The Last Mortal Bond

by Brian Staveley

  Valyn stood a pace away, his scarred eyes fixed on the slaughter. After a long time, he shook his head. “Not madness. Sacrifice.”

  “Dying in an insane attack that can’t possibly succeed?”

  “Not the dying, the fighting. The Hardening.”

  Adare watched as a sun-haired warrior, chest stitched with arrow shafts, began singing in the street below. More arrows. The song turned to blood in his mouth.

  Only after a full week, when the ruined streets north of the wall were choked with Urghul bodies, did the horsemen finally stop. It was hard to say why they broke off their attack. Through the long lens, Adare had spotted a woman—blond and scarred as the rest of them, middle-aged but hard as carved wood—standing barefoot on her horse’s back, arms spread as though inviting a spear to the chest, bellowing some inexplicable exhortation.

  “Huutsuu,” Valyn said. An unreadable expression tugged like a hook at the corner of his mouth.

  Adare stared at him. “Is that a name?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “You know her?”

  Another nod.

  “What in ’Shael’s name is she doing?”

  He cocked his head, as though he could hear the words from almost a mile away. “She is telling them to go home.”

  Adare studied the woman, studied the thousands of howling horsemen circling her like wolves. “They’re going to kill her.”

  “It is possible. I do not think so.”

  Then, to Adare’s shock, Valyn stepped up onto the low tower wall.

  “What are you doing?”

  He gestured north. “Going.”

  “Going where?”

  “Huutsuu helped me once. I will help her now, if I can.”

  “The Urghul will fucking murder you, Valyn.”

  He stared at her, through her, considering the possibility. It seemed impossible that this stranger, this creature of sinew, scar, and darkness, could somehow be her brother.

  “Maybe.”

  Then, before Adare could respond, he jumped. It was thirty-five feet to the street below, but Valyn landed like a cat, rose to his feet, dreadful as any unkillable thing from nightmare, then disappeared into the wreckage. Somehow Adare had understood, even then, that he would not be coming back.

  She could have skipped the funeral. No one in Annur aside from Gwenna and her Kettral knew how Kaden had died. Besides, Kaden had, by his own choice, abdicated the Unhewn Throne. Funerals, however, were not for the dead, and after the Urghul disappeared over the northern horizon, riding back to their steppe, Annur needed something—a ceremony, a shared moment—to mark a turning point.

  The tomb was there already. Stonemasons had hollowed the hole from the cliff the day after her father was laid to rest. There were no carvings, however, no statuary or reliefs to decorate the stone face. Those were chosen, traditionally, by the Emperor before his death, but Kaden had given no instructions, and all those who truly knew him—Rampuri Tan, Triste, the Shin monks among whom he had lived so long—were dead. Perhaps it didn’t matter—he was already so much ash and bone—but the people would expect carvings, and so Adare went to Kiel, the Csestriim.

  “What would he want? Have wanted?”

  Death’s grammar was slippery.

  The historian looked at her with unreadable eyes.

  “Are you speaking of your brother? Or of the one who will take his place in the tomb?”

  Adare blinked. She had told no one but Valyn and Gwenna, had wrapped the body herself, winding the water-smooth cloth around the naked figure, circling the feet first, then the legs, all the way up to the face, pausing for a long moment before winding it tight around those open eyes. The lie was easy: His wounds were too gruesome. The people should not see a Malkeenian so defiled.

  “How…”

  “Rest easy, Your Radiance,” the Csestriim said. “I have been studying this world a long time. No one else is likely to notice.” He moved the planes of his face into a smile. “Your brother needs no stone for his monument. But then, you know this. Kaden’s monument, and Triste’s, is carved into the minds of all your kind.”

  Adare hesitated, then gestured to the silk-wrapped figure. “And for him?”

  The historian closed his eyes, cocked his head, as though listening to some music she could not hear.

  “We do not want. Not in any way that you could understand.”

  “I have to do something.”

  “No, you do not. The tomb’s emptiness is all.”

  And so Adare found herself standing before a doorway unadorned by any carving, a perfect rectangle cut into the cliff. She would have preferred to remain silent, as she had been silent while Kaden burned atop the Spear, but the time for silence was over, and there was no one else to speak.

  “Perhaps you will look at me,” she continued, raising her voice above the breeze, “and wonder, Why is she here? If she would rule Annur, let her rule. Let her see to the millions left alive. The dead have no need of her ministrations.”

  She nodded.

  “And it is true. The dead are dust.”

  The crowd stirred at that, as though all those thousands of bodies formed one creature and the creature had grown uneasy. The men and women might have made the long walk from Annur for any of a dozen reasons, but after the madness of the past year, after the unreasoning fury of the weeklong Urghul assault and the blood-drenched fact of the final Urghul collapse, most would be looking for reassurance, certitude, a trotting out of the old phrases, all of them docile as sheep: died a hero … for the glory of Annur … in our memories forever.

  They expected an emperor who would stand before the tombs of her fathers and conjure up the old imperial theater. They wanted a prophet to open her mouth, and to see, instead of words, Intarra’s light sluicing forth, scouring away the darkness lodged inside their hearts.

  But I’m not a prophet, Adare thought.

  The miracle of Intarra’s Spear was not a miracle at all, but an act of calculated arson. The Malkeenian fire burned in her eyes, but the script of scar laid into her skin remained illegible. She remembered the lightning strike at the Everburning Well. That single syllable—Win—remained carved into her mind, but whether it had been a voice of the divine or something else, something less, Adare had no idea. Of the will of the goddess, she understood no more than the blank-eyed oxen standing on the churned-up dirt.

  For a moment she imagined telling everything: “I am no prophet. The goddess does not speak, either through me or to me. My scars are only scars. My blessings were lies.”

  And then? The righteous would rise up to kill her. Others would kill the killers, declare her a martyr. It was an old story, told over and over in the histories: bodies dragged from homes, butchered in the streets, burned alive, faith pitted against faith, belief against belief. The only way out was to stay alive, to keep wearing her bright mantle of lies. She had a lifetime to find a way to abdicate, to dismantle the broken apparatus of empire, to find a way to avoid passing the horror of her position on to her only son, that tiny child who was, even now, being carried down to her from the chilly fortress in Aergad.

  “The dead are dust,” she said again, “but you know this already. You have seen it.”

  She gestured to the bier.

  “My brother, Kaden hui’Malkeenian, died to save our city, to defeat a traitor at its very heart—but he is gone. Gone beyond all human reach, gone certainly beyond any meager language I might muster.

  “So are the loggers of the Thousand Lakes hacked apart by the Urghul. So are the soldiers sacrificed on bloody altars across the north. So are the Channarians who starved during Dombâng’s blockade, the warriors of the Waist who rose up to be slaughtered by our legions, and the legionaries slaughtered in their turn. So are the unnumbered Urghul buried, nameless, in their twin mounds north of Annur itself.

  “My brother lies right here, at my feet”—the lie was easier this time—“but he will not hear the words I speak today, nor will the rest of the d
ead spread across Vash and Eridroa, whom we will never fully tally.”

  Nira, laid to rest beside her brother in a tiny cemetery by the sea …

  The fallen Kettral, whom Gwenna had carried back to the Islands in the claws of a giant bird …

  Fulton, buried with pomp in the northern forests; Mailly, dragged from her hanging cell and burned without remark …

  “The dead are beyond all speech and hearing, so why speak at all? Why have we come here today?

  “I will tell you. Forget the dead. A funeral is the time for the living to speak with the living.”

  She thought again of Valyn walking away, of the Urghul finally riding north, disappearing like a storm over the horizon.

  “And what should we say, those of us who have survived? Should we drag out the old platitudes?

  “The dead will never be forgotten.…

  “They fell that we might live.…

  “The living will rebuild.…”

  She shook her head.

  “No.

  “Each death is a smashed glass, a burned pyre, a broken bow. Nothing can be put back.”

  Two dozen paces off, silent in his tomb, her father lay. In front of Adare, almost at her feet, wrapped in Liran silk, waited the corpse of the creature who had killed him.

  He will be the last, Adare decided. She gazed the length of the valley, the final resting place of so many Malkeenians. It was his, anyway, this empire we called Annur. He made it, and he is dead.

  She raised her chin.

  The sun was cold on her face.

  When she spoke, her words sounded like something written down long ago, as though she were listening to herself from some inexplicable distance.

  “What remains is the oldest work, the only labor, that endless task from which the dead have been absolved at last: to go into this smoldering, splintered world, and to make from the wreckage something strange and new, something unknown to us until now.”

  EPILOGUE

  A woman with eyes that burn like fire walks to the center of a bridge over deep, fast water. The woman has a name, as does the river, as does the bridge—Adare hui’Malkeenian, the White River, the Span of Peace—but the name is not the thing. This is the first of many challenges facing the Historian.

  All record is translation. There is no way to press that woman between the pages of a codex, no way to preserve the scarred man who approaches her but in words. All approaches are imperfect:

  Valyn hui’Malkeenian, the first son of Sanlitun hui’Malkeenian, first of that name …

  A badly scarred young man, his dark flesh twisted with muscle, stalking across the span …

  Chosen by Hull in the caverns beneath Irsk, a warrior-prophet faster and stronger than all other men …

  The Kettral commander who defected from Annur to join the Urghul north of the White River …

  Murderer of hundreds, traitor to his own people …

  Loyal brother …

  Beast …

  The characters shift with the focus, like the clouds scraping across the bowl of the sky, like the never-still shapes of the river surging between the piers below. Like waves, men and women exist only in motion, in change. Put them on the page, and you have already failed.

  And then there are their words:

  “This bridge,” says the Emperor, the sister, the mother, the prophet, gesturing to the stones beneath her feet, “this edifice, is a monument to the newfound peace between Annurians and Urghul.”

  This is a lie. The bridge will be different things to different people over the long years. To Adare, now, it is the price she has paid to make the Urghul stay out of Annur. Her brother does something like a smile with his face. How to describe it?

  “A link,” he agrees, “between two great lands.”

  This, too, a lie. To Valyn, the bridge is the knife he holds against his sister’s throat. He is not the chieftain of the Urghul; they fractured into a hundred rival tribes when the Kettral killed the leach who led them, their assault on the city suddenly inchoate, hopeless. He is not their chieftain, but as the only Annurian who rides among them, he speaks here for all the pale riders. He translates their Urghul words into Annurian, then translates the plain truth once more into this lie he sets before his sister.

  “It will bring us closer.”

  The bridge was his idea. The paved span took half a year to build. It is wide enough for twenty Urghul to ride abreast, which they will do, if the Emperor closes her fist too tightly around her empire. If it is even still an empire.

  The word that the historian might use for the bridge is bond—the bridge binds as surely as any chain—but it is not a historian’s place to use his own words. When he pens this moment, he will record the words as they were spoken: Monument to peace. A link between lands.

  What else will he record? The detail is infinite. A full description of the scene, of each of the tens of thousands of horses gathered on the northern bank, of every ranked legionary at the Emperor’s back, would be impossible. There is a universe of truth in the green-gold dragonfly that buzzes between these two Malkeenians, in the patterns of its fine-veined wings, in the refractions of its multiform eyes. A diligent historian could reflect for a lifetime on a single, swaying nuns-blossom, on the tessellation of the flower’s white petals.…

  For millennia, this was the way of the Csestriim: accounts of glaciation, records of water levels in flood and drought, examinations of the courses of the stars, investigations into heredity, numerical pattern, river formation, each with its columns and tallies, charts, maps, graphs.

  They had no stories—irrational to labor in the creation of the unreal. Their histories, before the humans came, were lists of dates, of deeds. Even after, the Historian cleaved to this approach, cleaved to it until it failed him.

  The brother and sister have locked eyes: his black, scarred; hers on fire. The thousands watching from either bank will try to read the future in this moment, but they will fail. The Historian has been at his task long enough to understand that the future is beyond him. Even this present is unreachable. There is too much of it, even for him. It is too bright; there are too many layers. The past, the present, the future—it is all beyond his grasp, the translation of a translation of a translation. Even the spoken words as they reach his ears are late, caught in the air’s clear amber.

  If the work cannot be done, what will he do?

  The Historian smiles. It took him centuries to learn to smile.

  The world is the world; his history is something else. What will he do? He will make the story up.

  GODS AND RACES, AS UNDERSTOOD BY THE CITIZENS OF ANNUR

  RACES

  Nevariim—Immortal, beautiful, bucolic. Foes of the Csestriim. Extinct thousands of years before the appearance of humans. Likely apocryphal.

  Csestriim—Immortal, vicious, emotionless. Responsible for the creation of civilization and the study of science and medicine. Destroyed by humans. Extinct thousands of years.

  Human—Identical in appearance to the Csestriim, but mortal, subject to emotion.

  THE OLD GODS, IN ORDER OF ANTIQUITY

  Blank God, the—The oldest, predating creation. Venerated by the Shin monks.

  Ae—Consort to the Blank God, the Goddess of Creation, responsible for all that is.

  Astar’ren—Goddess of Law, Mother of Order and Structure. Called the Spider by some, although the adherents of Kaveraa also claim that title for their own goddess.

  Pta—Lord of Chaos, disorder, and randomness. Believed by some to be a simple trickster, by others, a destructive and indifferent force.

  Intarra—Lady of Light, Goddess of Fire, starlight, and the sun. Also the patron of the Malkeenian Emperors of Annur, who claim her as a distant ancestor.

  Hull—The Owl King, the Bat, Lord of the Darkness, Lord of the Night, aegis of the Kettral, patron of thieves.

  Bedisa—Goddess of Birth, she who weaves the souls of all living creatures.

  Ananshael—God of Death
, the Lord of Bones, who unknits the weaving of his consort, Bedisa, consigning all living creatures to oblivion. Worshipped by the Skullsworn in Rassambur.

  Ciena—Goddess of Pleasure, believed by some to be the mother of the young gods.

  Meshkent—The Cat, the Lord of Pain and Cries, consort of Ciena, believed by some to be the father of the young gods. Worshipped by the Urghul, some Manjari, and the jungle tribes.

  THE YOUNG GODS, ALL COEVAL WITH HUMANITY

  Eira—Goddess of Love and mercy.

  Maat—Lord of Rage and hate.

  Kaveraa—Lady of Terror, Mistress of Fear.

  Heqet—God of Courage and battle.

  Orella—Goddess of Hope.

  Orilon—God of Despair.

  ALSO BY BRIAN STAVELEY

  The Emperor’s Blades

  The Providence of Fire

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Without the faith and hard work of my agent, Hannah Bowman, and my editor, Marco Palmieri, this story would never have seen the light of day. I am forever grateful to both of them for giving me the chance to write these books and for all their support along the way.

  I’m grateful, also, to every reader who has picked up this tale. Whenever I reach a tough spot with the writing, a place where I feel I can’t go on, I imagine you, all of you—snuggled under blankets or listening in the car on the way to work, reading in the hallway while your kids are falling asleep or perched atop some rock in the backcountry—then I plant my ass back in the chair and keep going.

  Finally, my wife, Jo. It may not look like it, but this is a love story, and I wouldn’t understand the first thing about love stories—not how to write them, not how to live them—without her.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BRIAN STAVELEY lives in rural Vermont. The Last Mortal Bond is his third novel, following The Emperor’s Blades and The Providence of Fire. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Thank you for buying this