The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “My rabbit,” Valyn said stupidly, words spilling out of him as he stared. “You been stealing from my snares.”

  The stranger grimaced. “You have bigger problems, kid.”

  Valyn took a step back, trying to keep some space between them, raising his hands. “I won’t tell no one. You can have the rabbit. You can have all of ’em. I’ll show you where the snares are.…” He was babbling, but he couldn’t stop himself. He’d seen something he wasn’t supposed to see, had caught this man who was barely a man with the stolen rabbit, and now he was going to die. Valyn glanced over his shoulder into the sluggish river. He could jump, could try to swim it out. Maybe the man in black didn’t know how to swim. He turned back just as the hand closed around his throat.

  Valyn felt his bladder give way. He tried to scream, but the hand wouldn’t let him. The man might look starved, but his grip was iron.

  “Quit squirming, kid. I’m trying to help you.”

  Stars screamed across Valyn’s vision. Everything started to go dark. He aimed a kick at the killer’s gut. Like kicking stone, he thought, just before he passed out.

  A hard slap across the face brought him back. The stranger had laid him out on the granite ledge, was kneeling beside him now, hand poised at his throat.

  “Don’t scream,” he said. “They’re far off, but that’s no reason to take chances.”

  He paused, raised his head. The movement—both wary and predatory—reminded Valyn of a lone wolf sniffing the air. After a moment, the man cursed quietly, then turned those awful, broken eyes back to Valyn.

  “You know who the Urghul are?”

  Valyn managed a weak nod.

  “They’re headed toward your cabin now. A small band of them. Maybe twenty. If you go back now, they’ll catch you, too. Hurt you. Kill you.”

  For a few heartbeats, Valyn struggled to make sense of the words. There were no Urghul this far north. He was safe here, he and his family both. They’d come here so they would be safe. The stranger was lying to him, was going to kill him.… He stared up at the man. Those eyes were worse than a skull’s hollow sockets. He was horrible, more terrifying than Valyn’s worst dream, but he wasn’t lying. A new horror bloomed inside Valyn. He tried to yank free, but the man held him down easily. It didn’t seem possible he could be so strong.

  “There aren’t any Urghul here,” Valyn protested. “They don’t come up here.”

  The stranger grimaced. “They didn’t. Now, it seems that they do.”

  “How do you know?”

  The man hesitated. “I can smell them,” he said finally. “Horses and blood. They reek.” He turned an ear to the wind. “I almost believe I can hear them.”

  It didn’t make sense. Valyn sucked in a huge breath. He didn’t smell any horses. The only thing he could hear was his own desperate panting.

  “If there’s Urghul, I gotta warn my folks, my brother.”

  The man in black shook his head grimly. “Too late for warning. Your cabin’s a long way off. They’re almost there.”

  “Then I’ll fight ’em!” Valyn said, trying again to twist free. This time, to his surprise, the man let him up.

  “Four against twenty? All you can do is die, kid.” He looked off blankly into the darkness between the trees, then shook his head. “Don’t go back.”

  Valyn expected something else, something more, but the man just turned on his heel. He even moved like a wolf, stalking toward the trees. He paused at the edge of the forest, turned, yanked the rabbit free of his belt, and tossed it to the ground in front of Valyn.

  “Yours,” he said, then turned away again.

  Valyn caught up with him a dozen paces into the hemlocks. Terror made him reckless, and he seized the stranger by the leather belt, pulled him back a moment, then found himself lifted by the front of his shirt, then slammed against the rough trunk of a tree. He could feel the jagged ends of the branches stabbing at him through his clothes as the man in black leaned close.

  “Never touch me,” he hissed.

  Valyn could barely breathe, but he forced himself to speak.

  “I need your help.”

  “You already got it.”

  “I need more. I need to save my family. You can fight.…”

  He couldn’t say how he knew. Something about the way the man moved, about those twin axes hanging from his belt, about the terrible strength that kept him pinned against the tree. He’s a warrior. The thought spun around and around in Valyn’s mind like an autumn leaf caught in an eddy. He’s a killer.

  “I can’t fight them alone,” Valyn pleaded. “I need your help.”

  “I don’t help.”

  The stranger held Valyn a moment longer, then dropped him.

  Valyn struggled to catch his breath, to get to his feet. One of the branches had torn through his leather tunic, tearing open a gash across his back. He could feel it bleeding. It didn’t matter.

  “You helped me,” he insisted. “You warned me. You’re not Urghul. You’re Annurian. You speak Annurian. And you warned me.”

  “It was convenient.”

  Valyn stared, aghast. He couldn’t get the vision of his burning cabin out of his head. This time in the morning, they would all be there—his father and mother chopping firewood for the fall; his brother digging the new well. He imagined his family bleeding, sprawled out on the ground, cut open, bled out like wild game.

  “Please,” he said, staying on his knees, staring up at the horrifying figure above him. “Please help me.”

  The stranger ground his teeth so hard Valyn thought his jaw might crack, that the tendons of his neck might snap in two. It was impossible to read the emotion on that face: Rage? Regret? He didn’t seem the type of person to feel regret, but he was hesitating, and that hesitation gave Valyn a faint, horrible hope.

  “Please,” he said again, voice barely louder than the breeze.

  “I need you to guide me,” the man said at last.

  Valyn nodded eagerly, lurching to his feet. “All right,” he said, stumbling down the low slope. “This way. Hurry!”

  After a dozen steps, he turned, realizing that the man in black hadn’t moved. He remained standing on the rock ledge, back turned to the morning sun, face lost in the shadow.

  “Please!” Valyn pleaded. “Come on!”

  The stranger shook his head slowly. “I can move through the forest alone, but I’m too slow.” Then, with a movement that was the opposite of slow, a gesture so fast Valyn didn’t have time to flinch, the man slipped one of the short axes from the belt at his side, spun it once in the air, then caught the haft below the head. He held the handle out toward Valyn. “Take the other end,” he said. “Lead the way. It’ll be faster.”

  For a moment, Valyn couldn’t move. He was terrified of what the stranger claimed was happening at his home, and terrified, too, of the stranger himself. Touching that ax, even the harmless butt of the wooden haft, seemed dangerous. More than dangerous. “What?” he asked, rooted to the spot by his conflicting horrors. “Why?”

  “Because,” the man replied grimly, “I’m blind.”

  * * *

  We’re too late.

  That was Valyn’s first thought when they burst into the narrow clearing.

  The cabin was still standing. Nothing was on fire. No one was screaming, but mounted men and women packed the small open space where Valyn’s family had cleared the trees to let in a little light. The riders looked like monsters. Their skin was too pale, their hair too yellow, their eyes too terribly blue. Urghul. The man in black had been right. Somehow, impossibly, the Urghul had come. They’d found Valyn’s home, Valyn’s family, and now it was all over, all finished.

  A scream scraped up his throat and out, shivering the late-morning air. Normally Valyn would have been ashamed of the thin, weak sound, but he was past shame, almost past fear, even. His legs shook beneath him, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe, like the air was all tangled up inside his chest. He felt like that chest might e
xplode. It felt like fear, and not like fear. Like something far worse than fear.

  He dropped the wooden handle of the ax and stumbled forward a step, searching for his belt knife, wondering if it would hurt when the Urghul killed him. A hand on his shoulder brought him up short. The stranger’s grip again, strong as stone. Valyn tried to twist free, but the man pulled him back.

  “Knock it off,” he growled. “Shut up. Get behind me.”

  “My family—”

  “—is still alive.” The man pointed to the shadow of the stacked woodpile, to where Valyn’s mother and brother stood pinned against the logs by the lowered lances of the horsemen. His father lay sprawled on the ground a pace away, blood seeping from an awful gash across his forehead. “Your family’s alive. Don’t do anything stupid, and they might stay that way.”

  Valyn felt his legs collapse beneath him, then he dropped like a deadfall stone.

  His mother jerked at the motion, noticing him for the first time, gave a strangled cry, tried to move forward, found steel at her throat, then subsided, tears streaking her cheeks. His brother met his eyes; he was trembling, either with fear or rage. Valyn’s own tears smeared his vision. Again he knew he should be ashamed, and again, the shame meant nothing. He would live with a lifetime of shame and worse than shame if only the Urghul would just ride on, would leave his family to their life here in this tiny clearing.

  “Huutsuu,” said the strange man with the axes.

  Valyn had no idea what the word meant, but most of the horsemen wheeled their mounts at the sound of this new voice. Spearheads glinted, bright in the unforgiving light. Bows creaked as the warriors took aim. There were enough to kill the man in black a dozen times over, but he didn’t seem worried.

  Of course he’s not worried, stupid, Valyn realized. He can’t see them.

  “They have bows,” he gasped. “They’re going to shoot—”

  Before he could finish the sentence, two of the horsemen loosed their shafts. They couldn’t miss from that distance. At eight paces, Valyn could hit a chipmunk darting along a branch, and the stranger was a lot larger than a chipmunk.

  And faster, too, as it turned out. So much faster.

  Valyn stared as the man slashed his arm up and across, the motion too quick to follow, too quick to be real … and yet there was an arrow shaft clattering uselessly into the needles just a few paces away. When Valyn turned back, he found the stranger holding the other arrow, the shaft snatched from the air just inches from his chest. He clenched his fist, and the arrow snapped.

  “Huutsuu,” he said again. “Check your warriors, or I will kill them.”

  The archers didn’t lower their bows, but they hesitated this time, obviously taken aback by what they’d just seen. Some were glancing over at a tall woman with streaming blond hair who was nudging her horse forward through the press. Valyn was no stranger to tough women—his own mother could spend half a day splitting rock maple with their eight-pound maul, then run her own circuit of traps before dark—but Huutsuu, if that was her name, made Valyn’s mother look old, weak. He felt as though he had been raised by a feral housecat, and was only now seeing a mountain lion for the first time. The Urghul woman wore hide leggings and a hide vest that did nothing to disguise the scars carved into her arms and across the flesh of her shoulders. When she shifted in her saddle, Valyn could see the muscle move beneath her skin. She carried a bow across the front of her saddle, but had made no effort to nock an arrow or to bring it to bear.

  She considered the man in black for a time, then shook her head.

  “So. Kwihna has seen fit to test you,” she said. “You are harder than when we last met.”

  The words sounded like a compliment. Valyn’s stomach squirmed inside him. The man in black knew the woman. What if they were friends? What if he decided not to stop her after all? What if he was one of the Urghul himself?

  Valyn glanced up at the stranger. His skin was too dark, and his eyes—but what did Valyn know about the alliances taking place beyond his family’s own quiet corner of the forest? Who was he to say that there weren’t Annurians—traitors!—in league with the horsemen? The Urghul had shot at the man in black, that was true, but then they’d stopped shooting. And the stranger had lied, lied about being blind.…

  Valyn started to inch through the needles, away from the stranger, toward the dubious safety of the forest. If he could slip away, maybe he could double back. There was a narrow gap between the stacks of wood. They could sneak out that way, get into the dense hemlocks where the horses wouldn’t be able to follow.…

  Pain exploded, bright and baffling, across the back of his head. He was facedown on the earth, mouth open, gagging on pine needles, nose filled with the reek of wet dirt and rotting things. Someone had hit him … the stranger … he’d attacked.…

  “I told you not to move,” the man said.

  Valyn began to raise himself up on his elbows, then caught his mother’s gaze from across the clearing. She didn’t speak, just shook her head slowly, carefully. She had a hand on his brother’s arm, holding him back. Kadare was strong, angry, quick to act. If he was keeping still, letting himself be held back, then it was important. It was necessary. Valyn subsided against the cool ground. He wanted to vomit, whether from the pain or the fear, he wasn’t sure.

  “Why are you here?” the stranger asked.

  Despite his claims about being blind, he had locked eyes with the woman. To Valyn’s amazement, she was able to hold that awful, wrecked gaze without flinching. The silence lasted a long time, as though the man in black and the mounted woman were both leaning against it, seeing who would collapse first. Finally the woman—Huutsuu, her name was—nodded curtly, as though she had made a decision.

  “We are looking. Hunting.”

  “Hunting.” The stranger shook his head, then spat into the litter of leaves. “Hunting what? A family of trappers? Doesn’t Long Fist have enough Annurians to murder down on the front?”

  “Long Fist is gone,” the woman replied.

  The man in black frowned. “Gone. Where?”

  “I don’t know. He told us to obey the leach, your friend. Then he left.”

  “Balendin.” There was rage in the stranger’s voice now. Valyn could see his fingers tighten around the haft of his ax. “Balendin is leading your people?”

  “Most of them,” Huutsuu replied.

  “Most?”

  The woman glanced over her shoulder at the other riders, then nodded. “It is not right. Some of us have had enough.”

  “I didn’t think you ever had enough. Pain is pain, right?”

  “You are harder, but still stupid.”

  “So teach me.”

  “We worship Kwihna. This foreign leach worships only himself. His killing is not a sacrifice; it is a hoarding up of his own power. There is nothing ennobling in it. Nothing ennobling in following such a creature.”

  The stranger grunted. None of it meant anything to Valyn, but as long as they were talking, as long as they were focused on each other, no one was murdering his family. He glanced across the clearing. His father was still unconscious in the dirt, but his brother had slipped clear of his mother’s grip, had used the distraction to pull a long log from the woodpile, wrapping his broad hands around it as though it were a weapon, as though he could fight his way free of two dozen Urghul with nothing more than a stick of firewood. Valyn’s mother had noticed, was struggling silently with him, trying to stop him, but he yanked free, pivoted, searching for a target.

  “Don’t!” Valyn shouted, but the nearest Urghul was already turning, swinging his spear around. Valyn’s mother lunged forward, trying to put herself between her son’s body and the leaf-shaped blade. She was fast, but the stranger’s ax was faster, flashing end over end through the center of the clearing, burying itself in the Urghul’s back with the sound of steel striking rotten wood. The horseman went all loose in the limbs, then fell silently. Before he hit the ground, Huutsuu was barking something in
her own language.

  The remaining Urghul looked angry, confused, but they didn’t continue the attack. Valyn’s mother wrested the log away from his brother, then dragged him back against the woodpile, her strong, sun-dark arm wrapped around him as he trembled with rage and shame, holding him close, whispering something in his ear that Valyn couldn’t hear.

  Huutsuu was watching the man in black, shaking her head. “Each time I see you, you kill my men.”

  “The last time I saw you, you told me they weren’t men if they let themselves be killed.”

  If the stranger was bothered to have only one ax left, it didn’t show. Nothing seemed to bother him. There was an angle to the way he stood, something in his posture or his face that seemed familiar. Rabid, Valyn realized suddenly. He’s like something rabid.

  Huutsuu’s laugh broke through the thought. The sound was chilling, like the howl of coyotes late at night, when they were closing in on their kill.

  “Why are you here?” she asked the man. “Where are your companions?”

  The stranger shook his head, as though the word companions had no meaning for him.

  “Keep going, Huutsuu,” he said quietly. “Leave these people alone.”

  “There is a danger in leaving alive those who hate you.” She smiled. “I thought that I had taught you this lesson.”

  “This family doesn’t hate you, Huutsuu. I’ve been watching them for half a year. They hunt and trap. They cut wood for the winter. They’re not part of the war. Leave them alone.”

  The woman hesitated, then shook her head. “I will kill them quickly.”

  “No,” he replied, voice flat. “You will not.”

  Again she laughed. “You are only one man, Malkeenian.”

  “And barely that,” the stranger muttered, so softly that Valyn almost missed the words. Then the man raised his chin and his voice both. “Ride or fight, Huutsuu. Ananshael can sort out the rest.”

  “Ananshael.” The woman grimaced, then blew out a long breath. “You would die for these people? You would kill for them?”