The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “How did they know?” Triste asked, after yet another gate had clanged shut behind them. “How did the army know we were here?”

  “I don’t know,” Kegellen replied tersely. Wrapped in a dress of exquisite red silk, her fingers flashing with rings, the flesh of her neck wobbling as she moved, the woman didn’t look like a soldier. She would have been as out of place on the Islands as some doe-eyed priestess of Eira, and yet there was something about her voice, about the way she carried herself, something about her conviction and determination as she guided them through the narrow passages, that reminded Valyn of his Kettral trainers. She was dangerous, this one, despite all appearances. The only question was, dangerous to whom?

  “You could have been followed,” Kegellen continued.

  Valyn shook his head curtly. “We weren’t.”

  “Then you could have been spotted when you arrived. Even the back entrance is watched, although I’ll admit I didn’t realize the army had taken an interest in my humble home.”

  Adare glanced back the way they had come, as though she expected to find soldiers racing down the corridor after them. “Our faces were hidden,” she said. “Both of them.”

  Kegellen shrugged and kept moving. “It matters less how they knew than what they will do next.”

  Valyn took a deep breath, sifting the scents of moldy stone and fine perfume, confusion and fear. He could smell the urgency on Kegellen, the bright tang of her haste, but there seemed to be no deceit. If she was lying, she knew how to hide it even from his senses, and besides, if the woman’s goal was to hand them over to the Army of the North, she could have done so without warning them, without the whole charade of escaping through the corridors.

  “Il Tornja,” Kaden said. “He’s here. This is his work.”

  Valyn turned to stare at his brother. The others were obviously frightened by the mention of the kenarang, but it seemed like a long time since he himself had felt frightened. Instead, he felt … eager. If Kaden was right, if Ran il Tornja was in the city somehow, it meant another chance, a final opportunity to put right what had gone wrong on that tower in Andt-Kyl all those months ago.

  “That’s impossible,” Adare objected. “You said il Tornja was in the Ancaz … what? A week ago? A little more? Unless he used the—”

  Kaden shook his head, cutting her off. “He didn’t. The kenta are too risky for him. He can’t bring his soldiers through the gates, which means he would have to travel alone, and it’s too easy for the Ishien to guard the island hubs. Too easy for them to set an ambush.”

  “I thought the Ishien were dead,” Adare protested. “That he killed them.”

  “Not all of them. It only takes one man with a flatbow to guard the whole island.”

  Kegellen reeked of curiosity, but she kept quiet, letting them talk as she swept along ahead.

  “The leach,” Triste suggested. “Maybe the leach helped him get back.”

  Valyn frowned, considering the map inside his mind. “No one saw him during the days you were at Rassambur.”

  Kaden shook his head. “It’s possible he left for Annur the moment Pyrre rescued us.”

  “Why?” Triste demanded. “Why would he do that? How would he know?”

  “The same way he’s known everything else,” Adare said bleakly. “The same way he knew the moment you escaped from the Spear. The same way he knew where to find you.” She stared into the darkness as they moved down the corridor, as though waiting for the kenarang himself to step from the shadows. “He’s been playing this game a long time, and he’s better at it than we are.”

  “He knows where we have to go to perform the obviate,” Kaden said. “And he has the ak’hanath.”

  Adare nodded. “The one thing brings him to Annur, the second to Kegellen’s mansion.”

  As they spoke, Valyn traced the path on his mental map, calculating the various rates of travel. “He’s only on foot from the Ancaz to Mo’ir. From there, all the travel is on river, lake, and canal. He can keep moving all day, all night, and the current’s in his favor. He could be here by now. Him and the leach and those ’Kent-kissing ak’hanath.”

  A grim silence settled over them as they walked. Valyn had lost all sense of direction in the twisting corridors, but Kegellen continued to forge ahead, choosing a path at every fork without pausing to think.

  “They will have a difficult time following,” she pointed out. “My basement is … complex, even without the gates and the guards.”

  “They’re not following,” Kaden replied. “Not all of them, at least.” He pointed up at the vaulted ceiling of the stone corridor. “Most of them will be up there, on the streets, tracking us.”

  Kegellen raised an eyebrow. “That would be impressive. And inconvenient.”

  “Where will this let us out?” Adare asked.

  “We’ve been moving east, toward your command center on the wall. The tunnels won’t get anywhere close to all the way there, but they’ll get us clear of whatever cordon the army set up around my home.”

  “We need to get to the Spear,” Kaden said.

  Adare shook her head. “No good. I already told you—it’s packed with il Tornja’s soldiers. Has been since they showed up in the city days ago.”

  “Kettral,” Valyn said. “We get a bird to fly us to the top.”

  Kaden nodded. “Good.”

  “Where are the Kettral?” Kegellen asked.

  “In a square just south of the wall,” Valyn replied.

  “That’s unfortunate,” the woman said. “You’ll need to cover at least two miles in the streets above.”

  “So we’ll cover two miles,” Adare said. “We can stay ahead of these bastards for a couple miles.”

  The words were bold, but Valyn could smell the uncertainty on her.

  “No,” Kaden said. “The ak’hanath are tracking Triste. Maybe Triste and me both. That means that if we split up, Adare will have a chance to get to the Kettral while we’re here, in Kegellen’s cellar, undercover.”

  “All right,” Adare said slowly. “And when I get the Kettral, what then?”

  Valyn tried to figure the timing in his head. Two miles, through crowded streets. Adare was in sturdy boots, but she had nothing like the Kettral or Shin training. The whole thing ought to take about twenty minutes, but Adare was tougher than she seemed. The glare in her burning eyes said she could make the run faster, that she would make the run faster. “We count heartbeats,” he said. “One thousand heartbeats from when Adare emerges. That’s the timing. She gets to Gwenna, gives her our location. When we come out, if everything hasn’t gone straight to shit, she should be overhead, ready for the grab.”

  Adare shook her head. “I thought things already had gone to shit. I thought that’s why we were fleeing through this tunnel.”

  “I think you’ll look back on this tunnel fondly as soon as you’re aboveground,” Valyn said.

  “You go with her,” Kaden said. “She’ll need your protection up there.”

  Valyn shook his head. “Not a chance. Adare is expendable. You’re not.”

  “We need her to get to the Kettral,” Kaden insisted. “There’s nothing you can do if the army catches up with us and we have no bird.”

  “Of course there is,” Valyn replied. “I can kill them.”

  * * *

  Gwenna had spent the better part of the morning trying to figure out just what in the fine fuck was going on. The Urghul were encamped beyond the desolation Adare had made of the northern third of Annur, and though they’d arrived only the day before, the horsemen were already busy trying to clear a path through the still-smoldering rubble. Of Balendin himself, there was no sign, which was more than worrisome, but instead of flying patrols north of the wall to scout the enemy position, she and the rest of the Kettral were trying to figure out what had happened to the ’Kent-kissing Emperor.

  “Valyn.” That was the Flea’s assessment. “He has the ability to do it, and the reason.”

  Certain
ly, everything Gwenna had heard of the early-morning attack smacked of Kettral work: an ambush at a choke point, smokers and flashbangs, the Emperor gone without any of her guard spotting so much as a single soldier.… And, of course, Valyn himself was gone, missing since the night before. It all added up, except for one obvious question: If Valyn had gone rogue, slipping out of the compound to execute his sister, why wasn’t she executed yet? Where was the body?

  Gwenna had had all five of her Wings scouring the city near where Adare disappeared, both on foot and in the air. So far they’d found nothing.

  No, she reminded herself, staring grimly at the map that she’d unfolded across the table of her command post just inside the courtyard. Not nothing. She studied the series of black ko stones that she’d been adding to the map all morning. Each one represented a sighting by her people of Annurian soldiers, men under the command of General Van, men who should, given the Urghul threat just north of the wall, have been on that fucking wall getting ready to defend the city. The stones showed an obvious cordon, as though the legions, too, were searching for Adare. That search, however, was proceeding more methodically than Gwenna’s own, as though Van’s soldiers were privy to information that she lacked.

  “What are we missing?” she muttered, staring at the map.

  The Flea shook his head. Over Gwenna’s strong objections, he and Sigrid had both dragged themselves out of the infirmary. The new cloth wrapping the Wing leader’s arm was still spotted with blood, but his face didn’t look as ashen as it had the night before. The leach, too, looked better than Gwenna would have expected. Once again, her blacks were immaculately clean, her long blond hair perfectly coiffed, as though she’d been at it all morning with a fine Rabin comb.

  “You use a kenning for that, don’t you?” Gwenna had demanded, squinting at the woman when she first emerged from the infirmary.

  “We all have our own personal acts of discipline,” the Flea replied quietly.

  Gwenna would have been a good deal happier if Sigrid had used her power to find the ’Kent-kissing Emperor instead of fixing her hair, but then, as Talal was always telling her, leaches couldn’t do everything. As the sun rose over the towers of the Dawn Palace, climbing past Intarra’s Spear itself, reaching its zenith, then dipping down toward the west, Adare was still missing, the Army of the North was still scattered over half the fucking city, and the Urghul were still massing to the north, preparing for their inevitable attack.

  Gwenna glanced at the map again. “To Hull with it. The next time the birds report in, I’m sending them north. You don’t need an emperor to have a war.”

  The Flea studied the deployment of the stones. “It’s hard to win a war, if you don’t know what’s going on on your side of the wall. Delka said she’d heard people whispering that il Tornja has returned to the city.”

  “You’d think, if that were true, that the bastard would pay a little more attention to the horde of barbarians. He is the kenarang, after all, and defending Annur from the threat of annihilation is a fairly substantial part of his job. At the very least—”

  She broke off at the sound of cries from the edge of the courtyard, searching for the source of the commotion.

  “Well,” the Flea said a moment later. “That’s one question answered.”

  Adare. The Emperor. She was running across the flagstones of the open square, flanked by a small knot of men who looked as ruthless as they were unkempt. Gwenna’s first thought was that they had seized her somehow, but no … they were moving in something like a guard formation, protecting her.

  Gwenna left the table, broke into a jog, the Flea and Sigrid at her side. She met the other woman halfway across the square.

  “Kaden,” Adare gasped. Sweat poured down her face and soaked her robe. She was desperately out of breath, hunched over and panting, but she managed to choke out the message all the same. “Triste and Valyn. Just at the corner … of the Wool District and the Flowers … where Anlatun’s old market spills over. They need … a bird.…”

  It was tempting to ask why, but Adare hadn’t run herself half to death in order to play questions and guesses.

  “Get her inside,” Gwenna said, turning to the Flea. “Make sure she’s all right. When the other birds come in, send them north, high, scouting the Urghul—we need to start getting ready for that fight. Jak,” she shouted, breaking away from Adare, racing across the courtyard to where Allar’ra waited in the shadow of the wall. “Get us in the air.”

  Talal and Annick had been on top of Adare’s tower, watching the Urghul deploy. They had a clear line of sight, however, from there back into the courtyard, and by the time Gwenna reached Jak and the bird, they were already running across the cobblestones at a full sprint, the sniper with her bow in one hand. It couldn’t have taken more than a hundred heartbeats from the moment Adare arrived until they were flying, but all the time Gwenna felt her stomach twisting.

  Too slow, she thought, shaking her head as they climbed above the slate and copper rooftops, remembering Adare’s exhaustion, her desperation. What if we’re too slow?

  It was only a matter of moments to reach the corner of the Wool District. The miles Adare had covered on foot melted away beneath the great bird’s wings.

  “What are we looking for?” Talal shouted, scanning the streets below as they approached.

  “Probably something ugly. Kaden and Valyn. Triste. Maybe a fight.” She shook her head, silently urging the bird to go faster. “I don’t know.” Over on the far talon, Annick just leaned out in her harness, an arrow nocked to her bow, face calm, composed, even serene, as though they’d taken to the air simply to enjoy the breeze. Gwenna felt ready to jump off the talon and start running.

  As they drew closer to the target, she ran her eyes over the streets below. There was a logic to the city, to the movement of people within it, a pattern that emerged from the thousands of random interactions, a pattern, she realized after a moment, that was being disrupted. At first she thought it was just one street, one inexplicable knot. Then she noticed another, and another: groups of soldiers, Annurians, forcing their way through the avenues and alleyways below.

  “They’re not converging on the Wool District,” Talal said, pointing.

  Gwenna followed his finger, gritted her teeth, then cursed.

  “They’re not searching for someone,” she said. “They’re chasing them.”

  They banked slightly, as though Jak were preparing for a slow, high circle. Gwenna yanked on the straps instead, a series of vicious tugs. A moment later, the bird tucked his wings in closer, and they began to drop.

  “You have them?” Talal asked.

  Gwenna pointed to a low stone building half a mile off. She couldn’t articulate what she was seeing, the precise nature of the pattern, the convergence of dozens of factors, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see it. “They’re there. Kaden and the rest of them. That’s where the soldiers are headed.”

  “How do you want to make the grab?”

  Gwenna grimaced. “We’re going to have put the bird down. You get the girl. I’ll take care of Kaden. Valyn can load his own ass up, while Annick shoots whoever needs shooting. We get ’em on the bird, get ’em up, and then we can figure out what the fuck’s going on.”

  She was signaling to Quick Jak even as she spoke. Allar’ra dipped his head, and they were descending, coasting down the air’s invisible slope, then leveling off just above the tallest rooftops. It was easy to forget, when you were five thousand feet off the deck, just how fast the kettral really were. Ten feet above the rooftops, however, that speed was suddenly, gut-wrenchingly obvious. Tiles, chimneys, and shingles smeared to a blur beneath their feet. Gwenna fixed her eyes on the blocky skyline, waiting to make the turn.

  She caught just a glimpse of them: Kaden and Triste running side by side, Valyn a few paces ahead, his axes naked and bloody in his hands, and then, while the bird was still forty feet up, something hard and viciously strong slammed into its side.


  Gwenna’s world went upside down, turned right side up, and then she was hanging in her harness, twisting as the wind tore at her. The bird was screaming, Talal was tangled in his straps, while over on the far talon, Annick was trying to drag herself back into something resembling proper position.

  “Another bird,” Gwenna shouted, as she got her feet under her, craning her head in an effort to see past Allar’ra’s wing. “Someone’s got another fucking bird.”

  It only made sense, but when she scanned the sky for a second kettral, she found only a few high clouds, smoke drifting from the chimneys, and the wide, unblemished blue. Then, even as she searched, something smashed into the bird again.

  “There’s no second kettral,” Talal shouted. “A kenning.” He was stabbing his finger down, not up. “It’s a kenning.”

  Gwenna took half a heartbeat to absorb the information.

  “New plan,” she said. “We drop—”

  Another vicious blow hammered into Allar’ra, smashing him so hard that his right wing grazed the wall of a long stone building, and then they were peeling away to the east.

  “Jak, you son of a bitch,” Gwenna cursed.

  “He’s right,” Talal shouted, shaking his head. “We’re too easy a target up here.”

  “I understand that,” Gwenna spat. “Which is why I need him to put the fucking bird down. We’ll do this on foot.”

  She reached for the leather strap, but at some point in the violence it had torn free. Whatever plan she had, there was no way to communicate it to Jak, no way to do anything but hang in the harness and hope that Valyn could get the other two clear of the army somehow, hope that Gwenna’s own bird wouldn’t be slammed straight out of the air, shattered on the streets below. As she twisted in her straps, another blow hit the bird. Allar’ra opened his beak to scream, and then Quick Jak was nudging the creature lower, so low they were skimming along one of the wider city streets, windows and balconies whipping by to either side.

  The moments that followed comprised the most terrifying flying of Gwenna’s life. She had no idea where the attacks against Allar’ra were coming from, no idea if they could be blocked or turned aside, no idea of anything, really, except that some leach they couldn’t even see was kicking the living shit out of them. She couldn’t communicate with Jak, but that hardly mattered now. He was doing the only thing he could—getting them low enough to hide, to stay alive.