“The bodies of the gods died as all bodies die: a hole hacked in the flesh, a break in Bedisa’s perfection where the life drained out. I would have expected their deaths to be different from our own in some way. Greater or louder. They were gods, after all. But they were bound and drugged, both of them, and Tan’is killed them with a knife no longer than my hand.

“It took me a century to be sure of the effect, decades upon decades walking among your kind, posing as one of you, asking the same questions over and over:

“ ‘What is this? What is this?’

“I always met with the same reply, ‘It is rock. It is water. It is air.’

“ ‘And what do you feel about the rock and the water? What do you feel about the air?’

“ ‘Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.’ ”

For a long time Kaden could not bring himself to speak. He struggled to conceive the magnitude of Kiel’s claim, of the loss. The Shin trained a lifetime to scrub out human emotion, and none ever succeeded, not completely, not perfectly. If Kiel was right, however, Ran il Tornja had managed just that, at least a portion of it, with two cuts of the knife. What would happen if everyone in the empire—everyone in the world—all at once lost hope and courage, fear and love? It was like looking down to find the once-solid ground nothing but an illusion. A dream.

Kiel watched him, eyes blank as shells. Only when Kaden finally nodded did he continue.

“Tan’is resolved to destroy the rest of the new gods, to capture and kill them individually, or to strike directly at Ciena and Meshkent. He believed—not without warrant—that the elimination of those two would cripple the others, that the new gods were in some way dependent on or emergent from their parents.”

Kaden stared. “Was he right?”

“We don’t know,” Kiel replied evenly. “We began to lose the war then, and when it was clear that your kind would defeat us, those gods who had taken your side . . . departed. They slipped clear of their adopted flesh. Their influence remains, but they are gone.”

“Holy Hull,” Triste breathed quietly.

“Yes,” Kiel agreed. “Like Hull. The god himself remains remote, unmanifest, but we know his darkness.”

“I should have left you in the Dead Heart,” Kaden said finally, the words loose before he could call them back. “I should have left you to rot.”

“You would not have escaped without me,” Kiel replied. “Even if you had won free somehow, you are not prepared to face il Tornja. He will destroy you without my help. He may destroy you in spite of it.” He shook his head. “I was accounted a good mind among my people, but Tan’is was always the better strategist, the better tactician.”

Kaden stared. “You killed two of our gods, and now you’re talking about helping me?”