Brian Staveley - The Last Mortal Bond

“The Urghul will fucking murder you, Valyn.”

He stared at her, through her, considering the possibility. It seemed impossible that this stranger, this creature of sinew, scar, and darkness, could somehow be her brother.

“Maybe.”

Then, before Adare could respond, he jumped. It was thirty-five feet to the street below, but Valyn landed like a cat, rose to his feet, dreadful as any unkillable thing from nightmare, then disappeared into the wreckage. Somehow Adare had understood, even then, that he would not be coming back.

She could have skipped the funeral. No one in Annur aside from Gwenna and her Kettral knew how Kaden had died. Besides, Kaden had, by his own choice, abdicated the Unhewn Throne. Funerals, however, were not for the dead, and after the Urghul disappeared over the northern horizon, riding back to their steppe, Annur needed something-a ceremony, a shared moment-to mark a turning point.

The tomb was there already. Stonemasons had hollowed the hole from the cliff the day after her father was laid to rest. There were no carvings, however, no statuary or reliefs to decorate the stone face. Those were chosen, traditionally, by the Emperor before his death, but Kaden had given no instructions, and all those who truly knew him-Rampuri Tan, Triste, the Shin monks among whom he had lived so long-were dead. Perhaps it didn’t matter-he was already so much ash and bone-but the people would expect carvings, and so Adare went to Kiel, the Csestriim.

“What would he want? Have wanted?”

Death’s grammar was slippery.

The historian looked at her with unreadable eyes.

“Are you speaking of your brother? Or of the one who will take his place in the tomb?”

Adare blinked. She had told no one but Valyn and Gwenna, had wrapped the body herself, winding the water-smooth cloth around the naked figure, circling the feet first, then the legs, all the way up to the face, pausing for a long moment before winding it tight around those open eyes. The lie was easy: His wounds were too gruesome. The people should not see a Malkeenian so defiled.

“How…”

“Rest easy, Your Radiance,” the Csestriim said. “I have been studying this world a long time. No one else is likely to notice.” He moved the planes of his face into a smile. “Your brother needs no stone for his monument. But then, you know this. Kaden’s monument, and Triste’s, is carved into the minds of all your kind.”

Adare hesitated, then gestured to the silk-wrapped figure. “And for him?”

The historian closed his eyes, cocked his head, as though listening to some music she could not hear.

“We do not want. Not in any way that you could understand.”

“I have to do something .”

“No, you do not. The tomb’s emptiness is all.”

And so Adare found herself standing before a doorway unadorned by any carving, a perfect rectangle cut into the cliff. She would have preferred to remain silent, as she had been silent while Kaden burned atop the Spear, but the time for silence was over, and there was no one else to speak.

“Perhaps you will look at me,” she continued, raising her voice above the breeze, “and wonder, Why is she here? If she would rule Annur, let her rule. Let her see to the millions left alive. The dead have no need of her ministrations. ”

She nodded.

“And it is true. The dead are dust.”

The crowd stirred at that, as though all those thousands of bodies formed one creature and the creature had grown uneasy. The men and women might have made the long walk from Annur for any of a dozen reasons, but after the madness of the past year, after the unreasoning fury of the weeklong Urghul assault and the blood-drenched fact of the final Urghul collapse, most would be looking for reassurance, certitude, a trotting out of the old phrases, all of them docile as sheep: died a hero … for the glory of Annur … in our memories forever .

They expected an emperor who would stand before the tombs of her fathers and conjure up the old imperial theater. They wanted a prophet to open her mouth, and to see, instead of words, Intarra’s light sluicing forth, scouring away the darkness lodged inside their hearts.

But I’m not a prophet, Adare thought.

The miracle of Intarra’s Spear was not a miracle at all, but an act of calculated arson. The Malkeenian fire burned in her eyes, but the script of scar laid into her skin remained illegible. She remembered the lightning strike at the Everburning Well. That single syllable- Win -remained carved into her mind, but whether it had been a voice of the divine or something else, something less, Adare had no idea. Of the will of the goddess, she understood no more than the blank-eyed oxen standing on the churned-up dirt.

For a moment she imagined telling everything: “I am no prophet. The goddess does not speak, either through me or to me. My scars are only scars. My blessings were lies.”

And then? The righteous would rise up to kill her. Others would kill the killers, declare her a martyr. It was an old story, told over and over in the histories: bodies dragged from homes, butchered in the streets, burned alive, faith pitted against faith, belief against belief. The only way out was to stay alive, to keep wearing her bright mantle of lies. She had a lifetime to find a way to abdicate, to dismantle the broken apparatus of empire, to find a way to avoid passing the horror of her position on to her only son, that tiny child who was, even now, being carried down to her from the chilly fortress in Aergad.

“The dead are dust,” she said again, “but you know this already. You have seen it.”

She gestured to the bier.

“My brother, Kaden hui’Malkeenian, died to save our city, to defeat a traitor at its very heart-but he is gone. Gone beyond all human reach, gone certainly beyond any meager language I might muster.

“So are the loggers of the Thousand Lakes hacked apart by the Urghul. So are the soldiers sacrificed on bloody altars across the north. So are the Channarians who starved during Dombang’s blockade, the warriors of the Waist who rose up to be slaughtered by our legions, and the legionaries slaughtered in their turn. So are the unnumbered Urghul buried, nameless, in their twin mounds north of Annur itself.

“My brother lies right here, at my feet”-the lie was easier this time-“but he will not hear the words I speak today, nor will the rest of the dead spread across Vash and Eridroa, whom we will never fully tally.”

Nira , laid to rest beside her brother in a tiny cemetery by the sea …

The fallen Kettral, whom Gwenna had carried back to the Islands in the claws of a giant bird …

Fulton, buried with pomp in the northern forests; Mailly, dragged from her hanging cell and burned without remark …

“The dead are beyond all speech and hearing, so why speak at all? Why have we come here today?

“I will tell you. Forget the dead. A funeral is the time for the living to speak with the living.”

She thought again of Valyn walking away, of the Urghul finally riding north, disappearing like a storm over the horizon.

“And what should we say, those of us who have survived? Should we drag out the old platitudes?

“The dead will never be forgotten.…

“They fell that we might live.…

“The living will rebuild.…”

She shook her head.

“No.

“Each death is a smashed glass, a burned pyre, a broken bow. Nothing can be put back.”

Two dozen paces off, silent in his tomb, her father lay. In front of Adare, almost at her feet, wrapped in Liran silk, waited the corpse of the creature who had killed him.