Kaden’s own chest felt tight and his lungs burned. Triste couldn’t have much longer. Her body was rebelling, the instinct to tear her way free of danger crushing whatever part of her reason that tried to resist. It was making Kiel’s work harder, although the Csestriim labored on, hauling her down the invisible corridor, moving, if anything, even faster than he had, although it was difficult to gauge speed in the darkness. There was only the water, the cold, Triste’s terror, the rough stone, and the awful empty airlessness searing Kaden’s own chest, the sluggish weight of muscles barely able to move.

They were going to die down there, all three of them, their bodies vanished inside a fortress that had, itself, vanished from the world. Sadness beckoned, like faint sunlight seen from beneath deep water. Kaden turned away from it. If he followed that light long enough, he would burst from the vaniate, and he had no desire to face his own slow suffocation outside the trance.

The pain is just pain. The pressure of the water is just pressure. Listen to the movement of your heart. It is only a muscle. It is only meat.

He repeated the words until his mind swam in the darkness with his body. It was a good place to die, a peaceful place. He let the darkness pour into him, fill him, flood him, until there was no line between his own flesh and the surrounding sea, until the ocean thrummed in him like his own heart, until, with an awful wrenching jerk, gravity seized him, hauling him, dazed and baffled, into the wide awful air and the blinding light of the sun.

Alive, Kaden thought. I’m alive.

Deep inside the vaniate, the thought brought him no joy. No sorrow. It was a fact, nothing more.

26

Hundreds of years earlier the walls of Annur had actually ringed the city; torches had blazed in the guard towers punctuating their length while armed men walked the parapets, spears in hand. It had been generations, however, since any foe posed a plausible threat to the capital, and Annur had long ago burst its seams. The houses and warehouses, stables and temples spilled out into the countryside, eating up the open fields and burying the walls behind entire neighborhoods—Newquarter, Canal, Fieldstreets—all of them utterly exposed. From the fields, Adare stared at the city’s outermost buildings—a motley collection of stone granaries and stilted teak houses built over the canals and streams—dread gnawing at her guts.