Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(114)

As it turned out, Tan hadn’t cut short the penance out of concern for Kaden’s mental state. It seemed as though, after Serkhan’s death, he considered it too risky to leave his pupil buried to the neck in earth. Evidently, if Kaden was to be killed, Tan wanted the pleasure of doing it himself.

Akiil, for his part, was ready to leap out of his skin with excitement. He kept picking up and putting down his spoon, gesturing with it toward Kaden and then toward the world outside, thumping his finger on the table to emphasize his points, and generally ignoring his rapidly cooling bowl of stew. He was always complaining that nothing ever happened at Ashk’lan, and now that excitement had arrived, he seemed to accept Serkhan’s death as the necessary price.

“Why now?” Kaden asked slowly. “I found the first goat over a month ago, and monks have been all over the trails since then. It could have attacked anyone.”

Akiil nodded, as though he’d been anticipating this question. “The way I figure it, the thing never wanted to kill a person. It stuck to goats as long as we let it, but then we penned the goats, all of them except the ones we set out as bait. It couldn’t get to those, and so it had no choice. Serkhan became dinner.”

Kaden winced at the crack. “The man is dead, Akiil. Show some respect.”

His friend waved off the remark. “You’re a terrible monk, you know that? Don’t you listen to anything you’re taught? Serkhan stopped being Serkhan when whatever it is tore him apart. The statement, ‘Serkhan is dead,’ doesn’t even make sense. Serkhan was. Now he is not. You can’t respect something that’s not.”

Kaden shook his head. Leave it to Akiil to ignore Shin teaching until it suited him. The tough thing was that his friend was right. The monks weren’t callous, exactly, but they didn’t make any more allowance for grief than they did for the other emotions—it was clutter, all of it, an obstacle to the vaniate. When a brother died, there was no funeral, no procession of mourners, no eulogy or scattering of ashes. Several monks conveyed the corpse to one of the high peaks and left it there for the rain and the ravens.

Kaden had learned all that the hard way. He could recall the moment in excruciating detail, despite the passage of the years. He had spent the morning in the potting hall, seated on one of the three-legged stools in the back corner, his attention focused on the lip of the ewer he was turning. Four times he had bungled the vessel, earning sharp words and sharper strokes from his umial. In his determination, he didn’t even notice the young monk, Mon Ada, until he stood directly before him, a narrow wooden cylinder in his hands, leather thongs dangling where they had been cut loose from the bird’s leg. Pigeons couldn’t carry any great weight and the letter was terse: Your mother has died. Consumption. She went quickly. Be strong. Father.

Kaden had kept his face still, set aside the note, and somehow finished the lip of the ewer. Only when Oleki dismissed him did he climb to the top of the Talon to weep in solitude. He had seen one of the monks at the monastery die of consumption and he remembered the fever and chills, the skin pale as milk, the bright red as the man coughed pieces of his own lung into the cloth. He did not go quickly.

After spending a night on the Talon, Kaden went directly to Scial Nin’s quarters to ask permission to visit his mother’s grave. The abbot refused. The next day Kaden turned eleven.

With an effort of will he hauled his mind back to the present. His mother was dead and so was Serkhan.

“Respect or no respect,” he said, “you’re acting like this is just all part of a game. Doesn’t it make you even a little bit scared?”

“Fear is blindness,” Akiil intoned, raising an admonitory finger and arching an eyebrow. “Calmness is sight.”

“You can skip the sayings—I learned them the same year you did.”

“Evidently not well enough.”

“A man was ripped apart,” Kaden insisted. He still felt dazed and a little detached from the world after his ordeal in the hole. The fact that Akiil refused to acknowledge the seriousness of Serkhan’s death only made him feel more confused. “I’m not arguing we should be running around in a terror, but the situation seems to warrant more than … excitement.”

Akiil stared at him for a while. “You know what the difference is between us?”

Kaden shook his head wearily. For the most part, years living with the monks had dulled his friend’s bitterness about a childhood spent grubbing scraps in the Perfumed Quarter. For the most part.