The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  While Gwenna tried to sort up from down, a door creaked open, salt-rusted hinges shrieking. She just had time to locate the ocean behind her, waves breaking against the stone, and then she was moving again. There was no light inside the barrel, but the shift from uneven stone onto smooth wood planking told her all she needed to know—they’d entered the warehouse.

  Suspicion and unease still coiled around her chest like a huge snake, constricting each time she drew a breath. She kept the chisel clutched in her hand, but clutching it was about all she could do as she listened to the other barrels jolting over the stone, the cursing of the men as they hauled in other crates and containers. Then there was only silence, thick and hot. Then a voice, Jakob Rallen’s, that sullen anger of his as instantly recognizable as the sound of the waves.

  “Which one is the leach?”

  “Not here, Commander. Must be in the next load.”

  He knows, Gwenna realized with horror. He knows the whole fucking thing.

  “You’re sure?” Rallen demanded. “He didn’t slip away?”

  “I don’t think so, sir. The bastard’s nailed inside a barrel. Hard to slip away from that.”

  Rallen just grunted his agreement, then, with an imperious gesture Gwenna couldn’t see but could picture perfectly, pointed at her barrel.

  “Get her out.”

  The blows started before she could come up with anything resembling a plan, before she could even protest. Someone was hitting the barrel with a heavy hammer, two or three people really, the brutal blows landing over and over, splintering the wooden staves, driving the shards of oak into her skin. The heavy steel hammers came down again and again, bruising her hips and shoulders. One particularly vicious strike sent a spike of pain shooting down her leg. There was nothing to do. No way to fight. Even as the hammers smashed holes in the barrel, the metal hoops held, trapping her inside. She wondered if Rallen intended to see her beaten to a meaty pulp right there on the wooden floor, struggled to cover her head with her arms, then realized that for all their ferocity, the men wielding the hammers were avoiding her head. They weren’t trying to kill her. At least not yet. Not quickly.

  With some difficulty, she brought her arms down, tucking her hands into the safe space in the hollow of her knees, protecting them. If there was ever a weapon close to hand she wanted to be able to grab the fucking thing. It was tempting to close her eyes, but closed eyelids weren’t going to stop an eight-pound hammerhead, and she forced herself to keep them open, trying, through the haze of pink pain and the barrel’s wreckage, to piece together the layout of the cavernous room.

  The space was large, but dim and windowless. When her head stopped spinning long enough, she caught a glimpse of wooden boxes stacked all the way to the eaves. So they had brought her to the warehouse. She stifled a grim laugh. At least that part of the plan had worked out. Of Talal, there was no sign. A few paces away, however, stood the tall barrel stamped Squash.

  Not only did Rallen know we were coming, she thought as the hammers rose and fell, he knew which ’Kent-kissing barrels to go after.

  Finally, after what seemed like an age, the staves around her collapsed. She could hear Rallen’s panting, hear the hammering hearts of his soldiers, and below that, another sound, a low, angry groaning. It was her own voice, she realized, and she went to work stopping it.

  Three steel hoops still ringed her folded body. She tried to straighten her legs, failed, strangled a scream before it clawed its way out of her throat, then tried again.

  Between the long, motionless hours and the beating, she wondered if it was still possible to straighten her legs. She’d seen ex-Kettral before, men and women who took a bad fall during barrel drops or on a botched extract, who couldn’t move from the waist down. Terror at the prospect took her by the neck, tried to shake her, but she forced it away, focused on her legs once more. At last, agonizingly, she managed to get them to twitch. They burned, throbbed, but she kept going, trying to loosen tendons twisted to the breaking point.

  These assholes better watch out, she thought, twisting her neck, hoping that the exploding pain there didn’t mean anything important. At this rate I’ll be able to attack some time around the middle of next month.

  Rallen, however, was taking no chances. “Get back!” he snapped at his men. “Back! All of you. She is not some useless washout, she is Kettral. Real Kettral.”

  Gwenna might have taken more satisfaction from the warning if she’d been able to stand up. She rolled onto her side, managed to get her bloody knees beneath her, then to lever herself up onto her elbows, raising her head enough to look around. Rallen had left nothing to chance.

  Two soldiers in blacks—one man, one woman—covered her with flatbows from five paces away. Too far to lunge at before they got off a shot; too close to even hope that they might miss. And they weren’t the only ones. Two other men had put down their hammers and drawn their double blades. They’d been enthusiastic enough in breaking her out, but now that she was free, they watched her as they would a viper, eyes fixed on that chisel in her hand. She debated throwing it. She could kill one of them, at least, but there wasn’t much point in killing just one.

  “Five on one?” she said to the men with the swords, packing her voice with as much scorn as it would bear. “You didn’t want to bring a few more, just to be on the safe side?” She locked eyes with the nearer of the two soldiers, smiled, then snapped her teeth at him. He jerked back as though stung, then, realizing his folly, started forward, anger bright in his eyes.

  “Stand back, you idiot!” Rallen snapped. “She is baiting you. Trying to force a mistake.”

  Not that it would matter much. Rallen’s men could make a dozen mistakes, and they’d still have the odds. Still, it was nice to know she’d put them on edge. Despite the birds, the blacks, and the blades, these soldiers weren’t true Kettral, and they knew it.

  Gwenna turned from the men with the swords and bows, neck shrieking with pain, to face Jakob Rallen himself. A year earlier, the Master of Cadets had been the fattest man on Qarsh. He’d broken his leg during a botched drop shortly after his own Trial, and the bone had set wrong, making it impossible for him to run or swim. He’d barely been able to walk without his cane, in fact, and in all Gwenna’s years as a cadet, she’d rarely seen him outside his office. He ate at his desk, shoving aside his papers to make space for a piled plate carried in by whatever young soldier had been unlucky enough to earn that particular punishment, and he went outside only for the short trek between Eyrie command and the small cottage afforded him as a top-ranking officer.

  Despite the extra weight, however, it had been possible back then to see that Rallen had been a soldier once. There had still been slabs of muscle under the fat, thick arms and legs that would have been punishing in the arena. And his keen dark eyes had missed absolutely nothing.

  All of that had changed. The fat was gone, gone so fully it might have evaporated, leaving his gray-brown skin hanging loose over his bones. It was hardly a healthy transformation. He sat on a single crate that someone had hauled out into the center of the room as though it were a makeshift throne, but he displayed none of the effortless ease one expected of men on thrones. The cloth of his blacks was soaked. Sweat glistened on his bald head, despite the shade of the warehouse. And his eyes—they were bright but glazed as he stared at her.

  Still dangerous, she thought as she studied him. Maybe more dangerous, but not as sharp.

  She couldn’t help shaking her head. “You’re all taking your orders from this piece of shit?”

  Rallen just smiled, a thin, mirthless expression, raised a clay cup to his lips, drank deep, then widened his smile. “Gwenna Sharpe. You always had too high an opinion of yourself, too little respect for anyone else. Here you are hurling insults, but it is you whose training appears to have been worthless. You who have stupidly delivered yourself to me like a side of pork.”

  That got a chuckle from a couple of the soldiers. Gwenna could feel her c
heeks flushing, the anger burning through her bones. Her muscles tensed for the lunge. She could kill him. If he weren’t a leach. Even with a couple arrows in her side she could live long enough to choke the life out of the bastard. Jaw clenched, she throttled the urge. He was a leach. For all she knew, he could burn her to ash if she blinked the wrong way.

  “How did you know?” she demanded. “About the barrels?”

  The man took another long sip from his cup. His pupils widened as he watched her, as though drinking in the sight. “You have a lot to learn, Sharpe, about leadership. About loyalty.”

  The words carved a sick pit in her gut.

  “Who talked?”

  Rallen pursed his lips. “You don’t want to guess?”

  Half a dozen names came to her at once, rose halfway up her throat before she swallowed them. It might be a game to Rallen, but that didn’t mean she had to play.

  “Not really,” she replied, sucking the blood from her split lip, then spitting it out in a slick bolus on the wooden floor.

  Even that minimal defiance made the nearest soldiers twitch. Gwenna looked over at the two with the flatbows, focusing, after a moment, on the woman. She was noticeably older than most of Rallen’s other recruits, maybe around thirty, though her arms were firm and her shoulders wider than those of most men.

  “You’re holding it wrong,” Gwenna said, nodding to the flatbow.

  The woman’s lips twisted. She took a hesitant step back, gaze darting between Gwenna and the weapon.

  “Don’t listen to her, Pol,” Rallen growled. “She’s testing you. That’s all. Just trying to find a weakness.”

  The woman named Pol colored, half lifted the flatbow to her shoulder, and stepped forward again menacingly.

  “You want to play with me?” she demanded, fear transmuted to fury in that strange, sudden way Gwenna had seen so often in the arena. “You still gonna want to play with me when you’ve got a flatbow bolt shoved halfway down your throat?”

  Gwenna shrugged. “Probably. Why don’t you try it and we’ll find out.”

  “Enough,” Rallen snapped, half rising to his feet. “Pol! Stand back.” The woman hesitated, then cursed under her breath and retreated several steps. Rallen turned his attention to Gwenna once again. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to drive a wedge between me and my people. It’s sad, actually, because you’re too stupid to realize that is precisely what I’ve already done to you.” He spread his hands. “Hobb? Remember him? He gave you to me. For free. A gesture of goodwill, he said.”

  Rage burned in Gwenna’s throat, hot and bilious, so thick she thought she might choke on it. Rallen, however, was watching her above the rim of his cup, and so she forced her face to remain still, indifferent.

  “Thanks for sharing. I’ll be sure to kill him first. After you, I mean.”

  The man coughed up a disgusted laugh. “Don’t bother taunting me. It won’t work. As for why these loyal men and women follow me…” He half raised a languid hand, twisting his fingers as he did.

  Gwenna felt a great invisible fist close around her, the empty air suddenly harder than the barrel staves had been. Harder and far, far tighter. She could barely breathe inside Rallen’s invisible grip, couldn’t even kick when he lifted her clear off the floor, held her twitching in midair.

  “They follow me for the same reason that men have always followed other men: power.”

  He rotated a lazy finger and Gwenna found herself revolving slowly in midair. The awed, frightened faces of Rallen’s soldiers told the whole story. So, Gwenna thought grimly, I guess he can reach his well from here. When she was finally facing Rallen again, he smiled. She stopped spinning, a puppet yanked short by a string.

  “Wait there,” Rallen said, sipping from his cup as he turned his attention to the other barrel. “While we get this other idiot out.”

  This time, his words were slightly slurred. Gwenna eyed the cup, wondering if the man were drunk barely halfway through the day. Then the hammering started again, the crack of steel against stave followed by the sickening thud as the blows connected with human flesh. Gwenna couldn’t turn her head to look behind her, but she could smell the fear on Jak—acrid as burning tar—and she could see Rallen’s eyes, glazed but greedy as he watched the unfolding violence. There was blood on the air now, mixed with Jak’s terror.

  When the blows finally stopped, Rallen smiled.

  “Tie him,” he said, gesturing toward the flier. As the soldiers set to work, Rallen reached out to refill his clay cup from a cast-iron kettle set on a crate beside him. “I’m enjoying this.”

  The acrid steam made Gwenna want to sneeze. It took her a moment to ransack her memory, but when she finally recognized the smell, she understood a dozen things at once: the fields of sun-bright flowers spread across the land around Hook; the slurring of Rallen’s words; the weight loss; the slack, grayish skin hanging off of him in folds; that unfocused, abstracted look in his eyes. In a snap, it all made sense.

  “Yellowbloom,” Gwenna said. Her voice sounded all busted up. Rallen’s invisible bands wrapped so tightly she had to force the words out. It hardly seemed worth the effort, but she’d be shipped to ’Shael if she’d wait patiently for the bastard to have his way. The taunting took all her breath, but it was worth it. “Drinking up your own profits?”

  Rallen’s gaze sharpened for a moment, as though she’d actually managed to land a blow. Then he relaxed, laughed, raised his cup in a mock salute, and drank deep once more.

  “The flower is much maligned,” he said, swirling the cup and considering the steaming liquid within. “Properly cultivated, it is fine as the best wines. And yet,” he said, setting the vessel down, “I don’t want to dull my enjoyment of the coming entertainment.”

  The former Master of Cadets was obviously pretty dulled already. Yellowbloom was weaker than whiskey, but the effects were less predictable. Some people reported visions, others nothing more than a vast lassitude settling over them, like a silk sheet spread over the mind. Gwenna had tried it once in some shithole over on Hook, just a small cup. It made her skin burn. Then it made her want to fight.

  That Rallen was drinking it now, in the middle of a crucial operation, was massively, inexcusably stupid. Clearly, he had moved on from enjoyment of the plant to need. This was the sort of error that could get people killed.

  So figure out a way to kill him, you useless bitch.

  She tested her bonds silently, straining against emptiness that might have been iron. Behind her, Jak groaned once, then fell silent. They’d drag Talal in soon enough, then smash apart his barrel, too. Gwenna could still talk. If she was fast enough, she could warn the leach before they started in with the hammers. Not much of a fucking warning. Talal’s well wasn’t that strong, and there wasn’t that much steel in the room. She’d never seen him manage anything like the kenning that held her motionless in the air.

  His well, she thought, turning her attention back to Rallen. If she could figure out his well, find a way to—

  The truth hit her like a shovel-butt to the stomach. She stared, first at the leach, then at the cup at his side. The yellowbloom. Rallen wasn’t keeping ahold of his twisted power in spite of the drink; the drink was the source of his power. Holy Hull, she realized, the yellowbloom is his well.

  All those fields on Hook, the long rows of sun-bright flowers—Rallen wasn’t growing them to sell, at least not entirely. He was tending to his own supply. He could never have used the drug so aggressively when the Eyrie still existed. He would have been found out in a matter of weeks, and ousted from his post. Since the fall of the Kettral, however, everything had changed. He could glut himself on the leaf. He had to, in fact, if he wanted to keep the soldiers under his own command awed, cowed. A fat man with a busted knee was weak, vulnerable, even to the sort of half-trained washouts that Rallen had assembled around him. The only way to hold them under his heel was to show—as he was doing now, just by holding Gwenna motionless in the air—that h
e could reach his well at any time, that with a flick of the finger he could destroy anyone opposing him.

  It left the man walking a delicate line. The ravages of the yellowbloom were already clear, after no more than a year. He needed the leaf, needed his well, but a drug was still a drug. It would be dulling his mind, making him slow, even as the power poured through his veins. On the other hand, he seemed to have found a workable balance. No one on the Islands had managed to topple him.

  But then, Gwenna thought, eyeing the leach, maybe they just didn’t shove hard enough.

  If she was right, if Rallen relied on the yellowbloom in difficult situations, he would be hitting it extra hard today. He would want to make an example, not just of Gwenna and the rest, but of his own power. It was working. Two of his soldiers were guarding Jak, but the others had lowered their bows and blades, were watching Gwenna with smug satisfaction. They had ceded their own vigilance to the leach. It was an opportunity, if only a slim one.…

  “So,” Gwenna asked, raising her brows, trying to keep her voice casual despite the iron bands around her chest. “How do you want to die?”

  Rallen’s lips tightened for a moment. He reached for the cup at his side. Gwenna forced her face into a smirk. Go ahead, she thought. Reach for it. Keep drinking.

  The leach took a small sip. It seemed to settle him. He watched Gwenna a while, then shook his head.

  “Your sad little gibes are tedious.”

  “Then kill me, you impotent fuck.”

  As gambits went, it seemed safe enough. Rallen could have tossed her barrel off a cliff the moment she landed. The fact that she was alive meant that he wanted her alive, at least for a while longer.