The Empire's Ruin, page 10
No one spoke. Overhead, a moth, trapped inside the lantern, battered the dried skin with its meager wings.
“What is that?” Bien asked finally, her dark eyes fixed on the collar.
“It is my axoch.”
“And what,” Ruc demanded quietly, “is an axoch?”
“A mark of favor,” the messenger replied, pride ringing in his voice, “in the eyes of the Lord.”
“Is it…” Bien hesitated, struggling to frame the question, “alive?”
“As long as I am alive, it is alive. It is my strength that feeds it.”
Ruc studied the coiled flesh with disgust. The delta was home to dozens of creatures that infested living bodies: gut flies and summer worms, meat puppeteers and eye wasps. They were horrifying, ghastly, and yet their grisly burrowing and hatching had always seemed natural to Ruc. Like all the delta’s other beasts, they too needed to eat, to breed. This thing around the messenger’s neck, on the other hand, this axoch, was anything but natural, not a living creature at all, but a twisted mockery of one.
“What did you mean you would feel it if your lord were dead?” Ruc asked.
The man raised a finger to stroke the scales of the axoch. Sweat drenched his brow, his skin was sickly sallow in the lamplight, but his smile was that of a saint contemplating his god.
“This joins me to him,” he replied. “Allows me to feel his grace and his displeasure.” A shadow passed over his features at the word displeasure, then fled. “I can feel him now.”
Bien glanced over at Ruc. He shook his head.
“And what is it, exactly, that you feel?”
“His might.” The man shuddered, his eyes rolled back in his head. “I can feel him, racing through the rushes, I can feel the blood slamming in his veins. He is eager. He is hunting.”
“Hunting what?”
“Your gods.”
The words sent a chill through Ruc.
Bien frowned. “I thought you said he wanted the Three for allies.”
The messenger shook himself free of whatever vision had possessed him, fixed his feverish gaze on Bien. “He has no allies. He is the First. Your gods will bow before him, or he will break them apart. Even now he pursues…”
The axoch twitched.
The man’s eyes widened.
“I’m sorry, my Lord,” he murmured. “I was told to spread the word, the tale of your glory.…”
The collar writhed, then began to tighten. Veins throbbed in the messenger’s neck. His face began to purple.
He raised a hand to the axoch, then yanked it back as though scalded.
“I’m sorry, my Lord…” he gargled, the words thick, wet. “Kill me quickly.… Close this unworthy throat.…”
“What’s happening?” Ruc demanded.
“It’s choking him,” Bien snapped. She tried to slide a hand inside the collar, but there was no space.
The messenger’s eyes bulged, watered.
Ruc snatched his belt knife from its sheath.
“Hold him,” he growled.
Bien threw herself on the messenger, pinning him against the bed.
The man opened his mouth, but managed to hack up only a few mangled syllables. With the last of his strength he tried to force Bien back, but she bore down with all her weight, arms clasped tight around his shoulders. Ruc went to work with the knife, but the messenger was thrashing, and the axoch was tough as twenty-year-old choke vine. He might have been able to hack through it with a hatchet, but the knife, despite its keen edge, just scratched uselessly at the scales.
“Hurry,” Bien hissed.
Ruc sawed harder.
The man began to spasm, and the knife slipped, slashing down into his shoulder.
“He’s dying,” Bien said.
Ruc shook his head, sat back, breath ragged in his lungs. A purple tongue lolled between the messenger’s swollen lips. His hands had stopped twitching at his side. The axoch twisted, tightened further, until it was half-buried in the flesh of the neck, then went still.
“Not dying,” Ruc murmured. “He’s dead.”
6
“The men you lost,” the Emperor said, “I remember them. Five years ago they helped to save Annur. They were good soldiers.”
Gwenna nodded, mute. The Emperor watched her with those burning eyes.
They sat in a small room. The floor was slate, the walls paneled wood. A single wide window behind the woman’s head opened onto a garden. From where Gwenna sat, there was no visible hint that they were inside the Dawn Palace—no gleaming regalia, no gold, no ostentatious statuary. From this small room, she couldn’t see the towers soaring above, or the miles of red walls circling the fortress, or the hundreds of structures—temples, armories, scriptoria, banquet halls, libraries, kitchens, laundries, audience chambers, baths—that packed those walls. If she had awoken here, her memory scrubbed, she might have believed they were anywhere, a small, neat room in an unremarkable house somewhere between Sia and Freeport.
She had not, however, just awoken, and her memory was all too whole.
It had taken more than a week to reach the capital, more than a week with her wrists and ankles shackled, locked inside the dark box of the brig, more than a week during which she’d spoken to no one, not even the soldier who brought her food and lugged off the bucket filled with her piss and shit. The man had tried to engage her, explaining how Frome had pulled everyone, the whole Annurian presence out of the delta. She hadn’t bothered replying. Talking, like fighting, was only worth the effort when it could accomplish something, change something, fix something, and there was no way to fix what she’d done.
“My condolences,” the Emperor continued, “for your loss.”
Gwenna nodded again. Condolences. Just another kind of talk, worth even less than the rest.
“You also lost one of Annur’s most critical military assets.” She paused, shook her head. “No. None of this is quite right, is it? You didn’t lose them—not your friends and not your bird. You flew them into a fortress controlled by people who have sworn to destroy Annur, a fortress you had specific orders to avoid. You flew them in, you lost a fight, and you left them there. Some dead, some alive.”
Gwenna’s shame boiled instantly into rage. The Emperor hadn’t been at the Baths when it all went down. The Emperor hadn’t witnessed the Greenshirts hacking Quick Jak to pieces. The fucking Emperor had never been faced with decisions that she had to make right now, between one heartbeat and the next.
She opened her mouth to say as much, but the woman forestalled her with a single raised finger. She was not large, Adare hui’Malkeenian. She lacked Gwenna’s muscle, Gwenna’s training, Gwenna’s weapons. If it came to a fight, Gwenna could murder her a hundred times over in a hundred different ways, even with her hands shackled behind her back, as they were. None of that mattered. Not here, not under the circumstances. That raised finger was enough to invalidate any objection or defense, and despite her fury, Gwenna had no defense.
Adare glanced down at the parchment on the table before her. She tapped a finger at the looping script.
“Admiral Frome says you’ve been reckless since you arrived in the delta. That you regularly ignored or subverted his orders.”
On this, at least, Gwenna had to speak.
“I failed at the Baths,” she said. “I failed both my team and my empire, and I accept whatever punishment you see fit. You should know, however, that Admiral Frome is an idiot. His orders have done more damage to the Annurian cause in Dombâng than all the local priests and Greenshirts combined.”
To Gwenna’s shock, the Emperor nodded. “Frome is a fool.”
“Then what the fuck was he doing commanding the operation?”
“Dombâng was the least damaging place for him to be.”
“The least damaging place would have been digging latrines.”
The Emperor chuckled grimly. “Frome’s family estates cover a quarter of Raalte and feed half a million people. My people. His sister has a web of alliances spanning the northern atrepies, from Katal to Nish. His brother just married into one of the oldest families in Sia. If Annur is going to survive, I need the admiral’s family to be cooperative, compliant. Which means giving them things they believe that they want.”
“An admiralty?”
Adare nodded. “In this case, yes.”
“And Annurian soldiers pay the price.”
“Someone always pays, Commander Sharpe. But I had hoped you might mitigate Frome’s idiocy. Instead you have added to it.”
Gwenna’s shame was a fire. A scream rose inside her, sharp as a knife. She refused to let it out. For the thousandth time she imagined Talal executed on the steps of the Shipwreck. She imagined his head and Jak’s and even the Dawn King’s mounted on stakes, paraded around the Arena, while their bodies were tossed into the canal.
The irons bit into her wrists. She ached from straining against them. If only there were someone to fight.…
“What’s happened to Annick and Qora?”
“I haven’t held them responsible for this debacle.”
“Where are they?”
The Emperor shook her head. “I won’t have you haring off after them.”
“I’m not haring anywhere. I’ve been in a brig, then a fucking cell.” She met the other woman’s blazing gaze. “I need to know that Qora’s all right.”
“According to Frome, she’ll make a full recovery.” The Emperor looked back at the paper before her, studied it a long time, then brushed it aside and returned her gaze to Gwenna. “Why did you go into the Baths?”
“The locals had two of my soldiers.”
“Why did you not fall back, regroup, request support from Frome?”
“Battles happen fast. There’s not always time to regroup. Do you remember the fight for Andt-Kyl? The fight for Annur? You weren’t actually out there, but you saw how they went. You’re not stupid. Soldiers aren’t bureaucrats. We don’t have days and days to haggle over our decisions. Most of the time we have one breath, one heartbeat, one glance to make the fucking call, and the people who don’t do that, who can’t? You know what happens to them? They die.”
The Emperor’s face was a mask. “Gambler’s folly.”
“What does that mean?”
“Do you play dice, Commander Sharpe?”
“Who has time to play dice when Annur’s in flames?”
The Emperor snorted. “The irony is that you would have done both Annur and your Wingmates less harm playing dice than flying our last kettral into a heavily fortified position. You may also have picked up a basic lesson in probability and decision-making.”
“You weren’t there.…”
“I did not need to be there.” She shook her head. “There are winning bets, Commander Sharpe, and there are smart bets.”
“Winning is winning. The rest is just theories.”
“Well, you didn’t win, did you?”
Adare’s eyes bored into her, then she blew out an exasperated breath. “You’re like a drunken dice player, Sharpe. You’ve had enough dumb luck to win big on some very bad bets—Andt-Kyl, Annur—and because you won a few purses calling snake eyes you’ve forgotten a basic truth—when you roll the bones, seven comes up more than two. Only kids, drunks, and idiots think otherwise.”
Kids, drunks, and idiots.
Gwenna stared down the words. She wasn’t drunk and she sure as shit wasn’t a kid anymore.…
She thought of all the blades that had missed her by inches, all the arrows that had whistled past her head, all the spears and crossbow bolts that hadn’t hit her. Some of that had been skill, sure—training, tactics, strategy, whatever. But plenty of it had been dumb fucking luck.
“It was a mistake,” she growled, “to take the bird into the Baths.”
The words tasted like ash.
“A realization,” the Emperor replied, “that comes weeks too late.”
Before she understood what she was doing, Gwenna had surged from her seat. Her hands were still shackled behind her, but she loomed over the table, over the absolute ruler of all Annur.
“Jak and Talal were my friends, you miserable bitch. I fucked up. I let them die. I don’t need you to lecture me about what’s too fucking late.”
Adare leaned slowly back in her chair, her eyes ablaze. Gwenna could smell wariness on her, but no real fear.
A light breeze slid through the open window. It smelled of wet dirt, cut grass.
“Do you know why I chose to hold this audience here?” Adare asked finally. “In this room? Alone?”
“Because you have a thing for me?”
“Because,” the Emperor replied grimly, “I knew you would respond this way. And because if you had done so in front of the entire court, I would have been forced to have you executed.”
“So have me executed.”
“You are not listening, Gwenna.” It was Gwenna now, she noted bleakly. Gwenna. Not Commander Sharpe. “We are having this conversation in private precisely because I do not want you dead.”
Gwenna studied her. “Then what?”
“Sit down.”
Gwenna hesitated, found her legs trembling beneath her, sat heavily. The Emperor rose, crossed to the window, gazed out onto the garden beyond. She spoke without turning.
“From the reports I’ve read, you were never the best choice to command your Wing. My understanding is that you simply … assumed the role after your former commander—my brother—disappeared.”
Gwenna didn’t reply. Adare continued.
“Annick Frencha will lead … what is left of the Wing henceforward. Her service record is impeccable, even by your own account.”
The words were an obscure kind of relief, like the lancing of an abscess long infected and festering.
“Annick’s brilliant,” Gwenna said. “She’ll be a perfect Wing leader.”
“She’d better be,” the Emperor replied, “given that she’ll be working without a bird or a full Wing.” She shook her head. “I would cut off my right arm to have the Kettral back at full strength. I could do so much with just ten Wings. With five…”
She trailed off, turned back to Gwenna, examined her with those burning eyes.
“Someday I might forgive you for losing me three of my last, best Kettral. Three and the bird.”
Gwenna shook her head numbly. “Two. Talal and Quick Jak.”
The Emperor pointed a long finger at Gwenna. “Three including you. I am stripping you of your rank. Removing you from the order entirely, in fact.”
The air in the room felt thin, unbreathable, as it did when flying a bird at altitude. Gwenna’s chair remained planted firmly on the floor, but she felt as though she might fall out of it. The sunlight pouring through the window was too bright. The day was cool, far cooler than Dombâng, but she was sweating through her blacks.
The Emperor narrowed her eyes.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Gwenna replied, fighting down the nausea in her gut. “I’m fine.”
Her whole life long, that was the answer she’d given. She might be sick or shot, pushed past the point of exhaustion, but she could always keep going—a little further, a little longer—and so if anyone ever asked Are you all right? that was always the answer: I’m fine.
She’d never wondered, never even dared to imagine what it might be like to stop being fine.
There were places in the world where disgraced warriors impaled themselves on their swords. She imagined walking out of the room when the audience was over, walking out of the Dawn Palace, out of the whole ’Kent-kissing city, walking until she found someplace quiet and alone, maybe a bluff overlooking the sea, waves scraping the rocks below, gulls circling.… She’d been cut enough times that it was easy to imagine the way the steel would feel pressed against her ribs, the cool, precise edge of it, the readiness. What she couldn’t imagine was how she would feel. Would her hands shake? Would she hate herself less or more as the blade sank home? She wondered what Talal and Annick would say. It was hard to know whether dying now would be brave or cowardly. All the old scales of strength and honor lay in wreckage around her.
“I understand,” she said, her voice brittle. “Am I dismissed?”
Adare laughed at that, a rich laugh of true amusement.
“Not even remotely.”
“If I’m not Kettral anymore—”
“Millions of Annurians are not Kettral, Gwenna. I rule them, too.”
“What do you want from me?”
A long pause. Then: “I want you to go on a voyage.”
Gwenna tried to parse the words. “Exile.”
“Not exile.” Adare drummed her fingers on the polished table. “Something else.” She studied Gwenna with those unquenchable eyes. “I need more kettral. Annur needs more kettral.”
“Sigrid, Newt, and the Flea are training the new cadets as fast as they can. Which isn’t very fast.”
“Not the soldiers. The birds. What makes the Kettral the Kettral has always been the birds.”
“Well, there aren’t any more. The King was the last one, and I lost him.”
The Emperor shook her head. She looked tired, suddenly, and older than her twenty-eight years. “Half a decade ago there were, what? Hundreds?”
“Three hundred and forty.”
“It doesn’t seem possible.”
“That’s what happens when there’s a war.”
A bright-plumed bird alighted on the sill, cocked its head, surveyed the inhabitants of the room, then disappeared in a spasm of wings.
After a long pause, the Emperor shifted in her chair. “What if there were more?”
“More wars?”
“More birds.”
“There are no more birds.”
The Emperor pursed her lips. “Don’t be so certain.”
The leaden weight settled tighter around Gwenna’s heart. The Eyrie had torn itself apart five years earlier in a brief, savage civil war—just one more casualty in the broader crumbling of the empire. According to most accounts, all the kettral had been destroyed in the violence, but there were rumors that a few Wings had escaped, skipped out on Annur altogether. It wasn’t impossible that some of the men and women who had trained Gwenna herself might have gone rogue or mercenary.
