Kensy shakes his head. “No, Basuin. I brought you here for a purpose. A purpose much greater than what you serve as Ariche’s captain. I need you here with me rather than running the fleet. Tehali is capable of that.”
There’s a stinging in his chest. “Tehali deserves to be captain,” he says. He means it.
“I knew you’d agree.” The corner of Kensy’s mouth jumps in a weary smile, clasping his hands together and bridging his thumbs. “Let’s face it, Bass. After Valkesta—”
For fuck’s sake, he could scream. He’d tear down this whole bastion. Burn it to the ground and go with it. Just to make them stop mentioning Valkesta.
“—your men haven’t seen you the same.” Kensy looks solemn, but his eyes are still cold. “A captain needs the respect of his men if he’s to succeed in the legion.”
It never should’ve been Tehali who found him bleeding out in the snow at Valkesta. It should’ve been Kensy—Kensy would have finished the job.
Basuin says nothing. He barely breathes. Kensy walks around his desk and stands beside Basuin, not looking at him, but resting a hand on his shoulder. Basuin stares at the wall ahead.
“But I still need you,” Kensy says. Needs him. Doesn’t respect him. “There’s only one person who can help me, and that person is you, Basuin.”
Kensy’s always said Basuin’s strength was in doing. In following orders. It’s why he chose Basuin to be his right-hand man—a rank that was Kensy’s to give, and now Kensy’s to take away.
So he swallows, and he asks, “What do you need, Commander?”
Kensy smiles at him. “A god speaker.”
A prickle of fear, unlike any other he’s felt, runs through his nervous system like fire struck from a match, racing to swallow everything in its path. The only thing that keeps him from visibly shuddering is the fact that Kensy is watching, and if Basuin shows any sort of weakness, it will only make it worse.
Why would Kensy need a god speaker? This is conquest. This is unholy.
And, worse than sacrilege, being blessed with the power to speak to the gods is murderous. A curse. God speakers never saw prisons. They were “kill-on-sight” targets after Queen Ye’suite outlawed the gods.
Basuin can’t speak to them anyway. Only his mother, cradling her jade stone between her wrinkled and worn hands, was blessed enough.
Kensy walks away, out of Basuin’s sight, to take a turn about the room. His footsteps echo off the wooden floors of his bunk house. It sounds like what Basuin imagines the death-bidden road to the Blacksalt Sea would, screams of emptiness echoing off the cavern walls as mortality is wrenched from the dead and their souls travel into the endless nothing of the afterlife for the damned.
Are we going there? a trembling hand clutching Basuin’s shirt asked. To the Blacksalt Sea? Captain, I don’t wanna go—
“Why?” he manages to ask through the bile rising in his throat. Kensy doesn’t believe in gods. He repeats it to himself like a mantra.
“I’m looking for something,” Kensy says. “Something sacred. Something only the gods know.”
Basuin nearly recoils, blowing a breath out of his nose. “You don’t believe in the gods.”
“No,” Kensy agrees, “I don’t.” He raps his knuckles on the wood grains of his desk. “But who built man?”
Who built man, Kensy says, as if man were a science. As if man were the technology that Ha’riste drives, the capital engineers soldering junk together to make weaponry. They did build man into weaponry. It’s why he stands here now, in front of Kensy, unmoving.
Kensy, who doesn’t believe the gods raised man.
Basuin doesn’t answer and Kensy continues on. “I’m in search of a godly artifact for our queen. Something powerful.” Kensy’s hand tightens into a fist. “I know how much you care for your gods. Finding the artifact is the best way to protect them.”
He bristles. “Protect them?”
Kensy grins. “Did you think I was so ruthless?” With slow, measured steps, Kensy approaches him, so close Bass can smell the lye of soap on Kensy’s skin. “I’m not replacing you, old friend. I’m recruiting you.” Kensy leans in closer, like he’s sharing a secret. “Help me find it so I don’t have to destroy the entire forest to get it.”
Ruthless—no. Kensy is godless.
Basuin swallows. His throat is dry. “Where did you learn of it?”
“From a god speaker,” Kensy says with a flash of teeth. “One like your mother.”
The stone sitting in the hollow of his throat echoes the rhythm of his heart, making it feel alive. The heat of it stings his skin. A seed of dread buries itself in the gloom of Basuin’s gut.
