Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(191)

“Well, they tried, but it was a pretty one-sided fight. Teeth against steel doesn’t make for a great matchup.”

“But they’re not with the rest of them,” Kaden said. “They’re not part of it.”

“The good news is,” Pyrre continued, as though she hadn’t heard the question, “a bird like that should be able to fly us all out of here.”

“The bird is there,” Rampuri Tan said. His eyes were sharp, focused. He had left whatever trance he entered far behind. “We are here. A valley and over a dozen armed men separate us.”

“Well,” Pyrre said, “I was still on the good news. You’ve jumped ahead.”

“That’s the end of it?” Triste demanded, anger creasing her brow. “That’s all you have to say?”

“Oh, no,” the assassin replied, turning to her. “There’s more good news: I have a plan.”

Kaden narrowed his eyes. There was a barb in this bait—he just couldn’t see it.

“Your plan?” Tan ground out.

“Now we come to bad news.” Pyrre put down the glass, drew one of those long, cruel knives of hers, and turned to Triste. “The bad news is that the plan involves sacrifice, and in this unfair world, some of us will be called upon to sacrifice more than others.”

Kaden lunged for the woman’s wrist at the last moment, trying desperately to stop the knife, but he was only a monk, not even a monk, while Pyrre Lakatur was a priestess of Ananshael, assassin, Skullsworn, trained to follow the ways of her bloody god in the unholy halls of Rassambur, so quick, so precise, that Triste barely had time to scream before the blade bit down.





48





Valyn had rubbed his wrists bloody and just about torn his shoulder from its socket trying to wrench a hand free from the ropes binding his wrists behind his back. He knew all the tricks for escaping a slaughter-knot, but then, so did the people who trussed him up in the first place—that was the problem with fighting other Kettral.

His body ached from the strain, but the physical pain was nothing beside the searing, lacerating guilt. In his eagerness to save his brother, he had led his Wing directly into harm’s way, had ignored the signs, spurned sensible caution, and now, unless he figured some way to cut them all loose, they were going to die here in the shadow of an unnamed mountain at the end of the world. It would have been bad enough to fall with a blade in each hand and a ready curse on the tongue, but this … trussed up like a pig for the butcher. The shame was far, far worse than the pain.

Keep working, he told himself. Keep thinking. As long as you’re alive, the fight isn’t truly over.

Escape, however, seemed unlikely. The Aedolians had halted for the night in the notch of a long, serrated ridge, hundreds of paces above the land before or behind. It was a good place with excellent lines of sight, easily defended from either direction, although difficult to retreat from if a fight went against them. That seemed unlikely. The only other people for a hundred leagues in any direction had been the monks, and, if Micijah Ut was to be believed, his men had killed all of them. Kaden was out there somewhere, scrambling through the darkness, but Kaden was fleeing. That left Valyn and his Wing, and they were thoroughly incapacitated, trussed up and then dumped in a rough jumble of scree right at the center of the notch. Even if they managed to cut their way loose, they were still trapped between the rock to the north and south, and the men guarding the pass to the east and west. A few boulders offered some meager cover, but they would be easy to flank, and …

And before you start thinking tactics you’ve got to get out of these ’Kent-kissing ropes.

The task seemed next to impossible. Yurl and Ut both knew their business. They’d taken down Valyn’s crew by the book, seeing to Talal first. None of them knew the leach’s well, but they didn’t take chances: Yurl put a knife to his throat, and then Hern Emmandrake, his master of demolitions, handed him a cloth soaked with adamanth. Talal tried to jerk away when they pressed the sodden material to his nose and mouth, but within moments he slumped into a limp heap, the cloth draped over his face, while Yurl looked on, grinning smugly.

“Now,” he said, “we can see to making the rest of you comfortable.”

It didn’t take long for his Wing to truss them up like livestock for the slaughter, binding them hand and foot, with an extra loop around the throat to discourage struggling. Gwenna managed to take a chunk out of the ear of one of the Aedolians, but all it gained her was a cuff across the face that split open both lips and half closed one of her eyes. The hurt did nothing to tame her, but once they’d stuffed a dirty rag in her mouth, she could neither curse them nor snap off their faces, and after a few minutes of futile struggle, she sagged back against the ground, green eyes blazing with silent rage. Despite the bleakness of their situation, however, Valyn felt a moment of relief at being shoved to the sharp gravel of the pass rather than killed outright. It’s a mistake. Yurl’s got no reason to keep us alive except to gloat. Then, in a sickening surge of anger and disgust, he realized why they had been spared.