The Last Mortal Bond (58 page)

“Whatever you believe,” Adare said finally, “I'm not your enemy.”

Triste's laugh was light, bitter. “Then let me go.”

“No. There is something about you, something dangerous to il Tornja. If I intend to fight him, I need to know what it is.”

“Fight him…,” Triste said quietly. For just a moment, for a heartbeat or two, something bloomed in her eyes, and the lines of her face softened. She looked years younger. Younger and lost and almost hopeful. Then she blinked, shuddered, and her face slammed shut.

“I hope you fight him,” she said, enunciating carefully.

“I intend to—” Adare began.

The girl cut her off. “I hope you fight him, and he fights back. I'll still be locked up somewhere, but I hope I hear about it.”

“About what?”

“About his death,” Triste said, violet eyes ablaze. “And Kaden's. And yours. About your son's. That's the only way this ends. You know it, but you're too stubborn to believe it. All of you scheming bastards are going to cut each other down, and though I don't pray often, when I do pray, I pray for this: that I get to hear how it all happened.”

 

30

Gray deepened into green as the eastern sky brightened with the watery light of the still-unrisen sun. Unseen frogs along the river's bank began their monophonic chorus. Fish rose to the water's surface, took flies, then disappeared, the silent ripples of their passage growing, spreading, fading. Kaden could make out flashes of color between the trees and vines—red and cerulean, sky-white and green—bright-plumed birds swooping down from their night's roost.

A part of his mind—the part that remained unmoved by Kiel's sudden arrival and dire news—catalogued the creatures, their songs and cries. The life of the jungle was so different from the life of the Bone Mountains—bolder, louder—but it was life all the same, millions of creatures moving through the stations of hunger and fear, lust and confusion, pleasure and pain.

“It will all go away,” Long Fist said, as though reading his thoughts, “if my consort's host is killed.”

“Triste is not Ciena's host,” Kaden replied without looking up from the river. “She didn't invite the goddess into her mind. She doesn't want her there.”

“The girl's invitations and desires are irrelevant. The world you know is fragile as glass. Her death will shatter it.”

Kaden turned to study the man. They sat—Long Fist, Kiel, and Kaden himself—on a large boulder at the river's edge. Dawn Rock, the local tribes called it, for the fact that it was there, from the top of the rock, looking east down the river's course, that you could first see the morning sun. Kaden would have preferred to be already on the way back to the
kenta,
but Long Fist's hieratic duties required him to be at the river just before dawn, to spill the blood of a small, black-haired monkey down the stone and into the swirling current as the sun rose. Unlike the sacrifice of the night before, this was a private ceremony, but a necessary one, evidently, and so the three of them sat on the rock as wide-mouthed fish rose for blood from the river's unseen bottom, and the morning's hot light ignited the white mist.

“Triste is not dead yet,” Kiel said. “She is simply missing. Gone from the dungeon.”

The Csestriim had arrived unexpectedly late the night before, escorted into the jungle camp by a pair of wary Ishien, just as Kaden had been.

Kaden shook his head. “The dungeon was the last thing keeping her safe.”

The Csestriim nodded. “She is at greater risk now. Grave risk.”

Whatever that risk, Kiel's voice was calm. He seemed indifferent to Triste's fate or that of the goddess trapped inside her. The girl's disappearance was a fact, no more or less than the other myriad facts of the world. Like Long Fist, Kiel sat cross-legged, gazing down into the current, but unlike the Urghul shaman, whose stillness spoke of coiled might, of strength gathering for an attack, Kiel might have grown from the stone itself. He might have planned to sit there forever.

“How did you know it wasn't her in the cell?” Kaden asked.

“I looked at the body,” the historian replied simply. “It was not her.”

“And no one else noticed? None of the jailors?”

“Your kind has always struggled to see clearly, and the girl's face was disfigured by the poison that killed her. There were blisters and sores everywhere. Discoloration. Bleeding and black pus obscuring the sclera—”

“Sclera?”

“Her eyes. They were unrecognizable.”

Kaden could remember perfectly his first encounter with Triste. Her eyes had been sharp and clear, bright as the jungle flowers unfolding to the sun all around him now. She'd been younger then, younger in more than years, and terrified, trussed up in Tarik Adiv's ostentatious bonds as though she weren't a woman so much as a gift, an object, a beautiful bauble for the new Emperor. It was her eyes—those layers of violet laid one over the next—that had first jarred Kaden from his speechless stare. He tried to imagine them blackened, tarred over with poison, but of course, they weren't. It wasn't Triste that Kiel had seen inside the cell, but someone else.

“Who?” Kaden asked. “Who was she?”

“The dead are nothing,” Long Fist cut in. “We must find the living girl, the one whose flesh conceals her goddess.”

“And our best chance of finding her,” Kaden replied, “is discovering who broke her free, and why.”

Kiel nodded. “The body in the cell is an obvious place to start. I was unable to learn her name.…”

“But?” Kaden asked, hearing the pause in the historian's voice.

“Your sister visited the dungeon the day that Triste disappeared, the day this strange girl's corpse appeared inside the cell.”

Surprise knocked faintly against the bronze of Kaden's calm, and then, a heartbeat after the surprise, anger, scratching with almost-silent claws. He held both feelings in his mind a moment, then put them away. There was no time for surprise, no room for the error that waited on human anger. What he needed was the bottomless calm of the Csestriim, but even as he reached for it, Long Fist was standing. “We will go to Annur then, and take the girl from your sister.”

As though it were that simple. As though the problems of the world could be solved just by going, by taking.

Instead of following the shaman to his feet, Kaden stared down into the river's slow eddy. The current had carried away the monkey's blood. There was only the water, muddy and dark, carried down from some distant hillside, traveling all the way to an unseen sea.

“How did Adare do it?” he asked. “Get her out?”

“I can't be certain that she did,” Kiel replied. “It is only an inference.”

Long Fist let out something that might have been a growl. Kaden glanced up to see the shaman's lips drawn back from his sharpened teeth. “She visited the girl the day she disappeared—”

“No,” Kaden said, cutting him off. “Kiel said she visited the
dungeon
.”

The Csestriim nodded. “She was there to see a man named Vasta Dhati, a Manjari prisoner.”

“Imprisoned for what?”

“The attack on your study.”

“That was Gwenna.”

“Indeed.”

Kaden took a breath, held it for a dozen heartbeats, then let it out.

What does my sister want? What is she trying to accomplish?

Answering the questions was like trying to find shape in the shifting clouds, but then, Adare's mind was smaller than the sky, more ordered. Understanding was no more than a matter of seeing through her eyes. Kaden closed his own, let his own thoughts go, and tried to slip inside Adare's conception of the world. She'd planned Triste's extraction well. Brilliantly, in fact. Had it not been for Kiel's perfect memory, no one would have realized Triste was missing at all.

“There is no time for talk,” Long Fist said. “Your sister has bound herself to this Csestriim, Ran il Tornja. She will deliver the girl into his hands, and he will destroy her.”

Kaden considered the claim. “No,” he said slowly. “That doesn't work.”

The shaman's gaze settled on him, hard and sharp enough to cut. “He twisted your sister to his purposes months ago. This was known, even on the steppe.”

“Maybe,” Kaden agreed, “but things change.”

“How are you certain?”

“Il Tornja wants Triste dead,” Kiel said.

Kaden nodded. “It is easier to kill a woman than to smuggle her out of the most closely guarded prison in the world. If Adare was taking orders from il Tornja, the jailors would have found Triste's body in that cell. We would have already lost. Adare went to great trouble, great risk, to take the girl out alive.”

Long Fist's hand had clenched into a fist at his side. His jaw was tight as he spoke. “Why?”

Kaden frowned. “That is what I will have to ask her.”

 

31

The barrel was cramped, and dark, and hot. It reeked of rum. The rum wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't also smelled like pickled herring, and curdled goat's milk, and the rancid oil that Gwenna had dumped into the harbor shortly before climbing into the fucking thing. The residents of Hook reused their barrels. Gwenna herself was only the most recent cargo, and whatever happened in the following days, she was unlikely to be its last. She imagined herself shattered on the rocks at the bottom of Skarn's limestone cliffs, or floating facedown in the waves. People were expendable, especially on the Islands, but a good barrel … you didn't just let a good barrel go to waste. She tried to imagine what it might hold next.

The question was, in its own odd way, relaxing. Better to think about those wooden staves brimming with whale oil or bootlegged ale than to spend too much time dwelling on the fact that she had willingly let herself be nailed into a cylindrical wooden coffin. She'd done hundreds of barrel drops in training, but never from inside of the 'Kent-kissing barrel.

Of course, the plan wasn't to get dropped fifty feet into the waves. The plan was to be set down as slowly and gently as an actual barrel of rum, to sit silently until nightfall, and then to carve her way free of the cramped space with the chisel, hand brace, and belt knife she had secreted beneath her crunched-up knees. She would have preferred to bring more weapons—her smoke steel blades, at the very least—but there wasn't room in the barrel for more, not if she didn't want to risk cutting off her leg in transit.

In theory, it wouldn't matter. She was going to Skarn to steal birds, not to fight Rallen and his men. In theory, she would connect with Quick Jak and Talal, both of whom were tucked inside barrels of their own, slip out of the storeroom, find the birds they wanted, and get in the air. In theory, Rallen wouldn't even know they'd come and gone until they were back again, the bird loaded with a full Wing this time, to gut the treacherous ex-Kettral leach and his bloody band.

That was the theory, anyway.

It had sounded good back in the Hole. She'd gone over it with Annick and Talal at least a dozen times. Now that she was nailed into the reeking barrel, the whole thing seemed a lot more likely to end in a quick, vicious death. There were dozens of ways the plan could go awry. The birds tasked with hauling the supplies—“tribute and taxation” as Rallen called the stacked crates and barrels—might drop her into the surf. Rallen's soldiers might decide to inspect the goods before flying them over to the island stronghold. Some of the rabble from Hook, furious at the burning of their homes, might decide to set the barrels ablaze out of sheer rebellious spite. It wouldn't matter much, once she started cooking, that they were all supposed to be on the same side.

And then there was the question of what would happen over on Skarn, provided they landed safely and were able to break free. It had been more than a week since the makeshift Trial, enough time for all but the worst of the wounds to knit closed, for bruises to fade, for the consumed albumen of the slarn eggs to begin its slow, subtle change in the flesh of the newest Kettral. Whether they were aware of their keener senses, of the fresh strength threaded through their muscles, Gwenna couldn't say.

She could see the difference, though. They had come out of the Hole harder, more willing to stand straight and keep their eyes up. It was more than Gwenna had dared hope for, actually, a reward commensurate with the risk, and yet she found herself dwelling, not on the triumphs of the living, but on the silence of the dead, on the three who
hadn't
come out of the caves. They had paid the price for her gamble. The three of them, and, in a different way, Quick Jak.

After their tense exchange on the day of the Trial itself, Gwenna had avoided another confrontation with the flier. She was worried she might hit him. Hurt him. Try as she might, she still couldn't bring herself to believe his story, not all of it. It seemed too easy, too pat, that he should come out of the darkness alone, nearly unharmed, when the others were cut to shreds. There wasn't anything to be gained, though, from badgering him. You couldn't shake the truth out of a man. Cut it out, maybe. Burn it out. But then you might as well be Jakob Rallen. Then you might as well be the 'Kent-kissing Urghul.

The simplest solution to the problem of the flier's cowardice would have been to ground him, to keep him in the caves until the fight was finished, then dump him off over on Arim, let him live out his days somewhere he couldn't get anyone killed. As Annick kept pointing out, some people just weren't meant to be Kettral. The trouble was, Gwenna didn't quite believe that. Or she believed the general principle, but couldn't convince herself that it was true of Jak. Every time she was ready to give up on him, she remembered just how easily he'd made the grueling swim to Skarn, how thoughtful he was when he wasn't terrified, how rational. And then there were Laith's words rattling around in the back of her head. Laith had said Quick Jak was the best flier on the Islands, and the truth was, she needed a flier.