The Last Mortal Bond

19

After five long days forcing the horses forward through miserable stands of tamarack and larch, they were still in the forest. Though the world remained unrelentingly dark to Valyn’s scarred eyes, he could feel the cold wind, honed over the mountain stone and bright as ice. It cut through his leathers and the wool beneath. He could smell the snow, and the ancient ice of the glaciers hanging in the high valleys.

The Eyrie had flown his class of cadets out to the Romsdals once for a two-week exercise in alpine evasion and survival. He’d only been twelve at the time, but he remembered the great gray-black peaks well. Where the Bone Mountains around Ashk’lan were comprised of clean white granite, of rivers cascading over smooth sweeps of stone, the Romsdals were crumbling and dark. Year-round snow capped the highest mountains, but below that white blanket, everything was ankle-twisting scree and shattered schist. The Romsdals felt old, somehow, older than the Bones, heavy with the age and weight of the world. Even when the sun shone, they were cold.

“How far west have we come?” Valyn asked. He could smell Huutsuu at his side, her sweat and leather, the dried blood on her hands from butchering a pair of rabbits that morning.

“Far enough,” she replied after a pause. “We are two days’ ride from a river and just beyond that, a city.”

Valyn studied his mind’s map, a composite of the hundreds he’d memorized during his time on the Islands.

“Aergad,” he concluded. “It’s in northeastern Nish, near the headwaters of the Haag.”

He could smell Huutsuu’s indifference. “Stones piled on other stones. People crammed so close they live in the shit of their neighbors. In this, at least, I agree with your leach-such places should be burned.”

“Balendin is here?” Valyn asked.

“He will be, either today or another day. He travels with his own guard now, joining the war at many places. The fiercest fighting is here, so he returns here often.”

“And you’re hoping the Flea will come hunting.”

Huutsuu hesitated. “Your warrior friends strike in unexpected places, but never in the heart of our force. We will keep to the forests and hope that they find us.”

It didn’t seem like much of a plan, but he couldn’t think of another. According to Huutsuu, the Urghul had been trying and failing to track the Flea for months. Even in deep snow, he and his Wing seemed able to simply disappear. The woman could hardly expect that adding a blind man to the mix would lead to more success, and Valyn had kept quiet about his hearing, about the fact that he could smell anything-a fox, a man, a bear-more than a mile distant. Maybe he could track the Kettral Wing if he got close enough, and maybe he couldn’t, but he wasn’t about to reveal that secret to Huutsuu.

“We ride south,” Huutsuu responded after a pause. “Slowly. He hides, this friend of yours, in the deep forest. He looks for bands like this. If we present a target, he will come.”

“The problem,” Valyn observed, “is that he might cut all of our throats before you can tell him you’ve switched sides.”

Huutsuu was silent for a while. “We are not cattle,” she said finally. “Unlike your Annurians, we are not beasts who wait patiently for the carving.”

Valyn felt the darkness twist, then tense inside him. The memory of slaughtered loggers and trappers filled his mind, of men and women screaming as the Urghul held them down, cut them open. He dropped a hand to the head of an ax; the pitted steel was cool against his burning skin.

“They are people,” he growled. “Not beasts.”

Huutsuu snorted. “They are weak. We are not. When this Flea comes, we will be ready.”

“Ready?” Valyn demanded. He could hear the rage in his own voice, but made no effort to harness it. “If you think because you bore three kids and can ride all day on a horse that you’re ready for the Flea, you’re a fool.” He could hear the horsemen turning in their saddles to look at him. He smiled grimly, then raised his voice. “Which doesn’t say much for these assholes following you.”

None beside Huutsuu seemed to speak Valyn’s language, but they understood a challenge well enough. They could translate the mockery if not the words. The horses, sensing the anger and confusion of their riders, shifted warily. Hooves ground against broken stone.

“I made peace with you,” Huutsuu said, “to fight against this leach.”

“You made peace with me,” Valyn spat back, “because you thought I was a weapon. Well, let’s find out.” The blood slammed in his temples, in his ears, a roaring fire. He set a hand on the head of the other ax. “Who wants to find out? Anyone?” He hurled the words like stones into the jagged silence.

“Have a care,” Huutsuu’s voice was hard. “These warriors follow me, but it sits ill with them to ride alongside an Annurian.”

“You’re telling me you can’t keep your people under control?”

“Control.” She spat the word, as though it tasted bitter. “It is a thing for emperors and the sheep they keep penned. The Urghul are a free people.”

“I’ve seen what that freedom looks like. I’ve seen the scars it leaves.”

“It is a meager freedom that leaves no scars.”

* * *

They made camp just before nightfall. On the steppe, the Urghul had been happy to ride in the darkness, but the ground of the northern forests was studded with stones and broken by twisting roots-dangerous ground, even for the small, sure-footed horses. The horsemen had gathered wood for a fire.

The faint heat was tempting, especially as the night’s chill settled into Valyn’s bones, but he didn’t care to spend the night surrounded by Urghul. No one had tried to kill him yet, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t. Maybe they agreed with Huutsuu’s decision to find the Flea. Maybe not. He might have a better idea if he could understand their language, but he couldn’t, and he didn’t. He picked out a flat patch of ground fist-deep in brown needles, a narrow space wedged between two huge boulders. He explored it with his hands, then, satisfied that the only approach was from the south, settled in, his back to the stone. It was cold, but he was used to cold.

For a while he kept his eyes open, staring into the endless void of his blindness. The wind howled between the boulders, kicking up grit and tearing at the ratty leathers the Urghul had given to him. If he listened long enough, there seemed to be voices on that wind, screaming their warnings and their torments, maddened, just beyond the verge of syllables and sense. Only the wind, he told himself. Just the icy fucking wind. It kept tearing at him, however, indifferent to his wall of words, and after a while he gave up, opened his mind to the wind’s wailing.

The people of Andt-Kyl had screamed like that, screamed as they fought and died, as Valyn crouched atop the signal tower, waiting, watching, and doing nothing. Over at the campfire, the Urghul were burning strips of rabbit, but the cooking reminded Valyn of the reek of human flesh, men and women charred to ash in fires they could not escape. Despite the night’s cold claws scratching at his flesh, he was sweating, the ragged wool beneath his leathers-the last remnant of his Kettral blacks-soaked through.

Most nights it was like this. Plenty of days, too. Memory came with the darkness, horror with the memory, and he could never leave that darkness. Eventually, maybe halfway through the night, his body would shudder its way still and he would sleep, mind racked past endurance, the sudden unconsciousness violent as a breakage.

I fixed something, he told himself, remembering the child who bore his name, terrified but brave, demanding to go back to save his family. I made that one thing right.

The words did him no good. His body continued to tremble, his mind to turn in the same ruts like a rusted wheel. The Kettral had taught him to break out of a dozen types of fortress, but they’d said nothing about escaping from his own mind.

For a long time he sat there, trembling with memory; so long it was almost a relief to hear Huutsuu approaching through the darkness, her footfalls rough in carcasses of leaves and needles, her breathing a warm echo of the great wind all around them.

She paused a few paces from where he sat, watching him, probably. It was well past dark, but Valyn had long ago lost track of the phases of the moon. Perhaps it was hanging up there somewhere, bright as milk, lighting the stones around him.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked finally.

He’d stopped shaking, some part of his mind or body recognizing the threat, readying the flesh to deal with it. Rather than let the woman stand over him, he rose to his feet, settling a hand on the pommel of his knife. The weight of the twin, short-handled axes hanging from his belt was solid, real, a reassuring ballast that kept him from drifting off into his own darkness.

“Which part?” he replied.

“You have said already that you are blind. You ride like a blind man. You walk like a blind man.”

“I guess it all fits then, doesn’t it?”

“A blind man does not do the things I saw back at that trapper’s cabin. He does not pull flying arrows from the air.”

“Maybe you didn’t see what you thought you saw.”

“I saw this,” Huutsuu replied grimly. “You put an ax in one of my taabe from fifteen paces. I will know how, or we will go no farther together.”

For a dozen slow heartbeats Valyn didn’t respond, though he could feel his body coiling, his heart slamming beneath his ribs. There would be no simple breaking of company, no riding off alone and unmolested. Not at this point. Splitting from the Urghul would mean fighting, and something inside him, something that had kept him alive in the waters of Scar Lake and then in the winters of the northern forests, was eager to fight, to limber his twin axes and begin carving. It would end in his own death, but for that, too, a part of him was eager.

But Balendin’s still alive, he reminded himself grimly. He’d told himself that he was done fighting, but it was one thing to growl the words to himself alone, in the frigid dark of some northern cave, another to stay out of it when he was around so many others who were diving back in. Dying was fine. He was ready to die, but he might as well try to drag Balendin down with him.

“I’m not always blind,” he said finally.

Wind whittled the silence to a point.

“I do not understand,” Huutsuu said.

“Neither do I. Most of the time all I see is darkness. I can hear just fine. I can smell. But I can’t see my own hand in front of my face.”

“And the fighting?”

“The fighting is different. When it matters, when someone’s trying to kill me, I can fight.”

“You can see?” Huutsuu demanded. She sounded suspicious.

“Yes,” Valyn said, remembering the shapes that were not shapes, those forms inscribed in black on his mind’s broader blackness. “I can see to fight. To kill.”

“So…,” Huutsuu began. The syllable was casual, laconic. It did nothing to cover the sound of her sword sliding free of the sheath, of her quickening pulse or her feet shifting on the stone. Even without the strange non-sight, Valyn would have known to move, to block, but for a moment there was more-a vision of the sword’s blade carved across his blindness, moving and not moving, the whole thing so pathetically slow. It was less than nothing to slide beneath the blade, to slam his stiffened hand up into her jaw, knocking her teeth closed and sending her reeling back into the boulder behind.

And then it was gone. He could hear Huutsuu’s breathing, he could smell the fresh blood, but he might as well have been standing in the bottommost pit of Hull’s Hole, his only torch long ago burned out.

“So,” he said. If his fist to her jaw hadn’t explained it, more words weren’t likely to do the job.

Huutsuu straightened, slid her sword back into her sheath. “I do not understand this,” she said slowly. He could smell the wariness on her, even thicker than the smoke of the campfire blazing a hundred paces behind them. “I do not understand it, but there is much about this world I fail to understand.”

Valyn just nodded. He felt suddenly weary, weary out of all proportion to the minimal effort of the scuffle. He wanted to sit, to lean his head back against the rock, to close his eyes against the stinging wind. He stayed on his feet instead.

“I’ll tell you what you need to understand: my eyes are broken. That is all.”

“Or perhaps,” Huutsuu replied, “you are blessed. I have known women and men like this.…”

“Who could fight through their blindness?” Valyn demanded.

“No, not that. They were blessed in other ways. Blessed by Kwihna. This is like the touch of a god on your flesh. There is something sacred in your blindness.”

“You don’t understand the first fucking thing about sacred,” Valyn spat. To hear the Urghul woman talk about sanctity after the chaos the Urghul had wrought in Annur made him angry in a way that went beyond human anger. He could feel his lips pulling back into a snarl. “You’re twisted, all of you. Warped. Broken. I don’t know how you ended up this way, but your worship of pain, it is an illness.”

“What do you know of pain?”

Before he knew what he was doing, Valyn seized the woman by the throat. He could feel the tendons in her neck straining against his fingers as he pulled her closer. She was choking, he realized, hacking, strangling sounds clawing their way free. He smiled.

“Look at my face,” he growled. He had drawn her so close that she could hardly do otherwise. Her ragged half breaths were hot against his lips. “Look at my eyes.”

She was pulling at his clenched hand with both of hers. He took one and forced it down to his side, to the vicious puckered scar left by Adare’s knife. “Do you feel that? Do you? What do you think? Did it hurt? Do I have some inkling of what pain is all about?”

Sickened suddenly by Huutsuu, by her savage god, by his own animal savagery, he loosened his grip. Instead of pulling back, however, she leaned closer, so close that her lips were at his ear. A moment later he felt the pain, the knife’s frigid tip already past his leathers and his blacks, pressed against his chest, then severing the skin, skewering the flesh of his chest.

His first thought was that the strange sight had finally failed him. The violence had brought no vision.

His second thought, even as he seized her wrist, was that he’d been too slow and too stupid, and that the Urghul woman had killed him for it. No fear came with the realization. No regret. In a grim flash, he understood how Pyrre could be so indifferent to the prospect of her own death. And then he realized that he wasn’t dying.

Huutsuu had threaded her blade through the muscle of his chest parallel to the ribs beneath. That knife was more than long enough to reach his heart, but she’d come in from the side; instead of driving it deeper, she was using it, using the pressure of the blade’s flat against the striated muscle, to pull him closer to her. Like a water buffalo with a ring through the nose, Valyn obeyed the pressure, moving forward with it, until he could feel the woman’s breath again, hot in the cold air.

“Show me,” she hissed.

He seized her by the throat once more, whether to choke her or push her back, he couldn’t say. There was pain, and there was darkness, and her ragged breathing.

“Show you what?”

“Show me,” she said, pulling him to her with the knife hooked in his flesh, “what you understand about pain.”

He started to respond, but her mouth was on his, hot and hungry, all lips and tongue and teeth and desperate breath. He tightened his fist, lifting her feet free of the ground, kissing her back, if something so vicious could be called kissing. In the endless blank of his blindness, there were two points bright as stars in dark night: the red pain of the blade buried in his chest, and the white fire of a lust that burned like rage. She shuddered when he slammed her back into the flat wall of the boulder, groaned with something that might have been pain or pleasure, then groped around his belt with her free hand.

The buckle was simple, straightforward, but she didn’t go for the buckle. Instead, she pulled his belt knife free of the sheath, broke off the kiss to shove him backward, slid the knife through the leather of the belt, the action so quick and insistent she nicked his hip as she cut the leather. As the belt parted, she was already carving away the rest of his clothes, the keen blade parting the fabric, slicing careless, shallow cuts into the flesh beneath until the wool and fur and leather fell away and that glacial air was everywhere on his skin.

It was cold, bitingly cold, but the blood sheeting down his chest was warm, and Huutsuu’s tongue was warm as she stepped forward again to lick the wound just where the knife plunged into his chest. When she kissed him again, he could taste blood, a taste that broke something inside him, some last, restraining civilized thread, and then both knives were in his hands, and the blood a hot wash down his flesh, and he could see her, see the rictus clench in her jaw as he cut her furs free, see the furrows he left in her flesh, fresh rents over the old webs of scar. He could see in shades of dark on dark her neck bent back, her back arching, her hands dragging him close, and then the sight blacked out and the ambit of his world became screaming, and blood, the blind pain and the searing, vicious bliss, unredeemed, unredeemable.