The Last Mortal Bond (50 page)

Adare forced herself to meet that gaze, to nod. “Perhaps I was not very clear earlier. There was a breach in palace security. Until I have the answers I seek, I will believe there is
still
a breach, and while there is a breach, I will trust no one. Including you.”

Simit studied her. “This is most irregular, Your Radiance.”

“We will see the prisoner now,” Adare said. “We will see him alone. And if there are any more delays, I will see you removed from your post, stripped of your armor and honors, and put out of the palace.”

The man held her gaze a moment, then bowed a final time. “As you say, Your Radiance. If you will follow me…”

Adare let out a long, unsteady breath when the man finally turned. Maybe there had been a more graceful way to handle the jailor, a subtler way, but grace and subtlety carried their own risks, risks she couldn't afford to take while il Tornja had her son. The blunt force of imperial prerogative wasn't pretty, but it worked.

It works,
she reflected bleakly,
provided you're willing to burn through all normal human bonds.

*   *   *

Simit's metal “basket” looked more like some obscure machine of torture than anything meant to carry apples or cotton. Adare and Mailly stood on a slab of cast iron barely wide enough for the two of them, grasping a waist-high metal railing that might have been hammered out on some drunken blacksmith's forge. The thing was all warped angles and rough edges, a baffling contrast with the clean lines of the rest of the prison.

It's meant to frighten them,
the Chief Jailor had explained, just before he lowered them through an open trapdoor in the steel floor.
The journey to the cages below should not be an easy one.

The whole thing hung from wrist-thick chains—obviously strong enough to hold up half a dozen oxen—but Adare felt nauseous all the same as the basket dropped through the floor in a series of jolts and lurches. The chains rattled over the pulleys above, setting the basket swaying. After a moment of dizzying vertigo, Adare closed her eyes. She could feel Mailly beside her. The girl was sobbing silently, trembling inside her robe, the sound muffled by the clanking of the chain. Adare felt her own fear begin to give way, shoved aside by her shame. Things could go awry for them all, horribly awry, but Mailly was the only one who had come to this place to die.

How does it feel,
Adare wondered,
to know you won't live to see another sunrise?
Soldiers marched to their deaths all the time, of course, and old people lying in their beds could surely hear Ananshael's quiet steps. Almost no one, however, could foresee with any certainty the actual
moment
. A soldier might survive a vicious battle. A grandmother with the gray pox might live for five more years. It was that
chance
of survival, the not knowing for sure, that kept people moving forward, even at the end. That chance had been denied to Mailly. Adare was denying it. She carried inside a small pocket of her robe the poison that would destroy the girl. Mailly knew it, had climbed all the way to the dungeon knowing it.

The basket jolted suddenly to rest, throwing Adare into the twisted railing. She opened her eyes to find a steel cage hanging in space just half a pace away. Like the basket in which she stood, it hung from chains, but when she traced those links back up, she found them fixed in the floor above. There was no raising and lowering of the hanging cells. Prisoners went down in the basket, and usually they didn't leave until they were dead.

If any of that bothered Vasta Dhati, it didn't show. The pirate priest sat cross-legged in the center of his cage, his only clothing a single scrap of sailcloth around his loins. The man was more battered than the last time Adare saw him—something had split his scalp just above the eye, and a huge bruise spread like a stain across his shoulder. He didn't appear to notice; not the wounds nor his new visitors.

“All is well, Your Radiance?”

Adare craned her neck to find Simit leaning out over the open door, staring down at the swaying basket.

“It is. You may leave us now.”

Simit hesitated. “Call out loudly—very loudly—when you are ready to ascend.” His head disappeared, and then, moments later, the trapdoor above slammed shut. Adare ignored her roiling stomach and the recriminations of her mind, turning back to face the priest.

“Are you all right?” she murmured. The sight of his wounds had filled her with sudden foreboding, and despite his earlier assurances, the whole thing suddenly seemed impossible. How could he keep track of the cloth for three days, through arrest and transport, beatings and interrogation? Could he eat, with that silk rope snaking down his throat? Could he sleep? “Do you have it?” she demanded, suddenly convinced she should have found a way to carry the rope herself, whatever the added risk.

“You are speaking to the First Priest of the Sea of Knives,” Dhati replied serenely, raising his eyes. Before Adare could respond, he tipped back his head and, as he had in Kegellen's home days earlier, vomited the silken rope into his hands. The cord was a slick, twisted mess, but it was
there
. When it was done, Dhati spat onto the steel floor of his cage. “This is no prison for the First Priest of the Sea of Knives.”

“What about the cage?” Adare asked, eyeing the steel gridwork. Instead of the simple vertical bars she had seen in other prisons, bars ran both horizontally and vertically over the front of the cell. The resultant empty squares were barely larger than the priest's head, certainly far too narrow for his shoulders, a fact that seemed to bother him not in the slightest.

For a moment he stood still as the steel walls. Then, with no warning, he began to windmill his arms in frenetic circles, all the while breathing in and out so quickly and violently that Adare thought he might snap his ribs. Mailly had pushed back her hood, and was staring at the tiny man, amazement replacing, if only for a moment, the pain that was usually scrawled across her face.

“What is he doing?” she whispered.

Adare grimaced. “Escaping.” She hoped.

Suddenly, Dhati went still again. He closed his eyes, muttered a few words in a language Adare didn't understand, then stepped forward to the bars. He put an arm through first, an approach that seemed obviously doomed to failure. Before Adare could lose hope, however, the priest let out a deep
humph,
and the arm seemed to pop free from the body, the shoulder liberated from its socket. The sight was both sickening and fascinating. Adare could do nothing but stare as the man distended his own flesh, twisting his limbs into positions of torture, horror, his body writhing in the impossible postures of nightmare. He didn't seem to climb through the metal grate so much as
pour
himself, as though there were no muscle or bone inside his skin, but an amorphous, gelatinous ooze. For a moment Adare thought the man was a leach, but she realized as she stared that there was no kenning involved—only a staggeringly violent subjugation of the flesh. It took a matter of minutes, but when Dhati was finished he stood outside the cage, perching easily on the bars as he retrieved his rope. Then, with an acrobatic flip, he tossed himself up onto the roof of the cell.

Adare shook her head in amazement. “Now what?” she managed, when she finally found her words.

Dhati bared his teeth—a feral expression that might have been a smile. “Knots.”

The First Priest of the Sea of Knives was fully fluent in his knots; his thin fingers flew through the whorls and twists as easily as Adare might write her own name on an empty page. It took him only a matter of moments to tie a series of small, fixed loops into the length of silk—holds for hands and feet, evidently—then just a heartbeat more to attach the end of the silk to one of the bars on his cage. When he finished, he looked up at Adare, then pointed beyond her shoulder.

“I will get the girl.”

Adare turned slowly, warily, shifting her grip on the railing as she moved. She'd managed not to look down, had managed not to look at anything but Dhati and his cage. Now, however, she was forced to confront the full scope of the prison. Dozens of cages hung from the floor above, most at different levels, facing different directions. She had a brief vision of the architect or mathematician responsible for solving that particular problem, for packing in as many cages as possible without offering any one prisoner a clear line of sight to any other.

In a way, the whole place was ludicrous. Holes hacked into the stone would have been cheaper and easier, and no one was likely to escape from a cave built straight into the bedrock.

But then,
Adare reflected, staring at the hanging cells, at the light reflecting off the steel,
it's not about ease. Not any more than this tower we decided to occupy. It's about power.

Anyone who saw the sunlight glinting off the tower—sailors miles out to sea, travelers down the coastal road, visitors to and citizens of Annur itself—knew that it belonged to the Malkeenians. Somehow a single family with blazing eyes had taken the greatest structure in the world for its own, then built a prison inside it, a dungeon so high, the story went, that even if a prisoner managed to leap from his cell, he would die before striking the ground. It was worth a logistical hassle to have the whole world believe a thing like that.

Atop his hanging cage, Vasta Dhati pulled the last of his knots tight, grunted in satisfaction, and then, without even a glance down, leapt the gap between his cell and the hanging basket. The whole thing swayed dangerously as he landed on the railing, but while Adare and Mailly scrambled to hold on, Dhati balanced easily, shading his eyes with a hand as he squinted to the west.

“How long will it take,” Adare asked, “to search the cells?”

The First Priest hissed, then shook his head. “No search. The girl is there.”

He pointed at a cell just twenty or thirty feet distant.

Adare stared at it. The gleaming steel walls stared blankly back. Presumably the cell had an open side, a gridwork of bars like those through which Dhati had just escaped.
It had better,
she thought. Even Dhati couldn't drag Triste out through a sheet of solid metal.

“She's in there? How do you know?”

“You want me to free a leach,” Dhati replied. “To keep the leach safely, she must be drugged. That is the only cage the guards visit, even in the middle of the night.”

I should be grateful,
Adare thought. The information was an unexpected windfall, as was the simple fact of the cage's location. After so much scheming and second-guessing, Triste hung inside a cell just a stone's throw away. Dhati, as promised, was out of his cage. Improbably, it was all working.
I should be grateful,
she told herself again, and yet, instead of gratitude, she felt only her heart's hammering, dread rising in her throat to choke her.

“You have the grapples?” Dhati asked impatiently.

Adare started at the question, then nodded. Hidden in her piled hair, masquerading as lacquered pins, were the three hooks the priest had given her days before. In retrospect, she could have simply carried them in her pocket, but there had been no way to be sure that Simit wouldn't search her, Emperor or no. Her fingers felt numb, clumsy, as she pulled the hooks free, and as she passed the final one to the priest, she felt it slip from her sweat-slick hand, tumbling into the void. Adare could only stare, but Dhati lashed out, viper-quick, snatching it as it fell, then hissing his disapproval as he straightened. It took him only a moment to lock it together with the other two, then to thread the rope through the triple eye of the grapple.

“How…,” Adare began.

Before she could finish the question, he tossed the steel hook. It was a casual motion, almost indifferent. It reminded Adare of the way she herself might toss aside her robe when she undressed for the bath. She watched, amazed, as the silk fluttered out behind the hook, as the enameled steel flashed with the sunlight, then landed with a
clank
atop the far cell. The sound seemed horribly loud, the kind of thing that would surely bring Simit and his guards running. She stared up at the closed trapdoor for a dozen nervous breaths. The steel panels didn't move. The Chief Jailor did not appear. Adare let out a long, slow breath, then turned back to the silken cord hanging in a shallow arc between the cells.

“Stay here,” Dhati said. Then, without even a glance down, the priest swung out onto the silk, hanging spiderlike beneath it, suspended from his hands and the backs of his ankles, then moved along its length, nimble and frighteningly fast. He reached Triste's cell in moments, rolled onto the roof, then tipped his head over the far side. He looked up a moment later, then signaled.

“She's there,” Adare breathed weakly. “She's there.”

“And he can get her out?” Mailly asked, her voice faint. “He can get me in?”

Adare kept her eyes fixed on the far cell, but nodded slowly. “You saw how he did it. You're just as small as Dhati—smaller, actually.”

“But my body,” the girl protested. “It doesn't
move
like that.”

“It will,” Adare replied. “He can help you.”

Help,
in fact, seemed like entirely the wrong word for what the priest would have to do. He had demonstrated his uncanny ability back in Kegellen's mansion, his strong, nimble fingers finding a series of points halfway between Adare's neck and shoulder, then pressing so viciously she thought he would break the skin. She'd cried out in alarm just as her shoulder went slack, then numb, the whole arm dangling stupidly at her side.

“Your soft emperor's body would not last a day on the Sea of Knives,” the priest had said, gesturing, “but it can be trained to obey.”

Then, before Adare could protest, he popped her shoulder from its socket. Whatever he'd done to relax the muscle also deadened the pain, at least in that moment. The ache came later, when she'd recovered the limb's use and feeling, a bone-deep sense of the wrong that had been done. Kegellen, of course, had been all apologies and solicitude, but Adare had brushed aside the woman's concern. “All that matters is that it works, that he can get Triste out, and Mailly in.”