The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “When I was young,” Gerra mused, “there was a time the plug gave way in three days. Jes the Gray was sitting the scale that day. She must have been a hundred—bent nearly double, but still sharp in the head. We joked that Ananshael just got tired of waiting.”

  “And how long,” Kaden asked, studying the barrel, “has this plug been in?”

  Pyrre shook her head. “I can never keep track. Thirteen months, maybe?”

  “Something like that,” Gerra agreed. They might have been discussing the age of a particularly uninteresting sheep. “It went in last summer, after Torrel went to meet the god.”

  Triste was staring at the scale and the man lying upon it, her violet eyes wide, horrified. “That’s awful,” she whispered.

  “Quite the contrary,” Gerra declared. “It’s the most peaceful place on the whole mesa. The only spot people won’t bother me.” He paused. “Usually. Who is that you’ve brought, my sister?”

  “Acquaintances,” Pyrre replied. “The almost-Emperor of all Annur and a somewhat threadbare prostitute. A nice enough young man and woman, but very serious.”

  “You think everyone is too serious. What about the Urghul, the pain priest?”

  Pyrre grimaced. “Gone.”

  “To the god?”

  “Perhaps. It’s hard to say. He went into one of the rivers, but the Urghul are surprisingly durable.”

  “And your brothers and sisters?”

  “Have made their last offering.”

  Even that revelation failed to jolt the priest from his rest. He remained so still for so long, in fact, that Kaden was starting to wonder if the man had fallen asleep. Pyrre seemed in no particular hurry, and so it was Triste, finally, who broke the silence.

  “Are we prisoners?”

  Gerra pursed his lips. “Most people are prisoners,” he replied. “I can hear the fear in your voice. You live in it as though it were a cage. Did you come here to be free?”

  “Free?” Kaden asked carefully.

  “Free,” Gerra agreed. “Liberated from the bonds of your fear. Do you wish to join our order?”

  “Before you answer—” Pyrre began.

  Triste cut her off. “No,” she snarled. “No. We came here because we didn’t have a choice. Not to become murderers.”

  “If what we’ve heard is true,” Gerra replied mildly, “you have given more souls to Ananshael than almost any of our priests. I hear whispers that you slaughtered hundreds in the heart of the Annurian palace—truly a great offering.”

  Triste’s face was frozen between horror and rage, her hands balled into fists at her sides. When she spoke again, her voice was barely louder than the wind. “I didn’t want to. Didn’t mean to. I’m not a killer.”

  “There are words,” Gerra mused, “and there are deeds. Still, I will take you at your word. We all have something to offer to the god. If you do not wish to kill, then you can die.”

  “No,” Kaden said, stepping toward the cliff’s edge as Meshkent growled and hissed inside his mind. “Please. There is a larger story here.”

  “The story always feels large,” Gerra replied without moving, without opening his eyes, “to those trapped inside of it. Ananshael will cut you free. It is not so difficult as you think, dying. We will be at your side.”

  Fear flared inside Kaden. He crushed it out, tried to focus through his mind’s smoke.

  “There must be an arrangement we can make. My father paid once, for Pyrre to save my life.…”

  “Which I did,” the woman said. “That deal was done a year ago.”

  “So I will pay you again. The treasury in Annur…”

  “Is irrelevant,” Gerra concluded. “You came here, to Rassambur, which means you must serve the god in one way or another. Since you will not learn to offer sacrifice, you will become that sacrifice.” He shrugged. “They are not so far apart.”

  “We’ll join you, then,” Kaden said. He just needed time, space to think, to plan. Escape could come later. “We’ll become Skullsworn.”

  “No,” Gerra said quietly, almost regretfully. “You have already spoken your truth. What you speak now is no true belief, but the desperate lie of a creature trying to flee. Tonight you will go to the god—there will be song to celebrate your sacrifice. Pyrre will help you to prepare.”

  The words sounded like a dismissal, and after a moment Pyrre put a steadying hand on Kaden’s shoulder. He shrugged it off, glancing back the way they had come. It wasn’t far to the bridge—maybe a quarter mile—but there would be no fleeing the flat space of the mesa, no escaping or fighting his way free. If he and Triste were going to survive, if the gods inside of them were going to live, he had to persuade this man, and he had to persuade him now, before the knives were sharpened and the fires lit. Kaden’s mind scrambled for purchase. He forced it still, then slid into the vaniate.

  Inside the trance, it was impossible to understand his urgency of moments earlier.

  So we die, he thought. And the gods are torn from this world.

  It hardly seemed a tragedy. Kiel’s warnings about the dangers of the vaniate echoed in the empty space. Kaden considered them, held them up to the light, then put them aside. He studied Gerra’s reclining figure for a moment—the man still hadn’t moved—then shifted his gaze to the mountains. What was the point in waiting for the Skullsworn knives? He could end it all with a few steps, could walk free of all the fear and pain, the running and the rage. It made sense, actually, what the priest had said: Ananshael’s gift was freedom, freedom so perfect, so absolute, it could never be revoked. Triste’s low sob broke into his thoughts, a human sob—regardless of the goddess locked inside her—the sob of someone utterly alone and almost broken. And she, too, will be free, Kaden thought. Ananshael can save her. Triste’s life since arriving at Ashk’lan had been one of unbroken terror and flight, imprisonment and torture. How could death’s annihilation be anything but welcome?

  And then, as though Meshkent could hear his silent thoughts, the god began thrashing, growling: No.

  The word rolled off the slick skin of the vaniate.

  I have seen what you bring to this world, Kaden said silently, and I have seen the clarity of the alternative.

  Pyrre was watching him warily. Kaden ignored her, took another step toward the cliff, then another, until he stood just at the verge. Hawks turned lazily in the hot air below. At the canyon’s bottom, a narrow river gnawed at the stone. Someday, even the mesa would be worn to sand, that sand washed out to the sea. There would be no trace of the place where he stood. No trace of Rassambur or the priests. It was the way of all things.

  “I will make my own offering,” Kaden said quietly, looking down, imagining the wonderful weightlessness of falling, and that other, greater weightlessness of death. “I have no need of your knives.”

  “No.”

  The voice was barely more than a whisper. For a few heartbeats, Kaden couldn’t be sure he had heard it at all, couldn’t be sure that the words had any life outside his own mind. Then it came again.

  “No.”

  Not Meshkent this time, but Triste, pleading.

  “Don’t, Kaden. Please don’t.”

  It was the name that called him back. Strange, that. The Shin had spent years teaching him that the word was not the thing, that a name was just a set of sounds aiming at an ever-shifting truth, aiming and always falling short. The name Kaden was no more him than his breath. It was, like all words, an error, and yet, on Triste’s lips, it called him back.

  I can’t save her, he said silently.

  But you can be there when she dies.

  Whose voice was that? Not Meshkent’s, certainly. Not his own. It was something older than logic, old as his bones, something bred into his very flesh, one last human bond threaded through his thought even when all emotion was scrubbed away, something ineluctable, even inside the blankness of the vaniate, not a voice at all, but the wordless truth of what he was, of what he owed, and slowly, slowly, he let the trance go.<
br />
  Fear came again, a fist clamped around his heart. Meshkent’s ranting fury, so quiet from inside the space of the vaniate, echoed in his mind once more: Free me. Submit and I will crush these worms. I will build a fire inside them that burns for a thousand days before I give them up to their Coward’s God.

  Kaden pushed the words aside.

  “Before I make this offering, however,” he said, “I will pose one question.”

  The Skullsworn priest nodded thoughtfully.

  Kaden glanced down once more, at the emptiness that waited, then raised his eyes.

  “Do you want to kill me?” he asked quietly. “Or do you want to kill the Csestriim?”

  For the first time, Gerra opened his eyes. They were a dark, vegetal green.

  “If you kill us here,” Kaden went on, “or let us go, Ananshael will claim us, and soon. We are human. We will bow to his will this year or the next. The Csestriim, however…”

  He let the words hang as Gerra sat slowly, then turned to face him.

  “The Csestriim are destroyed.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “Is this true?” Gerra asked, turning to Pyrre.

  She shrugged. “There are stories. But there are always stories.”

  “They are not stories,” Kaden said. “I can give you names. Names and a way to find them, fight them.”

  Gerra frowned. “Once already, you have tried to lie your way free of your debt to the god.”

  “And you heard that lie,” Kaden said, matching the man’s gaze. “Listen to me now. The Csestriim walk this world, undying, defying your god’s justice.” He cocked his head to the side. “If I am lying, say the word and I will go to meet your god.”

  For a long time, no one spoke. Wind honed its edge on the stone. Overhead, the sun hung hot and motionless in the blue. After what seemed like years, Gerra nodded.

  “The god’s ways are strange. I will think on this as I pray.”

  “And when your prayers are finished?” Kaden asked.

  Gerra smiled. “Then I will know whether to give you to Ananshael, or whether to listen to your names.”

  * * *

  From the ledge behind the low stone house, Kaden looked out over the mountains scraping the sky to the west. After so many days running, his legs throbbed. Blisters had burst across the soles of both feet, then bled, and then new blisters had formed beneath the ruin of the older skin. Those, too, had burst. He prodded gingerly at the cracked, livid flesh. In the days before Rassambur, there had been no time to consider the pain, no choice but to keep running. Now, with the luxury of stillness, of silence, that pain reasserted itself, aching and burning all at the same time, hurting all the way through to the bruised bone.

  As if in response to the sensation, Meshkent uncoiled, pressed against the boundaries of his cage, testing, testing.

  Free me.

  The words were not words, but something old and alien moving in Kaden’s mind, as though for just a moment he were seeing with someone else’s eyes, or dreaming someone else’s dream. Slowly, methodically, he went over the god’s prison, shoring and securing it, finding the places where it had worn thin—the moments of doubt, the tiny cracks where weariness worked, patient as ice, to bring down the wall—and fixing them.

  No, he replied silently.

  A flash of purple rage.

  These creatures will gut this body if they know you carry me inside.

  Kaden shook his head, as though that made any difference.

  They will not know.

  You risk everything.

  Risk and life are inextricable, Kaden said. Then, How do I perform the obviate?

  For a long time, he waited for a reply, for Meshkent’s awful weight against the walls. Instead, there was only silence, the god motionless as a stone inside his mind. He exhaled slowly, stretched his legs out before him, and began kneading the muscles of his lower back. Far out over the canyons, a pair of black birds he didn’t recognize rode the thermals. It was almost like Ashk’lan, except for the fact that in Ashk’lan, even as a novice, he had never been a prisoner, not quite. He had never lived beneath the open threat of death.

  Not that the Skullsworn had mistreated him or Triste. Quite the contrary, in fact. After the audience with Gerra, Pyrre had shown them to a modest stone house near the very edge of the mesa, a structure like those in which the Skullsworn seemed to live. Inside there were two rooms, two narrow beds, a hearth carved into the sandstone walls, and above it, hanging from hooks, a set of iron pots and pans.

  “Whose home is this?” Triste had asked, eyeing the nondescript space warily.

  “Most recently,” Pyrre replied, “it belonged to two priests: Helten and Chem.”

  “Where are Helten and Chem?”

  “They went to meet the god,” the assassin said, her voice easy, matter of fact. “Yesterday, when we came for you, the Annurians killed them.”

  Kaden had paused inside the doorway, trying to read the woman’s face.

  “Why did they come?”

  “I told them Long Fist was with you. I didn’t realize he had escaped.”

  “Why do the Skullsworn care about Long Fist?” Kaden asked, shaking his head.

  “They wanted to rescue him,” Triste spat. She was glaring around the modest cottage as though it were the darkest dungeon of the Dead Heart. “Priests of death come to rescue the priest of pain so that together they can spread their sick worship over the whole world.”

  Pyrre’s face hardened. “Obviously the brothel where you trained skimped on the theology.”

  “Murder is not theology,” Triste snarled.

  “On the contrary,” Pyrre replied. “As you would know if the whores who raised you cared for anything but coin and pleasure. The Lord of the Grave, my god, is Meshkent’s most ancient foe. In the face of the cat god’s savagery, Ananshael’s justice is our only mercy. We didn’t come—my brothers and sisters and I—to save the Urghul shaman—we came to kill him before he could spread his sickness further.”

  “Sickness?” Triste hissed. “Justice? Mercy? You’re a killer! You’re all murderers. Assassins! Your god is a god of blood and bones, of death and destruction. What justice is that?”

  “The only true justice,” Pyrre replied simply. Her momentary anger seemed to have passed, replaced by an uncharacteristic solemnity. It had seemed to Kaden, since the moment Pyrre arrived at the monastery, that she cared for nothing, not even her own life. Faced with death and defiance, she simply laughed or shrugged. Only now, a year later, had they finally stepped, if inadvertently, on her sacred ground.

  “Where is the justice,” Triste demanded, “in murdering men in their sleep? Where is the justice in killing children? In cutting down the good along with the evil?”

  “Precisely there—Ananshael spares no one. Emperor or orphan, slave or sovereign, priest or prostitute—he comes for us all. Your lady—Ciena—she doles out her pleasures according to her whims. Some live a life of unmitigated bliss while others struggle through their days in pain and agony. Ciena pities some, scorns others; only Ananshael offers up his justice to all. Ciena loves watching those she has spurned writhe in the claws of her love; only the Lord of the Grave can save a soul abandoned to Meshkent.”

  “They are in league,” Triste protested. “In all the songs and stories—”

  Pyrre cut her off. “The songs and stories are wrong. If Meshkent had his way, we would never die. He would hold us over his fires, flay the flesh from our bones, and we would live forever, screaming and bleeding, alert to every inch of his agony. He hates what my god does, hates the escape Ananshael offers, hates the release, the final peace.”

  And this is what I have caged inside me, Kaden thought. This is the being whose survival depends upon my own. For just a moment it seemed he should have stepped from the cliff after all, even if it meant leaving Triste to face the Skullsworn alone.

  Triste, for her part, just stared at Pyrre, mouth agape, then finally mustered her anger once
more.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Pyrre’s old smile crooked the corner of her mouth. “In this, too, Ananshael is just. He offers his boundless shelter even to the unbelievers.”

  And with that pronouncement, the assassin left them. There had been no admonitions, no threats about what would happen if they attempted to escape. Pyrre had taken a moment to point out the pile of wood outside, the vegetables ripening in the small raised beds, then left. Triste stood motionless a moment, wide-eyed and baffled, then cursed, stepped into the other room, and slammed the door behind her. Kaden had debated following, then discarded the idea. He was tired suddenly, viciously tired, but didn’t think that he could sleep, and so he found his way onto the stony ledge behind the house, found himself sitting cross-legged in the way of the Shin, here, thousands of miles from those other, colder mountains where he had grown from a boy into a man. The peaks were different, but the sky was the same, the emptiness of it, the way it deepened as the sun set through azure and indigo to black.

  * * *

  Triste found him just after moonrise. At some point she had taken off her shoes, and her bare feet scuffed quietly over the stone. Kaden started to turn, then stopped himself. Whatever she’d said at the cliff’s edge, Triste hated him, and with good reason. It was not Pyrre’s priesthood that had betrayed her, but Kaden himself, first in the Dead Heart, and then again inside his own palace. If she was here, now, it was because she had nowhere else to go.

  She sat a few paces away. For a long time, they remained silent as the moon climbed through the skein of stars. Behind them somewhere, the Skullsworn were singing in a haunting, polyphonic chorus. The Shin had had their music: low, droning chants, the few notes rough enough to grind away the self. This was entirely different. The twining melodies of the Skullsworn moved between dissonance and resolution, shifting from one register to the next. If the Shin chant had been a music of stone, this was human music, one that marked the passage of time, that anticipated with each aching cadence the inevitability of its own ending.