The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  When Kaden finally glanced over at Triste, he realized she was crying silently, her tears bright in the moonlight. She didn’t meet his eyes.

  “It’s not fair,” she whispered. “It’s not fucking fair.”

  Whether she meant their new imprisonment, or the god inside her, or Kaden’s presence at her side, he couldn’t say. Probably all of it. He searched for something to say, some explanation for everything he had done and not done. He found none.

  “I’m sorry,” he said instead. The words were weak as the night breeze, but of all the language in the world, that single phrase was the only one that seemed true.

  Triste shook her head.

  “Maybe we should let them do it,” she said. “The Skullsworn. Let them kill us and just be done with it.”

  Kaden studied her face. “That’s the first time I’ve heard you talk of giving up.”

  “What am I fighting for?” The words were bitter but quiet, the fire finally burned out. “For this?” She gestured to the stone and sky. “For this?” To her own scarred skin. “That heartless Skullsworn bitch is right about one thing, at least—when Meshkent gets you in his grip, he doesn’t let go.”

  “You came a long way just to die.”

  “So did you,” she replied. “We could have just stayed in the tent. Back at your monastery. Could have let Micijah Ut cut us apart with his broad blade.”

  “It would have saved a lot of running,” Kaden agreed.

  “It would have saved a lot of everything.” Triste shook her head. “How many people died, do you think, because of what we did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And for what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Triste glanced over at him at last.

  “You never told me,” she said finally, “why you went back to Annur in the first place.”

  Kaden turned from the sky’s dark gulf to look at her. “I almost didn’t go back. Valyn talked me into it, at least partly.” He shook his head. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “The right thing to do was to fight men you’d never met over a throne you had no skill to sit on?”

  For a long time, Kaden didn’t reply. In the starlight, he could make out little more than her eyes, two glinting points half hidden behind the tangle of black hair. Night hid the scars that the Ishien had carved into her skin, hid the drugged glaze of her eyes and the wary distance in that stare. Sitting a pace away from her in the darkness, it was easy to imagine he faced the same girl who had arrived in Ashk’lan a year earlier. Triste had been baffled then, even more terrified than Kaden himself, but she’d been … alive, afire with determination and, even more unlikely for a girl stolen from her mother and dragged across a continent to serve as an emperor’s slave, hope.

  Kaden remembered her facing down Pyrre Lakatur just after the assassin murdered Phirum Prumm. Who are you? Triste had demanded of the woman. Who are you to decide which people get to live or die? He remembered the way she had run through the mountains, keeping pace with the monks. She’d been pulling strength from the goddess inside her, of course, but the pain she’d suffered had been her own. Her goddess hadn’t spared her the ache in her legs, hadn’t spared her those bloody, shredded feet. And even beaten up like that, she’d played her part in the plan that saved them all, facing the traitorous Kettral and the leach who had stolen her from her home.

  It was the Ishien who had hacked the hope out of her, but not just the Ishien. Triste had still had some fight, some hope, some fire when they returned to Annur. It was Kaden himself who had taken that from her, taken it when he told her the truth about her mother and father, and then again, when he gave her up to the dungeon inside Intarra’s Spear. Whatever harm the Ishien had done he had more than matched. The girl had endured the violence of her enemies; it was the violence of her supposed friends that had shattered her spirit.

  “Habit,” he said finally, quoting the Shin, “is a chain to bind ten thousand men.”

  Triste broke a piece of stone from the ledge, rolled it in her hand a moment, then hurled it over the cliff. It fell into endless silence, as though the chasm before them had no bottom.

  “You weren’t in the habit of sitting on a throne,” she said. “Not back then. When I first met you, you seemed…” She trailed off, shaking her head.

  “There are habits of action and habits of thought. I never sat the throne, but I thought Annur needed an emperor. I thought the world needed Annur. For centuries the Malkeenians ruled, and I inherited that thought, too. The monks tried to teach me to set those habits of mind aside. I failed.”

  “I wish the monks had taught me that,” Triste murmured. “I grew up believing my mother loved me.” She had balled her hands into fists, clenched them to her chest as though she were holding something invisible and precious. Her body trembled.

  “Maybe she did.”

  “She gave me to him,” she hissed. “To Adiv. She gave me away.” The words dropped off, as though the thought of her betrayal had torn them from her. Then she exhaled, a long, shuddering breath. “Your monks were right. Our habits hurt us. They’re like blades we hold willingly to our own breasts.”

  For the first time since fleeing the oasis, Kaden allowed himself to think about Rampuri Tan. All over again he watched as the old monk, the broken bones inside his body grating against one another, raised that gleaming naczal to strike the final blow. Tan, who had helped to save him from the Annurian ambush, who taught him the vaniate, who stayed behind in the Dead Heart so that Kaden could escape; Tan, who had trained in the vicious ways of the Ishien for so many years and yet still found his way free. Even Tan, with that hard, level gaze, that mind of stone, had, in his final days, seen the world askew.

  A mind of stone. Kaden pondered the notion. It seemed apt. The mind, any mind, was like the land, the mesas and mountains, all that stone shaped moment by immeasurable moment, sculpted imperceptibly by the winds and rivers, the innumerable drops of rain, unable, in the end, to escape the logic of its own geology.

  After a long silence, Kaden shook his head slowly. “The Shin were right about a lot of things, especially when it came to snuffing out, scrubbing clean, carving away.” He turned from Triste to stare into the nothingness. “The monks told me a lot about what to destroy,” he went on after a while. “The question they never answered, though, was this: when you scrub it all out, the fear and hope, the anger and despair, all the thousands of habits of thought—what’s left?”

  Triste didn’t respond. The chorus behind them rose and fell, rose and fell like the wind. When he finally looked over at her, she was watching him. Her words, when she spoke, were thin as the wind. “Why does there need to be something left?”

  It was the sort of answer Scial Nin would have given, a question for a question. For all the abbot’s years and wisdom, however, he had never been forced to live the annihilation of all that he believed. Triste had.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, Kaden made a decision.

  “The god is inside me,” he said simply.

  Triste stared at him, eyes wide, lips parted. “Meshkent.” She only whispered the word, but so fervently it sounded half a prayer, half a curse.

  Kaden nodded. “It happened just before Long Fist died. I don’t…” He tried to put into language what he had done to save the god, to chain him. “I don’t know how it happened. Not exactly.”

  It should have seemed an outlandish claim, something utterly insane. It would have, probably, to anyone else, to anyone who had not lived with her own divinity locked inside her flesh.

  “I’m sorry,” Triste said. The words seemed pulled from her, torn from her throat with a hook.

  “I suppose I deserve it. After everything.”

  “No one deserves it.”

  The Shin aphorism came unbidden to Kaden’s lips. “There is only what is.”

  The Skullsworn chorus had fallen silent at last. Quiet crouched between Kaden and Triste like a dangerous beast.
r />   “But that means…,” she said at last. “If you want him to survive.…”

  Again, Kaden nodded. “The obviate.”

  Her face hardened. “I won’t do it. I won’t be shamed into it. I don’t fucking care what you do.…”

  “Triste,” Kaden said. It felt like they were floating on a scrap of stone in a great void. She trailed off, as though the sound of her own name were a leach’s kenning. Kaden spread his hands. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?” she asked warily.

  The thought was almost too big to put into words. “The whole thing,” he said finally. “The whole thing I’ve been fighting for. Defeating il Tornja. Saving these gods. Keeping our race alive … Why?”

  She stared. His question was no more than an echo to her own, but there was something awful in hearing your own doubt and despair spoken back aloud. Maybe silence was the only answer, but Kaden felt drawn to force the rest into words, to speak it all at least this one time.

  “I thought we should be saved, that humanity should be saved, that we were worth saving, but that was just a habit. Just a hope.”

  “Like everything else,” Triste whispered.

  Kaden nodded. “What if it’s wrong?”

  50

  Chilten, whose missing top front tooth caused him to whistle when he spoke.

  Jal, whose voice was high as a little girl’s, but who took his ribbing from the other men and sang the songs of his hillside village anyway each evening before they slept.

  Yemmer, who fought with two swords.

  Sander, who could throw a head-sized chunk of rubble farther than any of the others.

  Fent, who laughed in the middle of each day’s battle, but sobbed all night in his sleep.

  Dumb Tom, who could work any numbers in his head, who tallied up the dead each night, figured the odds, ran the betting books.

  Ho Chan, who knew how to set traps in the crumbling fort for the rats that they roasted every night.

  Belton, whose voice broke after two straight days of shouting orders.

  Brynt, who pissed himself each morning at the first Urghul horns.

  Ariq, who couldn’t stop talking about the town where he grew up, the palms around the tiny lake, the way the moon looked closer there somehow.

  Kel, who cut the ears from the Urghul dead, then threaded them on a leather thong that he wore around his neck.

  Gruin the Brick, who was as wide as he was tall and knew three hundred Kreshkan poems by heart.

  After four days fighting the Urghul from the top of Mierten’s crumbling wall, these were the last of the legionaries left.

  Four days. It seemed too little time to know a man, but Valyn found, as the sun’s bloody rim dipped beneath the western hills, that he did know these twelve. Not all the little facts of their lives, obviously, but what use were those facts? Maybe somewhere else, hundreds of miles from any war, knowing a person might mean something different. Among other people—farmers, say, or merchants, or fishermen—all those tiny details accrued over a lifetime—the names of parents and pets, stories of drunken antics and earnest grief, tales of broken bones and broken hearts—they might actually matter. Not here atop the wall. Not with Ananshael sitting silently in the darkness beyond their fires, patient, inescapable.

  The warrior had a different way of knowing. Death was always coming, always ready to obliterate the piles of facts that elsewhere in the world might constitute a life. What mattered wasn’t a record of the days lived, but something more immediate and fleeting: the pitch of a scream, the shape of a bloody grin, the timbre of a prayer. It was as though, if you paid attention, if you looked at the person just right, you could see an entire life in the smallest detail, could find everything that mattered in a single act.

  Had they been somewhere else, Valyn would have loathed some of the soldiers, liked others. Here, atop the wall, those words—loathed, liked—seemed stupid, pointless. Could you really hate a man who stood at your side, his face bathed in sweat, his spear bloody from having saved you over and over? Could you like him? The words just didn’t apply. They were for another world, one where women and men could afford to choose their friends, where you could walk away because of something someone said or did. By the end of the fourth day on the wall, they were, all of them, beyond any walking away, beyond running or fleeing, beyond any judgment that was not uttered in blood.

  It was amazing they had lived that long.

  It was one thing to hear the Urghul army, to smell it on the northern wind, another thing entirely to see it flowing over the churned-up earth, thousands upon thousands of riders, lances stabbed up into the sky, hair flowing out behind them as they charged the wall again, and again, and again. All during that first day, Valyn expected his sight to fail, to go suddenly dark as it always had before. It remained; in fact, it sharpened, until he could see every scar on the faces of the charging horsemen. In the long months of his blindness, Valyn had forgotten what it was to see, how the world was full to bursting with shape and movement, packed from dirt to sky the long length of the horizon. It was dizzying watching the horsemen wheel and turn with each attack, all those riders shifting like the tide.

  The Urghul would have finished the battle instantly but for one simple fact: Balendin was gone. After the botched attack on the hill, he had vanished utterly from the field of battle. When the leach remained absent for a second day, a few of the legionaries ventured to suggest that he might have been killed by the explosion after all, a notion the Flea flatly dismissed: He’s alive, the Wing commander said, and we’ll have to fight him again. Just be glad the fight’s even for now.

  Even wasn’t the word Valyn would have chosen.

  Leach or no leach, the Urghul numbered in the tens of thousands, taabe and ksaabe, the women every bit as hard, as vicious as the men, each with a bow and spear, each with a handful of remounts. They came against the wall from before dawn until after dusk every day, retiring only when the sky was so dark that any charge would risk the horses’ legs. There was no nuance to the attacks, no scheming or subtlety. They galloped along the wall, stood on the backs of their mounts, and then leapt screaming onto the battlements where the legionaries scrambled to cut them down.

  “It makes no sense,” Valyn said to Huutsuu after the Urghul had retreated for the second day. “They could be building siege engines.” He gestured to the forest. “There’s enough trees to build a thousand catapults, trebuchets, ballistae. Instead of dying on the wall, they could be lounging a hundred paces away and pounding us into oblivion.”

  Huutsuu watched the retreating riders in silence. When she finally turned to face him, her eyes blazed with reflected starlight. When she spoke, every word was stitched with scorn.

  “Whatever hardening you have had, you still think like an Annurian.”

  “If your people thought more like Annurians, they would have taken the wall already, and less of them would be dead.”

  “War is not a matter of the taking of walls.”

  “They’ve been trying hard enough to get on top of this one.”

  “What matters is the way it is claimed.”

  Valyn glanced over the edge of the wall at the carnage below. Some of the corpses—those that had fallen near the day’s end—were almost undisturbed. There might be an arm missing, or a gash across the collar, but they still looked like people, men and women who, but for a rent in their flesh, might still stand up, stumble away. The other bodies, the older ones, were worse. Days of battle had ground them into the mud. Hundreds of hooves had shattered skulls, pulped flesh, annihilated almost all that had been human. Crows were at these older carcasses, finishing the work. Valyn shook his head. “You want to claim it’s good to lose a thousand riders in the fight? Two thousand?”

  “Better that,” Huutsuu replied, “than to sit a hundred paces distant, to hide behind machines, to risk nothing while the enemy dies. This is not war; it is killing.”

  “As though the Urghul have respect for human
life. I’ve been among your people, Huutsuu. I’ve seen what you do.”

  She raised her brows. Valyn studied her; he had not had the opportunity to watch a human face, to really see one for so long. “And what is it, Malkeenian, that you have seen?”

  “The men and women you’ve murdered, torn apart. The blood.”

  “And you,” she pressed, cocking her head to one side, “have not done this? You have not spilled blood?”

  “Of course I have,” he said. The memory of the day’s fighting coursed through his mind, the perfect clarity of it, the life burning in his veins as he raised the ax and brought it down. “That doesn’t make it right.”

  “There is a sacred way of war,” Huutsuu said, “and a profane. I turned against my people, turned against the leach, because there is no struggle in the blood he spills. Like your generals with their engines, he risks nothing with his slaughter.” She raised an eyebrow. “Is this not the way you were raised? The way you were trained?”

  “It’s what makes sense,” Valyn ground out. “War’s plenty dangerous even without the idiotic stunts.”

  The Urghul woman shook her head. “Your way of war is a pale, ugly thing. A perversion. You call yourselves civilized, and yet look at the things you fight for: borders, power, wealth…”

  “As opposed to what?”

  “As opposed to nothing. The war itself is worship.”

  “A sick sort of worship.”

  “Sicker than killing a woman because she stepped across an invisible line you have drawn across the dirt? Sicker than burning a man because he took some gem, some brick of gold, from another man?”

  “Justice,” Valyn said. The word felt brittle as a dead bird’s bone. “The law…”

  Huutsuu waved his objection away. “There is only the struggle. You know this, Malkeenian. You have seen it, lived it. Forget your justice and your law; what is real is the struggle between person and person. The struggle that takes place inside a bloody heart.” Her smile was sharp as an ax’s edge. “This is why you can see, Malkeenian. You may deny this truth, but you have understood its sanctity.”