Brian Staveley - The Emperor's blades

They shone in the meager light, baffled and tormented by pain.

Valyn took half a step forward, then stopped. Assume nothing. That was the entire first chapter of Hendran’s Tactics, a tome that virtually every Kettral had committed to memory. The man looked near death, but Valyn held back.

“Can you hear me?” he asked quietly. “How badly are you wounded?”

The sailor’s eyes rolled in his head as though searching for the source of the sound before coming to rest, finally, on Valyn.

“You…,” he groaned, the word gravelly and weak.

Valyn stared. He had never seen the man before, certainly not in his years on the Islands, but recognition filled that feverish gaze and pinned him to the spot.

“You’re delirious,” he said carefully, edging closer. Unless the man was a professional masker, he wasn’t faking. “Where are you wounded?”

“You have the eyes,” the sailor responded weakly.

Valyn froze. Usually when people referred to “the eyes,” they were talking about his father, Sanlitun, or his brother, Kaden, both of whom had been blessed with the famous burning gaze, flaming irises that marked them as the heirs to Intarra herself, as the rightful Emperors of Annur. Even his older sister, Adare, had that gaze-although as a woman, she would never sit the Unhewn Throne. Growing up, Valyn had been fiercely jealous of those eyes, had, in fact, almost blinded himself once with a burning twig while trying to light his own eyes ablaze. The truth was, though, that Valyn’s stare was no less unsettling: black pupils set in irises brown as char. Kaden’s eyes might be fire, Ha Lin said, but Valyn’s were the remains after the fire had guttered out.

“We came … for you,” the sailor insisted.

Valyn felt suddenly dizzy, disoriented, and the ship seemed to roll more treacherously with the swells.

“Why?” he asked. “Who is ‘we’?”

“Aedolians,” the man managed. “The Emperor sent us.”

The Aedolian Guard. That explained both the professionalism and the Liran steel. The personal bodyguards of the Emperor were both well trained and well supplied; aside from the Kettral, they were the most fabled troops in the empire, iron-willed men whose loyalty to the Annurian throne was the stuff of legend. The founder of their order, Jarl Genner, had decreed that they take no wives, father no children, and own no property, all to ensure their unstinting allegiance to the Emperor and to the Guard.

None of which explained their presence here, on a clipper three full weeks’ sail from the capital, all of them dying or already dead. Or who could board such a ship and kill these men, some of the finest troops in the world. Valyn glanced back over his shoulder into the murky gloom of the hold, but whoever had wreaked the havoc appeared to be long gone.

The soldier was panting at the effort and the pain of speech, but he clenched his jaw and continued. “A plot. There is a plot. We were to … take you … away … protect you.”

Valyn tried to make sense of the claim. There were plenty of nefarious political currents in Annur, but the Kettral had chosen the Qirin Islands as their training ground and home because they were hundreds of leagues from anywhere. Besides, the Qirins were populated by the Kettral. The Aedolian Guard was storied, but the Kettral were legend. Anyone who planned to attack the Islands would have to be mad.

“Wait here,” Valyn began, although where the man would go he had no idea. “I have to tell someone. Fane. Eyrie command.”

“No,” the Aedolian managed, yanking a bloody hand from his jerkin and reaching toward Valyn, his voice surprisingly powerful. “Someone here … maybe someone important … is part of it.…”

The words landed like a slap. “Who?” Valyn demanded. “Who’s a part of it?”

The soldier shook his head wearily. “Don’t know…”

His head dropped to the side. Bright crimson blood hemorrhaged from somewhere beneath the jerkin, splattering Valyn and the surrounding deck in fading spurts. An arterial wound, Valyn realized … only, an arterial wound killed in minutes, not days. The man should have bled out onto the deck by the time his attackers slipped back over the gunwales. He stepped forward to part the soldier’s jerkin carefully and stared at the long gash, then turned his attention to the gore-drenched hand that had dropped limp into the Aedolian’s lap.

“There’s no possible way…,” he muttered to himself. And yet, the evidence was clear.

The man had been holding his own artery, had forced his fingers in through the sagging rent in his flesh, found the slippery tube, and clamped it shut. It was possible-Ellen Finch had gone over the technique in medical training-but even Finch acknowledged that you’d be lucky to last a day in that state. The Aedolian had gone close to three, waiting for someone, praying to whatever god he had trusted in, a god who had fucked him over well and for good.

Valyn touched his fingers to the man’s neck. The pulse fluttered, faltered, then failed. He reached out to shut the eyes when Fane’s earsplitting roar yanked him upright.

“Cadets on deck! Bird incoming!”

Just as Valyn shoved open the hatch, an ear-rending screech split the morning air. He burned to tell someone what he’d just heard, but the soldier’s warning echoed in his ears: Someone here is part of it. At the moment, he wasn’t even sure he could have told anyone: all eyes were turned to the sky to see a kettral soar overhead, dark wings blotting the sun.

Even after eight years on the Islands, eight years learning to fly on, fight from, load up, and drop off of the massive birds, Valyn still wasn’t fully at ease with them. If the annals were correct, the species was older than men, older even than the Csestriim and the Nevariim, a throwback to the days when gods and monsters strode the earth. Though the Kettral had found them, had ostensibly tamed them, nothing in the dark, liquid eyes of the birds had ever looked tame to Valyn, and now, standing on the open deck as the great creature winged overhead, he thought he understood the terror of a mouse caught in the middle of a freshly mown field as the falcon takes to the air.

“Looks like the Flea’s bird,” Fane said, shading his eyes with a hand. “Although what he’s doing all the way out here I’ve got no ’Kent-kissing idea.”

Normally Valyn would have been intrigued. Although the Flea took his turn training cadets, he was one of the most deadly soldiers in the Eyrie’s very deadly collection, and spent most of his time flying missions in the northeast, into the savage Blood Cities, or against the Urghul, or to the south, where the jungle tribes constantly pressed up through the Waist. His arrival in the middle of a run-of-the-mill exercise was unusual, if not unprecedented. Such surprises helped to liven up the training, although, after Valyn’s encounter with the Aedolian, the black bird struck him as an inauspicious portent, and he looked over to take new stock of the cadets on deck. If the man hadn’t been lying, dark forces were in play on the Islands, and if Valyn had learned one thing with the Kettral, it was that surpises were safe only if you were on the delivering end.

Without warning, the bird tucked its wings, all seventy feet of them, tight against its body and, like a spear falling from the heavens, dropped toward the ship. Valyn and the rest of the cadets stared. All the Kettral could make flying mounts and dismounts; the creatures weren’t much good if you couldn’t get on and off them. But this? He’d never seen anyone come in so fast.

“There’s no way…,” Lin breathed beside him, shaking her head in horror. “There’s just no-”