Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(93)

Akiil.

Kaden felt his limbs go slack and watery with relief. Of course. His friend would have heard about the penance. He would be here to gloat.

“You look terrible,” the boy announced after considering Kaden briefly.

Kaden tried to reply and got another mouthful of dirt for his trouble.

Akiil let go of his head and came around in front of Kaden, lowering himself to the dirt. “I’d dig you out a bit,” he said, gesturing toward the brimming earth, “but Tan told me if I moved so much as a pebble, he’d bury me right beside you and leave me for longer. The heroic thing would probably be to dig you out anyway—loyalty between friends, and all that.” He shrugged in the moonlight. “I’ve learned to be wary of heroism.”

He squinted, as though trying to make out Kaden’s expression. “Are you glaring at me?” he asked. “It looks like you’re glaring, but with those burning eyes of yours, it’s hard to tell glaring from just looking. Maybe you have to piss. Speaking of which, how do you piss while you’re in there?”

Kaden silently cursed his friend for reminding him of the growing pressure in his bladder. It appeared that one of the parts of his pupil that Tan intended to carve away was his dignity.

“Sorry I brought it up,” Akiil said. “And don’t be angry. I’m sure there’s a good reason for this. Just think—with such a concerned umial, you’re getting a real jump on your training.” He nodded encouragingly. “Anyway, you’ll be happy to know that our fates our tied. As long as you’re buried there, Tan wants me sitting behind you—in case a bird tries to shit on your head or some such.” He frowned. “Actually, there were no specific instructions about what to do if a bird shits on your head, but Tan wants me here, watching over you.”

He patted Kaden on the head as he rose. “I’m sure you’ll find that a comfort. Just remember—whatever you’re going through, I’m right here with you.”

“Akiil,” Tan said, his voice cutting through the darkness. “You are there to watch, not to talk. If you speak another word to my pupil, you will join him in the earth.”

Akiil didn’t speak another word.

For seven days, Kaden remained in the hole, baking in the noontime heat, shivering in his coffin of earth as the sun dropped beneath the steppe to the west and the stars swung up in a wheeling canopy of cold, distant light. He had been relieved to learn that he would not be left alone, but Akiil’s companionship, if it could be called that, provided scant comfort. At Tan’s insistence, he sat silently outside Kaden’s field of vision, and after the first day Kaden almost forgot he was there.

Instead, a thousand tiny trials filled his mind, minuscule problems he could not address that grew to maddening proportions. An itch on his thigh, for instance, that he once would have scratched absently and been done with, dogged him for two days. A cramp in his immobilized arm drove a spike of pain up his shoulder and into his neck. Tan’s digging had disturbed a nearby anthill, and the insects crawled over his face, into his ears and nose, into his eyes until he felt as though the creatures were everywhere, burrowing through the soil and swarming over his skin.

Every two days, someone brushed aside the earth covering his mouth and poured a cup of water onto his lips. Kaden lapped at it greedily, even going so far as to suck at the moist soil when the water was gone, a decision he always bitterly regretted when, hours later, he found his mouth plagued with grit that he could not spit out. He managed to tumble into a few hours of sleep late each night, when the monks had retired to their cells and the central square was still, but even his sleep was dogged by dreams of captivity and crushing confinement, and he woke haggard and exhausted each morning to find his nightmares real.

By the end of the first day, he thought he might go insane. By the fourth, he found himself hallucinating about water and freedom—vivid waking visions in which he splashed and danced in one of the cool mountain streams, whirling his arms and kicking his legs like a madman, slurping up great gulps of water, and sucking in endless breaths of clean, uncluttered air. When the monks came with his water, he found it difficult to tell if they were real or not, and stared the way one might at an apparition or a ghost.

On the eighth day, he woke to a cold dawn, the sky gray as slate, the light of the sun faint and watery over the eastern peaks. Several monks were up and about their morning ablutions, moving across the square, the only sound their bare feet crunching on the gravel of the paths. For a few heartbeats Kaden’s mind moved with a clean clarity he thought he had lost days before. Tan will leave me here, he realized. He will leave me here forever if I don’t learn what he wants me to learn. The thought should have filled him with desperation, but thoughts had lost all urgency. He felt as though reality was slipping from his grasp, and since his reality was a coffin of hard rock and unyielding soil, he was happy to let it go. After all, Kaden could suffer, but if Kaden wasn’t there, there was no suffering.