The Last Mortal Bond (72 page)

He squinted, trying to make out more detail. “Where are Tan and the Ishien?”

Long Fist didn't look back. “Lost. Dead. It doesn't matter.”

Dead.
Kaden tried to imagine Rampuri Tan dead. He failed.

After a moment he set the thought aside, took a deep breath, held it in his ragged lungs, then blew it out. “There's not much time,” he said, gesturing to the oasis. “We get Triste. Then we get out. Away somewhere.”

The shaman was breathing hard, panting really, but he smiled a lean, predatory smile. “No.” That single syllable bristled with violence. Then: “We kill.”

Kaden shook his head. “There are two of us. Three, with Triste. We can't fight.”

The Urghul smiled wider, baring those perfect teeth. “There will be no fight. I will destroy them.”

And suddenly Kaden was back inside the Jasmine Court, breath heaving in his lungs, wounds afire, staring in bafflement at the scattered dead, then turning to find Triste standing there, ancient-eyed and vacant, hands clenched into fists at her sides as though she had torn out those windpipes and shattered the skulls with her own small hands, one at a time.

“Your well…,” Kaden began. “You can reach it?”

“What do I need with a well? Where there is pain, there is power,” Long Fist replied. “And there is suffering in every hovel, misery in the beating of every creature's heart.”

Kaden looked into his own flesh, tried to weigh the ache in his calves and thighs, the dozens of tiny agonies driven like invisible spikes into his knees, his ankles, the soles of his blistered feet. He hurt, but he had hurt worse.

“Is it enough? The pain that's here, that you can reach?”

“Here?” Long Fist looked around, eyes narrowed, as though he were just now seeing where they stood, just at that very moment noticing the desert sprawled out to the south and east, the mountains towering to the west. “I am not this body. Where there is screaming, I am there. Why will this truth not put down root inside your mind?”

“You don't need to be near your well,” Kaden said slowly. The consequences were terrifying: a leach with no weakness, no moments of ordinary impotence. It seemed impossible, but then, when he sifted through his memories of Triste, it fit. She had drawn on her own powers at need, indifferent to her surroundings, as though the whole world were her well, as though she could plunge her hands into that arcane strength wherever she stood and they would emerge full and flowing over.

“It would be a small thing,” Long Fist continued, oblivious or indifferent to Kaden's shock, “to snuff out those lives.”

He held up a hand, sighting east between thumb and forefinger, as though il Tornja's soldiers, made small by distance, were no more than the charred wicks of so many candles. Kaden waited for him to squeeze those fingers shut, stared at the distant figures, wondering how slowly they would die. After a moment, however, the shaman shook his head, lowered his hand.

“No.”

Kaden felt a strange relief wash through him. The soldiers were dangerous. They had killed, would kill again, would keep killing until they came to Triste and cut her throat. Without Long Fist's power it would come down to little more than a race, a desperate gamble that they could find the girl, warn her, and escape. Kaden should have been grateful for the shaman's strength, and yet at the man's words—
Where there is screaming, I am there
—he had experienced a strange and sudden vision, as though his mind had been split open and pried wide as the world. He saw a million people twisting in their private agonies, bleeding or not bleeding, screaming or not screaming, dying or not dying, each person's pain a single red thread, pulsing like living tissue in a thick lace laid across the whole face of the earth. He saw all that awful fabric gathered in the shaman's fist, the pain inextricable from the power. They needed it, if they were to win, if they were to
survive,
but a question prowled the edge of Kaden's mind:
And if we win … what then?

Kaden looked from the shaman to the approaching soldiers.

“Why are you waiting?”

Long Fist leveled a finger over the blasted land. “The war chief will be with them. This petty creature with his schemes to lay me low.”

“Il Tornja.”

The shaman smiled. “I want him. He is no great instrument, but I want to hear the sounds he makes as I carve him apart.”

“What if he's not there?”

“For thousands of years he has aimed at this moment. He will be there.”

Kaden nodded slowly. The Csestriim was hardly likely to leave the killing blow to any hand but his own. Which meant that the man who had murdered his father, who had tried to murder him, the creature who had turned the whole Annurian Empire inside out—he was just a mile away, guarded by no more than a few dozen men.

“So we get to Triste,” he said. “Find her. Then what?”

“Then,” the shaman replied, “I will show this petty Csestriim what it is to war against a god.”

Whatever weariness Long Fist had felt seemed to have left him. His breathing was even now, steady, his face eager. When he broke suddenly into a run, it was the ground-covering lope of a hunter who has sighted his prey. After a pause, Kaden followed, unsteady on his own trembling legs.

 

38

Adare sat at her writing desk, though she made no effort to write. She had returned to her chambers at the top of the Crane late the night before after an evening arguing with Nira and Kegellen, had fallen onto her bed still clothed, dropped into a blank sleep, then woken to the midnight gong. For a while, she'd tried to go back to sleep, but sleep proved every bit as elusive as Triste. The girl's face filled Adare's mind, those violet eyes drugged but defiant, her words quiet but horribly final:
All of you scheming bastards are going to cut each other down.

If the girl were no more than a leach, her escape would still have been a disaster. According to Kaden, however, she was the vessel of a goddess, the human incarnation of Ciena herself. It seemed impossible, and yet it fit too perfectly with il Tornja's claims about Long Fist and Meshkent, with the fact that the
kenarang
had been willing to give up Adare herself in order to see the creature dead. Certainly, Kaden seemed to believe the tale he had told her days before. Which meant, if it were true, that Adare's mistake in letting the girl escape may have doomed them all.

Finally, she cursed, got up, and crossed to the doors leading out to her balcony. She unlatched them, then threw them open. The summer air washed over her skin, lifted her hair, then let it fall. She'd intended to write, to toil away at the backlog of imperial business waiting at her desk, but instead she'd just been sitting there, sitting there for half the night, the lamps unlit, the inkwell unopened, staring out those open doors from the darkness of her chambers into the larger darkness of the world beyond.

According to Kaden, the
kenta
were doors of a sort, gates, impossible passages from one land to the next. He could step from Annur to Sia as easily as Adare herself might walk from room to room. At first, she hadn't believed him. Surely, her father would have told her, would have trained her in the way he had trained her about so much else. That he had neglected this most crucial fact of his rule, the secret of the entire Malkeenian line, seemed both cruel and pointless. Then Kaden showed her.

It didn't look like anything, really, a strange arch in the basement of an abandoned Shin chapterhouse in one of Annur's backwater neighborhoods. Certainly it didn't look like the relic of a vanished race, the worst weapon of their genocidal war. It might have been nothing more than the folly of an eccentric architect until Kaden, his eyes cold as the winter stars, stepped through and vanished.

“I won't come back,” he'd said. “Not right away.”

And he did not.

That should have been a relief. He was searching for Triste, after all, using the network of gates to hunt down and reclaim the leach. If he succeeded, if he brought her back, there might still be some hope of thwarting il Tornja, of rescuing the gods and the millions of men and women who depended on them. The stakes were almost ludicrous, far too large for any human mind to comprehend, but Adare didn't find herself thinking of all those millions, not really. When she thought of what hung in the balance, it wasn't humanity she pictured, not Annur, not her brother, or Nira, or Lehav: there was only one face, her son's, those tiny blazing eyes, the pudgy hands; though to her horror, the memories she had of him were fraying.

Just another thing I can't keep hold of,
she thought, as she stared out the doors into the night.

In the dark hours, she tallied up her failures: her father, her mother, her son, one brother murdered, another, at least for now, beyond a set of gates that she could never pass. She'd lost control of the general she'd hoped would hold the northern front, and for all she knew, she was losing the front as well. She'd managed to reclaim her family's throne, but to what end? Every day, the good she'd hoped to work, the security and safety she'd hoped to bring to all Annur, crumbled like clay in her hands. Partly it was the council's fault, but another emperor, someone stronger, wiser, would have found a way to take the recalcitrant bastards in hand, to trick them or twist them into acting for the public good. Another emperor would have done what she had not.

And then there was her miracle, her blessing, the touch of the goddess laid into her very flesh. Adare ran a finger along the smooth whorls of scar. In the days following the lightning at the Everburning Well, she had believed, really
believed
for the first time in her life, that Intarra was something other than a name, a myth, a convenient fiction to cement her family's rule. The people had called her Prophet, and with the exhortation of the goddess ringing in her ears, she had accepted the title, worn it like an armor in her righteous fight. That righteousness, though, had seeped away—partly when Fulton died, then Valyn, partly when she forgave her father's murderer—and the title felt too large for her now, shining, ostentatious, hollow.

While Adare claimed to speak for Intarra—a goddess she could neither hear nor understand—there were others who walked the world, Triste and Long Fist, whose gods lived in their very flesh. Adare made speeches, accepted the genuflection of the Sons of Flame, of all Annur, but the words were her own. They were mortal, fallible. Whether she spoke the language of the Lady of Light, she had no idea. Not much more than a year earlier, she had seen a man destroyed for such a profanation of his faith. It had felt good to watch Uinian pinned there, burning in the awful beam of light. It had felt right. It was only justice, she had told herself, to unmask a traitor and a false priest, a man who invoked the name of the goddess for nothing greater than his own gain.

And if the false priest deserved to burn,
she asked herself grimly,
what of a false prophet?

Before she could fashion an answer to the question, a sharp rap sounded at the door. She glanced at the hourglass at the desk's corner—more than an hour remained before dawn. It would be urgent, for someone to disturb her now. Slowly, methodically, she put away her doubts, her fears, set them inside the drawers of her mind, then closed those drawers. Perhaps she was a fraud. Perhaps she would be unmasked one day, burned alive as she had seen Uinian burn. Fine. It didn't change the fact that there was work to do, and no one else to do it.

*   *   *

Instead of a legislative session, Adare might have been looking at the moments immediately before a battle. By the time she arrived in the hall, most of the others were already there, despite the fact that the sun had yet to rise. Her own stomach twisted sickeningly inside her, as though the news were rancid meat that her body refused to digest, but she managed to keep her face still. On that front alone, she was a step ahead of almost everyone else on the council.

They had gathered inside the Hall of the Chosen—the vast chamber they had selected as the legislative seat after Adare burned their map and the catwalks above it—but instead of seating themselves around the massive wooden table, almost everyone was standing, gathered in small knots by atrepy or alliance, all talking at the same time, a few of the delegates doing quite a bit more than that, bellowing in the faces of their ostensible friends and loudly cursing their enemies. No weapon longer than a belt knife was allowed inside the council chamber. Otherwise, Adare felt sure, blood would have spilled already.

There should have been a herald at the door to announce her, but either because of the chaos or the early hour or both, he was missing. As a result, despite the Sons of Flame at her side, almost no one noticed her arrival. She might have been a slave carrying a plate of roasted firefruit, a fact that had its advantages: it meant she had longer than she'd expected to gauge the situation, not that there was much to gauge. The men and women tasked with leading Annur through her darkest days were baffled, terrified. If they had a plan to deal with the coming catastrophe, Adare saw no sign of it.

As Adare studied the crowd, Nira approached from behind her. Whether a messenger had woken the old woman, too, Adare had no idea, not that it really mattered. She was here, now, glaring at the assembled council as though they were a herd of swine that had broken into her home.

“This is a disaster,” Adare muttered quietly.

“Been a disaster all along,” the small woman snapped. “Like a cracked glass no one notices until the day it shatters.”

“Il Tornja didn't say anything about leaving the front?”

“No,” Nira replied. “He did not. You think I would a' skipped that part when I first arrived?”

Adare shackled her impatience. “Were there any hints—”