Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(70)

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.”