Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(119)

Kaden was starting to think they’d go on all day like that: Tan urging them to watch the trail, Akiil griping, his own legs groaning and his lungs burning the entire way up and down. It was hard work, but preferable to freezing himself unconscious in Umber’s Pool, or waiting for Tan to bury him alive. He’d begun to accept the soreness, to welcome it as he’d learned in his long years at Ashk’lan, when Tan brought the two of them up short.

“Now,” the monk said curtly, “your study begins.”

From somewhere in his robe he produced two lengths of black cloth—they might have been the hem of an old monk’s habit torn into strips. With a fluid motion, he dropped down from his boulder, landing more lightly than Kaden would have expected, given his size.

“You will wear these,” he said, looping the cloth over Kaden’s eyes and a good portion of his nose as well, cinching the strip into a knot behind his head. There was a pause while he did the same for Akiil.

“Continue,” he said when the blindfolds were affixed.

Kaden frowned.

“Continue what?” Akiil asked.

“Running,” Tan replied flatly. “Up to the bend and back, as before.”

It was impossible. Kaden had barely been able to keep his footing on the rough trail with his eyes open. With the blindfold on, he wasn’t sure he could even find the trail, let alone follow it.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Akiil replied.

Kaden winced at the crisp sound of a hand striking flesh.

“I am not kidding.”

The whole thing was absurd, but Kaden wasn’t about to earn himself a bruise to match Akiil’s. He could start, at least. It wouldn’t take his umial long to see that the task was ludicrous.

The first ascent must have lasted the better part of an hour. Kaden couldn’t be sure, as he had no way to track the sun in its arc across the sky. He fell about every third step, and by the time he reached the bend, he could feel the blood running down his shins from nasty gashes on both knees, sticky as sap between his toes. A dozen times he was convinced he had lost the path entirely, and Akiil insisted on following something that turned out to be a dry streambed for a dozen or so laborious paces before they came to a rough cliff and were forced to turn back.

Kaden tried to summon a saama’an of the trail, but found that he could recall only pieces and chunks: a root here, a sharp rock there, fragments of glances lodged in his mind from the morning’s labor. The Carved Mind was a powerful tool, but always before he had used it to form a small and static image: a kestrel’s wing, the leaf of a bloodwood. Trying to recall a quarter-mile of rocky path seen at a quick lope was like trying to hold five gallons of water in your arms.

“I can’t see it,” he said when they finally arrived back at Tan’s rock, sweating, bruised, and bleeding. “I should have learned the terrain, but I didn’t.”

There was only silence, and Kaden wondered suddenly if Tan had left them, abandoned his post on the boulder and returned to the monastery. The thought that he and Akiil might have been stumbling around the trail for the past hour with blindfolds over their eyes while something capable of ripping out a monk’s stomach roamed the peaks made him catch his breath, and for a moment he was tempted to remove the blindfold.

His umial responded finally. “If you didn’t learn it earlier, then you will have to learn it now.”

“How can we learn it if we can’t see it?” Akiil asked.

“See with your feet,” Tan responded. “Learn with your flesh.”

“Kinla’an,” Kaden concluded wearily. The Flesh Mind. The whole thing was starting to make sense. At least, as much as anything else he’d learned.

“Kinla’an,” the older monk agreed, as though that concluded the matter.

The second ascent was, if anything, more laborious than the first. Rocks gouged into already bruised skin, the sun blared down, hot and invisible, and Kaden twice struck his toe so hard that he thought it might have broken. Learning by sight, he was used to. He had developed dozens of strategies and tricks over his years of practice in saama’an. This endless groping in the void, however, seemed designed to drive him mad.

At first he tried to make a sort of map, plotting each jutting corner, each winding root as though it were a figure inked on parchment. That seemed the sensible way to go about it, the method most in keeping with his earlier studies, but it proved almost impossible. Without the initial visual impression, the images simply wouldn’t stick. They were like shadows, or dark clouds, shifting and mercurial. He would sketch a patch of ground in his mind only to find a certain rock missing, or twice as close as he’d expected. He couldn’t keep track of whether he had covered ten paces or twenty. He couldn’t tell one twisted root from the next. From time to time, he heard Akiil curse or mutter some imprecation, but the thief had fallen behind, and Kaden toiled on in his own floating void.