Brian Staveley - The Last Mortal Bond

Then, even as Adare watched, he loosed it.

She could barely follow what happened next. Despite a year of marching with her armies, despite witnessing one of the most important battles in Annurian history, Adare knew almost nothing about fighting, dueling, or swordplay. It didn’t matter. Even to her untrained eye, even in the whirlwind of all that mad, dizzying steel, the difference between the two warriors was obvious.

Valyn was faster. His axes were everywhere at once, high and low, striking in concert sometimes, sometimes in counterpoint, shattering in a steel hail against il Tornja’s guard. And yet, somehow, that guard held. The long, elegant sword was always there to deflect the blood-smeared wedges. Valyn roared and snarled his rage, but il Tornja moved in an eddy of calm. He was slower than his opponent, far slower, but was always where he needed to be, always sliding into that slender empty space where Valyn’s axes were not, as though he’d seen the whole fight in advance, had studied it for years, had rehearsed every step of this savage dance.

But there’s a gash along his arm, Adare realized as Valyn broke off his attack. Valyn’s chest was heaving, but his bloody teeth showed in something that might have been a smile.

“Hello, Adare,” il Tornja said, speaking into the momentary stillness without taking his eyes from her brother.

“Kill him, Annick,” Gwenna said.

To Adare’s shock, the kenarang dropped his blade and turned, hands raised. “I give myself up.” He met her eyes and smiled, that same smile she’d seen so many times before. There was no hint of concern in his voice. “My work here is finished, and there are Urghul to fight.” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t need to remind you I have your son.”

Valyn took a predatory step forward, but Adare threw up a hand. “Don’t kill him.”

She half turned to find the sniper holding that strange bow of kettral bone, the string drawn back to her ear, sighting down the arrow’s shaft at il Tornja. Annick’s eyes didn’t waver from the target, but she held the string.

“Oh, for ’Shael’s sake,” Gwenna spat.

“Don’t kill him,” Adare said again, louder this time, more forcefully.

Valyn shifted forward, his axes light in his hands. Like Annick, he kept his scarred eyes on il Tornja even as he spoke to Adare. “We have been here before, sister.”

“Indeed we have,” the Csestriim agreed cheerfully. “You might recall that the last time, in Andt-Kyl, I urged you to put down your blades. As I told you then, there’s a lot that you don’t understand.” He spread his hands as though welcoming the group. “A lot that all of you don’t understand.”

“That was a long time ago,” Valyn said, testing the weight of his ax. “We’ve been learning.”

Then, before Adare could object, before she could even think, he spun. The movement was too fast to follow, as was the single ax hurtling toward il Tornja. Somehow-she could not begin to fathom how-the Csestriim had seen it coming, had managed to slide aside as the steel parted the air inches from his head. He turned, unconcerned, to watch it fly into the void, smiling as it disappeared into the roaring fire far below.

“That’s not what I had in mind,” he said finally, turning back to Valyn, “when I asked you to put down your blades.”

Valyn’s lips curled back, showing his teeth. “I am going to kill you,” he said. “I am going to cut you apart.”

“No,” Adare insisted, stepping forward.

“Get out of the way,” Valyn said.

She pressed ahead despite the death in his voice. “I won’t.”

“What’s wrong?” Valyn demanded. “You still want him to fight your wars? You still think you need him? You still willing, after all this, to play your fucking politics?”

“No,” Adare said, meeting her brother’s ravaged gaze as she slipped the polished poisoned hair stick-Kegellen’s gift-from the coils of her hair, then turned, slamming it into the kenarang ’s gut, screaming as she shoved it deeper and deeper still, pulling it out, then stabbing him again. The Csestriim half lifted a hand as though to protest, then let it fall. Adare stared at the wound, the blood soaking the cloth, then raised her eyes to il Tornja. “You can’t kill him,” she said quietly, “because I’m going to do it.” She held the poisoned stick in her trembling hand, then buried it between his ribs once more.

Il Tornja’s eyes went empty as a starless sky. The jocularity was gone, the wry act he’d worn for so long replaced by his true face, that unreadable, unknowable alien gaze. Even now it made something in Adare quail.

“But I had your son,” he murmured.

“What did you do to him?” Adare hissed, seizing her kenarang by the lapels of his coat. “What did you do to him?”

The Csestriim shook his head. “Nothing. He is safe.”

Adare stared, scouring that inhuman gaze for the truth. “I don’t believe you,” she whispered. “Why? After everyone you’ve murdered, why would you spare one infant?”

Il Tornja stared past her, past the landing and the stairs, into the bright, empty air of the Spear. “One grows tired,” he said finally, voice slender, “of killing one’s own children.”

Adare’s sob was like some jagged, broken thing torn bloody from her throat. The tears sheeted down her face. Il Tornja cocked his head to the side, studying her the way a botanist might scrutinize some strange, inexplicable flower.

“So broken,” he murmured, slumping to the floor. “All these years I tried to fix you, but you are still so broken.”

* * *

Strong hands gentle as air under his arms and legs, lifting, carrying.

Kaden tried to cry out, but there was nothing left inside him that could still cry. Where his mind had been, there was only a gaping hole, a passage to nothingness, oblivion. Meshkent was bellowing his fury, clinging with long claws to the remnants of Kaden, but Kaden himself was failing, unraveling. There was no way to undo what he had done. A few more heartbeats now, just a little more time, and it would be over.

We failed .

The words were vague, more sounds than words. He struggled to put a meaning to them, then gave up.

“… up. To the roof. Both of them…”

A brother’s voice, fierce and urgent, so tightly tethered to the world.

“… breathing’s weak. Can’t find a heartbeat. Wait…”

The voice went with a woman with hair like fire.

“… go. Go. Go…”

He was floating. The furious violence was gone, and he was floating up, light as smoke into the light.

We failed.

Meshkent raged desperately inside him.

Kaden could feel, with the little life that he had left, a sharp knife of regret, but even that was fading.

“… there. Open it. Open it! Through the door…”

“Kaden.” A sister’s voice. “Kaden!”

He tried to open his eyes. Failed. The hands were lowering him onto something hard and impossibly far away.

Meshkent-instantly, awfully silent.

We failed .

Then the god’s voice, composed this time, free, huge as the whole world, brutal and triumphant: NO.

The hole in Kaden’s mind, so dark a moment earlier, filled with light, so much light, too much. Kaden opened his eyes to escape it, and there, lying against the ironglass a pace away-Triste, her violet eyes fixed on his.

She smiled.

Something that had been Kaden remembered falling, a cold place full of stone and snow. A memory of falling like this falling. He waited to strike the ground, but this time, there was no ground. The whole world was those eyes, that face. Her name was gone, but the name didn’t matter, had never mattered. There was only the falling, endless, effortless, only a death that felt somehow as wide and strong and bright as any love.