The Last Mortal Bond Read online

  “You smell that?” she asked.

  Talal nodded. “I noticed it not too long ago. Thought about waking you, but it’s pretty far off. Nothing urgent, and I figured you could use another hour of rest after that swim.”

  “After that swim I could sleep for a week.” She twisted at the waist, cringing as the muscles seized, then relaxed. She knuckled them for a moment, then took a deep breath through her nose, sorting the before-dawn scents of the island.

  There was salt, and beneath the salt, sand. The warm green reek of vegetation farther up the cliff, hanging vines and twisting shoots, languid and sinuous. It still amazed her, whenever she paused to think about it, how much, how well she could smell. It was like she had lived her whole life blind, and then woken one day to a riot of shape and color. There were a few fish rotting down the beach. She could make out the shit of the seabirds dried by the sun, crusted on the rocks above. And she could smell the smoke.

  “Could just be someone up early,” Talal suggested. “Kitchen fires over on Buzzard’s Bay.”

  Gwenna closed her eyes, dragged the air over her tongue, testing it, tasting it. Someone was burning wood and dung, but not just that. There were other smells twisted into the scent, stranger and less wholesome. Even after a year away, the training came back to her easily. Paint was burning. And hair. And flesh.

  She exhaled heavily, suddenly eager to have the air out of her lungs.

  “It’s not just kitchen fires.”

  Talal studied her for a moment, then nodded.

  “Are we going?” Annick asked.

  The sniper had risen silently to join them while Gwenna was still puzzling over the smoke. Annick hadn’t slept much longer than Gwenna herself, but if she felt worn out or sore from the swim, she didn’t show it. Her smoke steel blades were already buckled, and she had her shortbow in one hand, the quiver strapped across her back.

  “We’re in no shape for a fight,” Talal observed. “Whatever’s going on here, it’s been going on for months. Another day won’t change it.”

  “You’re probably right,” Gwenna agreed. The smoke was stronger now. Thicker. It reminded her of Andt-Kyl, of the burning of an entire town. “On the other hand, some days are more important than others.”

  “You think this is one of them?”

  “Only one way to find out,” she replied.

  * * *

  The trail up to the ridgeline was rocky and steep, so steep in places that Gwenna found herself searching for toeholds in the pocketed limestone, balancing on precarious buttresses, hauling herself over tiered ledges using whatever purchase she could find.

  At least it’s not more fucking swimming, she reminded herself.

  By the time she reached the crenellated ridge, however, swimming sounded like a relief. You might drown in the water, but the waves wouldn’t cut you to pieces one nasty slice at a time. Her palms were bleeding, and her knees. She could smell her own blood on the stones, and Talal’s, and Annick’s.

  “I remembered this being easier,” she muttered, straightening up. “There was one time…”

  The remaining words died in her mouth. From atop the ridge she could see almost the entire island of Hook, the dark waters of the sound beyond, and still farther to the north, the low-slung bulk of Qarsh. That is, she could have seen Qarsh if she’d thought to look at it. Instead, her gaze was glued to the conflagration raging below, a massive fire roaring through the streets of the island’s only settlement. Hook had been a shitty little town even in the best of times, a haven for pirates and smugglers, criminals whose luck had run out on the mainland, whores, drug peddlers, and fishermen, both the enterprising and the insane. It was an amusing irony of the Islands that Hook was allowed to persist just across the water from the empire’s most powerful military force, but the Eyrie had decided there were uses to a civilian settlement on the island, regardless how corrupt, and so the small town had survived, even prospered in its twisted way.

  It wasn’t prospering anymore.

  “Someone’s burning down the whole west end of the town,” Gwenna observed quietly. “I guess they got tired of the smell.”

  “The fire was set on purpose?” Talal asked. “You’re sure?”

  “Look at the flames,” Gwenna said, gesturing. “They started in three places at the same time. There. There. There.”

  Talal glanced at Annick. The sniper just shrugged.

  “How long ago?” the leach asked.

  “Not long. None of the buildings have collapsed yet.”

  They hadn’t collapsed, but they were getting ready to. Half a dozen roofs had already fallen in. Flames lapped from windows and gaping doors. Timber framing groaned as the sudden strain torqued it out of place and crucial beams gave way. Buzzard’s Bay itself was bright with borrowed fire, slick waves reflecting back the shifting red and yellow, as though the water itself were burning.

  “Someone’s pissed off,” Gwenna said. “I think we can be pretty sure of that.”

  “It’s Hook,” Annick replied. “Someone’s always pissed off.”

  “And the Kettral aren’t there anymore,” Talal said. “To keep them in line.”

  Gwenna nodded slowly. The Eyrie had never really bothered to police the southern island, and it wasn’t unusual to find bloated bodies floating facedown in Buzzard’s Bay, to hear screaming from inside the garish taverns built out over the water on rotting stilts. The Kettral didn’t care about the private vendettas of pirates and profiteers. Open conflict, however, was destabilizing, and whenever some overzealous captain took it upon himself to turn the Island into his private kingdom, the Eyrie’s response was invariably quick and conclusive, the message clear: Kill each other if you want, but do it quietly.

  Obviously, no one was sending that message any longer.

  “Not our problem,” Annick concluded. “We’re here for the birds, not to bring Hook back into the Annurian Empire.”

  “Republic,” Gwenna said absently.

  Talal was still studying the town. “We could take a look,” he said.

  Gwenna watched the fire rage a moment. Probably Annick was right. Probably the hot, smoldering violence that had always plagued Hook had finally exploded. On the other hand, whoever started that fire had taken some care to see it done right. It wasn’t a stretch to think it might have something to do with the assholes on the birds, the ones who had sunk the Wish.

  “We go down,” Gwenna said finally, “find a few poor bastards who aren’t throwing water on the blaze, and figure out what the fuck’s going on.”

  * * *

  It was worse up close.

  Up close, Gwenna could hear the crackling of the blaze, the cries of anger, and terror, and pain. The townsfolk of Hook raced back and forth in a chaotic effort to extinguish the fire, but they were doing a piss-poor job of it, screaming recriminations and bellowing threats instead of working together. When she emerged from the cover of a narrow alley on the unburning edge of the town, Gwenna could feel the heat on her face, hotter than the noonday sun, even at a distance.

  No one so much as glanced at her. Not at her, or Annick, or Talal. It made sense—a few unfamiliar faces didn’t mean much when half the town was burning down. Skulking, if you didn’t do it right, tended to draw attention, and so rather than skulk, Gwenna and her Wing moved through the streets quickly, purposefully, as though, like everyone else, they were going somewhere. The important thing was to keep moving. To keep moving and keep listening, trying to pull the useful information from the noise.

  Unfortunately, while there was a great deal of noise, the inhabitants of Hook proved short on useful information. It seemed common knowledge that someone had set the town ablaze intentionally. People understood that the western end was burning while the eastern half was relatively safe. A few opportunistic fools, arms piled with dubious treasure, were trying to organize raids into the burning streets. It was idiotic. Gwenna could tell just from the sound—a greedy, growing roar—that no one going in now was likely
to come out alive, but she hadn’t crossed the Iron Sea, swimming the last few dozen miles, just to wag her finger at looters.

  There was an abrupt surge of noise a few blocks to the north—shouting, screaming, chanting, then a vicious explosion, then relative silence.

  “That was a flickwick,” Gwenna said.

  Annick pointed. “North. By the docks.” She switched to Kettral hand sign, hooking a finger. Move out?

  Gwenna glanced at Talal, then nodded.

  “Docks. Three approaches. Annick, west. Talal, east. Rally point is the ridge above the beach.”

  It wasn’t far—maybe a hundred paces—to where the buildings gave way before a broad open square fronting the docks. From the head of the street, Gwenna could see the whole harborside, the western shore ablaze, the east lit only by a few lanterns and lamps flickering in the windows. What looked like most of the population of Hook had gathered in that square—maybe two thousand men and women crammed together, faces smudged with smoke and soot, streaked with sweat, fitfully illuminated by the fire raging through the town. Despite the fire to the west, they were all looking north, toward the harbor.

  Well back on the center dock, high as a house, talons lodged in the rotting planks, perched a kettral; huge, silent, black eyes glittering and gelid. Gwenna hadn’t seen a bird up close for nearly a year, and for a moment she, like the townsfolk before her, could only stare. In the stories told across Annur, the kettral were cast as glorious flying mounts, huge horses with beaks and wings. So wrong, Gwenna thought, gazing up at the bird. The kettral had been trained to accept human riders, but that training did nothing to obscure the more ancient, enduring truth: they were not mounts, they were predators.

  With an effort, Gwenna shifted her eyes from the bird to the five men who stood on the dock just in front of it. Despite their Kettral blacks, the Kettral swords buckled over their backs, the Kettral bows held ready in their hands, Gwenna recognized none of them. They’d formed up in a standard diamond wedge, and it was clear why: twenty feet in front of them lay a dozen bodies. A few were still feebly convulsing, twitching, trying to drag themselves clear. Most were perfectly still, the flesh slack, mangled, tossed aside.

  The situation was as obvious as it was ugly: the mob came for the men with the bird, tried to attack, then ended up flattened by a few flickwicks. The five Kettral—if they were Kettral—had a good position. Any halfway decent sniper could take them down, but it didn’t look like there were many snipers in the disoriented mass. Most people, clearly rousted from their beds by the growing fire, were barely clothed. Aside from the Kettral, only one man that Gwenna could see carried a weapon—a sailor, judging from his gait. The man lugged a bare saber, but was otherwise naked, his cock swinging in the wind; interrupted while pissing, or fucking, or sleeping off his drunk. He didn’t look like much of a threat, especially not to a Wing of Kettral.

  Gwenna shifted her eyes back to the men on the dock. The one in front, a tall, wide son of a bitch with a shaved head and skin almost as pale as hers, was raising a hand. He smiled smugly, as though he were a popular atrep preparing to address a gathering of his most fervent supporters.

  If he expects to make a speech, Gwenna thought, he’s going to be disappointed.

  Between the fire and the mob she could barely make out voices a few feet away. When the Kettral opened his mouth, however, the words emerged hard-edged and clear, as though he were speaking directly into her ear.

  Which meant that one of them was a leach. Gwenna hadn’t expected a milk run when Kaden asked her to go back to the Islands. It had been obvious, even from Annur, that there would be blood on a lot of blades before the whole thing was over. This, however, was looking worse and worse. She gritted her teeth.

  “Your town is a shithole,” the man began, smiling all the time as though offering the most fulsome praise. “It is a shithole, but we didn’t want to burn it down.”

  The mob surged forward at that, men and women bellowing their rage and shame. They’d almost reached the dock when one of the soldiers raised a starshatter above his head. The fuse was already burning—a hot, bright point of light against the darkness beyond. The crowd trembled, hesitated, then recoiled, as though the whole mass were a single creature, one that had learned through hard discipline to avoid that horrible, brilliant light.

  The speaker smiled even more widely, white teeth bright in the fire.

  “So, as a gesture of good faith…” He extended one hand, palm up, slowly and dramatically toward the western portion of the town. “… we have only burned half of it. At least for now.”

  There were shouted protests. Accusations. Screamed curses.

  “No one here did nothing ta you!”

  “My husband’s dead. He’s dead! He’s dead!”

  “If you didn’t want to burn the town, then why did you burn it, you bastards?”

  The speaker put a cupped hand behind his ear at this last question.

  “Why?” He cocked his head, as though to hear better. “Did someone ask why?” He waited a moment, through a few more curses and questions, then nodded vigorously. “Ah, I think I understand the difficulty. Elsewhere in the world, this would not be a problem. Elsewhere people have a notion of law, crime, and consequence. Here on Hook, however, you have been … deprived of such notions.”

  He leaned back on his heels, tucked his thumbs into his leather belt, and smiled even more widely. He wasn’t much to look at—a wide, heavy face, lips that twisted up cruelly whenever he wasn’t talking—but the son of a bitch had the voice of a trained orator—rich, and strong, and supple. He had the voice, and obviously he liked to use it.

  “It’s not your fault, of course,” he went on. “No people can be expected to circumscribe their own … baser impulses without the outside imposition of law, of order. Formerly, the Eyrie let you all run amok because it suited their purposes to have you disordered, fragmented. A grievous lapse,” he said, shaking his head. “A lamentable lapse. Fortunately, we are here to introduce you to these notions. This,” he went on, leveling a steady finger at the flames, “is justice.”

  For a few moments, the mob just stared, first at the man in Kettral blacks, then at the flames consuming their miserable homes. To Gwenna’s ear it was all a lot of horseshit, long on talk and short on explanation. On the other hand, no one was trying to kill the bastard anymore, so he had to be doing something right. In fact, when Gwenna turned to scrutinize the faces around her, she found them filled with fear and resentment, but no confusion. Protest they might, but they understood why the men in black were burning their homes. She shifted her attention back to the dock.

  “When you harbor dissidents,” the leader said, allowing himself a flourish of rhetorical anger, “this is what happens. When you take rebels into your miserable cellars and hovels, we will burn them down.” He spat onto the dock. The gesture looked fake, somehow, like a performance he’d rehearsed back in the barracks. “You should be grateful. The shacks we burned weren’t fit for the rats you shared them with. Try to do better when you rebuild. And when those creeping vermin come to you again begging for help and hiding, remember that I’ll pay a gold Annurian sun for every head. On the other hand, the next time a field of our yellowbloom is burned, I’ll be back to torch a dozen more houses.” He shrugged. “Your choice.”

  The mob started to growl once more, but another voice cut through the rumbling discontent.

  “You want a head, you bastard?”

  Gwenna spun to find a woman standing on a flight of low stone steps almost directly behind her. She was tall, taller than Gwenna herself, long limbed and dark skinned, hair shaved down to the scalp. She was fine-featured, almost aristocratic in her face and bearing, but though she spoke with chin raised and her dark eyes flashing, Gwenna could smell the fear on her, a bone-deep fear held just barely in check. At first glance, in the night and fickle firelight, she appeared unarmed. As the mob stared, however, she pulled a blade from over her right shoulder. A short weapon, smoke
steel and carried in the Kettral style. Despite the blade, however, the woman wasn’t dressed like the men on the docks.

  Instead of blacks, she wore a sleeveless tunic and dark breeches, practical enough in the hot island weather, but a little too loose for good fighting attire. She knew how to hold the sword, which was more than you could say for most of the idiots swaggering around Hook, and had chosen her position well—high ground, back to a building, double escape routes—except for an open right flank, where a long alley offered a perfect angle of attack. It took less than a heartbeat to see it, but seeing was the easy part. What did it mean? The woman defying the Kettral on the dock was almost Kettral herself, but imperfect, like someone who’d been spying on the Eyrie for years without taking part in any of the actual training.

  “If you want a head,” she shouted again, voice fraying on the sharp edge of her growing panic, “then why don’t you come and take mine? I’m not hiding in a cellar, you murdering bastards. I’m right here. You want my head? Come and take it.”

  She had the attention of the men on the dock—that was pretty fucking obvious. Her sudden appearance had scraped the condescending smile off their leader’s face, and two of the soldiers behind him had half raised their bows. It was a pointless gesture; the woman could step back into the open doorway the moment they put an arrow in the air. The men on the dock seemed to understand this, and neither bothered trying to get off a shot.

  People shifted, moving clear of the coming violence, opening a straight path from the Kettral to the lone woman on the stairs, an empty avenue, as though for some emperor’s procession. The frightened woman held her ground. Which meant she was either very stupid, or had an end beyond simple taunting in mind.

  “I hope you’re pleased, Qora,” said the Kettral leader, drawling the long first syllable of her name. “People died here because of you.” The tone was casual, almost lazy, but Gwenna saw the man shift. She caught a whiff, below all the smoke and sweat, of the sudden eagerness pouring off him.