They considered the weapons for a few more heartbeats and then, as though responding to some silent command, began packing everything back the way they had found it. The jovial, larking expression had left Akiil’s face. He looked angry as he thrust the various items back into the satchel. Within moments they had returned the weapons to the bags and the bags to their hiding spot under the rocks. Akiil was replacing the final stones on the cairn when something clattered farther down the streambed, stone on stone.
Kaden spun to peer into the darkness.
“Did you hear that?” he murmured, trying to sort shadow from shape in the meager light.
Akiil nodded, hefting his stave in front of him. Kaden dropped a hand to his belt knife, then decided against it. He didn’t know much about fighting, but he didn’t like his odds if whatever it was got close enough for him to use a knife.
A cloud passed over the moon, plunging the ravine into even deeper shadow. Kaden could barely make out Akiil standing only a few feet away. Beyond him, the bare shapes of the cliffs and crenellations loomed, more felt than seen. He turned in a slow circle, leveling his staff, searching for light, movement, anything that might give him a warning of danger before it arrived.
“You see anything?” he hissed.
Akiil’s only response was a low umph, like a cough that never made it out of the chest. Kaden spun just in time to watch his friend collapse onto the streambed. Before he could cry out, a strong, implacable hand clamped down on his mouth.
Kaden was not soft. Eight years of hard physical exercise high in the mountains had seen to that. He could carry a quarter of his weight in water up hundreds of steps from the stream or run all night over rocky paths. He should have been able to put up something of a fight, and yet the hand that held him might have been made of granite. As he struggled, his adversary’s other arm closed around his neck, crushing his windpipe. This is the result of bad decisions, thought the part of him that could still think. In desperation, Kaden threw an elbow, hoping to dislodge his opponent. The man’s stomach was as solid as his arm. Kaden screamed silently as his mind failed.
33
He woke in a hard wooden chair surrounded by stone walls. Someone had lit a few candles, and when he first tried to open his eyes, the light drove a spike of pain directly through his head. He closed them again with a slight groan. He didn’t know where he was, but when the memory of the attack came back to him, he tensed himself to run or fight. No one had bound his hands or feet, and through slitted eyelids he tried to locate the door. They couldn’t have carried him far. He was in Ashk’lan still—the rough granite walls were proof enough of that. If he could just …
“We took some pains to bring you here silently. Please do not ruin it with clamor.”
He knew that voice, dry and tough as rawhide, although for half a heartbeat he couldn’t place it.
“What is it in obedience that the young find so difficult?” the voice went on.
The abbot, he realized with a start, and in spite of the pain, forced his eyes open once more. He was seated in the center of Scial Nin’s study, the humble, one-room structure where Nin and Tan had revealed the secret of the kenta a few weeks earlier. Nin slept in a dormitory cell like the rest of the monks, but he was known to stay late in his study when occupied with important business. Generally, a visit to the abbot’s study did not augur well, and this episode was starting out far worse than usual, although Kaden’s head still throbbed too badly for him to make much sense of what was going on.
A small fire burned in the hearth, but that was the only welcoming thing about the room. Nin sat behind his bare wooden desk, fingers steepled under his chin, dark eyes fixed on him intently, as though Kaden were some new species of squirrel that he had found in one of his deadfalls. A few feet from the desk, Rampuri Tan stood staring out the small window into the night. He hadn’t said anything at all, hadn’t even looked at his pupil, and Kaden felt his stomach tighten, an uncomfortable sensation, given that his head was still pounding and his legs felt like water. He started to groan, then suppressed the sound out of habit—it would earn him no sympathy from the older monks.
“Akiil?” he asked weakly, feeling like someone had scoured his mouth with coarse wool. His friend was not in the study. “Where is Akiil?”
“He is not here,” the abbot replied evenly. Normally Kaden would have ground his teeth in silent frustration at the response, but the knives they had discovered leapt into his mind, along with the memory of the hand clamped over his mouth, cutting off his breath.…
“The merchants,” he managed. “They’re—” What? he asked himself. Carrying knives? How was he going to explain the fact that he and Akiil were rummaging through their private belongings? “Who tried to kill us?” he asked instead. “Did you capture them?”