Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(58)

He nodded. “Six days to incubate. One to hatch. Four to grow the eyes.”

“She’s been dead for ten days, for almost exactly ten days.”

Valyn nodded. “Which means she died…” He counted back, then paused, turning first to the body, then to Lin.

She stared back at him, brown eyes huge in the lamplight. “Which means she died the same day Manker’s collapsed into the harbor.”





14





The soil of Hook, like that of all the Qirin chain, was rocky and unforgiving, and so it took Valyn and Lin the better part of two hours, working in shifts behind the pathetic shack in which Rianne and Amie had made their home, to hack a hole deep enough to bury the murdered girl. That was the easy part. Then they had to return to the horrible, reeking garret, wrap the corpse in a scrap of sailcloth they bought down by the docks, and carry her back to her grave. When the stones and thin soil were finally mounded up over the earth, then scattered with the few wretched petals Rianne had scrounged from the yellowweed behind the house, the moon had dipped toward the horizon, while the bright stars people called Pta’s gems hung directly overhead, cold, distant, and unpitying.

Valyn ached when he put down the shovel. Kettral training had prepared him for just about any kind of physical suffering, but there was something about digging a grave, an extra weight, as though the dirt tossed out of the hole were not just dirt, but something harder, heavier. He had seen plenty of bodies, had trained for years to kill people, but the corpses of the battlefield and the grown men he had seen there, armored for war and cut down in fury and rage, were different from the pale, flaxen-haired figure they had found mutilated in the tiny garret.

As Lin wrestled a rough headstone into place, Rianne continued to cry, low and quiet, as she had all night. Valyn turned to the girl. He wanted to say something wise, something comforting, but there just wasn’t a whole lot in the way of comfort to be had. The normal platitudes one offered in such situations seemed ridiculous and trite. I’m sorry for your loss? Rianne’s sister hadn’t been lost; she’d been strung up and hacked at like a slab of beef in a slaughterhouse, tortured horribly and left to die. She’s gone to a better world? What world? If there was a world after death, no one had come back from it with stories to tell. No, there wasn’t a ’Shael-spawned thing to say, and yet, he couldn’t just stand there staring at her.

“How about a drink?” he asked awkwardly. It was a soldier’s response to death, but it would have to do. “We’ll toast your sister.”

“A … a … alright,” she managed between choked-off sobs. “I’ve got some peach wine inside. It’s not very good, but Amie and I used to—” The memory of her sister strangled the end of the sentence, and as Valyn watched helplessly, Lin wrapped her arm around Rianne’s narrow shoulders.

“Your sister’s fine now,” she said quietly. “What happened to her was horrible, but it’s over.” As Rianne whimpered into her shoulder, Ha Lin raised her eyes to Valyn. “Why don’t you get that wine? We can share it in Amie’s memory. Pour some on her grave.”

Valyn nodded and turned toward the house, grateful for a momentary reprieve. The Kettral spent years training soldiers to get used to the dead; they didn’t say much, though, about dealing with the living.

The chipped crock of peach wine wasn’t hard to find. The sisters had only a few possessions: a single straw mattress, neatly covered with a tattered quilt, a trunk with one drawer missing. Two bowls and two spoons next to a wide tin washbasin. He imagined them sitting on the bed together, no more than children really, spooning up some kind of broth and telling each other stories to keep their lives at bay. He shook his head and pushed open the door, stepping back into the darkness.

They passed the bottle around, poured a swallow on the grave, then passed it around again. Lin asked Rianne if she wanted to say a few words about her sister.

“She took care of me,” was all Rianne could manage. “She was younger than me, but she took care of me.”

“It’s all right now,” Lin repeated quietly.

Valyn wanted to ask what, exactly, was all right about what had happened to Amie, but willed himself silent. Rianne’s life had turned dark enough without him dousing whatever light was left.

“Do you think Ananshael is kind to the dead?” she whispered after a while.

Lin glanced over at Valyn. People didn’t tend to think of the Lord of Bones as “kind.” It was hard to conceive of a god who ripped souls from bodies of the living, who parted parents from children and youths from their lovers, as anything other than fickle and malevolent. Macabre stories of the Skullsworn, the bloody priests of Ananshael, abounded: men and women who drank blood from goblets and strangled infants in their cribs. The Skullsworn were trained assassins, ruthless killers, and aside from the Kettral, probably the deadliest group on the two continents. If his chosen priests were any indication, it certainly did not seem that Ananshael would be kind.