The Last Mortal Bond (15 page)

“You want to go back?” Talal asked. “Can't be more than a couple of miles.”

“And do what?” Annick asked. She'd already tied one of the barrels to her waist with a short leash of rope, tossed her arm over one of the discarded oars. It was a cumbersome technique, sluggish but easy. With that much floatation, they could go for days. Annick had already started, ignoring the ship as she set out east in a slow sidestroke calibrated to cover the distance ahead.

Gwenna watched the bird as it glided in on a low approach to the ship.

“It's not even a navy vessel…,” she breathed.

The flash cut her off, a bright, incandescent burst, then another, then another. It took longer for the sound to come, and at the distance, with the ocean's waves slapping at her ears, it might have been no more than far-off thunder. It might have been, but it wasn't. Gwenna had spent her whole life around Kettral munitions, studying them, designing them, deploying them. Faint or not, distant or not, she recognized the vicious growl of starshatters, the shape of their explosion against the sky. When she turned her head, the afterimage followed her, and when she turned back, she could see that the real fires had already begun, the deflagration of decking, and masts, and sailcloth.

Rouan's men would try to put the fires out. They would, even now, be desperately hurling buckets of water on the blaze, hoping to keep their ship afloat. They would fail. Gwenna thought she could hear them screaming, but the wind was blowing the wrong way for that. Even after the slarn egg, her ears were not so sensitive.

“Go back?” Talal asked again.

Gwenna watched as the fire lapped at the sky. She'd lost sight of the bird behind the blaze, but whoever was on it would be circling back to finish the work if it wasn't already finished. She imagined Rouan watching, his hand clutching the rail, teeth gritted. Stupidly, pointlessly, Gwenna wondered if the albatross feather had already burned.

For the first time in her life, she saw the Kettral—the birds and the soldiers that rode them—not as warriors, but as agents of an unstoppable, almost unspeakable horror. For all his competence and pride, Rouan could do nothing against explosives shot from a soaring bird. It wasn't a fight, sinking a boat from the air like that; it was a slaughter.

Gwenna watched the ship burn a moment more, then turned away, waves cool against her burning face.

“Annick's right. We can't help. Let's do what we came here to do.”

She started swimming east, faster than was really wise, cutting through the waves, not bothering to look back to see if Talal and Annick were keeping pace.

 

9

Blood still wept from the gashes to her face and scalp as Adare slammed open the doors to the council chamber. At least, she had intended to slam them open. The great bloodwood slabs—each one twice her height and thick as her arm—proved heavy as oxen, and though she threw her whole weight against them, grunting with the effort, they swung only grudgingly on their huge oiled hinges, gliding silently through their arcs, coming so gently to rest that most of the men and women assembled in the chamber failed to notice their opening.

For a moment, Adare just stared. She had heard about the council's famous map chamber, of course. While their republic disintegrated at every border, while the citizens of Annur fought and starved and died, the newly appointed rulers of Annur had embarked on their construction project, diverting funds that could have fed tens of thousands into their glittering hall. Adare had heard more than her fill of the fucking map, but hearing was not the same as seeing. Standing inside the huge doors, perched on the edge of this wooden walkway suspended above the world, watching the oceans slosh in their basins, the rivers tumble through their carefully crafted courses, she found herself hesitating.

It wasn't the council, not the aristocrats seated around the circular catwalk at the hall's center, that gave her pause. She'd been handling aristocrats since she was a child, and judging from the idiocy of the past months, this lot was even less capable than most. No, it was the sight of Annur itself that brought her up short. She had her own maps, of course, dozens of maps, scores of them. Maps of Vash and Eridroa, of every city on the two continents, of strategic passes and likely battlegrounds. Her maps were the best available, meticulously inked records of coastlines and tax zones, watersheds and disputed boundaries. She had thought that those maps captured all that needed knowing about her crumbling empire. In this, as in so many things, she erred.

It was the scope of the empire that had escaped her. She stared at it. Some recent violence had marred the work, but it hardly mattered. The cities were miniature marvels of glass, and stone, and jewel, every palace, every house, the work of a hundred hours for a master craftsman. Forests of dwarf pine skirted the base of the Romsdals while tangled vines snaked across the choked terrain of the Waist. She looked north, to Aergad. There was the ancient castle that had served as her imperial seat these past nine months, standing proudly on the stone promontory overlooking the Haag. Her son was there in that squat, northeastern tower, probably crying for his dinner, crying for her. She forced the thought from her mind.

It was too much. The whole thing was too much.

She had thought she knew the magnitude of her task when she returned to Annur the first time, when she decided to take on the imperial mantle of her father. She had thought she'd seen the scope of the land after her forced march from Olon to Andt-Kyl. She'd thought she understood the responsibility after watching the battered men and women fleeing south, refugees from the Urghul assault. She'd thought she had plumbed the depths of the sacrifices required after witnessing the battle at the northern end of Scar Lake, after seeing Fulton cut down, after burying the knife in her own brother's ribs.

A map, after all that, even a huge map, should not have come as a shock. And yet there was something about seeing the land spread out before her, the whole huge ambit of her rule in a single room, the unbroken extent of the territory she had taken it upon herself to guard and protect, that made her stop, hands balled in fists at her sides, blood hot and wet on her face, dumb heart pumping more and quickly, horrified at how much depended on her, at how fully she could fail.

“… if she is harmed, the treaty is
lost
…”

She had stumbled, still unseen, into some ongoing argument at the center of the room.

“Some of us did not want this treaty in the first place.”

“Then you were a fool. We need unity.”

“And if the mob kills her, we have it. Let us not forget that it was Adare who decided to enter the city unannounced, unescorted, without warning the council or asking our permission. Her death can hardly be laid at our feet.”

“We don't know she is dead.” A quieter voice, this one. Vaguely familiar. “We ordered the soldiers out as soon as we had word of her arrival. They could have reached her in time. We don't know anything.”

Adare gritted her teeth, tore her gaze from the great map spread out beneath her, and advanced down the catwalk, a graceful curve of cedar and steel suspended by thick cables from the ceiling far above. She passed over the crescent of the Manjari Empire, over the Vena, then the gold-red sand of the Darvi Desert, passed beneath the lamps, glass blown into great globes meant, evidently, to echo the moon and stars. Most were unlit, wide cloth wicks floating silently in the clear oil. The council continued to bicker.

“The patrol said she was alone.”

“Precisely, which means the idiotic woman is probably dead. Which means—”

Adare cut through the words with her own.

“She is not. Idiotic, I'll grant you, but not dead.”

She ignored the exclamations of confusion and surprise, the scraping of chairs hastily shoved back, the arms and hands thrown about in postures of shock and alarm. A dozen more steps took her over the peaks of the Ancaz, bloodred sandstone thrusting up as high as the catwalk. Her face burned. That, too, she ignored.

“I'm sure my survival is a disappointment,” she went on, pausing just to the west of the earthen walls and low domes of Mo'ir, “but life is filled with disappointments. I would imagine, given the miserable state of your so-called republic, that you've grown accustomed to them by now. I certainly have. The relevant question is what we intend to do about them.”

She raised an eyebrow, studying the men and women of the council for the first time. She had learned all forty-five names, of course, had studied their families and histories, tried to ferret out, wherever possible, their reasons for joining Kaden's doomed cause. Most just wanted power; they would have leapt at any chance to see the Malkeenians brought low. Bouraa Bouree was one of these—she picked him out easily, all sweat and silk and sullen anger—as were Ziav Moss and Onu An. There were a handful of idealists in the mix, most notably Gabril the Red. He sat almost directly across from her, his dark eyes hawklike, sharp and predatory. In the past, the kenneled intensity of his gaze had made her look away. Not anymore. She met his eyes, nodded once, then turned her attention to the Annurian delegation.

If Sweet Kegellen was surprised at Adare's sudden entrance, she didn't show it. Annur's most dangerous criminal raised a fat hand, waggling her fingers in an incongruously girlish greeting, then smiled from behind her paper fan. Adare nodded, the same nod she had given Gabril. Kegellen hadn't earned her various names—The Queen of the Streets, That Unkillable Bitch—by sitting demurely behind her fan. The woman was at least as deadly as anyone else in the room, fans and waggling fingers or no.

Another time, Adare might have studied her further, or the lean figure seated beside her who could only be Kiel. Now, however, her gaze slid past them to the third member of the Annurian delegation, Kaden, her brother. The one she hadn't killed.

“Your Radiance,” he said quietly, rising as she met his eyes, then bowing low.

There was no meekness in the movement, no submission.

“I understand,” she replied grimly, “that you've acquired a title of your own. First Speaker.” She inclined her head a fraction of an inch.

He didn't look like a holder of titles. His robe was simpler in both cut and cloth than those of the other council members. In a room full of flashing gems, he had scorned all ornament. He was taller than she had expected, taller than Valyn, and leaner. His shaved scalp reminded her of the legions she commanded, and there was something, too, of a soldier's discipline in the way he held himself. Unlike those men she had seen at the front, however, there was no bluster to Kaden, no swagger. His strength was in his stillness, his silence. And in those burning eyes.

My brother,
she thought, staring at those fires with unexpected wonder. Then, remembering their surroundings, she erased all expression from her face.

After the confusion and consternation caused by her entrance, the assembly had fallen abruptly quiet. It was a quiet that Adare remembered well, a quiet she had first heard when she stood in the palace infirmary with her dying mother. A team of useless surgeons and physicians had attended the Emperor's wife through the final days of her illness, bickering in scholarly whispers as she coughed blood into meticulously boiled cloths. When Adare stepped into that bright, white room, however, the greatest medical minds of the empire had fallen suddenly silent, as though she might forget they were there, might believe she had been given a moment of privacy with her mother.

It hadn't worked then, and it didn't work now. Whatever exchange she was about to have with Kaden, it would be public, political. The angles of this particular silence afforded no space for intimacy. Not that she had any intimacy to offer.

“So this is the heart of your republic,” she said, not bothering to keep the scorn from her voice, letting her anger boil through the words. It wouldn't hurt for him to see her anger, for them all to see it.

He shook his head. “Not mine. Ours.”

Adare could hear her father in that response, in the cool deliberation of it. There was no shock in his eyes, no dismay, only the steady burning of those twin fires, cold, and bright, and distant. In this, too, he was like her father. Adare couldn't remember ever seeing Sanlitun surprised.

“How inclusive,” she replied grimly.

Kaden spread his hands. “If you had warned us of your approach, we could have given you safe passage through the city. I will call a surgeon to see to your wounds.”

She shook her head curtly. The motion sent pain up her neck. She ignored it.

“There's no need for a surgeon, and no time for one either. What were you
thinking
ordering armed men into the streets, ordering them to raise weapons against your own people?”

Kaden blinked. That, at least, was something new. Sanlitun would not have blinked.

“We heard that a mob was forming. An angry mob.”

“And so you sent out a few hundred brick-brained fools to
murder
them?”

“Murder?” Gabril demanded sharply.

“Yes,” Adare said, rounding on the man. “Murder. People trampled by horses, their skulls shattered by the flats of swords, their bodies scattered across the Godsway like offal. I think I'd call that murder.”

“The guards were ordered to protect you,” Kaden said. “At all costs.”

“At the cost of dead Annurians?”

This time he did not flinch. “If necessary, yes. Without you, we would have nothing. No alliance. No peace. None of the unity necessary to hold Annur together.”

“And how much unity do you think you're going to have with a few dozen bodies sprawled out on the stones of the Godsway? How much 'Kent-kissing peace?”

Her anger, so useful just moments before, was getting the better of her now. She could hear it; she was too loud. Nira had counseled her again and again on the importance of holding her tongue and her peace. Ironic, given the source, but good advice all the same. Adare could hardly rule an empire if she let herself be goaded into fury by one insane decision by the council. An emperor listened, waited, judged men and women in the silent chambers of her mind, and only spoke when it was necessary, when she was ready to wed the words to action. Adare knew it all well enough, but there was no holding her rage in check. In fact, the more rein she gave it, the greater it grew.