Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(120)
By the time he had descended to the meadow and then climbed to the boulder, he was on his hands and knees, palms bloody from pawing at the rocks, knees shredded by the gravel.
“What are you doing?” Tan asked.
Kaden stifled a laugh that he recognized as slightly insane. “Trying to learn the trail.”
“With your hands?”
“I thought if I could get a sense of it with my hands, I could make a sort of map, something I could memorize for next time.”
“Do you run on your hands?” Tan asked.
The question was clearly rhetorical, and Kaden didn’t respond.
“Do you drink with your eyes? Do you breathe with your feet?” The older monk paused, and Kaden could picture him shaking his head. “Get up.”
Kaden rose unsteadily to his feet.
“Walk the trail,” the monk said flatly.
“But I can’t see it,” Kaden replied, “not even in my mind.”
“Your mind,” Tan spat. “Still obsessed with that fine, elegant mind of yours. Forget your mind. Your mind is useless. Your body knows the trail. Listen to it.”
Kaden started to object, then stopped abruptly when he felt the chill, sharp steel of the spear head nudging his mouth shut.
“Stop talking. Stop thinking. Follow the trail.”
Kaden took a deep breath and turned from the darkness to the darkness, rotating in the blank void like a star turning in a starless night, and prepared to mount the path once more.
The next two dozen ascents passed in a strange sort of fugue. He continued to step, to stumble, to feel his ankles buckling under him when his foot came down on unexpected terrain, but here and there, for a few paces at a time, he found that he could walk almost normally. Then his thoughts would rise, like a hungry tide at the palace docks. I’m at that short dogleg! I just need to turn left, step off the fallen cedar and—and he would step off the trail, tumbling into a low ditch or cracking his head on a sharp, overhanging bough. Despite Tan’s injunction, he had developed a rough map of the path, but it led him astray more often than not, and he certainly couldn’t rely on it for the details of footing or the intricacies of minor directional changes. His body, however, did seem to know some of those things, and more often he found himself responding unconsciously: a patch of gravel led him to step a little higher over a small rock shelf. A slight declivity urged him to take a few unmeasured paces. It was a painful process still, and he shuddered to think what his face, hands, and knees would look like when Tan finally allowed him to take off the blindfold, but he felt as though he had developed some tenuous grasp on the concept of kinla’an.
“It’s nighttime, you know,” Akiil muttered when they ran into each other at the top of the trail.
Kaden stopped and raised his head. His friend was right, he realized. He was warm from the labor of climbing and falling, but the air was cool, and the daytime sounds of the birds had given way to the silent winging of bats.
“Your ’Kent-kissing umial has kept us here all day,” Akiil continued.
“Are you getting the hang of it?” Kaden asked. It felt strange to talk to another person after so many hours of silent, blind groping, like meeting a ghost, or addressing a fragment of his own mind.
“Am I getting the hang of it?” Akiil responded, incredulity tingeing his voice. “The only thing I’m going to hang is you. Or maybe that sadist who calls himself a monk. Or maybe both.”
Kaden grinned, but before long, he had turned back to the trail and was floating in that strange, vast landscape of shapeless forms in which his mind drifted while his body stumbled and fell. Climb and descend. Up and down.
When he reached the boulder for what must have been the hundredth time, Tan, who had been silent for hours, broke into the void.
“Stop. Take off your blindfolds.”
It took Kaden a long time to work free the knot with his sliced and bloody fingers. When the cloth finally fell away, he squinted at the brightness, unable to make out much more than his umial’s dark form and the vague shapes of the cliffs and peaks.
“It’s another day,” he said dumbly.
“Morning,” Tan replied. “The sun broke just an hour ago. You would have felt it, had you been paying attention.”
Akiil had managed to free himself from his own blindfold, and he squinted about, as though trying to make sense of his surroundings.
“Beshra’an, I can understand,” Kaden said. “And saama’an. It’s useful to be able to track, to be able to remember.”
Brian Staveley's Books
- Archenemies (Renegades #2)
- A Ladder to the Sky
- Girls of Paper and Fire (Girls of Paper and Fire #1)
- Daughters of the Lake
- Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker
- House of Darken (Secret Keepers #1)
- Our Kind of Cruelty
- Princess: A Private Novel
- Shattered Mirror (Eve Duncan #23)
- The Hellfire Club