The Last Mortal Bond (7 page)

Adare shook her head, trying to keep her rising anger in check.

“Of course I am not a leach,” she said quietly.

Nira hooted, screwed her wrinkled face into a parody of surprise. “Not a leach? You're
not
a
leach
? Ya mean ya
can't
actually twist this shitty world to your will with a half second's thought?” Before Adare could respond, the woman leaned forward, poked her in the chest with a bony finger. Nira's levity had vanished. “Then quit tellin' me what I can and can't do with my kennings.”

She pulled the finger back, then stabbed it toward the northern bank of windows. “I know where he is, right now. That's one a' the things the leash does, ya tit-headed excuse for an emperor. If he decides to ride west tomorrow morning, I'll know it. If he doubles back, I'll know it. I'll know it if I'm here, in this miserable hovel you call a palace, and I'll know it if I'm hip-deep in the newly smeared shit of some Raaltan farmer's field.

“And here's another piece a' wisdom I could be sellin' that I'll just give ta you for free: I can pull that leash tight from wherever I want, too. I could be sunnin' myself on a slow boat just off the coast of Dombâng, some pretty, naked boy workin' a nice oil into my aching feet, and if I wanted your general dead I could snap my fingers, feel him die, then roll over to let the oil boy go to work kneading my withered buttocks.

“So when ya say ya need me here to watch il Tornja, you're either dumber than a poleaxed ox, or you're lyin', and I'd be hard-pressed to say which I like less.”

Adare forced herself to count to three after the woman finally fell silent. Then to five. Then to ten.

“Are you quite finished?” she asked finally.

“I am not,” Nira snapped. “There's Oshi ta consider, too. Even if ya didn't trust the leash, my brother's right there with the bastard, doggin' his every step.”

Adare shook her head. “Oshi's not there to watch over il Tornja. He's there in the hope that the
kenarang
might find a way to
cure
him, to fix his memory, his madness. He doesn't even know who il Tornja
is
anymore.”

Nira snorted. “And the Csestriim bastard best keep it that way. Oshi'd burn him ta ash if he remembered the truth.”

They locked gazes. Adare could remember a time, not so many months earlier, when a tirade like that, delivered with all the woman's bony conviction, would have shamed and dismayed her. Not anymore. Months spent wrangling with Lehav about the southern force and il Tornja about the northern; months of negotiating with the local merchants' guilds over grain prices, with aristocrats over taxes, with the endless string of impotent ambassadors from Kaden's 'Shael-spawned republic, hard-talking idiots who made dozens of promises and twice as many demands without delivering any actual change; months of knowing that a single mistake, a single piece of bad luck, and she would have failed all the people she had sworn to protect; months of listening to her son scream himself to sleep night after night after night—after all those months, she wasn't as easy to cow as the terrified princess who fled the Dawn Palace a year earlier. And yet, there was nothing to be gained by locking horns with her own Mizran Councillor, especially when the woman was right.

“I did lie,” Adare said. “I want you close to il Tornja, but more than that, I need you here to watch over Sanlitun. To take care of him while I'm gone.”

“Ah,” Nira said, nodding slowly. “So that's the heart of it. You've finally agreed ta part from the child.”

“There's no other choice,” Adare said, hoping even as she spoke that she might still be wrong. “I have to go to Annur. The legions are undermanned, undersupplied, and exhausted. If I can't save them, they can't save Annur, can't defend the
people
of Annur, and then what fucking good am I? What's the point in being Emperor if you let a horde of savages tear apart the people you're supposed to be protecting?” She shook her head grimly. “That 'Kent-kissing council might just want me there so they have an easier time planting a knife between my ribs, but it's a risk I have to take.
I
have to take it. My son does not. It's safer for him here.”

She shivered as she said that word.
Safer
. As if any place was really safe with an Urghul army pressing down from the northeast, a false council of incompetent, power-grabbing whores holding Annur, the near-utter collapse of the legions in the south, an utter abdication of all peacekeeping within Annur itself, thieves and bandits prowling the land, and pirates pillaging the seas. There was every possibility that in leaving Sanlitun behind, Adare could be leaving him to die far from her arms.…

She forced the thought from her mind.

Aergad's walls were battered, but they stood. The Haag flowed deep and fast to the east, a final barrier between the city and the Urghul. Beyond the Haag, il Tornja's legions still fought their desperate battle. There was danger everywhere, but Aergad was still safer than the dubious welcome that awaited her in Annur.

“Look, Adare,” Nira said. For once, the woman kept her mockery and her anger in check. Her voice, too, seemed to have shifted, leaving behind the gutter slang of which she was so fond for something simpler, older, more sober. “You're smart to leave your boy—for a dozen reasons—but not with me.”

“Yes, with you. You're my Mizran Councillor.”

“Your councillor, yes. Not your wet nurse. These tits wore out a thousand years ago.”

“I don't need you to nurse him,” Adare said. “Or to change him or clean him or swaddle him. I have a dozen women who can do that. I just need you to watch over him. To keep him safe.”

Nira opened her mouth as though to reply, then shut it abruptly. To Adare's shock, tears stood in the old woman's eyes, glimmering in the lamplight.

She had a child.
The realization hit Adare like a fist to the face. In all the time since she first met Nira on the Annurian Godsway, she'd never thought to ask. For half a heartbeat she checked her memory of the histories of the Atmani, but the histories, for all their macabre detail when it came to the decades of war, were silent on the subject of children. As far as Adare knew, Nira had never married, not that that was any impediment to the bearing of children.

“I'm not the one, girl,” the old woman said, the whole weight of the centuries pressing down on her shoulders, voice rough as unsanded wood. “I'm not the one ta be watchin' over children.”

Adare stared. She had learned to stand up to the woman's curses and hectoring, but this sudden, quiet honesty left her dumb. “What happened?” she managed finally.

Nira shook her head. Her gnarled hands clutched each other on the table before her. Adare watched, trying to make sense of that awful, mute grief.

“I can't do it, girl,” the old woman said finally. “Not again. I won't.”

In just a few words, Adare heard the full scope of her own midnight horror. Since Sanlitun was born she had tried to tell herself that her nightmares and waking terrors, the endless litany of fears for her child, were nothing but the product of an exhausted, overworked mind.
He's healthy,
she would remind herself, studying the child's plump brown cheeks, his strong fingers wrapped around hers.
He's safe,
she would whisper, glancing out her window toward the walls of the city.
There's no reason to be afraid
.

Over the months since Sanlitun's birth, Adare had built these feeble walls between herself and the wilderness of awful possibility that lay beyond. She had half convinced herself that through love, and care, and unending vigilance, she could keep all harm from the fat, fretful child, this tiny, inarticulate being that meant more to her than her own heart. The tears in Nira's eyes, the twist of her hands, her few quiet words—
I can't do it, girl
—tore through those walls like a knife through wet paper. A sudden desperation took Adare by the throat, and for several heartbeats she could barely drag the air into her lungs.

“I don't…,” she began. Her voice cracked, and she took a deep breath, fixing Nira with her eyes, trying to make the woman see, to understand. “I know it's not perfect. I know you can't protect him from everything. But I don't have anyone else.”

Nira shook her head mutely, and Adare reached across the table, taking the woman's hands in her own.

“You're smart,” she said quietly. “You're strong. And I trust you.”

“They trusted me to rule a whole continent once, girl, and I let it burn. I
burned
it.”

“We're not talking about a continent.”

“I know what we're talking about,” Nira snapped, something like the old querulousness creeping back into her voice. “I had a boy, too. My own boy. I couldn't save him.”

Adare nodded. She could imagine the horror. She tried not to. “I'm begging you, Nira.”

The woman glared at her through the tears, then pulled her hands away to scrub her eyes. “An emperor doesn't beg. An emperor commands.”

Adare shook her head. “Not about this.”

Nira turned back to her. “About everything, ya silly slut. That's what it is to be an emperor.”

“Then you'll do it?”

“Is it an order?”

Adare nodded silently.

“Then I'll do it,” Nira said. She blew out a long, ragged breath. “I'll watch over the sobbing little shit while you're gone.”

Something inside Adare, some awful tension, went suddenly slack. She felt like she, too, might start weeping.

“Thank you, Nira.”

“An emperor doesn't thank her subject for following her orders.”

“Well, I'm thanking you anyway.”

Nira shook her head grimly. “Thank me when I put the brat back in your arms and he's still breathing.”

 

5

With burning lungs and cramping thighs, Kaden forced himself to keep climbing the spiraling wooden stairs. Maut Amut had assured him that the attack on the Spear went no higher than Kaden's own study, the thirtieth and last of the human floors built into the base of the ancient tower, and yet, after a restless night during which sleep eluded him, he realized he needed to see her, Triste, needed to look at her with his own eyes, to know that she was alive, safe; or safe as he had been able to make her.

It took only a dozen steps from the landing outside his study to climb free of the last of the lower floors, out of the human rooms and corridors and into the impossible, godlike space looming above. The stairs continued, of course, the only human construction in the echoing emptiness of the Spear, a tight wooden spiral at the tower's center, supported by their own carefully engineered scaffolding, by the wrist-thick steel cables hanging down from the unimaginable heights above. Everything else was air, emptiness, and light, and far, far above, the highest dungeon in the world.

When Kaden was five years old and Valyn six, one of them had discovered
The Design of Dungeons.
He couldn't remember how they had stumbled across the old codex, or where, or why they had even bothered to pick it up, but the book itself he remembered almost perfectly, every page, every meticulous diagram, every horrifying story of imprisonment, madness, and torture related in a dry, indifferent, scholarly tone. Yuala the Basc, the author of the treatise, had spent ten years visiting no fewer than eighty-four prisons and dungeons scattered over all fifteen Annurian atrepies and beyond. He had seen the Stone Pit of Uvashi-Rama, the Hot Cells of Freeport, and the infamous Thousand and One Rooms where Antheran kings and queens left their enemies to die. The diversity of the dungeons was nearly endless, but they shared a few common traits—they were underground, dark, and built of stone. On all three counts, the dungeon of the Dawn Palace defied expectation.

Though there were a handful of holding cells beneath the Hall of Justice—small, secure rooms for prisoners awaiting trial or processing—the greatest dungeon of Annur was not some crude, brutal hole hacked out of the bedrock. It was not a hole at all. You could mine a hole, after all, even one of stone. With enough time and the right tools, you could dig your way in or carve your way out. No one, however, in the whole history of the Annurian Empire or, indeed, earlier, had found a way to make the slightest scratch in the ironglass of Intarra's Spear, and so the builders of the palace prison had chosen Intarra's Spear for their work.

They didn't use the entire tower, of course. The whole Spear could have housed a hundred thousand prisoners, an entire nation of spies, traitors, and conquered kings. One floor was sufficient, one floor hundreds and hundreds of feet above the ground, accessible only by this staircase spiraling up through light and silence, suspended from a dizzying apparatus of steel bars and chains.

From a distance, Intarra's Spear looked impossibly slender, the tower's girth insufficient to support its height. It seemed that a light breeze would snap the brilliant needle in half, that the clouds scudding against its sides would shatter it. From the inside, however, after climbing free of those first human floors, it was possible to judge the true diameter of the thing. A man with a decent arm might throw a stone from the staircase at the center to one of those clear walls, but it wouldn't be easy. After the human dimensions of the rooms below, emerging into the huge empty column was intimidating. The staircase spiraling up inside looked fragile, futile, a bold, doomed effort to climb something that was never meant to be climbed.

Kaden counted a thousand steps, then paused on a landing, gathering his breath. The climb was no more brutal than some of the ascents in the Bone Mountains, no harder than running the Circuit of Ravens two or three times after the year's first snow, but, as Amut had pointed out, he was no longer a Shin acolyte. After nearly a year inside the Dawn Palace, his legs had softened, and the flesh had thickened over his ribs. When he worked hard, as now, his heart labored in his chest, stubborn, baffled at its own inadequacy.