The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Do you want Balendin dead, Huutsuu?” Valyn demanded. “Or do you want to destroy that chance right now, here, for the sake of a meaningless fight in the forest?”

  In truth, his own hands were still trembling to grasp the hafts of his axes. His body ached to attack, to let out a roar, then come out of the trees swinging. Whether he took the side of the Urghul or the Kettral hardly seemed to matter. Fighting brought that awful sight, and he had lived inside the darkness for so long. He started speaking, then kept going, because his own words were the only wall he could build to hold back the violence clawing inside of him.

  “Even if you win, you lose. You came here to find the Flea. What are you going to do if you actually manage to kill him? Go back to the front? Try to take down Balendin, fail, spend your last day screaming as he opens your chest and holds up your beating heart?”

  “I have no fear of that leach,” Huutsuu replied, voice tight. “Not of him or of his pain.”

  Valyn ground his teeth. “I don’t know what they say on the steppe when a woman dies in a hopeless, pointless fight, but back on the Islands we called it stupid. Useless. You don’t need to go looking for pain; the pain finds you.”

  Huutsuu didn’t respond. The other Urghul were moving carefully in the woods beyond the clearing. None of them would have understood the exchange, but that hardly mattered. The challenge in Huutsuu’s voice was obvious. The bodies of the dead scattered around the fire were fucking obvious. Even cloaked in the darkness, even with Sigrid throwing his voice, the Flea was taking a risk by waiting, by listening, by letting the Urghul wake up fully, get their bearings.

  Then a naked blade clattered against gnarled roots in the clearing—Huutsuu’s weapon, Valyn realized. A moment later, her belt knife followed, then her bow. She barked something curt in her own language.

  There was a long, tense pause. Then, from the far side of the clearing, one of the Urghul—a man—responded angrily, defiantly, a string of quick syllables rising with his rage. Before Huutsuu could respond, the words twisted into a long, guttural moan.

  “Sorry,” the Flea said, not sounding sorry at all. “I don’t understand your language, but he didn’t seem eager to talk.”

  “He was a fool,” Huutsuu replied curtly.

  “How many more fools are there?”

  As though they’d heard the taunt, two ksaabe launched themselves howling from the trees, charging blindly at the spot where the Flea wasn’t. Newt’s bowstring hummed once, and then, after a pause, twice. He wasn’t anywhere near as fast as Annick, but he was fast enough. The bodies tumbled to the dirt, a dozen paces apart by the sound of it.

  Then Huutsuu stepped into the clearing. “Piat!” she spat. Valyn didn’t know the word, but the intent was plenty clear. “Enough!” she went on, switching languages, turning slowly in place, making her body an offering to the hidden Kettral. “This quarrel can do nothing but brighten the heart of the leach we hope to kill. We will sheathe our swords and speak as equals.”

  “Great,” the Flea replied. “We’ll talk when your swords are sheathed and you’re all out here in the light. That means you, too, Valyn.”

  “There is no light,” Huutsuu said. “The fire is long dead.”

  Before she had finished speaking, however, there was a great inrushing of air, a roar like a house-high wave crashing on a rocky shore miles distant, and then the heat of a large blaze played over Valyn’s face and chest, warm even through the layers of wool and leather.

  “There’s the fire,” the Flea said. “Get warm. See to your dead. When you’re ready, we’ll talk.”

  “And you?” Huutsuu asked warily.

  “I’m here,” the Flea said. Valyn could hear him approaching the newly kindled blaze.

  “And the others? Your sniper? Your leach?”

  “I think they’ll stay in the trees,” the Flea replied. “Just in case the talking doesn’t go so well.”

  * * *

  It took the better part of the night for the surviving Urghul to collect the bodies, wash them in the small stream winding through the trees off east, then carry them back to the fire’s verge. When they were laid out on the ground, Huutsuu spoke over them, her voice low and hypnotic, halfway between chanting and prayer. When she was finally finished, Valyn could smell the wet wind that always gusted up just before dawn. Rather than letting the fire burn down, the Urghul heaped it higher. There were no graveyards on the steppe; scavengers would just dig up the buried bodies. Instead, the Urghul dead were given to the flame.

  The scent of burning flesh was thick, cloying, foul as the smoke that had filled the air of Andt-Kyl for days after the battle. Valyn stood a few paces from the fire, trying to keep his face still, his hands from shaking at the memory. Hundreds had burned alive in the small town, loggers and Urghul alike, trapped inside log buildings or pinned beneath flaming barricades. The hissing and steaming of the green branches blazing in front of him sounded like screaming.

  Not screaming, he told himself over and over. They’re dead. The fire can’t hurt them.

  Then one of the taabe stepped forward.

  Valyn could hear him chanting at the very edge of the fire. The words were raw with grief. Then the man bellowed his defiance into the huge night, and Valyn heard the pyre shift, collapsing in on itself in a shower of sparks as something was pulled free. The stench of burning flesh grew suddenly stronger, sharper.

  The Flea had been silent throughout the ceremony, but he spoke now.

  “We’re going to have a tough time killing Balendin if none of your men can hold their blades.”

  Huutsuu stank of contempt. “One of the warriors we just burned was Moahe’s brother. The Coward’s God has taken him to a place where he cannot feel pain, and so Moahe holds the burning brand for him. He feels the pain for his brother, who has gone beyond all feeling.”

  The Flea grunted, but fell silent.

  After that first cry, the taabe was silent. Valyn tried to imagine it, to understand how it might feel to clutch a smoldering log in his hands as the skin blistered, cracked, then sloughed away. Clean. The word came unbidden to his mind, shocking as a knife in the eye. The burning is clean. The pain is clean. It was an awful thought, but one he could not deny. Somewhere in the wide, cold northern forests he had become like these creatures, bowing before the most brutal of gods, as though life’s beauty had been utterly burned out of him, leaving only anger, hunger.

  Finally it was over. Valyn heard the crash of the log landing back in the fire, then the sound of a body collapsing to the dirt.

  Huutsuu said something in Urghul—Valyn thought he caught the words for warrior and hand before hearing her turn slowly to face the Flea. “Now,” she said, “we will talk. Balendin—”

  “Before we get to Balendin,” the Flea said, his voice quiet but sharp, slicing right through Huutsuu’s own, “Valyn and I have one or two questions to work out. The last time I saw him, one of my people died.”

  Valyn nodded, but didn’t move. He was close enough to the fire for the Flea to see him. That would have to be enough.

  “Ask your questions.”

  “What happened in Andt-Kyl?”

  “Laith died. Gwenna and Talal managed to blunt Balendin’s attack before Adare and her pet general arrived to finish the fight.”

  “I meant what happened to you.”

  Valyn took a long breath before answering. “I tried to kill il Tornja. Adare put a knife in my side and then the bastard blinded me.”

  “You’re carrying a lot of weapons for someone who can’t see.”

  It wasn’t a question, and so Valyn didn’t reply.

  The Flea sighed. “You went after il Tornja because you think he killed your father.”

  “I know he did,” Valyn growled. “Adare told me herself. She admitted it.”

  “All right,” the Flea said. “He killed your father.” He didn’t sound surprised. “So you decided to join up with the Urghul?”

  “He didn’t join us,” Huu
tsuu said.

  “He’s here,” the Flea pointed out. “You’re here. I’m looking at both of you.”

  “We ran into each other,” Valyn said. “More than a week back. She told me there was a Kettral Wing attacking her people, that she wanted to find you, to join up in the fight against Balendin. I agreed.”

  “I get the feeling there’s a little more to the story.”

  “There’s always more to the story.”

  The Flea snorted. “That’s truth. Fine. Balendin. We’d all love to see the bastard dead. Last time I checked—and I check pretty often—he was still alive. How’s our own budding friendship going to change that?”

  Huutsuu shifted beside the fire. “You know him. You know where he is weak. Tell us this, and we will kill him.”

  To Valyn’s surprise, the Flea chuckled. “That’s the plan? Not long on details, is it?”

  “These details,” Huutsuu replied coolly, “will depend on what you tell us of his weaknesses.”

  “Well, that’s the trouble,” the Flea said. The Wing leader paused to suck loudly at something stuck in his teeth. After a moment he spat into the fire, then continued. “If Balendin has a weakness, I don’t know it. The kid was dangerous back on the Islands, but that was nothing compared to what he can do now. If you’ve been anywhere in the north or west, you’ve seen it.”

  When Huutsuu responded, her voice was caught between hatred and grudging awe. “I saw him hold two bridges in the air while hundreds of horsemen rode across. I saw him burn a palisade of half a mile to ash. We have leaches among our people, but not like this.”

  “His well—” the Flea began.

  “Is us,” Valyn said, the words heavy on his tongue. “Balendin’s an emotion leach. He feeds off of us, off anyone who feels anything about him.”

  For a while no one spoke. The fire snapped into the blackness. The Urghul had taken up wary positions almost directly across the fire from the Flea, though they couldn’t understand the conversation taking place.

  “Sig,” the Flea said finally. “Newt. Might be you can join us after all. Looks like we already killed everyone who needs killing.”

  The two Kettral had flanked the fire moments after the fight. Valyn could smell them—the Aphorist as muddy and filthy as Sigrid was inexplicably clean. When Sigrid stepped into the clearing behind him, he could hear the mutters of surprise, could taste confusion on the cold air. He could imagine the Urghul staring, as though an atrep’s wife had stepped out of the trees in her full finery, condescending to walk among them.

  Valyn had been a boy of nine when he first met Sigrid—if “met” was the right word. He’d spent most of the day running navigation drills down in the mangrove swamps off the west coast of Shirrin, covered in mud and leeches most of the time, bruised everywhere from clambering over the twisted roots. When he finally got back to Qarsh just before dusk, he was wiped, aching for a bowl of fish broth and a few hours passed out in his bunk. Just as he was approaching the mess hall, however, a group of cadets came racing through the compound.

  “Come on,” Ha Lin called, seizing Valyn by the arm of his soaked blacks.

  “Come on where?” he’d protested.

  “The Flea’s Wing is fighting in the ring—part of it is, at least.”

  The part, as it turned out, was a single soldier: Sigrid sa’Karnya. It wasn’t all that odd for the vets to take a turn sparring, but the Flea wasn’t just another vet, nor were the men and women who flew with him. The man had been a legend, even back then, and he and his Wing were out flying missions most weeks of the year. Valyn never got a straight answer about what Sigrid was doing in the ring that day, but he never forgot the fight.

  The woman wore blacks, but unlike the serviceable wool favored by the rest of the Kettral, Sigrid’s clothes were immaculately tailored from fine silk. They were fighting clothes, but someone had cut and stitched them so they hugged and hung on her in the same way as the elaborate gowns Valyn remembered from the women in the Dawn Palace. And Sigrid moved like those women, at least partly; her grace was a hybrid of courtesan and killer. Valyn had seen pale-skinned women before, both in Annur and on the Islands, but he’d never witnessed anything like this golden-haired leach, who stepped into the ring with all the scorn of a goddess deigning to set foot upon the earth.

  The Flea had been in the rapidly gathering crowd that day. He’d looked tired and a little impatient, not at all the way a legend was supposed to look. The rest of his Wing seemed more enthusiastic. Blackfeather Finn was reclining with his boots up, gesturing to the ring and chatting expansively with some other vets. Chi Hoai Mi was drunk, sloshing around her wooden cup as she argued with anyone who would listen. The hideously ugly demolitions man that people called the Aphorist was even taking bets, stacking and sliding small piles of coin on the rough stone that formed the circumference of the fighting space as he dispensed his incomprehensible wisdom.

  “Who’s she fighting?” Laith asked, standing on his toes to try to see above the crowd.

  “Felp’s Wing,” someone replied.

  Valyn knew the name vaguely—the woman was in her thirties. Evidently she flew a lot of missions into Manjari territory.

  “Who from Felp’s Wing?” Lin demanded.

  “All of them,” Valyn said slowly, staring as five grim-faced Kettral filed into the ring. “Holy Hull. She’s squaring off to fight all of them.”

  And fight them she did, if you could call it fighting.

  The soldiers from Felp’s Wing arrayed themselves in a rough circle, blunted weapons brandished warily before them. Sigrid shook her head, drew her belt knife, then ran the steel along the pale flesh of her arm. Even from a distance, Valyn could see the blood bloom, so dark it looked black in the blazing sunlight.

  “That’s her well,” Laith hissed. “Blood!”

  Lin cuffed him on the back of the head. “No one knows what her well is.”

  “But she always does that,” Laith protested. “Everyone says it. She always cuts herself before a fight.”

  And indeed, a spiderwork of scars twisted around the woman’s arms all the way to her shoulders.

  “But she’s not allowed to use a kenning inside the ring,” Valyn pointed out. “It’s against the rules.”

  “I don’t think she cares,” Ha Lin whispered, obviously awed, “about the rules.”

  The leach didn’t look like she cared about anything, not the raucous crowd of Kettral screaming at her from all sides, not the five soldiers arrayed in an arc before her. She raised the bleeding arm to her lips, ran her tongue along the wound. It came away red and dripping. Valyn could see the red smeared across her perfect white teeth. The woman glanced over at the Flea, who made an impatient gesture with his hand—Get on with it. And then madness descended on the ring.

  Even when it was all finished, Valyn couldn’t quite say what he’d seen. There were no impossible kennings, no sheets of fire erupting from the ground, no swords of ice coalescing out of the air. Sigrid fought with her twin blunted blades, the same as any other Kettral, moving through the same forms that Valyn and the rest had been learning since they first arrived on the Islands. She was faster than some of the other Kettral, but not that much faster; she was more accurate, but not that much more accurate. The five soldiers arrayed against her should have taken her down in a matter of moments, and yet somehow, impossibly, they failed.

  It was like watching a year’s worth of bad luck strike Felp’s Wing in the space of a hundred heartbeats. Every blow was just a touch too slow, every attack just a hand’s breadth off target. Lunges that should have struck home slid past the leach, inexplicably wide. Knees buckled at crucial moments. Feet slipped. There was nothing that Valyn could identify, no one specific thing he could point at and say, There! That’s a kenning. Sigrid fought at the center of a whirlwind. Her blades were a blur, her feet constantly shifting on the sand, but her face never lost that look of casual disdain.

  She was barely winded by the time the five other Kettra
l lay groaning in the dirt. She looked down at them, shook her head, then made a horrible, tortured hacking sound deep in her throat. It took Valyn a long time to realize she was laughing, that those mangled, guttural sounds were all she could make with her severed tongue. After a moment she looked up, raised her chin, spat blood, and spoke to the crowd. The words came out broken between those beautiful lips, incomprehensible.

  “My esteemed companion,” Newt translated, “would like to thank Commander Felp and her soldiers for a challenging fight.”

  Sigrid’s mouth quirked up at the corner. The Flea sighed as she stepped from the ring, and Newt began collecting his coin in great glittering piles.

  Sigrid sa’Karnya was, in her own way, more dangerous than the Flea, and she was standing right behind Valyn in the small forest clearing. He couldn’t see her, of course, but he could smell her, could smell, beneath the jasmine and lavender, the woman’s blood, and hotter than that, redder, her rage.

  “What do you think, Sig?” the Flea asked. “Is Balendin leaching off our emotions? Is that even possible?”

  For a long time, the woman didn’t reply. When she did, the Aphorist translated the shredded sounds from across the fire.

  “My charming companion says yes.”

  “Yes to what?” the Flea asked.

  “Yes to all of it. It’s not just possible. She believes Valyn is right.”

  “Balendin admitted it,” Valyn said. “Back in the Bones. He tricked us, trussed us up, said it straight out: the only reason he was keeping us alive was to leach off our emotions.”

  “All right,” the Flea said. “What does it mean?”

  Sigrid choked up a handful of sounds.

  “He’s strong,” Newt said. “Stronger than Sigrid. One of the strongest leaches alive.”

  “And he’s getting stronger,” Valyn said. He’d been over it a thousand times since Andt-Kyl. Leaching off the terror of a single person—poor Amie back on Hook—had given Balendin enough power to rip down an entire building. Now, however, as the war leader of the Urghul, he was feared by tens of thousands—nomads and Annurians alike. “As his fame grows,” Valyn went on grimly, “so does his power. The more foes he faces, the greater his strength, as long as they know who he is.”