The Last Mortal Bond (67 page)

Tan shook his head. “You are tricked by the shifting of surfaces. The river is the same, regardless of the waves.”

“Meaning what?”

“This place is dangerous.”

“Everywhere is dangerous,” Kaden replied quietly. “Annur is dangerous. The Dawn Palace is dangerous. I came because I had to come.”

For the first time, Tan looked up. Lamplight glittered in his dark eyes. Slowly, he unfolded his limbs and stood.

“Why?”

It took less time than Kaden had expected to explain it all. It seemed as though it should have taken longer to anatomize the dissolution of an empire, to recount the return of the gods, to set in the scales the whole human race, to watch all humanity teeter over the abyss. Inside the
vaniate,
however, it was all a matter of timelines and facts, observation and inference, the possible annihilation of millions nothing but a desiccated conjecture. Kaden set his account between them like a species of strange beetle, killed and pinned to the board.

Tan evinced no shock at the revelation. No alarm. He listened silently, still as the stone walls of his cell as the lantern's light played over him. When Kaden finished, he didn't move, stood staring into the darkness for a dozen heartbeats before speaking.

“And you believe this.”

Kaden nodded. “I do.”

“And if you are wrong?”

“About what?”

“About all of it. What if these gods are not gods at all?”

Kaden studied the empty space between them. “I have heard Ciena speak. And Meshkent…”

“You heard words. You assumed divinity.”

“They pass the gates. They wield massive power.”

“The Csestriim pass gates,” Tan countered. “The Csestriim, too, have their leaches.”

“Long Fist is at
war
with Ran il Tornja—”

“He appears to be at war,” the monk cut in.

Kaden blinked. “Thousands have died on the northern front,” he managed after a moment. “More. This war is more than a mirage.”

“The deaths of men mean nothing to the Csestriim.”

“But
why
?” Kaden asked. “Why would they feign this?”

Tan met his eyes. “To destroy us.”

Kaden shook his head. “That doesn't make sense. Kiel is helping me to
stop
il Tornja. Long Fist didn't even know about Triste or Ciena until I told him.…”

“Stop listening to their words. Stop watching their faces. Look at the world as it is, at what they have caused to happen.”

“I have been looking at it. While you've been locked in the darkness, I have been looking at it every day.”

“Then the light has blinded you.”

Kaden stared at the figure of his former mentor. Tan had not shifted at all from the cell's center. The heavy door hung open at Kaden's back, but the monk had not looked toward it even once. If anything, he seemed indifferent to his sudden freedom.

“Blinded me to what?” Kaden asked. Even inside the
vaniate,
he almost felt like an acolyte once again, scrambling to answer his
umial
's questions, trying to follow the thread of the logic and falling short.

“They are all Csestriim,” Tan replied. “Il Tornja and Long Fist, Kiel and Triste. They are Csestriim, they are allies, and they are winning.”

Kaden shook his head. “No.”

“Il Tornja and Long Fist appear to be foes, but who are they destroying?” Tan let the question hang between them. “They are destroying you,” he said finally. “Us. Humanity. Listen to what you have told me: Long Fist seized control of the Ishien decades ago. He took the name of Bloody Horm, rose through the ranks until he ruled the Dead Heart and the men inside it. But has he used this power to attack il Tornja? He has not.

“Il Tornja took control of your throne, and to do what? To fight a perfectly balanced battle against Long Fist, a battle in which men and women die in droves while the two of them survive, often miles from the field of war itself. Triste and Kiel convince you to gut Annur from the inside, killing untold citizens, and then, when Triste is imprisoned, Ran il Tornja finds a way to break her free. They dance around each other, growling and feinting, but it is the humans who suffer, humans who die.”

The monk fell silent, but the emptiness trembled, around Kaden and inside him like a great, invisible bell tolling in his bones. It seemed impossible. The entire fabric of the past year was stitched from the conflict between Long Fist and il Tornja, between a god made flesh and the Csestriim trying to destroy him. But then, where had Kaden first heard that notion? From Kiel, another Csestriim, one who, for all his protestations of loyalty to Annur, all his alleged fascination with humanity, had been languishing in an Ishien dungeon when Kaden found him.

Or had he?

If Long Fist ruled the Dead Heart as Bloody Horm, Long Fist could have planted Kiel. The two of them could have colluded to ensure that Kaden returned to Annur with a Csestriim advisor at his side, an advisor who would convince him to destroy the very foundation of his own empire, an empire that had played a crucial role in holding the ancient gates against the return of the Csestriim.…

“It's not possible,” Kaden murmured. Even as he spoke the words, however, they sounded wrong.

The memory of Kiel at the stones board filled his mind. The Csestriim had spent countless hours at those solitary games, warring against himself, laying one stone after another on the polished surface, each landing with a quiet click—black, white, black, white. Kaden knew the game, of course—everyone did—but Kiel's play was baffling, almost nonsensical. Instead of the classical forms and attacks, the historian pursued moves so arcane as to seem suicidal: solitary stones placed deep inside enemy terrain, broken formations with obvious flaws, scattershot attacks that seemed built to fail. Never until the endgame could Kaden see the true shape, the structure beneath the chaos toward which both sets of sides had been aiming all along.

“They have played you, Kaden,” Rampuri Tan said quietly. “They have played us all.”

For a long time the words sat there, cold as the surrounding stone. Kaden studied Kiel's face, clear and motionless in the amber of memory, then Triste's, then Long Fist's. Was it possible the shaman's rage was all an elaborate act, one for which he'd trained a thousand years? Was Triste's grief all feigned, her fear and agony a calibrated farce? Inside the
vaniate
it seemed possible, probable, and after a long pause he let the trance go.

He felt naked outside the emptiness. Cold. A shiver ran over his skin, and deeper, somewhere between the muscle and the bone, emotion moved, fear and confusion burning like poison. It was tempting to slip back into the
vaniate,
but Kaden thrust the temptation aside, searching the memory of his flesh for what he had felt when he confronted Triste, when she touched him, when she sobbed or screamed.

Regret,
he realized. He felt regret, and something else, something more, a warm bewilderment to which he could not put a name.

“No,” he said slowly.

Tan just watched him, dark eyes reflecting back the lantern light from behind the mess of hair.

“You're wrong,” Kaden said again, remembering Triste's desperate sobbing that first night in his tent, the fear in her violet eyes, her fury when Pyrre killed Phirum Prumm in the mountains above the monastery. “There are things you cannot fake.”

“It is dangerous,” Tan replied finally, “to believe you understand the Csestriim. Their minds. Their abilities. I studied the creatures half my life, and I do not understand them. Our minds cannot encompass them.”

“Then how can you think you know Triste? Or Long Fist? Especially when you've been locked inside this prison?”

Tan shook his head. “I make no claim to know them. I am reading the facts of the world, facts you have conveyed to me.”

“The bare facts about what's happening in the world outside don't capture the whole truth.” Kaden thought of Triste's arms wrapped tight around him that first night back in Ashk'lan, of the tears streaking her cheeks in Assare, of those awful moments of hope when, from inside her cell, she seemed to actually see him. “There are other ways to know a thing,” he concluded quietly.

“No,” Tan said. “There are not. These ‘other ways of knowing' are the blindfolds of your hopes and fears. Remove the blindfolds. The world is the only truth.”

“Not always,” Kaden replied, shaking his head. “Not all of it. The world I've returned to is packed with lies.”

“The lies, too, are the truth.”

A grain of irritation scratched at the edge of Kaden's calm.

“I have begun to question the value of the old Shin paradox.”

“It is not a paradox. The blacksmith makes blades: a truth. The liar hammers out lies: a truth. All that is real is the thing made.” Tan crossed slowly to the stone wall, then laid a hand against it. “I know nothing of the creature who built this cell—male or female, old or young—but I know it is a cell.”

“Triste hasn't put me in a cell. Kiel broke me
out
of one.”

“The world is larger than one blindfolded prince.”

“And you think, based on what you just learned, that they've turned the whole world into a cell.”

Tan shook his head grimly. “Not a cell. A slaughterhouse.” He watched Kaden with those dark eyes before continuing. “You cannot see inside their minds, not even with the
beshra'an
. You can only see what they have done. What they have made. This is what the monks of Ashk'lan tried to teach you, but you are a novice no longer. Now there is a price for your blindness.”

Kaden stared past Tan, into the cell's far corners. It was easy, too easy, to remember Triste crouching in a cell exactly like this, her face cut and scabbed, her fingernails ragged and bloody from trying to claw her way free. An act? It seemed impossible.

More impossible than the Goddess of Pleasure come again?
a voice whispered in his ear.

Finally Kaden shook his head. “The only way to know is to find Triste.”

Tan's silence was stone.

“I need your help,” Kaden pressed.

“To save the creatures? Or to kill them?”

“We can't do either until we find them. Come with me, help me track down Triste, and we will find il Tornja, too. When you've seen her, seen Long Fist, you can tell me if you still think they're Csestriim.”

Tan made no move toward the open door. Water dripped from the stone, marking its own inscrutable hours.

“And if this is, in fact, what I tell you?”

Kaden considered his old
umial,
trying to read something in that unreadable face. “Then it will be good,” he replied finally, quietly, “that I am with a man long trained in the killing of Csestriim.”

 

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.