The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  While the Urghul worked, he walked the length of the old stone wall—108 paces from the embankment on the west, where the land fell away sharply into the Haag, to the squat tower in the east, beyond which the ground grew mossy, then spongy, so soft that he sank halfway to his knees. Old Mierten had understood terrain—that much was clear. Hundreds of years on, it was still a good place to fight.

  The fort itself was another matter. Valyn could pull crumbling mortar from between the stones with his bare fingers. The wall was high enough to stop the horsemen—ten feet in most places—but when he climbed atop the walk, loose stones rocked beneath his feet. Half the ramparts that would shield the defenders from arrows and spears had fallen away, leaving only clusters of stone to crouch behind, and those were tenuous at best. He dislodged one with a casual shove, listening to it scrape against the north face of the wall, then thud into the dirt. It might be possible to drop a few more on the Urghul when the assault came, but that would mean destroying the wall even further, like ripping off your own arm to use it as a club.

  Squat towers punctuated the wall every thirty paces. Originally they would have offered archers a little extra range, provided elevated platforms for the fort’s commander or a welcome shelter for the wounded. Now, they were mostly falling down. The jumbled stones blocked easy passage along the top of the wall, passage that might prove crucial to the defenders as the battle ebbed and flowed. Valyn couldn’t build barricades or dig trenches, but he could clear the battlements, and so that was what he did for the better part of the morning. Those blocks he could lift, he placed on the ruined ramparts. The stones would be good for a few shattered skulls at the very least. Some of the pieces were too heavy to lift, but Valyn did his best to muscle them out of the way.

  The work left his shoulders sore and his hands bloody, but he kept at it, even when the towers were more or less passable. It was that or sit in the midday darkness and wait. He was kicking the last of the gravel off the ledge with his boot—even an egg-sized stone could mean lost footing or a broken ankle—when the Annurians finally arrived. He’d heard them when they were still a mile off, boots thudding into the earth. As they drew closer he could smell the blood- and sweat-soaked wool, the leather and polished steel. And the fear. The Annurian soldiers reeked of fear.

  It seemed impossible that they were able to keep going. That much fear should have crushed them, unstrung their legs, left them gibbering in the dirt to be ground beneath the horses’ hooves when the Urghul rode south. Valyn paused his work, stretched his neck and shoulders as he stared into the darkness that was the north. What’s keeping them going? How have they not quit?

  As they drew closer, he could hear the ragged breathing, the pounding of dozens of hearts, quieter than the boots, but more frantic. And he could hear their voices. They weren’t really talking—none of the men had the breath left for conversation—but every so often one would offer a word, a fragment of a phrase:

  Steady there, Tem.

  When we gonna start running?

  Told you you were gettin’ fat.…

  It was all mixed up, the earnest exhortations with the bleak jokes, the choked-off curses when soldiers stumbled followed immediately by the goading of the others urging their fellows on. Valyn stood alone at the wall’s top, the wind cold on his face, listening. And there’s your answer, he thought. He could remember that feeling, the strength that came when you stood shoulder to shoulder with someone else, sharing the struggle. He could remember swimming the sound between Qarsh and Hook with Gent, running punishment miles all night long with Laith, sitting long, shivering watches with Ha Lin during their training missions in the north. He could remember that strength, but it had been a long time since he stood beside a friend or ally. What had kept him alive, in the long night since Andt-Kyl, was something deeper and darker than any human bond, something stitched into his flesh, something he could never share.

  As the legionaries clattered to a halt in front of the fort, Valyn glanced down. His knuckles throbbed. He realized he’d been punching the top of the wall over and over, lightly but persistently, testing his flesh against the stone. Stupid, he thought, wiping the blood on his furs. There would be plenty of fighting soon enough with no need to war against the heedless walls.

  From below, the Flea’s voice cut through the wind. “Welcome to Mierten’s Fort.”

  The Wing commander was on the ground north of the wall, had been working on the barricades. Even as he spoke, he kept working. Valyn could hear him pounding yet another spiked stake into the earth, parceling out his greeting between the blows. For a moment there was just silence. Then a new voice responded, a voice thick with wariness.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Anjin,” the Flea replied. “You have the command here?”

  “I do.”

  “You have a name, Commander?”

  The man hesitated. “Belton,” he said after a moment. “You have a rank?”

  “Kettral,” the Flea replied.

  A wave of murmurs ran through the troops at that. The Flea didn’t elaborate, didn’t stop working.

  “If you’re Kettral,” Belton demanded after a pause, “then who are they?”

  “Those are the Urghul,” the Flea said. “On our side. The good Urghul.”

  Belton spat. “No such fucking thing. What are you doing with a batch of horse-fuckers? Where’s your bird?”

  “Bird’s dead. And as I said, these particular horse-fuckers are on our side.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “There’s not much to like. We have less than a hundred and fifty men to defend this wall. The wall itself is falling down and the gates rotted away two hundred years ago. We have maybe a day to get ready. We have no reinforcements. No one knows we’re here, and if they did, they couldn’t get to us in time.” Even blind, Valyn could imagine the Flea’s tired shrug. “Given the situation, I’d say having a dozen extra fighters is one of the only things to like.”

  “Kettral are one thing,” Belton said warily. “We’re proud to fight with the Kettral, but we’ve been putting blades in these Urghul sons of bitches all year. You ask me, we’d do better chopping off their heads and shitting down their throats while we’ve got the chance.”

  “I did not ask you,” the Flea replied quietly. For the first time, his ax had fallen silent. The Urghul were a quarter mile to the east, felling more trees, but they would be back soon. Valyn settled a hand on the cold steel head of one of his own axes.

  Belton shifted his feet on the rough ground. Valyn could taste the tension pouring off his men. Back on the Islands, he’d seen brawls break out over less, but this wasn’t going to be a brawl. If it came to swords, people were going to die.

  Good, whispered some dark part of him.

  With violence came sight.

  Men were loosening swords in sheaths. The returning Urghul were muttering angrily in their liquid tongue. They, too, had stopped working, as though they were watching the confrontation unfold. There were only a few heartbeats before it all went straight to shit.

  Good.

  Valyn gritted his teeth, shook his head. It could be good, but not yet, not until Balendin arrived. He wanted, even more than a wash of mindless violence and the darksight that came with it, to hear the leach scream, to be there when the man who murdered Ha Lin in the depths of Hull’s Hole was finally torn apart.

  He set a boot against one of the stones he had balanced at the top of the wall, then shoved. It grated against the stone, then fell, cleaving in half with a sharp crack against the jumbled rubble below. Shouts of alarm erupted from the assembled legionaries. Steel scraped over steel. Valyn pitched his voice above it all.

  “Your friends are dead,” he said, pointing north. “They held the line so that you could be here.”

  For just a moment, everyone fell silent.

  “Of course, you’re dead too,” Valyn went on. He could feel the eyes turn to him. “You’re walking and talking like living soldi
ers, but you’re corpses, all of you. You’re as dead as the men you left behind yesterday, and the only reason you’re here and standing rather than there, getting trampled into the dirt, is because the Flea brought you here. This wall is just a different place to die.”

  “Who in Hull’s name are you?” Belton growled warily.

  “Just another dead man. And I’ll tell you this, one corpse to another: the dead don’t get to decide much, but you’ve got one choice left. You can be dead from saving your empire, your republic, whatever the fuck we’re calling it these days, or you can be dead for nothing, for a stupid scrap in the middle of nowhere, fighting people who want the same thing you do. Maybe it doesn’t matter—dead’s dead, after all—but you’ve got a choice to make, probably your last one, so you might as well make it.”

  For a long time no one spoke. Then the Flea started laughing, a low, wry chuckle barely louder than the breeze.

  “You know,” he said after a moment, “that the speech before the battle is traditionally more upbeat. Less death, more pride and defiance.”

  Valyn snorted. “Want me to try again?”

  “Nah. You already fucked it up.” Valyn could hear the Wing leader turn back to the legionaries. “So. You want to fight the good Urghul now, or the bad Urghul later?”

  Wind carved through the stones. Men shifted, coughed.

  “I’m asking,” the Flea went on, “because there’s a lot to do. If I need to kill you, I want to do it now, so I can finish this palisade.”

  “All right,” Belton said finally, grudgingly. “We’ll fight beside you. Just keep your pet savages on their chains.”

  * * *

  Sigrid reached the fort a little before dark. The woman had fought in a battle, then run all day long, but as usual, she smelled of delicate perfume—lavender, this time, and rosewater, and something Valyn couldn’t name. The legionaries stopped working as she approached, staring, waiting for word of the others, the Annurians who had stayed, the friends they had left behind. Sigrid ignored them, found Newt and the Flea up on the hill instead, where the two men were studying the ground and laying charges. Even with the wind, Valyn could hear their conversation easily enough.

  “How much time do we have?” the Flea asked.

  Sigrid coughed up her own mangled language.

  “Better’n I thought,” the Flea replied. “I figured they’d be here tonight. Good work. Anyone else make it?”

  Valyn didn’t need to see to know Sigrid was shaking her head.

  “No man can escape his fate,” Newt mused.

  “Let’s hope that applies to Balendin.”

  The Aphorist paused for a moment. “There’s enough explosive here to kill half a dozen oxen, but it’s all about how he sets up. If he’s dead center on the hill, we’ve got him. If not … probably not.”

  “I’ll take it,” the Flea replied. “How long will the fuses burn?”

  “Half a morning,” the Aphorist replied. “I’ll light ’em when we hear the horses. The flame will be underground. He won’t see anything. Won’t smell anything.”

  “Half a morning,” the Flea said grimly, “means we need to hold that wall for half a morning. How much you have left, Sig?” he asked.

  Newt translated the leach’s response. “She’ll be flooded in power when the time comes, but she’s been awake two days now, and on the move for all of it. She’ll only be able to pull a little from her well. Any more would drown her.”

  “All right,” the Flea said. “Get behind the walls. Get some sleep. Newt—let’s see about rigging some scare charges down in the field, see if we can get the horses to balk.”

  Valyn was so intent on the conversation that he didn’t notice the steps approaching along the top of the wall until they were a dozen paces off. He turned, half expecting Huutsuu, but the gait was all wrong, as was the smell—raw nerves rather than Huutsuu’s characteristic resolve. Instead of the warm, rank scent of horse and fur, the person smelled of oiled steel, weariness.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt, sir.” One of the Annurian legionaries. “I was ordered to this section of the wall.”

  Valyn spread his hands. “All yours.”

  He didn’t feel like talking, but he didn’t feel like moving. If the poor bastard wanted to guard the wall, he was welcome to it. For a long time the two of them stood a couple of paces apart, unmoving. Valyn tried listening for the horses that would be thundering down out of the north, but he could hear only the hack of axes and the cursing of soldiers as they worked, the rush of the river off to the west and the intermittent shrieking of the wind.

  “You really think they’re dead?” the soldier asked finally. “The men we left up north?”

  He offered the questions slowly, quietly, as though afraid to ask them, as though he didn’t really want to hear the answers. Valyn blew out an irritated breath.

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  Valyn pointed over the wall toward Sigrid. “She’s here, which means she’s not there, which means your friends don’t have a leach to shield them anymore. You’ve seen Balendin and the Urghul fight, so you tell me: You think your friends are alive?”

  “There’s always a chance. A hope.”

  “You’re hoping for the wrong thing. You should be hoping they’re dead, because if they’re not, then Balendin has them, and you know what he does with his prisoners.”

  They were cruel words, maybe too cruel, but there wasn’t anything to be gained by dodging the facts. The man sounded young, but half the people wrapped up in the fucking war were young. The legionary had fought the Urghul. He could hear the truth. He could face it.

  Valyn wanted to turn away, to forget the man, to take up his silent watch once more, but behind him the soldier’s breathing had gone rough and ragged.

  “Those ’Kent-kissing bastards,” the legionary managed. The air smelled of tears and sweat. “I’ll kill them. I’ll murder them.”

  Valyn closed his eyes. The young soldier’s grief was thick as early morning mist. Valyn wanted to step clear of it, to find some other place on the wall where there was only the stone and the wind, but there was no other place. The Annurians were preparing, readying weapons, testing out the jagged rocks that Valyn himself had balanced on the ramparts in preparation for the attack. There were people everywhere. There was grief everywhere. You could walk forever and not escape it, could cross rivers, continents, seas, only to find new cities filled with the bereaved, every life shattered in some awful way, every man and woman weeping.

  “They kill your friend?” he asked. His own voice sounded rough, callous, half a step from mockery.

  The soldier didn’t reply. Sobs rocked him. Nothing unusual there—men cried in battle, before, during, after—and if Valyn was lucky, the crying would be the worst of it. The guy would cough it out and move on. If he was lucky, there wouldn’t be a story to go with the sobs. He wasn’t lucky.

  “My brother,” the soldier said finally. “My brother was with them.”

  As though that single word—brother—were some kind of kenning, the darkness plastered across Valyn’s eyes shifted, filling with the memory of Kaden. According to the Flea, he was still alive, had made it back to Annur somehow, had even managed to pull the empire out from underneath Adare’s feet. Before Andt-Kyl, the discovery would have filled Valyn with relief, with pride. Now, when he probed his mind for those emotions, he found nothing, just a dark pit where the emotion should have been, lightless, bottomless, cold as winter stone. He could see Kaden’s face, could hear his brother’s voice in his mind, but behind it there was only that emptiness.

  “What was your brother’s name?” Valyn asked.

  “Oberan,” the soldier replied.

  Valyn turned to face the young man. “Well then, you’d better hope that Oberan is dead.”

  * * *

  The thunder started at dawn, not a thunder of the sky torn apart by lightning, not an intermittent growl punctuated by silence, but a low, constant
rumbling: the thunder of hooves so far to the north that Valyn had to strain to make it out, but growing always closer. He rose from the chilly corner of the fort where he had spent the night alone, felt his way along the broken passage, then outside and up onto the wall. Mist was rising off the swamps to the east—thick as smoke, wet and vegetal—but either the sun was obscured by clouds or it was still too low to feel the heat.

  The legionaries had spent the night on the walls—their snoring a softer counterpoint to the rumbling in the north—and as he walked among them Valyn thought about sounding the alarm, then discarded the idea. By his own vague reckoning, the Urghul were at least ten miles off. Probably there was something else that could be done to the fort, some final preparation to make, but all the crucial work was finished, and besides, the odds were against any of the sleeping men ever walking away from those walls. The dreams they dreamed as the morning mist shifted over the fort—their nightmares or the bright and fragile worlds to which they had escaped—those dreams would likely be their last.

  Valyn stepped carefully over the snoring forms, past them, continuing along the top of the wall until he reached one of the towers, then climbed the crumbling stairs to the top. There was nothing to see, not for him, but the air smelled lighter there, less like dirt and piss and hopelessness.

  The Flea found him there just after the sun finally broke through the morning cloud. Valyn recognized the Wing leader’s gait as he climbed the stone stairs to the tower—a little heavier on the right foot, as though some old wound had never fully healed—recognized that solid, steady heartbeat. The man joined him at the crenellations. He stood just a pace away, but remained silent a long time. The eastern forest was alive with birds—nuthatches and chickadees, jays and nightjars—a thousand threads of song. Valyn tried to untangle them, to pick one melody apart from the rest.