Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(154)

“It’s what the other Wings do,” Annick pointed out. “It’s the protocol.”

“Aren’t you the one who hammers her own arrowheads?” Laith demanded. “Since when do you give a whore’s heart for protocol?”

“Wait,” Valyn cut in, trying to focus on the words he’d just heard. “Hold on a second.”

The rest of the group stared at him for several long moments.

“You have something to say?” Laith asked finally. “Or you just need to take a shit?”

“Hooks,” Valyn replied, fixing on the idea. “Meat hooks.”

As a child, he’d been morbidly fascinated with the larder deep in the cellars of the Dawn Palace, where rows on rows of slaughtered pigs, cows, and sheep had been dressed and hung from frightening steel hooks. He and Kaden used to sneak down there, daring each other to snuff the lantern and wander in the darkness, hands stretched out before them to fend off the carcasses. It was where he had first learned about hearts, and brains, and livers, where he first understood that if you cut a body and bled it dry, the creature died. It did not seem an auspicious place to be gleaning combat ideas, but then, they didn’t have much else to work with.

“We use hooks instead of buckles.”

Annick squinted, tilted her head to the side as though calculating, then nodded once. “Good.” The sniper was a thorn in his side, but she was fast.

The rest of the Wing wasn’t so quick. “Hooks where?” Gwenna demanded.

“High,” Valyn responded, warming to his idea. “High on ’Ra’s talons, a little above our heads. We toss a loop of rope from our belts over the hooks, and our weight holds us in place.”

Laith shook his head. “You’ll have the same problem you’ve got with the buckles—you can’t release the loop from the hook with your weight on it.”

Valyn smiled. “That would be a problem … if you bothered to follow standard drop protocol.”

“Ah,” Talal chimed in, understanding spreading across his face. “As the angle of our descent gets steeper and steeper, the loop will slip closer to the lip of the hook.”

Valyn nodded. “When we’re in a near-vertical dive, the loop will slide right off. We drop. We don’t ever need to touch a thing.”

“It’s clever,” Gwenna replied with a frown, “but it means we all drop at the same time.”

“Not if we change the angles of the hooks slightly,” Laith countered. “First to drop has the shallowest angle, the last, the most severe. As ’Ra stoops harder, you’ll fall off one by one.”

Talal nodded. “It makes so much sense,” he marveled. “Why don’t any of the veteran Wings do this?”

“Because their fliers follow orders,” Valyn responded, eyeing Laith appraisingly. “The hooks wouldn’t work at shallower attack angles. The attack angles we’re supposed to adhere to.”

“This mean we get to quit following orders?” Gwenna asked with a smirk.

For the first time, Valyn found himself smiling in return. It was a small step, really—smaller than small. They hadn’t even built a mock-up of the system, hadn’t come close to testing it, and yet, for the first time, he thought he understood the Flea’s words: Command the Wing you have, not the one you want. For the first time, they’d demonstrated that they could work in concert to solve a common problem. Who knows, he thought to himself with a small smile, we might turn out all right after all.

Then the door to the shop slammed open.

Daveen Shaleel stepped into the room, followed immediately by Adaman Fane and the other four members of his Wing, all decked out in full combat kit.

“Don’t tell me,” Laith groaned. “You want us to swim around Qarsh underwater.”

Valyn started to chuckle, but the sound died in his throat. The soldiers in the door weren’t laughing. They weren’t even smiling. In fact, Valyn realized, his stomach tightening suddenly, they’d taken up standard assault positions just inside the room, as though they were getting ready to clear an enemy compound. He took a step forward, toward Shaleel, trying to formulate the right question. Fane’s blade brought him up short, whispering out of its sheath to point directly at Valyn’s throat.

“Less moving,” the man said grimly. “More listening.”

Shaleel took in the scene at a glance, then turned to Valyn. She seemed as calm as a housewife going about her chores, but steel edged her voice when she spoke.