The Last Mortal Bond (78 page)

“What happened here was wrong,” Kaden said, gesturing to the twitching body of the man Long Fist had hooked through the throat. It was hard to say what was wrong with him. The wound would have been painful, excruciating, but the mindless writhing was the product of something more. The woman beside him still bled from the ears, and the shaman hadn't even
touched
her. “It was wrong. It was a mistake, and we will fix it.”

Long Fist gave a jerk at his side. Kaden turned, half expecting to find the Urghul dying on his feet, finally losing control of the flesh he had so thoroughly possessed. Instead, Kaden realized with horror, the shaman was laughing, a low, slow sound, almost a growl.

“What would I fix?” he asked, gesturing with a bloody hand to the man and woman, both obviously lost in their own pain. “I have kindled something bright inside their minds. I will not put it out.”

“They haven't done anything.…”

“They did nothing,” Long Fist agreed. He seemed barely able to stand, but his voice was strong. “They lived gray, quiet lives, and I have made them sing.”

Triste shouldered her way forward angrily. “You're
killing
them.”

“No,” the shaman said. “I never break an instrument.” Despite the hemorrhaging wound in his side, he glanced at the mound of flesh that had been Tan, then smiled. “Almost never.”

It was that smile, Kaden thought later, that goaded the villagers out of their hesitation. They understood nothing of what was happening—how could they?—but two of their number were writhing like fish hauled out of the water, tossed onto the shore to flop themselves dead, and they knew who had done the tossing. Someone toward the back, a woman, Kaden thought, started screaming, and then those in front tumbled toward them like a wave.

They're going to kill him,
Kaden thought.
They're going to finish killing him
.

He hauled on the shaman's arm, but Long Fist might have been rooted to the dirt, might have been some piece of statuary carved from the bedrock itself.

“Run,”
Kaden growled, but the Urghul chieftain shrugged him off.

Standing straight for the first time since Tan's attack, he faced the fury of the townsfolk, raised a hand, and flicked his fingers outward, as though to sling clear the blood that had been pooling in his palm. It was a small gesture, almost delicate, and it hit the men and women of that nameless town like a wall. Flesh ripped open on some invisible fence. Bones shattered, the rough ends stabbing through ragged flesh. Suddenly, from the dark spaces between the reeds, a hundred dark-winged desert birds burst screaming into the sky. The villagers screamed too, men and women, young and old, screamed, then collapsed, clawing with the wreckage of their hands at their own bodies, as though there were some burning coal buried deep inside, as though they would rather die than keep it in a moment longer.

Only Triste remained upright.

“Why?” Triste demanded, stumbling toward the villagers, then half kneeling, stretching out her arms as though she were about to gather them all into her embrace, to lift them clear of their suffering.

“It is only what they would have done to us,” Long Fist replied, nodding to that awful tangle of flesh. “I have visited their own fury upon them.”

“You
attacked
them,” Triste screamed.

Kaden shook his head. A part of him was as shocked as she was, but he cordoned it off, set it aside. There was no time for shock. Not if they wanted to escape. Not if they wanted to survive. He glanced east, past the last huts, to where the sky had grown bright as bronze. He could just make out soldiers, dozens of soldiers, coming over the headland maybe a mile distant.

He stabbed a finger at them. “
Triste.
Those are il Tornja's men. They have been marching west for days.”

She wrenched her eyes from the carnage at her feet. The soldiers were small, but impossible to miss. Her voice, when she could speak, was a whisper, that same word she seemed unable to avoid: “Why?”

“For you,” Kaden snapped. “For the goddess inside.”

“How did they know?” she asked. “You told them.…”

“The
ak'hanath
. Those huge spiders that tracked us through the Bone Mountains.”

Triste let out a wail, a high sound close to breaking.

“We have to
go,
” Kaden insisted.

“These people,” Triste protested, turning back to the fallen villagers.

Kaden shook his head, kept his eyes from the faces. “We can't help them.”

“No,” she said. Then, with more conviction, leveling a finger at Long Fist's chest, “
No.
I won't go anywhere with him.”

Kaden cut her off, surprised at the edge in his own voice. “You were worried about these people?” he demanded, gesturing to the mangled bodies of the villagers. “You were worried about two dozen souls at the edge of the desert? You carry a goddess inside you, Triste. So does Long Fist. If you do not survive, both of you, then this human destruction will be nothing. If you do not survive this day, then
no one does.
”

Triste's face twisted, caught between one horror and another. She stared at Kaden a moment, then looked over at Long Fist. The shaman's pale brow had gone ash-gray. His blue eyes burned in their sockets, as though with fever.

“Can you stop them?” Kaden asked the man. “The way you did with…” He gestured to the still-twitching villagers.

The shaman tilted his head to one side, as though listening to his own beating heart. “Not all of them,” he said finally. “This body is weak and bleeding.”

“Can you fix it?” Kaden asked. “Use a kenning to stitch up your own wound?”

“No. It is not permitted.”

“Permitted by
whom
? Who's stopping you?”

“There are rules. I did not sculpt the shape of the world. This flesh cannot mend itself.” He turned to Triste, ran a tongue over his lips. “The goddess inside the girl, however—she could hem the wound with a flick of her smallest finger.”

“No,” Triste said, taking a step back. “Never.”

“Triste is not Ciena,” Kaden said. “And she cannot call her forth.”

Long Fist grimaced. “Then we flee.” The last word sounded like a curse on his lips, as though such surrender bothered him more than the life leaking out of him.

“You can't,” Triste spat, half defiant, half triumphant. “Not with that. You'll bleed out.”

Long Fist studied her. Despite the approaching soldiers, he showed no urgency. “How can you hold her inside and still understand so little?”

“I know you're dying,” Triste snarled.

“Dying,” the shaman replied, “is not dead.”

He turned from the girl, then beckoned to the knife that lay, bloody and forgotten, half a pace away. It flew to his hand like some sharp-beaked bird of prey. Long Fist held it delicately between his fingers, examining the steel as though reading some lost text etched into the blade. Then the metal began to glow a dull, sullen red. Long Fist pursed his lips and blew on it, like a man before a dying fire. At the breath, the red flamed into russet, then sun-hot gold. The shaman smiled, then pressed the glowing blade against the wound. Kaden could hear the sizzle and scorch of blood, could smell the burning meat. Any man would have collapsed beneath the pain, but Long Fist was not a man, not really, and instead of collapsing, he straightened, stiffened, back arching as though with pleasure or bracing cold. Then he threw the knife aside.

“Quickly,” he said, leveling a long finger toward the west. “There is a
kenta
in the mountains. The soldiers and the
ak'hanath
cannot follow us through.”

Kaden stared. “Il Tornja has moved to seize the
kenta
. That's what Tan said. We've seen it ourselves.”

Long Fist shook his head. “He would have to get ahead of us. There has been no dust.”

“How far?” Kaden asked.

“A night and then a day.”

“Will you make it?”

Long Fist glanced down at his body as though it were an old robe he intended to throw aside. “The flesh is flagging, but there is strength in it still. And this body was riding horses long before I took it for my own.”

“I won't go with you,” Triste whispered.

Kaden extended a hand to her, but she jerked back. “It's the only way.”

“I could stay here,” she said quietly. “Die on my own terms.”

“Are these your terms?” Kaden asked.

Triste bit her lip.

Kaden pointed east, toward the soldiers. “These are
his
terms. Il Tornja's. Everything that's happened to you since you left Ciena's temple happened because of
him,
and if he finds you here, he wins.”

She shook her head, lips drawn back in a rictus of indecision, eyes fixed on Kaden.

“And what about me?” she demanded quietly. “How do
I
win? You don't care at all about that, do you?”

“Right now,” Kaden replied, “just living a little longer …
that
is winning. And to do that, we need to move west, move
now,
put a little space between us and danger.”

Long Fist's rough laughter cut through the silence that followed.

“Oh, there is danger everywhere.”

Kaden turned to stare into the fevered eyes of the shaman. “Meaning what?”

“There is a reason il Tornja has not tried to reach the mountain
kenta
with his men.”

“What's the reason?”

“To reach it, we will need to pass beneath the shadow of the fortress of the Skullsworn. Ananshael's priests are blind to the fact, but the Csestriim gate stands less than a day from Rassambur.”

 

41

All Adare's life, the ancient wall surrounding Annur's inner city had been the haunt of lovers rather than warriors. She'd never been there herself, of course, not until now—the old wall was no place for a princess—but she'd heard of how young couples would stroll hand in hand along the wide walkway at the top of the stonework, whispering quiet nothings to each other as they admired the city stretching out to either side, ducking into the old guard towers that punctuated its length, taking advantage of the shadows. There was even a phrase—
to walk the whole wall
—usually offered up with a knowing wink and a sly smile, that had nothing to do with the lonely watch of long-dead sentries.

That wall had marked the edge of Annur once, centuries earlier. Terial's soldiers had built and manned it to defend against the raiders that would ride down out of the north. That had been before those lands were incorporated into the empire, before the kings and queens of Raalte, Nish, and Breata lost their hereditary titles and their heads, before their scions saw their territory annexed to Annur. After that, the soldiers went north or south or west, where the new wars were, and the city grew, bulging out beyond its walls. Adare had studied the old maps. There had been just a few buildings at first, like barnacles on a ship's hull, then more and more built up over the decades and the centuries until a third of Annur lay beyond the ambit of the wall: temples and squares, markets and thoroughfares, whole neighborhoods, the homes of tens of thousands.

It was, Adare thought, as she stood atop one of Terial's towers, a measure of Annur's success that the architecture of war had been given over so fully to the demands of love.
And a measure of my failure,
she added silently,
to have to seize it back
.

Even as she stared, the Sons of Flame were hard at work north of the wall destroying homes and markets, turning back the progress of centuries, tearing down smithies and stables, rendering temples to their constituent blocks and beams, then erecting those parts again as barricades across the streets and alleyways. Anything valuable, anything that might provide even the most minor succor to the coming foe, they burned. Huge, charred heaps smoldered in every square, in the center of every street, smudging the warm summer air with a sickening, greasy smoke.

Oddly, awfully, Adare found a strange sort of resolve in the destruction. She wouldn't have believed it a year earlier. Razing half of her own city would have seemed, back then, like the rankest defeat, the most ignominious capitulation. And it was, but at least commanding this defense was something she could
do
.

Triste had disappeared beyond her reach, and Kaden, and il Tornja, playing out the last moves of a game she barely understood, a contest on which the future of the world hinged and in which Adare herself was useless, superfluous, or worse. She had no idea how to save the gods or stop the Csestriim, but suddenly, it didn't matter, or didn't matter quite as much. The Urghul were coming, coming to destroy Annur. The council had disbanded, fled, for the most part. Which meant the city's defense had fallen to her, and with it, the terrible need to see so much of that city destroyed.

It was necessary work, but ugly. Even as she watched, a knot of ragged men burst from one of the alleys, their arms piled high with bolts of fine cloth. What they planned to do with the muslin and velvet, Adare had no idea. Probably they didn't either. All they knew was that large swaths of Annur were about to burn. The rest—the violence, the looting, even the suicides—it was inevitable from the moment Adare gave the orders.

“Your Radiance.”

She turned to find Lehav at the top of the tower steps, one hand in a stiff salute, the other resting on the pommel of his sword. Judging from the blood spattered across that hand, the blade had been out of its sheath, and recently. Despite his spear-straight posture, the commander of the Sons of Flame looked exhausted. Dark hollows ringed his eyes. Smoke and charcoal marred his usually immaculate uniform. Cuts and scrapes crisscrossed his knuckles and arms.