The Last Mortal Bond (63 page)

Too slow,
Gwenna wanted to scream.

Talal's movements were leaden, awkward—despite the violence with which he'd broken free—as though he'd forgotten how to use his legs. Like Gwenna herself, he'd been in the barrel too long. That he was standing at all, that he was fighting, was testament to his will, but you couldn't will the feeling back into legs gone numb half a day earlier. You couldn't will blood into starved muscle. Talal twisted halfway to face this other foe, then stumbled. The stumble saved his life.

The flatbow had been level with his chest. When the soldier pulled the trigger, however, she panicked, yanking the weapon back and up. As Talal dropped to his knee, the bolt just cleared his head. His eyes widened, then he lunged. It was fucking ugly—the sort of thing you'd see from first-year cadets in the ring—but Talal was no first-year. Unlike those kids fumbling with their wooden swords, he was fighting for his life, for
all
of their lives. He managed to snag the spent flatbow with one hand, wrench it free of the woman's grasp, then smash it across her face. Once, twice, three times, quick and vicious, until her head snapped back, dangling limply from the broken neck.

That was enough to stop Rallen in his tracks. In less time than it would take to recite a quarter page of the
Tactics,
he'd lost four of his six soldiers. One was half crawling, half groveling in his effort to get clear, and the other, the one guarding Quick Jak, instead of watching the flier, was staring at the bodies sprawled across the floor, at the blood seeping into the dry, eager wood.

Talal glanced over at Gwenna. He couldn't see the kenning holding her, but seemed to understand the situation all the same, and pivoted to hurl the bloody flatbow at Rallen. As attacks went, it wasn't much. Talal's aim was good, but if the other leach had been thinking clearly he could have blocked it, or simply stepped aside. Instead, he let Gwenna go, swinging his empty hand around, palm out, blocking himself from the bow with the same kenning he had used against the knife moments earlier.

Gwenna heaved in a breath, felt the life flooding back into her crushed limbs.

“He can't…,” she tried, fell off coughing.

“I know,” Talal said, snatching up a dropped sword, then moving wide, away from Gwenna, toward the far wall. Her own stolen blade tight in her hand, she lurched to her feet, circling the opposite direction, forcing Rallen to choose a target, denying him the chance to hit them both with the same kenning. Rallen watched them glide to the flanks, his eyes wide, lips drawn back in a rictus. Gwenna debated hurling her blade, but she'd tried that twice already.

Time to be thorough
.
Time to finish it
.

She took a step forward, keeping her gaze on Rallen, following Talal out of the corner of her eye. There was no need to talk. They'd been fighting side by side long enough to slide into the plan without any need for words. She took another step, another. Then, before she could close with him, Rallen bellowed and swung his arm in a wide, desperate arc. The kenning was like a massive hammer on a long chain swinging silently through the room. It hit Talal first, slamming him across the open floor and into the wall, then smashed into Gwenna a quarter-heartbeat later.

The corner of a stacked crate caught her in the ribs. She felt something break, but people fought with broken ribs all the time. She shoved the pain aside, twisted around—she could move this time, although it was like struggling through almost-frozen water—to find Rallen stumbling for the warehouse door. He was faster than Gwenna remembered, but then, he was also a hundred pounds lighter. Still, sweat streamed down his face. She could hear his breathing, labored, almost painful. She strained, trying to bring her sword to bear, to break free, to give chase, but Rallen was already framed in the doorway, and then he was gone.

The kenning shattered just half a dozen breaths later. Gwenna shoved herself off of the crates, was halfway to the door when she realized someone was shouting at her, the same desperate syllable over and over:
Stop! Stop!

It was the last guard, the one with his knife at Quick Jak's throat. He'd lost his chance to slip out in the madness, and now his fever-bright eyes darted from Gwenna to Talal, then back. He was shaking his head. His hand trembled, scraping the blade against the stubble of Jak's neck. He hadn't drawn blood, not yet, but he was so obviously terrified he could easily slit the flier's throat without even noticing.

“Stop,” he said again, begging now, voice barely more than a whisper.

Jak's face was bleak. His mouth hung half open, as though he wanted to protest, but couldn't remember how. A wave of loathing washed over Gwenna. She and Talal had been fighting—getting their asses handed to them, but still
fighting
. Jak hadn't moved, hadn't even raised his voice. The soldier guarding him was so lost in his own horror that the greenest cadet on his first day of training could take him down, and yet the flier stayed on his knees.

And this,
Gwenna thought bleakly,
is why you should have brought Delka.

On any other day, she would have been tempted to leave the flier, to take Talal and go after Rallen. The ugly truth, however, was that she still needed him. The plan had gone straight to shit, but then, that was the nature of plans. It was still possible to win, but to win they needed Annick and the others. Which meant they needed a bird to go get them. Which meant they needed Jak.

She shifted her eyes from the coward to the man guarding him.

“Let him go,” she said slowly. “And I won't kill you.”

“Don't come any closer!” the soldier insisted, pressing the knife harder against Jak's throat. A thread of blood ran down the flier's neck. He closed his eyes.

Gwenna ignored the warning. “If you kill him, I will take out your eyes and feed them to you off the end of my knife. I'm not much for horse trading, but this seems like an easy one: let my man up, and I will let you walk out of that door.”

The soldier stole a panicked glance over his shoulder, out the bright rectangle into the open air. Rallen was getting away, but Gwenna forced down her own impatience. Part of any battle was picking who to fight and when. Choosing who to save and who to let die.

Slow down,
she told herself,
and do it right.

“What's it going to be?” she asked the guard.

Horror etched the man's face. “How can I trust you?”

“You can't,” Gwenna replied grimly. “Now I'm going to count to one.”

“What?”

“One.”

The soldier shoved Jak to the floor, then hurled himself backward, stumbling as he reached the door. For a moment, he was just a silhouette against the sun, all detail blotted out in the glare. Gwenna waited for his second foot to clear the threshold before she threw the knife. It hit him square between the shoulders, and he tumbled to the ramp with a wet groan.

Jak stared at her. “You said…”

“I said he'd leave this room alive,” Gwenna replied. “He did. Now get the fuck up.”

The flier just stared at her.

She turned to Talal. “Get him. I can't carry him, and we're dead if we can't fly out of here.”

She reached the doorway in half a dozen strides, then pulled up, blinking in the sudden brightness. Jak's guard was dragging himself down the ramp, crawling toward the brilliant shape of his own death, leaving a smear of blood on the wood. Gwenna glanced at him, then looked away, scanning the land to the east.

Rallen's fort wasn't a single fort at all, but a compound of half a dozen buildings arranged in a vague L near the island's edge. The warehouse from which she'd just escaped stood inland, back from the ocean, at the very end of the short leg of the L. A few dozen paces away stood a small, open-walled shed, and beyond that, a large, barnlike structure that Gwenna took for the livery. The long leg of the L stretched along the seaward cliff, and those buildings—thick, defensible stone structures—were surrounded by a stone curtain wall maybe twice as high as Gwenna's head.

The leach himself had disappeared behind the walls. She could hear shouting—orders and questions—the urgent chorus of soldiers scrambling to meet an attack. Her lips tightened. Rallen had at least two dozen men back there, even after the soldiers she'd killed in the warehouse. From what she could hear, the whole fort seemed to be in momentary disarray, but soon enough the idiots would get their asses under them and come out swinging. Which would make it two dozen against three.

“What's the play?” Talal asked quietly.

He was half a step behind her, holding Jak around the waist. The flier didn't seem to be injured, but he was paralyzed, lost in his own fear.

“The livery,” she said, stabbing a finger at the low stone barn just outside the compound walls.

The original plan had involved more waiting and sneaking, less fighting and fleeing. For all the changes, though, everything still revolved around the kettral, and to have any hope with the kettral, they needed to find the whistles.

Every bird on the Islands was trained to respond to a particular pitch. Without that training, the entire Eyrie would have dissolved into chaos, kettral quartering the sky at random with no way to respond to their fliers. The whistles were a simple solution, louder than a human voice, more precise, small enough to carry in a pocket or on a thong around the neck, and almost indestructible. Those whistles simplified day-to-day logistics on the Islands, and in battle, their piercing shriek, higher than any human cry, could cut through the clash of swords and the roar of fire, calling the bird down at the crucial moment, saving soldiers' lives. After nearly a year, the birds would be accustomed to Rallen's soldiers, but they would accept new riders. All you needed was the right whistle.

When Gwenna first arrived on the Islands as a cadet, those whistles had seemed like an oversight, a weakness. “What if a soldier's captured?” she'd demanded. “What if an enemy gets her hands on the whistle and calls the bird?”

The Flea had just raised his eyebrows. “And then what?”

“Calls a bird. Climbs
on
the 'Kent-kissing thing. Starts killing the wrong people.”

“Climbs on?” the older man asked, raising a bushy eyebrow. “Do you remember the first time you saw a bird? Would you have known how to climb on?”

That was the crux of it, after all. Kettral were accustomed to fighting a foe that was
not
Kettral. Accustomed to dropping unseen straight out of the sky, cutting throats, and disappearing beneath the beat of massive wings. There was no point in devising tactics to fight other Kettral, no point to guard against them. Until now. There were always extra whistles in the livery, hanging up beside the harnesses and barrel straps, each labeled with the name of the bird that would respond to its call.

That, at least, was the way it had been back on the Eyrie before the Kettral destroyed themselves. How Rallen handled things was anyone's guess. Gwenna had hoped to have time to snoop around, to keep hunting if they came up empty-handed in the livery, but hope was a weak shield, one that had shattered the moment Rallen's thugs started bashing the outside of her barrel.

Maybe the whistles weren't in the livery at all, but one thing was clear—the three of them were sanding in the open, asses in the wind. Almost no vegetation grew from Skarn's rocky soil, certainly no trees, nothing that might provide any real cover. Whistles or no, the livery was shelter, and they were going to need shelter soon—partly from the arrows that Rallen's thugs were sure to put in the air, but mainly, crucially, from the patrol that would be circling somewhere above.

Gwenna glanced skyward. It took only a moment to find the bird turning in a lazy gyre around the island, a few hundred paces up and maybe half a mile to the north. Neither the bird nor the soldiers patrolling from her talons seemed to have noticed the violence breaking out below. They were searching the waves, most likely, if they were actually searching at all. A year of unopposed tyranny wasn't likely to lend vigilance to the daily watch. Still, you didn't need to be vigilant to notice the madness that was doubtless unfolding behind Rallen's wall. You didn't need to be vigilant to notice three assholes standing around looking confused.

“The livery is close to the fort,” Talal pointed out.

“It's where the whistles are,” Gwenna said, breaking into a run. “And if we're still out here when that bird spots us, we're dead.” She turned to Jak. “Can you fly?”

He stared at her with blank eyes. Gwenna slapped him full across the face.

“You said you could do this, you bastard, and now I need to know:
Can you still do it?
”

Even as she asked the question, she was trying to find some way to tweak the plan. There were a dozen options, all equally bleak.

Jak stared at her. “I'm sorry. I don't…” He shook his head.

“Oh,
fuck
this,” Gwenna spat. “Just get to the livery. It'll buy us time.”

They barely made it. The airborne patrol noticed them moments after they started running, banked for a closer look, then dropped into a half stoop. The arrows started raining down—from the fort and the bird both—just a few paces later. Rallen's snipers had nothing on Annick, but the range wasn't bad, and the shafts were landing all around, steel heads striking sparks from the rock.

Gwenna kicked open the door to the livery, shoved Talal inside as a broadhead clattered off the stone a few feet from her head, then dove for the opening. She rolled into a crouch as Talal slammed the door shut behind her, then dropped to a knee, chest heaving as he shrugged out from beneath Jak. Gwenna seized the flier by the throat, dragged him to his feet.

“Time to start fighting, you piece of shit. You freeze again and we're leaving you.”