The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  And so he was here. Gwenna twisted the long lens, focusing it on the island half a mile to the east. Skarn. No linguistic relation, she hoped, to the beasts living down in the Hole, but the name put her on edge all the same. So did the ’Kent-kissing terrain.

  “Well, this is unfortunate,” she said, eyeing the cliffs that climbed straight out of the water on every side.

  “You’ve never seen it before?” Jak asked.

  “Of course I’ve seen it. I just never thought I’d have to attack it.”

  The truth was, she’d never paid the island much mind. It lay well clear of Qarsh and Hook, off the usual swimming and smallboat circuits, and while she’d sailed around it dozens of times, flown over it twice that many, the only people who spent any time on the island were the fliers, both active and retired. The fliers, and the birds themselves.

  The kettral built their nests and raised their young over on the eastern end of Qarsh, where the ground was relatively flat. Once they matured, however, following some animal instinct no one at the Eyrie fully understood, they spread their wings and left the gentle island, searching, evidently, for something more … vertical. There wasn’t anywhere in the Islands more vertical than Skarn.

  “Are there any harbors or beaches?” Gwenna asked, sweeping the lens back and forth over the overhanging limestone.

  Jak shook his head. “Not really. The only thing you can reach from the water is a little rocky shoulder on the far side. It’s underwater at high tide, though.”

  “Can you get from there to the top of the cliffs?”

  “No.”

  “So how did Rallen get in the supplies to build the ’Kent-kissing thing?”

  She studied the fortress, or what she could see of it, at least. On level ground, Rallen’s fort wouldn’t have been much of a fort. It looked more like a series of stables strung along behind a large stone barn, the various structures connected by a wall no more than twice Gwenna’s height. The trouble was, the fort wasn’t set on level ground. The whole compound perched at the very brink of the cliff. The limestone crag on which it stood was so steep and high—at least forty paces, overhung for the bottom third—as to render the miserable walls at the top pointless, even ludicrous. It was as though the builders, having thrown together the hall and outbuildings, felt compelled to put up some sort of wall, all the time understanding the pointlessness of the gesture.

  “Most of it’s rock,” Jak replied. “Quarried right there on the island. There was a crane to haul up the heavy supplies, the mast from an old ship anchored in the stone with a block and tackle at the end. That’s how they hoisted up the timber for roof beams and the rest. Rallen had it torn down when the building was done.”

  “Why in Hull’s name,” Gwenna wondered aloud, “would you rip out your only means of resupply?”

  “Because he’s careful. The crane was a weakness. A potential entry point.”

  Gwenna put down the lens, then turned to stare at him. “Not if you remember to pull up the rope when you’re done with it!”

  Even as she was saying the words, however, she was thinking of ways she could have used that recommissioned mast. Annick could have shot an arrow over it, for one thing. Attach a light enough cord to that arrow—an unbraided thread of Liran rope, maybe—and you could use it as a pilot to drag up something more substantial. Then it was a simple matter of—

  “Whatever else he is, Rallen’s Kettral,” Jak said, as though reading her thoughts. “He’s lived on these islands at least forty years, and he knows what the Kettral can do.”

  “But there aren’t any Kettral left.”

  Jak met her gaze. “Even the washouts have some training. We’re not the real thing, Rallen knows that, but we’re not completely useless.”

  Gwenna nodded slowly, then turned the long lens back to the fort.

  “So the small buildings are storage and barracks, the large thing, that lopsided pile that looks like some farmer’s first attempt at a barn, is mess and command?”

  Jak shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve never been up there. This is the first time I’ve seen it.”

  “Who has seen it?”

  “None of us. Not from the inside. When Rallen came for us on Arim, when he offered us all a second chance, we took boats over to Qarsh. Set up in the barracks there.”

  “You must have known he was building something out here.”

  “We did. He said it was the first in a series of fortifications to make the Islands safer, more defensible, more secure. Flew in a couple dozen craftsmen from over on Hook to build the place.”

  “Craftsmen,” Gwenna snorted, peering through the long lens once more. “That’s a generous term for anyone living over on Hook. Where are they now? Can we talk to them?”

  “They’re dead,” Jak replied quietly. “When construction was finished, Rallen had them tied, ankles and elbows, and threw them off the cliff.”

  Gwenna shook her head slowly. “That sick fuck.”

  “You see why we have to stop him?” Jak asked.

  “What I don’t see is why you kept following him in the first place.”

  “He was Kettral.…”

  Gwenna waved away the explanation. “I know. He showed up. He offered you a second chance. Fine. But when he started throwing civilians off cliffs? That didn’t clue you all in to the fact that he was aiming at something other than the preservation of Annurian justice?”

  “Of course it did.” A new note in Jak’s voice made her put down the lens again. She looked over to find his hands clenched into fists, knuckles gone bone-white, as though he were trying to throttle something.

  I finally made him angry, she realized. About fucking time.

  “Of course we knew it,” Jak said again. “A lot of us were already planning to stop him, to stop helping, at least. That’s why we refused his personal pledge of fealty the next day.”

  Gwenna watched the anger wither. The flier’s eyes had gone wide and distant as he relived the slaughter.

  “And that’s when he killed you.”

  Jak nodded. “We didn’t know it, but he’d already stocked this place. The munitions were here, his most trusted lieutenants were here…”

  “And the birds were here,” she finished quietly.

  Jak nodded again, staring, rapt, into the past. That obsession, in its own way, was just as dangerous as what they faced atop the cliff. The flier was brittle enough when he wasn’t reliving the blood and screaming of Rallen’s purge. If he was going to survive, he needed to look forward, not back, and Gwenna needed him to survive.

  “So where are they?” she asked, waving a hand at the cliffs. “The birds?”

  For a few heartbeats he didn’t respond. Then, slowly, his eyes refocused, found hers. She could still smell the fear on him, but there was something else there, too, something in those clenched knuckles, in the set of his jaw. Stubbornness, she thought. Not the same thing as courage, not by a long shot, but it would have to do.

  “There,” Jak said, pointing. “And there. And there. In those shallow caves, mostly.”

  Gwenna studied the cliff for a moment. She could make out the hollows in the rock, huge holes carved from the stone by age after age of rain and prying wind. With the sun so bright overhead, however, she could barely make out anything inside. She put the long lens to her eye, studying the most obvious of the features. She could see the blocky shapes of the limestone wall in back, but no sign of a bird.

  “It’s empty.”

  “It’s daytime,” Jak replied. “They’ll all be out, flying missions or hunting.”

  Hunting. That was a sight you weren’t likely to forget. Early in their training, each class of cadets was hauled over to Qel, one of the only islands in the chain capable of supporting livestock. Sheep, goats, and cows grazed on the stiff, thick-bladed island grass—hundreds of animals scattered over a few square miles. It was a pleasant enough scene, a warmer, more tropical version of the kind of pastoral landscape you could find anywhere f
rom Sia to north of the Neck. Until the kettral showed up.

  It was impossible to understand the birds, to really appreciate what they could do, without seeing them stoop from a few hundred paces up, fall on a full-grown cow like a boulder of avian feathers and flesh. Gwenna had almost puked on her blacks the first time she saw it. She’d grown up around hawks and falcons, of course, had seen them take field mice and squirrels caught out between the trees. The sight of kettral savaging entire cows, however, the vision of them rending to bloody ribbons beasts that weighed ten times what she did herself … that was a vision she’d been trying to put out of her mind during every flight for the past ten years.

  “The timing is good,” Jak was saying. His voice reeled her back to the present. “The birds are hungry when they wake up. They usually hunt in the morning, take a little time lazing on the thermals while they digest, then come back here for some sport.”

  “I thought the hunting was the sport,” Gwenna said, thinking of sheep carved in half, split cleanly from spine to sternum as though with a massive ax.

  Jak shook his head. “Killing a cow on open ground? That takes about as much effort for the kettral as it would take you to open a coconut with one of your blades. The sport is between the birds themselves.”

  Even as he spoke, he pointed south. Five kettral were gliding in, carried on some invisible shelf of wind, wings spread wide, pinions silently rippling. They might have been normal birds, small as Gwenna’s outstretched thumb, until you realized they were still miles out and hundreds of paces up, that their scale was a trick of the eye, an untruth of the mind misreading the distance, a lie that made them, momentarily, a little easier to believe.

  “Only five?” Gwenna asked.

  “Six,” Jak said, pointing up at the bird circling the rocky island in a high, silent spiral. “Rallen keeps at least one in the air at all times. Flying guard patrol for his fort.”

  Gwenna glanced up, then back at the approaching birds. “Even six. There must have been scores here a year ago.…”

  “Eighty-seven,” Jak replied. “There were eighty-seven before the Eyrie killed them.”

  The words were blunt, bitter. Gwenna could smell his grief. It made her mad.

  “You realize,” she said, forcing herself to keep her voice low, “that there were people killed, too. That Kettral Wings were flying those creatures.…”

  “There are plenty more people,” Jak replied grimly. “More than enough people.” He gestured toward the incoming birds. “For all anyone knows, these are the last of the kettral.”

  Gwenna stared at him. She’d never considered that before. The destruction of the Eyrie itself, the mutual slaughter of nearly everyone she’d ever really known, that fact had eclipsed everything else. The birds were important, but important in the same way as munitions: valuable weaponry to be salvaged before it fell into unsavory hands. She’d never considered the kettral deaths themselves, never realized that the vicious battle on the Islands could well have scrubbed the creatures out of existence.

  “There,” Jak said, pointing at the two birds in the lead. “Sente’ril and Sente’ra. Young birds from the same clutch. We’ve seen them before, flying patrols.…”

  Gwenna glanced at the two birds, then scanned past them to a group of three birds trailing a little behind, her eye drawn to the center of the group, a mottled female with the slightest stutter in her wingbeat. “Holy Hull,” she breathed quietly. “She made it. Out of all of us, she was the first one back.”

  Jak glanced over at her, reading the situation. “Your bird?”

  Gwenna nodded. “Suant’ra.”

  “I remember her,” the flier said. “She was barely fledged when I … left for Arim.”

  “Laith raised her,” Gwenna said, the memory of the dead flier like a shard of glass lodged under her skin. “He trained her.”

  “I remember him, too,” Jak said slowly. “Good flier. Reckless.”

  Gwenna coughed up a laugh. “He was reckless, all right.” She shook her head, as though the motion might shake clear the thought of her slaughtered friend. “Always thought nothing could kill him. At least not while he was mounted up on ’Ra.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He got killed,” Gwenna replied, her voice flat. “Doing something stupid.”

  Jak glanced over at her quickly, then looked away, back to the approaching kettral. “And to her?” he asked quietly, gesturing.

  “She took an injury fighting the Flea’s bird up in the Bone Mountains. Something in her wing. Bad, Laith said. She couldn’t carry us, and we were a seventy-foot target in the middle of the steppe as long as we stayed with her, so Valyn sent her south.”

  Valyn, too. Another one who would never come back to the Islands.

  Jak glanced through the long lens for half a heartbeat, then nodded. “Looks like a patagial tear. She’s lucky it healed up enough to fly.”

  Gwenna stared at ’Ra again. The wingbeat stutter was almost invisible, but she remembered Laith running his hands over his bird for what seemed like half the day, then coming up with the same diagnosis.

  “You can tell that from this distance?” she asked.

  Jak nodded slowly, half his attention on the remaining birds. “I was good at all of this,” he said, voice little more than a murmur. “Just not the fear…”

  Gwenna shifted uncomfortably on the stone. It was bad enough to be a coward; you didn’t have to admit it. Didn’t have to say the words openly.

  “What about the others?” she asked.

  “Kei’ta and Shura’ka,” he replied after a moment. “I haven’t seen either of them on patrols.”

  “Why not?” Gwenna asked. “Why would Rallen hold those two in reserve?”

  “Maybe he’s not. We’re in the Hole, mostly. They could be flying every other day, and I might have just missed them.” He shook his head. “It’s a good thing I came. We have to get this right.”

  Gwenna turned at the unexpected note of determination in his voice. “Meaning what, exactly?”

  Jak frowned. “We have, at most, three fliers.”

  “Including you.”

  “Yes,” he replied, meeting her stare. “Including me. We’re only going to have one shot at this, and we can’t take all the birds. When the time comes, we need to make sure we get the right ones, the top flight.”

  “Top flight?”

  He nodded. “Some birds are better than others. Like soldiers. Faster or stronger. More tenacious.”

  Gwenna nodded slowly. She’d heard plenty of chatter in the mess hall over the years, men and women comparing kettral, arguing endlessly over questions of maximum speed, talon length, beak strength. She’d never paid much attention. After all, if you were on a bird, and you were fighting someone who wasn’t, the brute fucking fact of the bird itself was the deciding factor, not a few extra inches of talon. It had always seemed to her like quibbling over the raw tonnage of available warships when you were planning to go up against a nation whose best notion of a navy involved swimming.

  Except that wasn’t the case here. If she managed to find a way onto the island, if she managed to get the washouts mounted up, it would be birds against birds. The little differences suddenly mattered.

  Jak just watched the kettral, panning back and forth with the long lens, sometimes taking it away from his eye to watch the whole group gliding toward them in loose formation. Then, as though responding to some unheard note on the breeze, he turned abruptly south, body stiffening as he stared through the wooden tube. Gwenna tried to follow his gaze, but she couldn’t see much without a long lens of her own.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Holy Hull,” Jak breathed, ignoring her.

  “Jak,” she snapped, reaching for the bow at her side.

  “He’s alive,” the flier said. He lowered the long lens finally and met her glare. There were tears in his eyes. “Allar’ra.”

  Gwenna glanced back south. This time she could see a flash
of gold in the high noon light.

  “Another bird?” she said, shaking her head.

  Jak nodded slowly. “My bird. The one I trained.”

  He passed her the long lens, but she waved it away. The creature was at least a mile behind the others, but closing at a furious pace. Already, she could see it was gaining.

  “Never heard of a bird with golden plumage.”

  “Command didn’t like it,” Jak replied. “Said he was cursed by Hull. Too easy to see, especially at night. None of the other cadets wanted to train him, so I did. I called him the Dawn King.”

  Great, Gwenna thought, blowing out a long breath. The Dawn King. The bird almost as broken as the washout who trained him.

  As Allar’ra drew closer, however, he looked anything but broken. He was larger than the others, for one thing, substantially larger, and though Gwenna was no expert on avian flight, there was something about his wingbeat, something horribly strong and smooth. It had taken him only a matter of minutes to catch up with the others, and she stared as they passed directly overhead, shivering momentarily as the dark shadows scudded over the ground, silent, and so fast. It was like some part of her remembered being a squirrel once, a mouse, remembered cowering in dense clover, willing the heart to stillness, refusing to look up as death passed on silent wings.

  As the kettral drew closer to the cliffs of the rocky island, the golden bird suddenly beat his wings, just half a dozen powerful strokes, and he was a hundred feet and more above the rest.

  “We want him,” Jak said simply.

  “What about the eye-catching plumage?” Gwenna murmured.

  “Everyone’s got flaws.”

  “Sure, but I’m not looking to add more to the group.”

  “We want him,” Jak said again. “You have to trust me on this. I trained him.”

  Trained. It was not a word Gwenna would have used to describe the creature, not any more than she would when speaking of a crag cat or rabid brindled bear. Even silent, even gliding, the Dawn King looked wild, predatory, utterly unbridlable. Then he spread his wings, cracked his beak, and split the sky with a shriek that seemed one part challenge, one part rage. The two smaller birds behind and below, the siblings Sente’ril and Sente’ra, split apart, screaming their answer to the challenge.