The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Bait is not alive, Kaden. A worm on a hook thinks it’s alive—it keeps wriggling and wriggling and wriggling—but you only need to look a few heartbeats into the future to see what happens to that worm: either the fish kills it, or it dies, still squirming on the hook. The ’Kent-kissing creature was finished the minute it became bait. Worms are dumb, so they don’t know that. I’m not a worm. I can see what’s coming.”

  “It’s coming for all of us,” Kaden replied quietly. “If you wait long enough, we’re all dead.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly right, is it?” Triste demanded. “Your sister’s general—he’s not dead. This bitch inside my fucking head—she’s not going to die.”

  “They are Csestriim and gods. They are made differently from us. Bedisa wove our fate into our bones.”

  “I know that, Kaden. You think I don’t know that? The thing I don’t know yet is why we don’t all just get on with it.” She shook her head. It lolled back and forth sloppily over the weathered rock. “All it takes is one little blade to end a life. You don’t even need a blade. You don’t need anything. You can just not eat for couple of weeks.…”

  Kaden studied her, the perfect skin laced with scar, the blazing violet of her eyes. “If you were so eager to die,” he said finally, “you would have performed the obviate back in Annur, when we had the chance.”

  “It’s not the dying I care about; it’s helping her. She’s in my mind, Kaden. You don’t understand what that’s like. You can’t.” She took a long, deep breath, then blew it out. “Growing up in the temple, there was always talk about rape.”

  Kaden shook his head. “The leinas—”

  “Will you stop talking for just once?” At least there was heat in her voice now, a hint of the old fire. “You might have learned to be quiet in all those years with the monks, but you never learned to listen, did you?”

  Half a dozen replies came to mind. Kaden set them aside. If Triste wanted him to listen, he would listen. After a long silence she continued in a whisper.

  “Just because a woman is inside the temple walls doesn’t mean she’s safe. Demivalle and the other leinas who run the temple try to have guards in place, there are ways of doing things that are supposed to protect the priestesses, but you can’t protect against everything all the time. Sometimes the women can’t cry out, and sometimes they can but they don’t. You’re told you’re supposed to please, that pleasure is the apotheosis of your faith. There’s no space for second-guessing. No space to say, ‘Wait.’ It’s the clients, half drunk and emboldened because they paid, donated, whatever—but it’s not just the clients, it’s the whole place. If you’re not a conduit of pleasure, you don’t belong, and so the priestesses and priests suffer what’s done to them. The clients go away, but Ciena’s most holy carry their wounds inside.”

  She fell silent, lips parted as though she were short of breath or about to cry. Kaden’s mind filled with the memory of Louette Morjeta, Triste’s mother, the woman who had given her daughter up when her father came and demanded her. Had Morjeta wanted to lie with Adiv? Had she wanted to carry his child?

  “This is like that,” Triste said, breaking into his thoughts. “What the goddess did to me is like that, like what happens to women the whole world over, but it is worse. She’s inside my mind. She didn’t just fuck me and leave, she tried to become me. She’s probably still trying. Do you understand?”

  Kaden considered his words before replying. “Many people would embrace the presence of their god. To be taken in this way—it is an honor. That is what the man who was Long Fist must have thought before the Lord of Pain took on his mortal form. The acceptance is an exercise of devotion.”

  “That’s disgusting,” Triste said. Her eyes were far away. Dead-looking. “That’s what men tell women after: Actually, you wanted it. I am a king, a minister, an atrep, an emperor—you must have wanted it. Well, I’ll tell you something, Kaden,” she said, her voice rising, rising with her body as she shoved herself up onto her elbows, shoved herself up until she was sitting, glaring at him, a finger extended, trembling. The words, when she finally managed to finish them, came out a scream, “I didn’t fucking want it!”

  She was panting, breathless. Although the night was cool, her face glistened with sweat. He considered crossing the space between them, trying to offer some comfort, but what comfort could he offer? His words were all unequal to the task, and any human touch seemed suddenly obscene.

  “It’s not the dying I mind,” she said. They were the same words as before, but this time there was iron in them. “But I’ll let that Csestriim creature flay me alive, I’ll let him take me apart joint by joint before I do a thing to help this goddess who thought she could just take me, tame me, make me into her.”

  “I understand,” Kaden replied finally.

  “No,” Triste said, shaking her head. “You don’t. You can’t.”

  Meshkent moved silently, massively inside Kaden’s own mind. The pressure, the presence, the constant effort required to fight back against it, to keep the god from seizing control, was almost overwhelming, and Kaden had allowed him in, had managed to control him. He felt ashamed, suddenly. After half a day, he’d been almost ready to give himself over to the god, had been tempted to let the corridors of his mind just … fold, and here was Triste at the same time, still fighting, still defiant. The goddess could seize everything she was, had wrested her from herself half a dozen times at least, and still she hadn’t given up. For all her talk of dying, she wasn’t dead.

  “You would have made a good emperor,” Kaden said. He had no idea where the words had come from. As he spoke them, however, he realized they were true.

  Triste just stared at him, baffled. “What do I know,” she asked finally, “about the running of empires?”

  “As much as I do.”

  “From what I heard, you made an utter mess of it.”

  Kaden nodded. “I did.” He wondered what had happened since he left the Dawn Palace. Maybe Adare had managed to right Annur’s listing ship. It didn’t seem likely. The water had been pouring in in too many places. The whole vessel had already sunk too deep in the waves. Besides, Adare was hardly the benevolent leader she pretended to be. Il Tornja claimed she was doing what she did for the people of Annur. Maybe that was true, and maybe she was interested only in her own glory. Kaden didn’t know her well enough to say. What he did know was that she had lied to him even as she tried to make her peace. Lied about Valyn, about her own brother.

  It doesn’t matter, he reminded himself. A liar could rule an empire. A traitor could rule an empire. Either one would be better than a half-trained monk.

  “Why did you go back?” Triste asked.

  Kaden realized he’d been staring at her without seeing her.

  “Go back where?”

  “To Annur. To try to take the throne.”

  It was a simple question. He had no answer. Looking back, words like duty or tradition seemed too weak, too dry and abstract to explain the things that he had done. The throne itself had carried no allure. He knew no one in Annur, not even his sister.

  He shook his head. It was as though he were a stranger from his own life, incapable of explaining his own decisions, even to himself.

  “Look…,” Triste began.

  The night’s quiet shattered before she could finish. Over the low moan of the wind and the lisp of the river’s current, men began shouting, voices etched with anger and surprise. Annurian voices. Il Tornja’s soldiers, though Kaden couldn’t make out the kenarang’s orders in the sudden chaos.

  Steel smashed against steel, ground over stone. Men were screaming now. Dying, by the sound of it, the crisp urgency of command and response mixed with an animal panic, high keening notes of pain and desperation. As if in response, Meshkent shifted inside Kaden’s mind, testing the boundaries of his cage all over again.

  Slowed by drug, Triste rose slowly.

  “Who—”

  The wall exploded.


  One moment, lamplight had been playing over the rough red stone. The next, a sheet of flame, bright as the midday sun, blazed across Kaden’s eyes. Something punched him in the chest, knocking him back across the chamber and into the stone altar.

  A shard of rock, he thought blearily, trying to keep hold on his own consciousness even as he groped at his chest with a clumsy hand. Surely there would be blood. Surely beneath that massive ache, there would be something broken. Either he had gone blind, or the world was suddenly, absolutely dark. Meshkent seized that moment to claw at his prison, growling, raging, larger than the sky and bent on escape.

  Kaden closed his eyes, threw the whole weight of himself against the walls he’d made. The god inside him wanted out, ached to join whatever battle raged outside, but Meshkent misunderstood the weakness of his human vessel. Fighting was hopeless, pointless. Kaden couldn’t see, couldn’t stand, couldn’t even hear beyond the high, bright ringing in his ears. If Meshkent got free, he would fight, and if he fought, he would die.

  No, Kaden whispered.

  The god bore down, furious and huge. Kaden gritted his teeth, marshaled what strength he had, and pushed back.

  Between the battle beyond the temple walls and the desperate struggle raging in his mind, it took Kaden a long time to realize someone was clawing at him, a small hand, panicked and desperate. Triste. He reached out to seize her arm. Smoke and stone dust filled his nose, but the ceiling hadn’t fallen. No great corbels had crushed them. Instead, cold night air poured through the hole in the shattered wall. Flame ravaged the streets outside, though what was burning Kaden had no idea. Against that blazing background of orange and red, a dark figure stepped into the breach.

  Kaden blinked his eyes furiously, trying to make out more than the shape against the blinding flame. Then, abruptly as it had come, the fire was gone, leaving him staring into blackness. He raised his fists—a pointless gesture, but he could think of no other.

  “Triste,” he called out.

  There was no time to find out what was happening outside, no opportunity to sort the battle into sets of tactics or clearly labeled sides. The only thing he knew was that chaos had come, and with it, an opportunity.

  “Triste,” he hissed again.

  The girl’s answer was a scream.

  Kaden spun toward the sound, trying to blink back the afterimage—filigrees of red and yellow flame—stitched across his eyes. He could make out no more than two shapes in the darkness: Triste, and someone at her back, someone taller and evidently stronger, pinning the girl’s arms to her sides. Triste lashed out with a foot, started to scream again, then fell silent. Another fire roared to life beyond the temple’s shattered wall, farther away this time, but close enough that Kaden could see the flame reflecting off a blade at Triste’s neck.

  “Kaden,” said a new voice. “Triste. It’s lovely to see you both looking so well.”

  Whatever madness was unfolding in the streets beyond, the person holding the knife didn’t sound worried, didn’t sound rushed. It was a woman’s voice, low and throaty. She sounded … amused. Inside Kaden’s mind, Meshkent went suddenly, utterly still. Wariness poured off the god, wariness that could be explained only by the woman with the knife, a woman Kaden remembered all too well, though the last time he had seen her had been a year and two continents distant. They had been lost in another ancient city then, in another range of peaks, fighting for their lives against a different group of Annurian soldiers.…

  “I’m not sure what it says about the two of you,” the woman went on conversationally, “that every time I see you, you’re being chased by men with swords. Some people might take that amiss, I suppose, but I’m inclined to think it means you’re special.”

  “Pyrre,” Kaden said quietly.

  So Rassambur had noticed their arrival in the Ancaz after all.

  “What is going on out there?” he asked.

  “Oh, you know,” she replied breezily. “Death. Dying. A great offering to the god. And what a spot for it! Just a couple dozen miles from Rassambur, and we had no idea this place was even here. Very atmospheric.”

  As though to underscore the point, the air beyond the broken wall burst into another sheet of flame, illuminating for half a heartbeat both Triste and the Skullsworn assassin, who continued to hold the knife against her neck. Fear and confusion played over Triste’s face, but Pyrre looked cheerful, despite blood dripping down from a gash at her hairline. It was almost a loving pose, that arm wrapped around the girl’s chest, the two heads close to touching. Minus the knife, it was the sort of thing you might find between a mother and daughter, although the two looked nothing alike. Pyrre was obviously older, her face lined by long years in the sun, her hair as much gray as black. Older, and harder, leaner beneath her leathers. She wore the blood smearing her face as though it were makeup.

  “We have to go,” Kaden said, glancing toward the broken wall once more. Boots clattered somewhere in the streets beyond, steel continued to scream against steel, but there were no soldiers just outside, at least not for the moment. Pyrre had said nothing about a rescue, but she was a priestess of death. If she had come to kill them, she would have killed them already.

  “Indeed,” the assassin replied, cocking her head to the side. “The tide has shifted. My brothers and sisters came to make an offering to Ananshael, but it sounds as though they have become the sacrifice.” She didn’t sound bothered by the development.

  He listened to the fighting. “How do you know?”

  “Less screaming,” she said. “Ananshael’s adherents die quietly.” She shrugged. “They have a leach—a strong one. We didn’t figure on that.”

  Triste twisted in the woman’s grip. Pyrre let her go.

  “Where is the other one?” the assassin asked, glancing around the stone chamber. There was a new note in her voice this time, an eagerness, a hunger. “Long Fist. I’ve waited a long time to see him again.”

  Kaden shook his head. “Escaped.”

  Pyrre’s eyes narrowed. “We tracked you here.…”

  “He leapt into the river just a quarter mile north.”

  The Skullsworn clucked her tongue in irritation. “A shame. I was looking forward to opening his throat.”

  Inside Kaden’s mind, Meshkent coiled and uncoiled, his voice a silent, wordless growl.

  “We have to go,” Kaden said again, as much to blot out the god as to drive them into motion.

  Pyrre pursed her lips, looked from Kaden to Triste, then back again. “I suppose we do.”

  “How?” Triste demanded, staring out the gap in the wall. The fire had died down, but the shouts and screams seemed to be coming from everywhere.

  “I suppose it would be too much to hope,” Pyrre said, “that one or both of you might have spent the past year studying something other than pottery or fellatio?” The assassin raised an eyebrow. “No?” She let out a long sigh. “I guess we’ll stick with the same plan as last time, then.”

  “What plan?” Triste demanded.

  “You run as fast as you can,” Pyrre replied brightly, “while I kill people.”

  47

  From the top of the watchtower halfway along Annur’s old northern wall, Adare stared west. It was easier than looking north. There was nothing to the north now but burned-out wreckage, charred timbers crumbling under their own weight, backyard gardens buried beneath ash, the streets impassable, blocked by the crumbling hulks of shattered stores and stables, temples and taverns. The distinctions didn’t matter now. Whoever had lived, loved, and prayed in those spaces just days earlier was gone. Safely evacuated, hopefully. Maybe just dead, hung in one of the dozens of squares, or crushed beneath the weight of the burned-down buildings and their own stupid stubbornness.

  Atop the wall, at least, the situation was different. Terial’s old fortification was a hive of activity: soldiers stacking crates of arrows and extra spears, masons laboring to repair cracks and rents, men dangling on ropes before and behind the wall, or standing
on hastily erected scaffolding, or bent double in the middle of the walkway itself, slathering old stones with new mortar. Adare glanced up at the sky. According to the master mason in charge of the project, all the effort would come to nothing if the rain arrived before the mortar set, but there was nothing to be done. The Urghul wouldn’t wait for the rain.

  As Adare studied the ongoing work for her makeshift command post atop the tallest of the towers, Nira came puffing up the stairs, followed by Kegellen and Lehav.

  “Near as any of those assholes with the numbers can figure, there’s enough grain in the warehouses to last the city two weeks.”

  Adare looked up at the clouds, considered the figure.

  “’Course, we’ll have resupply,” the old woman went on. “More rice than wheat, but food’s food to a grumbling belly.”

  “Sixty percent of that food came from north of the Neck,” Adare replied finally, “at least for Annur. Given what’s in the warehouses and the trickle that’ll keep coming up from the south, we can last three weeks.”

  “Longer,” Lehav said. “A lot longer. Start the rations now.”

  Adare turned to him. “I just burned down the homes and neighborhoods of a hundred thousand Annurian citizens. I’ve told them to live in warehouses and whorehouses and any other kind of fucking houses with enough space on the floor for a curled-up body. It’s astounding the city isn’t rioting already.”

  “The Queen of the Streets has her thugs out,” Nira said. “They’re—”

  “Encouraging calm,” Kegellen interjected. Unlike nearly everyone else on the wall, Adare included, she didn’t seem to be panting or sweating. The sky-blue silk of her robe fluttered lightly in the hot breeze. She patted her hair with a free hand, as though to check it had not fallen free of the elaborate pins and clips holding it up.

  “And by encouraging calm, you mean killing people,” Adare said, pressing a hand to her forehead.

  Kegellen winced elaborately, as though the words themselves pained her.