The Last Mortal Bond (111 page)

She straightened her shoulders, checked her blades, then strode from the shadows into the open space.

“We failed,” she said. The three turned to watch her approach. Talal looked concerned; Quick Jak, wary, then scared. Gwenna shoved down her own fury. “We failed,” she said again, “but we are not done fighting. Right now, I need to hear it, all your best ideas on how we can get at Balendin before he blows the doors right off this 'Kent-kissing city.”

“Go in on foot,” Annick said after a pause. “He's seen the birds. He knows we escaped, so he'll be prepared for another air attack. If we can infiltrate that group of prisoners, get close to him…”

“We'll just be easier to kill,” Talal said quietly. He shook his head. “He's too strong. He has the awe of the whole Urghul nation to draw on, and the growing terror of every citizen in Annur. Right now, he might be the most powerful leach since the Atmani, and that power's not going away unless a million people suddenly forget all about him.” He shook his head again. “I'll go with you. I'll try it the way Annick says. I just don't see how we can win.”

Jak hadn't spoken, hadn't met Gwenna's eyes since she returned.

“What about you?” she asked, more harshly than she'd intended.

For a long time, he didn't reply. Then, instead of turning to her, he leveled an unsteady finger over her shoulder, southeast, toward Intarra's Spear. “What,” he asked quietly, “is happening?”

Gwenna knew what was coming, and still she couldn't help but stare. The base of the huge tower had begun to glow. It might have been a trick of reflected light, the sun's low rays glancing off the unbreakable glass. That light moved, however, writhed inside the column, growing brighter and brighter until the whole tower seemed ablaze with it.

“The Emperor,” Gwenna replied grimly. “She heard il Tornja went inside, so she lit the fucking thing on fire.”

It had seemed like an insane plan, reckless and desperate, but then, Gwenna's own plans hadn't worked out so well, and so she'd kept her mouth shut when Adare sent the orders. She was the Emperor, after all. She could set fire to her own tower if she wanted to.

The blaze, however, was like no ordinary fire. The glass walls soaked in the light, and though the glow had started in the lower floors, the whole Spear was red-gold with it now, like a lance of flame stabbed into the cloud. Quick Jak's jaw had dropped wide open, and even Annick looked impressed. Adare had wanted a miracle, and she had one, a raging, golden column high as the sky. Gwenna could hear the amazement up on the walls, soldiers gasping, turning, pointing at the pillar of fire in the center of their city, forgetting, if only for a moment, the army to their north.

And then she saw it.

“The bird,” Gwenna growled. The urgency was so sharp it hurt. She shoved Jak with one hand, dragged Talal with the other. “Get on the fucking bird, this is our
chance
.”

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.