The Last Mortal Bond (71 page)

“Full?”
Valyn asked. “We've got what, a hundred Annurians on the way, plus a dozen of Huutsuu's Urghul?”

“No,” the woman said. “This is not our fight. It means nothing to me if your empire of cowards falls. We came to kill the Annurian leach, not to make war with our own people.”

“So go kill him,” the Flea replied.

Huutsuu reeked of anger. “Our pact—”

“—remains,” the Flea said quietly. “We need to get a good fight going, first. Without a fight, Balendin has no reason to reach for his well, and we have no way to get close.”

“A distraction?” Huutsuu asked, incredulous. “It will not work. Even in battle, this leach guards himself. If he could be killed with a spear in the back, he would be dead already.”

“A spear wasn't what I had in mind,” the Flea replied. “More like an explosion. He can't be guarding against everything. A mole right underneath his feet might do the job.”

Huutsuu's suspicion hung in the air, sickly sweet as the stench of overripe fruit. “If you have these … devices, if you are able to make these explosions, why did you not kill him months ago?”

“Not the right ground,” Valyn said, seeing the strategy despite his blindness. “In order for the explosion to do any good, you need to know where Balendin's going to be and when. The front was too wide before. The timing was too uncertain.”

“That,” the Flea agreed, “and all the spots we knew he would go were in the middle of an Urghul army. Didn't think they'd take kindly to us burying munitions in the center of their camp. Here, though, we have it all. We know when, and we've got a pretty good idea of where.”

“The hill,” Huutsuu said, stirring in her saddle to point in a direction Valyn couldn't make out.

“The hill,” the Flea agreed. “It's high enough for him to see and be seen. He'll drag his captives up there, and start slaughtering them, hoping to pull more power from the Urghul and from our people on the wall. But that means,” he went on, turning to Huutsuu, “that we need to
have
people on the wall. We need to make it a fight. If not, he'll have no reason to bother getting up on that hill. We'll end up blowing a few clods of dirt fifty feet into the air. That's it.”

Huutsuu didn't reply at first. Valyn could hear the other Urghul behind her, the restlessness of the riders in the shifting of their mounts.

“All right,” she said at last. “We will stand here with you. We will make this place a great sacrifice to Kwihna. And you will kill the leach.”

Only when she had wheeled her horse away, calling out to the Urghul in her own tongue, leading them south to the fort itself to begin the preparations, did the Flea turn to Valyn.

“Will she betray us?” he asked.

Valyn hesitated, poring over his memories of Huutsuu. “No,” he replied finally. “She's too proud.”

“We're risking a lot on one woman's pride.”

“When I first captured her on the steppe, she looked me straight in the eye and told me that if I didn't kill her, she would hunt me down.”

“That was dumb.”

Valyn nodded slowly. “Maybe. But it was brave.”

“Brave usually has some dumb mixed in.”

Valyn shook his head, trying to see the situation clearly. “She hates Balendin. To her he is a … perversion of everything sacred.”

The Flea grunted. “Enough of a perversion to make her turn traitor?”

“She doesn't see it as treachery. The Urghul don't share our notion of command or duty.” Valyn thought of Huutsuu killing the Urghul warriors who had opposed her, the way she'd opened their throats without hesitation or regret. “For Huutsuu, it is the result that matters, not the path. If she needs to fight other Urghul in order for Balendin to die, she'll do it. It's not as though they've never fought one another before. I don't see very many things clearly, but I'll tell you this: she will stand on that wall and fight.”

The Flea sucked at his teeth, spat into the dirt. “And what about you? Can you fight?”

Valyn took a deep breath. His hands were suddenly sweating, the blood and death of Andt-Kyl scrawled across his vision. All over again he could hear the screaming, the men and women carved apart, burned alive, crushed beneath falling homes, choking as the river's current dragged them down.

“I'll fight,” he managed finally. “I'll fight.”

 

37

The low, narrow space of the tent was hot and dark. It reeked of poorly cured hide and human sweat. Outside, sand scraped over the leather with a million tiny claws. The wind screamed, trying to tear it free of the rocks holding down the corners. It was almost impossible to mark the passage between day and night; the hide shut out whatever meager, watery light had seeped down through the maelstrom, and so at noon and midnight both, Kaden and Long Fist sat or slept in an almost perfect darkness, even the sounds of their breathing scrubbed out by the raging storm.

After a while, it started to feel to Kaden that the world outside the tent had ceased to exist. Annur and Ashk'lan, the Dead Heart and the Waist—they might have been places that he had imagined or dreamed, and indeed, that line between dreaming and waking became harder and harder to trace. Long Fist refused to speak, refused to do anything but sit, staring northwest, a silent weight inside the hot darkness of the space. Two or three times, Kaden dreamed of walking free, of throwing open the leather folds and wandering into the storm. Each time he choked to death on dust, then woke again to the darkness of the tent.

When the storm finally broke, a week later, when he stumbled out of the battered hide on unsteady legs, the sudden light was like a spike driven straight into his eye. For a while he could do nothing more than stand there, bewildered by the brightness. For all its violence, the storm had left no trace. The land was still bleak and blasted. The blazing blue stretched drum-tight across the sky. Kaden took a deep breath, savored the clean air, morning-cool in his chafed and painful lungs, then realized what that meant.

“She's still alive.”

Long Fist nodded. “For now. We must move quickly to find her before the Csestriim.”

Kaden stared at the rusted peaks to the west. “We don't know for certain he is hunting her.”

“We know,” Long Fist replied, pointing to the southeast, back the way they had come.

Kaden squinted. Just on the horizon he could make out a wisp of sand rising like smoke against the blue.

He shook his head. “Another storm?”

“Men,” Long Fist replied, shouldering his pack. “Going toward the
kenta
.”

Kaden stared at that tenuous smudge, wishing he had one of the Kettral long lenses. “It could be anyone.”

“It is il Tornja. Or men under his command.”

“But Triste isn't going for the
kenta
. She doesn't even know where it is.”

“He has the soldiers to play all sections of the board at once. That,” Long Fist said, leveling a long finger at the plume of dust, “is not the head of his spear. It is a wall to block our retreat.”

Kaden nodded slowly. He had seen a snake from the Shirvian delta once. A rich Channarian merchant had presented it to his father as a gift, and Kaden and Valyn had both been mesmerized by the creature, the sheer size of it: twenty feet long and as thick as Kaden's chest, a monster of scale and coiled muscle. For all its size, though, the snake killed slowly, twisting its prey into an embrace. Kaden had watched it take a pig once, a massive sow that must have weighed eight hundred pounds. The snake wrapped it almost gently in its coils and then, each time the screaming beast exhaled, it curled imperceptibly tighter.

The great snake's weapon was its patience. It killed by waiting, by taking the space it was given, and refusing to relinquish it. Il Tornja's games of
ko
were like that, Kaden realized, as was this march to block the
kenta
. There would be no frantic rush to catch Triste all in one forced march, no desperate frenzy of eagerness that might lead to a mistake. Il Tornja would deny her space little by little, draw his slow coils close, destroy every avenue of escape, every person who might get her out, squeeze and squeeze until there was nowhere she could go, no way for her to breathe.

“And yet,” Kaden said slowly, “he came here, to this part of the world, for a reason. He can't have soldiers everywhere. Not across all two continents. He's following her somehow. Or following us. How?”

Long Fist hissed. “It is irrelevant. We are ahead of him. This is what matters. If we want to stay ahead of him, we must run.”

And so they ran.

For a day, and a night, and the start of the next day they ran, pausing only to drink from the flaccid skin that Kaden carried, and then later, to piss away whatever meager fluid remained after so much sweat. When they stopped, it was all Kaden could do just to stand there without collapsing.

Long Fist might have become a god, but he was a god locked inside a man's flesh, and despite the shaman's long limbs, the lean muscle rippling in his legs and arms, he was struggling even worse than Kaden. A limp had crept into his left leg at some point in the night, some tightening or slackening of a tendon, judging from the change in his gait. Kaden recognized the type of injury from his years in Ashk'lan, knew that it would only stiffen further, twist the shaman's stride more violently, until he could do little more than lurch over the uneven stones. What Long Fist needed was rest, but there was no time for rest.

The mountains, which had been no more than tiny red teeth against the western sky when Kaden first emerged from the
kenta,
were so close now that they cast half the land in shadow as the sun began to set. Somewhere in that shadow was a tiny village clustered around a reedy pool of water—Triste's oasis—maybe somewhere close, although it was impossible to know precisely where to look. If Kaden and Long Fist continued west, they would hit the cliffs by dawn, but then what? Turn north? South? They might spend days scouring the wrong patch of desert, and the plume of dust rising to the east whispered at their backs that they did not have days.

In the end, it was il Tornja's own mistake that saved them. Evening's cool shadow had settled over everything when Kaden saw the tracks. At first, he barely noticed them, his exhausted body plodding on, driven by little more than its own momentum as his mind worked through what his eyes had seen. A dozen paces on, he finally slowed to a trembling stop. The desert air burned in his lungs as he called out to Long Fist, gesturing wearily for the shaman to wait as he made his slow way back, bent over the broken ground, searching.

The tracks were easy to find, once he knew what he was looking for. The Dead Salts were not Ashk'lan; the ground was dirt rather than stone, and though the sun had baked it to a brittle clay, that clay still took a print, especially when that print was sharp, jagged, the result, not of paws or hooves, but claws.

Ak'hanath,
Kaden thought, staring at the scarred dirt.

He wanted it to be a mistake, for the shapes not to be tracks at all, or to be tracks, but from some other creature. Only there were no other creatures, not like that. Kaden could still see their segmented bodies scuttling over the granite ledges of the Bone Mountains, could hear their shrieks pitched at the very edge of human hearing. The
ak'hanath
might have looked like spiders—spiders the size of large dogs—save for the dozens of bloody eyes grafted into every clicking, twitching joint of the carapace. He remembered the way his stomach had twisted at that sight, as though his body understood the awful truth before his mind: the
ak'hanath
were no creation of Bedisa's art. They were not born, but made, spawned, built thousands and thousands of years ago by the Csestriim to track their human prey.

“What?” Long Fist demanded, doubling back. His long hair, drenched with sweat, hung heavy around his shoulders. His eyes were hard, glittering like stars in the gloaming, but his breathing was heavy and uneven.

Kaden pointed at the dirt.

“The answer to a question. Triste came this way.”

The shaman studied the tracks, then shook his head. “The girl did not leave these marks.”

“No,” Kaden agreed grimly. “She did not. It is the track of the
ak'hanath
that Ran il Tornja has tasked with following her.”

It made perfect sense, of course. It was the
only
thing that made sense. The
ak'hanath
could never creep into Intarra's Spear, but the creature could have been lurking inside Annur itself, could have been standing watch. When Triste escaped, it would have known, and so il Tornja would have known. The girl might have eluded all human pursuers, but the creations of the Csestriim were far from human. The
ak'hanath
needed no physical trace, no human track or mortal scent. Tan had explained it all what seemed a lifetime earlier: the spiders could taste the self. That was what they hunted. Triste could flee through the mountains or take to the sea, and the thing would follow, follow her across entire continents if necessary. And then il Tornja would come.

*   *   *

They reached the oasis and the tiny village of reed and thatch just as the eastern sky began to fill with a watery light. From the top of a low rise, Kaden could make out the shapes of twenty or thirty huts—little more than shadows in the tall, shifting grasses—most clustered right up against the small body of water. He glanced east, over his shoulder. The column of dust was closer. It seemed il Tornja's soldiers, too, had marched straight through the night, and while Kaden and Long Fist had been slowed by the effort of pausing to find faint tracks in the fickle moonlight, the men behind them had come on at a steady, unhalting pace. They were, at most, two miles back. As dawn resolved the eastern horizon, Kaden could see the dark shapes shimmering with the morning's heat.