The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Your high guard’s too high,” she said, knocking aside the woman’s blade.

  Delka nodded, shifted the weapon, then tried a tentative attack. Her hair—black and silver curls that she’d tied back with a leather thong—pulled free, flopping into her eyes. Gwenna shifted to avoid the thrust, not bothering to parry. Delka recovered, then lunged again, tried to brush back the hair with her free hand, failed, then lunged again. Again, Gwenna stepped aside.

  “Stop announcing your attack,” she growled.

  The older woman cursed quietly. “I am, aren’t I?” The lines on her face deepened around her frown, her narrowed eyes.

  Gwenna nodded. “Half a dozen times over. You look where you’re planning to thrust. You tighten your grip and pull back just before you lunge. You always plant your left foot, and just when you—”

  She abandoned the words, slammed Delka’s blade wide with her own, stepped smoothly into the gap, then buried a fist into her stomach. The older woman folded around the blow, groaning as she stepped back, raising a hand to surrender. Gwenna punched her in the jaw for that, then in the gut again, kept punching until the woman lashed out with her sword in a wide, blind arc. It was a shitty attack, but at least it was an attack.

  “Don’t stop fighting,” Gwenna said. “Ever.”

  Delka was coughing, trying to seize her breath, but she kept her sword up this time, managing a passable approximation of a high guard. Gwenna worked through a couple of the standard gambits at half speed; Delka countered them warily.

  “What was your specialty?” Gwenna asked. “As a cadet?”

  “Flier.” The woman shook her head. “You wouldn’t believe it now, but thirty years ago, I was good with my blades, too.”

  “Why’d you quit?”

  Delka stepped back, giving herself a little space, then smiled. That smile made Gwenna want to bury her head in her hands—it was a mother’s smile, gentle and indulgent. It was hard to imagine Delka gutting a fish, let alone hacking a hole in a man’s chest with a sword.

  “I guess I was just … tired,” the woman replied, shaking her head, brown eyes distant.

  “Of course you were tired,” Gwenna snapped. “That was the whole point. Everyone’s tired. But you made it to the Hole. You just had to go in.”

  “I know,” Delka said, shaking her head again. “I saw them do it. The others in my class. Huel, Tea, Anjin…”

  Gwenna stopped her with a raised hand. “Anjin Serrata?”

  Delka smiled that motherly smile again. “I hear they call him the Flea now.” Then the smile flagged. “Or they did, anyway, before—”

  “He wasn’t here,” Gwenna cut in. “Not when the Eyrie ripped itself apart. He was…” She hesitated. It wasn’t as though this old woman was likely to go spreading state secrets. It wasn’t even as though there was really a state with secrets left to spread. Still, it was best not to get in the habit of running her mouth. “He was somewhere else.”

  “Is he alive?” Delka asked. She still held her blade warily before her, still had her eyes on Gwenna, but she was seeing something else, something forgotten or lost.

  “I don’t know,” Gwenna said quietly, lowering her sword. The woman’s warmth, her openness, were disarming. “The last I saw him, he was going on a mission. A difficult mission.”

  “Then he’s alive.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  Delka nodded. “You don’t know him the way I did, Gwenna.”

  Gwenna stared. Then the words were half out of her mouth before she could call them back. “Were the two of you…”

  The woman just laughed, a warm, rich sound. “Anjin and I? Oh, Gwenna. I was his friend. Would have been his flier, probably, if I’d passed the Trial. And maybe I did love him a little bit—young people love so easily.” She shook her head. “No. Anjin’s only love was…” She fluttered a hand, as though to wave away the memory. “Never mind. These aren’t my tales to tell.”

  Gwenna watched her awhile in silence. The years had carved happy lines around Delka’s eyes. She seemed to have none of Manthe’s paranoia, none of Quick Jak’s regret. She might have been sitting in a comfortable wooden chair looking out over the sea rather than standing on the damp cold stone of a cavern in the earth’s gullet.

  “Why are you here?” Gwenna asked finally. “The way the others tell it, Rallen showed up on Arim and offered a second chance. Why did you take it?”

  Delka’s eyes went bleak. “And did you hear what happened, happened later, to those who didn’t take his chance? It was fight or die.”

  Gwenna waved away the objection. “Sure, but from the way I hear it, a lot of people died. No one knew, then, that he’d be back to murder those who stayed behind. That wasn’t why you joined up.”

  The woman hesitated, then shook her head. “No. I suppose it wasn’t. I never liked Jakob Rallen—he was two classes younger than me. Never trusted him. But I didn’t think he had this in him.”

  “Then why did you come back?” Gwenna pressed. “Why’d you take the second chance? It seems like you were happy over on Arim.”

  Delka watched her for a long time, so long Gwenna was starting to wonder if she’d actually asked the question or only intended to ask it. When the woman finally spoke, her voice was so soft Gwenna had to lean in to hear it.

  “Most people, Gwenna, they get one life. For example, you’re Kettral. You trained to be Kettral. Unless I’ve misjudged you, you’ll die Kettral. Me, though—for the past thirty years I’ve been a wife; a mother, though my children both died young; a widow.… I had lived my life, lived it and loved it, made peace with the pains, framed a thousand thousand memories. It seemed all done except for the remembering. And then Rallen came and said that I could be nineteen again.”

  “You can’t,” Gwenna said, more harshly than she’d intended.

  Delka just smiled. “I know that.” She shrugged. “But can you blame me for wanting?”

  * * *

  The harm wasn’t in the wanting, not for Delka, or Quick Jak, or Qora, or any of the rest of them. The harm was in the massive, seemingly unbridgeable gap between what they wanted, and what they were. Even those who’d made it most of the way through the training had deficits everywhere: they didn’t know how to rig flickwicks in parallel; they couldn’t remember the variations of a dead-man ambush; they botched even the most basic field repairs of their weapons. Several could recite whole chapters from Hendran’s Tactics, a fact that Gwenna found encouraging until she realized that not a single one had real-world experience with any of those tactics.

  The weapons skills were no exception. They could all swing a blade better than the average legionary. They could all hit the goat skull she propped up halfway down the cavern with either a flatbow or a longbow, but that wasn’t saying much. A second-year cadet on the Islands—a kid of nine or ten—could do the same. And things got worse under pressure.

  Gwenna had watched one of them, a stout, dark-skinned Bascan named Exte, put three arrows in a row through the skull’s eye. She was starting to feel optimistic, even allowed him a slight nod. As he made to draw a fourth arrow, however, Annick stepped up behind him, then laid a bare blade against his throat. She didn’t press hard, certainly not hard enough to draw blood, and she didn’t shout. The words were mild, even quiet: “Now do it.”

  Exte swallowed hard, loosed the string, and missed the target by an arm’s length.

  “Again,” the sniper said, pressing harder with the steel.

  This time, Exte couldn’t even nock the arrow to the string. Annick dismissed him silently, but the next shooter was trembling before he even raised the bow.

  * * *

  “It’s not too late,” Annick said after the first week was done.

  She and Gwenna sat on the low stone shelf that had become both their bunk and command post. It afforded a good view out over the cavern. At least it would be a good view, Gwenna thought, if there were anything encouraging to look at. Talal was still finishing up with
his part of the morning’s training, drilling a dozen would-be warriors on the finer points of a windmill feint. Half of them couldn’t do it at all, and the other half performed the sequence at something like quarter speed, their minds working through motions that Gwenna and the rest of the Kettral had entrusted to muscles years earlier.

  “You can still change the plan,” Annick went on. “We can do this ourselves. We should do this ourselves. This…” The sniper jerked her chin down the length of the cavern. “It’s not working.”

  Gwenna cursed. “It’s not, is it?”

  The sniper glanced over at her. “Not your fault. If it were easier to become Kettral, there’d be more Kettral.”

  “I don’t need them to be Kettral,” Gwenna replied bleakly. “At least not yet. Not right away. I just need them to be better. To have just a few more skills…”

  “Which ones?”

  “I don’t fucking know, Annick. The ones they’re going to need.”

  “We could drill them all on bows for a week, make a little progress, then have the fight with Rallen come down to fists.”

  “Fists?” Gwenna snorted. “You’d be just as screwed as they are.”

  “No,” Annick said, voice icy. “I would not.”

  Gwenna turned on the smaller woman. Annick might be death with her bow, but she couldn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds soaking wet.

  “When’s the last time you fought bare-handed?”

  “In the Kwihna Saapi,” the sniper reminded her.

  Gwenna nodded slowly, the memory of the Urghul torment rolling over her like a storm cloud. She’d killed four men in the short time that Long Fist had kept them all prisoner, four Annurian legionaries. All of them had been taller and larger than her, probably stronger, too. Not that that had helped. She had murdered them all, murdered them in a matter of heartbeats. So had Annick, for that matter, and Annick wasn’t even that good at bare-hand fighting.

  Gwenna stared at the sniper so long that Annick finally glanced over.

  “What?”

  “The skills don’t matter,” Gwenna said slowly.

  Annick frowned. “Of course they matter.”

  “Sure,” Gwenna said, waving the objection away impatiently. “In an absolute sense, it all matters. Learning more sword forms is better. Learning more complicated demo rigs is better. Learning to shoot accurately from a moving deck, or a moving bird, or a moving horse, it’s all better.…”

  “Obviously. That’s why we train.”

  “No,” Gwenna said, shaking her head vigorously. “It’s not. Not the only reason, at least. Not even the most important reason.” The sniper started to respond, but Gwenna raised a hand, forestalling the smaller woman. “Think back to the men you killed during the Kwihna Saapi. What did you do to beat them?”

  Annick frowned. “Different moves in each case.”

  “Yes, fine. But my point is that the moves were … secondary. The guys I killed—they were dead before I did a ’Kent-kissing thing. They looked at me, saw a woman in Kettral blacks, and they just … folded inside. I could see it, could see the hopelessness seep into their eyes. They fought—tried to, at least—but you can’t fight when you don’t think you can win.…”

  She trailed off, wondering if she was remembering those battles clearly. She could hear the screaming of the Urghul, could feel the heat of the sacrificial fires, could smell the piss of the poor bastards she was facing down, see the hopelessness scribbled across their faces. She could see all of it, but was she reading it right?

  The sniper studied her for a long time.

  “And you think that’s what’s wrong with them,” she said finally, tossing her head toward the men and women at the other end of the cave. “That they don’t think they can win.”

  “Of course they don’t. That’s why they’re cowering down here, shitting in dark corners and being eaten by slarn.”

  “There is a massive logistical and supply asymmetry between Rallen’s troops and—”

  “I know that, Annick. But there’s always some sort of asymmetry. The other guys always have more swords, or higher walls, or better intel, or whatever. When’s the last time you studied a battle between perfectly balanced forces? The point is, you can fight through all sorts of tactical and strategic imbalances. You can win. But you’re not going to win if you don’t think winning is possible.”

  The sniper picked at her bowstring with an idle finger, sounding that same note over and over and over. “All right. The psychological element is important. Hendran writes about it more than everything else combined. But a confident blacksmith is still just a blacksmith. The mind is not everything.”

  “We don’t need everything,” Gwenna said. “We need enough. And they’re not blacksmiths. They already have Kettral training, years of it, in most cases. They just need to believe they can use it.”

  “And what’s your plan for getting them to believe?”

  Gwenna blew out a long, unhappy breath, wondering suddenly if she was wrong, if she’d gone crazy. “It’s going to be tricky.”

  Annick shrugged. “It’s all tricky.”

  “And it’s going to get some of them killed. Maybe a lot of them.”

  The sniper shook her head. “I thought the point was to toughen them up before sending them out to die.”

  “We’re not sending them out,” Gwenna replied, smiling grimly. “We’re sending them down.”

  * * *

  “No,” Manthe hissed, shaking her head so hard Gwenna wondered how it stayed attached to her neck. “Are you insane? Absolutely not.”

  “No one’s asking you to do it,” Gwenna pointed out. “The two of you have already been through the Trial. You passed. Remember?”

  Manthe just shuddered, her eyes distant, focused on some remembered horror. Gwenna had the feeling she could reach out and knock the woman over with a gentle push. She could have, that was, if Hobb wasn’t standing there, looming over Gwenna, a protective arm around his wife’s shoulders. Since that first showdown in the cavern, neither of the two Kettral had challenged Gwenna again. When she decided to go scouting, she went scouting. When her Wing started trying to train the rebels, Manthe and Hobb stayed out of the way, watching the long sessions of archery and bladework with cautious, guarded looks.

  Early on, Gwenna had tried to enlist them. “Feel free to help,” she’d suggested. “Even after spending the last decade on Arim, you’ve got more experience than the rest of this lot.”

  “We have more experience than you,” Hobb had pointed out, his voice hard.

  Gwenna had managed not to hit him. She didn’t even retort. She just spread her arms, a gesture she hoped looked welcoming. “As I said, I could use your help getting the others up to speed.”

  Manthe had only glared at her, eyes bright, almost feral behind her stringy, graying hair.

  “I don’t think so,” Hobb had replied slowly. “You wanted to run this show. You run it.”

  Those had been their last words on the matter.

  It was just as well, Gwenna concluded, when her anger finally cooled. The older Kettral had gone through the training, had passed the Trial, had even flown actual missions, but they were broken, shattered. Hobb was too protective of his wife, and Manthe saw monsters in every shadow, heard death and disaster on every breath of air eddying through the cavern. The rebels needed backbone more than they did bladework, and they weren’t likely to get it from Manthe and Hobb. The two veterans didn’t go anywhere—there wasn’t anywhere to go—but they kept to their corner of the cave, to their own grimy blankets. They watched constantly, dark eyes flickering with the firelight, but they had made no move to interfere. Until now.

  “You cannot do this,” Manthe hissed again, half raising a clawed hand, as though to ward off a physical attack.

  “I can,” Gwenna said, “and I’m going to. I already said you don’t need to be part of it.”

  “It’s not about us,” Hobb said. He gestured the length of the cavern, to w
here the would-be soldiers were paired up, sparring. “These kids…”

  “They’re not kids,” Gwenna said. “Every one of them is older than I am. A few of them are older than you.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Hobb insisted, jaw tight. “They’re not ready.”

  “They’d be a lot more ready, you idiot,” Gwenna snapped, “if you quit telling them they’re not.”

  The man stared at her with open contempt. “Listen to yourself. You lucked through the Trial. You managed to survive barely a year off the Islands—a year in which half your Wing died—and you come back thinking you’re Kettral. Thinking you know the first thing about what it is to be a soldier. What it takes.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing I know,” Gwenna shot back. “Until we got here, you were fucking hiding. You were losing.”

  “There is a difference,” Manthe snarled, still clutching her husband’s arm as she leaned forward, “between courage and recklessness.”

  “And which one is it when you hide in a cave letting your people get killed by slarn?”

  “We are assessing,” the woman hissed. “There is intelligence.…”

  “We gathered more intelligence in the last week,” Gwenna snapped, cutting her off, “than you did in all the months since Rallen took over. At some point you have to stop assessing and start killing people.”

  Manthe stared at Gwenna, thin lips parted in disbelief. Gwenna could hear her panting, her heartbeat galloping along just at the edge of panic. Then she turned to her husband, voice low and beseeching. “She’s going to get us killed, Hobb. She’s crazy, and it’s going to kill us all.”