Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(36)

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.