“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?”
Adare shook her head, trying to keep her rising anger in check.
“Of course I am not a leach,” she said quietly.
Nira hooted, screwed her wrinkled face into a parody of surprise. “Not a leach? You’re not a leach? Ya mean ya can’t actually twist this shitty world to your will with a half second’s thought?” Before Adare could respond, the woman leaned forward, poked her in the chest with a bony finger. Nira’s levity had vanished. “Then quit tellin’ me what I can and can’t do with my kennings.”
She pulled the finger back, then stabbed it toward the northern bank of windows. “I know where he is, right now. That’s one a’ the things the leash does, ya tit-headed excuse for an emperor. If he decides to ride west tomorrow morning, I’ll know it. If he doubles back, I’ll know it. I’ll know it if I’m here, in this miserable hovel you call a palace, and I’ll know it if I’m hip-deep in the newly smeared shit of some Raaltan farmer’s field.
“And here’s another piece a’ wisdom I could be sellin’ that I’ll just give ta you for free: I can pull that leash tight from wherever I want, too. I could be sunnin’ myself on a slow boat just off the coast of Dombang, some pretty, naked boy workin’ a nice oil into my aching feet, and if I wanted your general dead I could snap my fingers, feel him die, then roll over to let the oil boy go to work kneading my withered buttocks.
“So when ya say ya need me here to watch il Tornja, you’re either dumber than a poleaxed ox, or you’re lyin’, and I’d be hard-pressed to say which I like less.”
Adare forced herself to count to three after the woman finally fell silent. Then to five. Then to ten.
“Are you quite finished?” she asked finally.
“I am not,” Nira snapped. “There’s Oshi ta consider, too. Even if ya didn’t trust the leash, my brother’s right there with the bastard, doggin’ his every step.”
Adare shook her head. “Oshi’s not there to watch over il Tornja. He’s there in the hope that the kenarang might find a way to cure him, to fix his memory, his madness. He doesn’t even know who il Tornja is anymore.”