Khalifstork: переводы

→Gent Herren stepped forward first, shaking his massive head. “Hard luck,” he growled, extending a hand like a mallet. The huge cadet stood at least a foot taller than Valyn and had shoulders to match. He looked like a bear—curly brown hair on his arms and chest hiding the pale skin beneath—and generally seemed about as tame as one, although now his manner was subdued. “Your father ran a tight ship,” he went on, as though unsure quite what to say.

→The bird skimmed above the wide landing field just to the west of the harbor, and Valyn leapt from the talons. A small cluster of his peers waited at the edge of the field, some awkwardly fingering their belt knives, some openly studying him as he approached. Word traveled fast among the Kettral.

→After the Aedolian’s warning and the death of his father, the small archipelago looked different somehow, strange, treacherous, gravid with menace. One of the ships in the harbor might carry the men who had boarded the Aedolian vessel and slaughtered the crew. Someone in the barracks or mess hall, someone he had passed a thousand times in the training ring or labored beside in the storeroom, could be plotting to kill him. Those winding rocky trails offered too much seclusion, too many twists and turns where a man could disappear without anyone the wiser, and Kettral training afforded a thousand opportunities for “accidents”—botched drops, rigged munitions, sharp bits of steel just about everywhere you looked. In the space of a single morning, his home had become a trap.

→Qarsh was his home—not just the long, low barracks that he’d shared with twenty-five other cadets for the past eight years or the mess hall where he took his meals, exhausted and numb after a long day of training, but the whole island, from the rocky headlands to the winding waterways between the mangroves. It was familiar, even comforting, in a way the Dawn Palace had never been. The Islands were < his >. Until now.

→He could see most of the Qirins by now, the slender chain stretching across the waves like a necklace of islands. Qarsh, the largest of the group, lay just a little to the south, and Valyn could see the sandy beaches, dense stands of mangroves, dusty limestone bluffs, and the various buildings of Eyrie command—barracks, mess hall, training arenas, storehouses—as clearly as if they were lines inked on a map. A few ships, a merchant ketch and a couple of sloops by the look of them, lolled at anchor in the harbor, and almost directly beneath him, a sleek-hulled cutter sliced through the surf, making for the port.

→He shook his head to clear away the visions, opened his eyes, then checked over his belt knife, short blades, and buckle once more, running through the standard flight list over and over. Gwenna had continued watching him, he realized, and he stilled his hands, redirecting his attention to the land and sea inching by below.

→At sea level, it would be hot and humid already, the kind of day that plastered your shirt to your back and slicked your sword grip with sweat, but Laith was holding the bird a thousand paces up, where the sun warmed without scorching while the kettral’s enormous wingspan provided plenty of shade for Valyn, Gwenna, and the two other cadets strapped in and balancing on the huge talons. He tried closing his eyes, but it was no good. Visions of his father’s face filled his mind. Or was it Kaden’s? All he could see were those golden irises, flaming high, then quenched as blood rose in the sockets.

→< You ’Kent-kissing idiot >, he muttered to himself, yanking the leather tight, then nodding curtly to Gwenna. < No one’s going to need to kill you if you take care of it for them >. With an effort, he forced his apprehensions down. Whatever plots were afoot, he couldn’t foil them while dangling from his harness. There was nothing to do while strapped in to the bird but rest, and he tried to settle back into the rigging, to let his weary muscles slacken for a while, to find some of the calm he usually felt while soaring over the waves.

→Her lips were turned down in something that was either a scowl or a frown of commiseration—it was hard to tell with her. < Could she be part of it? > Valyn wondered. It seemed ludicrous to suppose a high-level conspiracy bent at overthrowing the most powerful family in the world would enlist a cadet who hadn’t even passed the Trial. Still, there was an intensity in Gwenna’s green eyes that was hard to comprehend. Valyn had no idea how long she had been watching him, but when he looked over she pointed to the buckle linking his harness to the bird’s thick, scaly leg. He glanced down and discovered to his alarm that he hadn’t clinched the safety properly. If the bird stooped hard, he could have been ripped right off the talons, tossed a thousand paces to his death on the waves below.

→Overhead, strapped in to the kettral’s back with an elaborate harness, Laith, the flier, banked the bird into a steep turn. Valyn looked over to see Gwenna watching him from her perch on the other talon, red hair swept around her head like flame. Of all the cadets, Gwenna was maybe the least plausible. She looked like a brewer’s daughter rather than an elite soldier—all freckles and pale skin given to sunburn, curly hair, and womanly curves that her standard-issue blacks did nothing to hide. She < looked > like a brewer’s daughter, but she had just about the worst temper on the Islands.

→< Holy Hull >, Valyn thought grimly. As frightening as he found the idea of hidden assassins hunting him over the Qirin Islands, Kaden’s situation was far worse. Kaden, not Valyn, had the golden eyes. Kaden, not Valyn, was heir to the throne, was < Emperor > now. And Kaden, not Valyn, was alone in some distant monastery, untrained, unguarded, and unwarned.

→Of course, Sanlitun hadn’t died of bad fucking luck. The Flea had said “treachery,” which meant that someone, probably a group of people, had conspired to betray and murder the Emperor. Which brought Valyn back to the Aedolian he had found in the ship’s hold only hours earlier. It didn’t take a spymaster or a military genius to see that the threat against Valyn’s life was tied to the murder of the Emperor himself. In fact, it looked very much as though a quiet coup was in process, a systematic elimination of the entire Malkeenian line. Sanlitun must have discovered it before his death, must have dispatched the ship full of Aedolians to rescue and protect his son, but the ship had come to grief, and Sanlitun’s knowledge had failed to save him. Someone wanted to eliminate the Malkeenian line, and terrifyingly, they were managing it. Someone would be coming for Valyn, and not just him, but for Kaden, too. Even Adare might be in danger—although as a woman, she couldn’t sit the Unhewn Throne. That simple fact, so galling to her as a child, may have saved her life. He hoped.

→< The ablest swordsman >, Hendran wrote, the consummate tactician, the peerless general: < All seem invulnerable until luck turns against them. Make no mistake—place a man in death’s way enough times, and his luck > will < turn >.

→He tested them again, as though he could feel their veracity in his throat, taste it on his tongue. The Aedolian Guard should have kept his father safe, but the Guard couldn’t be everywhere, couldn’t defend against every threat.

→< The Emperor is dead. >

→And so, as the Flea, Fane, and a dozen other Kettral winged their way northwest, over the slapping chop toward Annur, Valyn found himself, along with a handful of his fellow cadets, strapped into the talons of a different bird, this one flying south, back toward the Islands. It was nearly impossible to talk with the wind in his face and the great wingbeats of the creature buffeting him from above, and Valyn was grateful for the semblance of solitude. The Flea had come and gone so quickly, delivered his words with so little preamble, that Valyn still didn’t feel as though the import of those words had really hit home.

→“And you, O Light of the Empire,” the trainer had growled, poking Valyn roughly in the shoulder, “don’t think this means you’ll be getting some sort of holiday. People die all the time. Best to get that through your obdurate skull. If you’re going to have even a pathetic shot at surviving Hull’s Trial, I’d recommend giving your father an hour of thought tonight and then getting on with the training.”

→He wasn’t even sure how his father had died. “Some sort of treachery,” was all the Flea could, or would, tell him. It was the standard Kettral horseshit: the trainers insisted that their charges memorize everything about the empire from the price of wheat in Channary to the length of the Chief Priest’s cock, but when it came to ongoing operations—then you couldn’t < buy > a straight answer. Every now and again, one of the veterans would toss the cadets a scrap—a name, a location, a grisly detail—just enough to whet the appetite without satisfying it. “Mission security,” the Eyrie called it, although what security you needed on a ’Kent-kissing island with a captive population Valyn had no idea. He’d more or less made his peace with the policy, but this was his own father’s death, and his ignorance tore at him like a cruel thorn lodged beneath the skin. Did < treachery > mean poison? A knife in the back? An “accident” in the Dawn Palace? It seemed like being Sanlitun’s son should count for something, but on the Islands, Valyn was not the son of the Emperor; he was a cadet, like the rest of the cadets. He learned what they learned and no more. He had thought, after the Flea first delivered his news, that the Wing may have come to sweep him up, to deliver him back to Annur in preparation for the funeral. Before he could even ask the question, however, Adaman Fane’s voice cut through his confusion and horror.

→The words lodged in Valyn’s brain like a bone and even now, hours after the Flea had landed in a flurry of wind and wings, they gouged at him mercilessly. It seemed impossible, like hearing that the ocean had dried up, or the earth had split in two. Sanlitun’s death was a tragedy for the empire, of course—he had provided decades of steady, measured rule—but during most of the flight back to the Qirins, all Valyn could think about were the tiny, seemingly inconsequential memories: his father holding the bridle as his son learned to ride his first horse, his father winking during a tedious state dinner when he thought no one else was looking, his father sparring with his sons left-handed to give them the passing illusion of success. There would be a solemn ceremony on the Qirins, as elsewhere, to mourn the passing of the Emperor, but Valyn had no one else with whom to mourn the passing of the man.

→<The Emperor is dead.>