The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Before Valyn could reply, however, before he could even nod, before the Urghul could kick their horses to a full gallop, a new sound carved the noon sky, slicing through the river’s roar and the cries of the horsemen, paring away the rumble of hooves and the hammering of Valyn’s own heart in his ears, a dagger of scream opening the world’s soft belly. Valyn stiffened, some animal panic older than all conscious thought striking through him, bellowing at him to run, to hide, to find some place where that bright, awful cry could never reach. It was the instinct of mouse and hare, of all small creatures naked beneath the sky, helpless and fleeing, the instinct of all prey when the predator finally arrives. And then, a heartbeat later, over that first instinct, a slower, greater thought: Kettral.

  The Urghul horses pawed at the dirt, shifting unsteadily beneath their riders as the horsemen tried to bring them back under control. Valyn spun, axes in hand, scanning the horizon to the south, searching, searching, and then … there: screaming up the river valley, talons skimming just inches above the frothing water, wings almost wide enough to stretch from bank to bank, a bird, golden as the setting sun, black-eyed, wide-beaked, furious as vengeance itself.

  This, too, the Flea took in stride.

  “Change of plan. Ready for a smash and grab. Valyn, you’re with Newt—use the corpse-carry. Signal we’ve got wounded, need to run the grab at half speed.”

  Valyn didn’t move. The bird was still a mile off, but he could see the figures on the talons, tiny silhouettes against the gray sky behind. Even with his sight, he couldn’t make out the faces, not at that distance, and so, for just a moment, he closed his eyes, found the darkness he had lived inside for so long, and listened. Behind the panicking horses and the cries of their riders, beneath the hiss of the wind and the river’s roar, laid beneath all the sounds of the world, or over them, a voice:

  “… just ignore the fact that the whole fucking Urghul nation came out to play. We make the grab, and we’re gone.…”

  “Holy Hull,” he breathed, eyes shattering open. “Holy fucking Hull. It’s Gwenna.”

  “I told you,” the Flea murmured, bending to lift Sigrid into his arms once more.

  Valyn shook his head. “Told me what?”

  “Back on the Islands, when you were still botching your barrel drops. I told you they’d make a good Wing.”

  * * *

  The Urghul horses were trained for steel and fire, trained to charge a line of infantrymen with pikes, but no one had trained them to face Kettral. At the bird’s deafening approach most reared up so violently that even the Urghul riders struggled to keep their seats.

  “Now!” the Flea growled. “Get to the river. We make the grab there, where the horses can’t follow.”

  Valyn slammed his axes back into his belt, hurled the Aphorist over his shoulder, and ran.

  Only when he’d reached the water, wading out as far into the eddy as he dared go, only when he’d shifted Newt from his back into the corpse-carry position and checked the bird’s angle of attack, did he realize that the Flea and Sigrid hadn’t made it. The horror stuck like a bone in his throat as he spun to find them still halfway up the bank, pinned down, surrounded by riders who had wrestled their mounts back under control. The Flea’s blade was a blur, hacking at the legs of the horses, chopping heads from the thicket of spears. Somehow, impossibly, he was holding the Urghul back, but he only had one hand, he was carrying a soldier who weighed as much as he did, and he was surrounded. Gwenna was coming, coming with the bird, but she was too late.

  Quickly, gently, Valyn lowered the Aphorist into the current.

  “What…,” Newt gasped. He had passed out during the run, come to only when the cold water reached his chest.

  “I’m going back.”

  Even as Valyn started moving toward the bank, slowed by the water as though lost in the depth of nightmare, he knew that he was dead. There were too many Urghul between him and the other Kettral, too many lances and swords. Regardless of the slarn’s strength running through his blood, regardless of his own uncanny speed, there was a weight of steel and horseflesh opposed to which no single soldier could ever hope to stand.

  He felt no fear at the realization. No sorrow. There was only a bright bronze eagerness that tasted strangely like relief. After surviving Adare’s knife and the fall from the tower in Andt-Kyl, he’d gone to the woods, partly because he could see no role for himself in the war, and partly because he was horrified; horrified of what he’d become, of what he’d learned to do, of what he’d done. His blindness had awoken something in the slarn’s poison, something dark and vicious, and he felt certain that if he moved again among men and women he would commit some terrible, irreversible act for which there could be no forgiveness.

  The most recent days with Huutsuu and the Flea had done nothing to diminish that feeling. Valyn could remember his hands wrapped around the Urghul woman’s neck, their naked skin washed in their own blood. In those burning, freezing nights, he’d almost killed her half a dozen times. And then there were the people he had killed, the dozens and dozens of Urghul. That was what he’d trained for. That was war. It wasn’t the killing that frightened him, but the fact that it felt so good.

  It’s time, he thought, breath afire in his throat as he struggled through the shallows. Time to finish all this.

  Maybe he could save Sigrid and the Flea, make just enough of a distraction that Gwenna could lift them free. Maybe he couldn’t. It didn’t seem to matter either way. A roar erupted in his throat, a cry that had been surging up through all the fabric of his flesh since Ha Lin died, rising and growing until it seemed too large for the body that contained it, as though that body had dissolved beneath the pain and the rage, leaving behind a man that was not a man at all, but a scream in the shape of a man, a sob of fury dying to shake free its last mortal bond.

  Then something yanked him back.

  An arm wrapped around his chest, a little weaker than his own but steadier, threaded through with some conviction he had long ago forgotten.

  “Knock it off, you asshole.”

  Gwenna’s voice at his ear, her whole body bent to the simple task of holding him back.

  He strained against her weight, eyes fixed on Sigrid and the Flea. The Urghul were closing around them closer and closer. Of the golden bird, there was no sign. Valyn twisted in Gwenna’s grip, tried to bring his axes to bear, but she just pulled him nearer, her arms so tight around his chest he could barely breathe. Valyn raged against the embrace, but could not break it.

  She was hissing in his ear, snarling the same words over and over. “… another bird. There’s another fucking bird coming, Valyn. Four of them. They’ll save the Flea. We have to go.”

  Of the grab itself he remembered almost nothing, just one barren fact: that when they finally rose into the air, Gwenna’s arm still wrapped around his shoulders, when the hammering of the bird’s great golden wings lifted them up, away from the battle, away from all the danger, it didn’t feel like flight. It felt like dying.

  53

  For a full week, the Skullsworn ignored them almost entirely. A young man or woman arrived each morning with a basket of food—vegetables and cheese, sometimes a piece of smoked meat—and every evening someone came to take the empty basket away. Aside from that, the legendarily vicious priests of Ananshael left Kaden and Triste alone.

  No one had told them to stay in the house, and so, on the second day, after a long, exhausted sleep, Kaden had started limping around the mesa, tentatively at first, then more boldly, wandering the open spaces between the white buildings, exploring the bounds of his open-air prison. The only time anyone stopped him was when he approached the bridge, that one path leading back to the rest of the world. A young woman was on her hands and knees—rag in hand, bucket of soapy water beside her—scouring the stone. She stood up as he drew close, met his eyes, then shook her head.

  “You can’t go over.”

  “Why not?” He knew why, but wanted to hear what sh
e would say.

  “Too dangerous.”

  “I grew up in mountains like these.”

  “Not the mountains. The soldiers. Annurians just beyond our sentries. Dozens of them, and more coming.”

  Kaden looked past her to the rim of the far cliff, a wide ledge backed by a maze of red sandstone glowing with the morning light. He couldn’t see anyone, assassin or soldier, but the crazed rock of the Ancaz, riven with cracks and fissures, offered a thousand places to hide. An entire army could be over there, a few men in this hollow, half a dozen behind the boulder.…

  “Il Tornja’s men are massing?”

  The woman just shrugged, then knelt, returning to her work.

  It didn’t take long for Kaden to find Pyrre. The assassin was leaning against the open doorframe of a large stone barn, enjoying the shade as she watched something inside. As Kaden approached, he realized that there was a fight going on, or something like a fight. A man and a woman circled each other warily, feinting and darting, testing the empty space between them, gazes locked firmly as horns. Both were naked from the waist up, their skin slick with sweat. Neither one, however, seemed to be wielding a weapon. There were no axes, no swords. Their hands weren’t even balled into fists.

  “What are they doing?” Kaden asked quietly.

  Pyrre glanced over at him. “Painting.”

  Kaden squinted in the gloom. As his eyes adjusted, he realized that the hands of the sparring Skullsworn weren’t empty after all. Each seemed to be holding something delicately between the thumb and index finger. Sunlight pouring through the open windows flashed off steel. Needles, slender enough to draw thread through a torn hem.

  “Painting?”

  Pyrre nodded. “We’re short on paper here, but there’s plenty of skin.” She smiled at his confusion, then flipped open the front of her own robe. Tattooed into the sun-dark skin between her breasts was a shape about the length of his thumb, the shading mottled, imperfect. It looked like someone had tried to build an image out of hundreds of tiny dots, then stopped short. Away from the ink’s dense center, those dots splashed out haphazardly, as though the tattoo were dissolving across her skin. He couldn’t quite make out the central shape, but something about the edges and angles tugged at his memory.

  “A desert sparrow,” Pyrre said, reading his confusion. “Similar to some of the birds I saw when I visited your monastery.”

  The words snapped the image into focus. It was a sparrow indeed, although the wings were more hinted at than fully inked.

  “Why?” Kaden asked.

  Pyrre shrugged her robe closed, then cinched the rope belt tighter around her waist. “Ananshael loves their song.” She whistled a long, lilting call, a string of notes that reached toward music but never quite resolved into a tune. “We each have one.” She gestured toward the sparring partners just as the woman feinted, then lunged, pricking the man’s chest with exquisite delicacy. He fell still, smiled, nodded to his opponent. They both crossed to a stone bowl balanced on a window’s sill, dipped their needles into dark ink, then returned to the center of the open floor. Another nod, and they were at it again, circling and testing, lunging and recovering. “It takes years,” Pyrre went on, “to ink the full bird. Longer, for those who are quicker.”

  “And when it’s finished?”

  “We celebrate. There is music and food. At the end of the night, the one with the songbird goes to the god.”

  “You kill the loser?”

  “There are no losers. There are only those who go earlier or later to the god’s embrace.”

  Kaden shook his head. “If the god’s embrace is so sweet, then why all this? Why go through the years of sparring at all?”

  “It’s a way of seeing who has the gift,” Pyrre replied. “The slow or unskilled, those who have grown too old to fight—their priesthood quickly becomes personal.”

  “Meaning you kill them.”

  “Meaning they give willingly of their own lives.”

  “And those of you who are quicker?”

  The assassin winked at him. “We’re around longer. To spread the god’s truth and his justice.”

  Kaden stared at the unfolding fight, but Pyrre had already turned away, stepping from the barn’s cool darkness into the bright sun as though she’d lost all interest in the contest.

  “Il Tornja knows we are here,” Kaden said, following her.

  “Of course he does.”

  “And he’s coming.”

  Pyrre grinned her most wolfish grin. “Of course he is.”

  “He can’t have more than a few dozen men with him.…”

  “There are more coming. Many more. My brothers and sisters killed most of his messengers, but a couple got away.” She stared eastward, as though she could make out those soldiers fleeing over the Dead Salts, toward Mo’ir and whatever reinforcements waited. “I’m looking forward to it, actually. Thousands of sweating young men camped out on the canyon rim just across the bridge. The Annurians aren’t great soldiers, but there’s no denying that all that marching and hauling and drilling—it makes a man fit. Just a shame that your empire won’t allow women in the ranks. A woman’s leg, well toned, is shapelier than a man’s. Still, one makes do.…” She closed her eyes, savored some imagination of the besieging army, then hummed contentedly.

  “Have you forgotten the leach?” Kaden asked. “The one who pulled lightning straight out of the sky? Il Tornja doesn’t need his army. One powerful leach could level Rassambur without stepping foot on the bridge.”

  Pyrre shrugged. “If he has his well. And that’s assuming your brilliant general…”

  “He’s not my general.”

  “… is willing to risk bringing that leach close enough to mount a serious attack. He might be handy with lightning, but he’ll die if someone puts an arrow in his eye. And we spend a lot of time here in Rassambur learning to put arrows in eyes.”

  Kaden exhaled slowly, trying to order his thoughts. “Even if that’s true, we’re trapped as long as we stay here, and the trap is only going to get tighter. If we’re going to get out, we need to get out now. Have you talked to Gerra?”

  “Gerra will decide what he decides in his own time,” Pyrre said, then cocked her head to one side, studying him. “I don’t remember you being so afraid, Kaden. The last time, back in those miserably frigid mountains of yours, there were moments when you seemed almost … calm. Where did that go?”

  “Last time, there wasn’t as much to be afraid of.”

  It was a weak response, and it did next to nothing to quench the question in the assassin’s eyes. And yet, what else could he say? There was no explaining the god locked inside of him, raging and thrashing by day and night, no explaining the nihilistic temptations of the vaniate, no explaining that the trance had become more dangerous than the panic it replaced. Revealing any corner of the truth to Pyrre would see him dead—that much was clear. If she knew he bore the god she loathed inside his flesh, she’d cut him and the god to bloody shreds.

  Maybe that would be best.

  All over again he felt the doubt, a thick tide rising inside him. He turned away before the assassin could see it in his eyes.

  * * *

  It was night, and Meshkent was awake, raging in the back of Kaden’s mind. More and more, he was learning to keep the god kenneled, to mute the endless demands for freedom and power, tamping them down until the voice was almost as incoherent as the wind over stone—constant and cold, but meaningless. Even when Kaden could ignore those words, however, he could feel the god there, a blight, a rabid creature that needed to be put down. All that fight, the clawing and the biting, it was the opposite of what il Tornja had described, and once again the kenarang’s words drifted across Kaden’s thoughts: The beauty of a life lived free, unenslaved by brutish passions …

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Kaden turned to find Triste’s slender shadow framed inside the door to the stone house. After a heartbeat’s hesitation, she stepped out onto th
e ledge. Moonlight glinted off her eyes, off a belt knife she held before her, clutching it tentatively in one hand. For just a moment, he had the ridiculous notion that she had come outside to kill him, to plunge that meager weapon into his heart. The thought aroused more curiosity than fear.

  All human life ends somehow, he thought.

  As Triste crossed the stone to sit beside him, however, he realized she carried a lobe of sugar cactus in her other hand. The knife was a tool, not a weapon, and for a while the only sound was the wet slice of the steel through the vegetable’s flesh.

  “Here,” she said finally, offering him a slice.

  Give yourself to me, Meshkent hissed silently, something inside the god responding to another human voice, and I will tear this hovel down.

  Be silent, Kaden replied. You are a sickness. A plague.

  These priests have fattened you on lies.…

  BE SILENT!

  The god went suddenly, utterly still. Kaden stared down into the pit he had built to pen in the divine, tried to keep his balance as he studied the mind inside his mind.

  There was a knife-edge ridge back in the Bone Mountains, a mile-long razor of stone connecting two peaks. From time to time, the monks ordered their older acolytes to traverse the ridge—it was an exercise, among other things, about holding fear in check. There was no easy way to move over the rock; in most places it was almost impossible simply to walk along it. One gust of wind could tumble you into the abyss on either side. Kaden remembered it all in perfect frozen detail, holding the cold granite of the ridgetop, moving hand over hand as he searched for footholds in the steep walls. Sometimes the easiest passage was on the west side of the ridge, sometimes on the east. To get to the end, you had to keep switching, climbing back and forth over that jagged knife-edge, knowing that a slip on either side would mean the end.

  Yes, it was an exercise about the controlling of fear, but Kaden had begun to suspect that, like most tasks the monks assigned their pupils, it was more than that. There was no safe place on that ridgeline. No flat ground where a boy could stop and rest. The only hope was in constant movement, constant change, climbing back and forth over that frigid stone, the fathoms of unforgiving air spread out below.