The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “You claim to know the mind of a creature you have never met?”

  “There are many ways to know another mind,” Kaden replied.

  And what about your mind, Triste? he thought. What are you thinking? Where have you gone to hide?

  He closed his eyes, then slowly, almost delicately, shed the infinite skin of the vaniate, moving from unbounded emptiness into a model of the young woman’s mind. For a time, the space of her thoughts remained inchoate, unknowable. Kaden set aside his impatience, resigned himself to the long effort of imagination, ignored Long Fist’s massive, silent presence at his side, and then, slowly, slowly, like the spring’s first warm, blind bud, Triste’s mind began to grow inside his own.

  For a long time, the beshra’an was just a matter of emotion, huge swaths of rage and pain binding and confining. Kaden knew little of Triste’s childhood, but her most recent years had been built from suffering and betrayal. The world had brutalized or abandoned her. Her goddess had betrayed her, as had her father, and most cruelly, her mother. Triste couldn’t even confront them: Ciena was buried too deep, and Ananshael’s strong hands had delivered her parents beyond all human reach forever.

  That’s where I want to go. The thought was Triste’s, blooming inside Kaden’s mind. Beyond all human reach. Somewhere I am no one, at the edge of the world …

  And then, strange as a leach’s kenning, the words, her words, took form. The imagined became the real, the remembered, Triste’s voice, speaking weeks earlier from the shadows of her cell, drugged past wariness, drugged into something like honesty: I’d go somewhere. Somewhere as far from your ’Kent-kissing palace as possible. There’s a place my mother used to talk about, a little village by an oasis in the shadow of the Ancaz Mountains, just at the edge of the Dead Salts. As far from the rest of the world as you can get, she used to say. I’d go there. That village. That’s where I’d go.

  Kaden’s eyes snapped open.

  It wasn’t much to go on. Less than a hunch, really—a few drugged phrases spoken in regret and rage. And yet, when he let himself settle back into the currents of the girl’s emotion, it made sense. The wastes of western Mo’ir were about as far from Annur as she could get; and more, going there would be a way of reaching out, reaching back, trying to grasp some fragment of her mother, of something Morjeta had told her in a moment of intimacy before all the betrayal began.

  Kaden turned to Long Fist.

  “She’s going to the Ancaz,” he said, surprised at the certainty in his own voice. “To an oasis there, on the edge of the Dead Salts.”

  The shaman’s gaze was a hammer.

  “How do you know this?”

  Kaden shook his head, unable to explain it all. “She told me.”

  “She told you where she was going, and you forgot?” The words were low, dangerous. “Or is this some mortal folly. Do you believe you can lie to me and survive?”

  “This is no lie,” Kaden replied. “Nor is it folly or forgetting. A human mind holds more than we can know. Her words were there, lying silently inside me, like a closed codex in some forgotten attic. I did not know what I had. It took time to find it. To open it.”

  Above them, gulls circled, gyring higher on the damp ocean air. The island might have stood at the center of the world, or it might have been severed from that world entirely. It was easy to believe, staring out over the sea, that those waves stretched on forever in all directions, that there was no Annur, no empire, no Urghul … only the slow swells of the ocean, the ragged island sward, and the tall, pale figure at Kaden’s side, a man hollowed out to hold a god.

  “Why would she go to the Ancaz?” Long Fist asked.

  “Because she wants to go somewhere empty and beautiful, somewhere no one will ever find her.” It seemed as sane a wish as any other. “We need to get there first.”

  “You would play all of your stones on this hunch?”

  “It is not a hunch.”

  Long Fist turned to him, placed a finger beneath Kaden’s chin, then lifted, hooking the sharp nail just behind the jaw, lifting slowly, smoothly, with awful strength, until Kaden’s feet were dangling above the ground. The pain was a bright fire. The pressure threatened to choke him. Kaden’s hands ached to reach up, to claw at the scarred arm that held him aloft, but he forced down the impulse, waiting for the Lord of Pain to say what he would say.

  “If you are lying to me,” Long Fist ground out at last, “or if you are wrong, I will open you like a fish. I will hold your lungs in my hands. I will work them like bellows as you scream.”

  “If I am lying,” Kaden managed, each word an agony, “or wrong, then I am dead. We all are.”

  Those blue eyes held him a heartbeat longer, then Kaden was falling. He hit the stony ground, lurched seaward, managed to stop himself just inches from the cliff’s brink. Long Fist watched him, as though wondering if he would fall. When he did not, the shaman nodded slowly.

  “We will go to the Ancaz, then.”

  With an effort, Kaden shook his head. “Not yet.”

  The Urghul’s eyes narrowed to slits.

  “We are two men,” Kaden said, shaking his head, “and the world is large. We need more.”

  “The Ishien,” Long Fist said after a pause.

  Kaden nodded. “They can pass the gates—some of them, at least.”

  “And if the Csestriim is hunting the girl with his soldiers, we may need soldiers of our own.”

  Kaden blinked. “If il Tornja has heard anything by now it will be that Triste is dead. Only Kiel knows the truth. Kiel and Adare.”

  The shaman’s eyes bored into him. “Are you willing to bet so much on the kenarang’s ignorance? Were you not just lecturing me, moments ago, on his formidable mind?”

  “All right,” Kaden said. “That’s another reason. It might be useful to have men who trained to kill the Csestriim. That’s why you joined them in the first place, right?”

  “One of the reasons.” The shaman nodded curtly. “We will bring the Hunters.”

  Kaden took a deep breath. “And one more,” he said quietly, steadily. “Rampuri Tan.”

  The shaman’s face hardened. “The monk is an apostate. He killed his brothers.”

  “He was helping me escape.”

  “Indeed. And for this he has been imprisoned.”

  “Then get him out.”

  * * *

  The Dead Heart stank of salt and spoiled fish, stale breath and stone, smoke and blood and urine. The stench didn’t stop at the nose. It coated the skin and tongue, chafed the lungs, soaked into the pores, until it felt as though no scrubbing could ever scour it all away. Kaden remembered the smell, of course, from his long weeks locked inside the Ishien fortress, but memory, even for a Shin monk, was imperfect, a leaky vessel, a smudged mirror. The fact of the place, its presence—cold, ancient, and implacable—weighed down in a way no memory ever could.

  And then there were the Ishien themselves. Their hate was palpable. Long Fist’s orders kept them in check, but Long Fist had disappeared down some side corridor almost as soon as he and Kaden arrived, leaving Kaden in the hands of two men that he recognized, men who had been on the kenta island the day that Tan was taken, the day Triste had slaughtered Ekhard Matol, using his sudden lust as a blade to hack the man apart. Whatever Long Fist’s orders, the Ishien had been honing their hate for a long time, and as they escorted Kaden down the corridor to the prison levels, one man before him, one behind, it was hard not to feel as though he had made a grave error in coming back. Hard not to feel that he was descending through the stone throat of the fortress, not to save Tan, but to become a prisoner himself.

  When the Ishien finally stopped before a heavy wooden door, Kaden wondered if the cell was to be his own. Fear scratched at the edges of his calm, and he was tempted to slide back into the vaniate. With an effort, he pushed back the temptation, Kiel’s warning echoing in his memory.

  “Be quick,” snapped the taller of the two men. “Horm wants to be gone before ni
ght.”

  How the Ishien could divide day from darkness while buried inside the Dead Heart, Kaden had no idea. He nodded, though, and after a pause, the two men retreated, leaving him to find his own way back to levels above.

  Despite their admonition, Kaden remained still for a long time. The lantern hissed angrily in his hand, the impure oil burning grudgingly, fitfully. Kaden set it on the stone, but made no effort to lift the steel bars blocking the door. The whole thing all seemed suddenly too simple. If he could free his old umial simply by asking, why had he not asked before? Why had he left the monk who covered his escape to languish in the chilly dark, or worse, to writhe beneath the knives of the broken men he had once called brothers?

  It was strange, in a way, to dwell on this regret. The world was filled with people Kaden had failed—thousands of them, tens of thousands, who had starved or suffered or died because of decisions he had made. Unlike those tens of thousands, though, Rampuri Tan was not some abstract figure inked on a page by an overtired scribe. Whatever Kaden had become, the fact that he’d survived at all, survived Ashk’lan’s burning, and the Dead Heart, and everything that followed—he owed it to Rampuri Tan. It was an unpaid debt.

  And yet, if Tan had taught him anything, it was that such sentiment was meaningless.

  The fact that Kaden could set aside his own guilt, sequester it in a dim, unfrequented corner of his mind—that, too, was a legacy of the monk’s brutal tutelage, and when Kaden finally lifted aside the bars and hauled open the door, he felt nothing—no guilt, no fear, nothing—having let the feeling go after all, sliding into the vaniate despite Kiel’s warning, armoring himself in emptiness as he stepped into the darkness to face the man who had trained him.

  At first, Kaden thought he had the wrong cell. The figure seated cross-legged at the chamber’s center looked tall enough to be Rampuri Tan, but was far too thin, almost emaciated, dark skin pulled tight around muscle and bone. He was naked, completely naked, and Kaden could see the scars carved into that skin, puckering the flesh of the chest and arms—Meshkent’s ancient script etched in the body’s imperfect palimpsest. Rampuri Tan, in keeping with Shin tradition, had always kept his hair shaved to the scalp. This creature’s hair, however, a greasy, tangled mess of gray and black, hung almost to his shoulders, obscuring his bearded face. The boulder of a man that Kaden remembered was gone, replaced by this withered thing. The voice, though, when the prisoner finally spoke, was Tan’s voice, rough and rock-hard.

  “You were a fool to come back.”

  Kaden considered the words from inside the vaniate.

  “The world has changed,” he replied finally.

  Tan shook his head. “You are tricked by the shifting of surfaces. The river is the same, regardless of the waves.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “This place is dangerous.”

  “Everywhere is dangerous,” Kaden replied quietly. “Annur is dangerous. The Dawn Palace is dangerous. I came because I had to come.”

  For the first time, Tan looked up. Lamplight glittered in his dark eyes. Slowly, he unfolded his limbs and stood.

  “Why?”

  It took less time than Kaden had expected to explain it all. It seemed as though it should have taken longer to anatomize the dissolution of an empire, to recount the return of the gods, to set in the scales the whole human race, to watch all humanity teeter over the abyss. Inside the vaniate, however, it was all a matter of timelines and facts, observation and inference, the possible annihilation of millions nothing but a desiccated conjecture. Kaden set his account between them like a species of strange beetle, killed and pinned to the board.

  Tan evinced no shock at the revelation. No alarm. He listened silently, still as the stone walls of his cell as the lantern’s light played over him. When Kaden finished, he didn’t move, stood staring into the darkness for a dozen heartbeats before speaking.

  “And you believe this.”

  Kaden nodded. “I do.”

  “And if you are wrong?”

  “About what?”

  “About all of it. What if these gods are not gods at all?”

  Kaden studied the empty space between them. “I have heard Ciena speak. And Meshkent…”

  “You heard words. You assumed divinity.”

  “They pass the gates. They wield massive power.”

  “The Csestriim pass gates,” Tan countered. “The Csestriim, too, have their leaches.”

  “Long Fist is at war with Ran il Tornja—”

  “He appears to be at war,” the monk cut in.

  Kaden blinked. “Thousands have died on the northern front,” he managed after a moment. “More. This war is more than a mirage.”

  “The deaths of men mean nothing to the Csestriim.”

  “But why?” Kaden asked. “Why would they feign this?”

  Tan met his eyes. “To destroy us.”

  Kaden shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. Kiel is helping me to stop il Tornja. Long Fist didn’t even know about Triste or Ciena until I told him.…”

  “Stop listening to their words. Stop watching their faces. Look at the world as it is, at what they have caused to happen.”

  “I have been looking at it. While you’ve been locked in the darkness, I have been looking at it every day.”

  “Then the light has blinded you.”

  Kaden stared at the figure of his former mentor. Tan had not shifted at all from the cell’s center. The heavy door hung open at Kaden’s back, but the monk had not looked toward it even once. If anything, he seemed indifferent to his sudden freedom.

  “Blinded me to what?” Kaden asked. Even inside the vaniate, he almost felt like an acolyte once again, scrambling to answer his umial’s questions, trying to follow the thread of the logic and falling short.

  “They are all Csestriim,” Tan replied. “Il Tornja and Long Fist, Kiel and Triste. They are Csestriim, they are allies, and they are winning.”

  Kaden shook his head. “No.”

  “Il Tornja and Long Fist appear to be foes, but who are they destroying?” Tan let the question hang between them. “They are destroying you,” he said finally. “Us. Humanity. Listen to what you have told me: Long Fist seized control of the Ishien decades ago. He took the name of Bloody Horm, rose through the ranks until he ruled the Dead Heart and the men inside it. But has he used this power to attack il Tornja? He has not.

  “Il Tornja took control of your throne, and to do what? To fight a perfectly balanced battle against Long Fist, a battle in which men and women die in droves while the two of them survive, often miles from the field of war itself. Triste and Kiel convince you to gut Annur from the inside, killing untold citizens, and then, when Triste is imprisoned, Ran il Tornja finds a way to break her free. They dance around each other, growling and feinting, but it is the humans who suffer, humans who die.”

  The monk fell silent, but the emptiness trembled, around Kaden and inside him like a great, invisible bell tolling in his bones. It seemed impossible. The entire fabric of the past year was stitched from the conflict between Long Fist and il Tornja, between a god made flesh and the Csestriim trying to destroy him. But then, where had Kaden first heard that notion? From Kiel, another Csestriim, one who, for all his protestations of loyalty to Annur, all his alleged fascination with humanity, had been languishing in an Ishien dungeon when Kaden found him.

  Or had he?

  If Long Fist ruled the Dead Heart as Bloody Horm, Long Fist could have planted Kiel. The two of them could have colluded to ensure that Kaden returned to Annur with a Csestriim advisor at his side, an advisor who would convince him to destroy the very foundation of his own empire, an empire that had played a crucial role in holding the ancient gates against the return of the Csestriim.…

  “It’s not possible,” Kaden murmured. Even as he spoke the words, however, they sounded wrong.

  The memory of Kiel at the stones board filled his mind. The Csestriim had spent countless hours at those solitary games,
warring against himself, laying one stone after another on the polished surface, each landing with a quiet click—black, white, black, white. Kaden knew the game, of course—everyone did—but Kiel’s play was baffling, almost nonsensical. Instead of the classical forms and attacks, the historian pursued moves so arcane as to seem suicidal: solitary stones placed deep inside enemy terrain, broken formations with obvious flaws, scattershot attacks that seemed built to fail. Never until the endgame could Kaden see the true shape, the structure beneath the chaos toward which both sets of sides had been aiming all along.

  “They have played you, Kaden,” Rampuri Tan said quietly. “They have played us all.”

  For a long time the words sat there, cold as the surrounding stone. Kaden studied Kiel’s face, clear and motionless in the amber of memory, then Triste’s, then Long Fist’s. Was it possible the shaman’s rage was all an elaborate act, one for which he’d trained a thousand years? Was Triste’s grief all feigned, her fear and agony a calibrated farce? Inside the vaniate it seemed possible, probable, and after a long pause he let the trance go.

  He felt naked outside the emptiness. Cold. A shiver ran over his skin, and deeper, somewhere between the muscle and the bone, emotion moved, fear and confusion burning like poison. It was tempting to slip back into the vaniate, but Kaden thrust the temptation aside, searching the memory of his flesh for what he had felt when he confronted Triste, when she touched him, when she sobbed or screamed.

  Regret, he realized. He felt regret, and something else, something more, a warm bewilderment to which he could not put a name.

  “No,” he said slowly.

  Tan just watched him, dark eyes reflecting back the lantern light from behind the mess of hair.

  “You’re wrong,” Kaden said again, remembering Triste’s desperate sobbing that first night in his tent, the fear in her violet eyes, her fury when Pyrre killed Phirum Prumm in the mountains above the monastery. “There are things you cannot fake.”

  “It is dangerous,” Tan replied finally, “to believe you understand the Csestriim. Their minds. Their abilities. I studied the creatures half my life, and I do not understand them. Our minds cannot encompass them.”