The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  His own mind felt like that ridgeline now. If he stumbled too far to one side, Meshkent would seize him; if he slipped to the other, he would fall into the vaniate. The mind of the god and the emptiness of the Csestriim trance were each an abyss: enormous, endless, stretching to the very edge of thought. His self, on the other hand, the part of him that still felt like him, was no more than that narrow ridge, the stone rough in his hands, and crumbling.

  Submit to me, Meshkent growled, his voice somehow impossibly distant and right inside the ear at the same time.

  No.

  Grimly, Kaden shifted across the ridgeline away from the god. The vaniate beckoned beneath his feet. It seemed impossible that he had ever not known how to enter that emptiness. It was as easy as falling.

  “What does it feel like?”

  Triste’s words jerked him free of his mind’s vertiginous ridge. Kaden turned to find her staring at him, eyes wide but hard in the darkness.

  “The god?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “It feels…,” he searched for the words, “like a great weight, a madness heavy as lead.” He hesitated. “I can hear him.”

  Triste leaned forward slightly, as though Meshkent’s commands might carry on the air, as though his words were something she might hear if she drew close enough. “What does it sound like?”

  Kaden shook his head, trying to find the right language. Failing. After a while he shifted to face Triste—he couldn’t say why—mirroring her cross-legged pose with his own. He felt carved out, hollowed by the running and the fighting and the lying. Suddenly, it was all he could do to sit upright.

  “It sounds like Long Fist,” he said at last. “Not the actual timbre of the voice…,” he struggled for the words, “but the force.”

  Tears slicked Triste’s eyes, as though someone had smeared moonlight across her cheeks. “At least you can hear him. Talk to him.”

  Kaden shook his head. “He thought he would inhabit me the way he had that Urghul. He almost succeeded.…”

  Triste watched him in silence for a long time.

  “And…,” she prodded finally.

  “And he couldn’t. The Shin taught me just enough.”

  “Enough what?”

  “Enough to control my mind. Divide it. Evacuate a space, seal it off.”

  “But I don’t know any of that,” Triste protested. “And Ciena’s trapped inside me just the same way.”

  Kaden shook his head again. “I don’t know, Triste. I don’t understand it. I can barely articulate what’s happening to me.”

  “Did he tell you…,” Triste asked tentatively. “The obviate…”

  Kaden just shook his head.

  For a while they sat in silence. Voices rose in the center of the mesa, laughing, then falling away. Kaden glanced over at the house, the cottage of two dead men that had become their prison. There was a time when he would have been thinking, scheming, trying to find some way out. He remembered that old, animal urgency. Remembered it—but couldn’t feel it. For the first time, the old Shin expression made sense: You live in your mind. The two of them might be trapped inside Rassambur, but they would have no more freedom, no true freedom, even if they wandered alone through the most remote valleys of the Bone Mountains. The mind was the cage, and there was no escaping it. Not without dying.

  “Why haven’t you killed her?” he asked, looking over at Triste again.

  The girl raised a hand to her chest, as though she felt something moving there, something she didn’t recognize. The Skullsworn had provided them with desert robes not unlike those worn by the Shin, but Triste hadn’t changed out of the simple pants and tunic she’d been wearing when he found her days earlier. He could see the scars running the length of her arm; they looked silver in the moonlight, almost beautiful. Her fingernails had grown back—the ones that Ekhard Matol had torn away—but they were ridged and ragged. Some things, once broken, could never be fully fixed.

  Her face hardened at the question. “I won’t…”

  “I don’t mean the obviate,” Kaden said, raising a hand to forestall her. “That would save her, not hurt her. But if you don’t go back to the Spear, if you don’t perform the ritual, you can destroy Ciena, or damage her so badly she will never touch this world again.”

  “Only by killing myself.”

  Kaden shrugged. It seemed a trivial objection. “You’re going to die anyway. We all are. If you hate the goddess so much, you can take her with you.” He paused, turning the next proposition over in his mind before he made it. “We could kill them both.”

  Triste stared at him, lips parted. “What happened to saving everyone? To defeating the Csestriim and preserving humanity? That’s why you kept me locked up in your Spear in the first place, right? That’s why you came after me when I escaped. All you cared about was the obviate, to get your goddess out, let her free, to rescue her, and to Hull with the carcass you left behind.…”

  She trailed off, breathless, chest heaving.

  “Maybe I cared about the wrong thing,” Kaden replied quietly. “I keep thinking about what we’ve seen—the Annurians slaughtering the monks back in Ashk’lan; the Ishien in the Dead Heart; Adiv and your mother; the conspirators that helped to overthrow the empire; Adare, who murdered Valyn, then lied to me about it.… Why would we want to preserve that? Why would we want to save any of it?”

  “I don’t,” Triste said. “I’m not trying to save the goddess or your ’Kent-kissing empire. It can all burn. I’ll set fire to it myself.…”

  “We can do that,” Kaden said.

  Meshkent roared in the chasm of his mind. Kaden stared down into the bottomless emptiness of the vaniate. It would be so easy to fall. He gestured from Triste toward the real cliff’s edge, the verge of Rassambur’s sheer-walled mesa, just a dozen paces away. “We can end it right here.”

  When Triste finally replied, her voice was small, lost. “I don’t want to die.”

  Kaden stared at her. She had come so close so many times already. “Why not?”

  She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

  “There is only more of this, Triste. More hiding, more hunger, more torture.”

  “We might get out. We might escape.”

  Kaden shook his head wearily. “It doesn’t matter. Rassambur isn’t the prison.” He tapped a finger against the side of his skull. “This is.”

  Her lips twisted back. She looked as though she were getting ready to leap on him, to rip out his throat with her teeth, only she didn’t move. The sound, when it came, wasn’t a scream, but a hopeless sob. He watched her, watched her shoulders heave, studied her perfect, mutilated body as it convulsed with grief.

  “This is what I mean,” he said quietly.

  She didn’t reply. Just shielded her face with her hands.

  “How can this,” he gestured to her with one hand, “be right? Long Fist told me, before we came after you, that this is what we are for, but how can that be true?” He cocked his head to the side. “You are like a fish pulled from the water. This struggle, this suffering—you can’t breathe it. None of us can.”

  Slowly Triste raised her head. Tangles of black hair fell across her face, but her eyes were fixed on him, steady, even as that unnamed grief continued to wrack her body. Meshkent shifted inside Kaden’s mind as though he felt the girl’s suffering, as though he were feeding off it.

  “There is more,” Triste said quietly, her voice like something torn apart. The tears still coursed down her cheeks, but she made no move to scrub them away.

  “More what?”

  “More to…” She gestured helplessly to him, to herself. “To this. To us. To life.”

  “That’s the cruelest part of it,” Kaden replied. “That belief. That hope. It’s worse than all Meshkent’s agonies. That’s what keeps us here; it’s what makes us accept our suffering. The young gods aren’t just the children of Ciena and Meshkent; they are their generals, the keepers of their jails.” He shook h
is head at the memory of Long Fist sitting across the fire from him in a hide tent in the Waist. “He said we were instruments. We are slaves.”

  He rose slowly to his feet, muscles and bones protesting. More of Meshkent’s work there. He scrutinized that pain a moment, then set it aside. They lived in a world twisted by the god, but now the god himself was trapped. Kaden lifted Triste’s belt knife from the stone. The blade was barely three inches long, and somewhat dull, but it would do. Bedisa wove the souls of living beings so weakly into their bodies.…

  He placed the point against the inside of his arm, dragged the notched steel over his skin. Meshkent hissed and twisted. Kaden turned away from the god, studying the dark blood welling up behind the blade. Pain came with the blood, bright and hot.

  That pain is there to stop me, he thought. That, and the hope, and the fear.

  All his human feelings, just a fence, a wall built by the gods to keep their precious chattel penned.

  Such a meager fence.

  Meshkent was raging now, bellowing, his demands all tangled up with his defiance. It didn’t matter, the god was on the far side of the ridge, caught deep in a chasm he could not escape. If Kaden dropped into the vaniate once more there would be no climbing free, not this time. Kiel had been warning him about that for months, but Kiel was wrong. How could the Csestriim understand how badly humanity was broken, how desperately in need of salvation?

  The walking away. That was what the monks called that passage, the departure from the world of human need into a more perfect world of sky, and snow, and stone. They were wrong, too. The walking was secondary, unnecessary. All that was necessary was the letting go. Kaden considered the shape of his mind, that narrow knife of stone stretching on endlessly into the clouds. He felt his grip slipping. He smiled, and let go.

  The vaniate closed around him, endless and unsullied. It seemed impossible, inside that emptiness, that he had ever considered the haphazard construction of flesh and blood his self. He looked at the knife, at where the blade’s point opened the skin of his arm. He’d fought so hard to preserve his carcass, and for what? The Shin had thrown open the door to his cage, and he had slammed it closed again, had hung against the bars, refusing to be set free.

  It’s so easy. Easier than breathing.

  Meshkent roared. The sound meant nothing.

  Then Triste closed her hand over his wrist, pulling the knife away.

  “What are you doing?”

  Kaden turned to her, confused. “I’m leaving.…” He gestured to the slash along his skin.

  “You can’t,” she snarled, face a rictus of fear and confusion.

  “Triste,” he said quietly. “You don’t understand. Everything you’re feeling now—you don’t have to feel it. You’re not supposed to. You’re a sick woman insisting on the beauty of your sickness.” He smiled at her. “We can be well. Whole.”

  He tried to go back to his work, but she had him by the wrist. Her fingers felt like steel.

  “Let me go, Triste.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “All of this, everything wrong in my fucking life, happened because of you, and you are not leaving me here alone.”

  He smiled. “I won’t leave you. We can both be done with this.” With his free hand, he ran a finger along her neck. Her skin was smooth as cream. Something stirred inside him, some spasm of the beast he had been. He crushed it. “You’re trapped,” he said, tracing a line down to her heart. He could feel it slamming against her chest. “You don’t have to be.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  Kaden shook his head. Blood slicked his arm, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to cut deeper, further.

  “Let me go, Triste.”

  “I already told you—you are not fucking leaving me, you bastard.”

  She pivoted as she spoke, twisted his wrist so viciously that the knife fell free and then, he, too, was falling.

  So strong, he thought vaguely. Even on that first night in Ashk’lan, when she was waiting for him naked in his bed, Triste had always been so strong.

  He landed hard, the stone bruising his hip, then jarring his skull as it struck. For a few heartbeats, he reeled, dizzy, confused, the vaniate swaying around him. Pain blazed outside the trance, in his arm, in the back of his head, but he was free of the pain, if only …

  “Stop it!” Triste screamed. She hit him across the face. “Don’t you fucking retreat into your private trance. You’re not leaving me here.” She hit him again. “YOU ARE NOT LEAVING ME.” Her breath was ripped and ragged. Her body shuddered with the terror and the strain. “I won’t let you. I won’t let you.” Tears soaked her face, matting her hair to her brow and cheeks in scribbled tangles. She was a vision of suffering, of madness, of everything that was wrong with what they had become.

  The Csestriim were right, Kaden thought.

  And then she stopped shouting. Stopped moving entirely. He could feel her weight on top of him, suddenly still and steady. Only her chest rose and fell as her lungs struggled to drag in more air. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper, quiet, composed, but hard as carved stone.

  “I won’t let you leave me alone with this.”

  “Triste…,” he began again.

  She shook her head. She was still crying, but her eyes were defiant, the way he remembered them. Strong. She leaned in, down, and pressed her lips to his.

  It was harder than he expected to pull away. “You hate me, Triste.”

  “I do,” she whispered.

  “I betrayed you.”

  “You betrayed me, and you gave me away. And do you think that absolves you now? It doesn’t. Just this one time, Kaden, this last time, I’m not begging you, I’m telling you, I’m demanding this of you: don’t.”

  Her eyes were wide as moons, bright, violent, violet, shifting with the light reflected from his own burning gaze. Her weight was like the whole warm night laid on top of him.

  “Every choice that you have made was wrong,” she whispered. “I am finished doing things your way.”

  The second kiss didn’t pull him from the vaniate, not right away, but if the trance was a bottomless well into which he had been falling, Triste’s touch was a hook lodged in his mind, arresting his fall, holding him spinning in the emptiness. And then, with a horrible, ineluctable slowness, pulling him up.

  The monks had trained Kaden to be hit. They had trained him to sit in the snow for hours on end. They had trained him to haul stones until his hands bled, to starve, to suffer, and then to step outside that suffering. They had trained him for every manner of austerity to which the flesh could be subjected. They had not trained him for this.

  He managed to pull away for a half a heartbeat.

  “Triste…” The word scraped out. There were no others.

  Her hands were cradling the back of his head, her chest pressed against his chest, her tongue running over his teeth. It was how she’d killed Ekhard Matol, pinning him against the kenta with her meager weight, then breaking him apart limb by limb. Only that hadn’t been Triste. That had been Ciena.

  When Kaden looked into the eyes of the woman who held him now, there was no sign of the goddess. There was only the woman, strong, furious, determined, pressing herself into him, tearing at his shirt, sliding her hands over his chest. He opened his arms, pulled her toward him, and woke from the vaniate.

  The beast brain. That was what the monks called all the myriad impulses of the flesh: rage and hunger, fear and eagerness and lust. For all their warnings, Kaden had never really known its strength.

  He slid his hands up Triste’s back, over the ridges of her scarred skin, then pulled her light shirt up over her head. She twisted to help, hurled the shirt free, then was on him again, skin sliding over skin, firm and smooth.

  Triste’s breath came hot through her parted lips. “Suffering is not everything.”

  Kaden kissed her, then kissed her again. Then again.

  “The monks were
wrong,” he whispered finally, his own words a revelation. “Il Tornja was wrong.”

  “Of course they were, you idiot. Of course they were fucking wrong.”

  They spent the night discovering just how wrong, clutching each other, whispering things they barely understood, finding something painful and perfect in the places where their skin touched, something old and undeniable, a truth that both had heard a hundred times but neither one had known, all while the desert moon slid down the sky, and the million stars, shivering and indifferent, burned their holes into the night.

  54

  Gwenna could still remember the day she’d fallen in love with Valyn. Or maybe love wasn’t the right word—she was only twelve at the time—but whatever it was had hit her like a sack of bricks to the gut.

  Every year there was a smallboat race around Qarsh. Vets went up against vets, and the cadets had their own division. Gwenna had never been much for sailing; the wind always seemed to be blowing the wrong way, and she’d been hit in the head by a swinging boom one too many times. Still, a race was a race, and she’d be shipped to ’Shael if she sat it out on the beach while the other cadets got all wet and beat up. There was a young soldier named Gelly. The girl wasn’t much with a blade or a bow—she washed out long before the Trial—but she could handle a boat, and so Gwenna went looking for her a month before the race.

  “We’re a team,” she said.

  Gelly had looked at her, uncertainty painted across her face. “We…”

  “The boat race,” Gwenna snapped. “You want in?”

  The girl nodded hesitantly.

  “Good,” Gwenna said gruffly. “And just so we’re on the same page, I don’t give a pickled shit if we win. I just want to beat Sami Yurl and that Malkeenian.”

  Gwenna had lumped them together, back then. Yurl and Valyn were both rich, both nobility, and even the unending rigors of Kettral training hadn’t yet managed to wash the stink of privilege off either of them. Everything about Valyn irritated Gwenna—the way he spoke, the way he addressed himself to the other cadets, even the way he sat in the mess hall, that royal spine of his just a little too straight. Unfortunately, he was a good sailor, better than Gwenna. Hence the need for Gelly.