The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Valyn glanced at the soldiers, then gestured to Kaden and Triste. “North. Walk fast until they see us, then run.”

  “Where’s the kettral?” Triste hissed.

  “No idea.”

  “We could retreat,” Kaden said, nodding toward Kegellen’s warehouse. The Queen of the Streets had remained behind, inside, along with a knot of her guards.

  “No,” Valyn growled, dragging him into the foot traffic. “We can’t. You can’t hide, not as long as il Tornja has those ’Shael-spawned spiders. You go back in those tunnels, and you’ll die there. He’s got the whole Army of the North to pin you down, smoke you out.”

  Even as he spoke, Valyn’s eyes roamed over the street ahead. He hadn’t drawn the axes from the belt, but that ruined gaze was enough to make anyone who met it jerk back, turn hastily aside, find somewhere else to look, somewhere else to be.

  “The bird’s our best shot at getting to the top of the Spear.”

  “And if the bird doesn’t show up?” Kaden asked.

  “Then we do it the hard way.”

  “What does that mean?” Triste demanded.

  “We go on foot,” Valyn said. “Fight our way in, up. There’s no choice now—we have to keep moving.”

  Triste stopped walking, turned to stare at Valyn. “Fight our way in?”

  “There are three of us,” Kaden said quietly, taking Triste by the elbow as he spoke, urging her into motion once more. “Three of us against il Tornja’s entire army.”

  Valyn’s smile was like something carved across his face with a knife. “I’m not sure you understand.”

  “Not sure I understand what?”

  “Everything that’s happened this past year,” Valyn replied, then trailed off, shaking his head. “I’m not the brother you remember, Kaden. I’m something … different. When you tally up the good people in this fight, the noble ones, the ones who’ve been doing the right thing: I’m not on that list. Not anymore. I don’t think I’ve been on that list for a very long time.”

  The words were lost, haunted, as though someone had hollowed out this warrior who stalked down the street, his scarred hand on the head of his ax.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Kaden said. “Not right now.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  Behind them, a sudden cry cut through the everyday babble of the avenue. The soldiers were shouting, bellowing questions and orders. Kaden risked a glance over his shoulder. The men weren’t jogging, they were running, fingers leveled directly at Kaden himself. When he turned back to the north, he found the far end of the street blocked by a hastily assembled cordon of armed men. Valyn was still smiling.

  “The thing you don’t understand, my calm, quiet brother, is that sometimes goodness and nobility aren’t enough. Sometimes, when the monsters come, you need a dark, monstrous thing to pit against them.” He slid one ax from the loop at his belt, then the other. People cried out in alarm, lurched away. Valyn ignored them. “I am that thing, Kaden. The human part of me … the part that should feel camaraderie, friendship, love…” He shook his head. “It’s gone. There is only darkness. I’m not a brother, not really. Not a friend. Not an ally or son. I don’t know how to be those things. All I know is blood and struggle. It is all I am. This fight, right now, is what I am for.”

  And then it began.

  Kaden had spent years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains, unseen atop the granite spire of the Talon, watching crag cats hunt. They had struck him as perfect predators, flowing over the stone like winter shadows, silently pacing their prey, moving from ledge to boulder so smoothly they seemed otherworldly, like creatures culled from a dream of hunting. He’d watched them stand utterly still for an hour, then uncoil all at once, leaping a dozen paces in a single, unerring strike. Death, Kaden thought, must be like that: perfect, patient, waiting one moment, striking the next, unstringing tendons so quickly, so precisely, that the dying thing—a bear, a mountain goat—was gone before the carcass struck the stone. Those crag cats, however, for all their perfection, all their silent, predatory grace, seemed clumsy, slow, almost comically awkward when Kaden compared them to the creature Valyn had become.

  Valyn didn’t attack the soldiers blocking the street to the north; attack wasn’t the right word. An attack implied a fight, implied some defense—if only feeble, notional—on the part of those attacked. The Annurian soldiers had no defense. They might as well have stood at the ocean’s verge, trying to hold back the steel-gray sea with their feeble spears. When Valyn was still twenty paces distant, he hurled his axes, one then the other. Kaden could barely follow the flashing blur of the vicious wedges tumbling end over end, but in the moment it took for both to find their marks, Valyn had already slipped knives from inside his blacks and hurled those, too, at the line of men. The sound reached Kaden a moment later—four sick wet thwacks, steel hacking into unready flesh.

  The line of soldiers shuddered as the four men at the center collapsed into their own agony. Valyn didn’t break stride.

  Between him and the Annurians, an ironmonger’s wagon laden with pots and heavy pans had skewed across the street. The mules, panicked by the scent of blood, were bellowing, stamping, hauling their groaning load in different directions. The bearded ironmonger hesitated a moment, torn between the need to protect his goods and the awful realization that there could be no protecting them, not against the madness coursing through the street. As the baffled merchant hurled himself to the dirt, Valyn leapt over the wagon, stripping two heavy iron pans from the load as he passed, hit the ground with a shoulder, rolled to his feet, knocked aside the arrows flying at his face, and then he was among the legionaries, caving in faces and shattering arms, bellowing at Kaden and Triste to follow.

  It was only a few dozen paces, but by the time they caught up, the legionaries were dead, blood chugging out onto the earth through ragged, ugly wounds, and Valyn was holding his axes once again.

  “Let’s go,” he growled. “And this time, try to keep up.”

  There was a moment early on in all the blood-slick madness when Kaden caught a glimpse of a golden-winged bird. The creature screamed, careened through the sky as though it were a huge puppet yanked by vicious, invisible strings, and then it was gone, vanished behind the rooftops. He ran on, waiting for the kettral to reappear even as dozens of men wielding spears and swords flooded into the street behind them.

  “Where is it?” he shouted.

  “Gone,” Valyn said. “Can’t make the grab.”

  Even as he spoke, another knot of armored men erupted from a side alley a dozen paces ahead. Valyn, already charging, charged harder. Kaden had never seen any human being move so fast, had never seen anything move that fast. Valyn wielded the axes as though they were part of his own flesh, as though he’d been born holding them, and the Annurians could find no defense that availed against that brutal steel. Valyn went over their guard or under, found holes in whatever feeble attacks were thrown up, sometimes just slammed straight through a raised blade, shattering it or knocking it aside as though three feet of sharpened sword were no more than a reed.

  “Come on,” he growled, gesturing through the hole he’d carved. Blood spattered his face.

  The flight that followed was madness. Not since the Aedolians had come to Ashk’lan to kill him had Kaden run so hard. This time, too, the Annurian soldiers were his foes. This time, too, Triste ran at his side, her breathing ragged, but steady. This time, too, he understood the stakes, how it would only take a single misstep, a twisted ankle, and the race would be over. It was all the same, and yet it was not the same at all.

  There had been a hope of escaping the Aedolians back in the Bone Mountains where the terrain favored the monks. Kaden enjoyed no such advantage on the streets of Annur. Worse, il Tornja’s soldiers weren’t trailing along somewhere behind, they were everywhere, lunging out of doorways and alleys, appearing at intersections, calling out to one another in ear-shivering blasts on their horns. Were it not for Valyn, the Annurians wo
uld have killed both Kaden and Triste a dozen times over, but Valyn, somehow, was everywhere.

  When Annurians came on horseback, he killed the horses. When they came with spears, he rolled beneath the shafts and cut the arms from the attackers. Once, when Kaden rounded a corner to find two legionaries leveling flatbows at his chest, Valyn lunged in front. An ax flew end over end into the face of one of the bowmen. Kaden couldn’t see what happened next. Or he saw it, but his mind couldn’t work through the fact. There was an arrow. A flying arrow. Then there was not. It looked as though Valyn had snatched it from the air, but that was impossible. There was no time to dwell on it. Valyn had reached the other bowman, caved in his throat, retrieved the first thrown ax, and was waving them on again.

  His look brought Kaden up short. Despite the blood bathing his arms, soaking the tattered cloth of his clothes, Valyn didn’t look like a man fighting for his life. He looked … glad.

  No, Kaden thought. Not glad. Something else.

  There was no time to ponder words. Even as he paused, the Annurians were closing.

  “Come on, Kaden,” Triste said, dragging him forward by the wrist. “Come on.”

  Kaden met her eyes, saw the fear and determination there, and he ran.

  The red walls of the Dawn Palace nearly proved their undoing. They’d come at the fortress from the west and south, working their way through the streets until they burst from one final crowded lane into the open space before the walls and the short bridge leading to the Water Gate.

  The Water Gate was nothing compared to the towering Godsgate that opened west onto Annur’s main thoroughfare. It was an entrance for minor ministers, deliveries of food and wine, workers come to repair roofs or walls. It was a small gate, but it was blocked by a steel portcullis, and for all Valyn’s ability to hack his way through human flesh, his axes would do nothing to get them past that grille.

  “West,” Valyn said, checking his momentum before he reached the short bridge over the moat. “We’ll go in the Great Gate.”

  Even as the words left his lips, however, a knot of twenty or thirty soldiers, half bearing loaded flatbows, marched out from a side street at the double to block the way west.

  “East,” Kaden gasped. “The harbor.”

  But there were men to the east, too, spreading out in a tight cordon across the street.

  Valyn hefted his axes, as though testing their weight. “We’ll go through them.”

  “That’s insane,” Triste hissed.

  “She’s right,” Kaden said. “I don’t care how good you are, we’re not going to survive, not through that.”

  “So we don’t survive,” Valyn said. “So we die.”

  His voice sent a shiver up Kaden’s spine.

  “The canal,” Kaden said, gesturing to the filthy water swirling along the base of the wall.

  One twitchy bowman loosed his bolt. It landed twenty paces distant, steel head striking sparks as it skittered across the stone.

  “We didn’t make it,” Triste whispered. “We didn’t make it.”

  Then, before Kaden could reply, madness erupted in the western rank of soldiers. Men cried out in pain and surprise, turned, tried to bring swords and bows to bear on some new, unseen foe, calling out conflicting orders even as their companions fell. The line of men, so strict and disciplined just moments earlier, flexed, then caved inward, like a river’s high bank before the rising waters of a flood, calving off at first, then collapsing. Kaden could just make out, at the center of the violence, two figures, little more than shadows, really, in all the kicked-up dust, fighting back to back, hacking their way through the stunned ranks of Annurians.

  “It’s another army…,” Kaden began, then trailed off as a gust of wind shoveled away the dust.

  There was no army. There were no rows of newly arrived soldiers to rank against those other deadly rows. There were just the two shadows, neither of them as fast as Valyn, but fast enough, twin blades naked in their hands as they forced their way forward step by bloody step, leaving a screaming, twisted human wreckage in their wake. Then, a moment later, they were free, bursting from the front rank of the legion, charging full tilt at the bridge. Both wore Kettral blacks, but their similarity ended there. The man was short, pockmarked, coal black, shaved-headed. The woman was tall, beautiful but freakishly pale, her yellow hair streaming out behind her.

  “Well, Holy Hull,” Valyn said, taken aback for the first time since their desperate flight began.

  “Not Hull,” the man said as they reached them. “Just a couple beat-up soldiers.” If Valyn was some preternatural hunter stalking the streets of Annur, these two looked half dead. Both were drenched in blood; a vicious blaze had singed the hair from half the woman’s head. The man’s blades were notched in half a dozen places. Somehow, though, they’d come across the city, cutting their own way through the Army of the North, and when the man spoke again, his voice was hard, level, focused. “What now?”

  Valyn pointed. “We need in, past the gate.”

  Neither of the Kettral asked why. The blond woman just threw up a hand, a casual gesture, as though she were flicking water free of her fingers. Behind Kaden there was a groan like the earth itself were breaking apart, then a deafening crash. He turned to find the steel portcullis crushed, crumbled, shoved aside.

  “Go,” Valyn said, seizing him by the shoulder, hauling him onto the bridge even as the bolts and arrows started falling once more. “Go.”

  “Triste,” Kaden said, but the short man had her by the arm, was dragging her with him as he ran.

  They were Kettral—that much was clear enough—although beyond that Kaden had no theories. It didn’t matter. There was only one thing left that mattered.

  “The Spear,” he gasped, pointing up at the impossible glass tower looming above. “We have to get to the Spear.”

  * * *

  Adare watched from the wall as the Kettral attacked.

  Balendin stood atop a small, charred knoll, the site, until days earlier, of some temple, the ruined walls and buttresses of which still stood, protecting him from anyone approaching from behind. He’d been plying his stomach-churning violence there for half the day, unseaming men and women as though they were dolls, opening the skin, holding up the dark, pulsing organs to the light, bathing in the cries of the surrounding Urghul and, presumably, the horror of the soldiers atop the wall.

  He had just torn the tongue from another helpless prisoner when the five birds came at him, one from every point of the compass and one stabbing down from above. It seemed an impossible attack to stop. Each of those birds was the size of a large canalboat, all wing, and beak, and claw. Through the long lens, Adare could see the Kettral on the talons beneath, armed to the ears with blades and bows. They started loosing arrows early, and kept shooting as the birds closed.

  “They’re going to do it,” Adare breathed quietly. “They’re going to kill that fucking bastard.”

  Nira was silent at her side a moment, studying the battle through her own long lens. Then she shook her head.

  “No,” she replied grimly, lowering the lens. “They’re not.”

  The first kettral exploded into flames when it was still a hundred paces from the leach, the second a heartbeat after that. One moment the birds were flying, screaming their defiance, the next they were charred, already dead, tumbling from the air, the burning Kettral struggling to cut themselves free of their harnesses. Struggling and failing.

  “Sweet Intarra’s light,” Adare breathed.

  “They could use a little a’ that right now,” Nira agreed.

  Whether the leach had used too much strength too quickly, or he just didn’t see the full scope of the attack early enough, the other three birds got closer. Closer, but not close enough. Balendin raised his hand, dropped it down, and the nearest kettral, already coming in low for its attack, slammed into the earth, scattering horses and riders, plowing up the soft ground. The mounted Urghul surrounded it, screaming, swarming over the brok
en creature and the soldiers beneath like so many ants on a rotting carcass.

  The fourth bird careened off some invisible wall, and though it managed to stay airborne, even Adare could tell from the stuttering wingbeat that the creature was injured, and badly. This one, however, managed to limp off toward the north, and though a group of the horsemen gave chase, it seemed at least possible that the soldiers strapped to the talons beneath would survive, escape.

  That left the fifth bird, the one dropping straight down out of the clouds.

  That one’s Gwenna, she realized, staring through the lens. The largest bird, the golden one, is hers.

  Adare allowed herself the smallest spark of hope. It was possible Balendin hadn’t noticed, that he’d been too busy knocking back the first four attacks to notice the fifth. He couldn’t see everything at once; he had to miss something eventually. The long lens was shaking so badly in Adare’s hand that she couldn’t see the leach’s face. She leaned it against the top of the stone wall, took a moment to find the range again, and then her stomach recoiled inside her. Balendin was staring straight up. Staring straight up, and smiling.

  Adare clenched her teeth, waiting for the inevitable, for this bird, too, the last of a shattered hope, to burst into flame or be smashed into the dirt. At the last moment, however, the enormous creature sheered off, peeling away toward the east, abandoning the attack. Not that it mattered. Another blow, just as vicious as the one that crippled the other four kettral, hammered into the huge golden bird from the side. It tumbled sideways, screamed, managed to right itself, then disappeared behind the rooftops, flying toward the Broken Bay.