Brian Staveley - The Last Mortal Bond

Valyn glanced at the soldiers, then gestured to Kaden and Triste. “North. Walk fast until they see us, then run.”

“Where’s the kettral?” Triste hissed.

“No idea.”

“We could retreat,” Kaden said, nodding toward Kegellen’s warehouse. The Queen of the Streets had remained behind, inside, along with a knot of her guards.

“No,” Valyn growled, dragging him into the foot traffic. “We can’t. You can’t hide, not as long as il Tornja has those ’Shael-spawned spiders. You go back in those tunnels, and you’ll die there. He’s got the whole Army of the North to pin you down, smoke you out.”

Even as he spoke, Valyn’s eyes roamed over the street ahead. He hadn’t drawn the axes from the belt, but that ruined gaze was enough to make anyone who met it jerk back, turn hastily aside, find somewhere else to look, somewhere else to be.

“The bird’s our best shot at getting to the top of the Spear.”

“And if the bird doesn’t show up?” Kaden asked.

“Then we do it the hard way.”

“What does that mean?” Triste demanded.

“We go on foot,” Valyn said. “Fight our way in, up. There’s no choice now-we have to keep moving.”

Triste stopped walking, turned to stare at Valyn. “Fight our way in?”

“There are three of us,” Kaden said quietly, taking Triste by the elbow as he spoke, urging her into motion once more. “Three of us against il Tornja’s entire army.”

Valyn’s smile was like something carved across his face with a knife. “I’m not sure you understand.”

“Not sure I understand what?”

“Everything that’s happened this past year,” Valyn replied, then trailed off, shaking his head. “I’m not the brother you remember, Kaden. I’m something … different. When you tally up the good people in this fight, the noble ones, the ones who’ve been doing the right thing: I’m not on that list. Not anymore. I don’t think I’ve been on that list for a very long time.”

The words were lost, haunted, as though someone had hollowed out this warrior who stalked down the street, his scarred hand on the head of his ax.

“That doesn’t matter,” Kaden said. “Not right now.”

“Yes, it does.”

Behind them, a sudden cry cut through the everyday babble of the avenue. The soldiers were shouting, bellowing questions and orders. Kaden risked a glance over his shoulder. The men weren’t jogging, they were running, fingers leveled directly at Kaden himself. When he turned back to the north, he found the far end of the street blocked by a hastily assembled cordon of armed men. Valyn was still smiling.

“The thing you don’t understand, my calm, quiet brother, is that sometimes goodness and nobility aren’t enough. Sometimes, when the monsters come, you need a dark, monstrous thing to pit against them.” He slid one ax from the loop at his belt, then the other. People cried out in alarm, lurched away. Valyn ignored them. “I am that thing, Kaden. The human part of me … the part that should feel camaraderie, friendship, love…” He shook his head. “It’s gone. There is only darkness. I’m not a brother, not really. Not a friend. Not an ally or son. I don’t know how to be those things. All I know is blood and struggle. It is all I am. This fight, right now, is what I am for.”

And then it began.

Kaden had spent years as an acolyte in the Bone Mountains, unseen atop the granite spire of the Talon, watching crag cats hunt. They had struck him as perfect predators, flowing over the stone like winter shadows, silently pacing their prey, moving from ledge to boulder so smoothly they seemed otherworldly, like creatures culled from a dream of hunting. He’d watched them stand utterly still for an hour, then uncoil all at once, leaping a dozen paces in a single, unerring strike. Death, Kaden thought, must be like that: perfect, patient, waiting one moment, striking the next, unstringing tendons so quickly, so precisely, that the dying thing-a bear, a mountain goat-was gone before the carcass struck the stone. Those crag cats, however, for all their perfection, all their silent, predatory grace, seemed clumsy, slow, almost comically awkward when Kaden compared them to the creature Valyn had become.

Valyn didn’t attack the soldiers blocking the street to the north; attack wasn’t the right word. An attack implied a fight, implied some defense-if only feeble, notional-on the part of those attacked. The Annurian soldiers had no defense. They might as well have stood at the ocean’s verge, trying to hold back the steel-gray sea with their feeble spears. When Valyn was still twenty paces distant, he hurled his axes, one then the other. Kaden could barely follow the flashing blur of the vicious wedges tumbling end over end, but in the moment it took for both to find their marks, Valyn had already slipped knives from inside his blacks and hurled those, too, at the line of men. The sound reached Kaden a moment later-four sick wet thwacks, steel hacking into unready flesh.

The line of soldiers shuddered as the four men at the center collapsed into their own agony. Valyn didn’t break stride.

Between him and the Annurians, an ironmonger’s wagon laden with pots and heavy pans had skewed across the street. The mules, panicked by the scent of blood, were bellowing, stamping, hauling their groaning load in different directions. The bearded ironmonger hesitated a moment, torn between the need to protect his goods and the awful realization that there could be no protecting them, not against the madness coursing through the street. As the baffled merchant hurled himself to the dirt, Valyn leapt over the wagon, stripping two heavy iron pans from the load as he passed, hit the ground with a shoulder, rolled to his feet, knocked aside the arrows flying at his face, and then he was among the legionaries, caving in faces and shattering arms, bellowing at Kaden and Triste to follow.

It was only a few dozen paces, but by the time they caught up, the legionaries were dead, blood chugging out onto the earth through ragged, ugly wounds, and Valyn was holding his axes once again.

“Let’s go,” he growled. “And this time, try to keep up.”

There was a moment early on in all the blood-slick madness when Kaden caught a glimpse of a golden-winged bird. The creature screamed, careened through the sky as though it were a huge puppet yanked by vicious, invisible strings, and then it was gone, vanished behind the rooftops. He ran on, waiting for the kettral to reappear even as dozens of men wielding spears and swords flooded into the street behind them.

“Where is it?” he shouted.

“Gone,” Valyn said. “Can’t make the grab.”

Even as he spoke, another knot of armored men erupted from a side alley a dozen paces ahead. Valyn, already charging, charged harder. Kaden had never seen any human being move so fast, had never seen anything move that fast. Valyn wielded the axes as though they were part of his own flesh, as though he’d been born holding them, and the Annurians could find no defense that availed against that brutal steel. Valyn went over their guard or under, found holes in whatever feeble attacks were thrown up, sometimes just slammed straight through a raised blade, shattering it or knocking it aside as though three feet of sharpened sword were no more than a reed.

“Come on,” he growled, gesturing through the hole he’d carved. Blood spattered his face.

The flight that followed was madness. Not since the Aedolians had come to Ashk’lan to kill him had Kaden run so hard. This time, too, the Annurian soldiers were his foes. This time, too, Triste ran at his side, her breathing ragged, but steady. This time, too, he understood the stakes, how it would only take a single misstep, a twisted ankle, and the race would be over. It was all the same, and yet it was not the same at all.