The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Valyn spread his hands angrily. “I can’t…”

  “The bridge,” the Flea said.

  “My people cannot take that bridge,” Huutsuu said again. “Even with the leach, they cannot seize it.”

  “Balendin doesn’t want to seize it,” the Flea replied grimly. “He wants to destroy it.”

  Valyn cocked his head to the side. There was another sound, a new one, something that hadn’t been there when they first arrived at the battlefield, a low, bass scraping of stone over stone punctuated by percussive cracks. Those cracks were far apart, at first, as though someone incompetent were struggling to set off Kettral munitions. Then they came faster, the sound growing louder, shifting into a higher register.

  “He’s tearing it down,” the Flea said.

  The bridge’s collapse came just moments later, the slow groan of stones that had stood for centuries caving beneath some new, unnatural weight. Valyn’s blindness spared him the sight of the men falling from the crumbling span, of the soldiers trapped and crushed as the huge blocks shifted, of legionaries pulled under the standing waves by the weight of their armor or pinned against stones to drown more slowly. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it all, even the individual voices: the most plaintive, the most strident. Some submitted quickly, lives quenched in an instant. Others took a long time to die.

  “We have to move,” the Flea said. There was no awe in his voice, no sorrow or anger. We have to move. It was a fact, nothing more.

  “The bridge…,” Valyn began.

  “… is gone. Or will be soon. When it’s done, Balendin will hammer through the poor bastards set up to screen the southern approach.”

  “Unless we kill him first,” Huutsuu said.

  “Hopeless,” the Flea replied.

  Sigrid spoke, and Newt translated. “He’s filled with his power. We would never get close.”

  Valyn could feel Huutsuu’s anger spike, then subside as she brought it back under control.

  “So we go back to the woods,” she said. “Wait for him to pass, then strike at his back.”

  “No good,” the Flea said. “Newt, get up there to the line. Order half the legionaries screening the southern approach to fall back on my position. And get me messengers, at least two.”

  The demolitions master kicked his horse into motion without bothering to reply.

  “What is not good?” Huutsuu demanded. “We came to kill the leach. It is his death that matters, not the dirt where his blood drains out.”

  The Flea ignored her. “Sig,” he said, voice calm, quiet. “Can you hold here ’til nightfall?”

  There was a long silence as the leach took stock of some context known only to herself. Valyn could feel the sun on his face. It was low in the sky, maybe an hour until dusk. Sigrid must have made some sign in reply, because the Flea grunted. “Good. Don’t die.”

  She rasped out a few syllables.

  “I’ll tell you when it’s time to make our stand, and this isn’t it,” the Flea said. “Buy us time, but not with your life.”

  Like Newt, the woman didn’t respond, just wheeled her horse and galloped off to the north.

  “Your leach will make no difference,” Huutsuu said. “My people will shatter that line. They will ride over your soldiers like grass.”

  The Flea shook his head. “Sigrid might not have Balendin’s strength, but she’s been at this game a lot longer. If she says she can hold until night, she’ll hold. It’s our job to make use of the time.”

  “How?” Huutsuu demanded.

  “Is there any kind of choke point farther south?” Valyn asked. “Anywhere we could hope to bottle them up?”

  “We’ll talk in the saddle,” the Flea said. “As soon as we have these two.”

  “These two?” Valyn asked, then listened. After a moment, he realized that two runners were approaching. He could hear their footfalls and ragged breath even over the noise of the battle. They stopped a few feet from the Flea. Valyn could smell the wariness on them, even stronger than the sweat and blood. Wariness and deep, bone-bruising weariness.

  “Messengers?” the Flea asked.

  “We are,” one of them replied. “I am Jia Chem. This is Ulli.” He hesitated. “And you…”

  “Just another soldier trying to hold this mess together,” the Flea replied.

  “Are you—”

  “Kettral,” the one named Ulli cut in. “You’re Kettral, aren’t you.”

  “We are,” the Flea said.

  And suddenly, there was hope. Valyn could almost taste it, thick and viscous on the cold breeze.

  “The Kettral are here?” Chem asked. “How many…”

  “We’re it,” the Flea said. “Sorry. Take four horses and ride hard for Annur. Tell whatever idiots are on or around the throne that the Urghul are coming. They have days to get ready. Weeks at the most.”

  To the messenger’s credit, his shock lasted only a moment. “Who should I say sent the order?”

  The Flea snorted. “Doesn’t much matter who’s giving the order, does it? What matters is that there’s an Urghul army coming.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “And just so we’re clear—you’re it.”

  The messenger hesitated. “It, sir?”

  “The two of you are the only messengers. I won’t tell you how to do your work, but remember that for every moment you rest, Annur will pay in lives. No one else is carrying this word. There are no birds. There are no other riders. You are it.”

  “Understood, sir. What about you?”

  “Us?” the Flea asked. “We’re going to ride with you for a while.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, at a certain point, we’re going to stop riding, turn around, and do some fighting.”

  * * *

  The ride south was punishing. In the forest, Valyn had been forced to guard constantly against the low-hanging boughs that threatened to sweep him from the saddle, but at least they’d rarely been able to move at much more than a walk. The uplift between the Haag and the eastern forests, however, was all grassland, open enough to allow the horses their heads, and although his beast was more sure-footed than any Annurian steed, Valyn still found himself thrown about roughly in the saddle, blind to the land ahead, unable to anticipate the thousand tiny adjustments of his horse.

  He soon discovered, however, that if he could see too little, he could hear too much. They couldn’t have been much more than a mile south of the ragged Annurian line when Balendin ordered the attack. He couldn’t hear the leach, of course, but he didn’t need to. At that distance, the individual cries all washed together, Urghul and Annurian, killer and killed, the rage and the terror, all caught up in the same swell of sound, punctuated by the crash of steel against steel. Given the scene the others had described, it seemed impossible that the legionaries would survive even that initial charge, but as Valyn galloped south, away from the fight, he began to hear the screaming of horses woven into the other sounds. Which meant that the legions were hurting the Urghul after all, holding them back, if only for the moment. The battle raged, but it didn’t seem to be following.

  The Aphorist caught up another mile on.

  “Got half of them,” he said.

  “And the other half?” the Flea asked.

  Valyn could hear the Aphorist’s shrug, the shift of stiff wool over skin. “Dying. As all men must.”

  “Sigrid?”

  “Making the dying take longer. She’ll hold the line until night.”

  “Good,” the Flea replied. “Double back to the Annurians coming south. Stay with them. Keep them moving at a double march through the night. You’ll catch up to us around midday tomorrow.”

  Newt whistled quietly. “These soldiers are not Kettral. They do not have our training. Every man has a point beyond which he will break.”

  “They can break later. Right now, they’re all that stands between the Urghul and Annur. Explain that to them. Go ahead and promise them all estates
on the Channarian coast when this is done.”

  “We have no estates to give,” Newt observed. “Regrettably.”

  “That’s fine,” the Flea replied. “When this is all over, there won’t be any soldiers left alive to give them to. Regrettably.”

  The Aphorist chuckled, as though it were all a fine joke. “A vital lie can shine more brightly than the truth.”

  “Sure,” the Flea replied. “Just keep them moving.”

  Huutsuu shifted in her saddle as the Aphorist rode off.

  “Urghul can ride at night,” she said. “Ride fast enough to catch these soldiers, if they have to.”

  “But they don’t have to,” the Flea said. “Balendin might have a straight shot to Annur, but even the Urghul aren’t going to ride all the way there without stopping. There’s no reason for him to risk a night gallop now when he has hundreds of miles to cover.”

  He kicked his horse into motion once more, and after a moment, Valyn followed.

  “What is our plan?” he asked.

  “Plan?” the Flea replied. “I thought you heard me when I told the two messengers. We ride south for a while, then turn around, then fight.”

  “For a great warrior,” Huutsuu said, “this seems very foolish.”

  “Yeah,” the Flea said. “Well. I didn’t end up all the way out here because I was smart.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, the Flea did have a plan after all. After a full night riding, eating strips of dried venison in the saddle, and stopping only to change mounts, they crossed a shallow stream early the next morning. The Wing leader called a halt just beyond it. For a few moments the only sounds were the water washing over the stones, the breathing of the weary beasts, and the shifting of men and women in the saddle, stretching sore muscles after so many hours.

  “What is this?” Huutsuu asked finally.

  “A fort,” the Flea replied.

  “It looks like a ruin.”

  “You’re welcome to stand out in the middle of the grass when your people arrive.”

  Valyn pored over musty memories of battles he had studied back on the Islands, trying to remember what a fort might be doing out here, in the middle of nowhere.

  “Something left over?” he ventured. “From when Raalte was an independent kingdom?”

  “It was the northernmost of Mierten’s forts. A bulwark against the barbarians beyond.”

  “How did you know it was here?”

  “I memorized the map of this area years ago.”

  “Lucky for us.”

  The Flea shrugged. “Not really. I memorized them all.”

  Valyn stared into the darkness.

  “There are hundreds of maps at the Eyrie.”

  “Yep,” the Flea said. “It was a pain in the ass.”

  Valyn turned south, toward where the old fort waited. More than ever, his blindness chafed. Around people, he could use his other senses. He could hear them approaching, could listen to their breathing or their heartbeats. He could smell them, their fear or hope. Their confusion. Here, however, facing the dilapidated wall, there was nothing to hear but the wind, nothing to smell but the vague cold scent of stone.

  “Can we hold it?” he asked.

  “Not a chance.”

  “Then why…”

  “We’re not fighting to win. We’re fighting to buy time. This old wall is worth a day. Two days, maybe, if the dice come up our way. It’s hard to ride a horse through a wall.”

  “What’s anchoring it? Why don’t they just go around?”

  “The river to the west,” Huutsuu replied. “And something that looks like a bog to the east.” It was hard to tell from her tone if she was happy about the terrain or not.

  “That,” the Flea agreed, “and the fact that Balendin’s not going to want to leave a fort full of enemies at his back.”

  “Full?” Valyn asked. “We’ve got what, a hundred Annurians on the way, plus a dozen of Huutsuu’s Urghul?”

  “No,” the woman said. “This is not our fight. It means nothing to me if your empire of cowards falls. We came to kill the Annurian leach, not to make war with our own people.”

  “So go kill him,” the Flea replied.

  Huutsuu reeked of anger. “Our pact—”

  “—remains,” the Flea said quietly. “We need to get a good fight going, first. Without a fight, Balendin has no reason to reach for his well, and we have no way to get close.”

  “A distraction?” Huutsuu asked, incredulous. “It will not work. Even in battle, this leach guards himself. If he could be killed with a spear in the back, he would be dead already.”

  “A spear wasn’t what I had in mind,” the Flea replied. “More like an explosion. He can’t be guarding against everything. A mole right underneath his feet might do the job.”

  Huutsuu’s suspicion hung in the air, sickly sweet as the stench of overripe fruit. “If you have these … devices, if you are able to make these explosions, why did you not kill him months ago?”

  “Not the right ground,” Valyn said, seeing the strategy despite his blindness. “In order for the explosion to do any good, you need to know where Balendin’s going to be and when. The front was too wide before. The timing was too uncertain.”

  “That,” the Flea agreed, “and all the spots we knew he would go were in the middle of an Urghul army. Didn’t think they’d take kindly to us burying munitions in the center of their camp. Here, though, we have it all. We know when, and we’ve got a pretty good idea of where.”

  “The hill,” Huutsuu said, stirring in her saddle to point in a direction Valyn couldn’t make out.

  “The hill,” the Flea agreed. “It’s high enough for him to see and be seen. He’ll drag his captives up there, and start slaughtering them, hoping to pull more power from the Urghul and from our people on the wall. But that means,” he went on, turning to Huutsuu, “that we need to have people on the wall. We need to make it a fight. If not, he’ll have no reason to bother getting up on that hill. We’ll end up blowing a few clods of dirt fifty feet into the air. That’s it.”

  Huutsuu didn’t reply at first. Valyn could hear the other Urghul behind her, the restlessness of the riders in the shifting of their mounts.

  “All right,” she said at last. “We will stand here with you. We will make this place a great sacrifice to Kwihna. And you will kill the leach.”

  Only when she had wheeled her horse away, calling out to the Urghul in her own tongue, leading them south to the fort itself to begin the preparations, did the Flea turn to Valyn.

  “Will she betray us?” he asked.

  Valyn hesitated, poring over his memories of Huutsuu. “No,” he replied finally. “She’s too proud.”

  “We’re risking a lot on one woman’s pride.”

  “When I first captured her on the steppe, she looked me straight in the eye and told me that if I didn’t kill her, she would hunt me down.”

  “That was dumb.”

  Valyn nodded slowly. “Maybe. But it was brave.”

  “Brave usually has some dumb mixed in.”

  Valyn shook his head, trying to see the situation clearly. “She hates Balendin. To her he is a … perversion of everything sacred.”

  The Flea grunted. “Enough of a perversion to make her turn traitor?”

  “She doesn’t see it as treachery. The Urghul don’t share our notion of command or duty.” Valyn thought of Huutsuu killing the Urghul warriors who had opposed her, the way she’d opened their throats without hesitation or regret. “For Huutsuu, it is the result that matters, not the path. If she needs to fight other Urghul in order for Balendin to die, she’ll do it. It’s not as though they’ve never fought one another before. I don’t see very many things clearly, but I’ll tell you this: she will stand on that wall and fight.”

  The Flea sucked at his teeth, spat into the dirt. “And what about you? Can you fight?”

  Valyn took a deep breath. His hands were suddenly sweating, the blood and death of
Andt-Kyl scrawled across his vision. All over again he could hear the screaming, the men and women carved apart, burned alive, crushed beneath falling homes, choking as the river’s current dragged them down.

  “I’ll fight,” he managed finally. “I’ll fight.”

  37

  The low, narrow space of the tent was hot and dark. It reeked of poorly cured hide and human sweat. Outside, sand scraped over the leather with a million tiny claws. The wind screamed, trying to tear it free of the rocks holding down the corners. It was almost impossible to mark the passage between day and night; the hide shut out whatever meager, watery light had seeped down through the maelstrom, and so at noon and midnight both, Kaden and Long Fist sat or slept in an almost perfect darkness, even the sounds of their breathing scrubbed out by the raging storm.

  After a while, it started to feel to Kaden that the world outside the tent had ceased to exist. Annur and Ashk’lan, the Dead Heart and the Waist—they might have been places that he had imagined or dreamed, and indeed, that line between dreaming and waking became harder and harder to trace. Long Fist refused to speak, refused to do anything but sit, staring northwest, a silent weight inside the hot darkness of the space. Two or three times, Kaden dreamed of walking free, of throwing open the leather folds and wandering into the storm. Each time he choked to death on dust, then woke again to the darkness of the tent.

  When the storm finally broke, a week later, when he stumbled out of the battered hide on unsteady legs, the sudden light was like a spike driven straight into his eye. For a while he could do nothing more than stand there, bewildered by the brightness. For all its violence, the storm had left no trace. The land was still bleak and blasted. The blazing blue stretched drum-tight across the sky. Kaden took a deep breath, savored the clean air, morning-cool in his chafed and painful lungs, then realized what that meant.

  “She’s still alive.”

  Long Fist nodded. “For now. We must move quickly to find her before the Csestriim.”

  Kaden stared at the rusted peaks to the west. “We don’t know for certain he is hunting her.”

  “We know,” Long Fist replied, pointing to the southeast, back the way they had come.