The short, sturdy horses penned inside a wide corral at the edge of the village whickered nervously as Kaden and Long Fist passed.
They smell the strangeness on us, he thought. They know that something’s wrong.
Cook fire smoke mixed with the thick, wet smell of the mud and reeds. It rose in twisting plumes from a dozen fire pits before the open doors of the reed huts, hovering for a moment, then torn apart by the warm wind blowing down out of the mountains. Men and women in loose tan robes tended those fires, cooking fish and plantains over the open coals. They watched the two strangers approach silently, their dark, weather-battered faces betraying nothing. They raised no voices, either in challenge or welcome.
“This could take time,” Kaden murmured. “If Triste is even here.”
“A matter of moments,” Long Fist replied. “There are only so many huts.”
“At least two dozen. She could hide for half the morning, especially if the locals are helping her. Searching-”
“We do not search.”
Before Kaden could ask what that meant, a couple of children came darting toward them, chattering a strange babble as they swooped in, then doubling back quick as swallows, shouting to friends or companions Kaden couldn’t see. They couldn’t have been much more than five, a girl and boy, siblings maybe, dark hair and eyes, brown skin made browner by hours playing in the dirt. They were the sort of village children you might find anywhere from the Romsdals to the Waist.
When Kaden and Long Fist reached the town’s central square, they found a knot of men and women drawn up before the largest of the thatched huts, all facing them warily. A couple of the men held axes-the sort of thing they might use on the cedars up in the mountain valleys-and one of the women clutched a long knife at her side, blade still bloody from the antelope that hung half gutted from a low branch a dozen paces distant. Tools, not weapons. It was possible that the villagers had just been surprised going about their morning’s work. There was something in those postures, however, that looked guarded, and when Kaden shaped his face into a smile, no one smiled back.
“We’re looking for a girl,” he said. “A young woman. Black hair. Violet eyes. Striking. Probably very tired.”
It was tempting to say the rest of it, to warn these people that even as he spoke soldiers were coming, well-trained men who would burn the village to the dirt to find their quarry, men who would not be deterred by a pair of axes and a skinning knife. Such an announcement, however, would cause almost as much confusion as the attack itself, and if Triste was here, he didn’t want to lose her in the ensuing panic.
“Have you seen her?”
No one spoke. Kaden studied their faces, their hands. The tightness around the eyes was obvious, the slight twist in the lips, the whitening knuckles. One woman glanced over her shoulder toward a cluster of other huts, then jerked her head back as though burned. Kaden’s heart beat faster. He forced it to slow. Triste was here-that much was obvious. They just needed to get her out.
“We are her friends,” he said, holding up his hands, palms out, as though in surrender.
The silence held for a moment. Then a man with a headscarf piled high on his head stepped forward. He might have been thirty-five or forty, thin, barefoot beneath the hem of his robe. Even in the morning’s weak light, Kaden could make out the ropy strength in his shoulders and arms, the scars webbing the backs of his hands.
“There’s no one here,” he said in imperfect Annurian, voice surprisingly soft, like the wash of wind through the reeds.
Kaden suppressed a grimace. “Please,” he said. “She’s in danger.”
The man met his eyes. “We say a thing here: Beware sand from the south, rain from the west, news from the north, and strangers walking out of the east.” He pursed his lips, glanced up at the sky. “There is no news. No sand or rain…” He turned his attention pointedly to Kaden, then to Long Fist, leaving the rest unsaid.
Kaden glanced over his shoulder. The scrubby trees obscured the dust kicked up by il Tornja’s soldiers, but they would be closer, closing.
“We know that she is here,” Kaden said, turning back to the group, “or that she has been here recently.…”
Before he could finish, Long Fist stepped forward. The shaman didn’t talk until he stood just a hand’s breadth from the man who had spoken. When the villager took an uncertain step back, Long Fist moved forward to fill the gap. It reminded Kaden of a dance he’d seen years ago in the Dawn Palace, only there was no play in these movements, no flirtation. The Urghul was a full head higher than the other, and he had to crane his neck to look down at him.
“What…,” the slender man began, raising his hands.
Long Fist lifted a single finger, pointed it straight up, then pushed the other man’s jaw shut. Kaden thought for a moment that the shaman was leaving his finger there, the nail pressed into the soft flesh just behind the chin, to keep the other from speaking. Then he saw the blood, saw the man’s body twitch, saw him rise up onto his toes as Long Fist drove that finger up and up, through the skin and the muscle folded beneath. Another heartbeat and the bloody finger appeared in the opening mouth, behind the lower teeth and beneath the tongue, curving up and out, like a hook through a fish’s jaw. The villager twitched, a series of spasmodic convulsions, but made no move to pull back or to fight, as though he were too shocked by the abrupt attack to do more than dangle from the Urghul’s crooked finger.
Kaden stepped forward, started to object, but a woman’s scream cut him off. She was the one with the knife. While the others stared, paralyzed, she lunged, staggering across the dusty ground with her blade outstretched, small features smeared with fear and fury. Long Fist glanced toward her, smiled, then pursed his lips as though he wanted to blow her a kiss. She covered another two paces. Then he whistled-a high sound slicing through her scream-and she collapsed, knife clattering to the gravel. The shaman watched as she thrashed at the dirt, suddenly blind to everything but her own agony. She clawed at her ears, pressed her palms hard against the sides of her head as though trying to block out that piercing whistle. As she rolled into a tiny ball, blood seeped between her fingers.
Long Fist ignored the man dangling from his finger, turning instead to his horrified neighbors.
“Where is the girl?”
A dozen of the villagers ran, darting away into the high scrub like panicked rabbits. The rest just stared, eyes scrubbed blank by their terror. One man started sobbing.
“No,” Kaden said, raising his hand as though there was anything in the world he could do with it. “We don’t need to do this. Let him go, let him-”
“You forget the stakes,” Long Fist said, turning to Kaden. “The game is about more than these few ragged souls.”
His blue eyes had gone a gray so dark it looked black. Kaden was reminded suddenly, incongruously, of Valyn. He shoved the memory away, hauling his mind back to the moment.
“They are not our enemies.”
“I said nothing of enemies.” Long Fist returned his attention to the man suspended from his finger. The villager had gone into spasms. “The Urghul would account this a great honor.”
“We’re not among the Urghul,” Kaden said.
“Indeed. And so here, it is merely an expedient.” He glanced over the crowd. “Bring the girl. Now.”
And then, as though responding to the shaman’s words, the door to one of the reed huts slammed open. Triste stepped from the dark square under the wooden lintel into the day’s dwindling light. Her violet eyes blazed with the sun’s reflected fire, and she held an arm out before her, palm up, as though she planned to take Long Fist in her fingers and crush him.
“Stop,” she said. For a moment Kaden didn’t know if the command was hers, or if it came from the goddess inside. Then he saw the fear painted across her face, saw that her legs were shaking. Not the goddess then. Just the girl. Her gaze snagged on Kaden. Anger blazed there, and betrayal, and hopeless bafflement, then she was rounding on Long Fist, pushing her way through the assembled villagers.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here. These people have done nothing but help me, hide me when no one else would. Leave them alone.”
Long Fist didn’t speak. He tossed aside the villager without a glance, ignoring the man where he fell writhing to the dirt. His eyes were fixed on Triste, his lips pulled back to reveal his sharpened teeth. He tilted his head back, dragged a long slow breath in through his nose, then blew it out between pursed lips.
“Ciena,” he said. The word started in a snake’s hiss, ended with a vowel drawn so thin it was little more than air. Then, again, shaking his head. “Ciena. How did you lose yourself in such a creature?”
Triste looked terrified, but she didn’t shy away. She never has, Kaden realized. Not in Ashk’lan or the Bone Mountains, not in Assare or the Dead Heart.
“I know who you are,” she said quietly.
The shaman shook his head. “You have no idea what I am. Your mind could not hold it all.”
“What about her?” Triste demanded, tapping at the side of her skull. “That’s what you came for, right? That’s why you’re both here,” she went on, including Kaden in her gesture. “To carve her out? Well, I guess that means my mind was large enough for your fucking wife.”
“Wife.” The shaman seemed to find the word amusing. “She is not my wife. And you have seen only the smallest shard of what she is.”
Triste opened her mouth to respond, but no words escaped her throat. The things that happened next took place so fast Kaden could only catch the fragments: a low, fluttering whir; a breeze just at his ear, as though a small-boned bird had flitted by; a slight shape catching the morning’s light, flashing it back; a blur as Long Fist turned; his shudder, then stumble; a bright splash of blood across the dirt.
For a heartbeat the details refused to cohere. Kaden could see the hilt of the knife, see the Urghul chieftain pitching forward, but his mind balked at the meaning tangled up inside the motion. All this time they’d been trying to save Triste, trying to get to the goddess trapped inside her.
And we were looking at the wrong thing.
As Long Fist reeled, Kaden spun, searching for the attacker, suddenly certain that il Tornja’s men had been faster than he expected. Or they’d managed to get to the village first, somehow, to lay an ambush. As he struggled with the raw facts of the attack, the head-high reeds fringing the clearing parted, and a man with a spear stepped out into the open.
No, Kaden realized. Not a spear, a naczal.
Rampuri Tan stood a dozen paces distant, studying the bleeding figure of the Urghul chieftain with that hard, unreadable stare Kaden remembered so well from his years at Ashk’lan. Long Fist stumbled to one knee, groaned, tried to stand, then dropped again. The knife wasn’t large, but it was buried to the hilt in the shaman’s side-more than deep enough to puncture a lung, to reach the heart, even. Kaden stepped between Long Fist and Tan.
“You just destroyed us all.”
The older monk shook his head slowly. “I told you already. The creature behind you is not what he claims.”
“He is a god,” Kaden said, “and you have killed him.”
Long Fist wasn’t dead yet-Kaden could hear the wet, labored breathing just a pace behind him-but he was dying, and fast. The villagers, transfixed by the sudden violence, bore shocked and sickened witness to the scene. One woman vomited onto the ground. The man Long Fist had hoisted into the air just moments earlier kept twitching in the dust, moaning quietly.
“He is Csestriim,” Tan said, stepping forward into the clearing. “Just as il Tornja is Csestriim.”
“No,” Kaden replied. “I explained it to you in the Heart.…”
“You painted a picture of your own error.” The monk shook his head as he approached. “This creature,” he continued, lowering his naczal toward Long Fist, “sent us through the kenta into a trap, a slaughter. Dozens of il Tornja’s men were waiting with bows and blades.”
“Il Tornja is sending soldiers to all the kenta,” Kaden protested. “He’s hunting Long Fist, not colluding with him.”
“Then where were the men,” Tan asked, spinning the spear in a curt arc, as though testing its balance, “when you stepped through the gate to the Dead Salts?”
Kaden stared, uncertain how to respond. The cold, stone memory of Ashk’lan flooded his mind, the years sitting on ledges and running the vertiginous trails, trying to scrape away the last remnant of the self. Tan had taught him the lesson a hundred times in a hundred ways: The mind is a flame. Blow it out, or it will blind you.
“Ran il Tornja and Long Fist,” Tan continued implacably, “have just destroyed the Ishien. They have gutted the last order that remembered the old war, and they have done it posing as foes to each other all the while.”
Tan reasoned like a man building a stone wall: Here is a fact. Here is a fact. Here is a fact. The world is no more than this. Kaden shoved at that wall, attacking the individual blocks with the crowbar of his own logic. Nothing budged. Il Tornja had freed Triste. Triste and Long Fist passed the kenta. For all his alleged loathing, Long Fist had never struck directly at the kenarang.
“No,” Triste said. Her eyes blazed violet. “You’re wrong.”
Tan turned his gaze on her. “And now this creature leaps to their defense. The truth is clear as the sky. Open your eyes to it.”
Open your eyes. Clear away the blindness of the self. After half a lifetime, Kaden had mastered the Shin method, and what wisdom had it brought him? Tan’s wall was unassailable, but a wall was not the world.
“Surely,” Kaden said quietly, “there are other ways of knowing the truth.”
The monk shook his head. “This is the babble of mystics and fools.”
He lowered the strange spear’s blade to Kaden’s chest. Kaden could feel the cold gray metal on his skin.
“Move,” Rampuri Tan said quietly.
Kaden looked down at the spearpoint. There would be no fighting against his old umial. Tan had destroyed a dozen ak’hanath alone in the Bone Mountains. He had stood against Ekhard Matol and his Ishien as Kaden escaped from the Dead Heart. The monk was as deadly with that naczal as any fighter Kaden had seen, and Kaden himself didn’t even have a weapon. There could be no fight, but neither could he simply stand aside to allow the slaughter to play out.
“No,” he said.
Tan’s eyes were dark, unreadable. “You should have stayed at Ashk’lan.”
“Ashk’lan was destroyed.”
“You would have made a fine monk.” Tan drew the spear back, “But this is no world for monks.”
He is going to kill me, Kaden thought. Fear and anger scrabbled against his composure, cats dropped in a steel bucket to drown. Kaden broke their necks, one, then the other, using that quick motion of the mind that Tan himself had taught him during those cold, gray-blue days among the peaks. The calm that came was glacial, older than all human struggle, a final gift from a umial to his last pupil. It does not matter, the wind whispered. It doesn’t matter. The words seemed wrong somehow, but Kaden could find no error in them.
Rampuri Tan opened his mouth to say something else-a last demand, a farewell-then stiffened. Instead of words, blood gushed out, hot and thick as vomit, so much blood that Kaden could only stare as it splashed over the thirsty ground. Tan half bent, swaying on his feet. Blood poured from between his teeth, running down his chin, as though some invisible blade had ripped him apart inside, from the gut straight through the heart in one vicious, inexplicable stroke. It seemed that so much blood erupting so suddenly should have dropped him where he stood, but Tan was still standing-leaning on his naczal, but standing-eyes fixed on something just beyond Kaden.
Kaden half turned to find that Long Fist had shoved himself into a seated position. The knife remained buried in his side, but he had leveled a scarred hand toward Rampuri Tan, seemed to be squeezing with it, twisting, as though those long fingers were wrapped around human organs rather than empty air. Rage illuminated his face.
Tan groaned, a sound like stone sliding over stone. Blood ran from his ears now, from the sockets of his eyes, but he took a halting step forward, then another, ignoring Kaden entirely, ignoring the blood and pain, his gaze, his whole body bent toward the wounded shaman bleeding out into the dirt. Long Fist snarled, wrapped his hand tighter, and Tan stumbled to a knee.
“You are finished, monk,” the shaman said. There was a sound like snapping wood. Spasms took Tan’s flesh, shook it violently. His bones, Kaden realized, stomach lurching into his mouth. Long Fist is breaking his bones. Blood smeared the shaman’s white teeth when he smiled. “This is your end.”
But it was not.
Somehow, impossibly, Tan forced himself back onto his feet, swayed a moment, then stumbled forward, one halting pace, then two, then three, until he stood within reach of the wounded Urghul chieftain. Kaden watched, lost in the stillness of his own amazement. Slowly, agonizingly, Tan raised the naczal.
Long Fist was sweating now, the hot sheen mixing with his blood. He grimaced, snarled, then twisted his hand again. Tan’s leg buckled beneath him. He dropped, but kept the naczal raised. The shaman’s blue eyes went wide.
“It is finished,” Tan managed, choking the words out through the blood. “I am ending it.”
For half a heartbeat, the two men were still, silent as a painting. The pale leach half-sitting, one hand pressed into the dirt, holding him up, the other cast out before him. The dark-skinned monk knelt, spear held in both hands above his head, as though it were a splitting maul. Blood glistened on both faces, bright with the rising sun. The whole scene might have been a fresco in the Dawn Palace, or a tapestry.
Or a saama’an, Kaden thought, staring at the motionless tableau.
It was as though the action were already over and he were just remembering it, as though everything that had to happen had already happened long, long ago. The morning wind had fallen away. The clouds hung still, nailed against the sky.
Kaden stepped forward into that stillness. He caught the cool, smooth shaft of the naczal as it hung there at its height, then pulled it free of his umial’s trembling hands. It was easy. Horribly easy. Tan’s broken grip was weaker than a child’s, the bones of his wrist and arm shattered beneath the skin. How he had managed to keep holding the weapon at all, Kaden had no idea.
“You can’t kill him,” Kaden murmured, dropping to his knees beside the monk. Some sensation he could not name had caught him in its jaws. “He is a god. Our god.”
Tan dragged his gaze away from Long Fist. His eyes wandered over the land as though lost, over the huts and reeds, over the still water of the oasis, then settled finally on Kaden. The first time he opened his mouth, nothing came out. He ground his teeth, hauled in another breath, then managed a single word, weak as the wind: “… wrong…”
With all context pared away, there was no saying who was wrong: Kaden, or Long Fist, or Tan himself. Kaden started to reply, to protest, but the monk’s eyes had already moved past him once again, past the village this time, past the branches of the trees, to the great space of the sky, the unplumbed blue depth of it, the cool, unrelenting emptiness. One heartbeat Rampuri Tan was there, a mortal creature shaking in his own shattered flesh … and then he was gone.
Kaden ignored the cries that had erupted behind him, the mad panic of the villagers finally tumbling into motion. He stared at Tan’s face.…
No, he reminded himself, the word cold as winter stone. Not his face. Not anymore. Just meat and bone. With a gentle motion he closed the drying orbs that had so recently been eyes, then turned away, from the dead back toward the dying.
Long Fist had fallen over into the dirt. He was breathing, but blood flecked his lips, dribbled down his chin. Kaden turned him slightly. Found the blade buried in his side. He knew next to nothing about the treatment of wounds in battle, but he had seen sheep die, and goats, had wielded the knife himself a hundred times. Long Fist was hurt, and badly, was bleeding into the dirt even as Kaden watched.
The thought was too big and so Kaden shoved it aside, focusing instead on the immediate situation. The soldiers were still coming. They were off to the east, somewhere, but they would be closing. Even more urgent, the townsfolk, loosed from their terror by the monk’s attack, were circling like jackals, growling and shouting, stabbing fingers at Long Fist, the man who moments before had held their own so cruelly in his hands. They wanted to see him finished, but fear still held them back; the lion was dying, but he was not dead.
That fear might buy us a hundred heartbeats, Kaden thought, scanning the small crowd. No more.
“Can you move?” he asked, glancing toward the paddock with the horses. “Can you ride?”
Long Fist twisted his head to meet Kaden’s eyes. Kaden had expected to see something human there, pain or fear, but there was nothing human in the shaman’s gaze. His voice, when he spoke, did not sound like a broken thing, but like something that had done the breaking.
“Not like this. Not with this in me.”
He forced himself up from the dirt. Then, slowly, deliberately as a violinist taking up his bow, the shaman wrapped a hand around the shaft buried in his side, then tightened his grip. He closed his eyes as he pulled the knife free, but the expression playing over his face was not one of agony but of careful attention, as though he were trying to make out some terribly beautiful, terribly distant music. When the knife was clear, blood welled from the wound, surging with each heartbeat, soaking his clothes and pooling beneath him. Long Fist ignored it, turning instead to Tan’s body.
“He hid it until the very end, but there was music in your monk. Most of your kind would have folded beneath the note I sounded in his bones. I wish I could have drawn out longer the great chord of his agony.”
“He’s dead now,” Kaden said. “He’s not important. We need to get out of here.”
He glanced over his shoulder as he said the words. The villagers were circling. One of the men had half lifted his ax, as though testing its weight. Even the empty-handed among them had balled fingers into fists or claws.
Long Fist rose slowly to a knee. Too slowly. Kaden seized him by the elbow, dragging him roughly upright, then searched for Triste. The girl stood a few paces away. She was wringing her desert robe between her hands, but made no move to step forward. Kaden started to shout to her, something about getting on the horses, escaping, then stopped himself. Shouting would do nothing but drive the villagers more quickly toward the coming violence. He took a half breath, ordered his thoughts, and turned to the townsfolk instead.
“Soldiers are coming,” he said. “They will be here before the sun crests these trees, and they will kill you all.”
The warning was for them, but not just them. He needed to talk his way clear of the town, and he needed Triste to follow. Seizing the girl was no option. He might be able to drag her screaming for a mile, maybe two; certainly not far enough to outpace il Tornja’s men. If they were going to escape, she needed to hear what was coming, needed to believe it.
“What happened here was wrong,” Kaden said, gesturing to the twitching body of the man Long Fist had hooked through the throat. It was hard to say what was wrong with him. The wound would have been painful, excruciating, but the mindless writhing was the product of something more. The woman beside him still bled from the ears, and the shaman hadn’t even touched her. “It was wrong. It was a mistake, and we will fix it.”
Long Fist gave a jerk at his side. Kaden turned, half expecting to find the Urghul dying on his feet, finally losing control of the flesh he had so thoroughly possessed. Instead, Kaden realized with horror, the shaman was laughing, a low, slow sound, almost a growl.
“What would I fix?” he asked, gesturing with a bloody hand to the man and woman, both obviously lost in their own pain. “I have kindled something bright inside their minds. I will not put it out.”
“They haven’t done anything.…”
“They did nothing,” Long Fist agreed. He seemed barely able to stand, but his voice was strong. “They lived gray, quiet lives, and I have made them sing.”
Triste shouldered her way forward angrily. “You’re killing them.”
“No,” the shaman said. “I never break an instrument.” Despite the hemorrhaging wound in his side, he glanced at the mound of flesh that had been Tan, then smiled. “Almost never.”
It was that smile, Kaden thought later, that goaded the villagers out of their hesitation. They understood nothing of what was happening-how could they?-but two of their number were writhing like fish hauled out of the water, tossed onto the shore to flop themselves dead, and they knew who had done the tossing. Someone toward the back, a woman, Kaden thought, started screaming, and then those in front tumbled toward them like a wave.
They’re going to kill him, Kaden thought. They’re going to finish killing him.
He hauled on the shaman’s arm, but Long Fist might have been rooted to the dirt, might have been some piece of statuary carved from the bedrock itself.
“Run,” Kaden growled, but the Urghul chieftain shrugged him off.
Standing straight for the first time since Tan’s attack, he faced the fury of the townsfolk, raised a hand, and flicked his fingers outward, as though to sling clear the blood that had been pooling in his palm. It was a small gesture, almost delicate, and it hit the men and women of that nameless town like a wall. Flesh ripped open on some invisible fence. Bones shattered, the rough ends stabbing through ragged flesh. Suddenly, from the dark spaces between the reeds, a hundred dark-winged desert birds burst screaming into the sky. The villagers screamed too, men and women, young and old, screamed, then collapsed, clawing with the wreckage of their hands at their own bodies, as though there were some burning coal buried deep inside, as though they would rather die than keep it in a moment longer.
Only Triste remained upright.
“Why?” Triste demanded, stumbling toward the villagers, then half kneeling, stretching out her arms as though she were about to gather them all into her embrace, to lift them clear of their suffering.
“It is only what they would have done to us,” Long Fist replied, nodding to that awful tangle of flesh. “I have visited their own fury upon them.”
“You attacked them,” Triste screamed.
Kaden shook his head. A part of him was as shocked as she was, but he cordoned it off, set it aside. There was no time for shock. Not if they wanted to escape. Not if they wanted to survive. He glanced east, past the last huts, to where the sky had grown bright as bronze. He could just make out soldiers, dozens of soldiers, coming over the headland maybe a mile distant.
He stabbed a finger at them. “Triste. Those are il Tornja’s men. They have been marching west for days.”
She wrenched her eyes from the carnage at her feet. The soldiers were small, but impossible to miss. Her voice, when she could speak, was a whisper, that same word she seemed unable to avoid: “Why?”
“For you,” Kaden snapped. “For the goddess inside.”
“How did they know?” she asked. “You told them.…”
“The ak’hanath. Those huge spiders that tracked us through the Bone Mountains.”
Triste let out a wail, a high sound close to breaking.
“We have to go,” Kaden insisted.
“These people,” Triste protested, turning back to the fallen villagers.
Kaden shook his head, kept his eyes from the faces. “We can’t help them.”
“No,” she said. Then, with more conviction, leveling a finger at Long Fist’s chest, “No. I won’t go anywhere with him.”
Kaden cut her off, surprised at the edge in his own voice. “You were worried about these people?” he demanded, gesturing to the mangled bodies of the villagers. “You were worried about two dozen souls at the edge of the desert? You carry a goddess inside you, Triste. So does Long Fist. If you do not survive, both of you, then this human destruction will be nothing. If you do not survive this day, then no one does.”
Triste’s face twisted, caught between one horror and another. She stared at Kaden a moment, then looked over at Long Fist. The shaman’s pale brow had gone ash-gray. His blue eyes burned in their sockets, as though with fever.
“Can you stop them?” Kaden asked the man. “The way you did with…” He gestured to the still-twitching villagers.
The shaman tilted his head to one side, as though listening to his own beating heart. “Not all of them,” he said finally. “This body is weak and bleeding.”
“Can you fix it?” Kaden asked. “Use a kenning to stitch up your own wound?”
“No. It is not permitted.”
“Permitted by whom? Who’s stopping you?”
“There are rules. I did not sculpt the shape of the world. This flesh cannot mend itself.” He turned to Triste, ran a tongue over his lips. “The goddess inside the girl, however-she could hem the wound with a flick of her smallest finger.”
“No,” Triste said, taking a step back. “Never.”
“Triste is not Ciena,” Kaden said. “And she cannot call her forth.”
Long Fist grimaced. “Then we flee.” The last word sounded like a curse on his lips, as though such surrender bothered him more than the life leaking out of him.
“You can’t,” Triste spat, half defiant, half triumphant. “Not with that. You’ll bleed out.”
Long Fist studied her. Despite the approaching soldiers, he showed no urgency. “How can you hold her inside and still understand so little?”
“I know you’re dying,” Triste snarled.
“Dying,” the shaman replied, “is not dead.”
He turned from the girl, then beckoned to the knife that lay, bloody and forgotten, half a pace away. It flew to his hand like some sharp-beaked bird of prey. Long Fist held it delicately between his fingers, examining the steel as though reading some lost text etched into the blade. Then the metal began to glow a dull, sullen red. Long Fist pursed his lips and blew on it, like a man before a dying fire. At the breath, the red flamed into russet, then sun-hot gold. The shaman smiled, then pressed the glowing blade against the wound. Kaden could hear the sizzle and scorch of blood, could smell the burning meat. Any man would have collapsed beneath the pain, but Long Fist was not a man, not really, and instead of collapsing, he straightened, stiffened, back arching as though with pleasure or bracing cold. Then he threw the knife aside.
“Quickly,” he said, leveling a long finger toward the west. “There is a kenta in the mountains. The soldiers and the ak’hanath cannot follow us through.”
Kaden stared. “Il Tornja has moved to seize the kenta. That’s what Tan said. We’ve seen it ourselves.”
Long Fist shook his head. “He would have to get ahead of us. There has been no dust.”
“How far?” Kaden asked.
“A night and then a day.”
“Will you make it?”
Long Fist glanced down at his body as though it were an old robe he intended to throw aside. “The flesh is flagging, but there is strength in it still. And this body was riding horses long before I took it for my own.”
“I won’t go with you,” Triste whispered.
Kaden extended a hand to her, but she jerked back. “It’s the only way.”
“I could stay here,” she said quietly. “Die on my own terms.”
“Are these your terms?” Kaden asked.
Triste bit her lip.
Kaden pointed east, toward the soldiers. “These are his terms. Il Tornja’s. Everything that’s happened to you since you left Ciena’s temple happened because of him, and if he finds you here, he wins.”
She shook her head, lips drawn back in a rictus of indecision, eyes fixed on Kaden.
“And what about me?” she demanded quietly. “How do I win? You don’t care at all about that, do you?”
“Right now,” Kaden replied, “just living a little longer … that is winning. And to do that, we need to move west, move now, put a little space between us and danger.”
Long Fist’s rough laughter cut through the silence that followed.
“Oh, there is danger everywhere.”
Kaden turned to stare into the fevered eyes of the shaman. “Meaning what?”
“There is a reason il Tornja has not tried to reach the mountain kenta with his men.”
“What’s the reason?”
“To reach it, we will need to pass beneath the shadow of the fortress of the Skullsworn. Ananshael’s priests are blind to the fact, but the Csestriim gate stands less than a day from Rassambur.”