“All of this is true,” Kiel replied, his eyes going distant. After a long pause, the Csestriim turned away, crossed to the small table that still held Sanlitun’s ko board. He seated himself in one of the two chairs facing it. Kaden watched. He had spent enough time around Kiel since their flight from the Dead Heart to have grown used to these lapses. Even after thousands of years lived among humans, generations chronicling their lives, habits, and histories, beneath his unremarkable manner, behind that human facade, Kiel’s rhythms of speech and thought remained alien, unknowable. Kaden schooled himself to patience, watching as the Csestriim removed the lids from the twin boxes and began playing, one side against the other, the only sound the quiet click of the stones against the board: white, then black, then white, over and over.
A stranger would have imagined Kiel preoccupied. Kaden knew better. The man played ko easily as breathing. He could go through entire games without looking at the board, and he never, ever lost. Whatever private war he was waging against himself, it had nothing to do with the game itself.
After forty moves, he paused, studied the stones a moment, then looked over at Kaden, picking up the thread of the conversation as though he had never dropped it.
“It is possible that il Tornja wants you to move her. That this entire episode was engineered to force you to move her.”
Kaden frowned at the board, as though there were some sort of answer in the sprawling patterns. “To strike at her when she’s outside the prison.”
Kiel nodded. “Right now, Triste is the most securely guarded person in this republic. Someone who wants to attack her, even someone who manages to get inside the Dawn Palace, still has to go through five locked doors and twenty guardsmen. It is not an inconsiderable obstacle.”
“They got in here.”
“One door,” Kiel pointed out. “Three guards. Today’s attack could be no more than a feint, an attempt to make you panic. He will come for Triste eventually, but he will not have to come for her if you give her up.”
“And if we keep her here,” Kaden said, “when he finishes with Long Fist in the north, he can come for her at his leisure.”
Kiel nodded.
Frustration gnawed at the edge of Kaden’s calm. “So if we move her, we lose. If we keep her, we lose.”
“It all returns to the obviate. You must convince her. She may not know the way, but the goddess inside her knows.”
“The ritual will kill her,” Kaden said. “That’s what your warriors found all those millennia ago, right?”
Kiel didn’t blink. “She is Ciena’s prison.”
“She is a person, not a prison. She didn’t ask for Ciena to inhabit her flesh, and she certainly hasn’t volunteered to undergo a slaughter intended to set the goddess free. It is murder.”
“It is sacrifice,” Kiel corrected him. “To the goddess. For the goddess.”
“And how do we know,” Kaden asked, “that killing Triste won’t annihilate Ciena’s touch on our world anyway? That’s what il Tornja wants to do, right?”
“Method matters. The obviate is not a murder, it is a ritual, one in which Triste consents to let go of her goddess. This is not a knife in the dark. It gives Ciena the time to depart the human flesh whole and unbroken. The obviate lays down the safe path she will take out of this world.”
“At least that’s what you believe,” Kaden said, staring at the Csestriim.
Kiel nodded fractionally. “It is what I believe. It is what happened with the young gods.”
“And if you’re wrong?”
“Then I am wrong. We act on the information we have.”
Kaden watched the historian a moment, then looked away, out over the darkened rooftops of Annur. Without a word, he slipped outside his own emotion and into the unending emptiness of the vaniate. He could do it at will now, could manage it walking, even talking. Scial Nin’s words came back to him, spoken directly across the space of the intervening year: You would have made a good monk.
Inside the trance, all pressure fell away. There was no urgency, no worry-only fact. Il Tornja would find a way to murder Triste, or he would not. She would agree to perform the obviate, or she would not. They would find a way to rescue the trapped goddess, or they would not. And if they failed, if all pleasure vanished from the world, how would that be any different from the vast peace of the vaniate?
“Come out of that, Kaden,” Kiel said. “You should not spend so much time so fully severed from yourself.”
Kaden hesitated inside the stillness. The vaniate had frightened him at first, the hugeness of it, the indifference, the cool, absolute smoothness. That fear was, he thought now, the way that one of the Annurians below, a man raised his whole life inside the hum and throb of the city, might feel were he to wake one clear morning on a glacier in the Bone Mountains: a terror of too much space, of too much nothing, of not enough self to fill the gap between snow and sky. Only, Kaden felt at home on the glacier now. He found, when the world grew too loud, too close, that he was unwilling to leave that infinite blank.
“Kaden.” Kiel’s voice again, sharper this time. “Let it go.”
Reluctantly, Kaden stepped out of the emptiness and into the cloister of his own irritation.
“You live inside it all the time,” he pointed out, careful to keep the emotion from his voice.
Kiel nodded. “Our minds were built for it. Yours is not.”
“Meaning what?”
The Csestriim didn’t reply at once. Instead, he rose, lit a lamp, then another. Light filled the room, warm as water, pressing out against the ironglass of the Spear. Only when the room was fully lit did he return to his chair, studying the ko board intently before he sat. After a pause, he placed a white stone, then a black, then another white. Kaden couldn’t make sense of any of the moves. It seemed as though Kiel had forgotten his question, or ignored it, but finally the historian looked up.
“You saw what happened to the Ishien,” he said quietly. “To some of them.”
Kaden nodded slowly. His weeks as a prisoner in their damp stone cells were not the sort of thing a person forgot, even one better equipped for forgetting than Kaden himself. He could still see Trant’s wide, agitated eyes, could still watch Ekhard Matol screaming spittle one moment, smiling that wide, awful smile the next. They were insane, all of them. They had tried to kill Kaden twice, once in the labyrinthine tunnels of the Dead Heart, and once on a sun-bright island ringed with kenta, awash in a wide sea. For all he knew, they were still trying to find a way to get at him. And yet …
“The Ishien aren’t the Shin,” Kaden replied. “Their methods…” He hesitated, remembering the scars, the descriptions of self-inflicted torment. “Those methods would break anyone.”
“Yes,” Kiel said, nudging another stone into place, “and no. The Shin discipline provides a gentler, subtler path, but the destination is the same. The vaniate is like … the deep sea. You can dive deeper and deeper, but the ocean is not your home. Stay down too long and it will crush you. Surely you heard of this happening among the monks?”
For months, Kaden had tried to put all thought of Ashk’lan from his mind. The memories of sky and silence were tangled up too tightly with the killing that came later. The truth that he could have done nothing to save the monks, to save Pater, or Akiil, or Scial Nin, sat too closely to that other, harder truth, that he had done nothing. It was easier to dwell on his failures here in Annur.