The Last Mortal Bond (79 page)

Adare tensed at the sight of him. “More?”

He nodded.

“All right,” she said. “Let's go.”

The man hesitated, obviously torn between his military discipline and the need to speak. “It is not necessary, Your Radiance,” he said finally. “Not every time. It is a pointless risk. The Sons are seeing to the evacuations and the defense. We can tend to the executions as well.”

“You could,” Adare replied. “But these people deserve to hear what's happening and why. They deserve to hear it from me.”

“Will hearing it from you make them happier when we loop the nooses around their necks and hang them? Will it matter to them that the Emperor herself descended from the wall to explain their misdeeds?”

“I'm not doing it for the condemned,” she said quietly. “They've chosen their course. I'm doing it for the rest.”

The soldier shook his head. “And what will they take away from it?”

“The chance to stay alive.”

*   *   *

Adare studied the neighborhood square from atop her horse. It was unremarkable. Two bakeries, their proprietors probably locked in lifelong rivalry. A tailor's shop. Three taverns. A small temple to Bedisa. There were hundreds of squares just like it all over the city. By nightfall, the whole swath of houses had to burn, and though Adare knew something of the population living here, she had no way to calculate the lives she would destroy, the dreams she planned to tear down with those old teak homes, the families she would rip apart. It had to be done, but there was no way to tally up the harm, not fully. Not truly.

Behind her, to the east, an oily smoke was already rising into the sky. She could hear the vague roar of fire punctuated by the smash and clatter of buildings that had stood for a hundred years cracking, then collapsing into their own rubble. To the west, in the streets she hadn't yet reached, came shouts and bellows, screams and the high sound of steel scraping against steel. More people were resisting. Which meant this would not be the last of the executions.

The Sons had hung two dozen people already for defiance of Adare's edict. There should have been trials, but there was no time for trials. Anyone who attacked a work crew was killed, the body tossed inside a fallen home to burn with the wood and plaster. Anyone who preached defiance was hauled before Adare herself to hang. It made her sick, but so did the thought of Balendin and the Urghul taking Annur. This was what her life had become: a choice between degrees of sickness.

Gritting her teeth, she turned to face the crowd that had gathered in the square. The Sons had been at their work for days, leading a conscripted crew of slaves and laborers in the brutal work. Even before that, Kegellen's shadowy network of runners had been spreading the word:
All structures north of the old wall are coming down. Take your families. Take what you can carry, and get out.

The men and women facing Adare now—a crowd of three or four hundred—looked angry, frightened, confused. One woman had a baby in a sling across her breast and a chicken held upside down by the legs. It wasn't clear whether she wanted to rescue the creature or slaughter it; the bird gave a weak flap every so often, but for the most part it hung still, as though it had already accepted its fate. Most people had some sort of bag—clutched to the chest, slung across the back, hanging down dumbly from a slack arm. One old man had held a dozen dogs on leashes, but nothing else—no food for either him or them. Adare had ordered the conversion of hundreds of warehouses by the harbor to shelter these sudden refugees, but there would be no room for the dogs. She wondered who would tell the old man that, wondered who would kill the beasts.

The dogs were sniffing the ground, but the people in the crowd were all staring at her, caught between awe and anger. They lived far from the Dawn Palace. Most would never have seen a Malkeenian or those burning eyes. In a city the size of Annur, people could live, work, and die without ever venturing more than half a mile from their homes. Adare herself might as well have been a myth to them, a subject for speculation rather than outright belief. And now here she was, tired, sweating, sitting atop her horse, about to tell them everything they'd ever known was going to be destroyed, that those who had tried to defend it would be killed.

She shifted her gaze from the crowd to the prisoners who knelt at the square's center, guarded by a dozen Sons of Flame. There were six of them. Two had been beaten so badly that blood streamed down their faces while their heads lolled drunkenly to the side. Were it not for the soldiers behind them, they would have collapsed. Those soldiers stared straight ahead, a portrait of military discipline, but Adare could see the bruised knuckles, the blood spattered across armor. Whether the prisoners at their feet had earned their beatings, she had no idea. Maybe they'd attacked the Sons—dozens of soldiers had already been wounded by roving mobs of angry Annurians—and maybe they'd done nothing more than refuse an order. Adare found herself wishing she knew who to blame—the soldiers or the citizens—found herself wishing she knew who had started it.

But you
do
know, don't you?
she thought grimly.
Whatever happened here, it was
you
who started it,
you
who gave the order to clear the streets,
you
who pitted these men with their bronze and blades against people who wanted only to keep their homes, who were just trying to resist the destruction of everything they'd ever known.

“We are at war,” Adare said, raising her voice to block out that other voice inside her mind. “We are at war with the Urghul, and we are losing.”

“Haven't seen no Urghul,” someone shouted from the crowd. “Just these bastards burning down the city.”

“These bastards,” Adare replied, “are preparing for a battle. The Urghul have broken past the Army of the North. They are riding on this city even as we speak. Each structure we leave standing beyond this wall is a shield behind which they might shelter, a mask for their movements, an infirmary for their wounded. If we leave this portion of the city standing, we risk the rest, and let me assure you, if they take Annur, we will all die, horribly and in unimagined pain.”

“We?” someone shouted from the crowd. “You'll sail out on the last tide, go to one of your other palaces.”

The defiance would have been inconceivable a year earlier, when Adare's father still ruled, but that year had played havoc with Annur.

The Emperor's power was an illusion. It always had been. There was the palace, and the palace guard, the Aedolians sworn to guard the royal family, and the legions, and of course Intarra's blazing eyes, all militating for the divine right of the Malkeenian line. None of it mattered. Not really.

That was the mystery at the heart of all power. Power appeared to be something that a ruler had, that she held, that she had taken from the people. The appearance was false. Power was something people
gave,
gave willingly, even if they didn't know it, even if they resented it. The wealthy merchant who paid a tax on every bolt of cloth, the slave who lived day after day under the yoke, the sailors who allowed their boats to be searched by crown officials, the soldiers who refused to break ranks even when their orders were ridiculous, insane—it was these people who gave a ruler her power, offered it up like a sacrifice.

Adare had read more than enough history to be baffled by the fact. Even the greatest writers seemed unequal to the explanation. Maybe people were frightened of chaos, those writers stipulated, frightened of violence. Maybe they were too stupid to rise up. Maybe they were too happy and sated. Too beaten down. Whatever the reasons of ten million men and women for giving up their freedom, history painted one lesson clearly over and over: people obeyed … until they did not.

Adare had read about it in tome after tome: that moment when a whole people, as though waking from a collective dream, stopped giving away their power. Sometimes the spark of change was obvious—a murder, a famine—but more often the causes were obscure, endlessly debated. Really, those causes didn't seem to matter.
Something
caused a crack in the veneer of power. The crack spread, ramified, until it was deep enough and wide enough for everyone to see. Then the whole edifice crumbled. When that happened, people died, millions of people, including those who had risen up to defy their rulers in the first place.

This is how it begins,
Adare thought, studying the crowd, wondering if this would be the moment the glass bauble of her own rule shattered in her hand.

“You'll burn our homes,” someone else shouted. “And then, when the Urghul come, you'll disappear, go somewhere soft and comfortable, leaving us to sleep in the ashes.”

Already, the grumbling had gone on too long. Beside Adare, Lehav shifted in his own saddle, testing his sword where it rested in the scabbard. Behind her, she could hear the Sons of Flame preparing. She laid a gentle hand on the general's wrist, holding him back even as she spoke.

“You are wrong,” she said. “There is nowhere else to go. Nowhere soft and comfortable. The whole world is on fire, and even were it not, I would stay here. I will stand at the wall when the Urghul come, and though I am no fighter, if it comes to that, I will fight.”

“And if the wall falls?”

Adare nodded. “Then I will retreat into the city. I will hide in attics and cellars. I will sneak out at night to poison the food of our foes, to cut their throats, to hobble their horses. When the grain stops arriving, and our fleets stop fishing, I will eat rats. I will sleep wedged beneath floorboards. I will fight until they kill me, and after that, I will become a ghost. I will haunt their dreams, and drag claws across their flesh so that every time a shadow falls across an Urghul face, they will know fear. I will not leave this city, even in death, because it is mine. It is mine, just as it is yours, and regardless of the army arrayed against us,
I will not go
.”

She paused, chest heaving, air burning in her lungs, thighs trembling where they gripped the saddle. She shifted her gaze from face to face, waiting for more bellowed defiance, for the mob to finally fall on her. It did not. Instead, the silence stood like a great stone in the center of the square.

“I will fight the Urghul,” she said quietly. “I will kill them.” Then, slowly, she turned to the slumped forms of the condemned, the six who had to hang. “And I will see those killed who would jeopardize that fight.”

She forced her face into the shape of determination and resolve. The bile rose in her throat.

She'd told Lehav that she came down from the wall to warn the living, but that wasn't the truth, not all of it. A part of her
wanted
them to rise up. She imagined it each time, imagined the thousands of hands clutching her, pulling her from the saddle, slaughtering her on the flagstones. It was a coward's thought, but each time, as the soldiers pulled the nooses tight, it consumed her: if she died, if the mob tore her apart, she would be freed from doing it again, freed from everything that had to happen next.

 

42

Impossible,
Kaden thought.

For the better part of the day they had pressed west on the backs of the desert horses, away from the oasis, across the open flats, then into the first foothills of the Ancaz. As the mountains steepened into cliffs and canyons, however, the exhausted beasts began to lose their footing.

“We have to go on foot,” Long Fist had groaned.

It was impossible. Kaden could make it a few miles over flat ground, maybe ten at the outside, tottering forward on exhausted legs, but here in the mountains? The bloodred cliffs loomed up in front of them, thousands of vertical feet stabbing straight into the bleached-blue belly of the sky. Canyons broke the serrated wall, offering tenuous access to the high country beyond, but even those canyons were steep, boulder-choked where they weren't flooded with storm runoff. The terrain would test even rested, healthy runners, and the three of them were anything but rested or healthy. They'd be navigating those canyons all day and all night, provided Long Fist knew the way, fleeing il Tornja's soldiers, hoping to avoid the eyes of whatever guards the Skullsworn posted at the approaches to Rassambur.

Maybe a year ago,
Kaden thought grimly, focusing on the ache in his thighs, the twinge in his left ankle that bit a little deeper every stride.
I could have run this as a monk, but I'm not a monk.
Tan had been clear enough about that. Still, there was nothing to do but run or turn back into the swords of the soldiers behind them, and so they ran.

The memory of his slaughtered
umial
dogged Kaden as he hobbled up the canyon, a twinge in his mind, a catch in his chest more painful than the aches of his knees and feet. He could set it aside as Tan had trained him, could slide into the smooth, cool halls of the
vaniate,
but doing so seemed wrong somehow, an evasion. Strange, that unexpected imperative to embrace the suffering. As though what Long Fist had been claiming all along was right, as though pain were ennobling, as though the
vaniate,
the ease of its promised escape, were indeed a profanation.

Kaden glanced over at Long Fist, wondering how long
he
could hold on. The shaman was moving fast, despite his uneven, shambling stride, the wound in his side cauterized and forgotten. As for Triste, Kaden had seen just what she could manage a year earlier, during their flight through the Bone Mountains, and she was fresh now, rested, far more ready than Kaden himself for this desperate trek westward.

And yet, as they ran, he found a strange strength returning, the stirring of the body's memories of all those endless days climbing the high peaks or running the Circuit of Ravens. It wasn't that the ache receded, but that he grew familiar with its contours, as though exhaustion were a home to which he had returned after a long time abroad. The strides which had at first threatened to break him grew increasingly plausible, and though his body throbbed with the effort, as the sun crested overhead, Kaden felt, to his surprise, that he could keep going all day.