The Last Mortal Bond

42

Impossible, Kaden thought.

For the better part of the day they had pressed west on the backs of the desert horses, away from the oasis, across the open flats, then into the first foothills of the Ancaz. As the mountains steepened into cliffs and canyons, however, the exhausted beasts began to lose their footing.

“We have to go on foot,” Long Fist had groaned.

It was impossible. Kaden could make it a few miles over flat ground, maybe ten at the outside, tottering forward on exhausted legs, but here in the mountains? The bloodred cliffs loomed up in front of them, thousands of vertical feet stabbing straight into the bleached-blue belly of the sky. Canyons broke the serrated wall, offering tenuous access to the high country beyond, but even those canyons were steep, boulder-choked where they weren’t flooded with storm runoff. The terrain would test even rested, healthy runners, and the three of them were anything but rested or healthy. They’d be navigating those canyons all day and all night, provided Long Fist knew the way, fleeing il Tornja’s soldiers, hoping to avoid the eyes of whatever guards the Skullsworn posted at the approaches to Rassambur.

Maybe a year ago, Kaden thought grimly, focusing on the ache in his thighs, the twinge in his left ankle that bit a little deeper every stride. I could have run this as a monk, but I’m not a monk. Tan had been clear enough about that. Still, there was nothing to do but run or turn back into the swords of the soldiers behind them, and so they ran.

The memory of his slaughtered umial dogged Kaden as he hobbled up the canyon, a twinge in his mind, a catch in his chest more painful than the aches of his knees and feet. He could set it aside as Tan had trained him, could slide into the smooth, cool halls of the vaniate, but doing so seemed wrong somehow, an evasion. Strange, that unexpected imperative to embrace the suffering. As though what Long Fist had been claiming all along was right, as though pain were ennobling, as though the vaniate, the ease of its promised escape, were indeed a profanation.

Kaden glanced over at Long Fist, wondering how long he could hold on. The shaman was moving fast, despite his uneven, shambling stride, the wound in his side cauterized and forgotten. As for Triste, Kaden had seen just what she could manage a year earlier, during their flight through the Bone Mountains, and she was fresh now, rested, far more ready than Kaden himself for this desperate trek westward.

And yet, as they ran, he found a strange strength returning, the stirring of the body’s memories of all those endless days climbing the high peaks or running the Circuit of Ravens. It wasn’t that the ache receded, but that he grew familiar with its contours, as though exhaustion were a home to which he had returned after a long time abroad. The strides which had at first threatened to break him grew increasingly plausible, and though his body throbbed with the effort, as the sun crested overhead, Kaden felt, to his surprise, that he could keep going all day.

Even when they reached the cliffs and began climbing the streambed, scrambling over the broken stone, fighting their way up, up through the choking briars that clustered around the water, he found himself able to keep moving, even to speed up. When he glanced back down the canyon, he could sometimes catch a glimpse of the soldiers, twenty of them at least, laboring up the defile behind. Mostly, he tried not to look back, keeping his eyes on the ground in front of him instead, shrinking the task at hand to a matter of the next few steps.

He lost himself so thoroughly in the landscape of his own motion that when they finally reached a saddle between the peaks, he almost didn’t notice it. The sandstone canyon had tightened until it was only shoulder-wide, then too narrow to pass, and when he climbed free, he found himself looking down the other side of the mountains, into a smooth, sweeping valley, red, and yellow, and gold sweeps of unbroken stone. Without thinking, without pausing, he lengthened his stride, loosened his arms for the downhill, chose a line through the chaparral and scattered stones, and started down.

Triste’s shout brought him up short. He thought, at first, that something had gone wrong, that il Tornja’s soldiers had managed to close the gap, and he skidded to a stop. When he turned, however, Triste wasn’t looking back the way they had come. She was pointing at Long Fist. The shaman was still running, but his gait had faded to a rough stumble. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the ground before him. His eyes were empty, fixed on the far horizon or on some vision only he could see. The endless run would have been a brutal trial for a healthy man, and Long Fist was not healthy. Though his wound was burned shut, the blade had done its damage; purple blood pooled beneath his pale skin. While Kaden and Triste had been grinding out the miles, the Urghul had been dying on his feet by slow degrees.

“We need to take a break,” Kaden said, lurching to a halt on wobbling legs. “Drink something.”

Long Fist didn’t seem to hear him. He continued on, stumbling down the slope until Kaden snagged his arm. The shaman’s weight almost brought them both down, and when he did finally stop, he swayed on his feet, then came to rest leaning against Kaden. Triste caught up to them, shook her head in mute exhaustion, then bent over, hands on her knees, lungs heaving in the dry air.

“He needs to stop,” Kaden said again.

Triste wasn’t looking at him, gave no indication, in fact, that she was listening to him at all, but Kaden addressed the words to her anyway. At some point during the long day, a balance had shifted. Since the Waist, the shaman had held the unspoken threat of pain and madness over Kaden’s head like a bright blade, one he could bring down with a snap of his fingers. Even after Tan’s attack, in the few hours after they left the oasis and the village, Long Fist had been the meager party’s undisputed chief.

No more. There was still a god inside the body, but it seemed as though Meshkent had been baffled to silence by the weakness of his chosen flesh.

He has not felt this, Kaden realized, studying the Urghul. It is a simple truth that all men die, but he has never lived inside it.

“We…,” Triste gasped, waving a vague hand backward, the way they had come, “… can’t stop. They…”

She trailed off, panting. Kaden turned, shading his eyes from the noonday sun, peering down the canyon they had climbed. There was no sign of the soldiers, but he couldn’t see far, not more than a quarter mile, and with the mountain wind keening over the stones, he couldn’t hear much more than his own breath rasping in his throat.

“Where is the kenta?” Kaden asked, turning back to Long Fist. The shaman didn’t respond. Kaden reached up, took him by the shoulders. “How far?”

Slowly those bottomless blue eyes focused. The Urghul looked at Kaden first, then turned to consider the red stone walls and canyons of the high Ancaz mountains.

“That way,” he said finally, pointing southwest. “There is a side canyon. It will take us in, then down.”

Kaden stared at the shattered land. He could count dozens of canyons from where he stood, a labyrinth of sandstone cuts and defiles. All of them led down eventually, but only one would reach the kenta.

“How will we know which canyon to take?” Kaden asked, staring south. “What do we look for?”

“Pillars,” Long Fist said. Then, as though goaded on by his own words, he lurched into a run.

“What kind of pillars?” Kaden asked, but the shaman did not turn. Triste looked over, her face a mask of exhaustion, shook her head, then followed.

Kaden didn’t follow, not at first. As he struggled to regain his breath, he watched the two figures laboring down the mountain’s steep side. From a little distance they looked so human-the blond Urghul beside the black-haired girl, both stumbling, both exhausted. From a distance, you couldn’t see the scars webbing Long Fist’s skin, or his eyes, couldn’t see how terribly beautiful Triste really was. They might have been refugees fleeing some ugly corner of the larger war, two people plucked from the many millions, just trying to survive.

Not at all like gods, Kaden thought, watching them. How could they possibly be gods? And then, hard on that thought, another, darker thought: How can they possibly survive?

That they had escaped the small village behind them was something of a miracle, as was the fact that they had made their way up and into the mountains. Suddenly, however, these miracles seemed meager, unequal to the coming fight. Even Long Fist’s effortless devastation of the villagers seemed inadequate, and as Kaden turned his gaze from the retreating figures to the great maze of the Ancaz, a thought, thin as the dust rising in the east, spread across his mind: We can’t win.

The despair settled down on him, lead-heavy, fitted to his flesh like a finely tailored coat. At Ashk’lan, he had not felt despair. Or if he had, it had been little more than an echo, a lassitude in the bones, a slowness of the mind that he had learned to recognize and escape. Back then, he had not fully appreciated the gift of the Shin, had not understood the gray weight under which most men labored the length of their days. Even in Annur, sparring pointlessly with the council while the fabric of the republic frayed and tore, he had not felt this hopelessness.

Or the hope, he thought. Or the hate. Il Tornja had betrayed him. So had Adare. But they had been stones, pieces to surround, to overpower and remove from the board. Even the prospect of Kaden’s own defeat, of his death, of the eradication of all humanity, had been clear but colorless, like frost etched across a winter pane.

Since joining Long Fist, however, his emotions had come back in a hot, bright flood. Anger and fear bathed him, battered him, smashing up against all rational thought like logs caught in the spate. He felt like a child again, lost in the wash of feeling, carried along on a current that was nothing of his own making. Only the vaniate offered escape, and so as he stood in that high saddle, cliffs falling away on all sides, wind tearing at his clothes, his face, legs quivering beneath him, he shrugged off his emotion, slid into the emptiness, and was able to breathe free once more.

Suspended in that blankness, he watched Long Fist and Triste struggling south, carrying the gods buried in their battered flesh.

And if they were destroyed? he wondered, cool and light inside the space of the vaniate. Would that be so tragic?

He turned his face slowly from the retreating figures to the huge sweep of the canyon below. A pair of hawks circled silently upward, wings outstretched and motionless, lifted on some distant, invisible wind. Those hawks followed their own ancient imperatives, ignorant of love or desperation. And the peaks themselves, carved from reds deeper and fuller than human blood, built from yellow, and white, and russet sandstone by forces stronger than any human hand-what did those mountains care for women, for men, for the gods on whom they depended? What did the sky care? Or the sun?

What if the world were like this? Kaden wondered.

Unbidden, his mind filled with the vision of a great, still space, the stone of the mountains, and beyond that stone the whole downward sweep of the earth west and south all the way to the ocean, the whole world empty, hill and stream and stone utterly untouched, unblemished by the scrabbling of men and women. There were no houses, no gouges in the dirt where quarries had cut free the rock. There were no roads carved across the land. There were no ships, no boats.

Would that be worse?

How hard would it be for him to simply step aside? He studied the cuts and valleys. A quarter mile off there was a pinnacle, a sheer-sided needle of stone. He had climbed formations like that back in the Bone Mountains. There would be space at the top of it to sit, to study the canyon, to watch the sun shift its slant while il Tornja’s soldiers followed the ak’hanath to a final slaughter. Long Fist and Triste would be far south by that point, almost out of sight, certainly too far for him to hear their cries. Inside the vaniate, he would feel nothing when they died. And later? He would emerge from the emptiness into a larger emptiness, a vacancy wide as the sky. He wouldn’t even need to fight for it.

This is what Kiel warned me of, he thought. That one day I might just walk away.

He could remember being wary of the possibility once, not long ago, but staring at it now he could not remember why. The world was brimming with worse fates than stillness and silence. At that moment, scattered all across Annur, soldiers were driving swords into skulls; pox-plagued children sobbed, bleeding in their sleep; men stole and women stole, heaping up their shining piles, screaming and snarling whenever anyone else came close. Why not walk off into the peaks?

Kaden took a deep breath. The air was bright in his lungs. Then, from the south, he heard a cry. He turned slowly from the great gulf of empty air to find Triste, thin as a sapling in the distance, waving her arms above her head, gesturing to him. Her voice was thin when it reached him, just a thread of sound: “… with me. Please. Please hurry.”

It was nothing, that thread, the thinnest wool, but it snagged on a corner of his mind. Slowly, he blew out the bright air, let go of the vaniate, sagged again beneath the weight of his own hope and pain, then started south, following in the footsteps of the feeble and stumbling gods.

* * *

They need not have worried about missing the pillars. The landscape of the Ancaz was littered with stone, huge boulders carved by the wind into strange, unwieldy shapes-giant saucers, blasted lumps that could almost pass as faces, top-heavy balanced forms with the attenuated waists of wasps-but even amongst that menagerie of stone, the pillars drew the eye. They flanked the entrance to a canyon, just a gradual, natural ramp at first, little more than a cut in the ground that deepened and widened quickly, dropping out of sight between sheer stone walls. Like the rest of the stone, the pillars had been whittled by the wind, thinned from perfect cylinders to vaguer shapes, but both were tall, five times Kaden’s height at the very least, and in the hard glare of the overhead sun he could just make out the shape of writing twisted around their length.

“What are these?” he asked.

No one replied. Kaden turned just in time to see Long Fist totter, put out a hand, and then collapse into the dirt. Triste let out a quiet whimper, but made no move to approach. Kaden glanced over his shoulder, north. It was hard to say, but he thought he could hear the clatter of rocks knocked free, falling hundreds of feet to shatter on the ledges below. He crossed to the shaman, then dropped unsteadily to his knees.

“We made it,” he said, gesturing to the looming pillars.

“To the canyon,” Triste said. “Where is the kenta?”

Long Fist didn’t respond. His breath was shallow and fast, his pale skin ashen. Sweat beaded his brow, matting the long blond hair to his scalp.

“This body,” he panted. “It is giving out.”

Triste stared, bafflement and anger warring across her features. “You healed the wound,” she protested.

Long Fist shook his head. The movement was weak, as though all the muscles of his neck had suddenly gone slack. “I burned shut the skin,” he replied. “It kept the blood in, but did nothing to stop the bleeding inside.”

He reached down with a feeble hand, scrabbled at the hem of his vest, as though his fingers could no longer grasp, as though he had forgotten what it was to hold a thing. Kaden pulled back the cloth, then stopped. Dried blood flaked from the shaman’s skin, but that was hardly the worst of the injury. Long Fist was right; the hot knife had seared shut the wound, but the blood beneath had pooled in a wide band from armpit to hip, from the center of the chest all the way around to the man’s back. The pale skin bulged, the bone and tightened cord of the shaman’s torso little more than a bag of blood.

He’s dying, Kaden realized. It doesn’t matter if we make it to the gate or not. He is already dying.

Panic scratched and scratched in a corner of his mind, like a mouse with one foot caught in the trap. Kaden turned his focus inward, took the terrified part of himself between his mind’s fingers, then crushed it. The scratching fell silent for a heartbeat, then reappeared, louder and more insistent. The emptiness beckoned, but he shoved it back.

“What can we do?” he asked, gently probing the shaman’s wound with his fingers.

“You?” Long Fist raised his brows. “Nothing. This is beyond whatever little skill you have. It is beyond all mortal instruments.” He turned to Triste, but coughing swallowed up his words, spattered bright, arterial blood across his chest in great gouts. There was more now, much more, as though something crucial had torn free inside. When the spasm finally subsided, pink phlegm trailed from his chin. When he spoke, it was a single word, sibilant as the wind’s whisper: “Ciena.”

Triste stared at him. Then, understanding, recoiled as though slapped. “I can’t.…”

Long Fist half lifted his hands. Kaden couldn’t say whether it was supplication or some weak spasm.

“This flesh fails,” he said, lip curling above bloody incisors. Then, again, “Ciena.” He wasn’t simply naming her this time, but calling, calling across the barriers of their two human bodies, across the wall of Triste’s mind into whatever cramped space Ciena had carved out for herself.

Kaden put a hand behind the shaman’s head, lifting it slightly, as though that might keep the life from draining out his mouth along with the blood. When he turned back to Triste, he half expected to find the girl gone from her own face, to hear the goddess speaking in that huge, implacable voice. It almost seemed it must be so, that the extremity of the situation would call her forth as it had each time before. Triste’s eyes, however, remained her own. The expressions ghosting over her face, her mouth opening in silent lamentation, her forehead creasing … Kaden had seen those expressions before, seen them scores of times. The girl was angry, baffled, terrified, but she was herself. Of the goddess inside, he could discover no sign.

“We have to draw her out,” Kaden said. They had pared away the other choices. The other choices had been stolen from them. It hardly mattered. Only this remained.

Triste’s lips were trembling. She took half a step back.

“The only way to do that…”

“… is to hurt you,” Kaden said. “I know.” There was no time left. Whatever indifference he had felt an hour earlier, it was gone, vanished. Outside the vaniate, unshielded from his own emotion, he felt almost sick with urgency. His heart hurled itself against his ribs again and again. He laid the shaman’s head down against the stone, straightened up, then reached for the knife at his side. “Ciena will respond,” he said, fixing Triste’s eyes with his own. “She will emerge. She always has.”

Triste took another step back.

“It won’t work.”

“It will. It has. In the Crane, that time you stabbed yourself-”

“I meant to kill myself. That’s what brought her out. It’s like she can smell it, can smell the real threat. That’s the only time the wall between us breaks.”

Long Fist groaned, a low sound like an animal might make.

Kaden shook his head. “There is no other choice. Triste. If he dies, we are done. Everyone is done. Everyone you love-”

“Who?” she screamed, the word a broadax cleaving his own. “Who do I love?”

In a moment, Kaden saw his mistake.

“My parents are dead,” Triste snarled, voice caught somewhere between a shout and a sob. “And when they were alive, they traded me away. They sold me.”

“Your parents betrayed you,” Kaden said, nodding. He took a step toward her, and she took another step back, a dance modeled from blood and distrust. “Does that mean everyone in the world should suffer?”

“Suffer?” she demanded, incredulous. She stabbed a finger at Long Fist where he lay against the rock, blue eyes unfocused on the sky. “He’s why they suffer. He’s where it all comes from! And you want to save him. You want to stab me in order to save him.”

“Not him. Humanity.”

“And what do I care,” she asked, voice dropping to a whisper, “about humanity?”

There is no time for this, Kaden thought. He tried to measure the distance between them, tried to weigh the knife in his hand. The shaman shuddered behind him, back arching in obedience to some command of the ruined body. Careful, he told himself. Careful. It was a narrow window. He needed Triste frightened, desperately frightened, but the girl was right-the goddess inside seemed only to break out in moments of the most violent need. How close would he have to be to induce such need? How deep would he have to cut?

Long Fist groaned. Kaden glanced over his shoulder. Just a glance, just a fraction of a moment-too long. Triste, legs lightened by her fear, darted past him, between the twin pillars, down the canyon and into the shadows. He was after her in an instant, hurling himself into a sprint, following half a dozen steps down the defile before he stopped. He could hear her feet scuffing the stone as she fled. He could catch her-he thought he could catch her-but how far down the canyon? And then what? Stab her? Put the knife to her throat and drag her back up? He couldn’t kill her, not without destroying the goddess in the vain attempt to save the god. Triste knew that as well as he did. If Ciena were going to emerge, wouldn’t she have done so already, wouldn’t she have shoved her way to the front of Triste’s mind the moment Long Fist called her name?

Kaden turned. The shaman was curled in the dirt behind him. He looked small, suddenly, as though death were already diminishing him.

I could carry him, Kaden thought. Get him as far as the kenta.

What good that would do, he had no idea. Maybe if he carried the man back to the Dead Heart … The Ishien were a military order. They would know something of the healing of wounds, if only because they had grown so adept at dealing them. It was a sliver of a hope, fingernail thin, but it was better than leaving Long Fist for the crows and the soldiers closing in from the north.

Hope’s edge, Kaden thought, remembering the old Shin expression, is sharper than steel.

He had never felt the emotion so strongly before. Strange that for so many millennia it had been so praised by so many men and women. Strange that there were innumerable temples raised to Orella all across the world. In that moment, the weight of Kaden’s own hope seemed more horrible to him than hate, or rage, or the blackest despair.

* * *

He could see Triste’s tracks clearly enough as he carried Long Fist down the canyon, but those tracks didn’t matter. What mattered was the weight slung over his own shoulders, the incremental movement of the shaman’s ribs that told Kaden he was still breathing, the ache in his own legs that threatened to buckle beneath him every step, and the fight against that ache. Mile after mile he carried the man, following Triste’s tracks across sunbaked stone and washes filled with sand. As he descended, the canyon grew warm, then hot. The dry air raked his lungs with every breath and his lips began to crack. When he first heard the roar of the river, he thought he was hallucinating, imagining the sound of water where no water should be, but a hundred paces later he broke from the walls of the narrow side canyon to find himself standing on a wide ledge. Below, a hundred paces straight down, a froth-white river tumbled past.

Triste’s footsteps led off to the right, following ancient stairs carved into the stone, but Kaden paused for a moment to adjust the shaman’s weight across his shoulders. That was when the voice started.

It was so strange that for the first few syllables he could ignore it. Then, as he stood there, gasping his ragged breaths, he began to understand the words.

There is another way.

He thought at first that Long Fist was whispering to him, and he held his breath, waiting for the shaman to speak again. There was only the roar of the river, the low moan of wind threading its way through the canyon, and the clatter of rocks from somewhere above; the echo twisted the distance until he couldn’t say whether his pursuers were far or near. When the words came again, Kaden realized with a shudder that they were not a matter of the ear, not something so pedestrian as sound, carried on dry stony air. They were inside his head.

There is another way.

Kaden could feel the language like the pressure deep in his ear when he had climbed a peak too quickly, or like a stone inside his mind, small, painless, smoothed by the long motion of a stream, but heavy, displacing something else. Reflexively, he pushed back. The voice dwindled to the barest breath, but he could still make out the words.

Submit, it whispered. Serve.

It was Long Fist-the same indifferent conviction, the same certainty, the same cadence-and yet not Long Fist. The syllables, as Kaden heard them, were shorn of all Urghul accent, filed down until there was no intonation left, as though they were not actually words at all, but only the idea of words.

You will not survive, if you do not serve. No one will survive.

Again, that pressure, and stronger now. It was an unfolding inside the mind; an awesome flower, sun-bright and blossoming too quickly; a hatching egg, the insistent beak cracking the smooth shell. Kaden could feel the shards breaking apart, shattering, slicing through his own thoughts. He put a hand against the canyon wall to steady himself, closed his eyes, felt himself falling into bottomless darkness, as though the whole world had become a well with that voice echoing up from the bottom.

You can be more than this-a vision of Kaden’s own burning eyes-more than the contents of your skin-another vision, this time from a great distance, of a pitiful figure kneeling on a sandstone ledge. It took a long time to find a name for that huddled, mortal creature: Kaden. The syllables were familiar, but irrelevant. The sad little man bore, on his bent back, a figure of such perfect radiance that it burned.

You can be this, the blazing figure said. You can be this if you submit.

A burning, as of cold fire sliding across the mind.

A desire, strong as week-long hunger, to burn.

Yes, the voice said. Let yourself burn. I will take this flesh and make of it a god.

A great conflagration, blue-bright as the noonday sky, divine, undeniable.

Yes, the god said. Yes.

But laced beneath that voice, there was another voice, barely the whisper of yesterday’s wind, dirt-poor and cracked, too-human, doomed. Defiant.

The mind is a flame, it insisted. The mind is a flame. The mind is a flame.

And then the part of him that heard, that recognized the words, that was still Kaden, whispered in response: Blow it out.

He opened his eyes. The sun had shifted overhead. The line of light and shadow, inscribed as though with a chisel, fell across his face. Long Fist was still alive, breathing weakly beside his ear, but the god inside had fallen almost quiet.

“You tried to take me,” Kaden said aloud. His own voice sounded strange in his ears, dry as stone. His tongue was swollen. “Tried to take my place in my own mind.”

It is the only way.

The voice was still inside his head, but weaker now, as though whatever fuel had fed that first fire were all but burned away.

“I am not a priest,” Kaden said. “I am nothing like the Urghul that you inhabit now. I never worshipped you. You explained it yourself. My mind is unprepared. You could not enter it.”

There are other ways than worship. Polluted ways, but ways all the same.

And then, as though the god spoke over himself in awful polyphony, Kaden heard his words from days earlier: It is possible for you to carve away a portion of what you are.…

“No,” Kaden said, shaking his head, seeing all over again the bafflement and self-loathing in Triste’s eyes, understanding it for the first time. “Not for this.”

If you do not submit, the Csestriim win.

Kaden heaved the Urghul chieftain from his shoulder, struggled briefly to hold the limp body, then lowered him to the stone at the very edge of the drop. Long Fist’s lids were closed. Breath rasped between his bloody lips. He was nearly dead, but then, what did that mean? Long Fist, if he had even been called Long Fist as a child, before his flesh was seized by his god, had been dead a long time, or if not dead, then gone, subsumed inside the mind of the divine.

Long Fist gave himself, the god said, as you must give yourself.

Kaden tried to imagine it. Not the quiet annihilation of the self that the Shin pursued. Close to that, but something worse: a twisting, a transmutation into something vicious and immortal, a creature of bloodletting and screams. Better to be gone than that. Better to simply cease.

Unless …

Triste had resisted. No one seemed to understand quite how, but she had resisted her goddess, taken her in, then locked her off in one of the mind’s forgotten corridors. She had kept hold of herself while she carried Ciena, and she had no training in the vaniate, no quiet years studying the shape and movements of her own mind. If she could find a way, then perhaps he could, too.

The dying god saw the shape of Kaden’s thought before he spoke.

No, Meshkent said. I will not be penned.

Kaden could feel the pressure starting again inside his head, trying to force him out.

Submit.

Kaden shook his head grimly, pushed back. It was easier, this time, almost trivially so. The god was growing weak, fading from the world.

Why would you choose to be what you are? Why be the flute when you could play the music?

“I know your music,” Kaden replied. “I have heard it.”

He could see the people burning, could see Annur replaced by an empire of pain, men and women and children manacled to ten thousand altars, bleeding, screaming. He could see them harnessed to their own agony, forced to drag it behind them like great stones, to bear it upon their shoulders until it broke them, and ruling over it all, seated on the Unhewn Throne, he saw himself, but not himself. A god wearing his face.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”

Then this body will give out, my touch will fade, and you will break, all of you. You were not made to live without me.

“We won’t,” Kaden said.

He turned his vision inward, considered the shape and space of his mind. The Shin had trained him to step outside the ambit of his own emotion, counseled him in the abdication of both his pleasure and his pain. What was the vaniate but empty space, a bubble’s perfect sphere beneath the surface of the world’s great sea? He couldn’t step into the trance, not without risking the blank indifference of his own addiction, but he could carve a part of him away without entering his own emptiness. There was room inside for his own mind and the god’s: Triste was proof.

It was a simple thing to clear the space-he had done the same a thousand times before-but much harder to remain outside of it, to live in his own mounting anxiety rather than diving into the vaniate. The blankness beckoned.

“There,” Kaden said. “I will not be your slave, but I will carry you.”

Nothing. Silence from the mind of the god.

I am too late, he thought, searching Long Fist’s chest for some sign of heartbeat or breath. He died while I stood here debating.

Then, vicious as a sword slammed into its sheath, the god was there. Kaden reeled beneath the violence, pressed a desperate hand against his eyes, certain he had erred somehow, ceded whatever self he had to Meshkent. He waited for the pain, then realized slowly that there was no pain. He straightened up, studied the body of the Urghul chieftain. Long Fist was dead, dull blue eyes staring stupidly skyward.

Gingerly, Kaden looked in. He could feel the edges of the god’s mind lodged inside his own, bright, startlingly sharp, but yes … sheathed.

I will not be your slave, growled something older than the world.

When Kaden finally replied, he spoke aloud, as though to the stones and the sky, to the slope of the canyon floor, to the wind, to something, anything beyond himself.

“You have no choice.”

This, too, the Shin had taught him: to look at the fact beyond the passion. He could hold the god, could pen him. It was all a matter of building the right walls, of draping the right chains, of being sure they would not break when the Lord of Pain threw his weight against them.