The Last Mortal Bond (10 page)

“And the goddess…”

“I hope she fucking feels it when the knife bites.”

*   *   *

The descent from the prison took Kaden almost as long as the climb. By the time he neared his father's study, his legs wobbled beneath him and his hands felt twisted into claws from so much clutching of the railing. The simple fact that Triste was alive should have come as a relief, but despite her survival, there was no comfort in the larger picture.

Every visible future was grim. Triste killing herself without performing the
obviate,
or being killed. Il Tornja's assassins hacking off her head, or the council throwing her alive onto a pyre with a few self-righteous words about law and justice. In some futures, it was Kaden himself killing her, holding the knife when there was no one else left to hold it. He could feel the girl's blood hot on his hands, could see her angry, helpless eyes locked on him as he tried to carve the goddess free of her flesh.

He wanted nothing more, when he finally stepped from the luminous emptiness of the Spear into human floors below, than to lock himself inside his study, set aside all emotion, and drift in the
vaniate
.

Kiel, however, was still in the huge chamber, sitting motionless in the half darkness, pondering the
ko
board before him, setting the stones on the board slowly—white, then black, white, then black—working through the moves of an ancient contest first played by men or Csestriim centuries dead. Kaden watched in silence for a while, but could make no sense of it.

After a dozen moves, he shook his head, turning away from the incomprehensible game on the
ko
board, from Kiel's unwavering gaze. For a moment, he looked at Annur; the city was even more baffling than the game of stones, the very sight of it a reproach. Kaden had survived the attack on Ashk'lan, had survived the
kenta
and the Dead Heart, had managed to overthrow Tarik Adiv, seize the Dawn Palace, establish the republic, and thwart Adare and il Tornja, and for what? Annur was in shambles, and il Tornja, according to Kiel, had managed to outmaneuver him at every juncture from hundreds of miles away. Kaden blew out a long breath, crossed to the wide wooden table, and flipped idly through the loose parchment stacked there.

Intarra knew that he tried to keep track of it all. To make sense of it. Orders for conscription, new laws intended to curb banditry and piracy, new taxes intended to fund all manner of ill-founded projects in the faltering republic. He read it all, but what did he know about any of it? What did it all—

He paused, finger on a sheet he hadn't seen before. Just a few lines of inked text. A simple signature. No seal. He shook his head in disbelief.

“What?” Kiel asked.

Kaden stared, reading the words again, and then again.

“What?” Kiel asked again.

“It wasn't a theft,” he managed finally. “They didn't break in to take anything.”

The Csestriim raised his brows. “Oh?”

“They broke into my study,” Kaden said, raising the sheet of parchment, “to leave this.”

 

6

At first, the steady
thock, thock, thock
of arrows striking wood was comforting. It was familiar, at least, from a thousand memories, long days training on the Islands, pulling bowstrings over and over until your shoulders ached and your fingers bled. The long warehouse in which they waited, however, was not the Islands. The air was hot and close, so dusty that breathing was difficult. Gwenna had chosen it for tactical reasons—long sight lines and redundant exits, proximity to the water if everything went to shit—but the place was beginning to feel like a trap. A fucking boring trap, but a trap all the same, and the relentless thrumming of the bowstring and thudding of arrows wasn't helping. Not anymore.

“Annick,” Gwenna growled. “You think you've had enough target practice for the day?” She pointed to the arrows lodged in the timber post. “I think it's dead.”

The sniper drew the bowstring, held it, then looked over. “Is there another way you think we should be spending our time while we wait?”

“What about resting? Maybe even sleeping. We
did
just break into the Dawn Palace. You're allowed to take a break, you know.”

Annick watched her a moment more, then let the arrow fly. Before it struck the beam, she had another notched and drawn, and then
it
was flying. Then another.

Thock, thock, thock.

Like a woodpecker—only woodpeckers weren't that persistent. And woodpeckers didn't kill you.

Annick cocked her head to the side, studying her work. The shafts were clustered together, packed into a space the size of an eyeball. A small eyeball. If the performance gave the sniper any pleasure, she didn't show it.

“Not tired,” she said, then started across the warped floorboards to reclaim her shafts.

Gwenna opened her mouth to respond, then clamped it shut. There was no point arguing with Annick. If she wasn't tired, she wasn't tired. Gwenna herself was exhausted. She felt like she'd been exhausted forever, since fleeing the Qirins, at least. The last nine months should have been a rest, of sorts. After the battle of Andt-Kyl, all three of them had been busted up, and bad. One of the Urghul had put half a lance through Annick's leg. Talal had three broken fingers, three broken ribs, and a fractured scapula—all, presumably, from the final blast that had crippled Balendin. That same blast had sent a chunk of stone into the side of Gwenna's skull, and another into her leg, fracturing it just above the knee.

They should have been dead, all of them. Those wounds would have killed anyone else. Talal had some theory, though, about how the slarn egg protected them, made them more resilient and faster healing. Gwenna didn't feel fucking resilient. None of them, in the immediate wake of the battle, could walk more than a quarter mile at a stretch, and Gwenna kept passing out when she moved too quickly. They searched slowly and futilely for Valyn. After a month, there was nothing left to search, not if they didn't intend to scour every bit of forest south of the Romsdals.

The three of them had found an abandoned cabin southeast of Andt-Kyl, some hunter's shack or outlaw's hovel already gone half to seed. They had hunkered down and worked really hard for the next few months on just not dying. That task had proven a good sight harder than any of them expected, and by the end of it—after months trying to lie still in between hacking up blood, of washing and dressing wounds, of living off the mushrooms they could gather within a few paces of the cabin and whatever birds Annick could bring down with her flatbow—the three of them looked more like corpses than warriors.

It meant months of convalescence, the rest of the summer and fall—walking before she could run, floating before she could swim, lifting the fucking swords before there was any point in trying to swing them—before Gwenna felt even half qualified to call herself a Kettral once more. An entire summer and fall gone before they could even contemplate going anywhere or killing anyone. Gwenna had no idea where to go or who to kill, but it seemed like they were going to need to do plenty of both. When they were finally whole enough to travel, the snow was already piled up to the eaves. Covering half a mile took half a day. And so, for
another
season, they were forced to hunker down, live off of venison stew, and try not to kill one another.

The extra winter months up north weren't all bad. It meant they were all fully healed before heading south, at least as strong and quick as they had been back on the Islands, wounds that should not have closed at all finally knitted. The disadvantage was that the rest of the world hadn't been convalescing inside a snowbound cottage for nine months, and when Gwenna, Talal, and Annick finally emerged, they had no idea what the fuck was going on.

Nothing good—that much was clear as soon as they broke free of the northern forests. The Urghul were everywhere, burning shit, killing people, erecting altars to their suffering and their god, generally getting blood on everything. Worse, Balendin was still alive. Gwenna had hoped that somehow, in the chaos and carnage of Andt-Kyl, the traitorous Kettral leach would have taken a blade to the brain. It seemed plausible, at least, given the twin Annurian armies that had swept up the coasts of Scar Lake.

Hope, as usual, proved to be a miserable bitch.

They weren't even out of the woods before they started hearing reports of an Urghul commander who was not Urghul, a man with dark skin and dark hair, a leach with black eagles perched on either shoulder, a warrior whose thirst for blood outstripped even that of the Urghul. The horsemen called him the Anvil, but it was obviously Balendin. He couldn't be fought, people whispered. Couldn't be defeated. He could light whole forests ablaze with a wave of his hand, could snap his fingers and watch the heads of his foes explode.

“We could kill him,” Annick had suggested.

Gwenna had mulled it over. It was tempting, but following your temptations was a good way to get dead.

“No,” she said finally, “we can't.”

“Why not?”

“Because we don't have a bird and we don't have a full Wing.”

“You don't need a bird or a full Wing to kill a man.”

Talal had shaken his head at that. “He's not just a man, Annick. His power—it's self-fulfilling. Everyone across the north is terrified of him, and all that terror just makes him stronger.” His face was sober. “The things he could do back on the Islands, or even in Andt-Kyl … those were nothing.”

“He should be punished,” Annick insisted.

“He will be punished,” Gwenna said, “but since it looks like we're the ones who are going to have to do the punishing, let's try to get it right the first time, eh? We need a bird, we need more people, and we need to know what in Hull's name is going on.”

“Where are we going to get all that?” Annick asked.

“We're going to start by finding Valyn's brother and beating some answers out of him,” Gwenna replied. “Which means we're going to Annur.”

She had steeled herself for an argument, for Annick to demand an attack on Balendin, or for Talal to insist on an immediate return to the Qirins.

Instead, Talal nodded. “All right,” he said quietly. “Annur.”

Annick just shrugged.

It was disconcerting, this deference, unsettling. Gwenna wasn't the Wing's commander—with Valyn and Laith dead, there was barely even a Wing left to command—but the other two, for reasons she couldn't begin to fathom, had started accepting her decisions as though they were orders, as though she weren't just making it all up as she went along, as though she had some larger, more coherent vision in mind beyond just keeping them alive from one day to the next. Which she most certainly did not.

It didn't make any sense. Talal and Annick were both better soldiers than Gwenna. Annick was already a legend among the Kettral snipers, and Talal—though he lacked Annick's obvious, ostentatious skill—had a good military mind and was cool enough to use it, even when the world was burning down around him. Either one of them could have commanded their truncated abortion of a Wing better than Gwenna herself … and yet they didn't.

Annick might argue some small tactical issue, but mostly she seemed to want to oil her bow and take target practice. Talal would actually say more than two or three words on a given topic, but he seemed to prefer advising to leading. And so Gwenna ended up making the choices, despite the fact that she had no fucking idea what she was doing. The whole situation made her itchy, twitchy, irritable, but what could you do?
Someone
had to make the 'Kent-kissing decisions.

And so they came to Annur, set up shop inside the warehouse, cased the Dawn Palace, broke into it, then into the Spear, knocked out the Aedolians guarding what was supposed to be Kaden's personal study, planted the note, and slipped out. The whole thing, as it turned out, was ludicrously, stupidly easy. The problem with having the largest fortress in the world was just that: it was fucking
large
. There were thousands of men and women inside, maybe ten thousand: bureaucrats to push the papers, masons to fix the walls, gardeners to keep the plants in line, petitioners dumb enough to think anyone in charge actually gave a pickled shit about their fishing rights or rice supplies or guild licenses or whatever. With a minimal amount of planning and improvisation, you could pretty much go anywhere you wanted. With a little more effort, Gwenna felt pretty sure they could have killed Kaden or any of the other members of the council, but she didn't want to kill him. At least not yet. Not until she had a better sense of what in Hull's name was going on.

“You think he found the note?” she asked of no one in particular, scanning the dim space of the warehouse as though the answer might be hidden between the dusty crates.

Annick ignored her, probably because Gwenna had asked the question a dozen times already.

“If he hasn't yet,” Talal replied, “I think he will soon. That monastic training…” He shook his head. “Evidently they can remember everything, remember it perfectly.”

“But do you think he'll know what it
means
?”

“I think,” Annick broke in, tugging her arrows from the wooden post, checking the shafts and the fletching one by one, “that there's nothing we can do about Kaden now. What's important is focusing on our own readiness in case he does come.”

Gwenna blew out an exasperated breath. “Fuck, Annick. How much more ready do you want to be? I've got every door and window rigged, that post you're shooting at is ready to blow, we've packed enough steel into those crates,” she gestured toward the wall, “that Talal should be able to…” She squinted at the leach. “What can you do with that much steel, exactly?”