The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Your choice,” he whispered, leaning forward until his mouth was just beside her ear. “Silence, or death.”

  * * *

  “Where is Kaden?”

  Adare’s only response was to twist awkwardly, tossing her head from side to side in a pointless effort to throw off the hood.

  “Don’t bother,” Valyn said. “It won’t come off. And don’t bother screaming—we’re in the storm drain two dozen paces below the streets.”

  That had been the trickiest part of the whole grab. The munitions were ready to hand, and the hood, but it had taken Valyn the better part of the preceding night to find a quick route from the street where he’d kidnapped his sister to someplace he could safely interrogate her. The narrow tunnel into which he’d brought her was barely high enough to stand up straight. A few inches of filthy water trickled over his boots, draining away toward one of the canals. Dark stains, the high-water marks of earlier storms, ran along the walls. It wasn’t the perfect place—there was always the chance they’d stumble across a handful of vagrants, men and women desperate enough to make a home out of the drain during the dry season—but then, nothing was perfect. Most people he could frighten off, and anyone he couldn’t frighten, he could kill. Besides, he didn’t expect to need a lot of time.

  “Who are you?” Adare demanded, her voice high, strident. “What do you want?”

  “I want to know where Kaden is,” he said again. “Did you kill him?”

  Adare turned her head back and forth, more slowly this time, as though she could see anything in the darkness. The rank red scent of thorny panic poured off her, along with a confusion that reeked of rancid oil, both smells so thick it was a wonder she hadn’t cracked already.

  If only you’d been weak, he thought grimly.

  “They’ll be searching for me,” she said. “People will be looking.…”

  “They’ll be following your horse. Which is at least a mile off by now.”

  “They’ll double back.…”

  He nodded. “In time to find you dead.”

  Adare went perfectly still, as though she were only now understanding the situation. Standing there in the murky water, bag over her head, wrists tied behind her back, she didn’t look like an emperor. She looked like a frightened woman torn from her home, ripped out of the fabric of everything she found familiar.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  A part of him was tempted to draw it out, to make her guess, to breathe in her terror when she finally started to shake.

  “I’m your brother,” he said instead. “The one you tried to kill.”

  The running water carved a wet course through the silence. Adare’s shallow, rapid breathing scratched against the close stone walls.

  “Valyn,” she whispered finally.

  His name sounded like a curse.

  “Hello, sister.”

  “How did you…”

  “Live?”

  “I stood at the end of the dock,” she said, the words low, as though she were talking only to herself, as though he weren’t there at all. “For half the day I watched them drag the lake. Every body they pulled free, I started shaking, thinking it might be yours.”

  “That’s strange, considering you’re the person who put that knife between my ribs in the first place.”

  She took a sharp breath, as though planning to object, then shook her head. Her fear, so sharp at first, had mostly faded, weariness washing in to replace the sick reek of terror.

  “So you’re here for your revenge.”

  “Among other things. First, I want to know what you did with Kaden.”

  Adare shook her head again. “I didn’t do anything with him.”

  Valyn gritted his teeth. “I don’t believe you. He was here, in Annur. Gwenna met with him. Then, when she came back, he had vanished, and no one seems to know where.”

  “He has come and gone more than once now,” Adare said, anger’s heat creeping back into her voice. “He uses those ’Kent-kissing gates—that’s why no one sees him.”

  “How convenient,” Valyn said.

  “Not for me, it’s not. I’m trying to hold this fucking city together, to get ready for the Urghul, to keep Annur from tearing itself to pieces, and meanwhile the First Speaker of the council has been coming and going according to his own whims, chasing his own monsters, showing up for a few hours, then haring off after that miserable bitch from the prison.…”

  She trailed off, as though worried she had said too much. Valyn closed his eyes, breathed in her tangled scent: anger, blue-gray grief, confusion, and a deep, thick musk of sickening regret. But no deceit, not that he could smell. Gritting his teeth, he reached out, lifted the hood from her head. Most of her black hair remained pinned behind her head, but a few strands hung in her face. She tried to shake them away, then gave up, glaring at him through the mess of sweaty tangles. Her eyes burned more brightly than he’d remembered, so bright in the blackness of the storm drain it seemed her whole face might catch fire. When she opened her mouth, Valyn expected a blaze of defiance. Instead, her voice was quiet, even to his ears.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He took a step back, as though the words themselves could burn.

  “A little late to start begging.…”

  “I’m not begging. From the moment I stabbed you I wanted to take it back.” She shook her head, looking past him into the prison of her memory. “It all happened so fast. Fulton dead, and you going after il Tornja, even while the battle was still playing out. I had the knife in my hand, and I thought you were going to ruin it all, that you were going to destroy Annur, and I just … broke.”

  Valyn stared. Somewhere inside his chest his heart ground out its savage rhythm over and over, refusing to give up.

  “Every day I wake up in the morning,” Adare went on after a pause, “knowing I killed you. What’s crazy is that most of the time I think that I was right. You’d gone utterly insane—you really were about to kill the only person who could hold the Urghul back.” She shook her head. “Somehow, in the end, being right didn’t matter.”

  Valyn dragged the next words up like shattered glass through his throat. “And you think I’ll spare you for this belated sorrow?”

  “I don’t care if you spare me,” she exploded. “I don’t care what you think at all. You’re even more insane now than you were then—that’s obvious just from looking at you. I’m not saying this for you. I’m saying it because for all these months I couldn’t say it, not to you, and now I can.” She raised her chin, exposing her throat. “Go ahead. Kill me. Have your revenge. Then you figure out how to save this city, this whole fucking land that used to be an empire and now is something else … something different. You find a way to fix it, to put it right, to rescue all the millions of people about to be slaughtered on Meshkent’s bloody altars, because I have no idea.”

  Tears were pouring down her face, glazing her cheeks, slick as molten glass with the light of her eyes. She shook her head wearily, angrily.

  “Kaden is at Kegellen’s manse. Go find him after you murder me, if you really give a shit. He needs you.”

  “Needs me for what?” Valyn asked. He was shaking, he realized. His hand ached. He looked down to find the bare knife in his hand, already drawn. He didn’t remember pulling it from the sheath.

  Finish it, the beast’s voice hissed. You’ve talked too long already.

  He stepped forward, put the knife against her neck.

  She winced, but kept her eyes fixed on his.

  “Go ahead.”

  Finish it.

  All over again he could taste the bile of the night-black slarn egg pouring down his throat. He could feel Ha Lin limp in his arms, her heart still, her hair smelling of the sea. He could hear the hacking sounds of the legionary messenger he’d killed, feel the man’s throat give as he ripped the knife through trachea and tendon. He could smell the smoke of the burning bodies of Andt-Kyl, taste his own blood hot in his mouth, and Huutsuu�
�s as she screamed her awful pleasure. He could hear all over again the horror tattooed in the heartbeats of the men he’d killed atop Mierten’s crumbling wall. He could feel the rotten softness of his axes sinking into human flesh, could taste his own eagerness as he pulled them free. Whatever he could have been, he was a beast, as much a monster as the slarn prowling the gullet of Hull’s Hole, a creature of blood and darkness and death.

  Finish it.

  He could feel his sister shuddering beneath the blade, could taste her copper terror. It wasn’t even about justice anymore, or revenge, or any other thing to which a man could put a word. There was only the urge in the blood, the need, that vicious, undeniable imperative.

  FINISH IT.

  It wasn’t mercy that stopped his hand. His mercy was gone—chipped away, burned out, carved to the quick—along with whatever else had once made him a man. It wasn’t justice. It wasn’t love or even fellow human feeling. All that was gone. All that was left to balance the fury was a sort of dumb stubbornness, an animal unwillingness to simply submit, the same stubbornness that had kept him alive the whole northern winter, that made him check the traps and stuff raw meat into his mouth, the same stubbornness that kept his heart hammering stupidly away.

  CUT OUT HER HEART.

  Slowly, shaking, careful not to nick the skin, Valyn lowered the knife.

  “No.”

  58

  For a long time, Kaden just watched his brother, trying to decide if Valyn believed this story of gods and goddesses trapped in human flesh, of a Csestriim genius whose whole horrible purpose was to find those gods, to flush them out and hunt them down, to destroy them, of how close il Tornja had already come, of how little time remained.

  Studying Valyn’s face, it was hard to say. Those ruined eyes betrayed nothing. Kaden tried to find the brother he had known in the figure that stood before him now, prowling back and forth along the wall of Kegellen’s wine cellar like some caged animal. The boy was gone, carved away by the long years of training and privation, and even the man Kaden remembered from their brief time together in the Bone Mountains, the Kettral Wing leader, seemed to have vanished. Kaden struggled to put a name to this lean, scarred, hungry creature that stood before him now.

  Valyn had arrived barely an hour earlier, appearing with Adare just after the noon gong, escorted by Kegellen herself into the mansion’s labyrinthine depths, where Kaden and Triste had been trying to figure a way around il Tornja’s soldiers and into Intarra’s Spear.

  “How heartwarming,” the Queen of the Streets had said as she threw open the door, then clasped her broad hands in front of her chest. “A reunion of siblings. Is there any love like the love of a brother or sister?”

  Love was not the word Kaden would have used.

  The tension in Valyn’s shoulders and neck, the way his hands kept drifting to those vicious axes at his belt, the way he kept his broad back always to the wall as Kaden talked—it all spoke of loathing, wariness, distrust. Anything but love.

  “And you have this god inside you now?” Valyn asked finally, his voice like rusted steel.

  Kaden nodded. He could feel Meshkent pressing, testing against the boundaries of his prison.

  “Why do you need to get into the Spear?” Valyn asked. “Why can’t you perform this ceremony here?”

  “That’s not how it works,” Kaden replied. “The Spear is some sort of … sacred place. A conduit between our world and the gods’. An altar.”

  Valyn grunted. “People die on altars.”

  “It’s a risk,” Kaden said quietly, leaving out the rest: Death is necessary. Death is the goal.

  The trouble was, Kaden had no idea how that death was supposed to be accomplished. Meshkent had moved from fury to silence and back again a hundred times since Kaden had penned him inside his mind. The god had cursed, bellowed, cajoled, but refused to reveal the least detail of the obviate. According to Kiel, the Csestriim had found the human vessels of the gods dead at the tower’s top all those thousands of years earlier, but how they had died, the historian had no idea. Was it enough simply to go to the tower’s top, to stand there, to wait for the divine to unchain itself, for the human flesh to fail? Or were there words to speak, genuflections to make, paces of some arcane path to tread? Kaden had no idea.

  In other circumstances, it might have made sense to wait, to try to pry the details of the ritual from the god’s mind, but there was no more time for waiting. Il Tornja was too close, and his trap was drawing tight.

  Triste shifted at Kaden’s side, moving closer to him. She’d barely spoken a word since Valyn and Adare arrived, watching them warily, her shoulders tense, as though she were getting ready to fight or to flee.

  “You can’t get into the Spear,” Adare said. “Il Tornja’s men have it locked down.”

  Kaden shook his head. “We have to. There is no other way.”

  “I’ll tell you another way,” Valyn said grimly. “We find il Tornja and put an ax between his eyes. How’s that?”

  “Inadequate,” Kaden replied. “Even if you manage to kill il Tornja, the gods are still trapped inside us. I’m battling Meshkent all the time, even when I sleep. I’m fighting against him now, fighting to keep control.”

  Adare studied his eyes, as though she could see the god behind his irises somehow. “Why not let him out? If he’s really a god, he can save himself, right?”

  “You don’t understand,” Kaden replied quietly. “This is the Lord of Pain I carry inside myself. He came here, to this world, to spread an empire of misery over the earth, to set up altars in every field and forest, to soak the earth with blood and make the air shake with screams. If I free him, if I give him this flesh, he will succeed or be destroyed. We can’t allow either to happen. The fact that we are fighting against il Tornja does not make an ally of Meshkent. There is only one way to walk this path, and that is the obviate.”

  He realized, as he fell silent, that Valyn had stopped moving. He stood perfectly, preternaturally still at the far end of the narrow room, scarred eyes fixed on Kaden.

  “Are you tempted?” he asked quietly.

  Kaden studied his brother. “Tempted by what?”

  “The other paths. The pain or the annihilation.”

  Triste wound an arm around Kaden’s waist. Such a fragile link, binding him to the world.

  He nodded in response to Valyn’s question, remembering how it felt to stand on the mesa’s edge at Rassambur, to feel the knife bite into his skin. “I was tempted once. Not anymore.”

  “Why not?” To his surprise, it wasn’t Valyn asking this time, but Adare. Her eyes were flooded with flame, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “Where did you find the faith?”

  “Is it faith?” Kaden asked. He searched inside himself, but in the thin ridge between Meshkent’s fury and the emptiness of the vaniate, he found only memory and anticipation. Hope that with the Kettral’s help they might reach the Spear’s summit mingled with despair at the thought that il Tornja’s soldiers might be already there. Joy at the fierce strength in Triste’s touch, and sorrow at what had to happen next. In all of it, there was nothing he could identify as faith. “I don’t think that’s the word.”

  “His blades,” Adare said quietly, angrily.

  Kaden shook his head, confused.

  “That’s what he called us,” she went on. “Our father. In his last letter. He said we were his last blades.” She bared her teeth, as though the memory caused her physical pain. “It’s a good thing, in a way, that he died before he realized just how broken we are.”

  To Kaden’s surprise, Valyn laughed. It was an ugly, busted sound, but there was, Kaden realized, a rough sort of hope woven through it. Adare rounded on him.

  “Annur’s about to be destroyed. Kaden and Triste might kill themselves. Everything we are is hanging in the balance, and you’re laughing?”

  Valyn ignored her rage. “It’s just funny, that word: broken. A better man than I’ll ever be told me something recentl
y: Sometimes you need to break a thing to find out what’s inside.”

  Kaden stared at his brother.

  “And just what the fuck,” Adare asked quietly, “do you think is inside us?”

  “I have no idea,” Valyn replied, “but I’ll tell you this: whatever it is, it doesn’t quit. It might be ugly, backstabbing, stubborn, but no one—not the Kettral or the Skullsworn, the Csestriim or the slarn or whole armies of Urghul—has been able to kill it yet.”

  Adare’s mouth had just quirked into a ragged smile when the door to the wine cellar slammed open. Kegellen stood in the doorway. Valyn’s axes were out of his belt before Kaden could blink. He crossed the floor in two strides, to lay a sharp edge against the woman’s neck. The Queen of the Streets’ broad chest was heaving, but her eyes were hard.

  “Don’t waste your steel on me, soldier,” she said.

  “What’s going on?” Adare demanded.

  “The Army of the North is here.”

  “They’ve been here for days,” Adare replied.

  “I’m not talking about the city,” Kegellen said. “They are here in this house. Now. And they are coming for you.”

  59

  The basement of Kegellen’s manse wasn’t so much a basement as a labyrinth of intersecting corridors, stairwells, and storage chambers, stretching out beneath the streets above like the roots of some vast, ancient tree. Clearly, the walled estate visible from the street was only the barest fraction of a much larger, subterranean compound: part fortress, part storehouse, part hidden passage for all manner of illicit goods. Valyn caught glimpses, as the Queen of the Streets hustled them through the maze, of rooms piled high with unlabeled crates, bolts of cloth, huge clay amphorae standing patiently as soldiers in the gloom. Steel gates blocked the largest of the intersections, each one thick as a castle portcullis and guarded by a handful of men. Kegellen’s toughs were an ugly lot—long on scars and short on teeth—but they seemed to know how to handle their steel, and they leapt into motion—uncoiling chains, hauling at the bars—the moment the huge woman swept into view.