10
The smoke was gone, and the shouting, and the rough stone beneath his feet. Kaden had walked from darkness and chaos into daylight, the sun shining hot overhead, warming his face, his hands. But the sun was wrong. At Ashk’lan it never rose so high in the sky, not even during the summer solstice. And the wind: warm and wet as a cloth drawn steaming from the wash and heavy with salt. The sounds, too, wrong: a keen skirling of seabirds; a scrape like rough steel across stone that Kaden recognized, after a moment, as waves. Gone, the spice of juniper. Vanished, the chill stillness of the granite peaks.
In the emptiness of the vaniate he registered the impressions one after another but felt no alarm, no surprise. These were facts, nothing more, details of the world to be noted, tallied. This is the earth. This is the sky. No fear attended the strangeness of the sight, no excitement its novelty. Here are the small, fork-tailed birds darting into the waves. Here is the sea.
Kaden glanced back through the empty gate, half expecting to see smoke and madness, to hear the shouted orders and cries of dismay from which he had just fled. But there was no darkness. There were no shouts or cries. All he could see beneath the arch of the kenta was a long line of unbroken swells, swift and silent as they rode the ocean’s back. Altogether elsewhere—a thousand miles off . . . two thousand . . . a few steps through the kenta—Valyn was fighting for his life, fighting or captured, dying or dead. It was real, but it didn’t feel real. It might have been a dream, all of it. It might never have happened. The sun, the sea, the sky, all of it seemed too much, too present, and suddenly Kaden felt like he was falling, unmoored from the ground below, the sky above, cut free from his own self, and he turned, searching for something more steady than the gray sea’s sway.
He stood on a grassy sward a few paces from the edge of a large bluff where the ground plunged straight down—a hundred paces or more—into the gnawing surf. Waves battered the rock, flinging spray into the air. The too-high sun cast a crisp, foreshortened shadow of the kenta on the earth before him, and after a moment, Kaden realized he was on an island, the whole thing no more than a quarter mile around, edged with cliff on every side. Beyond, the ocean stretched unbroken to the horizon, where heat blurred the line between heavy air and the heavier water below.
Before he could take in more, a figure stumbled through the gate, lurching into him, knocking him to the grass, shattering the vaniate like crockery. Not Tan. Too small to be Tan. Fear flooded in, knife-bright and sudden. Someone had followed him through the gate. It should have been impossible, but the gate itself was already impossible. Someone was on top of him, fingernails scratching at his eyes, hands groping for his neck, searching for some purchase as he twisted beneath the weight. Confusion and anger followed the fear, and he twisted out from beneath his assailant, struggling to protect his face and throat, to bring his emotion under control once again, to wrest sense from the chaos.
Long hair. Skin like silk. A scream like an animal makes when the jaws of the trap snap shut. The smell of sandalwood.
“Triste!” he shouted, pivoting to bring his weight to bear. During his time with the Shin he had wrestled plenty of panicked goats to stillness beneath the shears, but the girl, lithe though she was, weighed more than a goat, and the strength in her slender limbs surprised him.
“Triste,” he said again, bringing his voice under control, stilling his own emotion and willing a similar stillness upon her. “You’re safe. Safe. You’re through the kenta. They can’t pass . . .”
The words melted away as the girl relaxed against his grip, staring up at him with those eyes of hers. Her nearness hit him like a slap, the press of her hips as she shifted beneath him, the rise of her chest as she struggled for breath. She was steady now, her panic drained away, and yet for the moment he did not release her wrists.
“How are you here?” he asked. The last he’d seen of her she’d been collapsed on the crumbling floor of the orphanage, overcome by smoke. Even awake, she shouldn’t have been able to pass through the gates. That, after all, was the whole point of his years of training. He heard Scial Nin’s words once more in his mind: Men, whole legions, stepped through the kenta and simply vanished. But then, here she was, skin warm as sunlight against his skin, full lips parted slightly as her panting slowed.
“Kaden,” she said finally, releasing a long, shuddering sigh. His name sounded strange on her lips, foreign, like an old dialect spoken only in prayer.
“How did you pass the kenta?” he asked again. Then, even more urgently, “Is Valyn all right?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I woke up coughing. It was dark. Someone tried to grab me and I ran . . . I fell . . . here.” She glanced around, awe and fear warring in her expression. “Where are we?”
Kaden shook his head. “Far away from where we were.”
Triste’s eyes widened, but before she could respond, Tan stepped through the gate. Where the girl had stumbled, desperate, panicked, as though flung from the violence of the far side, Tan moved quickly but deliberately. His eyes were cold as water dredged from a winter well, reptilian in their indifference, their distance. The vaniate, Kaden realized, wondering if his own eyes had looked like that.
The monk scanned the island, glancing over the ring of impossible gates as though they were so many withered junipers. He ignored both the wide sky and the encircling sea, but when he turned his attention to Kaden and Triste, something moved in those eyes, like the flicker of a great fish glimpsed through winter’s thickest ice. His pupils dilated a hair and then he swung the naczal spear around in a curt arc, bringing the blade to rest against the fluttering pulse at Triste’s throat.
“What are you doing?” Kaden demanded, shock jarring the words from his throat.
“Get off her,” Tan said quietly. “Move back.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Move back.”
“All right,” Kaden said, half disentangling himself from the girl’s limbs. He reached toward the spear, to block it or push it back, then hesitated. The smallest nick of the blade could kill Triste. “All right,” he said again, standing, raising his hands. Emperor he may have become, but even the harrowing events of the preceding week had not completely effaced the old obedience of an acolyte. Besides, there was something new in the monk’s voice, something sharp and dangerous. In all the months of Kaden’s excruciating tutelage, he had heard indifference and disdain daily, but never this deadly focus, not even when Tan had faced the ak’hanath. He studied the monk’s face, but couldn’t tell if he remained in the vaniate. That frigid stare of his pinned Triste to the grass where she lay sprawled, the Aedolian uniform clutched about her. The bright tip of the naczal pressed at her throat.
“What are you?” Tan asked, each syllable distinct.
She glanced from Kaden to the surrounding sea, then shook her head.
“I don’t know what you’re asking. . . .”
Tan flexed his wrist and the blade slid a finger’s width, smooth steel over smoother skin. A moment later, blood welled in its wake: three drops, hot beneath the hot sun.
“Stop,” Kaden said, stepping forward, his mind scrambling to make sense of the scene. Moments before, they’d been struggling to escape the trap that was the orphanage, all focus on the kenta and vaniate, and suddenly, when Kaden wanted nothing more than to ask about Valyn, about the unfolding fight, about whether his brother was still alive, Tan had decided to turn on Triste. It made no sense. Triste was on their side. She had helped them to escape, had fled alongside him from the Aedolians through the vertiginous passes of the Bone Mountains, had, when the time came, played her part perfectly in the ruse that allowed them to defeat Ut and Adiv. The livid slice Pyrre had taken out of her cheek was proof enough of that. Kaden shifted toward her, but Tan brought him up short.
“Don’t.”
“I’m not going to let you kill her,” Kaden said. His heart slammed against his chest. He struggled to bridle it, to bring it under control, along with his bre
ath.
“It is not your choice,” Tan replied. “Even you can see that.”
Kaden hesitated. Triste’s blood stained the tip of the naczal.
“All right,” he said, stepping back a stride. “I can’t stop you, but I can urge you to wait. To think.”
“It is you,” Tan replied, “who would do well to think. You might think about how she came here. About how she passed the gate. Before you are so quick to defend her, think about what it means.”
Triste, for her part, hadn’t so much as twitched when the blade cut. Her panic from a minute before had vanished.
“What are you doing, monk?” she asked carefully. Tan had caught her in an awkward position, half lying, half seated, but her body showed no strain. Her voice, frayed with panic a moment earlier, didn’t waver. She might have been reclining on a divan in the Dawn Palace.
“What are you?” Tan asked again.
“I’m Triste,” she replied, though she did not sound like Triste. She sounded older, braver, more certain. Kaden stared, studying her face as she spoke. “We escaped from Ashk’lan together. We went to Assare. Someone was attacking us just before I fell through”—she gestured with the barest nod of her head—“your gate.”
“I know your story, but it crumbles here. The Blank God is exacting. He does not permit emotion, and yet you fell through thrashing and screaming.”
“Your theories are wrong and so you put a blade to my throat?” Triste asked, arching an eyebrow. “It’s somehow my fault that you don’t understand the kenta?”
It was wrong, Kaden thought. All wrong. He studied her face. Where was the girlish innocence, the terror, the utter confusion that had poured off her moments earlier? Why did Kaden himself feel a shudder of fear when he met her gaze?
“I understand the kenta,” Tan replied, voice flat as a file. “It is you I do not understand.”
“Tan,” Kaden began carefully, “maybe the gates have . . . weakened somehow over thousands of years. Maybe anyone can pass now. It’s possible they don’t work the way we think.”
The monk paused. Behind and below them, the waves continued to gnaw at the cliffs. Sweat had begun to soak Kaden’s robe.
“They have not weakened,” Tan said finally. “My order tests for such things. Only Shin can pass the gates, and Ishien. And Csestriim.”
“No,” Triste said, shaking her head despite the blade at her throat. The fear was suddenly back in her voice, blood-raw and rank, as though she was just now awakening to her predicament. “I’m not Csestriim.”
Kaden tried to sort and assemble the new information—Tan’s accusation, Triste’s confusion, her lightning-quick shifts from terror to steely defiance back to terror, the sheer impossible fact of the gates themselves. For the second time since stepping through the kenta, he felt he had come unmoored from reality, lost on this fragment of land adrift in the sloshing sea with a monk who was not a monk and a girl who might not be a girl locking eyes over the haft of a spear left behind by a long-extinguished race.
“Tan,” he began, “what we need to do is—”
“Be clear on one thing,” the monk cut in, his low voice driving through Kaden’s own like a chisel through clean wood. “You are Emperor of Annur, but we are not in Annur. The fact that you have entered the vaniate means no more than that: you have entered the vaniate. You still cannot see clearly, nor think carefully, nor kill quickly, and all three may be required, and soon. Your feelings still blind you to the facts of the world. You are not yet what you need to be.”
“Here is a fact,” Kaden said. “She helped me.”
“A single fir is not the forest.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning there is more to her tale than helping you. Much more.” Tan kept the naczal at Triste’s throat at he glanced over at Kaden. “Destroy what you believe.”
Destroy what you believe. Another Shin aphorism. Another monastic exercise on which Kaden had spent years.
You believe the sky is blue? What about night? Storm? What about clouds?
You think you are awake? How quaint. Perhaps you are dreaming. Perhaps you are dead.
Grimly, Kaden set to work. According to the story, Triste was meant as a distraction, a lure to hold Kaden’s attention while the Aedolians went about surrounding his tent and butchering the monks. If so, she had proven utterly superfluous. He tried to imagine the scene without her—the arrival of the imperial delegation, the feast, the vast pavilion . . . Triste wasn’t necessary for any of it.
And then there was her endurance through the high peaks, endurance to match a Skullsworn assassin and two monks who had spent their lives running in the mountains. Where would a girl raised on the velvet cushions of Ciena’s temple learn to run like that? Where did she learn the ancient script of Assare? How did she know anything about the ravaged city? And the kenta . . . how had she passed unscathed through a gate that should have annihilated her?
Kaden forced himself to consider Tan’s claim. According to Sami Yurl, the Kettral leader Valyn had slaughtered, the Csestriim were involved in the conspiracy against his family, a claim buoyed up by the presence of the ak’hanath. Would immortal creatures, creatures of godlike intellect and perfect reason, give their plot wholly over into the hands of men, flawed men like Tarik Adiv and Micijah Ut? Kaden stared at Triste, trying to see past his own initial conception, to shatter the lens of belief. She looked like a young woman, but the Csestriim were immortal; age did not touch them. And then there was the stony calm she had showed just a moment before, as though her mask had dropped. . . .
“Hundreds of years ago,” Tan said, speaking as though they were all seated around a table back in the Ashk’lan refectory, as though his spear wasn’t leveled at Triste’s neck, as though she wasn’t bleeding, the delicate red stream staining the collar of her tunic. She watched him with wary, animal eyes, body tensed to flee. “During the final years of Atmani rule, when the leach-lords and their massive armies clashed, turning farmland to mud, blood, and ash, obliterating entire cities, two Ghannans from the hills north of Chubolo risked their lives to save the local children.”
It wasn’t like Tan to linger over stories, but as long as the monk was talking, he wasn’t killing Triste, which meant Kaden could pause, could try to order his thoughts.
“The Ghannans,” Tan continued, “a man and woman, went from city to city, town to town, sometimes arriving even as the dust kicked up by the encroaching armies darkened the sky behind them. From their own fortune, they were able to supply wagons and food. They were able to promise ships waiting in Sarai Pol, ships that would take the children to Basc, where the fighting had not yet reached. Parents thrust infants into their arms, lifted sobbing toddlers into the beds of wagons, instructed the older children to care for the younger, then watched as the caravan departed, pushing east just ahead of the coming violence.
“As promised, the ships were waiting. And as promised, the children were whisked away before Roshin’s armies swept across eastern Ghan. As promised, they arrived in Ganaboa. They were saved. Then they disappeared.”
“What does this have to do with me?” Triste asked, eyes wide. “With anything?”
Kaden glanced at her, then turned back to the older monk. “Where did they go?”
“For a long time,” Tan replied, “no one knew. The wars of the Atmani threw the world into chaos for decades. Uncounted thousands died, first in battle, then of famine, of disease. People weren’t able to protect their own homes, to harvest their crops. Basc might have been on the far side of the world. Parents prayed for their children, a few scraped together the coin to go looking, but none found them.
“That took the Ishien. More than thirty years after the two strangers led the children away, fifteen Ishien finally managed to follow the trail to the southern coast of Basc. It is all jungle. Almost no one lives there, but tucked away in the hills they found a small cabin, and beneath the cabin, a warren of limestone caves, and in the caves, a prison, a vast prison.
”
“The children?” Kaden asked.
Tan shrugged. “Were adults. Or dead. Or crippled. The Ghannans, on the other hand, the man and woman who had saved them all—those two had not aged a day.”
“Csestriim.”
Tan nodded.
Triste stared, aghast. “What did they want with the children?”
“To experiment,” the monk replied grimly. “To prod and to test. They want to know how we work, how we are put together, why we differ from them. They nearly destroyed us thousands of years ago, and while we have almost forgotten, those Csestriim that survive have never given up the fight, not for a single day.” He turned from Triste to Kaden, stare hard as a hammer. “Consider the patience, to wait decades, centuries for the upheaval necessary to lead away so many children. Consider the planning, to have the coin stockpiled, the ships waiting at anchor, the caves and the cells prepared. The Csestriim do not think in days and weeks. They work in centuries, eons. Those who survived did so because they are brilliant, and hard, and patient, and yet they look like you or me.” He nodded toward Triste. “Or her.”
“No,” Triste said, shaking her head once more. “I would never do something like that. I’m not one of them.”
The monk ignored her, fixing his attention on Kaden.
“This is not something separate, some idle vendetta of my own that will distract you from the answers you hunt. If she is Csestriim, she is a part of the plot against your family and your empire. Erase Adiv and Ut from your mind. This creature is the one carrying the truth.”
Kaden stared, first at the monk, then at Triste, trying to make sense of it. She didn’t look like an immortal, inhuman monster, but then, according to Tan, neither had the Ghannans who stole the children. Parents had entrusted their families to the Csestriim. . . . Destroy what you believe. It all came back to that.
Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 02 - The Providence of Fire: Page 15