“Not ideal,” Pyrre said, slowing, shaking her head.
“We can break through,” Gwenna said, waving to a gap. Even as she waved, it closed.
Annick was shooting. Where she’d picked up the arrows Gwenna had no idea—probably plucked from the dead. The crude bow still looked ridiculous in her hands, but it was proving deadly enough, and the sniper didn’t hesitate as she loosed into the attacking Urghul. A few riders fell, but more arrived to take their place. The sniper’s shafts were soon gone, and the horsemen were closing.
“Now what?” Gwenna asked, turning to put her back to Annick and Pyrre, shifting her feet, searching for the best footing.
“Now,” Pyrre said, “it is time to greet the god.” She sounded ready. Eager, even.
“You’re giving up?” Gwenna spat. Not that she could see any way free, but the assassin’s calm conviction baffled her. Worried her. If she let go of her own fury, she wasn’t sure anything waited beneath but mindless, gibbering fear, and so she clung to her rage, stoked it, heaped it with fuel. “Fuck that,” she shouted, then turned to the Urghul. “Who’s first?” She gestured with her high blade. “Which one of you bloody shits is first?”
Sorry, Valyn, she said silently. We made a go of it.…
The lead rider—Huutsuu, Gwenna realized—shook her head, lowered her spear, and nudged her horse forward. The scars on her face and arms glistened with sweat in the torchlight. Her lips curled back in a smile or snarl. She had wonderful teeth, Gwenna thought pointlessly. A savage with perfect teeth was going to kill her.…
The scream came first, a sky-shattering, blood-boiling scream. The Urghul closing for the kill suddenly struggled to rein their rearing horses, but that scream drove straight into the beasts’ brains, triggering something ancient and undeniable in their hearts, a terror that would not be soothed. Again it came, and again, like steel shrieking through ice. The scream, then the wind, then the great shadow of outstretched wings, a perfect dark against the greater darkness of the night, and then the figures in black alighting silently as shadows.
“Valyn,” Gwenna called, shock and relief raging through her. “It’s Valyn!”
She had no idea where he found ’Ra, no idea how he knew to come back, no clue about any of it, and she didn’t care. Somehow, impossibly, the Wing was whole again. She’d been about to die, and now the bird had dropped straight out of the night to lift them clear.
The kettral tore into the closest riders with her talons, disemboweling one man and the horse beneath him. Huutsuu hurled herself clear at the last moment, just before her horse bucked then buckled beneath the slicing claws. The riders on the flanks tried to close, but someone was shooting arrows, the feathered shafts sprouting from necks and shoulders. When a huge taabe with a crooked nose bellowed, spurring his terrified horse forward, his skull just … folded. Gwenna could think of no other word. She hadn’t even seen the blow, but the flesh crumpled in on itself like a rotten gourd dropped from a height.
A kenning.
It had to be a kenning, but when Gwenna whirled about, instead of Talal, she found herself staring at Sigrid sa’Karnya. Not Valyn, she realized, horrified. The Flea’s Wing. Sigrid’s lips were drawn back in an expression that might have been ecstasy or rage. Blond hair whipped at her face, while blood ran in runnels down her milk-pale skin. The Flea stood just in front of her, shortbow loose in his hand, while a few steps to the side Newt was lighting a …
“Starshatter!” Gwenna bellowed, hauling Annick back with one hand, seeing the lit charge spin end over end into the mass of horsemen, bracing herself for the bone-jarring shock that lit half the sky and left her ears ringing. The air concussed. Blue-white flame sheeted up and out, slicing the night sky into shards. Gwenna closed her eyes at the last moment, blocking out the worst of the glare, reeled backward still holding Annick, then found her footing. She was amazed to still be standing after such a close detonation, but then, Newt knew his business, had figured in the mass of horses and men, using his target to shield them all from the backblow. A dozen of the beasts were down, some still, others thrashing desperately, kicking, screaming as their riders—one missing a leg, another with her face flayed to the bone—tried to claw their way free.
Someone seized her by the arm, and Gwenna pivoted, hacking down with her stolen sword. The Flea blocked the attack casually, sliding it off to the side as he locked eyes with her.
“Where are the rest?” he shouted. “Where’s Valyn?”
Gwenna hesitated. She had no idea if the Flea had come to save her or kill her. The attack on the Urghul argued for saving, but then, the last time the two Wings had met, they’d blown up the better part of a large building trying to murder each other.
“Gwenna!” he said, leaning close. She realized that, while their two swords remained locked together, he had brought a small knife to her throat. “If I wanted to kill you, you would be dead. I’m here to help.” He lowered the knife. “Now where’s Valyn?”
“Gone,” she said, waving her hand. “South. It’s just us.”
The Flea nodded, focused on something over her shoulder, threw the knife, then gestured to the bird with the empty hand. “Load up.”
Somewhere to Gwenna’s right another starshatter ripped into the Urghul. The camp was a madness of flame, screaming horses, brandished steel, and blood, all of it held at bay, impossibly, by the Flea and his Wing.
“Delay,” Newt called over his shoulder, “is the mother of defeat.”
“Meaning get on the bird,” the Flea said again. “Now.”
He tilted his head to the side, as though stretching his neck, and a spear shaft sailed past, embedding itself in the dirt. Gwenna stared at it for a moment, watching it quiver. Then she ran for the bird.
32
“Tan’is was among the youngest of us, one of the last Csestriim born without the rot,” Kiel said.
Two of the three lanterns in Morjeta’s bedchamber had spluttered out during their conversation, and the remaining lamp was burning low, tossing the corners of the room into fitful darkness. No one made a move to refill them. Morjeta herself had subsided against the pillows of the divan, a stunned look on her face. Kaden could sympathize. His own introduction to the Csestriim had been a shock, and the notion that they still stalked the earth had been introduced to him in gradual stages. To learn all at once that the immortal foes of humanity still lived, that one had all but seized control of Annur, that another sat several feet from her, dark stare as wide and deep and inscrutable as the sea, was clearly more than the woman could absorb all at once. There was no time, however, to ease her gently into the truth.
“Why was he appointed your general in the wars against humanity?” Kaden asked. “Why not someone older? Someone with more experience?”
“Because he was the best,” Kiel replied simply. “Not the best fighter. There were twenty-two Csestriim more skilled than Tan’is with both naczal and sword, at least at the start of the wars. In fact, he wasn’t even the greatest pure strategist. Asherah and a handful of others could defeat him at the stones board. In battle, however—” Kiel’s eyes went suddenly far, as though he were studying some furious fight thousands and thousands of years past. “—none of my people shared his gift for command.
“A part of it was simply native genius. His mind moves more quickly, more unexpectedly than most. More than that, however, Tan’is understood your race in a way that most of us, especially the older Csestriim, did not. He studied you.…”
“You mean he tortured and killed us,” Kaden said, thinking back to the lightless corridors of the Dark Heart.
Kiel nodded. “That was a part of his study, although not the entirety of it. The war lasted several human generations, and Tan’is spent that entire time, whenever he wasn’t actually leading the armies, in study, learning your peculiar use of the language, your physiology and limitations, your emerging social structures, your weapons and weaknesses, and most of all, your minds. He spent decades trying to discover wha
t had broken inside you, trying to understand whether it had anything to do with the new gods.”
“What do you mean, the new gods?” Triste asked. Unlike her mother, she wasn’t as jolted by the sudden revelation. After all, they’d been discussing the Csestriim for weeks. Triste had suffered in a Csestriim prison and passed through the Csestriim gates. Somehow, she knew their language. As Kiel spoke, she leaned forward on her cushion, eyes bright, sweat sheening her brow.
“You call them the young gods,” Kiel said. “The children of Meshkent and Ciena.”
“Heqet and Kaveraa,” Kaden said, reciting the names as he had heard them recited a thousand times before leaving for the Bone Mountains. “Eira and Maat; Orella and Orilon.”
“And Akalla,” Kiel added slowly. “And Korin.”
Kaden frowned. “No. There are only six of them. Six children of Pleasure and Pain.”
“That is because we killed the other two.”
For several heartbeats no one spoke. Morjeta had retreated behind the stillness of her painted face. Triste’s mouth hung open, as though in mid-gasp. Kaden realized that he, too, was leaning forward on his cushion, legs tense, breath lodged in his lungs. He exhaled slowly.
“You’re saying you killed two of the gods.”
“Tan’is killed them,” Kiel said. “He captured them after the battle of Nimir Point. Captured them, studied them, then killed them. I was there as historian. It is how we learned, learned conclusively, of the connection between our children—between you—and the new gods.”
Suddenly, Kaden was sitting once more in Scial Nin’s study, looking across the rough wooden desk at the abbot, listening to him explain about the kenta and the Shin, about the purpose of Kaden’s time among the monks. The abbot was dead, one of the hundreds of robed bodies left on the ledges to feed the ravens, and yet Kaden could still hear his patient explanation: It could have been the birth of the young gods that led to human emotion.
“They changed you somehow,” Kaden said quietly. “The young gods changed the Csestriim into … us.”
Kiel nodded. “It was only a suspicion at first. The facts fit. We had theory and evidence, but no proof. Then they came down. Here. They breathed their own immortal forms into human bodies, all to help you in your fight against my people.”
“And you killed them?” Triste demanded, utterly aghast.
“Only two,” Kiel said. If he was taken aback by the girl’s horror, he didn’t show it. “Like you, they were a threat. A foe.”
“Akalla,” Kaden said, tasting the strange syllables. “Korin.”
Kiel nodded. “Those were the names they took. I do not know their provenance.”
“And so they’re just … what? Gone?”
Kiel pursed his lips as though considering a thorny question of translation. “Perhaps not fully or forever. Gods are not Bedisa’s creation. Ananshael cannot unknit them. Even the young gods are … larger than us, more complete than this creation.” He shook his head. “Really, the language does not serve in discussing them.”
“So you didn’t kill them,” Kaden said, frustration fraying the fabric of his calm.
Kiel met his gaze for a moment, then held up a hand, studying it in the lamplight. “Tan’is destroyed the flesh while they were trapped inside, before they could be released. The gods may be eternal, without end or limit, but their touch on this world is not. That is what Tan’is killed—their hold on and influence over those born into their thrall.”
“But,” Kaden said, “if what we are, if the makeup of our minds and hearts comes from the touch of the young gods, there must have been an effect.…” He trailed off, trying to understand what such an effect might be, trying to hold the notion in his head.
“There was.”
The historian paused, so long this time that Kaden wondered if he had given up trying to explain.
“Imagine you are blind,” he said finally. “That you were born blind. That all your life you have lived in darkness among others like you. If you were suddenly and momentarily shown color, how would you explain it to your sightless race? What words would you use? What formulations of logic or reason? Analogy fails. Induction and deduction fail. This is the best I can do—
“Your ancestors, the first among you, felt differently about the world. Not just differently, but more. It was as though the stones and rivers, the sea and sky, the physical world and the transcendent notions that emanate from it were as crucial to those first, broken Csestriim children as their own human families, their own selves. They would die to avoid unnecessary destruction. They acted and spoke as though the earth itself were a part of them, woven into the fabric of their minds. This world of cities and roads—” He gestured to the walls of the chamber and beyond. “Your ancestors would not have recognized it. They would have loathed it.”
“And after you killed the gods?” Kaden asked, voice thin as the last smoke from a spent fire.
“You changed.
“The bodies of the gods died as all bodies die: a hole hacked in the flesh, a break in Bedisa’s perfection where the life drained out. I would have expected their deaths to be different from our own in some way. Greater or louder. They were gods, after all. But they were bound and drugged, both of them, and Tan’is killed them with a knife no longer than my hand.
“It took me a century to be sure of the effect, decades upon decades walking among your kind, posing as one of you, asking the same questions over and over:
“‘What is this? What is this?’
“I always met with the same reply, ‘It is rock. It is water. It is air.’
“‘And what do you feel about the rock and the water? What do you feel about the air?’
“‘Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’”
For a long time Kaden could not bring himself to speak. He struggled to conceive the magnitude of Kiel’s claim, of the loss. The Shin trained a lifetime to scrub out human emotion, and none ever succeeded, not completely, not perfectly. If Kiel was right, however, Ran il Tornja had managed just that, at least a portion of it, with two cuts of the knife. What would happen if everyone in the empire—everyone in the world—all at once lost hope and courage, fear and love? It was like looking down to find the once-solid ground nothing but an illusion. A dream.
Kiel watched him, eyes blank as shells. Only when Kaden finally nodded did he continue.
“Tan’is resolved to destroy the rest of the new gods, to capture and kill them individually, or to strike directly at Ciena and Meshkent. He believed—not without warrant—that the elimination of those two would cripple the others, that the new gods were in some way dependent on or emergent from their parents.”
Kaden stared. “Was he right?”
“We don’t know,” Kiel replied evenly. “We began to lose the war then, and when it was clear that your kind would defeat us, those gods who had taken your side … departed. They slipped clear of their adopted flesh. Their influence remains, but they are gone.”
“Holy Hull,” Triste breathed quietly.
“Yes,” Kiel agreed. “Like Hull. The god himself remains remote, unmanifest, but we know his darkness.”
“I should have left you in the Dead Heart,” Kaden said finally, the words loose before he could call them back. “I should have left you to rot.”
“You would not have escaped without me,” Kiel replied. “Even if you had won free somehow, you are not prepared to face il Tornja. He will destroy you without my help. He may destroy you in spite of it.” He shook his head. “I was accounted a good mind among my people, but Tan’is was always the better strategist, the better tactician.”
Kaden stared. “You killed two of our gods, and now you’re talking about helping me?”
Kiel nodded. “As I said, my goals are not those of Tan’is. He seeks a return to the past. I am more interested in chronicling the present.”
The Csestriim fell silent. Kaden stared at him a moment, then turned to Triste. She met his eyes with her own wide, wild gaze, th
en shook her head helplessly.
“I don’t know, Kaden,” she said. “He helped us. He keeps helping us. He’s here, right?”
Kaden blew out a long, unsteady breath. “All right. If you want to help, help. What about Ran il Tornja? What is he doing?”
“As I told you before,” Kiel replied, “he has not abandoned his charge. The gods are gone, beyond his reach, but he seeks another way to destroy you. Has sought one for many thousands of years.”
“And the fact that he’s taking action now…” Kaden began, trailing off as the horror hit him.
Kiel nodded. “It is impossible to be certain of the movings of another mind, but it would seem that our lost general has finally found what he seeks.”
33
“No, no, no, you’re missin’ the point, ya ox’s ass,” Nira said, smacking her cane against her palm, causing her horse to start. “Ya don’t need ta sign the papers, and swear the oaths, and have yer tits anointed with the holy oils, and whatever all other little bits a’ theater yer family’s been parading around the last few hundred years. Ya just do it.”
Adare took a firm rein on her temper. She was exhausted. Exhausted from riding from dawn until well past dusk every day since Annur. Exhausted from trying to anticipate il Tornja’s next deception. Exhausted from second-guessing herself. Exhausted from wondering if she had overstepped in claiming the throne, a throne never intended for her, a throne for which she might be killed, or even worse, forced to kill good people, Annurian citizens who would rise up against her, refusing to accept a female Emperor. Exhausted from telling Fulton over and over to back off, to give her space to talk in private, to think. Exhausted from sitting appropriately upright in her saddle when she wanted to collapse over the cantle. Exhausted from the sickness that twisted in her gut every morning, a result, no doubt, of the miserable camp food. Exhausted from worrying about the scars laid into her skin, from trying to wring some sense from the events at the Everburning Well. And exhausted from Nira’s endless tirade of acerbic counsel, Nira, who, despite her advanced age, seemed the only person in the long muddy ranks with any energy left.
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