27
“Dead,” Kaden said flatly, trying to make sense of the word.
“Slaughtered,” Akiil amended, forcing a hand through his dark hair. “Just like the goats.”
Kaden turned the idea over in his mind. Serkhan Khandashi had mostly kept to himself, spending his days on the trails beyond the monastery, studying trees. He always claimed he was preparing to write a treatise on the flora of eastern Vash, but no one had ever seen him set brush to parchment. Kaden hadn’t known the man well, but the thought that he could just cease, could go from a curious, quiet observer of the world to a scattered heap of decaying meat, made him faintly queasy.
“I thought the monks guarding the goats were in groups,” he said, putting down his spoon on the rough table. The bowl of turnip soup in front of him no longer seemed so appetizing, and the large refectory hall, normally so welcoming, struck him as cold and austere. A chill spring wind sliced through the open windows, rustling the sleeves of his robe, tugging at the meager fire that flickered on the hearth, stealing away any warmth it might have offered.
“They were in groups,” Akiil responded.
“Then what happened?”
“No one knows. The monks were all hidden, remember? When it came time to switch shifts, Allen found what was left of Serkhan scattered over half the eastern slope.”
“And the other monks didn’t hear anything?”
Akiil squinted at him as if he’d lost his mind. “You know the spring wind in the mountains. Half the time, you can’t hear your own footsteps.”
Kaden nodded, staring dully out one of the low, small windows. The sun was falling down toward the west, and already Pta’s gems, the brightest stars in the northern sky, were visible, hanging in a glimmering necklace above the peaks. He pulled his robe tighter around him to guard against the gusts that blew through the chinks in the casement.
It had been more than a week since Tan had Akiil dig him out of the hole, and although his appetite had started to return, painful sores covered his elbows and hips, and it was still difficult to hobble from the refectory to the meditation hall to his bed and back. Worse, his mind felt … blinded somehow, as though he had looked too long at a bright light. He still wasn’t sure what had happened to him inside that hole—the final days, in particular, seemed like a dream, or a story read from some musty tome—but he was glad to be free. He had a feeling that if Tan had left him buried much longer, his mind might have drifted away like one of those clouds. That, he suspected uneasily, might have been the point.
As it turned out, Tan hadn’t cut short the penance out of concern for Kaden’s mental state. It seemed as though, after Serkhan’s death, he considered it too risky to leave his pupil buried to the neck in earth. Evidently, if Kaden was to be killed, Tan wanted the pleasure of doing it himself.
Akiil, for his part, was ready to leap out of his skin with excitement. He kept picking up and putting down his spoon, gesturing with it toward Kaden and then toward the world outside, thumping his finger on the table to emphasize his points, and generally ignoring his rapidly cooling bowl of stew. He was always complaining that nothing ever happened at Ashk’lan, and now that excitement had arrived, he seemed to accept Serkhan’s death as the necessary price.
“Why now?” Kaden asked slowly. “I found the first goat over a month ago, and monks have been all over the trails since then. It could have attacked anyone.”
Akiil nodded, as though he’d been anticipating this question. “The way I figure it, the thing never wanted to kill a person. It stuck to goats as long as we let it, but then we penned the goats, all of them except the ones we set out as bait. It couldn’t get to those, and so it had no choice. Serkhan became dinner.”
Kaden winced at the crack. “The man is dead, Akiil. Show some respect.”
His friend waved off the remark. “You’re a terrible monk, you know that? Don’t you listen to anything you’re taught? Serkhan stopped being Serkhan when whatever it is tore him apart. The statement, ‘Serkhan is dead,’ doesn’t even make sense. Serkhan was. Now he is not. You can’t respect something that’s not.”
Kaden shook his head. Leave it to Akiil to ignore Shin teaching until it suited him. The tough thing was that his friend was right. The monks weren’t callous, exactly, but they didn’t make any more allowance for grief than they did for the other emotions—it was clutter, all of it, an obstacle to the vaniate. When a brother died, there was no funeral, no procession of mourners, no eulogy or scattering of ashes. Several monks conveyed the corpse to one of the high peaks and left it there for the rain and the ravens.
Kaden had learned all that the hard way. He could recall the moment in excruciating detail, despite the passage of the years. He had spent the morning in the potting hall, seated on one of the three-legged stools in the back corner, his attention focused on the lip of the ewer he was turning. Four times he had bungled the vessel, earning sharp words and sharper strokes from his umial. In his determination, he didn’t even notice the young monk, Mon Ada, until he stood directly before him, a narrow wooden cylinder in his hands, leather thongs dangling where they had been cut loose from the bird’s leg. Pigeons couldn’t carry any great weight and the letter was terse: Your mother has died. Consumption. She went quickly. Be strong. Father.
Kaden had kept his face still, set aside the note, and somehow finished the lip of the ewer. Only when Oleki dismissed him did he climb to the top of the Talon to weep in solitude. He had seen one of the monks at the monastery die of consumption and he remembered the fever and chills, the skin pale as milk, the bright red as the man coughed pieces of his own lung into the cloth. He did not go quickly.
After spending a night on the Talon, Kaden went directly to Scial Nin’s quarters to ask permission to visit his mother’s grave. The abbot refused. The next day Kaden turned eleven.
With an effort of will he hauled his mind back to the present. His mother was dead and so was Serkhan.
“Respect or no respect,” he said, “you’re acting like this is just all part of a game. Doesn’t it make you even a little bit scared?”
“Fear is blindness,” Akiil intoned, raising an admonitory finger and arching an eyebrow. “Calmness is sight.”
“You can skip the sayings—I learned them the same year you did.”
“Evidently not well enough.”
“A man was ripped apart,” Kaden insisted. He still felt dazed and a little detached from the world after his ordeal in the hole. The fact that Akiil refused to acknowledge the seriousness of Serkhan’s death only made him feel more confused. “I’m not arguing we should be running around in a terror, but the situation seems to warrant more than … excitement.”
Akiil stared at him for a while. “You know what the difference is between us?”
Kaden shook his head wearily. For the most part, years living with the monks had dulled his friend’s bitterness about a childhood spent grubbing scraps in the Perfumed Quarter. For the most part.
“The difference,” Akiil continued, leaning over the table, his stew forgotten, “is that I saw a dozen men torn to pieces every month back in the Quarter. The Tribes got some of them. Some of them wandered down the wrong alley on the wrong night. Some of them were whores, cut up and tossed out because that’s what some men like to do, and some of them were men, lured in by whores, then strangled or stabbed, flung on the midden without their sack of coin, naturally.”
“It doesn’t make it right,” Kaden said.
“It doesn’t make it anything,” Akill shot back. “It is what it is. People die. Everyone dies. Ananshael is always busy. You think the Shin taught me to scoff at death?” He scowled. “I learned that lesson on the streets of our beloved empire.”
He eyed Kaden squarely. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to die. But I’m not going to start sobbing every time someone stumbles over a body.”
“All right,” Kaden said, “I understand. You watch my back, I’ll watch yours, and let the crows feast on the rest. Still, something is out there killing monks and, in case you haven’t been paying attention, we are monks.”
“We’ll be careful.”
“Knowing you, that seems unlikely. What does Scial Nin plan to do?” It was frustrating getting all his news secondhand from Akiil, but he was too weak to move around the monastery on his own.
“No idea,” his friend responded. “Nin’s locked up in his study with Altaf and Tan again—worse than a bunch of elderly whores, those three.”
Kaden ignored the aside. “What are the rest of the monks doing?” Despite the Shin reserve, he had noticed a vague disquiet hanging over the monastery.
“Nin’s still allowing us outside the monastery, but only in groups of four now.”
“Well that’s not sustainable. How will the goats graze? Who’s going to haul clay or water?”
“Look on the bright side,” Akiil responded with a grin. “No running up Venart’s, no carrying rocks down the mountainside for some umial, no hunting for squirrel tracks all over the ’Shael-spawned peaks. If we had a flagon of ale and a couple of girls to tickle, this would be almost as good as a week back in the Quarter.”
“Except something out there is trying to kill us,” Kaden pointed out, exasperated by his friend’s levity.
“Were you not listening just a minute ago?” Akiil demanded, his face turning serious once more. “Something’s always trying to kill you. And I’m not just talking about the Quarter. Ananshael is everywhere, even in that Dawn Palace of yours.”
Kaden fell silent. The palace in which he had been raised was a fortified paradise: gardens of ailanthus, cherry blossom, and spreading cedar surrounded by impregnable golden walls. Even there, however, he had never scampered around without his Aedolian guardsmen a few paces behind. The men had seemed like friends or kindly uncles, but they were not uncles. They were there because they were needed, and they were needed because Akiil was right: Death walked even in the halls of the Dawn Palace.
A fresh gust of wind blew in as a robed figure opened the door, then closed it crisply behind him. It was Rampuri Tan, Kaden realized, and a jagged nail of apprehension scraped over his flesh. Maybe he’s just here for the evening meal, he thought. Surely it was too early for another penance. Surely the man didn’t mean to return him to that live burial. Tan ignored the nods from the other seated monks, striding across the flags of the floor with his broad, silent steps until he loomed over Kaden’s table. He considered his pupil.
“How are you feeling?” he asked finally.
Kaden had heard that question enough times now not to fall into the trap. “This body is sore and weak, but it breathes and moves well enough.”
Tan grunted. “Good. Tomorrow at dawn we resume your training. Find me at the trail to the lower meadow.”
Kaden squinted, trying to make sense of the direction. “I thought the abbot was insisting on groups of four.”
“Akiil will come as well,” Tan replied flatly.
The fact that the man didn’t even bother to glance over at Akiil as he delivered the news seemed to rankle Kaden’s friend, and with an ostentatious show of deference Akiil rose from his seat and spread his hands in mock supplication.
“I would love to attend you, Brother Tan, but our abbot was quite clear that four was the number, and I’m sure I couldn’t possibly disobey—”
Tan’s broad hand caught him flat across the face, knocking him backward into the table, where he upended the bowl of stew. A look of shock, then rage raced across Akiil’s face as the liquid spread across the table, then began to patter into a small pool on the stone floor. The older monk didn’t blink. “Three will be adequate. I will see you both at dawn.”
“He—,” Akiil began after Tan had closed the door behind him. The stew had splashed over his robe, and he wiped it away in short, angry motions.
“He will tie you to a pitch pine and leave you for the ravens,” Kaden interjected. “You think Yen Harval is a tough umial, think again. Look at this,” he continued, gesturing to his sunken cheeks and skeletal arms. “This is what happened to me, and I’ve been doing everything in Ae’s power to obey the man. Now, sit down and don’t do anything to make it worse.”
Akiil nodded and sat, but there was something new, and sharp, and defiant in his gaze that worried Kaden.