The Last Mortal Bond Page 3

  “You still believe Long Fist is Meshkent,” Adare said, trying for the hundredth time to wrap her mind around the notion. Failing for the hundredth time.

  “I’m more convinced than ever.”

  “How do you know? Explain it.”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  Adare bridled at the remark. “Try.”

  The kenarang spread his hands. “The … shape of his attacks. The rhythm of them.” He rose, crossing to the map. “He hit us here and here at exactly the same time. Then, half a day later, here, here, and here. All that time, another group was sweeping west, to arrive at Irfeth’s Ford just when the first group had retreated.”

  Adare glanced at the map, the scattering of positions il Tornja had indicated. The events were clear enough, but the pattern—if there was even a pattern—meant nothing. He waved a conciliatory hand. “The human mind was not built for this.”

  She stared at the rivers and mountains, the forests, the small lines indicating armies and positions, willing herself to find some shape in the attacks. “He did something smart?” she asked finally.

  The general shrugged. “Not particularly.”

  Adare suppressed a growl. “Then what?”

  “He did something … inhuman.”

  “Humans are all different,” Adare said, shaking her head. “There’s no such thing as a ‘human’ line of attack. A hundred generals would make a hundred different decisions.”

  “No. They would not.” He smiled, a wide, bright smile. “Sometimes you forget, Adare, that I have fought against thousands of human generals. Two thousand and eight, if you care for the precise figure. You like to think you are unique, that each man and woman is different from the one before, but you are wrong. In all those battles, all those wars, I saw the same things, over and over, the same handful of little tricks, the same set of clumsy gambits and tactics played over and over again with tiny, irrelevant variation. I know the lineaments of a human attack, and this is not that. Long Fist is Meshkent. You can take my word for it. He wants to spread his bloody worship through Vash and Eridroa, and, much though it galls me to admit it, he is winning.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t brilliant.”

  “He doesn’t need to be, when his army outnumbers mine twenty to one. I need more men, Adare. I need the Sons of Flame. And I need a secure southern front. At least until the war is over.” He smiled wolfishly.

  Adare studied her general. The kenarang looked hungry. His eyes were fixed on her, lips parted just enough to show the shadow of teeth. He looked ready to smile or snarl, ready to bite. Of all his carefully cultivated human expressions, this one was easiest to believe. Beneath all the casual banter and bright buckles, Ran il Tornja was a predator, a killer, the greatest general Annur had ever known, and this killer’s face stretched across his features seemed right, true.

  Nothing he shows you is true, she reminded herself.

  He had peeled away one mask, that was all. This hunger and savagery was just one more face beneath all the other faces, a better, subtler act, one she wanted to believe. She could understand the brutal slashing and biting for power. She could control it. The truth of il Tornja, however, was no simple animal snarl. It was something else, something older and worse waiting beneath all the faces, something awful and inhuman, unfathomable as the space between the light of the stars.

  Fear crept over her skin, raising the fine hairs on her arm. With an effort, she suppressed a shudder, forced herself to meet his eyes.

  “And when it’s over?” she asked.

  “Once Meshkent is defeated and the Urghul are driven back…” He smiled wider, pushed back until his chair was balancing on two legs, poised between falling and falling. “Well, then we can look into—how should we say it? The long-term viability of the republican experiment…”

  “And by look into,” Adare said flatly, “you mean kill everyone who doesn’t want me back.”

  “Well…” He spread his hands. “We could kill a few at a time until the others recall the golden glory of Malkeenian rule.”

  Adare shook her head. “It feels wrong. The great emperors of Annur, the ones who presided over a peaceful empire, punished treachery and rewarded those who stayed loyal. I’ve read the Chronicles. Now you want me to turn a blind eye to the treason and idiocy of this ’Kent-kissing council?”

  The kenarang smiled. “I’m in the Chronicles, Adare. I wrote two of them. The great emperors of Annur were great because they did what they needed to do. Whatever they needed to do. Of course, you’ll be putting your own life on the line.…”

  Adare waved a dismissive hand. He was right enough about the risks. It would be easy to arrive in Annur, present herself to the council, then be hauled off promptly to her own execution. The thought made her palms sweat, but there was no point dwelling on it. She’d visited the front, traveled to villages just after Urghul raids, seen the bodies carved open; the corpses spitted on stakes; the charred remains of men, and women, and children, some still sprawled over makeshift altars, others tossed into haphazard piles—the horrifying remnants of what the Urghul called worship.

  Annur—imperial, republican, it hardly mattered—all of Annur was teetering at the edge of a bloody abyss, and she was the Emperor. She had taken that title, had demanded it, not so she could primp atop an uncomfortable throne to the flattery of courtiers, but because she’d believed she could do a good job, a better job, certainly, than the man who had murdered her father. She’d taken the title because she thought she could make life better for the millions inside the empire, protect them, bring peace and prosperity.

  And so far, she’d failed.

  It didn’t matter that Kaden had made an even worse hash of things. It didn’t matter that she was the first emperor in centuries to face a barbarian invasion. It didn’t matter that even her father had failed to predict the chaos that enveloped them all. She had taken the title; it was her job to set things right, to mend the rents dividing Annur. Kaden’s council might have her torn limb from limb if she returned, but they might not. If she returned, there was a chance—and the chance to save Annur, to save the people of Annur, to push back the barbarians and restore some measure of peace, of order, was worth the possibility of her own bloodless head decorating a stake.

  “There is something else,” il Tornja added. “Something you will discover when you reach the city.” He paused. “Your brother has made a friend.”

  “We do that,” Adare replied. “Humans. We form attachments, develop feelings for people, that sort of thing.”

  “If he had befriended a human, I wouldn’t be concerned. The third Annurian representative to the council, the man who goes by the name of Kiel—he is not a man. He is one of my kind.”

  Adare stared stupidly. “Kaden has a Csestriim?”

  Il Tornja chuckled. “Kiel is not a horse or a hunting dog, Adare. I have known him for millennia, and I can assure you, if anyone has anyone, it is Kiel who has your brother, who has possessed his mind and poisoned his will.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Adare demanded.

  “I only just realized the truth myself. When I didn’t recognize the name of the third Annurian delegate, I asked for a painting and description. Unfortunately, the fool responsible sent back a gorgeously inked parchment depicting the wrong person—one of the Kreshkan delegation, evidently. I discovered the error only recently.”

  Adare scrambled to make sense of the revelation. Il Tornja was a weapon, an instrument of destruction. She had him collared and brought to heel, and still she worried that she’d overlooked something, that one day she would give a tug on his leash only to find it gone terribly slack. Learning that there was another Csestriim in the world, one allied with her brother, one over whom she had no control whatsoever … it made her stomach churn.

  “Kiel was the one who drafted the republican constitution,” she observed.

  Il Tornja nodded. “He has never been a lover of your empire. In fact, for hundreds o
f years he has labored to destroy it. Every important coup, every plot against Malkeenian rule—he was behind it.”

  “Except for yours, of course. Except for the coup when you killed my father.”

  He smiled. “Yes. Except for that.”

  Adare studied him, hoping again to read something in those unreadable eyes, to see the gleam of a lie or the hard light of truth. As usual, there was plenty to see. As usual, she couldn’t trust any of it.

  “You’re worried that Kaden knows who you are,” she said.

  “I am certain that Kaden knows who I am. Kiel has told him.”

  Behind her, Sanlitun twisted in his crib and cried out. For a moment, Adare had a horrible vision of the Urghul pouring over the bridge, the pale-skinned horsemen shattering the castle walls, smashing into her room, seizing the child.…

  She stood abruptly, turned so that il Tornja couldn’t see her face, and crossed the room to the crib. She watched her son a moment, watched him breathe, then lifted him gently into her arms. When she was certain she’d mastered her expression, she turned back to the kenarang.

  “I’ll go,” she said wearily. “I’ll try to mend the breach. I can’t promise more than that.”

  Il Tornja smiled, teeth bright in the lamplight. “Mending first. Later, perhaps, we can see to more … permanent solutions.”

  3

  “They wanted you,” Maut Amut said. “The attackers wanted you.”

  Kaden paused in his climb, leaned against the banister as he caught his breath, then shook his head. “You can’t be sure of that.”

  Amut continued on, taking the stairs two at a time, indifferent to the gleaming weight of his Aedolian steel. He reached the next landing before realizing that Kaden had fallen behind.

  “My apologies, First Speaker,” he said, bowing his head. “My shame makes me impatient.”

  The guardsman fixed his eyes on the stairs, settled a hand on the pommel of his broadblade, and waited. Even at his most animated, the First Shield of the Aedolian Guard was a stiff man, marmoreal, all right angles and propriety. Standing there motionless, waiting for Kaden to regain his strength, he looked like something carved, or hammered out on an anvil.

  Kaden shook his head again. “You don’t need to apologize for the fact that I’ve gone soft.”

  Amut didn’t move. “Intarra’s Spear is a daunting climb, even for hard men.”

  “It’s only thirty floors to my study,” Kaden replied, forcing his legs into motion once more. He made the climb almost every day, but always at a leisurely pace. More and more leisurely, he now realized, as the months had passed. Amut, on the other hand, had pushed hard since they left the council chamber, and Kaden’s legs had begun to burn by the tenth floor. He put from his mind for the moment the grim fact that he planned to climb well beyond the Spear’s thirtieth floor.

  “When I lived with the monks,” he said, pausing again when he reached Amut’s landing, “a climb like this would have been a rest, a respite.”

  “You are the First Speaker of the republic. You have more important things to do than tire yourself on the stairs.”

  “You’re the First Shield of the Aedolian Guard,” Kaden countered, “and you find the time to run these stairs every morning.” He’d seen the man training a few times, always well before dawn, always in full armor with a bag of sand across his shoulders, hammering up the steps, his face a mask of determination.

  “I run them every morning,” Amut replied grimly, “and still I failed in my duty.”

  Kaden turned away from the stairs above to face the guardsman. He made his voice hard.

  “Enough of your shame. I am alive. The council is safe. This self-reproach is an indulgence, one that will shed no light on what happened here.”

  Amut glanced up at him, ground his teeth, then nodded. “As you say, First Speaker.”

  “Talk while we climb,” Kaden said. There were still fifteen more floors before they reached the study. “More slowly, this time. What happened up here?”

  Hand still on his sword, Amut started up again. He spoke without turning his head, as though addressing the empty staircase before him.

  “Someone infiltrated the palace.”

  “Not hard,” Kaden observed. “There must be a thousand people who come through the gates every day—servants, messengers, merchants, carters.…”

  “Then they gained access to the Spear.”

  Kaden tried to puzzle that through. There was only one entrance to Intarra’s Spear, a high, arched doorway burned or carved or quarried from the unscratchable ironglass of the tower walls. Aedolians guarded it day and night.

  “Your men below…”

  “The Spear is hardly a sealed fortress. Imperial…” Amut shook his head, then corrected himself. “Republican business is conducted here. People come and go. My men at the door are tasked with stopping obvious threats, but they cannot stop everyone, not without causing untold disruption.”

  Kaden nodded, seeing the outlines of the problem.

  Intarra’s Spear was ancient, older than human memory, even older than the most venerable Csestriim records. The architects of the Dawn Palace had constructed their fortress around it without knowing who had built the tower itself, or how, or why. Kaden had dim childhood memories of his sister reading tome after tome exploring the mystery, codex after codex, each one with a theory, an argument, something that seemed like evidence. Sometimes, Adare, Sanlitun had finally told her, you must accept that there are limits to knowledge. It is possible that we will never know the true story of the Spear.

  And all the time, of course, he had known.

  “I told your father the Spear’s purpose,” Kiel had said to Kaden months earlier, only days after they reclaimed the Dawn Palace, “just as I will tell you now.”

  The two of them—the First Speaker of the fledgling Annurian Republic and the deathless Csestriim historian—had been sitting cross-legged in the shadow of a bleeding willow, at the edge of a small pond in the Dowager’s Garden. A breeze rucked the green-brown water; light winked from the tiny waves. The willow’s trailing branches splattered shadows. Kaden waited.

  “The tower is,” the historian continued, “at its very top, an altar, a sacred space, a place where this world touches that of the gods.”

  Kaden shook his head. “I have stood on the tower’s top a dozen times. There is air, cloud, nothing more.”

  Kiel gestured to a narrow insect striding the water’s surface. The pond’s water dimpled beneath the creature’s meager weight. It twitched long, eyelash-thin legs, skimming from darkness to light, then back into darkness.

  “To the strider,” he said, “that water is unbreakable. She will never puncture the surface. She will never know the truth.”

  “Truth?”

  “That there is another world—dark, vast, incomprehensible—sliding beneath the skin of the world she knows. Her mind is not built to understand this truth. Depth means nothing to her. Wet means nothing. Most of the time, when she looks at the water, she sees the trees reflected back, or the sun, or the sky. She knows nothing of the pond’s weight, the way it presses on whatever slips beneath that surface.”

  The insect moved across the reflection of Intarra’s Spear.

  “The reflection of the tower is not the tower,” Kiel continued, then turned away from the pond and the water strider both. Kaden followed his gaze. For a long time, the two of them studied the gleaming mystery at the heart of the Dawn Palace. “This tower, too,” Kiel said at last, gesturing to the sun-bright lance dividing the sky above them, “is only a reflection.”

  Kaden shook his head. “A reflection of what?”

  “The world beneath our world. Or above it. Beside it. Prepositions were not built to carry this truth. Language is a tool, like a hammer or an ax. There are tasks for which it is ill suited.”

  Kaden turned back to the water. The water strider was gone. “And the gods can pass beneath the surface inside the tower?”

  Kiel nodde
d. “We learned this too late in the long war against your people. Two of our warriors stumbled across the ritual, but by the time they had climbed to the tower’s top, the gods were gone. Only the human carcasses remained.”

  “The human vessels of the young gods,” Kaden said after a moment’s thought.

  Kiel nodded.

  “How?”

  “The obviate. The ritual Ciena demanded when Triste put the knife to her own chest.”

  Kaden frowned. “How does it work?”

  “This,” the historian replied, “my people were unable to learn. The tower is a gate, this much we know, but it seems that only the gods hold the keys.”

  A gate for the gods, Kaden thought grimly as he climbed the stairs behind Maut Amut, his own breath hot and snarled in his chest. There was nothing to say that whoever had broken into the Spear earlier in the day understood that truth. Then again, there was nothing to say they didn’t.

  Carefully, deliberately, he stepped clear of that avenue of thought. He could hear Scial Nin speaking, the old abbot’s voice calm and quiet: Consider the task at hand, Kaden. The more you try to see, the less you will notice.

  “The attackers could have posed as slaves or ministers,” Amut was saying. “Visiting diplomats, almost anything…”

  It made sense. Most of the Spear was empty—an unbreakable gleaming shell—but the earliest Annurian emperors had built inside that shell, constructing thirty wooden floors—thirty floors inside a tower that could have accommodated ten times that number—before giving up, leaving the thousands of feet above them vacant and echoing. The lowest of those human levels were given over to pedestrian concerns: ministerial offices and audience chambers, a great circular dining room affording views over the entire palace. Three whole floors were devoted to suites for visiting dignitaries, men and women who would return home to boast of their nights spent in the tallest structure in the world, a tower surely built by the gods. And then, of course, there was all the necessary service apparatus and the cooks, slaves, and servants such service entailed.

  If anything, Amut had understated the case—there was constant traffic in and out of the Spear, and no way for the Aedolians to search everyone on every floor. The attackers, however, hadn’t been skulking around in the kitchens. Somehow, they had gained the thirtieth floor, a place that was supposed to be secure.