The Last Mortal Bond (30 page)

“The bastard is Csestriim. He doesn't
get
frightened.”

“
Aware,
then … of something we are not. Maybe he knows who she is. Maybe he knows the source of her power, her well.” Adare grimaced. “She could be another Balendin, and Intarra knows we can't handle another Balendin.”

Nira nodded wearily. “That's how I read it, too. She's a knife. One your general doesn't want your brother to have.”

“Kaden,” Adare said, weighing her brother's name as she spoke it, “Kaden is not entirely the naïve monastic type I had expected. His republic is a disaster, but it was a surprise, one that nearly broke us for the war in the north. I can see why il Tornja would want to take away his knives.”

Slowly, grudgingly, a shape began to resolve out of Adare's initial terror and confusion. Her breath still came hot and ragged in her throat, but she no longer felt that the heart inside her chest might just explode.
My son is safe,
she said, the words like air in her lungs, like sun on her skin.
My son is safe
. Il Tornja had betrayed her, but a part of Adare had always expected the betrayal. If she thought too much about Sanlitun in il Tornja's clutches, her tiny, cantankerous, fire-eyed child swaddled at the breast of some complicit bitch of a wet nurse, if she let herself see all that, she might still collapse. But il Tornja had given her something else to look at, a problem to solve, an enemy to destroy.

“So I just need to get to her. To Triste. Get to her, then kill her.”

“And then what?”

“Then I get my son back.”

Nira stared, opened her mouth as though to respond, ran a tongue over her crooked teeth, then turned aside to spit onto the polished hardwood floor. “Ya still believe ya can bargain with him? After all this? Ya still think you can
trust
him?”

“Of course not,” Adare replied, forcing her hands to unclench, her shoulders to relax. “But il Tornja has reason to keep our alliance. My name gives him legitimacy. Even after the situation with Triste is … finished … he needs me.”

The words sounded true, but they tasted wrong on her tongue, poisonous. Bile rose in her throat. The truth was, she had no idea what il Tornja intended, no idea why he wanted Triste dead, no idea what he would do if Adare refused, or if she agreed. Not that it mattered. He had her son, and so she would kill Triste. The rest could wait.

“Kaden was right,” she said finally.

Nira cocked her head to the side, the question unspoken.

Adare exhaled wearily. “He said il Tornja's mind was too wide for me to comprehend, for any of us.” Her hands were clenched into white, desperate fists on the table before her. “He planned this,” she went on. “When the offer of the treaty first arrived, he was planning this.”

Nira nodded grudgingly. “If not before.”

Adare's mind filled with the memory of Andt-Kyl, of the Csestriim general seated cross-legged atop the signal tower issuing orders no one could understand, commanding his men to flee, or fight, or lay down their arms, watching them slaughtered or slaughtering according to some logic only he could comprehend, studying a pattern in the bloodshed that only he could see. His men called him a genius, but it was more than that. Battle's chaotic scrawl was, to Ran il Tornja, a fully legible text. He had arrived in Andt-Kyl to fight a force assembled by a god, and he had won.

The spectacle had been terrifying enough when il Tornja still battled Adare's
foes;
even then, the ruthless, alien genius of the Csestriim general had made some mortal part of her quail. And now the tide had shifted.

Adare stared at Nira's ravaged face and scalp, at the burns and the dried blood where the cuts had broken open. In all the haste and confusion, one fact was awfully, perfectly clear: Ran il Tornja wasn't Adare's general anymore. The time had come to face him down, to fight him, to pitch her own mind and will against that monstrous brilliance, and Adare realized, her breath shaking in her chest, she
knew,
the certainty lodged inside her like a blade, that there was no chance, no hope, no possible way that she could win.

 

17

He could remember a time when darkness had been a quality of the world itself, a thing of the sky when the sun sagged below the horizon and the light leaked out; a thing of the sea when you dove deep enough for the weight of salt water to smother the shine; a thing of castle keeps and caves after someone snuffed the last lamp and the great stone space went black. Even the darkness of Hull's Hole, that absolute absence of light filling the cave's snaking chambers: you went into it, then you came out. Or if you failed to come out, if the slarn tore you apart, then you slid into the longer darkness of death. It had seemed an awful fate once, being stuck in that endless black. That was before the blade had taught Valyn hui'Malkeenian a greater, more terrible truth: the outer dark, for all its horrors—the old, cold dark of caverns or the bottomless dark of the dead—it was nothing when set beside the darkness carried inside, a darkness bled into poisoned flesh and carved across ruined eyes, a darkness of the self.

Valyn sat with his back against a balsam's rough trunk. He knew the tree from the sap's scent, knew the trees beside it: hemlocks and larch ringing the small clearing. There were a hundred smells on the air, a thousand—decaying needles and mouse droppings, thick moss and wet granite, horse piss and horse sweat, leather and iron—all woven into a rough fabric cast across his mind.

He couldn't see a fucking thing.

From overhead, through the branches of the trees, the sunlight filtered down, hot and dark. He turned his eyes upward, opened them as wide as he could, kept them open even as they dried out and started to sting. You could go blind looking at the sun, but he was already blind. Maybe if he stared long enough, something, some hint of fire, would sear through the scarred lenses. That was the thought anyway, the hope. Now, as always, he saw nothing.

A few paces off, the Urghul were preparing camp. Valyn could hear them hobbling the horses and rummaging in saddle packs. He could smell the newly kindled fire, the stolen whiskey passed from hand to filthy hand, the blood of the elk the outriders had brought down a few hours earlier. If he bothered, he could make out conversations, all of the individual voices rising and falling in tuneless counterpoint. He couldn't understand the language, though, and so instead of trying to untangle the words, he listened to the breathing of the Urghul as they went about their tasks, to the dozens of heartbeats. Those sounds were more useful than words, anyway. If the horsemen were going to attack him, they weren't likely to announce it. He would hear the approaching murder in a quickened pulse first, in breath rasping too fast between parted lips.

Not that anyone had come after him so far. On leaving the crude homestead that morning, the Urghul had given him two horses, then utterly ignored him as the small band moved northwest through the trees. He might have been a sack of grain rather than a foreign warrior in their midst.
Fitting,
he thought grimly. Without his sight, he rode about as well as a sack of grain, crouching low over the withers, guiding the beast by the sound of those before him, trying not to get knocked from the saddle by low-hanging branches. The forest was so dense that, aside from a brief canter up a stony streambed, the Urghul couldn't move much faster than a walk.

Valyn had spent all day trying to sift through the scents coming off the horsemen. Beneath their leather and iron, he could make out the thick musk of weariness and a brassy, hammered determination. A few of the Urghul were angry—a smell he'd come to associate with rusting steel. That soft, rotten stench was fear—mostly it came from the
taabe
with the reeking leg wound. The man would be dead within the week, though he didn't seem to realize it.

Huutsuu's scents were mingled almost too fully to decipher: there was rage mixed with a muddy cloud of doubt, thick and heavy, and there, hot with the heat of a summer pepper, something very close to excitement. She didn't seem to mind the endless, fly-plagued swamps of the northern forests, or if she did, she had hammered flat her own irritation.

As he sifted through her scent for the tenth time, Valyn realized the woman was approaching, bare feet almost silent in the fallen needles. He shifted his focus, shoving aside everything but the approaching Urghul. Her heart beat steady and even, but he could taste her wariness. Valyn put his hand on his belt knife, but made no move to stand.

She stopped two paces away, out of easy reach, then watched him silently for a while before speaking.

“You believe I gave you horses and water at dawn only to kill you in the dusk?”

Her voice was full and raw as the smoke rising from the strips of cooking meat. The memory of their first encounter on the steppe filled Valyn's mind, of Huutsuu standing naked outside of her
api,
scars carved into her pale flesh, yellow hair like fire lashed to a frenzy by the wind. She must have been twice Valyn's age, maybe even into her fifth decade, the mother of three children, but the years had done nothing to soften her.

Valyn left the knife in its sheath, but didn't take his hand from the pommel.

“What I believe,” he said quietly, his own voice grating in his ears, a tool long neglected and running to rust, “is what I have seen. When you capture Annurians, you do one thing: you hurt them.”

There was a quick whiff of irritation, then the soft sound of the woman shaking her head.

“You live one month on the steppe and you think you know a whole people.”

“I saw what happened in Andt-Kyl.”

“Andt-Kyl was a battle. People die.”

“And after?” Valyn shook his head grimly. “For months, I was close enough to the front to hear your sacrifices. To smell them.”

The woman paused. “This is what you have been doing since the battle? Cowering in the forest listening to the slaughter of your own people?”

The words would have stung once. They
should
have stung. Valyn just nodded.

“I'm done taking sides,” he said. “Done with this fight.”

“What about your empire? Your revenge on your war chief, the one who killed your father?”

“My revenge…” Valyn trailed off. His hand ached on the handle of the knife. The scene atop the stone tower in Andt-Kyl blazed across his mind, sharp as lightning: killing the Aedolian, fighting Ran il Tornja, Adare's knife in his side, the keen edge of the
kenarang
's sword across his eyes, then the long fall to the water. His last vision had been one of blades and blood and betrayal.

“My revenge wasn't even mine,” he said at last. The words sounded dull, dead. “It was a lie peddled by your chieftain in the hope that I would do his killing for him. And I did. I believed the lie, and good men died for it. I killed them.”

Huutsuu paused. He could smell the uncertainty on her. “And your empire?”

“Is ruled by a murderous whore. I will not fight for her.”

“And yet this morning you killed for a useless family of loggers.”

“It's not their fault that my sister's a power-hungry bitch and il Tornja's a murderer. It's not their fault that Long Fist drove his Urghul vermin over the border.”

Huutsuu's pulse tattooed the silence. Valyn wondered if she was going to attack. If she did, he wondered if the awful, inexplicable sight would come to him again, or if it would fail him. He didn't much care, either way.

“You are one man among foes,” Huutsuu said at last. “You are fast, faster than you were, but not fast enough, I think, to be using words like
vermin
.”

Valyn shrugged. “Scum. Rabble. Plague. Horsefucker.” He paused, letting the words hang in the air. “Worthless, no-account, moon-pale, blood-drunk savages. Should I go on?”

Huutsuu's rage spiked, blood-hot and coppery. He could feel the air shift as she leaned toward him. He could hear, quieter than thought, her hand settling around the leather grip of her sword.

“Come on,” he said, still refusing to stand. Either the darksight would come, or it would not. “Come on.”

The moment balanced like a dagger set on its tip. Then Huutsuu leaned back on her heels, barked a derisive laugh.

“If you are so eager to die, why have you been hiding between the trees all these moons like a broken forest animal?”

“No reason to rush. You had to come sooner or later. You, or a band of riders just like you.”

“A warrior finds his fight. He does not wait for it.”

“I'm not a warrior,” Valyn said, gesturing to the wreckage of his eyes. “I can't find anything. I'm blind.”

Suddenly, she stank of suspicion.

“This is a lie.”

Valyn shrugged. “Believe what you want.”

Something in his voice gave her pause. Then he heard her shaking her head. “I saw you pull arrows from the air. I saw you throw the ax that killed Ayokha. These were not the acts of a blind man.”

Valyn ignored the unspoken question; he had no answer to it. How could he explain to the woman that, though he lived in unrelieved darkness, though he was reduced to stealing game from the traps of a family of unsuspecting homesteaders, though he had spent the coldest months of the winter cowering inside a rough cave, eating strip by icy strip the carcass of the hibernating bear he had killed and left frozen in the snow … despite all that he could still, sometimes, impossibly, see? How could he explain that he was blind except for those moments when he most
had
to see, that when forced to fight his mind filled with a sight that was not sight, a vision of the world etched in layers of undifferentiated black? How to cram into words the inexplicable fact that when death loomed, his mind slipped into a kind of primal understanding buried untold fathoms beneath rational thought? And how to tell that whatever had done this to him had also made him fast, impossibly fast, far stronger than all his years of training? How could he explain to anyone, let alone this woman, that he was broken, broken beyond all possibility of fixing, but that, like a shattered blade, he could still draw blood? The understanding lay beyond words, perhaps beyond thought, and so he shirked it.