enough lounging!” Adaman Fane bellowed, cuffing Valyn across the back of the head as he strode the length of the deck, stepping over the sprawled bodies as though they were downed spars or coils of rope. “Get your asses aft!” The massive bald trainer had been with the Kettral better than twenty years and still swam across the sound to Hook and back every morning before dawn. He had little patience for cadets standing around during one of his exercises.

Valyn joined the rest. He knew them all, of course; the Kettral were as small a fighting force as they were elite-the enormous birds that they used to drop in behind enemy lines couldn’t carry more than five or six soldiers at a time. The Empire relied on the Kettral when a mission had to be executed quickly and quietly-for everything else, the Annurian legions could usually get the job done or the navy, or the marines.

Valyn’s training group numbered twenty-six, seven of whom had flown out to the abandoned ship with Fane for the morning’s exercise. They were a strange crew: Annick Frencha, slim as a boy, snow-pale, and silent as stone; Balendin with his cruel grin and the falcon perched on his shoulder; Talal, tall, serious, bright eyes set in a face dark as coal; Gwenna Sharpe, impossibly reckless and incurably hot-tempered; Sami Yurl, the arrogant blond son of one of the empire’s most powerful atreps, bronze-skinned as a god and viscious as a viper with his blades. They didn’t have much in common aside from the fact that someone in command believed that one day they could be very, very good at killing people. Provided nothing killed them first.

All the training, all the lessons, the eight years of language study, demolitions work, navigational practice, weapons sparring, the sleepless nights on watch, the never-ending physical abuse, abuse intended to harden both the body and the mind, all of it aimed at one goal: Hull’s Trial. Valyn remembered his first day on the Islands as though it had been branded on his mind. The new recruits had stepped off the ship straight into a barrage of curses and insults, into the fierce, angry faces of the veterans who called this distant archipelago their home, who seemed to resent any incursion, even by those eager to follow in their footsteps. Before he’d taken two steps, someone cuffed him across the cheek, then drove his face into the wet, salty sand until he could barely breathe.

“Get this in your heads,” someone-one of the commanders? — hollered. “Just because some incompetent bureaucrat has seen fit to ship you out here to our precious Qirin Islands, it does not mean you will ever become Kettral. Some of you will be begging for mercy before the week is out. Others we will break in the course of training. Many of you will die, falling from birds, drowned in the spring storms, sobbing pathetically to yourselves as you submit to fleshrot in some miserable Hannan backwater. And that’s the easy part! That’s the fucking fun part. Those of you lucky or stubborn enough to live through the training will still need to face Hull’s Trial.”

Hull’s Trial. Despite eight years of whispered speculation, neither Valyn nor the other cadets knew what it was any more than they had when they first arrived on Qarsh. It always seemed so distant, invisible as a ship beyond the cusp of the horizon. No one forgot it, but it was possible to ignore it for a while; after all, no one reached Hull’s Trial if he didn’t survive the years of training leading up to it. And yet, after all those years, it had come at last, like a debt long due. In a little over a month, Valyn and the others would earn the rank of full Kettral or they would die.

“Maybe we can start this morning’s parade of incompetence,” Fane began, tugging Valyn’s attention back to the present, “with Ha Lin’s assessment.” He gestured with a huge hand for her to begin. It was a standard exercise. The Kettral were always dragging cadets to fresh battlefields, the examination of which would both harden them to the sight of death and hone their tactical understanding.

“It was a night attack,” Lin replied, voice crisp and confident. “Otherwise, the sailors on deck would have seen their assailants. The raiding party came from starboard-you can see the gouges left by the grapples on the rails. When the-”

“Sweet ’Shael on a stick,” Fane interrupted, raising a hand to silence her. “A first-year could tell me all this. Will someone please explain something that’s not obscenely obvious?” He cast about, eyes finally fixing on Valyn. “How about His Most Radiant Highness?”

Valyn hated the title. It wasn’t even accurate, for one thing-despite the fact that his father was Emperor, he was never going to sit the Unhewn Throne-and for another, his high birth was irrelevant. There were no ranks on the Islands, no special perquisites or prerogatives. If anything, Valyn probably worked a little harder than most. Still, he’d learned long ago that complaining just landed you deeper in the shit, and he did not, at the moment, need to spend more time in the shit, so he took a deep breath and began.

“The crew barely even knew they were in trouble-”

Before he could finish the sentence, Fane cut him off with a snort and a curt chop of his hand.

“I give you ten minutes to look over this ’Kent-kissing goat fuck, and your only conclusion is that it was a surprise attack? What have you been doing? Pilfering rings and going through pockets?”

“I was just starting-”

“And now you’re finished. How about you, Yurl?” Fane asked, pointing to the tall blond youth. “Maybe you can find some way to contribute to His Most Radiant Highness’s exhaustive analysis.”

“There’s just so much to say,” Sami Yurl began, shooting Valyn a satisfied smirk.

“That spit-licking son of a whore,” Lin hissed, low enough that only Valyn could hear.

Though all the cadets endured the same privations and aimed at the same goal, there were rifts in the group. Most of the young soldiers enlisted out of a hybrid desire to defend the empire, see the world, and fly those enormous birds to which only the Kettral had access. For a peasant’s son from the plains of Sia, the Kettral offered opportunities too fantastic to be believed. Others, however, came to the Islands for other reasons: the chance to fight, to inflict pain, to take life-these drew some as rotting flesh drew vultures. Despite Sami Yurl’s smooth good looks, he was a brutal and nasty fighter. Unlike most of the other cadets, he seemed never to have put his past behind him, striding around the Islands as though expecting everyone to bow and scrape. It was tempting to dismiss him as the pampered, puffed-up son of a lord, an aristocratic fool who had lucked into the cadets through coin or family connections. The truth was more galling: Yurl was an effective, dangerous fighter, better with his blades than some full-rank Kettral. He’d beaten Valyn bloody dozens of times over the years, and if there was one thing he enjoyed more than winning, it was humiliating those he had defeated.