The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Well, I’ll tell you another fact,” Gwenna replied grimly. “If you want to save yourself, if you want to survive, you’ve got to go down in those tunnels.”

  “Gwenna,” Talal said, voice harder this time.

  “I’m not going down there,” Jak said. “I quit. I refuse the Trial.”

  “No,” Gwenna said, spinning easily on one foot, sweeping the flier’s ankle, catching him in a half lock before he hit the ground, wrapping her legs around his chest, then flipping him toward the thrashing slarn. He tried to resist, made a good show of it, actually. He was strong, and if they’d been wrestling to a pin, or a blackout, he would have given her a run for her money. She didn’t need to pin him, though. Didn’t need to knock him out. All she needed to do was hold him half a heartbeat as the slarn’s jaws snapped shut on his forearm, tearing away a flap of skin and muscle. Jak bellowed, and she let him loose, rolling away and to her feet, dropping into a fighter’s crouch in case he came after her.

  Instead, he was staring at his arm. Blood wept down the skin, puddling on the floor. The creature gnashed its teeth, searching for more, and the flier pulled back, eyes wide with disbelief.

  “Hull’s Trial is voluntary,” he said quietly. “You can’t force someone to do it.”

  “No one’s forcing you,” Gwenna replied. “You have a choice. You can let the poison gut you, or you can go with your fucking Wing.”

  * * *

  “That was wrong,” Talal said.

  “Spare me the lesson in morality,” Gwenna spat. She stared into the bonfire, following the shifting shapes as logs turned to embers, then the embers caved under their own weight, sending showers of spark and ash into the air. They’d fed the hungry fire half a dozen times since the last poisoned Wing, including Quick Jak, disappeared down Hull’s gullet. It was impossible to gauge time down in the Hole, but it seemed someone should have come back. “I know it’s not the way the Eyrie used to do it, but we need him, Talal.”

  “We do not,” Annick said. She had her bow in hand. Whether she was guarding against a sudden appearance of slarn, or against Manthe and Hobb, who were crouched in whispered conversation over at their corner of the cavern, Gwenna couldn’t say. “He is the weakest of the entire lot. And they are all weak.”

  “He’s not weak,” Gwenna insisted. “He is afraid.”

  The sniper shook her head as though the statement didn’t make sense. “Fear is a weakness. A dangerous weakness.”

  “We all have weaknesses. I’m not saying Quick Jak is going to be the Flea someday, but he deserves a chance.”

  “Chances are something that people need to take for themselves,” Talal pointed out. “Part of your reason for sending them down into the Hole in the first place was to build their confidence. It doesn’t build a man’s confidence to knock him down, then offer him up as meat for a beast that terrifies him.”

  “I know,” Gwenna said, putting up a hand as though she could block the objection. “I understand that. But we all need a nudge sometimes. I was terrified my first barrel drop, couldn’t make myself undo the buckle. You know what Adaman Fane did? He cut the straps and shoved me off the talon. And I realized, as soon as I hit the water, that I could do it, that I’d done it. The next time, I did the buckles myself.”

  “You are not Quick Jak,” Talal said quietly.

  “Of course not. We’re all our own people.”

  “That’s not what he means,” Annick said.

  “Well, what the fuck does he mean?”

  “I mean you’re … better suited to this,” Talal said.

  “I’m not suited to it. Every ’Kent-kissing thing I’ve learned has been a struggle.”

  “Maybe,” Annick said, cutting her off. The sniper pursed her lips, flicked her bowstring with a finger. The note echoed in the empty chamber. Annick waited for it to die out before she continued. “And still, you are what the Eyrie aims for when they train us. You’re the perfect Kettral.”

  Gwenna stared at her. For a moment all words failed. “Are you fucking mad?” she managed finally.

  “No,” Annick replied evenly. “I was there when we fought our way free of Long Fist. I saw you command the defense of Andt-Kyl. I saw you pull Qora out of the mess over on Hook.”

  “I was improvising. Annick, I was making that shit up.”

  Talal just laughed. The sudden mirth was both welcome and disconcerting. “That’s the point,” he said. “Kettral improvise. They fight on the fly. When the Flea put you in charge of the Wing, he did it for a reason. You’re good at this shit.”

  Gwenna stared from one to the other, unsure what to make of the lump in her throat. Before she could get too emotional, however, the smile slipped off the leach’s face, and he was shaking his head.

  “That’s what we’re trying to tell you about Jak. Just because something worked for you doesn’t mean it will work for him. I like the guy, too, Gwenna. I’m sorry he’s broken, but he is broken. You’re a great demolitions master and an even better Wing leader, but that doesn’t mean you can fix him.”

  Annick nodded. “Keep trying, and someone’s going to get hurt. Killed.”

  “That happens to Kettral,” Gwenna retorted. “We get killed.”

  “Quick Jak’s not Kettral.”

  Gwenna turned away, staring into the tunnel where it snaked away into the labyrinth below. When she finally managed to speak again, her own quiet words sounded strange in her ears, half desperate, half defiant:

  “Not yet.”

  * * *

  By the time they’d heaped the central fire with wood another half-dozen times, the sniper’s warning was starting to look horribly prescient. All of the Wings had returned from the Hole—bloody, with broken fingers or twisted ankles, limping, leaning on one another, glancing over shoulders at some remembered terror, at a recollected triumph—all except for Quick Jak’s.

  The rebels clustered around the fire, too exhausted, mostly, for the sharing of stories or the comparing of wounds. Some dozed off, while others went at the stores of dried meat and fruit with a vengeance. They looked more like weary workers at the end of a long harvest week in the fields than they did soldiers, but Gwenna could smell the satisfaction on them, could hear the new note of pride in their voices. Sure, she’d changed the rules of the Trial; sure, she’d given them plenty of light and sent them down in groups; sure, it was ten times easier than what Gwenna’s own class of cadets had faced. None of that mattered. Not to them. Not now. They’d faced the slarn, had gone down into the Hole panicked and poisoned, and then they had found what they were looking for and come back out. They had won.

  All of them but Quick Jak and his three companions.

  Gwenna had taken to pacing impatiently over by the tunnel mouth, eighteen steps to the ledge, turn, eighteen steps back. She’d tried stepping into that darkness and listening, but that made it worse. For someone with her hearing, there were a hundred sounds whispering up from the depths of the cave, water washing the cold stone, wind etching the stalactites, underground rivers rumbling in the rock’s throat. The sounds of Hull’s darkness—none of them human.

  After she’d paced off the distance four or five hundred times, Delka came over to join her. Talal was busy tending to the wounded—wrapping bandages and splinting fingers—while Annick continued to stand watch against any number of hypothetical threats, the seen and the unseen. Both of them had given Gwenna her space when she finally shoved her way free of the fire and the questions both, leaving her to stalk back and forth in a cloud of her own doubt. Delka, however, had gone into the Hole before the whole scene with Jak. She had no idea what had happened, and a smile creased her lined face as she approached.

  “Thank you,” she said simply.

  Gwenna stared at her. The punctures in the woman’s arm had scabbed over, but she had other wounds—a gash across her scalp that left her face streaked with blood, a huge contusion on her left shoulder, purple so dark it was almost black except at the red, angry edges. Blood s
meared her teeth. She looked like she’d spent half the night losing a rough fight, like she ought to be sleeping it off somewhere dark and quiet, not standing in front of Gwenna grinning. Not fucking thanking her.

  “For what?” Gwenna demanded.

  “For letting us do it. For encouraging us.”

  “Encouraging…,” Gwenna said, shaking her head, remembering Quick Jak’s frantic thrashing as she held him down, imagining him and the others lost in the tunnels below, maybe dead already, ripped to fleshy ribbons by the slarn.

  “You see anyone else when you were down there? Any of the … others?”

  Delka met her eyes, shook her head slowly. “Just slarn. But we weren’t really looking, Gwenna. They could be finding the egg right now. They could be on their way up already.”

  “Or they could be dead,” Gwenna said.

  To her surprise, Delka nodded. “They could be dead,” she agreed, voice matter-of-fact. “That’s what it is to lead soldiers, Gwenna. Sometimes you make the right decision and people still get hurt. Sometimes they still die.”

  “I understand that,” Gwenna growled. “I understand it better than you do. While you were eating sliced firefruit over on Arim, I was up to my elbows in blood fighting the Urghul in Andt-Kyl.” She could still hear Pikker John’s screams as the horses lashed to his limbs pawed the earth, tearing him apart. She could still see the captives, bound hand and foot, heads bent toward the dirt, helpless as statuary in the moment before her starshatter rent them to pieces. “I know you lose people in a fight, but this isn’t a fight.”

  She glared at Delka a moment longer, then glanced into the darkness of the Hole once more. She could hear the river down there, groaning over the stone like something huge and in pain. She smelled blood, thick and hot on the back of her tongue; some of the stench came from the cavern behind her, where the returning men and women nursed their wounds, some from the warren of tunnels below.

  “The Eyrie has always sent men and women into the Hole,” Delka said quietly. “They don’t always come out.”

  Gwenna shook her head. “When the Eyrie sent us in we were trained. We were ready.”

  The older woman laid a hand on Gwenna’s shoulder. “I don’t know the other three well, but Quick Jak and I used to run together over on Arim. He’s strong. He’s smart.”

  “Is that enough?” Gwenna growled.

  Delka spread her hands. “We’ll have to wait to find out.”

  Gwenna shook her head curtly, seized a burning torch from its makeshift sconce near the entrance to the tunnel, then slipped a blade from the sheath on her back. “No,” she said quietly, stepping into the darkness before anyone could call her back. “We won’t.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, Delka was right. Gwenna found Jak less than a quarter mile below the cavern where the rebels made their camp, limping up the uneven stone, one blade bare and bloody, his own torch burned down to a guttering stump.

  Thank Hull, she thought, relief flooding through her like light, like air. Then she saw his face, the awful shock scrawled across his features, looked past him into the deeper dark, listened for those other footfalls, for the three other soldiers who had gone down into the Hole with him, who weren’t coming out.

  “They’re dead,” he said. His voice, too, sounded dead.

  “How?” Gwenna asked, covering the distance between them at a lope.

  Jak just shook his head.

  “How?” she demanded, shoving her torch almost into his face, trying to read what had happened in the spatters of blood, in the dark soot smeared across his skin.

  He stared at her, incredulous. “What do you mean, how? There are monsters down there, you bitch. Bigger than the one you dragged up into the cavern, the one you fed our blood to.”

  She shook her head, as though to refuse the truth. “The others all made it. The others came back.”

  “Maybe the others were better.”

  “No,” she said. “They weren’t. You’re one of the only washouts who actually made it all the way to the Trial. You’re younger than most of them, and you’re stronger. I’ve seen you swim.”

  “It’s not swimming down there,” he said, staring at the naked blade as though he had woken up only moments before, had just now discovered it clutched in his hand. “It’s a lot uglier than swimming.”

  “What happened?”

  “The slarn happened,” Jak said, shaking his head, eyes wide, mind obviously lost in the memory. “Half a dozen of them. We found the nest. Enough eggs to go around. Thought we got lucky. We were actually laughing as we drank from them, slapping each other on the back.” He closed his eyes. “Then they hit us.”

  “And did you fight back?”

  “Of course,” he said quietly. “What else could we do?”

  What else could we do? Gwenna stared at him. The flier was spattered with blood, but not much of it seemed to be his. There was that initial wound, wet and messy on his arm, and a handful of scratches. Nothing more. Nothing to indicate a bare-knuckle fight to the death.

  What else could we do?

  “You could run,” Gwenna said. Even in her own ears, her voice sounded like a knife sliding across stone.

  Jak opened his eyes, met her stare. “There was no need. Not in the end.”

  “You killed six slarn?”

  “I didn’t do it by myself. Helli killed at least three before the big one tore out her throat. Gim got one, I think. All I know is that they were all dead, finally. I was the only one left. Me and the largest of those monsters, and he was already all cut up. Dumb beast, practically dead on his feet and didn’t know it. I finished him.”

  Gwenna studied him. She could smell the grief, but grief for what? For seeing his companions killed or for leaving them? He’d frozen up that night in Hook, had all but abandoned Qora to the mercy of Rallen’s thugs. Was it really likely that he’d behaved any differently, that he’d behaved better in the tight, twisting darkness of the Hole? Gwenna had shoved him down into the cave’s gut hoping that could be true, but all those hours pacing back and forth in front of the fire had eroded her hope. Despair had had hours to whisper its own sibilant song, insistent as a river undercutting the bank: He’s a coward. He’s a coward, and you were a fool.

  “You don’t believe me,” Jak said, shaking his head wearily. “You think I ran.”

  Gwenna took a deep breath. “Take me to the bodies. They deserve to be burned.”

  Not just that. A few minutes studying the dead, and she’d know what had happened, who had fought and who had fled.

  “I can’t.”

  “We’ll find them,” Gwenna insisted grimly. “Just a matter of a little backtracking.”

  “I didn’t forget the way. The bodies aren’t there. I threw them into a river that carved its way through the cave.”

  Gwenna’s jaw throbbed. She realized she was grinding her teeth together, biting down so hard on her anger that pain lanced down the back molars.

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I wasn’t going to leave them for the slarn. They’re people. Not meat.”

  And now they’re gone, Gwenna thought bleakly. The bodies and the truth with them.

  “I didn’t run,” Jak said, eyes weary but defiant.

  She opened her mouth, ready to press the point, then shook her head, turning abruptly on her heel. There was no way to get at the facts, not anymore. And even if the flier had run, even if he had frozen up or abandoned his companions, it was Gwenna Sharpe who had forced him down there in the first place.

  28

  Nightly, when evening’s keen knife carved away the light, Valyn felt rather than saw the coming darkness in the air, which cooled to ice against his skin. He heard night in the silence of brighter birds, jays and woodpeckers giving way to the muttering of bats, the owl’s long cry. Night had its own smell—harder and more grudging than the scents of the day, as though every flower had closed, every leaf furled against the cold. And Valyn could feel the nig
ht inside himself as well, feel his own body answering the rhythms of the larger world, muscles tensing, hands closing into fists, breath faster in his lungs, hearing honed to such a point that every woodland crack and rustle cut.

  It was almost impossible to believe that there had been a time when darkness meant relaxation and rest, that there were still millions of men and women the whole world over who turned down the lamp, snuffed the candle, then curled comfortably into their blankets. Since his blinding, Valyn’s whole body had rebelled against sleep’s surrender. Most nights he managed only a few fitful bouts of nightmare, waking sweating more often than not, trembling, clutching the haft of his ax. Most nights, he fought sleep as hard as he could, back to a boulder or tree, staring into the cold dark, and so, despite the late hour, he was awake to hear the Flea approaching, boots quiet in the dried hemlock needles.

  The Urghul had made camp under a stand of pines a hundred paces to the north. Valyn could still hear a few of them talking quietly, eating and dicing. Huutsuu was among them, her rich laughter threaded on the breeze. If she came to visit him at all, it would be later, much later.

  A quarter mile to the south, the Kettral had hunkered down in their own bivouac. Valyn could smell Sigrid and Newt, the leach’s delicate perfume twining strangely on the night air with the Aphorist’s half-rancid stench. Valyn couldn’t say whether they were awake or asleep, but they were far off and staying there. The Flea was approaching alone. Valyn wasn’t sure how the man knew where he had bedded down, but the Wing leader was making straight for him, slowly but inexorably as the falling of night itself.

  Valyn had been expecting this encounter, dreading it from the moment he realized the Flea was still alive. He’d half expected the Wing leader to just kill him, to find him wandering around the forest with a band of Urghul and cut his throat. Some broken part of him had been hoping for that. Dying was easy, after all—a little pain, and then nothing. What had to happen now—that was hard.

  When the Flea was half a dozen feet away, he paused. He smelled like leather, and wool, and good, sharp steel. They’d talked earlier, obviously, but this was different. This time there was no Urghul band surrounding them. This time there would be no hiding from the past.