Trant shrugged, abruptly and utterly indifferent to the torture he had just relived so vividly. “Sometimes what breaks off,” he said, “is the feelings.” He snapped a bone off the fish carcass, sucked at it. “You know—love, fear, fucking hope. Sometimes the pain chips them right off. At least, it does for the ones with the gift. The ones who can use the gates. Those are the ones in charge, the Hunters.”

For a while Kaden just watched the man eat. When Tan warned him, when he explained that the Ishien were nothing like the Shin, Kaden had thought he was talking about differences in culture and outlook, changes in the methods and modes of training. Even after arriving in the Dead Heart, after seeing Loral Hellelen and the others, after having a loaded crossbow pointed at his chest, the gap had seemed wide, but bridgeable. Now . . .

Kaden tried to make sense of what Trant had just described. Clearly the Ishien had their own way of achieving the vaniate—if it even was the vaniate—a way that had nothing to do with meditation and discipline, silence and persistence. It sounded as though they were tortured, all of them, brutally tortured, and those few who went numb as a result became the leaders, while the rest . . . Kaden watched Trant suck broth from his wooden bowl. The man hummed a tuneless song, the same few notes over and over.

Then another thought struck Kaden like a blow across the face.

“And Tan . . .” he said.

Trant looked up from his bowl, nodding eagerly as broth dripped off his unshaven chin.

“Um-hmm,” he said. “Yes. Yes. Rampuri Tan was a Hunter. Almost as tough as Bloody Horm, least in some ways. A Hunter.”

Kaden exhaled slowly, measuring his pulse. “Will you talk to them for me?” he asked. There didn’t seem to be more than a few score men in the entire fortress. Kaden had heard enough to understand that Trant didn’t make the decisions, but he would have access to the people who did. “Your commander needs to know that Triste helped me to escape. She deserves some decency.”

“Oh. Decency. Oh. The Emperor wants to talk about decency.” Trant dropped his voice and his eyes both, muttering to himself, but no sooner did Kaden lean in than he started upright, slashing a rigid hand through the air between them. “Do you know . . . Do you know what the Enemy did to us?”