“You’re not the skinny monk that I remember.”
Kaden shook his head, hauling his thoughts away from sacrifice and surrender. “That monk wouldn’t have survived.”
“Survival.” Pyrre frowned. “For just a little while there, I thought that might have finally stopped mattering to you. The god comes for us all.”
“Then why are we running?”
Pyrre flashed him a smile. “Because if we run now, we get to fight later. And I like fighting.”
By midday, the sky had fallen quiet. When they paused at a narrow stream to gulp a few mouthfuls of water, Kaden could no longer make out the angry clatter of pursuit. It was tempting to believe they had outdistanced the soldiers, but he had been battling against il Tornja’s schemes too long to trust his own temptations. The kenarang was coming, whether Kaden could hear him or not; his goals were simple, even if his tactics were not. The question was, why had Pyrre and the other Skullsworn intervened?
“You could have let us die,” Kaden said, straightening from the stream, savoring the cold water on his tongue, in his throat. “Il Tornja would have killed us. You cheated your god.”
Pyrre shook her head. “Not cheated. Traded. Your two souls for those we left below.”
Triste was staring at the assassin, her scarred face twisted with revulsion. “But why? Why bother?”
“It was an intriguing opportunity,” Pyrre replied.
“To kill il Tornja?” Kaden asked.
The Skullsworn shook her head. “To take Long Fist.” There was an unusual note in her voice when she said the name, something vicious and eager, utterly at odds with her habitual wry calm.
“Long Fist?” Triste demanded. “Why?”
Pyrre turned to her, then raised an eyebrow, as though debating inwardly whether or not to respond. “He is a priest of pain,” she said finally. “A high priest of Meshkent. He would have made a fine offering to my god.” She glanced over at Kaden, cocked her head to the side. “Speaking of which, where did he go?”
The words were deceptively mild.
Kaden shook his head. “Escaped. Jumped into the river.”
Pyrre pursed her lips. “Then my god may have him after all.”
“Maybe,” Kaden agreed. Inside his mind, the ancient god raged. “So what happens to us now?”
“A good question,” Pyrre said. “We will go to Rassambur, and then decide.”
“What if we don’t want to go?” Triste demanded. She was panting, doubled over with her hands on her knees, but her eyes were hard, defiant.
Pyrre offered her a broad smile, made an ostentatious little flourish with one hand, and was holding a knife. “The altars of my god are everywhere. Each patch of dirt”-she gestured with the blade-“that stone on which you stand. And my piety sometimes outstrips my patience.”
“We’ll go,” Kaden said, holding up a hand, as though there were anything he could do to stop the assassin, then turning to Triste. “It’s safer than staying here.”
Pyrre chuckled. “Safe,” she said, lingering on the word as though she could taste it. “Such a tricky term. Never seems to mean what people want it to mean.” She shrugged. “But yes, I’d agree that Rassambur is safe.”
Triste narrowed her eyes. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning I might kill you, but I promise not to hurt you first.”
* * *
A fortress of dark iron and nightmare. A labyrinth reeking of carrion; long halls echoing with screams. A den of perversion, a home for men and women drinking blood from human skulls, offering their own infants as sacrifice on charred altars, slaughtering one another in twisted, blood-slick orgies. Halls of bones and altars of human flesh. Charnel pits brimming with the festering dead. Blasted caverns devoid of light, of hope, of all human comfort, given over to the veneration of the old and awful God of Death himself: Ananshael, unknitter of souls, savorer of rotting corpses.
Kaden had heard dozens of variations over the years of the tales told of Rassambur. Some, servants’ stories whispered in the kitchens of the Dawn Palace; others, historians’ accounts inked on expensive parchment and bound into codices for the shivering delectation of the rich. The fortress was a favorite subject of painters, too. Some, like Sianburi in his famous Stages of Death, used Rassambur as an excuse to explore human anatomy: a flayed arm here, an eyeball lolling from its socket there, perfectly drafted femurs and skulls stacked rafter-high in the background. The Ghannan ateliers, on the other hand, mostly ignored the corpses in their work, dwelling instead on Rassambur’s infinite gradations of shadow and darkness. Kaden had read somewhere that Fiarzin Qaid, the greatest of the Ghannan painters, had labored for eight years, grinding and mixing two hundred different shades of black, before attempting his masterpiece, The House of Death, a horse-high canvas depicting Rassambur’s most horrid hall.
Qaid never even saw the place, Kaden realized.
With Triste and Pyrre, he stood at a cliff’s lip, staring across a gulf of empty air to a huge, sheer-sided sandstone butte and the fabled fortress of the Skullsworn that perched at its top. Qaid didn’t need two shades of black, let alone two hundred.
In fact, the stronghold and the land around it were a study in light, air, and rich color: an azure sky nailed up above brilliant cliffs, dozens of shades of russet and rust and vermillion, and between them, the creamy white of Rassambur’s small, graceful buildings. There were no defensive walls, no ramparts or towers, no murder holes or arrow loops. At the top of the sheer-sided butte, there was no need-the land itself was the fortification. The lair of the priests of death was not a lair at all, but a bright, white-walled, sun-drenched place of gardens, cloisters, and humble temples. Splashes of green dotted the grounds where the Skullsworn had cultivated the flowering desert plants. Even the shadows cast by the scattered loggia and trellises looked inviting, cool and quiet. It almost reminded Kaden of Ashk’lan-the clarity of it all, the cleanness-but where the Bone Mountains were viciously cold at least half the year, here, the hot sun warmed the stone even as the mountain breezes cut through the heat’s worst bite.
A single bridge-a graceful arc of white stone with no railing or balustrade-spanned the chasm between Rassambur and the cliff where Kaden stood with Pyrre and Triste. It looked too slender to support its own weight, let alone that of anyone crossing. There was nowhere to hide on that bridge, nowhere to shelter. A single archer with enough arrows could hold it against an entire army for days. That was how it looked, at least. Kaden hoped it was true.
“We should get across,” he said, gesturing, forcing his aching, trembling legs into motion once more. “Before il Tornja catches up.”
“He won’t,” Pyrre replied.
Kaden shook his head. “You don’t understand. He abandoned his post in the north, he risked letting the Urghul destroy Annur, all so that he could come here, after … us.”
He glanced over at Triste as he pronounced that final word. She made no indication she had heard him. Instead, she stared fixedly at Rassambur, face bleak, as though she were peering into the freshly turned earth of her own grave.
Pyrre pursed her lips, studying the girl. “All this way for the two of you and an Urghul warlord. I so look forward to learning why.”
“We can talk about why when we’re on the other side,” Kaden said.
He had no idea what he would say when that talk came, no idea what lies he might spin to save himself, save Triste, and the gods hidden inside them both. That could wait, though. First they needed to reach Rassambur’s dubious safety.
“What I mean to say,” Pyrre went on, gesturing to the mountains around them, “is that these cliffs are alive with my brothers and sisters, some hunting, some just standing guard. If il Tornja has read his history at all, he will know this, he will know better than to come within a mile of Rassambur.”