The Empire's Ruin, page 11
“You want me to go after them,” she said. “You want me to kill the traitors and bring back the birds.”
She had no idea how to feel about that. She didn’t want to kill any more kettral, not the birds or the people flying them. On the other hand, the Emperor seemed to be offering her a purpose. Rogue Wings were a horrifying prospect, but one that meant there was work to do, work she was capable of. It meant the empire still needed her. That she could still be redeemed.
Adare, however, shook her head.
“I don’t know where the surviving Wings are or even if they are. Besides, I don’t want one or two birds back. I want dozens, hundreds.”
“There aren’t dozens.”
“There may be.”
Gwenna stared at her. “Where?”
For the first time, the Emperor seemed hesitant. Beneath the delicate scent of her perfume, a whiff of uncertainty asserted itself. The woman lifted a hand, set it on the codex in front of her. The book had been there all along, but until now Gwenna had paid it no mind. It was bound in leather, finely tooled. The ends of the pages may have been gilded once, or maybe that was just dust. It didn’t sparkle in the sunlight. It looked dull as dirt.
“This is the Itzal Codex,” the Emperor said. “It was penned before the Csestriim wars.”
The words soaked into Gwenna slowly.
“That would make it … what? Ten thousand years old?”
“Older.”
She tried to wrap her mind around the time frame, failed. How many generations was ten thousand years? She imagined her parents and her parents’ parents and the men and women before them, stretching back and back and back, past the founding of Annur, past the reign of the Atmani, past the first tribes and kingdoms, earlier than that, to when the very first humans fought a war for survival against the immortal, inhuman Csestriim.…
“This particular text,” the Emperor went on, oblivious to Gwenna’s sudden vertigo, “is a copy of a copy of a copy. How many times removed from the original manuscript, I have no idea.”
She traced the binding with a fingernail.
Gwenna dragged her attention back to the present.
“What’s it about?”
“Magnetism. Animal migration. The author—one of the Csestriim—had a theory about the way in which birds find their courses across vast bodies of water.”
Animal migration … Birds …
Understanding backhanded Gwenna across the face.
“You think you know where they came from. The kettral.”
The Emperor nodded. “They aren’t indigenous to the Qirin Islands.”
“Nothing’s indigenous to the Islands. There are kettral skeletons to the east, over on Baliin, but the colonies there died out thousands of years ago.”
“According to this text, they aren’t native to Baliin, either.”
Gwenna considered this. She’d always been more interested in explosives and swordplay than the tedium of Kettral history, but she was certain that all her lessons as a cadet had agreed on one fact: the birds originated on Baliin.
“Where?”
Her mind filled with the vision of some remote coast, uncounted miles from all human settlement, teeming with massive birds.
“The place names in this book,” the Emperor was saying, “are almost entirely unfamiliar. Most of them exist in no other extant text.”
“But there’s something,” Gwenna said. “You know something.”
Instead of responding, the Emperor flipped open the cover, opened to a spot marked with a long blue ribbon. A map, a very detailed map, sprawled across the two facing pages. The Kettral were the best cartographers in the world—one of the advantages of being able to map everything from the back of a flying bird—but none of the maps rolled up in the Eyrie’s chart room compared to this. Even after dozens of copies, the degree of detail was remarkable. It showed what looked like an island. An island with ranges of ice-rimed mountains and intricately braided rivers, something that might have been desert sands, thick forest. No, Gwenna realized after a moment, not an island, but an entire land.
“Here,” the Emperor said, indicating with a flick of her finger a point at the southern tip.
Gwenna ran through the maps in her head—dozens of them, hundreds—maps she’d memorized as a Kettral cadet. She didn’t have the best memory for all the intricacies, but the shape didn’t look familiar.
“Where is that?”
The Emperor looked at her, then past her, face carefully blank.
“Menkiddoc.”
Gwenna frowned. For a few moments, she struggled once again to compare the lines on the page with the maps in her memory. The Kettral had charted the northeastern coast of the continent, but they’d been hamstrung in their efforts by the fact that the birds couldn’t fly south through the equatorial heat. There was nothing of strategic importance in Menkiddoc to merit a major effort—no potential allies or threats, no trading partners, barely any settlement at all. Which meant that unlike the precise, detailed, regularly updated maps of Eridroa and Vash to which Gwenna and every other cadet had grown accustomed, the few maps of Menkiddoc back at the Eyrie weren’t really maps at all—little more than tentative, meandering scrawls of coastline unfurnished with detail, a coastline that vanished into the emptiness of the page a few hundred miles south of the Waist.
She looked up. “Didn’t another emperor—Anlatun?—send an expedition to Menkiddoc?”
“He sent three,” Adare replied. “None of them returned.”
“So where’d this map come from?”
“The Csestriim.”
“The Csestriim?”
Adare nodded.
“We wiped out the Csestriim thousands of years ago. Lots of thousands.”
“As I told you—this is a very old book. My chief historian has traced the map’s provenance back to the first century of the Csestriim wars. He assures me it is authentic.”
As Gwenna stared, Adare reached up, tugged twice on a length of silken rope hanging from the ceiling. Somewhere beyond the wooden door a bell chimed, the bright sound muffled by the distance, probably inaudible to any ears but her own.
She shifted her gaze back to the map, studied the coastline and contours.
“Does your chief historian say anything,” she asked carefully, “about why the people who go there never come back?”
According to what she remembered of her history, some early explorers—dating back to the Atmani and before—had ventured into the continent. They were searching for the usual—gold or timber, rock to be quarried, ore to be mined, slaves to be locked in chains and hauled back to the north. Most of those expeditions, like Anlatun’s much later, had vanished. The few people who returned came back broken. They spoke of a cursed continent, a whole land blighted by sickness and disease, a place where the very dirt turned to rot beneath your feet, where there were no beasts but monsters, where just breathing the air or drinking the water could drive a person mad.
“Sailors,” the Emperor replied, “have vivid imaginations. I’ve read accounts of the first people to set foot on Jakarian and the Skull. They claimed that the earth came alive at night to devour men whole.” She shook her head. “Ants, as it turned out. Dangerous ants—camp too close to one of their mounds and they’ll sting you to death and eat you—but still just ants.”
Gwenna frowned. “But people settled on Jakarian and the Skull eventually. No one lives in Menkiddoc.”
“In fact, they do. There are small towns along the northwest coast, whaling villages that trade with the Manjari.”
That was news to Gwenna, but then, the northwest coast of Menkiddoc wasn’t on the Kettral map.
“Villages. Are they part of some larger political force?”
The Emperor shook her head. “Not that I know of. I don’t have any intelligence from south of the Waist.” A flicker of irritation crossed her features. “My point is that the stories are wrong. People do live there. The monsters described in those early accounts are, without a doubt, nothing more than strange and unusual species. Sickness afflicted those early explorations, but there is sickness everywhere. People are afraid of unfamiliar places. That doesn’t mean the whole continent is cursed.”
As she finished speaking, there was a knock at the door.
“Enter,” Adare said.
The slab of bloodwood swung open, and an old man stepped inside.
“Gwenna,” the Emperor said. “This is Kiel, my historian.”
Kiel bowed to Adare, then to Gwenna.
Gwenna studied the old man. No, she realized at once—not old. There was no gray in his black hair, and his skin was unlined by sun or weather. What she’d mistaken for age in those first moments was, instead, breakage. The historian might have been barely into his fourth decade, but it looked as though most of the bones in his body had been snapped, then forced to heal at awkward angles. His nose was crooked, as was his jaw. His knuckles were more swollen than Gwenna’s own, the long fingers bent, as though they’d been shattered over and over. He stooped, carrying his right shoulder ahead of the left, and limped slightly when he moved. Altogether, it gave him the air of a man more than twice his age, but his voice, when he spoke, was filled with a quiet confidence, and his eyes were keen.
“Gwenna Sharpe. It is a pleasure. Your actions occupy many pages of my account of Annur’s recent history.”
“My actions.”
Kiel nodded. “The defense of Andt-Kyl against the Urghul. Wresting the Kettral back from Jakob Rallen. Your rescue of Valyn hui’Malkeenian and his companions. Your involvement in the defeat of Balendin Ainhoa, just beyond the gates of this city…”
For a moment she was speechless. She recognized the fights, of course. She could remember every preparation she’d made for the defense of Andt-Kyl, the placement of each barricade, the rigging of the bridges, the deployment of every one of those loggers. She had defeated Rallen, had rescued Valyn from the Urghul, had brought down Balendin.… And yet when the historian talked about it, none of it sounded real. Or if it was real, it sounded like something that had happened to someone else, some Kettral legend to whom she had no relation.
She glanced down at her hands. They’d stopped shaking, but she could feel the fear threaded into her flesh, the uncertainty and doubt. She poured that doubt into the forge of her rage, stoked the fire higher.
I did those things, she told herself. I was a good soldier.
She looked up from her hands, met Kiel’s eyes.
“Sounds like you’ve been listening to too many stories.”
He raised a brow. “Listening to stories is the work of a historian.”
“Is it?” Gwenna asked. “Is that how you came up with this horseshit about some birds at the ass end of Menkiddoc?”
All her life, her anger had been a kind of secret weapon, one she could rely on even when her bombs and blades had been stripped away. Now, though, as she reached for it, she found it slipping from her grasp. Even when she managed the crack at Kiel, the edge in her voice sounded brittle.
“In part,” the man replied, unruffled by her gibe.
In that moment she realized something strange about him—he didn’t smell. Or rather, he smelled of all the things she’d expect of a historian—ink and dust, glue and the musty odor of old pages—but nothing else. There was no hope on him. No fear. No eagerness. Not a whiff of lust or impatience or anticipation or distaste or … anything. Since drinking the egg of the slarn, she’d grown so accustomed to smelling the emotions of others that the absence made her skin crawl. Even Kettral had emotions, though kept sharply in check. Everyone had emotions, except …
“Are you a monk?” she asked.
Adare shifted in her seat. The motion was almost imperceptible, but Gwenna recognized a retreat when she saw one.
Kiel just raised his brows. “Why do you ask?”
“Her brother,” Gwenna said, nodding toward the Emperor. “Kaden. He was trained by monks. You remind me of him.”
In fact, Kiel looked nothing like Kaden. Kaden’s eyes had burned like Adare’s. He’d been young, and strong, where Kiel was broken a hundred times over. Gwenna herself had been young at the time, unaccustomed to her new powers, but she still remembered the strangeness of Kaden’s scent, the way there seemed to be no person beneath the robes, no heat behind the fire of those eyes. Kiel was like that, only … more. She might as well have been facing a statue.
“Keenly observed,” the historian replied with a nod. “I spent some … considerable time among an order kindred to Kaden’s own.”
“Strange place for a historian, out there at the edge of everything.”
“Centers are defined by edges.”
“Whatever the fuck that means.”
Kiel laughed. It was a perfectly normal laugh, exactly the kind of thing she might have heard on any street in Annur, utterly unremarkable, completely forgettable. Except that normal laughter had a smell that went with it, or a range of smells—astringent for mockery; sickly sweet for nerves; rough and tannic for true, unrestrained joy.… The historian smelled vaguely like a book. Nothing more.
He nodded, then gestured to the map spread open before Adare.
“Take these kettral. Though they are at the world’s edge, they have the power to change everything.”
“These hypothetical kettral,” Gwenna reminded him. “Kettral that are probably nothing but bones by now, nothing but fossils. If all of them didn’t migrate north in the first place…” She ran straight into the fact the way a woman stumbling through the dark might run into a stone wall.
“He’s wrong,” she said.
Adare raised a single imperial eyebrow.
“Or the codex is wrong, or the translators are wrong, or the fucking map is wrong.”
“The map,” Kiel interjected quietly, “is accurate.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is that someone made a mistake. The birds didn’t migrate from some mountain range in the south of Menkiddoc. They couldn’t have, not even by accident. They can’t cross the equator any more than they can the poles. Can’t get within five hundred miles of it. It’s too hot. Their physiology breaks down.”
The realization filled her with fury. No kettral meant no mission. No mission meant nothing for her to do but leave, walk out of the palace …
“Not birds,” the historian said calmly, cutting into her thoughts. “Eggs. The Csestriim who compiled this treatise brought back hundreds of them.”
Gwenna’s fingers twitched. She clenched them into a fist.
“Why?” she asked.
“To study.”
“Why?”
“It is what they do.” He made a wry face. “What they did.”
“And these eggs gave rise to the entire kettral population of the northern hemisphere.”
He nodded.
Gwenna took a deep breath, held it for a long time, then blew it out, shifted her gaze to Adare. “And you want me to go.”
The Emperor nodded.
“After I botched everything in Dombâng. After I lost a bird and got half my Wing killed.”
Another nod.
Gwenna stared at her, struggled for the right word, managed it at last. “Why?”
“You know the birds. Where they nest. How they behave.”
“I came up through demolitions. You need a flier for this. Someone like Quick Jak.”
The Emperor’s eyes were twin pyres. It was strange to find such ferocious flames so silent. “Quick Jak is dead,” she replied. “What I have left is you.”
Outside the window a young man had inched into view—a laborer on his hands and knees, wooden bucket at his side. He was scrubbing the flagstones of the garden path with a rough brush, one at a time. The Dawn Palace was filled with such paths, hundreds of them, thousands. Gwenna tried briefly to calculate the number of stones, then gave up.
“So I take a ship down the coast of Menkiddoc,” she said, “pick a spot on the coast, land, start hiking, start looking for mountains that look like,” she waved a hand at the codex, “this.”
“Kiel will accompany you.”
Gwenna blinked. “How the fuck is a crippled historian going to help?”
“I assure you,” the man replied. “I am less infirm than this body suggests.”
“I don’t care how infirm you are. It doesn’t help us find the birds.”
“You are traveling,” the Emperor said, an edge in her voice, “to shores no Annurian has ever visited. We know these lands only from ancient accounts, accounts that Kiel understands better than anyone else.”
Outside, the young man straightened, knuckled his back, then bent again to his task. He scrubbed in simple, scrupulous circles, careful in his work as though each flagstone were the last, the only, as though it would not be dirty again in a matter of days. She tried to imagine spending the rest of her life scrubbing, or mending, or building.
“It will take time,” she said. “Annur could be in shambles when we finally get back.”
“Annur,” the Emperor replied, “is already in shambles.” Her voice was stone-steady, but again, for just a moment, Gwenna could smell the desperation, the urgency beneath the perfume. In some ways, Adare’s life had been harder than Gwenna’s: she’d seen a father murdered, a brother killed, and another vanished into the vast frozen north. They were, none of them, ready for this shit.
The Emperor closed her eyes, briefly extinguishing the flame, then opened them again. “My younger brothers used to play a game with the ocean, down by the docks. When the tide was out, they would light a small fire on the narrow strip of beach inside the fortress. Then they would build a wall of sand and stones around it—three feet high, sometimes. Maybe five. Once, they ordered their Aedolians to help, and managed to put together a wall as high as a grown man.” She paused, stared back at the memory. “Do you want to guess how many times the wall kept out the coming tide?”
Gwenna snorted. For half a heartbeat she didn’t quite hate this woman. “Those boys always did love lost causes.”
Adare’s face hardened. Suddenly, she was all emperor once again. “I do not. What I have been doing is not working. What we have been doing is not working. There might be no more birds left in the southern hemisphere. You might die trying to find these mountains; drowned, diseased, slaughtered by whoever it is that lives on that side of the globe. Maybe there are monsters that inhabit the continent; maybe they’ll kill you. Maybe you will go mad. But the alternative is sitting on the beach as night clamps down, the clouds roll in, and we all watch, helpless, as the waves chew through the wall and put out the fire.”
