The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Kaden frowned. “The Urghul aren’t the only threat. Nor are they the greatest.”

  “Spoken by someone who’s never been an Urghul prisoner.” Gwenna stabbed a finger at him across the table. “We all spent weeks in their camp. Long Fist, may Ananshael fuck him bloody, forced Annick and me to take part in their sick little rituals.” She shook her head, unable to speak for a moment, faced with the full folly of Kaden’s idiocy. “Maybe you don’t know this,” she managed finally, “because you’ve been perched atop your throne—”

  “The Unhewn Throne is no longer in use,” he said, cutting her off. “And I am not the Emperor any longer.”

  “How convenient for you. If you were the Emperor, you’d probably already know that Balendin is with them.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Remember Balendin?”

  Kaden nodded. “The emotion leach. The Kettral.”

  “Yeah, except he’s not Kettral any longer. The bastard has gone over entirely to the Urghul.”

  “We heard something about one of Long Fist’s deputies. A leach. There was no reliable information.”

  “Well, here’s some information: Long Fist is a sick, dangerous bastard, and Balendin is at least as bad. He’s only getting more powerful as his legend spreads.…” She waved a hand at Talal. “You explain it.”

  Talal studied Kaden a moment. “You know that Balendin is an emotion leach. That he draws his power from the feelings of others, especially feelings directed at him by those physically close to him.”

  Kaden nodded again. “I remember our fight in the Bone Mountains.”

  “Except in the Bone Mountains there were only a few of us to give him strength,” Talal said grimly. “Now he has hundreds, thousands. His legend grows every day and with that legend grows his strength. If he breaks through the northern front, it will only get worse. By the time he reaches Annur, he will be as powerful as Arim Hua, as powerful as the greatest of the Atmani. Maybe more so.”

  “And this,” Gwenna cut in, “is the threat that you think might not be so bad as Ran il Tornja, who, as far as I can fucking tell, is the only one holding these bastards back.”

  “I didn’t realize…,” Kaden began, then fell silent.

  There was something new behind those burning eyes, some imperceptible change in the way he held himself. Gwenna tried to pinpoint what she was seeing. Anger? Fear? Before she could put a name to the expression, it was gone.

  “So why is it,” she pressed, “that you think your sister and her general are so dangerous?”

  “Perhaps they are not,” he admitted quietly. “Not compared to the threat you’ve described.”

  Gwenna watched him warily. She was asking him to see past his hatred of the man who had killed his father, past his jealousy of the sister who had stolen his throne. It was no small demand. At best, she had thought, it would take hours to convince him, if such convincing were even possible. Instead, he seemed to have absorbed the new facts in a matter of moments.

  “But you’re still determined to carry on this war against Adare,” she said, shaking her head.

  “No, in fact.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that the council has offered her a truce. More than a truce—a treaty. An offer to end all hostilities. She will be reinstalled on the Unhewn Throne with all her titles and honors while the council will retain legislative authority.”

  “Meaning you make the laws and she enforces them?”

  Kaden nodded.

  “It won’t work,” Annick said from the doorway, not bothering to look over her shoulder.

  Kaden turned to her. “Why not?”

  “Whoever has the power will destroy whoever doesn’t.”

  “The treaty divides power between us.”

  “Divided power,” Gwenna snorted. “That sounds promising.”

  “A moment ago,” Kaden replied, “you were urging me to make peace with Adare and Ran il Tornja.”

  “I was hoping for an arrangement that might last more than a week.”

  Kaden didn’t respond. Instead, he watched her over the table for what felt like a very long time. Gwenna held his gaze, resisted the impulse to fill the empty space with words. If he could sit with the silence, then so could she.

  “Why did you come back here?” he asked finally. “To Annur?”

  “To learn what was really happening.” She hesitated, then told him the rest. “And to be sure that Valyn wasn’t here, wasn’t still alive somehow.”

  “And now that you know what’s happening,” Kaden asked quietly, “now that you know that Valyn’s dead, what will you do?”

  There was no sign that Valyn’s death bothered him.

  Gwenna glanced over her shoulder at Annick, met Talal’s gaze for a moment, then turned back to Kaden. “I’ll need to discuss it with the Wing.”

  “What if I could furnish you with a ship back to the Islands?”

  “The fight’s coming here,” Annick broke in from the doorway. “Not to the Eyrie.”

  Kaden nodded. “And it would help us to win that fight if we had birds. Even two or three could make an enormous difference. We could have accurate reports of troop movements, could convey orders from army to army more quickly, could even attempt to get at … Long Fist, or Balendin, without going through the entire Urghul army.”

  Gwenna studied his impassive face, then turned away, staring at the swirling dust motes, trying to sift her emotions from her reasoning.

  “It makes sense,” Talal said at last. “Any birds that survived the battle will stay on the Islands. They won’t leave their roosts.”

  “I could get you a ship,” Kaden added. “Ready to sail on the morning tide.”

  Gwenna shook her head angrily. “A ship will take forever, and Annick’s right. The fight is coming here, it is coming now. Why didn’t you send someone nine months ago?”

  “We did,” Kaden said, meeting her gaze. “We’ve sent half a dozen expeditions.”

  “And?”

  “And none of them returned.”

  “What happened to them?” Talal asked.

  Kaden shook his head. “We have no idea.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Gwenna said. “You sent Daveen Shaleel back to the Islands to recover birds and she just fucking disappeared?”

  “No. Shaleel wanted to go, but the council refused. She was the highest-ranking Kettral to survive, to return to Annur. Even without a bird or a full Wing, she’s too valuable to risk.”

  “But we’re expendable,” Gwenna said.

  Kaden met her gaze. “Yes. You’re expendable.” He raised his brows. “Will you go?”

  “Well, shit.” She turned to her Wing. “Talal? Annick?”

  “I don’t see that we have any other choice,” the leach replied gravely.

  Annick just nodded.

  Gwenna studied them both a moment. Once again, it was up to her to make the final ’Kent-kissing choice.

  “Fine,” she said finally. “Whatever’s waiting there, it can’t kill us unless we fuck up.”

  7

  “Twenty paces,” Lehav insisted grimly. “With weapons ready to hand.”

  Adare shook her head. “Fifty paces. No swords visible.”

  “That’s insane. A mob could kill you a dozen times over before my men got close enough to help.”

  “It would have to be a very efficient mob, Lehav. Either that, or you brought a hundred of your slowest men.”

  The soldier had pointed out half a dozen times that his new name, the name given to him by the goddess Intarra in a dream, was Vestan Ameredad—the Shield of the Faithful. She continued to use the name he had given her when they first met, both of them in mud up to the ankles, down in Annur’s Perfumed Quarter.

  Shielding the faithful was all well and good, but Adare was surrounded by people with new names, new identities, surrounded by lies and lives meticulously tailored to cover the truth and obscure the past. Lehav, at least, she could call by the name his mother had given him when h
e was still bloody and squirming, before he ever heard of Annur, or Intarra, or Adare herself. A given name was a strange thing to insist on, but it struck Adare as a sort of honesty, and there weren’t so many truths lying around that she could afford to give them up.

  He was young, this commander of the Sons of Flame—maybe half a dozen years older than Adare herself—but he had a soldier’s hands and a zealot’s eyes. Adare had watched him whip his men for laxity and blasphemy, had seen him kneeling in prayer in the Aergad snow during the dawn hour and at dusk, had glimpsed him from her tower running his circuits of the walls, breath steaming in the icy air. She remembered their meeting in Olon almost a year earlier, when he had threatened to feed her to the flames. He might be young, but he was harder than most men she had met, and he approached his duty as her guardian with the same cold fervor he brought to the rest of his life.

  Now, staring at her, he shook his head. “The five score men you allowed me are my most reliable, but they are five score against the population of an entire city. Your Radiance.”

  The honorific still came slowly to the commander of the Sons of Flame. There was no disrespect in the words, but most of the time, as now, they sounded like an afterthought, a title to which he remained more or less indifferent.

  It was a good reminder, if Adare needed a reminder, of the complexity of her situation. Il Tornja and the legions fought for her because she was a Malkeenian, the only Malkeenian left who seemed willing to sit the Unhewn Throne. Lehav, however, and all the Sons of Flame, retained their old distrust of the empire. They followed Adare because of what had happened at the Everburning Well, because of the tracery of shining scar laid into her flesh, for the flames in her eyes. It was Intarra’s touch upon her that they trusted. The empire she was working so hard to preserve was incidental at best, disposable.

  “Whatever we’ve been doing in Aergad for the past nine months,” Adare went on, “Annur is my city, my capital. I grew up here.”

  “So did I,” he replied, “and I learned early not to trust it. Not Annur. Not Annurians.”

  “Good,” Adare said, eyes on the city sprawled out to the south. “Your job isn’t to trust people—it’s to keep me safe.”

  That, too, was a change. There was a score of Aedolian guardsmen in Aergad, men Fulton had swept up when passing through Annur almost a year earlier. Adare had no cause to fault their devotion or their service, but after Aats-Kyl, they worried her.

  According to Valyn, a contingent of Aedolians had come for Kaden, had murdered close to two hundred monks in a failed effort to kill him. Fulton, the Aedolian who had watched over her since childhood, had proven his loyalty a dozen times over, proven it with his death. The others, however, were just so many vaguely familiar faces, a lot of big men in bright armor. Aedolians swore to guard the imperial family, but Adare had not forgotten that it was Ran il Tornja, hundreds of years earlier and wearing a different name, who had founded the Aedolian Guard.

  The Sons of Flame, on the other hand, were hers; she had risked everything to make peace with them in Olon, and they had followed her north, first to fight il Tornja, then in a desperate scramble to stop the Urghul. For nearly a year now they had marched beneath her banner, sung their hymns and offered their prayers as they guarded her in camp and castle, bled and died for their goddess of light and for Adare, the woman they believed to be Intarra’s prophet. And so the Sons of Flame had come south, to Annur, while the Aedolians were conscripted into their own unit to fight the Urghul.

  The march to Annur had been exhausting, and not just physically. The long miles between Aergad and the capital offered a catalogue of the ways in which Adare had failed her empire. Though it was spring, half the fields they had passed lay fallow—the farmers fled, whether from the Urghul or the threat of banditry, Adare couldn’t say. Three towns they passed had been burned to the ground, and nearly every day they passed bodies, some rotting silently in ditches, some hung from the limbs of blackpines. In most cases, it was impossible to say whether the killings had been crimes or rough justice.

  Not that it mattered. Annur was collapsing; and though Adare dreaded her arrival in the capital, dreaded the fate she might face there, with each mile she grew more convinced of the necessity of her return, of the need to try, at least, to heal the horrible rift cleaving her nation. Every body they passed was a spur in her side, every burned farm a reproach urging her to hurry, hurry. Now that they had arrived, it was time to see if she would survive her precipitous return.

  “You have a hundred men, Lehav,” Adare said quietly. “Enough to protect me on the road, but not here.”

  “If we are closer,” he said, “we can set up a viable cordon—”

  She cut him off, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Lehav. If a mob of ten thousand is waiting on those city streets to rend me limb from limb, you can’t stop them. It doesn’t matter how close your men are walking.”

  The words were light, but they belied the cramp in her stomach. She had almost forgotten, after nine months’ exile in Aergad, just how big the empire’s capital really was, a sprawl of temples and towers, homes and hovels that spread across half the Neck. You could enter the city in Westgate and walk east along the Godsway for the better part of a morning before reaching the Dawn Palace, red walls sloping down into the lapping waters of the Broken Bay; the north-south avenues were nearly as long.

  Of course, it hadn’t always been Annur, not all of it. From where Adare stood in the middle of the Imperial Road she could still make out the older clusters of buildings folded into the hollows. They had been towns of their own once—Hundred Bloom, Jade, Old Cranes and New Crane—each with its own market square and cluster of squat temples, independent, each ruled by a lord or merchant council or mayor before the city of Annur, gorged on its own success, swallowed them up.

  Now the land between those old hamlets, land that had been used for crop and pasturage a hundred years earlier, housed a new wave of settlement—rough shacks and taverns tacked up in haphazard neighborhoods that had, over the course of decades, settled into their own illogic, new homes built on the foundations of the old, the roofs of covered markets spanning the space between until all the land south of her and east to the sea’s faint haze was an unbroken façade of human habitation: Annur’s northern face.

  Adare could study that face all day long. The trouble was, she couldn’t see anything past it. The flat cropland in which she stood afforded no vantage to look down on the city, to see past the homes of these most recent immigrants, to spy on the heart of the capital. She could see the meager houses shoved one against the next, the flash from the distant towers, the slant and pitch of palace roofs on the slopes of the Graves, copper gone green with verdigris, and then, above it all, stuck like a bright knife in the sky’s wide belly—Intarra’s Spear.

  Ruddy afternoon light gleamed on the tower’s glassy walls, reflected and refracted until the entire Spear glowed yellow-orange as though lit from within. Adare craned her neck. The tower’s top, so often lost in cloud or fog off the Broken Bay, was visible today, whittled thin as a needle’s tip by the impossible distance between it and the city sprawled below. Adare had stood atop that needle dozens of times, had stood there to see the ceremonial fires lit for the solstice twice each year, and once, as a small girl, to watch as her father ordered the city burned. It seemed unreal now, as though the tower were not her home but someplace foreign, unimaginably distant, a relic from another land, another life.

  Adare turned away from the Spear to confront Lehav once more.

  “I trust you,” she said quietly. “I trust your men, and above all I trust in the will of the goddess.”

  It wasn’t true, not really, but it was the sort of statement Lehav would usually accept. This time, though, he shook his head.

  “There should be no comparison between the trust you place in the goddess and that you have invested in me.” He gestured to the city. “If I stood at your shoulder throughout the entire negotiation I could not guar
antee your safety. There are too many variables, too many lines of attack, too many—”

  Adare cut him off. “That is exactly the point I am making.”

  The words brought him up short.

  She tried to soften her voice before continuing. “I don’t need a guarantee, Lehav. We will do, both of us, what we can do, but it is Intarra who will see fit to preserve us, or she will not. I need you to keep the Sons back, mostly out of sight, because when I ride into the city I need the people of Annur to witness an emperor, confident and sure, returning to her home.”

  “Emperors have guards. Your father did not ride down the center of the Godsway unattended.”

  “My father had the luxury of a stable reign. He was secure on his throne. He could afford to be careless with his image.”

  Careless, in truth, was not the best word to ascribe to her father. Sanlitun had been a deliberate, contemplative ruler, even a cautious one. Adare, however, could not afford caution. She’d been out of the city for nearly a year, and not a day of her absence had gone by without the ’Shael-spawned council spreading some sort of vicious rumor about her. Her spies had been reluctant to tell her most of it at first, worrying, not without reason, that even to speak such slanders openly before an emperor might cost them their posts, their lives. Adare, however, had insisted on the unvarnished truth. If she was to serve the people, to rule them, she needed to understand what they thought—and so she heard it all:

  She was il Tornja’s whore, the sex-mad puppet of a shrewd general. She was a leach who had used her power to kill Uinian and then, later, to fake a miracle at the Everburning Well. She had murdered Sanlitun herself, luring her father into the Temple of Light to stab him while he prayed. She was bankrolled by Anthera, or the Manjari, or the Federated Cities—the specifics changed with each speaker—bent on the overthrow of Annur, determined to see the empire delivered into the hands of her ancient foes.

  The endless lies were exhausting, infuriating. To hear, after nine months defending Annur from the Urghul, that she was an agent bent on Annur’s destruction made her want to scream, to seize someone by the throat and start shaking, to bring half a dozen of the ’Kent-kissing horsemen back to the capital and let them loose in the streets just so the bastards could see the horror that she was working day and night to hold at bay.