That opened the floodgates, and for a while the robed men lost some of their austerity in their eagerness. Nin did his best to maintain order, but more than once two or even three monks spoke at the same time, each trying to pitch his voice just a little louder than the others.
“How many ships of the line has O’Mara Havast taken this year?” asked Altaf the Smith. The man had plied his trade at the Bend before joining the Shin, and he retained a keen curiosity about the Annurian navy.
Chalmer Oleki wanted to know if the rebel Hannan tribes had stepped up attacks on the empire. Phirum Prumm, true to form, asked nervously if any plagues had swept Channary recently. “My mother,” he added apologetically. “She lives there still, at least she did when I departed.”
“I have no news of your mother,” Pyrre responded, “much to my chagrin. I can tell you that the atrep of Channary has redoubled his efforts to keep the city streets clear of filth, and the plague has not visited the city since.”
“How about the Urghul?” Rebbin wanted to know. “There were rumblings of war this year when we went down to trade with them in their winter pasturage. Something about a new chieftain unifying the tribes.”
“The Urghul,” she replied, turning her palms to the ceiling helplessly, “are the Urghul. One day they seem massed for an assault over the White River, following this new shaman or chief or whoever he is. The next, they’re sacrificing captives or buggering elk or whatever it is they do for sport.”
When the questions got around to Akiil, Kaden’s friend had the temerity to ask the merchants to describe “with careful attention to detail” the body of Ciena’s new high priestess. Pyrre laughed at that, a long melodious laugh, while the abbot shot the youth a look that promised penance on the morrow.
Kaden had been at Ashk’lan so long that he didn’t know most of the names and places his brothers asked after. At best they were dimly recollected echoes from a childhood so far away, it might have been a different life. In some cases, they were pure fantasy, and he let the strange syllables wash over him, rapt. For a while he forgot the questions pricking his mind, the nagging and unformed suspicions about the merchant and her husband. It was enough just to listen.
Pyrre responded to the questions in long, literary cadences while Jakin was blunt and direct. It seemed that someone named the Burned King was trying to unite the Blood Cities of southeastern Vash. Tsavein Kar’amalan continued to hold the Waist, as ruthless and shadowy as ever. An odd rumor out of Rabi had it that the tribes of the Darvi Desert were trying to force a passage over the Ancaz, though how they could hope to establish a foothold on Annurian territory held by Annurian legions was unclear. On and on and on it went until at long last, Halva Sjold asked the question Kaden had been waiting for: “And the Emperor? Sanlitun is still the strong, stubborn oak I remember from twenty years ago?”
Pyrre continued to smile as she had throughout most of the evening, an easy, casual grin that invited camaraderie and confidence. As she nodded, however, Kaden felt a pricking under his skin. “The books say Sanlitun means ‘stone’ in the old tongue. If so, the name suits the Emperor. It will take a hurricane to dislodge him.”
The words should have been comforting. It will take a hurricane to dislodge him. They should have been comforting, but the woman was lying, Kaden was sure of it. At the very least, she was concealing something. He reached for the calm he had summoned at the start of the meal, tried desperately to empty his mind and fill it with the image of the merchant smiling and nodding. The saama’an eluded him. He could think only of his father grasping his small forearm. I will teach you to make the cold, hard decisions through which a boy becomes a man.…
The conversation dragged on, but Kaden moved away from his post, allowing Pater the full space. As the boy peered in fascination into the room below, Kaden leaned back against the rough stone wall of the dovecote. Any fool can see what’s there. You need to see what is not there. As he stared into the darkness, he tried to imagine what Pyrre wasn’t saying about the empire, what she wasn’t saying about his father.
31
“I want to know your well,” Valyn began, trying to keep his voice reasonable and firm at the same time.
It had been over a week since the disaster in the swamp, and he’d made next to no progress in pulling together his Wing. Gwenna was still insubordinate, Laith was still reckless, Annick was still … Annick, and Talal still refused to share the secret source of what little arcane power he possessed. Worse, Valyn continued to harbor doubts about the sniper and the leach; they both had secrets, and he was learning quickly not to trust anyone with secrets. It was impossible to tackle everything at once, but learning Talal’s well would help him in his command of the Wing and might just fit one more piece into the larger puzzle of Amie’s and Lin’s deaths.
Talal nodded guardedly. “I wondered when we would get to this.”
The two of them sat face-to-face across a scarred wooden table. They had their own barrack now, a narrow wooden building with bunks in the back, a large room devoted to weapons and gear on the side, and out front, the “ready room”—a small space with a cast-iron stove, five chairs, and a large wooden table around which the whole Wing could gather to sort equipment, study maps, or plan for the next mission. It wasn’t glamorous, but after the cavernous cadets’ barracks, it felt private and secure. Would feel even better, Valyn thought bleakly, if I shared it with anyone I trusted.
The other three members of his Wing were off at the mess hall, but Valyn had asked Talal to stay behind.
“I’m the commander of this Wing,” he began, careful to douse the heat in his voice. “I choose strategy and tactics based on our assets and liabilities. I’ve respected your privacy so far, but it’s killing us out there.”
For the first couple of days, he’d hoped he would be able to ferret out the leach’s well with a little well-timed observation. It seemed like a straightforward problem: Look around whenever Talal used a kenning, make a list of possible wells, then narrow that list at every future kenning until there was only one possibility left. The problem was, Talal didn’t rely on his strange powers as much as Valyn had expected. Unlike a lot of leaches, he was more than proficient with a blade, better than anyone on the Wing except Valyn, in fact, and he seemed to prefer conventional tactics to more exotic solutions. Worse, even when he did use a kenning, there were just too many possible wells to narrow it down. Valyn might rule out firespike and blood one day, but that still left a legion of possibilities: sea, salt, stone, light, shade, iron … A clerk with a ledger and a year of study might manage it, but not Valyn, not while he was trying to keep his Wing from falling apart.
“If you want me to keep the secret from the rest of the group,” Valyn urged, “I can do that.”
Talal shook his head almost reluctantly. “I can tell you before the mission whether I’ll have access to my well or not, can probably even tell you how strong it will be.”
“Not good enough,” Valyn snapped. “I need backup plans, contingencies. I need all the knowledge we’ve got in order to improvise on the fly.” And I need to know if you took down Manker’s, he thought grimly. I need to know if you killed Amie and Ha Lin. There was still nothing linking the destruction of the alehouse with the deaths of the two women, nothing but the timing of Amie’s murder, but Valyn hadn’t abandoned the suspicion that it was all part of a larger, more intricate plot.
“I’m not sure you realize what you’re asking for,” Talal said quietly.
“Information,” Valyn said, spreading his hands. “That’s all. Just information.”
Talal shook his head once more. “You don’t understand.”
“Enlighten me.”
The leach took a deep breath. “I grew up with the same fear of leaches that anyone felt. My uncle used to come over and frighten us with stories of the Atmani—bloodcurdling stuff. My father once walked three days just to see a leach hanged. He returned home with a smile on his face.” Talal’s eyes went distant as he spoke. “We—my brothers and I—were so angry we hadn’t been allowed to go. We begged for all the details. Did he have a forked tongue? Did he cry blood? Did he piss himself when he died?
“A week later, I had my first delving.” The leach’s eyes were far away, his face blank as he continued. “I was working late in my father’s shop. I’d mismeasured a tenon, ruined a whole evening’s worth of effort. I was cursing the thing, cursing myself, cursing the chair, when suddenly, the chairback shattered. At first I was busy just picking the splinters out of my flesh. Then I realized what had happened. What it meant.
“No one had seen it—if they had, I’d have been hanged or burned or stoned in the street before the sun rose—but I still felt the guilt, the disgust. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t tried to use it. I knew the stories. When you had a well, it came to possess you, to twist you. It unmade everything good inside you until you would stop at nothing to bend the world to your will.”
He paused, gazing at his palm as though searching for something written there, some explanation scrawled in the lines of his flesh. “I found a rope in the barn, tied a careful noose, pulled it tight around my neck, and stepped off the back of the wagon.”
He stopped, and raised his eyes to the bruised sunset beyond the grimy window.
“And?” Valyn asked, drawn in to the story in spite of himself.
Talal shrugged. “My father found me. Cut me down. He never did know why I’d done it. A couple men from the Eyrie came three weeks later.”
“How’d they know?”
“They’ve had time to learn what to look for,” Talal replied. “Unexpected outbursts, children gone missing in safe towns, suicides that don’t make sense.” He fixed Valyn with a level gaze. “I wasn’t unusual. No one wants to learn that they’re an abomination.”
“Your family?” Valyn asked cautiously.
“They think I’m just a soldier. It’s a lie, but it makes them proud.”