The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “What is that?” he demanded

  Huutsuu bared her lips. “My people. They do not wait for the dawn.” She raised her free hand to the blade pressed against her neck, ran a finger along the steel. “Will you add me to the dead this day?”

  Valyn stared, the shock of what he’d been about to do ringing in his head like the horn. He shoved her viciously away, staggered back. The blade fell from Huutsuu’s numb fingers, clattering against the stone. Valyn’s own hands shook as though diseased.

  She watched him with narrowed eyes, then smiled.

  “Life is war. Every heartbeat is war. This is Kwihna’s truth.”

  Valyn turned away, sickened, from that truth, turned to face the coming charge—thousands of Urghul galloping toward the wall, dark figures on dark horses, the lines of their weapons and faces carved from the black wall of his blindness. They were still three hundred paces out, no threat to him at all, not yet, but he could see them, see them perfectly, see them all.

  49

  According to Pyrre, it was only twenty-five miles from Rassambur to the stone ruins by the river where she’d broken Kaden and Triste free. There were no straight lines in the mountains, however, and the miles had a way of multiplying. All night and all day they’d been fleeing il Tornja’s soldiers, laboring up narrow defiles, racing across swaths of open slickrock, fording mountain streams, and then running again, cutting through the maze of canyon and cliff, all too aware of what would happen if they faltered or fell. For a long time, the Annurians trailed just a few hundred paces behind.

  “The ak’hanath,” Kaden managed, not slowing as he pointed back. “Tracking us.”

  He hadn’t spotted the creatures—they were too quick, too nimble for that—but he had seen them move over stone back in the Bone Mountains, and had no illusions about his own ability to outrun them. He almost imagined he could hear, over the sound of his own breath and blood, the skittering of their hard claws on the rock, that high keening just at the edge of human hearing, the sound like a needle lodged inside the ear.

  “We could kill them,” Triste gasped as she struggled over the broken scree. “If they … come out…”

  Kaden shook his head. “They won’t. Il Tornja won’t risk them. As long as they’re alive, he can follow us anywhere.”

  Pyrre paused for a moment as Triste struggled to climb a short ledge. The assassin looked every bit as exhausted as Kaden felt. Sweat matted her hair, her breathing was ragged, blood crusted her leather tunic and bare arms—some of it from the soldiers she had killed, the rest from her own cuts and gashes. Unlike Triste, however, she didn’t seem concerned. In fact, even as she peered back down the canyon, shading her eyes with a hand, a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

  “I am really starting to dislike those creatures,” she said.

  And then, just as she finished speaking, as if the soldiers and the spiders were not enough, the lightning came. The sky remained utterly cloudless, one great bowl of undivided blue, and then the lightning was there, massive actinic bolts stabbing down all around them, blasting cliffs and shattering stone. The closest struck a hundred paces distant, but violence stretched away on all sides for miles.

  “The leach,” Kaden said wearily.

  Pyrre tsked her vexation. “It really does seem like cheating.”

  Another bolt fractured the cliff top a quarter mile ahead, the impact spraying smashed stone in all directions.

  Kaden forced down the animal urge to flinch, to cower in some shadow until the unnatural attack was over. Instead, he stepped into the middle of the wide canyon, studied the pattern of bolts ripping through the sky. “It’s random. They don’t know where we are.”

  “He doesn’t need to know,” Triste shouted back. She’d fought her way up onto the ledge, and was waving them on impatiently. “He might be just guessing, but the lightning can still kill us.”

  “Indeed,” Pyrre mused, gazing speculatively at the elemental savagery unfolding all around them. “Ananshael’s will is unknowable.”

  “Do you want to stand here and test it?” Kaden asked, glancing over at the Skullsworn. He hadn’t intended the question seriously, but found, even as he spoke the words, that there was a part of him that ached for just that—to stand and wait, to pass the weight of his own responsibility over to some other, greater power, to finally abdicate a fight he neither understood nor truly hoped to win. Meshkent raged inside him, wordless, slavering, furious, hurling himself against the walls Kaden maintained. It would be easy, effortless, to let those walls fall. To set the god free. To abandon the self once and for all …

  Another bolt slammed into the stone canyon, where they had passed just a few moments before. The assassin didn’t flinch, didn’t even look at it. Instead she turned to study Kaden.

  “You’re not the skinny monk that I remember.”

  Kaden shook his head, hauling his thoughts away from sacrifice and surrender. “That monk wouldn’t have survived.”

  “Survival.” Pyrre frowned. “For just a little while there, I thought that might have finally stopped mattering to you. The god comes for us all.”

  “Then why are we running?”

  Pyrre flashed him a smile. “Because if we run now, we get to fight later. And I like fighting.”

  By midday, the sky had fallen quiet. When they paused at a narrow stream to gulp a few mouthfuls of water, Kaden could no longer make out the angry clatter of pursuit. It was tempting to believe they had outdistanced the soldiers, but he had been battling against il Tornja’s schemes too long to trust his own temptations. The kenarang was coming, whether Kaden could hear him or not; his goals were simple, even if his tactics were not. The question was, why had Pyrre and the other Skullsworn intervened?

  “You could have let us die,” Kaden said, straightening from the stream, savoring the cold water on his tongue, in his throat. “Il Tornja would have killed us. You cheated your god.”

  Pyrre shook her head. “Not cheated. Traded. Your two souls for those we left below.”

  Triste was staring at the assassin, her scarred face twisted with revulsion. “But why? Why bother?”

  “It was an intriguing opportunity,” Pyrre replied.

  “To kill il Tornja?” Kaden asked.

  The Skullsworn shook her head. “To take Long Fist.” There was an unusual note in her voice when she said the name, something vicious and eager, utterly at odds with her habitual wry calm.

  “Long Fist?” Triste demanded. “Why?”

  Pyrre turned to her, then raised an eyebrow, as though debating inwardly whether or not to respond. “He is a priest of pain,” she said finally. “A high priest of Meshkent. He would have made a fine offering to my god.” She glanced over at Kaden, cocked her head to the side. “Speaking of which, where did he go?”

  The words were deceptively mild.

  Kaden shook his head. “Escaped. Jumped into the river.”

  Pyrre pursed her lips. “Then my god may have him after all.”

  “Maybe,” Kaden agreed. Inside his mind, the ancient god raged. “So what happens to us now?”

  “A good question,” Pyrre said. “We will go to Rassambur, and then decide.”

  “What if we don’t want to go?” Triste demanded. She was panting, doubled over with her hands on her knees, but her eyes were hard, defiant.

  Pyrre offered her a broad smile, made an ostentatious little flourish with one hand, and was holding a knife. “The altars of my god are everywhere. Each patch of dirt”—she gestured with the blade—“that stone on which you stand. And my piety sometimes outstrips my patience.”

  “We’ll go,” Kaden said, holding up a hand, as though there were anything he could do to stop the assassin, then turning to Triste. “It’s safer than staying here.”

  Pyrre chuckled. “Safe,” she said, lingering on the word as though she could taste it. “Such a tricky term. Never seems to mean what people want it to mean.” She shrugged. “But yes, I’d agree that Rassambur is safe.�
��

  Triste narrowed her eyes. “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning I might kill you, but I promise not to hurt you first.”

  * * *

  A fortress of dark iron and nightmare. A labyrinth reeking of carrion; long halls echoing with screams. A den of perversion, a home for men and women drinking blood from human skulls, offering their own infants as sacrifice on charred altars, slaughtering one another in twisted, blood-slick orgies. Halls of bones and altars of human flesh. Charnel pits brimming with the festering dead. Blasted caverns devoid of light, of hope, of all human comfort, given over to the veneration of the old and awful God of Death himself: Ananshael, unknitter of souls, savorer of rotting corpses.

  Kaden had heard dozens of variations over the years of the tales told of Rassambur. Some, servants’ stories whispered in the kitchens of the Dawn Palace; others, historians’ accounts inked on expensive parchment and bound into codices for the shivering delectation of the rich. The fortress was a favorite subject of painters, too. Some, like Sianburi in his famous Stages of Death, used Rassambur as an excuse to explore human anatomy: a flayed arm here, an eyeball lolling from its socket there, perfectly drafted femurs and skulls stacked rafter-high in the background. The Ghannan ateliers, on the other hand, mostly ignored the corpses in their work, dwelling instead on Rassambur’s infinite gradations of shadow and darkness. Kaden had read somewhere that Fiarzin Qaid, the greatest of the Ghannan painters, had labored for eight years, grinding and mixing two hundred different shades of black, before attempting his masterpiece, The House of Death, a horse-high canvas depicting Rassambur’s most horrid hall.

  Qaid never even saw the place, Kaden realized.

  With Triste and Pyrre, he stood at a cliff’s lip, staring across a gulf of empty air to a huge, sheer-sided sandstone butte and the fabled fortress of the Skullsworn that perched at its top. Qaid didn’t need two shades of black, let alone two hundred.

  In fact, the stronghold and the land around it were a study in light, air, and rich color: an azure sky nailed up above brilliant cliffs, dozens of shades of russet and rust and vermillion, and between them, the creamy white of Rassambur’s small, graceful buildings. There were no defensive walls, no ramparts or towers, no murder holes or arrow loops. At the top of the sheer-sided butte, there was no need—the land itself was the fortification. The lair of the priests of death was not a lair at all, but a bright, white-walled, sun-drenched place of gardens, cloisters, and humble temples. Splashes of green dotted the grounds where the Skullsworn had cultivated the flowering desert plants. Even the shadows cast by the scattered loggia and trellises looked inviting, cool and quiet. It almost reminded Kaden of Ashk’lan—the clarity of it all, the cleanness—but where the Bone Mountains were viciously cold at least half the year, here, the hot sun warmed the stone even as the mountain breezes cut through the heat’s worst bite.

  A single bridge—a graceful arc of white stone with no railing or balustrade—spanned the chasm between Rassambur and the cliff where Kaden stood with Pyrre and Triste. It looked too slender to support its own weight, let alone that of anyone crossing. There was nowhere to hide on that bridge, nowhere to shelter. A single archer with enough arrows could hold it against an entire army for days. That was how it looked, at least. Kaden hoped it was true.

  “We should get across,” he said, gesturing, forcing his aching, trembling legs into motion once more. “Before il Tornja catches up.”

  “He won’t,” Pyrre replied.

  Kaden shook his head. “You don’t understand. He abandoned his post in the north, he risked letting the Urghul destroy Annur, all so that he could come here, after … us.”

  He glanced over at Triste as he pronounced that final word. She made no indication she had heard him. Instead, she stared fixedly at Rassambur, face bleak, as though she were peering into the freshly turned earth of her own grave.

  Pyrre pursed her lips, studying the girl. “All this way for the two of you and an Urghul warlord. I so look forward to learning why.”

  “We can talk about why when we’re on the other side,” Kaden said.

  He had no idea what he would say when that talk came, no idea what lies he might spin to save himself, save Triste, and the gods hidden inside them both. That could wait, though. First they needed to reach Rassambur’s dubious safety.

  “What I mean to say,” Pyrre went on, gesturing to the mountains around them, “is that these cliffs are alive with my brothers and sisters, some hunting, some just standing guard. If il Tornja has read his history at all, he will know this, he will know better than to come within a mile of Rassambur.”

  Kaden squinted at the rocks through which they’d passed. He had seen nothing, no sign of guards or sentries. On the other hand, it had been all he could do to keep his feet as they stumbled over the rough stone, and he’d barely raised his eyes from the ground. He might have passed straight through the center of an army without noticing it. Still …

  “He has a leach.”

  “Leaches die just like everyone else,” Pyrre said with a shrug, “when you remember to put a knife in them.”

  There was no sign, when they finally stepped off the narrow bridge, that anyone from Rassambur had ever learned to put a knife in anything more dangerous than the cacti that they carved for the evening meal. Pyrre had learned to fight somewhere, that was obvious enough, but the devotees of Ananshael weren’t training or fighting. All the Skullsworn that Kaden could see—men and women in white desert robes—were going about the quiet tasks of daily life: gardening, paring vegetables, drawing water from a central well, walking between the modest buildings or talking quietly in groups of two or three. The only weapons Kaden could see weren’t weapons at all, but small belt knives, the sheathed blades no longer than a finger, less dangerous than what he himself had carried back at Ashk’lan.

  The place seemed more like a sanctuary than a den of death and violence, and though the Skullsworn fell silent as he passed, there was no malice mixed with their obvious curiosity. A few nodded to Pyrre, or murmured greetings. No one asked any questions. If they were concerned about the fates of those Skullsworn who had accompanied Pyrre, the men and women who had gone down to the ruined town and not returned, they didn’t show it. No one seemed worried that the kenarang of the Annurian Empire had come to the Ancaz Mountains with a knot of soldiers—they didn’t even seem aware of the fact.

  “Should we … tell someone?” Kaden asked. “Prepare some sort of defense?”

  Pyrre waved away the question. “The defense is there already.”

  “The sentries hidden in the rocks?”

  “Among other measures. Rassambur has been guarded since before the first stones of the oldest buildings were set in place.”

  Kaden glanced at those buildings. Most were small, a single room or two, date trees espaliered against sandstone walls, small patios sheltered from the sun, flower and vegetable gardens in raised beds before or beside them.

  Pyrre followed his gaze.

  “Each priest keeps her own plot,” she said. “It is a commandment of the god.”

  “Gardening?” Kaden asked. “Why?”

  The assassin looked amused. “We need to eat. The hot blood of the slaughtered is delicious, obviously, but sometimes the body craves vegetables.”

  They passed a series of stone barns and pens filled with goats and sheep. The animals trotted toward the fence, evidently eager for a handout. Dozens of chickens scratched in the dry soil toward the outside of the enclosures. Just beyond one of the barns, a pair of priests, one old, one young, were butchering a goat. The older woman pointed to various ligaments and organs as she worked, pausing often to allow her student to inspect the carcass. It was the first blood Kaden had seen.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “To see Gerra,” Pyrre replied.

  “Who is Gerra?” Triste asked warily.

  “Gerra is the person,” Pyrre said brightly, “who will decide whether we should help you,
or offer you to the god.”

  When they finally tracked down Gerra the Bald, leader of the Skullsworn, he was asleep on his back, fingers neatly laced across his chest, lying atop a narrow wooden platform suspended over the cliff’s edge, swaying lightly with the breeze above a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. The wooden platform was one of two, both part of a sort of strange scale, the type of apparatus a merchant might use to weigh grain or coin, but much larger, the whole thing built out over the abyss. The counterweight to Ananshael’s chief priest, set on the platform across from him, was a sealed wooden barrel. The hole at its base was plugged tight with something that looked like a stone cork.

  “What is that?” Triste asked, her voice tight.

  “That,” Pyrre replied, “is Ananshael’s Scale. Today is Gerra’s day.”

  “Not my day,” the priest said without bothering to open his eyes or sit up. “It should have been Baird, but he has not yet returned from the west. Others wanted to take his place, but I was selfish.” He smiled. “One of the few joys of leadership—the right to seize a day of peace and quiet when you can.”

  Pyrre shook her head in mock regret. “I didn’t realize, when I spoke in your favor all those years ago, the true depth of your greed.”

  Gerra’s smile widened. “The more fool you.” He still hadn’t opened his eyes.

  “What is the scale for?” Kaden asked.

  “It is a way of living close to the god,” Pyrre replied. She gestured. “The barrel is filled with water. It’s stoppered with a plug of rock salt. When the plug dissolves, the barrel empties, and the person on the platform goes to meet the god.”

  Triste took a step back, as though the apparatus might suddenly, violently snap.

  “When?” she asked.

  Pyrre shrugged. “It’s impossible to predict. Some salt deposits are denser than others. On hot days, the water dissolves the plug faster than on cold days. Usually it takes a year or so, but not always.”