As if in response to the sensation, Meshkent uncoiled, pressed against the boundaries of his cage, testing, testing.
Free me.
The words were not words, but something old and alien moving in Kaden’s mind, as though for just a moment he were seeing with someone else’s eyes, or dreaming someone else’s dream. Slowly, methodically, he went over the god’s prison, shoring and securing it, finding the places where it had worn thin-the moments of doubt, the tiny cracks where weariness worked, patient as ice, to bring down the wall-and fixing them.
No, he replied silently.
A flash of purple rage.
These creatures will gut this body if they know you carry me inside.
Kaden shook his head, as though that made any difference.
They will not know.
You risk everything.
Risk and life are inextricable, Kaden said. Then, How do I perform the obviate?
For a long time, he waited for a reply, for Meshkent’s awful weight against the walls. Instead, there was only silence, the god motionless as a stone inside his mind. He exhaled slowly, stretched his legs out before him, and began kneading the muscles of his lower back. Far out over the canyons, a pair of black birds he didn’t recognize rode the thermals. It was almost like Ashk’lan, except for the fact that in Ashk’lan, even as a novice, he had never been a prisoner, not quite. He had never lived beneath the open threat of death.
Not that the Skullsworn had mistreated him or Triste. Quite the contrary, in fact. After the audience with Gerra, Pyrre had shown them to a modest stone house near the very edge of the mesa, a structure like those in which the Skullsworn seemed to live. Inside there were two rooms, two narrow beds, a hearth carved into the sandstone walls, and above it, hanging from hooks, a set of iron pots and pans.
“Whose home is this?” Triste had asked, eyeing the nondescript space warily.
“Most recently,” Pyrre replied, “it belonged to two priests: Helten and Chem.”
“Where are Helten and Chem?”
“They went to meet the god,” the assassin said, her voice easy, matter of fact. “Yesterday, when we came for you, the Annurians killed them.”
Kaden had paused inside the doorway, trying to read the woman’s face.
“Why did they come?”
“I told them Long Fist was with you. I didn’t realize he had escaped.”
“Why do the Skullsworn care about Long Fist?” Kaden asked, shaking his head.
“They wanted to rescue him,” Triste spat. She was glaring around the modest cottage as though it were the darkest dungeon of the Dead Heart. “Priests of death come to rescue the priest of pain so that together they can spread their sick worship over the whole world.”
Pyrre’s face hardened. “Obviously the brothel where you trained skimped on the theology.”
“Murder is not theology,” Triste snarled.
“On the contrary,” Pyrre replied. “As you would know if the whores who raised you cared for anything but coin and pleasure. The Lord of the Grave, my god, is Meshkent’s most ancient foe. In the face of the cat god’s savagery, Ananshael’s justice is our only mercy. We didn’t come-my brothers and sisters and I-to save the Urghul shaman-we came to kill him before he could spread his sickness further.”
“Sickness?” Triste hissed. “Justice? Mercy? You’re a killer! You’re all murderers. Assassins! Your god is a god of blood and bones, of death and destruction. What justice is that?”
“The only true justice,” Pyrre replied simply. Her momentary anger seemed to have passed, replaced by an uncharacteristic solemnity. It had seemed to Kaden, since the moment Pyrre arrived at the monastery, that she cared for nothing, not even her own life. Faced with death and defiance, she simply laughed or shrugged. Only now, a year later, had they finally stepped, if inadvertently, on her sacred ground.
“Where is the justice,” Triste demanded, “in murdering men in their sleep? Where is the justice in killing children? In cutting down the good along with the evil?”
“Precisely there-Ananshael spares no one. Emperor or orphan, slave or sovereign, priest or prostitute-he comes for us all. Your lady-Ciena-she doles out her pleasures according to her whims. Some live a life of unmitigated bliss while others struggle through their days in pain and agony. Ciena pities some, scorns others; only Ananshael offers up his justice to all. Ciena loves watching those she has spurned writhe in the claws of her love; only the Lord of the Grave can save a soul abandoned to Meshkent.”
“They are in league,” Triste protested. “In all the songs and stories-”
Pyrre cut her off. “The songs and stories are wrong. If Meshkent had his way, we would never die. He would hold us over his fires, flay the flesh from our bones, and we would live forever, screaming and bleeding, alert to every inch of his agony. He hates what my god does, hates the escape Ananshael offers, hates the release, the final peace.”
And this is what I have caged inside me, Kaden thought. This is the being whose survival depends upon my own. For just a moment it seemed he should have stepped from the cliff after all, even if it meant leaving Triste to face the Skullsworn alone.
Triste, for her part, just stared at Pyrre, mouth agape, then finally mustered her anger once more.
“I don’t believe it.”
Pyrre’s old smile crooked the corner of her mouth. “In this, too, Ananshael is just. He offers his boundless shelter even to the unbelievers.”
And with that pronouncement, the assassin left them. There had been no admonitions, no threats about what would happen if they attempted to escape. Pyrre had taken a moment to point out the pile of wood outside, the vegetables ripening in the small raised beds, then left. Triste stood motionless a moment, wide-eyed and baffled, then cursed, stepped into the other room, and slammed the door behind her. Kaden had debated following, then discarded the idea. He was tired suddenly, viciously tired, but didn’t think that he could sleep, and so he found his way onto the stony ledge behind the house, found himself sitting cross-legged in the way of the Shin, here, thousands of miles from those other, colder mountains where he had grown from a boy into a man. The peaks were different, but the sky was the same, the emptiness of it, the way it deepened as the sun set through azure and indigo to black.
* * *
Triste found him just after moonrise. At some point she had taken off her shoes, and her bare feet scuffed quietly over the stone. Kaden started to turn, then stopped himself. Whatever she’d said at the cliff’s edge, Triste hated him, and with good reason. It was not Pyrre’s priesthood that had betrayed her, but Kaden himself, first in the Dead Heart, and then again inside his own palace. If she was here, now, it was because she had nowhere else to go.
She sat a few paces away. For a long time, they remained silent as the moon climbed through the skein of stars. Behind them somewhere, the Skullsworn were singing in a haunting, polyphonic chorus. The Shin had had their music: low, droning chants, the few notes rough enough to grind away the self. This was entirely different. The twining melodies of the Skullsworn moved between dissonance and resolution, shifting from one register to the next. If the Shin chant had been a music of stone, this was human music, one that marked the passage of time, that anticipated with each aching cadence the inevitability of its own ending.