The Last Mortal Bond (6 page)

“She doesn't know how. And even if she did, she wouldn't do it.” He had explained to her the truth. They'd been over it a dozen times, to no avail. “There's no point keeping her in the Spear if she can't perform the
obviate,
if she won't. Everyone knows she's in the prison, and even if no one has attacked her yet, they will.”

“All of this is true,” Kiel replied, his eyes going distant. After a long pause, the Csestriim turned away, crossed to the small table that still held Sanlitun's
ko
board. He seated himself in one of the two chairs facing it. Kaden watched. He had spent enough time around Kiel since their flight from the Dead Heart to have grown used to these lapses. Even after thousands of years lived among humans, generations chronicling their lives, habits, and histories, beneath his unremarkable manner, behind that human façade, Kiel's rhythms of speech and thought remained alien, unknowable. Kaden schooled himself to patience, watching as the Csestriim removed the lids from the twin boxes and began playing, one side against the other, the only sound the quiet click of the stones against the board: white, then black, then white, over and over.

A stranger would have imagined Kiel preoccupied. Kaden knew better. The man played
ko
easily as breathing. He could go through entire games without looking at the board, and he never, ever lost. Whatever private war he was waging against himself, it had nothing to do with the game itself.

After forty moves, he paused, studied the stones a moment, then looked over at Kaden, picking up the thread of the conversation as though he had never dropped it.

“It is possible that il Tornja wants you to move her. That this entire episode was engineered to
force
you to move her.”

Kaden frowned at the board, as though there were some sort of answer in the sprawling patterns. “To strike at her when she's outside the prison.”

Kiel nodded. “Right now, Triste is the most securely guarded person in this republic. Someone who wants to attack her, even someone who manages to get inside the Dawn Palace, still has to go through five locked doors and twenty guardsmen. It is not an inconsiderable obstacle.”

“They got in here.”

“One door,” Kiel pointed out. “Three guards. Today's attack could be no more than a feint, an attempt to make you panic. He will come for Triste eventually, but he will not have to come for her if you give her up.”

“And if we keep her here,” Kaden said, “when he finishes with Long Fist in the north, he can come for her at his leisure.”

Kiel nodded.

Frustration gnawed at the edge of Kaden's calm. “So if we move her, we lose. If we keep her, we lose.”

“It all returns to the
obviate
. You must convince her. She may not know the way, but the goddess inside her knows.”

“The ritual will kill her,” Kaden said. “That's what your warriors found all those millennia ago, right?”

Kiel didn't blink. “She is Ciena's prison.”

“She is a person, not a prison. She didn't ask for Ciena to inhabit her flesh, and she certainly hasn't volunteered to undergo a slaughter intended to set the goddess free. It is murder.”

“It is sacrifice,” Kiel corrected him. “To the goddess. For the goddess.”

“And how do we know,” Kaden asked, “that killing Triste won't annihilate Ciena's touch on our world anyway? That's what il Tornja wants to do, right?”

“Method matters. The
obviate
is not a murder, it is a ritual, one in which Triste consents to let go of her goddess. This is not a knife in the dark. It gives Ciena the time to depart the human flesh whole and unbroken. The
obviate
lays down the safe path she will take out of this world.”

“At least that's what you believe,” Kaden said, staring at the Csestriim.

Kiel nodded fractionally. “It is what I believe. It is what happened with the young gods.”

“And if you're wrong?”

“Then I am wrong. We act on the information we have.”

Kaden watched the historian a moment, then looked away, out over the darkened rooftops of Annur. Without a word, he slipped outside his own emotion and into the unending emptiness of the
vaniate
. He could do it at will now, could manage it walking, even talking. Scial Nin's words came back to him, spoken directly across the space of the intervening year:
You would have made a good monk.

Inside the trance, all pressure fell away. There was no urgency, no worry—only fact. Il Tornja would find a way to murder Triste, or he would not. She would agree to perform the
obviate,
or she would not. They would find a way to rescue the trapped goddess, or they would not. And if they failed, if all pleasure vanished from the world, how would that be any different from the vast peace of the
vaniate
?

“Come out of that, Kaden,” Kiel said. “You should not spend so much time so fully severed from yourself.”

Kaden hesitated inside the stillness. The
vaniate
had frightened him at first, the hugeness of it, the indifference, the cool, absolute smoothness. That fear was, he thought now, the way that one of the Annurians below, a man raised his whole life inside the hum and throb of the city, might feel were he to wake one clear morning on a glacier in the Bone Mountains: a terror of too much space, of too much nothing, of not enough self to fill the gap between snow and sky. Only, Kaden felt at home on the glacier now. He found, when the world grew too loud, too close, that he was unwilling to leave that infinite blank.

“Kaden.” Kiel's voice again, sharper this time. “Let it go.”

Reluctantly, Kaden stepped out of the emptiness and into the cloister of his own irritation.

“You live inside it all the time,” he pointed out, careful to keep the emotion from his voice.

Kiel nodded. “Our minds were built for it. Yours is not.”

“Meaning what?”

The Csestriim didn't reply at once. Instead, he rose, lit a lamp, then another. Light filled the room, warm as water, pressing out against the ironglass of the Spear. Only when the room was fully lit did he return to his chair, studying the
ko
board intently before he sat. After a pause, he placed a white stone, then a black, then another white. Kaden couldn't make sense of any of the moves. It seemed as though Kiel had forgotten his question, or ignored it, but finally the historian looked up.

“You saw what happened to the Ishien,” he said quietly. “To some of them.”

Kaden nodded slowly. His weeks as a prisoner in their damp stone cells were not the sort of thing a person forgot, even one better equipped for forgetting than Kaden himself. He could still see Trant's wide, agitated eyes, could still watch Ekhard Matol screaming spittle one moment, smiling that wide, awful smile the next. They were insane, all of them. They had tried to kill Kaden twice, once in the labyrinthine tunnels of the Dead Heart, and once on a sun-bright island ringed with
kenta,
awash in a wide sea. For all he knew, they were still trying to find a way to get at him. And yet …

“The Ishien aren't the Shin,” Kaden replied. “Their methods…” He hesitated, remembering the scars, the descriptions of self-inflicted torment. “Those methods would break anyone.”

“Yes,” Kiel said, nudging another stone into place, “and no. The Shin discipline provides a gentler, subtler path, but the destination is the same. The
vaniate
is like … the deep sea. You can dive deeper and deeper, but the ocean is not your home. Stay down too long and it will crush you. Surely you heard of this happening among the monks?”

For months, Kaden had tried to put all thought of Ashk'lan from his mind. The memories of sky and silence were tangled up too tightly with the killing that came later. The truth that he could have done nothing to save the monks, to save Pater, or Akiil, or Scial Nin, sat too closely to that other, harder truth, that he
had
done nothing. It was easier to dwell on his failures here in Annur.

“Did none of the Shin let go when you were among them?” Kiel asked.

Kaden stared at the board, unwilling to meet the other man's gaze. “Let go?”

“My people had a phrase for it:
Ix acma.
It means ‘Without self. Without center.'”

“I thought that was the whole point,” Kaden protested. “I must have recited the mantra a hundred thousand times:
The mind is a flame. Blow it out
.”

“It is a vivid figure of speech, but it lacks precision. The flame, if we keep to the figure, dims, it wavers, but it continues to burn. You need your emotions. They keep you … tethered to this world.”

“The walking away,” Kaden said quietly.

Kiel nodded. “That was what they called it when last I visited Ashk'lan.”

One of the Shin had walked away just a few months after Kaden first arrived in the mountains. Little was made of the event. The monk—Kaden was still too young, too untrained to recall his name—had simply stood up in the meditation hall one afternoon, nodded to the others seated there, then walked into the mountains. Akiil, always the curious one, had demanded to know what would happen to him, when he would come back. Scial Nin just shook his head. “He will not come back.” It was not a cause for sorrow nor for celebration. A man, one of their own, was gone, absent, his stone cell in the dormitory suddenly empty. But then, the Shin had lived with emptiness a long time.

“I always thought that the ones who walked away were the failures,” Kaden said. “That they were the ones who couldn't take it. You're telling me they were the only ones to really master the
vaniate
? To enter it fully?”

“Success or failure,” Kiel said, eyeing the board, “depend very much on one's goals. A cold death in the mountains would not be accounted a success by many of your kind, but those who walked away found what they sought. They blew out the flame.”

“And the rest? Rampuri Tan and Scial Nin and all the others?”

Kiel looked up. “They did not. You do not live long, any of you, severed from your emotions.”

“Which is why il Tornja wants to cut that cord. Why he's so intent on killing Ciena and Meshkent.”

The historian nodded.

Kaden blew out a long, slow breath. “I'll go talk to Triste.”

“What will you say?”

It was a good question. A crucial question. Kaden could only shake his head, mute.

 

4

Nira's stare might have been hammered out on an anvil.

“Just tell me,” the old woman demanded, “what's the point a' havin' a fuckin' councillor if ya're not plannin' ta listen ta any of her counsel?”

“I listen to your counsel,” Adare replied, trying to keep her voice low, reasonable, patient. She was reminded, suddenly, of her childhood visits to her father's hunting estate northeast of Annur. While Sanlitun had never been a hunter, he kept a kennel of dogs—some gifts from foreign dignitaries, others whelped on the estate—and Adare liked to visit the dogs in the early morning, before most of the servants and slaves were up and about their business. There was an old red-coat hound bitch, blind in one eye, half lame and wholly vicious, to whom Adare took a perverse liking. She'd bring the aging beast a bone from the kitchen, toss it into the pen, then stand back while the bitch gnawed with the good side of her mouth, eyeing Adare balefully the whole time.

The hound had died more than a decade earlier, but talking to Nira brought back all the old instincts. Like the hound, the woman refused to let something go once she got it in her teeth. Like the hound, she'd snap at any hand that got too close, even the hand that fed her. Like the hound, she'd survived her share of fights, fights that had killed off all her peers.

And unlike the hound,
Adare reminded herself grimly,
Rishinira is more than a thousand years old, and once helped to destroy half the world.

“I would like to have you in Annur,” Adare said slowly, trying to pry this particular bone from Nira's mouth without getting bitten, “but I need you here more.” She glanced toward the door of her study. It was closed and latched, but even so, she pitched her voice lower. “I have allies, Nira, but no friends aside from you.”

“Friends, is it?” the woman barked.
“Friends!”

Adare ignored the interruption. “Right now you are the only person I really trust, Intarra help me.”

“Which is why, ya dumb cow, ya want me by your side when you trot off to this fool fucking meeting you're so keen on.”

“No. It's why I need you
here,
to keep an eye on il Tornja.”

Nira's face hardened at the mention of the name. “Eyes are for fools. If all I kept on him was an eye, he'd a' been gone long months back, disappeared, slipped outta your weak little paws completely.”

“I don't think so,” Adare said slowly, considering for the hundredth time the events of the past year. “He's not fighting this war for
me,
but he's also not fighting it because you put some invisible leash around his neck. He was here, in the north, weeks before we came. He has his own reasons for going after the Urghul, for going after Long Fist.”

“Oh, I'll grant him his reasons. Every creature's got reasons, even a miserable, manipulating bastard like your general.
Especially
someone like him.” She shook her head. “Sticky thing about his reasons though, is just that: they're
his
fucking reasons.” Adare caught a glimpse of brown teeth as the woman smiled. “That's where the leash comes in.”

“But if you travel with me, if you go farther away, you won't be able to…”

“Won't be able ta
what
?” Nira raised an eyebrow. “You become a leach all of a sudden? Added that ta your long list of shiny titles?”