The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Qora shook her head grimly. “I don’t remember setting any fires.”

  “You should have realized when you chose to use civilians as shields that shields get battered. They get broken.”

  Qora’s face tightened. “No one’s fooled, Henk. They see who’s doing the breaking, and for what. People know a tyrant when they see one.”

  “And do they also know a coward who hides behind children?”

  She spread her hands. “I’m not hiding now. If you want me, here I am.”

  So—a trap. Obviously.

  Gwenna glanced over the square again, evaluating the angles and approaches. The woman—Qora—was trying to draw the Kettral south, off their dock. Into what? There were a few good spots to plant charges, but charges wouldn’t discriminate between attackers and civilians. Not necessarily a problem, but this woman seemed keen on the distinction.

  A sniper then.

  Qora knew that the men on the dock would have someone covering them, maybe several someones. She was clearly hoping that her appearance on the steps would lure those someones out, that the hidden Kettral with the bows—wherever they were—would get into position to take a shot at her. There was one obvious choice. Gwenna looked back down that street to the east, the open flank on Qora’s right. If there were Kettral hidden in the alleys, that’s where they’d move to take their shot. Which meant that if Qora was setting a trap, she’d have someone waiting down that very alley, someone ready to hamstring the sniper right … there.

  Qora’s companion was tucked back into a shadowy doorway, but his blade was drawn. A smoke steel blade. As traps went, it was clumsy, obvious—Gwenna had run through the whole thing in a few heartbeats—but you had to admire the woman on the steps for playing bait, facing down five Kettral and a bird in the hope of flushing one or two of her foes into the alley. You had to admire her, and you had to do it fast, because she was about to get all kinds of killed.

  Two bowmen—the Kettral snipers Gwenna had known would be there—stepped into the long alley forty paces back. Gwenna waited for the man with the sword, Qora’s hidden companion, to spring the trap. He didn’t. Instead of leaping from the shadows, he froze in place. The snipers, advancing down the alley with their bows half drawn, didn’t notice him, and as they approached, stalking forward, eager for their prey, the lone man melted back into the shadows, disappeared.

  “’Shael’s shit on a stick,” Gwenna muttered, turning to signal to Annick.

  Before she’d dropped her hand, Annick’s arrows were in the air. A moment later, the snipers in the alley collapsed. Of Qora’s cowardly companion, there was no sign. Gwenna scanned the crowd slowly, loosening her focus, ignoring the individual faces, searching for unexpected movement in the mass of people. Where there were two snipers, there could well be another.

  It only took a few heartbeats to find what she was looking for. A dozen paces back, emerging from a side street—two men moving against the drift of the larger current, pressing toward the woman on the steps when everyone else was trying to get clear. A third was coming in from yet another angle, all of them moving slowly, but with more purpose than the situation seemed to require. None carried bows, but you didn’t need a bow to kill a woman, not if you got close enough—and they were definitely closing.

  “Well, fuck,” Gwenna said, more loudly than she’d intended.

  She eased her belt knife in its sheath, eyes still roving over the scene.

  The Kettral on the dock didn’t move, but they had more than three accomplices seeded through the crowd, she realized. Four, five, six … Gwenna had figured on one extra Wing scattered about the square, but there were at least two, both of them clearly intended to cover the main act out on the dock, both now converging on the woman on the steps. Qora didn’t seem to notice. Instead, she was stealing glances up the side street toward where her companion had disappeared, slipping away while their shitty plan tore apart at the seams.

  Briefly, Gwenna considered letting the woman die. It hardly made sense to start putting knives in people until she’d sorted out who, exactly, was who, who needed killing and who just needed a swift kick in the ass. On the other hand, the basic contours were clear enough—the men with the birds were burning buildings to try to get at the others, the rebels. Qora was a rebel. Hull only knew how many more rebels there were, or where they were hiding; both pieces of information seemed useful.

  “Well, fuck,” Gwenna said again, sliding her knife between the ribs of the first Kettral as he passed.

  The man’s eyes widened, but pain stole his breath. He reached briefly, weakly, for the blade, fingers dumb and fumbling. Gwenna wrapped an arm around his waist, as though he were a friend with too much to drink—she’d learned that trick from a Skullsworn assassin a whole continent away in what seemed like another life—then lowered him gently to the stones. She hadn’t given Annick another signal, or Talal, but how much of a ’Kent-kissing signal did you need? It ought to be pretty clear that it was time to start killing people.

  When she straightened up, she saw they’d followed her play. One of the other Kettral was folding slowly over, grasping at an arrow in his chest. Then a second stumbled, coughing up blood. More were coming, though, and Annick didn’t have angles on all of them.

  “Qora,” Gwenna called, trying to get the attention of the woman on the steps without alerting the entire square. “Qora.”

  Qora looked down. Her eyes were wide and baffled, ablaze with the still-burning fire to the west, hot with her own fear and rage. Gwenna motioned her toward the nearest street.

  “Time to go.”

  The woman’s only move was to lower her sword at Gwenna, an unfortunate gesture that drew every eye in the crowd. Another Kettral, just a few feet away and closing, turned to stare at Gwenna. When he saw the bloody knife in her hand, he drew a sword from beneath his cloak.

  Gwenna shook her head. “I’m on your side, you asshole,” she hissed to the man.

  He hesitated, glanced back up at Qora, who was staring down at both of them. Gwenna stepped in and cut his throat. People were starting to shout, to scream. Behind her, on the docks, the men with the bird were moving. Things were ugly and about to get a whole lot uglier.

  “I wasn’t really on his side,” Gwenna growled, meeting Qora’s eye. “And it really is time to go. Now. The crowd’s seeded with them.”

  Qora shook her head, took half a step back toward the doorway behind her. “Who are you?”

  “Look, bitch,” Gwenna snapped, losing her patience. Off to her right, a man began to charge. Annick’s arrow took him in the eye. “You’re spunky, but you’re stupid. Now get off the fucking stairs and let’s go.” She stabbed a finger down the nearest street. “That way.”

  Just behind Gwenna a woman started screaming, pain mingled with panic. She was just one of the baffled folks who had stumbled outside in the middle of the night to see half her town burn. She had nothing to do with the unfolding fight, but the sound seemed to jolt Qora from her confusion, and she vaulted off the stone steps, finally showing a touch of the competence Gwenna had hoped for.

  Instead of following, however, Qora paused, staring up that alley to the east. “There’s someone else,” she hissed. “Jak—”

  “Forget him,” Gwenna said. “He’s gone.”

  “He was supposed to—”

  “I know what he was supposed to do. He didn’t do it.”

  Qora hesitated, jaw clenched in an agony of indecision, then let herself be led. Together, they raced down the muddy street. Within a dozen steps, Gwenna could hear the clatter of their pursuers. She grabbed the woman by the elbow, dragging her down a side street as more arrows thunked into the wooden walls. Talal was there, his own blades bare, one wet with blood.

  He pointed to a low wall between buildings, just high enough to scramble over.

  “There,” he whispered. “Straight shot out of town on the other side.”

  Gwenna shoved the other woman toward the short wall, but she yanked aw
ay, twisting back toward the square. “Jak!” she whispered desperately. “My partner. Where is he?”

  “How the fuck do I know?” Gwenna snapped. “East somewhere.”

  “I have to find him. Go back for him.”

  “No,” Gwenna said, taking the woman by the arm once more, sizing her up. Qora was an inch or two taller than Gwenna herself, but slender, light enough to knock out and carry if she kept up with the idiotic heroics. Gwenna shifted, wrapping an arm around her neck, but Talal stepped forward.

  “Describe him,” he said. “Jak.”

  Qora’s eyes were huge as moons. She twisted her head to look at Gwenna, then turned back to Talal.

  “Short. Strong. Pale. Shaved head. Twin kettral inked on his shoulders…”

  It wasn’t much of a description, but Talal nodded, then darted off down the alley before she could finish.

  Gwenna hissed her irritation, started to call the leach back, then muzzled her objection. Talal could take care of himself, his assurance had calmed Qora, and they’d be more likely to confuse the pursuit if they split up.

  “Get to the rally,” she growled after him. “And don’t fucking die.”

  11

  Adare sat at the end of the dock, bare feet rising and falling in the water as the low waves slapped against the pilings. It was hardly an imperial posture, but she’d been trying to look imperial all morning, sitting spear-straight in her chair above the smoldering ruins of the great map of Annur, trying not to choke on the day-old smoke and ash as she signed into law the treaty intended to heal the rift between her empire and the republic. It felt good to recline on her elbows at the end of the palace docks, to watch the great ships out in the bay lean with the breeze, to forget for just a moment how close she’d come to destroying it all.

  It would have been nice to forget about it, but her brother refused to let her.

  “How did you know,” Kaden asked quietly, “that the entire hall wouldn’t catch fire?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “How did you know someone on the council wouldn’t attack you? Kill you?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “How did you know they’d agree to ratify the treaty after all that?”

  “I didn’t, Kaden. I was fucking terrified, if you want to know the truth, but I didn’t see any other way.” She blew out a long, frustrated sigh, then turned to face him.

  Kaden sat cross-legged, hands folded in his lap, his posture, like the rest of him, contained, closed. Adare had no idea how he could sit like that with the burns. The fire in the council chamber had turned the air instantly, if only momentarily, to flame. Adare’s own skin was tender to the point of agony, a hint of sullen red spreading beneath the brown. The cold water felt so good on her feet and legs that she was tempted to jump in, to float on her back in the cool shade under the dock itself.

  She used to love to swim beneath the docks as a child, maybe because it drove her Aedolians to distraction. But Birch and Fulton were gone now—one quit, the other dead—and she was not a child but a woman grown, the Emperor, since the morning’s signing, of all Annur. There could be no more floating beneath docks.

  “You have no idea,” Kaden said slowly, “how difficult it was convincing the council to agree to this treaty. They did not want you back.”

  “And you did?” Adare asked, studying him warily.

  The man who sat before her on the rough planks of the dock bore little resemblance to the boy she remembered from her childhood. At eight, Kaden had been thin and bony, all elbows and knees, dark, unruly hair flopping into his eyes whenever he ran, which seemed to be all the time. He and Valyn had been raised in the same palace as Adare, disciplined by the same parents and guards, schooled by the same tutors, and yet the two brothers had managed to find a freedom inside the red walls that Adare had never truly felt.

  It wasn’t that she had resented the Dawn Palace as a child. Far from it. Every time she walked the long colonnades, or prayed inside the scented stillness of the ancient temples, or stood in the cool shadow of the Unhewn Throne, she felt the pride brimming within her, pride of her family, of her name, of her palace, and of the history it represented. Every time she strolled through the immaculately kept gardens, sprays of jasmine and gardenia winding above her, or paused to look up at the graceful angles of the Floating Hall, suspended a hundred feet above the courtyards, every time she stood at the top of Intarra’s Spear, gazing out over an empire that stretched away over ocean, and forest, and tilled ground, stretched away toward every horizon, every time she thought of the scope and breadth and majesty of it all, she felt her own good fortune.

  That fortune, however, had weight. Like the golden robes her father wore during celebrations of solstice and equinox, Adare’s own glittering, gorgeous position lay heavily on her slender shoulders. For as long as she could remember, she had felt it, that weight. To be a Malkeenian was to acknowledge the full heft of history, to feel present events, like some priceless silk, slide between her small hands. The high red walls of the Dawn Palace, instead of keeping the world back, instead of blocking it out, held in the whole elaborate apparatus of state, it was the hub around which the spokes of that great world spun. Adare felt that spinning, felt it every day, almost from the moment she woke … even though she knew she would never be the Emperor, that the unfathomable weight of her father’s responsibility would never be hers, but Kaden’s.

  Kaden, for his part, had always seemed blissfully ignorant.

  The boy she had known was always at his older brother’s side, sneaking away from lessons, trying to elude his own guardsmen, racing around the ramparts or delving down into the deepest cellars. He shared the burning eyes with Sanlitun and Adare, but he seemed to have no idea of or interest in what they meant, in what he would have to do. Most times, Adare could imagine Krim, the kennel master sitting on the Unhewn Throne before Kaden; the kennel master, at least, approached his work with a serious, sober regard.

  The only times Adare had ever seen Kaden go still were when he thought he was alone, when he thought no one was watching. Once, frustrated with her failure to understand some mathematical proof, Adare had climbed up to the seaward wall after her lessons, determined to sit there, regardless of the hard salt wind, working through the problem until she unlocked it. To her surprise, she had stumbled across Kaden. His Aedolians were a hundred paces off, blocking all approach to the high wall, and he was leaning against the stone, staring east between the ramparts. Adare started to approach, then paused, suddenly, almost preternaturally aware that this was a part of her brother she had not seen before, or had seen but not noticed. She couldn’t say what he was looking at—Ships in the harbor? Gulls overhead? The jagged limestone karsts of the Broken Bay? She could only see his stillness, an absence of action so perfect, so absolute, that it seemed impossible he should ever move again. Then, after a very long time, he turned. When he saw her watching him, his burning eyes widened, the boyish grin slipped back onto his face, and he raced away, his Aedolians hollering protests as they gave chase.

  It seemed, now, that that boy, the one who had raced and grinned, was gone. Almost a decade among the Shin had sanded the easy smile from his face. The dark hair was gone, shaved. Though his eyes still burned, the fire was distant now, cold, as the fire in her father’s eyes had been. Adare might not even have recognized him, were it not for that one day on the seaward wall a decade earlier. What she saw, when she looked at him now, was that stillness, that silence, that utterly unfathomable gaze.

  “Your return to the city was not a matter of desire,” Kaden said finally. “It was a matter of necessity.”

  She shook her head, weary and confused. “If we were going to be on the same side anyway, you could have decided to join forces a little earlier. Right when you got back to Annur, for instance. Instead of tearing each other apart, we could have been allies all this time, a united Malkeenian front.”

  “A united Malkeenian front,” Kaden repeated, studying her. Adare felt li
ke some rare bug beneath that gaze, a specimen carried in from the northern forests. “We’d need Valyn for that,” he went on after a moment. “Do you have any idea where he is?”

  Adare’s heart lurched inside her. She forced her face to stay still. She kept her eyes on the waves, kept lazily kicking her feet in the water as the awful scene played out inside her mind all over again: Valyn appearing from nowhere on the roof of the tower in Andt-Kyl; Valyn stabbing Fulton, her last Aedolian; the hot blood pumping from beneath Fulton’s armor; the guardsman’s body so horribly heavy as Adare tried to lift him; the way the steel refused to come free; Valyn threatening il Tornja, threatening to kill the only general who could save Annur; the knife light in Adare’s hand, then buried in her brother’s side; her own screaming like a spike in her skull.…

  Maybe there had been another choice, but she hadn’t seen it at the time. Without il Tornja, they would have been lost; the Urghul would have crushed all of Annur beneath the hooves of their horses months ago. Valyn had gone wild, had become half insane, judging from the look in his eyes. He’d been nothing at all like the boy Adare remembered; all the play was gone, all the joy and mischief, replaced by hate, and horror, and black, obliterating rage. And so she’d done what she needed to do to save the empire. Adare had been over her own reasoning scores of times, hundreds, since watching his limp body tumble from the tower’s top into the waves below. She could find no other choice—not then, not in the long months since. That knowledge did nothing to stop the nightmares.

  “The last time I saw Valyn,” she replied, careful to meet Kaden’s eyes, to keep her voice level, not too loud, skirting the border of indifference, “he was a kid getting on a ship for the Qirin Islands.”

  She forced herself to breathe in once, then out slowly. A lie, like a midwinter fire, was not a thing to rush.

  Instead of responding, Kaden just watched her with those burning eyes. No emotion played over his face. He might have been looking at a blank wall, or a patch of ragged grass, but he kept looking, on and on, until Adare felt a sweat break out on the back of her neck.