The Last Mortal Bond

22

Kaden studied the tall man standing at the stone altar, the man who was not just a man, but a god clothed in mortal bone and muscle. Long Fist may have taken a different name here, in the steaming jungle north of the Waist, where the men and women knew him as Diem Hra, but there was no changing his skin, milk-pale beneath the web of scars, no changing the blond hair that spilled past his shoulders. The flesh Meshkent had chosen for himself could not have been further removed from the bodies of the jungle tribesmen, all of whom were short and compact, their skin and hair universally dark. Long Fist towered above them all-he must have been a full head higher than Kaden himself-a god in the form of a blue-eyed monster come to offer his bloody sacrifice.

“Diem Hra,” Kaden murmured to the Ishien guard at his side. “What does it mean?”

“Red Laughter,” the man replied, then chuckled his own insane cackle. “It’s a small local snake. The rattle sounds like a child’s laughter.”

Kaden was still amazed that the Ishien hadn’t simply slaughtered him the moment he emerged from the kenta. He had stepped through from the stone chamber inside Annur’s old Shin chapterhouse-a chamber he’d had guarded since returning to Annur-into warm salt air, the skirling of seabirds, and the surprised cries of armed men. The low sun seared his eyes, hot and bright, blotting out all but the vaguest shapes. He could barely see the forms of soldiers, dark and featureless as shadows, closing around him. A sharp point-either a spear or a sword-pressed against his back. Then there was another at his chest. He considered the pain from inside the vaniate, studied the jagged red shape of it, then set it aside. The pain was irrelevant. They hadn’t killed him; that was what mattered. For a moment, he could not remember why.

He’d expected to have to convince them to bring him to Meshkent-Bloody Horm to the Ishien, yet another identity, another mask, another set of syllables that failed to name the god-but no convincing proved necessary. Meshkent had anticipated the possibility of Kaden’s return. Or, if not Kaden’s, someone’s. The man had left orders to have anyone passing through the kenta brought immediately before him, and so, before he’d uttered two dozen words, Kaden found himself stuffed into a cloak with a hood deep enough to hide his face, his eyes, then bustled through another gate, off of the remote island and into the glistening, sodden green of the jungle.

The kenta stood just a few paces from a small waterfall, in a glade where the stream pooled momentarily before meandering away. Wide-leafed trees ringed the small clearing, their slender branches drooping beneath the weight of hundreds of flowers-red, and yellow, and orange-bright as any imperial finery and wide as his hand. A dense tangle of vines knitted the trunks and branches together, but beyond that verdant wall, Kaden could hear the buzzing of a million flies and the screeching of sharp-tongued birds. And then there was the heat, the thick air like a steaming broth in his lungs each time he inhaled.

“Where are we?” he asked, turning to one of his captors.

The Ishien grunted, then shrugged. “The Waist. Just north of it.”

Kaden nodded. It was what he’d expected, what he and Kiel had guessed. Meshkent was using the Ishien gates to move all over the frontier, fomenting rebellion and war. Sometimes it seemed that all Annur was on fire, but the Waist had been blazing particularly brightly. It was no surprise to find Meshkent here, heaping more fuel on the conflagration.

“Where is he?” Kaden asked.

This time, instead of replying, the Ishien just shoved him forward, toward a small break in the trees and the shifting shadow of the jungle beyond. They walked for half the morning, following a network of streambeds and game trails down the side of a low mountain, deeper into the forest. The Ishien held to their silence as though it were a shield, and after two or three unanswered questions, Kaden, too, fell silent. It was tempting to remain in the vaniate, but Kiel’s warning came back to him-Your mind was not built for it-and after a while he let the trance lapse. From what he could make of the light sifting down through the branches above, the sun stood almost directly overhead when he first made out the rumbling of drums, then, almost quiet as the flies, at first, the drone and hum of human voices chanting.

At last, they emerged from the trees into a huge clearing packed with men and women and children, hundreds of them, thousands, chests naked in the southern heat, skin glistening, bows, and spears, and stranger weapons Kaden didn’t recognize clutched in their hands. Most were facing the center of the clearing, staring at a low ziggurat of pale stone. A few turned as the Ishien pushed Kaden forward through the throng, but they drew back at the sight of the men, as though they recognized them. A low mutter went up through the nearest, a quick patter of words in a tongue Kaden didn’t understand. The majority, however, didn’t even notice the new arrival.

Their attention was fixed on the ziggurat, and the pale man who stood atop it, high enough that even those at the very back of the throng had a clear view, low enough that everyone could make out the ritual about to unfold.

“Long Fist,” Kaden said quietly, the name too quiet for even the Ishien flanking him to hear.

There was a limestone slab before the shaman, raised to waist level on four columns carved in the shapes of bound men and women. The stone faces wore different features, but each was distended, teeth bared, lips howling in private agony.

“How long has he been doing this?” Kaden asked. “Coming here?”

One of the Ishien guards-neither man had bothered to supply his name, but this was the one who occasionally responded to Kaden’s questions-glanced over at him. “A long time.”

“They’re not surprised,” Kaden asked, gesturing to the assembled throng, then to Long Fist atop the dais, “that he doesn’t look like them?”

The man shook his head, his reluctance to speak giving way to the obvious awe in which he held his commander. “He turns this to his strength. They believe him to be singular. A prophet.”

It was hardly subtle-a god posing as his own prophet-but Long Fist appeared to have won over the jungle tribes just as fully as he had the Urghul.

“How does he do it?” Kaden asked, shaking his head.

The Ishien snorted. “Bloody Horm was not given his Hannan name yesterday. This is his strength. He lives among a people, rising to a place of honor among them, a position from which he can hunt our foes.” There was reverence in the Ishien’s voice. He gestured toward his commander. “It is a great honor here to wield those snakes.”

Kaden studied the snakes in question. One was a bright yellow, the other striped black and violet, each as long as his arm and writhing in Long Fist’s grip. The shaman held one in each hand, fingers clamped just behind the heads, ignoring the bodies of the creatures as they coiled and uncoiled around his scarred, muscled arms.

“You’ve seen this before?” Kaden asked.

The Ishien nodded. “Once.”

Before Kaden could respond, Hra raised the snakes above his head. The mass of men and women let up a great, ecstatic scream, all in unison, then fell suddenly, perfectly silent. Kaden could hear the cries of the jungle birds, high and accusatory, the croaking of a thousand bright-tongued frogs, the sweep and rustle of hot wind through the vines. Then the mob parted, men and women shifting aside to form a narrow avenue of sweaty flesh. After a few heartbeats, a prisoner, hands bound behind him, lurched forward on bare, unsteady feet. His shirt had been torn away, but Kaden recognized the filthy legion-issue breeches, the sloppy tattoo of the rising sun high on his right shoulder.

“Annurian,” Kaden said.

His guard nodded. “These people won a battle against your republic.” If an Annurian defeat mattered to the Ishien at all, Kaden couldn’t hear it in his voice. “This is their offering of thanks.”

The legionary approached the ziggurat, stumbling numbly on the uneven ground, then began climbing toward the stone slab and the man behind it. He moved slowly, as though something were already broken inside him, but he moved.

“Why doesn’t he run?” Kaden asked, trying to make sense of the scene. “Why doesn’t he struggle?”

The Ishien pointed with grim satisfaction to the thousands of men and women surrounding the altar, each with a bow or poisoned spear. They had fallen eerily silent, but each looked ready to rend the Annurian’s flesh with their sharpened teeth.

“Why? He dies either way.”

That seemed clear enough, and after a moment Kaden turned his attention back to the altar. The legionary stood on unsteady legs, staring out over the crowded clearing. The gathered thousands had gone perfectly still, as though paralyzed by their own anticipation. The soldier looked over the faces blankly, bleakly, searching from one to the next as though for someone he knew. His eyes widened when they fixed on the Ishien. Both men shared the soldier’s complexion, a brown paler than the surrounding faces, and the man must have taken them for Annurians, perhaps even legionaries. For the first time, something like life seemed to flood his limbs. He opened his mouth to call out, to scream for help or cry his defiance.

Before the sound could twist free of his throat, however, the first snake-silent, quicker than vision-struck. The soldier’s eyes went wide. His back arched. A sound like a strangled scream made it halfway out of his mouth, then withered on the hot air. Suddenly, awfully rigid, he toppled back onto the slab, where Long Fist laid him down.

“Paralytic,” the Ishien announced.

Kaden nodded slowly, watching the man’s fingers curl in skeletal claws. “And the second snake?”

Somewhere in the jungle behind them, a mortal creature cried out in terror, screamed its last, then fell silent. The Ishien’s smile was like a rusted knife.

“Pain,” he replied.

* * *

There was a monotony, Kaden had decided by the time the sun finally set, when the soldier’s spent body was finally carved into parts and laid about the edges of the altar, to horror. Something ultimately pedestrian in the strangled protests clawing their way up from the soldier’s frozen gut. The stomach could only twist so much at the sight of blood welling from the mouth and ears. The mind could only recoil so far.

When Kaden finally sat inside the hide tent, staring across the dwindling fire at the man who had done the hurting, the cutting, the man with all the names-Long Fist, Bloody Horm, Diem Hra, Meshkent, the man who was not a man at all-and when the tall man smiled at him, nodded, and asked, “How did you find our offering?” Kaden found himself answering without thinking.

“I found it boring.”

Foolish words, perhaps, with which to address the Lord of Pain, but the tall man just watched him through the smoke, took a sip from his steaming wooden cup, then nodded. “In pain, as in all things, there is an art. I would not expect you to understand it any more than I would expect the tribesmen outside this tent to appreciate the polyphonic choral music of the Manjari.”

Kaden blinked. Any mention of music seemed incongruous after the recent blood and brutality, and Long Fist’s ease, the casual urbanity with which he discussed the famous Manjari choruses-it wasn’t what Kaden had expected from someone who wielded poisonous snakes in his fists. Another reminder, as if he needed another, of an old Shin truth-expectation was the midwife of error.

“Where is the art,” he asked quietly, “in a paralyzed prisoner bleeding out through his ears?”

His own question surprised Kaden even as he gave it voice. He had come through the kenta, had risked his life with both the Ishien and the tribes of the Waist, in order to warn the shaman about Ran il Tornja, not to argue the aesthetic merits of pain. And yet it seemed crucial, suddenly, to distance himself from the slaughter, from the savagery of the women and men just outside. This, after all, was the one figure responsible for setting fire to Annur, for kindling war on every front, for ordering the Urghul south and the tribes north, for ushering in the slaughter of thousands, maybe millions when the violence was finally finished. It seemed important to be clear on one central point: Kaden had come to warn the priest, not to follow him. Not to join him.

“Where is the art,” he continued, “in peeling the skin off a man’s body, one strip at a time?”

Long Fist-Kaden still gave him that name in his head-just smiled, as though the question were at once familiar and disappointingly dull.

“Where is the art,” he replied, “in blowing air through a hollow reed? In smearing ink on a page? Reduce anything to its elements and the art…” He blew the pipe smoke slowly between pursed lips, watching it eddy in the hot air, then break apart. “It vanishes.”

“No,” Kaden said, shaking his head. “Music and painting are not like this. What you accomplish is just blood and suffering.”

“There are more shades to the suffering of men than there are colors in the forest. I can draw more notes from a woman bound than a harpist can from her crude arrangement of wood and string.” He gestured, a mere flick of the fingers that made something deep in Kaden’s gut recoil. “There is no instrument like man, no musical counterpoint like the play of terror and hope, the bafflement and aching clarity that you can draw from his distended flesh.” The shaman’s voice was lower and slower than it had been. Reverential. Incantatory. “This is art. This is true beauty.”

Kaden stared. A part of his mind moved, a part he thought he had long since tamed, something sluggish but powerful as a winter bear prodded from its slumber. The Shin had taught him to put away his terror, but here, in the tent’s low firelight, seated across from the god, Kaden felt that terror stirring once more.

“I know who you are,” he said, his own voice so low he wasn’t certain that he’d spoken.

Long Fist just smiled. “Of course you do.”

“And I know what you want.”

“No,” the priest replied. “You do not. You understand the edges, perhaps. You see the faintest outline, but the beating heart of it all-you are far from holding that in your fist.”

“You want Annur destroyed.”

“Annur.” Long Fist nodded. “It is a perversion.”

Something about the tent-maybe the sweet smoke, the heat, the closeness of the air-made Kaden’s head swim. The shaman spoke flawless Annurian, but the words seemed new and strange on his tongue, the collected syllables threatening to dissipate like steam above a boiling kettle, to decohere, their meaning lost in the silty air.

Long Fist continued to sit as he had been sitting all along-cross-legged, one hand in his lap, the other holding the bone pipe-but he seemed larger somehow, or smaller, like a massive statue seen from a great distance. Though Kaden himself was also sitting, he felt suddenly that he might pitch forward into the fire, that the earth beneath him were shifting, lifting up, shoveling him toward the flames. The feeling was so intense that he nearly reached out a hand to arrest his nonexistent slide. With great effort he dragged his gaze from the glaciated blue of Long Fist’s eyes to the fire’s vermillion. When the sight of the fire had burned away his mind’s smoke, he slid into the vaniate.

Inside the trance, the dislocation vanished. The smoke remained, but it was only smoke. He was still sweating in that dense, wet heat, but the sweat meant nothing. It slid down his skin, but his skin, too, meant nothing. The body he had worn for so many years-it was a feeble thing compared to this great roofless emptiness. He watched the flame for a few heartbeats. There was a stillness in that ever-shifting blaze, a stillness he recognized. When Kaden finally raised his eyes, Long Fist’s pipe froze halfway to his pursed lips. For the first time he looked surprised.

“You remind me of your father,” he said finally. “I did not expect this of one so young.”

“What did you know of my father?”

The shaman spread his hands. “We met. Several times. Like you, the flesh weighed less heavily upon him than it does on the rest of your kind.”

“Where did you meet?” Kaden asked. “Why?”

“On the hub where the gates converge. And why? This is a question with many answers. He wanted peace with the Urghul-”

“And you wanted to destroy Annur.”

Long Fist took a long pull on the pipe, held the smoke in his lungs, then watched Kaden as he blew it out.

“It is difficult to hear a thing when your ears are filled with your own words.”

“They are hardly my words,” Kaden replied. “You said as much moments ago. Annur is a perversion. If you met my father privately, all alone on that island, why didn’t you simply kill him?”

The shaman frowned. “Would he have been so easy to kill, Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian?”

Kaden hesitated. The truth was that he had no idea how hard his father had been to kill. Ran il Tornja had managed it, but then, il Tornja was Csestriim. Instead of responding, he shifted the conversation, tried to move it toward his original purpose.

“You took a risk in coming here, to take mortal form in this world.”

Abruptly, unexpectedly, Long Fist smiled, revealing his canines, filed to white points. “You believe that this-” He raised a hand into the flickering light, studied the palm a moment, then passed it back and forth through the fire, fast enough that it didn’t burn. “-is what I am?” His laugh, when it came, sounded like the purring of a massive cat, relaxed and predatory all at once. “Imagine, Kaden, that you are an ant. Your world,” he went on, gesturing to the tent walls and beyond, as though offering up the jungle, offering up all of Eridroa and more, “is a scrap of grass. Your monuments are hills of sand, tamped down by a heavy rain. One day you are crushed beneath a ragged fingernail. As your mind darkens, you marvel at the strength of that nail. The speed. The way it came straight down from a clear sky. If you survive, you will worship it for the rest of your days, but what is a fingernail?”

The shaman’s own nails were long and polished a deep arterial red. He set down his pipe, fanned his fingers, and contemplated those nails a moment. Then, with a quick, precise movement, ripped one clear of the finger. Blood welled in the recessed flesh. Long Fist ignored it. He held the polished nail up to the light, then tossed it into the fire. It was hard to be sure, but Kaden thought he could smell it burning, a dark, acrid scent woven into the sick-sweet smoke of the honey briar.

“You are not your fingernail,” Long Fist said, “and I am not this body.” He dragged that bloody finger over his chest, leaving trails of red over the pale scar, like a quick, hasty text brushed over another script, the older one more precise, inscribed in the skin itself. “This body is just the point where I intersect with your world.”

“Then why did you take it?”

Again, he smiled. “Sometimes it is necessary to put a fingernail on the back of an ant.”

Kaden wondered briefly how those words would have sounded to someone outside the vaniate. Unsettling, at the very least. Frightening. In the great blank, however, the emotions tied to those words had no meaning.

Years ago, during a severe winter penance, Kaden had sat naked in the snow outside Ashk’lan for the better part of a morning. When he was finally allowed back inside the refectory, stiff, dumb, and clumsy from the cold, he tried to cut a hunk of mutton from the shank, and ended up slicing open his palm instead. He could still remember staring at the wound, watching the bright blood flow, but feeling nothing from the cold-numbed hand. The limb may as well have belonged to someone else, and in the end it was someone else-Akiil, Kaden thought-who cursed, then wrapped it in clean cloth.

Long Fist’s words were every bit as sharp as that knife, sharp enough to hack with, to hurt with, but the vaniate was far colder than Ashk’lan’s snow, and whatever part of him the shaman hoped to harm had gone utterly, perfectly numb.

“If you wanted Annur dead,” Kaden said, “if you wanted to crush it, then why didn’t you kill my father when you had the chance?”

“Your father was not Annur. Not any more than you are. Than your sister is.”

Kaden’s own voice, when he finally spoke, sounded far off. “Ran il Tornja.”

Long Fist nodded. “Your war chief is more than a war chief.”

“He is Csestriim,” Kaden said, the words he had rehearsed so many times, the explanation he had risked his life and traveled the length of a continent to deliver just tumbling out, almost unexpectedly, as though the words had just willed themselves into being. “Ran il Tornja is Csestriim, and his only goal is to destroy you.”

Kaden wasn’t sure what he had expected. Not laughter, certainly, but Long Fist laughed then, loud and long.

“Csestriim.” He shook his head as memory slowly replaced the mirth. “I miss the arrogance of those creatures. It is almost a pity that your kind exterminated them.” The shaman took a long drag on his pipe, eyes distant, as though watching something far away, or very far in the past.

“We didn’t kill them all,” Kaden said. “And il Tornja hopes to reverse the damage, to replace us with his kind again.”

“Damage?” Long Fist said, pursing his lips. “Damage? No.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “You men have only your fly-brief lives, but those lives are rich. The Csestriim-” He held thumb and forefinger together, lifted them into the air as though he held a diminutive figure between them, examining it before tossing it into the fire. “-the Csestriim were durable as stone, but there was no music to them. Ciena and I, we would strike them and strum them, drag our fingers over their flesh, and for what? A few dull thuds. Rarely, every hundred years or so, a single spark. Nothing more.

“You, though,” Long Fist continued, gesturing to Kaden. “Humans. You are fragile as old harps. Always out of tune. Warped by the slightest change in the weather. A child could break you.” He smiled, revealing those sharpened teeth again. “But the music…”

“I did not come here to talk about music,” Kaden said. “I came here to warn you that-”

The shaman cut him off with a raised hand. “Let it go.”

Kaden shook his head. “The warning?”

“Not the warning. That deadness you wear around you like a cloak.”

“The vaniate,” Kaden realized.

Long Fist narrowed his eyes. “It is an ugly thing. An insult to what you are. To what you could be.”

Kaden watched the tall figure seated across the fire. Inside the trance, he felt no fear of the god. No awe. He could remember, though, the sudden vertigo that had struck him when he first entered the tent, when Meshkent first spoke to him through the mouth of the Urghul chieftain. He remembered it-the dislocation, the sense of standing at the edge of some vast chasm as the earth tipped up beneath him-but the memory meant nothing.

“I am not your instrument,” he said quietly.

Long Fist shook his head in disgust. “Not while you befoul yourself like this.”

“There is nothing foul in the vaniate,” Kaden replied. “It is freedom.”

“Freedom?” The shaman shook his head. “And from what, do you imagine, are you freeing yourself?”

“From you,” Kaden said. “From your touch. Your taint.”

“You poor, stick-legged creature. What do you think you are for?”

A new log had caught, and the fire flared between them. Kaden found himself watching the other man through a veil of flame. It was hard to make out his features in the shifting light, but he looked less like a man. Or rather, he was still a man, but one made of planes and surfaces, as though the flesh catching the light were just a reflection of something impossibly larger. This is the sun, the Shin had told him many years ago, pointing to the bright circle reflected in the still surface of Umber’s Pool, and it is not the sun.

“For?” Kaden asked, trying to place the word, to find some context for his own response.

“You belong to me, and to Ciena, and to our children. We made you, shaped you from the numb flesh of the Csestriim. Where they were bare, unwavering precision, we gave you resonance, and range, and timbre. You are a thing of beauty, Kaden, like one of these fine jungle drums, but you have defiled the wooden frame, smeared mud over the hide, sliced through the cords that should have held you tight, that let you vibrate to my touch.” The face behind the flame grimaced. “It is an insult.”

“I did not come here to insult you-”

“To yourself,” the shaman said, cutting him off. Then he smiled. “Fortunately for you, it is an insult I can unmake.” He raised a hand above the fire, placed the tip of his middle finger against the pad of his thumb, then snapped.

Kaden had felt the vaniate shatter before-when he stepped through the kenta into the frigid water of the Dead Heart, when the stone falling from the collapsing ceiling of the Dawn Palace smashed into his back, knocking him to the floor. The feeling was always disorienting, but it was nothing like this.

Instead of the silent bursting of the bubble he remembered, the snap of Long Fist’s fingers ripped him, ripped him in a way that felt physical, from inside the vaniate. Suddenly, his own emotions, heavy as stone and studded with steel, pressed in from all around. He struggled to draw breath, closed his eyes, found the darkness thick and unbreathable as pitch, opened his eyes once more, found the shaman’s unwavering gaze, and finally managed a ragged gasp.

It hurt. As though he were a fish hauled from the cool, weightless water into an air that burned like fire. Whatever he had learned among the Shin, it abandoned him. He could feel his mouth moving, gibbering with fear, could feel, buried deep inside him, the warm sweet hope that it would end, that the god would let him go. Briefly there was a hard cord of hope holding him up. Then Long Fist smiled more widely. The cord snapped.

“This is what you are,” the shaman whispered. “This is what you are for.”

“And if Ran il Tornja destroys you?” Kaden managed from between clenched teeth.

Long Fist waved a hand, brushing aside both the smoke and the warning. “He can no more destroy me than he can stab a star in the night sky.”

“He can kill this body,” Kaden ground out, hoping desperately that he was right, that he was making sense, that he understood the situation. The weight of his own emotion, ocean-heavy and pressing down, threatened to crush him, to annihilate the last walls of thought. “Destroy your hand on this world. How will you play your instruments then?”

The shaman watched him with narrowed eyes. “How do you know this?”

“Il Tornja knows who you are. He knows you are here and he is hunting you.”

“It does not matter. He is no threat to me, not even in this diminished skin I wear to walk the ways of your world.”

Kaden felt his mind might break beneath the strain. “What about Ciena?” he croaked. “She is here, too.”

Long Fist went suddenly, perfectly still, his face bright with reflected fire, blue eyes unmelting in the heat. Kaden wondered if he’d actually spoken aloud, or if he’d only managed to think his final warning. He had no idea what the god was doing to him, no idea how to fight it, and then, suddenly, it was over. The crushing weight was gone. The fire was just the fire. The face of the shaman was just a human face, hard and intent, all signs of mirth or levity vanished.

“What did you say about my consort?”

“She is here,” Kaden said. He was panting. Sweat poured in great sheets down his chest and back. His mind was his own once more, but it felt light, untethered from himself or the world. The heat in the tent, unbearable a moment before, was gone. Or it was not gone, but he no longer felt it. Or he felt it, but it didn’t feel like heat. “She is here,” he managed once more.

Long Fist’s eyes bored into him. “Why do you believe this?”

“Because I was with her,” Kaden replied warily. “With the girl whose mind she tried to inhabit.”

“Tried?” The shaman leaned on the word as though it were a pry bar.

Kaden nodded. “It didn’t work. I don’t know why. She … the goddess … tried to do with Triste what you did with…” He trailed off, gesturing at the flesh of the man who was no longer a man seated before him.

Long Fist shook his head. “This cannot be so.”

“I saw her kill a man with a kiss-the man you left in charge of the Ishien.”

The shaman’s eyes narrowed. “Ekhard Matol. I was told that he lost his hold on the emptiness. That he tried to pass through the gates unprepared.”

“He was unprepared because Triste-Ciena in that moment-stripped him of his emptiness. I watched her do it. It took her just a moment, a kiss.…”

“Bliss,” Long Fist mused. “It is powerful as pain.” He fell silent for a long time, staring into the flame. “This would be Ciena’s way,” he conceded finally.

“I spoke to her,” Kaden said. “She is the one who told me you were here, on this earth. She said you were power-mad. That you were drunk on your own ambition. That it made you stupid and vulnerable.”

The shaman laughed a long, rich laugh. “This, too, has the timbre of her voice.” Then he sobered, shook his head slowly, eyes never leaving Kaden’s. “And yet if I believe your tale, she is the one who lost control of her chosen flesh. If I believe this tale. If you spoke to her, then she is here, and this child-Triste-is gone.”

“No,” Kaden replied grimly. “Triste is very much alive; she is a broken woman, but your goddess was not the one to break her. I’ve seen Ciena only in crucial moments, situations of life and death, and then only glimpses. When Triste put a knife into her own belly-”

“The fool,” Long Fist growled. “I spent decades preparing the earth, and she tries to follow me on a whim.”

“I think she followed you to warn you.”

“And instead, she ends up putting herself at risk.” He bared his teeth. “The obviate. The girl must do it.”

Kaden shook his head slowly. The balance in the conversation had shifted suddenly, powerfully. For the first time since entering the tent, Long Fist seemed unsettled, even agitated. Kaden had imagined the god would be something like the Csestriim writ large-passionless and rational, brilliant beyond human imagining. For the first time, he realized the error of that conception.

Meshkent was not Csestriim. He despised the Csestriim. Kaden had considered il Tornja’s intellect and Kiel’s to be godlike, but they were nothing like the gods, at least not like these gods. Why had he supposed that Meshkent and Ciena, the progenitors of all passion, would eschew that passion, that they would be untouched by the forces of which they themselves were the font? Long Fist was surprised, surprised and angry. Clearly Kaden’s revelation had caught him like a fist to the chin.

“She won’t,” Kaden replied.

The man studied him through the smoke. “Does she understand what is at stake?”

Kaden nodded. “She doesn’t care. Triste didn’t ask to have a goddess lodged in her mind. She didn’t want it. And she has suffered because of it.”

“Suffered?” the shaman demanded, shaking his head. “She doesn’t understand the first thing about suffering. None of you do. If this child is killed with Ciena inside, if Ciena’s touch is severed from your world, then you will understand suffering.”

“Triste won’t,” Kaden said. “She will be dead.” He considered his next words carefully. “Can the obviate be performed without her consent?”

“No,” Long Fist replied, the syllable like the tolling of some funerary drum. “The obviate is not just a killing, not even a self-killing. It is…” he frowned, “a voyage. If the girl does not cast off the moorings, the ship of my consort’s soul … it will remain tethered to the shore as the dock burns.”

He grimaced, eyes distant, watching some possible future that only he could see as the flames played across the pale skin of his face.

“The work I do here will wait,” he concluded finally. “I must see this girl. Must speak with her.”

“She is imprisoned.”

“Take me to the prison.”

Kaden hesitated, wondering how far he could press the shaman. “Stop the war,” he said finally. “Stop the Urghul, and I will take you to her.”

Long Fist watched him. “You dare to haggle with me?”

“You’re attacking Annur,” Kaden said. “Killing thousands. Tens of thousands. I want you to stop.”

“And if I will not?”

“Then Triste stays where she is. The goddess remains trapped. Until someone kills her.”

Long Fist moved with all the speed of a striking adder. Since Kaden entered the tent, the man had remained still, seated. The violence he had plied earlier was a violence of the mind. Now, however, as he uncoiled, Kaden had time to think a single thought-impossible, it was not possible that any human should move so fast-and then Long Fist was through the fire and on top of him, those long, elegant fingers with the painted nails closing around his throat, slamming him back against the damp dirt.

“You would trade Ciena as though she were some Urghul horse?” he demanded, the last word a hiss.

Kaden tried to respond, to shake his head, but that hand might have been cast from iron.

“You would barter her welfare like one of your copper coins?” The grip tightened until Kaden felt he was breathing through a thin reed, the hot, sweet air too little for his heaving lungs.

“I will tell you three truths,” the shaman went on, “and I will shape them to your words so you can comprehend. First, the fact I wear this skin means nothing. That Ciena has robed herself in the flesh of some rebellious slattern means nothing. We are not what you are. We are so much more that your mind would break beneath the sight.”

Darkness hemmed Kaden’s vision. The light in the tent might have been failing, and fast, only he could still feel the fire, hot against his right flank. He harnessed his heart, slowed it, parceled out his breathless blood, focused only on the moment.

“Next, Ciena will not die with this child, but you will. All of you. Your minds were built for our fingers. Without them, you will wither or go mad. Her death or mine, either one, will mark the end of your race.”

He leaned so close Kaden could feel his breathing, smell the sweet root tea thick on the breath. Those blue eyes, sky-deep and ocean-cold, were suddenly the whole world, a universe awhirl with brutal blue, a blue so hot it burned, it seared. How had people not known the truth? Kaden’s air-starved brain offered up that single thought over and over and over. How had anyone ever believed those eyes were human?

“Do you understand?” Long Fist demanded.

The hand relaxed fractionally, enough for Kaden to gasp a half breath, to nod. And just as quickly as he had struck, the shaman released his grip.

Kaden’s body wanted to scramble backward, to claw through the walls of the tent, to get out and away. He forced himself to stillness. When he thought he could talk without gagging, he locked eyes with the Urghul.

“And the third truth you hoped to tell me?”

Long Fist watched him, his eyes human once more, or almost human.

“There is no calling it back,” he said finally.

Kaden shook his head, his mind cloudy with the attack. “Calling back what?”

“This war,” the shaman replied, nodding to the doors of the tent. “For decades, I have kindled fires beyond your border and inside it. Now they are beyond me.”

“You are a god.”

“There are older gods than I. Stronger gods. I took this flesh to set a single finger on the scales, to tip the delicate balance from order to chaos. That chaos stalks your empire now. It is beyond the grasp of any single man, so let us have no more talk of calling it back.”

As Kaden dragged the jungle air into his lungs, breath after desperate breath, he tried to think. The leverage he’d so trusted had proven treacherous, illusory. Trying to move Meshkent with the truth about Triste was like trying to pry a great stone from the dirt with a branch of rotten pine. Maybe there was another way, something else he could do or say to regain purchase in the conversation. If so, he had no idea what it was, no idea how to twist the shaman to his will. No idea if it would matter if he could. He had spent enough time kindling fires, watching them burn, to recognize an immutable truth in the god’s words. Maybe Kiel would have found a way, or il Tornja, but for all his skill with the vaniate, Kaden was not Kiel or il Tornja.

“All right,” he said. The words were part plea, part confession.

“How will you make all right?”

“I’ll get you into the Dawn Palace. I can probably even get you to Triste.…” He trailed off, despair, sudden as a hot summer gust, blowing over him, through him. Since Meshkent had wrenched him from the vaniate his mind was as disordered as that of the rankest acolyte. “But you won’t be able to get her out. Even you. You have no idea what the dungeon of the Dawn Palace is like.”

Long Fist just smiled that predatory, feline smile. “And you have no idea of the power slumbering inside me.”