Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(117)

“Who made it?” Kaden asked.

Tan considered the question. “It is a Csestriim weapon,” he said finally.

Akiil’s mouth dropped open. “You expect us to believe you’re lugging around a three-thousand-year-old spear?”

“What you believe is a subject of indifference to me.”

Kaden considered the naczal. As children, he and Valyn had marveled over the dark smoke steel of a Kettral blade, the grudging way it refused to reflect the light. At first glance, Tan’s spear looked similar, but where the Kettral steel appeared to have been forged in a deep smoke, coated with the ashes and eddies, the naczal might have been made from smoke. It looked solid enough, hard as any steel, but somewhere deep in the shaft, drifting across the surface of the blades, it seemed to roil and smolder, as though heat and ash from an extinguished blaze had been frozen in the air, then hammered into shape.

“Where did you get it?” Kaden asked.

“I brought it with me.”

“Why?” Akiil demanded. “Seems like overkill for slaughtering goats.”

“If you wait until you need a weapon,” Tan replied, “it is often too late to acquire one.”

“What about us?” Akiil asked. “What do we get?”

“My protection.”

“I’d rather have one of those.”

“Then you are a fool,” Tan replied. “We’re going to the South Meadow. Now, run.”

The South Meadow wasn’t much of a meadow at all, at least not by the standards of the imperial heartlands, where rich farms stretched for unbroken acres over the soft earth. It was, however, one of the few places in the mountains where the haphazard tufts of grass were stitched into an unbroken blanket that was, if not exactly lush, at least softer than the dirt and gravel immediately surrounding Ashk’lan. The White River, which roared and leapt through the canyons above and below, grew sluggish here, dividing into a wet skein that was home to frogs, flowers, and buzzing flies. It would have made an altogether more inviting site for the monastery than the grim plateau carved out of the rocks miles above. Which was, Kaden supposed, why the first Shin had refused to build there.

At the north end of the meadow the mountains resumed their dominion, sweeping upward in ramparts and splinters of granite. The trail to the monastery wound through those rocks, climbing over a thousand feet in a little less than half a mile, a tortuous ascent over shattered boulders and the groping roots of junipers. It was one of the steepest sections, and Kaden had a pretty good feeling he knew what Tan intended.

“Today’s study,” his umial began once they had reached the soft grass, “is in kinla’an. The ‘Flesh Mind.’”

Akiil’s mouth quirked as though he were going to make some sort of crack.

Tan turned to face him, and the former thief schooled his face back to careful blankness. Akiil was rash, not stupid.

Over his years at the monastery, Kaden had spent countless days practicing saama’an and beshra’an. The latter—“Thrown Mind”—was what allowed him to track his goat to its demise all those weeks earlier. Kinla’an, however, he had never heard of.

“Do all the Shin study the Flesh Mind?” he asked carefully.

Tan shook his head. “The monks pick and choose the training that suits them. They have not entirely forgotten the importance of kinla’an, but few umials emphasize it.”

“Let me guess,” Akiil said. “You’re one of the few.”

“You will run the trail,” Tan began, ignoring the crack and gesturing with the blade of his strange spear, “up to the sharp bend. Then you will return.”

Kaden eyed the terrain. It was steep, but no more than a quarter of a mile. He’d been running more than that since his first day at the monastery. Even hobbled as he was after the week of immobility, the task sounded suspiciously sedate. That worried him. He glanced at Tan’s face, but the older monk revealed nothing. Instead, he freed his bow, strung it, and nocked an arrow.

“You’re going to shoot at us while we’re running?” Akiil asked. It was supposed to be a joke, but Kaden wasn’t so sure. His umial had come close to killing him enough times to take any threat seriously.

“I’ll be halfway up the trail,” Tan replied. “If anything … threatens you, the bow will be useful.”

“I wonder,” Kaden began hesitantly, “if we shouldn’t be doing something … else. Whatever slaughtered those goats killed Serkhan, and it just seems strange for us to be training as though nothing happened.”