And then, all at once, she was almost on top of it, the jagged logs crushed together, looming like teeth from the swirling surface. She caught a glimpse of bodies pressed up against twisted wreckage, riders pinned by the current, drowned, their faces just inches from the good air. It sounded like there was fighting on the island, but she had no way to see it. There was just time to raise the starshatters above the surface, light them with a flick of a hand, to suck in a huge breath, manage half a prayer to Hull, and then dive, kicking down, down, down into the frigid, perfect blackness of the river bottom.

43

The midnight gongs had long since tolled when Kaden, Kiel, and Gabril began the long walk back to the Temple of Pleasure. They walked in silence, partly because they couldn’t speak freely on the streets of Annur, partly because there was nothing to say. Kaden had played his gambit, and it had failed. He could still hear the chaos of the warehouse, the various nobles shouting over each other, accusing, condemning, demanding. . . . Such a scene would have been impossible among the Shin, but then, that was the problem; neither Kiel nor Kaden had anticipated the full extent of the aristocrats’ irrationality, the strength of the clutching grasp in which their emotions held them.

He kept his hood up and his head down as they moved through the winding streets, eyes fixed on his own feet and those of Gabril and Kiel, who led the way a few paces ahead. For once, he was grateful for the disguise—the hood let him stay silent, let him drift in his own thoughts. Those thoughts—visions of failure and futility—had consumed him so fully that he almost strode directly into Kiel’s back when the man stopped short. Kaden started to speak, but Kiel pushed him back, quietly but firmly, down the street from which they had just emerged.

When they finally stopped, Kaden raised his head carefully, glancing from Gabril to the Csestriim.

“What?” he asked quietly.

“The Ishien,” Kiel replied. “Two of them, waiting in the shadows just outside the cobbler’s shop.”

Kaden took a long breath, forcing himself to calm. “Did they see us?”

Kiel shook his head.

“Who,” Gabril asked, “are the Ishien?”

Kaden started to explain, then thought better of it. “Enemies,” he said curtly. “Do you know another way into the temple?”

Gabril frowned. “Several.” He glanced over his shoulder. “These enemies of yours, they can fight?”

Kaden nodded.

“How did they follow you?”

Kaden considered the question. Matol couldn’t have tracked them from the kenta in the catacombs all the way to the temple. The memory of the ak’hanath sprang to mind, of their twisted, unnatural legs, of the red eyes bulging from the joints. But Matol wasn’t Csestriim. He didn’t have ak’hanath. Which meant the beshra’an.