Brian Staveley - The Last Mortal Bond

This time, the flier put the bird down right on the roof, ignoring the corpses altogether. The whole space stank of blood and urine. When Adare tried to walk, to cross the empty tower’s top, she slipped in the spilled viscera.

“They’re down there,” Gwenna said, stabbing a finger at the door leading into the Spear. “And there’s ’Shael’s own fucking fight going on, by the sound of it.”

Adare took a slow breath through her nose, tried not to vomit. They were doing what they’d come to do, kill il Tornja’s men, find the kenarang himself, and yet she found her eyes drifting away from the dead. Grimly, she forced herself to look at the bodies, to witness, even if for just a moment, the carnage she herself had ordered. The Kettral might have held the blades, but Adare had helped to make these men dead. And they weren’t finished yet. She glanced at the trapdoor, the woman’s words registering for the first time.

“Fighting?” Adare asked. “Il Tornja’s supposed to be in here alone. Who is he fighting?”

“How the fuck do I know?” Gwenna spat. “You want to stand up here with our thumbs up our cunts while we talk about it?”

Adare found herself grinning viciously in response. “No,” she said. “I don’t. I want to go down there.”

Her grin vanished as soon as she stepped into the tower. The wind outside was cool, sharp. Inside, there was nothing but flame and screaming and heat like a brick to the face. Most worshippers thought of Intarra as the Lady of Light, but there was another truth to the goddess, a harder truth, one Uinian had learned as he burned inside his own temple, one Adare herself had had seared into her flesh at the Everburning Well: Intarra was a goddess of heat as well as light, the awful mistress of all conflagration and the annihilation it brought.

“He’s here,” Nira said, following the Kettral down the winding staircase, breaking into Adare’s thoughts. “Oshi. He’s close.”

“Can he feel you the same way?” Adare demanded, pulling up short.

Nira shook her head. “He’s my well. I’m not his.”

When they reached the first landing, the old woman shouldered her way past the Kettral, then paused, gazing down the stairs into the inferno.

“This is my fight now,” she said. The words were quiet, as though meant for no human ears.

“Hold on…,” Gwenna began.

“No,” Nira said, rounding on the younger woman. “I will not. I am going down there to kill my brother, and then to kill the creature who made us what we are, and I am going alone.” Her voice softened. “You’re a vicious, feisty bitch, kid. I like that. But believe me when I tell you there’s nothing you can do down there but die.”

Gwenna opened her mouth to reply-to argue, no doubt-but Adare laid a hand on her arm.

“Let her go,” she said. “There’s more to this than you know.”

Gwenna gritted her teeth, then nodded. “You have two hundred heartbeats,” she said, “and then we’re coming down.”

Adare searched for the words. It seemed a lifetime ago that Nira had pulled her out of the crowd on the Godsway, seeing a truth that no one else had seen. After all the months fighting and marching, what Adare remembered was the woman’s swearing, her mockery and recriminations. A hundred times she’d thought of sending Nira away, of being free of her constant abrasion. But she wouldn’t have gone, Adare realized, staring at the old woman’s seamed face. She never left Oshi, and she didn’t leave me .

“Thank you,” she said.

“Oh, fuck off with your thanks…,” Nira began. Then she broke off, shook her head abruptly, closed her eyes, straightened her back. When she opened them again, that gray gaze was level, regal. When she spoke, there was nothing of the gutter slang, no hint of the profanity that had marked her every utterance since they first met. She was a queen, once a leader of millions, and the weight of her years was in her words.

“You are a fine emperor, Adare hui’Malkeenian,” she said. “A truer sovereign than I ever was, and mark this well, because these are the last words I will speak to you: if you survive this day, you will be a light to your people. Whatever you believe of your goddess, it is your own fire that blazes in your eyes.”

She held Adare’s gaze for a moment, then nodded once, as though that were something done, done well and finished forever. Then she smiled, tossed her cane aside, and turned away, descending the stairs toward the screaming, and the dying, and the fire.

Gwenna took a long breath, held it for a moment, then blew it out.

“Where the fuck did you find her?”

Adare just shook her head, counting off the heartbeats in her mind, each one final as the great bronze bell that had tolled her father’s passage. The stairwell shuddered, steel screamed, as though wrenched awry by some vicious hand. Adare stumbled, seized the railing to keep her balance. There was a great thunderclap, then another, and another; fires of unnatural color leapt up around them, then fizzled out in the hot air. By the time Gwenna waved them forward, the sounds from below had subsided.

“Let’s see who’s dead,” the Kettral woman said grimly. “And who’s left to kill.”

They found Nira and Oshi first, two hundred feet below, seated, leaning against the low railing with their arms wrapped around each other. At first, Adare thought they were still alive. Then she saw the blood soaking Oshi’s clothes, pooling beneath him, and the vicious wound that had caved in the side of Nira’s head.

They look so ordinary, she thought.

The palace was filled with paintings of the Atmani, storm-eyed, muscle-bound figures striding an earth that cracked and groaned beneath their very feet. Nira and Oshi, by contrast, looked small and gray, slight, like someone’s grandparents, just people like any of the people living in the city below; not rulers, just a brother and sister who had lived out a normal life. And, of course, they had. Not just one life, but dozens, all those centuries side by side, posing as peddlers and farmers, haberdashers and fisherfolk, dozens of names and disguises, one after the next. Despite the violence of their end, their eyes were closed. They may have died fighting, but Nira’s arms were wrapped around her brother, holding him as she had held him so many times before, cradling him finally to sleep.

Gwenna scanned the corpses.

“That the leach?” she asked.

Adare nodded mutely.

The woman stepped over the bodies as though they were so much stacked wood. “Il Tornja’s further down.”

Slowly, Adare let go of the railing. She was sweating, her heart beating so hard she thought she might die. “Then let’s go kill him.”

Together, the four of them descended the trembling steps.

Another twenty feet below, on a narrow landing, they came to the battle-what was left of it, at least. There were bodies, dozens of them, scores, hacked apart, strewn across the platform, the blood so thick it poured over the edge of the landing into the fiery abyss beneath. Annurians, Adare thought dully. They all wore the uniform of the Army of the North.

Amidst the carnage, there were only two men standing, one holding a slender, elegant blade, the other wielding dripping axes: Valyn and il Tornja, facing off again, just as they had that awful day on the tower in Andt-Kyl. Despite the slaughter, the kenarang looked calm, even urbane, endlessly patient. Valyn, on the other hand, might have been a monster out of nightmare, a horrifying figure in filthy wool and leather, hair plastered to his face, scarred eyes empty as the winter night. Unlike il Tornja, who stood perfectly still, poised, Valyn shifted back and forth, moving his weight from one foot to the other as though there were some violence inside him kept just barely in check.