The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  The Kettral stared at her as though she’d gone mad.

  “They’re all looking at the Spear!” she shouted. “The Urghul, the Annurians, everyone.”

  No one moved for moment, then Talal nodded. “Holy Hull,” he whispered. “No one’s thinking about Balendin.”

  It was the ugliest liftoff since Gwenna’s first year as a cadet—all tangled straps and shouting, unbuckled harnesses slapping in the wind—but Jak got them in the air less than twenty heartbeats after they started running.

  It has to be enough, Gwenna thought as they soared clear of Annur’s wall. Please, Hull, let it be fast enough.

  Behind them, the Spear was still burning; not the glass walls, of course, but the wooden floors built into the tower’s base, illuminating the entire shaft. For a moment, Gwenna could only stare. It was as though Intarra herself had come down at last to plant her pennon in the center of Annur, to claim the ancient structure for her own. The streets were filled with people, every house, temple, tavern emptied out, the princes and paupers of Annur speechless, staring, rapt.

  Gwenna wrenched her gaze away, north, toward the Urghul. She could see the low hill clearly enough, the burned-out temple, and Balendin surrounded by his victims at the center. They, too, were staring south, at the impossible pillar of flame. Jak banked the bird, fixing on the target, coming in low and fast.

  “Is this going to work?” Gwenna bellowed to Talal.

  The leach had his eyes trained on the ground below. “I don’t know. The Spear will be stealing a lot of his power, but not all of it. Those poor people dying in the mud around him might not even notice the light. Even if they do, it won’t wipe out their terror. He’s weaker, far, far weaker than he was, but weaker doesn’t mean weak.”

  “Sweet ’Shael on a stick, Talal, can you just tell me it’s going to work?”

  The leach smiled at her, a grim, quick smile. “It’s going to work.”

  It seemed like she should say something else, something more, but then, suddenly, she was wrenched sideways, almost yanked down off the bird’s talons as Jak pulled Allar’ra into a vicious climb. Gwenna regained her footing, then stared in horror as the ground fell away below; the ground, and Balendin with it. She seized the hastily mended leather strap, hauled on it furiously, the same simple code over and over: Attack. Attack. Attack.

  Quick Jak did not attack. Instead, they continued to climb, each beat of the bird’s wings carrying them farther from the target.

  “That son of a bitch,” Gwenna bellowed. “We have one chance at this. One fucking chance, and he’s running away.”

  Talal’s face was grim, his jaw tight. Over on the other talon, Annick was shaking her head in disbelief.

  “I’m going to cut his fucking heart out and feed it to him,” Gwenna snarled. It didn’t matter. It was a stupid threat. Jak was on the bird’s back, and she was below, with no way to get at him, no way to reverse the disastrous climb, no way to force the bird back down. Even if she killed the flier a dozen times over when they finally landed, it wouldn’t matter. The window for the attack was tiny, and already she could feel it closing.

  Allar’ra’s wings kept beating even as they rose above the clouds. The climb grew steeper and steeper, as though Jak were trying in his mindless panic to force the bird all the way into the stars. Gwenna could feel the air thin in her lungs, frigid on her skin. The bird’s angle of ascent had grown so severe she had to strain to stay on the talon.

  “No,” Talal said, the syllable almost lost in the wind.

  Gwenna turned to him, her heart like stone inside her chest. “He can’t hear us. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No,” Talal said again, staring at her, head cocked to the side as though he were listening to some impossibly distant tune. “He’s not running away.” The words were slow, quiet, but filled with grim triumph.

  Gwenna stared. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “He’s not running away,” Talal said again. “He’s getting more height.”

  The bird had gone absolutely vertical, beak stabbed through the center of the sky. And then, suddenly, Gwenna was weightless.

  As a child, before she left for the Islands, one of her jobs had been splitting wood for the family farm. She’d spent whole weeks of the late spring at the work, and she could still remember the feel of the maul in her hands, the way she had to strain to swing it up, and then that wonderful moment of weightlessness as the steel head moved through the top of the arc, poised for a fraction of a heartbeat against the blue sky.…

  “We’re the axhead,” Gwenna whispered.

  There was a moment of stillness, silence. She could just hear Quick Jak’s voice, trembling but determined, the same mantra repeated over and over:

  “I am Kettral. I am Kettral. I am Kettral.”

  Then the bird screamed once, the sound bright as the sun, and they were twisting, tumbling over, falling backward, wings tucked tight against Allar’ra’s side as they plunged toward the cloud, toward the earth beneath it, toward Balendin.

  The leach had time for one desperate blow. Gwenna saw the surprise and fear in his wide, dark eyes, saw him throw up a hand, felt the air around them stiffen, then shatter, as though they’d smashed through a pane of ice. She drew her blades, ready to jump, certain she couldn’t survive a landing at that speed. And then, like spring’s first green shoot, invisible beneath the warm dirt, then suddenly, inexplicably there, the arrow sprouted from Balendin’s eye. He raised a baffled hand, touched it, turned in a slow half circle, as though surveying the carnage, looking over the broken bodies piled around him. Then he fell. It seemed like there should have been more. More rage, more fight, more uncertainty and violence, but humans, at the bottom of it all, were weak creatures, souls bound so lightly to their bodies that a single arrow, a little metal grafted to a shaft of wood, could end them. The thing that had been Balendin, that had wrought so much pain and horror, was gone between one heartbeat and the next.

  As Quick Jak hauled the bird out of the stoop, Gwenna looked over. Annick stood on the far talon, her bowstring singing like a harp in the wind, tears streaming from her cheeks.

  * * *

  It happened almost too fast for Adare to understand. One moment the bird had seemed ready to attack, the next, it disappeared abruptly into the cloud above. Adare had almost turned back to stare at the blazing immensity of the Spear once more when Nira hauled her around.

  “There,” was the only syllable the old woman managed before the bird, which had plunged back through the cloud, leveled out over the Urghul horsemen, wheeling around to the east. When Adare raised the long lens to her eye, it took her a long time to find the corpse of the leach sprawled out across the mud. His prisoners, some mutilated, some dying, were already swarming over him, tearing him apart. Adare couldn’t hear their cries, but their faces weren’t human. They were the faces of beasts.

  “They killed him,” Adare breathed, setting the long lens down.

  Nira nodded. “It was the Spear. Everyone was looking at it. Gutted that bastard’s well.”

  Adare blew out a long, unsteady breath, understanding it at last, then raised the long lens again, studying the land to the north. “Now what?”

  The Urghul were milling around, some riding away from the site of the recent violence, others forcing their horses toward it. One thing was clear—without the leach, they had no way to shove past the wreckage of Annur’s northern quarters, no way that didn’t involve days of hauling timber and clearing a path.

  “Now we wait for your general and my brother to die,” Nira replied quietly. She was staring at the Spear, eyes distant, hard.

  Adare turned. “They’re dead already, Nira.” She laid a hand on the old woman’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, but nothing can survive that.”

  “Roshin isn’t dead,” Nira replied. “I can feel him. Feel my well. This close, I would know if he had died. I would feel him … gone.” She gestured toward the Spear with her cane. “The bottom floors are
burning, but the fire doesn’t reach the top. That’s just the light in the walls.”

  Adare nodded slowly, then gritted her teeth. “If Oshi’s still alive…”

  “Then il Tornja is, too.”

  Adare closed her eyes, studied the afterimage of flame scrawled across her lids for a long time, then finally opened them. “Can you kill him?”

  “Il Tornja? Or my brother?”

  “Both,” Adare said.

  Nira sucked a long, unsteady breath between her yellowed teeth. She might have been watching her thousand years slide past, a thousand years watching Oshi, the last of the mad Atmani, guarding him, loving him, always searching for a cure.

  “I can kill them,” she said, “if I get close enough. My brother is strong, but his power is mine.” She shook her head. Her sudden, unexpected laugher was sharp as something breaking apart. “And he’s fucking crazy.”

  “The bird,” Adare said, stomach lurching inside her as she spoke the words. The huge kettral soared back over the city wall and settled in the courtyard below. Gwenna and the others had just dismounted from the talons. “The bird can take us to the top of the Spear.”

  “There’s no us,” Nira growled. “Your place is here, on the walls defending the city. Did you forget il Tornja’s warning?”

  “No,” Adare said quietly. “I did not forget it.”

  Nira locked gazes with her. “He does not play games, girl. He will kill your boy if you defy him.”

  Adare watched the woman helplessly. “He might have killed him already. He might kill him even if I do exactly what he says.” She felt as though someone had opened her up, stitched her organs together, yanked the thread too tight, then tied it off. Every moment hurt. Breathing hurt. Thinking about Sanlitun, about his grasping hands, his bright, baffled eyes—it all hurt. “My son is not the only child in this city,” she forced herself to say. The words were like blades. “Maybe I could save Sanlitun, maybe not. Il Tornja is the foe of everything we are. How could I look at my son, how could I look at anyone, knowing that I let him go.”

  “You’re not letting him go,” Nira growled. “You’re sending me.”

  “We are both going,” Adare said, surprised by the iron in her own voice. “The creature who murdered my father, blinded my brother, and stole my son is inside that tower. I am going.”

  Nira spat. “There’s nothing you can do.”

  “I can see him die.”

  “Or die yourself.”

  Adare nodded. When she spoke again, the words felt right. “Or die myself.”

  * * *

  The steel of the prison blocked the fire. Blocked it, at least, for a brief time. As the prisoners screamed in their cages, Valyn slammed shut the huge metal doors, wrapped them with chain, trapping il Tornja’s soldiers in the horrible furnace below. Strangely, of the prison guards there was no sign, as though they had abandoned their post long before the fire came to the Spear. Kaden could think of no reason why, but there was no time to ponder the question. Even as they climbed, he could hear the protestations of the wooden beams and metal plates supporting the floor, screeching, snapping, warped by the vicious heat. Finally, the whole thing twisted, screamed, cracked, and then collapsed.

  Kaden seized the railing of the stairwell as it bucked and shuddered, waiting to be dragged down with the rest of the structure into the inferno boiling below. The wave of heat hit him a moment later, knocking him back into the shadow of the stairs. It was like standing inside the huge stone hearth back in Ashk’lan, and though the flames were too far below to reach them, the air seared his throat, scalded his lungs. He squeezed shut his eyes against the heat blasting up from beneath. Triste wrapped her arms around him, seeking solace and giving it in the same gesture.

  The Kettral were talking in low, urgent tones. There was no fear in their voices, only weariness mixed with determination. A few moments later, the staircase stopped shuddering. Valyn leaned out over the edge, stared down for a moment, then pulled back.

  “It’s gone. Broke off about five hundred feet below us. Takes care of the soldiers.”

  “Beats having to fight them,” the Flea said.

  Triste stared up at the stairs twisting away out of sight. “Why haven’t we fallen?”

  “Cables,” Valyn said, gesturing up without looking. “The lower stairs were built from the ground up, the next section hung from the prison level. Both of those are gone. We’re on the last part. It’s suspended from the ceiling, not built up from the floor, but we need to keep climbing, get clear of this heat.”

  The climb was an agony of burning lungs and legs pushed past all exhaustion. Kaden counted a hundred stairs, then a thousand, but instead of flagging, the fire below burned higher, brighter, gnawing through the wreckage, rendering all human instruments inside the Spear to ash and char, as though the goddess herself had come down to purify the monument, to consecrate what was divine in a bath of perfect flame. It seemed, for a while, that the fire would overtake them, claim them, too, but there was nothing to do but climb, and so, soaked with sweat and blood, the stairs swaying ominously beneath them, they climbed.

  Finally, after another thousand stairs, the air began to cool. Kaden dragged a breath into his lungs, savored the relief, then another, then another, pausing to haul in great deep gulps of it. He tried calling out to Valyn, who was plunging up the steps above, blood burned onto both axes. His voice came out a desiccated husk. He licked his lips, swallowed, then tried again.

  “We have to stop,” he managed. “We have to stop.”

  Valyn paused, turned. He looked lost, as though he’d forgotten where they were or why they had come. Those ravaged eyes roamed across Kaden’s face for what seemed a long time. Finally he nodded.

  “Good a place as any.”

  Triste leaned against the railing, groaned, then slid down until she was half sitting, half slumped. She vomited noisily onto the platform, over and over, long after her stomach was empty. The Flea and Sigrid took up opposite positions, one a dozen steps above the landing, one below. What foe they expected to fight, Kaden had no idea. Neither soldier had asked why they were here inside the Spear or what they had come to do. Their presence should have been a comfort; without them, il Tornja would have won the fight already. And yet, there was something terrible about warriors willing to kill in the total absence of question or explanation. What they felt about the trail of corpses they’d left littered across the city, Kaden couldn’t say. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe that was part of what it was to be Kettral. Maybe, like the Shin, they trained the feeling out of you.

  “What now?” Valyn asked.

  Kaden glanced at his brother, then looked over at Triste. She had stopped throwing up, mopped the vomit from her chin, then closed her eyes and nodded.

  “The obviate,” Kaden said slowly, trying to frame a truth larger than the human world with a few words. “It is almost time to free … what we carry inside us.”

  The Flea didn’t turn. Neither did Sigrid. Just soldiers doing a soldier’s work. Suddenly, Kaden envied them that simplicity. Kill. Run. Guard. Already they’d faced down dangers by the thousands, and yet those were human dangers—swords, arrows, fire, threats such as men and women were built to face. They might die in a fight, but no one would ask them to grind out their own lives.

  “This tower,” Kaden went on after a pause, “is a link. A bridge. Between this world and another.”

  “Whatever that means,” Valyn growled.

  “I don’t understand it any more than you. The only thing I know is that this is the only place from which the gods can ascend.”

  Valyn looked like he was going to object, question the notion further. Then he just shook his head. “Great. We’re here. We’ll get you to the top. What happens then?”

  Triste let out a small noise. It might have been a whimper or a twisted little laugh.

  Kaden put a hand on her shoulder, but turned inward, to the mind locked inside the depths of his own mind.

  We a
re close, he said to the god. It is time. Explain the obviate. Tell me how I can set you free.

  For a long time, he thought Meshkent would not respond. Hundreds of feet below, flame chewed eagerly through tons of flesh and wood, roaring as it feasted. Each breath was ash and hot iron. Kaden’s legs quaked beneath him. Triste’s sweat-drenched skin was molten beneath his touch.

  Tell me, Kaden said, or you will die here.

  Inside, silence. The world beyond, fire. Then, at last, the god spoke.

  Submit, and I will burn these foes to ash.

  Kaden shook his head grimly, released Triste, then stepped to the edge of the railing.

  Explain the obviate, or I will end you myself.

  Meshkent’s snarl was a notched blade twisted in the brain.

  You would pit yourself against your god?

  Kaden gazed down into the conflagration. I trained at the feet of an older god than you.

  I will flay you with a blade of screams.

  Kaden shook his head. You cannot flay what is not there.

  Then, with a motion of thought, he brought the honed blade of his own emptiness to bear against the god’s throat, a promise, a threat. I carried you this far. Do not test me further.

  Meshkent, the Lord of all Pain, shuddered, raged, and then went slack. His voice, when he finally gave up the truth of the obviate, echoed in Kaden’s mind like a child’s voice lost in a vast cavern.

  “What happens when we get to the top?” Valyn demanded at last. “The gods just … float away?”

  “Not quite,” Kaden said quietly, the truth heavy and simple inside him.

  “What does that mean?”

  “There is a ceremony to perform. Words to speak.” Kaden paused, forced himself to meet his brother’s eyes as he said the rest. “And then we have to die.”

  For a moment, no one spoke. Valyn’s face twisted with something that might have been rage or confusion. As though something human were trying to tear itself free of the bestial fury in which he had fought his way across the city. For a fraction of a second, there was confusion there, confusion and grief and anger. Then it was all gone, the emotion wiped away like so much blood—something messy, unnecessary once it had been spilled.