The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Are you all right?” she murmured. The sight of his wounds had filled her with sudden foreboding, and despite his earlier assurances, the whole thing suddenly seemed impossible. How could he keep track of the cloth for three days, through arrest and transport, beatings and interrogation? Could he eat, with that silk rope snaking down his throat? Could he sleep? “Do you have it?” she demanded, suddenly convinced she should have found a way to carry the rope herself, whatever the added risk.

  “You are speaking to the First Priest of the Sea of Knives,” Dhati replied serenely, raising his eyes. Before Adare could respond, he tipped back his head and, as he had in Kegellen’s home days earlier, vomited the silken rope into his hands. The cord was a slick, twisted mess, but it was there. When it was done, Dhati spat onto the steel floor of his cage. “This is no prison for the First Priest of the Sea of Knives.”

  “What about the cage?” Adare asked, eyeing the steel gridwork. Instead of the simple vertical bars she had seen in other prisons, bars ran both horizontally and vertically over the front of the cell. The resultant empty squares were barely larger than the priest’s head, certainly far too narrow for his shoulders, a fact that seemed to bother him not in the slightest.

  For a moment he stood still as the steel walls. Then, with no warning, he began to windmill his arms in frenetic circles, all the while breathing in and out so quickly and violently that Adare thought he might snap his ribs. Mailly had pushed back her hood, and was staring at the tiny man, amazement replacing, if only for a moment, the pain that was usually scrawled across her face.

  “What is he doing?” she whispered.

  Adare grimaced. “Escaping.” She hoped.

  Suddenly, Dhati went still again. He closed his eyes, muttered a few words in a language Adare didn’t understand, then stepped forward to the bars. He put an arm through first, an approach that seemed obviously doomed to failure. Before Adare could lose hope, however, the priest let out a deep humph, and the arm seemed to pop free from the body, the shoulder liberated from its socket. The sight was both sickening and fascinating. Adare could do nothing but stare as the man distended his own flesh, twisting his limbs into positions of torture, horror, his body writhing in the impossible postures of nightmare. He didn’t seem to climb through the metal grate so much as pour himself, as though there were no muscle or bone inside his skin, but an amorphous, gelatinous ooze. For a moment Adare thought the man was a leach, but she realized as she stared that there was no kenning involved—only a staggeringly violent subjugation of the flesh. It took a matter of minutes, but when Dhati was finished he stood outside the cage, perching easily on the bars as he retrieved his rope. Then, with an acrobatic flip, he tossed himself up onto the roof of the cell.

  Adare shook her head in amazement. “Now what?” she managed, when she finally found her words.

  Dhati bared his teeth—a feral expression that might have been a smile. “Knots.”

  The First Priest of the Sea of Knives was fully fluent in his knots; his thin fingers flew through the whorls and twists as easily as Adare might write her own name on an empty page. It took him only a matter of moments to tie a series of small, fixed loops into the length of silk—holds for hands and feet, evidently—then just a heartbeat more to attach the end of the silk to one of the bars on his cage. When he finished, he looked up at Adare, then pointed beyond her shoulder.

  “I will get the girl.”

  Adare turned slowly, warily, shifting her grip on the railing as she moved. She’d managed not to look down, had managed not to look at anything but Dhati and his cage. Now, however, she was forced to confront the full scope of the prison. Dozens of cages hung from the floor above, most at different levels, facing different directions. She had a brief vision of the architect or mathematician responsible for solving that particular problem, for packing in as many cages as possible without offering any one prisoner a clear line of sight to any other.

  In a way, the whole place was ludicrous. Holes hacked into the stone would have been cheaper and easier, and no one was likely to escape from a cave built straight into the bedrock.

  But then, Adare reflected, staring at the hanging cells, at the light reflecting off the steel, it’s not about ease. Not any more than this tower we decided to occupy. It’s about power.

  Anyone who saw the sunlight glinting off the tower—sailors miles out to sea, travelers down the coastal road, visitors to and citizens of Annur itself—knew that it belonged to the Malkeenians. Somehow a single family with blazing eyes had taken the greatest structure in the world for its own, then built a prison inside it, a dungeon so high, the story went, that even if a prisoner managed to leap from his cell, he would die before striking the ground. It was worth a logistical hassle to have the whole world believe a thing like that.

  Atop his hanging cage, Vasta Dhati pulled the last of his knots tight, grunted in satisfaction, and then, without even a glance down, leapt the gap between his cell and the hanging basket. The whole thing swayed dangerously as he landed on the railing, but while Adare and Mailly scrambled to hold on, Dhati balanced easily, shading his eyes with a hand as he squinted to the west.

  “How long will it take,” Adare asked, “to search the cells?”

  The First Priest hissed, then shook his head. “No search. The girl is there.”

  He pointed at a cell just twenty or thirty feet distant.

  Adare stared at it. The gleaming steel walls stared blankly back. Presumably the cell had an open side, a gridwork of bars like those through which Dhati had just escaped. It had better, she thought. Even Dhati couldn’t drag Triste out through a sheet of solid metal.

  “She’s in there? How do you know?”

  “You want me to free a leach,” Dhati replied. “To keep the leach safely, she must be drugged. That is the only cage the guards visit, even in the middle of the night.”

  I should be grateful, Adare thought. The information was an unexpected windfall, as was the simple fact of the cage’s location. After so much scheming and second-guessing, Triste hung inside a cell just a stone’s throw away. Dhati, as promised, was out of his cage. Improbably, it was all working. I should be grateful, she told herself again, and yet, instead of gratitude, she felt only her heart’s hammering, dread rising in her throat to choke her.

  “You have the grapples?” Dhati asked impatiently.

  Adare started at the question, then nodded. Hidden in her piled hair, masquerading as lacquered pins, were the three hooks the priest had given her days before. In retrospect, she could have simply carried them in her pocket, but there had been no way to be sure that Simit wouldn’t search her, Emperor or no. Her fingers felt numb, clumsy, as she pulled the hooks free, and as she passed the final one to the priest, she felt it slip from her sweat-slick hand, tumbling into the void. Adare could only stare, but Dhati lashed out, viper-quick, snatching it as it fell, then hissing his disapproval as he straightened. It took him only a moment to lock it together with the other two, then to thread the rope through the triple eye of the grapple.

  “How…,” Adare began.

  Before she could finish the question, he tossed the steel hook. It was a casual motion, almost indifferent. It reminded Adare of the way she herself might toss aside her robe when she undressed for the bath. She watched, amazed, as the silk fluttered out behind the hook, as the enameled steel flashed with the sunlight, then landed with a clank atop the far cell. The sound seemed horribly loud, the kind of thing that would surely bring Simit and his guards running. She stared up at the closed trapdoor for a dozen nervous breaths. The steel panels didn’t move. The Chief Jailor did not appear. Adare let out a long, slow breath, then turned back to the silken cord hanging in a shallow arc between the cells.

  “Stay here,” Dhati said. Then, without even a glance down, the priest swung out onto the silk, hanging spiderlike beneath it, suspended from his hands and the backs of his ankles, then moved along its length, nimble and frighteningly fast. He reached Triste’s
cell in moments, rolled onto the roof, then tipped his head over the far side. He looked up a moment later, then signaled.

  “She’s there,” Adare breathed weakly. “She’s there.”

  “And he can get her out?” Mailly asked, her voice faint. “He can get me in?”

  Adare kept her eyes fixed on the far cell, but nodded slowly. “You saw how he did it. You’re just as small as Dhati—smaller, actually.”

  “But my body,” the girl protested. “It doesn’t move like that.”

  “It will,” Adare replied. “He can help you.”

  Help, in fact, seemed like entirely the wrong word for what the priest would have to do. He had demonstrated his uncanny ability back in Kegellen’s mansion, his strong, nimble fingers finding a series of points halfway between Adare’s neck and shoulder, then pressing so viciously she thought he would break the skin. She’d cried out in alarm just as her shoulder went slack, then numb, the whole arm dangling stupidly at her side.

  “Your soft emperor’s body would not last a day on the Sea of Knives,” the priest had said, gesturing, “but it can be trained to obey.”

  Then, before Adare could protest, he popped her shoulder from its socket. Whatever he’d done to relax the muscle also deadened the pain, at least in that moment. The ache came later, when she’d recovered the limb’s use and feeling, a bone-deep sense of the wrong that had been done. Kegellen, of course, had been all apologies and solicitude, but Adare had brushed aside the woman’s concern. “All that matters is that it works, that he can get Triste out, and Mailly in.”

  “He’s going to relax your body…,” Adare began. Before she could finish, Mailly collapsed at her side, shaking her head in the slow cadence of terror or regret. “I can’t do it. I’m sorry, Your Radiance. I’m so sorry. But I can’t do it.”

  Adare took a deep breath, knelt on the hard iron slab, then draped her arm over Mailly’s shoulders. She could feel the girl’s thin frame shaking, racked with terror and disease.

  “It’s not so far,” Adare said, forcing a calm she did not feel into her voice. If Mailly refused her role, the whole thing was finished. They might still escape with Kaden’s leach, but the guards would know within the day—the very next time they descended to force the adamanth on Triste—that she was gone, and Adare had little doubt that Simit would make the obvious connection. Everything hung on Mailly’s cooperation, and yet, it was an awful thing to coax a young girl to her death.

  “Dhati will take you over,” Adare said, gesturing.

  Even as she spoke, the tiny priest had removed the grapple and tied the far end of the silk to the chains supporting Triste’s cell. With the steel hooks in his teeth, he made his way back hand over hand, swung up atop the basket railing once more, then dropped down next to Mailly.

  “Be quicker,” he hissed, lifting her robe over her head. “Speed is safety.”

  The girl, still half dazed, raised her arms. She wore only a light linen shift beneath the robe; the cloth had been washed so many times it was nearly sheer, and Adare winced at the gaunt angles of the girl’s body. Once she was in the cell, she would exchange garments with Triste. At least, that had been the plan before Mailly’s courage faltered.

  Dhati, oblivious or indifferent to the girl’s terror, tossed the robe aside, then began work on a harness. He had an extra length of silk, one he’d untied from the longer swath, and as Mailly stared at the far cell, he wove it deftly into a kind of saddle around her bare legs. In moments it was finished, tied off to the grapple hook.

  “Climb,” Dhati said, leaping up onto the railing once more, taking the long rope in his hands. “Hook over this. I will pull you.”

  “Not yet,” Adare protested, pulling the glass bottle from the pocket of her robe. “She has to drink this first.”

  “I can’t,” Mailly protested, shifting her gaze from the gap between the cells to the bottle in Adare’s hand. “Oh, Sweet Intarra, no. I can’t.”

  The words were desperate, panicked, but almost inaudible, as though there were no air left in the girl’s lungs for speech.

  You have to, Adare wanted to scream. You said you’d do it, and now you have to!

  Instead she hauled in a slow breath of her own, then forced herself to meet Mailly’s terrified eyes. “Tell me why you’re afraid.”

  Mailly stared at her. “I’m afraid to die.”

  “So am I,” Adare replied quietly.

  The words just tumbled out, but they weren’t quite the truth. It wasn’t Adare’s own death that terrified her, but her son’s. When she closed her eyes to shut out Mailly’s face, Sanlitun filled her mind, the tiny child with his small hands grasping for her hair, her face. If she failed here, he was gone. Il Tornja would learn she had defied him, and he would kill her son with the indifference of a fisherman hacking the heads from his catch. The simple fact felt like a knife nestled right beside her beating heart. She opened her eyes to Mailly’s tear-streaked face, so different from Sanlitun’s and yet bathed in the same bafflement, twisted by the same helpless need.

  And where is her mother?

  Living in some squalid hovel, no doubt—a rat-infested basement or a leaking garret in the Perfumed Quarter. Wherever it was, it couldn’t be good, not if Mailly was willing to drink poison to save her from it. Adare imagined the woman for a moment, imagined her in the cramped room as the sun’s last light flamed on the sill, then died. She would be confused about her daughter’s absence at first, then concerned, then sick with worry. Adare couldn’t picture her face, but she could see the hands, skin rough with a lifetime of scrubbing, clenched in the woman’s lap, the knuckles pale, bloodless.

  “You don’t have to do it,” Adare said. She glanced down at the bottle in her hand, suddenly tempted to toss it over the railing of the basket, to watch it disappear in the dusty light.

  “But the money,” Mailly moaned. “Five thousand suns…”

  “I’ll make sure your mother gets it. And your brother.”

  “You would do that?” the girl asked, shaking her head in disbelief, then dropping to her knees, clutching at Adare’s legs in gratitude or supplication.

  Adare nodded mutely. It was ruined. The whole fucking thing was ruined. She wanted to scream, but screaming wouldn’t do any good. I can delay, she thought, mind racing, tell il Tornja that I need more time. He won’t kill Sanlitun until he knows I’ve turned on him.…

  “Why are you crying?” Mailly asked.

  Adare stared at the girl, confused, then touched her own face with her fingertips. It was wet, soaked with tears.

  “It’s fine,” she said, scrubbing them roughly away. “We need to get out of here.”

  From his perch atop the railing, Vasta Dhati frowned.

  “You would stop now?”

  “Things have changed,” Adare snapped. “Take down the silk. Quickly.”

  The Manjari narrowed his eyes. “And my ships? This failure is nothing of my doing.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Adare snapped. “You make your own way out, as we arranged before, and you’ll have your ships.”

  “A weak people,” Dhati muttered, shaking his head. “What about the leach?” he asked, tossing his bald head toward Triste’s cell.

  Adare shook her head. “Leave her.”

  “She’s seen me. She could talk.”

  “Who would believe her?”

  Mailly changed her grip on Adare’s knees. She was still kneeling, but had shifted her gaze from Adare’s face to the far cage.

  “Who is she?” she asked, voice weak, as though it had been broken somewhere deep inside her throat.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Adare said, reaching down to grab the girl by the elbow, pulling her roughly to her feet. “We need to get out of here. Now.”

  Horror propelled her, horror at abandoning the plan, at what it would mean. Despair darkened her vision, pressed down on her heart. If she paused, it seemed, if she hesitated even a moment, it would crush her.

  “Put your robe bac
k on,” she said, dragging Mailly toward her. To her shock, the girl pulled away.

  “Who is she?” she asked again, voice stronger this time.

  Adare met her gaze. “She is a leach. She killed over a hundred people here, in this palace.”

  Mailly blanched. “And you want to get her out? Why?”

  “We need her.”

  “But she’s a leach.”

  “She is a weapon,” Adare said wearily.

  “But you’re the Emperor,” Mailly protested. “You’re Intarra’s prophet. You have whole armies to fight for you.”

  “Those armies,” Adare said tersely, “are losing. We are losing.”

  She wasn’t sure whether she meant losing to the Urghul, or to her own kenarang. Of course, there was more than one war, more than one kind of defeat. A woman could lose over and over, could fail in a thousand different ways.

  Mailly shook her head. “I didn’t know,” she whispered finally.

  “How would you know? It’s all happening in the north, or along the coast, or down in the Waist. Everywhere but here. The whole fucking empire could collapse, and Annur would only notice when there were no more boats, no more wagons piled high with food and supplies.”

  “And this leach,” Mailly asked, nodding toward Triste’s cage, “can stop it? Can save Annur?”

  “I have no idea,” Adare said. She could feel the long climb up the tower stairs like lead in her legs. She wondered if she would be able to descend from the Spear without collapsing. It didn’t seem to matter. “Maybe not. I had hoped so. Maybe there’s another way.”

  Mailly looked at Triste’s cage, tears in her wide eyes, then turned her gaze beyond it, past the hanging cells, through the clear walls of the Spear, out and away, to where Annur lay sprawled thousands of feet below. The towers glittered with their miniature beauty. The canals caught the noon light, throwing it back. From this height, even the slums looked beautiful, a collection of tiny dwellings stripped of the stench, the sobbing, the disease.