The Last Mortal Bond (113 page)

“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 smiled 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
.

“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.