The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Sigrid spoke a few sentences, then fell silent. For the first time, Newt was slow to translate.

  “What is it?” the Flea asked finally.

  Valyn could hear the Aphorist shaking his head. “Dark words dim even the brightest fire.”

  “We’ve been in the dark before,” the Flea replied. “Just tell us what she said.”

  “She says that if Valyn is right, then Balendin’s well is so deep he could bury a legion with a flick of his little finger.”

  Valyn frowned. “So why hasn’t he?”

  “Because,” the Flea mused, “someone is stopping him.”

  26

  All morning they climbed through the vast column of light and air inside Intarra’s Spear. Adare’s legs ached after the first ten floors, then throbbed, then burned. Whenever she stopped to catch her breath, they quaked uncontrollably. Her mouth was dry, her throat raw, her hands twisted into claws from so much clutching of the banister. Halfway to the dungeon, she felt as though she might simply collapse, and yet her own struggle was nothing compared with Mailly’s.

  In the three days since Adare had last seen the girl, the Weeping Sleep had continued its vicious work. Mailly’s eyes were sunk in their bruised sockets, jaundice stained her skin, and the disease had scraped away all healthy flesh, leaving skin tight around the smooth bone beneath. She didn’t look as though she could stand, let alone climb, and yet climb she did, slowly and with gritted teeth, pausing often to gasp or cough, dropping to her knees whenever she stumbled on the steps, but always rising once more, shaking, fighting, gutting it out, ascending through interminable degrees toward her own horrible death.

  Adare’s guards—Sons of Flame in half armor—escorted them, two ahead and two behind. The men could have helped—Mailly was a small woman, small enough that the soldiers might have carried her between them without too much effort—and yet Adare had refused that help. She trusted the Sons as much as she trusted anyone else—which wasn’t much. Mailly wore a deep hood to hide her face, but Adare wasn’t taking chances. Soldiers talked, even loyal soldiers, and the less they had to talk about, the better. Adare had ordered them to take up positions well before and behind, where they could see little and hear less. Of course, that left only Adare herself to help Mailly back onto her feet each time she stumbled.

  Gripping the girl’s arm was like holding a brittle stick. Adare could feel the fever blazing beneath her skin. Kegellen had assured her that the Weeping Sleep wasn’t contagious, but there was something about being so close to such sickness, about holding a person who, by the end of the day, would be dead, that made Adare queasy. She’d been forcing the feeling down all morning, guiding the girl by her elbow or shoulder, running a hand over her back when she rested. If Mailly could keep climbing, Adare could keep helping her. Not that helping was the right word.

  More like a shepherd leading her sheep to the slaughter, Adare thought grimly. The climb was just one more torture to add to the young woman’s suffering.

  Near the end of the morning, when the sun filtered down from above rather than lancing straight through the wall of the Spear, they finally reached the prison, or the start of it, at least. The steel floor was still a dozen flights above, but the landing where they stopped was the last one before the steel walls encircled the staircase, blocking out all light, all access to the cages hanging above. Past this last landing, there would be no room for mistakes.

  “Mailly,” Adare began, turning to the girl, touching her lightly on the elbow. “Are you ready? Are you all right?”

  For a long time, Mailly just stared out into the bright, limpid column of empty air. Almost close enough to touch, a pair of swallows turned lazily on an unseen breeze, but she didn’t seem to be looking at them. It was hard to tell, with her eyes hidden in the hood, but Mailly didn’t seem to be looking at anything.

  “It’s so … light,” she replied finally, quietly. “I’ve never seen so much light.”

  “That’s why it is named for Intarra,” Adare replied, unsure what else to say.

  Slowly, as though in pain, Mailly shook her head, then turned. Always before, she had tried to avert her gaze around Adare; now she stared straight into her eyes. “And she loves you,” the girl said quietly. “Intarra, I mean. She chose you.”

  Adare nodded, mute.

  Mailly shook her head again. “I wonder why.”

  There was no malice in the words, no doubt or condemnation. Just genuine perplexity. Perplexity and resignation.

  “So do I,” Adare replied quietly, her mind sliding back to that moment by the Everburning Well, to the crack of thunder and the lightning’s all-encompassing flash, to the single syllable ringing in her head—Win—a syllable she’d taken for the voice of Intarra herself. It seemed unreal now, like something she had dreamed, or a story she’d found in an old book, a story about someone else. Adare glanced down at her own hands, at the delicate scars burned into the skin. The glabrous whorls reflected the noon light, seemed to burn with it, but what did that mean? Everyone had scars.

  “Is it really hers?” Mailly asked, gesturing to the walls of the Spear. “Did Intarra really make this?”

  Adare shook her head slowly. “I don’t know. No one knows.”

  Mailly turned, her face twisted with pain and confusion. “But you’re her prophet.”

  Am I? Adare wondered. The Chronicles of Annur held dozens of accounts of prophets, men and women rabid with their faith. They had always struck her as tragic figures—deluded, often deranged.

  “I am,” Adare replied, “but even a prophet cannot comprehend the whole mind of a goddess.”

  “Does she speak to you?”

  Not since the Well, Adare thought bleakly. Not a single fucking word.

  “Yes,” she replied. “Although her messages can be obscure.”

  Mailly held her eyes a long time, then nodded. “I’m ready,” she said, sounding stronger than she had all day. “I’m ready to go up.”

  * * *

  “I am here,” Adare announced, “to see the prisoner.”

  For a moment, shocked stillness ruled the chamber. After the brilliance of the Spear itself, the steel room seemed dim, even with the light of a dozen lamps reflecting off the polished walls and ceiling and floor, as though the whole place were buried underground rather than suspended thousands of feet above it. The people, too—the scribes at their tables, pens poised above their records, the guards posted at the doors—seemed subterranean somehow, wide-eyed, startled as troglodytes by her arrival, staring at her burning irises as though they’d never seen the sun.

  Then, in a moment, everything tumbled into motion. Scribes were standing, knocking over chairs, bowing low while a wave of stiff salutes ran through the guardsmen. The Sons of Flame had offered to climb ahead, to provide word of her imminent arrival; Adare had refused. She was relying on this surprise and confusion. She wanted the dungeon guards and jailors shocked and off-balance, too busy staring at her to pay much attention to Mailly’s slender figure at her side.

  “Your Radiance.” One of the older jailors bowed formally, then stepped forward. Lamplight glinted off his immaculately polished armor, glittered in his dark eyes. Shrewd eyes, Adare concluded grimly. She had been hoping for a fool. “My name is Haram Simit,” the man continued, “and I am the Chief Jailor here. You honor us with your presence.”

  “I didn’t come to honor you,” she said brusquely. She had put on her Emperor’s face before entering the chamber, and she used her Emperor’s voice now. “I came to question the spy.”

  Simit pursed his lips. “We have a number of spies, Your Radiance.”

  “Vasta Dhati. The Manjari. The one who broke into my brother’s study. The one who somehow managed to elude you until just days ago.”

  The rebuke was unfair, but she had hoped it might unsettle the Chief Jailor. Simit, however, did not look unsettled. He shook his head slightly.

  “The prison staff does not apprehend the criminals, Your Radiance. Our char
ge is limited to their imprisonment.” He gestured to a set of chairs. “Please. If you and your companion would rest, I will send someone for water and refreshment. The climb is long, even for those who make it often.” The chairs were bare wood, hard and unupholstered. Adare ached to collapse into one, to rest her trembling legs. The last thing she needed, however, was to sit in a ’Kent-kissing chair while Simit scrutinized her further. The sooner they were into the prison and out again, the better. She shook her head.

  “As you say, the climb is long. Too much time has been wasted already. We will see the spy now.”

  Simit’s lips tightened, and he shifted his gaze to Mailly. “And may I ask, Your Radiance, who is your companion?”

  Mailly twitched at her side. Adare reached down and took her by the elbow.

  “No,” Adare replied, careful to keep her voice brusque, level. “You may not ask. She has knowledge of the spy that may prove useful—that is all you need to know.”

  Simit studied Mailly for two or three heartbeats, as though if he watched her long enough, he might see straight through the fine wool of her hood.

  “Forgive me, Your Radiance,” he said at last, “but is this not a matter for the First Shield and his Aedolian Guard?”

  “The same so-called guard,” Adare snapped, pouring as much scorn as she could into that last word, “that let the bastard into the Spear in the first place? The same guard that allowed three of their number to be subdued by a single spy? Is that the guard you want me to trust?”

  She let the question hang there, cocked her head to the side and raised an eyebrow. The other scribes and jailors might have been statues. No one moved. They barely seemed to breathe. There was no way, however, to stop them from watching, and when the whole thing was over, when Adare was gone and the corpse was found, they would remember what they’d seen. They would spend hours pondering Adare’s visit, going over and over all the details, debating the tiny nuances of what she said, the way she held herself. She needed to get out of the chamber soon, get away from all those eyes before she let something slip, or Mailly did. Rushing, on the other hand, was a good way to cause just such a slip, and so she forced herself to stand still, to keep her face aloof, to wait for Simit’s reply.

  “Forgive me, Your Radiance,” the man said again, “but I was given to believe your brother declared the Aedolian Guardsmen free of any guilt.”

  My brother, Adare reflected grimly, who seems to have disappeared from the palace. Kaden had been seen days earlier, departing through the Ghost’s Gate, but after that … nothing. Kiel had assured both Adare and the council that the First Speaker would be absent only temporarily. Adare was not reassured. She had sent twenty of the Sons into the city to search for her brother; they had returned empty-handed. Kaden’s absence was a vexing and dangerous riddle, but breaking Triste out of the Spear afforded no leisure to consider it further, and so Adare had set the question aside, where it gnawed quietly at a corner of her mind like a rat at a bit of gristle.

  “I am not bound by the whimsical declarations of my brother.”

  “And yet he is the First Speaker of the council.”

  Adare made her voice cold, hard. “And I am the Emperor.” Simit acknowledged that with a shallow bow, but Adare was bulling ahead even before he had a chance to straighten. “This matter is more important than my brother knows, and I will not see the handling of it botched any further.”

  Simit bowed lower this time. The man was all respect but no submission. Even as he acquiesced to her demands, she could feel him watching, could see his mind moving behind his eyes. The room wasn’t hot, but Adare was sweating. She could feel it running hot and slick down the skin beneath her robe, glistening on her brow.

  It’s a long climb, she reminded herself. Everyone must be dripping with sweat by the time they get here.

  Simit glanced at Mailly again. “Your Radiance, if I might just—”

  “The Manjari,” Adare said, smashing through the man’s voice with her own, “attacked us here. In the very heart of Annur. You may not find that troubling, but I do, and I will not hand away Annurian advantages to assuage your idle curiosity. I will not have my companion compromised.”

  “My scribes and guardsmen are sworn to silence,” Simit protested, “as am I. The truth of what transpires here does not pass beyond that door.” He pointed discreetly at the steel slab behind Adare.

  “I have every trust in your circumspection.” Adare smiled grimly. “Still…”

  She let the word hang there, the silence stronger than any threat. After a pause, Simit bowed again. “I will have the prisoner transferred to a standard cell for questioning.”

  Adare’s heart bucked like a panicked horse. Everything, the entire plan, depended on meeting Vasta Dhati below, where the steel cages hung in the vast emptiness of the Spear.

  “No,” she barked.

  Simit’s eyes widened a fraction.

  Adare strangled her fear, took a deep breath, and shoved it aside. “I am done with waiting, with incompetence and delay. We will see him now, wherever he is.”

  Simit shook his head, then pointed down through the floor. “He is in a cage, Your Radiance. Hanging below us.”

  “And you’re telling me you have no way to reach these cages?” she demanded, arching an eyebrow.

  “We do,” Simit replied. “A sort of steel basket, but it is not fit for an Emperor. It is precarious.”

  “So is sitting on the Unhewn Throne.”

  “But the basket will accommodate only two,” Simit said.

  “One,” Adare said, pointing to her own chest, then shifting her finger to Mailly. “Two.”

  “You wish to see the prisoner alone?” Concern fringed the jailor’s voice, and his eyes were troubled as he met hers.

  Adare forced herself to meet that gaze, to nod. “Perhaps I was not very clear earlier. There was a breach in palace security. Until I have the answers I seek, I will believe there is still a breach, and while there is a breach, I will trust no one. Including you.”

  Simit studied her. “This is most irregular, Your Radiance.”

  “We will see the prisoner now,” Adare said. “We will see him alone. And if there are any more delays, I will see you removed from your post, stripped of your armor and honors, and put out of the palace.”

  The man held her gaze a moment, then bowed a final time. “As you say, Your Radiance. If you will follow me…”

  Adare let out a long, unsteady breath when the man finally turned. Maybe there had been a more graceful way to handle the jailor, a subtler way, but grace and subtlety carried their own risks, risks she couldn’t afford to take while il Tornja had her son. The blunt force of imperial prerogative wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

  It works, she reflected bleakly, provided you’re willing to burn through all normal human bonds.

  * * *

  Simit’s metal “basket” looked more like some obscure machine of torture than anything meant to carry apples or cotton. Adare and Mailly stood on a slab of cast iron barely wide enough for the two of them, grasping a waist-high metal railing that might have been hammered out on some drunken blacksmith’s forge. The thing was all warped angles and rough edges, a baffling contrast with the clean lines of the rest of the prison.

  It’s meant to frighten them, the Chief Jailor had explained, just before he lowered them through an open trapdoor in the steel floor. The journey to the cages below should not be an easy one.

  The whole thing hung from wrist-thick chains—obviously strong enough to hold up half a dozen oxen—but Adare felt nauseous all the same as the basket dropped through the floor in a series of jolts and lurches. The chains rattled over the pulleys above, setting the basket swaying. After a moment of dizzying vertigo, Adare closed her eyes. She could feel Mailly beside her. The girl was sobbing silently, trembling inside her robe, the sound muffled by the clanking of the chain. Adare felt her own fear begin to give way, shoved aside by her shame. Things could go awry for them all, h
orribly awry, but Mailly was the only one who had come to this place to die.

  How does it feel, Adare wondered, to know you won’t live to see another sunrise? Soldiers marched to their deaths all the time, of course, and old people lying in their beds could surely hear Ananshael’s quiet steps. Almost no one, however, could foresee with any certainty the actual moment. A soldier might survive a vicious battle. A grandmother with the gray pox might live for five more years. It was that chance of survival, the not knowing for sure, that kept people moving forward, even at the end. That chance had been denied to Mailly. Adare was denying it. She carried inside a small pocket of her robe the poison that would destroy the girl. Mailly knew it, had climbed all the way to the dungeon knowing it.

  The basket jolted suddenly to rest, throwing Adare into the twisted railing. She opened her eyes to find a steel cage hanging in space just half a pace away. Like the basket in which she stood, it hung from chains, but when she traced those links back up, she found them fixed in the floor above. There was no raising and lowering of the hanging cells. Prisoners went down in the basket, and usually they didn’t leave until they were dead.

  If any of that bothered Vasta Dhati, it didn’t show. The pirate priest sat cross-legged in the center of his cage, his only clothing a single scrap of sailcloth around his loins. The man was more battered than the last time Adare saw him—something had split his scalp just above the eye, and a huge bruise spread like a stain across his shoulder. He didn’t appear to notice; not the wounds nor his new visitors.

  “All is well, Your Radiance?”

  Adare craned her neck to find Simit leaning out over the open door, staring down at the swaying basket.

  “It is. You may leave us now.”

  Simit hesitated. “Call out loudly—very loudly—when you are ready to ascend.” His head disappeared, and then, moments later, the trapdoor above slammed shut. Adare ignored her roiling stomach and the recriminations of her mind, turning back to face the priest.