The Last Mortal Bond (42 page)

Long Fist shook his head. “This cannot be so.”

“I saw her kill a man with a kiss—the man you left in charge of the Ishien.”

The shaman's eyes narrowed. “Ekhard Matol. I was told that he lost his hold on the emptiness. That he tried to pass through the gates unprepared.”

“He was unprepared because Triste—Ciena in that moment—stripped him of his emptiness. I watched her do it. It took her just a moment, a kiss.…”

“Bliss,” Long Fist mused. “It is powerful as pain.” He fell silent for a long time, staring into the flame. “This would be Ciena's way,” he conceded finally.

“I spoke to her,” Kaden said. “She is the one who told me you were here, on this earth. She said you were power-mad. That you were drunk on your own ambition. That it made you stupid and vulnerable.”

The shaman laughed a long, rich laugh. “This, too, has the timbre of her voice.” Then he sobered, shook his head slowly, eyes never leaving Kaden's. “And yet if I believe your tale,
she
is the one who lost control of her chosen flesh.
If
I believe this tale. If you spoke to her, then she is here, and this child—Triste—is gone.”

“No,” Kaden replied grimly. “Triste is very much alive; she is a broken woman, but your goddess was not the one to break her. I've seen Ciena only in crucial moments, situations of life and death, and then only glimpses. When Triste put a knife into her own belly—”

“The
fool,
” Long Fist growled. “I spent decades preparing the earth, and she tries to follow me on a whim.”

“I think she followed you to warn you.”

“And instead, she ends up putting herself at risk.” He bared his teeth. “The
obviate
. The girl must do it.”

Kaden shook his head slowly. The balance in the conversation had shifted suddenly, powerfully. For the first time since entering the tent, Long Fist seemed unsettled, even agitated. Kaden had imagined the god would be something like the Csestriim writ large—passionless and rational, brilliant beyond human imagining. For the first time, he realized the error of that conception.

Meshkent was not Csestriim. He
despised
the Csestriim. Kaden had considered il Tornja's intellect and Kiel's to be godlike, but they were nothing like the gods, at least not like these gods. Why had he supposed that Meshkent and Ciena, the progenitors of all passion, would eschew that passion, that they would be untouched by the forces of which they themselves were the font? Long Fist was surprised, surprised and angry. Clearly Kaden's revelation had caught him like a fist to the chin.

“She won't,” Kaden replied.

The man studied him through the smoke. “Does she understand what is at stake?”

Kaden nodded. “She doesn't care. Triste didn't ask to have a goddess lodged in her mind. She didn't want it. And she has suffered because of it.”

“Suffered?” the shaman demanded, shaking his head. “She doesn't understand the first thing about suffering. None of you do. If this child is killed with Ciena inside, if Ciena's touch is severed from your world,
then
you will understand suffering.”

“Triste won't,” Kaden said. “She will be dead.” He considered his next words carefully. “Can the
obviate
be performed without her consent?”

“No,” Long Fist replied, the syllable like the tolling of some funerary drum. “The
obviate
is not just a killing, not even a self-killing. It is…” he frowned, “a voyage. If the girl does not cast off the moorings, the ship of my consort's soul … it will remain tethered to the shore as the dock burns.”

He grimaced, eyes distant, watching some possible future that only he could see as the flames played across the pale skin of his face.

“The work I do here will wait,” he concluded finally. “I must see this girl. Must speak with her.”

“She is imprisoned.”

“Take me to the prison.”

Kaden hesitated, wondering how far he could press the shaman. “Stop the war,” he said finally. “Stop the Urghul, and I will take you to her.”

Long Fist watched him. “You dare to haggle with me?”

“You're attacking Annur,” Kaden said. “Killing thousands. Tens of thousands. I want you to stop.”

“And if I will not?”

“Then Triste stays where she is. The goddess remains trapped. Until someone kills her.”

Long Fist moved with all the speed of a striking adder. Since Kaden entered the tent, the man had remained still, seated. The violence he had plied earlier was a violence of the mind. Now, however, as he uncoiled, Kaden had time to think a single thought—
impossible,
it was not possible that any human should move so fast—and then Long Fist was through the fire and on top of him, those long, elegant fingers with the painted nails closing around his throat, slamming him back against the damp dirt.

“You would trade Ciena as though she were some Urghul horse?” he demanded, the last word a hiss.

Kaden tried to respond, to shake his head, but that hand might have been cast from iron.

“You would barter her welfare like one of your copper coins?” The grip tightened until Kaden felt he was breathing through a thin reed, the hot, sweet air too little for his heaving lungs.

“I will tell you three truths,” the shaman went on, “and I will shape them to your words so you can comprehend. First, the fact I wear this skin means nothing. That Ciena has robed herself in the flesh of some rebellious slattern means nothing. We are not what you are. We are so much more that your mind would break beneath the sight.”

Darkness hemmed Kaden's vision. The light in the tent might have been failing, and fast, only he could still feel the fire, hot against his right flank. He harnessed his heart, slowed it, parceled out his breathless blood, focused only on the moment.

“Next, Ciena will not die with this child, but
you
will. All of you. Your minds were built for our fingers. Without them, you will wither or go mad. Her death or mine, either one, will mark the end of your race.”

He leaned so close Kaden could feel his breathing, smell the sweet root tea thick on the breath. Those blue eyes, sky-deep and ocean-cold, were suddenly the whole world, a universe awhirl with brutal blue, a blue so hot it burned, it seared.
How had people not known the truth?
Kaden's air-starved brain offered up that single thought over and over and over.
How had anyone ever believed those eyes were human?

“Do you understand?” Long Fist demanded.

The hand relaxed fractionally, enough for Kaden to gasp a half breath, to nod. And just as quickly as he had struck, the shaman released his grip.

Kaden's body wanted to scramble backward, to claw through the walls of the tent, to get out and away. He forced himself to stillness. When he thought he could talk without gagging, he locked eyes with the Urghul.

“And the third truth you hoped to tell me?”

Long Fist watched him, his eyes human once more, or almost human.

“There is no calling it back,” he said finally.

Kaden shook his head, his mind cloudy with the attack. “Calling back what?”

“This war,” the shaman replied, nodding to the doors of the tent. “For decades, I have kindled fires beyond your border and inside it. Now they are beyond me.”

“You are a god.”

“There are older gods than I. Stronger gods. I took this flesh to set a single finger on the scales, to tip the delicate balance from order to chaos. That chaos stalks your empire now. It is beyond the grasp of any single man, so let us have no more talk of calling it back.”

As Kaden dragged the jungle air into his lungs, breath after desperate breath, he tried to think. The leverage he'd so trusted had proven treacherous, illusory. Trying to move Meshkent with the truth about Triste was like trying to pry a great stone from the dirt with a branch of rotten pine. Maybe there was another way, something else he could do or say to regain purchase in the conversation. If so, he had no idea what it was, no idea how to twist the shaman to his will. No idea if it would matter if he could. He had spent enough time kindling fires, watching them burn, to recognize an immutable truth in the god's words. Maybe Kiel would have found a way, or il Tornja, but for all his skill with the
vaniate,
Kaden was not Kiel or il Tornja.

“All right,” he said. The words were part plea, part confession.

“How will you make
all right
?”

“I'll get you into the Dawn Palace. I can probably even get you to Triste.…” He trailed off, despair, sudden as a hot summer gust, blowing over him, through him. Since Meshkent had wrenched him from the
vaniate
his mind was as disordered as that of the rankest acolyte. “But you won't be able to get her out. Even you. You have no idea what the dungeon of the Dawn Palace is like.”

Long Fist just smiled that predatory, feline smile. “And you have no idea of the power slumbering inside me.”

 

23

When Adare had asked Kegellen to acquire a thief, she'd had a few vague ideas in mind. A good thief, she'd always believed, would be inconspicuous, forgettable, bland as a stone wall, a creature of quick fingers and old clothes. Not a tiny, naked bald man with a hand-wide tattoo of the moon inked across his smooth brown face.

Adare glanced at Kegellen, then over the woman's shoulder, half waiting for some other, more suitable figure to slip in through the door. Over Nira's strenuous objections, she had agreed to meet in a modest mansion up on Graves, one of the dozens of properties belonging to the Queen of the Streets; if the whole plan went straight to 'Shael, after all, Adare didn't want anyone in the Dawn Palace remembering a parade of unsavory characters visiting her own chambers.

Kegellen's house, like the woman herself, was all elegance: quiet courtyards ringed with marble colonnades, delicate fountains, fine rugs from Sia and Mo'ir, tropical flowers that must have required an army of gardeners to maintain. The woman's taste in art leaned toward the erotic—sculptures of lithe young men twisting around their own muscled forms, Liran tapestries woven into scenes of pleasure and delight—but even the boldest pieces managed to be tasteful, restrained. It hardly looked like a den of thieves, but then, the naked man before her didn't look like a thief.

Adare raised a brow. “This is him?”

“Indeed, Your Radiance! Indeed.” Kegellen made an elegant little flourish with her outstretched hand. “May I present to you Vasta Dhati, First Priest of the Sea of Knives.”

The man didn't smile. He seemed to be looking at Adare and not looking at her, as though he were studying a portion of her forehead without realizing it was attached to a face.

“I wasn't aware,” Adare said carefully, “that there
was
a priesthood associated with the Sea of Knives. Last I heard, the whole place was just a haven for pirates.”

Dhati didn't blink, didn't shift his gaze, but he made a quick hiss, so loud and unexpected Adare took half a step back.

Kegellen spread her hands apologetically. “
Pirates.
It is a regrettable word that our landbound world uses to describe his congregation.”

Adare blinked. “I asked for a thief who was good with climbing and ropes and you brought me a pirate priest of the Manjari?”

At the word
pirate,
Dhati hissed again. Then, without preamble, leapt into the air, folded his skinny legs beneath him mid-flight, and landed atop the table, ankles crossed onto the inside of his thighs in a way that made them look exceedingly likely to break. Adare stared.

“I think you will find Vasta Dhati's skills quite satisfactory,” Kegellen said. “He has collaborated with me for quite some time.”

“How long?”

Kegellen turned to Dhati, who, after his brief display of acrobatics, seemed content to sit atop the table, eyes fixed before him.

“Seven years, I think it is now.”

“What about his flock?” Adare asked. “Back in the Sea of Knives?”

Kegellen spread her hands. “Regrettably, he is in exile.”

“Exile? Exiled by whom?”

The small priest seemed disinclined to do any talking on his own behalf, and so Adare had addressed the question to Kegellen. Before the woman could respond, however, Dhati raised a single finger, pointed it straight at the ceiling, and began speaking in a rapid patter so heavily accented Adare could barely understand.

“Apostates and blasphemers. Those of unsteady breath. A plague of the unsanctified. Clutchers of anchors and coastlines, traitors to the swell of the holy wave. They”—Dhati's finger trembled here, and his eyes rose to the ceiling as though seeking confirmation from the huge chandelier—“will pay the full account on the day when I return.”

He made some complicated sign in the air with that single finger, as though to seal the words, then fell so silent he might never have spoken. He wasn't even breathing hard. Adare stared. Despite his naked chest, it was hard to tell if the priest was breathing at
all
.

All right,
she thought bleakly.
So he's insane.

“Can you climb?” Adare asked hesitantly. “Climb ropes?”

Dhati hissed again. It seemed to be his preferred mode of expression.

“He is the finest climber in Eridroa,” Kegellen replied for him. “Before he came to me, he lived an entire life in the rigging of his ship.”

“Great,” Adare replied. “But there's no rigging inside Intarra's Spear.”

“Dhati believes a man should be his own rope.”

Adare blinked, looked from Kegellen to the self-proclaimed priest, then back again.

“I have no idea what that means.”

As if in answer, Dhati tipped his head abruptly back, his spine hinging perfectly at the neck until he was staring straight up at the ceiling. As Adare stared, he extended both hands before him, interlaced his fingers into a double fist, paused with his arms at their rigid full extent, and then, with a sound like a strangled, phlegmy roar, slammed the heels of his hands into his gut. The blow doubled him over. He remained in that position, motionless save for a wavelike rippling of his ribs.