The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Not that anyone had come after him so far. On leaving the crude homestead that morning, the Urghul had given him two horses, then utterly ignored him as the small band moved northwest through the trees. He might have been a sack of grain rather than a foreign warrior in their midst. Fitting, he thought grimly. Without his sight, he rode about as well as a sack of grain, crouching low over the withers, guiding the beast by the sound of those before him, trying not to get knocked from the saddle by low-hanging branches. The forest was so dense that, aside from a brief canter up a stony streambed, the Urghul couldn’t move much faster than a walk.

  Valyn had spent all day trying to sift through the scents coming off the horsemen. Beneath their leather and iron, he could make out the thick musk of weariness and a brassy, hammered determination. A few of the Urghul were angry—a smell he’d come to associate with rusting steel. That soft, rotten stench was fear—mostly it came from the taabe with the reeking leg wound. The man would be dead within the week, though he didn’t seem to realize it.

  Huutsuu’s scents were mingled almost too fully to decipher: there was rage mixed with a muddy cloud of doubt, thick and heavy, and there, hot with the heat of a summer pepper, something very close to excitement. She didn’t seem to mind the endless, fly-plagued swamps of the northern forests, or if she did, she had hammered flat her own irritation.

  As he sifted through her scent for the tenth time, Valyn realized the woman was approaching, bare feet almost silent in the fallen needles. He shifted his focus, shoving aside everything but the approaching Urghul. Her heart beat steady and even, but he could taste her wariness. Valyn put his hand on his belt knife, but made no move to stand.

  She stopped two paces away, out of easy reach, then watched him silently for a while before speaking.

  “You believe I gave you horses and water at dawn only to kill you in the dusk?”

  Her voice was full and raw as the smoke rising from the strips of cooking meat. The memory of their first encounter on the steppe filled Valyn’s mind, of Huutsuu standing naked outside of her api, scars carved into her pale flesh, yellow hair like fire lashed to a frenzy by the wind. She must have been twice Valyn’s age, maybe even into her fifth decade, the mother of three children, but the years had done nothing to soften her.

  Valyn left the knife in its sheath, but didn’t take his hand from the pommel.

  “What I believe,” he said quietly, his own voice grating in his ears, a tool long neglected and running to rust, “is what I have seen. When you capture Annurians, you do one thing: you hurt them.”

  There was a quick whiff of irritation, then the soft sound of the woman shaking her head.

  “You live one month on the steppe and you think you know a whole people.”

  “I saw what happened in Andt-Kyl.”

  “Andt-Kyl was a battle. People die.”

  “And after?” Valyn shook his head grimly. “For months, I was close enough to the front to hear your sacrifices. To smell them.”

  The woman paused. “This is what you have been doing since the battle? Cowering in the forest listening to the slaughter of your own people?”

  The words would have stung once. They should have stung. Valyn just nodded.

  “I’m done taking sides,” he said. “Done with this fight.”

  “What about your empire? Your revenge on your war chief, the one who killed your father?”

  “My revenge…” Valyn trailed off. His hand ached on the handle of the knife. The scene atop the stone tower in Andt-Kyl blazed across his mind, sharp as lightning: killing the Aedolian, fighting Ran il Tornja, Adare’s knife in his side, the keen edge of the kenarang’s sword across his eyes, then the long fall to the water. His last vision had been one of blades and blood and betrayal.

  “My revenge wasn’t even mine,” he said at last. The words sounded dull, dead. “It was a lie peddled by your chieftain in the hope that I would do his killing for him. And I did. I believed the lie, and good men died for it. I killed them.”

  Huutsuu paused. He could smell the uncertainty on her. “And your empire?”

  “Is ruled by a murderous whore. I will not fight for her.”

  “And yet this morning you killed for a useless family of loggers.”

  “It’s not their fault that my sister’s a power-hungry bitch and il Tornja’s a murderer. It’s not their fault that Long Fist drove his Urghul vermin over the border.”

  Huutsuu’s pulse tattooed the silence. Valyn wondered if she was going to attack. If she did, he wondered if the awful, inexplicable sight would come to him again, or if it would fail him. He didn’t much care, either way.

  “You are one man among foes,” Huutsuu said at last. “You are fast, faster than you were, but not fast enough, I think, to be using words like vermin.”

  Valyn shrugged. “Scum. Rabble. Plague. Horsefucker.” He paused, letting the words hang in the air. “Worthless, no-account, moon-pale, blood-drunk savages. Should I go on?”

  Huutsuu’s rage spiked, blood-hot and coppery. He could feel the air shift as she leaned toward him. He could hear, quieter than thought, her hand settling around the leather grip of her sword.

  “Come on,” he said, still refusing to stand. Either the darksight would come, or it would not. “Come on.”

  The moment balanced like a dagger set on its tip. Then Huutsuu leaned back on her heels, barked a derisive laugh.

  “If you are so eager to die, why have you been hiding between the trees all these moons like a broken forest animal?”

  “No reason to rush. You had to come sooner or later. You, or a band of riders just like you.”

  “A warrior finds his fight. He does not wait for it.”

  “I’m not a warrior,” Valyn said, gesturing to the wreckage of his eyes. “I can’t find anything. I’m blind.”

  Suddenly, she stank of suspicion.

  “This is a lie.”

  Valyn shrugged. “Believe what you want.”

  Something in his voice gave her pause. Then he heard her shaking her head. “I saw you pull arrows from the air. I saw you throw the ax that killed Ayokha. These were not the acts of a blind man.”

  Valyn ignored the unspoken question; he had no answer to it. How could he explain to the woman that, though he lived in unrelieved darkness, though he was reduced to stealing game from the traps of a family of unsuspecting homesteaders, though he had spent the coldest months of the winter cowering inside a rough cave, eating strip by icy strip the carcass of the hibernating bear he had killed and left frozen in the snow … despite all that he could still, sometimes, impossibly, see? How could he explain that he was blind except for those moments when he most had to see, that when forced to fight his mind filled with a sight that was not sight, a vision of the world etched in layers of undifferentiated black? How to cram into words the inexplicable fact that when death loomed, his mind slipped into a kind of primal understanding buried untold fathoms beneath rational thought? And how to tell that whatever had done this to him had also made him fast, impossibly fast, far stronger than all his years of training? How could he explain to anyone, let alone this woman, that he was broken, broken beyond all possibility of fixing, but that, like a shattered blade, he could still draw blood? The understanding lay beyond words, perhaps beyond thought, and so he shirked it.

  “So,” he said instead. “You’re looking for these Annurian warriors, these ghosts. You know that they’re Kettral, right?”

  He’d spent most of the day pondering Huutsuu’s words back at the homestead: three warriors, dressed all in black, almost unkillable. They had to be Kettral; the question—the question that gnawed at his mind like a rat—was who?

  “We know this,” Huutsuu replied.

  “Then you’re an idiot. The Kettral, whoever they are, are going to want to help you even less than I do. They’re not going to put aside the knowledge of what you’ve done here.”

  Huutsuu hesitated. A snow-cold breeze out of the north carried the smell of se
ared elk. Most of the Urghul were clustered around the fire, talking quietly between bites. It had always struck Valyn as strange that a people so brutal should speak in such a musical tongue. Listening to the horsemen was like listening to gentle chanting or birdsong. He could smell the stale sweat and leather of the sentries, four of them standing guard in a rough square around the camp. For just a moment the small patch of forest felt safe, warm, the kind of place you could let down your guard to enjoy the company of friends.

  “The Kettral will not help us, even if it means killing this leach who leads my people?” Huutsuu asked.

  “A man can hate two foes at the same time. Especially if one’s a traitor and the other is a blood-soaked barbarian that loves to carve open kids.”

  “My fight is not with Annur.”

  Valyn stared stupidly into the darkness, toward where her face would be. “Then what the fuck are you doing here, Huutsuu? Why did you even cross the Black?”

  Her frustration was bright, sharp. “We came to purge the world of your weakness, this is true. But now—the world has changed.”

  “The world doesn’t change.”

  “There is much a man might miss while hiding in the forest.”

  Valyn shook his head grimly. “Did you torture Annurian citizens?”

  He could feel the whisper of wind in his ragged beard as she nodded. “By the score.”

  “Then I haven’t missed anything.”

  “We have stopped. I and my people put aside that fight. There is another, greater foe than the millions of people your empire raises into sheep.”

  “And because you realized you listened to the wrong lies, that you followed the wrong bloody bastard, you’ll stop cutting Annurian throats for … what? A few weeks? Long enough to find a proper religious fanatic to lead you again? Then what? Back to boiling Annurian children in your pots? If you’re really done with this then go home.”

  “I will not leave the leach at my back. I will not leave him alive to return to the northern grasses when his war is finished.”

  “And if you manage to kill Balendin, you will leave?”

  “I will leave. This land was not built for horses.”

  Valyn breathed deeply, smelling her, searching for the lie. There was only the woman’s sweat, her determination.

  He shook his head, sick of it all. After more than half a year in the forest, lost, forgotten, dead in the minds of everyone who knew him, here he was again, getting tangled up in some formless war where no one was right, where everyone murdered and lied, where the ally you sided with might be worse than the foe you fought.

  It doesn’t matter, he reminded himself silently. That family of trappers is still alive. That’s why you’re here.

  The rest of it would end in ugliness and blood. Saving that kid, though, him and his family, that, at least, had been good. Valyn hadn’t expected, in the long months scratching an existence out of the forest, to have another chance to do a thing that was good, unfouled. As for what came next … well … it didn’t much matter whether he died fighting a bear for next winter’s cave or trying to put a knife in Balendin’s heart.

  “Fine,” he said at last. “Tell me about these ghosts you’re hoping to find.”

  “They wear black.”

  It was no more than she’d said that morning, but once more the urgency pricked at Valyn. The only other Kettral at Andt-Kyl had been those on his Wing. Immediately after the battle, when he was still struggling with the fact that Adare’s knife had not killed him, he thought he’d caught Gwenna’s smell on the lake wind, and Annick’s, and Talal’s. He’d thought about trying to rejoin them, had even tried for half a morning to force his way through the trees. Then he abandoned the course. His Wing, if they were alive, if his mind wasn’t taunting him with warmed-over memories, was better off without him. All he’d done was to lead them from ambush to disaster, and that was before il Tornja carved out his eyes. They’d defended the small town just fine without him, better than fine. He’d taken one more long breath, dragging the air of those forests into his lungs, lingering over the distant smells of his companions, his friends, his Wingmates, and then he’d turned his face away, to the north, pushing slowly through the trees until he couldn’t smell anything but the forest and the wind off the mountains.

  “Kettral,” he said quietly. His palms were slick with sweat, as was his face, despite the cold air slicing between the trunks. Could it be his own Wing after all these months, Gwenna and Talal and Annick hiding in the woods just like Valyn himself?

  No, he amended silently. Not like me. Not hiding. Fighting.

  He half hoped that he was right. After so many months alone, he could almost hear Gwenna’s tart laugh ringing in his ears, almost feel Talal’s hand steady on his shoulder. But then, there was a reason he hadn’t tried to find them immediately after Andt-Kyl. Even if they were his Wing, he had nothing left to give them.

  “Describe them,” he said.

  Huutsuu hesitated, marshaling her thoughts. “The details are elusive; they attack only at night.”

  “Try.”

  “There are three, two men and a woman.”

  Valyn leaned back against the rough trunk of the tree, disappointment mingling with relief. It wasn’t his Wing after all, at least not all of it. Maybe they weren’t even Kettral after all. It wasn’t as though the Eyrie had the only black cloth in the world.

  “The leader is short,” Huutsuu continued. “Shorter than me, and black-skinned. There is a tall, yellow-haired woman, almost Urghul-looking. Maybe Eddish.”

  Valyn’s relief evaporated. He leaned forward. Huutsuu paused.

  “You know them,” she said.

  “The third,” Valyn said. “An ugly bastard with a scraggly beard.”

  Her nod was a whisper.

  “The Flea,” he said. “Holy Hull. You’re looking for the Flea.”

  Huutsuu repeated the name. “The Flea,” she said slowly, as though tasting the word. “You are certain of this?”

  “The description fits. It’s perfect.”

  “Who is this Flea?”

  Valyn shook his head, momentarily at a loss about how to respond. “The deadliest of us,” he said finally.

  “You know him?”

  “He trained me,” Valyn replied slowly.

  “It was good to bring you, then.”

  “Not really. We fought later. It was my fault that his sniper died.”

  The memory of that desperate fight in Assare filled his mind, of Blackfeather Finn stepping from the open doorway, Pyrre’s knife buried in his belly. Valyn had decided, over the course of the cold, lonely months, that that was the moment when his own life had turned. Everything that had gone before, even the horror of Ha Lin’s death, even the flight from the Islands themselves—none of it would have led down the same path if only Valyn had managed to keep his people in check, to find a way to make his peace with the Flea instead of fighting him. He’d gone over the events a thousand times. Pyrre, of course, had been the wick that lit the whole explosive mess, but he should have found a way to control Pyrre. For some time he couldn’t measure, he lost himself in it all over again. It was Huutsuu’s voice, finally, that pulled him clear.

  “So you fought him. Warriors fight. This does not mean you cannot ride at his side again.”

  Valyn frowned at the word ride. “Does he have his bird?”

  “The bird is dead,” Huutsuu replied. “Long Fist killed it the first time these Kettral attacked. He killed it and the woman flying on its back.”

  “Chi Hoai Mi,” Valyn said, then shook his head. “The first time?”

  “They came for Long Fist just before the battle at the lake, northeast of Andt-Kyl—the three of them with no bird, just like now. They killed many of my people, fought their way almost to Long Fist himself before they were stopped, taken. Then the bird came. Long Fist brought it down, but the other three escaped.”

  “Brought it down?” Valyn demanded. “With what?”

&nbs
p; Huutsuu hesitated. He could taste her awe, bright and cold as the night wind. “His strength is not all in his limbs. He raised a hand, and the bird burst into flame. It screamed as it fell.”

  “A leach,” Valyn breathed. “Long Fist is a ’Kent-kissing leach. Just like Balendin.”

  “Long Fist is blessed by the god,” Huutsuu said. “Your Kettral leach … he is twisted.”

  “Twisted,” Valyn growled. “We’re all fucking twisted.” He was holding the handle of his knife so tightly that his knuckles ached. With an effort he relaxed his grip. “Where did the Flea go? After.”

  “He disappeared. Into the forest. For months now, he has haunted our camps, striking, leaving a dozen dead in moments, then disappearing into the trees. I need him now; a Kettral to kill a Kettral leach.”

  “That’s right,” Valyn spat. “You need him. Not me.”

  “Two spears are better than one. I will use whatever weapon I can hold inside my hand.”

  “I’m not a weapon.”

  There was wariness on the wind now, and something else, something bright and hot that Valyn couldn’t quite recognize. “I have seen you kill,” the woman said finally. “I have seen this with my own eyes.”

  “I’m fucking blind, you stubborn bitch.”

  “Perhaps. And perhaps it is because of this that you cannot see what you have become.”

  18

  “I hate this fucking place,” Gwenna said, staring into the fissure in the limestone that marked the entrance to Hull’s Hole.

  They’d waited in the mangroves until dark, crossed the spine of Hook to Buzzard’s Bay, stolen a boat from the harbor, rowed it three-quarters of the way to Irsk, scuttled it, then swam in the last few miles. The days since leaving Annur had pared away the moon, sliver by sliver, until only a slight crescent remained. Still, a slight crescent was enough to illuminate a boat on the waves, and Gwenna spent the entire passage scanning the sky, searching for some sign of pursuit.