The Empire's Ruin, page 45
“You also need to keep your body upright,” Gwenna said, dragging the girl back to her feet. She demonstrated. “Don’t hunch over. Lead with the knife, not your face.”
Rat narrowed her eyes, emulated the posture. This part was new. When they first began training, the girl had slashed at her with every opportunity, a wild thing bent only on killing. Now, almost a week later, she still seemed to want to kill Gwenna, but she had grown more patient. When there was something to learn, she put down the knife and listened. She’d mostly stopped trying to slit Gwenna’s throat while the older woman was asleep or eating or taking a piss. Mostly.
“The moon,” Gwenna said, taking advantage of the moment, “is up there.” She pointed toward the bright coin hanging just above the northern peaks.
Rat glared at it. “Shit moon.”
“Yeah,” Gwenna replied. “Kettral feel the same way. It’s easier to sneak up on people when there’s no moon.”
“People,” Rat repeated, brow furrowing.
“People.” Gwenna made a sweeping motion to include herself and Rat. She pointed toward the other fires of the camp, where the legionaries were bedding down for the night. “People. People. People. All of these are people.”
“People,” the girl murmured. There was something new in her voice, a note Gwenna hadn’t heard before. She looked back over her shoulder, toward the empty lands through which they had traveled. “People,” she said again, the word little more than a whisper. “No people.”
Gwenna took a deep breath. “No. No people.” She hesitated. “Where did they go?”
Rat looked back at her, confusion, grief, and anger warring across her features.
“Your people,” Gwenna said. “Rat’s people?” She held out an empty hand, shook her head. “Where?”
“Fuck people,” the girl said, her face hardening. She threw herself at Gwenna, everything she’d learned in the last week utterly forgotten, scrubbed out. Gwenna kicked the knife to the dirt, caught the girl by the shoulders, grappled her close, where she couldn’t do any damage with her flailing fists. “Fuck people,” Rat screamed. “Fuck people. Fuck people. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck Gwenna Sharpe.”
“Yeah,” Gwenna muttered, holding the girl against her. “You’re right about that, kid. Fuck people. And fuck Gwenna Sharpe.”
* * *
“You are training the girl to use a knife.”
Jonon stared at her over his camp table. It wasn’t a question. The wonder was it had taken this long for someone to tell him.
Gwenna nodded. “It was the only way to get her to talk.”
“And what has she said?” He turned his attention to Rat, who was glaring at the admiral through her hair, hands clenching and unclenching, as though her fingers were hungry for the handle of the small blade.
“That her people are gone.”
“Do not attempt to jest with me.”
“I’m not jesting, sir. It’s been barely a week. She doesn’t have the words yet, but she’s learning.”
“According to Chent and Vessik, what she is learning is how to cut people apart with a dagger. Once again, you have placed my men and this mission in danger by indulging your own idiocy.”
“The danger of a chained-up nine-year-old girl?”
Gwenna was surprised to hear a note of contempt in her voice. It had been a long time since she’d felt contempt for anyone but herself.
“A girl with a knife can slit a throat as well as any Annurian soldier.”
“It’s my throat she’s been trying to slit.”
“And have you considered that this expedition may suffer if she succeeds? You were sent here, sent by the Emperor herself, bright be the days of her life. You were sent because, despite your many and manifest failures, you alone have experience in dealing with the birds we have come to seek.”
“Kiel’s book—”
“The historian’s book is just that. A book. Many thousands of years out of date. You have handled these birds, fed them, studied them, flown them. Your knowledge may still prove necessary, prove crucial. You will never fly again, but your fellows, the rest of your Wing—those you didn’t get killed—they stand to gain if we succeed here. If we come away with eggs, one day they may have birds once again, but you are not thinking of them, are you? You think your life is your own, to throw away if you want for the chance to play soldier with this stinking brute of a girl.” He stared at her with those deep green eyes. “Your selfishness astounds me. This is why your men died. Because of your selfishness.”
And all over again she saw it, Quick Jak wading into the flames, Quick Jak fighting what seemed like the entire city of Dombâng, Quick Jak hacked down like some dead tree fallen across a path. Talal shouting for her to go, go, go. Talal gone, everything that he was, all the steadiness and laughter, snuffed out. As she stared at the memory, the sick, decaying flower of her shame blossomed inside her. The doubt, which for a day or two she’d managed to elbow to the edges of her thought, closed down around her once more. The fear surged, that nameless, reasonless, implacable fear—yajusha—etching like acid into her gut. The world seemed impossibly far off, a land that she would never return to.
“Fuck sir.”
Gwenna’s mind reeled as she struggled to make sense of the words, to pin them to a source.
“Fuck you. Fuck sir.”
It was Rat, she realized, glaring at Jonon, shaking her head, pointing a skinny finger at the admiral.
“So this is the imperial light,” Jonon said, lip twisting as he studied Gwenna, “that you have kindled in her savage heart.”
“She’s learning,” Gwenna said. “Every day she learns more words.”
The admiral reeked of disgust, but for a while he studied them in silence.
“You will hand over the knife,” he said finally. “I won’t have you killed until I’m certain to have no more use of you.”
Like a woman moving in a dream, Gwenna slid the dagger from her belt, passed it to the admiral.
“Now get out,” Jonon said, turning away.
The night was cold. A glacier-honed wind sliced down from the high peaks, carving into her. She felt like the deer the soldiers had killed days earlier—gutted, opened.
Rat tugged at the chain joining them.
Gwenna turned to stare at the girl.
“No knife,” Rat said, her eyes intent. “Body. Hand.” She took Gwenna’s wrist, made as though to twist it. “Body,” she said, hurling herself at Gwenna, seizing her awkwardly around the waist. “Hand.” She drove her bony knuckles into Gwenna’s kidney, hit her again and again and again, punctuating each punch with the same word. “Hand, hand, hand.”
Gwenna twisted free before she realized what she was doing, caught the skinny wrist, jerked it up behind the girl’s back.
“Yes,” Rat said, craning her neck to look up at her. Her bright eyes brimmed with moonlight. “Yes.”
“You want to learn hand-to-hand?”
“Hand-to-hand,” the girl said. “Yes.”
Gwenna shook her head. “You don’t know when to quit, girl.”
“No quit,” Rat replied, voice fierce. “Hand-to-hand. Fuck quit.”
* * *
By the time they reached the foot of the mountains, Rat had more or less gotten the hang of half a dozen wrist locks. Gwenna tried to start out with the grappling basics—establishing, escaping, and passing a guard—but the girl’s legs were too short, and she was too light to control the fight with her weight. The wrist locks made more sense, even if they were trickier and less crippling than a good choke. Rat muttered to herself as they fought, sometimes in Annurian, sometimes in her own language, the same furious syllables over and over and over as she twisted Gwenna’s wrists into positions just a degree or two from breaking. Every night she wanted to train, regardless of the miles they’d covered, regardless of the exhaustion Gwenna could read in her eyes, smell on her skin and in her tangled hair. It was a way to stay warm, anyway, as they followed a valley up into the peaks and the nights went from chill to cold, a way to avoid thinking, feeling, and so Gwenna didn’t stop her. Sometimes they fought all the way until the camp’s second watch, rehearsing the same positions over and over.
Once, Rat fell asleep in the middle of a bout; the girl had gone after Gwenna’s right hand, found herself—for the thousandth time—caught, turned, wrapped up, her back to Gwenna’s chest, Gwenna’s elbow around her neck. At first, when she went still, Gwenna thought she’d sunk the choke too deep. Then she realized the girl on top of her wasn’t passed out; she was asleep, snoring, her head tipped back into the crook of Gwenna’s neck. Gwenna craned her neck to look at her. The girl’s mouth hung open, lips twitching through a few silent syllables. In that moment, her face lit by the pale moon, she looked even younger than her years. Her small hands, which had been trying to pry away the older woman’s arm, had closed gently around it, pulling it close, as though it were a blanket. Gwenna let her own head drop back against the stony ground, listened to the girl breathe, stared up at the stars.
“I can’t take care of you,” she murmured.
The world’s cold seeped up into her back. Rat’s small breaths steamed the night air.
“I can’t protect you.”
The girl turned in her sleep. The chain linking their ankles clinked quietly. She burrowed her face deeper into Gwenna’s neck.
“Shit,” Gwenna said, staring up into the cavern of the night. “Shit. Shit. Shit. Fuck. Shit. Moon.”
29
Ruc studied Talal from across the small bunkroom that the two of them shared with Bien. The flame from the single lantern licked the warm night air. He wondered if he could kill the man if the next few moments went wrong. Almost certainly not, he was forced to admit. Despite the chain and iron ball, the Kettral was quite obviously one of the deadliest people Ruc had ever met. He tried, during Goatface’s training, to hide the full extent of his strength and speed, but Ruc had sparred with enough people back in the delta to size up an opponent and he didn’t care for his chances going toe-to-toe with the soldier. Not just that, but he actually liked the man. Talal didn’t seem like a heartless killer, despite what Ruc had argued to Bien. He was quiet, thoughtful, tough—exactly the kind of ally they needed if they were going to escape.
Provided that he was, in fact, an ally. They were about to find out, and fast.
“Is it really true,” Bien asked casually, “that the Kettral don’t use leaches?”
She was putting on a better act than Ruc had expected. There wasn’t much call for lying and dissembling among the priests of Eira, but then—she wasn’t just a priest. It stood to reason that she could perform her own innocence. Ruc wondered how many times she had lied to him, hiding this secret part of her as they walked the streets of Dombâng, or chatted in the markets, or lay together in bed, their naked limbs tangled.
Talal nodded, didn’t look up from his soup. “There are hundreds of myths.” He blew the steam from the spoonful, sipped it, grimaced. “I’ve also heard that we can breathe water and fly.”
He sounded indifferent, even bored, but the yellow heat radiating from his face darkened for a moment into orange. Not that that proved anything. Body heat fluctuated with a hundred factors. It could have been a lie … or the soup.
“The guards, though,” Bien said. “Every morning with the … what is it they make you drink?”
“Adamanth.”
She nodded. “Right. The adamanth. The guards seem pretty concerned.”
The soldier took another sip of his soup, nodded as he swallowed. “Pride.”
“Pride?” Bien blinked. Her confusion didn’t seem feigned.
Talal nodded. “The Purple Baths was one of only two command centers in the city. It served as barracks for thousands of troops, at least half of which were there when my Wing attacked. No one—not the high priests, not the Greenshirts, not the Arena guards—wants to believe that five Annurian soldiers could have destroyed it with nothing more than blades and bows.”
“Blades, bows, and a preposterously large hawk,” Ruc pointed out.
“Sure, the bird gave us an edge, but the ground wasn’t right for kettral. It might have killed a dozen Greenshirts before we brought it down.”
Bien stared at him. “You killed your own bird?”
The Kettral looked out the open window awhile, then turned his gaze back to her. “We couldn’t get him out, and we couldn’t leave him for the priests.”
Ruc was struck all over again by the realization that beneath Talal’s easy smile and offers of camaraderie ran a vein of cold iron. He might talk about friendships and alliances, would probably do his best to keep them alive as long as they were fellow prisoners in the yard, but if the moment ever came when he was forced to choose between their lives and his own, he wouldn’t hesitate.
“The point is,” Talal went on, “no one wants to believe that it only took five of us to bust into the barracks, kill a couple dozen Greenshirts, then burn the place down. It’s easier to think there was something else to the story, some sick, twisted, mystical power.” He shook his head. “All the adamanth and hand-wringing about whether or not I’m a leach? It’s just a way to save face. Believe me—if I were a ’Kent-kissing leach, I would have burned the place from five hundred paces up and flown home.”
Ruc studied the man from his post by the window. He didn’t look like he was lying. He looked like a prisoner who was sick of answering the same ridiculous questions over and over, who’d had a long day out in the hot sun, who just wanted to sit and enjoy his soup. More than that—his story made sense. If he were a leach there wouldn’t have been any need to infiltrate the Purple Baths. In fact, if the empire really did have leaches at its disposal, the Dombângan revolution never would have succeeded in the first place. He opened his mouth to change the topic, to ask about one of Goatface’s spear drills, but Bien was already talking, almost vomiting into the momentary silence the words that could end their lives:
“I am.” The shifting light of the lantern painted shadows across her horrified face. “I’m a leach.”
Talal’s spoon stopped halfway to his mouth. He held it there a moment, then put it back in the bowl. Somewhere outside in the vast night, a dusk owl loosed its screech.
“That,” the Kettral said quietly, “is the most interesting thing I’ve heard all day.”
His voice was flat, emotionless, almost the same voice he’d used when he talked about killing his bird.
His soldier’s voice, Ruc thought. His true voice.
Bien stared at him, lips parted, brown eyes defiant.
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I think you can help. Because I think you’re a leach, too.”
“After everything I just told you?”
Bien nodded. “Yes.”
The man stared at her.
Ruc slid forward another step, just behind Talal’s chair, brought his knife up beneath his chin. He expected the soldier to curse, recoil, or lash out. Instead, he remained perfectly, preternaturally still.
“You don’t need to kill me,” Talal said quietly.
Bien leapt to her feet, her eyes wide.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“He’s protecting you,” Talal said calmly.
“Stop it, Ruc. He’s on our side.”
Talal gave an incremental shake of his head, careful not to open his throat on the blade. “He doesn’t know that.”
“No,” Ruc agreed. “I don’t know that.”
“I respect the play,” Talal said, “but it’s unnecessary. Bien is right.”
She shifted her gaze from Ruc to the Kettral. “I am?”
“We do use leaches, and I’m one of them.”
The lantern’s wick hissed, just at the edge of hearing. When Talal swallowed, Ruc could feel the bronze blade scrape against his stubble.
“Then why,” Ruc asked finally, “didn’t you do what you said? Burn down the Baths from the back of your bird without ever landing?”
“The same reason I didn’t burn all the Greenshirts to cinders when they attacked me.” With one slow hand, he gestured to his body. “The same reason I have all these scars.”
“Which is?”
“I’m weak.”
Ruc coughed up a chuckle at that. “My bet is you’re the deadliest person in here.”
“I’m weak as a leach.”
“There are different strengths?” Bien asked.
Talal nodded. “As in everything.”
Another silence, shattered by a burst of raucous laughter from somewhere across the yard. Someone belted out a few lines of an old Dombângan drinking song, then was shouted down.
“You can put away the knife, Ruc,” Bien said. “Please.”
He shook his head. “I think I’ll hold on to it for now.”
“He said he’s a leach,” she protested. “Just like me.”
“He is nothing like you, Bien. He’s an Annurian soldier.”
“Even Annurian soldiers tell the truth sometimes,” Talal observed quietly.
Ruc shook his head. “Did you see any marsh rats when you were out in the delta?”
“I was too busy keeping an eye out for the snakes and spiders.”
“The marsh rat,” Ruc said, “has a problem. It likes to eat birds—blue-headed vultures, spadebeaks—but it’s a rat. It can’t even get close to them. So do you know what it does?”
“I have a feeling you’re about to tell me.”
“It pretends to be dead. It shits out something that smells like rotting carrion, then lies there until the birds come to pick at the carcass. Then it rips out their throats and devours them.”
“If you’re comparing me to a shitting rat,” Talal said, “I’m not flattered.”
“You ought to be. Everyone talks about crocs and jaguars, qirna and snakes, but kill for kill, the marsh rat is the most deadly predator in the delta.”
“Listen to yourself,” Bien hissed. “You sound insane. Put down the knife.”
Ruc met her eyes. “He’s faster than me, Bien. Stronger. This whole thing, claiming to be a leach—it could be an act, a way to appear weak. He only said it when he had the blade at his throat. If I put down the knife, there’s nothing I can do to stop him if he decides to turn on us. Nothing you can do, either.”
