The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “How did you know it wasn’t her in the cell?” Kaden asked.

  “I looked at the body,” the historian replied simply. “It was not her.”

  “And no one else noticed? None of the jailors?”

  “Your kind has always struggled to see clearly, and the girl’s face was disfigured by the poison that killed her. There were blisters and sores everywhere. Discoloration. Bleeding and black pus obscuring the sclera—”

  “Sclera?”

  “Her eyes. They were unrecognizable.”

  Kaden could remember perfectly his first encounter with Triste. Her eyes had been sharp and clear, bright as the jungle flowers unfolding to the sun all around him now. She’d been younger then, younger in more than years, and terrified, trussed up in Tarik Adiv’s ostentatious bonds as though she weren’t a woman so much as a gift, an object, a beautiful bauble for the new Emperor. It was her eyes—those layers of violet laid one over the next—that had first jarred Kaden from his speechless stare. He tried to imagine them blackened, tarred over with poison, but of course, they weren’t. It wasn’t Triste that Kiel had seen inside the cell, but someone else.

  “Who?” Kaden asked. “Who was she?”

  “The dead are nothing,” Long Fist cut in. “We must find the living girl, the one whose flesh conceals her goddess.”

  “And our best chance of finding her,” Kaden replied, “is discovering who broke her free, and why.”

  Kiel nodded. “The body in the cell is an obvious place to start. I was unable to learn her name.…”

  “But?” Kaden asked, hearing the pause in the historian’s voice.

  “Your sister visited the dungeon the day that Triste disappeared, the day this strange girl’s corpse appeared inside the cell.”

  Surprise knocked faintly against the bronze of Kaden’s calm, and then, a heartbeat after the surprise, anger, scratching with almost-silent claws. He held both feelings in his mind a moment, then put them away. There was no time for surprise, no room for the error that waited on human anger. What he needed was the bottomless calm of the Csestriim, but even as he reached for it, Long Fist was standing. “We will go to Annur then, and take the girl from your sister.”

  As though it were that simple. As though the problems of the world could be solved just by going, by taking.

  Instead of following the shaman to his feet, Kaden stared down into the river’s slow eddy. The current had carried away the monkey’s blood. There was only the water, muddy and dark, carried down from some distant hillside, traveling all the way to an unseen sea.

  “How did Adare do it?” he asked. “Get her out?”

  “I can’t be certain that she did,” Kiel replied. “It is only an inference.”

  Long Fist let out something that might have been a growl. Kaden glanced up to see the shaman’s lips drawn back from his sharpened teeth. “She visited the girl the day she disappeared—”

  “No,” Kaden said, cutting him off. “Kiel said she visited the dungeon.”

  The Csestriim nodded. “She was there to see a man named Vasta Dhati, a Manjari prisoner.”

  “Imprisoned for what?”

  “The attack on your study.”

  “That was Gwenna.”

  “Indeed.”

  Kaden took a breath, held it for a dozen heartbeats, then let it out.

  What does my sister want? What is she trying to accomplish?

  Answering the questions was like trying to find shape in the shifting clouds, but then, Adare’s mind was smaller than the sky, more ordered. Understanding was no more than a matter of seeing through her eyes. Kaden closed his own, let his own thoughts go, and tried to slip inside Adare’s conception of the world. She’d planned Triste’s extraction well. Brilliantly, in fact. Had it not been for Kiel’s perfect memory, no one would have realized Triste was missing at all.

  “There is no time for talk,” Long Fist said. “Your sister has bound herself to this Csestriim, Ran il Tornja. She will deliver the girl into his hands, and he will destroy her.”

  Kaden considered the claim. “No,” he said slowly. “That doesn’t work.”

  The shaman’s gaze settled on him, hard and sharp enough to cut. “He twisted your sister to his purposes months ago. This was known, even on the steppe.”

  “Maybe,” Kaden agreed, “but things change.”

  “How are you certain?”

  “Il Tornja wants Triste dead,” Kiel said.

  Kaden nodded. “It is easier to kill a woman than to smuggle her out of the most closely guarded prison in the world. If Adare was taking orders from il Tornja, the jailors would have found Triste’s body in that cell. We would have already lost. Adare went to great trouble, great risk, to take the girl out alive.”

  Long Fist’s hand had clenched into a fist at his side. His jaw was tight as he spoke. “Why?”

  Kaden frowned. “That is what I will have to ask her.”

  31

  The barrel was cramped, and dark, and hot. It reeked of rum. The rum wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t also smelled like pickled herring, and curdled goat’s milk, and the rancid oil that Gwenna had dumped into the harbor shortly before climbing into the fucking thing. The residents of Hook reused their barrels. Gwenna herself was only the most recent cargo, and whatever happened in the following days, she was unlikely to be its last. She imagined herself shattered on the rocks at the bottom of Skarn’s limestone cliffs, or floating facedown in the waves. People were expendable, especially on the Islands, but a good barrel … you didn’t just let a good barrel go to waste. She tried to imagine what it might hold next.

  The question was, in its own odd way, relaxing. Better to think about those wooden staves brimming with whale oil or bootlegged ale than to spend too much time dwelling on the fact that she had willingly let herself be nailed into a cylindrical wooden coffin. She’d done hundreds of barrel drops in training, but never from inside of the ’Kent-kissing barrel.

  Of course, the plan wasn’t to get dropped fifty feet into the waves. The plan was to be set down as slowly and gently as an actual barrel of rum, to sit silently until nightfall, and then to carve her way free of the cramped space with the chisel, hand brace, and belt knife she had secreted beneath her crunched-up knees. She would have preferred to bring more weapons—her smoke steel blades, at the very least—but there wasn’t room in the barrel for more, not if she didn’t want to risk cutting off her leg in transit.

  In theory, it wouldn’t matter. She was going to Skarn to steal birds, not to fight Rallen and his men. In theory, she would connect with Quick Jak and Talal, both of whom were tucked inside barrels of their own, slip out of the storeroom, find the birds they wanted, and get in the air. In theory, Rallen wouldn’t even know they’d come and gone until they were back again, the bird loaded with a full Wing this time, to gut the treacherous ex-Kettral leach and his bloody band.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  It had sounded good back in the Hole. She’d gone over it with Annick and Talal at least a dozen times. Now that she was nailed into the reeking barrel, the whole thing seemed a lot more likely to end in a quick, vicious death. There were dozens of ways the plan could go awry. The birds tasked with hauling the supplies—“tribute and taxation” as Rallen called the stacked crates and barrels—might drop her into the surf. Rallen’s soldiers might decide to inspect the goods before flying them over to the island stronghold. Some of the rabble from Hook, furious at the burning of their homes, might decide to set the barrels ablaze out of sheer rebellious spite. It wouldn’t matter much, once she started cooking, that they were all supposed to be on the same side.

  And then there was the question of what would happen over on Skarn, provided they landed safely and were able to break free. It had been more than a week since the makeshift Trial, enough time for all but the worst of the wounds to knit closed, for bruises to fade, for the consumed albumen of the slarn eggs to begin its slow, subtle change in the flesh of the newest Kettral. W
hether they were aware of their keener senses, of the fresh strength threaded through their muscles, Gwenna couldn’t say.

  She could see the difference, though. They had come out of the Hole harder, more willing to stand straight and keep their eyes up. It was more than Gwenna had dared hope for, actually, a reward commensurate with the risk, and yet she found herself dwelling, not on the triumphs of the living, but on the silence of the dead, on the three who hadn’t come out of the caves. They had paid the price for her gamble. The three of them, and, in a different way, Quick Jak.

  After their tense exchange on the day of the Trial itself, Gwenna had avoided another confrontation with the flier. She was worried she might hit him. Hurt him. Try as she might, she still couldn’t bring herself to believe his story, not all of it. It seemed too easy, too pat, that he should come out of the darkness alone, nearly unharmed, when the others were cut to shreds. There wasn’t anything to be gained, though, from badgering him. You couldn’t shake the truth out of a man. Cut it out, maybe. Burn it out. But then you might as well be Jakob Rallen. Then you might as well be the ’Kent-kissing Urghul.

  The simplest solution to the problem of the flier’s cowardice would have been to ground him, to keep him in the caves until the fight was finished, then dump him off over on Arim, let him live out his days somewhere he couldn’t get anyone killed. As Annick kept pointing out, some people just weren’t meant to be Kettral. The trouble was, Gwenna didn’t quite believe that. Or she believed the general principle, but couldn’t convince herself that it was true of Jak. Every time she was ready to give up on him, she remembered just how easily he’d made the grueling swim to Skarn, how thoughtful he was when he wasn’t terrified, how rational. And then there were Laith’s words rattling around in the back of her head. Laith had said Quick Jak was the best flier on the Islands, and the truth was, she needed a flier.

  Others could learn, of course, once they’d taken back control, but in order to do that, in order to kill Rallen and his batch of thugs, Gwenna needed fliers now, needed someone she could nail in a barrel, who could take control of a bird as soon as they broke out over on Skarn.

  She’d almost chosen Delka. The woman was older than Jak, weaker and slower, but she was steady, reliable. When Gwenna went to talk to her, however, Delka had convinced her otherwise.

  “You’re in command,” she’d said, shaking her head, “and if you tell me to go, I’ll go. But I think you’re making a mistake.”

  “The mistake has a name,” Gwenna’d spat. “Quick Jak. He’ll start shitting himself the minute someone draws a sword.”

  “But no one’s supposed to draw swords. That’s the plan, right? Sneak in, get the birds, sneak out. Jak freezes when he has to fight, but there shouldn’t be any fighting.”

  Gwenna ground her teeth. “Shouldn’t isn’t the same as won’t. I can’t be certain what’s going to happen once we get over there.”

  “Of course you can’t,” Delka said. “You play the odds. I was already over on Arim when Jak started his training. We heard the stories, even over there. A flier like him comes along once in a generation, if you’re lucky, and if Rallen comes after you while you’re in the air, you’re going to need the best flier you can get.”

  Gwenna glanced the length of the cave. Quick Jak was in the shadow of a large stalactite, working through his sword forms over and over. The moves were good, fluid, but it was easy to be fluid when someone wasn’t hitting you back. “Fuck,” she said.

  To her surprise, Delka smiled. “Fuck, indeed.”

  “You think he can do it?”

  The older woman shrugged. “I don’t know. But there’s one other thing, right? That bird, the huge one?”

  Gwenna nodded slowly. “Allar’ra.”

  “It’s Jak’s. He trained it.”

  And that settled the question, to the extent that it could be settled. Gwenna spent the next nine days swinging between irritation and impatience, trying to beat a little last-minute training into the heads of the men and women newly under her command, trying to hammer out a plan that wouldn’t get them all killed, and all the while worrying that right now, when they were so close to go-time, Rallen would discover their hideaway, blow shut the entrance in the stone above, and leave them all to rot. It was almost a relief to climb finally into the barrel. At least the time had come to do something, even if doing meant sitting in the hot, cramped dark, trying not to vomit from the smell.

  When the bird finally arrived, that relief had faded to a dull ache pervading muscle and bone. There was no real way to mark time inside the barrel. For a while she tried counting heartbeats, but they were too loud, too jarring, and after a hundred or so, she tried focusing on something else—the waves washing the rocks, the indignant screeching of the gulls, anything to take her mind off the staves squeezing her from every side.

  Even focused on the world outside her tiny wooden prison, she almost missed the bird’s approach. Kettral tended to screech when they stooped—a habit encouraged by most fliers—but there was no need for such a precipitous dive to pick up a load of cargo. The bird came in low and quiet from the east. Gwenna caught the whrrr of wind feathering the great wings, then felt the barrel’s sickening lurch as the kettral caught the cargo net in its claws, lifting the whole load into the air.

  It took a few moments to get used to the motion, to the creak of the heavy ropes, and the groaning protestations of the cargo. The load was too large for one bird, and there was no way of knowing whether Gwenna had been bundled into the same grab net with Talal or Quick Jak. Not that it ought to matter. The whole stack of goods was bound for Skarn. They could rendezvous when they arrived.

  The flight was short, a lot shorter than the swim, and there was no more warning for the drop than there had been for the pickup—just half a heartbeat of sick, sudden weightlessness followed by a tooth-rattling thud.

  Gwenna twisted inside the barrel, trying to ease the pain in her cramped legs. Hours of motionlessness had wrapped a thick strap of tension across the muscles of her back. It would be a bitch drilling her way out, and she could already feel the lead-heavy ache that would make an awkward mess out of her first few steps. Those were problems she’d anticipated, however, problems she could solve. The first hurdle was behind her.

  She wondered how the others were faring. Talal was slightly taller than Gwenna, but Jak would have the hardest time of it. He’d gone in first, knees, then elbows, then shoulders scraping against the barrel’s rim. Gwenna had watched him, trying to decide if he’d make it through half a day trapped inside the thing, trying to read his face for any hint of panic, any sign that he’d lose it once they hammered the lid shut. The flier grimaced silently as the rough wood tore open the slarn scab on his upper arm, then, as though feeling Gwenna’s gaze upon him, glanced over. He didn’t do anything when she met his eyes. Didn’t scowl, or nod. Didn’t even blink. If he looked ready to be locked inside the barrel, it was only because he looked half dead.

  But he’s here, Gwenna reminded herself. He’d managed to remain silent during the long wait and the short flight. The rest of it, the stealing of the birds, the flying … that was the shit he was supposed to be good at. That was why she’d risked bringing him in the first place.

  She shifted, trying to get a better grip on the hand brace, then froze at the sound of voices approaching. Three of them. All male. No, she realized, listening more intently. Four. The fourth wasn’t talking, but she could hear his footfalls alongside the others’: soles scuffing over rough stone. The men paused just a few paces away. She imagined them standing at the edge of the piled barrels and crates. Slowly, silently, she pressed her hands against the wooden staves, bracing herself for the jostling to come.

  “Which ones you want to start with?” A deep voice, and loud. The man sounded amused for some reason.

  “Up to you, Ren. We gotta move ’em all in the end.”

  “Not necessarily,” said a third voice, high-pitched and sly. “We could just … lose a coupl
e. Right over the edge of the cliff.”

  A pause, then laughter all around.

  Gwenna tensed. They were joking, clearly. There was no point in hauling supplies all the way from Hook only to chuck them off the limestone cliffs. Even Rallen’s thugs couldn’t be that lazy.

  “That’s our food, you fuckin’ fool. Whatta’ya want to get rid of it for?”

  “Not all our food, is it? Rallen’s going to eat half a’ what’s here. I’m not sayin’ we chuck anything good, but surely we can do without half a ton a’ … say … squash.”

  Squash. That was Jak’s barrel. The rebels had filled two burlap sacks with the yellow and green vegetables in order to make enough room for the flier. She tensed, a slow, cold dread creeping up her spine. Suddenly, horribly, she felt the full weight of her helplessness. Training didn’t matter if you couldn’t move, and combat nerves weren’t worth much if you couldn’t get to the actual combat. Worse, she wasn’t the only one listening to the lazy banter. Quick Jak would be able to hear the men as well as Gwenna herself. He’d know better than she did that six letters—S Q U A S H—were stamped in bold red ink on the lid of his barrel.

  Stay cool, Jak, she prayed quietly. They’re just joking. Just fucking around. Stay cool.

  “I like squash,” one of the men was saying. “You’re not tossing my barrel of squash.”

  “We’re not tossing anything,” the first voice cut in. “We’re going to do what we’re told to do. Let’s go. One man to a barrel. Get ’em rolling.”

  Something was wrong. A voice was screaming inside her skull to abort, abort, abort. Only there was no aborting. There was no doing anything. As the barrel lurched onto its side, she tightened her grip on the chisel. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it would kill a man quick enough if you put it in his eye.

  The ’Shael-spawned thing almost ended up in her own eye when the barrel lurched into motion. Whoever was pushing it wasn’t making any effort to save the wooden staves, and the whole thing bounced over the rough ground, jolting against the rocks, jostling into larger obstacles, all with Gwenna spinning inside it, trying not to vomit into her own mouth. They couldn’t have covered more than a hundred paces, but by the time it was done, she felt bruised in a dozen places, battered at the knees, back, and elbows.