The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Something about the tent—maybe the sweet smoke, the heat, the closeness of the air—made Kaden’s head swim. The shaman spoke flawless Annurian, but the words seemed new and strange on his tongue, the collected syllables threatening to dissipate like steam above a boiling kettle, to decohere, their meaning lost in the silty air.

  Long Fist continued to sit as he had been sitting all along—cross-legged, one hand in his lap, the other holding the bone pipe—but he seemed larger somehow, or smaller, like a massive statue seen from a great distance. Though Kaden himself was also sitting, he felt suddenly that he might pitch forward into the fire, that the earth beneath him were shifting, lifting up, shoveling him toward the flames. The feeling was so intense that he nearly reached out a hand to arrest his nonexistent slide. With great effort he dragged his gaze from the glaciated blue of Long Fist’s eyes to the fire’s vermillion. When the sight of the fire had burned away his mind’s smoke, he slid into the vaniate.

  Inside the trance, the dislocation vanished. The smoke remained, but it was only smoke. He was still sweating in that dense, wet heat, but the sweat meant nothing. It slid down his skin, but his skin, too, meant nothing. The body he had worn for so many years—it was a feeble thing compared to this great roofless emptiness. He watched the flame for a few heartbeats. There was a stillness in that ever-shifting blaze, a stillness he recognized. When Kaden finally raised his eyes, Long Fist’s pipe froze halfway to his pursed lips. For the first time he looked surprised.

  “You remind me of your father,” he said finally. “I did not expect this of one so young.”

  “What did you know of my father?”

  The shaman spread his hands. “We met. Several times. Like you, the flesh weighed less heavily upon him than it does on the rest of your kind.”

  “Where did you meet?” Kaden asked. “Why?”

  “On the hub where the gates converge. And why? This is a question with many answers. He wanted peace with the Urghul—”

  “And you wanted to destroy Annur.”

  Long Fist took a long pull on the pipe, held the smoke in his lungs, then watched Kaden as he blew it out.

  “It is difficult to hear a thing when your ears are filled with your own words.”

  “They are hardly my words,” Kaden replied. “You said as much moments ago. Annur is a perversion. If you met my father privately, all alone on that island, why didn’t you simply kill him?”

  The shaman frowned. “Would he have been so easy to kill, Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian?”

  Kaden hesitated. The truth was that he had no idea how hard his father had been to kill. Ran il Tornja had managed it, but then, il Tornja was Csestriim. Instead of responding, he shifted the conversation, tried to move it toward his original purpose.

  “You took a risk in coming here, to take mortal form in this world.”

  Abruptly, unexpectedly, Long Fist smiled, revealing his canines, filed to white points. “You believe that this—” He raised a hand into the flickering light, studied the palm a moment, then passed it back and forth through the fire, fast enough that it didn’t burn. “—is what I am?” His laugh, when it came, sounded like the purring of a massive cat, relaxed and predatory all at once. “Imagine, Kaden, that you are an ant. Your world,” he went on, gesturing to the tent walls and beyond, as though offering up the jungle, offering up all of Eridroa and more, “is a scrap of grass. Your monuments are hills of sand, tamped down by a heavy rain. One day you are crushed beneath a ragged fingernail. As your mind darkens, you marvel at the strength of that nail. The speed. The way it came straight down from a clear sky. If you survive, you will worship it for the rest of your days, but what is a fingernail?”

  The shaman’s own nails were long and polished a deep arterial red. He set down his pipe, fanned his fingers, and contemplated those nails a moment. Then, with a quick, precise movement, ripped one clear of the finger. Blood welled in the recessed flesh. Long Fist ignored it. He held the polished nail up to the light, then tossed it into the fire. It was hard to be sure, but Kaden thought he could smell it burning, a dark, acrid scent woven into the sick-sweet smoke of the honey briar.

  “You are not your fingernail,” Long Fist said, “and I am not this body.” He dragged that bloody finger over his chest, leaving trails of red over the pale scar, like a quick, hasty text brushed over another script, the older one more precise, inscribed in the skin itself. “This body is just the point where I intersect with your world.”

  “Then why did you take it?”

  Again, he smiled. “Sometimes it is necessary to put a fingernail on the back of an ant.”

  Kaden wondered briefly how those words would have sounded to someone outside the vaniate. Unsettling, at the very least. Frightening. In the great blank, however, the emotions tied to those words had no meaning.

  Years ago, during a severe winter penance, Kaden had sat naked in the snow outside Ashk’lan for the better part of a morning. When he was finally allowed back inside the refectory, stiff, dumb, and clumsy from the cold, he tried to cut a hunk of mutton from the shank, and ended up slicing open his palm instead. He could still remember staring at the wound, watching the bright blood flow, but feeling nothing from the cold-numbed hand. The limb may as well have belonged to someone else, and in the end it was someone else—Akiil, Kaden thought—who cursed, then wrapped it in clean cloth.

  Long Fist’s words were every bit as sharp as that knife, sharp enough to hack with, to hurt with, but the vaniate was far colder than Ashk’lan’s snow, and whatever part of him the shaman hoped to harm had gone utterly, perfectly numb.

  “If you wanted Annur dead,” Kaden said, “if you wanted to crush it, then why didn’t you kill my father when you had the chance?”

  “Your father was not Annur. Not any more than you are. Than your sister is.”

  Kaden’s own voice, when he finally spoke, sounded far off. “Ran il Tornja.”

  Long Fist nodded. “Your war chief is more than a war chief.”

  “He is Csestriim,” Kaden said, the words he had rehearsed so many times, the explanation he had risked his life and traveled the length of a continent to deliver just tumbling out, almost unexpectedly, as though the words had just willed themselves into being. “Ran il Tornja is Csestriim, and his only goal is to destroy you.”

  Kaden wasn’t sure what he had expected. Not laughter, certainly, but Long Fist laughed then, loud and long.

  “Csestriim.” He shook his head as memory slowly replaced the mirth. “I miss the arrogance of those creatures. It is almost a pity that your kind exterminated them.” The shaman took a long drag on his pipe, eyes distant, as though watching something far away, or very far in the past.

  “We didn’t kill them all,” Kaden said. “And il Tornja hopes to reverse the damage, to replace us with his kind again.”

  “Damage?” Long Fist said, pursing his lips. “Damage? No.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “You men have only your fly-brief lives, but those lives are rich. The Csestriim—” He held thumb and forefinger together, lifted them into the air as though he held a diminutive figure between them, examining it before tossing it into the fire. “—the Csestriim were durable as stone, but there was no music to them. Ciena and I, we would strike them and strum them, drag our fingers over their flesh, and for what? A few dull thuds. Rarely, every hundred years or so, a single spark. Nothing more.

  “You, though,” Long Fist continued, gesturing to Kaden. “Humans. You are fragile as old harps. Always out of tune. Warped by the slightest change in the weather. A child could break you.” He smiled, revealing those sharpened teeth again. “But the music…”

  “I did not come here to talk about music,” Kaden said. “I came here to warn you that—”

  The shaman cut him off with a raised hand. “Let it go.”

  Kaden shook his head. “The warning?”

  “Not the warning. That deadness you wear around you like a cloak.”

  “The vaniate,” Kaden realized.<
br />
  Long Fist narrowed his eyes. “It is an ugly thing. An insult to what you are. To what you could be.”

  Kaden watched the tall figure seated across the fire. Inside the trance, he felt no fear of the god. No awe. He could remember, though, the sudden vertigo that had struck him when he first entered the tent, when Meshkent first spoke to him through the mouth of the Urghul chieftain. He remembered it—the dislocation, the sense of standing at the edge of some vast chasm as the earth tipped up beneath him—but the memory meant nothing.

  “I am not your instrument,” he said quietly.

  Long Fist shook his head in disgust. “Not while you befoul yourself like this.”

  “There is nothing foul in the vaniate,” Kaden replied. “It is freedom.”

  “Freedom?” The shaman shook his head. “And from what, do you imagine, are you freeing yourself?”

  “From you,” Kaden said. “From your touch. Your taint.”

  “You poor, stick-legged creature. What do you think you are for?”

  A new log had caught, and the fire flared between them. Kaden found himself watching the other man through a veil of flame. It was hard to make out his features in the shifting light, but he looked less like a man. Or rather, he was still a man, but one made of planes and surfaces, as though the flesh catching the light were just a reflection of something impossibly larger. This is the sun, the Shin had told him many years ago, pointing to the bright circle reflected in the still surface of Umber’s Pool, and it is not the sun.

  “For?” Kaden asked, trying to place the word, to find some context for his own response.

  “You belong to me, and to Ciena, and to our children. We made you, shaped you from the numb flesh of the Csestriim. Where they were bare, unwavering precision, we gave you resonance, and range, and timbre. You are a thing of beauty, Kaden, like one of these fine jungle drums, but you have defiled the wooden frame, smeared mud over the hide, sliced through the cords that should have held you tight, that let you vibrate to my touch.” The face behind the flame grimaced. “It is an insult.”

  “I did not come here to insult you—”

  “To yourself,” the shaman said, cutting him off. Then he smiled. “Fortunately for you, it is an insult I can unmake.” He raised a hand above the fire, placed the tip of his middle finger against the pad of his thumb, then snapped.

  Kaden had felt the vaniate shatter before—when he stepped through the kenta into the frigid water of the Dead Heart, when the stone falling from the collapsing ceiling of the Dawn Palace smashed into his back, knocking him to the floor. The feeling was always disorienting, but it was nothing like this.

  Instead of the silent bursting of the bubble he remembered, the snap of Long Fist’s fingers ripped him, ripped him in a way that felt physical, from inside the vaniate. Suddenly, his own emotions, heavy as stone and studded with steel, pressed in from all around. He struggled to draw breath, closed his eyes, found the darkness thick and unbreathable as pitch, opened his eyes once more, found the shaman’s unwavering gaze, and finally managed a ragged gasp.

  It hurt. As though he were a fish hauled from the cool, weightless water into an air that burned like fire. Whatever he had learned among the Shin, it abandoned him. He could feel his mouth moving, gibbering with fear, could feel, buried deep inside him, the warm sweet hope that it would end, that the god would let him go. Briefly there was a hard cord of hope holding him up. Then Long Fist smiled more widely. The cord snapped.

  “This is what you are,” the shaman whispered. “This is what you are for.”

  “And if Ran il Tornja destroys you?” Kaden managed from between clenched teeth.

  Long Fist waved a hand, brushing aside both the smoke and the warning. “He can no more destroy me than he can stab a star in the night sky.”

  “He can kill this body,” Kaden ground out, hoping desperately that he was right, that he was making sense, that he understood the situation. The weight of his own emotion, ocean-heavy and pressing down, threatened to crush him, to annihilate the last walls of thought. “Destroy your hand on this world. How will you play your instruments then?”

  The shaman watched him with narrowed eyes. “How do you know this?”

  “Il Tornja knows who you are. He knows you are here and he is hunting you.”

  “It does not matter. He is no threat to me, not even in this diminished skin I wear to walk the ways of your world.”

  Kaden felt his mind might break beneath the strain. “What about Ciena?” he croaked. “She is here, too.”

  Long Fist went suddenly, perfectly still, his face bright with reflected fire, blue eyes unmelting in the heat. Kaden wondered if he’d actually spoken aloud, or if he’d only managed to think his final warning. He had no idea what the god was doing to him, no idea how to fight it, and then, suddenly, it was over. The crushing weight was gone. The fire was just the fire. The face of the shaman was just a human face, hard and intent, all signs of mirth or levity vanished.

  “What did you say about my consort?”

  “She is here,” Kaden said. He was panting. Sweat poured in great sheets down his chest and back. His mind was his own once more, but it felt light, untethered from himself or the world. The heat in the tent, unbearable a moment before, was gone. Or it was not gone, but he no longer felt it. Or he felt it, but it didn’t feel like heat. “She is here,” he managed once more.

  Long Fist’s eyes bored into him. “Why do you believe this?”

  “Because I was with her,” Kaden replied warily. “With the girl whose mind she tried to inhabit.”

  “Tried?” The shaman leaned on the word as though it were a pry bar.

  Kaden nodded. “It didn’t work. I don’t know why. She … the goddess … tried to do with Triste what you did with…” He trailed off, gesturing at the flesh of the man who was no longer a man seated before him.

  Long Fist shook his head. “This cannot be so.”

  “I saw her kill a man with a kiss—the man you left in charge of the Ishien.”

  The shaman’s eyes narrowed. “Ekhard Matol. I was told that he lost his hold on the emptiness. That he tried to pass through the gates unprepared.”

  “He was unprepared because Triste—Ciena in that moment—stripped him of his emptiness. I watched her do it. It took her just a moment, a kiss.…”

  “Bliss,” Long Fist mused. “It is powerful as pain.” He fell silent for a long time, staring into the flame. “This would be Ciena’s way,” he conceded finally.

  “I spoke to her,” Kaden said. “She is the one who told me you were here, on this earth. She said you were power-mad. That you were drunk on your own ambition. That it made you stupid and vulnerable.”

  The shaman laughed a long, rich laugh. “This, too, has the timbre of her voice.” Then he sobered, shook his head slowly, eyes never leaving Kaden’s. “And yet if I believe your tale, she is the one who lost control of her chosen flesh. If I believe this tale. If you spoke to her, then she is here, and this child—Triste—is gone.”

  “No,” Kaden replied grimly. “Triste is very much alive; she is a broken woman, but your goddess was not the one to break her. I’ve seen Ciena only in crucial moments, situations of life and death, and then only glimpses. When Triste put a knife into her own belly—”

  “The fool,” Long Fist growled. “I spent decades preparing the earth, and she tries to follow me on a whim.”

  “I think she followed you to warn you.”

  “And instead, she ends up putting herself at risk.” He bared his teeth. “The obviate. The girl must do it.”

  Kaden shook his head slowly. The balance in the conversation had shifted suddenly, powerfully. For the first time since entering the tent, Long Fist seemed unsettled, even agitated. Kaden had imagined the god would be something like the Csestriim writ large—passionless and rational, brilliant beyond human imagining. For the first time, he realized the error of that conception.

  Meshkent was not Csestriim. He despised the
Csestriim. Kaden had considered il Tornja’s intellect and Kiel’s to be godlike, but they were nothing like the gods, at least not like these gods. Why had he supposed that Meshkent and Ciena, the progenitors of all passion, would eschew that passion, that they would be untouched by the forces of which they themselves were the font? Long Fist was surprised, surprised and angry. Clearly Kaden’s revelation had caught him like a fist to the chin.

  “She won’t,” Kaden replied.

  The man studied him through the smoke. “Does she understand what is at stake?”

  Kaden nodded. “She doesn’t care. Triste didn’t ask to have a goddess lodged in her mind. She didn’t want it. And she has suffered because of it.”

  “Suffered?” the shaman demanded, shaking his head. “She doesn’t understand the first thing about suffering. None of you do. If this child is killed with Ciena inside, if Ciena’s touch is severed from your world, then you will understand suffering.”

  “Triste won’t,” Kaden said. “She will be dead.” He considered his next words carefully. “Can the obviate be performed without her consent?”

  “No,” Long Fist replied, the syllable like the tolling of some funerary drum. “The obviate is not just a killing, not even a self-killing. It is…” he frowned, “a voyage. If the girl does not cast off the moorings, the ship of my consort’s soul … it will remain tethered to the shore as the dock burns.”

  He grimaced, eyes distant, watching some possible future that only he could see as the flames played across the pale skin of his face.

  “The work I do here will wait,” he concluded finally. “I must see this girl. Must speak with her.”

  “She is imprisoned.”

  “Take me to the prison.”

  Kaden hesitated, wondering how far he could press the shaman. “Stop the war,” he said finally. “Stop the Urghul, and I will take you to her.”

  Long Fist watched him. “You dare to haggle with me?”

  “You’re attacking Annur,” Kaden said. “Killing thousands. Tens of thousands. I want you to stop.”