The Last Mortal Bond (35 page)

 

20

From the balcony of her chambers on the top floor of the Crane, Adare looked down. It was a hundred paces straight down to the courtyards, gardens, and temples of the Dawn Palace, but she didn't look straight down. Instead, she stared north, eyes wandering over Annur's roofs of copper and slate and teak shingle. Morning fog off the Broken Bay still filled the streets and alleys, and though Adare could make out the sounds of the city stirring—curses of carters and canal hands; the rattle of merchants opening their shops; strident cries of grocers and fishmongers hawking fruit and flowers, the day's fresh catch—she couldn't see anything in those streets but the still, white fog. The morning was all noise and no motion, as though the living had abandoned Annur to the ghosts.

The balcony easily overtopped the masts of the tallest ships, the gulls wheeling above the harbor, and yet from that balcony, even when she tipped her head back until her neck hurt, she could not make out the top of Intarra's Spear. That other, greater tower's wall rose like a curtain of slagged glass barely a hundred paces away, but the top was lost in the clouds.

Nira glanced up at it, then grunted. “Intarra's Spear, my withered ass.”

“You don't believe it's a relic of the goddess?” Adare asked. She'd lived inside the palace her whole life, and yet some sights you did not grow used to. Could not grow used to. “It antedates all Csestriim records.”

“Antedates?”
Nira shook her head. “It's no wonder Lehav made you before we were halfway ta Olon. Ya never did learn ta quit talkin' like a princess.”

Adare ignored the gibe. In fact, she would have suffered through a hundred more if only Nira would hold on to this tiny bit of her former fire. Adare needed her for the task ahead, of course; there was no way she could break into Intarra's Spear all by herself. Just as important, however, was having someone on her side, someone she could talk to, who would talk back. It had seemed in those first hours after her return that the Nira Adare had known was gone, the life drained out, all the rough edges scoured away by her brother's betrayal. The old woman had finished off a huge carafe of wine, and then, to Adare's despair, passed out on the table. When she woke, however, something had goaded her partway back to life. This morning she had climbed all the stairs to Adare's chambers with something like her usual vigor, and this discussion of the tower was the most animated she had been since returning.

“Even the name
Intarra's Spear
is ancient,” Adare went on. “I spent weeks as a child sifting through old codices trying to find the source. The etymology—”

“Piss on your etymology,” Nira griped. She hefted her cane, waved it over the balustrade at the huge tower, as though it had offended her. “What
goddess
is gonna give her name to the world's largest cock?”

Adare started to object, then stopped herself. They had come out to her balcony to plan an attack on the tower, or an infiltration, at least, not to bicker about history. She stared at the Spear a moment longer, then turned her attention to something closer, smaller, more manageable: the closed lacquer box that Nira had placed on the wooden table.

“So that's it.”

Nira glared at her. “'Course it is. Think I'm in the habit a' using Csestriim lacquer ta pack my soiled underclothes?”

The box was small, just a little larger than Adare's two hands, barely deep enough to hold a pair of wine bottles. At first glance it was unremarkable—no gold or silver, no ostentatious scrollwork to the handle, nothing bright or shiny to draw the eye. When Adare lifted it gingerly to the light, however, she saw that Nira was right. Instead of a flat black, the lacquer was laid on in a thousand shades of gray—some inky and opaque, some smoke thin, some slick as the dorsal fin of a quickpike, some glinting like tarnished silver. From a distance, the cumulative effect was a simple black, but when you held it close, shifted it back and forth beneath the sun, elaborate shapes and beautifully crafted shadows ghosted below the surface. Adare thought she could make out an outstretched hand, a sun in near eclipse, a pair of twining dancers, but each time that she half glimpsed a shape, the whole scene shifted, like the surface of a fast-moving river, and it was gone.

“Hardly inconspicuous,” Adare observed.

Nira shrugged. “Il Tornja didn't want anyone else gettin' at what's inside, and I wasn't about ta carry a locked iron chest all the way from Aergad.”

Adare tested the weight, then set it back on the table. “How do you open it?”

The old woman laid the tips of her fingers carefully on the surface, scrunched her face in concentration, then traced a series of quick, precise gestures. With a click, the box popped open.

In spite of herself, Adare took half a step back. “A kenning?”

Nira smirked. “The Csestriim were a batch a' evil bastards, that's sure, but they weren't as squeamish about a leach's gifts as we are.”

Adare nodded slowly. She'd read as much. After the wars, when men and women tore the Csestriim cities to the ground, they had discovered thousands of artifacts, blades and boxes, statues and stele that were not entirely … natural. Found them, and destroyed them—those that could be destroyed. A few historians, those who dared to touch the subject, traced the first seeds of the human hatred of leaches to those early purges.

Adare put the thoughts aside. Whatever the box's provenance, it was the contents that concerned her. She hooked a single finger beneath the lid, lifted it, and stared.

Arranged along one side in tiny beds of black velvet lay fifteen or twenty vials, each with a name etched into the glass. Adare recognized less than half the labels—
Sweethorn, Dusk, Itiriol
—but those few were enough to intuit the contents of the others. Il Tornja had sent her enough poison to destroy the entire council, maybe enough to kill everyone inside the Dawn Palace.

“He just …
had
this, lying around?” Adare asked.

“I've been alive more than a thousand years,” Nira replied, “and the bastard makes me look like a child. He's probably got warehouses a' this shit piled up all over the world, hidden troves buried beneath the Romsdals, secreted on some unknown island in the Broken Bay.”

All over again, the hopelessness of opposing her own general washed over Adare, dragging her down like a winter wave. The notion that she could ever steal a march on him, devise a plan he hadn't seen from years away—it was all hubris and stupidity. Was it likely, after the man had held Annur in his fist for centuries, that she, Adare, would be the one to wrest it away?

“Ya look like ya're thinkin' of drinkin' half those vials yourself,” Nira said, her voice a rasp shredding Adare's thoughts.

Adare looked up to find the other woman studying her, an expression that might have been wariness or concern carved across her ancient features.

“He's just so far ahead of us, at every step.”

“He hasn't won yet,” Nira said.

“Are you sure? We don't even know what he wants. Not really.”

“According ta what your brother told you, he wants ta kill Meshkent.”

Adare grimaced. “I don't trust Kaden. And I definitely don't trust that Csestriim he keeps at his side.”

“Well, whatever il Tornja wants,” Nira snapped, “we know he hasn't got it.”

Adare raised her brows. “We do?”

“A bull don't tend ta keep fuckin' after he's had his way with the cow. When a bull's done, he goes off with that sloppy slack sack between his legs ta eat or sleep.”

“Il Tornja's not a bull.”

“Men.” The old woman shrugged. “Bulls. Csestriim. Point is, if il Tornja'd won, there wouldn't still be a war goin' on.”

Adare stared north, toward Aergad, toward where il Tornja held back the Urghul. Things had come to a bleak pass when ongoing war was a reason for hope. The fact that il Tornja still wanted something made for dubious consolation, but it was the only consolation she had. She turned back to the box.

“What are these?” she asked, pointing at half a dozen metal tubes set into the velvet opposite the glass vials.

“Bombs,” Nira replied.

Adare's hand jerked back. “Bombs?”

“Kettral make. Starshatters, moles, and flickwicks. Two apiece.”

“And just what in Intarra's name,” Adare breathed, still staring at the munitions, “am I supposed to do with Kettral explosives?”

“My guess is you're supposed ta blow shit up, but don't quote me. You're the prophet.”

“They're stable?” Adare asked, studying the slender tubes.

“I lugged 'em here and I survived.” She gestured at her body. “Two arms. Two tits, wobbly but still attached. Two legs.” She shrugged again.

Adare blew out a low, slow whistle. “I'm starting to see why he didn't want anyone else to open it.”

Nira nodded. “Question is, how do we use
this,
” she jabbed a finger at the box, “ta get at the bitch in
there
?” Another jab, this time at the Spear.

“Yes,” Adare agreed vaguely. “That is the trick.” She turned back to the tower, then fell silent, baffled by the audacity of il Tornja's demand. “It's never been done, you know. No one's ever broken into the palace dungeon.”

“I wish,” the old woman replied, scowling, “we could quit calling it a dungeon. Dungeons are underground.”

“Not this one,” Adare said, shaking her head slowly. “People have tried to get at it before, tried to fight their way up from the tower's base. Skinny Tom made it to the thirtieth floor before the guardsmen cut him down, and Skinny Tom made it farther than anyone else.”

“'Course, we've got an edge on Skinny Tom, whoever the fuck he was.”

“A rebel,” Adare said absently. “Two hundred years ago. A peasant.”

“Hence the skinny. Point is, you're a princess, a prophet. I wager that gives you a leg up on some rebel peasant when it comes ta the gettin' into of well-guarded towers.”

“The problem isn't the tower,” Adare said, squinting. Most of the time the glass reflected back the sun, the sky, the copper and tile rooftops of Annur. If the glare wasn't too great, however, and you looked at it just right, you could sometimes catch a glimpse of the inside. From the balcony of the Crane, Adare could just barely make out the break, the point inside the Spear where the man-made floors gave way to that huge column of empty air. “I could go inside right now, climb all the way up to my father's study the way I did a million times as a child. The problem is what happens after, what happens
above.
”

“I take it the whole place gets less welcoming.”

Adare nodded. “There are guards where the stairs break free of the first thirty floors, then guards again, however many thousand feet above, when you reach the prison level.”

“Last time I looked,” Nira observed, “guards get outta the way pretty quick when the Emperor comes knocking. Snap your royal fingers, click your holy heels, and you'll have them all groveling.”

Adare grimaced. “Not good enough. Triste is the most carefully guarded prisoner in all of Annur. I
might
be able to get close enough to kill her, but not without everyone in the 'Kent-kissing palace knowing.”

Nira shrugged. “Let 'em know.”

“No,” Adare replied, shaking her head. “The council already hates me. They'll take any chance they can get to break the treaty. If I just walk in and murder the girl, I give it less than a day before they sling me into the cell to take her place.”

“So … what? Ya want to piss yourself, quit, and go hide in a hole?”

Instead of responding, Adare studied the fields beyond the city's bounds, then looked past them, over them, to where distance scrubbed away all detail and she lost both the land and the sky in the morning's golden haze. How far could she see from this balcony atop the Crane? Fifty miles? A hundred? How far away were the walls of Aergad, the cold stone keep where il Tornja had her child? She could remember the distance if she tried, could pluck it from some map kept tucked tight in her memory. She did not.

Far
. That was the simple, awful fact.
Too far
. All those horrible, indifferent miles, and her son at the very end of them.

“What if we don't kill her?” Adare asked finally, quietly.

Nira's eyes narrowed.
“Dead,”
she growled. “That was the deal. We kill the leach, and in return il Tornja leaves your son alive.”

Adare nodded, dragging her gaze back to her councillor.

“I know,” she replied quietly.

“You know. You
know.
” Nira spat over the side of the balcony. “Then I'll go ahead and assume ya also know that if ya don't kill her, then
he
will kill
him
.”

Adare closed her eyes. She could feel a tide of terror rising inside her, dark, icy, and undeniable. When she thought of Sanlitun, of his tiny chest stilled, of those eager hands suddenly unable to clutch, she felt an almost physical compulsion to comply, to obey, to do exactly what il Tornja demanded. She would bully her way into the dungeon, then pour every one of those poisons down Triste's throat, she would hold the girl down while she blistered and thrashed, if only it would keep her own son safe.

Except that it won't.

Again and again, that was the thought that brought her up short.

“If we kill Triste,” she said slowly, meeting Nira's eyes as she forced the thoughts into words, “what will il Tornja do? Will he surrender my son? Will he give your brother back?”

Nira's jaw was set. “He won't give Oshi back. He needs him too much.”

“And he needs Sanlitun. As long as he has my child, he's turned the tables. He's cut his way free, and slipped a noose around
my
neck at the same time.”