The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Kaden felt that he had come unmoored in the wide ocean of the night. Long Fist’s talk of music and violence, exaltation and profanation, was baffling but hypnotic, the language a landscape all its own, dark as the salt flats surrounding them, a place where a man could become lost. Annur wasn’t perfect—Kaden understood that clearly enough—but surely it was better than a hundred rival warlords rending the land and the people who lived there. Surely the sufferings of the countless Annurian slaves weighed less, when you put them in the scales, than the broken infants torn from their mothers’ breasts and killed; than the defeated armies castrated, mutilated, mocked, and massacred; than the annihilation of whole nations because they spoke the wrong language, wore the wrong clothes, worshipped at the wrong altar. Surely, set in the scales, Annur was an improvement over what had come before, over the world to which Long Fist struggled to return them all.

  But then, what did Kaden know of Annur? What did he know of the world? He had passed his early childhood cloistered inside the opulence of the Dawn Palace, and the rest of his life in a monastery so remote that goats and ravens outnumbered men. Of Dombâng and Sia, Mo’ir or Ludgven, of the city of Annur itself, he knew nothing. The fishing villages and logging towns, the mining camps perched on the slopes of the Romsdals and the terraced rice patties of Sia—he might be able to gesture to them on a map, but nothing more. What did he know of the lives lived in such places? What could he say of Annurian justice, Annurian peace, Annurian prosperity that was not simply an echo of the self-congratulatory words he had overheard from ministers and scribes a thousand times over as a child?

  He put his palms on the hard dirt beside him, as though the solidity of the ground might give foundation to his tottering thoughts. He tried to focus on the silhouettes of the mountains, but it was impossible to be sure, in the gathering darkness, what was the land, and what was thick cloud, piled up on the horizon. Sailors navigated by the stars, but the stars were different here than they had been in Ashk’lan, the familiar constellations perched strangely in the sky, and besides, the stars moved.

  “If you believe all this,” he said finally, “if you think we are not present enough in our own suffering, that we don’t take adequate delight in the misery of others, why do you care what happens to Triste? To Ciena?”

  It was the question that had started the conversation, and he asked it again, as though by returning to that first place, by beginning again, he might find once more the path that he had lost.

  For the first time the shaman turned to stare at him. “Ciena is what makes you what you are, she and I together. You would be shattered without her, a million lutes dashed on the rocks. Whole octaves lost. What agony could I sustain without hope? What hatred without the promise of love? What pain is there when there is only pain?”

  Kaden tried to make sense of the words. “Hope and love,” he began hesitantly. “They are the work of Orella, Eira. The young gods—”

  “They are nothing without us.”

  “Your children—” Kaden began, and again Long Fist cut him off.

  “Your words are boxes built too small to hold the truth.”

  “Which is what?”

  “We are not this flesh,” the shaman replied, touching the shadow that was his chest with a dark finger. “We are not beasts squeezed out screaming from between the legs of other beasts. A woman might rut with a dozen men, birth a dozen children, and then die. The flesh born of her flesh is not her flesh. Her children will survive her death. It is not so with us.”

  Kaden realized he was holding his breath, and slowly, silently, he let it out. When he inhaled once more, the night air was cold in his throat, in his lungs. He could imagine the darkness of that almost-desert inside him like an inhuman child, heavy as flesh but not flesh, chill as the night itself, still as something already dead.

  “If the young gods are not your children,” he asked, voice little louder than a whisper, “then what are they?”

  “They are something we dream,” Long Fist replied.

  Kaden shook his head. “They can’t be. They’re real. They took human form in the war with the Csestriim, just as you have now.”

  “Dreams are real.”

  “But you’re saying the young gods are just a part of you? That they do what you say?”

  “Do the creatures of your own dreams follow your desires? Do the creatures of your nightmares bend to your will? They obey their own nature, these children of ours, but they are our dreams all the same.”

  “And without you,” Kaden said slowly, the words raising the fine hairs from his skin, “without you, they die.”

  “Death,” Long Fist spat. For the first time that night, he sounded angry, disdainful. “That hoarder of bones has no lordship over gods.”

  “But the young gods are in peril, too,” Kaden insisted. “By threatening you and Ciena, il Tornja threatens them.”

  The shaman inclined his head slightly. “Without the dreamer, there is no dream, at least not one strong enough to touch your world, to color your minds.”

  “That’s what he wants,” Kaden said. “Il Tornja. If he destroys you, we would be Csestriim once more. Kiel was right.”

  “You would be Csestriim or mad.”

  “And what if you survive,” Kaden asked, “but Triste does not? What happens to us then?”

  “You are puppets, all of you. We hold your strings. You move through this world because there is a balance—Eira and Maat, Kaveraa and Heqet.”

  “And if il Tornja breaks that balance?”

  “Imagine a puppet,” the shaman said, “tangled, twitching, struggling to move, strangling slowly in its own severed strings.”

  When Kaden finally fell asleep, he dreamed of strings strong as ropes of steel twisted around his throat. He woke to a sandstorm blowing up out of the south. At first, he thought he might be imagining it. The sky above was still scraped perfectly clean, the sun a pitiless blazing eye in the midst of that unblinking blue. Any change in the weather seemed impossible, but there it was, a brown wall looming up out of the south, moving so fast they barely had time to assemble the tent.

  When they were finished, Long Fist stood, baring his teeth as he stared down the storm. The wind tore at his hair and hides. “The people of the Dead Salts call this Hull’s Scourge. The worst of these storms have destroyed whole caravans.”

  Kaden could taste the dirt, rough and rusty on his tongue. “We have the tent. You told me it was built for this.”

  Long Fist turned those blue eyes on him. His gaze was fervid, almost rabid. “I am not worried about us. The tent will hold, though the storm may pin us down for a week or more. If the girl is moving west as you claim, however, if she is caught unprepared in this, the Csestriim will not need to find her. The wind and sand will flay her to the bone.”

  36

  Close to its headwaters, the Haag ran fast, and white, and cold, pouring down from the high, glaciated valleys above. This, too, Valyn remembered from his training years before, and from the maps he had studied back at the Eyrie. Over uncountable eons, the river had carved a deep course between the banks to the east and the west. It wasn’t as wide as the Black River at Andt-Kyl, or the White just above the confluence, but it was wide enough to form a boundary. More importantly, it was violent.

  He could hear the river when they were still half a day’s ride off, below the noise of the horses moving through the thick forests of pine and tamarack: a churning, grumbling current. At first it was no more than an itch in the ear, some vibration buried so deep in his bones he might have imagined it. As they drew closer, however, the growl grew to a roar that all but obliterated the softer sounds of the forest: it was as though all the squirrels scuttling along branches, all the woodpeckers and snuffling porcupines had fallen silent together, as though they’d all died.

  The sound brought back his memory of the sight: the river’s current smashing down against house-sized boulders in the rocky bed, tossing spray fifty feet into the air. He could s
mell it now, the schist and iron on the damp morning air. Aergad stood on the western bluff, almost a mountain itself, dark stone slammed up against the skyline. It had been a fortress before it was a city, a single castle guarding the northeastern marches of Nish. Over time, as war faded, a city had grown up around it, an entrepôt for traders coming through the Romsdal passes or linking up the northern atrepies. It hadn’t seen a battle in two hundred years, and yet the city, when Valyn had last seen it, still looked built to take a siege—all windowless walls and arrow loops glaring down on the river below.

  A single bridge spanned the river. All those years ago, Valyn’s instructors had spent a whole morning lecturing the cadets about that bridge, pointing out the methods of construction, the weak points, the economic value to the city itself.… Valyn had forgotten most of it, but one point remained, the most basic: that bridge was the only place to cross the Haag above Lowan. Whoever held that bridge held the whole southwestern corner of Vash.

  Judging from the furious sounds of battle echoing off the river’s banks below, Valyn wasn’t the only one who had learned that lesson. The Haag was still almost a mile from where he stood, hidden in the shadows at the forest’s edge, among the last fringes of firs, but even at that distance he could make out the vicious clash of steel against steel, the thunderous drumming of hooves churning the dirt to mud, the brutal chorus of thousands of voices shouting, bellowing, screaming out their rage, and bafflement, and pain. He had lived so long in the quiet of the northern forests that he had almost forgotten the deafening noise of war’s thousand-throated roar.

  Valyn let it pour over him, tried to find some structure, some order in the serrated wave of sound. Sometimes a word or phrase would rise out of the swell, like a stone tossed up on the beach by the sea’s storm—an order, a plea, a dying scream. Everyone was down by the river, but it seemed the Urghul were concentrated at the northern and eastern ends of the battle, sounded as though they were trying to force their way west.

  “The bridge,” Valyn murmured quietly. “The horsemen are trying to take the bridge.”

  The Flea just grunted, started rummaging in his pack. A moment later, Valyn heard the metallic click of the long lens snapping open.

  “Give two men the wide world,” Newt observed, “and they will still kill each other over a single scrap of land.” The words were bleak, but if he was concerned about the violence unfolding below, Valyn couldn’t hear it in his voice, couldn’t smell it on him. The Aphorist reeked, as he always did, of smoke and nitre, wet wool and rancid sweat.

  “What I’m concerned about,” the Flea said after a moment, “is that the Annurians don’t seem to be doing their share of the killing.”

  Valyn shut his eyes, let himself sink more deeply into the sound. If the panicked shouts of the Annurians were anything to go by, the Army of the North was losing. Valyn could hear the legionary drums beating out conflicting orders to conflicting companies—Stand firm. Retreat. Dig In.—the skins trembling out the bass to some greater music whose treble registers were the screeching of steel against steel, the screams of the frightened and the dying. He could imagine them pressed back against the river’s bank, forced onto that single, crucial bridge.

  “A week ago, the fight was further east,” the Flea observed grimly. “Higher up in the foothills. Something has changed.”

  The northwestern corner of Raalte was a strange place to be fighting in the first place. Long Fist’s initial strike at the empire had been far more direct, aiming to cross the Black close to the steppe, and from there to drive straight into the heart of Raalte. After the defeat at Andt-Kyl, however, after Long Fist’s disappearance, Balendin had taken charge, and he’d pulled the Urghul back, all the way into the icebound empty land north of the Black. They’d been able to make good time up there, pushing west past the source of the streams that fed the wetlands below, until they reached the apron of the Romsdals. The shattered scree didn’t favor the Urghul horses much more than the dense forests of the Thousand Lakes, and il Tornja met them there with the Army of the North. According to both Huutsuu and the Flea, the two forces had locked horns and barely moved in the long months since. The winter had taken its toll on both armies, but the Annurians had supply lines running back through Aergad; the Urghul were left hunting deer, elk, and beaver through the chest-high snows.

  “I thought the Urghul were too weak for a major push,” Valyn said. “Too hungry.”

  “They are,” Huutsuu replied.

  “Not that weak, if they managed to force the Army of the North back to the Haag.”

  “It is a matter of only miles.”

  “Important miles,” the Flea said. “Before, it was just rocks and gravel. Now they’re fighting for something that matters. It’s the first time since Andt-Kyl. Il Tornja has made a mistake.”

  They fell silent at that. As he listened to the thunder of hooves, the high cries of the nomads, the grudging, barked commands of the legionary soldiers, Valyn tried to imagine Ran il Tornja, kenarang and Csestriim, making a mistake. After watching the battle of Andt-Kyl, he thought it seemed unlikely.

  “My people will not take the bridge,” Huutsuu said. “The Annurians have fortified it fully.”

  “They don’t need to take the bridge,” the Flea replied. “They’re not trying to cross. At least, I wouldn’t be. If they can bottle up the Annurians over in Aergad, on the western bank, it’s a straight shot south along the east bank of the Haag, a straight shot all the way to Annur.”

  “The Thousand Lakes back up to the river,” Valyn said, trying to remember the details of his geography.

  “Not quite,” the Flea replied. “There’s a strip of high ground separating the drainages. We’re at the edge of it now. It’s not more than a few miles wide in most places, but wide enough for the Urghul to ride and to ride hard. They could be in Annur in days.”

  “And the legions aren’t blocking that southern passage?” Valyn asked. “How are they deployed?”

  He could hear the battle well enough, but it was maddening not to be able to see, not to be able to make more sense of the riot of sound.

  “Shittily,” the Flea said. “If they form up to stop the Urghul from going south, they won’t have enough men to guard the bridge, or Aergad for that matter. If they protect the bridge and the city, they leave the path to Annur wide open.”

  “Better to sacrifice one city than the whole empire,” Valyn said.

  “They don’t appear to agree. Whoever’s in charge has a screen of men across the southern route, not nearly enough. The rest are on the bridge or west of it, where the Urghul can’t get at them. It’s a strong defensive position, but they’re defending the wrong thing.”

  “Where is this war chief of yours?” Huutsuu asked. “Ran il Tornja?”

  She smelled wary, suspicious. Even while surveying the battle below, she was careful to keep a few paces between herself and the Kettral, as though she half expected them to come after her at any moment.

  “The kenarang seems to have disappeared,” the Flea said after a long time.

  “Disappeared?” Valyn asked. The word felt like Adare’s knife buried in his guts all over again, a cold, serrated betrayal.

  They’d come for Balendin—that had been the plan from the start—but now that Valyn stood on the edge of the battle, just a mile from the Army of the North, he realized that during every step of the long ride, even when he thought he wasn’t thinking, even asleep, a part of his mind had been revolving one image over and over, the last thing he’d seen with his unbroken eyes: il Tornja’s blade, and behind the blade, his face. Valyn was ready to kill Balendin, eager, but killing the leach was just a beginning. Once the slaughter started, there would be no reason to stop, not while Il Tornja remained alive, or Adare.…

  Valyn realized he was trembling. He balled his hands into fists around the horse’s reins, forced himself to breathe slowly, steadily, until the shuddering stopped. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded old as good steel gone
to rust.

  “Where is he?”

  “Gone,” the Flea replied simply.

  “Not every man you cannot see is gone,” Huutsuu said. “He could be somewhere in this city. He could be meeting with his chiefs.”

  “No,” Valyn said. He dragged in a long breath, testing the air. It was impossible to unthread one man’s smell from the stench of piss, and mud, and shit, and bleeding meat, but an awful certainty had settled in his gut all the same. “The Flea is right. Il Tornja is gone. That’s why the Urghul were able to force their way west, why they were able to get here.”

  Sigrid made a vexed, violent sound. She shifted in her saddle, gesturing to something, and for half a heartbeat the delicate jasmine scent of her hovered on the air, unsullied by the battle’s reek.

  “This flawless woman at my side,” Newt said, “would like to point out that even if the kenarang is gone, the man we came to kill is very much present.”

  “So he is,” the Flea agreed quietly. “So he is.”

  Valyn turned his head pointlessly to the north, opening his eyes from darkness to darkness, as though that might do the slightest bit of good.

  “Where?” Valyn asked. “What’s he doing?”

  “Balendin is doing what he always does,” the Wing leader replied. “Standing at the edge of battle, beyond it and above it, tearing people apart.”

  “He has the high ground?” Valyn asked.

  “Sure does. About half a mile northwest of us. Staked out the best command post on this side of the valley. On top of that rise, he can see everything.”

  “He’s not trying to see everything. He wants everyone else to see him. He wants the Annurians to witness him murdering his prisoners, skinning them, or cutting out their hearts, or threading their eyes on string. He wants the legions terrified and the Urghul in awe. It’s how he builds his power. He did the same thing back in Andt-Kyl.”

  “For what?” Huutsuu asked. “What does he want to do with that power?”