The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “We’re not among the Urghul,” Kaden said.

  “Indeed. And so here, it is merely an expedient.” He glanced over the crowd. “Bring the girl. Now.”

  And then, as though responding to the shaman’s words, the door to one of the reed huts slammed open. Triste stepped from the dark square under the wooden lintel into the day’s dwindling light. Her violet eyes blazed with the sun’s reflected fire, and she held an arm out before her, palm up, as though she planned to take Long Fist in her fingers and crush him.

  “Stop,” she said. For a moment Kaden didn’t know if the command was hers, or if it came from the goddess inside. Then he saw the fear painted across her face, saw that her legs were shaking. Not the goddess then. Just the girl. Her gaze snagged on Kaden. Anger blazed there, and betrayal, and hopeless bafflement, then she was rounding on Long Fist, pushing her way through the assembled villagers.

  “I’m here,” she said. “I’m here. These people have done nothing but help me, hide me when no one else would. Leave them alone.”

  Long Fist didn’t speak. He tossed aside the villager without a glance, ignoring the man where he fell writhing to the dirt. His eyes were fixed on Triste, his lips pulled back to reveal his sharpened teeth. He tilted his head back, dragged a long slow breath in through his nose, then blew it out between pursed lips.

  “Ciena,” he said. The word started in a snake’s hiss, ended with a vowel drawn so thin it was little more than air. Then, again, shaking his head. “Ciena. How did you lose yourself in such a creature?”

  Triste looked terrified, but she didn’t shy away. She never has, Kaden realized. Not in Ashk’lan or the Bone Mountains, not in Assare or the Dead Heart.

  “I know who you are,” she said quietly.

  The shaman shook his head. “You have no idea what I am. Your mind could not hold it all.”

  “What about her?” Triste demanded, tapping at the side of her skull. “That’s what you came for, right? That’s why you’re both here,” she went on, including Kaden in her gesture. “To carve her out? Well, I guess that means my mind was large enough for your fucking wife.”

  “Wife.” The shaman seemed to find the word amusing. “She is not my wife. And you have seen only the smallest shard of what she is.”

  Triste opened her mouth to respond, but no words escaped her throat. The things that happened next took place so fast Kaden could only catch the fragments: a low, fluttering whir; a breeze just at his ear, as though a small-boned bird had flitted by; a slight shape catching the morning’s light, flashing it back; a blur as Long Fist turned; his shudder, then stumble; a bright splash of blood across the dirt.

  For a heartbeat the details refused to cohere. Kaden could see the hilt of the knife, see the Urghul chieftain pitching forward, but his mind balked at the meaning tangled up inside the motion. All this time they’d been trying to save Triste, trying to get to the goddess trapped inside her.

  And we were looking at the wrong thing.

  As Long Fist reeled, Kaden spun, searching for the attacker, suddenly certain that il Tornja’s men had been faster than he expected. Or they’d managed to get to the village first, somehow, to lay an ambush. As he struggled with the raw facts of the attack, the head-high reeds fringing the clearing parted, and a man with a spear stepped out into the open.

  No, Kaden realized. Not a spear, a naczal.

  Rampuri Tan stood a dozen paces distant, studying the bleeding figure of the Urghul chieftain with that hard, unreadable stare Kaden remembered so well from his years at Ashk’lan. Long Fist stumbled to one knee, groaned, tried to stand, then dropped again. The knife wasn’t large, but it was buried to the hilt in the shaman’s side—more than deep enough to puncture a lung, to reach the heart, even. Kaden stepped between Long Fist and Tan.

  “You just destroyed us all.”

  The older monk shook his head slowly. “I told you already. The creature behind you is not what he claims.”

  “He is a god,” Kaden said, “and you have killed him.”

  Long Fist wasn’t dead yet—Kaden could hear the wet, labored breathing just a pace behind him—but he was dying, and fast. The villagers, transfixed by the sudden violence, bore shocked and sickened witness to the scene. One woman vomited onto the ground. The man Long Fist had hoisted into the air just moments earlier kept twitching in the dust, moaning quietly.

  “He is Csestriim,” Tan said, stepping forward into the clearing. “Just as il Tornja is Csestriim.”

  “No,” Kaden replied. “I explained it to you in the Heart.…”

  “You painted a picture of your own error.” The monk shook his head as he approached. “This creature,” he continued, lowering his naczal toward Long Fist, “sent us through the kenta into a trap, a slaughter. Dozens of il Tornja’s men were waiting with bows and blades.”

  “Il Tornja is sending soldiers to all the kenta,” Kaden protested. “He’s hunting Long Fist, not colluding with him.”

  “Then where were the men,” Tan asked, spinning the spear in a curt arc, as though testing its balance, “when you stepped through the gate to the Dead Salts?”

  Kaden stared, uncertain how to respond. The cold, stone memory of Ashk’lan flooded his mind, the years sitting on ledges and running the vertiginous trails, trying to scrape away the last remnant of the self. Tan had taught him the lesson a hundred times in a hundred ways: The mind is a flame. Blow it out, or it will blind you.

  “Ran il Tornja and Long Fist,” Tan continued implacably, “have just destroyed the Ishien. They have gutted the last order that remembered the old war, and they have done it posing as foes to each other all the while.”

  Tan reasoned like a man building a stone wall: Here is a fact. Here is a fact. Here is a fact. The world is no more than this. Kaden shoved at that wall, attacking the individual blocks with the crowbar of his own logic. Nothing budged. Il Tornja had freed Triste. Triste and Long Fist passed the kenta. For all his alleged loathing, Long Fist had never struck directly at the kenarang.

  “No,” Triste said. Her eyes blazed violet. “You’re wrong.”

  Tan turned his gaze on her. “And now this creature leaps to their defense. The truth is clear as the sky. Open your eyes to it.”

  Open your eyes. Clear away the blindness of the self. After half a lifetime, Kaden had mastered the Shin method, and what wisdom had it brought him? Tan’s wall was unassailable, but a wall was not the world.

  “Surely,” Kaden said quietly, “there are other ways of knowing the truth.”

  The monk shook his head. “This is the babble of mystics and fools.”

  He lowered the strange spear’s blade to Kaden’s chest. Kaden could feel the cold gray metal on his skin.

  “Move,” Rampuri Tan said quietly.

  Kaden looked down at the spearpoint. There would be no fighting against his old umial. Tan had destroyed a dozen ak’hanath alone in the Bone Mountains. He had stood against Ekhard Matol and his Ishien as Kaden escaped from the Dead Heart. The monk was as deadly with that naczal as any fighter Kaden had seen, and Kaden himself didn’t even have a weapon. There could be no fight, but neither could he simply stand aside to allow the slaughter to play out.

  “No,” he said.

  Tan’s eyes were dark, unreadable. “You should have stayed at Ashk’lan.”

  “Ashk’lan was destroyed.”

  “You would have made a fine monk.” Tan drew the spear back, “But this is no world for monks.”

  He is going to kill me, Kaden thought. Fear and anger scrabbled against his composure, cats dropped in a steel bucket to drown. Kaden broke their necks, one, then the other, using that quick motion of the mind that Tan himself had taught him during those cold, gray-blue days among the peaks. The calm that came was glacial, older than all human struggle, a final gift from a umial to his last pupil. It does not matter, the wind whispered. It doesn’t matter. The words seemed wrong somehow, but Kaden could find no error in them.

  Rampuri Tan opened his mo
uth to say something else—a last demand, a farewell—then stiffened. Instead of words, blood gushed out, hot and thick as vomit, so much blood that Kaden could only stare as it splashed over the thirsty ground. Tan half bent, swaying on his feet. Blood poured from between his teeth, running down his chin, as though some invisible blade had ripped him apart inside, from the gut straight through the heart in one vicious, inexplicable stroke. It seemed that so much blood erupting so suddenly should have dropped him where he stood, but Tan was still standing—leaning on his naczal, but standing—eyes fixed on something just beyond Kaden.

  Kaden half turned to find that Long Fist had shoved himself into a seated position. The knife remained buried in his side, but he had leveled a scarred hand toward Rampuri Tan, seemed to be squeezing with it, twisting, as though those long fingers were wrapped around human organs rather than empty air. Rage illuminated his face.

  Tan groaned, a sound like stone sliding over stone. Blood ran from his ears now, from the sockets of his eyes, but he took a halting step forward, then another, ignoring Kaden entirely, ignoring the blood and pain, his gaze, his whole body bent toward the wounded shaman bleeding out into the dirt. Long Fist snarled, wrapped his hand tighter, and Tan stumbled to a knee.

  “You are finished, monk,” the shaman said. There was a sound like snapping wood. Spasms took Tan’s flesh, shook it violently. His bones, Kaden realized, stomach lurching into his mouth. Long Fist is breaking his bones. Blood smeared the shaman’s white teeth when he smiled. “This is your end.”

  But it was not.

  Somehow, impossibly, Tan forced himself back onto his feet, swayed a moment, then stumbled forward, one halting pace, then two, then three, until he stood within reach of the wounded Urghul chieftain. Kaden watched, lost in the stillness of his own amazement. Slowly, agonizingly, Tan raised the naczal.

  Long Fist was sweating now, the hot sheen mixing with his blood. He grimaced, snarled, then twisted his hand again. Tan’s leg buckled beneath him. He dropped, but kept the naczal raised. The shaman’s blue eyes went wide.

  “It is finished,” Tan managed, choking the words out through the blood. “I am ending it.”

  For half a heartbeat, the two men were still, silent as a painting. The pale leach half-sitting, one hand pressed into the dirt, holding him up, the other cast out before him. The dark-skinned monk knelt, spear held in both hands above his head, as though it were a splitting maul. Blood glistened on both faces, bright with the rising sun. The whole scene might have been a fresco in the Dawn Palace, or a tapestry.

  Or a saama’an, Kaden thought, staring at the motionless tableau.

  It was as though the action were already over and he were just remembering it, as though everything that had to happen had already happened long, long ago. The morning wind had fallen away. The clouds hung still, nailed against the sky.

  Kaden stepped forward into that stillness. He caught the cool, smooth shaft of the naczal as it hung there at its height, then pulled it free of his umial’s trembling hands. It was easy. Horribly easy. Tan’s broken grip was weaker than a child’s, the bones of his wrist and arm shattered beneath the skin. How he had managed to keep holding the weapon at all, Kaden had no idea.

  “You can’t kill him,” Kaden murmured, dropping to his knees beside the monk. Some sensation he could not name had caught him in its jaws. “He is a god. Our god.”

  Tan dragged his gaze away from Long Fist. His eyes wandered over the land as though lost, over the huts and reeds, over the still water of the oasis, then settled finally on Kaden. The first time he opened his mouth, nothing came out. He ground his teeth, hauled in another breath, then managed a single word, weak as the wind: “… wrong…”

  With all context pared away, there was no saying who was wrong: Kaden, or Long Fist, or Tan himself. Kaden started to reply, to protest, but the monk’s eyes had already moved past him once again, past the village this time, past the branches of the trees, to the great space of the sky, the unplumbed blue depth of it, the cool, unrelenting emptiness. One heartbeat Rampuri Tan was there, a mortal creature shaking in his own shattered flesh … and then he was gone.

  Kaden ignored the cries that had erupted behind him, the mad panic of the villagers finally tumbling into motion. He stared at Tan’s face.…

  No, he reminded himself, the word cold as winter stone. Not his face. Not anymore. Just meat and bone. With a gentle motion he closed the drying orbs that had so recently been eyes, then turned away, from the dead back toward the dying.

  Long Fist had fallen over into the dirt. He was breathing, but blood flecked his lips, dribbled down his chin. Kaden turned him slightly. Found the blade buried in his side. He knew next to nothing about the treatment of wounds in battle, but he had seen sheep die, and goats, had wielded the knife himself a hundred times. Long Fist was hurt, and badly, was bleeding into the dirt even as Kaden watched.

  The thought was too big and so Kaden shoved it aside, focusing instead on the immediate situation. The soldiers were still coming. They were off to the east, somewhere, but they would be closing. Even more urgent, the townsfolk, loosed from their terror by the monk’s attack, were circling like jackals, growling and shouting, stabbing fingers at Long Fist, the man who moments before had held their own so cruelly in his hands. They wanted to see him finished, but fear still held them back; the lion was dying, but he was not dead.

  That fear might buy us a hundred heartbeats, Kaden thought, scanning the small crowd. No more.

  “Can you move?” he asked, glancing toward the paddock with the horses. “Can you ride?”

  Long Fist twisted his head to meet Kaden’s eyes. Kaden had expected to see something human there, pain or fear, but there was nothing human in the shaman’s gaze. His voice, when he spoke, did not sound like a broken thing, but like something that had done the breaking.

  “Not like this. Not with this in me.”

  He forced himself up from the dirt. Then, slowly, deliberately as a violinist taking up his bow, the shaman wrapped a hand around the shaft buried in his side, then tightened his grip. He closed his eyes as he pulled the knife free, but the expression playing over his face was not one of agony but of careful attention, as though he were trying to make out some terribly beautiful, terribly distant music. When the knife was clear, blood welled from the wound, surging with each heartbeat, soaking his clothes and pooling beneath him. Long Fist ignored it, turning instead to Tan’s body.

  “He hid it until the very end, but there was music in your monk. Most of your kind would have folded beneath the note I sounded in his bones. I wish I could have drawn out longer the great chord of his agony.”

  “He’s dead now,” Kaden said. “He’s not important. We need to get out of here.”

  He glanced over his shoulder as he said the words. The villagers were circling. One of the men had half lifted his ax, as though testing its weight. Even the empty-handed among them had balled fingers into fists or claws.

  Long Fist rose slowly to a knee. Too slowly. Kaden seized him by the elbow, dragging him roughly upright, then searched for Triste. The girl stood a few paces away. She was wringing her desert robe between her hands, but made no move to step forward. Kaden started to shout to her, something about getting on the horses, escaping, then stopped himself. Shouting would do nothing but drive the villagers more quickly toward the coming violence. He took a half breath, ordered his thoughts, and turned to the townsfolk instead.

  “Soldiers are coming,” he said. “They will be here before the sun crests these trees, and they will kill you all.”

  The warning was for them, but not just them. He needed to talk his way clear of the town, and he needed Triste to follow. Seizing the girl was no option. He might be able to drag her screaming for a mile, maybe two; certainly not far enough to outpace il Tornja’s men. If they were going to escape, she needed to hear what was coming, needed to believe it.

  “What happened here was wrong,” Kaden said, gesturing to the twitching body of
the man Long Fist had hooked through the throat. It was hard to say what was wrong with him. The wound would have been painful, excruciating, but the mindless writhing was the product of something more. The woman beside him still bled from the ears, and the shaman hadn’t even touched her. “It was wrong. It was a mistake, and we will fix it.”

  Long Fist gave a jerk at his side. Kaden turned, half expecting to find the Urghul dying on his feet, finally losing control of the flesh he had so thoroughly possessed. Instead, Kaden realized with horror, the shaman was laughing, a low, slow sound, almost a growl.

  “What would I fix?” he asked, gesturing with a bloody hand to the man and woman, both obviously lost in their own pain. “I have kindled something bright inside their minds. I will not put it out.”

  “They haven’t done anything.…”

  “They did nothing,” Long Fist agreed. He seemed barely able to stand, but his voice was strong. “They lived gray, quiet lives, and I have made them sing.”

  Triste shouldered her way forward angrily. “You’re killing them.”

  “No,” the shaman said. “I never break an instrument.” Despite the hemorrhaging wound in his side, he glanced at the mound of flesh that had been Tan, then smiled. “Almost never.”

  It was that smile, Kaden thought later, that goaded the villagers out of their hesitation. They understood nothing of what was happening—how could they?—but two of their number were writhing like fish hauled out of the water, tossed onto the shore to flop themselves dead, and they knew who had done the tossing. Someone toward the back, a woman, Kaden thought, started screaming, and then those in front tumbled toward them like a wave.

  They’re going to kill him, Kaden thought. They’re going to finish killing him.

  He hauled on the shaman’s arm, but Long Fist might have been rooted to the dirt, might have been some piece of statuary carved from the bedrock itself.

  “Run,” Kaden growled, but the Urghul chieftain shrugged him off.