The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Leaning on the wooden railing, he looked down. Swallows had invaded the space, hundreds of them, roosting in the scaffolding, soaring through the empty tower, their sleek, dark forms darting and twisting in the rich light. Kaden glanced up. A few hundred feet above him, another man-made floor cut across the Spear’s girth, a floor of solid steel supported by great arches of iron and wood that spanned the enormous space. There was no way to carve the glass walls of the tower, no way to drill into them, but the Spear, like the stone cliffs Kaden had spent his years climbing, had its own natural features: shallow cracks and ledges, inexplicable gouges both small and large that might have been worn away by wind and weather. Only there was no weather inside the Spear, no wind.

  Whatever the cause of those irregular features, the builders of the dungeon had used them to anchor their structure high inside the tower, nearly two-thirds of the way to the very top, a single floor set atop those arches. Kaden was close enough now to see the blocky forms dangling listlessly beneath—the steel cages of the condemned like ugly pendants hung from heavy chain. He slowed his heart, pushed more blood out into his quivering limbs, and kept climbing.

  After a hundred more steps, the staircase wound its way into a metal sheath, like a corkscrew into the neck of a steel bottle. Fruin the First, the dungeon’s architect, had bolted huge plates of steel—each one larger than the bed of a wagon—onto the wooden beams of the stairs, blocking out the light and ruining any possibility of a would-be rescuer throwing a rope—or a vial of poison—to one of the prisoners.

  Kaden paused inside the sudden darkness, his robe soaked with sweat, his lungs heaving inside him, to allow his eyes to adjust. Then, with trembling legs, he climbed on, forcing himself to grind out the last three hundred feet in one brutal push. There was no way to know, inside the near-blackness of the stairwell, when he was approaching the level of the dungeon itself. There were stairs beneath his feet, a railing in his hand, and then, abruptly, a landing lit by a lamp. The stairs continued on, twisting up and up, straight through the dungeon into another immeasurably large space and finally to the Spear’s top. Kaden ignored them, turning instead to the two armored guards—jailors rather than Aedolians—flanking a steel door hung from heavy hinges in a steel wall.

  “First Speaker,” said the nearer of the two with a low bow.

  Kaden nodded in return, glancing past the man at the closed door. It seemed Amut was right—the attackers, whoever they were, hadn’t made an attempt on the dungeon.

  “Be welcome,” the guard said, turning from Kaden to the door. It swung silently open on well-oiled hinges.

  For all the steps that Kaden had climbed, the admittance chamber to the dungeon of the Dawn Palace might as well have been underground after all, some windowless room in the base of a squat stone fortress. Skylights would have admitted ample light, but Fruin hadn’t allowed skylights into the design of his prison. That left hanging lamps as the only light. Kaden paused as the door thudded shut behind him, considering the room, studying the space for anything different, anything strange. Below the lamps, half a dozen clerks sat at a row of desks, bent over their papers, the scratch of their pens interrupted by a light chime when they dipped those pens into the ink, then tapped the excess free against the glass rims of their inkwells. Kaden took a deep breath, relaxed his shoulders. Here, too, all was calm.

  In fact, only the unrelieved steel—the walls, the ceiling, the roughened floor, the three doors leading out of the room—suggested anything other than an ordinary ministerial office. The steel, and the fact that the man sitting beside the far door, sitting at a desk just the same as all the rest, wore full armor.

  At the sight of Kaden, he rose quickly to his feet, then bowed.

  “You honor us, First Speaker. Your second visit this month, if I am not mistaken.”

  “Captain Simit,” Kaden replied slowly, studying the man.

  He made a point of carving a saama’an of every guard each time he ascended to the prison, comparing them week to week, searching for some change in the angle of the mouth, the tightness around the eyes, anything that might tell of a betrayal before it came. He had come to trust Captain Haram Simit—one of the three chief jailors—more than most of them. The man looked more like a scholar than a guard—thin-fingered and stooped, a haze of uncut gray hair gathered in a kerchief beneath his helm—but there was a steadiness to him, a deliberation in his actions and his gaze that reminded Kaden of the Shin. Kaden considered his face, comparing it to the various saama’an he had compiled over the previous months. If there was a change, he couldn’t find it.

  “You have come to see the young woman?” Simit asked.

  He was careful like that—never the leach, or the whore, or even the prisoner—always the young woman.

  Kaden nodded. He kept his face still, composed. “Have the Aedolians been up here? Have you been notified of the attack below?”

  Simit nodded soberly. “Shortly after the third bell yesterday.” The jailor hesitated. “Perhaps it’s not my place to ask, First Speaker, but what happened?”

  “Someone attacked three of Amut’s men. They broke into my study, then disappeared.”

  Simit’s face darkened. “Not just inside the Red Walls, but in the Spear itself…” He trailed off, shaking his head grimly. “You should be careful, First Speaker. Annur is not what it was. You should be very careful.”

  Despite the warning, relief seeped into Kaden like a cool rain into cloth. She’s still alive, he told himself. Unharmed. Suddenly, standing had become an effort. His legs were slack, whether with that same relief or simple exhaustion, he couldn’t say.

  Simit frowned. “I hope you didn’t feel the need to climb all the way up here just to check. I can assure you, First Speaker, that this prison is secure.”

  “I believe it,” Kaden said, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  Simit watched him for a moment, then gestured to a chair. “Would you care to rest for a moment? The climb is taxing, even for those of us who make it often.”

  “You’re the second person who’s told me that in two days.” He shook his head. “If I start sitting I don’t think I’ll get up.”

  “Wise,” the jailor said, smiling. “I’ll let the cage-men know that you’re here to see the young woman.”

  “Thank you,” Kaden replied.

  Simit crossed to a discreet bellpull set into the wall beside the steel door, gave it a dozen tugs, some short, some long, then waited for the cord to twitch in response.

  “Different code,” Kaden observed.

  The guard smiled. “Most people don’t notice.”

  “How often do you change it?”

  “Daily.”

  “And what would happen if I tried to go through that door without it?”

  Simit frowned. “I could not permit that.”

  “And what would they do below, at the cages? Let’s say the attackers from my study had come here instead. Let’s say they’d forced their way past you.”

  “We have measures in place.”

  “Measures?”

  The jailor spread his hands helplessly. “I’m not at liberty to say, First Speaker.”

  “Even to me?”

  “Even to you.”

  Kaden nodded. “Good.”

  * * *

  The main door opened onto a long, dim hall—steel ceiling and floors, steel walls punctuated by steel doors on heavy steel hinges. Kaden’s light slippers were nearly silent on the rough metal, but the guard who had come to escort him—Ulli, a younger man with a blotchy face and lopsided ears—wore heavy boots that rang out at every step, as though the whole floor of the prison were one great gong. Answering clangs and clankings came from deeper inside: other boots, other doors slamming open or shut, chains dragging over rough edges. They had to pause twice for Ulli to unlock heavy gates. The prison was built in different zones, of which Triste occupied the most remote and inaccessible.

  “How is she?” Kaden asked as they approached her cell d
oor at last. A small number “1” was etched into the steel.

  Ulli shrugged. He was never talkative. Unlike Simit, who understood the formalities of life inside the Dawn Palace, Ulli had all the formality of a sullen innkeeper serving late-night ale to drunkards. Most of the other council members would have bristled at the treatment, but then, most of the others weren’t ever going to climb thousands of stairs to the prison. Kaden found the young man’s indifference a relief.

  “Is she still eating?” he pressed.

  “If she stopped eating,” Ulli replied, swinging open the door, “then she’d be dead, wouldn’t she?”

  “Does she still have the nightmares? Is she still screaming?”

  Ulli put his shrug to use once more. “Everyone screams. That’s what happens when you put people in cages.”

  Kaden nodded, and stepped into the cell. The first time he had visited, nearly a year earlier, he’d been momentarily shocked to find it empty—no sign of Triste inside the narrow steel box. That, of course, was because Triste wasn’t kept inside her cell. A leach and a murderer warranted an even higher level of security.

  Ulli swung the door shut behind them, locked it, then gestured to an hourglass standing on the floor in the corner.

  “Gave her the dose of adamanth at the start of the shift. She looked healthy enough then.”

  “Healthy enough?”

  “No point in me telling you when you’re about to see for yourself.”

  Ulli gestured to a chain suspended from the ceiling. A steel bar the length of Kaden’s forearm hung horizontally from the final link in that chain. It looked like a crude swing and served much the same purpose. Kaden crossed to it, took the chain in both hands, seated himself on the bar, then turned to the guard.

  “Ready,” he said.

  “You want the harness?”

  Kaden shook his head. It was foolish, perhaps, always refusing the harness. Sitting on the wide bar wasn’t difficult. No doubt, thousands of children all over the empire gamboled on something similar every day. Those children, however, would be hanging from tree limbs or barn rafters a few feet off the ground. Unlike Kaden, if they slipped, they wouldn’t fall thousands of feet to their deaths.

  There was no practical reason to take the risk, but month after month, Kaden insisted on it. Back in the mountains there had been a thousand ways to die—slipping from icy ledges, getting caught out in an early fall blizzard, stumbling across a hungry crag cat. In the council chamber far below, however, danger was something distant and abstract. Kaden worried he was forgetting what it actually meant. Sitting on the slender bar alone, with no harness, was a way of remembering.

  The metal doors dropped open. Kaden looked down. He could see the edge of Triste’s cage hanging from its own, much heavier chain, a few dozen feet below and to the right. A hundred feet below that, a pair of swallows turned in a lazy gyre. Below them—just air. Kaden looked back up in time to see Ulli throw the catch on an elaborately geared winch at the corner of the cell. The bar lurched, dropped half a foot, then steadied. Kaden slowed his heartbeat, smoothed out his breathing, forced himself to relax his grip on the chain. And then, with a clanking that sounded like some massive, mechanical thunder, he was lowered out of the prison and into the dazzling bright emptiness of the Spear.

  Triste’s cage was not the only one. There were at least two dozen, hanging from their chains like huge, angular, rusting fruit—reserved for the most vile, the most deadly. Each had three solid walls and a fourth of thick steel bars. The cages were staggered, some closer to the floor of the prison above, some hanging much lower, all facing the walls of the Spear. The prisoners could see Annur spread out below—a different portion of the city depending on the orientation of the individual cage—but none could see each other. A few had a clear view of Kaden as he descended. Some cried out or cursed, some stretched imploring hands through the bars, a few just watched with baffled eyes, as though he were some unknown creature lowered down from the skies.

  One poor soul had no cage at all. Instead, he sat wide-eyed and gibbering on a narrow platform barely one pace square, a platform supported at each corner by a chain. Simit called it, simply, the Seat. As punishment for defiance, or aggression, or violence, a prisoner was put on it for a week. The men subjected to it fell, went mad, or learned to behave. To Kaden it was a vivid reminder: while the Urghul openly worshipped Meshkent, Annurians had their own ways of paying homage to the god of all suffering.

  He shifted his gaze to the cage below him, Triste’s cage, watching it approach as Ulli lowered him. The whole thing—the wrist-thick chains, the heavy steel plates, the bars—looked built to hold some monster out of legend, some unimaginable horror. When Kaden’s seat finally jerked to a halt, however, when he looked across the narrow space separating him from the hanging cell, when his eyes adjusted well enough to see inside, there was only Triste: small, bound, half broken, and even here, in this awful place, almost impossibly beautiful.

  For the first month of her imprisonment, she had cowered all the way in the back of the steel box, as far from the bars as she could crawl. During Kaden’s earliest visits, she kept her face turned away, as though the light burned her eyes, flinched each time he spoke, and offered only the same unvarying words: You put me here. You put me here. You put me here.

  Had Kaden allowed it, those words would have cut. Despite the massacre in the Jasmine Court, despite the terrible truth of the goddess buried inside her, Kaden couldn’t help thinking of the young woman as an ally, even a friend. Which was one of the reasons he had insisted on this cell. Whatever toll it would take, it kept her safe. Safe from the vicious members of the council, and safe from outside attackers, like whoever had raided his study earlier. He had tried to explain that, but Triste was beyond hearing explanations, so far gone that for months he worried she might die inside the cell despite his precautions, hollowed out by her own despair.

  Recently, however, she had stopped huddling. Instead of cringing against the steel floor, she sat cross-legged in the very center of her cage, hands folded in her lap, eyes fixed on the bars before her. Kaden recognized the pose from his years of meditation among the Shin, but where Triste had learned it, or why she had decided to adopt it, he had no idea. She didn’t look like a prisoner; she looked like a queen.

  And like a queen, she seemed barely to notice him during his most recent visits. An effect of the adamanth, according to Simit, of so much adamanth administered over so many months. Necessary, if they were to block all access to her well. Today, however, Triste raised her eyes slowly, as though considering Kaden’s dangling, slippered feet, then his chest, and only after a very long time, his face. He tried to read that gaze, to translate the planes and surfaces of the flesh into thought and emotion. As usual, he failed. The Shin were great ones for observing nature, but a life among the monks had given him scant opportunity for the study of humanity.

  “I counted ten thousand lights last night,” she said, her voice low and rough, like something almost worn out. “Out there.” She inclined her chin ever so slightly, the gesture intended to encompass, he supposed, the whole of the world beyond the grim ambit of her cage, beyond the clear walls of the Spear. “There were lanterns hung from bamboo poles. Cook fires burning in the kitchens of the rich, in the fish stalls of the markets, on the streets of the Perfumed Quarter. There were fires of sacrifice on the rooftops of a thousand temples, and above those fires there were the stars.”

  Kaden shook his head. “Why are you counting lights?”

  Triste looked down at her hands, then over at the steel walls of her cage. “It gets harder and harder to believe,” she said quietly.

  “What does?”

  “That it’s a real world. That each of those fires has someone tending it, cooking or chanting or just warming her hands.” She glanced up toward the sky. “Not the stars, of course. Or maybe the stars. Do you think the stars are on fire?”

  “I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

  Tri
ste laughed, a limp, helpless sound. “Of course you wouldn’t.”

  Though Kaden had come to expect the rambling, disjointed thoughts, Triste’s incoherence still left him struggling to keep up with the conversation. It was like seeing a mind in the slow process of disintegration. As though she were a woman of packed sand thrown into a great, invisible river.

  “How are you, Triste?” he asked softly.

  She laughed again. “Why ask the question when you don’t care about the answer?”

  “I care about the answer.”

  For a moment she seemed to look at him, to actually see him. For just a fraction of a heartbeat, her eyes went wide. She started to smile. Then it was gone.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head slowly. The exaggerated movement, back and forth, back and forth, reminded him of some half-tamed creature testing the range of a collar and leash. “No, no. No. What you care about is her. Your precious goddess.”

  The other cells were dozens of paces away, well out of earshot, but Kaden glanced over his shoulder reflexively. The other prisoners, even if they could hear, weren’t likely to understand the conversation, and if they understood it, weren’t likely to believe that a goddess was trapped inside the young woman imprisoned in a nearby cage. The price of discovery, on the other hand, was disaster. Kaden lowered his voice.

  “Ciena is your goddess, Triste. Not mine. That is why she chose you.”

  The girl stared at him. “Is that why you keep coming up here? Are you having little chats with her while I’m drugged into oblivion?”

  Kaden shook his head. “She hasn’t spoken. Hasn’t … emerged since that time in the Crane, when you put the knife to your stomach.”

  For the first time Triste raised a hand, the movement slow, groping, like the searching of some blind creature as she probed the flesh beneath her shift, searching out the old wound.