The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Oh, fuck off with your thanks…,” Nira began. Then she broke off, shook her head abruptly, closed her eyes, straightened her back. When she opened them again, that gray gaze was level, regal. When she spoke, there was nothing of the gutter slang, no hint of the profanity that had marked her every utterance since they first met. She was a queen, once a leader of millions, and the weight of her years was in her words.

  “You are a fine emperor, Adare hui’Malkeenian,” she said. “A truer sovereign than I ever was, and mark this well, because these are the last words I will speak to you: if you survive this day, you will be a light to your people. Whatever you believe of your goddess, it is your own fire that blazes in your eyes.”

  She held Adare’s gaze for a moment, then nodded once, as though that were something done, done well and finished forever. Then she smiled, tossed her cane aside, and turned away, descending the stairs toward the screaming, and the dying, and the fire.

  Gwenna took a long breath, held it for a moment, then blew it out.

  “Where the fuck did you find her?”

  Adare just shook her head, counting off the heartbeats in her mind, each one final as the great bronze bell that had tolled her father’s passage. The stairwell shuddered, steel screamed, as though wrenched awry by some vicious hand. Adare stumbled, seized the railing to keep her balance. There was a great thunderclap, then another, and another; fires of unnatural color leapt up around them, then fizzled out in the hot air. By the time Gwenna waved them forward, the sounds from below had subsided.

  “Let’s see who’s dead,” the Kettral woman said grimly. “And who’s left to kill.”

  They found Nira and Oshi first, two hundred feet below, seated, leaning against the low railing with their arms wrapped around each other. At first, Adare thought they were still alive. Then she saw the blood soaking Oshi’s clothes, pooling beneath him, and the vicious wound that had caved in the side of Nira’s head.

  They look so ordinary, she thought.

  The palace was filled with paintings of the Atmani, storm-eyed, muscle-bound figures striding an earth that cracked and groaned beneath their very feet. Nira and Oshi, by contrast, looked small and gray, slight, like someone’s grandparents, just people like any of the people living in the city below; not rulers, just a brother and sister who had lived out a normal life. And, of course, they had. Not just one life, but dozens, all those centuries side by side, posing as peddlers and farmers, haberdashers and fisherfolk, dozens of names and disguises, one after the next. Despite the violence of their end, their eyes were closed. They may have died fighting, but Nira’s arms were wrapped around her brother, holding him as she had held him so many times before, cradling him finally to sleep.

  Gwenna scanned the corpses.

  “That the leach?” she asked.

  Adare nodded mutely.

  The woman stepped over the bodies as though they were so much stacked wood. “Il Tornja’s further down.”

  Slowly, Adare let go of the railing. She was sweating, her heart beating so hard she thought she might die. “Then let’s go kill him.”

  Together, the four of them descended the trembling steps.

  Another twenty feet below, on a narrow landing, they came to the battle—what was left of it, at least. There were bodies, dozens of them, scores, hacked apart, strewn across the platform, the blood so thick it poured over the edge of the landing into the fiery abyss beneath. Annurians, Adare thought dully. They all wore the uniform of the Army of the North.

  Amidst the carnage, there were only two men standing, one holding a slender, elegant blade, the other wielding dripping axes: Valyn and il Tornja, facing off again, just as they had that awful day on the tower in Andt-Kyl. Despite the slaughter, the kenarang looked calm, even urbane, endlessly patient. Valyn, on the other hand, might have been a monster out of nightmare, a horrifying figure in filthy wool and leather, hair plastered to his face, scarred eyes empty as the winter night. Unlike il Tornja, who stood perfectly still, poised, Valyn shifted back and forth, moving his weight from one foot to the other as though there were some violence inside him kept just barely in check.

  Then, even as Adare watched, he loosed it.

  She could barely follow what happened next. Despite a year of marching with her armies, despite witnessing one of the most important battles in Annurian history, Adare knew almost nothing about fighting, dueling, or swordplay. It didn’t matter. Even to her untrained eye, even in the whirlwind of all that mad, dizzying steel, the difference between the two warriors was obvious.

  Valyn was faster. His axes were everywhere at once, high and low, striking in concert sometimes, sometimes in counterpoint, shattering in a steel hail against il Tornja’s guard. And yet, somehow, that guard held. The long, elegant sword was always there to deflect the blood-smeared wedges. Valyn roared and snarled his rage, but il Tornja moved in an eddy of calm. He was slower than his opponent, far slower, but was always where he needed to be, always sliding into that slender empty space where Valyn’s axes were not, as though he’d seen the whole fight in advance, had studied it for years, had rehearsed every step of this savage dance.

  But there’s a gash along his arm, Adare realized as Valyn broke off his attack. Valyn’s chest was heaving, but his bloody teeth showed in something that might have been a smile.

  “Hello, Adare,” il Tornja said, speaking into the momentary stillness without taking his eyes from her brother.

  “Kill him, Annick,” Gwenna said.

  To Adare’s shock, the kenarang dropped his blade and turned, hands raised. “I give myself up.” He met her eyes and smiled, that same smile she’d seen so many times before. There was no hint of concern in his voice. “My work here is finished, and there are Urghul to fight.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t need to remind you I have your son.”

  Valyn took a predatory step forward, but Adare threw up a hand. “Don’t kill him.”

  She half turned to find the sniper holding that strange bow of kettral bone, the string drawn back to her ear, sighting down the arrow’s shaft at il Tornja. Annick’s eyes didn’t waver from the target, but she held the string.

  “Oh, for ’Shael’s sake,” Gwenna spat.

  “Don’t kill him,” Adare said again, louder this time, more forcefully.

  Valyn shifted forward, his axes light in his hands. Like Annick, he kept his scarred eyes on il Tornja even as he spoke to Adare. “We have been here before, sister.”

  “Indeed we have,” the Csestriim agreed cheerfully. “You might recall that the last time, in Andt-Kyl, I urged you to put down your blades. As I told you then, there’s a lot that you don’t understand.” He spread his hands as though welcoming the group. “A lot that all of you don’t understand.”

  “That was a long time ago,” Valyn said, testing the weight of his ax. “We’ve been learning.”

  Then, before Adare could object, before she could even think, he spun. The movement was too fast to follow, as was the single ax hurtling toward il Tornja. Somehow—she could not begin to fathom how—the Csestriim had seen it coming, had managed to slide aside as the steel parted the air inches from his head. He turned, unconcerned, to watch it fly into the void, smiling as it disappeared into the roaring fire far below.

  “That’s not what I had in mind,” he said finally, turning back to Valyn, “when I asked you to put down your blades.”

  Valyn’s lips curled back, showing his teeth. “I am going to kill you,” he said. “I am going to cut you apart.”

  “No,” Adare insisted, stepping forward.

  “Get out of the way,” Valyn said.

  She pressed ahead despite the death in his voice. “I won’t.”

  “What’s wrong?” Valyn demanded. “You still want him to fight your wars? You still think you need him? You still willing, after all this, to play your fucking politics?”

  “No,” Adare said, meeting her brother’s ravaged gaze as she slipped the p
olished poisoned hair stick—Kegellen’s gift—from the coils of her hair, then turned, slamming it into the kenarang’s gut, screaming as she shoved it deeper and deeper still, pulling it out, then stabbing him again. The Csestriim half lifted a hand as though to protest, then let it fall. Adare stared at the wound, the blood soaking the cloth, then raised her eyes to il Tornja. “You can’t kill him,” she said quietly, “because I’m going to do it.” She held the poisoned stick in her trembling hand, then buried it between his ribs once more.

  Il Tornja’s eyes went empty as a starless sky. The jocularity was gone, the wry act he’d worn for so long replaced by his true face, that unreadable, unknowable alien gaze. Even now it made something in Adare quail.

  “But I had your son,” he murmured.

  “What did you do to him?” Adare hissed, seizing her kenarang by the lapels of his coat. “What did you do to him?”

  The Csestriim shook his head. “Nothing. He is safe.”

  Adare stared, scouring that inhuman gaze for the truth. “I don’t believe you,” she whispered. “Why? After everyone you’ve murdered, why would you spare one infant?”

  Il Tornja stared past her, past the landing and the stairs, into the bright, empty air of the Spear. “One grows tired,” he said finally, voice slender, “of killing one’s own children.”

  Adare’s sob was like some jagged, broken thing torn bloody from her throat. The tears sheeted down her face. Il Tornja cocked his head to the side, studying her the way a botanist might scrutinize some strange, inexplicable flower.

  “So broken,” he murmured, slumping to the floor. “All these years I tried to fix you, but you are still so broken.”

  * * *

  Strong hands gentle as air under his arms and legs, lifting, carrying.

  Kaden tried to cry out, but there was nothing left inside him that could still cry. Where his mind had been, there was only a gaping hole, a passage to nothingness, oblivion. Meshkent was bellowing his fury, clinging with long claws to the remnants of Kaden, but Kaden himself was failing, unraveling. There was no way to undo what he had done. A few more heartbeats now, just a little more time, and it would be over.

  We failed.

  The words were vague, more sounds than words. He struggled to put a meaning to them, then gave up.

  “… up. To the roof. Both of them…”

  A brother’s voice, fierce and urgent, so tightly tethered to the world.

  “… breathing’s weak. Can’t find a heartbeat. Wait…”

  The voice went with a woman with hair like fire.

  “… go. Go. Go…”

  He was floating. The furious violence was gone, and he was floating up, light as smoke into the light.

  We failed.

  Meshkent raged desperately inside him.

  Kaden could feel, with the little life that he had left, a sharp knife of regret, but even that was fading.

  “… there. Open it. Open it! Through the door…”

  “Kaden.” A sister’s voice. “Kaden!”

  He tried to open his eyes. Failed. The hands were lowering him onto something hard and impossibly far away.

  Meshkent—instantly, awfully silent.

  We failed.

  Then the god’s voice, composed this time, free, huge as the whole world, brutal and triumphant: NO.

  The hole in Kaden’s mind, so dark a moment earlier, filled with light, so much light, too much. Kaden opened his eyes to escape it, and there, lying against the ironglass a pace away—Triste, her violet eyes fixed on his.

  She smiled.

  Something that had been Kaden remembered falling, a cold place full of stone and snow. A memory of falling like this falling. He waited to strike the ground, but this time, there was no ground. The whole world was those eyes, that face. Her name was gone, but the name didn’t matter, had never mattered. There was only the falling, endless, effortless, only a death that felt somehow as wide and strong and bright as any love.

  60

  Morning’s blue ax split the Valley of Eternal Repose. At the land’s crease, white-gray and lazy, the thin, indifferent river traced its ancient course. Years earlier, Adare had labored through a treatise on hydraulics. Mostly it focused on the building of canals, but there was an entire section on the natural history of rivers, on the way that even a small stream could carve a canyon through the land, given enough time. She tried to imagine the valley before it was a valley, before the current had cut down through the topsoil, exposing the low limestone walls that would serve as tombs to her people. How long had the water toiled through that stretch of ground? Tens of millennia? Hundreds?

  And it’s not finished.

  Even now, while the Annurians who had gathered in the valley stood still, silent, waiting for her to speak, the current was moving, going about its patient work, chiseling away at its bed, digging deeper, deeper. One day, the stone tombs along the valley’s walls would be too high to reach. Some traveler would stand at the bottom of the gorge and stare up, baffled, at the monuments of Malkeenian emperors—the weathered lumps that had been Alial the Great’s stone lions, Olanon’s martial bas-relief, the rising sun carved around her own father’s tomb—and wonder who had built so far up the wall of the cliff, and why, and where they had gone.

  They might not notice Kaden’s grave at all. The huge cedar doors would have rotted away by then, leaving a simple aperture into the cliff’s darkness. Even if that future traveler climbed the limestone cliff to look inside, the body would be gone, ground to dust beneath time’s silent hammer. Even if people remembered, so many millennia hence, names like Annur or Malkeenian, there would be no proof left of the lie Adare was about to tell, no corpse to gaze upon, no evidence to suggest that the Malkeenian laid in that last tomb was no Malkeenian at all.

  She had burned Kaden’s body ten days earlier, the night after the fire inside Intarra’s Spear. She could have asked Gwenna to carry the corpse down. The Kettral had already made two trips—the first, to lift the Flea and Sigrid to the palace infirmary; the second, to bring the bodies of Nira, and Oshi, and Ran il Tornja.

  “I’ll get your brother next,” Gwenna announced gruffly. “Him and Triste.”

  Adare shook her head. “We will burn them here.”

  Below her, the tower glowed with still-smoldering fire. Overhead, the smoke-smudged stars carved their slow arcs through the dark. Valyn was watching her with his scarred eyes.

  “Here?” Gwenna asked.

  Adare nodded. “Here.” Her own conviction surprised her. “This is the place they fought so hard to reach. It is the place they made their stand. It is here that they won our war. Why take them down? Why cover them with dirt?”

  And so she had labored half the night alongside Gwenna, and Annick, and Talal, and Valyn to build a rough pyre from the wreckage of the staircase below. When they were finally finished, her hands bled. Her back screamed.

  “You’re limping,” Gwenna pointed out quietly. As though that were worth worrying about, as though, compared to everything else that had happened that day, it constituted some kind of sacrifice.

  “I’ll survive.”

  They laid the two bodies atop the pyre just before dawn. The leach kindled a spark. It wavered, then caught. The flame’s blades made smoke of the dead. The Kettral stood their vigil silently. Even Valyn just stared into the flame as though hoping to go blind. Adare opened her mouth, then shut it. What did she know of Kaden or Triste? Anything she said might be a lie. Silence was the truest eulogy, and it was a relief to remain silent. There would be time in the weeks to come, too much time, for speeches, ample need for noble-sounding lies.

  And now, she thought, gazing out over the throng assembled in the valley, that time has come.

  She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and then began.

  “Some of you who have gathered here will see the splendor of this funeral and whisper, ‘Waste.’”

  She gestured to the columns of soldiers—bull-thick Aedolians, legionaries
, Sons of Flame in their flashing bronze—that had marched all the way from Annur, through the wreckage north of the wall, over the low hills, then into the long, winding valley, halting, finally, before her to stand motionless as stone men. The steel heads of a thousand spears blazed like torches in the morning light.

  “You will look at these warriors and you will see men who could be laboring, even now, in the service of the living rather than standing pointless vigil for the dead.

  “You will look at the horns of these oxen, gilded with gold, and you will think, What need have the dead for gold?”

  The oxen—eight huge black beasts, their coats oiled and groomed to a glistening sheen—had drawn the bier all the way from the Dawn Palace. They stared west now, motionless in their harnesses, round, dark eyes inscrutable as stones. Soon, the Aedolians would take up that slab of sweet-smelling cedar, bear the silk-wrapped corpse into that chilly passage carved into the cliff, set it gently down on the stone plinth, file out, put their shoulders to the massive doors that would block up all access to the tomb, and it would be done. After so long, it would finally be done.

  Adare would have come sooner, but in the days after the Spear burned, it was impossible to reach the Valley of Eternal Repose—the Urghul were still north of the wall in all their thousands. Without Long Fist or Balendin to cleave a path through the wreckage, the horsemen had no viable way to attack, no path by which to bring their horses to bear, and yet they came on, day after day, hurling themselves through the burned-out ruin of Annur’s northern quarter, screaming in their strange tongue, brandishing spears from the improvised barricades even as Annurian archers cut them down.

  Adare had watched most of the carnage from her tower atop the northern wall. “It’s madness,” she muttered halfway through the second day.