Hand still on his sword, Amut started up again. He spoke without turning his head, as though addressing the empty staircase before him.
“Someone infiltrated the palace.”
“Not hard,” Kaden observed. “There must be a thousand people who come through the gates every day-servants, messengers, merchants, carters.…”
“Then they gained access to the Spear.”
Kaden tried to puzzle that through. There was only one entrance to Intarra’s Spear, a high, arched doorway burned or carved or quarried from the unscratchable ironglass of the tower walls. Aedolians guarded it day and night.
“Your men below…”
“The Spear is hardly a sealed fortress. Imperial…” Amut shook his head, then corrected himself. “Republican business is conducted here. People come and go. My men at the door are tasked with stopping obvious threats, but they cannot stop everyone, not without causing untold disruption.”
Kaden nodded, seeing the outlines of the problem.
Intarra’s Spear was ancient, older than human memory, even older than the most venerable Csestriim records. The architects of the Dawn Palace had constructed their fortress around it without knowing who had built the tower itself, or how, or why. Kaden had dim childhood memories of his sister reading tome after tome exploring the mystery, codex after codex, each one with a theory, an argument, something that seemed like evidence. Sometimes, Adare, Sanlitun had finally told her, you must accept that there are limits to knowledge. It is possible that we will never know the true story of the Spear.
And all the time, of course, he had known.
“I told your father the Spear’s purpose,” Kiel had said to Kaden months earlier, only days after they reclaimed the Dawn Palace, “just as I will tell you now.”
The two of them-the First Speaker of the fledgling Annurian Republic and the deathless Csestriim historian-had been sitting cross-legged in the shadow of a bleeding willow, at the edge of a small pond in the Dowager’s Garden. A breeze rucked the green-brown water; light winked from the tiny waves. The willow’s trailing branches splattered shadows. Kaden waited.
“The tower is,” the historian continued, “at its very top, an altar, a sacred space, a place where this world touches that of the gods.”
Kaden shook his head. “I have stood on the tower’s top a dozen times. There is air, cloud, nothing more.”
Kiel gestured to a narrow insect striding the water’s surface. The pond’s water dimpled beneath the creature’s meager weight. It twitched long, eyelash-thin legs, skimming from darkness to light, then back into darkness.
“To the strider,” he said, “that water is unbreakable. She will never puncture the surface. She will never know the truth.”
“Truth?”
“That there is another world-dark, vast, incomprehensible-sliding beneath the skin of the world she knows. Her mind is not built to understand this truth. Depth means nothing to her. Wet means nothing. Most of the time, when she looks at the water, she sees the trees reflected back, or the sun, or the sky. She knows nothing of the pond’s weight, the way it presses on whatever slips beneath that surface.”
The insect moved across the reflection of Intarra’s Spear.
“The reflection of the tower is not the tower,” Kiel continued, then turned away from the pond and the water strider both. Kaden followed his gaze. For a long time, the two of them studied the gleaming mystery at the heart of the Dawn Palace. “This tower, too,” Kiel said at last, gesturing to the sun-bright lance dividing the sky above them, “is only a reflection.”
Kaden shook his head. “A reflection of what?”
“The world beneath our world. Or above it. Beside it. Prepositions were not built to carry this truth. Language is a tool, like a hammer or an ax. There are tasks for which it is ill suited.”
Kaden turned back to the water. The water strider was gone. “And the gods can pass beneath the surface inside the tower?”
Kiel nodded. “We learned this too late in the long war against your people. Two of our warriors stumbled across the ritual, but by the time they had climbed to the tower’s top, the gods were gone. Only the human carcasses remained.”
“The human vessels of the young gods,” Kaden said after a moment’s thought.
Kiel nodded.
“How?”
“The obviate. The ritual Ciena demanded when Triste put the knife to her own chest.”
Kaden frowned. “How does it work?”
“This,” the historian replied, “my people were unable to learn. The tower is a gate, this much we know, but it seems that only the gods hold the keys.”
A gate for the gods, Kaden thought grimly as he climbed the stairs behind Maut Amut, his own breath hot and snarled in his chest. There was nothing to say that whoever had broken into the Spear earlier in the day understood that truth. Then again, there was nothing to say they didn’t.
Carefully, deliberately, he stepped clear of that avenue of thought. He could hear Scial Nin speaking, the old abbot’s voice calm and quiet: Consider the task at hand, Kaden. The more you try to see, the less you will notice.
“The attackers could have posed as slaves or ministers,” Amut was saying. “Visiting diplomats, almost anything…”
It made sense. Most of the Spear was empty-an unbreakable gleaming shell-but the earliest Annurian emperors had built inside that shell, constructing thirty wooden floors-thirty floors inside a tower that could have accommodated ten times that number-before giving up, leaving the thousands of feet above them vacant and echoing. The lowest of those human levels were given over to pedestrian concerns: ministerial offices and audience chambers, a great circular dining room affording views over the entire palace. Three whole floors were devoted to suites for visiting dignitaries, men and women who would return home to boast of their nights spent in the tallest structure in the world, a tower surely built by the gods. And then, of course, there was all the necessary service apparatus and the cooks, slaves, and servants such service entailed.
If anything, Amut had understated the case-there was constant traffic in and out of the Spear, and no way for the Aedolians to search everyone on every floor. The attackers, however, hadn’t been skulking around in the kitchens. Somehow, they had gained the thirtieth floor, a place that was supposed to be secure.
“What happened at my study?” Kaden asked.
Amut’s voice was tight when he responded. “They took down the three men I had posted there.”
Kaden looked over at the First Shield. “Killed them?”
Amut shook his head curtly. “Incapacitated. They were knocked unconscious, but otherwise unharmed.”
“Who,” Kaden wondered, slowing on the stairs, “could get past three Aedolians at their post?”
“I don’t know,” Amut replied, his jaw rigid, as though trying to hold back the words. “That is what I intend to find out.”
“I’m starting to see,” Kaden said, glancing down the stairs behind them, “why you think they’re dangerous.”
When they finally reached the study, it was aswarm with Aedolians. Kaden glanced through the doorway. The guardsmen seemed to be cleaning up, mostly, putting codices back on the shelves, furling maps, rolling out the massive Si’ite rug.
“It’s clear?” Kaden asked.
His shoulders were tight, he realized, and his back, as though he were expecting some assassin’s knife at the base of the neck, some snare to cinch closed around his ankles. He took a moment to ease the tension.
See the fact, not the fear.
The study was the same as it always had been-a huge, semicircular room filling half the floor. The curving ironglass wall offered an unparalleled view of Annur, and for the most part Sanlitun had done nothing to obscure that view. Bookshelves lined the interior wall, and massive tables stood in the center of the space, but along the smooth arc of that unbreakable wall there was almost nothing: just a table with two chairs and an antique ko board, a simple plinth holding a fossil, a dwarf blackpine in a pot, trunk withered and twisted.