Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (69 page)

Kaden gestured to the flatbow. “I shot him. He went over the cliff.”

For a long time Valyn just stared, then he nodded, then laughed. “Holy Hull,” he breathed, rocking back onto his heels, freeing Kaden. He let out a loud whoop. “Sweet ’Shael on a stick! How did you
do
it?”

“I aimed, then pulled the trigger.”

Valyn shook his head. “No, the
emotion
thing. I’ve been training for battle for years, and I was drowning in anger, and fear, and
shit,
Kaden … even now you look like you’ve been reading a somewhat dull book.”

“The Shin. They taught me … some skills.”

“I guess they fucking
did
!” Valyn burst out, catching his brother in a huge hug. Kaden did not return the gesture.

“Don’t we need to be moving?” he asked instead. “I’m not clear on the tactics here, but haste seems at a premium.”

Valyn let him go. “Well, don’t get all mushy on me now,” he muttered.

The next few minutes were a whirlwind of activity: Valyn slapping the others awake, everyone clutching their heads, then searching desperately for lost weapons, shadows darting through the darkness.

“Kaden,” Valyn gestured, “you’re with me on the bird. It’s the safest place for now, especially if Yurl doubles back. Talal, can you delve yet?”

The leach’s eyes were still glazed, but he rose unsteadily to his feet. “I can go,” he said. “I don’t know … I don’t know about a kenning. But I can go.”

Valyn glanced from Talal to the darkness, then back again, as though wrestling with some decision. When he spoke, however, his voice was sure.

“You’re staying here. And Triste. And Gwenna.”

“Bull
shit,
” the red-haired woman snapped, stepping forward.

“This is not the
time,
Gwenna,” Valyn replied. “Talal is busted up worse than he knows, and I’m not leaving him alone. You’re staying.”

Gwenna opened her mouth to argue, then looked over at Talal, who was leaning unsteadily against a boulder. “If you get yourselves killed,” she hissed, turning back to Valyn, “I will come down there and kick the shit out of your corpses.”

“Agreed,” Valyn said.

And then they were running down the short slope to the kettral.

“Step into this,” Valyn shouted, gesturing at a harness. Kaden did as he was told, staring as the bird gathered itself in a great burst of power and leapt into the air. Under other circumstances, the flight would have been terrifying and exhilarating both, but deep inside the
vaniate,
Kaden felt only calm, distance, as though he were no more than the wind rifling his robes, no more than the snow on the peaks, or the silent clouds scrubbing the sky.

“Pyrre will be down there,” he shouted, pointing toward the southeast. “She said she’d keep the others busy as long as she could.”

“What are you doing with a Skullsworn?” Valyn shouted back.

Kaden spread his hands, at a loss about how to explain. “I’m not sure. She’s on our side.”

Valyn shot him a strange look, but nodded.

It didn’t take long to find the assassin. The enemy Wing had her pinned down in a dead-end canyon about a mile and a half from the site of the Aedolian camp. One of the attacking Kettral had lit a couple of long tubes that looked like sticks, but that burned with a bright, incandescent light, illuminating the entire scene. The blond youth that Kaden took to be the Wing leader had Pyrre hemmed in, his people arranged in a loose semicircle, blocking off any escape. No one, however, had yet dared to step into the lethal circle of the woman’s spinning steel.

“Why haven’t they taken her yet?” Valyn bellowed in Kaden’s ear. “I don’t care how good she is—one arrow and she’s down!”

Kaden shook his head. “They think Tan and I made it to the cave. They need to capture Pyrre alive, to question her.”

Kaden had taken the assassin at her word when she insisted that it was a lot trickier to capture a foe than to kill her. After all, Pyrre was the one getting either captured or killed. Valyn nodded, as if it all made sense.

He flicked a few quick signs to the dark-skinned youth on the far talon, and moments later, the bird dipped into a steep approach. The girl with the bow, she couldn’t have been much more than fifteen, was hanging out into the darkness—ever since Kaden first cut her loose, she seemed to have been aiming or shooting at something—and as they fell on the circle of soldiers from above, she drew and fired, drew and fired, three shots in quick succession, and three of the Kettral collapsed into the dust—dead so quickly, they never had time to clutch at their necks.
I never saw a man die before last night,
Kaden realized.
I didn’t think it would be so easy.

Ut turned at the last moment, just in time for the arrow to glance off his breastplate, falling away into the darkness. The other youth, the Wing leader, dived into the darkness, and then the bird was upon them, shrieking an earsplitting cry, and Valyn was leaping free of the talons, rolling as he hit the ground, a knife in one hand, short sword in the other.

*   *   *

There hadn’t been much time for elaborate tactics, but the plan had seemed like a good one to Valyn: Take down the Wing’s sniper, flier, and demolitions man first, and then they could deal with the more conventional threats of Ut and Yurl. Valyn’s own Wing could have dropped, of course. It would be nice to have Laith and Annick at his back, but he liked having them in the air better; the altitude gave Annick a better range of attack. As his feet hit the ground, however, he realized the flaw: Ut and Yurl had fled outside the blazing light of the flares, into the darkness. The air support he had counted on was no good if the members of his Wing couldn’t see what was going on. He was on his own.

“That,” came a voice from behind, “is an exceptionally large bird you’ve got.”

Valyn spun to find himself face-to-face with the knife-wielding woman—Pyrre, Kaden had called her. Skullsworn. Valyn eyed the assassin, gauging her quickly. She was breathing heavily, and her clothes were sliced open in a dozen places—whether from this fight or something earlier, it was hard to tell—but she seemed strangely relaxed. The fact that Yurl hadn’t managed to take her spoke well for her abilities, that and the blood on her blades.

“They went that way,” she said, pointing with one of her long knives. “I’ve got a score to settle with the unpleasant gentleman in all the armor, but you’re welcome to kill the other one.”

Valyn considered the offer. Pyrre had helped Kaden, but he didn’t like the idea of relying on an assassin he’d never met before to guard his back. Of course, there wasn’t much to like, and every moment he delayed was a moment Yurl could be slipping farther away or honing an ambush. “All right,” Valyn replied, nodding warily. “Ut’s yours. Yurl’s mine. Just don’t fuck up.”

Pyrre smiled an easy smile. She didn’t look like a murderer. “I could have used that advice a few days ago, before we got ourselves chased into these miserable mountains.”

“Good luck,” he said.

“And with you,” Pyrre replied. “Be careful. That bastard is good.”

Valyn nodded grimly. For weeks now, for
months,
he’d been biding his time, waiting for just this opportunity, a chance to face Yurl one on one. So much the better that they had flown beyond imperial borders, past the aegis of law and the ambit of Annurian justice, into these unnamed peaks, where there were no trainers or regulations, no blunted blades or codes of conduct, no one to cry foul or stop the fight. It was just what Valyn had longed for, and yet the stark fact remained: Yurl was better with his blades. He was faster and he was stronger. When it was all settled, any blood on the ground was likely to be Valyn’s. It was folly to chase after him, and for a moment Valyn hesitated. He could go back for the rest of his Wing. The other man was alone now, on foot in hostile terrain with minimal provisions. It was pride and folly to pursue him alone.
There is wisdom,
Hendran wrote,
in waiting
.

But Valyn was through waiting. The man who had brutalized Ha Lin, who had tried to murder his Wing, to slaughter his brother, to end the Malkeenian line, was only a few paces away. Valyn had tried playing by the rules. For as long as he could remember, he’d tried to weigh his options, to think before acting, to make the wise choice. It had all ended in ashes: Lin dead, himself and his Wing traitors in exile. Yurl might kill him, but what did that matter? He would die eventually, either on the point of a blade or in his bed, and something inside him was stirring, a part of his mind older than conscious thought, quicker and more savage, whispering to him, rasping the same malevolent syllable over and over:
death, death, death
. Whether the death was his own or Sami Yurl’s no longer seemed to matter.

*   *   *

The sword came hard at his head—so fast, he barely had time to knock it aside. Were it not for the residual light of the flares flickering behind him, Valyn would have missed it entirely, and as he stumbled backward, trying to regain his balance, Yurl stepped from behind an outcrop.

The other Wing leader’s grin was gone. “You killed my men, Malkeenian.”

“As if you cared,” Valyn said, trying to gain time, to see a way through the other man’s guard.

“It’s an insult,” Yurl replied, swords flashing out as he spoke, one high, one low, probing, pressing. Valyn parried and launched a quick riposte, but Yurl swatted it down contemptuously. “
You
are an insult,” he continued, circling as he spoke. “Valyn hui’Malkeenian, son of the Emperor, Kettral Wing commander.” He sneered. “And any day I chose, I could have cut you down like grass.”

The swords whistled at Valyn again, a double-wing attack that folded into something else at the last minute. Valyn leaned back, tried to create space to parry just as the steel bit beneath his ribs. The wound wasn’t deep, but the blood was flowing.

“This is my point,” Yurl said, dropping his upper blade to gesture languidly at the wound.

Valyn started to lunge for the opening, then checked himself. It was a trap, just like in the arena, just like on the West Bluffs. Instead of pressing the weak guard, he took a step back, trying to ignore the blood sheeting down his side, trying to think. The blades might do the cutting, but as in all true swordplay, the real fight would be won or lost in the mind. Yurl’s words were as much a part of the thing as his footwork, those taunts as tactical as each feint and false position. Back on the Islands, Valyn always gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the distractions, fighting on in stubborn silence, refusing to be drawn in.
Drawn in
. He almost laughed. It was a ridiculous notion. He had fled the Eyrie, abandoned his training and his life to come here, to find Yurl and to stop him, to fight this fight. He hadn’t been drawn in; he had hurled himself.

“You’re fucked, you know,” he said, jerking his head over his shoulder toward the flares. “Your Wing’s dead. The Aedolians are dead. Even if you kill me, you’re fucked.”

A grimace twisted Yurl’s face. “Then I’ll have to settle for the joy of gutting you,” he said, sliding into a folding fan attack, the feint blade slicing up and across while the true thrust came from beneath. Valyn battered it aside, but Yurl moved into the space, pressing forward, forward, raining down blows from above, from the side, twisting through obscure Manjari forms Valyn scarcely recognized and could barely block. The assault seemed to last hours, and when it was finished, Valyn could feel his breath tight in his chest. Another wound seeped blood down his shoulder.

“I’m going to kill you,” Yurl said, spitting onto the ground, “just the way I killed your little bitch down in the Hole when Balendin was done with her.”

“You,” Valyn said, his heart a block of ice threatening to choke him.

Yurl shrugged. “Along with the leach.”

It was just more talk, more tactics, but Valyn could feel the rage rabid inside him. His teeth were bared as though he planned to leap on the other man and tear out his throat. Hot blood slammed behind his eyes in a frantic, murderous tattoo.

“Too bad she’s not here to help you now,” Yurl continued with a shrug. “Might have made for a passably interesting fight.”

Oh,
Valyn realized, the memory striking him like a slap across the face.
Oh
.

As the pain flared in his shoulder and side, he shifted to his left. He was losing blood, and with it, speed. Yurl’s next attack would come hard and fast, which meant Valyn had one play left, and suddenly, he knew what it had to be. A vision of Ha Lin’s smile ghosted through his mind. He was only ten years old when she first saved his ass, dragging him through the end of a long swim after his legs cramped, keeping his head above the slapping chop, alternately cursing and encouraging him, her pinched child’s face angry, stubborn, determined. That was the first time she’d bailed him out, but it wasn’t the last. Even now, even dead, the girl wouldn’t quit.

With a roar, he threw himself into a bull’s horns lunge. It was a desperate gambit, an insane attack that left him open to all manner of riposte. Only, in order to riposte, Yurl would need to settle back, to set his leg, his left leg. As Valyn fell through the night, both blades outstretched, he could hear Ha Lin’s voice soft in his ear:
I got in some shots of my own … the left ankle … maybe something you could work with.

Yurl’s face twisted in confusion at the unexpected lunge. His step back was basic reflex, the kind of thing drilled into every Kettral over thousands of days in the arena, the motion trained and trained and trained until it was threaded into muscle and bone alike. His body obeyed the training flawlessly, sliding fluidly down and away, dropping him into the standard off-guard crouch as he swept aside the horns of Valyn’s attack, the horns that weren’t the true attack at all.

Valyn rolled, ignoring the stone scraping over his wounds, lashing out with a foot at that flexed ankle. It was a feeble blow, off balance and poorly timed, but he connected just as Yurl was transferring his weight, loading the foot for the counterstrike. The ankle buckled. Yurl staggered, his own blade sliding just wide of Valyn’s neck, his face twisted with rage, and fury, and, beneath it all, another emotion blossoming, something new: the sweet, hideous flower of fear.