The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  She barked a laugh. “Just like that, eh?”

  He shrugged. “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t fucking trust you, Kaden. That’s why not. The first thing you did when you got back to Annur was to destroy it. You’re trying to stop il Tornja, or so you claim, but Ran il Tornja is the only one actually defending Annur.”

  “He is not defending Annur,” Kaden said quietly. “He’s trying to kill Long Fist.”

  “At the moment, it amounts to much the same thing.”

  “It would, if Long Fist were just an Urghul chieftain.”

  And so, after a long diversion, they were back to Long Fist. Adare had never even seen the man, and yet he seemed to be everywhere, the answer to every riddle, the fire beneath every column of smoke, the bloody battle at the end of every endless march. All paths led to him. Every scream could be traced back to his bright knives. Underneath every name she uttered—Kaden, il Tornja, Valyn, Balendin—underneath or above, she seemed to hear the name of the Urghul chieftain echoing.

  “And you think he is what?”

  Kaden took a deep breath, held it a moment, then blew it out slowly. “Long Fist is Meshkent.”

  Adare stared. The small hairs on her arm, on the back of her neck, stood up at once. The evening was cool, not cold, but she suppressed a shiver. Il Tornja had been saying the same thing for months, but she had never believed him, not really. “What makes you say that?”

  He narrowed his eyes, studying her. “You knew.”

  “I knew it was a possibility.”

  “Il Tornja told you.”

  She nodded carefully.

  “And did he tell you why he was so eager to see Long Fist destroyed?”

  “For the same reason that I am,” she said. “For the same reason that you should be. To protect Annur.”

  “Why would he want to protect Annur? He fought to destroy humanity, Adare. He nearly succeeded. Why would he care about one of our empires?”

  “Because it is not our empire,” she replied. The words were bitter, but she said them anyway. “It is his. He built it. He takes care of it.”

  “In the same way that a soldier cares for his sword.”

  “You keep saying that,” she said, “but you never get around to explaining how he’s planning to use that sword.”

  “To kill Meshkent.”

  “Why?”

  Kaden hesitated, then looked away.

  Adare blew out an angry breath. “If you expect me to believe you, Kaden, if you expect me to help you, then you have to give me something. Why are you so concerned about the health of Long Fist or Meshkent or whoever the fuck it happens to be? The bastard is putting our people to the sword and the fire, he’s leaping around through these ’Shael-spawned gates—your gates, these kenta—lighting fires at every corner of Annur. I’m not sure il Tornja’s reasons even matter, as long as he stops him.”

  For the first time, Kaden’s eyes widened. Something she’d said, finally, had made it past that shield he used for a face.

  “Long Fist is using the kenta?” he asked, a new note in his voice, one she couldn’t place. “How do you know that?”

  “I don’t know it. It sounds impossible to me, but il Tornja insists it’s true.”

  Kaden was shaking his head, as though resisting the claim.

  “I know you thought you and your monks were special,” she said, “but if il Tornja’s right, Long Fist is a god. Evidently gods can pass through the gates.”

  “It’s not the—”

  Kaden clamped his mouth shut.

  “What?” Adare pressed.

  It had seemed, for just a moment, that he was about to talk to her, to really talk, without the evasions and omissions that had marred the rest of their conversation. It had seemed as though they were about to push past some unseen barrier, some awful, invisible wall that stood between them even in the limpid evening air. It had seemed, for just a heartbeat, that he was about to speak, not as one politician to another, but as a brother to a sister, as someone who understood the weight and texture of her loss, the awful, echoing emptiness, someone who shared it. Then the moment passed.

  “It’s surprising,” he said brusquely. “Although it makes sense. The violence on the borders is too perfect, too well coordinated to be random.”

  Adare stared at him, willing him to say more, but he did not say more.

  “Nothing about it makes sense,” she snapped finally. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t be the truth.”

  Kaden nodded slowly.

  “So,” Adare said, breathing heavily, “are you still going to insist we should be worrying about il Tornja and not Long Fist?”

  “It’s starting to seem,” Kaden replied, “that we need to worry about everyone.”

  “Well, I’ve done more than worry,” Adare said. “I’ve got il Tornja collared. Under control.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll tell you when I trust you.”

  And suddenly, it didn’t seem so impossible, trust. Kaden had known more than she realized. Her lies hadn’t needed to be as wide as she had expected, nor so deep. The gap between them was just that, a gap, not a chasm. Intarra knew she could use an ally, one who wasn’t immortal or half insane.

  “Kaden,” she said quietly. “We need to be honest with each other.”

  He held her eyes and nodded slowly. “I agree.”

  “You’re my brother. We can figure this out together.”

  Again he nodded, but there was nothing behind the nod, no true agreement.

  “I wish Valyn were here,” he said after a pause.

  It didn’t seem like Kaden, like this new Kaden, to wish for anything. He was a monk now, and his monk’s training appeared to have put him beyond wishing, in the way that fish were beyond breathing. On the other hand, the Shin couldn’t have changed him entirely. He had confided in her. It was a start.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  It was the truth. Scholars and philosophers were forever lauding truth, holding it up as a sort of divine perfection available to man. The truth in those old texts was always shining, glowing, golden. As though they didn’t know, not any of them, that some truths were jagged as a rusty blade, horrible, serrated, irremovable, lodged forever in the insubstantial substance of the soul.

  12

  The deadfall was empty.

  For the fifth day running, something had triggered the snare, something strong enough to shift the bait stick, but quick enough not to be there when the huge rock came crashing down. Valyn stifled a curse as he knelt in the soft, loamy soil, sifting through the brown needles and dry hemlock cones, searching for some sign of a print. The deadfall wasn’t perfect. When he was too cautious in setting it, he’d find the bait stick licked clean while the snare remained untriggered. If he wasn’t cautious enough, the whole thing would end up lying in a jumble on the forest floor with no sign that an animal had come anywhere near. Sometimes the stone came down wrong, pinning a hare or a squirrel without killing it. Sometimes the larger creatures—beaver, porcupines—could haul themselves free. It wasn’t all that strange to find the snare empty. What was strange was finding it triggered day after day, finding animal tracks leading in and blood on the stone, but no carcass. No tracks leading away.

  “’Shael take it,” he cursed, resetting the trap with nimble fingers, trying once again to figure out what had gone wrong, how he could prevent it from going wrong again.

  It had to be a bird. A red eagle would be plenty strong enough to haul a bloody carcass out of the trap. A red eagle or even a balsam hawk. Birds would take the catch without leaving tracks.

  “But birds can’t lift the stone,” he muttered to himself, hauling with both hands on the flat slab of granite, grunting as he muscled it into position. Valyn could barely lift it himself—which seemed to rule out a bird after all. No—something else was stealing his catch, some creature strong enough to heave aside the huge stone, but smart enough to move over the soft ground without leaving a t
rack. Valyn tried to puzzle out what it might be, tried and failed.

  “Sure is a clever bastard,” he muttered. “Clever, clever, clever.”

  As though speaking that word aloud, repeating it, could drown out the other word, the more honest one prowling the back of his mind: not clever, but frightening.

  A cold wind gusted through the boughs. Hemlocks creaked, trunks packed so close together that even the dead trees still stood, forced to remain upright, supported by the living as they went to rot. Even at midmorning, sun filtered weakly through the branches, every lance of light casting a shifting shadow.

  Normally Valyn didn’t mind the gloom. He knew these woods better than he knew his own home, knew the softest, driest moss where he could catch a quick nap, the best trout holes in the meandering streams, the damp hollows where the mosquitoes swarmed most thickly, and the few sweet spots where the ferns and the breeze kept them at bay. The forest was his; he loved it. Today, though, as he straightened from the newly rigged snare, something felt off, wrong.

  He paused just long enough to smear the bait stick with suet, then, crouching low, slipped through a gap in the rough trunks, wanting suddenly to be away from the dark thicket, to get to somewhere he could see more than a dozen paces, somewhere he could actually run.

  It wasn’t far to the Jumping Rock—a low, lichen-crusted granite shelf leaning out over a bend in the river, and when Valyn reached it, he paused, hunkering on the lip to catch his breath. The sun had climbed well above the jagged tops of the eastern trees, high enough to burn off the last of the mist above the meandering current, to warm his skin. A little upstream, a trout rose for a fly; tiny waves radiated out from the disturbance, perfect circles on the green-brown water. Suddenly, Valyn felt foolish. Here he was, a boy of eight, jumping at forest shadows as though he were a baby. He offered up a silent prayer of thanks that his brother wasn’t along to witness his cowardice.

  “It’s a red eagle, sure,” he muttered aloud, changing his mind once more as he pondered the mystery of the snare. Out of the shadows, sitting comfortably on the rock’s rim, skinny legs dangling down over the water, it seemed like a reasonable answer. A rabbit had triggered the trap, then twisted itself partway free. The eagle could have seized the struggling creature without ever lifting the rock at all. He squinted, trying to picture the scene, the beak hooked in the blood-soaked fur. Definitely a red eagle.

  He put the question out of his mind, rooting in his leather sack for a twisted length of dried venison, then sat gnawing it contentedly, looking out over the water. There were still a dozen more snares to check, and one of them, surely, would have a squirrel or a hare, maybe even a fisher cat. And if not, well, he wouldn’t mind an afternoon going after one of those trout. There was still half a deer hanging up over the fire pit back in the cabin, and plenty of game in the forest. His mother might come home with another deer, or his father and brother with that bear they’d been tracking. It wasn’t as though the whole family was relying on Valyn.

  He had just settled back on the warm stone, half reclining as he chewed the dried meat, the morning’s agitation all but forgotten, when something made him jerk upright, hand on his belt knife. Skin prickling along his arms, he scanned the forest around him. There had been no noise, no bear’s growl or rabbit’s dying scream. If anything, the woods seemed more still, somber. Even the birds had gone quiet, their light song chopped off mid-note. Sweat slicked Valyn’s palms. He could feel his breath coming fast and ragged. Why were the birds so quiet?

  “Leave your knife where it is.”

  Valyn spun, searching for the speaker, eyes ranging desperately over the dark wall of the forest. He had to turn in place three times before he finally found the figure, a man almost all in black, standing motionless maybe ten paces away, cloaked in the deepest gloom of the silent pines and hemlocks, face hidden in shadow.

  Valyn’s heart lunged inside his chest as he lurched to his feet. His fingers scrabbled at his belt knife, trying to pull it free as he raised his other hand in a feeble defense. The man hadn’t moved, he had no weapon visible, but that hardly mattered. The simple fact of his presence was danger enough.

  Valyn’s parents had chosen this buggy, swampy stretch of nowhere precisely for the lack of people. After the Urghul arrived, and the Annurian armies, living in anything like a town became dangerous, even deadly. If the horsemen got you, they killed you, and they killed you slow. Valyn hadn’t seen the corpses, but he’d heard the stories, how they’d take people, stake them out, and then start skinning. Just the way you’d take the pelt off a beaver, only you killed the beaver first.

  The story was, the Annurian armies were there to protect the loggers and the trappers scattered through the northern woods. That was the story. The truth was, those armies were just as likely to take your winter’s store of meat and mead as they were to do any protecting. Valyn’s parents had tried to hide the worst from him, but he’d heard tales of Annurian soldiers demanding everything from blankets to bear meat, sometimes the coats right off those too defenseless to object. And that wasn’t even the worst of it; Valyn had heard whispers, sick stories of soldiers insisting on having their way with kids like him, the sons and daughters of the frontier families. It wasn’t right—it was a whole long way from anything even looking like something right—but if you refused, if you tried to fight back, the soldiers killed you. Killed you, or left you for the Urghul. Hard to say which was worse.

  And so Valyn’s parents had taken them away. Most folks who fled headed south. Valyn’s mother, though, wouldn’t hear of it. “What do we know about the south?” she had demanded of his father one night when the fire burned down to a few angry embers. “What do we know about cities? Or city people?”

  “It’s not all cities,” Valyn’s father had insisted. His father, who had never set foot outside the Thousand Lakes in his life. “There are farms.”

  “And what do we know of farming?”

  Valyn was supposed to be asleep, tucked beneath his furs in the far corner of the cabin, but through slit lids he’d watched his mother take his father’s face in both hands, pulling him close as though she meant to kiss him, then stopping short. “You’re a tracker, Fen. A tracker, a trapper, and a hunter. You’re a better man than any I’ve ever met, but you’re no farmer.”

  He could see his father’s jaw tense. “The forest isn’t safe anymore. We can figure out the farming later. Right now, we’ve got to get out.”

  “No,” she said slowly, shaking her head. “What we have to do is go deeper.”

  And so deeper they went, plunging north into territory Valyn had never seen before, untouched forest of balsam and hemlock and red spruce, territory only the hardest or the maddest had even tried to hunt or trap. They kept pushing until they were well north of the last logging villages, a week’s walk clear of the lines of battle spreading across the forests of the north, beyond the reach of Urghul and Annurian both. Valyn was starting to think they’d walk forever—all the way to Freeport, maybe, and the oceans of ice beyond that—but one day, just as the sun was setting, the wind blowing cold and hard out of the north, they came to a tiny clearing in the trees, a quiet, mossy spot from which you could see the gray peaks of the Romsdals looming to the north.

  “Here,” his mother said, putting down her pack on a low granite boulder.

  His father had smiled at that. “Here.”

  The next day they started building.

  When it was done, the cabin was larger than the one they’d left—two rooms with a fieldstone fireplace built into the wall. The day they lit that fire for the first time, Valyn’s father had taken his mother in his hairy arms, lifted her off her feet, then kissed her square on the lips despite her sputtering protestations.

  “You were right,” he said. “This is better than anything in the south.”

  Valyn had thought so, too. Exploring the new forests, choosing the best circuit for his own snares, claiming a portion of land that no one in the long history of the
world had ever claimed—it was all a small boy’s dream. If he sometimes longed for companionship, for other children to share his adventures, well, he had Kadare, two years older; Kadare, who had taught him even more than Mother and Father about hunting, trapping, and moving silently through the wilderness. Thanks to Kadare, these dark, dense forests felt like home. Until now.

  “I told you to leave the knife in the sheath,” the stranger said again, shaking his head grimly.

  That voice—low, hard, rough and rusted as a long-neglected tool—made Valyn shrink back, and the voice was the least of it. The man facing him looked more dead than alive, lean as a starving wolf at winter’s end, all the fat and softness scraped away until there was only skin stretched across corded muscle and bone. He wore something that might have been clothes once—leggings and a shirt of black wool so ripped and torn they offered less protection than Valyn’s own crude hides. Beneath the cloth, his flesh was scribbled with scars, small puckered marks and long seams running over his chest and arms. The wounds that left those scars should have killed him half a dozen times over, but he wasn’t killed. He was right there, standing just a few paces away, staring at Valyn, if staring was even the right word.

  There had been a blind man in the village where Valyn grew up, an old grandfather people called Ennel the Bent. Valyn had stared at Ennel’s eyes whenever he could, fascinated and a little frightened by the milky cloud splashed across the pupils. It had been strange, queasy-making, but old Ennel’s eyes were nothing beside those of the man who faced him now.

  The stranger’s eyes were … ruined. They looked as though someone had hacked straight across them with an ax. Blood, trapped somehow beneath the eyeball’s surface, washed the part that should have been white. The dark part around the pupil—the iris, Valyn remembered vaguely—was black as burned wood, blacker, dark as the dot at the very center, except for a ragged line of star-white scar. They didn’t look like a man’s eyes. They didn’t look like eyes at all. Valyn wanted to scream.

  “Keep your mouth shut,” the stranger said, stepping forward. He still hadn’t drawn a weapon, but Valyn could see the axes now, two of them, handles lopped short, hanging from a poorly tanned leather belt. Dangling from the same belt was the corpse of a rabbit, skull crushed and bloody.