The Emperor's blades

16

Kaden glanced out the narrow window of the pottery shed. Despite the damp chill inside the stone structure that his rough robe seemed powerless to defeat, the sun had climbed above Lion’s Head to the east, illuminating Ashk’lan’s paths and buildings. It would be a pleasant day outside, young buds vibrant green against the deep blue of the sky, a fresh spring breeze gusting down off the summits, the sharp scent of junipers mingling with the warm mud. Unfortunately, the slaughtered goats and strange tracks outside the monastery had led to a change in routine, and the upshot of Scial Nin’s interdiction against acolytes working outside the central square was that Tan had moved Kaden from his outdoor labors and into the shed.

“You can finish taking your castle apart later,” the older monk had said, dismissing with a wave the structure Kaden had labored senselessly to build. “For now, I want you to make pots, broad and deep.”

“How many?” he asked.

“As many as it takes.” Whatever that meant.

Kaden stifled a sigh as he looked around the shed, eyeing the silent rows of ewers, pots, mugs, bowls, urns, and cups set carefully on the wooden shelves. He would have preferred to be out with the monks who were trying to hunt down the mysterious creature, not cooped up making pots, but what he preferred didn’t figure into the matter.

Kaden knew his way around pottery, of course. The Shin traded their earthenware along with honey and jam in the spring and fall to the nomadic Urghul, a barbaric people who lacked the skill or the interest to make such things for themselves. He usually enjoyed time spent in the shed, kneading the cool clay between his palms, conjuring the graceful shape of a cup or jar between his fingers as he worked the treadle with his foot. Given the events taking place, however, an assignment to work in the clay shed from dawn to dusk felt a little like imprisonment, and he found his mind wandering in ways that would have earned him a beating if Tan had been around to see. He even had to scrap several pieces for novice mistakes he hadn’t made in half a dozen years.

He was just about to take a break to eat the heel of hard bread he had tucked into his robe at breakfast when something darkened the window above him. Before he could turn, his mind filled with the saama’an of the slaughtered goat, brain scooped from its skull, and he reached for his belt knife as he rose from his seat. It was a ridiculous weapon but … there was no need. Akiil perched in the window, black curls backlit by the sun, a smirk on his face.

“Fear is blindness,” the youth intoned solemnly, wagging a finger. “Calmness is sight.”

Kaden let out a deep breath. “Thank you for that wisdom, Master. Did you complete your acolyte’s training in the two days I’ve been locked in here?”

Akiil shrugged, then dropped from the window ledge into the room. “It’s amazing the progress I was able to make without you around to hold me back. The vaniate’s like picking pockets-seems hard until you catch the knack.”

“And what is it like, O Enlightened One?”

“The vaniate?” Akiil frowned as though pondering. “A profound mystery,” he said finally, waving a dismissive hand. “An undeveloped maggot like you could never understand.”

“You know,” Kaden said, settling back onto the stool where he had been working, “Tan told me that the Csestriim practiced the vaniate.” He had had plenty of time to ponder this peculiar claim, but Akiil had been cooped up in the kitchen for days, boiling down bruiseberries in Yen Harval’s heavy iron pots, and the two hadn’t been able to talk. With all the confusion about whatever was killing the goats, Kaden had finally set the information about the vaniate to the side until he could share it with his friend.

Akiil furrowed his brow. “The Csestriim? I didn’t figure Tan to be one for tall tales and kids’ stories.”

“There are records,” Kaden said. “They were real enough.” The two of them had been over this before. Kaden had seen the volumes in the imperial library-scrolls and tomes penned in some illegible script that his father’s scribes claimed belonged to the long-dead race. There were entire rooms given over to the Csestriim texts, shelf upon shelf, codex upon codex, and scholars visited from the two continents and beyond-Li, even the Manjari Empire-to study the collection. Akiil, on the other hand, tended to believe only in what he could see or steal, and there were no Csestriim wandering around the Perfumed Quarter of Annur.

“Maybe the Csestriim are the ones killing the goats,” Akiil suggested with mock solemnity. “Maybe they eat brains. I feel like I heard that in one of the stories.”

Kaden ignored the sarcasm. “You can hear anything in the stories. They’re not reliable.”

“You’re the one who believes the stories!” Akiil protested.

“I believe that the Csestriim existed,” Kaden said. “I believe we fought a war against them that lasted decades, maybe centuries.” He shook his head. “Beyond that, it’s hard to know what to think.”

“You believe the stories. You don’t believe the stories.” The youth waggled a finger. “Pretty sloppy thinking.”

“Look at it this way,” Kaden replied. “The fact that half your tales are lies doesn’t mean the Perfumed Quarter of Annur doesn’t exist.”

“My stories!” Akiil sputtered. “Lies? I protest!”

“Is that part of the speech you practiced for the magistrate?”

Akiil shrugged, dropping the pretense. “Didn’t work,” he replied, gesturing to the brand-a rising sun-burned into the back of his right hand. All Annurian thieves were marked in such a way as punishment after their first offense. If half Akiil’s stories of picking pockets and pilfering wealthy homes were true, he was extremely lucky. A second offense called for a similar brand to the forehead. Men with the second brand had a hard time finding work, scarred, as they were, with the emblem of their misdeeds. Most returned to crime. For the third offense, the magistrates of Annur meted out death.

“Forget what you think about the Csestriim,” Kaden pressed, “you have to admit it’s strange that the Shin are pushing an idea based on the language and minds of an ancient race. It would be even stranger, actually, if the Csestriim weren’t real.”

“I think just about everything about the Shin is strange,” Akiil retorted, “but they put food on my plate two meals a day, a roof over my head, and no one has burned anything else into my flesh with a hot iron-which is more than I can say for your father.”

“My father didn’t-”

“Of course he didn’t,” Akiil snapped. “The Emperor of Annur is far too busy to see personally to the punishment of a minor thief.”

The years at Ashk’lan had blunted Akiil’s bitterness toward the social inequities of Annur, but once in a while Kaden would say something about slaves or taxes, justice or punishment, and Akiil would refuse to let it go.

“What’s the word from outside?” Kaden asked, hoping to change the subject. “Any more dead goats?”

Akiil looked ready to ignore the question and continue the argument. Kaden waited. After a moment he saw his friend take half a breath, hold it, then another half breath. The pupils of his dark eyes dilated, then shrank. A calming exercise. Akiil was as adept at the Shin discipline as any of the other acolytes-more so than most, in fact-provided he chose to exercise it. “Two,” he replied after a long pause. “Two more dead. Neither were the ones we staked out as bait.”

Kaden nodded, disturbed at the news but relieved to have avoided a fight. “So whatever it is, it’s smart.”

“Smart or lucky.”

“How are the rest of the monks dealing with it?”

“About the same way the Shin deal with everything else,” Akiil replied, rolling his eyes. “After Nin’s meeting, aside from the prohibition on acolytes and novices leaving the main buildings, people are still hauling water, still painting, still meditating. Honest to ’Shael, I swear that if a murderous horde of your Csestriim rode in on a cloud and started hacking off heads and mounting them on pikes, half the monks would try to paint them and the other half wouldn’t pay any attention at all.”

“None of the older monks are saying anything else about it? Nin, or Altaf, or Tan?”

Akiil scowled. “You know how it is. They tell us about as much as I’d tell a hog I was planning to slaughter for the pots. If you want to learn anything, you have to go look for yourself.”

“But you, of course, have scrupulously obeyed the abbot’s command to remain at the monastery.…”

Akiil’s eyes sparkled. “Of course. I may have lost my way from time to time-Ashk’lan is such a vast and complicated place-but I would never willingly disobey our revered abbot!”

“And when you lost your way, did you find anything?”

“Nah,” the youth replied, shaking his head in frustration. “If Altaf and Nin can’t track the ’Kent-kissing thing, I don’t have a chance. Still, I thought … sometimes you get lucky.”

“And sometimes you get unlucky,” Kaden said, remembering the savaged carcass, the dripping blood. “We don’t know what it is, Akiil. Be careful.”

* * *

The following evening Tan returned to the shed. Kaden stopped his work and looked up expectantly, hoping to read some clue about outside events in his umial’s weathered face. Tan knew more than the other monks. Kaden was certain of that. Trying to ferret out what he knew, however, was impossible. The sudden appearance of gruesomely mutilated corpses seemed to affect him no more than the discovery of a new patch of mountain bluebells. He closed the door behind him and looked with a critical eye over the dozen or so pots Kaden had thrown and fired.

“Have you made any progress?” Kaden asked after letting the silence stretch.

“Progress,” Tan said, pronouncing the word as though it were new to him.

“Yes. Have you found whatever killed the goats?”

Tan tapped against the outside of one of the pots with his fingernail, then ran a finger around the inside of the lip. “Would that be progress?” he asked without looking up from his inspection.

Kaden suppressed a sigh and, with an effort, stilled his breathing and lowered his heart rate. If Tan wanted to be cryptic, Kaden wasn’t going to be goaded into pestering him like a wide-eyed novice. His umial progressed to the next pot, rapped the rim with his knuckles, then scrubbed at some imperfection on the surface of the vessel.

“What about you?” Tan asked after he’d looked over half the pots. “Have you made any progress?”

Kaden hesitated, trying to find the hook hidden in the question.

“I’ve made these,” he replied guardedly, gesturing to the silent row of earthenware.

Tan nodded. “So you have.” He hefted one of the vessels and sniffed at the inside of it. “What is this one made out of?”

Kaden held back a smile. If his umial expected to trip him up with questions about clay, he was going to be sorely disappointed. Kaden knew the various river clays better than any other acolyte at the monastery. “That one’s black silt blended with beach red at a ratio of one to three.”

“Anything else?”

“A little resin to give it that hue.”

The monk moved on to the next pot. “What about this one?”

“White shallows clay,” Kaden responded readily, “medium grain.” Pass this test, he told himself silently, and you may just get to see the sun again before winter.

Tan went down the line of pots, all dozen of them, each time asking the same questions: What is this made out of? Anything else? At the end of the row he frowned, looked at Kaden for the first time, then shook his head.

“You have not made progress.”

Kaden stared. He’d made no mistakes; he was sure of it.

“Do you know why I sent you here?”

“To make pots.”

“A potter could teach you to make pots.”

Kaden hesitated. Tan might whip him for his stupidity, but the beating he would receive for trying to bluff his way through the conversation would be even worse. “I don’t know why you sent me here.”

“Speculate.”

“To keep me from going up into the mountains?”

The monk’s eyes hardened. “Scial Nin’s command is not bar enough?”

Kaden thought back to his conversation with Akiil and schooled his face to stillness. Most of the Shin umials could smell deception or omission the way a hound scented a fox. Kaden himself hadn’t stepped foot out of the clay shed, but he wasn’t eager to land his friend a hefty penance.

“‘Obedience is a knife that cuts the cord of bondage,’” he responded, quoting the start of the ancient Shin maxim.

Tan considered him, silent, inscrutable. “Go on,” he said at last.

Kaden hadn’t been forced to recite the whole thing since he was a novice, but the words came back easily enough:

Obedience is a knife that cuts the cord of bondage.

Silence is a hammer that shatters the walls of speech.

Stillness is strength; pain a soft bed.

Put down your basin; emptiness is the only vessel.

As he uttered the final syllables, he realized his mistake. “The emptiness,” he said quietly, gesturing back toward the silent row of earthenware. “When you asked me what they were made out of, I was supposed to say ‘emptiness.’”

Tan shook his head grimly. “You know the words, but no one has made you feel them. Today we will rectify that. Come with me.”

Kaden rose reflexively from his stool, steeling himself for some new brutality, some hideous penance that would leave him battered or bleeding or bruised right down to the bone, all in the name of the vaniate, a concept no one had ever bothered to fully explain to him. He rose, then paused. For eight years he had run when the monks said run, painted when they told him to paint, labored when he was instructed to labor, and fasted when they refused him food. And for what? Akiil’s words from the day before came back to him suddenly: They tell us about as much as I’d tell a hog.… Training and study were all well and good, but Kaden wasn’t even sure what he was training for.

“Come,” Tan said, his voice hard and unyielding.

Though Kaden’s muscles ached to obey, he forced himself to remain still. “Why?”

The older monk’s fist struck his cheek before he realized it was moving, splitting the skin and knocking him to the floor. Tan took a step forward, looming over him.

“Get up.”

Kaden rose unsteadily to his feet. The pain was one thing-he could handle pain-but his mind was blurry, dizzy from the blow.

“Go,” Tan said, pointing toward the door.

Kaden hesitated, then took a step back. The split skin of his cheek wept blood, but he forced himself to leave his hands at his side. He shook his head again. “I want to know why. I’ll do what you tell me, but I want to understand the point. Why do I need to learn the vaniate?”

It was impossible to read any emotion in the older monk’s eyes. He might have been staring at a carcass or a passing cloud. He might have been a hunter looming over his wounded prey, readying himself for the kill. Kaden wondered if the man would hit him again, would keep hitting him. He had never heard of an acolyte being murdered by his trainer before, but then, if Tan wanted to beat his pupil to death, who would stop him? Scial Nin? Chalmer Oleki? Ashk’lan lay more than a hundred leagues past the border of the Annurian Empire, past any civilized borders. There were no laws here, no magistrates, no courts of justice. Kaden watched his umial warily, trying to still the pounding of his heart against his ribs.

“Your ignorance is an impediment,” the monk concluded finally. He stood for one more moment in stillness before turning toward the door. “Perhaps your training will be more effective once you understand the urgency behind it.”

* * *

Scial Nin’s study hunched against the cliffs a few hundred paces from the main compound. The building looked like part of the mountain-dry stonework shaded by a gaunt, withered pine that shed its brown needles on the roof and ground alike. Kaden and Akiil tended to avoid the place-an acolyte or novice was usually called before the abbot only for an extreme infracation requiring an extreme penance-and, despite Rampuri Tan’s suggestion that Scial Nin would provide answers to his questions, Kaden now approached with some trepidation, following in the footsteps of his umial. Tan shoved the wooden door open without preamble, and suddenly reluctant, Kaden stepped over the threshold after him.

The inside of the room was dim, and he didn’t immediately notice Scial Nin seated behind a low desk, the surface of which was empty save for a single parchment-the painting, Kaden realized, of the tracks left by whatever was slaughtering the goats. If the abbot was surprised or irritated by the sudden entrance, he didn’t show it. He looked up from the paper, and waited.

“The boy wants answers,” Tan said brusquely, stepping to the side.

“Most people do,” Nin replied, his voice smooth and solid as planed oak. He considered the older monk, then turned his attention to Kaden. “You may speak.”

Now that he stood before the abbot, Kaden wasn’t quite sure what to say. He felt suddenly foolish, like a small child making trouble for his elders. Still, Tan had relented enough to bring him before the abbot; it would be a shame to squander the opportunity.

“I’d like to know why I was sent here,” he began slowly. “I understand the goal of the Shin: emptiness, vaniate. But why is that my goal? Why is it necessary in ruling an empire?”

“It’s not,” Nin replied. “The Manjari Emperors beyond the Ancaz Mountains pay no homage to the Blank God. The savages at the borders of your empire revere Meshkent. The Liran kings on the far side of the earth refuse to worship gods at all-they venerate their ancestors.”

Kaden glanced over at his umial, but Tan stood silent, his face like stone.

“Then why am I here?” he asked, turning his attention back to the abbot. “My father told me, just before I left, that the Shin could teach me things he could not.”

“Your father was a talented student,” Nin replied, nodding at the recollection, “but he had no experience as a umial. He would have had great difficulty with your training, even were there not an empire requiring his attention.”

“What training?” Kaden asked, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “Painting? Running?”

The abbot cocked his head to the side, looking at Kaden the way a robin might consider a spring earthworm.

“The Emperor has many titles,” he said at last. “One of the oldest and least understood is ‘Keeper of the Gates.’ Do you know what it means?”

Kaden shrugged. “There are four gates to Annur: the Water Gate, the Steel Gate, the Gate of Strangers, and the False Gate. The Emperor keeps them, guards them. He protects the city from her foes.”

“So most people believe,” Nin replied, “in part because it’s true: the Emperor does guard the gates of Annur and has for hundreds of years, ever since Olannon hui’Malkeenian built the first rough walls of the city from wood and wattle. There are other gates, however. Older. More dangerous. It is these to which the title refers.”

Kaden felt a flame of excitement kindle inside him. He doused it. If the abbot saw a flicker of emotion, he was just as likely to send Kaden back to the clay shed as to continue his tale.

“Four thousand years ago,” Nin continued, “perhaps longer, perhaps not so long-the archives are murky on the point-a new creature appeared on the earth. It was not Csestriim or Nevariim, god or goddess-those had all lived for millennia. The new creature was human.

“Scholars and priests still debate our origins. Some say Ouma, the first mother, hatched from a giant egg and bore nine hundred sons and daughters, and from these we are descended. Others hold that Bedisa created us, an infinite supply of toys for her great love, Ananshael, to destroy. The Kindred of the Dark believe we arrived from the stars, borne through the blackness in ships with sails of flame. The theories are endless.

“My predecessor in this post, however, thought that our parents were Csestriim. He believed that after thousands of years ruling the earth, the Csestriim, for reasons unknown, began to bear children who were … strange.”

Kaden glanced over at his umial, but Tan’s face was an inscrutable mask.

“Strange?” he asked. He’d always heard that the Csestriim and humans were implacable foes. The idea that they might be related, that the humans were descended from their enemies-it was bizarre beyond comprehension.

“The Csestriim were immortal,” the abbot replied. “Their children were not. The Csestriim, for all their logical brilliance, felt no more emotion than beetles or snakes. The children they bore, the human children, were more fully in the grip of Meshkent and Ciena. Csestriim felt pain and pleasure, but humans cared about their own suffering and their bliss. Perhaps as a result, they were the first to feel emotion: love and hatred, fear, bravery. Alternatively, it could have been the birth of the young gods that led to human emotion. In either case, the Csestriim viewed this emotion as a curse, an affliction. There is a story claiming that when they saw the love that the first human twins bore each other, they tried to strangle them in their crib. My predecessor believed that Eira, the goddess of that love, hid the twins from their parents and spirited them away, west of the Great Rift, where they bore a race of humans.”

“It sounds implausible,” Kaden said. For years the Shin had trained him to believe only what he could observe, to trust only what he could see, or smell, or hear. And now, contrary to all prior habit, the abbot was spinning stories like a masker back on one of the great stages in Annur. “How do you know this happened?”

Scial Nin shrugged. “I don’t. It’s impossible to untangle myth from memory, history from hagiography, but one thing is certain: Before us, the Csestriim ruled this world, undisputed masters of a domain stretching from pole to pole.”

“What about the Nevariim?” Kaden asked, drawn in to the saga in spite of himself. In all the old tales, the Nevariim were the heroic foes of the Csestriim, beings of impossible, tragic beauty who had warred against the evil race for hundreds of years before succumbing, finally, to Csestriim ruthlessness and guile. In the elaborate paintings of the storybooks Kaden and Valyn had pored over as children, the Nevariim always looked like princesses and princes, eyes flashing as they wielded their blades against the crabbed gray shapes of the Csestriim. If Nin thinks the storybooks are real, Kaden thought to himself, I might as well get the full story.

It was not Nin, however, who replied. Instead, Tan shook his head slightly. “The Nevariim are a myth. Tales told by the humans to comfort themselves as they died.”

The abbot shrugged once more. “If they did live, the Csestriim destroyed them long before our arrival. The records that remain of the Nevariim are few, scant, and contradictory. By contrast, your Dawn Palace is filled with annals that tell the story of our own fight with the Csestriim. They tell the tales of the long years of imprisonment, when we were held and bred like beasts in the stables of Ai. They tell of Arim Hua, the sun leach, who hid his power for forty seasons, waiting for the sun storms that only he could feel before bursting asunder the locked gates and leading our people to freedom. There are heart-wrenching lays of the lean years, when the snow fell deeper than the highest pines in the mountain passes and children ate the flesh of their parents to survive. Those were the years of the Hagonine Purges, when our foes hunted us like beasts through the snow.”

“Behind the abbot’s poetry there is one hard fact,” Tan said. “The Csestriim sought to annihilate us. We fought to survive.”

Scial Nin nodded. “Men and women prayed then to gods both real and imagined.”

“To the Blank God?” Kaden asked.

The abbot shook his head. “The Blank God has no interest in humans or Csestriim, war or peace. His domain is much wider. Our ancestors prayed to more practical gods, desperate not for victory, but for respite, even a moment’s shelter. And then an amazing thing occurred: The gods heard our prayers. Not the old gods, of course; they walked their inscrutable ways as always, breaking and remaking worlds according to their ancient games, weaving webs of light and darkness, madness and law.

“But there were new gods, unknown to the Csestriim, and they left their home to come here in human form, despite the risks, to fight at our side. You know their names, naturally: Heqet and Kaveraa, Orella and Orilon, Eira and Maat. Even Ciena and Meshkent came. They fought, and slowly our flight became our holding, our holding became battle, battles became war.”

“It was not so easy as that,” Tan interjected. “We were overmatched, even with the help of the gods. The Csestriim were old past thought, immortal, implacable. Because they lived inside the vaniate, they felt no mercy, no fatigue, no fear of pain or death.”

“In their own way,” Nin added, “they were more powerful than the gods. The gods could not be killed, of course, but a Csestriim blade could shatter their human form, cropping their power for eons to come, and so they kept to the shadows, weaving their power in secret, subtle ways, and aside from Heqet, none would take the field.”

Kaden tried to make sense of it. He had heard versions of all the stories, of course, about how the young gods of courage and fear, love and hate, hope and despair had taken the part of the humans, but he had always assumed they were simply stories. Hearing them now, from the mouths of his abbot and his umial, filled him with an unexpected fascination. “But we survived,” he said. “We rallied and destroyed the Csestriim.”

“No,” Tan said. “We died. Died by the thousands and the tens of thousands.”

Nin nodded. “It was not our cunning or our courage, but our numbers that saved us, Kaden. As the strength of the young gods waxed, the Csestriim, who had borne few children to begin with, could bear no more. Oh, their women grew heavy and brought babes into the world, but they were human babes, born fully in the grip of Ciena, Meshkent, and the young gods descended from them, sharing our fears and our passions, our hatreds and our hope.

“Our lives were short, no more than a blink to the foes we fought, but we were fertile. Fathers fought our battles, but it was our mothers who won the war. As the numbers of the Csestriim dwindled and ours grew, victory seemed certain.”

“And then,” Tan said, “the kenta.”

Kaden looked from his umial to the abbot and back again. He had never heard the word.

“It means ‘gift’ in the Csestriim tongue,” Nin added, “but the kenta were no gift to the humans. The Csestriim leaches struggled for a thousand days and a thousand nights with powers even the old gods feared to confront, and they died in their efforts, but they created what our ancestors knew as the Death Gates.

“War as men had known it, as we know it today, disintegrated. With the gates, the Csestriim could appear anywhere at any time, ranging thousands of leagues in the blink of an eye. We still outnumbered them, but our numbers were useless without a front. Time and again, human armies believed they had trapped a Csestriim force only for their foes to evaporate through one of the hidden gates. While the human legions hunted them in the mountains, hundreds of leagues from family and home, the Csestriim arrived in the hearts of their cities. They killed without mercy.

“Crops were put to the torch, towns razed. Women and children thought safe, hundreds of miles from danger, were herded into temples and burned alive. What little restraint the Csestriim had to begin with vanished, for now they knew without a doubt that they fought for the very survival of their race.”

“Why didn’t we destroy the gates?” Kaden asked.

“We tried. Nothing availed. Eventually, men built fortresses around all those they could find, encasing many in stone and brick. Even those had to be guarded, lest the Csestriim break through to work their slaughter.

“Why didn’t we just use the gates ourselves? Strike back at them with their own weapon?”

“Foolishness like that,” Tan replied, “led to the deaths of thousands.”

“People tried,” Nin continued. “Men, whole legions, stepped through the kenta and simply vanished. Because the openings of the gates were opaque, no one realized the loss. When exploratory parties failed to report, it was assumed that the Csestriim had ambushed them. Human generals sent more and still more men through to the rescue. It was weeks before we understood our error.”

“Where did they go?” Kaden asked, aghast. “People don’t just vanish.”

“This certainty of yours,” Tan replied, “it could kill thousands someday.”

“It was only later,” Nin said, “that men learned the gates belonged to a power older than the Csestriim. They belong to the Blank God. He took the men.”

Kaden shivered. Unlike Ananshael or Meshkent, the older gods didn’t involve themselves in the human world, and the Blank God was the oldest of the old. Despite the fact that Kaden had spent the last eight years in service of the ancient deity, he hadn’t really considered his power. Most of the monks seemed to think of and refer to him as an abstract principle rather than a supernatural force with desire and agency. The thought that the Blank God could touch the world, could swallow whole legions, was unsettling, to say the least.

The abbot continued. “It’s not so surprising. When one uses the gates, the space separating here from, say, Annur, is not just shortened; it becomes nonexistent. One passes, quite literally, through nothing, and nothing is the province of our lord. Evidently, he resents the incursion on his territory.”

The abbot broke off and for a long time the two older monks simply stared at Kaden, as though expecting him to finish the story.

“There’s a way,” he said finally, testing the idea as he spoke it. “The Csestriim used the gates, so there is clearly a way.”

Neither responded. Kaden stilled his heart and ordered his mind.

“The vaniate,” he concluded. “It has something to do with the vaniate. If we master it, we become like the Csestriim, and the Csestriim could use the gates.”

Nin nodded at last. “A person cannot become nothing, not completely. He can, however, cultivate a nothingness inside himself. It seems that the god will allow someone carrying the void to pass through his gates.”

“The Keeper of the Gates,” Kaden said, thinking back to the start of the conversation. “That’s why I was sent here. Something to do with these gates.”

Nin nodded, but it was Tan who spoke.

“The Csestriim did not always slaughter their prisoners. Intrigued by our emotions, they kept a small number of us for study.”

The words sounded strange coming from Rampuri Tan’s lips. Of all the monks at Ashk’lan, he seemed just about the least likely to have any appreciation of human feeling.

“Some of those imprisoned,” Tan continued grimly, “did clandestine studies of their own-they watched, they listened, they learned about their captors. They were the first to discover the secret of the gates and, in so doing, the vaniate. They vowed to one another that they would escape, develop their new knowledge, and use it to destroy the Csestriim.”

“They were the first Shin,” Kaden said slowly, the ramifications dawning on him.

Tan nodded. “Ishien, in the old tongue: ‘those who avenge.’”

“But what does this have to do with the empire, or with me?”

The abbot sighed. “Patience, Kaden. We are coming to that. When the humans finally defeated the Csestriim, a large part of that final victory was attributed to the Ishien. Although the war was over, the Ishein continued to watch the gates, convinced that their enemies were not vanquished, only dormant.”

“There were reasons,” Tan interjected, his voice hard. “Our people hunted down Csestriim for hundreds of years after the close of the war. Then we started to forget.”

Nin acknowledged the point with a slight nod of his head. “As the years turned to centuries, the charge lost its urgency. Some began to forget the Csestriim altogether. Meanwhile, generations of Ishien had discovered the quiet joy of a life lived in pursuit of the vaniate. They began to venerate the Blank God for his own sake, not for revenge on a long-dead foe. They put aside their armor, their blades, and took up less … agonistic pursuits.”

“Not all of us,” Tan said.

“Even you, old friend, arrived here in the end. One cannot hunt ghosts forever.”

Tan’s lips tightened, but he remained silent.

“Our way is not easy,” the abbot continued, “and as the imperatives of the mission slipped, fewer and fewer young men joined the order. There were some, however, who had not forgotten our desperate fight for survival, and as the Shin diminished, as gate after gate was abandoned, these monks feared lest the Csestriim return.

“It was at this point that your ancestor, Terial, took the throne of a teetering kingdom torn with civil war-”

“-and at this point that the Shin abandoned their charge,” Tan added.

“We did not abandon it. We passed it on. The Annurian state had grown too large for one man to control. Rebels and rival claimants rent the land. Terial had heard of the gates and realized the power they held for his own political ends. An Emperor who could instantly visit any corner of his empire need not fear rebellions of distant commanders or the misleading reports of provincial ministers. An Emperor able to use the gates could bring unity and stability to entire continents.”

“He made a deal with the Shin,” Kaden said, the pieces falling into place.

Scial Nin nodded. “If they would teach him the secret of the gates, the vaniate, he would commit his imperial resources to keeping those gates against the return of the Csestriim. The Shin, who had long ago lost both the ability and the will to carry out their original task, agreed. From that time on, all heirs to the Malkeenian line have trained here, with us. It is no coincidence that they have also enjoyed an unbroken line of succession.”

“Keeper of the Gates,” Kaden said, repeating the old title, understanding it for the first time. “We’re guarding against the Csestriim.”

“You should be,” Tan replied curtly. “But memory is short.”

“There are those,” Nin said, nodding toward Kaden’s umial, “who believe the Shin should never have given over their charge, who believe that the Emperors neglect their responsibility.”

Kaden turned back to Rampuri Tan. The man stood in the shadow, arms crossed over his chest, eyes dark in the dim light of the study. He didn’t move, or speak, or shift his gaze from his pupil.

“You don’t believe they’re gone, do you?” Kaden asked quietly. “You’re not training me to be a monk or to rule an empire. You’re training me to fight the Csestriim.”

For several heartbeats, Tan didn’t respond. That implacable stare bored into Kaden as though seeking out the hidden secrets of his heart.

“It seems the Csesriim are dead,” the monk said at last.

“Then why are you telling me this?”

“In case they are not.”