Brian Staveley - The Last Mortal Bond

“Your choice,” he whispered, leaning forward until his mouth was just beside her ear. “Silence, or death.”

* * *

“Where is Kaden?”

Adare’s only response was to twist awkwardly, tossing her head from side to side in a pointless effort to throw off the hood.

“Don’t bother,” Valyn said. “It won’t come off. And don’t bother screaming-we’re in the storm drain two dozen paces below the streets.”

That had been the trickiest part of the whole grab. The munitions were ready to hand, and the hood, but it had taken Valyn the better part of the preceding night to find a quick route from the street where he’d kidnapped his sister to someplace he could safely interrogate her. The narrow tunnel into which he’d brought her was barely high enough to stand up straight. A few inches of filthy water trickled over his boots, draining away toward one of the canals. Dark stains, the high-water marks of earlier storms, ran along the walls. It wasn’t the perfect place-there was always the chance they’d stumble across a handful of vagrants, men and women desperate enough to make a home out of the drain during the dry season-but then, nothing was perfect. Most people he could frighten off, and anyone he couldn’t frighten, he could kill. Besides, he didn’t expect to need a lot of time.

“Who are you?” Adare demanded, her voice high, strident. “What do you want?”

“I want to know where Kaden is,” he said again. “Did you kill him?”

Adare turned her head back and forth, more slowly this time, as though she could see anything in the darkness. The rank red scent of thorny panic poured off her, along with a confusion that reeked of rancid oil, both smells so thick it was a wonder she hadn’t cracked already.

If only you’d been weak, he thought grimly.

“They’ll be searching for me,” she said. “People will be looking.…”

“They’ll be following your horse. Which is at least a mile off by now.”

“They’ll double back.…”

He nodded. “In time to find you dead.”

Adare went perfectly still, as though she were only now understanding the situation. Standing there in the murky water, bag over her head, wrists tied behind her back, she didn’t look like an emperor. She looked like a frightened woman torn from her home, ripped out of the fabric of everything she found familiar.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

A part of him was tempted to draw it out, to make her guess, to breathe in her terror when she finally started to shake.

“I’m your brother,” he said instead. “The one you tried to kill.”

The running water carved a wet course through the silence. Adare’s shallow, rapid breathing scratched against the close stone walls.

“Valyn,” she whispered finally.

His name sounded like a curse.

“Hello, sister.”

“How did you…”

“Live?”

“I stood at the end of the dock,” she said, the words low, as though she were talking only to herself, as though he weren’t there at all. “For half the day I watched them drag the lake. Every body they pulled free, I started shaking, thinking it might be yours.”

“That’s strange, considering you’re the person who put that knife between my ribs in the first place.”

She took a sharp breath, as though planning to object, then shook her head. Her fear, so sharp at first, had mostly faded, weariness washing in to replace the sick reek of terror.

“So you’re here for your revenge.”

“Among other things. First, I want to know what you did with Kaden.”

Adare shook her head again. “I didn’t do anything with him.”

Valyn gritted his teeth. “I don’t believe you. He was here, in Annur. Gwenna met with him. Then, when she came back, he had vanished, and no one seems to know where.”

“He has come and gone more than once now,” Adare said, anger’s heat creeping back into her voice. “He uses those ’Kent-kissing gates-that’s why no one sees him.”

“How convenient,” Valyn said.

“Not for me, it’s not. I’m trying to hold this fucking city together, to get ready for the Urghul, to keep Annur from tearing itself to pieces, and meanwhile the First Speaker of the council has been coming and going according to his own whims, chasing his own monsters, showing up for a few hours, then haring off after that miserable bitch from the prison.…”

She trailed off, as though worried she had said too much. Valyn closed his eyes, breathed in her tangled scent: anger, blue-gray grief, confusion, and a deep, thick musk of sickening regret. But no deceit, not that he could smell. Gritting his teeth, he reached out, lifted the hood from her head. Most of her black hair remained pinned behind her head, but a few strands hung in her face. She tried to shake them away, then gave up, glaring at him through the mess of sweaty tangles. Her eyes burned more brightly than he’d remembered, so bright in the blackness of the storm drain it seemed her whole face might catch fire. When she opened her mouth, Valyn expected a blaze of defiance. Instead, her voice was quiet, even to his ears.

“I’m sorry.”

He took a step back, as though the words themselves could burn.

“A little late to start begging.…”

“I’m not begging. From the moment I stabbed you I wanted to take it back.” She shook her head, looking past him into the prison of her memory. “It all happened so fast. Fulton dead, and you going after il Tornja, even while the battle was still playing out. I had the knife in my hand, and I thought you were going to ruin it all, that you were going to destroy Annur, and I just … broke.”

Valyn stared. Somewhere inside his chest his heart ground out its savage rhythm over and over, refusing to give up.

“Every day I wake up in the morning,” Adare went on after a pause, “knowing I killed you. What’s crazy is that most of the time I think that I was right . You’d gone utterly insane-you really were about to kill the only person who could hold the Urghul back.” She shook her head. “Somehow, in the end, being right didn’t matter.”

Valyn dragged the next words up like shattered glass through his throat. “And you think I’ll spare you for this belated sorrow?”

“I don’t care if you spare me,” she exploded. “I don’t care what you think at all. You’re even more insane now than you were then-that’s obvious just from looking at you. I’m not saying this for you . I’m saying it because for all these months I couldn’t say it, not to you, and now I can.” She raised her chin, exposing her throat. “Go ahead. Kill me. Have your revenge. Then you figure out how to save this city, this whole fucking land that used to be an empire and now is something else … something different. You find a way to fix it, to put it right, to rescue all the millions of people about to be slaughtered on Meshkent’s bloody altars, because I have no idea.”

Tears were pouring down her face, glazing her cheeks, slick as molten glass with the light of her eyes. She shook her head wearily, angrily.

“Kaden is at Kegellen’s manse. Go find him after you murder me, if you really give a shit. He needs you.”

“Needs me for what?” Valyn asked. He was shaking, he realized. His hand ached. He looked down to find the bare knife in his hand, already drawn. He didn’t remember pulling it from the sheath.

Finish it, the beast’s voice hissed. You’ve talked too long already.

He stepped forward, put the knife against her neck.

She winced, but kept her eyes fixed on his.

“Go ahead.”

Finish it .

All over again he could taste the bile of the night-black slarn egg pouring down his throat. He could feel Ha Lin limp in his arms, her heart still, her hair smelling of the sea. He could hear the hacking sounds of the legionary messenger he’d killed, feel the man’s throat give as he ripped the knife through trachea and tendon. He could smell the smoke of the burning bodies of Andt-Kyl, taste his own blood hot in his mouth, and Huutsuu’s as she screamed her awful pleasure. He could hear all over again the horror tattooed in the heartbeats of the men he’d killed atop Mierten’s crumbling wall. He could feel the rotten softness of his axes sinking into human flesh, could taste his own eagerness as he pulled them free. Whatever he could have been, he was a beast, as much a monster as the slarn prowling the gullet of Hull’s Hole, a creature of blood and darkness and death.