8
“I think Tan’s trying to kill me,” Kaden said, straightening up from the bundle of tiles he had just hoisted up onto the dormitory roof and wiping the sweat from his brow.
Down below, Phirum Prumm was huffing with the effort of muscling the next load into place and hitching it to the rope. Kaden’s back and hands ached from the repetitive labor, but compared with the rigors of Rampuri Tan’s training, retiling the roof after the winter ice damage felt like a holiday. At least he could find the occasional moment to straighten from his task and knuckle the sore muscles without getting whipped.
“Quit whining,” Akiil retorted, hunkering down to get a good grip on the tiles, then hauling the whole crate up with a grunt. Kaden had no idea how his friend could work with the mop of black curls hanging down over his eyes—by tradition he should have cropped his scalp like the rest of the monks, but a tradition wasn’t exactly a rule, and Akiil was extremely adept at balancing on the fine line between the two. “The first month with a new umial is always the worst. Remember when Robert made me carry those stones for the new goat shed down from the Circuit of Ravens?” He groaned at the memory.
“I don’t think this is so bad,” Pater protested as Akiil dropped the bundle at his feet. The boy perched on the roof’s apex, like a small gargoyle set against the austere background of the snowy peaks beyond. He was barely eight, a novice still, and had yet to experience a truly brutal umial.
“Of course you don’t,” Akiil responded, pointing an admonitory finger at the boy. “While the rest of us are lugging and lifting, all you have to do is sit there!”
“I’m placing them,” Pater protested, his brown eyes round and aggrieved. He held up a loose tile by way of demonstration.
“Oh, placing,” Akiil replied, rolling his eyes. “How demanding. My apologies.”
“This is just work,” Kaden pointed out as he wrapped his hands around the thick rope and began to haul. “Since I started with Tan, I haven’t gone a single day without a beating. He’s running out of unbroken skin.”
“Just work?” Akiil demanded, fixing him with an incredulous glare. “Just work? Work is an affliction, my friend, a potentially fatal affliction.”
Despite the pain of his wounds, Kaden suppressed a smile. Carrying rocks and hefting tiles probably did feel like murder to Akiil. The young acolyte had been at Ashk’lan as long as Kaden, but the Shin ethic and way of life weren’t rubbing off on him as quickly as many of the older brothers would have liked. Scial Nin, the abbot, and some of the umials held out hope for the youth, but in most ways, he was little changed from the nine-year-old thief who had arrived from the gritty Perfumed Quarter of Annur so many years before.
Kaden had been at Ashk’lan for only a few months when Blerim Panno—the Footsore Monk, they called him—trudged into the main yard, brown robe ripped around the hem but otherwise looking no worse for the long walk from the Bend. The three boys who trailed behind him, however, the three boys who would soon be novices, appeared battered and uncertain. All limped on badly blistered feet, all slumped beneath the weight of the canvas sacks they carried on their backs, and of the three, only Akiil bothered to look around him, those brown eyes of his assessing the cold stone buildings of Ashk’lan with a shrewd gaze that had reminded Kaden of Edur Uriarte, his father’s Minister of Finance. When that gaze landed on him, however, the new boy stiffened, as though pricked by the point of an invisible dagger.
“Who’s he?” Akiil had asked Panno suspiciously, his vowels long and broad, almost incomprehensible to Kaden, who had grown up around the mellifluous, aristocratic accent of the imperial court.
“His name is Kaden,” Panno replied. “He is also a novice.”
Akiil had shaken his head. “I know them eyes. He’s some kind of prince or lord or something. Nobody told me there’d be no princes or lords here.” He spat the titles venomously, as though they were curses.
Panno had laid a calm hand on his shoulder. “That’s because there are no princes or lords here. Only Shin. Kaden may have come from the Malkeenian line and one day he may return to it, but now, here, he is a novice, just like you.”
Akiil measured Panno with his eyes, as though testing the truth of his words. “Meaning he don’t get to boss me around none?”
Kaden had bristled at the suggestion. He wanted to object that he didn’t boss people around even when he wasn’t in a monastery, but Panno replied before he could fashion a retort.
“Here he is learning to obey, not to command.” He turned to Kaden, as if by way of illustration. “Kaden, please run down to the White Pool and fetch some cold fresh water for our brothers. They have walked a good distance since dawn, and must be thirsty.” Kaden had scowled at the injustice of the command, and Akiil, seeing the scowl, smiled his wide, dirty smile. It was not an auspicious start to their friendship.
After eight years, however, an unlikely camaraderie had grown up between the son of the Emperor and the thief from the Perfumed Quarter. As Blerim Panno had promised, the Shin ignored all differences in rank and rearing, and over time it became possible to forget that the parents Akiil had never known were hanged by the law of Kaden’s father, that someday, if they went back to their former lives, Akiil might be put to death at the order of a scroll carrying Kaden’s own sigil.
“Anyway,” Akiil continued, stretching his neck and rubbing a sore forearm, “your sob stories are a heap of pickled pig shit. I don’t see Tan hounding you now.”
“The benefits of group labor,” Kaden replied, passing the next crate of tiles to his friend. “As long as I’m stuck doing monastery work, Tan lets me off from my training.”
“Well,” Akiil said, shoving the load toward Pater and sitting down on the roof with a contented sigh. “I guess we want to stretch this job out as long as we can.”
Kaden looked down into the courtyard. Late afternoon sun illuminated the stone buildings and stunted trees, warm in spite of the patches of dirty snow squirreled away in the corners. A few monks trod the gravel paths, their heads bowed in contemplation, and a pair of stray goats cropped the meager spring shoots in the shadow of the meditation hall, but Scial Nin, who had assigned them to the roofing project, was nowhere to be seen.
“That’s the last of them,” Phirum shouted up from below. “You want me to come up?”
“We’ll take care of it,” Akiil shouted back. “We’re almost done.”
“We are?” Kaden asked, eyeing the remaining crates skeptically, then glancing back down into the courtyard. The Shin provided severe penance for shirkers, although Akiil never seemed to learn that lesson, and Pater was picking up on the older youth’s bad habits.
“Quit looking over your shoulder,” Akiil said, settling back against the dark tiles. “No one’s going to come hunting for us up here.”
“You confident enough about that to risk a whipping?”
“Of course!” the youth replied, lacing his fingers behind his head and closing his eyes. “It was one of the first things I learned back in the Quarter—people never look up.”
Pater scampered down from the crest of the roof, the bundle of tiles forgotten. “Is that Thieves’ Wisdom?” he demanded. “Is it, Akiil?”
Kaden groaned. “Pater, I’ve told you before that ‘Thieves’ Wisdom’ is just a fancy name Akiil gives to his pronouncements. Which are usually wrong, by the way.”
Akiil fixed Kaden with a glare through one half-open eye. “It is Thieves’ Wisdom, Pater. Kaden has just never heard of it because he spent his young life being pampered in a palace. Be thankful you have someone here who is willing to look after your education. Besides,” he added, rushing on before Kaden could protest, “Tan’s been keeping Kaden so busy, we haven’t had a chance to talk to him about the goat he lost.”
Akiil’s words brought the saama’an of the slaughtered goat unbidden to Kaden’s mind, and with it the chill, creeping fear pricking the skin between his shoulder blades. It was sloppy thinking, letting someone else’s words dictate the contents of his thought, and he dismissed both the image and the emotion. Still, the afternoon sun was warm, the breeze carried the sharp scent of the junipers, and it wouldn’t hurt to rest for just a few minutes before searching out his umial once more. After a final glance out over the monastery, he settled down onto the tiles beside his friends.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“You tell me,” Akiil responded, rolling onto one elbow. “I know the goat was slaughtered. I know you didn’t find any tracks—”
“And the brain,” Pater burst in. “Something ate the brain.”
Kaden nodded. He’d been over the events more times than he cared to admit, but couldn’t add much more to the scene. “That’s about it.”
“A leach,” Pater said, shoving between the two youths to gesture with a small but insistent hand. “A leach could have done it!”
Akiil dismissed the absurd suggestion with a lazy wave. “Pater, what would a leach be doing wandering around the Bone Mountains at the ass end of winter?”
“Maybe he’s in hiding. Maybe his neighbors discovered what he was and he had to run away in the night. Maybe he put a kenning on someone,” the boy went on, his expression rapt. “Something really evil, and—”
Akiil chuckled. “And then he came up here to kill a few goats?”
“They do things like that,” the boy insisted. “Eat brains and drink blood and stuff.”
Kaden shook his head. “They do not, Pater. They’re men and women, just the way we are, only … twisted somehow.”
“They’re evil!” the small boy exclaimed. “That’s why they have to get hanged or beheaded.”
“They are evil,” Kaden agreed. “And we do have to hang them. But not because they drink blood.”
“They might drink blood,” Akiil suggested unhelpfully, knuckling Pater in the ribs to goad him on.
Again, Kaden shook his head. “We have to hang leaches because they have too much power. No one should be able to twist the fabric of reality to their own ends.” Hundreds of years earlier, the Atmani leach-lords had gone insane and nearly destroyed the world. Whenever Kaden wondered if leaches deserved the loathing and opprobrium heaped upon them, he had only to remember his history. “Only the gods should have that kind of power.”
“Too much power!” Akiil crowed. “Too much power! And this from the person who’s going to be the ’Kent-kissing Annurian Emperor someday.”
Kaden snorted. “According to Tan, I don’t have enough wit in my head to make it as a simple monk.”
“You don’t have to make it as a monk. You’re going to rule half the known world.”
“Maybe,” Kaden responded, doubtfully. The Dawn Palace and the Unhewn Throne felt impossibly far away, a hazily remembered dream from his childhood. For all he knew, his father would rule another thirty years, years Kaden would spend at Ashk’lan hauling water, retiling roofs, and, oh yes, getting beaten by his umial. “I don’t mind the work and the whippings when I feel like it’s all part of some bigger plan. Tan, though … I might as well be some sort of insect, for all he cares.”
“You should be happy,” Akiil responded, rolling onto his back and staring up at the scudding clouds. “I’ve worked my ass off my whole life precisely in order to keep the expectations for me low. Low expectations are the key to success.” He started to turn to Pater, but Kaden cut him off.
“That is not more Thieves’ Wisdom,” he said to the boy. Then, turning back to Akiil, “You know what Tan’s had me doing for the past week? Counting. Counting all the stones in all the buildings at Ashk’lan.”
“That’s what you’re complaining about?” Akiil demanded, stabbing a finger at him. “I was getting harder tasks when I was ten.”
Kaden rolled his eyes. “You always were precocious.”
“No need to show off the big words. Not all of us grew up with a Manjari tutor.”
“Aren’t you the one who claims the only schooling a man needs he can get from a butcher, a sailor, and a whore?”
Akiil shrugged. “The butcher and the sailor are optional.”
Pater had been trying to follow the exchange, head swiveling back and forth with the conversation.
“What’s a whore?” he asked. Then, distracted by his earlier reasoning, “If a leach didn’t kill the goat, what did?”
Kaden saw it all again, the shattered skull, scooped clean.
“I told you, I don’t know.” He looked out across the courtyard, past the stone buildings and the granite ledges to where the sun was sinking toward the endless grasslands of the steppe. “But it’s going to be dark soon, and if I don’t get cleaned up and find Tan before dinner, I’m going to find myself envying that goat.”