The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  She felt like a child staring at the great book of the world, diligently, stupidly studying letters she could not read. Il Tornja had created the Atmani; what did that mean? He seemed intent on waging a vicious war against an Urghul chief that he claimed was the God of Pain; what did that mean? He wanted Triste freed.…

  Adare paused, then beckoned to Jia Chem. “When?” she demanded.

  She could barely hear her own voice over the room’s din, and the rider hesitated, shook his head, then bowed and stepped closer.

  “Beg pardon, Your Radiance?”

  “When did he disappear? The kenarang? What day?”

  “It’s hard to say, Your Radiance. The kenarang has always moved along the front, riding through the night from one legion to the next, arriving unexpectedly where he is needed most, then disappearing again. We thought his most recent absence was just that … part of a larger stratagem that none of us could ever understand.”

  “Estimate.”

  He pursed his lips, shook his head. “It must have been…” He closed his eyes, calculating. “Maybe ten days back?”

  Adare took a slow, shuddering breath. It’s just a guess, she told herself. He just got done saying he can’t be certain. But the coincidence seemed too strange, too perfect.

  The same day, Adare thought. He disappeared the same day we broke Triste free.

  “And then?” she asked.

  “Then the Urghul broke through in the foothills. We kept fighting, made a strategic retreat, but order started leaking out. Once enough men knew we were going to fall back on Aergad anyway, get behind the bridge and the river and those high stone walls, they lost stomach for the fight—no point dying over ground you’re planning to give up.”

  “But if the army’s in Aergad,” Adare said, consulting her memory of the map, “there’s nothing standing between the Urghul and Annur itself.”

  Jia Chem nodded bleakly. “Commander Belton understood that. He refused to cross the bridge, insisted on staying on the east side of the Haag.”

  “With how many men?”

  “A couple hundred.”

  Silence settled on the room, heavy and cold.

  Finally, Kiel spoke. “Two hundred men,” he said quietly, “against Balendin and the entire might of the Urghul? They wouldn’t last an afternoon. They wouldn’t last the first charge.”

  Jia Chem nodded. “Belton expected to die. Our place is fighting for our land and our families, not hiding. That’s what he said to the men. The other commanders believed that the kenarang had a plan, that il Tornja’d find a way, even with the army on the wrong side of the river, to stop the Urghul before they pushed too far south. I was there, at Belton’s shoulder, when they argued with him to retreat. They said that disregarding the kenarang’s order was treason. He just shrugged. The kenarang comes and goes, he said, but my conscience never leaves me.”

  “And what happened,” Adare asked, dreading the answer, “to Commander Belton and his men?”

  Jia Chem shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. Not for sure. The Kettral sent us south before the battle began.”

  “Kettral?” Adare asked sharply.

  Mention of the fighting force sent a shiver of excitement and confusion through the room, and it took some time before the tumult subsided.

  “They were Kettral,” the messenger said. “Four of them…”

  “With a bird?”

  Chem shook his head. “If they had a bird, they could have flown here to warn you. Ulli and I can ride, but we’re nothing compared to those creatures. No. They were on horseback, riding with a small group of Urghul, maybe two dozen, a group that had broken off from the main army, traitors to their own people, I guess. I don’t know—the one in charge told us to ride south. We’d planned to stay, to fight along with Belton and the others, but this man,” the messenger shook his head at the memory, “he wasn’t the sort you disobeyed.”

  Adare’s skin had risen into gooseflesh. Four Kettral. Valyn had died in Andt-Kyl, but the rest of his Wing might have survived.

  “Can you describe them?” she asked.

  Jia Chem glanced at Ulli for the second time. The Coyote’s face was tight, frightened.

  “I’d never seen Kettral up close,” he said finally. “And I hope I never do again. They were all different—the leader was coal-black and short, there was a woman, she was beautiful, even though her skin was sickly pale and she didn’t have a tongue. One of them was blind, one seemed to be missing half his teeth. They were all different but they were all the same—they didn’t look at you, they looked through you. Like they could already see you dead, and were just trying to decide whether it was time to make it so.” He shuddered. “They rode up out of the woods. No warning. No nothing. Their commander told us to ride south, to bring you word of what was coming.

  “‘What are you going to do?’ I managed to ask him.

  “He just smiled. ‘We’ll try to hold ’em long enough to give those idiots in the south a head start with the defense.’

  “There were only four of them, not counting the Urghul.” He held up his fingers, stared at them as though he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying. “Four. And he talked about holding back the Priest and the whole Urghul army as though it were an irritation. An inconvenience.”

  Adare tried to make sense of the story and failed. Aside from Valyn, she didn’t know any of the Kettral by face or name. The soldiers in question sounded older than the remnants of Valyn’s Wing, but beyond that, there was little else to be learned. Grimly, she turned her attention to the larger question.

  “How far away are the Urghul now? How fast are they coming?”

  “I can’t be sure, Your Radiance,” Chem replied. “The Kettral—”

  “Assume the Kettral failed. That they are dead.”

  “Still, there are so many factors.…”

  “Estimate.”

  “Any estimate I make—”

  “—will be miles better than anything we could come up with,” she snapped impatiently. “You know this foe. You have watched them, fought them.”

  Jia Chem hesitated, glanced over at Ulli, then nodded.

  “A whole army—even an Urghul army—is slower than two men. We’ve stopped only to change mounts, haven’t really been out of the saddle since Aergad.” He shook his head wearily. “If they pushed hard, they might be halfway to Annur, but that’s not the Priest’s way. He likes to stop, to hold his sick ceremonies—it’s like he wants to savor all the pain he’s caused.” He frowned. “I’d say they’re still four or five days out.”

  Four or five days. The words went through Adare like an icy blade.

  The council chamber erupted into madness once more, but this time Adare made no effort to impose order. For months, the Urghul had pressed against the Annurian lines all along the northern front, and for months, the legions had held them off. The battles were savage. The northern swamps ran red with blood in a dozen places, but each time the horsemen had attacked, the legions threw them back. The horror remained, but Adare had started to believe it was contained. She had even allowed herself to hope, after signing the treaty with the council, that the newly unified Annur might finally crush the horsemen once and for all. And now there was an Urghul army five days from Annur.

  Even as she sat there, bafflement and rage playing out all around her, men and women were dying, sacrificed on Balendin’s blades and in his fires.

  All while I schemed and meddled, spent my energy on freeing that leach so I could see my son again.

  She wanted to be sick. Sick for all the tens of thousands she had failed, and for her own child, if he was even still alive. It seemed suddenly, violently important to go over it all again, every choice, every decision she had made. Somewhere along the way, she had made a mistake, maybe dozens of mistakes, but she found that just exactly where she had gone wrong, she couldn’t say. In fact, whatever her errors, whatever her flaws, it was starting to seem that she might be irrelevant. She was the Emperor,
accounted Intarra’s prophet by an army of the faithful, but what had she done? Il Tornja had held back the Urghul and their bloody priests. Not the council. Not Adare. Not even the legions, really. It all hinged on il Tornja, and now he was gone.

  “Five days,” she said, the words rising like bile to her tongue.

  “We do not know precisely what’s taking place up there,” Moss observed. “This account is vague.”

  “It is what we have,” Adare spat. “We know what we know. Il Tornja is gone. The Urghul have broken past the Army of the North, and are pushing south out of the lakes. I’ve seen these horsemen with my own eyes, seen what they do. Even now, while we are talking, they are hurting Annurians, burning, raping, rending, and killing the people we have sworn to protect. Right now, there are babies—” She hesitated half a heartbeat, the memory of Sanlitun’s face filling her mind again, then forced herself ahead. “Right now there are children hanging from the trees. There are men staked naked to the earth, their bellies open to the sky.”

  She could see the horror seeping into their eyes, as though that simple syllable—war—were a relic of another tongue, something to be puzzled over, debated, but never truly faced, as though they were only now, after almost a year, starting to understand what the word actually meant.

  “And I will tell you something else,” she said, forging ahead before they could regain their balance. “Those horsemen are coming here, to Annur, to this city, and right now we have no force in place to stop them.”

  “Well,” Kegellen said, speaking into the stunned silence, patting at her chest with her hand as she surveyed the room. “All this excitement has strained my fat old heart.”

  She didn’t look strained, Adare thought. She looked ready, almost eager.

  After another moment, Bouraa Bouree stumbled to his feet. “We must move the council. Move it immediately. Evacuate those of us crucial to this government…”

  The other voices spoke over and around him in a grim chorus of fear and denial.

  “… we go to the eastern coast…”

  “… Sia is well provisioned. We could defend…”

  “… the fortresses of the northwest…”

  The panic moved like fire from one voice to the next, blazing higher, brighter. Adare heard it roaring around her, felt it hot and urgent in the air. There was something inside herself, however, that would not catch. It felt as though her heart had been scorched already, burned down to the roots by so many months of fighting and fear. There was a strange safety in that blackened desolation. She imagined herself standing on a wide patch of charred earth while the world burned around her. The cries of the others didn’t frighten her. They made her angry.

  “We are staying,” she said.

  No one heard. The fury raged.

  “We are staying,” she said again, more quietly this time.

  Ziav Moss was on his feet calling for calm. He, too, was failing. For a moment, he met Adare’s eyes, then looked away.

  They can’t face it, she thought. None of them will face what is coming.

  Il Tornja was gone. The council was falling apart, readying itself to flee. Annur was tearing itself apart, and all the while the Urghul were coming, a world of war and fire at their backs.

  “I am staying,” Adare said after a long pause, the words loud enough for her ears alone.

  39

  Justice, as it turned out, was a lot harder than war.

  War was largely a series of technical questions, a matter of taking living human bodies and making them dead. There were infinite variations in the tactics and the strategy, of course, nuances in weaponry and technique, but the basic premise was bedrock: you’d done it right if you were alive at the end of the day, and the other poor fool was not. Jakob Rallen, for instance—Gwenna had put a knife through his neck the day before almost without thinking, hurling the blade even as Annick and the rest of the Kettral swept low over the compound. It was almost easy, when it came down to it. Trivial.

  Gwenna had never really enjoyed killing. She still had nightmares about the Annurians she’d cut down in the brutal Urghul pits, awful dreams from which she woke soaked in a sweat that felt, in the midnight hours, like hot blood. Even what came later, the men and women she’d killed in proper battle, were hard to stomach when she pondered them from the still, cool darkness between waking and dawn’s first light. She could see the pale blue eyes of a horseman she’d stabbed in Andt-Kyl, the way they went suddenly wide as her blade slid past his ribs, then flat, lifeless as broken crockery. In her dreams she tried to talk to him, to scream at him, to urge him to go the fuck home.

  The thing about those fights, though, was just that: they had been fights. Even at the bloodiest, especially at the bloodiest, a combination of rage, and righteousness, and training had carried Gwenna through, her own thudding pulse holding her up even when her mind quailed at the madness of it. What she faced now was something different.

  A score of men and women knelt before her in the soft earth beneath the tenebral oak: Rallen’s soldiers—the ones that were left—and there at the end, Manthe and Hobb, the traitors. Most kept their faces down, avoiding Gwenna’s gaze, avoiding the eyes of the Kettral who stood behind her. Looking at them bound and bruised, it was tough to believe that so few soldiers had tyrannized the Islands so effectively, so brutally, for so long.

  The kid at the end had been in Gwenna’s own class of cadets—a pale-skinned young woman named Urri. She’d been training to be a sniper, but wasn’t very good, and had washed out a year before the Trial. Beside her knelt a middle-aged man. He was weeping silently, tears carving through the grime on his face. Every so often he’d raise his red-rimmed eyes slowly, tentatively, as though hoping Gwenna might have disappeared; every time he found her standing there, fists on her hips, he’d cringe, fold a little further into himself, as though his own dread had cored him out. It went like that straight on down the line.

  Gwenna stared at them a moment longer, then, disgusted, raised her eyes to the branches of the ancient tree. Instead of leaves, ten thousand bats hung from the tenebral’s twisting limbs. They would wake at dusk in a great rustle of wings, take to the air, harry the creatures of the night, both the large and small, sinking fangs into bird or beast, any creature with hot, beating blood, drinking deep before returning at dawn to roost. The ground beneath Gwenna’s feet was soft with the blood that dripped from the bats’ fangs. It squelched beneath her boots. The massive oak had no need of sunlight; it drank the spilled blood in through the roots.

  The old bastard’s going to drink deep today, Gwenna thought grimly, returning her eyes to the captives bound before her.

  Justice. It sounded like such a noble word. Clean. Polished. It seemed strange that justice should come to this—a brutal bloodletting in the shadow of a blood-hungry tree. It would have been easier, in a way, to cut the throats and have done with it, but that was not justice. Justice allowed the accused to speak, to explain, to plead. That was what made it so ’Kent-kissing hard.

  “You,” Gwenna said, gritting her teeth as she pointed at Urri. “Did you serve with Jakob Rallen?”

  The woman’s eyelid twitched. Her mouth dropped open, revealing crooked teeth. Language seemed to have abandoned her.

  “Of course she did,” Qora snarled, stepping forward beside Gwenna. “They all did—you know it as well as I do. You were there when we hauled them out of Rallen’s fucking fort. Quit this horseshit, kill them, and have done with it.”

  Gwenna turned to face the other woman. Of all the newly anointed Kettral, Qora was the one who most reminded Gwenna of herself, of herself before Hull’s Trial, before she fled the Islands. A part of her wanted to agree, to slip her blades free of their sheaths, and go at the mass execution as though it were war.

  “This is a trial,” she said to Qora grimly.

  The blood vessels bulged beneath the skin of the woman’s shaved scalp. “Fuck your trial. These sons of bitches have been hunting us for months.” She slipped a k
nife from the sheath at her belt. “They’ve been killing us, murdering people over on Hook, stealing and raping. And now you want to hear them talk? Now you want to give them a chance to explain?” She shook her head. Her dark eyes were bleak, fixed on the prisoners. “No. If you won’t do it, I’m going to—”

  Gwenna’s backhand blow took her across the face, knocking her to the ground. The woman snarled as she rolled into a crouch. Despite the blood pouring from her split lip, she’d managed to keep a hold on her knife.

  She’ll make a good fighter someday, Gwenna noted in the back of her mind, if she can ever put a rein on that rage.

  The rest of the Kettral were still, staring, unsure what to make of Qora’s challenge and Gwenna’s sudden violence. Talal raised an eyebrow, but Gwenna shook her head incrementally. She could keep knocking Qora down all day if necessary, but she didn’t want it to be necessary. She could feel her own blades, heavy in their sheaths across her back. She made no move to reach for them.

  “When we’re finished,” she said, holding Qora’s gaze with her own, “you can tell me if I let them off too easy. When we’re done here, you can tell me if there was justice. If you think I’ve betrayed either you or the Eyrie, you are welcome to come after me with everything you have.” She raised her eyes to the other Kettral. “All of you are. After.

  “Now, we are going to have a trial, and if you get in the way of it, I swear to you, no matter how tight your ass might happen to be, I will put my boot all the way up inside of it and keep kicking until you shut up. The Eyrie has protocol for this, and we are going to follow it.”

  Qora spat blood into the moist earth beneath the tree. “The Eyrie was destroyed.”