*
Umber’s Pool wasn’t a proper pool so much as a pocket of rocks half a mile from the monastery where the White River paused, gathering itself in deep, still silence before spilling over a shelf in a dizzying waterfall, tumbling hundreds of feet into a deep ravine before snaking lazily into the steppe far below. After a childhood spent bathing in copper tubs filled with steaming water by the palace servants, Kaden had been shocked to realize that any washing at Ashk’lan would take place outside, in Umber’s. Over the years, however, he had grown accustomed to it. The water was viciously cold, even in summer; anyone stoic enough to brave it in the winter had to hack a hole in the ice with the rusty, long-handled axe that was left between the rocks for just that purpose. Still, after a long day lugging tile beneath the glare of the mountain sun, the water would feel good.
He lingered before entering the pool. It was nice to have a few moments to himself, away from Tan’s discipline, away from Pater’s questions and Akiil’s goading. He stooped to scoop up a clear handful of water, then straightened, allowing the icy drink to trickle down the back of his throat while he peered down the vertiginous trail that descended to the foothills and steppe below.
He had last walked that trail eight years ago, craning his skinny neck for a glimpse of his new home, a home that seemed to be perched in mountains so high that their peaks etched the clouds. He had been frightened; frightened of this cold, stone place, and frightened to show his fear.
“Why?” he had pleaded with his father before leaving Annur. “Why can’t you teach me about ruling the empire?” Sanlitun’s stern face softened as he replied. “Someday I will, Kaden. I will teach you, as my father taught me, to tell justice from cruelty, boldness from folly, friends from fawning sycophants. When you return, I will teach you to make the hard decisions through which a boy becomes a man. But there are other lessons you must learn first, lessons of the greatest importance, and these I cannot teach you. These, you must learn from the Shin.”
“But why?” Kaden had begged. “They don’t rule an empire. They don’t even rule a kingdom. They rule nothing!”
His father smiled cryptically, as though the boy had made some kind of clever joke. Then the smile was gone and he was taking his son’s wrist in the strong handshake men called the soldier’s clasp. Kaden did his best to return the gesture, although his fingers were too small to gain any real purchase around his father’s muscled forearm.
“Ten years,” the man said, exchanging the face of a parent for that of the Emperor. “It is not long, in the life of a man.”
Eight years gone, Kaden thought as he leaned back against the sloping boulder. Eight years gone, and the things he’d learned were as few as they were useless. He could craft pots, cups, urns, vases, and mugs from the clay of the river shallows, and he could sit still as a stone or run uphill for hours on end. He could mind goats. He could draw any plant, animal, or bird perfectly from memory—at least as long as someone wasn’t beating him bloody, he amended wryly. Although he had grown fond of Ashk’lan, he couldn’t stay there forever, and his accomplishments seemed a sad showing for eight years, nothing that would help him to run an empire. And now Tan had him counting rocks. I hope Valyn’s making better use of his time, he thought. I’ll bet he’s passing his tests, at the very least.
The thought of tests conjured up the pain in his back where the willow switch had broken open his flesh. Better to wash them out now, he thought, eyeing the cold water. Won’t do any good to let them fester. He pulled his robe over his head, wincing as the rough fabric scraped over the bloody gashes, and tossed it in a rough heap. The pool wasn’t deep or wide enough to accommodate a dive, but at the upstream end one could step off a narrow ledge and drop in to the chest all at once. It was easier that way—like ripping off a scab. Kaden took three breaths, stilling his heartbeat and calming himself for the shock, then plunged.
As usual, the icy chill stabbed into him like a knife. He’d been bathing in the pool since he was ten, however, and had long ago learned to shepherd his body’s heat. He forced himself to take a deep, calm breath; hold it; then drive the meager warmth out through his trembling limbs. It was a trick the monks had. Scial Nin, the abbot, could spend whole hours sitting quietly in the winter snow, his shoulders bare to the elements, flakes dissolving in little puffs of steam when they struck his skin. Kaden couldn’t manage that yet, but he could keep himself from biting his tongue in two as he reached over his shoulders to wash the dried blood out of the gashes. After a minute of vigorous scrubbing, he turned to the bank. Before he could hoist himself out, however, a voice broke the stillness.
“Stay in the water.”
Kaden froze and sucked in his breath. Rampuri Tan. He turned, searching for his umial, only to find the man seated in the shadow of an overhanging flake of granite just a few paces away, legs crossed, back erect. Tan looked like a statue hewn from the mountain itself rather than a figure of flesh and blood. He must have been sitting there the whole time, observing, judging.
“No wonder you can’t paint,” Tan said. “You’re blind.”
Kaden clamped his teeth together grimly, forced down the creeping cold, and kept silent.
Tan didn’t move. He looked, in fact, as though he might never move, but he scrutinized Kaden with the attention one might bring to a vexing problem on the stones board.
“Why didn’t you see me?” he asked finally.
“You blended with the rocks.”
“Blended,” Tan chuckled. The sound held none of Heng’s mirth. “I blended with the rocks. I wonder what that might mean.” He glanced up toward the darkening sky, as though the answer were scrawled in the flight of the peregrines wheeling far above. “A man blends water with tea. A baker blends flour with egg. But blending flesh with stone?” He shook his head as though the concept were beyond him.
Kaden had started to tremble beneath the icy water. The heat he had built up hauling tiles all afternoon was little more than a memory now, swept over the ledge with the chill current.
“Do you know why you are here?” the monk asked after an interminable pause.
“To learn discipline,” Kaden replied, trying not to catch his tongue between his chattering teeth. “Obedience.”
Tan shrugged. “Important, both of them, but you could learn discipline and obedience from a farmer, a bricklayer. The Shin can teach you more.”
“Concentration,” Kaden managed.
“Concentration? What does the Blank God want with your concentration? What does it matter to him if an acolyte in a dim stone building is able to recall the shape of a leaf?” Tan spread his hands as though waiting for Kaden’s response, then continued. “Your concentration is an affront to your god. Your presence, your self, is an affront to your god.”
“But the training—”
“—is a tool. A hammer is not a house. A knife is not death. You muddle the method with the goal.”
“The vaniate,” Kaden said, trying desperately to control his shivering.
“The vaniate,” Tan agreed, repeating the strange syllables as though he were tasting them. “Do you know what it means?”
“Emptiness,” Kaden stammered. “Nothingness.”
Everything the monks studied, all the exercises the umials set their pupils, the endless hours painting, and running, and digging, and fasting, were aimed at that one constant goal: the emptiness of the vaniate. Two years earlier, in a frustrated moment, Kaden had been foolish enough to question the value of that emptiness. Heng had laughed out loud at the challenge, and then, smiling genially, replaced his pupil’s bowl and mug with two stones. Each day Kaden stood in the refectory line only to have the monk serving the food ladle his soup over the shapeless lump of granite. Sometimes a chunk of lamb or carrot balanced miraculously on top. More often, he was forced to watch in famished agony as the thick broth ran off the stone and back into the serving pot. When the monks filled their own mugs with deep drafts of cold water, Kaden could only splash the stone and then lick it off, the quartz rough against his tongue.
After two weeks, Heng brought out Kaden’s bowl and cup with a smile. Before he returned them, however, he hefted the rock Kaden had been trying to drink from. “Your mind is like this rock: full, solid. Nothing else can fit inside. You pack it with thoughts and emotions and claim that this fullness is something to be proud of!” He laughed at the absurdity of the notion. “How much you must have missed your empty old bowl!”
Over the following years, Kaden had worked diligently at the skill, learning how to hollow a space out of himself, out of his own mind. He hadn’t mastered it, of course—most monks didn’t reach the vaniate until their third or fourth decades—but he had made progress. Memorization and recall, the saama’an, played a central role in the practice; they were the picks and levers with which the Shin pried away the self. Heng taught him that a packed mind resisted new impressions; it tended to force itself onto the surrounding world, rather than filling itself with that world. The inability to recall the shape of a thrush’s wing, for instance, indicated a mind transfixed with its own irrelevant ephemera.
And mind was not the only obstacle. The body, too, came packed with aches, itches, pains, and petty pleasures. When a monk emptied his mind of thought and emotion, the voice of the body proved all too ready to fill the void. To silence that voice, the Shin stood naked in the baking sun, ran barefoot in the snow, sat in the same cross-legged position for days on end as the muscles cramped and the stomach twisted itself into knots. As long as the body impinged on the mind, vaniate was impossible. So, one by one, the Shin confronted the demands of the body, faced them down, and discarded them.
The practice was not easy. Earlier in the year, Kaden had helped to carry the body of one of the acolytes from the bottom of a gorge. The boy, only eleven years old, had fallen to his death while trying to run away in the night. Such tragedies were rare, however. The umials knew the limits of their students, and the monk whose acolyte had fallen was subjected to severe penance. Still, the testers considered sliced feet, frostbitten hands, and broken bones an inevitable portion of a boy’s first five years at the monastery.
The quest for the vaniate never ended, of course, and even the oldest monks admitted to difficulties. The mind was a clay pot set out in the rain. A monk could empty it daily and still the old hopes and worries, the body’s meager strengths and perennial pains pattered against the bottom, trickled down the sides, filling it once more. The life of the Shin was a life of constant vigilance.
The monks were not cruel, exactly, but they made no allowances for the vagaries of human emotion. Love or hate, sadness or joy, these were cords that bound one to the illusion of self, and self, in the Shin lexicon, was a curse. It spread everywhere, obscuring the mind, muddying the world’s clarity. As the monks struggled to achieve emptiness, the self always seeped in, cold water in the bottom of a deep well.
Kaden’s limbs felt like lead. The frigid snowmelt in Umber’s Pool had numbed his fingers and toes, chilled his core until it was an effort to lug each breath into his heavy lungs. He had never stayed in the pool so long so early in the season, and yet Tan showed no signs of relenting.
“Emptiness,” the monk mused. “You could translate the word that way, but our language doesn’t map well onto such a foreign concept. Do you know where the word comes from?”
Kaden shook his head helplessly. At the moment, there was nothing he could have cared about less than the etymology of some strange Shin obsession. Two winters prior, one of the younger monks, Fallon Jorgun, had died of cold when he broke his leg running the Circuit of Ravens, and water chilled a body far more quickly than air.
“The Csestriim,” Tan replied at last. “It is a Csestriim word.”
At any other point, Kaden would have pricked up his ears and paid attention. The Csestriim were nursery stories—a vicious, vanished race, who had walked the world when it was young, who had ruled that world before the arrival of humans and then fought ruthlessly to exterminate those same humans. Kaden had never heard them mentioned in conjunction with the vaniate. Why the Shin would want to master some skill of a long-dead, evil race, he had no idea, and with the heat inside of him leaking away, he couldn’t bring himself to care. The Csestriim were millennia gone, if they had ever lived at all, and if Tan didn’t let him out of the water, he was going to follow them shortly.
“For the Csestriim,” the older monk continued, “the vaniate was not an arcane skill to be mastered. They lived in the vaniate. Emotion was as alien to their minds as emptiness is to ours.”
“Why do you want me to learn it?” Kaden managed weakly. Breathing was difficult, and speaking felt nearly impossible.
“Learning,” Tan said. “You care too much about learning. Studies. Progress. Growth.” He spat the words. “Self. Maybe if you stopped thinking about your learning, you might notice the world around you. You would have noticed me sitting in the shadows.”
Kaden kept silent. He wasn’t sure he could have spoken anyway, not without biting off the end of his tongue. He’s made his point, he thought to himself, and now I can get out of this ’Shael-spawned water. He wasn’t at all sure his arms would be able to hoist him from the pool, but surely Tan would help to drag him out. The older monk, however, made no move to rise.
“Are you cold?” he asked, as though the thought had just struck him.
Kaden nodded vigorously.
Tan watched with the detached curiosity a monk might reserve for the study of a wounded animal. “What feels cold?”
“L-l-legs,” Kaden managed. “Ar-arms.”
Tan frowned. “But are you cold?”
There was some change in the inflection, but Kaden couldn’t make sense of it. The world seemed to be getting darker. Had the sun set so quickly? He tried to remember how late it was when he’d started down to the pool, but he couldn’t think of anything beyond the heavy stillness of his limbs. He forced himself to take a breath. There was a question. Tan had asked him a question.
“Are you cold?” the monk said again.
Kaden stared at him helplessly. He couldn’t feel his feet anymore. Couldn’t feel much of anything. The cold was gone, somehow. The cold was gone and he had stopped shivering. The water felt like … nothing, like air, like space. Maybe if he just closed his eyes for a moment …
“Are you cold?” Tan said again.
Kaden shook his head wearily. The cold had gone. He let his eyes slip shut. Nothingness surrounded him in a gentle embrace.
Then someone was behind him, dragging him by the armpits out of the water. He wanted to protest that he was too tired to move, that he just wanted to go to sleep, but the person kept tugging until he was sprawled out on the ground. Strong hands bundled him in what must have been a robe or blanket; his skin was too numb to feel the texture. A blow struck his face, jarring him from his stupor. He opened his eyes to protest, and Tan slapped him again across the cheek, hard.
“Hurts,” Kaden mumbled blearily.
Tan paused. “What hurts?”
“Cheek.”
“Do you hurt?”
Kaden tried to focus on the question, but it made no sense. The world was fog. The pain was a red line scribbled on nothingness.
“Cheek.”
“And you?” Tan pressed.
Kaden opened his mouth, but for a long time words eluded him. “I don’t…,” he managed at last. What did the monk want? There was pain and there was darkness. That was all. “I’m not…,” he began, then let the words go.
His umial paused, dark eyes bright and intense. “Good,” he said finally. “That’s a start.”