The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “I thought to spare you from the full truth,” il Tornja said. “It was a mistake.”

  Meshkent howled inside Kaden’s mind.

  This time, the Csestriim’s smile was the smile of a skull.

  45

  The leach spoke to his prisoners as he murdered them, spoke in the soft, almost soothing voice that a man might use with a balky horse, or a petulant child:

  “I’m going to take out your eye now,” he purred. “I will pop it from the socket, like husking a pea. It will hurt, hurt horribly, I’m afraid, but I’m going to ask you to hold it carefully in your hand. It’s amazing, but you’ll still be able to see out of it. Do you understand?”

  Valyn stood atop the crumbling wall, hundreds of paces from the small hill where the leach stood, and yet he could hear it all, every word a window into memory. In the battle’s lull, he was blind, but he could remember Balendin all too well, the blue ink twisting up his arms, the long, dark braids hung with fragments of bone, the rings piercing his ears—iron and ivory, bronze and silver and steel. Valyn’s mind stitched the old images—scenes from the Islands, from Andt-Kyl—onto the land he imagined lying to the north. He could see the man’s easy slouch, the cruel hook of his smile, the arms bathed to the elbows in blood as the prisoner whimpered.

  “Do you understand what’s going to happen next?” Balendin crooned.

  The whimper broke into open sobbing. Overhead a raven screamed, then another, and another. Balendin had always had a way with animals, even back on the Islands, though it was impossible to tell if the birds above were tamed somehow, or just waiting for the promised offal.

  “If you don’t talk to me,” the leach went on, “I will make it worse. I will make it hurt more. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.…”

  “Thank you. Try to be brave.…”

  The prisoner’s scream cleaved through all other words, an endless, animal howl divorced from all language and reason, a perfect expression of agony and terror and despair. As though in response, the Urghul raised their voices, thousands of them, tens of thousands, so many that the whole dark world to the north seemed nothing but a wall of sound. It grew louder, higher, more frenzied, and then, as though cut with a knife, snapped. Behind the sound, there was only silence, high as the sky and hard as stone.

  After a moment, Balendin spoke into that silence.

  “A shame. I thought he would live longer. Bring out the next.”

  It had been going on like that for the better part of the morning.

  The Urghul vanguard had ridden down out of the north a few hours after dawn. Most armies, confronted with a long wall manned by an unknown number of defenders, would have called a halt, sent scouts into the swamp to try to get behind the enemy lines, maybe arranged a parley in the hope that the other side would give something away. Not the Urghul.

  When those early riders were still half a mile to the north, instead of stopping, they kicked their horses to a full gallop, swinging wide to the west, almost to the river itself, then looping back to the east, charging along the face of the fort just a pace from the defenders above. At first it had made no sense to Valyn. There was no way the horses could jump the wall; all the maneuver seemed to do was bring the Urghul pointlessly within reach of the Annurian spears. It took him a moment to piece it together from the alarmed shouts of the legionaries on the wall: the horsemen weren’t sitting, they were standing on the backs of their mounts, then leaping from the horses onto the crumbling ramparts.

  The darksight came to Valyn then. Each time one of the horsemen gained his section of wall, Valyn would have a few heartbeats of razor clarity, the whole scene etched in shades of black against black—the howling face of the woman or man, lips drawn back from the teeth, sword or spear raised. Each time, the sight came long enough for Valyn to make the kill, but the Urghul made it onto the wall only rarely, and the resulting vision proved flickering, inconsistent, unreliable. As the battle raged around him, Valyn found himself hungry for more. More danger, and the vision that came with it. More death. It hardly mattered whose.

  Instead, after what might have been an hour, the Urghul pulled back. Throughout the assault, more warriors had been arriving from the north, arriving constantly, until it seemed that they must fill the narrow space all the way from Mierten’s Fort to the ruined bridge at Aergad. When Valyn finally lowered his axes to listen, he heard the whole land brimming with voices, thousands and tens of thousands, enough to come against the feeble wall day and night in successive waves without ever abating. The northern front was wide, but it seemed to his blind eyes that the whole Urghul nation was here, in this one place, ready to break through and into Annur.

  “Stupid,” he muttered. “If those first idiots had just waited…”

  At his side, Huutsuu made an irritated sound deep in her throat. “There is honor,” she said, “in being the first warrior over the wall.”

  True to her word, the woman and her tiny band had fought alongside the legionaries all morning. Valyn had caught glimpses of her spear flashing out, catching riders as they passed, the weapon’s tip snagging a jaw, a neck, then Huutsuu lifting them from the backs of their horses as though they were so many fish to haul struggling from the water. If she felt bad about killing her own people, Valyn couldn’t smell it on her.

  “Trouble is,” he replied, “none of them made it over the wall.”

  “There is honor in the attempt.”

  “What they got for the attempt was a stone to the skull or an ax to the face, then a short fall back into the bloody mud.”

  “Honor comes at a cost.”

  Someone on the Urghul side seemed to have decided, finally, that the cost wasn’t worth it. After hours of furious, unpremeditated attack, the riders had finally fallen back. They didn’t go far—just out of bow range. Valyn could hear them regrouping, checking horses and binding wounds, muttering to one another in their musical tongue. Closer to the wall, the wounded were turning into the dead. Some were dragging themselves over the ground, some lying still, their breathing wet, shallow, rapid. For the most part, they died quietly—no sobbing, no groaning, no protestation against the pain.

  “Is anyone going to help them?” Valyn had asked.

  “Those able to crawl out of bow range will be treated.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Will endure their hardening in silence.”

  Endure they did, but not in silence. Balendin shattered whatever quiet had come with the battle’s lull, emerging from out of the massed warriors to take up a position on the hill, just where Newt and the Flea had predicted that he would. Then, after a long pause to let everyone notice his arrival, the leach began his macabre bit of theater. One after another, men and women were dragged from the train of prisoners, hauled before Balendin, and carved apart. Valyn was no leach, but he could smell the horror reeking off the legionaries along the wall, the awe of the Urghul riders, hot as fanned embers, glowing brighter with every sacrifice. He could hear, in Balendin’s smugly satisfied brutality, that it was working, that the leach was finding what he sought in the reverence or loathing of the massed humanity, that his power was growing.

  Valyn dragged in a breath, trying to catch some hint of the wicks of the Kettral munitions smoldering silently beneath the ground. No use. There was only blood and horse sweat, piss and horror. He could only trust that the fuses were still burning somewhere under Balendin’s feet. Newt knew his work, of course, but if he’d made any mistake, if those charges failed, then the battle was finished. The leach would punch a hole straight through the wall, and the Urghul would pour through, murdering everyone they found.

  “Bring me someone strong,” Balendin said, his voice carrying over the bloody ground. Valyn could hear the smile, the certainty. “Bring me someone who won’t break the moment I put a knife in his flesh. I want to take my time with this. I want the soldiers on those walls to plumb the full depths of their despair.”

  The words were Annurian, of
course. The leach had learned the Urghul tongue, but he was speaking to the legionaries, speaking directly to their fear. The realization hit Valyn like a slap.

  “We need to distract them,” Valyn said.

  Huutsuu shook her head. “The Urghul?”

  “The soldiers. Our soldiers. We need to give them something to look at, to think about, that’s not Balendin. He needs their fear, their horror, but we can take it away.”

  Too late.

  As the leach’s captive screamed, a massive section of the wall of Mierten’s Fort collapsed. There was no explosion, no concussive blow, nothing like what a Kettral starshatter might do. Instead, there was a grinding of stone against stone, slow at first, almost reluctant, maybe forty paces to Valyn’s west, as though some implacable giant had put a shoulder to the huge blocks, dug in his heels, and shoved. There was time for the Annurians atop that chunk of wall to shout the alarm, to give voice to half a dozen baffled questions and desperate warnings. Then the structure hit some invisible point beyond which it could not stand, and the whole thing crumbled inward, the sound of falling stones mingled with the screams of those crushed beneath.

  “There,” Balendin said, when the noise finally subsided. He lingered over the word, as though he were trying to choose the juiciest pear from a marketplace stall. “Now we can finish with this foolishness.”

  The Flea was already shouting orders, sprinting toward the breach. Sigrid coughed up something that might have been a curse, and then the world exploded into sound once more, the panicked shouting of legionaries mixing with the vicious, triumphant screams of the Urghul as they wheeled their horses for the final attack.

  “Where is the explosion buried by your Flea?” Huutsuu demanded.

  Valyn shook his head. “It’s too soon.” He turned blindly toward the sky, but the sun had passed behind a cloud and he could no longer feel it, no longer gauge its height. It might have been noon or midnight for all he could tell. “We need to hold the wall. Need to keep him there.”

  Huutsuu spat. “There is a hole in the stones wide as ten men. My people will ride through—”

  “No,” Valyn said, cutting her off, turning away before she could finish. “They will not.”

  He planted a foot on top of the wall, hefted his axes, and leapt to the ground in front of the fort. The blind landing almost broke his ankle. He hit with one foot on the ground, one foot on the soft flesh of some dead warrior. His body responded more quickly than his mind, rolling over and away even as his ankle absorbed the strain. When he rose, he stood in darkness, the wall behind him, the Urghul a wordless thunder rolling in from the north.

  His first steps toward the breach were blind, uncertain. He could hear Huutsuu cursing on the wall above and behind him, but she didn’t matter. All that mattered was reaching the hole, the gap, and the killing that had to happen there. He needed it suddenly, needed it in the way a man struggling for days in the desert needed water. He could already feel the violence tugging at him, as though every death were a tiny hook hauling him onward. He stumbled over stones and corpses, caught himself on his axes, and ran on, westward, into the darkness as though it were light, life, freedom.

  Just before he reached the hole, just before the Urghul hit, the darksight came.

  Balendin’s kenning had brought down a dozen feet of wall, but there was still a pile of rubble for the Urghul to struggle over. The Flea had taken up a position atop the heap, Sigrid a few paces behind him, the Aphorist just at his side. The Wing leader was shouting orders to the legionaries. Some were stumbling, some covered with their own blood, but they tried to form up, to make some sort of line as the Urghul hammered down out of the north.

  “Valyn,” the Flea shouted. “Fall back on me.”

  Valyn hesitated, caught between the line of Annurians and the approaching storm. Then slowly, his axes light in his hands, he turned away from the legions, away from the dubious safety of the wall and the other men, turned north toward the galloping horses even as he spoke: “No.”

  The fight that followed was a dream of blood and bliss. For the first time since il Tornja had taken his eyes, Valyn was able to see for more than a few heartbeats at a time, and not just see, but move through the violence that buoyed him up, lashing out and pulling back, stabbing and hacking until the blood ran down his face, his arms. There was no saying how long he fought. Sometimes Huutsuu was at his side, sometimes not. He could hear the Flea calling out orders behind him, well behind, but the Flea had given him up to the fight. The man’s words weren’t for Valyn, but for the line of Annurians still struggling to hold the wall, and Valyn made no effort to listen to them, to understand. Words were crooked, useless things beside the clarity of blood. He waded in it like a warm sea. He’d been fighting forever, but he wasn’t tired. As long as they kept coming, he would keep killing, and killing, and killing.

  He buried his axes in one Urghul after another, slaughtering man and beast alike, throwing the weight of his shoulder behind heavy steel wedges, pivoting and rocking, shattering skulls, then pulling free. He was laughing, he realized, had been laughing for a long time, the joy horrible inside him.

  When the hill finally exploded, the force of the blow knocked Valyn back half a step. Stones and dirt fell all around him like rain. It took him a moment to realize what it meant.

  Newt’s munitions, he thought. Balendin’s dead.

  There was no joy in the understanding. If anything, that explosion meant an end to the battle. It felt like something stolen, like a great door closing. It was victory, and it tasted like rust.

  46

  A low stone plinth—the altar, maybe, of the ancient temple—stood at the room’s center. Triste sat atop it. She wasn’t chained, wasn’t tied up or tethered in any way—evidently il Tornja considered the thick stone walls and the half-dozen guards outside the only door ample protection against her escape. The space was nothing compared to the subterranean cells of the Dead Heart, or to the steel cages of the imperial prison inside the Spear, but then, it didn’t really need to be. Triste wasn’t likely to fight her way past three dozen armed Annurian soldiers, and if she did, what then? She could search for ages in the ruined city without finding the kenta.

  He has us, Kaden thought. We raced straight into his trap. They were alive only because il Tornja thought they might still be useful: Triste as bait, Kaden as a willing traitor to his race.

  The failure should have stung, but Kaden found himself beyond stinging. The confrontation with the Csestriim general had left him numb, exhausted to the bones. The effort of holding up the lie, of maintaining his own face while hiding the god inside, had burned through the last of his reserves. He felt like the blackened, twisted scrap of wick left at the bottom of the clay pot when all the wax was gone, the flame guttered out.

  Meshkent, at least, had fallen finally, mercifully silent. Kaden could still feel the god inside his mind, shifting, testing, searching for a way out, but now that il Tornja was gone, the urgency had subsided. Sooner or later, Kaden would fail. He was built that way. He would fail, and the god would claim him completely.

  And why not? he asked himself.

  Meshkent might be blinded by his own pride, but he was strong—Kaden could feel that strength like a bright, awful weight. More importantly, il Tornja, for all his planning, did not know the truth. He kept Triste drugged, but there had been no point in forcing Kaden, too, to drink the adamanth. It would be easy, so easy to just … give himself up, let the Lord of Pain take his mind and body both, let Meshkent have his fight with the Csestriim. Let him win.

  It would mean not being Kaden anymore, but what was that worth? He’d spent half a lifetime trying to snuff out the embers of his own thought, and now he could achieve it, achieve that sublime annihilation instantly, absolutely. All it would take was a simple acquiescence of will.

  “Did you come to finish killing me?” Triste asked.

  The words were quiet, but they snapped the thread of Kaden’s thought. He shifted his a
ttention from the invisible landscape of his own fragmented mind to the room in which he stood. The guards had left a single lantern burning on the floor, but the flame was too small to illuminate the entire space; the corners and vaulted ceiling were lost in shadow.

  He started to protest, then thought better of it. Il Tornja would have men listening, and besides, what could he say? He’d drawn a knife on Triste, had threatened to drive it into her flesh in an effort to flush out the goddess. It hadn’t been an empty threat. He would have done it, if he’d been faster.

  “Il Tornja wants you alive,” he replied finally.

  “Alive?” Triste asked. She stared at him a moment, then lay back on the stone slab, arms flat at her sides, her whole body limp with drug or exhaustion. Only her eyes moved, shifting back and forth as though searching for something in the darkness above.

  “Bait,” Kaden explained. “For Long Fist.”

  “Better be careful,” Triste said, sounding indifferent to her own advice. “You don’t want to give anything away to whoever’s listening.”

  “There’s nothing to give away,” Kaden said. “He knows everything. He knows that you carry Ciena inside you. He knows that Meshkent and I came to find you, to help.”

  Triste made a wry, bitter sound that might have been a laugh.

  “He knows the whole thing,” Kaden said again. “He figured it out before I told him.”

  “Of course he did. He’s Csestriim. All of this … it’s just a game to him. We’re just stones on the board.” She shook her head wearily. “So Long Fist got away. He wasn’t dying after all.”

  She might have been talking about some made-up character from a tale in which she had long ago lost interest.

  “He got away.”

  “And I’m the bait. For Long Fist. Or Meshkent. Or whoever wants to bite.”

  “At least you’re still alive.”

  Triste raised her head just slightly, staring at Kaden as though wondering whether to believe what she had just heard. When she let it drop, he could hear her skull against the stone. She didn’t grimace. Didn’t even seem to notice.