Meshkent, at least, had fallen finally, mercifully silent. Kaden could still feel the god inside his mind, shifting, testing, searching for a way out, but now that il Tornja was gone, the urgency had subsided. Sooner or later, Kaden would fail. He was built that way. He would fail, and the god would claim him completely.
And why not? he asked himself.
Meshkent might be blinded by his own pride, but he was strong-Kaden could feel that strength like a bright, awful weight. More importantly, il Tornja, for all his planning, did not know the truth. He kept Triste drugged, but there had been no point in forcing Kaden, too, to drink the adamanth. It would be easy, so easy to just … give himself up, let the Lord of Pain take his mind and body both, let Meshkent have his fight with the Csestriim. Let him win.
It would mean not being Kaden anymore, but what was that worth? He’d spent half a lifetime trying to snuff out the embers of his own thought, and now he could achieve it, achieve that sublime annihilation instantly, absolutely. All it would take was a simple acquiescence of will.
“Did you come to finish killing me?” Triste asked.
The words were quiet, but they snapped the thread of Kaden’s thought. He shifted his attention from the invisible landscape of his own fragmented mind to the room in which he stood. The guards had left a single lantern burning on the floor, but the flame was too small to illuminate the entire space; the corners and vaulted ceiling were lost in shadow.
He started to protest, then thought better of it. Il Tornja would have men listening, and besides, what could he say? He’d drawn a knife on Triste, had threatened to drive it into her flesh in an effort to flush out the goddess. It hadn’t been an empty threat. He would have done it, if he’d been faster.
“Il Tornja wants you alive,” he replied finally.
“Alive?” Triste asked. She stared at him a moment, then lay back on the stone slab, arms flat at her sides, her whole body limp with drug or exhaustion. Only her eyes moved, shifting back and forth as though searching for something in the darkness above.
“Bait,” Kaden explained. “For Long Fist.”
“Better be careful,” Triste said, sounding indifferent to her own advice. “You don’t want to give anything away to whoever’s listening.”
“There’s nothing to give away,” Kaden said. “He knows everything. He knows that you carry Ciena inside you. He knows that Meshkent and I came to find you, to help.”
Triste made a wry, bitter sound that might have been a laugh.
“He knows the whole thing,” Kaden said again. “He figured it out before I told him.”
“Of course he did. He’s Csestriim. All of this … it’s just a game to him. We’re just stones on the board.” She shook her head wearily. “So Long Fist got away. He wasn’t dying after all.”
She might have been talking about some made-up character from a tale in which she had long ago lost interest.
“He got away.”
“And I’m the bait. For Long Fist. Or Meshkent. Or whoever wants to bite.”
“At least you’re still alive.”
Triste raised her head just slightly, staring at Kaden as though wondering whether to believe what she had just heard. When she let it drop, he could hear her skull against the stone. She didn’t grimace. Didn’t even seem to notice.
“Bait is not alive, Kaden. A worm on a hook thinks it’s alive-it keeps wriggling and wriggling and wriggling-but you only need to look a few heartbeats into the future to see what happens to that worm: either the fish kills it, or it dies, still squirming on the hook. The ’Kent-kissing creature was finished the minute it became bait. Worms are dumb, so they don’t know that. I’m not a worm. I can see what’s coming.”
“It’s coming for all of us,” Kaden replied quietly. “If you wait long enough, we’re all dead.”
“Well, that’s not exactly right, is it?” Triste demanded. “Your sister’s general-he’s not dead. This bitch inside my fucking head-she’s not going to die.”
“They are Csestriim and gods. They are made differently from us. Bedisa wove our fate into our bones.”
“I know that, Kaden. You think I don’t know that? The thing I don’t know yet is why we don’t all just get on with it.” She shook her head. It lolled back and forth sloppily over the weathered rock. “All it takes is one little blade to end a life. You don’t even need a blade. You don’t need anything. You can just not eat for couple of weeks.…”
Kaden studied her, the perfect skin laced with scar, the blazing violet of her eyes. “If you were so eager to die,” he said finally, “you would have performed the obviate back in Annur, when we had the chance.”
“It’s not the dying I care about; it’s helping her. She’s in my mind, Kaden. You don’t understand what that’s like. You can’t.” She took a long, deep breath, then blew it out. “Growing up in the temple, there was always talk about rape.”
Kaden shook his head. “The leinas-”
“Will you stop talking for just once?” At least there was heat in her voice now, a hint of the old fire. “You might have learned to be quiet in all those years with the monks, but you never learned to listen, did you?”
Half a dozen replies came to mind. Kaden set them aside. If Triste wanted him to listen, he would listen. After a long silence she continued in a whisper.
“Just because a woman is inside the temple walls doesn’t mean she’s safe. Demivalle and the other leinas who run the temple try to have guards in place, there are ways of doing things that are supposed to protect the priestesses, but you can’t protect against everything all the time. Sometimes the women can’t cry out, and sometimes they can but they don’t. You’re told you’re supposed to please, that pleasure is the apotheosis of your faith. There’s no space for second-guessing. No space to say, ‘Wait.’ It’s the clients, half drunk and emboldened because they paid, donated, whatever-but it’s not just the clients, it’s the whole place. If you’re not a conduit of pleasure, you don’t belong, and so the priestesses and priests suffer what’s done to them. The clients go away, but Ciena’s most holy carry their wounds inside.”
She fell silent, lips parted as though she were short of breath or about to cry. Kaden’s mind filled with the memory of Louette Morjeta, Triste’s mother, the woman who had given her daughter up when her father came and demanded her. Had Morjeta wanted to lie with Adiv? Had she wanted to carry his child?
“This is like that,” Triste said, breaking into his thoughts. “What the goddess did to me is like that, like what happens to women the whole world over, but it is worse. She’s inside my mind. She didn’t just fuck me and leave, she tried to become me. She’s probably still trying. Do you understand?”
Kaden considered his words before replying. “Many people would embrace the presence of their god. To be taken in this way-it is an honor. That is what the man who was Long Fist must have thought before the Lord of Pain took on his mortal form. The acceptance is an exercise of devotion.”
“That’s disgusting,” Triste said. Her eyes were far away. Dead-looking. “That’s what men tell women after: Actually, you wanted it. I am a king, a minister, an atrep, an emperor-you must have wanted it. Well, I’ll tell you something, Kaden,” she said, her voice rising, rising with her body as she shoved herself up onto her elbows, shoved herself up until she was sitting, glaring at him, a finger extended, trembling. The words, when she finally managed to finish them, came out a scream, “I didn’t fucking want it!”