The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Adare tried to parse the claim, to make sense of it. “They seem a lot more opinionated than the walls.”

  Kiel spread his hands. “As I said, the analogy is imperfect. Reality is not a house. Foundational principles of order and chaos, being and nothingness…” He trailed off, shrugged again. “They’re not just stones.”

  “The point,” Kaden said, breaking into the conversation for the first time, “is that if you knock out the foundation, walls fall down.”

  Kiel frowned. “Meshkent and Ciena are hardly foundational. Not in the way of Ae and the Blank God, Pta and Astar’ren.”

  “I get it,” Adare cut in. “For whatever reason, if you destroy Meshkent and Ciena, you destroy what’s built on them. Shatter the parents and the children crumble.”

  The words made her think of Sanlitun, swaddled in his cradle in a cold castle at the empire’s very limit. There had been no choice but to leave him. Annur was a den of wolves; Adare had no doubt that there were a dozen members of the council who would leap at the chance to see the child murdered. He was safer in the north, safer in Nira’s care—and yet, what would happen to him if Adare herself were killed? How long would the ancient Atmani woman watch over him?

  “It makes sense, in a way,” Kaden went on, jolting Adare from her thoughts. “Imagine you had no capacity to feel pain or pleasure.”

  With an effort of will, she hauled her mind away from that castle, away from the son of hers who at that very moment might be sleeping or fretting, squirming or crying out, forced herself to focus. The only way to save him, the only true way, was to win.

  “Physically?” she asked.

  “Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. No pain or pleasure of any sort.” He shook his head, staring down at the charred ruin she had made of Kresh, and Sia, and Ghan. “Why would you feel any of the rest of it? Why would you feel fear or hate or love? How would you feel them?”

  Adare tried to imagine such an existence, to conceive of a life lived in the utter absence of … what? Not sensation. That wasn’t it. The Csestriim could feel the wind when it blew, could hear the plucking of a harp as well as any human. Theirs wasn’t a failure to apprehend the world. It was a failure to feel, as though the meaning, the importance were leached from all experience, leaving only the desiccated facts pinned to the mind like glittering insects, exotic butterflies—all bright, brilliant, dead.

  She looked at Kiel, then shuddered. She had known the Csestriim were different—smarter, older, immortal. She had read all the most famous accounts, understood that they were creatures of reason rather than passion. Somehow, she had never quite realized what it all meant, the bleakness of it. The horror.

  “We would be like you,” she murmured.

  Kiel nodded gravely. “If you survived at all.”

  “Why wouldn’t we survive?”

  The historian gestured to Kaden. “I have tried to explain this to your brother. Your minds are not built like ours. You rely on your loves and your hates, your fears and hopes, to move you, to guide you.” He gestured toward Adare. “Why are you here?”

  “Because this is where we agreed to meet.”

  “Not here in the map room. In Annur.”

  “Because someone has to fix this wreck we’ve made of the empire.”

  The historian raised his brows. “Oh? Why?”

  Adare floundered. “Because people are depending on us. Relying on us. Millions of them will starve, or succumb to disease, or end up on the blades of the Urghul.…”

  “So what?”

  “So what?”

  Kiel smiled a careful, almost delicate smile. “Yes. So what? You’re going to die anyway. All of you. It is what happens to your kind, how you are made. Does it really matter who does the killing? Or when?”

  “It matters to me,” Adare snapped. She stabbed a finger at the wall, a wordless invocation of the uncounted souls living in the city and beyond. “It fucking matters to them.”

  “Because an Urghul slaughter would pain you. A resurgence of the gray plague would hurt you…” He reached over to tap her very lightly on the head, just below the hairline. “… here.”

  “Yes!”

  “Your general wants to make a world in which it would not. He thinks you will become like us, then.”

  Adare stared. “And you? What do you think?”

  “You might change,” he conceded, nodding to Kaden. “Some of you, those with the right training.”

  “And the rest?” she demanded. “The ones who actually care?”

  Kiel looked down at the map, tilted his head to one side, then shrugged once more—a human gesture, but empty of all human feeling.

  “There is no way to be certain,” he replied. “I believe your minds would twist beneath the strain, crack, then shatter.”

  15

  “All right,” Gwenna said wearily, settling herself on a knobby mangrove root, feet dangling in the warm water, “now that we’re all good and bloody, maybe someone can start explaining what in Hull’s name is going on.”

  The woman, Qora, hissed in irritation. “We’re not safe here. They’ll have birds in the air—”

  “Last time I checked,” Gwenna said, cutting her off, “birds can’t see through forest canopy, and neither can the people who fly them. Birds are excellent, on the other hand, at spotting the bobbing heads of desperate swimmers in full daylight, so if you want to keep swimming, then by all means,” she gestured toward the bright light filtering through the seaward verge of the mangroves, “swim.”

  Not the most diplomatic approach, maybe, but it had been a long night. Gwenna had only counted ten or so of the Kettral—the ones with the blacks and the birds—in the central square. As she fled through the streets, however, dragging Qora along by the elbow, then the shoulder, then the back of the neck, the bastards kept turning up, leaping out of alleyways, dropping off rooftops. Gwenna killed at least three, Qora finished off one more, but they just kept coming. It made sense, in retrospect: if you were going to burn down a whole town, you wanted to bring enough soldiers to do the job right.

  In the end, it was the night that saved them—Hull’s darkness covering their retreat. That and the tortuous trail over the ridge. Gwenna could see the path just fine in the starlight, but Qora kept tripping, lurching into the thick vines to either side. Judging from the calls and curses behind them, their pursuers were having an even tougher time—more evidence that they weren’t true Kettral, that wherever they’d scrounged up those smoke steel blades, however they’d managed to wrangle their way onto the birds, they’d never been down into Hull’s Hole, never been bitten by the slarn, never chugged that disgusting slop from inside the egg. It was an advantage. A small one, but Gwenna wasn’t in a position to be choosy.

  Annick and Talal had met them at the beach in the dim hour before dawn. The leach was half carrying a young man with a head wound, the other half of Qora’s sloppily laid trap. He was pale-skinned, his shaved head a white reflection of Qora’s own. His shirt had torn away during the escape, and when he doubled over to puke, Gwenna noticed the spreading wings of a kettral tattooed across his broad shoulders.

  “Jak,” Qora had gasped, lurching across the sand toward the reeling soldier, clutching his shoulders as though he were made of dirt and starting to crumble, as though she meant to hold him together with nothing more than the force of her hands. “Are you all right?”

  He’d nodded unsteadily, pushing himself free of Talal. Blood sheeted his face, obscuring his features. “Looks worse than it is…”

  “Can you swim?” Gwenna asked.

  Jak glanced at the black, lapping waves. “Normally, yes, but…” He raised his fingers gingerly to the nasty gash across his scalp, swayed, then shuddered. “I … maybe…”

  “Maybe’s not good enough,” Gwenna replied. She pointed at the cliff above. Even in the dark, their pursuers were getting close. “If you can’t swim, you’re on your own.”

  “He’s a liability if we leave him alive,” Annick
said.

  Qora spun about to confront the sniper. “What are you suggesting?”

  “That we bring him,” Annick said, not bothering to look over. “Or we kill him. I’m fine either way.”

  The man named Jak stared at Annick, then turned to Gwenna. “Who in Hull’s name are you?” he whispered.

  “No one,” Gwenna said. There was something about the man, about his voice or his bloody face, that nagged at her memory, but she couldn’t place it. “Just sightseeing. Heard Hook was nice this time of year. Now get in the fucking water. Head north.”

  “Look at him,” Qora demanded, leaning forward. “He can barely stand. We need a different plan.”

  “By all means,” Gwenna said, gesturing to the ocean behind them, the tiered limestone looming above. “I always enjoy hearing plans.” She paused, put a cupped hand to her ear. “If you wait just a minute, our friends on the ridgeline will be here. You can tell them about it, too.”

  Qora’s jaw tightened. “Leave us, then, if you’re scared. We’ll take care of ourselves.”

  “Because that’s been working out so well.”

  “Gwenna,” Talal said, gesturing to the east. “Normally I’d take the time to talk, but…”

  She nodded, turning back to Qora. “Look. I understand that you like this guy. Maybe he’s your pasty brother. Maybe the two of you have been grinding hips when you should have been training. Doesn’t matter. I’m not sure if you were paying attention back there, but he abandoned you. I was watching when those bastards in black tightened their net, and do you want to know what he did?”

  Waves ground a thousand thousand small stones down the surface of the narrow beach. The west wind had picked up, flicking spray off the sea. The shouts on the cliff were closer, at least ten voices, male, angry, and confused. Annick half drew her bow and stepped out from the shadows, eyeing the rough trail they had just descended.

  “Give the word,” the sniper said. “I’ll have a shot as soon as they come over the ridge.”

  Gwenna shook her head. “They’re just guessing we’re down here. No reason to confirm it.” She turned her attention to Jak once more, trying again to remember where she’d seen him, how she remembered him.

  “How about it, asshole?” she said, raising an eyebrow. “You want to tell your lady friend how you left her to twist in the wind?”

  She had expected defiance or fury, expected him to snarl or come at her. Instead, his face crumpled. It took a moment for her to realize, shocked, that the star-bright lines carved through the drying blood smeared across his face … those were tears.

  “I couldn’t…,” he began. “I just … I couldn’t.…”

  Some old instinct shifted inside her; pity, she realized after a moment. Whoever the poor fucker was, he wasn’t Kettral. Not everyone had trained half a lifetime to face down a dozen killers in a crowd. Clearly, Jak hadn’t volunteered to battle men with smoke steel blades and murderous birds, and he was hardly the first person to freeze like a fawn when the blood started flying.

  None of that mattered. What mattered was getting away, getting clear. Gwenna had always been a shitty card player, but it was time to bluff, so she took a deep breath and bluffed: “You can swim, or I can kill you quick. Your call.”

  Jak’s head jerked up. She saw the fear blaze through his eyes, hot and bright as lightning. She might have felt bad, but there was no time for feeling bad.

  She slid her knife from the sheath. “I’ll count to one.”

  The man held up his hands. “I’ll swim.”

  * * *

  Gwenna ended up having to drag him the last few hundred paces, stroking with one arm and scissor-kicking hard while she kept the other hand clamped over his chest. It was a pain in the ass, but it worked. They reached a thick stand of mangroves just before dawn, slipping into the twisting waterways between the roots. Anyone trying to track them would need to do so over a mile of open ocean, and the mangroves themselves would pose even more difficulty for their pursuers.

  As a cadet, Gwenna had always hated the mangrove stands—the trees were too thick to allow swimming, the water too deep for easy wading, the branches just the right level to take out an eye. You could spend half a morning covering half a mile, especially if you were trying not to make noise. Bad territory for training exercises, but a great spot to regroup. There’d been no sign of pursuit since the beach, but that wasn’t a reason to get stupid. Whatever the next step, she planned to wait out the daylight among the knobby, twisted trees. Which gave them all plenty of time to get acquainted.

  Gwenna eased back against one of the trunks, balanced a naked blade on her knees, then pointed a finger at Qora.

  “So. Where should we start?”

  “We can start,” Qora spat, “with the fact that you blew our best chance at killing those bastards.”

  For a moment Gwenna could only stare.

  “You have got to be kidding,” she said finally.

  “I’m not kidding. We had it set up, Jak and I. We’d figured the whole scene, and then you assholes showed up, whoever the fuck you are.…”

  Qora trailed off, breathing hard. Gwenna looked over at Talal, wondering if she was losing her mind. The leach just shrugged. He was sitting on a twisted root a pace away, a hand on Jak’s shoulder, steadying the man as he vomited up the last salt water from the swim. It was disgusting, but at least it kept him from talking. The more Qora talked, the more Gwenna wanted to spend a little time drowning her.

  “You were about to get killed…,” Gwenna said, trying to keep her voice level, reasonable.

  “No!” Qora said, eyes huge and furious. “I had an exit. You didn’t see how we set it up.”

  “And did you see the men moving toward you through the crowd?”

  The woman nodded. “I saw both of them.”

  Gwenna raised her brows. “Both? There were five.”

  “Henk and his gang were still on the dock.”

  Gwenna shook her head. “You were looking at the wrong thing.”

  “I was looking at the sons of bitches who have been hunting us like dogs for the better part of a year.”

  “Like I said,” Gwenna replied. “The wrong thing.”

  Jak groaned, then raised his head. “What do you mean?” he asked quietly. The long swim had washed the blood from his face, and Gwenna studied him for a few heartbeats, tumbling his name over and over in her head. Jak. Who in Hull’s name was Jak? The answer eluded her, as it had all night. She turned back to Qora.

  “Look at this,” she said, holding a hand above her head, fluttering the fingers slightly. Qora looked up. Gwenna drove a fist into her gut, caught the back of her neck, and shoved her head underwater. The woman struggled and splashed, clawed indiscriminately at Gwenna’s leg, at the sprawling mangrove roots, battered pointlessly at the water. Annick shifted to avoid the thrashing. Qora was stronger than she looked, but strong didn’t matter much when you couldn’t breathe. Jak, eyes huge as plates, started to move, but Talal brought him up short with a knife at the neck.

  “Don’t worry,” Gwenna said, satisfied to hear that she’d kept the anger out of her voice. “It’s all right.”

  She counted to fifteen, then dragged the woman up, shoving her into one of the mangrove trunks just in time to avoid getting puked on. Qora choked and coughed and swore, looked like she was going to lunge for Gwenna, then subsided, jaw clenched with suppressed fury, brown eyes ablaze.

  “If you keep looking at the wrong things,” Gwenna explained patiently, “you’re not going to make it.”

  The woman coughed once more, hacking up half a lungful of water. “Fuck you.”

  “Not my type,” Gwenna replied. Her patience was fraying. She thought back to the Flea, tried to channel something of his unflappable calm. “We’re trying to help you.”

  “By drowning me?” Qora spat. “By putting a knife to my friend’s throat?”

  Gwenna looked over at Talal. “He’s all right.”

  The leach met her
eyes, then slipped the blade back into its sheath.

  “There,” Gwenna said. “Can we talk like adults now?”

  Qora shook her head. “Who are you?” she asked again.

  “We are confused,” Gwenna said. “Confusion makes us nervous, and when I’m nervous I start holding heads underwater. So maybe you could take the first turn answering questions.”

  On the whole, it felt like a very temperate proposition. Qora, however, didn’t look at all pacified. She looked ready to keep fighting, if you could call having your head stuffed under the water and held there fighting. Gwenna blew out a breath and got ready for the next round, but Talal leaned forward instead, putting a conciliatory hand between them.

  “We came to help,” he murmured.

  “That’s what I said!” Gwenna protested. “I already said that.”

  Talal nodded, but kept his eyes fixed on Qora. “We came to help,” he said again.

  “To help who?” Qora demanded.

  “Whoever’s fighting the men with the birds. Soldiers flying kettral have already killed some of our friends. They tried to kill us. If you’re against them, we’re with you.”

  Gwenna leaned back against the narrow trunk of the mangrove. Probably she should have let Talal do the talking from the start. He had a way of bringing people around without holding their heads underwater. She forced herself to relax, to close her eyes, to feel the late-morning sun filtering down through the leaves, bright and hot. She might not be great with the talking, but at least she understood when to shut up and get out of the way.

  “Those men with the bird,” Talal said. “They set the fire because the townspeople were helping you? Hiding you?”

  Qora nodded warily. “It was punishment. A lesson. They love their ’Kent-kissing lessons.”

  “And who are they?”

  “Kettral.” She spat the word.

  Talal frowned. “I didn’t recognize them, and I trained on these islands for almost a decade.” He glanced over at Gwenna, then Annick.

  “Nope,” Gwenna replied.