The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Kaden squinted. Just on the horizon he could make out a wisp of sand rising like smoke against the blue.

  He shook his head. “Another storm?”

  “Men,” Long Fist replied, shouldering his pack. “Going toward the kenta.”

  Kaden stared at that tenuous smudge, wishing he had one of the Kettral long lenses. “It could be anyone.”

  “It is il Tornja. Or men under his command.”

  “But Triste isn’t going for the kenta. She doesn’t even know where it is.”

  “He has the soldiers to play all sections of the board at once. That,” Long Fist said, leveling a long finger at the plume of dust, “is not the head of his spear. It is a wall to block our retreat.”

  Kaden nodded slowly. He had seen a snake from the Shirvian delta once. A rich Channarian merchant had presented it to his father as a gift, and Kaden and Valyn had both been mesmerized by the creature, the sheer size of it: twenty feet long and as thick as Kaden’s chest, a monster of scale and coiled muscle. For all its size, though, the snake killed slowly, twisting its prey into an embrace. Kaden had watched it take a pig once, a massive sow that must have weighed eight hundred pounds. The snake wrapped it almost gently in its coils and then, each time the screaming beast exhaled, it curled imperceptibly tighter.

  The great snake’s weapon was its patience. It killed by waiting, by taking the space it was given, and refusing to relinquish it. Il Tornja’s games of ko were like that, Kaden realized, as was this march to block the kenta. There would be no frantic rush to catch Triste all in one forced march, no desperate frenzy of eagerness that might lead to a mistake. Il Tornja would deny her space little by little, draw his slow coils close, destroy every avenue of escape, every person who might get her out, squeeze and squeeze until there was nowhere she could go, no way for her to breathe.

  “And yet,” Kaden said slowly, “he came here, to this part of the world, for a reason. He can’t have soldiers everywhere. Not across all two continents. He’s following her somehow. Or following us. How?”

  Long Fist hissed. “It is irrelevant. We are ahead of him. This is what matters. If we want to stay ahead of him, we must run.”

  And so they ran.

  For a day, and a night, and the start of the next day they ran, pausing only to drink from the flaccid skin that Kaden carried, and then later, to piss away whatever meager fluid remained after so much sweat. When they stopped, it was all Kaden could do just to stand there without collapsing.

  Long Fist might have become a god, but he was a god locked inside a man’s flesh, and despite the shaman’s long limbs, the lean muscle rippling in his legs and arms, he was struggling even worse than Kaden. A limp had crept into his left leg at some point in the night, some tightening or slackening of a tendon, judging from the change in his gait. Kaden recognized the type of injury from his years in Ashk’lan, knew that it would only stiffen further, twist the shaman’s stride more violently, until he could do little more than lurch over the uneven stones. What Long Fist needed was rest, but there was no time for rest.

  The mountains, which had been no more than tiny red teeth against the western sky when Kaden first emerged from the kenta, were so close now that they cast half the land in shadow as the sun began to set. Somewhere in that shadow was a tiny village clustered around a reedy pool of water—Triste’s oasis—maybe somewhere close, although it was impossible to know precisely where to look. If Kaden and Long Fist continued west, they would hit the cliffs by dawn, but then what? Turn north? South? They might spend days scouring the wrong patch of desert, and the plume of dust rising to the east whispered at their backs that they did not have days.

  In the end, it was il Tornja’s own mistake that saved them. Evening’s cool shadow had settled over everything when Kaden saw the tracks. At first, he barely noticed them, his exhausted body plodding on, driven by little more than its own momentum as his mind worked through what his eyes had seen. A dozen paces on, he finally slowed to a trembling stop. The desert air burned in his lungs as he called out to Long Fist, gesturing wearily for the shaman to wait as he made his slow way back, bent over the broken ground, searching.

  The tracks were easy to find, once he knew what he was looking for. The Dead Salts were not Ashk’lan; the ground was dirt rather than stone, and though the sun had baked it to a brittle clay, that clay still took a print, especially when that print was sharp, jagged, the result, not of paws or hooves, but claws.

  Ak’hanath, Kaden thought, staring at the scarred dirt.

  He wanted it to be a mistake, for the shapes not to be tracks at all, or to be tracks, but from some other creature. Only there were no other creatures, not like that. Kaden could still see their segmented bodies scuttling over the granite ledges of the Bone Mountains, could hear their shrieks pitched at the very edge of human hearing. The ak’hanath might have looked like spiders—spiders the size of large dogs—save for the dozens of bloody eyes grafted into every clicking, twitching joint of the carapace. He remembered the way his stomach had twisted at that sight, as though his body understood the awful truth before his mind: the ak’hanath were no creation of Bedisa’s art. They were not born, but made, spawned, built thousands and thousands of years ago by the Csestriim to track their human prey.

  “What?” Long Fist demanded, doubling back. His long hair, drenched with sweat, hung heavy around his shoulders. His eyes were hard, glittering like stars in the gloaming, but his breathing was heavy and uneven.

  Kaden pointed at the dirt.

  “The answer to a question. Triste came this way.”

  The shaman studied the tracks, then shook his head. “The girl did not leave these marks.”

  “No,” Kaden agreed grimly. “She did not. It is the track of the ak’hanath that Ran il Tornja has tasked with following her.”

  It made perfect sense, of course. It was the only thing that made sense. The ak’hanath could never creep into Intarra’s Spear, but the creature could have been lurking inside Annur itself, could have been standing watch. When Triste escaped, it would have known, and so il Tornja would have known. The girl might have eluded all human pursuers, but the creations of the Csestriim were far from human. The ak’hanath needed no physical trace, no human track or mortal scent. Tan had explained it all what seemed a lifetime earlier: the spiders could taste the self. That was what they hunted. Triste could flee through the mountains or take to the sea, and the thing would follow, follow her across entire continents if necessary. And then il Tornja would come.

  * * *

  They reached the oasis and the tiny village of reed and thatch just as the eastern sky began to fill with a watery light. From the top of a low rise, Kaden could make out the shapes of twenty or thirty huts—little more than shadows in the tall, shifting grasses—most clustered right up against the small body of water. He glanced east, over his shoulder. The column of dust was closer. It seemed il Tornja’s soldiers, too, had marched straight through the night, and while Kaden and Long Fist had been slowed by the effort of pausing to find faint tracks in the fickle moonlight, the men behind them had come on at a steady, unhalting pace. They were, at most, two miles back. As dawn resolved the eastern horizon, Kaden could see the dark shapes shimmering with the morning’s heat.

  He squinted, trying to make out more detail. “Where are Tan and the Ishien?”

  Long Fist didn’t look back. “Lost. Dead. It doesn’t matter.”

  Dead. Kaden tried to imagine Rampuri Tan dead. He failed.

  After a moment he set the thought aside, took a deep breath, held it in his ragged lungs, then blew it out. “There’s not much time,” he said, gesturing to the oasis. “We get Triste. Then we get out. Away somewhere.”

  The shaman was breathing hard, panting really, but he smiled a lean, predatory smile. “No.” That single syllable bristled with violence. Then: “We kill.”

  Kaden shook his head. “There are two of us. Three, with Triste. We can’t fight.”

  The Urghul smiled
wider, baring those perfect teeth. “There will be no fight. I will destroy them.”

  And suddenly Kaden was back inside the Jasmine Court, breath heaving in his lungs, wounds afire, staring in bafflement at the scattered dead, then turning to find Triste standing there, ancient-eyed and vacant, hands clenched into fists at her sides as though she had torn out those windpipes and shattered the skulls with her own small hands, one at a time.

  “Your well…,” Kaden began. “You can reach it?”

  “What do I need with a well? Where there is pain, there is power,” Long Fist replied. “And there is suffering in every hovel, misery in the beating of every creature’s heart.”

  Kaden looked into his own flesh, tried to weigh the ache in his calves and thighs, the dozens of tiny agonies driven like invisible spikes into his knees, his ankles, the soles of his blistered feet. He hurt, but he had hurt worse.

  “Is it enough? The pain that’s here, that you can reach?”

  “Here?” Long Fist looked around, eyes narrowed, as though he were just now seeing where they stood, just at that very moment noticing the desert sprawled out to the south and east, the mountains towering to the west. “I am not this body. Where there is screaming, I am there. Why will this truth not put down root inside your mind?”

  “You don’t need to be near your well,” Kaden said slowly. The consequences were terrifying: a leach with no weakness, no moments of ordinary impotence. It seemed impossible, but then, when he sifted through his memories of Triste, it fit. She had drawn on her own powers at need, indifferent to her surroundings, as though the whole world were her well, as though she could plunge her hands into that arcane strength wherever she stood and they would emerge full and flowing over.

  “It would be a small thing,” Long Fist continued, oblivious or indifferent to Kaden’s shock, “to snuff out those lives.”

  He held up a hand, sighting east between thumb and forefinger, as though il Tornja’s soldiers, made small by distance, were no more than the charred wicks of so many candles. Kaden waited for him to squeeze those fingers shut, stared at the distant figures, wondering how slowly they would die. After a moment, however, the shaman shook his head, lowered his hand.

  “No.”

  Kaden felt a strange relief wash through him. The soldiers were dangerous. They had killed, would kill again, would keep killing until they came to Triste and cut her throat. Without Long Fist’s power it would come down to little more than a race, a desperate gamble that they could find the girl, warn her, and escape. Kaden should have been grateful for the shaman’s strength, and yet at the man’s words—Where there is screaming, I am there—he had experienced a strange and sudden vision, as though his mind had been split open and pried wide as the world. He saw a million people twisting in their private agonies, bleeding or not bleeding, screaming or not screaming, dying or not dying, each person’s pain a single red thread, pulsing like living tissue in a thick lace laid across the whole face of the earth. He saw all that awful fabric gathered in the shaman’s fist, the pain inextricable from the power. They needed it, if they were to win, if they were to survive, but a question prowled the edge of Kaden’s mind: And if we win … what then?

  Kaden looked from the shaman to the approaching soldiers.

  “Why are you waiting?”

  Long Fist leveled a finger over the blasted land. “The war chief will be with them. This petty creature with his schemes to lay me low.”

  “Il Tornja.”

  The shaman smiled. “I want him. He is no great instrument, but I want to hear the sounds he makes as I carve him apart.”

  “What if he’s not there?”

  “For thousands of years he has aimed at this moment. He will be there.”

  Kaden nodded slowly. The Csestriim was hardly likely to leave the killing blow to any hand but his own. Which meant that the man who had murdered his father, who had tried to murder him, the creature who had turned the whole Annurian Empire inside out—he was just a mile away, guarded by no more than a few dozen men.

  “So we get to Triste,” he said. “Find her. Then what?”

  “Then,” the shaman replied, “I will show this petty Csestriim what it is to war against a god.”

  Whatever weariness Long Fist had felt seemed to have left him. His breathing was even now, steady, his face eager. When he broke suddenly into a run, it was the ground-covering lope of a hunter who has sighted his prey. After a pause, Kaden followed, unsteady on his own trembling legs.

  38

  Adare sat at her writing desk, though she made no effort to write. She had returned to her chambers at the top of the Crane late the night before after an evening arguing with Nira and Kegellen, had fallen onto her bed still clothed, dropped into a blank sleep, then woken to the midnight gong. For a while, she’d tried to go back to sleep, but sleep proved every bit as elusive as Triste. The girl’s face filled Adare’s mind, those violet eyes drugged but defiant, her words quiet but horribly final: All of you scheming bastards are going to cut each other down.

  If the girl were no more than a leach, her escape would still have been a disaster. According to Kaden, however, she was the vessel of a goddess, the human incarnation of Ciena herself. It seemed impossible, and yet it fit too perfectly with il Tornja’s claims about Long Fist and Meshkent, with the fact that the kenarang had been willing to give up Adare herself in order to see the creature dead. Certainly, Kaden seemed to believe the tale he had told her days before. Which meant, if it were true, that Adare’s mistake in letting the girl escape may have doomed them all.

  Finally, she cursed, got up, and crossed to the doors leading out to her balcony. She unlatched them, then threw them open. The summer air washed over her skin, lifted her hair, then let it fall. She’d intended to write, to toil away at the backlog of imperial business waiting at her desk, but instead she’d just been sitting there, sitting there for half the night, the lamps unlit, the inkwell unopened, staring out those open doors from the darkness of her chambers into the larger darkness of the world beyond.

  According to Kaden, the kenta were doors of a sort, gates, impossible passages from one land to the next. He could step from Annur to Sia as easily as Adare herself might walk from room to room. At first, she hadn’t believed him. Surely, her father would have told her, would have trained her in the way he had trained her about so much else. That he had neglected this most crucial fact of his rule, the secret of the entire Malkeenian line, seemed both cruel and pointless. Then Kaden showed her.

  It didn’t look like anything, really, a strange arch in the basement of an abandoned Shin chapterhouse in one of Annur’s backwater neighborhoods. Certainly it didn’t look like the relic of a vanished race, the worst weapon of their genocidal war. It might have been nothing more than the folly of an eccentric architect until Kaden, his eyes cold as the winter stars, stepped through and vanished.

  “I won’t come back,” he’d said. “Not right away.”

  And he did not.

  That should have been a relief. He was searching for Triste, after all, using the network of gates to hunt down and reclaim the leach. If he succeeded, if he brought her back, there might still be some hope of thwarting il Tornja, of rescuing the gods and the millions of men and women who depended on them. The stakes were almost ludicrous, far too large for any human mind to comprehend, but Adare didn’t find herself thinking of all those millions, not really. When she thought of what hung in the balance, it wasn’t humanity she pictured, not Annur, not her brother, or Nira, or Lehav: there was only one face, her son’s, those tiny blazing eyes, the pudgy hands; though to her horror, the memories she had of him were fraying.

  Just another thing I can’t keep hold of, she thought, as she stared out the doors into the night.

  In the dark hours, she tallied up her failures: her father, her mother, her son, one brother murdered, another, at least for now, beyond a set of gates that she could never pass. She’d lost control of the general she’d hoped would ho
ld the northern front, and for all she knew, she was losing the front as well. She’d managed to reclaim her family’s throne, but to what end? Every day, the good she’d hoped to work, the security and safety she’d hoped to bring to all Annur, crumbled like clay in her hands. Partly it was the council’s fault, but another emperor, someone stronger, wiser, would have found a way to take the recalcitrant bastards in hand, to trick them or twist them into acting for the public good. Another emperor would have done what she had not.

  And then there was her miracle, her blessing, the touch of the goddess laid into her very flesh. Adare ran a finger along the smooth whorls of scar. In the days following the lightning at the Everburning Well, she had believed, really believed for the first time in her life, that Intarra was something other than a name, a myth, a convenient fiction to cement her family’s rule. The people had called her Prophet, and with the exhortation of the goddess ringing in her ears, she had accepted the title, worn it like an armor in her righteous fight. That righteousness, though, had seeped away—partly when Fulton died, then Valyn, partly when she forgave her father’s murderer—and the title felt too large for her now, shining, ostentatious, hollow.

  While Adare claimed to speak for Intarra—a goddess she could neither hear nor understand—there were others who walked the world, Triste and Long Fist, whose gods lived in their very flesh. Adare made speeches, accepted the genuflection of the Sons of Flame, of all Annur, but the words were her own. They were mortal, fallible. Whether she spoke the language of the Lady of Light, she had no idea. Not much more than a year earlier, she had seen a man destroyed for such a profanation of his faith. It had felt good to watch Uinian pinned there, burning in the awful beam of light. It had felt right. It was only justice, she had told herself, to unmask a traitor and a false priest, a man who invoked the name of the goddess for nothing greater than his own gain.

  And if the false priest deserved to burn, she asked herself grimly, what of a false prophet?