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May 11 - May 28, 2017
“We have another name for the Lord of the Grave: the Patient God.” “Patience is no virtue for a warrior.” “I’m not a warrior,” the Flea replied quietly. “I am a killer.”
The Lord of the Grave, my god, is Meshkent’s most ancient foe. In the face of the cat god’s savagery, Ananshael’s justice is our only mercy. We didn’t come—my brothers and sisters and I—to save the Urghul shaman—we came to kill him before he could spread his sickness further.”
“Where is the justice,” Triste demanded, “in murdering men in their sleep? Where is the justice in killing children? In cutting down the good along with the evil?” “Precisely there—Ananshael spares no one. Emperor or orphan, slave or sovereign, priest or prostitute—he comes for us all. Your lady—Ciena—she doles out her pleasures according to her whims. Some live a life of unmitigated bliss while others struggle through their days in pain and agony. Ciena pities some, scorns others; only Ananshael offers up his justice to all. Ciena loves watching those she has spurned writhe in the claws of
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If the Shin chant had been a music of stone, this was human music, one that marked the passage of time, that anticipated with each aching cadence the inevitability of its own ending.
A mind of stone. Kaden pondered the notion. It seemed apt. The mind, any mind, was like the land, the mesas and mountains, all that stone shaped moment by immeasurable moment, sculpted imperceptibly by the winds and rivers, the innumerable drops of rain, unable, in the end, to escape the logic of its own geology.
Kiel had been warning him about that for months, but Kiel was wrong. How could the Csestriim understand how badly humanity was broken, how desperately in need of salvation? The walking away. That was what the monks called that passage, the departure from the world of human need into a more perfect world of sky, and snow, and stone. They were wrong, too. The walking was secondary, unnecessary. All that was necessary was the letting go. Kaden considered the shape of his mind, that narrow knife of stone stretching on endlessly into the clouds. He felt his grip slipping. He smiled, and let go.
Gwenna could still remember the day she’d fallen in love with Valyn. Or maybe love wasn’t the right word—she was only twelve at the time—but whatever it was had hit her like a sack of bricks to the gut.
“I want to be with you,” Triste said, pulling him close, so tight it was a struggle to breathe. “When we do it, I want to be right beside you.” It. She didn’t say the word. She didn’t need to. Kaden nodded. For the first time since his childhood, he was crying.
Sometimes, when the monsters come, you need a dark, monstrous thing to pit against them.”
“The bird,” Gwenna growled. The urgency was so sharp it hurt. She shoved Jak with one hand, dragged Talal with the other. “Get on the fucking bird, this is our chance.” The Kettral stared at her as though she’d gone mad. “They’re all looking at the Spear!” she shouted. “The Urghul, the Annurians, everyone.” No one moved for moment, then Talal nodded. “Holy Hull,” he whispered. “No one’s thinking about Balendin.” It was the ugliest liftoff since Gwenna’s first year as a cadet—all tangled straps and shouting, unbuckled harnesses slapping in the wind—but Jak got them in the air less than twenty
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Tell me, Kaden said, or you will die here. Inside, silence. The world beyond, fire. Then, at last, the god spoke. Submit, and I will burn these foes to ash. Kaden shook his head grimly, released Triste, then stepped to the edge of the railing. Explain the obviate, or I will end you myself. Meshkent’s snarl was a notched blade twisted in the brain. You would pit yourself against your god? Kaden gazed down into the conflagration. I trained at the feet of an older god than you.
“The phrase isn’t in our language,” Kaden replied. “Not anymore.” He closed his own eyes. “Ac lanza, ta diamen. Tel allaen ta vanian sa sia pella.” He felt something shudder inside his mind, as though the language were a pry bar, as though some deep-buried stone foundational to his very being had shifted. “I am a gateway for the god,” Triste translated, voice terrified, awed. “I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.” Kaden nodded, and then, this time together, they spoke the awful words.
Il Tornja’s eyes went empty as a starless sky. The jocularity was gone, the wry act he’d worn for so long replaced by his true face, that unreadable, unknowable alien gaze. Even now it made something in Adare quail.
Il Tornja stared past her, past the landing and the stairs, into the bright, empty air of the Spear. “One grows tired,” he said finally, voice slender, “of killing one’s own children.” Adare’s sob was like some jagged, broken thing torn bloody from her throat. The tears sheeted down her face. Il Tornja cocked his head to the side, studying her the way a botanist might scrutinize some strange, inexplicable flower. “So broken,” he murmured, slumping to the floor. “All these years I tried to fix you, but you are still so broken.”
“Your brother needs no stone for his monument. But then, you know this. Kaden’s monument, and Triste’s, is carved into the minds of all your kind.” Adare hesitated, then gestured to the silk-wrapped figure. “And for him?” The historian closed his eyes, cocked his head, as though listening to some music she could not hear. “We do not want. Not in any way that you could understand.” “I have to do something.” “No, you do not. The tomb’s emptiness is all.”
Like waves, men and women exist only in motion, in change. Put them on the page, and you have already failed.
If the work cannot be done, what will he do? The Historian smiles. It took him centuries to learn to smile. The world is the world; his history is something else. What will he do? He will make the story up.
