The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “You have said already that you are blind. You ride like a blind man. You walk like a blind man.”

  “I guess it all fits then, doesn’t it?”

  “A blind man does not do the things I saw back at that trapper’s cabin. He does not pull flying arrows from the air.”

  “Maybe you didn’t see what you thought you saw.”

  “I saw this,” Huutsuu replied grimly. “You put an ax in one of my taabe from fifteen paces. I will know how, or we will go no farther together.”

  For a dozen slow heartbeats Valyn didn’t respond, though he could feel his body coiling, his heart slamming beneath his ribs. There would be no simple breaking of company, no riding off alone and unmolested. Not at this point. Splitting from the Urghul would mean fighting, and something inside him, something that had kept him alive in the waters of Scar Lake and then in the winters of the northern forests, was eager to fight, to limber his twin axes and begin carving. It would end in his own death, but for that, too, a part of him was eager.

  But Balendin’s still alive, he reminded himself grimly. He’d told himself that he was done fighting, but it was one thing to growl the words to himself alone, in the frigid dark of some northern cave, another to stay out of it when he was around so many others who were diving back in. Dying was fine. He was ready to die, but he might as well try to drag Balendin down with him.

  “I’m not always blind,” he said finally.

  Wind whittled the silence to a point.

  “I do not understand,” Huutsuu said.

  “Neither do I. Most of the time all I see is darkness. I can hear just fine. I can smell. But I can’t see my own hand in front of my face.”

  “And the fighting?”

  “The fighting is different. When it matters, when someone’s trying to kill me, I can fight.”

  “You can see?” Huutsuu demanded. She sounded suspicious.

  “Yes,” Valyn said, remembering the shapes that were not shapes, those forms inscribed in black on his mind’s broader blackness. “I can see to fight. To kill.”

  “So…,” Huutsuu began. The syllable was casual, laconic. It did nothing to cover the sound of her sword sliding free of the sheath, of her quickening pulse or her feet shifting on the stone. Even without the strange non-sight, Valyn would have known to move, to block, but for a moment there was more—a vision of the sword’s blade carved across his blindness, moving and not moving, the whole thing so pathetically slow. It was less than nothing to slide beneath the blade, to slam his stiffened hand up into her jaw, knocking her teeth closed and sending her reeling back into the boulder behind.

  And then it was gone. He could hear Huutsuu’s breathing, he could smell the fresh blood, but he might as well have been standing in the bottommost pit of Hull’s Hole, his only torch long ago burned out.

  “So,” he said. If his fist to her jaw hadn’t explained it, more words weren’t likely to do the job.

  Huutsuu straightened, slid her sword back into her sheath. “I do not understand this,” she said slowly. He could smell the wariness on her, even thicker than the smoke of the campfire blazing a hundred paces behind them. “I do not understand it, but there is much about this world I fail to understand.”

  Valyn just nodded. He felt suddenly weary, weary out of all proportion to the minimal effort of the scuffle. He wanted to sit, to lean his head back against the rock, to close his eyes against the stinging wind. He stayed on his feet instead.

  “I’ll tell you what you need to understand: my eyes are broken. That is all.”

  “Or perhaps,” Huutsuu replied, “you are blessed. I have known women and men like this.…”

  “Who could fight through their blindness?” Valyn demanded.

  “No, not that. They were blessed in other ways. Blessed by Kwihna. This is like the touch of a god on your flesh. There is something sacred in your blindness.”

  “You don’t understand the first fucking thing about sacred,” Valyn spat. To hear the Urghul woman talk about sanctity after the chaos the Urghul had wrought in Annur made him angry in a way that went beyond human anger. He could feel his lips pulling back into a snarl. “You’re twisted, all of you. Warped. Broken. I don’t know how you ended up this way, but your worship of pain, it is an illness.”

  “What do you know of pain?”

  Before he knew what he was doing, Valyn seized the woman by the throat. He could feel the tendons in her neck straining against his fingers as he pulled her closer. She was choking, he realized, hacking, strangling sounds clawing their way free. He smiled.

  “Look at my face,” he growled. He had drawn her so close that she could hardly do otherwise. Her ragged half breaths were hot against his lips. “Look at my eyes.”

  She was pulling at his clenched hand with both of hers. He took one and forced it down to his side, to the vicious puckered scar left by Adare’s knife. “Do you feel that? Do you? What do you think? Did it hurt? Do I have some inkling of what pain is all about?”

  Sickened suddenly by Huutsuu, by her savage god, by his own animal savagery, he loosened his grip. Instead of pulling back, however, she leaned closer, so close that her lips were at his ear. A moment later he felt the pain, the knife’s frigid tip already past his leathers and his blacks, pressed against his chest, then severing the skin, skewering the flesh of his chest.

  His first thought was that the strange sight had finally failed him. The violence had brought no vision.

  His second thought, even as he seized her wrist, was that he’d been too slow and too stupid, and that the Urghul woman had killed him for it. No fear came with the realization. No regret. In a grim flash, he understood how Pyrre could be so indifferent to the prospect of her own death. And then he realized that he wasn’t dying.

  Huutsuu had threaded her blade through the muscle of his chest parallel to the ribs beneath. That knife was more than long enough to reach his heart, but she’d come in from the side; instead of driving it deeper, she was using it, using the pressure of the blade’s flat against the striated muscle, to pull him closer to her. Like a water buffalo with a ring through the nose, Valyn obeyed the pressure, moving forward with it, until he could feel the woman’s breath again, hot in the cold air.

  “Show me,” she hissed.

  He seized her by the throat once more, whether to choke her or push her back, he couldn’t say. There was pain, and there was darkness, and her ragged breathing.

  “Show you what?”

  “Show me,” she said, pulling him to her with the knife hooked in his flesh, “what you understand about pain.”

  He started to respond, but her mouth was on his, hot and hungry, all lips and tongue and teeth and desperate breath. He tightened his fist, lifting her feet free of the ground, kissing her back, if something so vicious could be called kissing. In the endless blank of his blindness, there were two points bright as stars in dark night: the red pain of the blade buried in his chest, and the white fire of a lust that burned like rage. She shuddered when he slammed her back into the flat wall of the boulder, groaned with something that might have been pain or pleasure, then groped around his belt with her free hand.

  The buckle was simple, straightforward, but she didn’t go for the buckle. Instead, she pulled his belt knife free of the sheath, broke off the kiss to shove him backward, slid the knife through the leather of the belt, the action so quick and insistent she nicked his hip as she cut the leather. As the belt parted, she was already carving away the rest of his clothes, the keen blade parting the fabric, slicing careless, shallow cuts into the flesh beneath until the wool and fur and leather fell away and that glacial air was everywhere on his skin.

  It was cold, bitingly cold, but the blood sheeting down his chest was warm, and Huutsuu’s tongue was warm as she stepped forward again to lick the wound just where the knife plunged into his chest. When she kissed him again, he could taste blood, a taste that broke something inside him, some last, restraining civilized thread, and then both knives
were in his hands, and the blood a hot wash down his flesh, and he could see her, see the rictus clench in her jaw as he cut her furs free, see the furrows he left in her flesh, fresh rents over the old webs of scar. He could see in shades of dark on dark her neck bent back, her back arching, her hands dragging him close, and then the sight blacked out and the ambit of his world became screaming, and blood, the blind pain and the searing, vicious bliss, unredeemed, unredeemable.

  20

  From the balcony of her chambers on the top floor of the Crane, Adare looked down. It was a hundred paces straight down to the courtyards, gardens, and temples of the Dawn Palace, but she didn’t look straight down. Instead, she stared north, eyes wandering over Annur’s roofs of copper and slate and teak shingle. Morning fog off the Broken Bay still filled the streets and alleys, and though Adare could make out the sounds of the city stirring—curses of carters and canal hands; the rattle of merchants opening their shops; strident cries of grocers and fishmongers hawking fruit and flowers, the day’s fresh catch—she couldn’t see anything in those streets but the still, white fog. The morning was all noise and no motion, as though the living had abandoned Annur to the ghosts.

  The balcony easily overtopped the masts of the tallest ships, the gulls wheeling above the harbor, and yet from that balcony, even when she tipped her head back until her neck hurt, she could not make out the top of Intarra’s Spear. That other, greater tower’s wall rose like a curtain of slagged glass barely a hundred paces away, but the top was lost in the clouds.

  Nira glanced up at it, then grunted. “Intarra’s Spear, my withered ass.”

  “You don’t believe it’s a relic of the goddess?” Adare asked. She’d lived inside the palace her whole life, and yet some sights you did not grow used to. Could not grow used to. “It antedates all Csestriim records.”

  “Antedates?” Nira shook her head. “It’s no wonder Lehav made you before we were halfway ta Olon. Ya never did learn ta quit talkin’ like a princess.”

  Adare ignored the gibe. In fact, she would have suffered through a hundred more if only Nira would hold on to this tiny bit of her former fire. Adare needed her for the task ahead, of course; there was no way she could break into Intarra’s Spear all by herself. Just as important, however, was having someone on her side, someone she could talk to, who would talk back. It had seemed in those first hours after her return that the Nira Adare had known was gone, the life drained out, all the rough edges scoured away by her brother’s betrayal. The old woman had finished off a huge carafe of wine, and then, to Adare’s despair, passed out on the table. When she woke, however, something had goaded her partway back to life. This morning she had climbed all the stairs to Adare’s chambers with something like her usual vigor, and this discussion of the tower was the most animated she had been since returning.

  “Even the name Intarra’s Spear is ancient,” Adare went on. “I spent weeks as a child sifting through old codices trying to find the source. The etymology—”

  “Piss on your etymology,” Nira griped. She hefted her cane, waved it over the balustrade at the huge tower, as though it had offended her. “What goddess is gonna give her name to the world’s largest cock?”

  Adare started to object, then stopped herself. They had come out to her balcony to plan an attack on the tower, or an infiltration, at least, not to bicker about history. She stared at the Spear a moment longer, then turned her attention to something closer, smaller, more manageable: the closed lacquer box that Nira had placed on the wooden table.

  “So that’s it.”

  Nira glared at her. “’Course it is. Think I’m in the habit a’ using Csestriim lacquer ta pack my soiled underclothes?”

  The box was small, just a little larger than Adare’s two hands, barely deep enough to hold a pair of wine bottles. At first glance it was unremarkable—no gold or silver, no ostentatious scrollwork to the handle, nothing bright or shiny to draw the eye. When Adare lifted it gingerly to the light, however, she saw that Nira was right. Instead of a flat black, the lacquer was laid on in a thousand shades of gray—some inky and opaque, some smoke thin, some slick as the dorsal fin of a quickpike, some glinting like tarnished silver. From a distance, the cumulative effect was a simple black, but when you held it close, shifted it back and forth beneath the sun, elaborate shapes and beautifully crafted shadows ghosted below the surface. Adare thought she could make out an outstretched hand, a sun in near eclipse, a pair of twining dancers, but each time that she half glimpsed a shape, the whole scene shifted, like the surface of a fast-moving river, and it was gone.

  “Hardly inconspicuous,” Adare observed.

  Nira shrugged. “Il Tornja didn’t want anyone else gettin’ at what’s inside, and I wasn’t about ta carry a locked iron chest all the way from Aergad.”

  Adare tested the weight, then set it back on the table. “How do you open it?”

  The old woman laid the tips of her fingers carefully on the surface, scrunched her face in concentration, then traced a series of quick, precise gestures. With a click, the box popped open.

  In spite of herself, Adare took half a step back. “A kenning?”

  Nira smirked. “The Csestriim were a batch a’ evil bastards, that’s sure, but they weren’t as squeamish about a leach’s gifts as we are.”

  Adare nodded slowly. She’d read as much. After the wars, when men and women tore the Csestriim cities to the ground, they had discovered thousands of artifacts, blades and boxes, statues and stele that were not entirely … natural. Found them, and destroyed them—those that could be destroyed. A few historians, those who dared to touch the subject, traced the first seeds of the human hatred of leaches to those early purges.

  Adare put the thoughts aside. Whatever the box’s provenance, it was the contents that concerned her. She hooked a single finger beneath the lid, lifted it, and stared.

  Arranged along one side in tiny beds of black velvet lay fifteen or twenty vials, each with a name etched into the glass. Adare recognized less than half the labels—Sweethorn, Dusk, Itiriol—but those few were enough to intuit the contents of the others. Il Tornja had sent her enough poison to destroy the entire council, maybe enough to kill everyone inside the Dawn Palace.

  “He just … had this, lying around?” Adare asked.

  “I’ve been alive more than a thousand years,” Nira replied, “and the bastard makes me look like a child. He’s probably got warehouses a’ this shit piled up all over the world, hidden troves buried beneath the Romsdals, secreted on some unknown island in the Broken Bay.”

  All over again, the hopelessness of opposing her own general washed over Adare, dragging her down like a winter wave. The notion that she could ever steal a march on him, devise a plan he hadn’t seen from years away—it was all hubris and stupidity. Was it likely, after the man had held Annur in his fist for centuries, that she, Adare, would be the one to wrest it away?

  “Ya look like ya’re thinkin’ of drinkin’ half those vials yourself,” Nira said, her voice a rasp shredding Adare’s thoughts.

  Adare looked up to find the other woman studying her, an expression that might have been wariness or concern carved across her ancient features.

  “He’s just so far ahead of us, at every step.”

  “He hasn’t won yet,” Nira said.

  “Are you sure? We don’t even know what he wants. Not really.”

  “According ta what your brother told you, he wants ta kill Meshkent.”

  Adare grimaced. “I don’t trust Kaden. And I definitely don’t trust that Csestriim he keeps at his side.”

  “Well, whatever il Tornja wants,” Nira snapped, “we know he hasn’t got it.”

  Adare raised her brows. “We do?”

  “A bull don’t tend ta keep fuckin’ after he’s had his way with the cow. When a bull’s done, he goes off with that sloppy slack sack between his legs ta eat or sleep.”

  “Il Tornja’s not a bull.”

  “Men.” The old woman shrugged.
“Bulls. Csestriim. Point is, if il Tornja’d won, there wouldn’t still be a war goin’ on.”

  Adare stared north, toward Aergad, toward where il Tornja held back the Urghul. Things had come to a bleak pass when ongoing war was a reason for hope. The fact that il Tornja still wanted something made for dubious consolation, but it was the only consolation she had. She turned back to the box.

  “What are these?” she asked, pointing at half a dozen metal tubes set into the velvet opposite the glass vials.

  “Bombs,” Nira replied.

  Adare’s hand jerked back. “Bombs?”

  “Kettral make. Starshatters, moles, and flickwicks. Two apiece.”

  “And just what in Intarra’s name,” Adare breathed, still staring at the munitions, “am I supposed to do with Kettral explosives?”

  “My guess is you’re supposed ta blow shit up, but don’t quote me. You’re the prophet.”

  “They’re stable?” Adare asked, studying the slender tubes.

  “I lugged ’em here and I survived.” She gestured at her body. “Two arms. Two tits, wobbly but still attached. Two legs.” She shrugged again.

  Adare blew out a low, slow whistle. “I’m starting to see why he didn’t want anyone else to open it.”

  Nira nodded. “Question is, how do we use this,” she jabbed a finger at the box, “ta get at the bitch in there?” Another jab, this time at the Spear.

  “Yes,” Adare agreed vaguely. “That is the trick.” She turned back to the tower, then fell silent, baffled by the audacity of il Tornja’s demand. “It’s never been done, you know. No one’s ever broken into the palace dungeon.”

  “I wish,” the old woman replied, scowling, “we could quit calling it a dungeon. Dungeons are underground.”

  “Not this one,” Adare said, shaking her head slowly. “People have tried to get at it before, tried to fight their way up from the tower’s base. Skinny Tom made it to the thirtieth floor before the guardsmen cut him down, and Skinny Tom made it farther than anyone else.”

  “’Course, we’ve got an edge on Skinny Tom, whoever the fuck he was.”