“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.
“We did not abandon it. We passed it on. The Annurian state had grown too large for one man to control. Rebels and rival claimants rent the land. Terial had heard of the gates and realized the power they held for his own political ends. An Emperor who could instantly visit any corner of his empire need not fear rebellions of distant commanders or the misleading reports of provincial ministers. An Emperor able to use the gates could bring unity and stability to entire continents.”
“He made a deal with the Shin,” Kaden said, the pieces falling into place.
Scial Nin nodded. “If they would teach him the secret of the gates, the vaniate, he would commit his imperial resources to keeping those gates against the return of the Csestriim. The Shin, who had long ago lost both the ability and the will to carry out their original task, agreed. From that time on, all heirs to the Malkeenian line have trained here, with us. It is no coincidence that they have also enjoyed an unbroken line of succession.”
“Keeper of the Gates,” Kaden said, repeating the old title, understanding it for the first time. “We’re guarding against the Csestriim.”
“You should be,” Tan replied curtly. “But memory is short.”
“There are those,” Nin said, nodding toward Kaden’s umial, “who believe the Shin should never have given over their charge, who believe that the Emperors neglect their responsibility.”
Kaden turned back to Rampuri Tan. The man stood in the shadow, arms crossed over his chest, eyes dark in the dim light of the study. He didn’t move, or speak, or shift his gaze from his pupil.
“You don’t believe they’re gone, do you?” Kaden asked quietly. “You’re not training me to be a monk or to rule an empire. You’re training me to fight the Csestriim.”
For several heartbeats, Tan didn’t respond. That implacable stare bored into Kaden as though seeking out the hidden secrets of his heart.
“It seems the Csesriim are dead,” the monk said at last.
“Then why are you telling me this?”
“In case they are not.”