The Last Mortal Bond

35

Whatever reason the Csestriim had for building a kenta on the cracked, arid plain of the Dead Salts, that reason had been whittled to dust by the wind, or swallowed by the land. The sun, nailed high overhead in a cloudless sky, baked the soil until it was hard as stone. The few plants were stunted, spiky, nearly as brown as the earth itself, and widely spaced, as though anything growing too close would choke. There were signs of rain, Kaden realized with surprise-sharp drainages and spattered dirt crusted up around the base of the bleached-white rocks-but even those marks were sharp and harsh, carved, scored, scarred into the dirt by vanished water sharp as any knife.

The kenta itself stood at the bottom of a man-made trench. The gouging of shovel and pickax were clear in the baked clay flanking the gate, although the material of the kenta itself remained unscratched.

“The Ishien keep it clear?” Kaden asked.

Long Fist nodded, but ignored the gate. The shaman had climbed immediately clear of the hole. His eyes were fixed on the horizon to the northwest. The land stretched away, flat as an iron pan in all directions, but there, just at the limit of vision, the jagged tips of the Ancaz broke the horizon, bloodred against the cruel blue of the sky. Somewhere in that direction, in the evening shadow of the stony cliffs, there was an oasis, a palm-fringed patch of green amid all the brown, home to a few dozen herders and hunters. Triste’s destination, if Kaden had read the situation right. For the hundredth time he called to mind the saama’an of their final conversation.

I’d go somewhere, she’d said, clutching the bars of her cage, as far from your ’Kent-kissing palace as possible. There’s a place my mother used to talk about, a little village by an oasis in the shadow of the Ancaz Mountains, just at the edge of the Dead Salts. As far from the rest of the world as you can get, she used to say. I’d go there. That village. That’s where I’d go.…

There was no doubt about the words. He could hear them so clearly Triste might have been standing at his ear. He could see her face twist as she spoke. The question was one of interpretation. Did she truly want to find the oasis, to hide away there, or was it just an empty wish, a vaguely articulated longing for any desolate spot away from the prying of human eyes? If that was the case, the hunt was hopeless. She could be anywhere, walking the wide ways of the earth with the goddess lodged inside her, utterly unfindable, one highwayman’s knife from the destruction of all humanity.

“Why here?” the shaman asked, studying the sun-blasted land, a hand shading his eyes. His strange, pale skin would blister beneath that sun, but he paid it no mind, focusing instead on the distant mountains.

Kaden shook his head. “Not here.”

“The mountains,” Long Fist replied. “I understand. But why? What ties her to this place?”

“It’s empty,” Kaden replied. The answer was more complicated, but he wasn’t sure he had the words to fit the truth.

Long Fist shook his head. “The world is filled with empty places. In your greatest cities there are holes, openings, places no one goes.”

“Her mother was here once. I think she wants to see what her mother saw.”

The shaman frowned. “And this girl, does she always speak the truth? Is she incapable of deception?”

Kaden wished he had the answer to that question, and not just regarding Triste. Tan’s suspicions still rasped in his ears: They have played you, Kaden. They have played us all. Of course, he had managed to convince the older monk to suspend judgment, to play his part in the hunt until they could learn more. Tan himself was somewhere to the east now, leading all the Ishien who could pass the gates through a different kenta, one east of Mo’ir. Their hope was to pick up some sign of Triste’s passage, to follow her, or, barring that, to somehow intercept il Tornja.

Provided Triste was coming this way at all. Provided the kenarang had left his post in the north to hunt her. It was all guesswork, a mixture of beshra’an and desperation, but it was the best plan they’d been able to devise, and any plan was better than sitting in Annur or the Dead Heart, waiting for Ran il Tornja to finally spring shut his trap.

“Triste had no reason to lie,” Kaden said after a pause. “She couldn’t have known she would be free in a matter of weeks.”

The shaman spat onto the parched ground. “But once she was free, she would remember this conversation. She would go anywhere but here.”

“No,” Kaden said, studying his memory of the woman. “She was drugged. Half delirious. It was a trivial remark, almost inconsequential. Not the kind of thing she would remember.”

“It is a thin thread to follow,” the shaman said. “If it snaps, we will be far from what matters with no fast way to return.”

Kaden nodded, then turned to consider the kenta once more. They had crossed from the Dead Heart to that nameless island lost in the ocean to here, two or three days’ hard march east of the Ancaz, all in a few dozen paces. It was enough to make the mind quail. Kings would kill for the power. Emperors had. And it was not enough. This was the closest gate, and it put them at least a hundred miles from the oasis, provided they could find it at all.

“Is there no way,” Kaden asked, studying the arch, “for you to create another?”

Long Fist turned to him. “You do not understand what it is that you ask.”

“No. I don’t. But the Csestriim made them, and you are more than the Csestriim.”

“The Csestriim did not make these any more than they made the emptiness between the stars.”

Kaden shook his head. “Meaning … what? The kenta were always here?”

“The kenta are not like stones or steel,” Long Fist replied. “They are not things. Not a part of this world.”

The arch glinted, that silvery substance strangely dull in the blazing overhead light. Through it, beyond it, Kaden could see only the same cracked clay, half rock, half dirt.

“I don’t know what that means,” Kaden said.

“Your world,” the Urghul replied, “is like a wall. The Csestriim punched holes in it, but those holes are not the wall, and the Csestriim did not build what lies beyond.”

“And you cannot punch another hole?”

“It destroyed them,” Long Fist said, voice hard and flat as the surrounding waste. “All of them and utterly. I will not meddle more than necessary in the domain of the Nameless.”

There was a new note in the shaman’s voice, something Kaden could not parse, and after a moment, as though by some silent accord, they both turned away from the kenta toward the diminutive western peaks, toward the hope that somewhere there they would find a girl who was also a goddess, that she would be alive when they found her.

* * *

The urgency dug at them both like a sharp burr against tender skin, but they could only move so fast. Long Fist set a brutal pace, and Kaden was amazed by the betrayal of his own body. A year earlier he had run through the Bone Mountains, run for days in his desperate attempt to escape the Aedolians. A year of sitting, however, of spending each day debating in the council chamber rather than running the Circuit of Ravens, had left him with soft legs and lungs that labored in his chest. The shaman was impatient. They walked all day, then all night, making the most of the low, fat moon and the delicious cool, and then again all the next day, stopping only to eat the dried fruit and meat Kaden carried in a small pack over both shoulders. By the end of that second day, however, even the god was forced to submit to the weakness of his chosen flesh, and as the sun bled out into the west, they made a rough camp on the featureless plain.

The night was surprisingly cool, but there was nothing to burn, and so Kaden drank long and deep from his waterskin, settled the pack beneath his head, and leaned back. He’d spent harder nights in the Bone Mountains a hundred times over, and expected to fall asleep at once. Instead, his body, still for the first time since stepping out of the kenta, cooled, stiffened, then began to ache. The bands along the outsides of his legs were so tight that they felt like stone when he tried to knead the flesh with his fingers. He worked at the muscle for a while, then gave up, lying back, letting the pain wash over him, warm in the cold night.

Long Fist did not lie down. He sat cross-legged, staring northwest, hands folded in his lap. The posture was a familiar one. Kaden had spent half his life like that: sitting, chanting, painting, breathing his measured breaths. The Urghul chief was not chanting, however, not painting, and there was something in his posture, something Kaden couldn’t quite articulate, that seemed predatory rather than restful. His open eyes were bright, sharp in the starlight.

Kaden watched the other man, unease coiling and uncoiling like a restless snake twisting about his innards. Since the Waist, the calm he had mastered among the monks had proven elusive. Each time he reached for the vaniate, it was slippery in his fingers, almost ungraspable. Even inside the trance, he could feel his own fear and hope like vibrations pitched too low to hear. On the back of his tongue, like something overripe, almost rotten, he could taste his own desperation.

For the most part, the shaman had ignored him, striding over the broken ground with his eyes fixed on the horizon. Whenever Long Fist turned that gaze on Kaden, however, something quailed inside him. The vaniate offered an escape, but Kaden had not forgotten the ease with which the other man had shattered the trance, had little doubt that Long Fist could do it again if he chose, do it at will. Walking with the chieftain was like walking alone through the parched land beside a crag cat; Kaden’s body wanted to run, but there was no point. Nor was there any point to fighting. The best you could do was to keep quiet and hope to remain unnoticed, and so Kaden had remained quiet, had kept his eyes on the fissured ground, and turned his attention from the dozens of questions swarming like summer flies to the mindlessness of his own movement.

Now, however, there was no progress to distract either him or the shaman. Night leached color and contour from the land, reducing the brown of the flats and the red of the approaching mountains to planes of gray and black. The stars were bright with their silent violence, but irrelevant, meaningless, and after watching them for a long time, Kaden looked away. Long Fist was just a shape, a sharp-edged shadow chiseled from the surrounding dark. Kaden could not see his face. That absence made it easier to speak.

“Who was he?”

For a moment Long Fist did not respond. Then he slid a finger down the center of his chest, as though slicing open the flesh and the bone beneath.

“The creature who inhabited this body before me?”

Kaden nodded.

“It does not matter.”

“You could have chosen anyone?”

“Of course not,” the god replied. “Human minds are cramped, filthy. I could no more slide into them than you could inhabit a barrel filled with rocks.” His voice hardened. “Ciena was a fool to try to force herself inside the head of one so unprepared, so fat and swollen with her own self.”

Wind winnowed the stony ground as though it were grain, as though there were something there worth saving, something that could be saved.

“Unprepared?” Kaden asked.

This time Long Fist raised the finger to a point between his eyes. “It is possible for your kind to carve away a portion of what you are. Possible, but rare. It is into this emptiness that I stepped.”

Kaden blinked. “The vaniate.”

“A perversion,” Long Fist growled. “A mockery. The space I’m describing doesn’t come from your desiccated mantras and endless sitting.”

“Then what?”

“Devotion. Worship. Prayer and sacrifice. The most devout give away something of themselves. This creature, through the fervor of his faith in me, made of himself a vessel.”

Kaden studied the still form of the chieftain, then turned away to stare at the star-stabbed northern sky. The language was close to the language of the Shin-emptiness, space-but there was Long Fist’s talk of passion to consider, too.

“Triste,” Kaden said finally. “She was raised in Ciena’s temple. She was trained to serve.…”

“Not every woman who moves through the stations of prayer is a priestess,” Long Fist said. “If she had been devoted to her goddess, truly devoted, Ciena would not be trapped inside the polluted prison of her too-human mind.”

A falling star sliced a white scar across the night.

“How will it happen?” Kaden asked. “If il Tornja catches Triste, if he kills her, what will it feel like?”

The shaman didn’t respond, didn’t move. Kaden wondered for a moment if he’d actually spoken aloud, or only thought the question. When Long Fist finally spoke, he didn’t turn his head, as though his words were directed to the night and the horizon.

“The death of the goddess would fill past the brim the cup of your suffering.”

Kaden frowned. “Isn’t that what you want? You took this form to wage your wars against Annur, to spread your suffering across Vash and Eridroa both.”

“I took this form to reestablish a world that had lapsed.”

“A world of brutality and violence. A plague of suffering and slaughter.”

Long Fist shook his head slowly. “It is your empire that is the plague. It twists what you are. In the dry flesh of the Csestriim, we built something beautiful, Ciena and I. We made them into something better, freed from inside them the twin screams of bliss and misery. We offered them this gift.”

“Gift?” Kaden asked. “What gift?”

“A gift of the world. Like a man touching a woman through thick leather gloves, the Csestriim felt nothing. We removed the gloves. We made you feel the world as you moved through it and it moved through you. For thousands of years after the death of the Csestriim, humans were naked in the forests. You were beautiful and bloody as you moved over the plains. Then Annur took that away, forced you to be mute and ugly. Reduced you to slaves.”

“Is it slavery to outlaw the slaughter of children on some bloody altar? To put a stop to the rape of the innocent?”

Long Fist laughed, a sound like distant thunder on the horizon. “The alleys of your cities reek with the corpses of children. Your fields crawl with the violated; they hunch over the memories of their rapes as though those memories were green, growing things. They suffer, but there is no glory in the suffering. You have taken a sacred thing and profaned it, made it a matter of offices and laws.”

“Annur’s offices and laws are there to protect people.”

“Your offices and laws are blindfolds. They are methods of looking away, of not seeing. You have endless blood-more than the Urghul and the people of the Waist combined-but there is no reverence in it. An emperor waves a finger and a whole people is put to the sword. A merchant moves a pile of coin and a thousand men become slaves. The rich man in his tall house does not know their names. He does not see their faces as the manacles slam shut. He does not feel the warm blood on his hands. He does not hear the screaming, does nothing to tune it. There is no music in his violence.”

Kaden felt that he had come unmoored in the wide ocean of the night. Long Fist’s talk of music and violence, exaltation and profanation, was baffling but hypnotic, the language a landscape all its own, dark as the salt flats surrounding them, a place where a man could become lost. Annur wasn’t perfect-Kaden understood that clearly enough-but surely it was better than a hundred rival warlords rending the land and the people who lived there. Surely the sufferings of the countless Annurian slaves weighed less, when you put them in the scales, than the broken infants torn from their mothers’ breasts and killed; than the defeated armies castrated, mutilated, mocked, and massacred; than the annihilation of whole nations because they spoke the wrong language, wore the wrong clothes, worshipped at the wrong altar. Surely, set in the scales, Annur was an improvement over what had come before, over the world to which Long Fist struggled to return them all.

But then, what did Kaden know of Annur? What did he know of the world? He had passed his early childhood cloistered inside the opulence of the Dawn Palace, and the rest of his life in a monastery so remote that goats and ravens outnumbered men. Of Dombang and Sia, Mo’ir or Ludgven, of the city of Annur itself, he knew nothing. The fishing villages and logging towns, the mining camps perched on the slopes of the Romsdals and the terraced rice patties of Sia-he might be able to gesture to them on a map, but nothing more. What did he know of the lives lived in such places? What could he say of Annurian justice, Annurian peace, Annurian prosperity that was not simply an echo of the self-congratulatory words he had overheard from ministers and scribes a thousand times over as a child?

He put his palms on the hard dirt beside him, as though the solidity of the ground might give foundation to his tottering thoughts. He tried to focus on the silhouettes of the mountains, but it was impossible to be sure, in the gathering darkness, what was the land, and what was thick cloud, piled up on the horizon. Sailors navigated by the stars, but the stars were different here than they had been in Ashk’lan, the familiar constellations perched strangely in the sky, and besides, the stars moved.

“If you believe all this,” he said finally, “if you think we are not present enough in our own suffering, that we don’t take adequate delight in the misery of others, why do you care what happens to Triste? To Ciena?”

It was the question that had started the conversation, and he asked it again, as though by returning to that first place, by beginning again, he might find once more the path that he had lost.

For the first time the shaman turned to stare at him. “Ciena is what makes you what you are, she and I together. You would be shattered without her, a million lutes dashed on the rocks. Whole octaves lost. What agony could I sustain without hope? What hatred without the promise of love? What pain is there when there is only pain?”

Kaden tried to make sense of the words. “Hope and love,” he began hesitantly. “They are the work of Orella, Eira. The young gods-”

“They are nothing without us.”

“Your children-” Kaden began, and again Long Fist cut him off.

“Your words are boxes built too small to hold the truth.”

“Which is what?”

“We are not this flesh,” the shaman replied, touching the shadow that was his chest with a dark finger. “We are not beasts squeezed out screaming from between the legs of other beasts. A woman might rut with a dozen men, birth a dozen children, and then die. The flesh born of her flesh is not her flesh. Her children will survive her death. It is not so with us.”

Kaden realized he was holding his breath, and slowly, silently, he let it out. When he inhaled once more, the night air was cold in his throat, in his lungs. He could imagine the darkness of that almost-desert inside him like an inhuman child, heavy as flesh but not flesh, chill as the night itself, still as something already dead.

“If the young gods are not your children,” he asked, voice little louder than a whisper, “then what are they?”

“They are something we dream,” Long Fist replied.

Kaden shook his head. “They can’t be. They’re real. They took human form in the war with the Csestriim, just as you have now.”

“Dreams are real.”

“But you’re saying the young gods are just a part of you? That they do what you say?”

“Do the creatures of your own dreams follow your desires? Do the creatures of your nightmares bend to your will? They obey their own nature, these children of ours, but they are our dreams all the same.”

“And without you,” Kaden said slowly, the words raising the fine hairs from his skin, “without you, they die.”

“Death,” Long Fist spat. For the first time that night, he sounded angry, disdainful. “That hoarder of bones has no lordship over gods.”

“But the young gods are in peril, too,” Kaden insisted. “By threatening you and Ciena, il Tornja threatens them.”

The shaman inclined his head slightly. “Without the dreamer, there is no dream, at least not one strong enough to touch your world, to color your minds.”

“That’s what he wants,” Kaden said. “Il Tornja. If he destroys you, we would be Csestriim once more. Kiel was right.”

“You would be Csestriim or mad.”

“And what if you survive,” Kaden asked, “but Triste does not? What happens to us then?”

“You are puppets, all of you. We hold your strings. You move through this world because there is a balance-Eira and Maat, Kaveraa and Heqet.”

“And if il Tornja breaks that balance?”

“Imagine a puppet,” the shaman said, “tangled, twitching, struggling to move, strangling slowly in its own severed strings.”

When Kaden finally fell asleep, he dreamed of strings strong as ropes of steel twisted around his throat. He woke to a sandstorm blowing up out of the south. At first, he thought he might be imagining it. The sky above was still scraped perfectly clean, the sun a pitiless blazing eye in the midst of that unblinking blue. Any change in the weather seemed impossible, but there it was, a brown wall looming up out of the south, moving so fast they barely had time to assemble the tent.

When they were finished, Long Fist stood, baring his teeth as he stared down the storm. The wind tore at his hair and hides. “The people of the Dead Salts call this Hull’s Scourge. The worst of these storms have destroyed whole caravans.”

Kaden could taste the dirt, rough and rusty on his tongue. “We have the tent. You told me it was built for this.”

Long Fist turned those blue eyes on him. His gaze was fervid, almost rabid. “I am not worried about us. The tent will hold, though the storm may pin us down for a week or more. If the girl is moving west as you claim, however, if she is caught unprepared in this, the Csestriim will not need to find her. The wind and sand will flay her to the bone.”