The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “I will be delighted,” he said, “when the time comes. For now, there are still a few things we need to discuss.”

  “I’m not much for discussion.”

  The Kettral commander exhaled heavily. “You know how this goes as well as I do, Sharpe. I was the one who trained you. Do we really need to walk through all the steps?”

  “Trained me?” Gwenna raised an eyebrow. “You sat behind a desk and gave orders. You were weak then, and you are weak now. The women and men who trained me could break you across a knee.”

  “And where are they now?” Rallen demanded. “They are dead. Surely you remember your Hendran: All that matters, when the fight’s over, is who is still alive.” He looked around as though appreciating his own survival for the first time. “Looks like I win.”

  The words were confident, undeniable, but he raised the cup to his lips again.

  “Oh, the fight’s not over,” Gwenna replied airily, trying to shape her face into something that might read as amused indifference.

  Rallen frowned, drank. “Actually, I would say it is. Here you are, bound like a bitch for the Manjari flesh markets. In fact, the idea of selling you when this is done entertains me. Of course, you’ll be horribly mutilated. It’s a shame, in a way—”

  “Save your pity for yourself,” Gwenna said, cutting him off, meeting his stare with her own. Let him think she had a plan. Let him think he needed even more strength to meet it.

  Rallen narrowed his eyes, chewed at the inside of his cheek as he studied her warily. “You think you’re clever.” He raised his cup to his lips, found it empty, frowned, then reached over to refill it from the kettle. When Gwenna had tried yellowbloom, a cup smaller than her closed fist had made her feel crazy. Rallen, on the other hand, had likely been drinking it every day for a year. There was no telling how much he could handle. It was altogether possible that her goading was only making him more powerful, that it wasn’t compromising his judgment or timing at all. Not that she had any other ideas.

  “Luckily, I don’t need to be clever,” Gwenna said. “Not when you’re the target.”

  The final word had the intended effect. Rallen’s soldiers shifted uncomfortably, glances sliding from the leach to Gwenna and back. Whatever show Rallen had hoped to put on, Gwenna clearly wasn’t playing her part.

  “Let me explain this to you in a way that might penetrate,” Rallen said, more loudly now. Was she just imagining that the slurring had grown worse? “I am going to hurt you. Then I am going to hurt you worse.…”

  “Then hurt me,” Gwenna said. “Start hurting. What’s with all the talk?”

  Rallen’s lips pulled back in a snarl. He tightened his fist, and Gwenna felt her ribs bend painfully. He stabbed a finger at her. “I’m looking forward to driving a knife between your tits, but first you’re going to satisfy my curiosity on a number of points. If you were the type to take advice, I’d make a suggestion: answer my questions directly, and I’ll kill you quickly. But then, you’ve always been dumb and stubborn, so it seems we’re going to have to go back to the Uses and Methods.”

  Rallen smiled, as though he could see the fear he’d kindled inside her burning like a hot, silent ember.

  The real title of the volume was On the Uses, Methods, and Limitations of Torture. When Gwenna was first introduced to it as a third-year cadet, she’d thought it the most horrifying book she’d ever seen. Page after page of hand-inked illustrations comprised a catalogue of agony: men flayed or burned, bruised or broken, cut open so slowly and carefully that they remained alive even as the torturer removed the various organs.… She’d known this was coming, but still felt her guts go watery at the mention of the title.

  “In fact,” she made herself say, shoving aside the fear, filing her voice flat, “you’re wrong. You’re already dead.” She forced herself to smile. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  It was an insane claim, beyond madness. Rallen stared at her blearily, glanced up into the rafters, then toward the doors, as though expecting the warehouse to implode at any point. Then he raised the cup to his lips again.

  32

  Returning through the kenta to the island hub, and from there to the quiet, musty basement in the Shin chapterhouse, was easy. Convincing Long Fist to remain behind proved far more difficult. The shaman seemed to think he could stride straight into the Hall of a Thousand Trees, demand answers, and start picking people apart at the seams when he didn’t get them. For all Kaden knew, maybe he could. He wasn’t about to second-guess the raw power of the Lord of Pain.

  On the other hand, there were some problems that couldn’t be solved by any amount of power, and this appeared to be one of them. There was no telling where Adare had hidden Triste, no telling who was guarding her or what they would do if an Urghul chieftain suddenly appeared in the throne room, sword in hand, scarred flesh flexing beneath his leather vest. Long Fist might be a god, but the price of his power seemed to be a kind of blindness about the limits of his chosen flesh.

  “Adare won’t talk to you,” Kaden had insisted. “She loathes you. She’s been fighting against you for a year.”

  Long Fist had smiled grimly. “Her warriors have been fighting my warriors. It is not the same thing.”

  “You think she’s likely to be more cooperative in person?”

  “Pain has a way of limbering the tongue.”

  “And while her tongue is being limbered,” Kaden replied, “what will be happening with Triste? There is no quick way to bring you into the Dawn Palace without dozens of people seeing. There are guards outside the kenta chamber. They will speak to Adare before you reach her. She could have Triste smuggled out of the city before you make your first cut in her skin.”

  In the end, the shaman loathed the logic, but he saw it.

  “You have one day,” Long Fist had said, laying the words out before him as though they were knives. “One day to wrestle the truth from your sister and return. If you are not here, I will come myself.”

  He didn’t need to speak the rest.

  It had been night on the kenta island, the stars glistening like tiny points of ice. Back in Annur, however, the sun hung halfway down the sky, filling the pavilions of the Dawn Palace with a golden light, casting long shadows from the cypresses lining the paths. The timing was good. Adare had left the Hall of a Thousand Trees for the afternoon, and Kaden found her in her study, poring over a sheaf of documents.

  “Kaden,” she said, glancing up from the papers on the table before her, then pushing back her chair. Dark hollows ringed her eyes, and though she would be expected on the Unhewn Throne within the hour, her hair hung loose around her face. In a way, it wasn’t surprising—the strain of ruling a crumbling empire could wear on anyone—but Adare was hardly a stranger to strain. She’d been fleeing or fighting someone for more than a year, had faced at least as much danger as Kaden himself. For her to look so weary now … it meant something had gone wrong. Something important enough to shake her in her bones. She almost looked like a different woman, although her voice was still strong, almost sardonic. “So you decided to come back after all. I was starting to think you gave up on the whole Annurian experiment.”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t given up.”

  Adare chuckled. “I’d find that more comforting if I understood what in Intarra’s name it is you’re trying to accomplish.”

  Kaden glanced over his shoulder. The heavy, engraved doors to his sister’s study were closed. He turned back, studied her blazing eyes for a moment, trying to read something in those shifting flames. There were priests of Intarra who claimed to see things in their fires—the future, or the truth. Looking into his sister’s irises, Kaden could find no trace of either. The fire was the fire, cold and bright, utterly unknowable.

  “Where is Triste?” he asked quietly.

  He’d debated taking a more subtle approach, but he wasn’t sure he had either the time or the skill for subtlety. Every hour Triste remained unaccounted for was a danger.
If Kaden couldn’t trick the truth out of his sister, maybe he could shock it out, and indeed, his question seemed to shock. Adare’s eyes widened a fraction. The breath caught silently in her chest.

  “Dead,” she responded after half a heartbeat, shaping her face into a frown. “I cannot mourn for a leach, but I know that she was close to you, and so for your loss, I am sorry.”

  It was a good act. A great act. Kaden ignored it, keeping his eyes on hers as he seated himself across the table.

  “She is not dead. You replaced her with a different woman, one you killed to cover her disappearance.”

  Adare shook her head slowly but relentlessly. “How would I do that?”

  “I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you took Triste out of the prison where she was safe.”

  Kaden’s last doubts evaporated as he watched his sister. Though she tried to hide it, the truth was scribbled in a hundred tiny ways across her face.

  “Why do you care so much,” she demanded after a pause, “what happens to some murdering leach?”

  Kaden ignored the challenge, considering one final time what he was about to say, the peril of it. Whatever he and Adare had shared since her return to the city, she was still lying to him, lying about Valyn, maybe about a dozen things of which he was still unaware. She didn’t trust him, and he certainly didn’t trust her. She’d stopped trying to tear apart the republic, but that didn’t mean they were on the same side, not by a long shot. If there were another choice, he would have taken it, but he couldn’t see any other choice.

  “She is not an ordinary leach,” he replied finally. “Just as Long Fist is the human vessel of Meshkent, Triste carries Ciena inside of her.”

  Adare opened her mouth to reply, then shut it. For a long time, she just watched him, her eyes hooded, wary. Kaden held the gaze, schooled his pulse, and waited. His claim was, on the surface of it, outlandish. He could imagine Adare’s laughter, her scorn, her curt refusal to say anything about the missing leach. And where would that leave him? He could go back to Long Fist, tell him that he’d failed, throw wide the doors of Annur, offer up his sister to the Lord of Pain in the hope that the shaman’s savage ministrations could tease out the truth. It was a bleak path, but they seemed to have come to a place where all paths were bleak, where all led through cold, and shadow, and doubt.

  “Well, that,” Adare said finally, quietly, breaking him from his thought, “is a fucking disaster.”

  There was no disbelief or mockery in her gaze, only a deep, unplumbed weariness.

  “You believe me?”

  Adare hacked up a laugh. “For two reasons. First, it’s an insane story to make up. And second, it fits.”

  “Fits with what?”

  “The risk il Tornja took.”

  Kaden shook his head. “Il Tornja?”

  “It was his idea. He wanted her dead. Badly.”

  “And what risk,” Kaden asked, dread welling inside him, “did he take?”

  Adare gestured to her chest. “Me. The Emperor. He risked my life, my station here inside Annur, my endorsement of him and of his command—all to see the girl dead.”

  To see her dead, Kaden repeated silently, fear’s cold claw running along his spine. He drained the feeling from his flesh.

  “But you didn’t kill her.”

  Adare scrubbed her face with her hands. “No.”

  “Why not? You couldn’t have known the truth.”

  “I didn’t need to. Il Tornja wanted her dead badly enough to risk me, to threaten my son’s life.”

  Kaden raised an eyebrow. “He has Sanlitun?”

  Her face froze at the question, lips drawn back as though she were about to snarl or to scream. Her hands had curled into fists on the table before her, trembling with some unbearable strain. For a half-dozen heartbeats she stayed like that, almost motionless, a mute sculpture of rage and pain, caught in the grip of passions Kaden had spent his whole life learning to evade. Then, with an effort that seemed to tear something free inside of her, she closed her eyes, dragged in a breath, held it a long time, then blew it out. When she opened her lids, tears glazed those burning irises.

  “Yes. He has my son.”

  Annurians considered Eira the gentlest member of the pantheon. In statuary and painting, the Goddess of Love was universally doe-eyed and open, slender arms spread, as though offering her embrace to the weary and worn. Men and women prayed to all the gods, even Kaveraa and Maat, but they prayed to Eira most often and most fervently, as though she were an old friend or a loving parent, a figure of universal understanding and infinite compassion.

  And they’re wrong, Kaden realized, staring at his sister.

  Love’s brutal truth was there in those four words, in the crack of her voice as she spoke them: He has my son.

  Whatever tenderness the goddess offered had to be set in the scales against this: the fear, the desperation. Love’s open-armed embrace hid blades. Her ministrations could be counted kind only by those who had not lost what they loved.

  “I’m sorry,” Kaden said.

  Even as he said the words, he doubted them. It was inconvenient that il Tornja had seized his sister’s son. It was dangerous. Certainly, Kaden would have preferred it not to be the case. But sorry? Sorrow? Did he feel that?

  As though in response, Adare shook her head.

  “I was an idiot,” she said, voice rough as sand dragged over steel. “I thought he would be safer in the north.”

  “Surely he won’t hurt the child.”

  Adare stared at Kaden as though he’d lost his mind. “Il Tornja is Csestriim. If you are right about Triste, and I’m starting to think you are, he wants to destroy all of us. You think he’ll balk at cutting one tiny throat? Do you think it will give him a moment’s pause?”

  She shuddered, fell silent.

  “Then why did you defy him?”

  Adare shook her head. Her fists had fallen open, and she was staring at her palms, as though trying to remember something they had once held. “I thought I could at least make it a fight.”

  Kaden studied her. Whatever lies she had tried to tell him earlier, this was the truth. Her face was naked, unpremeditated, all the guile finally, for this one moment, scrubbed away. She might have schemed with il Tornja a year earlier, might even have been in league with him when she returned to the city, but they were in league no more. She hated the kenarang in a way that Kaden, tutored so long among the snow and the stone, could not begin to imagine.

  He nodded slowly. “All right then. Let’s make it a fight. Where is Triste?”

  Adare looked up at him then. Horror burned in her eyes.

  “She’s gone,” his sister whispered. “She escaped. I lost her.”

  For a long time, Kaden didn’t respond. Instead of following a logical train of thought, his mind probed that one word: lost. Strange that a single syllable, such a small sound, could bear so many meanings. Lost: it might indicate a person who, journeying through a dark wood, had stumbled from the path; it could point to a defeat, either in battle, with thousands dead, or on a game board, the stones lying in some final, silent, inevitable configuration; or it could mean, simply, something gone—gone only for the moment, or utterly, beyond all retrieval.

  “How?” he asked finally.

  Adare shook her head. “Her well. I had her in Kegellen’s mansion. She threw up the adamanth.…”

  “No,” Kaden said. “That wouldn’t be enough. Triste isn’t a leach. It’s Ciena’s power, and Ciena only comes out when their shared body is in mortal danger.”

  “It was,” Adare said wearily. “Triste told the guards she’d thrown up the adamanth. Showed them. They panicked, came after her. Kegellen had six men on that door, and only one survived.”

  Kaden studied his sister. She was telling the truth.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Where?”

  For a heartbeat, he considered telling her everything—about the kenta, the island lost in t
he thundering sea, the god inside the body of a man who waited for him there. The barrier between them, so insurmountable when she first returned to Annur, looked feeble now. He could crush it with a handful of words. They could fight the kenarang together, brother and sister, as he had thought to do with Valyn once.…

  Valyn.

  Slowly, he shook his head.

  Adare watched him. “You were going to tell me.”

  “I was.”

  “But you think you still can’t trust me.”

  “It is not something I think. It is something I know.”

  Adare covered her burning eyes with her palms. The gesture kindled some old memory inside Kaden, a vision of his childhood, of playing hide-and-find with his brother, how they had believed somehow as tiny little boys, believed foolishly, madly, that by covering your own eyes you might disappear, as though if you could not see the seeker, then you could not, in turn, be seen.

  What is it, Adare, he wondered silently, that you don’t want me to see?

  When she finally dropped her hands, her gaze was like the fire’s heart.

  “I killed Valyn.”

  The words might have been uttered in some foreign tongue for all the sense Kaden could make of them at first. Even when his mind had translated, linked the three together, they made no sense, as though she’d claimed to have doused the sun. He started to respond, then stilled himself, falling back, baffled, into the old Shin discipline of listening and observation.

  “He was waiting on the tower in Andt-Kyl,” Adare went on. She stared at the empty space between them, as though she’d forgotten Kaden entirely, as though she were talking only to herself. “He surprised me, murdered Fulton, and then he tried to kill il Tornja. I thought we needed the kenarang, thought we needed him to save Annur, and I panicked. I picked up a knife, and I slid it between his ribs. I killed him. I saw him fall.…”

  She fell silent.

  Kaden scrambled to build the scene as it had been, to populate the tower with the necessary bodies, to put them all in motion, then to see inside their minds, inside Adare’s mind most of all, to understand what she had done, and how, and why. At first it would not come. His brain was like a bright bird squawking out the same pointless syllables: brother, murder, why. He silenced it, studied that tower’s top, and at the same time, his sister’s eyes as she stared into the awful chambers of her memory.