The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “You are welcome,” the Flea said wearily, “to just give us the horses.”

  “You are lost to honor,” the woman snarled. “All of you.”

  “Honor’s a fine thing, but it’s not much use in a fight.”

  The silence that followed was knife-sharp, poised to cut the first person who moved or spoke. Valyn listened to the heartbeats, half a dozen stubborn drums hammering out their cadences of wariness or rage, each one trapped inside its cage of bone. Breath sawed in and out between chapped, bloody lips. Breath and blood—that was all that separated them from the dead littering the ground outside. It didn’t seem like much. Didn’t seem like enough.

  “How many times,” Valyn asked finally, turning to Huutsuu, “have you called Ananshael the Coward’s God?”

  He waited. She refused to reply.

  “Let’s be clear about one thing,” he went on finally. “I know the Flea. If he kills you, there won’t be any pain. There won’t be any glory. You will be alive, then you will be gone, off into death’s endless softness. Balendin will be alive, and we will be fighting him, but you will have quit. Over a few horses.”

  Huutsuu ground her teeth. “This is not what we agreed.”

  “We agreed to kill the leach,” the Flea pointed out.

  “And you failed to kill him.”

  “When I am dead,” the Wing leader replied, “then you can say I’ve failed.”

  Valyn could almost feel their gazes locked like horns, the Flea’s eyes dark as mud, Huutsuu’s sky blue and cruel.

  “All right,” she said finally. “You will have the horses you need. How do we kill the leach?”

  Valyn exhaled slowly. “We go in now,” he said. “Kill him while he’s wounded, while his guard is down.”

  The Flea shook his head slowly. “It won’t be down. It will be doubled. Remember your Hendran: Wariness is the strongest armor. Balendin has always been cautious. Now that he’s wounded he will be more so. Worse, he knows he’s facing Kettral. He’s seen us.”

  Belton spat onto the broken ground. “Isn’t this what you Kettral do? Sneak around? Kill people?”

  “It is, and we’ve done a lot of it, so you’ll have to trust me when I tell you this won’t work. If we go after Balendin right now, there will be sneaking and killing. We will be the ones getting killed.”

  “There is no blade,” Newt agreed, “as keen as surprise.”

  “I understand this,” Huutsuu said. “A child of five understands there is a good time for a raid, and a foolish time. We do not have the choice. We cannot hold this wall forever.”

  “We will hold it as long as we can,” the Flea replied. “Then we will fall back to the next position, then the next. We will purchase time for the men and women of Annur, and we will wait for the leach to make a mistake.”

  “Wait?” Huutsuu demanded. “That is how you plan to kill this leach? Wait? This is not the way of a warrior.”

  Outside the stone chamber someone screamed, a long, lost, awful cry, then fell viciously silent. Valyn’s blood blazed at the sound, his hand dropped to his ax, but there was no attack, not yet. The soldier was battling his own agony, nothing more, nothing less.

  “You call Ananshael the Coward’s God,” the Flea said finally.

  Huutsuu stiffened. “He shields the weak from their pain.”

  “We have another name for the Lord of the Grave: the Patient God.”

  “Patience is no virtue for a warrior.”

  “I’m not a warrior,” the Flea replied quietly. “I am a killer.”

  * * *

  Late that same night, after the legionaries had finally plugged the breach in the wall with a jumble of hastily cut logs, after the Annurian dead were buried in shallow graves and the wounded given what comfort there was to give, after everyone on the south side of the wall had collapsed into a few hours of fitful sleep, Huutsuu found Valyn sitting atop one of the guard towers, staring blindly over the land to the north.

  “How many are there?” he asked, not bothering to turn.

  The woman smelled of blood-soaked leather and something else, a sharp, pungent scent. It took Valyn a moment to realize she was drinking some sort of strong spirit.

  “I don’t know. Our songs say the Urghul are numberless as the stars.”

  Valyn grunted. “Then we’re fucked.”

  Huutsuu’s earthenware bottle clinked as she set it on the stones next to him. “Drink.”

  Valyn took the rough bottle around the neck and lifted it. The liquor burned his split lip, burned all the way down his throat. “Where did you get this?”

  “They were hidden in a back room of the fort. I don’t know why.”

  “Smugglers,” Valyn said. “Probably running the stuff up or down the Haag.” It seemed strange that this place had been used for something so normal, strange that there were people beyond the scope of the battle, men and women inside the empire and beyond who knew nothing about the violence that had exploded there that day, whose thoughts were bent instead toward saving a few coppers on a jug of rotgut. Valyn shook his head, took another swig, then passed the bottle back.

  Huutsuu drank long and deep, swirled the spirits inside the crock. The sound reminded Valyn of waves, of the sea around the Islands, of endless hours swimming or running the beaches. He had thought he was beyond sorrow, that the events of Andt-Kyl had hammered it out of him. Earlier in the day, he’d listened to thousands of men and women fighting for their lives, Urghul and Annurian alike, fighting and dying, and he’d felt nothing but a savage animal anticipation. That the sound of splashing should haul back all the old emotions—if only for a moment—baffled him. He took the jug from Huutsuu, threw back a slug, then another, and another, until the feeling subsided.

  He could feel her eyes on him. “Tens of thousands,” she said finally. “That is how many of my people came to your land. There are more scattered through these miserable forests, but here, fighting us, maybe thirty thousand.”

  Valyn stared at her, then laughed. It seemed the only response. “Tens of thousands against less than a hundred. The Flea can talk all he wants about waiting to kill Balendin. If we survive one more day, I’ll eat this ’Shael-spawned bottle.”

  Huutsuu hesitated. “I saw you fight today.…”

  Valyn shook his head. “So?”

  “You killed two dozen men. Alone.”

  The number sounded insane. Certainly, there were men and women among the Kettral who claimed to have killed scores of foes, but that was over the course of many missions, twenty or thirty years; not standing in front of a wall battling a whole army.

  “Why didn’t they shoot me?” he asked.

  His memory of the battle was jagged and haphazard, as though he’d been viciously drunk, or only dreaming. There had been the wall behind him and the Urghul in front, the corpses of warriors and horses piled high on every side, a barricade of sorts, one he’d hewn from the flesh of his foes. It was an awful position, open to even the most amateur bowman, and the Urghul had never lacked for bows.

  “They tried,” Huutsuu replied. “The arrows … flew aside. It was as though they hit a wall of air. The leach, the Edish woman with no tongue, she stood on that wall. Her eyes were fixed on you until the sun fell.”

  “Sigrid,” Valyn said slowly.

  It made sense. According to the Flea, the woman was too exhausted to fight, too weary to work any significant kenning. Flicking a few dozen arrows wide, though—that might be something she could manage. Valyn found himself laughing again, the sound rough and ragged. “There you have it. I might have killed two dozen of your riders, but I was hiding behind a shield.” He shook his head. “Some warrior.”

  “Shield or no shield,” Huutsuu said, “I have seen many warriors fight. None like you.”

  She fell silent. Injured men and women, Annurian and Urghul alike, cried out in their sleep, sharp sobs punched into the cold northern wind. Already, the rot was settling into their wounds. Valyn could smell it. Some would be dead b
y morning. Against that backdrop of dismemberment and death, it seemed impossible that Valyn himself had walked away from the battle with nothing more than a few scratches. He dragged a finger along a rough scab running the length of his forearm. Huutsuu’s knife had cut deeper nearly every night than the lances and swords of the Urghul army. The Kettral taught their cadets to face death in battle, but in that long, bloody fight in front of the walls of a crumbling fortress, Valyn had felt, for the first time in nearly a year, fully, utterly alive. He shuddered at the memory.

  “You can kill this leach,” Huutsuu said to him. “I went into the forests months ago searching for the wrong ghost. This Flea of yours—he is strong, fast, but his way is all waiting and no war.” She put a hand on Valyn’s chest, wrapped his leather jerkin in her fist and pulled him close, so close he could taste the eagerness on her breath. “You can do what he cannot.”

  Valyn knocked her hand away. “I’m fucking blind.”

  “Not when you fight. You have told me this yourself.”

  “I can’t fight all the time.”

  He hadn’t expected the words to emerge so heavy with regret. There was something broken, something twisted about wanting to live constantly in the midst of so much blood. Even the Kettral, men and women who lived to fight, to kill, came back to the Islands, they lounged on the beach, went fishing, stayed up half the night swapping tales in shitty taverns over on Hook. I would trade it all, Valyn realized, talking, sleeping, eating, all of it, just to stand in front of that wall burying my axes in the necks of the Urghul. A part of him recognized the desire as mad, suicidal, but what was the point of living if that life was spent plunged in darkness and regret?

  “What am I supposed to do?” he demanded. “Blunder through the Urghul camp with my hands stretched out in front of me calling out for Balendin?”

  “I want you to learn,” Huutsuu replied.

  “Learn what?” Valyn demanded.

  “To see.”

  As she whispered the last word, he felt the knife bite between his ribs, and again the sight came: Huutsuu leaning close, holding him by the shoulder with one hand, pulling him in even as her steel broke the skin. It was a ritual they’d played out a dozen times already, one ending in the same spasm of blood and sex, but this time Huutsuu made no move to lean close. Instead, she watched him, her blue eyes black, bright, shadow lips drawn back. He could feel her hot breath on his cheek, but unlike all those other nights, this time she smelled of determination rather than desire.

  “You can see,” she said.

  As the knife’s pressure eased, the vision faded.

  Valyn shook his head grimly. “No, I can’t.”

  Huutsuu pulled away. “You can.”

  “Only when I have to,” Valyn said. “Only when I’m about to die.”

  Huutsuu turned her back on him, boots crunching over rough stone as she crossed the top of the small tower. When she reached the far side she paused, as though studying the wall below. She was still facing away from him when she spoke again.

  “You are always about to die.”

  Then, with the sound of a distant wind picking up through the trees, she spun and threw. As her arm moved through the top of the arc, the world’s form resolved from the darkness—Huutsuu’s torso twisting with the throw, her fingers letting the knife fly free, the knife itself tumbling over and over, etching its own black path on the greater blackness. Just as it had on the battlefield below, Valyn could feel his body reacting before his mind, some part of him older and faster than thought making a dozen small adjustments, pivoting, throwing his hand up, closing his own fingers around the handle of the knife, snatching it clear of the air and then flicking it back at Huutsuu.

  If she hadn’t known it was coming, she would have died. Instead, even as she threw, she was expecting his impossible catch and diving aside. Even so, she was almost too slow. The knife clattered into the stone where she had stood a quarter heartbeat earlier. They both fell still. Valyn’s darksight passed as quickly as the violence, leaving him with the sound of his own quickened breathing rasping in his ears.

  “You think I won’t kill you,” he said quietly. “You think because we’ve fucked a dozen times and neither one of us has died that it won’t happen.” He shook his head. “You’re wrong. One of these times, it will take over completely.…”

  “It?” Huutsuu asked. He could hear her getting to her feet.

  “This thing inside me. The thing that can see. That can kill.”

  “No, Malkeenian,” she said. “It is not a thing inside you. It is you.”

  Valyn shook his head. “I’m not this fast. Not even close. Look…” He yanked one of the twin axes free of his belt, just to show her. It would have been a passable draw back on the Islands, but after the strange, impossible competence that came over him with the darksight, the motion felt clumsy, almost interminably slow.

  Huutsuu shook her head, but made no move to approach. “A horse will not run at a fire,” she said, “not when it is young. But fire—it is as much a part of war as blood. The creatures must be trained, and so we blind them, not with a blade, but with thick wool. I have done this many times. Blinded, the horse will ride toward a fire, will ride straight through a fire if you ask it to.”

  “I’m not one of your horses, Huutsuu.”

  “No. You are faster and more dangerous, but for you, as for them, there is a time for blindness, and a time to take the blindfold off.”

  “I don’t know how,” he snarled.

  “You do. I have watched you all these days. Even when you say you cannot see, you see. You turn toward motion and light. When a branch looms before you, you dip your head.”

  “Do you have any idea how many branches I hit riding around that ’Kent-kissing forest?” Valyn demanded.

  Huutsuu’s laugh was sharp enough to cut. “Do you have any idea how many branches you missed?” She shook her head. “You are a fool, Malkeenian. You say you can only see when death looms close, but death is always close. Now, for instance…”

  She lunged at him, her body resolving from the darkness. As she closed, she drew her sword, swinging it overhead in a vicious arc. Valyn stepped aside at the last moment, saw the dark sparks flash as it crashed against the stone. He kicked her in the back of the knee, and she fell, rolled away, came up in a crouch, the sword level before her, pointed at his chest.

  “Can you see me?” she asked quietly.

  “We’ve been over this,” he growled. “When the fight is finished—”

  “What if it is never finished, Malkeenian?”

  He stared at her. She smiled.

  “This is what Kwihna teaches.…”

  “Kwihna’s ‘teachings,’” he spat, “are nothing more than blood.”

  “Your blindness is not a blindness of the eyes,” Huutsuu replied. “It is a blindness of the soul. You think that you can draw a line in the dirt, that you can say, ‘To this side of the line is fighting, to this side quiet. On this side war, and on this side, peace. On this side I can see, but here I am blind.’”

  As Valyn stared, she hurled herself at him again. He let the blade go by his face, caught her wrist, and pulled her close.

  “It is all struggle, Malkeenian,” she whispered. “Life is suffering—that is what Kwihna teaches.”

  “Life is…”

  “Suffering,” she said again. “Pain is suffering because we want to be free of it, and pleasure is suffering because we fear to lose it. Fools search for freedom, but there is no freedom. There is only the embrace. You say you are blind whenever you do not fight, but you are always fighting.”

  She shifted in his grip, hit him hard across the face with her free fist. The skin split open beneath the blow. Valyn’s blood blazed. He bared his teeth, tightened his grip on her wrist, twisted until he thought her arm would break. She refused to wince.

  “Life is all a fight,” she hissed. “You deny this because you come from a weak people, and so you stumble around believing you are
blind.”

  She spit in his face.

  He wrenched the woman’s sword around, forcing it back on her until the blade lay against her throat. He could feel the pulse hammering in her veins, see her pupils dilated in the moonlight.

  “You think you’re fighting me?” she whispered. “You are a fool, Valyn hui’Malkeenian. Look in yourself. See what you are fighting.”

  He stared, his own breath barbed and tangled in his chest. Kill her, something inside him whispered. Cut her throat. Let the blood spill.

  “Even now, Malkeenian, you are fighting it.”

  A line of blood darkened the blade. Valyn pressed harder, wanting more.

  “There is only one foe,” she whispered. “Each woman has her own, and each man, his. Do you know its name?”

  He realized, as the blood ran down the steel onto his hand, that he understood Balendin’s joy, the bliss of standing among the dead and dying, of terrifying the terrified, of reaching out with strong hands to rip life from the living. The knowledge sickened him.

  “You think I won’t kill you?” he snarled. “You think I wouldn’t enjoy it?”

  He could feel her collarbone hard beneath the sword’s blade, her hot breath in his face.

  “Of course you would.”

  “You gambled,” he told her, tightened his grip around her wrist. “And you lost.”

  She shrugged, indifferent to the blade’s edge. “There is no sight without sacrifice. Name it before you give me to your Coward’s God.”

  “Name what?”

  Her smile was bloody, mocking. “The thing you fight. Your foe. Give it its proper name.”

  “There are dozens, hundreds—”

  Huutsuu shook her head. “There is only one.”

  Kill her, something inside him whispered. Open her throat and feel the life drain out.

  No. Not something inside of him. Him. The sick whisper was his own.

  “Name your foe, Valyn hui’Malkeenian,” the woman said again, “and then tell me if there will ever be a day, ever a moment, when you will not have to fight.”

  He would have killed her then, he realized, would have taken the head from her shoulders, would have bowed to the dark part of himself that prowled the corners of his mind. Only the horn stopped him, an Urghul horn that shattered the predawn calm, the long, angry note drawn out over a dozen heartbeats. It fell silent, then sounded again, and again.