The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “We made it,” he said, gesturing to the looming pillars.

  “To the canyon,” Triste said. “Where is the kenta?”

  Long Fist didn’t respond. His breath was shallow and fast, his pale skin ashen. Sweat beaded his brow, matting the long blond hair to his scalp.

  “This body,” he panted. “It is giving out.”

  Triste stared, bafflement and anger warring across her features. “You healed the wound,” she protested.

  Long Fist shook his head. The movement was weak, as though all the muscles of his neck had suddenly gone slack. “I burned shut the skin,” he replied. “It kept the blood in, but did nothing to stop the bleeding inside.”

  He reached down with a feeble hand, scrabbled at the hem of his vest, as though his fingers could no longer grasp, as though he had forgotten what it was to hold a thing. Kaden pulled back the cloth, then stopped. Dried blood flaked from the shaman’s skin, but that was hardly the worst of the injury. Long Fist was right; the hot knife had seared shut the wound, but the blood beneath had pooled in a wide band from armpit to hip, from the center of the chest all the way around to the man’s back. The pale skin bulged, the bone and tightened cord of the shaman’s torso little more than a bag of blood.

  He’s dying, Kaden realized. It doesn’t matter if we make it to the gate or not. He is already dying.

  Panic scratched and scratched in a corner of his mind, like a mouse with one foot caught in the trap. Kaden turned his focus inward, took the terrified part of himself between his mind’s fingers, then crushed it. The scratching fell silent for a heartbeat, then reappeared, louder and more insistent. The emptiness beckoned, but he shoved it back.

  “What can we do?” he asked, gently probing the shaman’s wound with his fingers.

  “You?” Long Fist raised his brows. “Nothing. This is beyond whatever little skill you have. It is beyond all mortal instruments.” He turned to Triste, but coughing swallowed up his words, spattered bright, arterial blood across his chest in great gouts. There was more now, much more, as though something crucial had torn free inside. When the spasm finally subsided, pink phlegm trailed from his chin. When he spoke, it was a single word, sibilant as the wind’s whisper: “Ciena.”

  Triste stared at him. Then, understanding, recoiled as though slapped. “I can’t.…”

  Long Fist half lifted his hands. Kaden couldn’t say whether it was supplication or some weak spasm.

  “This flesh fails,” he said, lip curling above bloody incisors. Then, again, “Ciena.” He wasn’t simply naming her this time, but calling, calling across the barriers of their two human bodies, across the wall of Triste’s mind into whatever cramped space Ciena had carved out for herself.

  Kaden put a hand behind the shaman’s head, lifting it slightly, as though that might keep the life from draining out his mouth along with the blood. When he turned back to Triste, he half expected to find the girl gone from her own face, to hear the goddess speaking in that huge, implacable voice. It almost seemed it must be so, that the extremity of the situation would call her forth as it had each time before. Triste’s eyes, however, remained her own. The expressions ghosting over her face, her mouth opening in silent lamentation, her forehead creasing … Kaden had seen those expressions before, seen them scores of times. The girl was angry, baffled, terrified, but she was herself. Of the goddess inside, he could discover no sign.

  “We have to draw her out,” Kaden said. They had pared away the other choices. The other choices had been stolen from them. It hardly mattered. Only this remained.

  Triste’s lips were trembling. She took half a step back.

  “The only way to do that…”

  “… is to hurt you,” Kaden said. “I know.” There was no time left. Whatever indifference he had felt an hour earlier, it was gone, vanished. Outside the vaniate, unshielded from his own emotion, he felt almost sick with urgency. His heart hurled itself against his ribs again and again. He laid the shaman’s head down against the stone, straightened up, then reached for the knife at his side. “Ciena will respond,” he said, fixing Triste’s eyes with his own. “She will emerge. She always has.”

  Triste took another step back.

  “It won’t work.”

  “It will. It has. In the Crane, that time you stabbed yourself—”

  “I meant to kill myself. That’s what brought her out. It’s like she can smell it, can smell the real threat. That’s the only time the wall between us breaks.”

  Long Fist groaned, a low sound like an animal might make.

  Kaden shook his head. “There is no other choice. Triste. If he dies, we are done. Everyone is done. Everyone you love—”

  “Who?” she screamed, the word a broadax cleaving his own. “Who do I love?”

  In a moment, Kaden saw his mistake.

  “My parents are dead,” Triste snarled, voice caught somewhere between a shout and a sob. “And when they were alive, they traded me away. They sold me.”

  “Your parents betrayed you,” Kaden said, nodding. He took a step toward her, and she took another step back, a dance modeled from blood and distrust. “Does that mean everyone in the world should suffer?”

  “Suffer?” she demanded, incredulous. She stabbed a finger at Long Fist where he lay against the rock, blue eyes unfocused on the sky. “He’s why they suffer. He’s where it all comes from! And you want to save him. You want to stab me in order to save him.”

  “Not him. Humanity.”

  “And what do I care,” she asked, voice dropping to a whisper, “about humanity?”

  There is no time for this, Kaden thought. He tried to measure the distance between them, tried to weigh the knife in his hand. The shaman shuddered behind him, back arching in obedience to some command of the ruined body. Careful, he told himself. Careful. It was a narrow window. He needed Triste frightened, desperately frightened, but the girl was right—the goddess inside seemed only to break out in moments of the most violent need. How close would he have to be to induce such need? How deep would he have to cut?

  Long Fist groaned. Kaden glanced over his shoulder. Just a glance, just a fraction of a moment—too long. Triste, legs lightened by her fear, darted past him, between the twin pillars, down the canyon and into the shadows. He was after her in an instant, hurling himself into a sprint, following half a dozen steps down the defile before he stopped. He could hear her feet scuffing the stone as she fled. He could catch her—he thought he could catch her—but how far down the canyon? And then what? Stab her? Put the knife to her throat and drag her back up? He couldn’t kill her, not without destroying the goddess in the vain attempt to save the god. Triste knew that as well as he did. If Ciena were going to emerge, wouldn’t she have done so already, wouldn’t she have shoved her way to the front of Triste’s mind the moment Long Fist called her name?

  Kaden turned. The shaman was curled in the dirt behind him. He looked small, suddenly, as though death were already diminishing him.

  I could carry him, Kaden thought. Get him as far as the kenta.

  What good that would do, he had no idea. Maybe if he carried the man back to the Dead Heart … The Ishien were a military order. They would know something of the healing of wounds, if only because they had grown so adept at dealing them. It was a sliver of a hope, fingernail thin, but it was better than leaving Long Fist for the crows and the soldiers closing in from the north.

  Hope’s edge, Kaden thought, remembering the old Shin expression, is sharper than steel.

  He had never felt the emotion so strongly before. Strange that for so many millennia it had been so praised by so many men and women. Strange that there were innumerable temples raised to Orella all across the world. In that moment, the weight of Kaden’s own hope seemed more horrible to him than hate, or rage, or the blackest despair.

  * * *

  He could see Triste’s tracks clearly enough as he carried Long Fist down the canyon, but those tracks didn’t matter. What mattered was the weight
slung over his own shoulders, the incremental movement of the shaman’s ribs that told Kaden he was still breathing, the ache in his own legs that threatened to buckle beneath him every step, and the fight against that ache. Mile after mile he carried the man, following Triste’s tracks across sunbaked stone and washes filled with sand. As he descended, the canyon grew warm, then hot. The dry air raked his lungs with every breath and his lips began to crack. When he first heard the roar of the river, he thought he was hallucinating, imagining the sound of water where no water should be, but a hundred paces later he broke from the walls of the narrow side canyon to find himself standing on a wide ledge. Below, a hundred paces straight down, a froth-white river tumbled past.

  Triste’s footsteps led off to the right, following ancient stairs carved into the stone, but Kaden paused for a moment to adjust the shaman’s weight across his shoulders. That was when the voice started.

  It was so strange that for the first few syllables he could ignore it. Then, as he stood there, gasping his ragged breaths, he began to understand the words.

  There is another way.

  He thought at first that Long Fist was whispering to him, and he held his breath, waiting for the shaman to speak again. There was only the roar of the river, the low moan of wind threading its way through the canyon, and the clatter of rocks from somewhere above; the echo twisted the distance until he couldn’t say whether his pursuers were far or near. When the words came again, Kaden realized with a shudder that they were not a matter of the ear, not something so pedestrian as sound, carried on dry stony air. They were inside his head.

  There is another way.

  Kaden could feel the language like the pressure deep in his ear when he had climbed a peak too quickly, or like a stone inside his mind, small, painless, smoothed by the long motion of a stream, but heavy, displacing something else. Reflexively, he pushed back. The voice dwindled to the barest breath, but he could still make out the words.

  Submit, it whispered. Serve.

  It was Long Fist—the same indifferent conviction, the same certainty, the same cadence—and yet not Long Fist. The syllables, as Kaden heard them, were shorn of all Urghul accent, filed down until there was no intonation left, as though they were not actually words at all, but only the idea of words.

  You will not survive, if you do not serve. No one will survive.

  Again, that pressure, and stronger now. It was an unfolding inside the mind; an awesome flower, sun-bright and blossoming too quickly; a hatching egg, the insistent beak cracking the smooth shell. Kaden could feel the shards breaking apart, shattering, slicing through his own thoughts. He put a hand against the canyon wall to steady himself, closed his eyes, felt himself falling into bottomless darkness, as though the whole world had become a well with that voice echoing up from the bottom.

  You can be more than this—a vision of Kaden’s own burning eyes—more than the contents of your skin—another vision, this time from a great distance, of a pitiful figure kneeling on a sandstone ledge. It took a long time to find a name for that huddled, mortal creature: Kaden. The syllables were familiar, but irrelevant. The sad little man bore, on his bent back, a figure of such perfect radiance that it burned.

  You can be this, the blazing figure said. You can be this if you submit.

  A burning, as of cold fire sliding across the mind.

  A desire, strong as week-long hunger, to burn.

  Yes, the voice said. Let yourself burn. I will take this flesh and make of it a god.

  A great conflagration, blue-bright as the noonday sky, divine, undeniable.

  Yes, the god said. Yes.

  But laced beneath that voice, there was another voice, barely the whisper of yesterday’s wind, dirt-poor and cracked, too-human, doomed. Defiant.

  The mind is a flame, it insisted. The mind is a flame. The mind is a flame.

  And then the part of him that heard, that recognized the words, that was still Kaden, whispered in response: Blow it out.

  He opened his eyes. The sun had shifted overhead. The line of light and shadow, inscribed as though with a chisel, fell across his face. Long Fist was still alive, breathing weakly beside his ear, but the god inside had fallen almost quiet.

  “You tried to take me,” Kaden said aloud. His own voice sounded strange in his ears, dry as stone. His tongue was swollen. “Tried to take my place in my own mind.”

  It is the only way.

  The voice was still inside his head, but weaker now, as though whatever fuel had fed that first fire were all but burned away.

  “I am not a priest,” Kaden said. “I am nothing like the Urghul that you inhabit now. I never worshipped you. You explained it yourself. My mind is unprepared. You could not enter it.”

  There are other ways than worship. Polluted ways, but ways all the same.

  And then, as though the god spoke over himself in awful polyphony, Kaden heard his words from days earlier: It is possible for you to carve away a portion of what you are.…

  “No,” Kaden said, shaking his head, seeing all over again the bafflement and self-loathing in Triste’s eyes, understanding it for the first time. “Not for this.”

  If you do not submit, the Csestriim win.

  Kaden heaved the Urghul chieftain from his shoulder, struggled briefly to hold the limp body, then lowered him to the stone at the very edge of the drop. Long Fist’s lids were closed. Breath rasped between his bloody lips. He was nearly dead, but then, what did that mean? Long Fist, if he had even been called Long Fist as a child, before his flesh was seized by his god, had been dead a long time, or if not dead, then gone, subsumed inside the mind of the divine.

  Long Fist gave himself, the god said, as you must give yourself.

  Kaden tried to imagine it. Not the quiet annihilation of the self that the Shin pursued. Close to that, but something worse: a twisting, a transmutation into something vicious and immortal, a creature of bloodletting and screams. Better to be gone than that. Better to simply cease.

  Unless …

  Triste had resisted. No one seemed to understand quite how, but she had resisted her goddess, taken her in, then locked her off in one of the mind’s forgotten corridors. She had kept hold of herself while she carried Ciena, and she had no training in the vaniate, no quiet years studying the shape and movements of her own mind. If she could find a way, then perhaps he could, too.

  The dying god saw the shape of Kaden’s thought before he spoke.

  No, Meshkent said. I will not be penned.

  Kaden could feel the pressure starting again inside his head, trying to force him out.

  Submit.

  Kaden shook his head grimly, pushed back. It was easier, this time, almost trivially so. The god was growing weak, fading from the world.

  Why would you choose to be what you are? Why be the flute when you could play the music?

  “I know your music,” Kaden replied. “I have heard it.”

  He could see the people burning, could see Annur replaced by an empire of pain, men and women and children manacled to ten thousand altars, bleeding, screaming. He could see them harnessed to their own agony, forced to drag it behind them like great stones, to bear it upon their shoulders until it broke them, and ruling over it all, seated on the Unhewn Throne, he saw himself, but not himself. A god wearing his face.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No.”

  Then this body will give out, my touch will fade, and you will break, all of you. You were not made to live without me.

  “We won’t,” Kaden said.

  He turned his vision inward, considered the shape and space of his mind. The Shin had trained him to step outside the ambit of his own emotion, counseled him in the abdication of both his pleasure and his pain. What was the vaniate but empty space, a bubble’s perfect sphere beneath the surface of the world’s great sea? He couldn’t step into the trance, not without risking the blank indifference of his own addiction, but he could carve a part of him away without entering his own
emptiness. There was room inside for his own mind and the god’s: Triste was proof.

  It was a simple thing to clear the space—he had done the same a thousand times before—but much harder to remain outside of it, to live in his own mounting anxiety rather than diving into the vaniate. The blankness beckoned.

  “There,” Kaden said. “I will not be your slave, but I will carry you.”

  Nothing. Silence from the mind of the god.

  I am too late, he thought, searching Long Fist’s chest for some sign of heartbeat or breath. He died while I stood here debating.

  Then, vicious as a sword slammed into its sheath, the god was there. Kaden reeled beneath the violence, pressed a desperate hand against his eyes, certain he had erred somehow, ceded whatever self he had to Meshkent. He waited for the pain, then realized slowly that there was no pain. He straightened up, studied the body of the Urghul chieftain. Long Fist was dead, dull blue eyes staring stupidly skyward.

  Gingerly, Kaden looked in. He could feel the edges of the god’s mind lodged inside his own, bright, startlingly sharp, but yes … sheathed.

  I will not be your slave, growled something older than the world.

  When Kaden finally replied, he spoke aloud, as though to the stones and the sky, to the slope of the canyon floor, to the wind, to something, anything beyond himself.

  “You have no choice.”

  This, too, the Shin had taught him: to look at the fact beyond the passion. He could hold the god, could pen him. It was all a matter of building the right walls, of draping the right chains, of being sure they would not break when the Lord of Pain threw his weight against them.

  43

  Before any fight, there was the waiting. In the moment of violence, Valyn could kill as well as anyone else, but in the long hours of preparation, he was lost in his own blindness. He could hear Huutsuu and her riders chopping trees in the forest somewhere to the east, could feel the earth vibrate as they hauled the huge logs into place to block gates in the old fortress, and doorways. He could smell the sweat pouring off of the men and women, the lather of the horses, the sweet resin of the newly felled firs. He felt it all around him, the coming violence building like a summer storm, and yet he could do nothing to prepare.