“How do you know that?”

“I was there,” the prisoner replied. “At your birth. You burst from between your mother’s thighs with plenty of vigor, but for a long time you were silent—you didn’t cry, didn’t scream, just stared at the world around you with those burning eyes.” He shook his head at the memory. “The midwives were terrified that you were going to die, but your father calmed them. ‘This child understands the road he must travel. He is already practicing silence.’ And, in time, you began to cry in the way of all human children.”

Kaden stared, dumbfounded. He had never heard the story, not from his parents or his sister. Certainly not from the Shin. He had no way of knowing if it were true, but he did bear the crescent mark on his thigh. All his life it had been there.

“Why were you at the birth?”

“As historian,” Kiel replied. “It is what I do, what I am for. It is how I came to know your father in the first place.”

Kaden tried to make sense of the claim. All he had heard of the Csestriim involved war and slaughter, with a few vague references to their cities. “You were a historian?” he asked. “A Csestriim historian?”

Kiel nodded. “Your language is imprecise, but I believe you would say The Historian. I chronicled my people’s age-long war with the Nevariim, then the war with your kind. I was there for the reign of the Atmani—both the brilliant beginning and the tragic end. And I’ve been there for the centuries during which your own family has ruled.”

For a while Kaden just stared, then shook his head. “Still not good enough. There must have been half a dozen people at my birth.”

“There were eight,” Kiel said.

“Any one of them could have spread the story of the mark on my leg.”

The prisoner shook his head quietly. “At some point, Kaden, you must trust. It is this ability that the Ishien have lost. You must have realized already that they are nothing like the monks among whom you were raised. They found a different path to the blankness, one that has broken them. We showed them how, of course, inadvertently, when this was still a prison and we were still testing your people. We showed them how, but they perfected the technique.”

Kaden’s memory filled with Trant’s account, the tale of men gouging eyes, cutting off fingers, ripping out teeth, all in the awful cold and darkness, all to achieve their twisted version of the vaniate. This was the place to which he had dragged Triste. The horror of it settled on him like ice while a distant part of his mind, one untouched by either Kiel or the Ishien, continued to count, measuring out the heartbeats, cataloging them, keeping the dark passage of time.

“Your way out,” Kaden said. “Can we take Triste?”