Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades Read online

  Valyn scanned the room. He had no idea who the girl was, who Amie was, or what in ’Shael’s name was going on, but it didn’t sound pretty. Usually the locals had enough sense to leave the Kettral out of their vendettas and turf wars, but if he’d learned one thing on the Islands, it was that fear and rage made people unpredictable. Whatever the girl was talking about, it sounded bad. He glanced over at Lin. It didn’t seem like they were going to get much more out of Juren. There were a few more survivors that he wanted to hunt up, and he had neither the time nor the inclination to get caught up in some asinine local brawl at the Black Boat.

  His friend, however, hadn’t moved. She was just staring at the girl, lips parted, but silent.

  “You know her?” Valyn asked.

  She nodded. “Rianne. She’s a whore. Works down by the docks, mostly, but she and her sister have a little garden on the hill above town. I used to buy firefruit from her in the spring.”

  “Who’s Amie?” Valyn asked warily, keeping an eye on the seated patrons. Everyone was watching Rianne. No one had risen, but whispered conversations were starting up at a few of the tables, and men were easing back in their seats, freeing up the knives and cutlasses tucked in their belts, eyeing one another cautiously. None of the other patrons were Kettral, but evidently they, too, had learned the hard way to distrust surprises. Valyn measured the distance to the door, the gap between him and the other tables, running through a half dozen tactical responses if things went ugly.

  “Amie was her sister,” Lin replied. Her eyes remained fixed on Rianne. She seemed oblivious of the tension in the room.

  Rianne took a couple of steps forward, her bony hands beggared before her as though she were holding up an invisible body. The people at the nearest tables leaned back in their chairs, giving her space. She stared helplessly from one face to the next, as though searching for something, the nature of which she had long ago forgotten. Then she saw Lin.

  “Ha Lin,” she whispered, dropping to her knees on the rough wooden floor. “You have to help me.” Valyn wasn’t sure if the posture was part of the plea, or if she simply lacked the strength to stand. “You’re a soldier. You’re Kettral. You can find them! Please.” She raked a hand through her tangled hair. Dark streaks lined her face, tears smeared with the charcoal she used to darken her eyes. “You have to help me.”

  All eyes swiveled to the two soldiers.

  “Not our concern,” Valyn murmured to his friend, tossing a couple of coins on the bar and getting ready to step past the kneeling woman.

  Lin fixed him with an angry glare. “Whose concern is it?”

  “Her father’s,” Valyn replied, trying to keep his voice low, trying to turn Lin away from the prying stares. “Her brother’s.”

  “She doesn’t have a father. Or a brother. She and Amie were alone.”

  “How in Hull did they end up on Hook?”

  “Does it matter?” Lin snapped.

  Valyn took a deep breath. “We can’t do this now,” he ground out. Rianne’s situation sounded horrible, tragic, but there was no way they could chase down every killer on Hook, no way they could defend every dockyard whore. Besides, even if they found the man responsible, the Eyrie explicitly forbade unauthorized violence against civilians. There were a thousand reasons to step past the girl, offer a polite condolence, and return to Qarsh. “This isn’t why we’re here.”

  Lin stepped in close, close enough that he could smell the sea salt in her hair, opened her mouth to say something, and then looked over her shoulder, as though noticing the other patrons for the first time. Her lips tightened.

  “So much for protecting the innocent people of Annur.”

  Valyn swallowed a curse. All eyes were on him now, furtive, feral glances over the rims of tankards, calculating stares from the far end of the room. The whole thing was horseshit. They’d come to the Boat to get answers out of Juren, to learn something about the conspiracy to kill Valyn, to try to thwart a plot to overthrow the entire fucking empire. Evidently all it took to knock them off the scent was a sailor’s whore with a sob story. In fact, once you started thinking about plots, Rianne’s sudden, unexpected appearance looked pretty suspicious. He opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again.

  Quarrel if you must, Hendran wrote, but do so out of sight. Open division emboldens a foe.

  Valyn had no idea what to make of the girl’s sudden arrival, but arguing about it with Ha Lin in the middle of a crowded tavern seemed like a poor way to proceed. Juren wasn’t going anywhere with his busted leg. Any secrets about the collapse of Manker’s would still be there to uncover a day later, a week later. There’s time, he thought to himself.

  Besides, Lin had a point. Assuming Rianne was telling the truth, she, like Valyn, had lost family. She, like Valyn, wanted answers. Unlike Valyn, however, she was no Kettral. She lacked the tools to solve her own mystery, lacked the training to rectify a wrong. The memory of the corpses from Manker’s came back to him, bodies broken and bloated with water. Whatever else was going on, the Kettral were supposed to protect people, to guard citizens and defend the helpless. That, as much as the swords and the birds, was why Valyn had stepped onto the boat eight years earlier.

  “What do you want us to do?” he asked warily.

  * * *

  The room was a cramped garret on the fourth story of a tall, narrow building next to the harbor. A rickety staircase spiraled up tightly, the ceiling so low Valyn had to crouch, boards so warped and twisted that each time they groaned beneath his weight he wondered if the whole thing was going to crumble, dumping him into the cellar. If someone wanted to kill me, he thought grimly, this is the place to do it. The sun had set while they were still in the Black Boat, and inside the building the only light came from Rianne’s small storm lantern, a weak, flickering flame that did little more than carve furtive, jerking shadows from the darkness.

  Valyn didn’t like the feel of that darkness. For all that Hull was the patron god of the Kettral, for all the midnight training missions, for all the blindfolded practice assembling and breaking down arbalests and munitions, the close, claustrophobic dark of the stairwell felt alien and unfriendly. Shadows were supposed to be allies of the soldier, but this inky black was menacing and palpable—a cloak for any would-be assassin.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Rianne. The girl had practically dragged them down the dusty street, but as they approached the building she grew suddenly reluctant, as though overwhelmed with dread at the thought of what waited above.

  “What is this place?” Valyn asked her, trying to be gentle, trying to dampen his own apprehension.

  She scrubbed a tear away. “It’s nothing.”

  “Who owns it?”

  “No one. Used to be a boarding house, but it’s been abandoned better’n four years now.”

  “And your sister was here?” he asked, confused. “What was she doing?”

  Rianne dropped her red-rimmed eyes. “We took ’em here, sometimes,” she mumbled. “The men.”

  Valyn frowned. “Why didn’t you just take them home?”

  Rianne stopped on the stairs ahead of him, and turned until the lantern was shining directly into his eyes. He could smell her cheap perfume, and underneath, a sharper, more desperate smell of fear, hunger, exhaustion. “Would you?” she asked dully.

  They climbed the remainder of the stairs in silence. As they neared the garret, Valyn noticed a new smell. It was the same as on the ship, the same as on every battlefield he’d ever studied, only those bodies had all been outside, washed by the rain and bleached by the sun before he got a look at them. As Lin shoved open the rickety door, the cloying, pent-up scent of death and rot threatened to choke him, and he stopped for a second, forcing down the bile in his throat. Rianne had started sobbing again.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “You don’t need to come in with us. Why don’t you wait downstairs?”

  She nodded feebly, handed him the lantern, and turned back into the darkness.

/>   Once Valyn stepped into the cramped, peeling attic, he was glad he’d sent her away. There was only one body, but the sight was as disturbing as any tableau of battlefield carnage. Someone had stripped the murdered girl of her clothes—they were tossed in an untidy heap in the corner—and then hung her by her wrists from the low rafters. The corpse had bloated and rot had set in badly, but Amie looked as though she had been even younger than her sister—maybe sixteen, blond, pale, probably pretty. Festering red gashes ran the length of her slender torso, her arms, her legs, all deep enough to paint her skin with runnels of blood, but none severe enough to kill quickly. Tightening flesh curled back from the wounds. The rope groaned as she twisted, moved by some slight, unseen breeze.

  Valyn sucked in an angry breath, clenched his hand into a fist, and turned away. Outside the narrow window, the night was calm and cool. Across the harbor he could see the lights of the Black Boat and the other alehouses, as well as the dark gaping hole where Manker’s had been. People were walking on the streets of Hook, laughing and arguing, going on about their lives, heedless of the girl who had been tied up, murdered, and left to rot in an abandoned attic.

  “Sons of bitches,” Lin breathed behind him. She was angry, Valyn could hear that clearly enough, but there was a faint current of something else behind the anger—fear, and confusion.

  He turned back to the room, trying to find something concrete, some particular detail upon which he could focus his training. There wasn’t much to look at. A thin tick mattress stuffed with reeds lay heaped in the corner, evidently kicked out of the way during the assault. A three-legged stool squatted beneath the window, and a wooden shelf along one wall supported a few candles that had burned down to the nubs, splattering the warped floor with tallow. He considered those for a while. Candles were relatively expensive—fat had to be cut, rendered, then cast around the wick. They were a necessity, of course, for those who worked by night, but the poor and thrifty would never waste the excess drippings. Rianne’s lantern, like most of the lanterns on Hook, was fed by cheap fish oil, and gave off an inconstant light that was as smoky as it was rank. He wondered if the candles had belonged to Amie, if she had intended to scrape the tallow off the floor later, or if her murderer had brought them, planning ahead to ensure he had plenty of light by which to perform his grisly work.

  Relucantly, Valyn turned back to the corpse. Her ankles were tied, no doubt to keep her from kicking. His eyes settled on the knot: a peculiar double bowline with a couple of extra loops. He started to study it, then tore himself away. You’re looking at the knot to avoid looking at the girl, he realized, forcing himself to shift his gaze from her wrists to her face.

  “All right,” he said brusquely, turning to the training he had spent so many years perfecting. “How did she die?”

  Ha Lin didn’t respond. She stood in the center of the room, arms slack at her sides, head shaking silently, slowly as she considered the revolving corpse.

  “Lin,” Valyn said, edging his voice with what he hoped was something of Adaman Fane’s characteristic growl. “What killed this girl? How long has she been dead?”

  Ha Lin turned to him blankly. For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to respond at all, but after a long pause her eyes focused, and she shook herself, as though awakening from a deep sleep. Her lips hardened into a thin line and she nodded abruptly before crossing to the dangling corpse. She leaned in to sniff the wounds, then ran a finger along the major lacerations, probing the flesh.

  “No scent of poison. No major arteries severed.” She bit her lip. “It looks like blood loss, pure and simple.”

  “Painful,” Valyn added grimly. “And slow.” He reached above the girl’s head and cut the rope holding her up before easing her body to the floor. “Take a look at this,” he said, holding out the severed rope.

  Lin squinted in the darkness. “The rope is from Li,” she said, the surprise clear in her voice. Li was on the other side of the world, months distant by sail. They made the best rope and steel in the world there, but it wasn’t the kind of thing that found itself into the hands of the sailors on Hook. The Kettral, on the other hand … the Kettral used Liran cord sometimes. It was too slick for the taste of most soldiers, but it was light and strong, and there were those who swore by it.

  Valyn and Lin exchanged a bleak stare.

  “When did she die?” he asked finally, breaking the silence.

  Lin hunched over the body, sniffing the wounds once more.

  “Hard to say. The rot looks almost two weeks advanced, but that could swing a few days in either direction, depending.”

  “Must get pretty hot up here during the day,” Valyn agreed. “Body would decay faster.”

  Lin nodded, then drove her fingers into one of the gashes, searched around for a minute before pulling out something white and glistening. “The skin might lie, but the bugs won’t.” She held up the writhing creatures for Valyn to inspect.

  “Blood worms, still larval.”

  Valyn took the worm, a sickening sluglike thing, and held it up to the fading light from the window. “It’s got its eyes just in.”

  “But no segmentation yet. Which means less than eleven days.”

  He nodded. “Six days to incubate. One to hatch. Four to grow the eyes.”

  “She’s been dead for ten days, for almost exactly ten days.”

  Valyn nodded. “Which means she died…” He counted back, then paused, turning first to the body, then to Lin.

  She stared back at him, brown eyes huge in the lamplight. “Which means she died the same day Manker’s collapsed into the harbor.”

  14

  The soil of Hook, like that of all the Qirin chain, was rocky and unforgiving, and so it took Valyn and Lin the better part of two hours, working in shifts behind the pathetic shack in which Rianne and Amie had made their home, to hack a hole deep enough to bury the murdered girl. That was the easy part. Then they had to return to the horrible, reeking garret, wrap the corpse in a scrap of sailcloth they bought down by the docks, and carry her back to her grave. When the stones and thin soil were finally mounded up over the earth, then scattered with the few wretched petals Rianne had scrounged from the yellowweed behind the house, the moon had dipped toward the horizon, while the bright stars people called Pta’s gems hung directly overhead, cold, distant, and unpitying.

  Valyn ached when he put down the shovel. Kettral training had prepared him for just about any kind of physical suffering, but there was something about digging a grave, an extra weight, as though the dirt tossed out of the hole were not just dirt, but something harder, heavier. He had seen plenty of bodies, had trained for years to kill people, but the corpses of the battlefield and the grown men he had seen there, armored for war and cut down in fury and rage, were different from the pale, flaxen-haired figure they had found mutilated in the tiny garret.

  As Lin wrestled a rough headstone into place, Rianne continued to cry, low and quiet, as she had all night. Valyn turned to the girl. He wanted to say something wise, something comforting, but there just wasn’t a whole lot in the way of comfort to be had. The normal platitudes one offered in such situations seemed ridiculous and trite. I’m sorry for your loss? Rianne’s sister hadn’t been lost; she’d been strung up and hacked at like a slab of beef in a slaughterhouse, tortured horribly and left to die. She’s gone to a better world? What world? If there was a world after death, no one had come back from it with stories to tell. No, there wasn’t a ’Shael-spawned thing to say, and yet, he couldn’t just stand there staring at her.

  “How about a drink?” he asked awkwardly. It was a soldier’s response to death, but it would have to do. “We’ll toast your sister.”

  “A … a … alright,” she managed between choked-off sobs. “I’ve got some peach wine inside. It’s not very good, but Amie and I used to—” The memory of her sister strangled the end of the sentence, and as Valyn watched helplessly, Lin wrapped her arm around Rianne’s narrow shoulders.

&n
bsp; “Your sister’s fine now,” she said quietly. “What happened to her was horrible, but it’s over.” As Rianne whimpered into her shoulder, Ha Lin raised her eyes to Valyn. “Why don’t you get that wine? We can share it in Amie’s memory. Pour some on her grave.”

  Valyn nodded and turned toward the house, grateful for a momentary reprieve. The Kettral spent years training soldiers to get used to the dead; they didn’t say much, though, about dealing with the living.

  The chipped crock of peach wine wasn’t hard to find. The sisters had only a few possessions: a single straw mattress, neatly covered with a tattered quilt, a trunk with one drawer missing. Two bowls and two spoons next to a wide tin washbasin. He imagined them sitting on the bed together, no more than children really, spooning up some kind of broth and telling each other stories to keep their lives at bay. He shook his head and pushed open the door, stepping back into the darkness.

  They passed the bottle around, poured a swallow on the grave, then passed it around again. Lin asked Rianne if she wanted to say a few words about her sister.

  “She took care of me,” was all Rianne could manage. “She was younger than me, but she took care of me.”

  “It’s all right now,” Lin repeated quietly.

  Valyn wanted to ask what, exactly, was all right about what had happened to Amie, but willed himself silent. Rianne’s life had turned dark enough without him dousing whatever light was left.

  “Do you think Ananshael is kind to the dead?” she whispered after a while.

  Lin glanced over at Valyn. People didn’t tend to think of the Lord of Bones as “kind.” It was hard to conceive of a god who ripped souls from bodies of the living, who parted parents from children and youths from their lovers, as anything other than fickle and malevolent. Macabre stories of the Skullsworn, the bloody priests of Ananshael, abounded: men and women who drank blood from goblets and strangled infants in their cribs. The Skullsworn were trained assassins, ruthless killers, and aside from the Kettral, probably the deadliest group on the two continents. If his chosen priests were any indication, it certainly did not seem that Ananshael would be kind.