Unhewn Throne 01 - The Emperor's Blades(71)

“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.

“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.”