The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “This is their sport,” Jak said, his voice soft with reverence.

  It looked, at first, like a horribly lopsided contest. Sente’ril and Sente’ra set on the King from both sides at once, claws stretched out before them, raking, grasping. The larger bird, despite his altitude, looked cornered, caught as the siblings swept together. He couldn’t face both at once, and if he turned to meet one, the other would have him. Gwenna had watched birds with fliers spar in the air, each trying to get behind and above the other, into a position where the Kettral stationed on the talons could loose their arrows at will.

  That was nothing like this.

  At the last moment, just as ’Ril and ’Ra closed on him, the King folded his vast wings and … rolled.

  “What…,” Gwenna breathed.

  “Most birds won’t fight from that altitude,” Jak replied, unable to keep the pride from his voice. “He will.”

  Suddenly upside down and just below his attackers, the huge bird could bring his own talons to bear. He locked claws with one of the siblings, then twisted viciously in the air, slamming one smaller bird into the other. Sente’ril and Sente’ra plummeted as the King pulled himself clear, righting himself as the water rushed up and his two assailants crashed toward the waves. They caught themselves at the last moment, swooping clear on outspread wings, no challenge this time, not even a glance back.

  “He’ll leave them?” Gwenna asked quietly.

  “They’re sparring,” Jak replied. “He’s not trying to kill them.”

  “Like blood time,” she said. “In the arena.”

  “Considerably more civil than that, actually.”

  “It doesn’t look civil.”

  “It does, once you know what to look for.”

  The second fight was more protracted than the first. Rather than two birds ganging up on one, Suant’ra, Kei’ta, and Shura’ka all battled each other. None had the obvious advantage, at least not at first, and the avian brawl seemed to stretch on half the morning, a savage display of beaks and talons, wings frantically hammering, huge bodies locked together, falling, then breaking apart. Somewhere in the middle of the fight, the smallest of the three, Kei’ta, peeled away, climbing clear of the conflict, then coming to roost on the stone cliffs. Not long after, Shura’ka seized ’Ra by the wing, claws clutching hard enough to hold, but not hard enough to break or tear. ’Ra twisted, let out an agonized shriek. Shura’ka let her go.

  “I’ve never seen that,” Gwenna said.

  Jak shrugged. “Most Kettral don’t. The fliers are interested, of course, but for the rest … it’s a long swim over here, and for what? It’s not like the bird’s going to be doing any of this with a Wing strapped into the talons.” He frowned. “Like expecting a horse to gallop with a grown man tied to each leg.”

  “So we want the King,” Gwenna said. “And Shura’ka, clearly. Who’s the third?”

  Jak hesitated, then shook his head. “Not Shura’ka.”

  “She handled ’Ra and that other one easily enough.”

  “She’s limited,” Jak replied. “Slow rotation to the right, a stupid tendency never to check out and below her left wing. A dozen other things.…”

  “And does any of it matter? I thought we were choosing the best birds, the ones that can win when things get bloody.”

  “The bird that wins fighting alone isn’t the same as the bird that wins carrying a Wing,” Jak replied carefully. “We want the King, Kei’ta, and your old bird.”

  “She’s injured,” Gwenna protested. “Even I can see it.”

  “And she’s smart. She’s wily.”

  “She lost.”

  “She lost today,” Jak replied quietly. “Tomorrow is another chance.”

  22

  Kaden studied the tall man standing at the stone altar, the man who was not just a man, but a god clothed in mortal bone and muscle. Long Fist may have taken a different name here, in the steaming jungle north of the Waist, where the men and women knew him as Diem Hra, but there was no changing his skin, milk-pale beneath the web of scars, no changing the blond hair that spilled past his shoulders. The flesh Meshkent had chosen for himself could not have been further removed from the bodies of the jungle tribesmen, all of whom were short and compact, their skin and hair universally dark. Long Fist towered above them all—he must have been a full head higher than Kaden himself—a god in the form of a blue-eyed monster come to offer his bloody sacrifice.

  “Diem Hra,” Kaden murmured to the Ishien guard at his side. “What does it mean?”

  “Red Laughter,” the man replied, then chuckled his own insane cackle. “It’s a small local snake. The rattle sounds like a child’s laughter.”

  Kaden was still amazed that the Ishien hadn’t simply slaughtered him the moment he emerged from the kenta. He had stepped through from the stone chamber inside Annur’s old Shin chapterhouse—a chamber he’d had guarded since returning to Annur—into warm salt air, the skirling of seabirds, and the surprised cries of armed men. The low sun seared his eyes, hot and bright, blotting out all but the vaguest shapes. He could barely see the forms of soldiers, dark and featureless as shadows, closing around him. A sharp point—either a spear or a sword—pressed against his back. Then there was another at his chest. He considered the pain from inside the vaniate, studied the jagged red shape of it, then set it aside. The pain was irrelevant. They hadn’t killed him; that was what mattered. For a moment, he could not remember why.

  He’d expected to have to convince them to bring him to Meshkent—Bloody Horm to the Ishien, yet another identity, another mask, another set of syllables that failed to name the god—but no convincing proved necessary. Meshkent had anticipated the possibility of Kaden’s return. Or, if not Kaden’s, someone’s. The man had left orders to have anyone passing through the kenta brought immediately before him, and so, before he’d uttered two dozen words, Kaden found himself stuffed into a cloak with a hood deep enough to hide his face, his eyes, then bustled through another gate, off of the remote island and into the glistening, sodden green of the jungle.

  The kenta stood just a few paces from a small waterfall, in a glade where the stream pooled momentarily before meandering away. Wide-leafed trees ringed the small clearing, their slender branches drooping beneath the weight of hundreds of flowers—red, and yellow, and orange—bright as any imperial finery and wide as his hand. A dense tangle of vines knitted the trunks and branches together, but beyond that verdant wall, Kaden could hear the buzzing of a million flies and the screeching of sharp-tongued birds. And then there was the heat, the thick air like a steaming broth in his lungs each time he inhaled.

  “Where are we?” he asked, turning to one of his captors.

  The Ishien grunted, then shrugged. “The Waist. Just north of it.”

  Kaden nodded. It was what he’d expected, what he and Kiel had guessed. Meshkent was using the Ishien gates to move all over the frontier, fomenting rebellion and war. Sometimes it seemed that all Annur was on fire, but the Waist had been blazing particularly brightly. It was no surprise to find Meshkent here, heaping more fuel on the conflagration.

  “Where is he?” Kaden asked.

  This time, instead of replying, the Ishien just shoved him forward, toward a small break in the trees and the shifting shadow of the jungle beyond. They walked for half the morning, following a network of streambeds and game trails down the side of a low mountain, deeper into the forest. The Ishien held to their silence as though it were a shield, and after two or three unanswered questions, Kaden, too, fell silent. It was tempting to remain in the vaniate, but Kiel’s warning came back to him—Your mind was not built for it—and after a while he let the trance lapse. From what he could make of the light sifting down through the branches above, the sun stood almost directly overhead when he first made out the rumbling of drums, then, almost quiet as the flies, at first, the drone and hum of human voices chanting.

  At last, they emerged from the trees into a huge clearing packed with men and
women and children, hundreds of them, thousands, chests naked in the southern heat, skin glistening, bows, and spears, and stranger weapons Kaden didn’t recognize clutched in their hands. Most were facing the center of the clearing, staring at a low ziggurat of pale stone. A few turned as the Ishien pushed Kaden forward through the throng, but they drew back at the sight of the men, as though they recognized them. A low mutter went up through the nearest, a quick patter of words in a tongue Kaden didn’t understand. The majority, however, didn’t even notice the new arrival.

  Their attention was fixed on the ziggurat, and the pale man who stood atop it, high enough that even those at the very back of the throng had a clear view, low enough that everyone could make out the ritual about to unfold.

  “Long Fist,” Kaden said quietly, the name too quiet for even the Ishien flanking him to hear.

  There was a limestone slab before the shaman, raised to waist level on four columns carved in the shapes of bound men and women. The stone faces wore different features, but each was distended, teeth bared, lips howling in private agony.

  “How long has he been doing this?” Kaden asked. “Coming here?”

  One of the Ishien guards—neither man had bothered to supply his name, but this was the one who occasionally responded to Kaden’s questions—glanced over at him. “A long time.”

  “They’re not surprised,” Kaden asked, gesturing to the assembled throng, then to Long Fist atop the dais, “that he doesn’t look like them?”

  The man shook his head, his reluctance to speak giving way to the obvious awe in which he held his commander. “He turns this to his strength. They believe him to be singular. A prophet.”

  It was hardly subtle—a god posing as his own prophet—but Long Fist appeared to have won over the jungle tribes just as fully as he had the Urghul.

  “How does he do it?” Kaden asked, shaking his head.

  The Ishien snorted. “Bloody Horm was not given his Hannan name yesterday. This is his strength. He lives among a people, rising to a place of honor among them, a position from which he can hunt our foes.” There was reverence in the Ishien’s voice. He gestured toward his commander. “It is a great honor here to wield those snakes.”

  Kaden studied the snakes in question. One was a bright yellow, the other striped black and violet, each as long as his arm and writhing in Long Fist’s grip. The shaman held one in each hand, fingers clamped just behind the heads, ignoring the bodies of the creatures as they coiled and uncoiled around his scarred, muscled arms.

  “You’ve seen this before?” Kaden asked.

  The Ishien nodded. “Once.”

  Before Kaden could respond, Hra raised the snakes above his head. The mass of men and women let up a great, ecstatic scream, all in unison, then fell suddenly, perfectly silent. Kaden could hear the cries of the jungle birds, high and accusatory, the croaking of a thousand bright-tongued frogs, the sweep and rustle of hot wind through the vines. Then the mob parted, men and women shifting aside to form a narrow avenue of sweaty flesh. After a few heartbeats, a prisoner, hands bound behind him, lurched forward on bare, unsteady feet. His shirt had been torn away, but Kaden recognized the filthy legion-issue breeches, the sloppy tattoo of the rising sun high on his right shoulder.

  “Annurian,” Kaden said.

  His guard nodded. “These people won a battle against your republic.” If an Annurian defeat mattered to the Ishien at all, Kaden couldn’t hear it in his voice. “This is their offering of thanks.”

  The legionary approached the ziggurat, stumbling numbly on the uneven ground, then began climbing toward the stone slab and the man behind it. He moved slowly, as though something were already broken inside him, but he moved.

  “Why doesn’t he run?” Kaden asked, trying to make sense of the scene. “Why doesn’t he struggle?”

  The Ishien pointed with grim satisfaction to the thousands of men and women surrounding the altar, each with a bow or poisoned spear. They had fallen eerily silent, but each looked ready to rend the Annurian’s flesh with their sharpened teeth.

  “Why? He dies either way.”

  That seemed clear enough, and after a moment Kaden turned his attention back to the altar. The legionary stood on unsteady legs, staring out over the crowded clearing. The gathered thousands had gone perfectly still, as though paralyzed by their own anticipation. The soldier looked over the faces blankly, bleakly, searching from one to the next as though for someone he knew. His eyes widened when they fixed on the Ishien. Both men shared the soldier’s complexion, a brown paler than the surrounding faces, and the man must have taken them for Annurians, perhaps even legionaries. For the first time, something like life seemed to flood his limbs. He opened his mouth to call out, to scream for help or cry his defiance.

  Before the sound could twist free of his throat, however, the first snake—silent, quicker than vision—struck. The soldier’s eyes went wide. His back arched. A sound like a strangled scream made it halfway out of his mouth, then withered on the hot air. Suddenly, awfully rigid, he toppled back onto the slab, where Long Fist laid him down.

  “Paralytic,” the Ishien announced.

  Kaden nodded slowly, watching the man’s fingers curl in skeletal claws. “And the second snake?”

  Somewhere in the jungle behind them, a mortal creature cried out in terror, screamed its last, then fell silent. The Ishien’s smile was like a rusted knife.

  “Pain,” he replied.

  * * *

  There was a monotony, Kaden had decided by the time the sun finally set, when the soldier’s spent body was finally carved into parts and laid about the edges of the altar, to horror. Something ultimately pedestrian in the strangled protests clawing their way up from the soldier’s frozen gut. The stomach could only twist so much at the sight of blood welling from the mouth and ears. The mind could only recoil so far.

  When Kaden finally sat inside the hide tent, staring across the dwindling fire at the man who had done the hurting, the cutting, the man with all the names—Long Fist, Bloody Horm, Diem Hra, Meshkent, the man who was not a man at all—and when the tall man smiled at him, nodded, and asked, “How did you find our offering?” Kaden found himself answering without thinking.

  “I found it boring.”

  Foolish words, perhaps, with which to address the Lord of Pain, but the tall man just watched him through the smoke, took a sip from his steaming wooden cup, then nodded. “In pain, as in all things, there is an art. I would not expect you to understand it any more than I would expect the tribesmen outside this tent to appreciate the polyphonic choral music of the Manjari.”

  Kaden blinked. Any mention of music seemed incongruous after the recent blood and brutality, and Long Fist’s ease, the casual urbanity with which he discussed the famous Manjari choruses—it wasn’t what Kaden had expected from someone who wielded poisonous snakes in his fists. Another reminder, as if he needed another, of an old Shin truth—expectation was the midwife of error.

  “Where is the art,” he asked quietly, “in a paralyzed prisoner bleeding out through his ears?”

  His own question surprised Kaden even as he gave it voice. He had come through the kenta, had risked his life with both the Ishien and the tribes of the Waist, in order to warn the shaman about Ran il Tornja, not to argue the aesthetic merits of pain. And yet it seemed crucial, suddenly, to distance himself from the slaughter, from the savagery of the women and men just outside. This, after all, was the one figure responsible for setting fire to Annur, for kindling war on every front, for ordering the Urghul south and the tribes north, for ushering in the slaughter of thousands, maybe millions when the violence was finally finished. It seemed important to be clear on one central point: Kaden had come to warn the priest, not to follow him. Not to join him.

  “Where is the art,” he continued, “in peeling the skin off a man’s body, one strip at a time?”

  Long Fist—Kaden still gave him that name in his head—just smiled, as though the question were at once fami
liar and disappointingly dull.

  “Where is the art,” he replied, “in blowing air through a hollow reed? In smearing ink on a page? Reduce anything to its elements and the art…” He blew the pipe smoke slowly between pursed lips, watching it eddy in the hot air, then break apart. “It vanishes.”

  “No,” Kaden said, shaking his head. “Music and painting are not like this. What you accomplish is just blood and suffering.”

  “There are more shades to the suffering of men than there are colors in the forest. I can draw more notes from a woman bound than a harpist can from her crude arrangement of wood and string.” He gestured, a mere flick of the fingers that made something deep in Kaden’s gut recoil. “There is no instrument like man, no musical counterpoint like the play of terror and hope, the bafflement and aching clarity that you can draw from his distended flesh.” The shaman’s voice was lower and slower than it had been. Reverential. Incantatory. “This is art. This is true beauty.”

  Kaden stared. A part of his mind moved, a part he thought he had long since tamed, something sluggish but powerful as a winter bear prodded from its slumber. The Shin had taught him to put away his terror, but here, in the tent’s low firelight, seated across from the god, Kaden felt that terror stirring once more.

  “I know who you are,” he said, his own voice so low he wasn’t certain that he’d spoken.

  Long Fist just smiled. “Of course you do.”

  “And I know what you want.”

  “No,” the priest replied. “You do not. You understand the edges, perhaps. You see the faintest outline, but the beating heart of it all—you are far from holding that in your fist.”

  “You want Annur destroyed.”

  “Annur.” Long Fist nodded. “It is a perversion.”