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.”