The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Hobb grimaced, then shifted slightly in her clutches. Trying to keep his sword hand clear, Gwenna observed. Talal and Annick were working with the washouts at the other end of the cave, the leach murmuring quiet advice, Annick smacking knuckles and elbows with the flat of her blade to emphasize the price of error. Gwenna thought she could kill Hobb in a fair fight, but that might be exactly the recklessness Manthe was ranting on about. The man had the height, the reach, and judging from the muscle corded in his arms, the strength. Save the fight for Rallen, Gwenna reminded herself. This is not a risk you need to take.

  “Look,” she said, holding her palms up. “All I want is to beat Rallen and those sons of bitches he has flying for him. To do that, we need every advantage, and you both know that the Trial confers major advantages. You’ve been bitten by the slarn and eaten the egg. You know what it does to you.”

  Hobb glanced over at his wife. Her eyes were wide as lamps and her lips twitched silently.

  Gwenna ransacked her memory for recollections of the Flea, for that quiet voice that always rode the edge between confidence and indifference. “I’m not asking permission,” she said. “This is happening.” It didn’t come out sounding like the Flea, but it would have to do. Hobb wasn’t going for his blades, at least. “I told you first,” she continued quietly, “as a courtesy. You’re Kettral, and I thought you might want to help.”

  Manthe shook her head frantically. Hobb looked down at her for a long time, then put an arm around her shoulders, smoothed her hair back from her furrowed brow. The gesture was incongruously soft, private, as though they were alone somewhere, standing on the veranda of a house, maybe, or in front of a quietly crackling fire. Gwenna had been ready to fight Hobb, even to kill him, but the sudden and unexpected intimacy caught her off guard.

  “I could use your help,” she said awkwardly.

  Hobb kept his arm around his wife, but when he met Gwenna’s eyes again, his voice was hard. “Something wrong with your hearing?” he growled. “I already told you: no.”

  Gwenna stared at him a moment, then shook her head. “Then stay out of the fucking way.”

  25

  Every day, as they nudged their horses forward through the mossy trunks of the old trees, Valyn swore to himself that it was over, that he was finished, that when the sun’s heat dropped beneath the western peaks he would shackle his sick lust, wrap himself in bison hide, close his ruined eyes, and sleep. Almost every night, he failed.

  Traveling with Huutsuu was like standing chest-deep in the surf as a hurricane approached; between the swells he could keep his feet, hold his head above water, breathe freely, but when the waves came there was no way to avoid the whole oceanic weight tugging him under, under and out, away from familiar footing, far from any shore he might hope to recognize. Half the time he thought that she would drag him down and kill him. That first night, for instance, when she finally pulled the knife free of his chest. Or the second night, when they fucked so close to the fire that the heat blistered his skin. Or the third, or the fourth …

  Sometimes he thought he would be the one to kill her, even that he had killed her. One night, as the wind scythed down off the mountains, cutting through the rough trunks of the trees, he wrapped a leather belt around her neck, dragging it tighter and tighter as she shuddered, arched her back, choked out a moan, then went suddenly slack. She was only out for heartbeats. Valyn remembered his training well enough to know the lack of air wasn’t going to kill her unless he kept going, kept pulling, and yet he discovered, horrified, that there was a part of him that wanted to keep going, wanted to break her, destroy her.

  Or to have her destroy him. Hurting or being hurt, killing or being killed—it was all part of the same desperate currency, the same cold, heavy coin.

  Most nights he half hoped she would just finish it, finish him. It would be a relief to be cut free finally from the tatters of his own life, a release, and for some reason that release seemed to lie through Huutsuu. The Kettral had offered him a path—a straight road of discipline and sacrifice—but he had strayed from that path. His only road now, the only way through the wilderness, was one of violence and pain, but even as he walked it, a faint voice whispered in the back of his brain, a human voice trapped inside the beast he had become, asking the same questions over and over: What kind of man does this? What kind of man enjoys it? What have you become, Valyn hui’Malkeenian? What have you made yourself into?

  When he let the belt drop, Huutsuu would lie corpse-still and warm a long time, reeking of blood, and sex, and leather, then shudder into life all over again, her strong hands seizing him, twisting, scratching her demands into his ravaged skin, and he would grind out that questioning voice like a fire’s last ember.

  Sometimes—when her knife cut too deep, when he bent her arm behind her to the point of breaking—he could see. It was the same sight that came with mortal violence, that precise etching of darkness on darkness, Hull’s twisted vision, a rush every bit as strong, as overwhelming, as the final convulsions of their sex. Just as fleeting. When the gravest danger passed, so did the engraved blackness of his non-sight, leaving him in darkness once more, with only Huutsuu’s growling voice to guide him.

  The Urghul woman knew her work. She understood just where to put a blade to hurt a man without crippling him, without killing him. When she bit his neck, her teeth closed just wide of the artery throbbing beneath the skin. Still, without the slarn’s strength in his blood, Valyn’s wounds would have left him unable to travel most days. As it was, he found himself limping to the horse each morning, fire from a dozen cuts blazing over his skin as he hauled himself into the saddle. That Huutsuu, likewise, managed to press ahead spoke volumes of her acquaintance with pain. Valyn could remember her mocking him back on the steppe when they first met, mocking him and the rest of his Wing for their softness. He had placed little stock in the words then. Now, at last, he understood; the woman did not simply endure her pain, she wore it like a cloak of fine cloth. She was a savage, worse than savage—but she lived her faith.

  For all the carnal fury of the nights, the long, chill summer days riding north and west were mostly given over to silence. Valyn’s horse followed a few paces behind Huutsuu’s, and yet they barely spoke. The animal lust that he smelled pouring off her in the night vanished when the sun rose, replaced with a granitic resolve, a fixed and unwavering purpose. If she shared any of his confusion, his regret, his turmoil and shame, he couldn’t hear it in her even breathing or steady heartbeat, couldn’t smell it on her skin. Beneath the bright eye of the sun, they were warriors going to do the work of warriors, nothing more.

  “You understand,” Valyn said to her one day when he grew tired of listening to the horses’ hooves on the stone, to the steady swish of their tails, to the breathing of the Urghul all around him, “that if we ever find the Flea, he’ll probably kill us all.”

  “Not all,” Huutsuu replied. “It takes time to kill thirty warriors, time I will use to speak.”

  “Fine. It will still mean buying that time with the lives of your warriors.”

  “So there will be a price.” She shrugged, leather sliding over skin. “Only a fool believes a thing of value will be laid in her lap with no reckoning.” He could feel her eyes on him. “Still. Your presence here may slow this Flea. He may pause before killing.”

  “Maybe,” Valyn conceded. “Probably not. Kettral tend to come in fast and brutal. There’s not a lot of exchanging names or studying faces.”

  Huutsuu shrugged again. “Then women and men will bleed.”

  She smelled almost eager.

  * * *

  Halfway between midnight and dawn, Hendran wrote, most people are either sleeping, fucking, or drunk. It’s a good time to attack.

  It was old advice, but sound, and the Flea took it, hitting the small Urghul camp sometime between midnight and dawn. Huutsuu had posted guards, but guards were little use against men and women trained to move silently through the dark, whose own sense
s were heightened beyond all normal proportion by the eggs of the slarn. Valyn himself was asleep, shivering through nightmare after nightmare, when a starshatter exploded fifty paces distant, ripping him from his dreams.

  His eyes slammed open at the sound. An old reflex—useless now, stupid, just opening a door from darkness into darkness. He extended a tentative hand, groping in the black until he brushed the rough bark of the hemlock’s trunk. He’d climbed a dozen feet into the fork of the old tree just after nightfall, wedged himself there before falling asleep. It was hardly the strongest defensive position, but it was what he had. The Urghul camp would have been warmer, but he had no intention of sleeping among the horsemen—Huutsuu might kill him, but he didn’t intend to offer himself up to the other bastards, or to the Flea, if the Wing leader finally came calling. Outside the camp, he’d at least be able to make a fight of it. Now, it seemed, the decision had saved his life.

  The Urghul were shouting, screaming, and Valyn could smell blood in the air, thick, and hot, and wet, as he dropped out of the tree, landed awkwardly, then straightened up. He half drew one of the axes at his belt, then let it be. If he’d wanted to stay alive, he could have stayed in the fucking tree. The whole point in coming all this way was to try to make contact with the Flea. If it didn’t work, well then, he would die.

  “Anjin Serrata,” he called out, moving too slowly through the low branches, shielding his face with his hands. It was the first time he’d ever used the Flea’s real name. He couldn’t say why he thought to speak it now. “Anjin Serrata!” he shouted again, pitching his voice to carry above the screams of the injured and the dying. The starshatter had done its vicious work, shredding limbs as it had broken apart the silence, leaving those Urghul who had gathered too close to the dying embers of the fire broken, burning, or both. The Flea’s Wing was already moving among them, cutting hamstrings and slitting throats before anyone had a chance to regroup or recover.

  Valyn couldn’t see them, of course, but he could hear steel parting flesh, the grinding of blade against bone, the reluctant sucking sound when the weapon was wrenched free. He could smell the Flea, his leather and determination, and Sigrid sa’Karnya, his leach, who might have bathed in lavender and jasmine that very day. Newt was there, too—pitch, and lice, and nitre. Valyn could hear him muttering to himself, quiet but insistent, as he went about his work. All of the Flea’s people were quiet.

  Huutsuu, on the other hand, was bellowing orders in her strange, musical tongue. Like Valyn and a dozen others, she had made her bed outside the range of the fire. The decision had spared her the ravages of the starshatter, but she wasn’t likely to stay alive if she kept shouting.

  Valyn tried to redouble his pace, stepped into a hole—some sort of burrow, maybe—cursed as he twisted his knee, half fell, caught himself on an outstretched hand, and forced himself up again, lunging forward in spite of the branches stabbing at his face and arms.

  “Anjin Serrata,” he called out again. “Sigrid sa’Karnya.”

  He started to say more, then stopped himself. Any plea or demand would only muddy the message. Either the names would be enough, or nothing would. This time, if only for a moment, the sounds of violence paused.

  “Valyn,” the Flea said finally. “Newt said he smelled you. I didn’t believe him.”

  Nearly half of Huutsuu’s Urghul were dead or dying, and the man didn’t even sound winded.

  “We need your help,” Valyn said.

  He was still a dozen paces from the guttering fire; close enough to take an arrow in the chest, but not close enough to fight. It would have to do. Unless the Flea had gone horribly soft, one of the three Kettral would have taken up a position just outside the fray, would be picking shots with a shortbow while the other two managed the close work. Even as Valyn spoke, someone—probably Newt—would be training an arrow on his chest. His flesh felt hot beneath his blacks. It itched, as though eager for the steel to strike, to punch past his breastbone and into his heart.

  The memory of that night in Assare burned. Seared across his mind’s unblinded eye, the whole disaster played out again: the dead city of stone, acrid smoke filling the air, Gwenna’s deafening explosives, the Flea’s Wing surrounding them, and Blackfeather Finn, the best sniper on the Islands, stumbling into the crumbling chamber with a Skullsworn knife in his chest.

  That was the moment, Valyn thought again. That was the moment I lost it.

  He had thought he was finally ready to face the Flea again, to put right what had gone wrong in Assare. Now, though, locked inside his own private darkness, one arm outstretched helplessly before him, the whole notion seemed so desperately stupid. He hadn’t known the right words then, and, for all he had rehearsed this moment over and over, he didn’t know them now. Worse, the stench of blood on the air had woken something inside him, something vicious and bestial, the same creature that Huutsuu dragged from him each night, an animal eagerness indifferent to all negotiation, whispering over and over the same silent syllable: Kill. Kill. Kill them all.

  “Listen,” he said again, choking back his own savagery. “Just listen.”

  The Flea’s voice was hard in the darkness. “You have five heartbeats.”

  Valyn counted two before he found his voice. “They want to kill Balendin. These warriors want to kill Balendin.”

  Over by the fire, someone was groaning, the same incomprehensible Urghul word over and over. The sick crack of steel against skull cut it abruptly short. Piss mingled with the blood and smoke and hemlock.

  “If they want to kill the leach,” the Flea asked quietly, “what are they doing here? He’s three days to the north, or he was three days ago.”

  “They are looking for you.”

  The silence was cold as winter’s first ice; at any moment it would break, and people would start dying all over again. Valyn ached to reach for the axes hanging from his belt. His empty hands hungered for their weight. Some part of him buried deep inside his brain was thirsty for the blood; it hardly mattered whose. The last time he’d fought the Flea, he’d lost, but he was stronger now, and faster, so much faster. For a moment the scene around the fire resolved in his mind’s darkness: the other Wing leader back-to-back with Sigrid, all four of their blades drawn and dripping, the Urghul scattered like dolls. One of the nomads had fallen into the fire’s last embers. Valyn’s stomach moved at the scent of the burning flesh; he couldn’t say if he was nauseated or hungry. Then the vision was gone, scrubbed away.

  In the vertigo of darkness, he could hear his body’s song, keening to the drumming of his blood: Kill. Kill. Kill. He started to reach for his axes, then, hands twisted into fists, he checked himself again.

  “Looking for us why?” the Flea asked warily.

  “An alliance. They can’t kill Balendin alone. They need Kettral.”

  “Looks like they’ve got you.”

  Valyn’s pulse flared. Fire raged beneath his skin. “I’m not Kettral.”

  “It’s not always up to a man,” the Flea replied quietly, “what he is, and what he’s not. Some things you don’t get to choose.” Valyn could hear him shift, could imagine him scanning the darkness between the trees. “Who leads here?”

  Huutsuu was somewhere off to Valyn’s right, still hidden. She smelled wary but ready.

  “I do,” she replied after a moment.

  “Drop your bow and blades. Tell your warriors to do the same.”

  “You are the ones surrounded,” Huutsuu observed. “In the open.”

  It was true enough. The Flea’s entire attack was predicated on speed, surprise. To succeed, even to survive, he needed to be out of that tiny clearing before the Urghul fully awoke, before they could bring their numbers to bear. The Wing leader had taken a grave risk in pausing halfway through the assault. Even as they spoke, Valyn could hear the Urghul—those who had slept farther off from the fire—moving in darkness, readying their bows.

  “I wouldn’t quite say surrounded,” the Flea replied. “There’s a hol
e in your net there, and there, and there. We killed your guards to the north, so that’s a way out as well.” He paused to let the point sink in. “But you can’t see that, can you? It’s a new moon. You can’t see anything at all.”

  And that was the crux of the matter. The stars splattered across the northern sky would be plenty of light for the Flea and his Wing. They could move through the trees as though it were full day, killing Urghul who were almost as blind as Valyn himself.

  “I can hear you,” Huutsuu replied. “So can my warriors. If we put enough arrows in the air, you’ll die.”

  “Not much of a way to open a parley,” the Flea replied wearily. “But you’re welcome to try it.”

  It seemed a foolish taunt, an insane gambit, until Valyn realized that what he’d seen in that moment of darksight didn’t coincide with the voice. He inhaled deeply. Sigrid and the Flea were at the far side of the clearing now, well wide of the source of the Wing leader’s voice when he spoke. A kenning, Valyn realized. The leach is throwing his voice. He could hear Huutsuu moving forward, searching for better light maybe, or just a better position if it all went to shit. She was being quiet, but not nearly quiet enough.

  “Huutsuu,” he said. “Stand down. I know this man and his team. I’ve seen what they can do. If you want to make peace, do as he says.”

  “I would have a peace between partners, not between masters and unarmed slaves.”

  “Don’t have much interest in slaves,” the Flea replied. “I came to kill, so the fact that I’m not killing is a pretty good hint I’m willing to talk. I’m getting tired of arguing, though, and my back’s getting itchy between the shoulder blades, so I’ll say it one more time: drop your bows, drop your blades, and then we can decide who else needs to die and who maybe ought to stay alive.”

  Huutsuu’s shame and rage were so thick Valyn could taste them. The Flea’s casual demands, his obvious indifference to whatever threat she posed, cut more deeply than any knife. Her blade slid from its sheath, steel whispering against leather. She reeked of readiness.