Triste’s face was frozen between horror and rage, her hands balled into fists at her sides. When she spoke again, her voice was barely louder than the wind. “I didn’t want to. Didn’t mean to. I’m not a killer.”
“There are words,” Gerra mused, “and there are deeds. Still, I will take you at your word. We all have something to offer to the god. If you do not wish to kill, then you can die.”
“No,” Kaden said, stepping toward the cliff’s edge as Meshkent growled and hissed inside his mind. “Please. There is a larger story here.”
“The story always feels large,” Gerra replied without moving, without opening his eyes, “to those trapped inside of it. Ananshael will cut you free. It is not so difficult as you think, dying. We will be at your side.”
Fear flared inside Kaden. He crushed it out, tried to focus through his mind’s smoke.
“There must be an arrangement we can make. My father paid once, for Pyrre to save my life.…”
“Which I did,” the woman said. “That deal was done a year ago.”
“So I will pay you again. The treasury in Annur…”
“Is irrelevant,” Gerra concluded. “You came here, to Rassambur, which means you must serve the god in one way or another. Since you will not learn to offer sacrifice, you will become that sacrifice.” He shrugged. “They are not so far apart.”
“We’ll join you, then,” Kaden said. He just needed time, space to think, to plan. Escape could come later. “We’ll become Skullsworn.”
“No,” Gerra said quietly, almost regretfully. “You have already spoken your truth. What you speak now is no true belief, but the desperate lie of a creature trying to flee. Tonight you will go to the god-there will be song to celebrate your sacrifice. Pyrre will help you to prepare.”
The words sounded like a dismissal, and after a moment Pyrre put a steadying hand on Kaden’s shoulder. He shrugged it off, glancing back the way they had come. It wasn’t far to the bridge-maybe a quarter mile-but there would be no fleeing the flat space of the mesa, no escaping or fighting his way free. If he and Triste were going to survive, if the gods inside of them were going to live, he had to persuade this man, and he had to persuade him now, before the knives were sharpened and the fires lit. Kaden’s mind scrambled for purchase. He forced it still, then slid into the vaniate.
Inside the trance, it was impossible to understand his urgency of moments earlier.
So we die, he thought. And the gods are torn from this world.
It hardly seemed a tragedy. Kiel’s warnings about the dangers of the vaniate echoed in the empty space. Kaden considered them, held them up to the light, then put them aside. He studied Gerra’s reclining figure for a moment-the man still hadn’t moved-then shifted his gaze to the mountains. What was the point in waiting for the Skullsworn knives? He could end it all with a few steps, could walk free of all the fear and pain, the running and the rage. It made sense, actually, what the priest had said: Ananshael’s gift was freedom, freedom so perfect, so absolute, it could never be revoked. Triste’s low sob broke into his thoughts, a human sob-regardless of the goddess locked inside her-the sob of someone utterly alone and almost broken. And she, too, will be free, Kaden thought. Ananshael can save her. Triste’s life since arriving at Ashk’lan had been one of unbroken terror and flight, imprisonment and torture. How could death’s annihilation be anything but welcome?
And then, as though Meshkent could hear his silent thoughts, the god began thrashing, growling: No.
The word rolled off the slick skin of the vaniate.
I have seen what you bring to this world, Kaden said silently, and I have seen the clarity of the alternative.
Pyrre was watching him warily. Kaden ignored her, took another step toward the cliff, then another, until he stood just at the verge. Hawks turned lazily in the hot air below. At the canyon’s bottom, a narrow river gnawed at the stone. Someday, even the mesa would be worn to sand, that sand washed out to the sea. There would be no trace of the place where he stood. No trace of Rassambur or the priests. It was the way of all things.
“I will make my own offering,” Kaden said quietly, looking down, imagining the wonderful weightlessness of falling, and that other, greater weightlessness of death. “I have no need of your knives.”
“No.”
The voice was barely more than a whisper. For a few heartbeats, Kaden couldn’t be sure he had heard it at all, couldn’t be sure that the words had any life outside his own mind. Then it came again.
“No.”
Not Meshkent this time, but Triste, pleading.
“Don’t, Kaden. Please don’t.”
It was the name that called him back. Strange, that. The Shin had spent years teaching him that the word was not the thing, that a name was just a set of sounds aiming at an ever-shifting truth, aiming and always falling short. The name Kaden was no more him than his breath. It was, like all words, an error, and yet, on Triste’s lips, it called him back.
I can’t save her, he said silently.
But you can be there when she dies.
Whose voice was that? Not Meshkent’s, certainly. Not his own. It was something older than logic, old as his bones, something bred into his very flesh, one last human bond threaded through his thought even when all emotion was scrubbed away, something ineluctable, even inside the blankness of the vaniate, not a voice at all, but the wordless truth of what he was, of what he owed, and slowly, slowly, he let the trance go.
Fear came again, a fist clamped around his heart. Meshkent’s ranting fury, so quiet from inside the space of the vaniate, echoed in his mind once more: Free me. Submit and I will crush these worms. I will build a fire inside them that burns for a thousand days before I give them up to their Coward’s God.
Kaden pushed the words aside.
“Before I make this offering, however,” he said, “I will pose one question.”
The Skullsworn priest nodded thoughtfully.
Kaden glanced down once more, at the emptiness that waited, then raised his eyes.
“Do you want to kill me?” he asked quietly. “Or do you want to kill the Csestriim?”
For the first time, Gerra opened his eyes. They were a dark, vegetal green.
“If you kill us here,” Kaden went on, “or let us go, Ananshael will claim us, and soon. We are human. We will bow to his will this year or the next. The Csestriim, however…”
He let the words hang as Gerra sat slowly, then turned to face him.
“The Csestriim are destroyed.”
“Not all of them.”
“Is this true?” Gerra asked, turning to Pyrre.
She shrugged. “There are stories. But there are always stories.”
“They are not stories,” Kaden said. “I can give you names. Names and a way to find them, fight them.”
Gerra frowned. “Once already, you have tried to lie your way free of your debt to the god.”
“And you heard that lie,” Kaden said, matching the man’s gaze. “Listen to me now. The Csestriim walk this world, undying, defying your god’s justice.” He cocked his head to the side. “If I am lying, say the word and I will go to meet your god.”
For a long time, no one spoke. Wind honed its edge on the stone. Overhead, the sun hung hot and motionless in the blue. After what seemed like years, Gerra nodded.
“The god’s ways are strange. I will think on this as I pray.”
“And when your prayers are finished?” Kaden asked.
Gerra smiled. “Then I will know whether to give you to Ananshael, or whether to listen to your names.”
* * *
From the ledge behind the low stone house, Kaden looked out over the mountains scraping the sky to the west. After so many days running, his legs throbbed. Blisters had burst across the soles of both feet, then bled, and then new blisters had formed beneath the ruin of the older skin. Those, too, had burst. He prodded gingerly at the cracked, livid flesh. In the days before Rassambur, there had been no time to consider the pain, no choice but to keep running. Now, with the luxury of stillness, of silence, that pain reasserted itself, aching and burning all at the same time, hurting all the way through to the bruised bone.