The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

Standing straight for the first time since Tan’s attack, he faced the fury of the townsfolk, raised a hand, and flicked his fingers outward, as though to sling clear the blood that had been pooling in his palm. It was a small gesture, almost delicate, and it hit the men and women of that nameless town like a wall. Flesh ripped open on some invisible fence. Bones shattered, the rough ends stabbing through ragged flesh. Suddenly, from the dark spaces between the reeds, a hundred dark-winged desert birds burst screaming into the sky. The villagers screamed too, men and women, young and old, screamed, then collapsed, clawing with the wreckage of their hands at their own bodies, as though there were some burning coal buried deep inside, as though they would rather die than keep it in a moment longer.

  Only Triste remained upright.

  “Why?” Triste demanded, stumbling toward the villagers, then half kneeling, stretching out her arms as though she were about to gather them all into her embrace, to lift them clear of their suffering.

  “It is only what they would have done to us,” Long Fist replied, nodding to that awful tangle of flesh. “I have visited their own fury upon them.”

  “You attacked them,” Triste screamed.

  Kaden shook his head. A part of him was as shocked as she was, but he cordoned it off, set it aside. There was no time for shock. Not if they wanted to escape. Not if they wanted to survive. He glanced east, past the last huts, to where the sky had grown bright as bronze. He could just make out soldiers, dozens of soldiers, coming over the headland maybe a mile distant.

  He stabbed a finger at them. “Triste. Those are il Tornja’s men. They have been marching west for days.”

  She wrenched her eyes from the carnage at her feet. The soldiers were small, but impossible to miss. Her voice, when she could speak, was a whisper, that same word she seemed unable to avoid: “Why?”

  “For you,” Kaden snapped. “For the goddess inside.”

  “How did they know?” she asked. “You told them.…”

  “The ak’hanath. Those huge spiders that tracked us through the Bone Mountains.”

  Triste let out a wail, a high sound close to breaking.

  “We have to go,” Kaden insisted.

  “These people,” Triste protested, turning back to the fallen villagers.

  Kaden shook his head, kept his eyes from the faces. “We can’t help them.”

  “No,” she said. Then, with more conviction, leveling a finger at Long Fist’s chest, “No. I won’t go anywhere with him.”

  Kaden cut her off, surprised at the edge in his own voice. “You were worried about these people?” he demanded, gesturing to the mangled bodies of the villagers. “You were worried about two dozen souls at the edge of the desert? You carry a goddess inside you, Triste. So does Long Fist. If you do not survive, both of you, then this human destruction will be nothing. If you do not survive this day, then no one does.”

  Triste’s face twisted, caught between one horror and another. She stared at Kaden a moment, then looked over at Long Fist. The shaman’s pale brow had gone ash-gray. His blue eyes burned in their sockets, as though with fever.

  “Can you stop them?” Kaden asked the man. “The way you did with…” He gestured to the still-twitching villagers.

  The shaman tilted his head to one side, as though listening to his own beating heart. “Not all of them,” he said finally. “This body is weak and bleeding.”

  “Can you fix it?” Kaden asked. “Use a kenning to stitch up your own wound?”

  “No. It is not permitted.”

  “Permitted by whom? Who’s stopping you?”

  “There are rules. I did not sculpt the shape of the world. This flesh cannot mend itself.” He turned to Triste, ran a tongue over his lips. “The goddess inside the girl, however—she could hem the wound with a flick of her smallest finger.”

  “No,” Triste said, taking a step back. “Never.”

  “Triste is not Ciena,” Kaden said. “And she cannot call her forth.”

  Long Fist grimaced. “Then we flee.” The last word sounded like a curse on his lips, as though such surrender bothered him more than the life leaking out of him.

  “You can’t,” Triste spat, half defiant, half triumphant. “Not with that. You’ll bleed out.”

  Long Fist studied her. Despite the approaching soldiers, he showed no urgency. “How can you hold her inside and still understand so little?”

  “I know you’re dying,” Triste snarled.

  “Dying,” the shaman replied, “is not dead.”

  He turned from the girl, then beckoned to the knife that lay, bloody and forgotten, half a pace away. It flew to his hand like some sharp-beaked bird of prey. Long Fist held it delicately between his fingers, examining the steel as though reading some lost text etched into the blade. Then the metal began to glow a dull, sullen red. Long Fist pursed his lips and blew on it, like a man before a dying fire. At the breath, the red flamed into russet, then sun-hot gold. The shaman smiled, then pressed the glowing blade against the wound. Kaden could hear the sizzle and scorch of blood, could smell the burning meat. Any man would have collapsed beneath the pain, but Long Fist was not a man, not really, and instead of collapsing, he straightened, stiffened, back arching as though with pleasure or bracing cold. Then he threw the knife aside.

  “Quickly,” he said, leveling a long finger toward the west. “There is a kenta in the mountains. The soldiers and the ak’hanath cannot follow us through.”

  Kaden stared. “Il Tornja has moved to seize the kenta. That’s what Tan said. We’ve seen it ourselves.”

  Long Fist shook his head. “He would have to get ahead of us. There has been no dust.”

  “How far?” Kaden asked.

  “A night and then a day.”

  “Will you make it?”

  Long Fist glanced down at his body as though it were an old robe he intended to throw aside. “The flesh is flagging, but there is strength in it still. And this body was riding horses long before I took it for my own.”

  “I won’t go with you,” Triste whispered.

  Kaden extended a hand to her, but she jerked back. “It’s the only way.”

  “I could stay here,” she said quietly. “Die on my own terms.”

  “Are these your terms?” Kaden asked.

  Triste bit her lip.

  Kaden pointed east, toward the soldiers. “These are his terms. Il Tornja’s. Everything that’s happened to you since you left Ciena’s temple happened because of him, and if he finds you here, he wins.”

  She shook her head, lips drawn back in a rictus of indecision, eyes fixed on Kaden.

  “And what about me?” she demanded quietly. “How do I win? You don’t care at all about that, do you?”

  “Right now,” Kaden replied, “just living a little longer … that is winning. And to do that, we need to move west, move now, put a little space between us and danger.”

  Long Fist’s rough laughter cut through the silence that followed.

  “Oh, there is danger everywhere.”

  Kaden turned to stare into the fevered eyes of the shaman. “Meaning what?”

  “There is a reason il Tornja has not tried to reach the mountain kenta with his men.”

  “What’s the reason?”

  “To reach it, we will need to pass beneath the shadow of the fortress of the Skullsworn. Ananshael’s priests are blind to the fact, but the Csestriim gate stands less than a day from Rassambur.”

  41

  All Adare’s life, the ancient wall surrounding Annur’s inner city had been the haunt of lovers rather than warriors. She’d never been there herself, of course, not until now—the old wall was no place for a princess—but she’d heard of how young couples would stroll hand in hand along the wide walkway at the top of the stonework, whispering quiet nothings to each other as they admired the city stretching out to either side, ducking into the old guard towers that punctuated its length, taking advantage of the shadows. There was even a phrase—to walk the whole wall�
��usually offered up with a knowing wink and a sly smile, that had nothing to do with the lonely watch of long-dead sentries.

  That wall had marked the edge of Annur once, centuries earlier. Terial’s soldiers had built and manned it to defend against the raiders that would ride down out of the north. That had been before those lands were incorporated into the empire, before the kings and queens of Raalte, Nish, and Breata lost their hereditary titles and their heads, before their scions saw their territory annexed to Annur. After that, the soldiers went north or south or west, where the new wars were, and the city grew, bulging out beyond its walls. Adare had studied the old maps. There had been just a few buildings at first, like barnacles on a ship’s hull, then more and more built up over the decades and the centuries until a third of Annur lay beyond the ambit of the wall: temples and squares, markets and thoroughfares, whole neighborhoods, the homes of tens of thousands.

  It was, Adare thought, as she stood atop one of Terial’s towers, a measure of Annur’s success that the architecture of war had been given over so fully to the demands of love. And a measure of my failure, she added silently, to have to seize it back.

  Even as she stared, the Sons of Flame were hard at work north of the wall destroying homes and markets, turning back the progress of centuries, tearing down smithies and stables, rendering temples to their constituent blocks and beams, then erecting those parts again as barricades across the streets and alleyways. Anything valuable, anything that might provide even the most minor succor to the coming foe, they burned. Huge, charred heaps smoldered in every square, in the center of every street, smudging the warm summer air with a sickening, greasy smoke.

  Oddly, awfully, Adare found a strange sort of resolve in the destruction. She wouldn’t have believed it a year earlier. Razing half of her own city would have seemed, back then, like the rankest defeat, the most ignominious capitulation. And it was, but at least commanding this defense was something she could do.

  Triste had disappeared beyond her reach, and Kaden, and il Tornja, playing out the last moves of a game she barely understood, a contest on which the future of the world hinged and in which Adare herself was useless, superfluous, or worse. She had no idea how to save the gods or stop the Csestriim, but suddenly, it didn’t matter, or didn’t matter quite as much. The Urghul were coming, coming to destroy Annur. The council had disbanded, fled, for the most part. Which meant the city’s defense had fallen to her, and with it, the terrible need to see so much of that city destroyed.

  It was necessary work, but ugly. Even as she watched, a knot of ragged men burst from one of the alleys, their arms piled high with bolts of fine cloth. What they planned to do with the muslin and velvet, Adare had no idea. Probably they didn’t either. All they knew was that large swaths of Annur were about to burn. The rest—the violence, the looting, even the suicides—it was inevitable from the moment Adare gave the orders.

  “Your Radiance.”

  She turned to find Lehav at the top of the tower steps, one hand in a stiff salute, the other resting on the pommel of his sword. Judging from the blood spattered across that hand, the blade had been out of its sheath, and recently. Despite his spear-straight posture, the commander of the Sons of Flame looked exhausted. Dark hollows ringed his eyes. Smoke and charcoal marred his usually immaculate uniform. Cuts and scrapes crisscrossed his knuckles and arms.

  Adare tensed at the sight of him. “More?”

  He nodded.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The man hesitated, obviously torn between his military discipline and the need to speak. “It is not necessary, Your Radiance,” he said finally. “Not every time. It is a pointless risk. The Sons are seeing to the evacuations and the defense. We can tend to the executions as well.”

  “You could,” Adare replied. “But these people deserve to hear what’s happening and why. They deserve to hear it from me.”

  “Will hearing it from you make them happier when we loop the nooses around their necks and hang them? Will it matter to them that the Emperor herself descended from the wall to explain their misdeeds?”

  “I’m not doing it for the condemned,” she said quietly. “They’ve chosen their course. I’m doing it for the rest.”

  The soldier shook his head. “And what will they take away from it?”

  “The chance to stay alive.”

  * * *

  Adare studied the neighborhood square from atop her horse. It was unremarkable. Two bakeries, their proprietors probably locked in lifelong rivalry. A tailor’s shop. Three taverns. A small temple to Bedisa. There were hundreds of squares just like it all over the city. By nightfall, the whole swath of houses had to burn, and though Adare knew something of the population living here, she had no way to calculate the lives she would destroy, the dreams she planned to tear down with those old teak homes, the families she would rip apart. It had to be done, but there was no way to tally up the harm, not fully. Not truly.

  Behind her, to the east, an oily smoke was already rising into the sky. She could hear the vague roar of fire punctuated by the smash and clatter of buildings that had stood for a hundred years cracking, then collapsing into their own rubble. To the west, in the streets she hadn’t yet reached, came shouts and bellows, screams and the high sound of steel scraping against steel. More people were resisting. Which meant this would not be the last of the executions.

  The Sons had hung two dozen people already for defiance of Adare’s edict. There should have been trials, but there was no time for trials. Anyone who attacked a work crew was killed, the body tossed inside a fallen home to burn with the wood and plaster. Anyone who preached defiance was hauled before Adare herself to hang. It made her sick, but so did the thought of Balendin and the Urghul taking Annur. This was what her life had become: a choice between degrees of sickness.

  Gritting her teeth, she turned to face the crowd that had gathered in the square. The Sons had been at their work for days, leading a conscripted crew of slaves and laborers in the brutal work. Even before that, Kegellen’s shadowy network of runners had been spreading the word: All structures north of the old wall are coming down. Take your families. Take what you can carry, and get out.

  The men and women facing Adare now—a crowd of three or four hundred—looked angry, frightened, confused. One woman had a baby in a sling across her breast and a chicken held upside down by the legs. It wasn’t clear whether she wanted to rescue the creature or slaughter it; the bird gave a weak flap every so often, but for the most part it hung still, as though it had already accepted its fate. Most people had some sort of bag—clutched to the chest, slung across the back, hanging down dumbly from a slack arm. One old man had held a dozen dogs on leashes, but nothing else—no food for either him or them. Adare had ordered the conversion of hundreds of warehouses by the harbor to shelter these sudden refugees, but there would be no room for the dogs. She wondered who would tell the old man that, wondered who would kill the beasts.

  The dogs were sniffing the ground, but the people in the crowd were all staring at her, caught between awe and anger. They lived far from the Dawn Palace. Most would never have seen a Malkeenian or those burning eyes. In a city the size of Annur, people could live, work, and die without ever venturing more than half a mile from their homes. Adare herself might as well have been a myth to them, a subject for speculation rather than outright belief. And now here she was, tired, sweating, sitting atop her horse, about to tell them everything they’d ever known was going to be destroyed, that those who had tried to defend it would be killed.

  She shifted her gaze from the crowd to the prisoners who knelt at the square’s center, guarded by a dozen Sons of Flame. There were six of them. Two had been beaten so badly that blood streamed down their faces while their heads lolled drunkenly to the side. Were it not for the soldiers behind them, they would have collapsed. Those soldiers stared straight ahead, a portrait of military discipline, but Adare could see the bruised knuckles, the blood spa
ttered across armor. Whether the prisoners at their feet had earned their beatings, she had no idea. Maybe they’d attacked the Sons—dozens of soldiers had already been wounded by roving mobs of angry Annurians—and maybe they’d done nothing more than refuse an order. Adare found herself wishing she knew who to blame—the soldiers or the citizens—found herself wishing she knew who had started it.

  But you do know, don’t you? she thought grimly. Whatever happened here, it was you who started it, you who gave the order to clear the streets, you who pitted these men with their bronze and blades against people who wanted only to keep their homes, who were just trying to resist the destruction of everything they’d ever known.

  “We are at war,” Adare said, raising her voice to block out that other voice inside her mind. “We are at war with the Urghul, and we are losing.”

  “Haven’t seen no Urghul,” someone shouted from the crowd. “Just these bastards burning down the city.”

  “These bastards,” Adare replied, “are preparing for a battle. The Urghul have broken past the Army of the North. They are riding on this city even as we speak. Each structure we leave standing beyond this wall is a shield behind which they might shelter, a mask for their movements, an infirmary for their wounded. If we leave this portion of the city standing, we risk the rest, and let me assure you, if they take Annur, we will all die, horribly and in unimagined pain.”

  “We?” someone shouted from the crowd. “You’ll sail out on the last tide, go to one of your other palaces.”

  The defiance would have been inconceivable a year earlier, when Adare’s father still ruled, but that year had played havoc with Annur.

  The Emperor’s power was an illusion. It always had been. There was the palace, and the palace guard, the Aedolians sworn to guard the royal family, and the legions, and of course Intarra’s blazing eyes, all militating for the divine right of the Malkeenian line. None of it mattered. Not really.

  That was the mystery at the heart of all power. Power appeared to be something that a ruler had, that she held, that she had taken from the people. The appearance was false. Power was something people gave, gave willingly, even if they didn’t know it, even if they resented it. The wealthy merchant who paid a tax on every bolt of cloth, the slave who lived day after day under the yoke, the sailors who allowed their boats to be searched by crown officials, the soldiers who refused to break ranks even when their orders were ridiculous, insane—it was these people who gave a ruler her power, offered it up like a sacrifice.