The Last Mortal Bond

13

“Adare is lying,” Kaden said.

Kiel studied him by the low light of the lamp. Kaden had returned to his study on the thirtieth floor of the Spear almost immediately after his conversation on the docks, pausing only to send a servant in search of the historian. The wait gave him time to mull over the conversation with his sister, staring out the ironglass walls at the city below while he worked through every gesture, every phrase, trying to see the truth beneath the words. By the time Kiel arrived, night had nearly fallen, and Kaden’s darkest suspicion had calcified into certainty.

“About what?” Kiel asked, plucking an olive from a wooden bowl on the table, then joining Kaden at the clear wall.

Kaden paused to summon up the saama’an of his sister’s face once more, examining her eyes, her mouth, the tension around her jaw. After considering the still image, he scrolled the vision forward slowly, pausing on the moments when she hesitated or looked away.

“Not everything,” he said finally. “But where Valyn is concerned, she’s holding something back.”

Kiel kept his eyes on the city below. His expression was flat, impassive, as he waited silently for the rest of it.

“When I made contact with Gwenna and her Wing,” Kaden went on quietly, “I learned a little more about Valyn. Talal-the leach-said that Valyn made contact with Adare in Aats-Kyl-the town at the southern end of Scar Lake-days before the actual battle.”

“And your sister,” the historian concluded, “claims not to have seen him at all.”

“That’s right,” Kaden said, then shook his head. “But why?”

Once again, he studied the image carved across his mind.

In some ways, Adare was instantly recognizable, the woman who had grown from the girl to whom Kaden had bidden farewell on the Annurian docks all those years earlier. The eyes, of course, were unmistakable-Adare’s had always burned the brightest, the hottest, even when their father was still alive. The lines of her face, too, he recognized, long and lean, high cheekbones and a narrow jaw. All of her physical attributes, as he studied them one by one, seemed consistent with the slender girl he remembered from his childhood.

There was something else, however, a new cast to her face or her features, a look at once obvious and ineffable that had nothing at all to do with the girl she had been. Kaden stared into his sister’s eyes, trying to shape their strangeness into words. She was more …

He closed his own eyes, blotting out the familiar sights of his father’s study, focusing more intently on the image he had etched into his brain. There were Adare’s scars, of course, a delicate red tracery seared into her skin by the lightning strike at the Everburning Well. Thousands of men and women accounted her a prophet for those very scars, for having survived the ordeal at the Well at all, and yet for all their strangeness, the scars were just scars-smooth, raised flesh bright in the day’s remembered light.

“Adare has changed…,” Kaden began, then trailed off.

“It is natural,” Kiel replied. “Your kind has always been … unstable, impermanent. Like all humans, like yourself, Adare is a creature in flux.”

“No,” Kaden said, shaking his head. “It’s more than that. Or different than that. She’s older, but she is also … deeper. Harder. There is more to her, somehow, than I remember, and not just more, but different, as though she were broken, and that break were mended with something foreign to her nature. She reminds me of Valyn.”

“Human nature is not fixed,” Kiel said. “You are always shifting, changing. Normally your kind does not notice the alteration because it takes place gradually, over weeks and years. You, however, were separated from your siblings for a long time; now you are trying to accommodate that change, to make sense of it, all at once.”

Kaden exhaled slowly, letting the saama’an go with the breath, then opening his eyes.

“According to Talal,” he said, taking the facts, setting them carefully into place one by one, as though they were stones forming the foundation of a new wall, “Valyn wanted to kill il Tornja. Long Fist gave my brother both freedom and weapons to do just that. Valyn crossed the border with Talal and Laith. They found Adare and il Tornja at Aats-Kyl, draining the lake to allow the army to pass. Valyn spoke with Adare then. She convinced him that il Tornja was necessary in the coming battle with the Urghul. She convinced Valyn to spare him until after Andt-Kyl. According to Talal, Valyn lay in wait for the general, along with Talal himself, on top of the tallest tower in Andt-Kyl-some sort of signal tower for boats coming up from the south. Talal didn’t see what happened next, he went down to fight Balendin, but we know from Adare that il Tornja was also atop that tower commanding the battle, along with Adare herself.…”

He let the silence say the rest.

After a long pause, Kiel nodded. “Your conclusion seems likely. Perhaps inevitable.”

Kaden hesitated, then sloughed off his own mind, sliding first into the vast emptiness of the vaniate, and then, after a pause, into the imagined contours of a different mind, one that might have belonged to his brother. The beshra’an was an imperfect skill, especially when you weren’t certain of the person you aimed to inhabit, of their actions and habits, the recurring patterns of emotion. Though they were brothers, Kaden knew almost nothing of Valyn. Their paths had forked too early in life, their reunion had been too brief and baffled by fighting and flight. Still, when he settled his own mind into the shape of Valyn’s thoughts, a few things seemed clear: Valyn wanted il Tornja dead, and he wouldn’t ever quit.

Kaden had never come within a hundred miles of Andt-Kyl, but he could imagine the tower, a precarious pile of roughly mortared stone at the north end of the lake. He could imagine Valyn lying on the roof watching the battle below, torn between a desire to take part, to fight beside his friends, and his determination to see il Tornja killed. According to Talal, he had sacrificed everything to stay on that roof. When the battle was finished, when he finally had the opportunity …

Kaden’s eyes slammed open. He let his brother’s mind go.

“He attacked. He tried to kill il Tornja, and he failed.”

“It fits,” Kiel said slowly, “with what you learned from Gwenna and Talal.”

“And it fits with who he was. Even if Valyn knew il Tornja was Csestriim, even if he knew he couldn’t win, he wouldn’t have quit. He would have tried to carry out his mission.”

Only when Kaden trailed off did he hear his own words: who he was. At some point, lost in the beshra’an, he’d started speaking of his brother in the past tense. He turned his mind once more to the memory of his sister. He contemplated her face, the way she averted her eyes when he asked her about Valyn.

“He’s dead,” Kaden said. “And Adare knows it. If she was on the tower, she saw him killed.”

“Or killed him herself,” Kiel added quietly.

Kaden felt a sick sorrow twist around him. For a moment, he began to reach for the vaniate, then resisted. Maybe the Csestriim was right about the dangers of living too long inside the emptiness, and maybe he wasn’t, but this … if it was true … was something he needed to face. What would it mean, after all, if his sister had killed his brother and Kaden himself felt no sorrow, no anger, no horror? If human beings were no more than the tangled sum of their experience, what was a person who had no experience, who sidestepped it, whose emotions remained unsnared by the cords of the world? Despite its allure, the vaniate of the Shin was a cold thing, alien, alienating.

“I don’t think she could have killed him,” Kaden said finally, shaking his head. “Not unless she put a knife in his back.”

“Regardless of who wielded the knife,” Kiel said, “it seems likely, more than likely, that Valyn tried to kill il Tornja. He failed, then died for his failure. Adare knows all of this.”

“So ruthless,” Kaden said, shaking his head. “And for what? So she can sit the throne? So she can wear the imperial title?”

He tried to inhabit his sister’s mind, but he knew even less of Adare than he did of Valyn. The shapes of her actions and decisions made no sense. For several heartbeats he struggled to achieve some version of the beshra’an, then gave up. He had long ago accepted that there were some people-Rampuri Tan, Pyrre Lakatur, even his own father-that he would never really know.

“Adare was lying about Valyn,” Kaden said finally, “but she was telling the truth about Meshkent.”

“And what truth,” Kiel asked, cocking his head to the side, “did she tell?”

Kaden took a deep breath. This was a part of the conversation that he had so far failed to parse. The facts were clear, but the implications remained beyond him. Which was why he needed Kiel’s counsel.

“Long Fist-Meshkent-is using the kenta.”

The Csestriim studied him a moment, then leaned back, eyes suddenly elsewhere. Kiel was generally very good at hiding his true nature, but this look, one Kaden had seen before, always when the historian was trying to work through some intractable problem, was not human at all. “She knows this for certain?” he asked at last.

“She believes it. Il Tornja believes it. It explains the coordination of the attacks on Annur’s borders, explains how everything seems to be falling apart all at the same time.”

“It explains more than that,” the Csestriim said quietly.

“Meaning what?”

“Long Fist is not simply Urghul.” Kiel seemed to be studying the stars through the glassy walls of the Spear. “He is also one of the Ishien. Their commander, in fact.”

Kaden stared. The words were simple enough, and the meaning behind them, but there seemed no way to thread this claim into the world’s densely woven fabric. It didn’t fit. And if it could be made to fit, the implications …

“Matol was the commander,” Kaden said slowly, rehearsing his own beliefs, as though to speak a thing were to make it true. “Triste destroyed him with the kenta.”

Kiel shook his head. “Matol was only a lieutenant, one who had been left in charge a long time, many years-but still just a lieutenant. There was another man they spoke of: Horm. I never met him.”

Kaden ransacked his memory, sorting through the conversations. Tan had never mentioned the name, nor had Matol, but it was there, lodged in the back of his mind, recollected from an offhand remark of one of his jailors: Rampuri Tan was a Hunter. Almost as tough as Bloody Horm, least in some ways. In the moment, Kaden had been too curious about Tan’s past to ask anything more about the man to whom he was compared, and there had been no reason to revisit the comment later. The Dead Heart had been filled with hard men, and he’d had no intention of getting to know them all.

“So Horm was on the steppe,” Kaden said slowly, the stones of his thought locking into place. “He was Ishien pretending to be Urghul, pretending to be Long Fist.”

Kiel shook his head. “Not quite. Long Fist, that physical body, is Urghul-he has the skin, the eyes, the hair. It’s hard to say when Meshkent inhabited that body-probably when Long Fist was still on the steppe, maybe after he’d joined the Ishien-but the Ishien piece is crucial.” Oddly, he smiled. “I should have seen it so much earlier.”

“You said you never even met Horm.”

“It is hardly an excuse. The pattern was there.”

Kaden frowned. “So Meshkent inhabited Long Fist, united the Urghul…”

Kiel shook his head. “No. His triumphant return to the steppe would have happened after he joined the Ishien, perhaps long after. The Ishien do this sort of thing all the time-take on new identities, worm their way into communities all over Vash and Eridroa, often for years. For decades.”

“It’s how they hunt you.”

The Csestriim nodded. “They wouldn’t find many of my kind if they never left the Dead Heart. To do that, they need to go out, to blend in, or in Long Fist’s case, to return.”

“Then why take the detour in the first place? Meshkent wants to destroy Annur, but the Ishien don’t care about Annur. They don’t care about anything except the extermination of your race.”

“Your thinking is too linear,” Kiel said. “Not every scheme leads directly to its goal.”

Kaden’s thinking felt anything but linear. His mind tumbled end over end, tossed like a stick in a turbulent stream. With an effort, he slowed that stream, tried to find an eddy where he could rest, take stock.

“The gates,” Kaden said after a long pause. “Meshkent knew that to defeat Annur, he’d need to fight on more than one front, and to do that, he needed access to the gates.”

“Indeed,” Kiel replied. “Even with the full might of the Urghul behind him, Long Fist is unable to force his way past il Tornja and the Army of the North. He is winning because he’s fighting on the other fronts. The pirates and rebellions, the proliferation of banditry and violence down in the Waist-it is a more subtle war than the one being waged in the north, but it is war all the same.”

“And it is destroying us,” Kaden breathed.

He felt, suddenly, like one of the raptors in the imperial mews. The birds were kept hooded when they weren’t flying, and with a flick of his mind, he could imagine one of the creatures chafing against the constraints of the hood, eager to be free of the leather, believing that the hood was the whole prison. And then, to have the hood pulled off, to see that it had been the least of the constraints, to find the thick jesses wrapping the talons, to comprehend the bars of the cage, and beyond those bars, the implacable walls, and to find, nowhere in the deep rustle and gloom of the awful, man-made mews, any sign of the sky.

All this time, Kaden had known they were failing. He just hadn’t seen how badly.

“And there may be another reason,” Kiel went on, oblivious to Kaden’s silence. “If Meshkent suspects that a Csestriim sits at the heart of Annurian power, he will have been wise to ally himself with the Hunters of Csestriim.”

“Could he?” Kaden asked. “Could he know that?”

Meshkent was a god, after all. It suddenly seemed possible that he knew everything.

Kiel said nothing for a long time. He didn’t move. Finally he met Kaden’s eyes. “I cannot say. The gods are not omniscient, but what they know … or how they know it … is beyond me.”

Inside the darkness of his own mind, Kaden studied the cold caverns of the Dead Heart, tried to imagine a god cloaked in a man’s flesh walking those chill halls, eating the same soft white fish year after year, living among men whose minds were broken by the rituals they set themselves.

“And he likes it,” Kaden said softly.

Kiel raised his brows.

“Meshkent,” Kaden went on. “Long Fist. Bloody Horm. Whatever he calls himself, he might have joined the Ishien in order to use the gates, to get at the Csestriim, but he also likes it there. The Dead Heart-it is a temple to suffering.”

The Csestriim nodded slowly. “So it is.”

Kaden watched the historian for a moment, then looked out past the ironglass at the city of Annur stretched out below. The crescent moon, sharp as a blade, was buried in the rooftops to the west. The night was dark, and about to get darker.

“I have to go there,” he said quietly. A part of him quailed at the words, but he found the fear, crushed it out. “I have to go back to the Dead Heart.”

Kiel studied him. “You hope to find him. Meshkent.”

“I need to,” Kaden said. “I can’t win against il Tornja. We brought Adare here hoping she might tell us his weaknesses, maybe even help us kill him.…” He shook his head wearily. “And now we know we can’t trust her, that she’s lying to us. For all we know, she’s here to do il Tornja’s work, whatever that is. At every step, he has outmaneuvered us. We destroyed the empire, and it didn’t even matter. Not in the real fight.”

“Don’t be too certain,” Kiel said. “If il Tornja had the strength of a unified Annur behind him, he might have destroyed Meshkent already. If you didn’t control the Dawn Palace, he could have already come for Triste. For Ciena.”

“We managed a delay,” Kaden said, shaking his head. “Nothing more. Il Tornja knew about Long Fist, knew the Urghul chieftain was also the god. Meshkent isn’t the only one fighting the war on several fronts, and worse, he might not even be aware of the danger he is in. He thinks he’s fighting for Annur, but il Tornja doesn’t care about Annur. All of this,” Kaden gestured to the city, to the dark fields slumbering beyond, “is just a set of stones to be played, to be sacrificed if necessary.”

“Ran il Tornja is quick,” Kiel said, “and bright. But Meshkent is a god. He has played his own stones well.”

“But he’s playing the wrong game. He’s trying to control the board, to wrest back control of Vash and Eridroa, to reinstate his own bloody worship. Il Tornja doesn’t care about the board. His victory hangs on the capture of just two stones: Triste and Long Fist. I can’t help Triste any more than I have. She is as safe as I can make her, and more, she is here, inside the Spear, where she needs to be. There’s nothing else I can do for her, but I can warn Long Fist. I can try to bring him here, too.”

“To the Spear.”

Kaden nodded. “Where else?”

Kiel watched him for a while, or seemed to watch him. Kaden had the impression that the Csestriim was actually looking past him or through him, at some truth more crucial and abstract.

“Long Fist is not like Triste,” he said finally.

“They’re both gods,” Kaden replied.

“No,” Kiel replied, shaking his head. “Triste as you know her is a young woman with a goddess trapped inside her mind. Meshkent is not trapped. He wears Long Fist as you would wear a monk’s robe. He is in control, fully in control.”

“That’s why I need to talk to him. He can help.…”

“Why would he help?”

Kaden blinked. “Il Tornja is trying to kill Ciena, trying to kill him. We are trying to stop il Tornja. That puts all of us on the same side. At least as far as this fight goes, that makes us allies.”

“You assume the god believes he needs an ally. You assume that he wants one. Do not forget, Kaden, that Meshkent came to this earth, took on this human flesh, to destroy Annur, to tear down everything your progenitors worked so hard to build.”

“According to Adare, it was il Tornja who built Annur. The Malkeenians were just … puppets.”

“And it is generally the puppets who pay the heaviest price. Meshkent may not know about il Tornja’s involvement in your empire. And if he does know, he may not care. You are no longer Emperor, but you are still First Speaker of Annur, of the Annurian Republic. He has every reason to kill you. This notion of an alliance is a shield of glass. It will cut you when it shatters.”

Kaden shook his head slowly. “You’re wrong. My shield is not the alliance. It is my uselessness.”

Kiel regarded him silently, waiting.

“I have failed here in Annur,” Kaden went on, voice level as he faced the ugly fact. “The republic is a shambles. I could hardly have done more to help Meshkent if I had set out to support him from the very beginning.”

“He may eliminate you nonetheless. He may kill you to simplify the battle, for no other reason.”

“And if he kills me,” Kaden asked quietly, “is that such a great loss to our cause? I have none of your understanding of history. None of Gabril’s knifework. None of Kegellen’s unnumbered underground army.”

“You have Intarra’s eyes.”

“So does Adare, and she’s the one sitting on the throne.” Kaden smiled. The expression felt strange on his face. “I can go to Meshkent, I can die, if necessary, because I do not matter here.”

Kiel spread his hands. “If you want someone who truly does not matter, send a servant. Send a slave.”

“No,” Kaden said, shaking his head slowly. “A slave cannot travel the necessary paths.”

The Csestriim studied him with those empty eyes. “The kenta.”

Kaden nodded silently.

“The Ishien control the gates,” Kiel observed. “All of them. When you step through onto the island they will kill you before you say three words.”

“Then I’ll have to say what needs saying in two.”