The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “I’ve killed for less.”

  The Urghul watched him a long time. Valyn’s palms were sweating. His heart galloped inside his ribs. He felt as though he might pass out, but he did not pass out. Finally a new expression crept onto the woman’s face.

  “These fools are harmless,” she said, gesturing to Valyn’s family. “I can leave them behind, leave them alive.”

  The stranger started to nod, but she cut him off with a raised hand.

  “But you, Malkeenian, are far from harmless. You left me alive once, and it nearly killed you. I will not make your mistake.”

  “If you think you can kill me,” he said quietly, “you are welcome to try.”

  He sounded ready, though to kill or to die, Valyn couldn’t say.

  “I don’t want you dead. I want you to join us.”

  The man in black narrowed his eyes. “Why would I join a band of Urghul savages?”

  Huutsuu smiled. “Because these Urghul savages will kill the leach who corrupts our people. Who profanes our god.”

  “Balendin.” The name—if it was a name—sounded like a curse.

  “Like us,” Huutsuu replied, “you hate the leach. I remember this well.”

  The stranger hesitated, then shook his head. “I hate a lot of people.”

  She shrugged. “This is a start.”

  “I don’t need a start.”

  “Yes,” Huutsuu said. “You do. For half a year, you say, you have been prowling these forests like a diseased wolf. I offer … another path.”

  “I don’t want your path. I’m delighted with my own.”

  Huutsuu’s eyes flashed. “And if you do not join us, I will kill you, then offer this family to the god. Slowly.”

  The stranger studied her a long time, features expressionless as worn granite. “Why?” he asked, the word a growl.

  She shrugged. “I need warriors. And whatever else you are, you are a warrior.”

  “If you need warriors, then what in Hull’s name are you doing up here? You’re miles from any kind of fight.”

  “We’re looking for ghosts, Malkeenian. Three of them. People like you.”

  The stranger jerked as though struck, half raised his remaining ax, bared his teeth, as though he were about to leap upon the woman and hack out her heart.

  His words, when he finally spoke, were cold as winter stone. “What people?”

  Huutsuu shook her head slowly. “We have no names, but they wear black,” she gestured toward the stranger’s shredded clothes, “like you. Only three, but for many months they have plagued us. They attack our messengers and our warriors, sometimes come into full camp to do their killing. Those who give chase come back empty-handed, or they do not come back at all. They have no horses, these three, but they are fast, and they strike always at night.”

  “So…” Something that might have been a smile twisted the stranger’s lips. “You want to join them? To help them? I thought Annurians were a weak, degenerate people.”

  “Not these. They are hard as any Urghul. More, they are Annurians, like the leach who leads my people. They may know how to kill him.”

  “It sounds like they’ve been trying,” the man in black replied. “Failing.”

  Huutsuu waved the words away. “They are only three. It is a hard thing for them to move among my people. Together, though, we could open the throat of this leach.”

  “If they don’t open your throat first. If they’re so dangerous, they might find you first, kill you.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. You will join us. You will explain the way of things to these Annurians.”

  The stranger lowered his ax, hesitated a long moment as though torn, then shook his head. “No. I am finished with all this.”

  Huutsuu shrugged. “Then we will fight, and when the fight is through, I will give this family to the god.”

  Valyn could only watch, aghast. He understood almost none of it. He didn’t know who Long Fist was, or Balendin, or why this man had been hiding in the woods, or how he knew the woman, or why that woman kept calling him Malkeenian, as though he were some Annurian emperor. All he knew was that his own family’s fate hung in the balance. If the man said yes, they might live. If he said no, something terrible was going to happen. He was sobbing, he realized, moaning into the dirt.

  “It’s all right, Valyn.” His mother’s voice from across the clearing. “Just stay still, son. It’s going to be all right.”

  He looked up to see her staring at him, a hand half outstretched. Urghul spears blocked her way, and Urghul horses, but he could see her eyes, could hear her voice.

  “It’s all right, Valyn, my son. It’s all right.”

  Off to his right, the stranger shifted. Valyn glanced over to find the man staring down at him.

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Valyn,” he stammered. “Named for the prince,” he said. “The Emperor’s oldest son.”

  Why the man cared, he had no idea, but talking wasn’t killing. Please, he prayed inwardly, offering the words up to any god that would listen, please let us just keep talking.

  And then, to his shock, Huutsuu was laughing. She was watching the man in black and laughing uncontrollably. The stranger glanced up at her, then back at Valyn, studying him. Finally, something seemed to go slack in his shoulders. He nodded.

  “Fine,” he growled. “Getting tired of stealing the food from this kid’s trap anyway.”

  “Of course you’ll come,” the Urghul woman replied, as though she’d known it all along, as though all the drawn bows and leveled spears had been just for show. “Your flesh is hard, but there is still a softness in your heart.”

  The man looked anything but soft when he fixed her with his gaze. “You may regret this,” he said.

  She smiled. “That’s what makes it interesting.” She turned away from the stranger, barked a few commands, and the Urghul were riding out of the clearing, ignoring Valyn and Valyn’s parents as though they were no more consequential than dirt where they had fallen. Valyn could only stare as the man in black reached down, dragged him to his feet by the front of his tunic, then fixed him with that ravaged stare.

  “You’re brave, kid. And you’re good. Whatever your name, you’re better than any fucking emperor’s son. You got that?”

  Valyn nodded hesitantly. The man watched him a long time, then nodded.

  “Good,” he said roughly, then turned away to cross the clearing. He wrenched his short ax free from the flesh of the slaughtered Urghul, then kicked the body clear as though it were a piece of rotten wood, good for nothing; not building, not even the fire.

  13

  “Adare is lying,” Kaden said.

  Kiel studied him by the low light of the lamp. Kaden had returned to his study on the thirtieth floor of the Spear almost immediately after his conversation on the docks, pausing only to send a servant in search of the historian. The wait gave him time to mull over the conversation with his sister, staring out the ironglass walls at the city below while he worked through every gesture, every phrase, trying to see the truth beneath the words. By the time Kiel arrived, night had nearly fallen, and Kaden’s darkest suspicion had calcified into certainty.

  “About what?” Kiel asked, plucking an olive from a wooden bowl on the table, then joining Kaden at the clear wall.

  Kaden paused to summon up the saama’an of his sister’s face once more, examining her eyes, her mouth, the tension around her jaw. After considering the still image, he scrolled the vision forward slowly, pausing on the moments when she hesitated or looked away.

  “Not everything,” he said finally. “But where Valyn is concerned, she’s holding something back.”

  Kiel kept his eyes on the city below. His expression was flat, impassive, as he waited silently for the rest of it.

  “When I made contact with Gwenna and her Wing,” Kaden went on quietly, “I learned a little more about Valyn. Talal—the leach—said that Valyn made contact with Adare in Aats-Kyl—the to
wn at the southern end of Scar Lake—days before the actual battle.”

  “And your sister,” the historian concluded, “claims not to have seen him at all.”

  “That’s right,” Kaden said, then shook his head. “But why?”

  Once again, he studied the image carved across his mind.

  In some ways, Adare was instantly recognizable, the woman who had grown from the girl to whom Kaden had bidden farewell on the Annurian docks all those years earlier. The eyes, of course, were unmistakable—Adare’s had always burned the brightest, the hottest, even when their father was still alive. The lines of her face, too, he recognized, long and lean, high cheekbones and a narrow jaw. All of her physical attributes, as he studied them one by one, seemed consistent with the slender girl he remembered from his childhood.

  There was something else, however, a new cast to her face or her features, a look at once obvious and ineffable that had nothing at all to do with the girl she had been. Kaden stared into his sister’s eyes, trying to shape their strangeness into words. She was more …

  He closed his own eyes, blotting out the familiar sights of his father’s study, focusing more intently on the image he had etched into his brain. There were Adare’s scars, of course, a delicate red tracery seared into her skin by the lightning strike at the Everburning Well. Thousands of men and women accounted her a prophet for those very scars, for having survived the ordeal at the Well at all, and yet for all their strangeness, the scars were just scars—smooth, raised flesh bright in the day’s remembered light.

  “Adare has changed…,” Kaden began, then trailed off.

  “It is natural,” Kiel replied. “Your kind has always been … unstable, impermanent. Like all humans, like yourself, Adare is a creature in flux.”

  “No,” Kaden said, shaking his head. “It’s more than that. Or different than that. She’s older, but she is also … deeper. Harder. There is more to her, somehow, than I remember, and not just more, but different, as though she were broken, and that break were mended with something foreign to her nature. She reminds me of Valyn.”

  “Human nature is not fixed,” Kiel said. “You are always shifting, changing. Normally your kind does not notice the alteration because it takes place gradually, over weeks and years. You, however, were separated from your siblings for a long time; now you are trying to accommodate that change, to make sense of it, all at once.”

  Kaden exhaled slowly, letting the saama’an go with the breath, then opening his eyes.

  “According to Talal,” he said, taking the facts, setting them carefully into place one by one, as though they were stones forming the foundation of a new wall, “Valyn wanted to kill il Tornja. Long Fist gave my brother both freedom and weapons to do just that. Valyn crossed the border with Talal and Laith. They found Adare and il Tornja at Aats-Kyl, draining the lake to allow the army to pass. Valyn spoke with Adare then. She convinced him that il Tornja was necessary in the coming battle with the Urghul. She convinced Valyn to spare him until after Andt-Kyl. According to Talal, Valyn lay in wait for the general, along with Talal himself, on top of the tallest tower in Andt-Kyl—some sort of signal tower for boats coming up from the south. Talal didn’t see what happened next, he went down to fight Balendin, but we know from Adare that il Tornja was also atop that tower commanding the battle, along with Adare herself.…”

  He let the silence say the rest.

  After a long pause, Kiel nodded. “Your conclusion seems likely. Perhaps inevitable.”

  Kaden hesitated, then sloughed off his own mind, sliding first into the vast emptiness of the vaniate, and then, after a pause, into the imagined contours of a different mind, one that might have belonged to his brother. The beshra’an was an imperfect skill, especially when you weren’t certain of the person you aimed to inhabit, of their actions and habits, the recurring patterns of emotion. Though they were brothers, Kaden knew almost nothing of Valyn. Their paths had forked too early in life, their reunion had been too brief and baffled by fighting and flight. Still, when he settled his own mind into the shape of Valyn’s thoughts, a few things seemed clear: Valyn wanted il Tornja dead, and he wouldn’t ever quit.

  Kaden had never come within a hundred miles of Andt-Kyl, but he could imagine the tower, a precarious pile of roughly mortared stone at the north end of the lake. He could imagine Valyn lying on the roof watching the battle below, torn between a desire to take part, to fight beside his friends, and his determination to see il Tornja killed. According to Talal, he had sacrificed everything to stay on that roof. When the battle was finished, when he finally had the opportunity …

  Kaden’s eyes slammed open. He let his brother’s mind go.

  “He attacked. He tried to kill il Tornja, and he failed.”

  “It fits,” Kiel said slowly, “with what you learned from Gwenna and Talal.”

  “And it fits with who he was. Even if Valyn knew il Tornja was Csestriim, even if he knew he couldn’t win, he wouldn’t have quit. He would have tried to carry out his mission.”

  Only when Kaden trailed off did he hear his own words: who he was. At some point, lost in the beshra’an, he’d started speaking of his brother in the past tense. He turned his mind once more to the memory of his sister. He contemplated her face, the way she averted her eyes when he asked her about Valyn.

  “He’s dead,” Kaden said. “And Adare knows it. If she was on the tower, she saw him killed.”

  “Or killed him herself,” Kiel added quietly.

  Kaden felt a sick sorrow twist around him. For a moment, he began to reach for the vaniate, then resisted. Maybe the Csestriim was right about the dangers of living too long inside the emptiness, and maybe he wasn’t, but this … if it was true … was something he needed to face. What would it mean, after all, if his sister had killed his brother and Kaden himself felt no sorrow, no anger, no horror? If human beings were no more than the tangled sum of their experience, what was a person who had no experience, who sidestepped it, whose emotions remained unsnared by the cords of the world? Despite its allure, the vaniate of the Shin was a cold thing, alien, alienating.

  “I don’t think she could have killed him,” Kaden said finally, shaking his head. “Not unless she put a knife in his back.”

  “Regardless of who wielded the knife,” Kiel said, “it seems likely, more than likely, that Valyn tried to kill il Tornja. He failed, then died for his failure. Adare knows all of this.”

  “So ruthless,” Kaden said, shaking his head. “And for what? So she can sit the throne? So she can wear the imperial title?”

  He tried to inhabit his sister’s mind, but he knew even less of Adare than he did of Valyn. The shapes of her actions and decisions made no sense. For several heartbeats he struggled to achieve some version of the beshra’an, then gave up. He had long ago accepted that there were some people—Rampuri Tan, Pyrre Lakatur, even his own father—that he would never really know.

  “Adare was lying about Valyn,” Kaden said finally, “but she was telling the truth about Meshkent.”

  “And what truth,” Kiel asked, cocking his head to the side, “did she tell?”

  Kaden took a deep breath. This was a part of the conversation that he had so far failed to parse. The facts were clear, but the implications remained beyond him. Which was why he needed Kiel’s counsel.

  “Long Fist—Meshkent—is using the kenta.”

  The Csestriim studied him a moment, then leaned back, eyes suddenly elsewhere. Kiel was generally very good at hiding his true nature, but this look, one Kaden had seen before, always when the historian was trying to work through some intractable problem, was not human at all. “She knows this for certain?” he asked at last.

  “She believes it. Il Tornja believes it. It explains the coordination of the attacks on Annur’s borders, explains how everything seems to be falling apart all at the same time.”

  “It explains more than that,” the Csestriim said quietly.

  “Meaning what?”

&nbs
p; “Long Fist is not simply Urghul.” Kiel seemed to be studying the stars through the glassy walls of the Spear. “He is also one of the Ishien. Their commander, in fact.”

  Kaden stared. The words were simple enough, and the meaning behind them, but there seemed no way to thread this claim into the world’s densely woven fabric. It didn’t fit. And if it could be made to fit, the implications …

  “Matol was the commander,” Kaden said slowly, rehearsing his own beliefs, as though to speak a thing were to make it true. “Triste destroyed him with the kenta.”

  Kiel shook his head. “Matol was only a lieutenant, one who had been left in charge a long time, many years—but still just a lieutenant. There was another man they spoke of: Horm. I never met him.”

  Kaden ransacked his memory, sorting through the conversations. Tan had never mentioned the name, nor had Matol, but it was there, lodged in the back of his mind, recollected from an offhand remark of one of his jailors: Rampuri Tan was a Hunter. Almost as tough as Bloody Horm, least in some ways. In the moment, Kaden had been too curious about Tan’s past to ask anything more about the man to whom he was compared, and there had been no reason to revisit the comment later. The Dead Heart had been filled with hard men, and he’d had no intention of getting to know them all.

  “So Horm was on the steppe,” Kaden said slowly, the stones of his thought locking into place. “He was Ishien pretending to be Urghul, pretending to be Long Fist.”

  Kiel shook his head. “Not quite. Long Fist, that physical body, is Urghul—he has the skin, the eyes, the hair. It’s hard to say when Meshkent inhabited that body—probably when Long Fist was still on the steppe, maybe after he’d joined the Ishien—but the Ishien piece is crucial.” Oddly, he smiled. “I should have seen it so much earlier.”

  “You said you never even met Horm.”

  “It is hardly an excuse. The pattern was there.”

  Kaden frowned. “So Meshkent inhabited Long Fist, united the Urghul…”

  Kiel shook his head. “No. His triumphant return to the steppe would have happened after he joined the Ishien, perhaps long after. The Ishien do this sort of thing all the time—take on new identities, worm their way into communities all over Vash and Eridroa, often for years. For decades.”