The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  An adult kettral had a wingspan of at least seventy feet, which didn’t leave much room for flying, even in Annur’s largest streets. Gwenna could feel the creature straining under its own weight, trying to rise above the buildings without fully spreading its wings. And then, when they were just clear of the highest roofs, the leach hit them again, knocking the bird a few paces sideways in the air.

  ’Ra screamed his rage and frustration. Gwenna had no way of knowing how badly the bird was hurt. That they were still in the air at all seemed like a ’Kent-kissing miracle, one that only an idiot would trust any longer than necessary. Jak seemed to agree. He gave the bird its head, letting it climb for seven or eight powerful wingbeats, and then they fell into another steep glide, ’Ra’s wings tucked halfway back against his sides, the city’s streets rushing up at them all over again. It was desperate flying, getting high enough to keep air speed, then dropping down to hide below the rooflines, soaring through streets so tight than any error meant all of them were going to end up as stains against the side of some tenement or temple. It was madness and genius all at the same time, and it kept them alive.

  When they finally burst out of the final street into the wide-open space of Annur’s lower harbor, nothing hit them. Quick Jak guided the bird cautiously higher, then higher still. Nothing.

  Gwenna glanced over at Talal. “We safe here?”

  The leach spread his hands helplessly. “No idea. I couldn’t do something like that even if the whole world turned to steel.”

  Great, Gwenna thought as Jak banked the bird north and west, back toward their improvised command center. An unknown leach of incalculable power who is not on our side.

  * * *

  Adare felt like a condemned woman climbing to her death as she mounted the stone stairs of the tower. There was no gibbet at the top, of course—just the bare stone with a clear view out to the north, but that view, in its way, was worse than any hangman’s noose. A noose might mean death for a single woman, but the Urghul army that waited—that might spell the doom of all Annur. And that was forgetting all about the disaster she’d left behind, the two brothers she’d abandoned in Kegellen’s tunnels.

  She was still winded from the sprint through the city, a mad rush in which she’d barely managed to stay on her feet. The gamble had worked, at least for her. Whatever method il Tornja’s soldiers were using to track her through the underground labyrinth, it stopped working as soon as she split off from the rest of the party. Kegellen had dispatched a dozen men alongside Adare, but there had been nothing for them to do besides run and look menacing. She would have found more relief in the escape if the implications hadn’t been so obvious: the army wasn’t searching for her. As Kaden had suggested, the men were looking for him and Triste.

  As she climbed the stairs, Adare stared south, where the huge, golden-winged kettral had disappeared. Gwenna and the three soldiers with her had proven themselves more than competent. If anyone had a chance to snatch Kaden and Triste out of the clutches of il Tornja’s army, it was a Kettral Wing with a bird. The plan was working, they had made the right call, and yet something inside Adare felt sick, soiled, cowardly. She’d run as fast as she could as long as she could in an effort to get to the Kettral quickly, to save the people she’d left behind, but that didn’t change the basic fact: she had run.

  And there’s nothing you can do about it now, she told herself viciously. Whatever triumph or tragedy was playing out to the south, a contest compared to which the war with the Urghul was some pedant’s marginalia, she could do nothing to affect it. Either Gwenna would get to Kaden and Triste in time, would carry them to the Spear in time to perform the obviate, or she would not. Adare’s job now was making sure that if the others succeeded, if il Tornja didn’t manage to annihilate the very gods, that those humans who remained might inherit something other than the Urghul’s savage kingdom of agony and ash.

  As she reached the tower’s top, Nira’s voice jerked her from her thoughts.

  “If ya were pickin’ times to fuck off and disappear,” the old woman said, “this was a pretty shit pick.”

  The old woman stood alone at the tower’s top, wind tearing at her tangled gray hair. Even as she turned to face Adare, she leaned heavily on her cane, as though the weight of her hundreds of years had settled down on her all at once. Her eyes were still bright, but sunken deep in their sockets. When her gaze settled on Adare, it felt like the gaze of someone in a portrait, someone once strong, determined, resilient, but long since dead.

  “What’s going on?” Adare asked.

  “Aside from an army a’ Urghul gettin’ ready to turn your nice shiny city into a stable?”

  Adare took the final stairs two at a time, then stopped, staring north over the devastation she had visited on her city to the Urghul army beyond. For the better part of the year she’d been near the front, just a few dozen miles from the most brutal fighting, but not since Andt-Kyl had she actually seen more than a few of the horsemen at a time. The sight filled her with both dread and fascination. They poured over the low hills, more and more and more, until it seemed they would fill all the fields north of the burned barricade she had created.

  “How many are there?” she asked.

  “Enough,” Nira grunted, as though there were nothing more to say about the matter. “Was it him?”

  Adare shook her head in confusion. “Him?”

  “Il Tornja,” Nira replied. “Was he the one that grabbed ya?”

  She was staring south rather than north, not at the Urghul, but over the innumerable walls and rooftops of Annur. Adare’s stomach went cold inside her.

  “We thought he might have returned. Is it true?”

  Nira nodded slowly, wearily. “And my brother with him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can feel him, for one thing,” Nira replied quietly. “Oshi. I never told ya this, but he’s my well. I can feel him moving through the city, somewhere to the south.”

  Adare followed the older woman’s gaze. “If Oshi is here, then so is il Tornja.”

  “Ya don’t need me ta tell you that,” Nira said, rummaging in the folds of her dress for a moment, then extending a gnarled hand. “He sent ya a love letter.”

  Adare stared at the folded parchment. The letters she had received of late had brimmed with disaster. “You opened it,” she said.

  Nira nodded. “’Course I opened it. Thought ya might be dead.”

  “And what does it say?”

  Even as she asked the question, Adare could feel the dread coiling around her heart, squeezing tighter and tighter, until her own pulse hammered in her ears, drowning out the awful noise of the horsemen to the north. War and worse than war had come to Annur, and yet that single sheet of parchment terrified her more than all the Urghul nation, more than whatever fight was unfolding in the streets below.

  “What does it say?” she asked again, the words dry as sand inside her mouth.

  Nira grimaced. “It says he has your son.”

  It felt as though someone had closed a fist around her lungs. For a moment all she could do was gape, staring at Nira like some dumb fish hauled up from the depths to flop itself to death atop the tower. Finally, she managed one more word. “And?”

  “Focus on the Urghul,” Nira said. “Leave what’s happening inside the city alone, and your boy’ll be fine.”

  Adare exhaled slowly, the breath rattling out of her.

  Just focus on the Urghul. That was what she’d climbed the tower to do, and yet, she’d already sent Gwenna south. Il Tornja couldn’t miss that golden bird knifing through the air. Would he see Adare’s hand behind it? Was it already too late?

  Trembling, she placed her hands on the stone ramparts, trying to find some strength in the ancient masonry. Down the wall to the west, she could see Lehav readying the Sons of Flame. She suddenly wished Fulton were there, the longing for his stern, steady presence an ache so vicious that it momentarily stole her speech.

  �
��So,” Nira said, the syllable simple and unforgiving as an anvil.

  “So,” Adare replied, trying to keep the scream inside her from ripping free.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What I came here to do. Hold back the Urghul while the Kettral finish what needs doing in the city.”

  Nira narrowed her eyes. “And what is it, exactly, that needs doing? What is it everyone’s so worked up about that the whole ’Kent-kissing army seems ta have not noticed the arrival of the entire Urghul nation?”

  Adare shook her head, unsure how to tell the story, unsure what words would suffice. “Trying to save us,” she said finally.

  After studying her a moment, Nira nodded. “And if it comes ta your brothers or your son, who’ll ya choose?”

  “It’s not going to come to that.”

  “Sayin’ a thing don’t make it so.…”

  “It’s not…” The words died in Adare’s mouth.

  She stared north. While she’d been standing on the tower’s top, the Urghul had divided into two groups, separated by a wide lane. She hadn’t been paying any attention to the maneuver—they were still days from being able to attack. Or so she’d thought.

  Without shifting her gaze from the Urghul, she groped at her side, found the long lens, and raised it to her eye. A figure leapt into view, riding down the center of that lane, a man she’d heard discussed a thousand times, but never actually seen. He was decked out in the Urghul style, all leather and fur, though his skin and hair were far too dark for any Urghul. Despair’s gray, sickly flower unfolded in Adare’s mind. Through the long lens, she could see the grim smile on the man’s face, the leashes trailing from his saddle, and collared at the end of those leashes, naked, terrified, and bleeding from some recent lash, a dozen prisoners, men and women, all Annurian.

  “Balendin,” Adare said quietly.

  That got Nira’s attention finally. The old woman turned, took up a long lens of her own, and studied him silently.

  “He’s the leach, eh?” She shook her head. “Emotion. It’s a strong well. One a’ the strongest.”

  “What can he do?” Adare asked. The story from Andt-Kyl was that he had used his foul power to hold up an entire bridge while the Urghul rode across. Adare wasn’t sure whether to believe it or not—the bridge had been destroyed by the time that she arrived, Balendin gone.

  Nira frowned. “A lot. He’s not just leaching off those poor doomed fucks.” She gestured down the wall with her cane. “There must be five thousand men on these walls. They’ve heard a’ him. Everyone in the ’Kent-kissing city’s heard a’ him. Once they know he’s here, once he can feel all that hate, and rage, and fear”—she shook her head again—“even the Army of the North might not make a difference.”

  * * *

  When Quick Jak finally put Allar’ra down inside the improvised Kettral compound, the entire place was on the verge of madness. The other Wings were all there, back from their own scouting missions. No one had found Kaden, obviously, but everyone had seen the same thing north of the wall: the Urghul army parting down the center to make room for Balendin and his string of blood victims. Sigrid and the Flea had managed to impose some sort of order, but Adare was up on top of her tower, stabbing a finger to the north, and a string of terrified messengers were waiting on the cobblestones, all bearing the same message: kill the leach.

  “Son of a bitch,” Gwenna cursed, dropping off the talon, “how long has he been there?”

  “Not long,” the Flea replied. “Just getting ready, from the sound of it.” He nodded to the south. “What happened to you?”

  Gwenna shook her head, unsure how to cram it all into a few words. “Nothing good. Valyn’s with Kaden and Triste. According to Adare, they all need to get to the Spear. I have no idea why, but everyone seems to think it’s pretty fucking important. Including the Army of the North, who is hunting them.”

  “You couldn’t manage an extract?”

  “The bastards have a leach. Almost knocked us clear out of the air, and we never even saw him.”

  “A leach?” the Flea asked. He glanced over at Sigrid. The blond woman just shook her head, made an angry growl in the back of her throat. “That’s two of them,” the Flea said grimly. “Whoever this is south of the wall, and Balendin to the north. Sig thinks that after half an afternoon of cutting out hearts he’ll be strong enough to clear a path through all Adare’s hard-earned wreckage, maybe strong enough to punch straight through the wall.”

  “Well that’s unpleasant,” Gwenna said, scrambling for anything resembling a plan, something that would save Kaden and Triste and Annur at the same time.

  “Valyn and Kaden,” the Flea said, slicing through her thoughts. “What was their last location?”

  “West of the Wool District, heading farther west.”

  The Wing leader’s brow furrowed. “Thought you said they wanted to get to the Spear.”

  “Yeah. Well. Looks like wanting not to get killed counted a little higher than wanting to get to the Spear. Valyn’s leading them west, which, given the way the army’s arranged, seems like a pretty good idea.”

  The Flea glanced over at Sigrid. The blond woman met his gaze, then nodded.

  “We’ll get them,” he said, turning back to Gwenna. “We don’t have a bird anyway, and this is a job for a foot team. You take care of Balendin.”

  Gwenna stared. “Take care of him? You have any ideas how to do that?”

  “Nope. That’s why it’s your job.” The Flea gestured toward the birds. “You’ve got five Wings here. Use ’em.”

  For a moment, Gwenna couldn’t move. The thought was too large, the responsibility too daunting. Then the Flea stepped forward, set a solid hand on her shoulder. “You’re a good soldier, Gwenna.”

  She met his eyes, but could find no words.

  “This is what you trained to do,” the Flea went on, his voice quiet, low, steady as the waves on the shore. “No one ever thinks they’re ready for something like this, but I’m telling you now, and I’m only going to say it once, so listen good.…” He paused, smiled that crooked smile of his. “You’re ready.”

  Then, before Gwenna could respond, he and Sigrid were gone, racing south toward Valyn, toward the Army of the North, toward a viciously powerful leach, and in all likelihood, toward an immortal Csestriim general against whom every human attack had failed.

  “Well, shit,” Gwenna muttered.

  “I agree,” Talal replied. He was standing just a pace distant, Annick at his side.

  “We could go with him,” Gwenna said. “Provide air cover.”

  “That didn’t work so well last time,” the leach pointed out, “and besides. Balendin’s here. We can’t fight all the fights.”

  Gwenna nodded, looked past him to where Quick Jak was going over Allar’ra’s wings, sliding his hands beneath the feathers looking for damage.

  “Can he fly?” Gwenna shouted.

  The flier hesitated. “He can fly, but I need more time to assess the damage.…”

  “We don’t have more time. We have to hit Balendin now. Once he knocks down half the wall, there won’t be much point.” She gestured to the other Kettral, most of whom had dismounted to check over weapons and birds. “Fliers and Wing commanders on me.”

  The plan was as shitty as it was simple. They had five birds. Balendin couldn’t look five directions at once. Four Wings would come in from the cardinal directions, and one would stoop from almost directly above.

  “Balendin shields himself,” Talal pointed out. “He did at Andt-Kyl, anyway. If the leach attacking us to the south was using a hammer, Balendin’s kenning will be like an invisible wall.”

  Gwenna nodded, wondering if she had it all wrong. “He shields himself against arrows, flatbow bolts, spears. You think he can hold out against eight tons of bird coming at him faster than a galloping horse?”

  Talal hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”

  The other Kettral looked nervous. Qu
ick Jak, for all his slick flying just moments earlier, seemed close to panic. He had picked at the cuticle of his thumb so viciously that the nail was awash in blood, but he just kept at it, not seeming to notice.

  “Look,” Gwenna said, stepping forward. “Balendin’s only going to get stronger. The more people in this city learn that he’s here, learn who he is and what he does, the harder it’s going to be to kill him. I can’t say that my plan will work. Maybe we get lucky, maybe someone gets through, and maybe we all die.

  “I will tell you this, though. You are Kettral, every ’Kent-kissing one of you. We called you washouts, but you’re not, not anymore. You went down in the Hole, you fought the slarn, you drank the egg, and you came back out. That makes you Kettral, you crazy sons of bitches, and let me tell you something about being Kettral. We don’t get the easy jobs. We don’t pull wall duty or guarding the baggage chain. In return for getting to fly around on these enormous, manslaughtering hawks, we actually have to go do the dangerous shit, the shit that gets men and women killed, and so if this isn’t what you signed up for, you tell me now.” She paused, shifting her eyes from one soldier to the next. “Which one of you isn’t Kettral? Who wants to wash out all over again?”

  No one stepped forward. No one spoke.

  Finally, Gwenna allowed herself to smile. “Good. Mount up.”

  * * *

  Their hastily constructed plan failed almost the moment they stepped from the shelter of Kegellen’s street-level warehouse and into the street beyond. They needed to go outside in order for the bird to find them, of course, but when they stepped, blinking, into the afternoon heat and sunlight, there was no kettral in the sky. Kaden stood with Valyn and Triste in a wide, treelined avenue, one of Annur’s larger thoroughfares. Shops occupied the bottom floors of the buildings to either side—leatherworkers, mostly, judging from the wares on display—and the street itself was busy with men and women haggling or selling, pushing handcarts loaded with stock, making purchases or deliveries. It almost might have been a normal city street on an everyday afternoon, except for the Annurian soldiers, at least a dozen of them, jogging up the center of the road from the south. They hadn’t spotted their quarry yet, but they weren’t bothering to stop, not even pausing to search inside the shops. They moved with the certainty of hunters who knew exactly where to find the beast they sought.