Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades (24 page)

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.