The Last Mortal Bond

49

According to Pyrre, it was only twenty-five miles from Rassambur to the stone ruins by the river where she’d broken Kaden and Triste free. There were no straight lines in the mountains, however, and the miles had a way of multiplying. All night and all day they’d been fleeing il Tornja’s soldiers, laboring up narrow defiles, racing across swaths of open slickrock, fording mountain streams, and then running again, cutting through the maze of canyon and cliff, all too aware of what would happen if they faltered or fell. For a long time, the Annurians trailed just a few hundred paces behind.

“The ak’hanath,” Kaden managed, not slowing as he pointed back. “Tracking us.”

He hadn’t spotted the creatures-they were too quick, too nimble for that-but he had seen them move over stone back in the Bone Mountains, and had no illusions about his own ability to outrun them. He almost imagined he could hear, over the sound of his own breath and blood, the skittering of their hard claws on the rock, that high keening just at the edge of human hearing, the sound like a needle lodged inside the ear.

“We could kill them,” Triste gasped as she struggled over the broken scree. “If they … come out…”

Kaden shook his head. “They won’t. Il Tornja won’t risk them. As long as they’re alive, he can follow us anywhere.”

Pyrre paused for a moment as Triste struggled to climb a short ledge. The assassin looked every bit as exhausted as Kaden felt. Sweat matted her hair, her breathing was ragged, blood crusted her leather tunic and bare arms-some of it from the soldiers she had killed, the rest from her own cuts and gashes. Unlike Triste, however, she didn’t seem concerned. In fact, even as she peered back down the canyon, shading her eyes with a hand, a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“I am really starting to dislike those creatures,” she said.

And then, just as she finished speaking, as if the soldiers and the spiders were not enough, the lightning came. The sky remained utterly cloudless, one great bowl of undivided blue, and then the lightning was there, massive actinic bolts stabbing down all around them, blasting cliffs and shattering stone. The closest struck a hundred paces distant, but violence stretched away on all sides for miles.

“The leach,” Kaden said wearily.

Pyrre tsked her vexation. “It really does seem like cheating.”

Another bolt fractured the cliff top a quarter mile ahead, the impact spraying smashed stone in all directions.

Kaden forced down the animal urge to flinch, to cower in some shadow until the unnatural attack was over. Instead, he stepped into the middle of the wide canyon, studied the pattern of bolts ripping through the sky. “It’s random. They don’t know where we are.”

“He doesn’t need to know,” Triste shouted back. She’d fought her way up onto the ledge, and was waving them on impatiently. “He might be just guessing, but the lightning can still kill us.”

“Indeed,” Pyrre mused, gazing speculatively at the elemental savagery unfolding all around them. “Ananshael’s will is unknowable.”

“Do you want to stand here and test it?” Kaden asked, glancing over at the Skullsworn. He hadn’t intended the question seriously, but found, even as he spoke the words, that there was a part of him that ached for just that-to stand and wait, to pass the weight of his own responsibility over to some other, greater power, to finally abdicate a fight he neither understood nor truly hoped to win. Meshkent raged inside him, wordless, slavering, furious, hurling himself against the walls Kaden maintained. It would be easy, effortless, to let those walls fall. To set the god free. To abandon the self once and for all …

Another bolt slammed into the stone canyon, where they had passed just a few moments before. The assassin didn’t flinch, didn’t even look at it. Instead she turned to study Kaden.

“You’re not the skinny monk that I remember.”

Kaden shook his head, hauling his thoughts away from sacrifice and surrender. “That monk wouldn’t have survived.”

“Survival.” Pyrre frowned. “For just a little while there, I thought that might have finally stopped mattering to you. The god comes for us all.”

“Then why are we running?”

Pyrre flashed him a smile. “Because if we run now, we get to fight later. And I like fighting.”

By midday, the sky had fallen quiet. When they paused at a narrow stream to gulp a few mouthfuls of water, Kaden could no longer make out the angry clatter of pursuit. It was tempting to believe they had outdistanced the soldiers, but he had been battling against il Tornja’s schemes too long to trust his own temptations. The kenarang was coming, whether Kaden could hear him or not; his goals were simple, even if his tactics were not. The question was, why had Pyrre and the other Skullsworn intervened?

“You could have let us die,” Kaden said, straightening from the stream, savoring the cold water on his tongue, in his throat. “Il Tornja would have killed us. You cheated your god.”

Pyrre shook her head. “Not cheated. Traded. Your two souls for those we left below.”

Triste was staring at the assassin, her scarred face twisted with revulsion. “But why? Why bother?”

“It was an intriguing opportunity,” Pyrre replied.

“To kill il Tornja?” Kaden asked.

The Skullsworn shook her head. “To take Long Fist.” There was an unusual note in her voice when she said the name, something vicious and eager, utterly at odds with her habitual wry calm.

“Long Fist?” Triste demanded. “Why?”

Pyrre turned to her, then raised an eyebrow, as though debating inwardly whether or not to respond. “He is a priest of pain,” she said finally. “A high priest of Meshkent. He would have made a fine offering to my god.” She glanced over at Kaden, cocked her head to the side. “Speaking of which, where did he go?”

The words were deceptively mild.

Kaden shook his head. “Escaped. Jumped into the river.”

Pyrre pursed her lips. “Then my god may have him after all.”

“Maybe,” Kaden agreed. Inside his mind, the ancient god raged. “So what happens to us now?”

“A good question,” Pyrre said. “We will go to Rassambur, and then decide.”

“What if we don’t want to go?” Triste demanded. She was panting, doubled over with her hands on her knees, but her eyes were hard, defiant.

Pyrre offered her a broad smile, made an ostentatious little flourish with one hand, and was holding a knife. “The altars of my god are everywhere. Each patch of dirt”-she gestured with the blade-“that stone on which you stand. And my piety sometimes outstrips my patience.”

“We’ll go,” Kaden said, holding up a hand, as though there were anything he could do to stop the assassin, then turning to Triste. “It’s safer than staying here.”

Pyrre chuckled. “Safe,” she said, lingering on the word as though she could taste it. “Such a tricky term. Never seems to mean what people want it to mean.” She shrugged. “But yes, I’d agree that Rassambur is safe.”

Triste narrowed her eyes. “Meaning what?”

“Meaning I might kill you, but I promise not to hurt you first.”

* * *

A fortress of dark iron and nightmare. A labyrinth reeking of carrion; long halls echoing with screams. A den of perversion, a home for men and women drinking blood from human skulls, offering their own infants as sacrifice on charred altars, slaughtering one another in twisted, blood-slick orgies. Halls of bones and altars of human flesh. Charnel pits brimming with the festering dead. Blasted caverns devoid of light, of hope, of all human comfort, given over to the veneration of the old and awful God of Death himself: Ananshael, unknitter of souls, savorer of rotting corpses.

Kaden had heard dozens of variations over the years of the tales told of Rassambur. Some, servants’ stories whispered in the kitchens of the Dawn Palace; others, historians’ accounts inked on expensive parchment and bound into codices for the shivering delectation of the rich. The fortress was a favorite subject of painters, too. Some, like Sianburi in his famous Stages of Death, used Rassambur as an excuse to explore human anatomy: a flayed arm here, an eyeball lolling from its socket there, perfectly drafted femurs and skulls stacked rafter-high in the background. The Ghannan ateliers, on the other hand, mostly ignored the corpses in their work, dwelling instead on Rassambur’s infinite gradations of shadow and darkness. Kaden had read somewhere that Fiarzin Qaid, the greatest of the Ghannan painters, had labored for eight years, grinding and mixing two hundred different shades of black, before attempting his masterpiece, The House of Death, a horse-high canvas depicting Rassambur’s most horrid hall.

Qaid never even saw the place, Kaden realized.

With Triste and Pyrre, he stood at a cliff’s lip, staring across a gulf of empty air to a huge, sheer-sided sandstone butte and the fabled fortress of the Skullsworn that perched at its top. Qaid didn’t need two shades of black, let alone two hundred.

In fact, the stronghold and the land around it were a study in light, air, and rich color: an azure sky nailed up above brilliant cliffs, dozens of shades of russet and rust and vermillion, and between them, the creamy white of Rassambur’s small, graceful buildings. There were no defensive walls, no ramparts or towers, no murder holes or arrow loops. At the top of the sheer-sided butte, there was no need-the land itself was the fortification. The lair of the priests of death was not a lair at all, but a bright, white-walled, sun-drenched place of gardens, cloisters, and humble temples. Splashes of green dotted the grounds where the Skullsworn had cultivated the flowering desert plants. Even the shadows cast by the scattered loggia and trellises looked inviting, cool and quiet. It almost reminded Kaden of Ashk’lan-the clarity of it all, the cleanness-but where the Bone Mountains were viciously cold at least half the year, here, the hot sun warmed the stone even as the mountain breezes cut through the heat’s worst bite.

A single bridge-a graceful arc of white stone with no railing or balustrade-spanned the chasm between Rassambur and the cliff where Kaden stood with Pyrre and Triste. It looked too slender to support its own weight, let alone that of anyone crossing. There was nowhere to hide on that bridge, nowhere to shelter. A single archer with enough arrows could hold it against an entire army for days. That was how it looked, at least. Kaden hoped it was true.

“We should get across,” he said, gesturing, forcing his aching, trembling legs into motion once more. “Before il Tornja catches up.”

“He won’t,” Pyrre replied.

Kaden shook his head. “You don’t understand. He abandoned his post in the north, he risked letting the Urghul destroy Annur, all so that he could come here, after … us.”

He glanced over at Triste as he pronounced that final word. She made no indication she had heard him. Instead, she stared fixedly at Rassambur, face bleak, as though she were peering into the freshly turned earth of her own grave.

Pyrre pursed her lips, studying the girl. “All this way for the two of you and an Urghul warlord. I so look forward to learning why.”

“We can talk about why when we’re on the other side,” Kaden said.

He had no idea what he would say when that talk came, no idea what lies he might spin to save himself, save Triste, and the gods hidden inside them both. That could wait, though. First they needed to reach Rassambur’s dubious safety.

“What I mean to say,” Pyrre went on, gesturing to the mountains around them, “is that these cliffs are alive with my brothers and sisters, some hunting, some just standing guard. If il Tornja has read his history at all, he will know this, he will know better than to come within a mile of Rassambur.”

Kaden squinted at the rocks through which they’d passed. He had seen nothing, no sign of guards or sentries. On the other hand, it had been all he could do to keep his feet as they stumbled over the rough stone, and he’d barely raised his eyes from the ground. He might have passed straight through the center of an army without noticing it. Still …

“He has a leach.”

“Leaches die just like everyone else,” Pyrre said with a shrug, “when you remember to put a knife in them.”

There was no sign, when they finally stepped off the narrow bridge, that anyone from Rassambur had ever learned to put a knife in anything more dangerous than the cacti that they carved for the evening meal. Pyrre had learned to fight somewhere, that was obvious enough, but the devotees of Ananshael weren’t training or fighting. All the Skullsworn that Kaden could see-men and women in white desert robes-were going about the quiet tasks of daily life: gardening, paring vegetables, drawing water from a central well, walking between the modest buildings or talking quietly in groups of two or three. The only weapons Kaden could see weren’t weapons at all, but small belt knives, the sheathed blades no longer than a finger, less dangerous than what he himself had carried back at Ashk’lan.

The place seemed more like a sanctuary than a den of death and violence, and though the Skullsworn fell silent as he passed, there was no malice mixed with their obvious curiosity. A few nodded to Pyrre, or murmured greetings. No one asked any questions. If they were concerned about the fates of those Skullsworn who had accompanied Pyrre, the men and women who had gone down to the ruined town and not returned, they didn’t show it. No one seemed worried that the kenarang of the Annurian Empire had come to the Ancaz Mountains with a knot of soldiers-they didn’t even seem aware of the fact.

“Should we … tell someone?” Kaden asked. “Prepare some sort of defense?”

Pyrre waved away the question. “The defense is there already.”

“The sentries hidden in the rocks?”

“Among other measures. Rassambur has been guarded since before the first stones of the oldest buildings were set in place.”

Kaden glanced at those buildings. Most were small, a single room or two, date trees espaliered against sandstone walls, small patios sheltered from the sun, flower and vegetable gardens in raised beds before or beside them.

Pyrre followed his gaze.

“Each priest keeps her own plot,” she said. “It is a commandment of the god.”

“Gardening?” Kaden asked. “Why?”

The assassin looked amused. “We need to eat. The hot blood of the slaughtered is delicious, obviously, but sometimes the body craves vegetables.”

They passed a series of stone barns and pens filled with goats and sheep. The animals trotted toward the fence, evidently eager for a handout. Dozens of chickens scratched in the dry soil toward the outside of the enclosures. Just beyond one of the barns, a pair of priests, one old, one young, were butchering a goat. The older woman pointed to various ligaments and organs as she worked, pausing often to allow her student to inspect the carcass. It was the first blood Kaden had seen.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“To see Gerra,” Pyrre replied.

“Who is Gerra?” Triste asked warily.

“Gerra is the person,” Pyrre said brightly, “who will decide whether we should help you, or offer you to the god.”

When they finally tracked down Gerra the Bald, leader of the Skullsworn, he was asleep on his back, fingers neatly laced across his chest, lying atop a narrow wooden platform suspended over the cliff’s edge, swaying lightly with the breeze above a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. The wooden platform was one of two, both part of a sort of strange scale, the type of apparatus a merchant might use to weigh grain or coin, but much larger, the whole thing built out over the abyss. The counterweight to Ananshael’s chief priest, set on the platform across from him, was a sealed wooden barrel. The hole at its base was plugged tight with something that looked like a stone cork.

“What is that?” Triste asked, her voice tight.

“That,” Pyrre replied, “is Ananshael’s Scale. Today is Gerra’s day.”

“Not my day,” the priest said without bothering to open his eyes or sit up. “It should have been Baird, but he has not yet returned from the west. Others wanted to take his place, but I was selfish.” He smiled. “One of the few joys of leadership-the right to seize a day of peace and quiet when you can.”

Pyrre shook her head in mock regret. “I didn’t realize, when I spoke in your favor all those years ago, the true depth of your greed.”

Gerra’s smile widened. “The more fool you.” He still hadn’t opened his eyes.

“What is the scale for?” Kaden asked.

“It is a way of living close to the god,” Pyrre replied. She gestured. “The barrel is filled with water. It’s stoppered with a plug of rock salt. When the plug dissolves, the barrel empties, and the person on the platform goes to meet the god.”

Triste took a step back, as though the apparatus might suddenly, violently snap.

“When?” she asked.

Pyrre shrugged. “It’s impossible to predict. Some salt deposits are denser than others. On hot days, the water dissolves the plug faster than on cold days. Usually it takes a year or so, but not always.”

“When I was young,” Gerra mused, “there was a time the plug gave way in three days. Jes the Gray was sitting the scale that day. She must have been a hundred-bent nearly double, but still sharp in the head. We joked that Ananshael just got tired of waiting.”

“And how long,” Kaden asked, studying the barrel, “has this plug been in?”

Pyrre shook her head. “I can never keep track. Thirteen months, maybe?”

“Something like that,” Gerra agreed. They might have been discussing the age of a particularly uninteresting sheep. “It went in last summer, after Torrel went to meet the god.”

Triste was staring at the scale and the man lying upon it, her violet eyes wide, horrified. “That’s awful,” she whispered.

“Quite the contrary,” Gerra declared. “It’s the most peaceful place on the whole mesa. The only spot people won’t bother me.” He paused. “Usually. Who is that you’ve brought, my sister?”

“Acquaintances,” Pyrre replied. “The almost-Emperor of all Annur and a somewhat threadbare prostitute. A nice enough young man and woman, but very serious.”

“You think everyone is too serious. What about the Urghul, the pain priest?”

Pyrre grimaced. “Gone.”

“To the god?”

“Perhaps. It’s hard to say. He went into one of the rivers, but the Urghul are surprisingly durable.”

“And your brothers and sisters?”

“Have made their last offering.”

Even that revelation failed to jolt the priest from his rest. He remained so still for so long, in fact, that Kaden was starting to wonder if the man had fallen asleep. Pyrre seemed in no particular hurry, and so it was Triste, finally, who broke the silence.

“Are we prisoners?”

Gerra pursed his lips. “Most people are prisoners,” he replied. “I can hear the fear in your voice. You live in it as though it were a cage. Did you come here to be free?”

“Free?” Kaden asked carefully.

“Free,” Gerra agreed. “Liberated from the bonds of your fear. Do you wish to join our order?”

“Before you answer-” Pyrre began.

Triste cut her off. “No,” she snarled. “No. We came here because we didn’t have a choice. Not to become murderers.”

“If what we’ve heard is true,” Gerra replied mildly, “you have given more souls to Ananshael than almost any of our priests. I hear whispers that you slaughtered hundreds in the heart of the Annurian palace-truly a great offering.”

Triste’s face was frozen between horror and rage, her hands balled into fists at her sides. When she spoke again, her voice was barely louder than the wind. “I didn’t want to. Didn’t mean to. I’m not a killer.”

“There are words,” Gerra mused, “and there are deeds. Still, I will take you at your word. We all have something to offer to the god. If you do not wish to kill, then you can die.”

“No,” Kaden said, stepping toward the cliff’s edge as Meshkent growled and hissed inside his mind. “Please. There is a larger story here.”

“The story always feels large,” Gerra replied without moving, without opening his eyes, “to those trapped inside of it. Ananshael will cut you free. It is not so difficult as you think, dying. We will be at your side.”

Fear flared inside Kaden. He crushed it out, tried to focus through his mind’s smoke.

“There must be an arrangement we can make. My father paid once, for Pyrre to save my life.…”

“Which I did,” the woman said. “That deal was done a year ago.”

“So I will pay you again. The treasury in Annur…”

“Is irrelevant,” Gerra concluded. “You came here, to Rassambur, which means you must serve the god in one way or another. Since you will not learn to offer sacrifice, you will become that sacrifice.” He shrugged. “They are not so far apart.”

“We’ll join you, then,” Kaden said. He just needed time, space to think, to plan. Escape could come later. “We’ll become Skullsworn.”

“No,” Gerra said quietly, almost regretfully. “You have already spoken your truth. What you speak now is no true belief, but the desperate lie of a creature trying to flee. Tonight you will go to the god-there will be song to celebrate your sacrifice. Pyrre will help you to prepare.”

The words sounded like a dismissal, and after a moment Pyrre put a steadying hand on Kaden’s shoulder. He shrugged it off, glancing back the way they had come. It wasn’t far to the bridge-maybe a quarter mile-but there would be no fleeing the flat space of the mesa, no escaping or fighting his way free. If he and Triste were going to survive, if the gods inside of them were going to live, he had to persuade this man, and he had to persuade him now, before the knives were sharpened and the fires lit. Kaden’s mind scrambled for purchase. He forced it still, then slid into the vaniate.

Inside the trance, it was impossible to understand his urgency of moments earlier.

So we die, he thought. And the gods are torn from this world.

It hardly seemed a tragedy. Kiel’s warnings about the dangers of the vaniate echoed in the empty space. Kaden considered them, held them up to the light, then put them aside. He studied Gerra’s reclining figure for a moment-the man still hadn’t moved-then shifted his gaze to the mountains. What was the point in waiting for the Skullsworn knives? He could end it all with a few steps, could walk free of all the fear and pain, the running and the rage. It made sense, actually, what the priest had said: Ananshael’s gift was freedom, freedom so perfect, so absolute, it could never be revoked. Triste’s low sob broke into his thoughts, a human sob-regardless of the goddess locked inside her-the sob of someone utterly alone and almost broken. And she, too, will be free, Kaden thought. Ananshael can save her. Triste’s life since arriving at Ashk’lan had been one of unbroken terror and flight, imprisonment and torture. How could death’s annihilation be anything but welcome?

And then, as though Meshkent could hear his silent thoughts, the god began thrashing, growling: No.

The word rolled off the slick skin of the vaniate.

I have seen what you bring to this world, Kaden said silently, and I have seen the clarity of the alternative.

Pyrre was watching him warily. Kaden ignored her, took another step toward the cliff, then another, until he stood just at the verge. Hawks turned lazily in the hot air below. At the canyon’s bottom, a narrow river gnawed at the stone. Someday, even the mesa would be worn to sand, that sand washed out to the sea. There would be no trace of the place where he stood. No trace of Rassambur or the priests. It was the way of all things.

“I will make my own offering,” Kaden said quietly, looking down, imagining the wonderful weightlessness of falling, and that other, greater weightlessness of death. “I have no need of your knives.”

“No.”

The voice was barely more than a whisper. For a few heartbeats, Kaden couldn’t be sure he had heard it at all, couldn’t be sure that the words had any life outside his own mind. Then it came again.

“No.”

Not Meshkent this time, but Triste, pleading.

“Don’t, Kaden. Please don’t.”

It was the name that called him back. Strange, that. The Shin had spent years teaching him that the word was not the thing, that a name was just a set of sounds aiming at an ever-shifting truth, aiming and always falling short. The name Kaden was no more him than his breath. It was, like all words, an error, and yet, on Triste’s lips, it called him back.

I can’t save her, he said silently.

But you can be there when she dies.

Whose voice was that? Not Meshkent’s, certainly. Not his own. It was something older than logic, old as his bones, something bred into his very flesh, one last human bond threaded through his thought even when all emotion was scrubbed away, something ineluctable, even inside the blankness of the vaniate, not a voice at all, but the wordless truth of what he was, of what he owed, and slowly, slowly, he let the trance go.

Fear came again, a fist clamped around his heart. Meshkent’s ranting fury, so quiet from inside the space of the vaniate, echoed in his mind once more: Free me. Submit and I will crush these worms. I will build a fire inside them that burns for a thousand days before I give them up to their Coward’s God.

Kaden pushed the words aside.

“Before I make this offering, however,” he said, “I will pose one question.”

The Skullsworn priest nodded thoughtfully.

Kaden glanced down once more, at the emptiness that waited, then raised his eyes.

“Do you want to kill me?” he asked quietly. “Or do you want to kill the Csestriim?”

For the first time, Gerra opened his eyes. They were a dark, vegetal green.

“If you kill us here,” Kaden went on, “or let us go, Ananshael will claim us, and soon. We are human. We will bow to his will this year or the next. The Csestriim, however…”

He let the words hang as Gerra sat slowly, then turned to face him.

“The Csestriim are destroyed.”

“Not all of them.”

“Is this true?” Gerra asked, turning to Pyrre.

She shrugged. “There are stories. But there are always stories.”

“They are not stories,” Kaden said. “I can give you names. Names and a way to find them, fight them.”

Gerra frowned. “Once already, you have tried to lie your way free of your debt to the god.”

“And you heard that lie,” Kaden said, matching the man’s gaze. “Listen to me now. The Csestriim walk this world, undying, defying your god’s justice.” He cocked his head to the side. “If I am lying, say the word and I will go to meet your god.”

For a long time, no one spoke. Wind honed its edge on the stone. Overhead, the sun hung hot and motionless in the blue. After what seemed like years, Gerra nodded.

“The god’s ways are strange. I will think on this as I pray.”

“And when your prayers are finished?” Kaden asked.

Gerra smiled. “Then I will know whether to give you to Ananshael, or whether to listen to your names.”

* * *

From the ledge behind the low stone house, Kaden looked out over the mountains scraping the sky to the west. After so many days running, his legs throbbed. Blisters had burst across the soles of both feet, then bled, and then new blisters had formed beneath the ruin of the older skin. Those, too, had burst. He prodded gingerly at the cracked, livid flesh. In the days before Rassambur, there had been no time to consider the pain, no choice but to keep running. Now, with the luxury of stillness, of silence, that pain reasserted itself, aching and burning all at the same time, hurting all the way through to the bruised bone.

As if in response to the sensation, Meshkent uncoiled, pressed against the boundaries of his cage, testing, testing.

Free me.

The words were not words, but something old and alien moving in Kaden’s mind, as though for just a moment he were seeing with someone else’s eyes, or dreaming someone else’s dream. Slowly, methodically, he went over the god’s prison, shoring and securing it, finding the places where it had worn thin-the moments of doubt, the tiny cracks where weariness worked, patient as ice, to bring down the wall-and fixing them.

No, he replied silently.

A flash of purple rage.

These creatures will gut this body if they know you carry me inside.

Kaden shook his head, as though that made any difference.

They will not know.

You risk everything.

Risk and life are inextricable, Kaden said. Then, How do I perform the obviate?

For a long time, he waited for a reply, for Meshkent’s awful weight against the walls. Instead, there was only silence, the god motionless as a stone inside his mind. He exhaled slowly, stretched his legs out before him, and began kneading the muscles of his lower back. Far out over the canyons, a pair of black birds he didn’t recognize rode the thermals. It was almost like Ashk’lan, except for the fact that in Ashk’lan, even as a novice, he had never been a prisoner, not quite. He had never lived beneath the open threat of death.

Not that the Skullsworn had mistreated him or Triste. Quite the contrary, in fact. After the audience with Gerra, Pyrre had shown them to a modest stone house near the very edge of the mesa, a structure like those in which the Skullsworn seemed to live. Inside there were two rooms, two narrow beds, a hearth carved into the sandstone walls, and above it, hanging from hooks, a set of iron pots and pans.

“Whose home is this?” Triste had asked, eyeing the nondescript space warily.

“Most recently,” Pyrre replied, “it belonged to two priests: Helten and Chem.”

“Where are Helten and Chem?”

“They went to meet the god,” the assassin said, her voice easy, matter of fact. “Yesterday, when we came for you, the Annurians killed them.”

Kaden had paused inside the doorway, trying to read the woman’s face.

“Why did they come?”

“I told them Long Fist was with you. I didn’t realize he had escaped.”

“Why do the Skullsworn care about Long Fist?” Kaden asked, shaking his head.

“They wanted to rescue him,” Triste spat. She was glaring around the modest cottage as though it were the darkest dungeon of the Dead Heart. “Priests of death come to rescue the priest of pain so that together they can spread their sick worship over the whole world.”

Pyrre’s face hardened. “Obviously the brothel where you trained skimped on the theology.”

“Murder is not theology,” Triste snarled.

“On the contrary,” Pyrre replied. “As you would know if the whores who raised you cared for anything but coin and pleasure. The Lord of the Grave, my god, is Meshkent’s most ancient foe. In the face of the cat god’s savagery, Ananshael’s justice is our only mercy. We didn’t come-my brothers and sisters and I-to save the Urghul shaman-we came to kill him before he could spread his sickness further.”

“Sickness?” Triste hissed. “Justice? Mercy? You’re a killer! You’re all murderers. Assassins! Your god is a god of blood and bones, of death and destruction. What justice is that?”

“The only true justice,” Pyrre replied simply. Her momentary anger seemed to have passed, replaced by an uncharacteristic solemnity. It had seemed to Kaden, since the moment Pyrre arrived at the monastery, that she cared for nothing, not even her own life. Faced with death and defiance, she simply laughed or shrugged. Only now, a year later, had they finally stepped, if inadvertently, on her sacred ground.

“Where is the justice,” Triste demanded, “in murdering men in their sleep? Where is the justice in killing children? In cutting down the good along with the evil?”

“Precisely there-Ananshael spares no one. Emperor or orphan, slave or sovereign, priest or prostitute-he comes for us all. Your lady-Ciena-she doles out her pleasures according to her whims. Some live a life of unmitigated bliss while others struggle through their days in pain and agony. Ciena pities some, scorns others; only Ananshael offers up his justice to all. Ciena loves watching those she has spurned writhe in the claws of her love; only the Lord of the Grave can save a soul abandoned to Meshkent.”

“They are in league,” Triste protested. “In all the songs and stories-”

Pyrre cut her off. “The songs and stories are wrong. If Meshkent had his way, we would never die. He would hold us over his fires, flay the flesh from our bones, and we would live forever, screaming and bleeding, alert to every inch of his agony. He hates what my god does, hates the escape Ananshael offers, hates the release, the final peace.”

And this is what I have caged inside me, Kaden thought. This is the being whose survival depends upon my own. For just a moment it seemed he should have stepped from the cliff after all, even if it meant leaving Triste to face the Skullsworn alone.

Triste, for her part, just stared at Pyrre, mouth agape, then finally mustered her anger once more.

“I don’t believe it.”

Pyrre’s old smile crooked the corner of her mouth. “In this, too, Ananshael is just. He offers his boundless shelter even to the unbelievers.”

And with that pronouncement, the assassin left them. There had been no admonitions, no threats about what would happen if they attempted to escape. Pyrre had taken a moment to point out the pile of wood outside, the vegetables ripening in the small raised beds, then left. Triste stood motionless a moment, wide-eyed and baffled, then cursed, stepped into the other room, and slammed the door behind her. Kaden had debated following, then discarded the idea. He was tired suddenly, viciously tired, but didn’t think that he could sleep, and so he found his way onto the stony ledge behind the house, found himself sitting cross-legged in the way of the Shin, here, thousands of miles from those other, colder mountains where he had grown from a boy into a man. The peaks were different, but the sky was the same, the emptiness of it, the way it deepened as the sun set through azure and indigo to black.

* * *

Triste found him just after moonrise. At some point she had taken off her shoes, and her bare feet scuffed quietly over the stone. Kaden started to turn, then stopped himself. Whatever she’d said at the cliff’s edge, Triste hated him, and with good reason. It was not Pyrre’s priesthood that had betrayed her, but Kaden himself, first in the Dead Heart, and then again inside his own palace. If she was here, now, it was because she had nowhere else to go.

She sat a few paces away. For a long time, they remained silent as the moon climbed through the skein of stars. Behind them somewhere, the Skullsworn were singing in a haunting, polyphonic chorus. The Shin had had their music: low, droning chants, the few notes rough enough to grind away the self. This was entirely different. The twining melodies of the Skullsworn moved between dissonance and resolution, shifting from one register to the next. If the Shin chant had been a music of stone, this was human music, one that marked the passage of time, that anticipated with each aching cadence the inevitability of its own ending.

When Kaden finally glanced over at Triste, he realized she was crying silently, her tears bright in the moonlight. She didn’t meet his eyes.

“It’s not fair,” she whispered. “It’s not fucking fair.”

Whether she meant their new imprisonment, or the god inside her, or Kaden’s presence at her side, he couldn’t say. Probably all of it. He searched for something to say, some explanation for everything he had done and not done. He found none.

“I’m sorry,” he said instead. The words were weak as the night breeze, but of all the language in the world, that single phrase was the only one that seemed true.

Triste shook her head.

“Maybe we should let them do it,” she said. “The Skullsworn. Let them kill us and just be done with it.”

Kaden studied her face. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you talk of giving up.”

“What am I fighting for?” The words were bitter but quiet, the fire finally burned out. “For this?” She gestured to the stone and sky. “For this?” To her own scarred skin. “That heartless Skullsworn bitch is right about one thing, at least-when Meshkent gets you in his grip, he doesn’t let go.”

“You came a long way just to die.”

“So did you,” she replied. “We could have just stayed in the tent. Back at your monastery. Could have let Micijah Ut cut us apart with his broad blade.”

“It would have saved a lot of running,” Kaden agreed.

“It would have saved a lot of everything.” Triste shook her head. “How many people died, do you think, because of what we did?”

“I don’t know.”

“And for what?”

“I don’t know.”

Triste glanced over at him at last.

“You never told me,” she said finally, “why you went back to Annur in the first place.”

Kaden turned from the sky’s dark gulf to look at her. “I almost didn’t go back. Valyn talked me into it, at least partly.” He shook his head. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

“The right thing to do was to fight men you’d never met over a throne you had no skill to sit on?”

For a long time, Kaden didn’t reply. In the starlight, he could make out little more than her eyes, two glinting points half hidden behind the tangle of black hair. Night hid the scars that the Ishien had carved into her skin, hid the drugged glaze of her eyes and the wary distance in that stare. Sitting a pace away from her in the darkness, it was easy to imagine he faced the same girl who had arrived in Ashk’lan a year earlier. Triste had been baffled then, even more terrified than Kaden himself, but she’d been … alive, afire with determination and, even more unlikely for a girl stolen from her mother and dragged across a continent to serve as an emperor’s slave, hope.

Kaden remembered her facing down Pyrre Lakatur just after the assassin murdered Phirum Prumm. Who are you? Triste had demanded of the woman. Who are you to decide which people get to live or die? He remembered the way she had run through the mountains, keeping pace with the monks. She’d been pulling strength from the goddess inside her, of course, but the pain she’d suffered had been her own. Her goddess hadn’t spared her the ache in her legs, hadn’t spared her those bloody, shredded feet. And even beaten up like that, she’d played her part in the plan that saved them all, facing the traitorous Kettral and the leach who had stolen her from her home.

It was the Ishien who had hacked the hope out of her, but not just the Ishien. Triste had still had some fight, some hope, some fire when they returned to Annur. It was Kaden himself who had taken that from her, taken it when he told her the truth about her mother and father, and then again, when he gave her up to the dungeon inside Intarra’s Spear. Whatever harm the Ishien had done he had more than matched. The girl had endured the violence of her enemies; it was the violence of her supposed friends that had shattered her spirit.

“Habit,” he said finally, quoting the Shin, “is a chain to bind ten thousand men.”

Triste broke a piece of stone from the ledge, rolled it in her hand a moment, then hurled it over the cliff. It fell into endless silence, as though the chasm before them had no bottom.

“You weren’t in the habit of sitting on a throne,” she said. “Not back then. When I first met you, you seemed…” She trailed off, shaking her head.

“There are habits of action and habits of thought. I never sat the throne, but I thought Annur needed an emperor. I thought the world needed Annur. For centuries the Malkeenians ruled, and I inherited that thought, too. The monks tried to teach me to set those habits of mind aside. I failed.”

“I wish the monks had taught me that,” Triste murmured. “I grew up believing my mother loved me.” She had balled her hands into fists, clenched them to her chest as though she were holding something invisible and precious. Her body trembled.

“Maybe she did.”

“She gave me to him,” she hissed. “To Adiv. She gave me away.” The words dropped off, as though the thought of her betrayal had torn them from her. Then she exhaled, a long, shuddering breath. “Your monks were right. Our habits hurt us. They’re like blades we hold willingly to our own breasts.”

For the first time since fleeing the oasis, Kaden allowed himself to think about Rampuri Tan. All over again he watched as the old monk, the broken bones inside his body grating against one another, raised that gleaming naczal to strike the final blow. Tan, who had helped to save him from the Annurian ambush, who taught him the vaniate, who stayed behind in the Dead Heart so that Kaden could escape; Tan, who had trained in the vicious ways of the Ishien for so many years and yet still found his way free. Even Tan, with that hard, level gaze, that mind of stone, had, in his final days, seen the world askew.

A mind of stone. Kaden pondered the notion. It seemed apt. The mind, any mind, was like the land, the mesas and mountains, all that stone shaped moment by immeasurable moment, sculpted imperceptibly by the winds and rivers, the innumerable drops of rain, unable, in the end, to escape the logic of its own geology.

After a long silence, Kaden shook his head slowly. “The Shin were right about a lot of things, especially when it came to snuffing out, scrubbing clean, carving away.” He turned from Triste to stare into the nothingness. “The monks told me a lot about what to destroy,” he went on after a while. “The question they never answered, though, was this: when you scrub it all out, the fear and hope, the anger and despair, all the thousands of habits of thought-what’s left?”

Triste didn’t respond. The chorus behind them rose and fell, rose and fell like the wind. When he finally looked over at her, she was watching him. Her words, when she spoke, were thin as the wind. “Why does there need to be something left?”

It was the sort of answer Scial Nin would have given, a question for a question. For all the abbot’s years and wisdom, however, he had never been forced to live the annihilation of all that he believed. Triste had.

Between one heartbeat and the next, Kaden made a decision.

“The god is inside me,” he said simply.

Triste stared at him, eyes wide, lips parted. “Meshkent.” She only whispered the word, but so fervently it sounded half a prayer, half a curse.

Kaden nodded. “It happened just before Long Fist died. I don’t…” He tried to put into language what he had done to save the god, to chain him. “I don’t know how it happened. Not exactly.”

It should have seemed an outlandish claim, something utterly insane. It would have, probably, to anyone else, to anyone who had not lived with her own divinity locked inside her flesh.

“I’m sorry,” Triste said. The words seemed pulled from her, torn from her throat with a hook.

“I suppose I deserve it. After everything.”

“No one deserves it.”

The Shin aphorism came unbidden to Kaden’s lips. “There is only what is.”

The Skullsworn chorus had fallen silent at last. Quiet crouched between Kaden and Triste like a dangerous beast.

“But that means…,” she said at last. “If you want him to survive.…”

Again, Kaden nodded. “The obviate.”

Her face hardened. “I won’t do it. I won’t be shamed into it. I don’t fucking care what you do.…”

“Triste,” Kaden said. It felt like they were floating on a scrap of stone in a great void. She trailed off, as though the sound of her own name were a leach’s kenning. Kaden spread his hands. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t know what?” she asked warily.

The thought was almost too big to put into words. “The whole thing,” he said finally. “The whole thing I’ve been fighting for. Defeating il Tornja. Saving these gods. Keeping our race alive … Why?”

She stared. His question was no more than an echo to her own, but there was something awful in hearing your own doubt and despair spoken back aloud. Maybe silence was the only answer, but Kaden felt drawn to force the rest into words, to speak it all at least this one time.

“I thought we should be saved, that humanity should be saved, that we were worth saving, but that was just a habit. Just a hope.”

“Like everything else,” Triste whispered.

Kaden nodded. “What if it’s wrong?”