The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Before Kaden could respond, however, the soldiers behind him clattered into the courtyard. Sweat streamed down their faces. A handful of men toward the back doubled over, hands on their knees, chests heaving. They snapped to attention quickly enough, however, when the man leading them hammered his fist against his heart and barked out a salute.

  “Sir!”

  Il Tornja nodded casually. “Sarkiin. Good work.” He scanned the men behind, then his eyes narrowed. “Where’s the third? The one who was with them?”

  It didn’t seem possible, but Sarkiin went even more rigid. His eyes were fixed on empty air half a pace in front of him. He looked like a man readying himself to die.

  “Gone, sir. Over the cliff just above and into the river.”

  If il Tornja was angry, it didn’t show. Of course, Kaden reminded himself, he’s not capable of anger, not really.

  “Interesting,” he said finally, shifting his attention from his lieutenant and back to Kaden. “Who was he?”

  Kaden scrambled for a plausible lie, one this immortal creature might believe. “Ishien,” he said after a heartbeat. “He came with me to find Triste. Before she could do more damage.”

  “And why,” the kenarang asked, “did he decide to leap into a river knowing he could not possibly survive the current?”

  “He died,” Kaden said, hewing as close as he could to the truth. “I tried to hide the body.”

  “Sarkiin?” il Tornja asked.

  The soldier nodded brusquely. “The man was injured, sir. Badly. I am surprised he made it as far as he did.”

  “Describe him.”

  Kaden tensed. It was impossible to say just how much the Annurian soldiers had seen. They’d been miles off during the entire chase, but if one of them had a long lens, if they’d managed to find a line of sight somewhere in that canyon …

  “Tall,” Sarkiin replied. “Couldn’t make out much more.”

  “His race?”

  The soldier shook his head slowly. “The light was wrong, sir. We only caught a couple of glimpses and couldn’t make out much more than shapes.”

  “Send a team downstream. The body may have washed up in an eddy, or caught on a snag.” Il Tornja paused; his eyes went distant for a quarter heartbeat, then refocused on Kaden. “You tell an interesting story, and this is only the start of it.”

  “Not really,” Kaden replied. “We came to find Triste. We found her. Then you came.”

  “Triste,” the kenarang said, his voice brimming with a mirth he couldn’t feel. “Is that what you call her?”

  “It is her name,” Kaden replied.

  “Names,” il Tornja mused, “are even easier to put on and take off than faces.” He glanced over his shoulder at Triste. She hadn’t woken, hadn’t even moved. “I will speak with her first.” He pointed to the shell of an old temple. “There.”

  That Triste was alive at all was puzzling. Il Tornja knew about the goddess in the girl. It was the only explanation for the fact that he had abandoned his war with the Urghul to come here, chasing her to the very edge of the empire. He knew he had Ciena in his grasp, yet he held back.…

  Because he doesn’t know, Kaden realized, that awful hope slicing him up inside. He doesn’t know he has us both.

  As far as il Tornja was aware, he’d captured half his quarry, but only half. Meshkent was still out there, and if the Csestriim wanted to trap the Lord of Pain, he would need bait. Which meant that Triste was safe, at least for the moment. The moment the kenarang understood that he had won the game, however, when he realized that he had both gods in his hands—at that moment it was over.

  Meshkent raged silently in the locked corner of Kaden’s mind.

  “I don’t know about you,” il Tornja said, turning his attention back to Kaden, “but I find this all very exciting.”

  * * *

  Kaden studied the eddy. He was bound at the elbows, wrists, and waist, tied to a huge stone behind him, but he was free, at least, to look, to watch the river play out its elegant violence half a dozen feet below him. As an acolyte in the Bone Mountains he had spent hours studying the eddies of the mountain streams. It was the sort of inscrutable exercise the monks might have assigned, but the truth was, Kaden had enjoyed it. There was something relentless in the twisting currents of those small rivers, so much inevitability in their onrushing course. The eddies offered the only reprieve. Kaden had never quite understood why the current would pause, slow down, double back on itself, but the whole retrograde motion seemed, in some odd way, like a type of forgiveness, the river escaping, if only momentarily, from its own ineluctable nature.

  It was a lie, of course.

  The water might pause, but it would empty into the sea all the same. The world was built from a thousand examples of such inevitability. Thrown stones fell unerringly to earth. Flesh left unfrozen would always go to rot. The days would grow short, then long, then short again. Without those truths, the whole framework of reality would tremble and break apart. You could forget for a while, caught in the eddy’s beguiling spiral, that the world’s current raged all around. That it could not be denied.

  Submit, Meshkent whispered inside his mind, the voice quiet but ripe with fury. You risk everything if you do not. Submit.

  It was impossible to be certain how much the god understood of what was happening. Kaden had tried to respond to the commands, to explain the bare outline of their situation, while at the same time keeping that other, divine mind buried so deep that even he himself could barely hear it.

  Give yourself to me, the god grated again, then fell silent.

  Kaden weighed the possibilities. Meshkent could fight—he’d shown that much already when still wearing the flesh of Long Fist. The crucial question was: how well? A single monk with a knife and the element of surprise had nearly killed the shaman and the god inside him—would have killed him if Kaden hadn’t taken the Lord of Pain into himself. Meshkent was strong, but his strength was his weakness; even now, he seemed incapable of imagining failure, or conceiving a world that did not end in his own victory. And why would he be? Kaden thought wearily. What setback had Meshkent encountered that could serve as a model for his own destruction?

  Submit to me, the god growled.

  Kaden shook his head as he stared into the slowly circling eddy.

  No.

  * * *

  It was well past midnight when he finally heard boots approaching over broken stone.

  “Go,” il Tornja said to the soldiers who had been standing guard. “I’ll talk with our new friend alone.”

  After the others had retreated beyond earshot, the kenarang stepped in front of Kaden, set his lantern down on a low wall, and half sat, half leaned beside it, arms crossed over his chest.

  “So…,” he said, nodding genially, as though they were old companions sitting down to dinner after a long time apart.

  “Where is Triste?” Kaden asked. “What did you do to her?”

  “What did I do to her?” il Tornja asked, touching a finger to his chest as though perplexed. “It looked an awful lot like she was fleeing from you.”

  “She was terrified,” Kaden said, brushing aside the truth. “Confused. I didn’t knock her unconscious or drug her. I didn’t tie her up.”

  “Actually,” il Tornja replied, drumming his fingers on the stone, “you did. You let the poor girl secure your return to the palace, then you threw her inside that ridiculous prison of yours. All things being equal, I’d say she has a lot more reason to hate you than me.”

  Kaden shook his head. “She knows who you are. So do I.”

  Il Tornja raised his brows. “And who am I?”

  “Csestriim,” Kaden said, locking eyes with the man. “The general who led the war to destroy humanity. The architect of the genocide against your own children. The murderer of gods.”

  “Oh,” the kenarang replied, waving a lazy hand, “that.”

  Kaden hesitated, uncertain how to respond. He wasn’t sure what he had expec
ted. Denial maybe. Defiance. Almost anything but this jocular indifference.

  “The thing is,” il Tornja continued, “you can make anything sound bad if you pick the right words: genocide, murder—that sort of thing. You slap a word on something you don’t like, and it excuses you from having to think about it any further.”

  “What is there to think about? Kiel told me how you killed the gods—Akalla and Korin. He explained it all to me, how after you murdered them a whole part of what we are—the reverence for the natural world and the heavens—just … went away. I know the whole story. You’ve been searching all these thousands of years to find a way to destroy more gods, older gods, to annihilate our race.…”

  “Sure. Of course. But did he tell you why?”

  Kaden stared. “Because you hate us…,” he began, realizing his mistake as soon as the word left his mouth.

  Il Tornja shook his head. “Don’t be dense. The word means nothing to me, and you know it.” He sighed ostentatiously. “I have been trying, all these years, to fix something that is broken.”

  “We are not broken.”

  “Oh?”

  “We are different. Not every living creature needs to be like the Csestriim.”

  “Of course not. Kettral aren’t Csestriim. Dogs aren’t Csestriim.” He paused to wag a finger at Kaden. “But you … you were Csestriim once, before the new gods broke you.”

  “It is no breakage to feel love, loyalty, joy.…”

  “Those are just the chains,” il Tornja said impatiently. “The new gods broke you, made you weak so they could enslave you, and then, in the greatest insult of all, your new masters made you worship them. Look at the temples you’ve built: to Ciena and Eira, Heqet and Whoever. Listen to your prayers, ‘Please, goddess, give me joy. Please, lord, spare me pain.’” The general shook his head. “I expected better from you, Kaden. You, at least, had the chance to understand.”

  Kaden took a slow breath, tried to steady his thoughts. “What chance?”

  “The Shin!” il Tornja exclaimed. “You studied with the Shin. You weren’t there long enough, obviously, but you must have at least glimpsed the truth. You must have seen at least a piece of the beauty of a life lived free, unenslaved by all those brutish passions.”

  Kaden hesitated. Whatever twisted game the Csestriim was playing, his words hit close to the truth. Kaden had, in those long years at Ashk’lan, come to cherish the freedom from his own human weakness, from all the relentless need. It was an imperfect freedom, of course. Even the Shin still looked out at the world through the dirty window of the self, but the absolute emptiness of the vaniate suggested something greater. A life more pure, more clear.

  “Let’s be frank with each other,” il Tornja said, settling back against the wall. “You know there’s a goddess locked inside the girl, and so do I.”

  Kaden blinked, tried to keep his thoughts from showing in his eyes.

  “You’ve been brainwashed and blinded like the rest of your kind, twisted all around by the shape of your own brain,” il Tornja went on, “but you’re not an idiot, Kaden. You know I wouldn’t have left the northern front, wouldn’t have come all the way down here just to chase a leach.” He raised his brows, waiting for Kaden’s response.

  “What do you want from her?” Kaden asked finally.

  “I want to kill her!” il Tornja said brightly. “I’m going to kill her.”

  Deep inside Kaden’s mind, Meshkent twisted, writhed, hurled himself against walls that were not walls. In the early iconography, the Lord of Pain had been depicted as a tiger, or giant cat, and it felt as though a tiger were slavering, pacing, growling inside Kaden’s brain. Just keeping company with Meshkent had been enough to unsettle whatever equilibrium Kaden had won among the Shin; having the divine inside of him was worse. He felt infected by the god’s presence, disturbed, as though Meshkent were a huge stone thrown into the still lake of his thought. Fighting back the god, keeping him caged, was battle enough. Doing that while guarding his face before il Tornja proved nearly impossible.

  “What are you waiting for?” Kaden asked, voice tight.

  Il Tornja sighed. “I need her.”

  “For what?”

  “For bait.”

  So, Kaden realized. I was right. There was no satisfaction in the thought.

  “You think you can lure Meshkent to her,” he said, shaking his own head this time, forcing a measure of scorn into his voice. “You really think a god would be that stupid?”

  Il Tornja just smiled. “Of course I do. You’re forgetting that I’ve fought them before.”

  “You lost,” Kaden pointed out.

  The kenarang shrugged. “The battle is not the war. I have Ciena now. Meshkent will come. Then I’ll kill them both.”

  Kaden gritted his teeth. “Are you trying to frighten me?”

  “What could be frightening,” il Tornja replied, “about a world without suffering? What’s frightening about a world without pain or hate? Without people being dragged around by the clanking chains of their lust? What’s frightening about a world in which no one needs to weep over a child’s grave?”

  “We would not be what we are,” Kaden said. Even to his own ears, the answer rang hollow.

  “Surely the Shin taught you something. Surely you learned you can be better than your self.”

  “Why do you care?” Kaden asked, desperate for the conversation’s end.

  Submit, Meshkent whispered. Submit, and I will rip out his lying throat.

  The pressure inside Kaden’s mind was almost unbearable, but he could still hear his own baffled reply: He’s not lying. However tortured il Tornja’s version of the truth, it was truth. Meshkent’s province was pain. That was his only gift. What kind of man would submit to such a master? In this much, at the very least, the Csestriim was correct—the young gods came, and they made men and women into slaves.

  “Why do I care?” il Tornja asked, cocking his head to the side. “Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to help me.”

  “Help you? How?”

  “You could start by telling me the truth. How did you know that Triste would be here? How did you find her? You have no ak’hanath.…”

  “She told me,” Kaden said simply. “When she was still in prison. She told me where she’d go if she escaped.”

  Il Tornja stared at him, that gaze measuring, weighing. Then he burst out laughing. “I’ll tell you, Kaden—it’s amazing. You’d think, after all these centuries, that I’d get used to just how stupid people can be, but I just … I’m still surprised.” He composed his features. “I’ll admit it. It’s a weakness. Now. Tell me how Meshkent escaped.”

  The question landed like a slap. Kaden’s stomach seized inside him.

  “I don’t know who—”

  “Of course you do. You didn’t arrive here with some lone Ishien soldier, as you claimed. You came with Long Fist, the Urghul chief, and you know as well as I do that that name, that flesh, is just a mask. He came with you to find his consort. You arrived through one kenta and you attempted to flee through another.”

  Kaden realized he was shaking his head. “You’re wrong,” he whispered.

  “No,” il Tornja replied patiently. “I am not.”

  “You’re guessing because you’re desperate.”

  Even as Kaden spoke, however, he was remembering the stones board, remembering Kiel playing out the kenarang’s games. Even the most basic moves had been utterly opaque, following a logic beyond anything Kaden understood.

  “I’m neither guessing,” il Tornja said, “nor am I desperate. I am, however, vexed.”

  “You can’t be. You don’t have the capacity for anger.”

  The general waved away the objection. “A figure of speech. The point remains—you came here with Long Fist. He is not dead, as you claimed. If the river had killed him, we would know, the world would know. He is alive. He survived. You spent time with him. You can tell me what he wants, how he thinks.”

  �
��You think you can turn me to your side the way you turned my sister.”

  “Of course not. You and Adare are nothing alike. She conspired with me because she genuinely thought I’d help her save Annur, save the people of Annur. You don’t care about the people of Annur.”

  “I do…”

  “Of course you don’t. Not really. You are free to help me in a way she never was. You can help me willingly.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because,” il Tornja said, smiling wide, his teeth moon-bright in the lamplight, “you know that I am right.”

  Kaden took a long, shuddering breath. Meshkent raged inside him. His own mind was a maelstrom. The vaniate beckoned, the only calm in the chaos. He turned his face away. “Kiel told me that you’d lie.”

  “Kiel,” il Tornja said, shaking his head. “Of course he did.”

  “This face, this argument, all these human gestures … none of it is true. You’re doing it so I won’t see what you really are. What you really want.”

  It was barely convincing, but it was all he had, the only resistance he could summon. For the first time, however, il Tornja’s face went serious, still. He studied Kaden for a long time, then stood abruptly, turned away, and approached the river, walking to the very edge of the low cliff fronting the current.

  The water was black in the lamplight. It looked cold, bottomless. For a long time, the Csestriim just stared into the moving depths. When he finally turned back, Kaden found himself looking into the face of a creature he did not know. The jocular, indifferent Annurian general was gone, scrubbed utterly away. This creature wore his face, the flesh hadn’t changed, but the eyes were impossibly cold, hard. They were formed like a man’s eyes, but the thought that moved behind them was unknowable as the river at night.

  Kaden had faced gods, had spoken with the lords of all pleasure and pain, and yet there had been something in those immortal spirits that he recognized, a posture of feeling and thought, a core of emotion that he shared even with the divine. This, the emptiness in that stare, the distance of it … the sight made Kaden’s heart fold inside of him. It was all he could do to keep from crying out.