The Last Mortal Bond (87 page)

Just before he reached the hole, just before the Urghul hit, the darksight came.

Balendin's kenning had brought down a dozen feet of wall, but there was still a pile of rubble for the Urghul to struggle over. The Flea had taken up a position atop the heap, Sigrid a few paces behind him, the Aphorist just at his side. The Wing leader was shouting orders to the legionaries. Some were stumbling, some covered with their own blood, but they tried to form up, to make some sort of line as the Urghul hammered down out of the north.

“Valyn,” the Flea shouted. “Fall back on me.”

Valyn hesitated, caught between the line of Annurians and the approaching storm. Then slowly, his axes light in his hands, he turned away from the legions, away from the dubious safety of the wall and the other men, turned north toward the galloping horses even as he spoke: “No.”

The fight that followed was a dream of blood and bliss. For the first time since il Tornja had taken his eyes, Valyn was able to see for more than a few heartbeats at a time, and not just see, but move through the violence that buoyed him up, lashing out and pulling back, stabbing and hacking until the blood ran down his face, his arms. There was no saying how long he fought. Sometimes Huutsuu was at his side, sometimes not. He could hear the Flea calling out orders behind him, well behind, but the Flea had given him up to the fight. The man's words weren't for Valyn, but for the line of Annurians still struggling to hold the wall, and Valyn made no effort to listen to them, to understand. Words were crooked, useless things beside the clarity of blood. He waded in it like a warm sea. He'd been fighting forever, but he wasn't tired. As long as they kept coming, he would keep killing, and killing, and killing.

He buried his axes in one Urghul after another, slaughtering man and beast alike, throwing the weight of his shoulder behind heavy steel wedges, pivoting and rocking, shattering skulls, then pulling free. He was laughing, he realized, had been laughing for a long time, the joy horrible inside him.

When the hill finally exploded, the force of the blow knocked Valyn back half a step. Stones and dirt fell all around him like rain. It took him a moment to realize what it meant.

Newt's munitions,
he thought.
Balendin's dead.

There was no joy in the understanding. If anything, that explosion meant an end to the battle. It felt like something stolen, like a great door closing. It was victory, and it tasted like rust.

 

46

A low stone plinth—the altar, maybe, of the ancient temple—stood at the room's center. Triste sat atop it. She wasn't chained, wasn't tied up or tethered in any way—evidently il Tornja considered the thick stone walls and the half-dozen guards outside the only door ample protection against her escape. The space was nothing compared to the subterranean cells of the Dead Heart, or to the steel cages of the imperial prison inside the Spear, but then, it didn't really need to be. Triste wasn't likely to fight her way past three dozen armed Annurian soldiers, and if she did, what then? She could search for ages in the ruined city without finding the
kenta
.

He has us,
Kaden thought.
We raced straight into his trap.
They were alive only because il Tornja thought they might still be useful: Triste as bait, Kaden as a willing traitor to his race.

The failure should have stung, but Kaden found himself beyond stinging. The confrontation with the Csestriim general had left him numb, exhausted to the bones. The effort of holding up the lie, of maintaining his own face while hiding the god inside, had burned through the last of his reserves. He felt like the blackened, twisted scrap of wick left at the bottom of the clay pot when all the wax was gone, the flame guttered out.

Meshkent, at least, had fallen finally, mercifully silent. Kaden could still feel the god inside his mind, shifting, testing, searching for a way out, but now that il Tornja was gone, the urgency had subsided. Sooner or later, Kaden would fail. He was built that way. He would fail, and the god would claim him completely.

And why not?
he asked himself.

Meshkent might be blinded by his own pride, but he was strong—Kaden could feel that strength like a bright, awful weight. More importantly, il Tornja, for all his planning, did not know the truth. He kept Triste drugged, but there had been no point in forcing Kaden, too, to drink the adamanth. It would be easy, so easy to just … give himself up, let the Lord of Pain take his mind and body both, let Meshkent have his fight with the Csestriim. Let him win.

It would mean not being Kaden anymore, but what was that worth? He'd spent half a lifetime trying to snuff out the embers of his own thought, and now he could achieve it, achieve that sublime annihilation instantly, absolutely. All it would take was a simple acquiescence of will.

“Did you come to finish killing me?” Triste asked.

The words were quiet, but they snapped the thread of Kaden's thought. He shifted his attention from the invisible landscape of his own fragmented mind to the room in which he stood. The guards had left a single lantern burning on the floor, but the flame was too small to illuminate the entire space; the corners and vaulted ceiling were lost in shadow.

He started to protest, then thought better of it. Il Tornja would have men listening, and besides, what could he say? He'd drawn a knife on Triste, had threatened to drive it into her flesh in an effort to flush out the goddess. It hadn't been an empty threat. He would have done it, if he'd been faster.

“Il Tornja wants you alive,” he replied finally.

“Alive?” Triste asked. She stared at him a moment, then lay back on the stone slab, arms flat at her sides, her whole body limp with drug or exhaustion. Only her eyes moved, shifting back and forth as though searching for something in the darkness above.

“Bait,” Kaden explained. “For Long Fist.”

“Better be careful,” Triste said, sounding indifferent to her own advice. “You don't want to give anything away to whoever's listening.”

“There's nothing to give away,” Kaden said. “He knows everything. He knows that you carry Ciena inside you. He knows that Meshkent and I came to find you, to help.”

Triste made a wry, bitter sound that might have been a laugh.

“He knows the whole thing,” Kaden said again. “He figured it out before I told him.”

“Of course he did. He's Csestriim. All of this … it's just a game to him. We're just stones on the board.” She shook her head wearily. “So Long Fist got away. He wasn't dying after all.”

She might have been talking about some made-up character from a tale in which she had long ago lost interest.

“He got away.”

“And I'm the bait. For Long Fist. Or Meshkent. Or whoever wants to bite.”

“At least you're still alive.”

Triste raised her head just slightly, staring at Kaden as though wondering whether to believe what she had just heard. When she let it drop, he could hear her skull against the stone. She didn't grimace. Didn't even seem to notice.

“Bait is not alive, Kaden. A worm on a hook
thinks
it's alive—it keeps wriggling and wriggling and wriggling—but you only need to look a few heartbeats into the future to see what happens to that worm: either the fish kills it, or it dies, still squirming on the hook. The 'Kent-kissing creature was finished the minute it became bait. Worms are dumb, so they don't know that. I'm not a worm. I can see what's coming.”

“It's coming for all of us,” Kaden replied quietly. “If you wait long enough, we're all dead.”

“Well, that's not exactly right, is it?” Triste demanded. “Your sister's general—he's not dead. This bitch inside my fucking head—she's not going to die.”

“They are Csestriim and gods. They are made differently from us. Bedisa wove our fate into our bones.”

“I know that, Kaden. You think I don't know that? The thing I don't know yet is why we don't all just get
on
with it.” She shook her head. It lolled back and forth sloppily over the weathered rock. “All it takes is one little blade to end a life. You don't even
need
a blade. You don't need anything. You can just not eat for couple of weeks.…”

Kaden studied her, the perfect skin laced with scar, the blazing violet of her eyes. “If you were so eager to die,” he said finally, “you would have performed the
obviate
back in Annur, when we had the chance.”

“It's not the dying I care about; it's helping
her
. She's in my
mind,
Kaden. You don't understand what that's like. You can't.” She took a long, deep breath, then blew it out. “Growing up in the temple, there was always talk about rape.”

Kaden shook his head. “The
leinas
—”

“Will you stop talking for just once?” At least there was heat in her voice now, a hint of the old fire. “You might have learned to be quiet in all those years with the monks, but you never learned to listen, did you?”

Half a dozen replies came to mind. Kaden set them aside. If Triste wanted him to listen, he would listen. After a long silence she continued in a whisper.

“Just because a woman is inside the temple walls doesn't mean she's safe. Demivalle and the other
leinas
who run the temple try to have guards in place, there are ways of doing things that are supposed to protect the priestesses, but you can't protect against everything all the time. Sometimes the women can't cry out, and sometimes they can but they don't. You're told you're supposed to please, that pleasure is the apotheosis of your faith. There's no space for second-guessing. No space to say,
‘Wait.'
It's the clients, half drunk and emboldened because they paid,
donated,
whatever—but it's not just the clients, it's the
whole place
. If you're not a conduit of pleasure, you don't
belong,
and so the priestesses and priests suffer what's done to them. The clients go away, but Ciena's most holy carry their wounds inside.”

She fell silent, lips parted as though she were short of breath or about to cry. Kaden's mind filled with the memory of Louette Morjeta, Triste's mother, the woman who had given her daughter up when her father came and demanded her. Had Morjeta wanted to lie with Adiv? Had she wanted to carry his child?

“This is like that,” Triste said, breaking into his thoughts. “What the goddess did to me is like that, like what happens to women the whole world over, but it is
worse
. She's inside my mind. She didn't just fuck me and leave, she tried to
become
me. She's probably
still
trying. Do you understand?”

Kaden considered his words before replying. “Many people would embrace the presence of their god. To be taken in this way—it is an honor. That is what the man who was Long Fist must have thought before the Lord of Pain took on his mortal form. The acceptance is an exercise of devotion.”

“That's disgusting,” Triste said. Her eyes were far away. Dead-looking. “That's what men tell women after:
Actually, you wanted it. I am a king, a minister, an atrep, an emperor—you must have wanted it.
Well, I'll tell you something, Kaden,” she said, her voice rising, rising with her body as she shoved herself up onto her elbows, shoved herself up until she was sitting, glaring at him, a finger extended, trembling. The words, when she finally managed to finish them, came out a scream,
“I didn't fucking want it!”

She was panting, breathless. Although the night was cool, her face glistened with sweat. He considered crossing the space between them, trying to offer some comfort, but what comfort could he offer? His words were all unequal to the task, and any human touch seemed suddenly obscene.

“It's not the dying I mind,” she said. They were the same words as before, but this time there was iron in them. “But I'll let that Csestriim creature flay me alive, I'll let him take me apart joint by joint before I do a thing to help this goddess who thought she could just take me, tame me, make me into her.”

“I understand,” Kaden replied finally.

“No,” Triste said, shaking her head. “You don't. You can't.”

Meshkent moved silently, massively inside Kaden's own mind. The pressure, the presence, the constant effort required to fight back against it, to keep the god from seizing control, was almost overwhelming, and Kaden had
allowed
him in, had managed to control him. He felt ashamed, suddenly. After half a day, he'd been almost ready to give himself over to the god, had been tempted to let the corridors of his mind just … fold, and here was Triste at the same time, still fighting, still defiant. The goddess could seize everything she was, had wrested her from herself half a dozen times at least, and still she hadn't given up. For all her talk of dying, she wasn't dead.

“You would have made a good emperor,” Kaden said. He had no idea where the words had come from. As he spoke them, however, he realized they were true.

Triste just stared at him, baffled. “What do I know,” she asked finally, “about the running of empires?”

“As much as I do.”

“From what I heard, you made an utter mess of it.”

Kaden nodded. “I did.” He wondered what had happened since he left the Dawn Palace. Maybe Adare had managed to right Annur's listing ship. It didn't seem likely. The water had been pouring in in too many places. The whole vessel had already sunk too deep in the waves. Besides, Adare was hardly the benevolent leader she pretended to be. Il Tornja claimed she was doing what she did for the people of Annur. Maybe that was true, and maybe she was interested only in her own glory. Kaden didn't know her well enough to say. What he did know was that she had lied to him even as she tried to make her peace. Lied about Valyn, about her own brother.