The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Adare had read more than enough history to be baffled by the fact. Even the greatest writers seemed unequal to the explanation. Maybe people were frightened of chaos, those writers stipulated, frightened of violence. Maybe they were too stupid to rise up. Maybe they were too happy and sated. Too beaten down. Whatever the reasons of ten million men and women for giving up their freedom, history painted one lesson clearly over and over: people obeyed … until they did not.

  Adare had read about it in tome after tome: that moment when a whole people, as though waking from a collective dream, stopped giving away their power. Sometimes the spark of change was obvious—a murder, a famine—but more often the causes were obscure, endlessly debated. Really, those causes didn’t seem to matter. Something caused a crack in the veneer of power. The crack spread, ramified, until it was deep enough and wide enough for everyone to see. Then the whole edifice crumbled. When that happened, people died, millions of people, including those who had risen up to defy their rulers in the first place.

  This is how it begins, Adare thought, studying the crowd, wondering if this would be the moment the glass bauble of her own rule shattered in her hand.

  “You’ll burn our homes,” someone else shouted. “And then, when the Urghul come, you’ll disappear, go somewhere soft and comfortable, leaving us to sleep in the ashes.”

  Already, the grumbling had gone on too long. Beside Adare, Lehav shifted in his own saddle, testing his sword where it rested in the scabbard. Behind her, she could hear the Sons of Flame preparing. She laid a gentle hand on the general’s wrist, holding him back even as she spoke.

  “You are wrong,” she said. “There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere soft and comfortable. The whole world is on fire, and even were it not, I would stay here. I will stand at the wall when the Urghul come, and though I am no fighter, if it comes to that, I will fight.”

  “And if the wall falls?”

  Adare nodded. “Then I will retreat into the city. I will hide in attics and cellars. I will sneak out at night to poison the food of our foes, to cut their throats, to hobble their horses. When the grain stops arriving, and our fleets stop fishing, I will eat rats. I will sleep wedged beneath floorboards. I will fight until they kill me, and after that, I will become a ghost. I will haunt their dreams, and drag claws across their flesh so that every time a shadow falls across an Urghul face, they will know fear. I will not leave this city, even in death, because it is mine. It is mine, just as it is yours, and regardless of the army arrayed against us, I will not go.”

  She paused, chest heaving, air burning in her lungs, thighs trembling where they gripped the saddle. She shifted her gaze from face to face, waiting for more bellowed defiance, for the mob to finally fall on her. It did not. Instead, the silence stood like a great stone in the center of the square.

  “I will fight the Urghul,” she said quietly. “I will kill them.” Then, slowly, she turned to the slumped forms of the condemned, the six who had to hang. “And I will see those killed who would jeopardize that fight.”

  She forced her face into the shape of determination and resolve. The bile rose in her throat.

  She’d told Lehav that she came down from the wall to warn the living, but that wasn’t the truth, not all of it. A part of her wanted them to rise up. She imagined it each time, imagined the thousands of hands clutching her, pulling her from the saddle, slaughtering her on the flagstones. It was a coward’s thought, but each time, as the soldiers pulled the nooses tight, it consumed her: if she died, if the mob tore her apart, she would be freed from doing it again, freed from everything that had to happen next.

  42

  Impossible, Kaden thought.

  For the better part of the day they had pressed west on the backs of the desert horses, away from the oasis, across the open flats, then into the first foothills of the Ancaz. As the mountains steepened into cliffs and canyons, however, the exhausted beasts began to lose their footing.

  “We have to go on foot,” Long Fist had groaned.

  It was impossible. Kaden could make it a few miles over flat ground, maybe ten at the outside, tottering forward on exhausted legs, but here in the mountains? The bloodred cliffs loomed up in front of them, thousands of vertical feet stabbing straight into the bleached-blue belly of the sky. Canyons broke the serrated wall, offering tenuous access to the high country beyond, but even those canyons were steep, boulder-choked where they weren’t flooded with storm runoff. The terrain would test even rested, healthy runners, and the three of them were anything but rested or healthy. They’d be navigating those canyons all day and all night, provided Long Fist knew the way, fleeing il Tornja’s soldiers, hoping to avoid the eyes of whatever guards the Skullsworn posted at the approaches to Rassambur.

  Maybe a year ago, Kaden thought grimly, focusing on the ache in his thighs, the twinge in his left ankle that bit a little deeper every stride. I could have run this as a monk, but I’m not a monk. Tan had been clear enough about that. Still, there was nothing to do but run or turn back into the swords of the soldiers behind them, and so they ran.

  The memory of his slaughtered umial dogged Kaden as he hobbled up the canyon, a twinge in his mind, a catch in his chest more painful than the aches of his knees and feet. He could set it aside as Tan had trained him, could slide into the smooth, cool halls of the vaniate, but doing so seemed wrong somehow, an evasion. Strange, that unexpected imperative to embrace the suffering. As though what Long Fist had been claiming all along was right, as though pain were ennobling, as though the vaniate, the ease of its promised escape, were indeed a profanation.

  Kaden glanced over at Long Fist, wondering how long he could hold on. The shaman was moving fast, despite his uneven, shambling stride, the wound in his side cauterized and forgotten. As for Triste, Kaden had seen just what she could manage a year earlier, during their flight through the Bone Mountains, and she was fresh now, rested, far more ready than Kaden himself for this desperate trek westward.

  And yet, as they ran, he found a strange strength returning, the stirring of the body’s memories of all those endless days climbing the high peaks or running the Circuit of Ravens. It wasn’t that the ache receded, but that he grew familiar with its contours, as though exhaustion were a home to which he had returned after a long time abroad. The strides which had at first threatened to break him grew increasingly plausible, and though his body throbbed with the effort, as the sun crested overhead, Kaden felt, to his surprise, that he could keep going all day.

  Even when they reached the cliffs and began climbing the streambed, scrambling over the broken stone, fighting their way up, up through the choking briars that clustered around the water, he found himself able to keep moving, even to speed up. When he glanced back down the canyon, he could sometimes catch a glimpse of the soldiers, twenty of them at least, laboring up the defile behind. Mostly, he tried not to look back, keeping his eyes on the ground in front of him instead, shrinking the task at hand to a matter of the next few steps.

  He lost himself so thoroughly in the landscape of his own motion that when they finally reached a saddle between the peaks, he almost didn’t notice it. The sandstone canyon had tightened until it was only shoulder-wide, then too narrow to pass, and when he climbed free, he found himself looking down the other side of the mountains, into a smooth, sweeping valley, red, and yellow, and gold sweeps of unbroken stone. Without thinking, without pausing, he lengthened his stride, loosened his arms for the downhill, chose a line through the chaparral and scattered stones, and started down.

  Triste’s shout brought him up short. He thought, at first, that something had gone wrong, that il Tornja’s soldiers had managed to close the gap, and he skidded to a stop. When he turned, however, Triste wasn’t looking back the way they had come. She was pointing at Long Fist. The shaman was still running, but his gait had faded to a rough stumble. He didn’t seem to be paying any attention to the ground before him. His eyes were empty, fixed on the far horizon or on some vision only he
could see. The endless run would have been a brutal trial for a healthy man, and Long Fist was not healthy. Though his wound was burned shut, the blade had done its damage; purple blood pooled beneath his pale skin. While Kaden and Triste had been grinding out the miles, the Urghul had been dying on his feet by slow degrees.

  “We need to take a break,” Kaden said, lurching to a halt on wobbling legs. “Drink something.”

  Long Fist didn’t seem to hear him. He continued on, stumbling down the slope until Kaden snagged his arm. The shaman’s weight almost brought them both down, and when he did finally stop, he swayed on his feet, then came to rest leaning against Kaden. Triste caught up to them, shook her head in mute exhaustion, then bent over, hands on her knees, lungs heaving in the dry air.

  “He needs to stop,” Kaden said again.

  Triste wasn’t looking at him, gave no indication, in fact, that she was listening to him at all, but Kaden addressed the words to her anyway. At some point during the long day, a balance had shifted. Since the Waist, the shaman had held the unspoken threat of pain and madness over Kaden’s head like a bright blade, one he could bring down with a snap of his fingers. Even after Tan’s attack, in the few hours after they left the oasis and the village, Long Fist had been the meager party’s undisputed chief.

  No more. There was still a god inside the body, but it seemed as though Meshkent had been baffled to silence by the weakness of his chosen flesh.

  He has not felt this, Kaden realized, studying the Urghul. It is a simple truth that all men die, but he has never lived inside it.

  “We…,” Triste gasped, waving a vague hand backward, the way they had come, “… can’t stop. They…”

  She trailed off, panting. Kaden turned, shading his eyes from the noonday sun, peering down the canyon they had climbed. There was no sign of the soldiers, but he couldn’t see far, not more than a quarter mile, and with the mountain wind keening over the stones, he couldn’t hear much more than his own breath rasping in his throat.

  “Where is the kenta?” Kaden asked, turning back to Long Fist. The shaman didn’t respond. Kaden reached up, took him by the shoulders. “How far?”

  Slowly those bottomless blue eyes focused. The Urghul looked at Kaden first, then turned to consider the red stone walls and canyons of the high Ancaz mountains.

  “That way,” he said finally, pointing southwest. “There is a side canyon. It will take us in, then down.”

  Kaden stared at the shattered land. He could count dozens of canyons from where he stood, a labyrinth of sandstone cuts and defiles. All of them led down eventually, but only one would reach the kenta.

  “How will we know which canyon to take?” Kaden asked, staring south. “What do we look for?”

  “Pillars,” Long Fist said. Then, as though goaded on by his own words, he lurched into a run.

  “What kind of pillars?” Kaden asked, but the shaman did not turn. Triste looked over, her face a mask of exhaustion, shook her head, then followed.

  Kaden didn’t follow, not at first. As he struggled to regain his breath, he watched the two figures laboring down the mountain’s steep side. From a little distance they looked so human—the blond Urghul beside the black-haired girl, both stumbling, both exhausted. From a distance, you couldn’t see the scars webbing Long Fist’s skin, or his eyes, couldn’t see how terribly beautiful Triste really was. They might have been refugees fleeing some ugly corner of the larger war, two people plucked from the many millions, just trying to survive.

  Not at all like gods, Kaden thought, watching them. How could they possibly be gods? And then, hard on that thought, another, darker thought: How can they possibly survive?

  That they had escaped the small village behind them was something of a miracle, as was the fact that they had made their way up and into the mountains. Suddenly, however, these miracles seemed meager, unequal to the coming fight. Even Long Fist’s effortless devastation of the villagers seemed inadequate, and as Kaden turned his gaze from the retreating figures to the great maze of the Ancaz, a thought, thin as the dust rising in the east, spread across his mind: We can’t win.

  The despair settled down on him, lead-heavy, fitted to his flesh like a finely tailored coat. At Ashk’lan, he had not felt despair. Or if he had, it had been little more than an echo, a lassitude in the bones, a slowness of the mind that he had learned to recognize and escape. Back then, he had not fully appreciated the gift of the Shin, had not understood the gray weight under which most men labored the length of their days. Even in Annur, sparring pointlessly with the council while the fabric of the republic frayed and tore, he had not felt this hopelessness.

  Or the hope, he thought. Or the hate. Il Tornja had betrayed him. So had Adare. But they had been stones, pieces to surround, to overpower and remove from the board. Even the prospect of Kaden’s own defeat, of his death, of the eradication of all humanity, had been clear but colorless, like frost etched across a winter pane.

  Since joining Long Fist, however, his emotions had come back in a hot, bright flood. Anger and fear bathed him, battered him, smashing up against all rational thought like logs caught in the spate. He felt like a child again, lost in the wash of feeling, carried along on a current that was nothing of his own making. Only the vaniate offered escape, and so as he stood in that high saddle, cliffs falling away on all sides, wind tearing at his clothes, his face, legs quivering beneath him, he shrugged off his emotion, slid into the emptiness, and was able to breathe free once more.

  Suspended in that blankness, he watched Long Fist and Triste struggling south, carrying the gods buried in their battered flesh.

  And if they were destroyed? he wondered, cool and light inside the space of the vaniate. Would that be so tragic?

  He turned his face slowly from the retreating figures to the huge sweep of the canyon below. A pair of hawks circled silently upward, wings outstretched and motionless, lifted on some distant, invisible wind. Those hawks followed their own ancient imperatives, ignorant of love or desperation. And the peaks themselves, carved from reds deeper and fuller than human blood, built from yellow, and white, and russet sandstone by forces stronger than any human hand—what did those mountains care for women, for men, for the gods on whom they depended? What did the sky care? Or the sun?

  What if the world were like this? Kaden wondered.

  Unbidden, his mind filled with the vision of a great, still space, the stone of the mountains, and beyond that stone the whole downward sweep of the earth west and south all the way to the ocean, the whole world empty, hill and stream and stone utterly untouched, unblemished by the scrabbling of men and women. There were no houses, no gouges in the dirt where quarries had cut free the rock. There were no roads carved across the land. There were no ships, no boats.

  Would that be worse?

  How hard would it be for him to simply step aside? He studied the cuts and valleys. A quarter mile off there was a pinnacle, a sheer-sided needle of stone. He had climbed formations like that back in the Bone Mountains. There would be space at the top of it to sit, to study the canyon, to watch the sun shift its slant while il Tornja’s soldiers followed the ak’hanath to a final slaughter. Long Fist and Triste would be far south by that point, almost out of sight, certainly too far for him to hear their cries. Inside the vaniate, he would feel nothing when they died. And later? He would emerge from the emptiness into a larger emptiness, a vacancy wide as the sky. He wouldn’t even need to fight for it.

  This is what Kiel warned me of, he thought. That one day I might just walk away.

  He could remember being wary of the possibility once, not long ago, but staring at it now he could not remember why. The world was brimming with worse fates than stillness and silence. At that moment, scattered all across Annur, soldiers were driving swords into skulls; pox-plagued children sobbed, bleeding in their sleep; men stole and women stole, heaping up their shining piles, screaming and snarling whenever anyone else came close. Why not walk off into the peaks?


  Kaden took a deep breath. The air was bright in his lungs. Then, from the south, he heard a cry. He turned slowly from the great gulf of empty air to find Triste, thin as a sapling in the distance, waving her arms above her head, gesturing to him. Her voice was thin when it reached him, just a thread of sound: “… with me. Please. Please hurry.”

  It was nothing, that thread, the thinnest wool, but it snagged on a corner of his mind. Slowly, he blew out the bright air, let go of the vaniate, sagged again beneath the weight of his own hope and pain, then started south, following in the footsteps of the feeble and stumbling gods.

  * * *

  They need not have worried about missing the pillars. The landscape of the Ancaz was littered with stone, huge boulders carved by the wind into strange, unwieldy shapes—giant saucers, blasted lumps that could almost pass as faces, top-heavy balanced forms with the attenuated waists of wasps—but even amongst that menagerie of stone, the pillars drew the eye. They flanked the entrance to a canyon, just a gradual, natural ramp at first, little more than a cut in the ground that deepened and widened quickly, dropping out of sight between sheer stone walls. Like the rest of the stone, the pillars had been whittled by the wind, thinned from perfect cylinders to vaguer shapes, but both were tall, five times Kaden’s height at the very least, and in the hard glare of the overhead sun he could just make out the shape of writing twisted around their length.

  “What are these?” he asked.

  No one replied. Kaden turned just in time to see Long Fist totter, put out a hand, and then collapse into the dirt. Triste let out a quiet whimper, but made no move to approach. Kaden glanced over his shoulder, north. It was hard to say, but he thought he could hear the clatter of rocks knocked free, falling hundreds of feet to shatter on the ledges below. He crossed to the shaman, then dropped unsteadily to his knees.