Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(46)



Sami Yurl, along with his small cabal. Plenty of the cadets were nasty and strong—you had to be both, to some degree, to survive on the Islands—but Yurl’s lot was the worst, a handful of brutal young men who had signed on to become Kettral, not out of any great love for the empire, but because it satisfied some itch, a cruel glee derived from pain, and power, and killing. Meshkent’s Minions, they called themselves, though most of Meshkent’s most ardent worshippers lay beyond the boundaries of Annur. Regardless, the name suited them well enough; Valyn had little doubt that if they were promoted to full Kettral, they would inflict enough misery to make the Lord of Pain proud. He was also sure that most of them would sell the others to Manjari slavers for a handful of coin, but you needed someone to watch your back on the Islands, and over the years, the cadets had fallen into loose alliances.

Valyn frowned and turned back to Lin. “Try to stay away from Yurl today. We’re just three weeks from the Trial, and if something goes wrong—”

“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she snapped.

The blond youth caught them staring, and nudged one of his companions in the ribs. The two shared a rough laugh, and then Yurl returned his gaze to Lin and licked his lips ostentatiously.

“Keep laughing, you bastard,” Lin murmured in a voice almost too low for Valyn to hear. “You just keep laughing.”

The first fight of the afternoon was an ugly brawl between two of the younger cadets. It went right to the dirt and ended with the larger of the boys holding his eye and crawling for the edge of the ring. After that, a tedious, probing dance between a pair of kids with blades took up what seemed like half the afternoon. Most of the older youths and the trainers jeered and coached from the sidelines while Valyn waited impatiently for the fights that mattered, for the ones he needed to study. Finally one of the kids landed a lucky blow, the other collapsed in a heap, and Jordan Arbert, the senior trainer, decided it was time for some real combat.

“Somebody get that ’Shael-spawned idiot out of my ring,” he growled. “Take him to the infirmary. There’s a batch of would-be soldiers here who think they’re ready to stand for Hull’s Trial. I want to see a few matchups before I place my bets about who survives. Now, who do I want?” he mused, looking over the crowd.

Valyn reached over his shoulder to ease his training blades in their scabbards, twisted his head to one side to stretch out a knot in his neck.

“So many options! How about we mix things up a little today? Two on two—see if you murderous bastards can actually manage to cooperate.” The trainer smiled a sinister smile. “I’m going to go with Yurl and Ainhoa on one side. That’s a nasty little pair.”

Valyn had to agree. Although Balendin Ainhoa was a part of Yurl’s circle, they could not have looked more different. Where Yurl was well-muscled and handsome, the very image of well-heeled Annurian nobility, Ainhoa looked like a savage straight out of the Hannan jungles. The feathers of seabirds hung among his long, dark braids, rings of ivory and iron pierced his ears, and blue ink snaked up his arms. Rumor had it that Balendin had ended up on the Islands after the people in his town—some tiny settlement on the western coast of Basc—discovered that he was a leach. When they came for him, he killed half the mob and fled, stealing and murdering the whole way, until the Kettral were called in to deal with the problem. They dealt with it by recruiting him.

Anywhere else in the Annurian Empire, a leach would have been strung up, stabbed, or strangled on sight. Valyn had grown up believing such men and women were abominations, that their powers were unholy and evil. He remembered old Crenchan Xaw, commander of the Aedolian Guard, waggling his knife as he made the point: They steal from the world around them, leach the power right out of the earth. No man should be able to twist and tangle the laws of nature to suit his will. Xaw was not alone in his convictions. Everyone hated leaches. Everyone hunted them. Everyone except the Kettral.

The Eyrie was always looking for an edge. It wasn’t enough that they had the birds, not enough that they controlled the few mines from which the fabled Kettral munitions were made. It wasn’t enough that their soldiers were better trained and better equipped than any fighting force in the world. Eyrie Command wanted leaches, too, even killers like Balendin. Especially killers.

Valyn had been appalled when he first arrived on the Qirins to discover he would be fighting alongside such perversions of nature. It had taken months to overcome the most basic revulsion and years to grow comfortable around the strange breed of men and women. As it turned out, reports of both their power and their evil were greatly overblown. They didn’t mutter incantations, for one thing, or drink the blood of infants. More important from a tactical standpoint, every leach had a different well, a different source from which he drew his power—granite, water, blood, anything—the secret of which he guarded as closely as his life. Without the presence of his well, he was no more powerful than the next man, a fact that could even the scales considerably. The problem was, if you didn’t know a leach’s well, you didn’t know when you had to be careful.

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