The Last Mortal Bond (99 page)

“… is willing to risk bringing that leach close enough to mount a serious attack. He might be handy with lightning, but he'll die if someone puts an arrow in his eye. And we spend a lot of time here in Rassambur learning to put arrows in eyes.”

Kaden exhaled slowly, trying to order his thoughts. “Even if that's true, we're trapped as long as we stay here, and the trap is only going to get tighter. If we're going to get out, we need to get out
now
. Have you talked to Gerra?”

“Gerra will decide what he decides in his own time,” Pyrre said, then cocked her head to one side, studying him. “I don't remember you being so afraid, Kaden. The last time, back in those miserably frigid mountains of yours, there were moments when you seemed almost … calm. Where did that go?”

“Last time, there wasn't as much to be afraid of.”

It was a weak response, and it did next to nothing to quench the question in the assassin's eyes. And yet, what else could he say? There was no explaining the god locked inside of him, raging and thrashing by day and night, no explaining the nihilistic temptations of the
vaniate,
no explaining that the trance had become more dangerous than the panic it replaced. Revealing any corner of the truth to Pyrre would see him dead—that much was clear. If she knew he bore the god she loathed inside his flesh, she'd cut him and the god to bloody shreds.

Maybe that would be best
.

All over again he felt the doubt, a thick tide rising inside him. He turned away before the assassin could see it in his eyes.

*   *   *

It was night, and Meshkent was awake, raging in the back of Kaden's mind. More and more, he was learning to keep the god kenneled, to mute the endless demands for freedom and power, tamping them down until the voice was almost as incoherent as the wind over stone—constant and cold, but meaningless. Even when Kaden could ignore those words, however, he could feel the god there, a blight, a rabid creature that needed to be put down. All that fight, the clawing and the biting, it was the opposite of what il Tornja had described, and once again the
kenarang
's words drifted across Kaden's thoughts:
The beauty of a life lived free, unenslaved by brutish passions …

“Can't sleep?”

Kaden turned to find Triste's slender shadow framed inside the door to the stone house. After a heartbeat's hesitation, she stepped out onto the ledge. Moonlight glinted off her eyes, off a belt knife she held before her, clutching it tentatively in one hand. For just a moment, he had the ridiculous notion that she had come outside to kill him, to plunge that meager weapon into his heart. The thought aroused more curiosity than fear.

All human life ends somehow,
he thought.

As Triste crossed the stone to sit beside him, however, he realized she carried a lobe of sugar cactus in her other hand. The knife was a tool, not a weapon, and for a while the only sound was the wet slice of the steel through the vegetable's flesh.

“Here,” she said finally, offering him a slice.

Give yourself to me,
Meshkent hissed silently, something inside the god responding to another human voice,
and I will tear this hovel down
.

Be silent,
Kaden replied.
You are a sickness. A plague
.

These priests have fattened you on lies.…

BE SILENT!

The god went suddenly, utterly still. Kaden stared down into the pit he had built to pen in the divine, tried to keep his balance as he studied the mind inside his mind.

There was a knife-edge ridge back in the Bone Mountains, a mile-long razor of stone connecting two peaks. From time to time, the monks ordered their older acolytes to traverse the ridge—it was an exercise, among other things, about holding fear in check. There was no easy way to move over the rock; in most places it was almost impossible simply to walk along it. One gust of wind could tumble you into the abyss on either side. Kaden remembered it all in perfect frozen detail, holding the cold granite of the ridgetop, moving hand over hand as he searched for footholds in the steep walls. Sometimes the easiest passage was on the west side of the ridge, sometimes on the east. To get to the end, you had to keep switching, climbing back and forth over that jagged knife-edge, knowing that a slip on either side would mean the end.

Yes, it was an exercise about the controlling of fear, but Kaden had begun to suspect that, like most tasks the monks assigned their pupils, it was more than that. There was no safe place on that ridgeline. No flat ground where a boy could stop and rest. The only hope was in constant movement, constant change, climbing back and forth over that frigid stone, the fathoms of unforgiving air spread out below.

His own mind felt like that ridgeline now. If he stumbled too far to one side, Meshkent would seize him; if he slipped to the other, he would fall into the
vaniate
. The mind of the god and the emptiness of the Csestriim trance were each an abyss: enormous, endless, stretching to the very edge of thought. His self, on the other hand, the part of him that still felt like
him,
was no more than that narrow ridge, the stone rough in his hands, and crumbling.

Submit to me,
Meshkent growled, his voice somehow impossibly distant and right inside the ear at the same time.

No
.

Grimly, Kaden shifted across the ridgeline away from the god. The
vaniate
beckoned beneath his feet. It seemed impossible that he had ever not known how to enter that emptiness. It was as easy as falling.

“What does it feel like?”

Triste's words jerked him free of his mind's vertiginous ridge. Kaden turned to find her staring at him, eyes wide but hard in the darkness.

“The god?” he asked.

She nodded.

“It feels…,” he searched for the words, “like a great weight, a madness heavy as lead.” He hesitated. “I can hear him.”

Triste leaned forward slightly, as though Meshkent's commands might carry on the air, as though his words were something she might hear if she drew close enough. “What does it sound like?”

Kaden shook his head, trying to find the right language. Failing. After a while he shifted to face Triste—he couldn't say why—mirroring her cross-legged pose with his own. He felt carved out, hollowed by the running and the fighting and the lying. Suddenly, it was all he could do to sit upright.

“It sounds like Long Fist,” he said at last. “Not the actual timbre of the voice…,” he struggled for the words, “but the force.”

Tears slicked Triste's eyes, as though someone had smeared moonlight across her cheeks. “At least you can hear him. Talk to him.”

Kaden shook his head. “He thought he would inhabit me the way he had that Urghul. He almost succeeded.…”

Triste watched him in silence for a long time.

“And…,” she prodded finally.

“And he couldn't. The Shin taught me just enough.”

“Enough
what
?”

“Enough to control my mind. Divide it. Evacuate a space, seal it off.”

“But I don't know any of that,” Triste protested. “And Ciena's trapped inside me just the same way.”

Kaden shook his head again. “I don't know, Triste. I don't understand it. I can barely articulate what's happening to me.”

“Did he tell you…,” Triste asked tentatively. “The
obviate…”

Kaden just shook his head.

For a while they sat in silence. Voices rose in the center of the mesa, laughing, then falling away. Kaden glanced over at the house, the cottage of two dead men that had become their prison. There was a time when he would have been thinking, scheming, trying to find some way out. He remembered that old, animal urgency. Remembered it—but couldn't feel it. For the first time, the old Shin expression made sense:
You live in your mind
. The two of them might be trapped inside Rassambur, but they would have no more freedom, no
true
freedom, even if they wandered alone through the most remote valleys of the Bone Mountains. The mind was the cage, and there was no escaping it. Not without dying.

“Why haven't you killed her?” he asked, looking over at Triste again.

The girl raised a hand to her chest, as though she felt something moving there, something she didn't recognize. The Skullsworn had provided them with desert robes not unlike those worn by the Shin, but Triste hadn't changed out of the simple pants and tunic she'd been wearing when he found her days earlier. He could see the scars running the length of her arm; they looked silver in the moonlight, almost beautiful. Her fingernails had grown back—the ones that Ekhard Matol had torn away—but they were ridged and ragged. Some things, once broken, could never be fully fixed.

Her face hardened at the question. “I won't…”

“I don't mean the
obviate,
” Kaden said, raising a hand to forestall her. “That would save her, not hurt her. But if you don't go back to the Spear, if you don't perform the ritual, you can destroy Ciena, or damage her so badly she will never touch this world again.”

“Only by killing myself.”

Kaden shrugged. It seemed a trivial objection. “You're going to die anyway. We all are. If you hate the goddess so much, you can take her with you.” He paused, turning the next proposition over in his mind before he made it. “We could kill them both.”

Triste stared at him, lips parted. “What happened to saving everyone? To defeating the Csestriim and preserving humanity? That's why you kept me locked up in your Spear in the first place, right? That's why you came after me when I escaped. All you
cared
about was the
obviate,
to get your goddess out, let her free, to rescue her, and to Hull with the carcass you left behind.…”

She trailed off, breathless, chest heaving.

“Maybe I cared about the wrong thing,” Kaden replied quietly. “I keep thinking about what we've seen—the Annurians slaughtering the monks back in Ashk'lan; the Ishien in the Dead Heart; Adiv and your mother; the conspirators that helped to overthrow the empire; Adare, who murdered Valyn, then lied to me about it.… Why would we want to preserve that? Why would we want to save
any
of it?”

“I don't,” Triste said. “I'm not trying to save the goddess or your 'Kent-kissing empire. It can all
burn
. I'll set fire to it myself.…”

“We can do that,” Kaden said.

Meshkent roared in the chasm of his mind. Kaden stared down into the bottomless emptiness of the
vaniate
. It would be so easy to fall. He gestured from Triste toward the real cliff's edge, the verge of Rassambur's sheer-walled mesa, just a dozen paces away. “We can end it right here.”

When Triste finally replied, her voice was small, lost. “I don't want to die.”

Kaden stared at her. She had come so close so many times already. “Why not?”

She shook her head helplessly. “I don't
know
.”

“There is only more of this, Triste. More hiding, more hunger, more torture.”

“We might get out. We might escape.”

Kaden shook his head wearily. “It doesn't matter. Rassambur isn't the prison.” He tapped a finger against the side of his skull. “
This
is.”

Her lips twisted back. She looked as though she were getting ready to leap on him, to rip out his throat with her teeth, only she didn't move. The sound, when it came, wasn't a scream, but a hopeless sob. He watched her, watched her shoulders heave, studied her perfect, mutilated body as it convulsed with grief.

“This is what I mean,” he said quietly.

She didn't reply. Just shielded her face with her hands.

“How can this,” he gestured to her with one hand, “be right? Long Fist told me, before we came after you, that this is what we are for, but how can that be
true
?” He cocked his head to the side. “You are like a fish pulled from the water. This struggle, this suffering—you can't breathe it. None of us can.”

Slowly Triste raised her head. Tangles of black hair fell across her face, but her eyes were fixed on him, steady, even as that unnamed grief continued to wrack her body. Meshkent shifted inside Kaden's mind as though he felt the girl's suffering, as though he were feeding off it.

“There is more,” Triste said quietly, her voice like something torn apart. The tears still coursed down her cheeks, but she made no move to scrub them away.

“More what?”

“More to…” She gestured helplessly to him, to herself. “To this. To us. To life.”

“That's the cruelest part of it,” Kaden replied. “That belief. That hope. It's worse than all Meshkent's agonies.
That's
what keeps us here; it's what makes us accept our suffering. The young gods aren't just the children of Ciena and Meshkent; they are their generals, the keepers of their jails.” He shook his head at the memory of Long Fist sitting across the fire from him in a hide tent in the Waist. “He said we were instruments. We are slaves.”

He rose slowly to his feet, muscles and bones protesting. More of Meshkent's work there. He scrutinized that pain a moment, then set it aside. They lived in a world twisted by the god, but now the god himself was trapped. Kaden lifted Triste's belt knife from the stone. The blade was barely three inches long, and somewhat dull, but it would do. Bedisa wove the souls of living beings so weakly into their bodies.…

He placed the point against the inside of his arm, dragged the notched steel over his skin. Meshkent hissed and twisted. Kaden turned away from the god, studying the dark blood welling up behind the blade. Pain came with the blood, bright and hot.