The Empire's Ruin, page 36
“And the moral of this plaintive tale?”
“That maybe, Your Shiny, Sparkling Radiance, when it comes to the precariousness of life, you should not be the one giving the lectures.”
Most people would have been discomfited by the account of rape and slaughter. Adare just snorted.
“I would be delighted to listen to a lecture,” she replied, “on the use of the ’Kent-kissing kenta.”
“That’s not how it works.”
She leaned toward him, eyes ablaze. “I do not have ten years to spend sitting atop mountains listening to the wind. I do not have ten years to ladle water out of rivers or watch ice drip. I do not have five years. I might not have one year. Whatever the Shin did, whatever their method, I do not care. Annur is staggering.…” She trailed off, shook her head, as though dismissing everything she’d just said. “Let me put this in language that will matter to you. If you want more gold, you will explain to me something useful, something I can understand. There will be no mention of stones, or stillness, or empty vessels. If you cannot do this, we are finished.”
Her eyes blazed so bright he half expected to feel the heat on his face. After matching that gaze for a full breath—long enough to show her he wasn’t impressed, not so long that she’d take it for defiance—he turned away, back toward the city, toward the blighted streets of the Perfumed Quarter.
It wasn’t a bad offer. It was true enough what she’d said about having given him enough coin to feed a monastery. With that gold he could buy a small cottage somewhere, a farmhouse, a little place on the ocean, complete with a dock and a boat. There would be enough left over to live for years, him and Yerrin both, especially if they were frugal. And anyway, he’d done what he came to do, hadn’t he? He’d returned to Annur, talked his way into an audience with the Emperor, and tricked her out of her gold. All that was left was to nod, apologize, and explain that the Shin path was the only path he knew. A handful of words and it would be over. Victory for the orphaned kid from the Quarter.
It didn’t feel like victory. It didn’t feel like anything.
“Did Kaden ever talk to you about the vaniate?” he asked, not looking away from the stars gleaming beyond the glass wall.
“No,” Adare said after a pause. Then, “Why don’t you assume Kaden never talked to me about anything.”
“It’s a Csestriim word. It means emptiness. Or nothingness.”
When he turned to face Adare, he could see the tightness in her jaw. “I just finished telling you that I do not have time to contemplate a sermon on empty pots.”
“Not pots,” he replied. “People.”
Adare narrowed her eyes. “Meaning what?”
“What is a person?” Akiil asked. When she didn’t reply, he gestured to his body. “Not this. Not the legs and the head and all the rest of it. You see a few bodies rotting in canals and you know that the body has nothing to do with the person who used to live inside it.” He shook his head. “The person is all the other stuff—all the thoughts, and memories, and emotions. The vaniate is what you end up in when you get rid of those.”
“Get rid of them,” Adare repeated.
Akiil nodded, plastered on his most confident smile.
The tricky truth of the matter was that he didn’t really know. A few of his teachers had mentioned the vaniate, and he’d spent days and days arguing about it with Kaden, but he wasn’t lying when he told Adare that the Shin method was long on sitting and short on any kind of explanation. He’d certainly never managed the trance himself. At least he didn’t think he had. Would you know if you’d managed to scrub out your self? Yerrin was the only monk left alive, and Yerrin was even worse at explaining things than the others had been.
Not that he intended to tell Adare any of that.
“The vaniate is the trance that remains,” he said instead, “when you have extinguished everything that makes you who you are.”
She frowned. “If I had no thoughts, how would I act? If I had no memories, how would I reach the kenta? If I had no emotions, why would I bother doing anything at all?”
Akiil aimed for something like the quiet sternness of Scial Nin. “Every novice asks these questions.”
“I am not a novice. I am the Emperor of Annur and the prophet of Intarra.”
This was safer ground. The nuances of the vaniate eluded him, but he was more or less certain that insisting on titles wasn’t part of it.
“The Blank God cares nothing for words.”
“Does he not?” Adare asked. She cocked her head to the side, considered him with those burning eyes, then nodded. “Perhaps you’re right.”
He started to smile.
“Enough words, then,” she went on. “I think it is time for a demonstration.” She met his brittle smile with one of her own. “I think it is time for you to show me how a student of the Shin monks can pass through the gates.”
22
Five days after the battle, Gwenna and Bhuma Dhar were hauled out of the brig onto the deck of the Daybreak.
She squinted at the too-bright sun, the waves so blue they burned her eyes, the green …
“Land,” she murmured as the coastline resolved in her vision.
She hadn’t expected to see land again, she realized. Hadn’t expected to see anything.
Every day, legionaries had come for the Manjari captain, hauling him out of the brig, then returning him later with a new complement of gashes and bruises.
“Your admiral is zealous in his pursuit of the truth,” he remarked after the third day.
“So tell him the truth.”
“I have. Men with this hunger do not want to believe. As long as he thinks I am lying, he has something to strive for.”
Jonon hadn’t broken the Manjari captain, despite the burns, the bruises to his face and body, the dislocated fingers that Gwenna had reset one by one, but Dhar had begun to smell of resignation. He expected to die aboard the ship, and soon, that much was obvious. Every day he ate less, said less, and so she spoke less in turn. It was a species of relief to be locked away with someone else who had also moved beyond hope.
The anger that had sustained her since the Purple Baths had vanished, snuffed out as surely as yesterday’s flame. Darkness yawned in its place, a wide, blank, black expanse with no name or limit. After the battle, she’d tried to return to her exercises, managing half a dozen push-ups before she sank to the damp decking and stopped. The muscles of her arms and shoulders felt like mud, but the muscles weren’t the problem. She’d pushed her body past the point of failure plenty of times—in training, in war—but as she lay there on the rough wood, she found nothing inside herself capable of pushing. In place of the old stubbornness there was only pain and regret, and when she tried to lean on them, they folded beneath her.
The nights were worse. When she was awake, she wanted nothing more than to tumble into oblivion, but her snatches of sleep offered up the same dream over and over:
Talal’s face, just as it had been in the Purple Baths, streaked with blood and sweat. All over again, she watched his features strain as he used the last of his strength to heave Qora through the collapsing door. Screaming, Gwenna forced her way back through that door only to find herself on the deck of the Daybreak, with Talal sprawled out dead before her, his arm torn off at the shoulder by the force of an explosion. A few paces away, Jak hunched over the stump of a shattered leg.
Need to find the artery, he muttered. Need to stop the blood.
He looked up, met Gwenna’s eyes.
Do you have a bandage?
Every time, instead of a bandage, she handed him a starshatter, its fuse already lit.
What’s this? he asked, face quizzical.
No, she tried to shout. Get rid of it! Throw it overboard!
But the words congealed like day-old grease in her throat, and, every time, Jak smiled his thanks at her, pressed the bomb to his ruined leg, relief flooding his features, as though he’d known all along that she would be there, that she’d save him.
The explosion itself offered the barest moment of respite, jolting her from the dream’s daylight into the rolling darkness of the brig. Sweating, she’d drag in a harried breath, and for just a moment she’d start to relax, realizing it was all just a dream. Then memory would wrap a fist around her guts and twist: the dream was wrong in the details, but the details didn’t matter. Talal was dead. Quick Jak was dead. All those Annurian sailors …
The weight felt like water, like fathoms of ocean piled on top of her, crushing the air from her lungs, squeezing her heart until she thought it would burst. The world was too tight, too small. Her hands trembled as she stared at nothing, stared into the nothing for hours sometimes, from one watch to the next. Darkness was the only consolation. It absolved her from putting on any kind of face for Bhuma Dhar, absolved her from doing anything at all. Not that there was anything to do. Nothing but sit and rot.
After days of that, it hurt to be dragged back out into the sun, forced to see that the world was still there, bright and waiting, as though it expected something.
She stared through the haze of her sun-blindness toward the shore.
They were in a harbor, she realized, sheltered from the sea beyond by a craggy headland thirty or forty paces high. In the lee of that headland, stacked in concentric terraces up the rocky hillside, stood a village. Two hundred homes, maybe three, most built of wooden posts and thatched with palm leaves, roofs overhanging to provide outdoor shelter when the storms came. If the details were slightly strange—the ends of posts carved into wooden ornaments, bouquets of brightly colored flowers pinned up above doorways to flutter in the wind—it still looked like a normal enough town, the kind of place she might have stumbled across anywhere in southern Eridroa. Nothing, at first glance, to raise the small hairs on the back of her neck, and yet she could feel those hairs standing on end.
You’re a fool, she told herself wearily. A fool and now—she glanced down at her trembling hands—a coward, evidently.
She found herself baffled by the fear. Of course she’d been afraid hundreds of times before, thousands of times. You’d have to be insane to go through Kettral training—let alone war—without feeling fear. And yet, always before there had been a reason for the fear, some danger or threat to which she could put a name, some problem she could go about solving. Not any longer. No foe prowled the deck of the Daybreak. The day was warm, calm, the offshore breeze soft in her hair. And yet she felt the terror like a claw around her throat.
Something in the village, she told herself desperately, scouring the shore.
A thin stream of water split the town, tumbling down the slope from the land to the east. It wasn’t much—so narrow Gwenna could have leaped over it with a running start—but the inhabitants had made the most of the current, digging pools into the hillside to catch the flow—for washing, probably, or bathing. There was even a small waterwheel near the bottom spinning noisily away, though its purpose wasn’t immediately obvious. Down at the water, two docks extended into the harbor, each larger than Gwenna would have expected for such a small town. Evidence of trade with the large Manjari ships, maybe, although there were no ships other than the Daybreak in the small harbor. No ships, no boats, nothing at all that looked like it could float.
That was strange.
She turned her attention back to the town. Not only were there no boats, there seemed to be no people, either. All the signs of human habitation remained. Large clay water pots sat beside the doors, ladles hanging from the lips. Tidy earthen ovens squatted beneath the overhanging roofs, pots and pans stacked atop them. Hammers hung neatly beneath the eaves of an open-walled structure that could only be a forge. The village didn’t look abandoned. All signs pointed to people, but there were no people. The only living things were a few gulls perched on the eaves, and a solitary pig wandering between the cottages, rooting at the dirt, snorting disconsolately.
The locals might have been hiding—a foreign warship hung at anchor in their harbor, after all—but when Gwenna closed her eyes to focus she heard nothing. Oh, there was the knocking about and shouting of Jonon’s sailors and soldiers going through their duties on the deck of the Daybreak, but beneath all that she could find no hint of whispered voices, no footfalls on the village paths, no muffled sobs. She drew a deep breath in through her nose, braced herself for the reek of rotting bodies, then exhaled slowly. The only rot she smelled was faint, vegetal. Squash, maybe, or manioc. A whiff of salted fish drifted over from the drying racks down by the harbor, but it felt old, faint, mostly scoured away by the wind, as though no fish had hung there for days, maybe even weeks. For a moment, the wind shifted and she caught the copper sent of blood. Then it shifted back and the scent vanished.
“Something is wrong here,” she whispered.
Bhuma Dhar nodded at her side. “Indeed.”
The words earned each of them a cuff alongside the head.
Gwenna half turned to find the man who’d struck her—one of the two legionaries responsible for dragging her out of the brig—with his hand still raised.
“Keep talking to each other,” he said. “See what happens.”
He wore a smile that she recognized. People decided to become soldiers for a hundred different reasons: to serve their empire; for a handful of coin; to escape something or somewhere; because their friends signed on; to spite a father or a mother; to please a father or mother; for the misguided notion it might make them famous.… Some, however, joined up for the simple joy of inflicting pain. Back on the Islands, Gwenna had learned to recognize them. There was a gleam to the eye, an eagerness, a hunger you learned to pick out in the way they leaned toward any scene of violence, and often, as now, there was a hook at the edge of the smile.
“What do you want with us?” Gwenna asked quietly.
“What do I want?” The legionary tapped a finger on his bottom lip, looked her up and down, leaned in so close she could have torn off his ear with her teeth, then smelled her hair, her neck.
“Chent,” said the other soldier. There was a warning in his tone, but Gwenna could smell the lust on him, too, cloying and sick. “Admiral said bring ’em, not sniff ’em.”
Chent fingered her hair, then pulled away. Like Gwenna, he was pale-skinned, one of only a few men in the crew who shared her complexion. He stared at her with blue eyes that might have been the mirror of her own, ran a tongue over his lips, smiled wider, then shrugged. “Today, it’s not a question of what I want.” He gestured toward the shore. “Jonon sent for the two of you.”
It was not Jonon, however, who met them at the dock, but the Emperor’s historian. Gwenna hadn’t seen him since the battle. Something had torn a gouge across his cheek, but aside from that he appeared none the worse for the encounter. He watched silently as Gwenna, Dhar, and the two legionaries disembarked from the boat.
“More torture?” Dhar asked, gazing around at the village.
“Not today,” Kiel replied. “Not from me.”
Chent put the tip of his naked cutlass against Gwenna’s lower back. “Up,” he said, gesturing with his free hand toward the stone steps snaking up the hillside. “Don’t want to keep the admiral waiting.”
“I’ll take them from here,” Kiel said.
The legionary narrowed his eyes. “Angling for some time alone with the lady, old man?”
“Jonon wants every soldier going through the houses looking for people.”
“No people here,” scoffed the other soldier. “None alive, anyway.”
“The orders are not mine,” Kiel replied evenly. “If you come with us, you can explain to the admiral why you chose to disobey them.”
Chent shifted his gaze from Kiel to Gwenna. “She’s shifty, this one. Squirmy. What if she runs off on you?”
“If she runs,” the other legionary said, “we get to chase her.”
The historian raised his brows, ran his eyes over the empty town, the rocky headland. “To where would she run?”
“I’m not running,” Gwenna said.
Not long ago, listening to three men talk about her as though she were a stray dog would have led her to hit someone, maybe several someones. As she stood there on the shifting dock, she half expected the anger to come. It did not. All she wanted was for this to be over—whatever this was—so she could go back to the brig, back to the darkness.
Chent patted her on the shoulder, gave a little squeeze, then turned away.
“Come on, Lurie,” he said to the other legionary. “Let’s see if there’s anything in this dung heap worth taking.”
As the two soldiers broke off to search the homes, Kiel led Gwenna and Dhar along a path verging the harbor. Sunlight jeweled the harbor waves. It was hot, Gwenna realized, almost as hot as it had been back in Dombâng. She’d done nothing but sit in the boat and already she was sweating beneath her blacks.
Twenty paces on, they came to a large, unwalled building with a half-built boat sitting in a cradle at the center. Adzes, axes, chisels all hung neatly from hooks in the low rafters. Only one tool lay out of place—a large hammer, incongruously dropped or tossed in the sawdust.
Dhar stepped from the path into the shade, crossed to the unfinished vessel, ran a hand along the lapstrake planking.
“This is the labor of many days. Not a thing a person would walk away from.”
Gwenna nodded, nudged the sawdust near the hammer with her boot. It was dark, clotted with dried blood. “Maybe they didn’t walk.”
The Manjari captain turned warily.
“It’s all right,” Gwenna said. “This happened a while ago. Maybe three weeks or so.”
Dhar raised his eyebrows.
She gestured at the tools. “It’s been about three weeks since those were oiled. Give or take.”
“How do you know?” the captain asked.
“The rust.” The barest haze of brown smudged the steel. “It’s about right for three weeks unoiled out in the salt air.”
Evidently there was some stubborn, stupid part of her mind that still thought it was Kettral.
“What is this place?” she asked, turning in a slow circle, taking in the town all over again.
