The Last Mortal Bond (91 page)

“You think I won't kill you,” he said quietly. “You think because we've fucked a dozen times and neither one of us has died that it won't happen.” He shook his head. “You're wrong. One of these times, it will take over completely.…”

“It?” Huutsuu asked. He could hear her getting to her feet.

“This thing inside me. The thing that can see. That can kill.”

“No, Malkeenian,” she said. “It is not a thing inside you. It is you.”

Valyn shook his head. “I'm not this fast. Not even close. Look…” He yanked one of the twin axes free of his belt, just to show her. It would have been a passable draw back on the Islands, but after the strange, impossible competence that came over him with the darksight, the motion felt clumsy, almost interminably slow.

Huutsuu shook her head, but made no move to approach. “A horse will not run at a fire,” she said, “not when it is young. But fire—it is as much a part of war as blood. The creatures must be trained, and so we blind them, not with a blade, but with thick wool. I have done this many times. Blinded, the horse will ride toward a fire, will ride straight
through
a fire if you ask it to.”

“I'm not one of your horses, Huutsuu.”

“No. You are faster and more dangerous, but for you, as for them, there is a time for blindness, and a time to take the blindfold off.”

“I don't know
how,
” he snarled.

“You do. I have watched you all these days. Even when you say you cannot see, you see. You turn toward motion and light. When a branch looms before you, you dip your head.”

“Do you have any idea how many branches I hit riding around that 'Kent-kissing forest?” Valyn demanded.

Huutsuu's laugh was sharp enough to cut. “Do you have any idea how many branches you missed?” She shook her head. “You are a fool, Malkeenian. You say you can only see when death looms close, but death is always close. Now, for instance…”

She lunged at him, her body resolving from the darkness. As she closed, she drew her sword, swinging it overhead in a vicious arc. Valyn stepped aside at the last moment, saw the dark sparks flash as it crashed against the stone. He kicked her in the back of the knee, and she fell, rolled away, came up in a crouch, the sword level before her, pointed at his chest.

“Can you see me?” she asked quietly.

“We've been over this,” he growled. “When the fight is finished—”

“What if it is
never
finished, Malkeenian?”

He stared at her. She smiled.

“This is what Kwihna teaches.…”

“Kwihna's ‘teachings,'” he spat, “are nothing more than blood.”

“Your blindness is not a blindness of the eyes,” Huutsuu replied. “It is a blindness of the soul. You think that you can draw a line in the dirt, that you can say, ‘To this side of the line is fighting, to this side quiet. On this side war, and on this side, peace. On this side I can see, but here I am blind.'”

As Valyn stared, she hurled herself at him again. He let the blade go by his face, caught her wrist, and pulled her close.

“It is
all
struggle, Malkeenian,” she whispered. “Life is suffering—
that
is what Kwihna teaches.”

“Life is…”

“Suffering,” she said again. “Pain is suffering because we want to be free of it, and pleasure is suffering because we fear to lose it. Fools search for freedom, but there is no freedom. There is only the embrace. You say you are blind whenever you do not fight, but you are
always
fighting.”

She shifted in his grip, hit him hard across the face with her free fist. The skin split open beneath the blow. Valyn's blood blazed. He bared his teeth, tightened his grip on her wrist, twisted until he thought her arm would break. She refused to wince.

“Life is
all
a fight,” she hissed. “You deny this because you come from a weak people, and so you stumble around believing you are blind.”

She spit in his face.

He wrenched the woman's sword around, forcing it back on her until the blade lay against her throat. He could feel the pulse hammering in her veins, see her pupils dilated in the moonlight.

“You think you're fighting me?” she whispered. “You are a fool, Valyn hui'Malkeenian. Look in yourself. See what you are fighting.”

He stared, his own breath barbed and tangled in his chest.
Kill her,
something inside him whispered.
Cut her throat. Let the blood spill.

“Even now, Malkeenian, you are fighting it.”

A line of blood darkened the blade. Valyn pressed harder, wanting more.

“There is only one foe,” she whispered. “Each woman has her own, and each man, his. Do you know its name?”

He realized, as the blood ran down the steel onto his hand, that he understood Balendin's joy, the bliss of standing among the dead and dying, of terrifying the terrified, of reaching out with strong hands to rip life from the living. The knowledge sickened him.

“You think I won't kill you?” he snarled. “You think I wouldn't enjoy it?”

He could feel her collarbone hard beneath the sword's blade, her hot breath in his face.

“Of course you would.”

“You gambled,” he told her, tightened his grip around her wrist. “And you lost.”

She shrugged, indifferent to the blade's edge. “There is no sight without sacrifice. Name it before you give me to your Coward's God.”

“Name
what
?”

Her smile was bloody, mocking. “The thing you fight. Your foe. Give it its proper name.”

“There are dozens, hundreds—”

Huutsuu shook her head. “There is only one.”

Kill her,
something inside him whispered.
Open her throat and feel the life drain out.

No. Not something inside of him. Him. The sick whisper was his own.

“Name your foe, Valyn hui'Malkeenian,” the woman said again, “and then tell me if there will ever be a day, ever a moment, when you will not have to fight.”

He would have killed her then, he realized, would have taken the head from her shoulders, would have bowed to the dark part of himself that prowled the corners of his mind. Only the horn stopped him, an Urghul horn that shattered the predawn calm, the long, angry note drawn out over a dozen heartbeats. It fell silent, then sounded again, and again.

“What is that?” he demanded

Huutsuu bared her lips. “My people. They do not wait for the dawn.” She raised her free hand to the blade pressed against her neck, ran a finger along the steel. “Will you add me to the dead this day?”

Valyn stared, the shock of what he'd been about to do ringing in his head like the horn. He shoved her viciously away, staggered back. The blade fell from Huutsuu's numb fingers, clattering against the stone. Valyn's own hands shook as though diseased.

She watched him with narrowed eyes, then smiled.

“Life is war. Every heartbeat is war. This is Kwihna's truth.”

Valyn turned away, sickened, from that truth, turned to face the coming charge—thousands of Urghul galloping toward the wall, dark figures on dark horses, the lines of their weapons and faces carved from the black wall of his blindness. They were still three hundred paces out, no threat to him at all, not yet, but he could see them, see them perfectly, see them all.

 

49

According to Pyrre, it was only twenty-five miles from Rassambur to the stone ruins by the river where she'd broken Kaden and Triste free. There were no straight lines in the mountains, however, and the miles had a way of multiplying. All night and all day they'd been fleeing il Tornja's soldiers, laboring up narrow defiles, racing across swaths of open slickrock, fording mountain streams, and then running again, cutting through the maze of canyon and cliff, all too aware of what would happen if they faltered or fell. For a long time, the Annurians trailed just a few hundred paces behind.

“The
ak'hanath,
” Kaden managed, not slowing as he pointed back. “Tracking us.”

He hadn't spotted the creatures—they were too quick, too nimble for that—but he had seen them move over stone back in the Bone Mountains, and had no illusions about his own ability to outrun them. He almost imagined he could hear, over the sound of his own breath and blood, the skittering of their hard claws on the rock, that high keening just at the edge of human hearing, the sound like a needle lodged inside the ear.

“We could kill them,” Triste gasped as she struggled over the broken scree. “If they … come out…”

Kaden shook his head. “They won't. Il Tornja won't risk them. As long as they're alive, he can follow us anywhere.”

Pyrre paused for a moment as Triste struggled to climb a short ledge. The assassin looked every bit as exhausted as Kaden felt. Sweat matted her hair, her breathing was ragged, blood crusted her leather tunic and bare arms—some of it from the soldiers she had killed, the rest from her own cuts and gashes. Unlike Triste, however, she didn't seem concerned. In fact, even as she peered back down the canyon, shading her eyes with a hand, a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“I am really starting to dislike those creatures,” she said.

And then, just as she finished speaking, as if the soldiers and the spiders were not enough, the lightning came. The sky remained utterly cloudless, one great bowl of undivided blue, and then the lightning was there, massive actinic bolts stabbing down all around them, blasting cliffs and shattering stone. The closest struck a hundred paces distant, but violence stretched away on all sides for miles.

“The leach,” Kaden said wearily.

Pyrre tsked her vexation. “It really does seem like cheating.”

Another bolt fractured the cliff top a quarter mile ahead, the impact spraying smashed stone in all directions.

Kaden forced down the animal urge to flinch, to cower in some shadow until the unnatural attack was over. Instead, he stepped into the middle of the wide canyon, studied the pattern of bolts ripping through the sky. “It's random. They don't know where we are.”

“He doesn't need to know,” Triste shouted back. She'd fought her way up onto the ledge, and was waving them on impatiently. “He might be just guessing, but the lightning can still kill us.”

“Indeed,” Pyrre mused, gazing speculatively at the elemental savagery unfolding all around them. “Ananshael's will is unknowable.”

“Do you want to stand here and test it?” Kaden asked, glancing over at the Skullsworn. He hadn't intended the question seriously, but found, even as he spoke the words, that there was a part of him that ached for just that—to stand and wait, to pass the weight of his own responsibility over to some other, greater power, to finally abdicate a fight he neither understood nor truly hoped to win. Meshkent raged inside him, wordless, slavering, furious, hurling himself against the walls Kaden maintained. It would be easy, effortless, to let those walls fall. To set the god free. To abandon the self once and for all …

Another bolt slammed into the stone canyon, where they had passed just a few moments before. The assassin didn't flinch, didn't even look at it. Instead she turned to study Kaden.

“You're not the skinny monk that I remember.”

Kaden shook his head, hauling his thoughts away from sacrifice and surrender. “That monk wouldn't have survived.”

“Survival.” Pyrre frowned. “For just a little while there, I thought that might have finally stopped mattering to you. The god comes for us all.”

“Then why are we running?”

Pyrre flashed him a smile. “Because if we run now, we get to fight later. And I like fighting.”

By midday, the sky had fallen quiet. When they paused at a narrow stream to gulp a few mouthfuls of water, Kaden could no longer make out the angry clatter of pursuit. It was tempting to believe they had outdistanced the soldiers, but he had been battling against il Tornja's schemes too long to trust his own temptations. The
kenarang
was coming, whether Kaden could hear him or not; his goals were simple, even if his tactics were not. The question was, why had Pyrre and the other Skullsworn intervened?

“You could have let us die,” Kaden said, straightening from the stream, savoring the cold water on his tongue, in his throat. “Il Tornja would have killed us. You cheated your god.”

Pyrre shook her head. “Not cheated. Traded. Your two souls for those we left below.”

Triste was staring at the assassin, her scarred face twisted with revulsion. “But why? Why bother?”

“It was an intriguing opportunity,” Pyrre replied.

“To kill il Tornja?” Kaden asked.

The Skullsworn shook her head. “To take Long Fist.” There was an unusual note in her voice when she said the name, something vicious and eager, utterly at odds with her habitual wry calm.

“Long Fist?” Triste demanded.
“Why?”

Pyrre turned to her, then raised an eyebrow, as though debating inwardly whether or not to respond. “He is a priest of pain,” she said finally. “A high priest of Meshkent. He would have made a fine offering to my god.” She glanced over at Kaden, cocked her head to the side. “Speaking of which, where did he go?”

The words were deceptively mild.

Kaden shook his head. “Escaped. Jumped into the river.”

Pyrre pursed her lips. “Then my god may have him after all.”

“Maybe,” Kaden agreed. Inside his mind, the ancient god raged. “So what happens to us now?”

“A good question,” Pyrre said. “We will go to Rassambur, and then decide.”

“What if we don't want to go?” Triste demanded. She was panting, doubled over with her hands on her knees, but her eyes were hard, defiant.

Pyrre offered her a broad smile, made an ostentatious little flourish with one hand, and was holding a knife. “The altars of my god are everywhere. Each patch of dirt”—she gestured with the blade—“that stone on which you stand. And my piety sometimes outstrips my patience.”