The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  If Qora and Quick Jak were right, if all of Rallen’s thugs were washouts who hadn’t passed the Trial, the darkness was plenty thick to hide a few swimmers. On the other hand, Gwenna herself could see just fine in the watery light, could make out the slow, graceful shapes of swells around them, the sullen bulk of Qarsh black against the horizon, a few high clouds thin as silver filigreed across the night. It would only take one flier who passed the Trial to make them, just one of those bastards with the slarn sight to turn them into chum. She’d felt exposed in the boat, then exposed in the water. The entire passage, she’d felt hunched and hunted, desperate to get under cover once more, and yet now that they were here, in front of the Hole, staring into that jagged black pit … well … the ocean didn’t seem quite so bad.

  Hull’s Hole reeked in its subtle, sick-sweet way of guano, and salt, and mussels gathered by the seabirds then shattered on the rocks. Gwenna could still remember those mussels from the first time. Next to the slarn and the poison, it seemed like a trivial detail, but she could picture them inside the entrance, hundreds of purple shells burst open, the stringy, gelatinous flesh torn apart by the beaks of birds, what was left of the mollusks pierced through by their own shattered shells. There was something obscene about them, about that splattering of wet, helpless flesh, too dumb and busted even to squirm.

  And that was just the entrance. She could smell more now than she had been able to then. Farther in, there was the thin, dank scent of wet stone, the keen smell of blood, and beneath these, faint as a remembered nightmare, the slick, oleaginous, rotten stink—like yesterday’s vomit laid over rotting meat—of the slarn.

  “How long have all of you been hiding here?” Talal asked, no more eager, evidently, to go down into the Hole than Gwenna herself.

  “Months,” Qora replied. “Manthe and Hobb had the idea.”

  “The idea to hide in a cave filled with poisonous hive lizards?” Gwenna asked. “Who are those two geniuses?”

  “They’re in charge,” Quick Jak said. “Since we broke off from Rallen. They’ve been holding us together.”

  “And the slarn?” Talal asked. “You’ve found a way to keep them at bay?”

  “Mostly.”

  The word spoke volumes. Gwenna hadn’t forgotten the reptilian monsters—half snake, half eyeless lizard. She’d dreamed of them the night she escaped the Hole and passed the Trial, then nearly every night after that. If those dreams had grown less frequent, it was only because other horrors now vied with the slarn for her few restless hours of sleep. She hadn’t forgotten the slarn, nor had she forgotten what the slarn did to people. When she closed her eyes, she could see Ha Lin’s corpse, smooth skin pared open in long, fine gashes, flesh peeling back from the wounds. Some of that had been Balendin’s work. Some, but not all.

  “How many have you lost?” Gwenna asked.

  Qora stared at her, held her silence like it was some kind of treasure.

  “Twenty-two,” Jak said quietly.

  Gwenna stared at him. “Out of…”

  “Close to fifty.”

  “And you’re still here?”

  “You don’t understand,” Qora snarled, turning on her. “We have nowhere else to go. You said it yourself. The Islands aren’t that big, and there aren’t that many of them. At least against the slarn we have a chance.”

  “Yeah,” Gwenna replied, shaking her head. “A chance. About one in two, if I haven’t totally fucked up the math.”

  “Should be higher,” Annick said, switching from her longbow to a short horn bow more suitable to fighting in the tunnels. “Slarn are killable.”

  “And we’ve started killing them,” Qora snapped.

  “It’s better now,” Jak said. “Most of the people we lost, we lost early on. Manthe and Hobb found a new cavern, a place where we can keep them at bay.”

  “It makes sense,” Talal said, stepping inside the entrance to the cave, then sniffing the air. “No one’s going to come hunting here. Definitely not Rallen and his crew. They’d give up their biggest advantage the moment they left their birds to go in the door.”

  “They don’t have to go in the door,” Gwenna pointed out. She gestured to the broken limestone cliffs around them. “Set an ambush here. Kill anyone coming or going. Better yet, just block up the fissure and leave the poor fuckers for the slarn.”

  She could tell from the bleak expression on Jak’s face that she’d hit a nerve, but then, maybe they needed someone banging on some nerves. Cowering in a lightless cave with a few hundred predatory monsters hungry for human flesh hardly seemed like anyone’s idea of a sound strategy. She tried to soften her voice.

  “They’re going to find you sooner or later, you know.”

  “They’ve come to the island,” Jak said. “They’ve even explored a few hundred paces inside the cave.…” He trailed off, shaking his head.

  “No one wants to go deeper,” Qora concluded. “That’s why it’s a good spot.”

  “Good,” Gwenna said, “provided you’re not one of the twenty-two.”

  “We all have to die of something.”

  “Yeah—but we don’t all have to die today.”

  “You wanted to come here. You demanded it!”

  Gwenna snorted. “Fair enough. Just seemed like a better idea when we were farther away.”

  It had been a year since the Trial, but she remembered the ordeal all too well. Life was like that—you tended to remember the times you almost died. She’d spent the first few hours searching the upper caverns and corridors, refusing any shafts that sloped down too abruptly, hoping she might come across one of the slarn eggs without diving too deep under the earth. It didn’t work. The slarn preferred the depths, and so, as the fire from the poison burned its way up her arm, she had descended at last, torch in one hand, smoke steel blade in the other.

  By the time she emerged, the torch was gone, the steel was bloody, and so was she—both arms soaked up to the elbows with her own wounds and those of the slarn she’d killed. A few hundred paces from the surface, she’d come across Gent. Another day, in another place, she would have been pleased to discover he was even more cut up than she was. Not in the Hole. The two of them had limped out together, leaning on each other, neither willing to speak. If there were words for what happened in that labyrinth, Gwenna didn’t know them. She’d felt no relief at the sight of the sun when she emerged, just a faint slackening of dread. Whatever happened next, whatever miserable missions she undertook, whatever stinking shitholes she had to fight her way through, nothing would be as bad as the Hole.

  And now I’m going back into the ’Kent-kissing thing, she thought grimly. Her chest felt heavy, tight, as though iron bands were constricting her heart and lungs.

  “Let’s just get in there, find out what the fuck’s going on, figure out what we’re going to do about it, and try really hard not to die while we’re at it.”

  * * *

  The only way to mark time in the winding passages of the Hole was by the burning of their torches. It was tempting to watch the flame twist and writhe around the pitch-soaked rag, but watching the flame played havoc with Gwenna’s night vision, and so she kept her gaze on the ground before her, walking with one eye open, then the other, switching every so often to make sure she maintained at least some ability to see in the dark.

  As they drove deeper into the cave, however, she started to wonder if eyesight was really all that important. According to Talal, drinking the slarn eggs had changed them, made them faster and stronger, more perceptive. Gwenna had witnessed the effects dozens of times since fleeing the Islands, both in herself and her Wingmates. She’d grown accustomed to her quickly clotting blood, to the fact that her ears could hear a bird rustling in its nest fifty paces distant, to her ability to run, or fight, or swim for hours without stopping. She’d grown used to her altered body, to what it could do. After all these long months, it was easy to forget what things had felt like … before.

  And now, returning to the Hole
seemed to have awakened something further inside her. As they descended into the bottomless stone warren, she could feel each eddy of air shifting over the fine hairs on her arms. She could smell her companions, their sweat, the dried blood crusted on their clothes, scabbed over their skin. If she breathed deep, she could taste something else on the very back of her tongue, a rancid, bitter flavor. Fear, she thought. It wasn’t impossible. Animals could smell fear. Maybe the slarn could, too. Certainly she felt some animalistic stirring within her, an awareness, a savage willingness that made her tighten her grip on her sword though there was nothing in the corridor to attack.

  “Exactly how do you keep back the slarn?” she asked.

  “Manthe and Hobb post a watch at each entrance to the cavern,” Qora replied without turning. She was just a few steps ahead, but her voice sounded very far away. “They have us rotate every few hours. And we keep a large central fire up. That’s a big part of the problem … the thing devours wood, but there’s not all that much wood on the island. Pretty soon, we’ll have to start crossing over to Harrask, which is risky with Rallen’s birds in the air, but if the fire goes out…”

  She left the rest unsaid.

  Gwenna shook her head. “I don’t remember those ugly bitches being all that scared of fire. I put out a torch in one of their faces and all she did was shriek like a boiling kettle and try to take my arm off.”

  “Sometimes they come past our fires,” the woman admitted. “Then we fight.”

  “How does that work out?”

  “Manthe and Hobb say—”

  “I’ve had just about an earful,” Gwenna cut in, “of Manthe and fucking Hobb. Who are these two idiots? How’d they end up running this sorry little show?”

  This time Jak responded. “They’re running things because they’re the only real Kettral left. Aside from Rallen.”

  Gwenna frowned. “Never heard of them.”

  “That’s because they live over on Arim. Lived there, I mean, before we came here. They haven’t flown missions in ten years, not since half their Wing got killed down in the Waist.”

  “Fantastic,” Gwenna said, the outlines of the rebel command structure resolving themselves finally. “Not just washed-out cadets, but real, honest-to-’Shael Grounded. This is some operation.”

  The Grounded were unusual. The Eyrie had been perfecting its selection, training, and testing criteria for centuries. Most of the soldiers who survived Hull’s Trial flew missions until they died or couldn’t hang in the harness anymore. For those who survived to old age, there was a long row of small, unremarkable houses fronting the harbor on Qarsh. Command referred to the structures as Retired Veterans’ Housing, but everyone else, including the scarred and limping old men and women who lived there, called it Lucky Fucks’ Row. The buildings weren’t much, but they were close to the arena and the mess hall, close to the action, and if there was one thing those old vets shared, it was a desire to be close to the action.

  There was, however, another group, smaller, less talked-about, who survived the training and passed the Trial, who flew missions and then just … couldn’t. Combat shock, the Eyrie called it, and though some of the afflicted had obvious bodily wounds, the real damage was somewhere inside, a breaking of the mind or heart, that left them unable or unwilling to go on. Gwenna had heard stories of women weeping at the sound of munitions, of men who shook as though palsied at the sight of a naked blade. The Eyrie offered them the choice to stay on Qarsh, but something about the island, the constant training and combat, the never-ending flyovers, the ceaseless stories of blood and brutality, sent them elsewhere, and elsewhere, for the Grounded, as for anyone trained by the Kettral, meant Arim.

  As cadets, Gwenna and the others had tried to imagine what it must feel like, living on an island surrounded by the failed and the broken, an island that was at once a paradise and a prison, where every reasonable desire was met, where you would be killed without question for trying to leave. Five years ago, the notion had seemed inconceivable. Gwenna had sworn, they all had, that death would be preferable. Now that she was a little better acquainted with death, she wasn’t so sure.

  The washouts and the Grounded might be prisoners, but it was starting to feel as though everyone was a prisoner of something: duty or family, conscience or past mistakes. There were worse fates than a quiet life on a warm island far from the killing. Good people could choose to quit fighting—that was clear enough. The trouble was, sometimes you had to fight, and when the fight came, you didn’t necessarily want the good people running the show.

  “What made these two, Manthe and Hobb, get involved?” Gwenna asked finally.

  Qora stopped in the passage ahead. “Do you still not get it?”

  Gwenna resisted the urge to smack the woman. “I’m slow.”

  “Everyone’s involved. You’re either with Rallen, or you’re fighting him.”

  “What about the rabble over on Hook?”

  “They’re an exception,” Qora conceded. “But if you have any Kettral training at all, you’re in this fight.”

  “Or you’re dead,” Jak added quietly, his words echoing inside the great stone throat of the passage.

  “If those two are the only Kettral,” Talal asked, “why were the two of you over on Hook? Why were you the ones doing the fighting?”

  “We weren’t supposed to be fighting,” Qora replied grimly. “We were supposed to be hiding and watching. Learning their patterns.”

  Gwenna nodded, another piece locking into place. “And then the boys in black burned down your hideout. Still, you could have run. Could have just slipped away in the confusion.”

  “It looked like an opportunity,” Qora said.

  “Oops,” Gwenna said.

  She could smell the regret pouring off of Jak, dark as an old mold long lost to the light. Between the fear and the regret, it was a wonder the poor bastard had emotion left over for anything else. She wondered idly if he’d always been so tentative, so fearful, or if the years of training, training intended to harden him, had somehow had the opposite effect.

  “And what were Manthe and Hobb doing,” Talal asked, the question breaking into Gwenna’s thoughts, “while you were running surveillance?”

  A long pause, interrupted only by the sound of dripping water and their own feet scuffing the uneven stone.

  “Planning,” Qora replied finally. “Running things.”

  “By which you mean hiding,” Gwenna said flatly. She hadn’t even met these self-proclaimed leaders of the Kettral resistance, and they were already pissing her off.

  “Manthe doesn’t fight,” Jak said. “She doesn’t go out. She’s been Grounded a long time. Vicious combat shock.”

  From the tone of his voice, he didn’t share any of Gwenna’s anger. He sounded, if anything, sorry for the woman.

  “But you’re all fucked up somehow. That’s why you were on Arim.”

  “Gwenna…,” Talal warned.

  “No. If we are going to be fighting our way out of this goat fuck together,” she said, riding over his objection, “we’re not going to do it tiptoeing around feelings like they’re lit starshatters. The facts are the fucking facts—washouts aren’t Kettral. They don’t have the training and they never went down into the Hole. That’s just a reality on the ground that we have to deal with.”

  “We may not be Kettral,” Qora growled, “but at least we’re fighting.”

  “That,” Gwenna said, wagging a finger at the back of the woman’s head, “is exactly my point. You’re out there risking your assholes, making a ’Kent-kissing mess of it, sure, but getting your hands bloody. And all the while your so-called leaders, the only ones with the full training to actually do the job right, are cowering in a hole.” She blew out a frustrated breath. “I’m not pissing in your soup, you bitch. At least you’re doing what you can. It’s Manthe’s combat shock that I’m finding tough to swallow.”

  She walked a few more paces before Talal broke the angry silence.

>   “What about Hobb?”

  “He’s fine,” Jak said after a pause. “Angry, but fine.”

  “Then what was he doing on Arim?”

  “Being with Manthe.”

  Gwenna sucked air between her teeth. It was almost inconceivable for a Kettral who still had the fight in his bones to stop flying missions voluntarily. Almost. She tried to imagine it, following someone she loved into uselessness and obscurity. Giving up everything she’d trained for, throwing away the chance at revenge, at redemption, for what … to sit on the porch with some poor broken bastard looking out at the sea? No wonder Hobb was angry.

  “So he’s in charge?”

  “There isn’t … a formal structure,” Qora replied. “Manthe can’t fight. Won’t fight. Whatever. But she seems better than Hobb with a lot of things—tactics, knowledge of the birds, stuff like that.”

  “You have no birds,” Annick observed. It was the first thing she’d said since entering the cave. “You are hiding in a cave being slowly decimated by slarn. It is time to shift tactics.”

  “My point exactly,” Gwenna said. “If Manthe is the strategic genius behind this operation, you might want to rethink your leadership.”

  “They’re Kettral,” Jak protested. “The only Kettral.”

  Gwenna smiled grimly. “Not anymore.”

  * * *

  The cavern stank of torch smoke and spoiled food, piss and wet wool. There was no ventilation. The air just sat, wet and sullen, fat and unmoving. The chill didn’t feel invigorating. It felt dead. The large fire Qora had described was visible well before they reached the cavern proper. Gwenna had expected something warming, comforting, but from the tunnel in which they stood, it looked like a hazy red maw, the ruddy light throwing everything beyond its scope into deeper darkness. And then there was the blood, long dried but still acrid, a reminder, as if she needed a reminder, that the darkness had teeth.