Kiel turned to him, eyes like wells. “Hate is a creature of the human heart. Those of us who gave birth to you are strangers to Maat’s embrace. The general you call Ran il Tornja does not hate you any more than you would hate a stone, the sky.”

“So what does he want?”

“He wants,” the Csestriim said, measuring the words as he spoke them, “what he has always wanted. Victory.”

“Victory over whom?”

“Your race.”

“Well, he’s getting pretty close,” Kaden said. “From the sound of it, he already more or less controls Annur.”

Kiel pursed his lips, then shook his head slowly, almost ruefully. “You do not understand. Victory, to il Tornja, is not a momentary matter of draping himself in garlands or sitting atop a throne.”

“It’s not just any throne,” Kaden pointed out. “Annur is the most powerful empire in the world.”

“Annur is an eyeblink.”

“Hundreds of years of uninterrupted rule are an eyeblink?”

Kiel smiled. “Yes. Il Tornja’s goals are deeper. Older. He is still fighting the war that we entrusted to him thousands of years ago.”

“When will he stop?”

“When you are gone.”

Kaden spread his hands in protest. “Why me?”

The historian frowned. “Your language is imprecise. Not just you, Kaden. All of you.”

Kaden stared. “All of Annur?”

“All of humanity.”

31

The day after the first Kwihna Saapi, as the Urghul folded their api and began to break camp, Gwenna knew she had been right. The blood-drenched spectacle wasn’t just some arbitrary ritual carried out in accordance with the chieftain’s whim or the phases of the moon: it was a particular sacrifice begging Meshkent’s favor as the Urghul rode to war.

Long Fist’s army had since crossed the White River north of the confluence, avoiding the Annurian forts to the east. The rafts ferrying the horses and their riders were ridiculous, precarious craft, crudely lashed and awkwardly balanced, but there were hundreds of them, hundreds upon hundreds, the numbers alone betraying months of preparation; Gwenna felt sick to her stomach when she saw them lined up along the shore. Long Fist didn’t need rafts to defend his land. He needed them to attack.

By the time they’d crossed the river, the shaman had dropped all pretense of their “honored guest” status. Their tent was ringed with guards each night, and they weren’t allowed out except in the evening, when they were forced to take part in the bloody nighttime rituals.