She was panting, breathless. Although the night was cool, her face glistened with sweat. He considered crossing the space between them, trying to offer some comfort, but what comfort could he offer? His words were all unequal to the task, and any human touch seemed suddenly obscene.
“It’s not the dying I mind,” she said. They were the same words as before, but this time there was iron in them. “But I’ll let that Csestriim creature flay me alive, I’ll let him take me apart joint by joint before I do a thing to help this goddess who thought she could just take me, tame me, make me into her.”
“I understand,” Kaden replied finally.
“No,” Triste said, shaking her head. “You don’t. You can’t.”
Meshkent moved silently, massively inside Kaden’s own mind. The pressure, the presence, the constant effort required to fight back against it, to keep the god from seizing control, was almost overwhelming, and Kaden had allowed him in, had managed to control him. He felt ashamed, suddenly. After half a day, he’d been almost ready to give himself over to the god, had been tempted to let the corridors of his mind just … fold, and here was Triste at the same time, still fighting, still defiant. The goddess could seize everything she was, had wrested her from herself half a dozen times at least, and still she hadn’t given up. For all her talk of dying, she wasn’t dead.
“You would have made a good emperor,” Kaden said. He had no idea where the words had come from. As he spoke them, however, he realized they were true.
Triste just stared at him, baffled. “What do I know,” she asked finally, “about the running of empires?”
“As much as I do.”
“From what I heard, you made an utter mess of it.”
Kaden nodded. “I did.” He wondered what had happened since he left the Dawn Palace. Maybe Adare had managed to right Annur’s listing ship. It didn’t seem likely. The water had been pouring in in too many places. The whole vessel had already sunk too deep in the waves. Besides, Adare was hardly the benevolent leader she pretended to be. Il Tornja claimed she was doing what she did for the people of Annur. Maybe that was true, and maybe she was interested only in her own glory. Kaden didn’t know her well enough to say. What he did know was that she had lied to him even as she tried to make her peace. Lied about Valyn, about her own brother.
It doesn’t matter, he reminded himself. A liar could rule an empire. A traitor could rule an empire. Either one would be better than a half-trained monk.
“Why did you go back?” Triste asked.
Kaden realized he’d been staring at her without seeing her.
“Go back where?”
“To Annur. To try to take the throne.”
It was a simple question. He had no answer. Looking back, words like duty or tradition seemed too weak, too dry and abstract to explain the things that he had done. The throne itself had carried no allure. He knew no one in Annur, not even his sister.
He shook his head. It was as though he were a stranger from his own life, incapable of explaining his own decisions, even to himself.
“Look…,” Triste began.
The night’s quiet shattered before she could finish. Over the low moan of the wind and the lisp of the river’s current, men began shouting, voices etched with anger and surprise. Annurian voices. Il Tornja’s soldiers, though Kaden couldn’t make out the kenarang’s orders in the sudden chaos.
Steel smashed against steel, ground over stone. Men were screaming now. Dying, by the sound of it, the crisp urgency of command and response mixed with an animal panic, high keening notes of pain and desperation. As if in response, Meshkent shifted inside Kaden’s mind, testing the boundaries of his cage all over again.
Slowed by drug, Triste rose slowly.
“Who-”
The wall exploded.
One moment, lamplight had been playing over the rough red stone. The next, a sheet of flame, bright as the midday sun, blazed across Kaden’s eyes. Something punched him in the chest, knocking him back across the chamber and into the stone altar.
A shard of rock, he thought blearily, trying to keep hold on his own consciousness even as he groped at his chest with a clumsy hand. Surely there would be blood. Surely beneath that massive ache, there would be something broken. Either he had gone blind, or the world was suddenly, absolutely dark. Meshkent seized that moment to claw at his prison, growling, raging, larger than the sky and bent on escape.
Kaden closed his eyes, threw the whole weight of himself against the walls he’d made. The god inside him wanted out, ached to join whatever battle raged outside, but Meshkent misunderstood the weakness of his human vessel. Fighting was hopeless, pointless. Kaden couldn’t see, couldn’t stand, couldn’t even hear beyond the high, bright ringing in his ears. If Meshkent got free, he would fight, and if he fought, he would die.
No, Kaden whispered.
The god bore down, furious and huge. Kaden gritted his teeth, marshaled what strength he had, and pushed back.
Between the battle beyond the temple walls and the desperate struggle raging in his mind, it took Kaden a long time to realize someone was clawing at him, a small hand, panicked and desperate. Triste. He reached out to seize her arm. Smoke and stone dust filled his nose, but the ceiling hadn’t fallen. No great corbels had crushed them. Instead, cold night air poured through the hole in the shattered wall. Flame ravaged the streets outside, though what was burning Kaden had no idea. Against that blazing background of orange and red, a dark figure stepped into the breach.
Kaden blinked his eyes furiously, trying to make out more than the shape against the blinding flame. Then, abruptly as it had come, the fire was gone, leaving him staring into blackness. He raised his fists-a pointless gesture, but he could think of no other.
“Triste,” he called out.
There was no time to find out what was happening outside, no opportunity to sort the battle into sets of tactics or clearly labeled sides. The only thing he knew was that chaos had come, and with it, an opportunity.
“Triste,” he hissed again.
The girl’s answer was a scream.
Kaden spun toward the sound, trying to blink back the afterimage-filigrees of red and yellow flame-stitched across his eyes. He could make out no more than two shapes in the darkness: Triste, and someone at her back, someone taller and evidently stronger, pinning the girl’s arms to her sides. Triste lashed out with a foot, started to scream again, then fell silent. Another fire roared to life beyond the temple’s shattered wall, farther away this time, but close enough that Kaden could see the flame reflecting off a blade at Triste’s neck.
“Kaden,” said a new voice. “Triste. It’s lovely to see you both looking so well.”
Whatever madness was unfolding in the streets beyond, the person holding the knife didn’t sound worried, didn’t sound rushed. It was a woman’s voice, low and throaty. She sounded … amused. Inside Kaden’s mind, Meshkent went suddenly, utterly still. Wariness poured off the god, wariness that could be explained only by the woman with the knife, a woman Kaden remembered all too well, though the last time he had seen her had been a year and two continents distant. They had been lost in another ancient city then, in another range of peaks, fighting for their lives against a different group of Annurian soldiers.…
“I’m not sure what it says about the two of you,” the woman went on conversationally, “that every time I see you, you’re being chased by men with swords. Some people might take that amiss, I suppose, but I’m inclined to think it means you’re special.”
“Pyrre,” Kaden said quietly.
So Rassambur had noticed their arrival in the Ancaz after all.
“What is going on out there?” he asked.