The Empire's Ruin, page 60
No one said anything.
Every fiber of her was pain, and beneath the pain, exhaustion, and beneath the exhaustion, terror, and beneath the terror all the old shame and sorrow and regret. But beneath the regret, like a smooth stone plucked from a river, that other thing, worn down but still hard, still there, still refusing to let her die. She had no idea, as she hung from the rope, dripping blood and water into the endless sea, whether or not she should be thankful that she had a stone lodged in the center of her beating heart.
* * *
Pain is a gift.
Another line from Hendran.
It keeps the weary soldier awake. It reminds the irresolute warrior that there is work still to finish. It whispers in the ear of all who feel it something they might otherwise forget: You are not dead.
Back in the darkness of the brig, huddled in a heap against the bulkhead, knees drawn up to her chest, eyes squeezed shut, Gwenna half wished she were dead. Rat and Bhuma Dhar were there, leaning over her, saying something, but she couldn’t hear the words past the roar of the agony.
She wouldn’t have believed a person could hurt so bad without passing out. With each desperate breath she expected her vision to pinch in, then go dark as she tumbled into oblivion. Unfortunately, oblivion didn’t seem to want her. Breath after breath she remained stubbornly awake until the grave realization dawned that there would be no escape. The pain had her. It was crushing her. Which meant it was her job not to be crushed. Grimly, she turned her attention inward. Instead of trying to blot out the agony, she opened herself to it.
Pain was a foe like any other foe; in order to fight it she had to know it.
Her shoulders felt as though they’d been wrenched from their sockets, her ankles and wrists throbbed, her head ached where she’d smashed it against the keel, her lungs burned, and her elbows and knees felt flayed to the bone. Blood from a hundred cuts and slashes soaked her blacks, so much blood she wondered if she’d survived after all. If she stayed perfectly still, the agony was just bearable, but it was impossible to stay perfectly still on a ship shouldering its way through the swells. Every time the Daybreak pitched or rolled, she felt half a dozen knives driving into her. Every time, the scream boiled up in her throat, and every time she choked it back.
Crying, she could do silently, and in the darkness of the brig neither Rat nor Dhar could see her, and so she cried. For a long time she cried, hours maybe, maybe a day, huddled against the bulkhead, her body shaking with the silent sobs. The shaking hurt and the tears burned her lacerated cheeks, but she made no effort to stop. Those sobs had been locked inside her, she realized, since Talal and Quick Jak died in the Purple Baths. No—longer. Far longer. Since the day she’d learned that the Kettral had destroyed themselves. Since Laith died trying to hold the bridge in Andt-Kyl. Since the Urghul forced Gwenna to murder that lost legionary up on the steppe. Since the day she decided to leave her father and her brothers behind. Since she was a child learning that her mother was dead …
In all those years, she’d never cried, not once. Grief was useless to a soldier, after all, and so she’d turned all that grief into rage, an armor hammered from a thousand layers, and now, after all these years, the rage had finally broken. Wave after wave, her grief washed over her, blotting out thought, scrubbing away even the agony in her limbs, until finally, after what seemed like a lifetime, the waves slowed, then slackened. Her body stopped shuddering. There were no more tears. She opened her eyes, woke again to the present, found Dhar sitting beside her, his hand on her shoulder, Rat gently stroking her hair. They might almost have been a family, her family.
Almost.
40
For a gate fashioned by the most powerful magics of an ancient race, a doorway that led, literally, through nothingness, for a strategic weapon that had nearly destroyed humanity itself, the kenta didn’t look like much—just a slender arch standing at the center of a round, vaulted chamber, the kind of architectural flourish you could find in any of a hundred temples around the city, except that this arch was part of no wall. The longer Akiil looked at it, the stranger it became. For one thing, he couldn’t quite decide what it was made of; from one angle it appeared to be metal, from another, polished stone. And the light reflected strangely off of it, as though the flames burning in the surrounding lanterns weren’t the source of its illumination. There was a vague sense of something wrong, something unnatural.
“Leave us,” Adare said.
Hugel, the larger of the two Aedolians, shot Akiil a warning glance—he was always shooting warning glances—before withdrawing.
“He’s still not very friendly,” Akiil observed.
Adare ignored him, waited until both men were gone, crossed to the heavy steel door, checked that it was firmly shut, then turned to Akiil.
“So,” she said, the syllable a gauntlet tossed down between them.
Akiil met her eyes, smiled, used the time to calm his kicking heart, to slow his breath.
Stop trying.
Yerrin’s advice. For whatever the fuck it was worth.
“You said you’ve been studying it,” he said. “How?”
“We have sent animals through—chickens, dogs, monkeys.”
“I take it they didn’t come back?”
Adare crossed to one of the torches, removed it from its sconce, then walked to the kenta. “We sent them in with leashes on. It didn’t work.” She held the torch out toward the gate. When the flame passed beneath the arch, it vanished.
The scene reminded him, strangely, of fishing the small ponds below Ashk’lan on summer nights, the way the line dropped into the black water and seemed to simply cease. This was like that, except vertically, and without the water. He could see straight through the kenta to the far side of the room—the walls, the floor of the cavern, the torches in their sconces, everything where it should be. Everything except the fire at the end of Adare’s brand. When she withdrew it, the entire top of the torch was gone, the wooden stump smooth, as though sheared off by some beautifully honed blade. The Emperor ran a finger over it, shook her head, then tossed the whole thing through the gate. It disappeared into the air without a shiver or splash.
“No,” she said. “They didn’t come back.”
Her jaw tightened fractionally. Her eyes dilated.
Akiil considered her face.
“You didn’t just send animals,” he said finally. “You sent humans through, too.”
The Emperor studied him. “You have Kaden’s knack for reading people. It’s vexing.”
“Only if you’re trying to keep secrets.”
“An emperor’s job is keeping secrets.” She seemed about to say more on that subject, then shook her head. “I didn’t order them through.”
Akiil raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“Two of my Aedolians, good men who had been down here with me dozens of times, insisted on testing it.” She turned away to stare through the kenta. “Dogs can’t report back, they said. I explained to them the danger. I even read them passages from some of the earliest human histories, accounts of people destroyed by the gates. They understood the risk and they insisted.”
“That happen often to emperors? People insist, and you have to do what they say?”
She rounded on him. “People die because of my decisions every day. So many people die that it’s tempting to stop making decisions, except do you know what would happen then? People would keep dying, only faster.” She shook her head. “The men who went through that gate were soldiers. They died the way any soldier would choose to die.”
“Snuffed into nothingness on an emperor’s pointless whim?”
Adare had him by the neck before he realized what was happening. He reached up to grab her wrist, to shove her away, then crushed the instinct. He wasn’t a child anymore. This wasn’t a tavern in the Quarter. The woman holding him didn’t want to use him or sell him. All his old methods of survival were useless here. If he punched her, he died. If he tried to run, he died. An old Shin saying bloomed in his mind: If you are fighting, you have already lost.
He relaxed his shoulders, his gut, his chest. The Emperor’s grip was stronger than he’d have expected, but she wasn’t actually choking him. The kenta might kill him, but this woman wasn’t going to.
Her eyes burned inches from his face, but her voice was cold when she spoke. “I had a general once. The man mocked me at every turn, betrayed me, lied to my face. I hated him, but I refused to see him executed. I kept him at his post. Do you know why?”
Akiil managed to speak, despite the fingers gouging into his neck. “Tell me.”
“Because I thought I needed him.” The Emperor’s eyes remained on Akiil, but she was looking at something else, some fragment of memory. “I thought that without his battlefield brilliance I would be lost, that Annur would be lost. By the time I realized my mistake, he had taken my son and nearly destroyed my empire.”
Akiil shook his head incrementally. “I didn’t come here to destroy Annur. I came to help you.”
“Do you have any idea how many people present themselves at this palace claiming to want to help?”
“I can do something they can’t.”
“No one is indispensable.”
“If you need the kenta, I am.”
“I would like to use the kenta,” she replied grimly. “I would find the gates useful in all manner of ways, but I made a point, after I finally killed my general, to stop believing I needed things. So if you hope to play on whatever it is you claim to know, if you think, because you are the last of the Shin, that you are safe, if you believe you can do or say whatever you want because I need you…” She shook her head grimly, dropped her hand from his throat, but kept him fixed with her eyes. “I don’t.”
Akiil resisted the urge to rub his neck.
“Spoken,” he said evenly, “like a Shin monk. Teaching you might not be impossible after all.”
“Enough talk about teaching.” Adare gestured to the kenta. “The time has arrived for a demonstration.”
Fear dragged a cold fingernail down Akiil’s spine.
He turned away from the Emperor to consider the gate.
Know less, Yerrin murmured. Know nothing.
He closed his eyes.
The calm that had enveloped him in the Captain’s pig yard was gone, vanished, trampled by a stampede of emotions. Fear seethed in his gut, restless and sharp-clawed. His whole life, that fear had helped to keep him alive, to run faster when he needed to run, to fight harder when he had to fight. Suddenly, it felt wrong to let it go, like abandoning the only piece of flotsam while stranded in the open ocean.
He didn’t have to do it. The Emperor would be furious, but what did he care about the Emperor? She wasn’t really going to have him executed for changing his mind. A month earlier, she hadn’t even known he existed. She already suspected he was a fraud. If he told the truth and walked out, he’d end up penniless, but he’d been penniless before. There were other ways to get coin, better cons to run, more reliable cons, cons that weren’t going to end up with, well, the end of him.
And there was Skinny Quinn to consider.
Her betrayal didn’t bother him—she’d done what she needed to do to stay alive. What bothered him was the fact that the Captain still had her. If she was only dealing cards, then fine, but those empty eyes, that blank face, suggested more and worse. Not that he had any idea how to fix it. Obviously she didn’t want him to try. And yet the fact that she was alive tugged at him, as though someone had tied a slender thread around some organ to which he could not put a name. Staring down the Captain’s pigs he’d been ready to die, convinced of the rightness of his own annihilation. Now, though, a new thought nagged at him, the possibility that death, too, might be just another kind of escape, that if he failed he might just be running away again.
He turned back to the kenta.
What did it feel like if it went wrong? Those men who’d tried it—what had they experienced in the slender moment when they were only partway through—the front leg, the hand and arm. Did they know they’d failed? Could they sense their bodies, half-undone, hemorrhaging blood into nothingness? He imagined yanking his arm back, finding the hand gone, watching the blood gush from the stump.…
Knock it off, you asshole, he told himself.
His heart was hammering, but he knew how to calm it. His breath came hot and ragged through his nose, but that, too, he could manage. He was Akiil from the Perfumed Quarter, but he was also a Shin monk. He’d had the same training as Kaden, and Kaden had learned to use the gates. Passing beneath the gate was a gamble, but then, life was a gamble.
The trick to gambling was not caring if you won or lost.
That was the lesson of the hog pen.
He wasn’t sure what had happened to him, as he watched Andraz torn apart by the animals, but it felt like the way the Shin described the vaniate. No fear. No hope. No emotion at all.
No self.
Of course, Shin meditation had never involved watching men rent into gobbets of flesh, but maybe there were other ways, other paths. That frigid emptiness from the Captain’s courtyard was, in the end, what he had, and so, while the Emperor of Annur watched him, he called to mind the memory of Andraz’s final moments, watched the club come down against the man’s knee, watched Fori topple him over the wall, watched the hogs close in and open his stomach with their tusks, watched the guts spill.
This is all he was, he reminded himself.
Blood. Bone. Meat. Piss. Shit.
That is all anyone is.
That is all I am.
In his perfect memory, he watched Andraz’s eyes go wide with horror, then glaze over as everything he’d loved and hated and hoped for drained away. He shifted the image, imagined himself among the hogs, imagined their teeth tearing at him, ripping, rending, tearing him away in layers, felt himself coming apart, ceasing to be.
I am nothing.
The thought rose natural and unbidden as breath. He could picture Skinny Quinn watching him as he died, that pretty face of hers blank as the sky.
I am not.
There was no satisfaction in the words. He tried to remember what satisfaction felt like, failed. What was satisfaction to a bag of meat?
Between one breath and the next, he opened his eyes.
The world remained: the vaulted stone chamber, the torches burning in their sconces, the Emperor studying him with those eyes of flame, the kenta standing in the center of space. He felt nothing about any of it. He could remember his fear of the gate, but the emotion might as well have been something he’d heard about thirdhand. There was no urgency to it, no color, no life.
“Is this…” Adare asked. “Did it work?”
“You want me to go through?”
She studied him warily for a moment, then nodded. “Go through, come back, and tell me what’s on the other side.”
He shrugged, turned away from her, and stepped through the gate.
* * *
A small island, maybe a hundred paces across, surrounded by sea.
Two dozen kenta ringed the perimeter. Beyond them cliffs dropped away seventy or eighty feet into the waves. The bright sun hurt his eyes, but the pain didn’t bother him. It was hard to be sure why pain had ever bothered him. Like the wind, like the waves, like the ring of gates, like the tent of sky stretched overhead, it was just a fact of the world.
Graven into the apex of each kenta were words in a script he didn’t recognize. Place names, probably. He walked in a slow circle around the island’s edge, memorizing the shapes of that script; perhaps the Emperor or one of her historians would recognize it. Halfway through his circuit, he stepped on something hard hidden by the high grass. When he knelt, his fingers closed around the wooden shaft of a spear. A few feet away he found a skull and other bones half-sunken in the dry dirt. It took him only moments to excavate the entire skeleton, a large man, judging by the size of the legs and arms. Csestriim? One of the Shin? The remains could have been lying there for one year or a thousand, although the wooden shaft of the spear remained relatively unrotten. Akiil sifted the dirt until he found one of the small bones of the hand, tucked it into a pocket in his robe, then straightened.
More skeletons lay near the first. One of the skulls was half-crushed. A flatbow bolt nestled among the ribs of another. It was impossible to know who had killed them, or why. Outside the vaniate, the thought of people fighting and dying on this island in the middle of the ocean would have been unsettling. Inside the vast hall of his calm, he felt only a mild curiosity.
When he had traveled halfway around the island, he paused, turned, looked back at the gate through which he had come. It would be easy for someone else, someone without the Shin trick of committing images to memory, to lose track of the way home.
Home. He tried to make sense of the notion.
He’d always thought of Annur as his home, even during the years at Ashk’lan—but what did that mean, really? What was the thought of home, but a kind of mad attachment to one place instead of all the rest? He stared out through the gate to Annur, found only the sea, the sky hazed by distant cloud, dozens of some kind of bird he didn’t recognize diving into the waves. For a moment, it felt as though his whole life—everything from his first memories in the Perfumed Quarter to the slaughter of the monks to Skinny Quinn’s empty face as she gave him to the Captain—had been nothing more than a febrile hallucination, as though only the island was real, as though all those empty gates led, not back to actual places, but to a useless dream world of suffering and stupidity, of madness, of grasping, of endless bright-hued ludicrous human delusion.
41
Storms had a smell. Some reeked of wet stone, others of rust, still others of salt and hot seaweed. There had been Kettral back on the Islands who could tell you what kind of weather was coming just by closing their eyes and taking a deep breath. Thunder, they’d say. Or, high seas. Gwenna never quite got the knack. The most she’d ever managed was to tell good weather from bad, which was how she knew, even buried in the darkness of the brig, that some truly nasty shit was headed their way.
