The Last Mortal Bond

14

“There are two problems with recalling il Tornja to the city,” Adare said, shaking her head. “First, if we bring him here, there won’t be anyone to fight the Urghul.”

She gestured to the ruined map below, as though it were possible to descry the movement of horsemen hundreds of miles away in the cinder and soft ash left behind when the tiny false forests of the Thousand Lakes burned. The council had abandoned the entire chamber after Adare’s demonstration. She could hardly blame them. The place reeked of oil and char, half the lamps were shattered, shards of glass still littered the table, the catwalks, the chairs. Servants had come to clean it almost immediately, summoned by some unheard command. Adare had sent them away. She would see the map restored when she had restored Annur itself. In the meantime, the ruined hall provided a space where she could meet with Kaden and Kiel without interference from the rest of the council.

“There are other generals in the world,” Kaden pointed out. “Warriors other than il Tornja who might fight the Urghul.”

Adare looked up from the map to study her brother. He stood just a few feet away, almost close enough to touch, but everything about him-his posture, his gaze, that perfectly empty face-whispered of distance. There was no warmth to him. No human movement. Adare might have been watching him through a long lens while he stood alone on a far, far peak. Whatever rapprochement she had imagined or hoped might arise between them had vanished. The simple fact that he had insisted on bringing Kiel, the Csestriim, was evidence enough of that. Adare swallowed, unsure if the bitter taste on the back of her tongue was doubt or regret, then shook her head.

“There are no generals like il Tornja. The Urghul would have overrun us months ago if anyone else had been in command. They would have destroyed us in the very first battle.”

“Annur was still divided then. We’ve healed that rift.…”

“Have we?” Adare arched an eyebrow. “The council might be willing to let me perch atop the throne, but it seems pretty clear, based on that last meeting, that perching is about the extent of my imperial powers.”

“The point is,” Kaden said, “that with our armies allied, we have greater resources to fight the Urghul. You can recall il Tornja without scuttling the northern campaign.”

“You can recall him,” Kiel said, voice soft as a leather sole scuffing stone. “He will not come.”

Adare nodded curtly. “That was my second point.”

She let the silence stretch as she considered the historian, trying to read him. She had expected someone like il Tornja-strong, confident, insouciant-but of course, that was all an act, a mask her general wore to make him appear human. There was no reason that Kiel should have chosen the same one.

According to Kaden, Kiel was older than the kenarang, older by thousands of years, although what such a difference meant among the Csestriim, she didn’t care to guess. He certainly looked older. Partly it was the historian’s manner-unlike il Tornja, Kiel moved and spoke deliberately, almost cautiously, and Adare associated such caution with age. Kiel had also been a prisoner for a very long time, and the marks remained-a nose and jaw broken over and over, a limp, hands shattered then poorly healed, fingers twisted as twigs. If il Tornja seemed too young and cocksure to be Csestriim, Kiel appeared too bent, too broken.

There was, however, something about his eyes, something old and impossibly distant that she remembered from that tower in Andt-Kyl. Like il Tornja, he tried to mask it, but for whatever reason, he hadn’t been quite so successful, and there were times, as now, moments when he seemed to look right past her, through her, as though she were just a tiny point in some pattern so unfathomably vast she could never hope to understand it.

“He knows that I am here,” Kiel continued after a moment.

Adare nodded. “He told me as much before I left. Said that you would tell me lies about him. He can’t know that I’d side with you.”

In truth, she wasn’t sure that she intended to side with Kaden and the other Csestriim. The thought of il Tornja bending finally to Annurian justice was honey-sweet, but the brute facts of the matter remained: il Tornja held back the Urghul, and whatever Kaden had been about to say on the docks the day before-something about il Tornja and Long Fist, about the kenarang’s insistence on seeing the chieftain destroyed-he hadn’t said it. Just when Adare thought she saw a path, an open door, a chance at a connection, Kaden had folded back into himself like a paper fan clicking quietly shut.

“You’re not telling me something,” she said, careful to keep her voice level, firm.

Kaden raised his brows a fraction.

“I suspect,” he replied, “that we are all holding something back. As you said before: you don’t trust me.”

That was true enough. It was more than true. Adare hadn’t told her brother about Nira, about the noose of flame the leach kept around il Tornja’s neck, about the fact that she could order the kenarang dead with a word, a gesture. Trusting and sharing were all well and good, but she wasn’t about to go first.

“There is only one way to build trust,” she said, holding Kaden’s gaze as she spread her hands. “If we’re going to do anything at all about il Tornja, about his stranglehold on military power, I need to know what he wants with Long Fist. You need to explain to me his … obsession with Meshkent. I can’t do anything, I can’t be an ally if you won’t tell me the truth.”

“The truth,” Kaden repeated quietly.

They faced each other, a pace apart, eyes locked. That single word-truth-felt like a blade in her hand, something hard and sharp to hold up between her and this brother she barely knew. Of course Kaden had his own invisible sword, his own truth to parry hers. She could almost hear them scraping, grating against each other, as though the stillness were battle, their mutual silence were screams, as though that one syllable could cut, kill.

“If il Tornja destroys Meshkent,” Kaden said at last, “we die.”

Adare narrowed her eyes. This acquiescence was too sudden, too absolute to trust.

“Who dies?”

“All of us.” Kaden glanced over at Kiel. Something seemed to pass between them, some unspoken agreement. Then he turned back to her and explained it all, explained in perfect detail just how Ran il Tornja, Adare’s general, the father of her child, was plotting to destroy the human world.

* * *

“It doesn’t make sense,” Adare said slowly, when Kaden had finally finished. “Let’s accept, for the moment, the premise that the young gods are the source of our feelings, our humanity. Let’s say I buy that their existence is what makes us who we are. Meshkent isn’t one of them. Why isn’t il Tornja obsessed with Kaveraa or Maat or Eira?”

“He would be,” Kiel replied, “if they were here. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for your kind, the young gods have not worn flesh since they came down to side with you in the long war against my people. That was thousands of years ago.”

“So how does killing Meshkent solve his problem? How does ridding the world of pain suddenly usher in a second golden age of the Csestriim?”

The historian watched her a moment, gauging her question. Then his eyes went distant in that way that made her stomach clench. She glanced over at Kaden, partly to see whether he had anything to add to the conversation, mostly to look away from Kiel. To her dismay, Kaden’s eyes, too, were empty.

“The theology,” Kiel said finally, “is nuanced.”

Adare snorted. “In my experience, nuanced is a word people use when they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.”

To her surprise, Kiel smiled. “I, too, have had that experience.” He shrugged. “Meshkent and Ciena are the progenitors of the younger gods.”

She shook her head. “So what? Il Tornja murdered my father, but I’m still around. So is Kaden.”

“And Valyn, too,” Kaden added quietly. “We can hope, at least.”

“Of course,” she said, heat rising to her cheeks. “Of course we’re all pulling for Valyn, but the point is, the relevant point right now, is that killing Meshkent won’t do a thing to limit the power of his progeny.”

“Your analogy is limited,” Kiel said. “Despite your burning eyes, the Malkeenians are not gods.”

“And you’re claiming that the gods die when their parents die?”

He shook his head. “As I said before, the theology is complex. My people studied the gods a long time, but those studies were, by their very nature, imperfect, incomplete. On many subjects touching the divine, we remain entirely ignorant. The corpus of knowledge is contingent. Uncertain.”

“Wonderful,” Adare said.

Kiel raised a hand, as though to stop her objection before it could begin. “One thing, however, is certain. The gods are more than us. Not just older and stronger, but different.” He paused, as though searching for words sturdy enough to bear the freight of his thought. “We are of the world-you and I, Csestriim and human. We live inside it as a man lives inside a house. When we die, the world remains.

“The gods are different. They are the world. Their existence is built inextricably into the structure of reality.” He shook his head, reformulated. “They give reality its structure. This is what makes them gods. To return to the analogy of the house-a most imperfect analogy, but one that might serve-the gods are the foundation and floors, they are the windows admitting light, they are the walls.”

Adare tried to parse the claim, to make sense of it. “They seem a lot more opinionated than the walls.”

Kiel spread his hands. “As I said, the analogy is imperfect. Reality is not a house. Foundational principles of order and chaos, being and nothingness…” He trailed off, shrugged again. “They’re not just stones.”

“The point,” Kaden said, breaking into the conversation for the first time, “is that if you knock out the foundation, walls fall down.”

Kiel frowned. “Meshkent and Ciena are hardly foundational. Not in the way of Ae and the Blank God, Pta and Astar’ren.”

“I get it,” Adare cut in. “For whatever reason, if you destroy Meshkent and Ciena, you destroy what’s built on them. Shatter the parents and the children crumble.”

The words made her think of Sanlitun, swaddled in his cradle in a cold castle at the empire’s very limit. There had been no choice but to leave him. Annur was a den of wolves; Adare had no doubt that there were a dozen members of the council who would leap at the chance to see the child murdered. He was safer in the north, safer in Nira’s care-and yet, what would happen to him if Adare herself were killed? How long would the ancient Atmani woman watch over him?

“It makes sense, in a way,” Kaden went on, jolting Adare from her thoughts. “Imagine you had no capacity to feel pain or pleasure.”

With an effort of will, she hauled her mind away from that castle, away from the son of hers who at that very moment might be sleeping or fretting, squirming or crying out, forced herself to focus. The only way to save him, the only true way, was to win.

“Physically?” she asked.

“Physically. Mentally. Emotionally. No pain or pleasure of any sort.” He shook his head, staring down at the charred ruin she had made of Kresh, and Sia, and Ghan. “Why would you feel any of the rest of it? Why would you feel fear or hate or love? How would you feel them?”

Adare tried to imagine such an existence, to conceive of a life lived in the utter absence of … what? Not sensation. That wasn’t it. The Csestriim could feel the wind when it blew, could hear the plucking of a harp as well as any human. 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.

She looked at Kiel, then shuddered. She had known the Csestriim were different-smarter, older, immortal. She had read all the most famous accounts, understood that they were creatures of reason rather than passion. Somehow, she had never quite realized what it all meant, the bleakness of it. The horror.

“We would be like you,” she murmured.

Kiel nodded gravely. “If you survived at all.”

“Why wouldn’t we survive?”

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.” He gestured toward Adare. “Why are you here?”

“Because this is where we agreed to meet.”

“Not here in the map room. In Annur.”

“Because someone has to fix this wreck we’ve made of the empire.”

The historian raised his brows. “Oh? Why?”

Adare floundered. “Because people are depending on us. Relying on us. Millions of them will starve, or succumb to disease, or end up on the blades of the Urghul.…”

“So what?”

“So what?”

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?”

“It matters to me,” Adare snapped. She stabbed a finger at the wall, a wordless invocation of the uncounted souls living in the city and beyond. “It fucking matters to them.”

“Because an Urghul slaughter would pain you. A resurgence of the gray plague would hurt you…” He reached over to tap her very lightly on the head, just below the hairline. “… here.”

“Yes!”

“Your general wants to make a world in which it would not. He thinks you will become like us, then.”

Adare stared. “And you? What do you think?”

“You might change,” he conceded, nodding to Kaden. “Some of you, those with the right training.”

“And the rest?” she demanded. “The ones who actually care?”

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.”