Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(42)

During his own rotation in the shed, Valyn had watched a younger cadet, Halter Fremmen, light what looked like an innocuous candle. An errant gust of wind tugged at the flame until it caught the boy’s blacks, burning quickly through the fabric and then biting into his skin. Several of Halter’s friends had dragged him to one of the massive wooden tubs standing close by and forced him down into the water, but even beneath the surface, the flame continued to eat at the boy’s flesh with a bright, savage glow. Valyn had stood transfixed. He was trained to respond quickly and decisively to emergencies, but this … No one had spoken a word to him about how to handle a flame that could not be quenched. In the end, Newt, the demolitions master everyone called the Aphorist, had dragged the screaming boy outside and buried him in the sand. The sand extinguished the unnatural blaze, but not before it had taken the skin off half Halter’s body and melted one of his eyes in his face. He died three days later.

At first Valyn thought the shed was empty, but then he noticed Gwenna down at the far end, red hair obscuring her face, leaning over stock-still as she inserted something into a long tube with what looked like a pair of very narrow tongs. She didn’t greet them or look up. Not that he had expected her to, really. He hadn’t spoken to her since the day he learned of his father’s death, since the day she had practically bitten his head off about his unbuckled harness, and he had no idea if she still harbored the grudge. Knowing Gwenna, she probably did.

It wasn’t that Gwenna Sharpe was a bad soldier. In fact, she probably knew more about demolitions than any other cadet on the Islands. The problem was her temper. From time to time, one of the swaggering gallants over on Hook would find himself tempted by the bright green eyes and flaming red hair, by the supple, curvaceous body that she did her best to hide under her Kettral blacks. It never turned out well for him; Gwenna had tied her last would-be suitor to a dock piling and left him there for the tide. When his friends finally found him, he was sobbing like a baby as the waves washed over his face. Even Gwenna’s trainers joked that with a temper like that, she didn’t need any ’Kent-kissing munitions.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Valyn began as he reached the end of the table opposite Gwenna.

“Then don’t,” she replied, her eyes fixed on her work as she slid the slender tongs down the inside of the hollow cylinder. He stifled a sharp retort, clasped his hands behind his back, and schooled himself to patience. He wasn’t sure Gwenna would agree to help in the first place, and he didn’t want to make it any more difficult by irritating her right off the mark. Instead, he focused on the object of her attention, something that looked like a modified starshatter.

The tube was hollowed-out steel, twice the width of his thumb. Coated around the inside was some pitchlike substance he didn’t recognize. Gwenna withdrew the tongs, picked up a small shard of stone, and started to insert it. Ha Lin gasped.

“Don’t. Do. That,” Gwenna said, pausing, then sliding the tongs deeper.

“That’s claranth, isn’t it?” Lin asked, her voice tight. “Claranth and nitre?”

“Sure is,” Gwenna replied curtly.

Valyn stared. One of the first things that the Aphorist had taught his class of cadets was to always, always, always keep the two separate. “We like explosions here,” the man had joked, “but we like to control those explosions.” Unless Valyn had badly misunderstood something, if Gwenna so much as touched the content of the tongs to the side of the tube, someone would be sorting body parts out of the rubble. He started to reply, then thought better of it and held his breath instead.

“This is why,” Gwenna grated, sliding the tongs deeper, releasing the stone, then withdrawing them with a smooth, measured motion, “you shouldn’t interrupt.”

“Is it done?” Lin asked.

Gwenna snorted. “No, it’s not done. If I move it by half an inch, it’ll take the roof off this shed. Now, stop talking.”

Lin stopped talking, and the two of them watched in tense fascination as Gwenna reached for a vial of bubbling wax, grasped it with two gloved fingers, and upended it into the tube. There was a faint hissing, a whiff of acrid steam, and then a long pause.

“There,” Gwenna said finally, laying the tube down on the workbench and straightening up. “Now it’s done.”

“What is it?” Valyn asked, eyeing the thing warily.

“Starshatter,” she replied with a shrug.

“Doesn’t look like a normal starshatter.”