*
Scial Nin’s study hunched against the cliffs a few hundred paces from the main compound. The building looked like part of the mountain—dry stonework shaded by a gaunt, withered pine that shed its brown needles on the roof and ground alike. Kaden and Akiil tended to avoid the place—an acolyte or novice was usually called before the abbot only for an extreme infracation requiring an extreme penance—and, despite Rampuri Tan’s suggestion that Scial Nin would provide answers to his questions, Kaden now approached with some trepidation, following in the footsteps of his umial. Tan shoved the wooden door open without preamble, and suddenly reluctant, Kaden stepped over the threshold after him.
The inside of the room was dim, and he didn’t immediately notice Scial Nin seated behind a low desk, the surface of which was empty save for a single parchment—the painting, Kaden realized, of the tracks left by whatever was slaughtering the goats. If the abbot was surprised or irritated by the sudden entrance, he didn’t show it. He looked up from the paper, and waited.
“The boy wants answers,” Tan said brusquely, stepping to the side.
“Most people do,” Nin replied, his voice smooth and solid as planed oak. He considered the older monk, then turned his attention to Kaden. “You may speak.”
Now that he stood before the abbot, Kaden wasn’t quite sure what to say. He felt suddenly foolish, like a small child making trouble for his elders. Still, Tan had relented enough to bring him before the abbot; it would be a shame to squander the opportunity.
“I’d like to know why I was sent here,” he began slowly. “I understand the goal of the Shin: emptiness, vaniate. But why is that my goal? Why is it necessary in ruling an empire?”
“It’s not,” Nin replied. “The Manjari Emperors beyond the Ancaz Mountains pay no homage to the Blank God. The savages at the borders of your empire revere Meshkent. The Liran kings on the far side of the earth refuse to worship gods at all—they venerate their ancestors.”
Kaden glanced over at his umial, but Tan stood silent, his face like stone.
“Then why am I here?” he asked, turning his attention back to the abbot. “My father told me, just before I left, that the Shin could teach me things he could not.”
“Your father was a talented student,” Nin replied, nodding at the recollection, “but he had no experience as a umial. He would have had great difficulty with your training, even were there not an empire requiring his attention.”
“What training?” Kaden asked, trying to keep the edge out of his voice. “Painting? Running?”
The abbot cocked his head to the side, looking at Kaden the way a robin might consider a spring earthworm.
“The Emperor has many titles,” he said at last. “One of the oldest and least understood is ‘Keeper of the Gates.’ Do you know what it means?”
Kaden shrugged. “There are four gates to Annur: the Water Gate, the Steel Gate, the Gate of Strangers, and the False Gate. The Emperor keeps them, guards them. He protects the city from her foes.”
“So most people believe,” Nin replied, “in part because it’s true: the Emperor does guard the gates of Annur and has for hundreds of years, ever since Olannon hui’Malkeenian built the first rough walls of the city from wood and wattle. There are other gates, however. Older. More dangerous. It is these to which the title refers.”
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.