The Emperor's Blades(8)
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.
4
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.