“My brothers are all in the legions,” Gwenna spat. “On the frontier. Keeping you bastards out.”

“You see?” Long Fist said, looking past Gwenna to Huutsuu. “This is what most Annurians believe.”

“What?” Valyn demanded. “What do we believe?”

The shaman spread his hands. “That my people are trying to invade your empire.”

Valyn frowned, then nodded to the sprawling camp. “What’s all this then? We’ve got to be all the way into the Blood Steppe, probably just a few days from the White, and you’ve put together a ’Kent-kissing army.”

“A defensive army,” Long Fist replied. “Protection against your predatory war chief.”

Valyn shook his head. “War chief?”

“Ran il Tornja,” Talal said quietly. They were the first words the leach had spoken, and the Urghul chief turned an appraising eye on him, then nodded.

“This is his name. My army, as you call it, is no more than a shield against his depredations.”

“There’s a guy back on the Islands,” Laith observed, “Great Gray Balt. He loves his shield—beaten twenty men to death with it.”

Long Fist nodded. “More than twenty will die if Ran il Tornja comes across the White. But I have no longing for this fight.” He pointed at Valyn with the stem of his pipe. “Your father understood this. I wonder . . . do you?”

“What do you know of my father?” Valyn demanded, the chieftain’s earlier words coming back to him.

“More than you. We met yearly to reestablish our common border, to discuss our common goals. I sparred with him just ten moons past.”

Valyn felt the ground shift beneath him. Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian had less than nothing in common with this savage. The ideals of the empire were diametrically opposed to those of the Urghul. And yet . . . Valyn’s father had tried to exercise restraint regarding the steppe nomads. Until the last few years, imperial policy had called for a hard border at the White River, no intervention to the north.

“Met him? Where?”

“East of here. A place sacred to the Urghul.”

Valyn shook his head. “A lie. It would have taken him months to make the trip and months to return. The whole court would have noted his absence.”

Long Fist smiled. “Such certainty.”

Even as he spoke Valyn realized his error: the kenta. He had never heard of the gates before fleeing the Islands, but according to Kaden, the whole point of the Shin training was to allow the Emperor access to the kenta, to provide him with the keys necessary to oversee all Annur. If there was a gate buried in the Bone Mountains, there could be a gate stuck in the middle of the steppe, a lone arch somewhere on a wind-beaten hill, an indestructible span of something that was neither stone nor steel. A primitive people like the Urghul would likely hold such a place sacred.