The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  She had none of Kaden’s training, no ability to set aside grief, no ability to smooth the cruel edges of confusion. She had lived with this memory as though it were a rusted blade lodged inside her, hiding it even as it bit deeper. Kaden himself might betray a whole world of brothers and never feel the same pain. The Shin had trained it out of him. Whether that was good or not, he could not say.

  “What are you going to do?” Adare asked finally. Her eyes were on him once again, so hot it seemed impossible they should not burn out.

  “I’m going to try to stop il Tornja,” he said quietly. “And so are you.”

  He told her then, explained the kenta and his training, the Dead Heart and the Ishien, Long Fist’s hatred of Annur and the strange alliance Kaden himself had managed to strike up with the shaman. Adare had given him the truth, finally, and so he gave her his own truth in return.

  It was strange the way that people venerated truth. Everyone seemed to strive for it, as though it were some unalloyed good, a perfect gem of glittering rectitude. Women and men might disagree about its definition, but priests and prostitutes, mothers and monks all mouthed the word with respect, even reverence. No one seemed to realize how stooped the truth could be, how twisted and how ugly.

  33

  There was a passage buried in the middle of Hendran that Gwenna had always thought deserved more attention. Not really a passage, actually—just a couple of sentences: Change is dangerous. The change of guard on a fortress wall. A change of a prisoner from one cell to another. A change of command in the middle of the battle. In every case, there will be a moment—sometimes no longer than a single heartbeat—when everything goes slack, when no one is in control. Strike then.

  Gwenna was waiting for that moment.

  It hadn’t taken long for Rallen’s thugs to return to the warehouse pushing the barrel with Talal inside. Gwenna couldn’t see it. She was still pinned against the empty air by Rallen’s kenning, and the leach hadn’t allowed her the freedom to turn her head. She could hear the barrel rumbling over the stone outside, however, the staves protesting each crunch and jolt. She could hear it hit the ramp into the warehouse, then bump the threshold, then roll smoothly over the level floor before coming to rest somewhere off to her right.

  Close now, she thought, trying to keep half a dozen possible scenarios in her mind at the same time. The kenning didn’t allow her to move, but she could flex her muscles against the invisible bonds, tensing, testing. Readiness is everything.

  If they were going to crack out of Rallen’s trap, it would have to be in the next few moments, and Gwenna was the only one in a position to start the cracking. Talal didn’t know what was going on, not yet, and Quick Jak … She could hear his breathing behind her. The last glimpse she’d had of the flier he’d been kneeling, frozen, a knife against his neck. He’d appeared more ready to die than to fight. Even now, she could smell the panic pouring off him. The rank scent made her want to spit.

  Another mistake to add to the growing list.

  If she survived, she’d be able to write her own text, a rival to Hendran’s. She’d call it Error and Improvisation: How to Learn From a Total Goat Fuck. It was starting to look like she’d need an entire chapter for her idiocy when it came to Quick Jak. Handling him would be crucial when everyone started swinging steel.…

  No, she told herself, pulling her focus back to her bonds, to the three guards readying their weapons. Jak was a problem for after she was free.

  “Right there,” Rallen said, licking his lips warily, looking past Gwenna to the new arrivals. “Bows on the barrel. The leach inside has nothing like my power, but until he’s drugged, he’s dangerous.”

  That was what Gwenna was counting on. Rallen might be strong, but he wasn’t invincible; he couldn’t look at everything at once. Standard Kettral protocol would have split the prisoners up from the very start, but Rallen couldn’t do that. Or wouldn’t. He didn’t trust his soldiers, certainly didn’t trust them to go toe-to-toe with real Kettral, and so here they were, all packed into the same space, and if Rallen was going to handle Talal, there would be at least a few moments when he couldn’t handle Gwenna herself.

  “You three,” the leach said, waving his hand toward the soldiers ringing her. “Close in, but be wary. I’m going to put her down.”

  As he spoke, the air around Gwenna slackened, as though some invisible rope had been cut. Then slowly, slowly, she began to sink toward the floor. The nearest of the three soldiers took an eager step forward, raising his sword.

  “Not too close!” Rallen snapped. “You’re not here to fight her. You’re here to just watch the miserable bitch while I deal with the leach.”

  That’s right, Gwenna thought, suppressing a smile as her feet touched the floor. Just watch this miserable bitch.

  And then, as Rallen was shifting his attention and his kenning to Talal’s barrel, as the guards were still raising their blades, uncertain how to configure themselves, Gwenna hurled herself into motion. She smashed aside the nearest blade, aiming for the sword’s flat with the palm of her hand, hitting it slightly wrong, feeling the steel slice across her skin. The pain didn’t matter. She was inside the bastard’s guard, and she crushed his windpipe with a fist.

  She turned into the collapsing body, shrugging the corpse over her shoulder with one arm as though he were a heavy coat, turning, heaving him around so that the desperate blows of the other two sank into dead flesh, lodging against the bone. When Gwenna dropped the body, it pulled the blades down with it, wrenching them from the hands of the baffled soldiers. She put two stiffened fingers into the eyes of the nearest man, pulled away as he screamed, then lashed out, shattering the kneecap of the other with her boot. As he lurched toward her, she stepped aside, stripping his belt knife from the sheath, cocking her arm, then throwing, watching the blade tumble over and over toward Rallen’s throat.

  It had taken her only heartbeats to destroy her guards, but heartbeats should have been plenty of time for Rallen to hurl another kenning at her—to tie her in invisible chains all over again, to shatter her skull. Even as that blade hung in the air, as his glassy eyes widened, Gwenna was half waiting for his own killing blow, for that attack she had no way of stopping, the one that would smash the life out of her.

  Only the yellowbloom saved her—those few extra swallows she had taunted him into taking. The tea might have given the leach power, but it had dulled his reflexes, and, sluggish with drug, his reaction was the most basic of any man facing his own death. Instead of attacking, or striking back, he flung up a desperate hand in the oldest motion of self-preservation. The knife careened off an invisible wall just feet from his face, then skittered off across the floor.

  “Four men standing,” Gwenna shouted, turning toward Talal’s barrel and the stunned soldiers beside it, stooping to snatch one of the short blades from a fallen body. “Bows and blades…”

  Before she could finish the warning, the roof fell on her. That’s how it felt, anyway—as though a crushing weight had been dropped onto her head and shoulders from a great height. Her knees buckled, then she caved, head smashing against the floor, darkness gnawing the fringes of her vision.

  Rallen’s bellow, slurred and furious, filled her ears. “… kill you, Sharpe. I’m going to feed your blood to Hull’s twisted tree.…”

  She fought the pain and nausea, tried to twist free of the leach’s grip, to find some break in whatever held her. There was nothing but air above, but she might have been lying under a pile of rubble. Breathing was almost impossible.

  She’d fallen facing the doorway, toward Quick Jak. The flier was still on his knees, hands bound behind him, the knife still at his throat. The soldier guarding him was obviously shocked, distracted, so stunned by the sudden violence that it would have been a simple matter for the flier to roll free, kick the knife away, get on his feet, and start fucking fighting. Jak didn’t even try. Instead, his eyes fixed on Gwenna, wide and horrified, and though his shoulders strained aga
inst the bonds, it was just some animal impulse. He wasn’t actually trying to break away.

  Gwenna tried to shout at him to go, but she could barely draw enough breath for a moan. Out of the corner of her eye she could see motion; Rallen, she realized, approaching her, his cup of yellowbloom discarded in favor of a naked blade.

  “You thought you could defy me, Sharpe?”

  She tried to growl something vicious and defiant. All she managed was a groan mixed with drool, and so she clamped her mouth shut.

  “I was going to hurt you,” Rallen went on, “in order to learn what I needed to learn.” He waved the knife in the air between them in satisfied admonition. “Now, though? Now I’m going to hurt you for that, and then I’m going to keep hurting you just for the sheer—”

  Before he could finish, the steel hoops ringing Talal’s barrel snapped. The sound echoed in the closed space of the warehouse, crisp as a series of cracked skulls, and then, a moment later, the staves split. Wood shattered, splintered, tore into jagged fragments along the grain, pushing up, and out, and away as Talal, sweating, bleeding, eyes wide, teeth bared, like something awful hatching from its massive shell, shoved his way clear, then stumbled to his feet.

  The soldiers facing him reeled. One tried to back up too quickly, tripped, then fell, losing his sword, crab-crawling away from the leach, struggling to find his feet or his freedom or both. Talal took a step after him, belt knife half raised, then noticed the other threat, the woman in his blind spot who was also backing up, but raising her flatbow as she retreated, sighting hastily along the quarrel. He tried to turn.…

  Too slow, Gwenna wanted to scream.

  Talal’s movements were leaden, awkward—despite the violence with which he’d broken free—as though he’d forgotten how to use his legs. Like Gwenna herself, he’d been in the barrel too long. That he was standing at all, that he was fighting, was testament to his will, but you couldn’t will the feeling back into legs gone numb half a day earlier. You couldn’t will blood into starved muscle. Talal twisted halfway to face this other foe, then stumbled. The stumble saved his life.

  The flatbow had been level with his chest. When the soldier pulled the trigger, however, she panicked, yanking the weapon back and up. As Talal dropped to his knee, the bolt just cleared his head. His eyes widened, then he lunged. It was fucking ugly—the sort of thing you’d see from first-year cadets in the ring—but Talal was no first-year. Unlike those kids fumbling with their wooden swords, he was fighting for his life, for all of their lives. He managed to snag the spent flatbow with one hand, wrench it free of the woman’s grasp, then smash it across her face. Once, twice, three times, quick and vicious, until her head snapped back, dangling limply from the broken neck.

  That was enough to stop Rallen in his tracks. In less time than it would take to recite a quarter page of the Tactics, he’d lost four of his six soldiers. One was half crawling, half groveling in his effort to get clear, and the other, the one guarding Quick Jak, instead of watching the flier, was staring at the bodies sprawled across the floor, at the blood seeping into the dry, eager wood.

  Talal glanced over at Gwenna. He couldn’t see the kenning holding her, but seemed to understand the situation all the same, and pivoted to hurl the bloody flatbow at Rallen. As attacks went, it wasn’t much. Talal’s aim was good, but if the other leach had been thinking clearly he could have blocked it, or simply stepped aside. Instead, he let Gwenna go, swinging his empty hand around, palm out, blocking himself from the bow with the same kenning he had used against the knife moments earlier.

  Gwenna heaved in a breath, felt the life flooding back into her crushed limbs.

  “He can’t…,” she tried, fell off coughing.

  “I know,” Talal said, snatching up a dropped sword, then moving wide, away from Gwenna, toward the far wall. Her own stolen blade tight in her hand, she lurched to her feet, circling the opposite direction, forcing Rallen to choose a target, denying him the chance to hit them both with the same kenning. Rallen watched them glide to the flanks, his eyes wide, lips drawn back in a rictus. Gwenna debated hurling her blade, but she’d tried that twice already.

  Time to be thorough. Time to finish it.

  She took a step forward, keeping her gaze on Rallen, following Talal out of the corner of her eye. There was no need to talk. They’d been fighting side by side long enough to slide into the plan without any need for words. She took another step, another. Then, before she could close with him, Rallen bellowed and swung his arm in a wide, desperate arc. The kenning was like a massive hammer on a long chain swinging silently through the room. It hit Talal first, slamming him across the open floor and into the wall, then smashed into Gwenna a quarter-heartbeat later.

  The corner of a stacked crate caught her in the ribs. She felt something break, but people fought with broken ribs all the time. She shoved the pain aside, twisted around—she could move this time, although it was like struggling through almost-frozen water—to find Rallen stumbling for the warehouse door. He was faster than Gwenna remembered, but then, he was also a hundred pounds lighter. Still, sweat streamed down his face. She could hear his breathing, labored, almost painful. She strained, trying to bring her sword to bear, to break free, to give chase, but Rallen was already framed in the doorway, and then he was gone.

  The kenning shattered just half a dozen breaths later. Gwenna shoved herself off of the crates, was halfway to the door when she realized someone was shouting at her, the same desperate syllable over and over: Stop! Stop!

  It was the last guard, the one with his knife at Quick Jak’s throat. He’d lost his chance to slip out in the madness, and now his fever-bright eyes darted from Gwenna to Talal, then back. He was shaking his head. His hand trembled, scraping the blade against the stubble of Jak’s neck. He hadn’t drawn blood, not yet, but he was so obviously terrified he could easily slit the flier’s throat without even noticing.

  “Stop,” he said again, begging now, voice barely more than a whisper.

  Jak’s face was bleak. His mouth hung half open, as though he wanted to protest, but couldn’t remember how. A wave of loathing washed over Gwenna. She and Talal had been fighting—getting their asses handed to them, but still fighting. Jak hadn’t moved, hadn’t even raised his voice. The soldier guarding him was so lost in his own horror that the greenest cadet on his first day of training could take him down, and yet the flier stayed on his knees.

  And this, Gwenna thought bleakly, is why you should have brought Delka.

  On any other day, she would have been tempted to leave the flier, to take Talal and go after Rallen. The ugly truth, however, was that she still needed him. The plan had gone straight to shit, but then, that was the nature of plans. It was still possible to win, but to win they needed Annick and the others. Which meant they needed a bird to go get them. Which meant they needed Jak.

  She shifted her eyes from the coward to the man guarding him.

  “Let him go,” she said slowly. “And I won’t kill you.”

  “Don’t come any closer!” the soldier insisted, pressing the knife harder against Jak’s throat. A thread of blood ran down the flier’s neck. He closed his eyes.

  Gwenna ignored the warning. “If you kill him, I will take out your eyes and feed them to you off the end of my knife. I’m not much for horse trading, but this seems like an easy one: let my man up, and I will let you walk out of that door.”

  The soldier stole a panicked glance over his shoulder, out the bright rectangle into the open air. Rallen was getting away, but Gwenna forced down her own impatience. Part of any battle was picking who to fight and when. Choosing who to save and who to let die.

  Slow down, she told herself, and do it right.

  “What’s it going to be?” she asked the guard.

  Horror etched the man’s face. “How can I trust you?”

  “You can’t,” Gwenna replied grimly. “Now I’m going to count to one.”

  “What?”

  “One.”<
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  The soldier shoved Jak to the floor, then hurled himself backward, stumbling as he reached the door. For a moment, he was just a silhouette against the sun, all detail blotted out in the glare. Gwenna waited for his second foot to clear the threshold before she threw the knife. It hit him square between the shoulders, and he tumbled to the ramp with a wet groan.

  Jak stared at her. “You said…”

  “I said he’d leave this room alive,” Gwenna replied. “He did. Now get the fuck up.”

  The flier just stared at her.

  She turned to Talal. “Get him. I can’t carry him, and we’re dead if we can’t fly out of here.”

  She reached the doorway in half a dozen strides, then pulled up, blinking in the sudden brightness. Jak’s guard was dragging himself down the ramp, crawling toward the brilliant shape of his own death, leaving a smear of blood on the wood. Gwenna glanced at him, then looked away, scanning the land to the east.

  Rallen’s fort wasn’t a single fort at all, but a compound of half a dozen buildings arranged in a vague L near the island’s edge. The warehouse from which she’d just escaped stood inland, back from the ocean, at the very end of the short leg of the L. A few dozen paces away stood a small, open-walled shed, and beyond that, a large, barnlike structure that Gwenna took for the livery. The long leg of the L stretched along the seaward cliff, and those buildings—thick, defensible stone structures—were surrounded by a stone curtain wall maybe twice as high as Gwenna’s head.

  The leach himself had disappeared behind the walls. She could hear shouting—orders and questions—the urgent chorus of soldiers scrambling to meet an attack. Her lips tightened. Rallen had at least two dozen men back there, even after the soldiers she’d killed in the warehouse. From what she could hear, the whole fort seemed to be in momentary disarray, but soon enough the idiots would get their asses under them and come out swinging. Which would make it two dozen against three.