Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(148)

Damek was a brilliant general, a master politician, and a leach who claimed to be a god. The Annurians ridiculed the notion, but after a series of improbable victories, the citizens of the Blood Cities believed, and for the first time in several centuries, the empire found itself facing a unified army led by a man whose powers, admittedly, seemed godly—generals struck down by arrows shot from a mile distant, geysers of earth routing cavalry, entire rivers diverted to drown his foes as they thrashed in their armor. In a single season, he destroyed the eastern imperial army and marched on the Bend with fifty thousand troops.

The Kettral were called in.

The Kettral, shockingly, failed.

Damek captured three Wings in quick succession, captured, castrated, mutilated, and decapitated them. It was the worst string of defeats in the history of the Eyrie. In his camp east of the Bend, the general boasted that he gave no more thought to the Kettral than he did to the fleas on his great gray mastiffs.

Four days later, he was dead.

On the Qirins, mission assignments were confidential. No one asked questions and no one made boasts. Within days, however, Anjin Serrata, a quiet, capable Wing commander who was known for nothing more than keeping his head down and his eyes up, acquired a new nickname: the Flea.

And that was just the beginning of the legend, Valyn reminded himself as he prepared for the tongue-lashing.

The Flea, however, didn’t say a word. He waited silently until the whole Wing assembled before dismissing them with a curt wave of his hand. Valyn hesitated, uncertain, then turned with the rest. The man’s voice brought him up short.

“Not you.”

So, Valyn realized. Here it comes. At least the commander wasn’t going to ream him out in front of his own people.

“A solid and thorough goat f*ck,” the Flea said again once the others had left.

“Yes, sir,” Valyn responded wearily. “It was a mess.”

“What went wrong?” the man asked. He sounded curious rather than angry.

“What didn’t go wrong?” Valyn exploded. He shook his head. “We couldn’t get the ’Kent-kissing straps to release quickly enough, for one thing. And the angle of attack was all wrong—we kept slamming into each other, and the barrel almost took off Talal’s head two drops in a row. As it is, he’s going to need to get stitched up at the infirmary. You can see a little chunk of his skull when you pull the skin out of the way.” He grimaced. “It’s Laith’s flying,” he concluded reluctantly. “That’s the root of all the problems.”

The Flea picked absently at a new scar on his thumb, but didn’t respond.

“I know I’m the commander,” Valyn replied, raising his hands in surrender. “I know it’s my responsibility and I accept that responsibility. I’ve explained the standard protocol to Laith a dozen times, and I’ve gone over the reasons for it. He just can’t do it … won’t do it … I don’t know, but the bottom line is he comes in too fast and too hard. The rest of it all stems from that.”

The Flea frowned out over the waves, as though considering some indiscernible shape in the distance.

“You’re frustrated with your Wing,” he said finally.

Valyn bit down on the temptation to agree. “They’re my Wing, sir. We’ll work things out.”

The Flea nodded, but didn’t take his eyes from the horizon. “You’re commanding the wrong Wing,” he said.

Valyn’s eyes widened. He had no idea how the Wing selection process happened, but obviously the Flea did. “I didn’t choose them,” Valyn replied cautiously.

“That’s not what I mean. You’re trying to command the Wing you expected, the Wing you wanted.”

“Sir?” Valyn asked, shaking his head.

The Flea snorted. “You wanted rule-abiding, book-crunching professionals. That’s not what you got.”

“You can say that again.”

“Then stop commanding the Wing you wanted. Start commanding the Wing you have.”

Valyn puzzled over this for a moment. He’d spent the entire day trying to get Laith to follow barrel drop protocol, and he had failed. If anything, the flier had come in faster and harder than ever on that last run, frustrated at the repeated failures. Everything hinged on the speed and the angle: the order of buckle release, the placement of the barrel, the timing of the jumps. If he just let Laith continue to fly by the seat of his pants, they’d have to change everything, have to rework the barrel drop from the ground up. There were reasons the Kettral had instituted the protocol in the first place.