The Last Mortal Bond (Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne, #3)

by Brian Staveley

Sos fought like a cartographer following his own perfect maps through a world of the blind, baffled, and lost.

“They are not winning,” Sos said again. “They have won. This is why their gods have departed.” They have won. Axta studied the proposition for flaws, found none.

We didn’t need craftsmen, Kaden thought. We needed soldiers with heavy boots to remind us what we’ve done, to grind this little world of ours to mud.

“The tower is,” the historian continued, “at its very top, an altar, a sacred space, a place where this world touches that of the gods.”

Language is a tool, like a hammer or an ax. There are tasks for which it is ill suited.”

Consider the task at hand, Kaden. The more you try to see, the less you will notice.

“Come out of that, Kaden,” Kiel said. “You should not spend so much time so fully severed from yourself.” Kaden hesitated inside the stillness. The vaniate had frightened him at first, the hugeness of it, the indifference, the cool, absolute smoothness. That fear was, he thought now, the way that one of the Annurians below, a man raised his whole life inside the hum and throb of the city, might feel were he to wake one clear morning on a glacier in the Bone Mountains: a terror of too much space, of too much nothing, of not enough self to fill the gap between snow and sky. Only, Kaden felt at home on the glacier now. He found, when the world grew too loud, too close, that he was unwilling to leave that infinite blank.

It was disconcerting, this deference, unsettling. Gwenna wasn’t the Wing’s commander—with Valyn and Laith dead, there was barely even a Wing left to command—but the other two, for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, had started accepting her decisions as though they were orders, as though she weren’t just making it all up as she went along, as though she had some larger, more coherent vision in mind beyond just keeping them alive from one day to the next. Which she most certainly did not.

“Half the Kettral backed the empire,” Kaden said, spreading his hands. “Half backed the new republic. The whole thing was over in three days.”

Adare studied the blood, bright against her darker palm. She watched it a moment, then looked down at the flagstones, at the bodies strewn there, dozens of them, crushed to death, eyes bulging, limbs twisted in the awful poses of their panic. I am a fool, and people have died for my folly. They’d been ready to kill her, of course. Probably would have, if the soldiers hadn’t arrived. It didn’t matter. They were her people. Annurians. Men and women that she had sworn both privately and publicly to protect, and they were dead because she had thought, idiotically, that she could return in triumph to the city of her birth. She had thought she risked only her own life. So very, very stupid.

Theirs wasn’t a failure to apprehend the world. It was a failure to feel, as though the meaning, the importance were leached from all experience, leaving only the desiccated facts pinned to the mind like glittering insects, exotic butterflies—all bright, brilliant, dead.

The historian gestured to Kaden. “I have tried to explain this to your brother. Your minds are not built like ours. You rely on your loves and your hates, your fears and hopes, to move you, to guide you.”

Kiel smiled a careful, almost delicate smile. “Yes. So what? You’re going to die anyway. All of you. It is what happens to your kind, how you are made. Does it really matter who does the killing? Or when?”

Kiel looked down at the map, tilted his head to one side, then shrugged once more—a human gesture, but empty of all human feeling. “There is no way to be certain,” he replied. “I believe your minds would twist beneath the strain, crack, then shatter.”

“I didn’t know. Not until the collar was off. Then I tried ta stop them both.” She shaded her eyes with a withered hand, as though the memory of what had happened was too bright. When she spoke again, the words were a whisper. “I woulda killed him then—my brother. I tried. But he’s strong. Oshi’s broken, but still so, so strong.”

The spectacle had been terrifying enough when il Tornja still battled Adare’s foes; even then, the ruthless, alien genius of the Csestriim general had made some mortal part of her quail. And now the tide had shifted.

“Who is this Flea?” Valyn shook his head, momentarily at a loss about how to respond. “The deadliest of us,” he said finally.

“Long Fist is blessed by the god,” Huutsuu said. “Your Kettral leach … he is twisted.” “Twisted,” Valyn growled. “We’re all fucking twisted.”

“Mostly.” The word spoke volumes. Gwenna hadn’t forgotten the reptilian monsters—half snake, half eyeless lizard. She’d dreamed of them the night she escaped the Hole and passed the Trial, then nearly every night after that. If those dreams had grown less frequent, it was only because other horrors now vied with the slarn for her few restless hours of sleep. She hadn’t forgotten the slarn, nor had she forgotten what the slarn did to people. When she closed her eyes, she could see Ha Lin’s corpse, smooth skin pared open in long, fine gashes, flesh peeling back from the wounds. Some of that had been Balendin’s work. Some, but not all.

A few hundred paces from the surface, she’d come across Gent. Another day, in another place, she would have been pleased to discover he was even more cut up than she was. Not in the Hole. The two of them had limped out together, leaning on each other, neither willing to speak. If there were words for what happened in that labyrinth, Gwenna didn’t know them. She’d felt no relief at the sight of the sun when she emerged, just a faint slackening of dread. Whatever happened next, whatever miserable missions she undertook, whatever stinking shitholes she had to fight her way through, nothing would be as bad as the Hole.

it was starting to feel as though everyone was a prisoner of something: duty or family, conscience or past mistakes.

“We’re going to end up dead either way,” Adare replied quietly. “All these alliances, all these deals—they’re not real. If I’ve learned one thing about il Tornja, it’s that. Whatever battles he fights, whatever wars he wins, he is not on our side. He will use us—you, me, Oshi, Sanlitun—then discard us. Now or later—whenever it’s most convenient.”

“Holy Hull,” she breathed quietly. “She made it. Out of all of us, she was the first one back.”

Valyn, too. Another one who would never come back to the Islands.

There was a monotony, Kaden had decided by the time the sun finally set, when the soldier’s spent body was finally carved into parts and laid about the edges of the altar, to horror. Something ultimately pedestrian in the strangled protests clawing their way up from the soldier’s frozen gut. The stomach could only twist so much at the sight of blood welling from the mouth and ears. The mind could only recoil so far.

He watched the flame for a few heartbeats. There was a stillness in that ever-shifting blaze, a stillness he recognized.

“—the Csestriim were durable as stone, but there was no music to them. Ciena and I, we would strike them and strum them, drag our fingers over their flesh, and for what? A few dull thuds. Rarely, every hundred years or so, a single spark. Nothing more.

The shaman cut him off with a raised hand. “Let it go.” Kaden shook his head. “The warning?” “Not the warning. That deadness you wear around you like a cloak.”

Mailly took a shuddering breath, as though she’d been jolted from some waking dream. “Will it hurt?” The simplicity of the question hit Adare like a slap. She had lived so long with misinformation, double meanings, and outright lies—her own and those of everyone around her—that it was easy to forget that some people just asked their questions, then believed the answers they were given. She felt a sudden knife-sharp desire to live in such a world, to cut away all the dizzying layers of her own schemes, to spend even a few days telling the naked truth, hearing it told.

“And still, you are what the Eyrie aims for when they train us. You’re the perfect Kettral.” Gwenna stared at her. For a moment all words failed. “Are you fucking mad?” she managed finally. “No,” Annick replied evenly. “I was there when we fought our way free of Long Fist. I saw you command the defense of Andt-Kyl. I saw you pull Qora out of the mess over on Hook.” “I was improvising. Annick, I was making that shit up.” Talal just laughed. The sudden mirth was both welcome and disconcerting. “That’s the point,” he said. “Kettral improvise. They fight on the fly. When the Flea put you in charge of the Wing, he did it for a reason. You’re good at this shit.” Gwenna stared from one to the other, unsure what to make of the lump in her throat.

“I hope you fight him,” she said, enunciating carefully. “I intend to—” Adare began. The girl cut her off. “I hope you fight him, and he fights back. I’ll still be locked up somewhere, but I hope I hear about it.” “About what?” “About his death,” Triste said, violet eyes ablaze. “And Kaden’s. And yours. About your son’s. That’s the only way this ends. You know it, but you’re too stubborn to believe it. All of you scheming bastards are going to cut each other down, and though I don’t pray often, when I do pray, I pray for this: that I get to hear how it all happened.”

She had none of Kaden’s training, no ability to set aside grief, no ability to smooth the cruel edges of confusion. She had lived with this memory as though it were a rusted blade lodged inside her, hiding it even as it bit deeper. Kaden himself might betray a whole world of brothers and never feel the same pain. The Shin had trained it out of him. Whether that was good or not, he could not say.

It was strange the way that people venerated truth. Everyone seemed to strive for it, as though it were some unalloyed good, a perfect gem of glittering rectitude. Women and men might disagree about its definition, but priests and prostitutes, mothers and monks all mouthed the word with respect, even reverence. No one seemed to realize how stooped the truth could be, how twisted and how ugly.

Jak stared at her. “You said…” “I said he’d leave this room alive,” Gwenna replied. “He did. Now get the fuck up.”

No winning this one, she thought, fixing her eyes on the leach. The man smiled at her. Please, Hull, just let me carve that smile off his face before they bring me down. Before she could reach him, however, before the leach could speak, before anyone could loose another arrow, a great shape exploded over the compound’s far wall. It was a bird, but seemed bigger than a bird, the twin golden wings wide as the sky, blotting out the sun, throwing the whole courtyard into shadow. Below, hanging from the talons by a tangle of makeshift rope, hung half a dozen Kettral, Gwenna’s Kettral, the men and women she had trained or tried to train—Qora and Delka, Fruin and Chelt—their eyes wide with anger and horror, knuckles white where they clung to the madness of straps, and where they hung on, also, to another figure, small as a boy, utterly untethered to the bird’s talons, relying only on the hands of the others to hold her as she leaned so far out it seemed she had to fall—Annick, her bow a blur in her hands, her eyes still as stone as she drew and fired, drew and fired, drew and fired, her bowstring’s twang lost in Allar’ra’s ear-shattering scream.

“You heard words. You assumed divinity.”

“The death of the goddess would fill past the brim the cup of your suffering.”

“A gift of the world. Like a man touching a woman through thick leather gloves, the Csestriim felt nothing. We removed the gloves. We made you feel the world as you moved through it and it moved through you. For thousands of years after the death of the Csestriim, humans were naked in the forests. You were beautiful and bloody as you moved over the plains. Then Annur took that away, forced you to be mute and ugly. Reduced you to slaves.”

Annur wasn’t perfect—Kaden understood that clearly enough—but surely it was better than a hundred rival warlords rending the land and the people who lived there. Surely the sufferings of the countless Annurian slaves weighed less, when you put them in the scales, than the broken infants torn from their mothers’ breasts and killed; than the defeated armies castrated, mutilated, mocked, and massacred; than the annihilation of whole nations because they spoke the wrong language, wore the wrong clothes, worshipped at the wrong altar. Surely, set in the scales, Annur was an improvement over what had come before, over the world to which Long Fist struggled to return them all.

For the first time the shaman turned to stare at him. “Ciena is what makes you what you are, she and I together. You would be shattered without her, a million lutes dashed on the rocks. Whole octaves lost. What agony could I sustain without hope? What hatred without the promise of love? What pain is there when there is only pain?”

“Do the creatures of your own dreams follow your desires? Do the creatures of your nightmares bend to your will? They obey their own nature, these children of ours, but they are our dreams all the same.”

“Important miles,” the Flea said. “Before, it was just rocks and gravel. Now they’re fighting for something that matters. It’s the first time since Andt-Kyl. Il Tornja has made a mistake.” They fell silent at that. As he listened to the thunder of hooves, the high cries of the nomads, the grudging, barked commands of the legionary soldiers, Valyn tried to imagine Ran il Tornja, kenarang and Csestriim, making a mistake. After watching the battle of Andt-Kyl, he thought it seemed unlikely.

“Is it enough? The pain that’s here, that you can reach?” “Here?” Long Fist looked around, eyes narrowed, as though he were just now seeing where they stood, just at that very moment noticing the desert sprawled out to the south and east, the mountains towering to the west. “I am not this body. Where there is screaming, I am there. Why will this truth not put down root inside your mind?”

“The Eyrie was destroyed.” “Well,” Gwenna replied, “now it’s back.”

In the end, they killed all of Rallen’s soldiers. Gwenna did some of the grisly work herself, partly because it seemed necessary to acknowledge her role in the whole affair, partly to set an example for the other Kettral: “This is not about vengeance,” she said as the first body dropped. “It is about justice. You will kill quickly, cleanly, or you will join the dead.”

This is what Kiel warned me of, he thought. That one day I might just walk away. He could remember being wary of the possibility once, not long ago, but staring at it now he could not remember why.

“And now?” Valyn asked quietly. “Now? I’m old. Finn’s gone. But the habits are there. I don’t think I could wake up late if I tried.” The words were soft, but Valyn could hear the grief vibrating in the other man’s voice.

“Csestriim,” Kaden said, locking eyes with the man. “The general who led the war to destroy humanity. The architect of the genocide against your own children. The murderer of gods.”

“What could be frightening,” il Tornja replied, “about a world without suffering? What’s frightening about a world without pain or hate? Without people being dragged around by the clanking chains of their lust? What’s frightening about a world in which no one needs to weep over a child’s grave?”

The pressure inside Kaden’s mind was almost unbearable, but he could still hear his own baffled reply: He’s not lying. However tortured il Tornja’s version of the truth, it was truth. Meshkent’s province was pain. That was his only gift. What kind of man would submit to such a master? In this much, at the very least, the Csestriim was correct—the young gods came, and they made men and women into slaves.