The Last Mortal Bond (81 page)

Triste stared at him. Then, understanding, recoiled as though slapped. “I can't.…”

Long Fist half lifted his hands. Kaden couldn't say whether it was supplication or some weak spasm.

“This flesh fails,” he said, lip curling above bloody incisors. Then, again, “Ciena.” He wasn't simply naming her this time, but calling, calling across the barriers of their two human bodies, across the wall of Triste's mind into whatever cramped space Ciena had carved out for herself.

Kaden put a hand behind the shaman's head, lifting it slightly, as though that might keep the life from draining out his mouth along with the blood. When he turned back to Triste, he half expected to find the girl gone from her own face, to hear the goddess speaking in that huge, implacable voice. It almost seemed it
must
be so, that the extremity of the situation would call her forth as it had each time before. Triste's eyes, however, remained her own. The expressions ghosting over her face, her mouth opening in silent lamentation, her forehead creasing … Kaden had seen those expressions before, seen them scores of times. The girl was angry, baffled, terrified, but she was herself. Of the goddess inside, he could discover no sign.

“We have to draw her out,” Kaden said. They had pared away the other choices. The other choices had been stolen from them. It hardly mattered. Only this remained.

Triste's lips were trembling. She took half a step back.

“The only way to do that…”

“… is to hurt you,” Kaden said. “I know.” There was no time left. Whatever indifference he had felt an hour earlier, it was gone, vanished. Outside the
vaniate,
unshielded from his own emotion, he felt almost sick with urgency. His heart hurled itself against his ribs again and again. He laid the shaman's head down against the stone, straightened up, then reached for the knife at his side. “Ciena will respond,” he said, fixing Triste's eyes with his own. “She will emerge. She always has.”

Triste took another step back.

“It won't work.”

“It will. It
has
. In the Crane, that time you stabbed yourself—”

“I meant to
kill
myself. That's what brought her out. It's like she can smell it, can smell the real threat. That's the
only
time the wall between us breaks.”

Long Fist groaned, a low sound like an animal might make.

Kaden shook his head. “There is no other choice. Triste. If he dies, we are done.
Everyone
is done. Everyone you love—”

“Who?”
she screamed, the word a broadax cleaving his own. “Who do I love?”

In a moment, Kaden saw his mistake.

“My parents are dead,” Triste snarled, voice caught somewhere between a shout and a sob. “And when they were alive, they traded me away. They
sold
me.”

“Your parents betrayed you,” Kaden said, nodding. He took a step toward her, and she took another step back, a dance modeled from blood and distrust. “Does that mean everyone in the world should suffer?”

“Suffer?” she demanded, incredulous. She stabbed a finger at Long Fist where he lay against the rock, blue eyes unfocused on the sky. “He's
why
they suffer.
He's
where it all comes from! And you want to save him. You want to stab me in order to
save
him.”

“Not him. Humanity.”

“And what do I care,” she asked, voice dropping to a whisper, “about humanity?”

There is no time for this,
Kaden thought. He tried to measure the distance between them, tried to weigh the knife in his hand. The shaman shuddered behind him, back arching in obedience to some command of the ruined body.
Careful,
he told himself.
Careful
. It was a narrow window. He needed Triste frightened, desperately frightened, but the girl was right—the goddess inside seemed only to break out in moments of the most violent need. How close would he have to be to induce such need? How deep would he have to cut?

Long Fist groaned. Kaden glanced over his shoulder. Just a glance, just a fraction of a moment—too long. Triste, legs lightened by her fear, darted past him, between the twin pillars, down the canyon and into the shadows. He was after her in an instant, hurling himself into a sprint, following half a dozen steps down the defile before he stopped. He could hear her feet scuffing the stone as she fled. He could catch her—he thought he could catch her—but how far down the canyon? And then what? Stab her? Put the knife to her throat and drag her back up? He couldn't kill her, not without destroying the goddess in the vain attempt to save the god. Triste knew that as well as he did. If Ciena were going to emerge, wouldn't she have done so already, wouldn't she have shoved her way to the front of Triste's mind the moment Long Fist called her name?

Kaden turned. The shaman was curled in the dirt behind him. He looked small, suddenly, as though death were already diminishing him.

I could carry him,
Kaden thought.
Get him as far as the
kenta.

What good that would do, he had no idea. Maybe if he carried the man back to the Dead Heart … The Ishien were a military order. They would know something of the healing of wounds, if only because they had grown so adept at dealing them. It was a sliver of a hope, fingernail thin, but it was better than leaving Long Fist for the crows and the soldiers closing in from the north.

Hope's edge,
Kaden thought, remembering the old Shin expression,
is sharper than steel
.

He had never felt the emotion so strongly before. Strange that for so many millennia it had been so praised by so many men and women. Strange that there were innumerable temples raised to Orella all across the world. In that moment, the weight of Kaden's own hope seemed more horrible to him than hate, or rage, or the blackest despair.

*   *   *

He could see Triste's tracks clearly enough as he carried Long Fist down the canyon, but those tracks didn't matter. What mattered was the weight slung over his own shoulders, the incremental movement of the shaman's ribs that told Kaden he was still breathing, the ache in his own legs that threatened to buckle beneath him every step, and the fight against that ache. Mile after mile he carried the man, following Triste's tracks across sunbaked stone and washes filled with sand. As he descended, the canyon grew warm, then hot. The dry air raked his lungs with every breath and his lips began to crack. When he first heard the roar of the river, he thought he was hallucinating, imagining the sound of water where no water should be, but a hundred paces later he broke from the walls of the narrow side canyon to find himself standing on a wide ledge. Below, a hundred paces straight down, a froth-white river tumbled past.

Triste's footsteps led off to the right, following ancient stairs carved into the stone, but Kaden paused for a moment to adjust the shaman's weight across his shoulders. That was when the voice started.

It was so strange that for the first few syllables he could ignore it. Then, as he stood there, gasping his ragged breaths, he began to understand the words.

There is another way.

He thought at first that Long Fist was whispering to him, and he held his breath, waiting for the shaman to speak again. There was only the roar of the river, the low moan of wind threading its way through the canyon, and the clatter of rocks from somewhere above; the echo twisted the distance until he couldn't say whether his pursuers were far or near. When the words came again, Kaden realized with a shudder that they were not a matter of the ear, not something so pedestrian as sound, carried on dry stony air. They were inside his head.

There is another way.

Kaden could feel the language like the pressure deep in his ear when he had climbed a peak too quickly, or like a stone inside his mind, small, painless, smoothed by the long motion of a stream, but heavy, displacing something else. Reflexively, he pushed back. The voice dwindled to the barest breath, but he could still make out the words.

Submit,
it whispered.
Serve.

It was Long Fist—the same indifferent conviction, the same certainty, the same cadence—and yet not Long Fist. The syllables, as Kaden heard them, were shorn of all Urghul accent, filed down until there was no intonation left, as though they were not actually words at all, but only the idea of words.

You will not survive, if you do not serve
.
No one will survive.

Again, that pressure, and stronger now. It was an unfolding inside the mind; an awesome flower, sun-bright and blossoming too quickly; a hatching egg, the insistent beak cracking the smooth shell. Kaden could feel the shards breaking apart, shattering, slicing through his own thoughts. He put a hand against the canyon wall to steady himself, closed his eyes, felt himself falling into bottomless darkness, as though the whole world had become a well with that voice echoing up from the bottom.

You can be more than this—
a vision of Kaden's own burning eyes—
more than the contents of your skin—
another vision, this time from a great distance, of a pitiful figure kneeling on a sandstone ledge. It took a long time to find a name for that huddled, mortal creature:
Kaden
. The syllables were familiar, but irrelevant. The sad little man bore, on his bent back, a figure of such perfect radiance that it burned.

You can be this,
the blazing figure said.
You can be this if you submit.

A burning, as of cold fire sliding across the mind.

A desire, strong as week-long hunger, to burn.

Yes,
the voice said.
Let yourself burn. I will take this flesh and make of it a god.

A great conflagration, blue-bright as the noonday sky, divine, undeniable.

Yes,
the god said.
Yes.

But laced beneath that voice, there was another voice, barely the whisper of yesterday's wind, dirt-poor and cracked, too-human, doomed. Defiant.

The mind is a flame,
it insisted.
The mind is a flame. The mind is a flame.

And then the part of him that heard, that recognized the words, that was still Kaden, whispered in response:
Blow it out.

He opened his eyes. The sun had shifted overhead. The line of light and shadow, inscribed as though with a chisel, fell across his face. Long Fist was still alive, breathing weakly beside his ear, but the god inside had fallen almost quiet.

“You tried to take me,” Kaden said aloud. His own voice sounded strange in his ears, dry as stone. His tongue was swollen. “Tried to take my place in my own mind.”

It is the only way.

The voice was still inside his head, but weaker now, as though whatever fuel had fed that first fire were all but burned away.

“I am not a priest,” Kaden said. “I am nothing like the Urghul that you inhabit now. I never worshipped you. You explained it yourself. My mind is unprepared. You could not enter it.”

There are other ways than worship. Polluted ways, but ways all the same.

And then, as though the god spoke over himself in awful polyphony, Kaden heard his words from days earlier:
It is possible for you to carve away a portion of what you are.
…

“No,” Kaden said, shaking his head, seeing all over again the bafflement and self-loathing in Triste's eyes, understanding it for the first time. “Not for this.”

If you do not submit, the Csestriim win.

Kaden heaved the Urghul chieftain from his shoulder, struggled briefly to hold the limp body, then lowered him to the stone at the very edge of the drop. Long Fist's lids were closed. Breath rasped between his bloody lips. He was nearly dead, but then, what did that mean? Long Fist, if he had even been
called
Long Fist as a child, before his flesh was seized by his god, had been dead a long time, or if not dead, then gone, subsumed inside the mind of the divine.

Long Fist gave himself,
the god said,
as you must give yourself.

Kaden tried to imagine it. Not the quiet annihilation of the self that the Shin pursued. Close to that, but something worse: a twisting, a transmutation into something vicious and immortal, a creature of bloodletting and screams. Better to be gone than that. Better to simply cease.

Unless …

Triste had resisted. No one seemed to understand quite how, but she had resisted her goddess, taken her in, then locked her off in one of the mind's forgotten corridors. She had kept hold of herself while she carried Ciena, and she had no training in the
vaniate,
no quiet years studying the shape and movements of her own mind. If she could find a way, then perhaps he could, too.

The dying god saw the shape of Kaden's thought before he spoke.

No,
Meshkent said.
I will not be penned.

Kaden could feel the pressure starting again inside his head, trying to force him out.

Submit.

Kaden shook his head grimly, pushed back. It was easier, this time, almost trivially so. The god was growing weak, fading from the world.

Why would you choose to be what you are? Why be the flute when you could play the music?

“I know your music,” Kaden replied. “I have heard it.”

He could see the people burning, could see Annur replaced by an empire of pain, men and women and children manacled to ten thousand altars, bleeding, screaming. He could see them harnessed to their own agony, forced to drag it behind them like great stones, to bear it upon their shoulders until it broke them, and ruling over it all, seated on the Unhewn Throne, he saw himself, but not himself. A god wearing his face.