The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “What’s the other way?” Valyn asked.

  Kaden shook his head. He hadn’t explained this part back in Kegellen’s manse. There had been no reason, and he could find no words. “There is no other way. Humanity depends on Ciena and Meshkent. No one will be safe until they are free, and they can’t be free while we are still alive.”

  “How in Hull’s name did the bastard get inside you?” Valyn growled.

  “I told you already. I let him in.”

  “So let him out.”

  “This is the only way.”

  “Well, we’ll find another way,” Valyn growled. “We’re safe here. We’ve got time. We—”

  He broke off mid-sentence, cocked his head to the side, then closed his eyes as though listening to something. Kaden watched his jaw tighten. Valyn half raised one of the axes, as though he were about to attack Kaden himself.

  “No,” he said, dragging the word out in a long, quiet growl. Then again, “No.”

  “What is it?” Kaden asked, though he could already see the bleak contours of the answer.

  Valyn’s eyes opened. His face was blank, awful.

  “They’re above us.”

  Triste stumbled to her feet. “Who is?”

  “Ran il Tornja.”

  “Alone?” the Flea asked. He didn’t look down, didn’t raise his blades, didn’t move at all. It was as though he were getting ready, wringing out every last moment of rest, savoring a final stillness, preparing for whatever had to come next.

  “No,” Valyn replied grimly. “There are at least fifty men with him.”

  “How do you know?” Kaden demanded.

  “I can smell him. Them.”

  Fear surged like a fire inside Kaden. He wrapped it in a fist, crushed it out. There was no time for fear. He leaned out over the railing of the stairs, craned his neck to look up.

  “We’re maybe three hundred feet from the top.”

  Valyn nodded. “They’re coming down.”

  “Can you hold them?”

  The Flea shook his head. “Not for long. They have the high ground.”

  “And a leach,” Valyn said.

  Sigrid’s head snapped around at that. Valyn nodded.

  “He almost knocked Gwenna’s bird out of the air. I thought he was down in the streets somewhere. I was wrong.”

  Sigrid bared her teeth, made a vicious sound somewhere deep in her throat, and abandoned her post below them, climbing the stairs until she stood shoulder to shoulder with the Flea. Her blacks were a spray-spatter of gore: blood, and brain, and chips of bone. Sweat-streaked char smudged her face. She closed her eyes, put a hand on the Flea’s shoulder, and then, as Kaden stared, the grime lifted away from her clothes, her face, her arms, rising clear of her, then sliding aside, hanging in the air a moment like a shadow, then collapsing, blown away on the hot wind. The woman was immaculate, radiant, as though she’d just stepped from a day in the baths. Even her hair fell in graceful waves around her face. Her eyes, however, might have been chips of ice.

  The Flea looked over at her, then chuckled. “You always did say you wanted to die looking good. Well, I’ll tell you, Sig, you’re stunning.”

  Triste ignored the woman. She was pacing around the narrow landing like a trapped animal. “We’ll do it here,” she said finally. “We’ll do it here.” She turned to the Kettral. “If you keep them back, we’ll do it here. The obviate.” Then she faced Kaden. “You know how, don’t you. He told you.”

  Before he could respond, she crossed to him, took his hand in her own, then squeezed it gently.

  Kaden met her eyes, held them, then nodded.

  “Are we high enough?” Valyn asked roughly. “You said the top of the Spear.”

  “I don’t know,” Kaden replied quietly. “But we’re as high as we’re likely to get.”

  “I hear them now,” the Flea said. The Kettral commander turned to Sigrid. His voice was soft, but Kaden could hear it clearly enough. “What do you need from me?”

  The woman met his eyes, then reached out to take both of his shoulders in her hands. She made no effort to speak.

  “Do it,” the Flea said.

  She didn’t move.

  “Do it,” he said again. “I’m ready.”

  She didn’t move.

  “I’ve been ready since he died, Sig.” His voice was quiet, gentle. “Do it.”

  Then, the movement so fast that Kaden almost couldn’t follow it, the woman slid a knife from her belt and slammed it into the man’s side. He stiffened with the blow, almost fell, then steadied himself.

  “What…,” Triste said, lunging forward despite herself.

  Kaden held her back, his arm wrapped tight around her shoulders. He could feel her heart slamming in her chest.

  “Her well,” Valyn said grimly. “It’s pain. He’s giving her the strength to fight il Tornja’s leach.” He exhaled slowly. “And I’ll do the same.”

  “No,” the Flea ground out, his voice on the verge of snapping. “You need to fight … shield her while … she works.”

  Valyn gritted his teeth, but even Kaden could hear the footsteps now, dozens of boots pounding down the stairs from above.

  Sigrid drew another knife from her belt, more slowly this time, then drove this one, too, into the Flea’s flesh. He dropped to his knees. Dead, Kaden thought, then paused, made himself really look at the wounds, at the angle of the steel where it entered the skin. They were savage, cruel, almost too painful to contemplate, but they weren’t fatal. And slowly the Flea rose, met the leach’s eyes, and made an animal noise. No, Kaden thought. Not a noise. It was a word: Another.

  And so a third time the blond woman buried a blade in her commander’s flesh, a third time he dropped, and a third time he rose slowly to his feet.

  “Is it enough?” he whispered.

  Sigrid watched him a moment, then took him by the shoulders, leaning over to kiss his blood-smeared forehead with those perfect lips. She nodded, and they both turned toward the stairs, to hold at bay whatever was descending from above.

  “We have to do it, Kaden,” Triste said finally, roughly, breaking him free of what felt like an awful dream. “We have to do it now.”

  Kaden nodded. It seemed impossible that after all the running, all the fighting and climbing, all the fire and dying, it should come down to this. A whole life, whittled to a few final instants. Slowly, his legs trembling with the strain, he knelt on the narrow landing. Triste knelt beside him.

  “How do we…?” she asked.

  “Close your eyes,” he replied. Men were shouting above them, pounding down the stairs. Kaden ignored the sound.

  “Wait!” Triste said, clutching his face in her hands.

  Kaden shook his head. “There’s no time, Triste. If we had a year or ten years, there wouldn’t be time.” He reached out to touch her cheek. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t need to say it.”

  Tears poured down her face. All over again, he saw her as he’d seen her that first night in Ashk’lan, the same violet eyes, the same perfect face, the same fear.…

  No, he thought, gazing at her. Not the same at all. Her face was scarred now, and her eyes … there was fear in her eyes, but this time, it wasn’t a fear of him. This time, when she reached out to touch him, there was none of the frenzied desperation he remembered from that night in his tent, none of the mad, animal haste.

  All my life, Kaden thought. I’ll remember her all my life. It was an inane thought, given they were both about to die, but somehow that didn’t matter. Everyone was always about to die, always a breath away, a dozen breaths, ten thousand—that was the lesson of the Skullsworn, the surprisingly gentle tutelage of Ananshael.

  “I’ll remember you all my life,” Kaden said. For some reason, he wanted to speak the words aloud.

  The Shin had been wrong about so many things, but the old aphorism came back to him all the same, spoken, for some reason, in Tan’s gravelly voice: Live now. The future is a dream.

  Triste s
miled at him, smiled through her tears, leaned forward, kissed him once, then settled back and closed her eyes.

  In the stairwell above, steel smashed against steel. There was a savage, animal howl, half defiance, half hunger. Valyn, Kaden realized. Valyn, standing alone against il Tornja and his army while Sigrid drew from the Flea’s agony to hold back the leach. Kaden listened for a moment to the discordant music of his brother—the screaming, the ringing of blades—all of it, too, beautiful in its own way. There was a time when he might have wished something for his brother—luck, maybe, or strength—but they were, all of them, well beyond wishing. Kaden closed his mind to the carnage, focused only on what was inside of him.

  “When the goddess entered you,” he said, repeating what Meshkent had told him, “she built a doorway. All you need to do is open it.”

  He could hear Triste panting just a few inches away. “A doorway? What kind of doorway?”

  “Like the kenta,” Kaden said. “But in your mind.”

  “How do I find it? How do I open it?”

  “The phrase isn’t in our language,” Kaden replied. “Not anymore.” He closed his own eyes. “Ac lanza, ta diamen. Tel allaen ta vanian sa sia pella.”

  He felt something shudder inside his mind, as though the language were a pry bar, as though some deep-buried stone foundational to his very being had shifted.

  “I am a gateway for the god,” Triste translated, voice terrified, awed. “I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

  Kaden nodded, and then, this time together, they spoke the awful words.

  Above them, men were bellowing, screaming, falling from the staircase. The air shuddered with fire. None of it mattered. Only the words mattered, words growing, spreading, until they were huge as the world itself.

  “I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

  The staircase trembled, as though it were about to plunge into the abyss.

  “I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

  Il Tornja was shouting something, voice hard, confident.

  “I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

  Triste was sobbing through the words, her hands clenched around Kaden’s own. He held them, as though through that holding he could keep her from some unfathomable abyss, as though she, in her turn, might bear him up even as the world itself collapsed.

  “I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

  Each time they said the phrase, Kaden could feel the gateway opening inside him. At first it was uncomfortable. Then the pain came, a bright, invisible knife carving a hole out of his mind. He shuddered. It was bright beyond any human light. Too bright.

  “I am a gateway for the god. I will unmake my mind so that she might pass.”

  Inside his mind, Meshkent was bellowing. No. NO! Not here! THIS IS NOT THE PLACE!

  Too late, Kaden thought, the doorway opening on its own now, prying him apart, destroying him. He held tight to Triste’s hands. They were the only thing left. It’s too late.

  * * *

  Hanging in the harness from the kettral’s talons as the bird rose up above the city was the most terrifying and exhilarating thing Adare had ever experienced. She stared, heart in her throat, as Annur fell away beneath her, the streets, and squares, and avenues, everything she’d been trying so hard to protect suddenly small, then tiny, then miniscule. There was the Temple of Intarra, small as a gem and flashing in the sun. There was the wide avenue of the Godsway plunging through the city’s heart, the statues of the gods smaller than bugs. There were the green-brown canals, winding from the Basin out to the sea, and the boats bobbing at anchor in that Basin. There were the crooked alleys of the Perfumed Quarter, and the long docks lined up along the harborside. There were the red walls of the palace, the leafy, flowering pavilions. Her city, so slight at this altitude it seemed impossible it could be the home to a million souls, so fragile that a single blow might break it. Adare would have stared at it forever, had Gwenna not pulled her around, a rough hand on her arm.

  “They’ve taken the top of the Spear,” she shouted, pointing.

  Adare squinted. The bird had climbed so high so fast that even the top of Intarra’s Spear was below them, flashing with trapped fire. She could barely make out anything at that distance—how Gwenna could see, she had no idea—but as the kettral drew closer, she saw them, dozens of tiny figures spread out on the tower’s top. One of them had to be il Tornja. Even with the fire, he’d escaped somehow, escaped again. Not anymore, she swore silently, turning her attention back to Gwenna.

  “Can you…”

  “Kill them?” she asked.

  Adare nodded.

  The Kettral woman’s smile was feral. “What the fuck do you think they teach us to do on the Islands? Write love letters?”

  “What should I…”

  “You stay out of the way, right here on the bird. You and the old woman. We’ll drop on the first pass, Jak’ll circle, then bring you in when we’ve cleared the space.”

  Adare wanted to protest, to object, to insist on joining the others, but that was just pride and idiocy. Besides, there was no time. The bird had dropped a thousand feet, level with the tower’s top. Adare stared as the Spear approached. Now that she had a way to gauge the speed, it seemed like madness. They were going to die, all of them, dashed against the tower’s top. No one could survive that approach. Then, as they swept overhead, just a pace above the tower’s top, Gwenna was gone, and the sniper, and the leach, the three of them leaping from the talon into the mass of men. There was a flash of steel, a sudden chorus of shouts and screams, and the bird was past the tower’s top, dropping down the other side.

  Stomach lodged in her chest, Adare looked over at Nira.

  “Did you see Oshi?”

  The old woman’s face was grim. She held on to the strap above her head with one clawlike hand, but unlike Adare, she didn’t seem frightened by the flight. “No. Not him or the Csestriim.”

  “They must be below,” Adare said. “In the Spear itself.”

  “Those three idiots we just dropped on the roof better hope they stay there. I don’t care how handy they are with those blades. Oshi’ll leave them splattered across the wall.”

  When the bird came back for the second pass, however, the Kettral were most definitely not spattered. They stood in a rough triangle near the center of the tower, blades bare and dripping blood. The soldiers around them were dead—dead or dying—frozen in the awful postures of their slaughter. Annick and Talal began stalking the platform, cutting throats, working with all the bleak efficiency of laborers in the field, trying to get the last of the grain in before the rain.

  “Sweet Intarra’s light,” Adare whispered.

  “That glittery bitch of a goddess already did her work,” Nira snapped, gesturing to the glowing Spear below them. “It’s our turn now.”

  This time, the flier put the bird down right on the roof, ignoring the corpses altogether. The whole space stank of blood and urine. When Adare tried to walk, to cross the empty tower’s top, she slipped in the spilled viscera.

  “They’re down there,” Gwenna said, stabbing a finger at the door leading into the Spear. “And there’s ’Shael’s own fucking fight going on, by the sound of it.”

  Adare took a slow breath through her nose, tried not to vomit. They were doing what they’d come to do, kill il Tornja’s men, find the kenarang himself, and yet she found her eyes drifting away from the dead. Grimly, she forced herself to look at the bodies, to witness, even if for just a moment, the carnage she herself had ordered. The Kettral might have held the blades, but Adare had helped to make these men dead. And they weren’t finished yet. She glanced at the trapdoor, the woman’s words registering for the first time.

  “Fighting?” Adare asked. “Il Tornja’s supposed to be in here alone. Who is he fighting?”

  “How the fuck do I
know?” Gwenna spat. “You want to stand up here with our thumbs up our cunts while we talk about it?”

  Adare found herself grinning viciously in response. “No,” she said. “I don’t. I want to go down there.”

  Her grin vanished as soon as she stepped into the tower. The wind outside was cool, sharp. Inside, there was nothing but flame and screaming and heat like a brick to the face. Most worshippers thought of Intarra as the Lady of Light, but there was another truth to the goddess, a harder truth, one Uinian had learned as he burned inside his own temple, one Adare herself had had seared into her flesh at the Everburning Well: Intarra was a goddess of heat as well as light, the awful mistress of all conflagration and the annihilation it brought.

  “He’s here,” Nira said, following the Kettral down the winding staircase, breaking into Adare’s thoughts. “Oshi. He’s close.”

  “Can he feel you the same way?” Adare demanded, pulling up short.

  Nira shook her head. “He’s my well. I’m not his.”

  When they reached the first landing, the old woman shouldered her way past the Kettral, then paused, gazing down the stairs into the inferno.

  “This is my fight now,” she said. The words were quiet, as though meant for no human ears.

  “Hold on…,” Gwenna began.

  “No,” Nira said, rounding on the younger woman. “I will not. I am going down there to kill my brother, and then to kill the creature who made us what we are, and I am going alone.” Her voice softened. “You’re a vicious, feisty bitch, kid. I like that. But believe me when I tell you there’s nothing you can do down there but die.”

  Gwenna opened her mouth to reply—to argue, no doubt—but Adare laid a hand on her arm.

  “Let her go,” she said. “There’s more to this than you know.”

  Gwenna gritted her teeth, then nodded. “You have two hundred heartbeats,” she said, “and then we’re coming down.”

  Adare searched for the words. It seemed a lifetime ago that Nira had pulled her out of the crowd on the Godsway, seeing a truth that no one else had seen. After all the months fighting and marching, what Adare remembered was the woman’s swearing, her mockery and recriminations. A hundred times she’d thought of sending Nira away, of being free of her constant abrasion. But she wouldn’t have gone, Adare realized, staring at the old woman’s seamed face. She never left Oshi, and she didn’t leave me.