*
“Well,” Pyrre said, gazing across the narrow valley as the enormous silhouette of the bird floated noiselessly into the night sky, blotting the stars. “Normally I find elaborate plans just the slightest bit untenable, but I have to say, this one seems to be working out quite nicely. Of course, we’re not yet to the point where an entire Kettral Wing chases me through a maze of razor-sharp rock.”
“She did it,” Kaden said, shaking his head. “I wasn’t sure she could do it.”
“It looks like we can add ‘brains’ to your paramour’s list of impressive … assets,” the assassin agreed.
Tan was in no mood for celebration. “The girl has done her part,” he said, turning to Kaden. “Yours is considerably more difficult.”
Kaden nodded, stilling his excitement and his apprehension both. His umial was right. If he failed, all Triste had managed was to expedite their capture and execution.
“I don’t know how the ak’hanath communicates with its handlers,” the older monk admitted, “but it does. During the day, they might have relied on the bird to hunt us down, but at night that Csestriim thing will be their guide. If we fail to elude it, the entire ruse is pointless.”
“I’m still looking forward,” Pyrre interjected, “to hearing how you elude a creature that tracks your sense of self.”
“You destroy the self,” Tan responded.
A long silence followed. The stars burned like silent sparks on the vast sheet of darkness.
“I take back what I said about liking the plan,” Pyrre said finally.
“The vaniate,” Kaden breathed.
Tan nodded. “The vaniate.”
“It sounds very impressive,” the assassin interjected. “And I hope it’s equally fast, because that bird is half a mile off. If they’re following the Csestriim critter, they’ll be here before long.”
Kaden felt his heart quicken, then forced it down. He had never summoned the emotionless Shin trance before, had no idea if he could do so now, but Tan had said he was ready. Besides, there was little choice, if he was to elude the ak’hanath and the men following.
“Clear your mind,” the monk instructed. “Then bring up a saama’an of a bird, a heart thrush.”
Kaden closed his eyes, then did as he was told, the image of the creature leaping bright and sharp into his mind as it had in a thousand painting tests.
“See the coverts,” Tan continued, “the pinions, the flight feathers … see every detail … feel the rough scales of her leg, her smooth beak, the soft down of her breast.”
Somewhere to the south, the kettral let out an ear-piercing shriek. Worry surged through Kaden’s blood, and the image of the thrush wavered until he forced down the anxiety. See the bird, he told himself. Just the bird.
“Leave your hand on her breast,” Tan said. “Can you feel her heart beating?”
Kaden paused. This was new. The saama’an was a visual exercise. No one had ever asked him to file away tactile sensation. He took a deep breath.
“She is frightened,” Tan said, “trapped in your hand. You know her fear. Let yourself feel that fear.”
Kaden nodded. This was like the beshra’an, he realized, throwing himself into the mind of a creature, only this creature lived inside his brain. He let himself sink deeper into the vision, laid a hand on the bird’s heart and felt it beating.
“Can you hear her heart?” Tan asked.
Kaden waited. A mountain wind skirled in his ears. Something down the slope somewhere knocked free an avalanche of pebbles. Behind it, though, beneath it, the bird’s heart beat, quick and light, thumping, thumping, until it filled his ears, his mind. He held the creature in his hand—so fragile, he could crush her with a squeeze of his fingers. She was terrified, he realized. He was terrifying her.
“Now let her go,” Tan said. “Open your hand and let her fly away.”
Slowly, Kaden opened his fingers, reluctant to let the thrush escape his grasp. It seemed important that he hold her, for some reason, that he clutch her to him … but Tan had said to let her go and so, ever so lightly, he let her slip from his fingers.
“She’s flying now,” he whispered.
“Watch,” Tan replied.
Against closed lids, Kaden watched as the bird dwindled, smaller and smaller against the great blue of his mind’s vast sky, smaller and smaller until she was a smudge, a speck, a pinprick on the great open emptiness of the heavens. And then she was gone. Blankness filled his mind.
He opened his eyes.
Almost overhead now, the kettral shrieked. They’re close, he realized, but they’re too late.
Then he saw the eyes. At first he wasn’t sure what they were: glowing bloodred orbs, at least a dozen, some the size of apples, others no larger than Annurian copper coins, floating up the slope below. As they drew closer, he could make out the irises, pulsing with crooked veins, dilating and contracting, and then he understood. The ak’hanath had come.
He should have been terrified, and yet the realization carried no fear. The creature was a fact—no more, no less—like the fact that night had fallen, or that Pyrre stood, staring, at his side. Like the fact that people would die tonight. It was strange, he realized, this lack of feeling. He used to feel something. Only minutes ago, before he had freed the bird inside him, his mind had been a welter of emotions: fear and confusion and hope. Inside the vaniate, however, there was only a great, blank calm.
The ak’hanath was larger than he had expected, almost the size of a female black bear, but it skittered up the rocky slope more quickly than any bear, claws clicking over the stones, chitinous legs flexing and unflexing, causing the eyes at the joints to bulge under the strain. A dozen paces off it paused, turned back in forth in the darkness as though sniffing for something, then let out a thin but piercing wail just at the edge of hearing. Twice more the creature uttered its unnatural scream and then, from father down the slope, an answering call.
“Two,” Tan observed as the second horror approached.
As it drew near, the first ak’hanath raised wicked, slicing pincers, as though testing the air, clicking them open and shut spasmodically. One of those things could hack through the skull of a goat. They had killed Serkhan back at the monastery. Facts. Just more facts.
Kaden turned to Tan. “Is it too late?”
“Not if I kill them.”
“About that,” Pyrre interjected, hefting a small stone and hurling it at one of the creatures. It flew true, striking one of the eyes with a sick, popping sound. The ak’hanath spasmed a moment, let out another high-pitched shriek, then sidled farther up the slope. Kaden could make out the tiny limbs around its mouth twitching feverishly. “Any advice?” She might have been asking about the best local wine.
“Leave them to me,” the monk replied. “You have your own part to play.”
“You don’t want help?”
“The ak’hanath are trackers, not killers, although these—” The monk frowned. “—they differ from those I have studied.”
“They seemed like they were doing plenty of killing back there in Ashk’lan,” the assassin pointed out, crushing two more eyes with two more thrown stones. The spiders were agitated now, thrashing violently, and they had resumed their approach.
“In Ashk’lan, they had not come up against someone who knew how to fight,” the monk replied, stepping forward to meet the foe.
Even from inside the vaniate, everything seemed to happen at once. The closest creature, still a few paces distant, crunched itself into a ball, then sprang. Kaden had watched crag cats attack—they were the fastest animals in the mountains, quick enough to take down a deer in full flight, but even at its fastest there was something relaxed, almost languorous in the cat’s motion. The ak’hanath moved with the violence of a mechanical device tightened past tolerance in an explosion of grasping claws and slicing arms.
Tan’s naczal, somehow, was there to meet it, smashing the creature aside as the monk rolled with the blow, coming back to his feet in a fighting crouch the like of which Kaden had never seen. The strange Csestriim spear spun above his head in quick, looping arcs.
“Stay behind me,” he said to Kaden, not taking his eyes from the creature.
Pyrre had kept up her assault with the rocks—she would have run out of knives long before the creatures ran out of eyes—but the effort of the attack didn’t seem to wind her.
“I never expected to find a Shin monk fighting dharasala style,” she said, a new note of respect in her voice. “And in the old forms, too.”
“I wasn’t always a monk,” Tan replied, and then it was his turn to attack.
He darted between the two spiders, swinging the spear in a great overhead arc. For a moment Kaden thought the man had missed his target, then realized the true intention behind the blow as each end of the naczal connected with one of the ak’hanath. In the cool space of the vaniate, Kaden wondered how long Tan must have studied with the weapon, how carefully he must have trained. Had he learned those skills among the Ishien, or were they older still, a remnant of some prior life Kaden couldn’t begin to imagine?
Tan stood almost between the spiders now, in what seemed an impossible position, too close to maneuver, surely too close to bring his long spear to bear. And yet, with short, savage motions, Tan was striking them, each blow counting double as it connected with the creature before and behind. More, when the spiders thrust back against his blade, metal scraping against shell and ichor, he was able to use the strength of one against the other, allowing the naczal to pivot in his hand. The creatures were landing their own blows, vicious cuts and snaps, but the monk was able to keep them away from his head and chest, driving his own attack harder, harder, until, with a great plunging motion he was able to force the spear between the flailing arms and into the gullet of the first ak’hanath. As the thing spasmed and screamed, he ripped the blade free, wrenching it overhead in a crushing arc that staggered his remaining foe, then stepped in close to finish it.
For a hearbeat, the mountainside was still and quiet save for the sound of the monk’s breath rasping in his chest.
“You’re hurt,” Pyrre said, stepping forward, but Tan held up a hand to keep her back.
“Nothing fatal.” He glanced down at his robes. “Though the creatures should not have been so large, nor so strong.”
“When this is all finished,” the woman said, giving the monk a hard, appraising look, “you’re going to have to tell me where you learned to fight.”
“No,” Tan replied. “I won’t.”
Before the assassin could respond, a clicking and screeching broke the silence beyond their small circle. At first Kaden thought that Tan had failed to kill one of the creatures, but both spiders lay still, their horrid red eyes dimmed by death. Down the slope, however, fifty paces away and closing, more eyes floated through the night, dozens of eyes, scores.
“They brought more,” Tan observed, a hint of weariness in his voice.
“How many?” Kaden asked, trying to sort through the glowing red orbs into individual spiders.
“Looks like ten, maybe a dozen. They weren’t at the monastery all these months. We would have seen them. They must have come with the Aedolians.”
“You can’t fight a dozen of them,” Pyrre said.
“Can, or cannot,” Tan replied, “it is what needs to be done.” He turned to Kaden. “You can both still escape them if you break free. They followed the others here; they cannot track you in the vaniate.”
“You’re going to die here, monk,” Pyrre observed.
“Then your god will be glad,” Tan replied. “Go now, both of you. The time has come to make good on our words.”
And then the monk was moving forward, the naczal swinging above his head. A part of Kaden knew he should be frightened, horrified. But fear and horror—they were like distant lands he had heard of but never visited. Tan would live, or he would die. Either way, Kaden’s own role was clear. He was to run. As his umial ducked and stabbed, sliced and hacked at the fetid tide rolling over him, as Rampuri Tan fought for his life against something dark and unnatural, something that should have been wiped from earth millennia earlier, as the old monk struggled for the very survival of his pupil, Kaden turned into the darkness and ran.