The Last Mortal Bond (55 page)

She glared at Delka a moment longer, then glanced into the darkness of the Hole once more. She could hear the river down there, groaning over the stone like something huge and in pain. She smelled blood, thick and hot on the back of her tongue; some of the stench came from the cavern behind her, where the returning men and women nursed their wounds, some from the warren of tunnels below.

“The Eyrie has always sent men and women into the Hole,” Delka said quietly. “They don't always come out.”

Gwenna shook her head. “When the Eyrie sent us in we were trained. We were
ready
.”

The older woman laid a hand on Gwenna's shoulder. “I don't know the other three well, but Quick Jak and I used to run together over on Arim. He's strong. He's smart.”

“Is that enough?” Gwenna growled.

Delka spread her hands. “We'll have to wait to find out.”

Gwenna shook her head curtly, seized a burning torch from its makeshift sconce near the entrance to the tunnel, then slipped a blade from the sheath on her back. “No,” she said quietly, stepping into the darkness before anyone could call her back. “We won't.”

*   *   *

As it turned out, Delka was right. Gwenna found Jak less than a quarter mile below the cavern where the rebels made their camp, limping up the uneven stone, one blade bare and bloody, his own torch burned down to a guttering stump.

Thank Hull,
she thought, relief flooding through her like light, like air. Then she saw his face, the awful shock scrawled across his features, looked past him into the deeper dark, listened for those other footfalls, for the three other soldiers who had gone down into the Hole with him, who weren't coming out.

“They're dead,” he said. His voice, too, sounded dead.

“How?” Gwenna asked, covering the distance between them at a lope.

Jak just shook his head.

“How?”
she demanded, shoving her torch almost into his face, trying to read what had happened in the spatters of blood, in the dark soot smeared across his skin.

He stared at her, incredulous. “What do you mean,
how
? There are monsters down there, you bitch. Bigger than the one you dragged up into the cavern, the one you fed our blood to.”

She shook her head, as though to refuse the truth. “The others all made it. The others came back.”

“Maybe the others were
better
.”

“No,” she said. “They weren't. You're one of the only washouts who actually made it all the way to the Trial. You're younger than most of them, and you're stronger. I've seen you swim.”

“It's not swimming down there,” he said, staring at the naked blade as though he had woken up only moments before, had just now discovered it clutched in his hand. “It's a lot uglier than swimming.”

“What happened?”

“The slarn happened,” Jak said, shaking his head, eyes wide, mind obviously lost in the memory. “Half a dozen of them. We found the nest. Enough eggs to go around. Thought we got lucky. We were actually laughing as we drank from them, slapping each other on the back.” He closed his eyes. “Then they hit us.”

“And did you fight back?”

“Of course,” he said quietly. “What else could we do?”

What else could we do?
Gwenna stared at him. The flier was spattered with blood, but not much of it seemed to be
his
. There was that initial wound, wet and messy on his arm, and a handful of scratches. Nothing more. Nothing to indicate a bare-knuckle fight to the death.

What else could we do?

“You could run,” Gwenna said. Even in her own ears, her voice sounded like a knife sliding across stone.

Jak opened his eyes, met her stare. “There was no need. Not in the end.”

“You killed six slarn?”

“I didn't do it by myself. Helli killed at least three before the big one tore out her throat. Gim got one, I think. All I know is that they were all dead, finally. I was the only one left. Me and the largest of those monsters, and he was already all cut up. Dumb beast, practically dead on his feet and didn't know it. I finished him.”

Gwenna studied him. She could smell the grief, but grief for what? For seeing his companions killed or for leaving them? He'd frozen up that night in Hook, had all but abandoned Qora to the mercy of Rallen's thugs. Was it really likely that he'd behaved any differently, that he'd behaved
better
in the tight, twisting darkness of the Hole? Gwenna had shoved him down into the cave's gut hoping that could be true, but all those hours pacing back and forth in front of the fire had eroded her hope. Despair had had hours to whisper its own sibilant song, insistent as a river undercutting the bank:
He's a coward. He's a coward, and you were a fool.

“You don't believe me,” Jak said, shaking his head wearily. “You think I ran.”

Gwenna took a deep breath. “Take me to the bodies. They deserve to be burned.”

Not just that. A few minutes studying the dead, and she'd know what had happened, who had fought and who had fled.

“I can't.”

“We'll find them,” Gwenna insisted grimly. “Just a matter of a little backtracking.”

“I didn't forget the way. The bodies aren't there. I threw them into a river that carved its way through the cave.”

Gwenna's jaw throbbed. She realized she was grinding her teeth together, biting down so hard on her anger that pain lanced down the back molars.

“Why did you do that?”

“I wasn't going to leave them for the slarn. They're people. Not meat.”

And now they're gone,
Gwenna thought bleakly.
The bodies and the truth with them
.

“I didn't run,” Jak said, eyes weary but defiant.

She opened her mouth, ready to press the point, then shook her head, turning abruptly on her heel. There was no way to get at the facts, not anymore. And even if the flier
had
run, even if he had frozen up or abandoned his companions, it was Gwenna Sharpe who had forced him down there in the first place.

 

28

Nightly, when evening's keen knife carved away the light, Valyn felt rather than saw the coming darkness in the air, which cooled to ice against his skin. He heard night in the silence of brighter birds, jays and woodpeckers giving way to the muttering of bats, the owl's long cry. Night had its own smell—harder and more grudging than the scents of the day, as though every flower had closed, every leaf furled against the cold. And Valyn could feel the night inside himself as well, feel his own body answering the rhythms of the larger world, muscles tensing, hands closing into fists, breath faster in his lungs, hearing honed to such a point that every woodland crack and rustle cut.

It was almost impossible to believe that there had been a time when darkness meant relaxation and rest, that there were still millions of men and women the whole world over who turned down the lamp, snuffed the candle, then curled comfortably into their blankets. Since his blinding, Valyn's whole body had rebelled against sleep's surrender. Most nights he managed only a few fitful bouts of nightmare, waking sweating more often than not, trembling, clutching the haft of his ax. Most nights, he fought sleep as hard as he could, back to a boulder or tree, staring into the cold dark, and so, despite the late hour, he was awake to hear the Flea approaching, boots quiet in the dried hemlock needles.

The Urghul had made camp under a stand of pines a hundred paces to the north. Valyn could still hear a few of them talking quietly, eating and dicing. Huutsuu was among them, her rich laughter threaded on the breeze. If she came to visit him at all, it would be later, much later.

A quarter mile to the south, the Kettral had hunkered down in their own bivouac. Valyn could smell Sigrid and Newt, the leach's delicate perfume twining strangely on the night air with the Aphorist's half-rancid stench. Valyn couldn't say whether they were awake or asleep, but they were far off and staying there. The Flea was approaching alone. Valyn wasn't sure how the man knew where he had bedded down, but the Wing leader was making straight for him, slowly but inexorably as the falling of night itself.

Valyn had been expecting this encounter, dreading it from the moment he realized the Flea was still alive. He'd half expected the Wing leader to just kill him, to find him wandering around the forest with a band of Urghul and cut his throat. Some broken part of him had been hoping for that. Dying was easy, after all—a little pain, and then nothing. What had to happen now—that was hard.

When the Flea was half a dozen feet away, he paused. He smelled like leather, and wool, and good, sharp steel. They'd talked earlier, obviously, but this was different. This time there was no Urghul band surrounding them. This time there would be no hiding from the past.

“So,” the Flea said quietly.

“So,” Valyn replied, parrying the syllable with his own.

“Time to talk.”

“We talked this morning.”

“That's not what I mean.”

Valyn shook his head. “You already talked to Gwenna months ago. Gwenna and Annick. I'm sure you heard it all from them.”

“I want to hear it from you.” The Flea didn't raise his voice, but there was something dangerous in the words, something that made Valyn lean back against the tree, his body trying in vain to put a little more space between them. He didn't want to go over it all again, to say it aloud, to explore the dismal chronicle of his own failure, but then, sometimes wanting didn't really come into it. After Finn's death, he owed the other man an explanation. That much, at least, was clear.

He blew out a long breath. “We got to Assare just before dusk—”

“No.”

Valyn hesitated.

“Start earlier,” the Flea said. “Start on the Islands. Why did you leave?”

Valyn shook his head silently, trying to find the words. His life on the Qirins—Ha Lin and Gent, barrel drops and mess hall slop—it all seemed like something from a dream. Worse, when Valyn thought back on himself, on the self he had been before losing his eyes, he barely recognized the man. Valyn the Kettral cadet, the Wing leader—he had died somewhere between the Bone Mountains and Andt-Kyl. What he had become, he had no idea.

“There was a conspiracy…,” he managed finally.

It was a twisted, tortuous tale, but it didn't take long to tell it: how Balendin had killed Ha Lin, had tried to murder Valyn himself; how the Aedolians had come for Kaden; how Valyn's rage at the
kenarang
had blinded him to all the rest; how he had sat atop the tower in Andt-Kyl while his friends fought, while they died. He'd lived every detail of the story over and over, waking and in nightmare, but it was another thing to say the words aloud, and when he finished, he was trembling. If he hadn't been sitting already, his back pressed up against a huge hemlock, he thought he might collapse.

“It's no easy thing,” the Flea said finally, “losing a Wingmate.”

It seemed a strange thing to focus on, after all the rest. After all the talk of Csestriim gates and imperial treachery, Valyn hadn't expected the man to return to the simple fact of a soldier fighting, dying. That was what soldiers did, after all. It was the least of the tale. And yet it was Laith's death, Valyn realized with a cold shock, that remained lodged inside him like a poisoned arrowhead the medics had been unable to pull free. He'd had moments of success—killing Yurl, making sure Kaden got free—but who were Yurl and Kaden? Strangers. Valyn had slaughtered one and saved the other, but both actions seemed small now, trivial. Laith, on the other hand, had been a friend and a Wingmate, more a brother than Valyn's real brother. And Valyn had left him to die, fighting alone on a bridge.

He wanted to say all that, to force his own guilt and regret into words. After recounting the whole sick story, however, he found he had no more words to offer. Instead he just shook his head. “We're all going to die one day.”

“Still,” the Flea replied, his voice low and cold as the night wind. “The day matters.”

Valyn let out a long, shuddering breath. “About Blackfeather Finn,” he said finally. “I didn't…”

He trailed off. The Flea hadn't moved, hadn't even twitched, but the man smelled suddenly of grief, bright red grief twisted with rage, the scent so powerful that for a moment Valyn thought he might choke on it. The man's voice, however, when he finally spoke, was flat, level.

“Tell me about your eyes.”

“No,” Valyn replied. “I have to say this. About Finn…”

He wanted to talk about the fight in Assare, wanted to explain the whole context, how he couldn't have known the Flea's allegiance, how even after he'd decided to trust the other Wing, Pyrre had come out of the darkness. He wanted to explain that her killing wasn't his killing, that he hadn't ordered it, hadn't wanted it.…

“We're done talking about Finn,” the Flea said, cutting into his thoughts. He hadn't raised his voice, but for just a moment Valyn could
see.
The other Wing leader stood a pace away. He'd moved his hand to his belt knife, but his eyes weren't on Valyn. He was looking up between the boughs, as though there were something to read in the night's black bowl. Then, as quickly as it had come, the vision was gone. Valyn suppressed a shudder. Vision meant danger, always and inevitably—mortal danger—as though there were more violence pent up in the Flea's few quiet words than in any number of bared blades. Wind blew down cold out of the north, raising the hairs on Valyn's neck. There had been no threats, no rage, but suddenly he felt certain that death had blown past him, just barely ruffling his hair.

Words were useless to stitch together some wounds, and so Valyn left behind the subject of Blackfeather Finn's death. “I can see,” he said after a long pause. “Not most of the time. Only when there's a fight, when I'm about to die.” He omitted the nightly violence of his sex with Huutsuu. “Like another sense, a new sense that isn't quite vision, shades of black on black.…” He trailed off, shaking his head.