Brian Staveley - The Last Mortal Bond

Morning’s blue ax split the Valley of Eternal Repose. At the land’s crease, white-gray and lazy, the thin, indifferent river traced its ancient course. Years earlier, Adare had labored through a treatise on hydraulics. Mostly it focused on the building of canals, but there was an entire section on the natural history of rivers, on the way that even a small stream could carve a canyon through the land, given enough time. She tried to imagine the valley before it was a valley, before the current had cut down through the topsoil, exposing the low limestone walls that would serve as tombs to her people. How long had the water toiled through that stretch of ground? Tens of millennia? Hundreds?

And it’s not finished .

Even now, while the Annurians who had gathered in the valley stood still, silent, waiting for her to speak, the current was moving, going about its patient work, chiseling away at its bed, digging deeper, deeper. One day, the stone tombs along the valley’s walls would be too high to reach. Some traveler would stand at the bottom of the gorge and stare up, baffled, at the monuments of Malkeenian emperors-the weathered lumps that had been Alial the Great’s stone lions, Olanon’s martial bas-relief, the rising sun carved around her own father’s tomb-and wonder who had built so far up the wall of the cliff, and why, and where they had gone.

They might not notice Kaden’s grave at all. The huge cedar doors would have rotted away by then, leaving a simple aperture into the cliff’s darkness. Even if that future traveler climbed the limestone cliff to look inside, the body would be gone, ground to dust beneath time’s silent hammer. Even if people remembered, so many millennia hence, names like Annur or Malkeenian, there would be no proof left of the lie Adare was about to tell, no corpse to gaze upon, no evidence to suggest that the Malkeenian laid in that last tomb was no Malkeenian at all.

She had burned Kaden’s body ten days earlier, the night after the fire inside Intarra’s Spear. She could have asked Gwenna to carry the corpse down. The Kettral had already made two trips-the first, to lift the Flea and Sigrid to the palace infirmary; the second, to bring the bodies of Nira, and Oshi, and Ran il Tornja.

“I’ll get your brother next,” Gwenna announced gruffly. “Him and Triste.”

Adare shook her head. “We will burn them here.”

Below her, the tower glowed with still-smoldering fire. Overhead, the smoke-smudged stars carved their slow arcs through the dark. Valyn was watching her with his scarred eyes.

“Here?” Gwenna asked.

Adare nodded. “Here.” Her own conviction surprised her. “This is the place they fought so hard to reach. It is the place they made their stand. It is here that they won our war. Why take them down? Why cover them with dirt?”

And so she had labored half the night alongside Gwenna, and Annick, and Talal, and Valyn to build a rough pyre from the wreckage of the staircase below. When they were finally finished, her hands bled. Her back screamed.

“You’re limping,” Gwenna pointed out quietly. As though that were worth worrying about, as though, compared to everything else that had happened that day, it constituted some kind of sacrifice.

“I’ll survive.”

They laid the two bodies atop the pyre just before dawn. The leach kindled a spark. It wavered, then caught. The flame’s blades made smoke of the dead. The Kettral stood their vigil silently. Even Valyn just stared into the flame as though hoping to go blind. Adare opened her mouth, then shut it. What did she know of Kaden or Triste? Anything she said might be a lie. Silence was the truest eulogy, and it was a relief to remain silent. There would be time in the weeks to come, too much time, for speeches, ample need for noble-sounding lies.

And now, she thought, gazing out over the throng assembled in the valley, that time has come .

She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and then began.

“Some of you who have gathered here will see the splendor of this funeral and whisper, ‘Waste . ’ ”

She gestured to the columns of soldiers-bull-thick Aedolians, legionaries, Sons of Flame in their flashing bronze-that had marched all the way from Annur, through the wreckage north of the wall, over the low hills, then into the long, winding valley, halting, finally, before her to stand motionless as stone men. The steel heads of a thousand spears blazed like torches in the morning light.

“You will look at these warriors and you will see men who could be laboring, even now, in the service of the living rather than standing pointless vigil for the dead.

“You will look at the horns of these oxen, gilded with gold, and you will think, What need have the dead for gold? ”

The oxen-eight huge black beasts, their coats oiled and groomed to a glistening sheen-had drawn the bier all the way from the Dawn Palace. They stared west now, motionless in their harnesses, round, dark eyes inscrutable as stones. Soon, the Aedolians would take up that slab of sweet-smelling cedar, bear the silk-wrapped corpse into that chilly passage carved into the cliff, set it gently down on the stone plinth, file out, put their shoulders to the massive doors that would block up all access to the tomb, and it would be done. After so long, it would finally be done.

Adare would have come sooner, but in the days after the Spear burned, it was impossible to reach the Valley of Eternal Repose-the Urghul were still north of the wall in all their thousands. Without Long Fist or Balendin to cleave a path through the wreckage, the horsemen had no viable way to attack, no path by which to bring their horses to bear, and yet they came on, day after day, hurling themselves through the burned-out ruin of Annur’s northern quarter, screaming in their strange tongue, brandishing spears from the improvised barricades even as Annurian archers cut them down.

Adare had watched most of the carnage from her tower atop the northern wall. “It’s madness,” she muttered halfway through the second day.

Valyn stood a pace away, his scarred eyes fixed on the slaughter. After a long time, he shook his head. “Not madness. Sacrifice.”

“Dying in an insane attack that can’t possibly succeed?”

“Not the dying, the fighting. The Hardening.”

Adare watched as a sun-haired warrior, chest stitched with arrow shafts, began singing in the street below. More arrows. The song turned to blood in his mouth.

Only after a full week, when the ruined streets north of the wall were choked with Urghul bodies, did the horsemen finally stop. It was hard to say why they broke off their attack. Through the long lens, Adare had spotted a woman-blond and scarred as the rest of them, middle-aged but hard as carved wood-standing barefoot on her horse’s back, arms spread as though inviting a spear to the chest, bellowing some inexplicable exhortation.

“Huutsuu,” Valyn said. An unreadable expression tugged like a hook at the corner of his mouth.

Adare stared at him. “Is that a name?”

He nodded slowly.

“You know her?”

Another nod.

“What in ’Shael’s name is she doing ?”

He cocked his head, as though he could hear the words from almost a mile away. “She is telling them to go home.”

Adare studied the woman, studied the thousands of howling horsemen circling her like wolves. “They’re going to kill her.”

“It is possible. I do not think so.”

Then, to Adare’s shock, Valyn stepped up onto the low tower wall.

“What are you doing?”

He gestured north. “Going.”

“Going where ?”

“Huutsuu helped me once. I will help her now, if I can.”