The Last Mortal Bond (97 page)

Adare knew this well enough—it was a truism of history—but she had always imagined something different when she thought of a military coup: the army battering down its own walls, blood in the streets and gutters, crowns ripped from heads and those heads impaled, openmouthed, on pikes. It seemed only natural that the military overthrow of a nation should be loud, violent, obvious to all; the opposite, in fact, of what was unfolding before her eyes, on the flagstones of her own throne room.

Suddenly, Adare felt the weight of every sword inside the chamber, every spearhead, every piece of armor. The soldiers had not moved—they might have been carved from stone—but they didn't
need
to move. Everyone knew what they could do, what they were for. Against those silent ranks of men, her slippered ministers seemed soft and insubstantial; not men, but the ghosts of men.

“Of course,” Van went on, “our only purpose is to serve, Your Radiance.”

He kept his eyes on her as she slowly, agonizingly inclined her chin. There was nothing else to do. Any protest would only underscore her own impotence.

“You have my thanks,” she managed, the words like tar on her tongue.

It was a good lesson, if she somehow survived to remember it: silence had its own violence; some reigns ended in blades and fire; some with the barest nod of a head.

 

52

No matter the training, no matter the book study and drills in the field, no matter the tactics and strategy, the missions completed, the years survived—sometimes you just had bad fucking luck.

True to his word, the Flea had waited until the last possible moment to pull his people off the wall. All morning, the Kettral stood shoulder to shoulder with those few Annurian soldiers who remained, beating back one more wave of riders, then another, then another. Only when it was obviously hopeless, when the Urghul were as thick atop Mierten's wall as the defenders themselves, did the Wing leader give the signal to retreat. The remaining legionaries—sweating, bleeding, locked in their own desperate struggles—didn't even notice.

They'll never know,
Valyn realized as he turned for one last glance. The lines of battle had dissolved into madness. Fent was fighting with a broken sword, while Sander, who had no weapon at all, was punching his attackers, clawing at them, hugging them close enough to bite into their throats. Farther down the wall, Huutsuu and her Urghul were also losing ground, and though Valyn had fought beside her for the first part of the morning, she, too, was lost in her own struggle, oblivious to his betrayal.
They'll never know we left them to their deaths
.

He realized, as he backed away, that he'd been hoping someone would notice. He'd been waiting to see the fury in the eyes of those he was abandoning, readying himself for their rage. He'd been preparing to bear away, as long as he survived, their final curses. And then there were no curses to bear. No judgment. The ease of the whole thing made him sick. The Urghul swarmed over the wall, but that didn't matter, not to him, not anymore. The river was only a few hundred paces away. Even if he didn't run, even if he stopped to offer up a prayer before diving in, he was going to make it.

Then the bad luck hit.

There was no way to know, passing beneath the fort's southern gate, that the stonework had been weakened by the days of battle to the north. Or maybe it wasn't that at all. Maybe the weakness had nothing to do with the war. Maybe it was just a matter of rain and snow, hundreds of years of ice and wind gnawing at the mortar, eroding it a little at a time, chewing between the huge stone blocks until anything, even the softest footstep, could bring them down. Not that it mattered. What mattered was the way the stone shifted beneath Newt's feet, how the wall caved and the huge lintel came down upon his leg.

Anyone slower would have been killed. The stone was twice as high as Valyn and had to weigh two dozen times as much. Only the Aphorist's quick reflexes—he'd twisted his torso clear at the last moment—had saved his head. Not that it mattered. The leg was crushed below the knee, pinning him in place, and the Urghul were coming. Valyn couldn't see the northern wall beyond the fort's central structures, but he could hear what was happening there clearly enough—the sounds of fighting had drained away, replaced by the vicious ululation of victory.

By the time Valyn reached Newt, his face was twisted with pain, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Shockingly, the man had refused to cry out, forcing the agony down inside him somewhere deep, silent, somewhere it wouldn't betray his Wingmates. Sigrid reached them a moment later, shoved Valyn roughly aside, then knelt next to the demolitions master. She made a quiet sound—half whistle, half croon—as she rested an open hand on his sweating brow. Valyn had never seen such a tender gesture from the leach.

Newt hacked out something that might have been a moan or a laugh.

“I understand the irony…,” he whispered.

The Flea had been lagging behind, covering their retreat. When he rounded the corner, however, he took the scene in at a glance and, barely breaking stride, threw his shoulder against the massive stone. For a moment, Valyn thought the man might actually move it.

The Islands had been filled with scenes of determination, hard men and women harnessing their will to perform nearly impossible tasks. Anyone who passed Hull's Trial had to be able to fight through exhaustion and despair, had to be able to keep moving, keep trying, long after the body was finished and the mind close to unraveling. Valyn had been there when Trea Bel dragged herself from the waves after seven days swimming laps around the Islands, smiling even as she collapsed because she knew she'd won her bet. He'd been there when Daveen Shaleel demonstrated to a whole class of cadets that a soldier could perform field surgery on herself, talking quietly between gritted teeth all while she stitched shut a shark bite that had taken out a portion of her thigh. It was easy, after a life spent training on the Islands, to think you had seen it all, but Valyn had never seen anything quite like the Flea as he threw his weight against that stone.

It wasn't the cords of muscle standing out in his neck, or the way the veins in his scalp throbbed with the blood beneath, or the sound of his teeth grinding—so loud it seemed his jaw would have to crack. Valyn had seen all that before, seen it dozens of times over in different variations. The thing he had never seen before was the sheer, granitic determination in the Flea's eyes. The Wing leader wasn't looking at Newt or the stone he had to move. He wasn't looking forward to the river or backward to the Urghul behind. He was looking at nothing, staring at the empty air a foot away from his face, his whole attention fixed so fully on that point he seemed to have forgotten his own body, which was bent to breaking beneath the load, forgotten the point of his awful labors, forgotten everything but that one goal, as though his entire life had been aiming at this single moment, this task beside which there was no other and after which nothing else mattered, this moving of the stone.

He failed.

He staggered, exhausted, reset his boots, tried to find new purchase. Newt shook his head.

“No good,” he gasped. “One man can't … lift the world.”

“Fuck that,” the Flea growled as he threw his shoulder against the block.

Valyn was there in a single stride, hitting the rock from the same side, hitting it so hard he felt his shoulder lurch horribly in the socket. The stone didn't budge.

“Get out,” the Aphorist said.

“When I die,” the Flea replied, his voice level, quiet despite the strain, “then you can start giving the orders.” He turned to the leach. “What can you do, Sig?”

She kept her hand on Newt's forehead, but closed her eyes. The plinth shuddered, raining down gravel from where it leaned against the doorframe above. It shifted a few degrees, then fell still. Sigrid made an awful broken sound, some hacked-apart kind of howl.

“She cannot raise the whole weight,” Newt translated. “Not even … with my pain. All men must die, but this is … not your time. Get out.”

The Flea let go of the stone, crossed to kneel beside Sigrid.

“How much more?” he asked.

She looked up from the Aphorist. Tears stood in her blue eyes.

“No,” Newt groaned.

The Flea ignored him.
“How much more?”

At their backs, fifty paces away but obscured by the fort's crumbling buildings, the Urghul were howling. Valyn could hear the cracking of wood hauled aside, the crash of barricades thrown down. They were opening Balendin's gap in the wall, finishing the work they'd begun almost a week earlier. It wouldn't be long before the horses were able to pour through that gap, wouldn't be long before they'd come hunting for survivors.

“This…,” Newt began.

“Is not your choice,” the Flea said. He kept his eyes on the leach. “Sig, I need you to tell me.”

She made a strange, mute gesture, a sort of slice across her arm.

The Flea's face tightened. He nodded, slid his belt knife from the sheath, closed his eyes, then, in a decisive motion, scored the skin, notching a shallow V into the flesh. With the practiced motion of a cook in the kitchen, he flipped the knife, slid the steel beneath his own skin, then started peeling. Valyn stared. There had been a couple of classes on flaying back on the Islands. The accepted wisdom was that it wasn't much use as torture—it hurt too much. Instead of saying useful things, flayed soldiers passed out or went mad. According to the Kettral trainers, no one could take the pain.

Evidently, the phrase
no one
did not include the Flea.

He tore free the ribbon of bloody skin, yanked it off the way he might have pulled a recalcitrant peel from an apple, then went at it again, carving away another strip quickly, but carefully, refusing to let the knife bite so deep it might sever a tendon or artery. Valyn understood it all at once: Sigrid needed pain—that was her well—and the Flea was giving it to her without gutting his own ability to fight. He might die later from gangrene or wet rot, but not today, not until they had escaped. Blood washed his arm. Valyn could see the red cords of twisted muscle laid bare, the filaments of veins.

“Is that enough?” the Flea asked.

Sigrid took the mutilated limb in her hand, then closed her eyes again. This time, when she put her free hand against the stone, it lurched. The leach groaned, a horrifying, broken sound deep in her chest. When she bared her teeth, they were bloody, as though she'd bitten open the inside of her cheek. The stone shifted up another inch, and Valyn lunged forward, seized the Aphorist beneath the armpits, pulling him from the wreckage.

“Clear,” he said. “He's out.”

Sigrid didn't seem to hear him. Her eyes were still closed, her pale face bathed with sweat. She might have been bearing the weight of that massive stone on her own body, letting it crush her slowly into the dirt.

The Flea pulled his arm from her grip, her eyes snapped open, the slab dropped, and the whole wall shuddered with the weight.

“Go,” the Wing leader said, jerking his head toward the river as he hacked a length of cloth from the hem of his blacks, then began to bind the bloody arm.
“Go.”

Valyn heaved the Aphorist onto his back, ignored the man's stifled cry as his broken leg jolted, and began to move over the uneven ground, his eyes fixed on the spot a hundred paces distant where the grassy bank sloped down to the Haag. This far north, the river was barely fifty paces wide. There was a quiet eddy directly ahead, at the base of the bank, but beyond those calm shallows the current surged into a brown-white froth, churning through head-high standing waves and grinding over massive boulders.

The notion that any of them would be swimming that thing was ridiculous. The best that they could hope for was to stay afloat somehow, to keep from being sucked under, pinned beneath the river's weight, and killed. There was no way the legionaries they'd left behind could have survived it. The Kettral spent their whole lives swimming, and Valyn wasn't sure
he
could make it. Not that there was any choice.

He glanced over his shoulder. Sigrid stumbled forward as though in a daze. The Flea had her by an elbow, guiding her on, but he was losing blood despite his hastily bandaged arm, the rich dark skin of his face going gray, ashen.

“Problems for later,” Valyn muttered to himself.

He hitched Newt higher on his shoulder, turned back toward the river, then staggered to a halt. Urghul riders were pouring out of another gap in the southern wall, massing up between the Kettral and the river. They'd found a way through Mierten's Fort, around it, over it—it didn't matter—they were
here,
half a dozen of them, then a dozen, and more coming, lances leveled, faces alight at the sight of their cornered quarry. Valyn slid an ax free of his belt, started to shift the Aphorist around to give himself more room.

“Down,” Newt groaned. “Put me down. In a fight like this … a man needs all his arms.”

Valyn hesitated, then lowered the demolitions master. As he was drawing his second ax, Newt forced himself to his knees, grimaced, almost passed out, steadied himself against the ground with a hand, straightened again, then slipped two knives from the belt at his waist. Knives against mounted riders with spears. It seemed almost pointless, but the worst of the soldier's pain seemed to have passed, and the Aphorist's eyes were sharp and bright as he watched the riders form up for their attack.

The Flea reached them a moment later. He was carrying Sigrid now, cradling the tall woman in his arms as though she were a child. Her lids were open, but her eyes lolled back inside her skull. Gently, patiently, despite the horsemen bearing down upon them, the Wing leader laid her on the dirt, then straightened with a wince.

“We get one chance at this,” he said. “They'll come at us in a wave. There will be a moment when the wave breaks, then another when it is past. That's when we run for the river.”