Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(196)

“Clear your mind,” the monk instructed. “Then bring up a saama’an of a bird, a heart thrush.”

Kaden closed his eyes, then did as he was told, the image of the creature leaping bright and sharp into his mind as it had in a thousand painting tests.

“See the coverts,” Tan continued, “the pinions, the flight feathers … see every detail … feel the rough scales of her leg, her smooth beak, the soft down of her breast.”

Somewhere to the south, the kettral let out an ear-piercing shriek. Worry surged through Kaden’s blood, and the image of the thrush wavered until he forced down the anxiety. See the bird, he told himself. Just the bird.

“Leave your hand on her breast,” Tan said. “Can you feel her heart beating?”

Kaden paused. This was new. The saama’an was a visual exercise. No one had ever asked him to file away tactile sensation. He took a deep breath.

“She is frightened,” Tan said, “trapped in your hand. You know her fear. Let yourself feel that fear.”

Kaden nodded. This was like the beshra’an, he realized, throwing himself into the mind of a creature, only this creature lived inside his brain. He let himself sink deeper into the vision, laid a hand on the bird’s heart and felt it beating.

“Can you hear her heart?” Tan asked.

Kaden waited. A mountain wind skirled in his ears. Something down the slope somewhere knocked free an avalanche of pebbles. Behind it, though, beneath it, the bird’s heart beat, quick and light, thumping, thumping, until it filled his ears, his mind. He held the creature in his hand—so fragile, he could crush her with a squeeze of his fingers. She was terrified, he realized. He was terrifying her.

“Now let her go,” Tan said. “Open your hand and let her fly away.”

Slowly, Kaden opened his fingers, reluctant to let the thrush escape his grasp. It seemed important that he hold her, for some reason, that he clutch her to him … but Tan had said to let her go and so, ever so lightly, he let her slip from his fingers.

“She’s flying now,” he whispered.

“Watch,” Tan replied.

Against closed lids, Kaden watched as the bird dwindled, smaller and smaller against the great blue of his mind’s vast sky, smaller and smaller until she was a smudge, a speck, a pinprick on the great open emptiness of the heavens. And then she was gone. Blankness filled his mind.

He opened his eyes.

Almost overhead now, the kettral shrieked. They’re close, he realized, but they’re too late.

Then he saw the eyes. At first he wasn’t sure what they were: glowing bloodred orbs, at least a dozen, some the size of apples, others no larger than Annurian copper coins, floating up the slope below. As they drew closer, he could make out the irises, pulsing with crooked veins, dilating and contracting, and then he understood. The ak’hanath had come.

He should have been terrified, and yet the realization carried no fear. The creature was a fact—no more, no less—like the fact that night had fallen, or that Pyrre stood, staring, at his side. Like the fact that people would die tonight. It was strange, he realized, this lack of feeling. He used to feel something. Only minutes ago, before he had freed the bird inside him, his mind had been a welter of emotions: fear and confusion and hope. Inside the vaniate, however, there was only a great, blank calm.

The ak’hanath was larger than he had expected, almost the size of a female black bear, but it skittered up the rocky slope more quickly than any bear, claws clicking over the stones, chitinous legs flexing and unflexing, causing the eyes at the joints to bulge under the strain. A dozen paces off it paused, turned back in forth in the darkness as though sniffing for something, then let out a thin but piercing wail just at the edge of hearing. Twice more the creature uttered its unnatural scream and then, from father down the slope, an answering call.

“Two,” Tan observed as the second horror approached.

As it drew near, the first ak’hanath raised wicked, slicing pincers, as though testing the air, clicking them open and shut spasmodically. One of those things could hack through the skull of a goat. They had killed Serkhan back at the monastery. Facts. Just more facts.

Kaden turned to Tan. “Is it too late?”

“Not if I kill them.”

“About that,” Pyrre interjected, hefting a small stone and hurling it at one of the creatures. It flew true, striking one of the eyes with a sick, popping sound. The ak’hanath spasmed a moment, let out another high-pitched shriek, then sidled farther up the slope. Kaden could make out the tiny limbs around its mouth twitching feverishly. “Any advice?” She might have been asking about the best local wine.