“You can’t go over.”
“Why not?” He knew why, but wanted to hear what she would say.
“Too dangerous.”
“I grew up in mountains like these.”
“Not the mountains. The soldiers. Annurians just beyond our sentries. Dozens of them, and more coming.”
Kaden looked past her to the rim of the far cliff, a wide ledge backed by a maze of red sandstone glowing with the morning light. He couldn’t see anyone, assassin or soldier, but the crazed rock of the Ancaz, riven with cracks and fissures, offered a thousand places to hide. An entire army could be over there, a few men in this hollow, half a dozen behind the boulder.…
“Il Tornja’s men are massing?”
The woman just shrugged, then knelt, returning to her work.
It didn’t take long for Kaden to find Pyrre. The assassin was leaning against the open doorframe of a large stone barn, enjoying the shade as she watched something inside. As Kaden approached, he realized that there was a fight going on, or something like a fight. A man and a woman circled each other warily, feinting and darting, testing the empty space between them, gazes locked firmly as horns. Both were naked from the waist up, their skin slick with sweat. Neither one, however, seemed to be wielding a weapon. There were no axes, no swords. Their hands weren’t even balled into fists.
“What are they doing?” Kaden asked quietly.
Pyrre glanced over at him. “Painting.”
Kaden squinted in the gloom. As his eyes adjusted, he realized that the hands of the sparring Skullsworn weren’t empty after all. Each seemed to be holding something delicately between the thumb and index finger. Sunlight pouring through the open windows flashed off steel. Needles, slender enough to draw thread through a torn hem.
“Painting?”
Pyrre nodded. “We’re short on paper here, but there’s plenty of skin.” She smiled at his confusion, then flipped open the front of her own robe. Tattooed into the sun-dark skin between her breasts was a shape about the length of his thumb, the shading mottled, imperfect. It looked like someone had tried to build an image out of hundreds of tiny dots, then stopped short. Away from the ink’s dense center, those dots splashed out haphazardly, as though the tattoo were dissolving across her skin. He couldn’t quite make out the central shape, but something about the edges and angles tugged at his memory.
“A desert sparrow,” Pyrre said, reading his confusion. “Similar to some of the birds I saw when I visited your monastery.”
The words snapped the image into focus. It was a sparrow indeed, although the wings were more hinted at than fully inked.
“Why?” Kaden asked.
Pyrre shrugged her robe closed, then cinched the rope belt tighter around her waist. “Ananshael loves their song.” She whistled a long, lilting call, a string of notes that reached toward music but never quite resolved into a tune. “We each have one.” She gestured toward the sparring partners just as the woman feinted, then lunged, pricking the man’s chest with exquisite delicacy. He fell still, smiled, nodded to his opponent. They both crossed to a stone bowl balanced on a window’s sill, dipped their needles into dark ink, then returned to the center of the open floor. Another nod, and they were at it again, circling and testing, lunging and recovering. “It takes years,” Pyrre went on, “to ink the full bird. Longer, for those who are quicker.”
“And when it’s finished?”
“We celebrate. There is music and food. At the end of the night, the one with the songbird goes to the god.”
“You kill the loser?”
“There are no losers. There are only those who go earlier or later to the god’s embrace.”
Kaden shook his head. “If the god’s embrace is so sweet, then why all this? Why go through the years of sparring at all?”
“It’s a way of seeing who has the gift,” Pyrre replied. “The slow or unskilled, those who have grown too old to fight-their priesthood quickly becomes personal.”
“Meaning you kill them.”
“Meaning they give willingly of their own lives.”
“And those of you who are quicker?”
The assassin winked at him. “We’re around longer. To spread the god’s truth and his justice.”
Kaden stared at the unfolding fight, but Pyrre had already turned away, stepping from the barn’s cool darkness into the bright sun as though she’d lost all interest in the contest.
“Il Tornja knows we are here,” Kaden said, following her.
“Of course he does.”
“And he’s coming.”
Pyrre grinned her most wolfish grin. “Of course he is.”
“He can’t have more than a few dozen men with him.…”
“There are more coming. Many more. My brothers and sisters killed most of his messengers, but a couple got away.” She stared eastward, as though she could make out those soldiers fleeing over the Dead Salts, toward Mo’ir and whatever reinforcements waited. “I’m looking forward to it, actually. Thousands of sweating young men camped out on the canyon rim just across the bridge. The Annurians aren’t great soldiers, but there’s no denying that all that marching and hauling and drilling-it makes a man fit. Just a shame that your empire won’t allow women in the ranks. A woman’s leg, well toned, is shapelier than a man’s. Still, one makes do.…” She closed her eyes, savored some imagination of the besieging army, then hummed contentedly.
“Have you forgotten the leach?” Kaden asked. “The one who pulled lightning straight out of the sky? Il Tornja doesn’t need his army. One powerful leach could level Rassambur without stepping foot on the bridge.”
Pyrre shrugged. “If he has his well. And that’s assuming your brilliant general…”
“He’s not my general.”
“… is willing to risk bringing that leach close enough to mount a serious attack. He might be handy with lightning, but he’ll die if someone puts an arrow in his eye. And we spend a lot of time here in Rassambur learning to put arrows in eyes.”
Kaden exhaled slowly, trying to order his thoughts. “Even if that’s true, we’re trapped as long as we stay here, and the trap is only going to get tighter. If we’re going to get out, we need to get out now. Have you talked to Gerra?”
“Gerra will decide what he decides in his own time,” Pyrre said, then cocked her head to one side, studying him. “I don’t remember you being so afraid, Kaden. The last time, back in those miserably frigid mountains of yours, there were moments when you seemed almost … calm. Where did that go?”
“Last time, there wasn’t as much to be afraid of.”
It was a weak response, and it did next to nothing to quench the question in the assassin’s eyes. And yet, what else could he say? There was no explaining the god locked inside of him, raging and thrashing by day and night, no explaining the nihilistic temptations of the vaniate, no explaining that the trance had become more dangerous than the panic it replaced. Revealing any corner of the truth to Pyrre would see him dead-that much was clear. If she knew he bore the god she loathed inside his flesh, she’d cut him and the god to bloody shreds.
Maybe that would be best.
All over again he felt the doubt, a thick tide rising inside him. He turned away before the assassin could see it in his eyes.
* * *
It was night, and Meshkent was awake, raging in the back of Kaden’s mind. More and more, he was learning to keep the god kenneled, to mute the endless demands for freedom and power, tamping them down until the voice was almost as incoherent as the wind over stone-constant and cold, but meaningless. Even when Kaden could ignore those words, however, he could feel the god there, a blight, a rabid creature that needed to be put down. All that fight, the clawing and the biting, it was the opposite of what il Tornja had described, and once again the kenarang’s words drifted across Kaden’s thoughts: The beauty of a life lived free, unenslaved by brutish passions …