“I’ve had my men go over it a dozen times,” Amut said, following him inside as the Aedolians filed silently out. “I checked for every trap I know how to set, then had the dogs here all afternoon sniffing for poisons. We went through every drawer, scroll, and codex looking for munitions.” He shook his head. “There’s nothing. It’s clear.”
“Too clear.”
Kaden turned at the voice to find Kiel standing by a far bookshelf, running a finger over the wooden frame.
“In your search for traps, you have obliterated any sign of the intruders.”
Amut’s fingers tightened on the pommel of his sword. “There was no sign. They were good. Better than good.”
Kiel considered the Aedolian a moment, then nodded. There was no concern on his face, only curiosity. It had been that way even in the Dead Heart, when the historian was still caged deep in the bedrock of a forgotten fortress by madmen bent on exterminating the last members of his kind. Kiel had learned to feign emotion well enough, but most of the time he didn’t bother. People considered him an eccentric genius, but then, Annur was filled with eccentrics and geniuses.
Kaden watched the historian as he crossed the room, his stride marred by a slight hitch, where something broken inside him had mended imperfectly. Kiel had walked the world for millennia, but his face, sober and barely lined, might have belonged to a man in his fourth or fifth decade. Eventually, he would need to leave the council and the palace, probably need to leave Annur altogether before someone noticed that he never changed, never aged.
Provided we’re not all dead before that happens, Kaden amended silently.
“So why did they come?” the historian asked.
“Theft,” Amut replied. “It has to be.”
Kaden raised his eyebrows. “Is anything missing?”
“I wouldn’t know, First Speaker. Aedolians are guards. We stand outside the door. Now that we are sure the study is clear, I hoped you might shed some light on what was inside. Something missing?”
“All right,” Kaden replied. He crossed to the middle of the room, turned in a slow circle. “Seems safe enough. Nothing’s killed me yet.”
“It is the safest room in the Dawn Palace right now,” Amut said. “I would stake my life on it.”
Kaden shook his head. “And just how safe,” he asked quietly, “is the Dawn Palace?”
* * *
Only when Maut Amut left the room did Kaden turn to Kiel once more.
“What do you think?”
The Csestriim considered the closed bloodwood door. “It was by observing men like that Aedolian that I learned the meaning of your human word pride.”
“I meant about the study. You think Amut was right? That it was all some sort of elaborate theft?”
The historian shook his head. “It is impossible to say. The guardsmen moved everything.”
Kaden nodded. He visited the study nearly every day, could, with a moment of thought, call up a reasonable image of the half-round room, but he’d never bothered with a formal saama’an. The spines on the codices in his memory were hazy, the arrangement of the scrolls imperfect. Still, it would have been a decent place to start if the Aedolians hadn’t been at the chamber for the better part of the morning. Kaden considered the mental image for a few heartbeats, then let it go, focusing on the room itself.
The sun was setting, sagging down the western sky until it hung just above Annur’s rooftops. No one had yet bothered to light the room’s lamps, but enough daylight remained for a cursory inspection. Instead of turning to the tables or the shelves, however, Kaden crossed to the wall overlooking the city, to a small section of the bloodwood floor that was polished to higher shine than the rest. It wasn’t hard to imagine Sanlitun sitting there, the last true emperor of Annur, cross-legged in the way of the monks who had trained him. Kaden let his own thoughts go, trying to slide into the mind of his murdered father.
Annur was the largest city in the world’s largest empire, home to more than two million men, women, and children; their homes and shops, temples and taverns all built shoulder to shoulder. People ate and fought there, loved, lied, and died-all within a few paces of their neighbors, no more than a cracked teak wall between the pain of a laboring mother and the lovers locked in a hot embrace. After the emptiness of Ashk’lan, the space and the silence, it was all … too much, even inside the Dawn Palace. Kaden could inhabit his father’s desire to climb out of the wash of humanity, above it, could imagine Sanlitun ignoring the heavy wooden chairs to sit on the bare floor, eyes closed, blind to the city that surged and hummed beyond those clear, unbreakable walls.…
He let the beshra’an go.
Maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe that particular patch of floor had been worn smooth by something else, something irrelevant-one of the silver smoke cats that prowled the palace, or a small table shifted a thousand times in cleaning. Kaden could see his father sitting there still and silent as a Shin monk perched on a granite ledge above Ashk’lan. He could see it, but he’d never actually seen it. Sanlitun was a shadow, a dim shape cast on the present by the things he’d left behind.
Kaden turned from the memories of his father and the sight of the sprawling city he had ruled to consider the room once more. The Aedolians had been neat in their search, stacking the loose papers in piles on the tables, returning the codices to the shelves with the spines perfectly aligned. The soldiers did not, however, have Kiel’s memory or Kaden’s. He sighed as he crossed to the nearest table, flipped through a few pages, then let them fall.
“I’m not sure I kept anything here worth stealing,” he said.
“There were pages detailing troop movements,” Kiel replied. “Supply lists.”
Kaden shook his head. “There are easier places to find those papers. No need to infiltrate the Spear itself. No need to subdue three Aedolians.” He paused, trying to make sense of it. “This was something different. Something … more.” He glanced at the heavy door-three inches of banded bloodwood with Aedolian guardsmen just beyond it. Only a madman would try to get past that. A madman, or someone very, very determined. “It was il Tornja, wasn’t it?”
“We have reliable reports of your sister’s kenarang in the north, but his reach is long.”
Kaden nodded slowly. “He knew this study. He’s been here. If he needed something, he would know where to look, and he knows the kind of people who could manage something like this.” Kaden hesitated before saying the rest. “And, like you, he knows the truth about the Spear. What it is for.”
Kiel inclined his head slowly. “He does.”
A cold weight settled in Kaden’s chest. He glanced up, as though he could see through the ceiling, through thousands of feet of empty air that waited in the tower above, through the steel floor of the cage dangling there, to where a young woman with black hair and violet eyes, a woman of impossible beauty, a priestess and a murderer, a human with a goddess trapped inside her flesh, waited in chains to meet her fate.
“We have to get Triste out,” he said finally. “We have to find a way to do it now and do it safely. If il Tornja can get into this study, he can get into the prison.”
“And yet it is only atop this tower that the girl can do what must be done,” Kiel replied.
“She doesn’t know how. And even if she did, she wouldn’t do it.” He had explained to her the truth. They’d been over it a dozen times, to no avail. “There’s no point keeping her in the Spear if she can’t perform the obviate, if she won’t. Everyone knows she’s in the prison, and even if no one has attacked her yet, they will.”