The Last Mortal Bond (86 page)

“I'm neither guessing,” il Tornja said, “nor am I desperate. I am, however, vexed.”

“You can't be. You don't have the capacity for anger.”

The general waved away the objection. “A figure of speech. The point remains—you came here with Long Fist. He is not dead, as you claimed. If the river had killed him, we would know, the
world
would know. He is alive. He survived. You spent time with him. You can tell me what he wants, how he thinks.”

“You think you can turn me to your side the way you turned my sister.”

“Of course not. You and Adare are nothing alike. She conspired with me because she genuinely thought I'd help her save Annur, save the
people
of Annur. You don't care about the people of Annur.”

“I do…”

“Of course you don't. Not really. You are free to help me in a way she never was. You can help me willingly.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because,” il Tornja said, smiling wide, his teeth moon-bright in the lamplight, “you know that I am right.”

Kaden took a long, shuddering breath. Meshkent raged inside him. His own mind was a maelstrom. The
vaniate
beckoned, the only calm in the chaos. He turned his face away. “Kiel told me that you'd lie.”

“Kiel,” il Tornja said, shaking his head. “Of course he did.”

“This face, this argument, all these human gestures … none of it is true. You're doing it so I won't see what you really are. What you really want.”

It was barely convincing, but it was all he had, the only resistance he could summon. For the first time, however, il Tornja's face went serious, still. He studied Kaden for a long time, then stood abruptly, turned away, and approached the river, walking to the very edge of the low cliff fronting the current.

The water was black in the lamplight. It looked cold, bottomless. For a long time, the Csestriim just stared into the moving depths. When he finally turned back, Kaden found himself looking into the face of a creature he did not know. The jocular, indifferent Annurian general was gone, scrubbed utterly away. This creature wore his face, the flesh hadn't changed, but the eyes were impossibly cold, hard. They were formed like a man's eyes, but the thought that moved behind them was unknowable as the river at night.

Kaden had faced gods, had spoken with the lords of all pleasure and pain, and yet there had been something in those immortal spirits that he recognized, a posture of feeling and thought, a core of emotion that he shared even with the divine. This, the emptiness in that stare, the distance of it … the sight made Kaden's heart fold inside of him. It was all he could do to keep from crying out.

“I thought to spare you from the full truth,” il Tornja said. “It was a mistake.”

Meshkent howled inside Kaden's mind.

This time, the Csestriim's smile was the smile of a skull.

 

45

The leach spoke to his prisoners as he murdered them, spoke in the soft, almost soothing voice that a man might use with a balky horse, or a petulant child:

“I'm going to take out your eye now,” he purred. “I will pop it from the socket, like husking a pea. It will hurt, hurt horribly, I'm afraid, but I'm going to ask you to hold it carefully in your hand. It's amazing, but you'll still be able to see out of it. Do you understand?”

Valyn stood atop the crumbling wall, hundreds of paces from the small hill where the leach stood, and yet he could hear it all, every word a window into memory. In the battle's lull, he was blind, but he could remember Balendin all too well, the blue ink twisting up his arms, the long, dark braids hung with fragments of bone, the rings piercing his ears—iron and ivory, bronze and silver and steel. Valyn's mind stitched the old images—scenes from the Islands, from Andt-Kyl—onto the land he imagined lying to the north. He could see the man's easy slouch, the cruel hook of his smile, the arms bathed to the elbows in blood as the prisoner whimpered.

“Do you understand what's going to happen next?” Balendin crooned.

The whimper broke into open sobbing. Overhead a raven screamed, then another, and another. Balendin had always had a way with animals, even back on the Islands, though it was impossible to tell if the birds above were tamed somehow, or just waiting for the promised offal.

“If you don't talk to me,” the leach went on, “I will make it worse. I will make it hurt more. Do you understand?”

“I understand.…”

“Thank you. Try to be brave.…”

The prisoner's scream cleaved through all other words, an endless, animal howl divorced from all language and reason, a perfect expression of agony and terror and despair. As though in response, the Urghul raised their voices, thousands of them, tens of thousands, so many that the whole dark world to the north seemed nothing but a wall of sound. It grew louder, higher, more frenzied, and then, as though cut with a knife, snapped. Behind the sound, there was only silence, high as the sky and hard as stone.

After a moment, Balendin spoke into that silence.

“A shame. I thought he would live longer. Bring out the next.”

It had been going on like that for the better part of the morning.

The Urghul vanguard had ridden down out of the north a few hours after dawn. Most armies, confronted with a long wall manned by an unknown number of defenders, would have called a halt, sent scouts into the swamp to try to get behind the enemy lines, maybe arranged a parley in the hope that the other side would give something away. Not the Urghul.

When those early riders were still half a mile to the north, instead of stopping, they kicked their horses to a full gallop, swinging wide to the west, almost to the river itself, then looping back to the east, charging along the face of the fort just a pace from the defenders above. At first it had made no sense to Valyn. There was no way the horses could jump the wall; all the maneuver seemed to do was bring the Urghul pointlessly within reach of the Annurian spears. It took him a moment to piece it together from the alarmed shouts of the legionaries on the wall: the horsemen weren't sitting, they were standing on the backs of their mounts, then leaping from the horses onto the crumbling ramparts.

The darksight came to Valyn then. Each time one of the horsemen gained his section of wall, Valyn would have a few heartbeats of razor clarity, the whole scene etched in shades of black against black—the howling face of the woman or man, lips drawn back from the teeth, sword or spear raised. Each time, the sight came long enough for Valyn to make the kill, but the Urghul made it onto the wall only rarely, and the resulting vision proved flickering, inconsistent, unreliable. As the battle raged around him, Valyn found himself hungry for
more
. More danger, and the vision that came with it. More death. It hardly mattered whose.

Instead, after what might have been an hour, the Urghul pulled back. Throughout the assault, more warriors had been arriving from the north, arriving constantly, until it seemed that they must fill the narrow space all the way from Mierten's Fort to the ruined bridge at Aergad. When Valyn finally lowered his axes to listen, he heard the whole land brimming with voices, thousands and tens of thousands, enough to come against the feeble wall day and night in successive waves without ever abating. The northern front was wide, but it seemed to his blind eyes that the whole Urghul nation was here, in this one place, ready to break through and into Annur.

“Stupid,” he muttered. “If those first idiots had just waited…”

At his side, Huutsuu made an irritated sound deep in her throat. “There is honor,” she said, “in being the first warrior over the wall.”

True to her word, the woman and her tiny band had fought alongside the legionaries all morning. Valyn had caught glimpses of her spear flashing out, catching riders as they passed, the weapon's tip snagging a jaw, a neck, then Huutsuu lifting them from the backs of their horses as though they were so many fish to haul struggling from the water. If she felt bad about killing her own people, Valyn couldn't smell it on her.

“Trouble is,” he replied, “none of them made it over the wall.”

“There is honor in the attempt.”

“What they got for the attempt was a stone to the skull or an ax to the face, then a short fall back into the bloody mud.”

“Honor comes at a cost.”

Someone on the Urghul side seemed to have decided, finally, that the cost wasn't worth it. After hours of furious, unpremeditated attack, the riders had finally fallen back. They didn't go far—just out of bow range. Valyn could hear them regrouping, checking horses and binding wounds, muttering to one another in their musical tongue. Closer to the wall, the wounded were turning into the dead. Some were dragging themselves over the ground, some lying still, their breathing wet, shallow, rapid. For the most part, they died quietly—no sobbing, no groaning, no protestation against the pain.

“Is anyone going to help them?” Valyn had asked.

“Those able to crawl out of bow range will be treated.”

“And the rest?”

“Will endure their hardening in silence.”

Endure they did, but not in silence. Balendin shattered whatever quiet had come with the battle's lull, emerging from out of the massed warriors to take up a position on the hill, just where Newt and the Flea had predicted that he would. Then, after a long pause to let everyone notice his arrival, the leach began his macabre bit of theater. One after another, men and women were dragged from the train of prisoners, hauled before Balendin, and carved apart. Valyn was no leach, but he could smell the horror reeking off the legionaries along the wall, the awe of the Urghul riders, hot as fanned embers, glowing brighter with every sacrifice. He could hear, in Balendin's smugly satisfied brutality, that it was working, that the leach was finding what he sought in the reverence or loathing of the massed humanity, that his power was growing.

Valyn dragged in a breath, trying to catch some hint of the wicks of the Kettral munitions smoldering silently beneath the ground. No use. There was only blood and horse sweat, piss and horror. He could only trust that the fuses were still burning somewhere under Balendin's feet. Newt knew his work, of course, but if he'd made any mistake, if those charges failed, then the battle was finished. The leach would punch a hole straight through the wall, and the Urghul would pour through, murdering everyone they found.

“Bring me someone strong,” Balendin said, his voice carrying over the bloody ground. Valyn could hear the smile, the certainty. “Bring me someone who won't break the moment I put a knife in his flesh. I want to take my time with this. I want the soldiers on those walls to plumb the full depths of their despair.”

The words were Annurian, of course. The leach had learned the Urghul tongue, but he was speaking to the legionaries, speaking directly to their fear. The realization hit Valyn like a slap.

“We need to distract them,” Valyn said.

Huutsuu shook her head. “The Urghul?”

“The soldiers.
Our
soldiers. We need to give them something to look at, to think about, that's
not
Balendin. He needs their fear, their horror, but we can take it away.”

Too late.

As the leach's captive screamed, a massive section of the wall of Mierten's Fort collapsed. There was no explosion, no concussive blow, nothing like what a Kettral starshatter might do. Instead, there was a grinding of stone against stone, slow at first, almost reluctant, maybe forty paces to Valyn's west, as though some implacable giant had put a shoulder to the huge blocks, dug in his heels, and shoved. There was time for the Annurians atop that chunk of wall to shout the alarm, to give voice to half a dozen baffled questions and desperate warnings. Then the structure hit some invisible point beyond which it could not stand, and the whole thing crumbled inward, the sound of falling stones mingled with the screams of those crushed beneath.

“There,” Balendin said, when the noise finally subsided. He lingered over the word, as though he were trying to choose the juiciest pear from a marketplace stall. “Now we can finish with this foolishness.”

The Flea was already shouting orders, sprinting toward the breach. Sigrid coughed up something that might have been a curse, and then the world exploded into sound once more, the panicked shouting of legionaries mixing with the vicious, triumphant screams of the Urghul as they wheeled their horses for the final attack.

“Where is the explosion buried by your Flea?” Huutsuu demanded.

Valyn shook his head. “It's too soon.” He turned blindly toward the sky, but the sun had passed behind a cloud and he could no longer feel it, no longer gauge its height. It might have been noon or midnight for all he could tell. “We need to hold the wall. Need to
keep
him there.”

Huutsuu spat. “There is a hole in the stones wide as ten men. My people will ride through—”

“No,” Valyn said, cutting her off, turning away before she could finish. “They will not.”

He planted a foot on top of the wall, hefted his axes, and leapt to the ground in front of the fort. The blind landing almost broke his ankle. He hit with one foot on the ground, one foot on the soft flesh of some dead warrior. His body responded more quickly than his mind, rolling over and away even as his ankle absorbed the strain. When he rose, he stood in darkness, the wall behind him, the Urghul a wordless thunder rolling in from the north.

His first steps toward the breach were blind, uncertain. He could hear Huutsuu cursing on the wall above and behind him, but she didn't matter. All that mattered was reaching the hole, the gap, and the killing that had to happen there. He needed it suddenly, needed it in the way a man struggling for days in the desert needed water. He could already feel the violence tugging at him, as though every death were a tiny hook hauling him onward. He stumbled over stones and corpses, caught himself on his axes, and ran on, westward, into the darkness as though it were light, life, freedom.