“His race?”
The soldier shook his head slowly. “The light was wrong, sir. We only caught a couple of glimpses and couldn’t make out much more than shapes.”
“Send a team downstream. The body may have washed up in an eddy, or caught on a snag.” Il Tornja paused; his eyes went distant for a quarter heartbeat, then refocused on Kaden. “You tell an interesting story, and this is only the start of it.”
“Not really,” Kaden replied. “We came to find Triste. We found her. Then you came.”
“Triste,” the kenarang said, his voice brimming with a mirth he couldn’t feel. “Is that what you call her?”
“It is her name,” Kaden replied.
“Names,” il Tornja mused, “are even easier to put on and take off than faces.” He glanced over his shoulder at Triste. She hadn’t woken, hadn’t even moved. “I will speak with her first.” He pointed to the shell of an old temple. “There.”
That Triste was alive at all was puzzling. Il Tornja knew about the goddess in the girl. It was the only explanation for the fact that he had abandoned his war with the Urghul to come here, chasing her to the very edge of the empire. He knew he had Ciena in his grasp, yet he held back.…
Because he doesn’t know, Kaden realized, that awful hope slicing him up inside. He doesn’t know he has us both.
As far as il Tornja was aware, he’d captured half his quarry, but only half. Meshkent was still out there, and if the Csestriim wanted to trap the Lord of Pain, he would need bait. Which meant that Triste was safe, at least for the moment. The moment the kenarang understood that he had won the game, however, when he realized that he had both gods in his hands-at that moment it was over.
Meshkent raged silently in the locked corner of Kaden’s mind.
“I don’t know about you,” il Tornja said, turning his attention back to Kaden, “but I find this all very exciting.”
* * *
Kaden studied the eddy. He was bound at the elbows, wrists, and waist, tied to a huge stone behind him, but he was free, at least, to look, to watch the river play out its elegant violence half a dozen feet below him. As an acolyte in the Bone Mountains he had spent hours studying the eddies of the mountain streams. It was the sort of inscrutable exercise the monks might have assigned, but the truth was, Kaden had enjoyed it. There was something relentless in the twisting currents of those small rivers, so much inevitability in their onrushing course. The eddies offered the only reprieve. Kaden had never quite understood why the current would pause, slow down, double back on itself, but the whole retrograde motion seemed, in some odd way, like a type of forgiveness, the river escaping, if only momentarily, from its own ineluctable nature.
It was a lie, of course.
The water might pause, but it would empty into the sea all the same. The world was built from a thousand examples of such inevitability. Thrown stones fell unerringly to earth. Flesh left unfrozen would always go to rot. The days would grow short, then long, then short again. Without those truths, the whole framework of reality would tremble and break apart. You could forget for a while, caught in the eddy’s beguiling spiral, that the world’s current raged all around. That it could not be denied.
Submit, Meshkent whispered inside his mind, the voice quiet but ripe with fury. You risk everything if you do not. Submit.
It was impossible to be certain how much the god understood of what was happening. Kaden had tried to respond to the commands, to explain the bare outline of their situation, while at the same time keeping that other, divine mind buried so deep that even he himself could barely hear it.
Give yourself to me, the god grated again, then fell silent.
Kaden weighed the possibilities. Meshkent could fight-he’d shown that much already when still wearing the flesh of Long Fist. The crucial question was: how well? A single monk with a knife and the element of surprise had nearly killed the shaman and the god inside him-would have killed him if Kaden hadn’t taken the Lord of Pain into himself. Meshkent was strong, but his strength was his weakness; even now, he seemed incapable of imagining failure, or conceiving a world that did not end in his own victory. And why would he be? Kaden thought wearily. What setback had Meshkent encountered that could serve as a model for his own destruction?
Submit to me, the god growled.
Kaden shook his head as he stared into the slowly circling eddy.
No.
* * *
It was well past midnight when he finally heard boots approaching over broken stone.
“Go,” il Tornja said to the soldiers who had been standing guard. “I’ll talk with our new friend alone.”
After the others had retreated beyond earshot, the kenarang stepped in front of Kaden, set his lantern down on a low wall, and half sat, half leaned beside it, arms crossed over his chest.
“So…,” he said, nodding genially, as though they were old companions sitting down to dinner after a long time apart.
“Where is Triste?” Kaden asked. “What did you do to her?”
“What did I do to her?” il Tornja asked, touching a finger to his chest as though perplexed. “It looked an awful lot like she was fleeing from you.”
“She was terrified,” Kaden said, brushing aside the truth. “Confused. I didn’t knock her unconscious or drug her. I didn’t tie her up.”
“Actually,” il Tornja replied, drumming his fingers on the stone, “you did. You let the poor girl secure your return to the palace, then you threw her inside that ridiculous prison of yours. All things being equal, I’d say she has a lot more reason to hate you than me.”
Kaden shook his head. “She knows who you are. So do I.”
Il Tornja raised his brows. “And who am I?”
“Csestriim,” Kaden said, locking eyes with the man. “The general who led the war to destroy humanity. The architect of the genocide against your own children. The murderer of gods.”
“Oh,” the kenarang replied, waving a lazy hand, “that.”
Kaden hesitated, uncertain how to respond. He wasn’t sure what he had expected. Denial maybe. Defiance. Almost anything but this jocular indifference.
“The thing is,” il Tornja continued, “you can make anything sound bad if you pick the right words: genocide, murder-that sort of thing. You slap a word on something you don’t like, and it excuses you from having to think about it any further.”
“What is there to think about? Kiel told me how you killed the gods-Akalla and Korin. He explained it all to me, how after you murdered them a whole part of what we are-the reverence for the natural world and the heavens-just … went away. I know the whole story. You’ve been searching all these thousands of years to find a way to destroy more gods, older gods, to annihilate our race.…”
“Sure. Of course. But did he tell you why?”
Kaden stared. “Because you hate us…,” he began, realizing his mistake as soon as the word left his mouth.
Il Tornja shook his head. “Don’t be dense. The word means nothing to me, and you know it.” He sighed ostentatiously. “I have been trying, all these years, to fix something that is broken.”
“We are not broken.”
“Oh?”
“We are different. Not every living creature needs to be like the Csestriim.”
“Of course not. Kettral aren’t Csestriim. Dogs aren’t Csestriim.” He paused to wag a finger at Kaden. “But you … you were Csestriim once, before the new gods broke you.”
“It is no breakage to feel love, loyalty, joy.…”
“Those are just the chains,” il Tornja said impatiently. “The new gods broke you, made you weak so they could enslave you, and then, in the greatest insult of all, your new masters made you worship them. Look at the temples you’ve built: to Ciena and Eira, Heqet and Whoever. Listen to your prayers, ‘Please, goddess, give me joy. Please, lord, spare me pain.’” The general shook his head. “I expected better from you, Kaden. You, at least, had the chance to understand.”