The Last Mortal Bond

52

No matter the training, no matter the book study and drills in the field, no matter the tactics and strategy, the missions completed, the years survived-sometimes you just had bad fucking luck.

True to his word, the Flea had waited until the last possible moment to pull his people off the wall. All morning, the Kettral stood shoulder to shoulder with those few Annurian soldiers who remained, beating back one more wave of riders, then another, then another. Only when it was obviously hopeless, when the Urghul were as thick atop Mierten’s wall as the defenders themselves, did the Wing leader give the signal to retreat. The remaining legionaries-sweating, bleeding, locked in their own desperate struggles-didn’t even notice.

They’ll never know, Valyn realized as he turned for one last glance. The lines of battle had dissolved into madness. Fent was fighting with a broken sword, while Sander, who had no weapon at all, was punching his attackers, clawing at them, hugging them close enough to bite into their throats. Farther down the wall, Huutsuu and her Urghul were also losing ground, and though Valyn had fought beside her for the first part of the morning, she, too, was lost in her own struggle, oblivious to his betrayal. They’ll never know we left them to their deaths.

He realized, as he backed away, that he’d been hoping someone would notice. He’d been waiting to see the fury in the eyes of those he was abandoning, readying himself for their rage. He’d been preparing to bear away, as long as he survived, their final curses. And then there were no curses to bear. No judgment. The ease of the whole thing made him sick. The Urghul swarmed over the wall, but that didn’t matter, not to him, not anymore. The river was only a few hundred paces away. Even if he didn’t run, even if he stopped to offer up a prayer before diving in, he was going to make it.

Then the bad luck hit.

There was no way to know, passing beneath the fort’s southern gate, that the stonework had been weakened by the days of battle to the north. Or maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe the weakness had nothing to do with the war. Maybe it was just a matter of rain and snow, hundreds of years of ice and wind gnawing at the mortar, eroding it a little at a time, chewing between the huge stone blocks until anything, even the softest footstep, could bring them down. Not that it mattered. What mattered was the way the stone shifted beneath Newt’s feet, how the wall caved and the huge lintel came down upon his leg.

Anyone slower would have been killed. The stone was twice as high as Valyn and had to weigh two dozen times as much. Only the Aphorist’s quick reflexes-he’d twisted his torso clear at the last moment-had saved his head. Not that it mattered. The leg was crushed below the knee, pinning him in place, and the Urghul were coming. Valyn couldn’t see the northern wall beyond the fort’s central structures, but he could hear what was happening there clearly enough-the sounds of fighting had drained away, replaced by the vicious ululation of victory.

By the time Valyn reached Newt, his face was twisted with pain, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. Shockingly, the man had refused to cry out, forcing the agony down inside him somewhere deep, silent, somewhere it wouldn’t betray his Wingmates. Sigrid reached them a moment later, shoved Valyn roughly aside, then knelt next to the demolitions master. She made a quiet sound-half whistle, half croon-as she rested an open hand on his sweating brow. Valyn had never seen such a tender gesture from the leach.

Newt hacked out something that might have been a moan or a laugh.

“I understand the irony…,” he whispered.

The Flea had been lagging behind, covering their retreat. When he rounded the corner, however, he took the scene in at a glance and, barely breaking stride, threw his shoulder against the massive stone. For a moment, Valyn thought the man might actually move it.

The Islands had been filled with scenes of determination, hard men and women harnessing their will to perform nearly impossible tasks. Anyone who passed Hull’s Trial had to be able to fight through exhaustion and despair, had to be able to keep moving, keep trying, long after the body was finished and the mind close to unraveling. Valyn had been there when Trea Bel dragged herself from the waves after seven days swimming laps around the Islands, smiling even as she collapsed because she knew she’d won her bet. He’d been there when Daveen Shaleel demonstrated to a whole class of cadets that a soldier could perform field surgery on herself, talking quietly between gritted teeth all while she stitched shut a shark bite that had taken out a portion of her thigh. It was easy, after a life spent training on the Islands, to think you had seen it all, but Valyn had never seen anything quite like the Flea as he threw his weight against that stone.

It wasn’t the cords of muscle standing out in his neck, or the way the veins in his scalp throbbed with the blood beneath, or the sound of his teeth grinding-so loud it seemed his jaw would have to crack. Valyn had seen all that before, seen it dozens of times over in different variations. The thing he had never seen before was the sheer, granitic determination in the Flea’s eyes. The Wing leader wasn’t looking at Newt or the stone he had to move. He wasn’t looking forward to the river or backward to the Urghul behind. He was looking at nothing, staring at the empty air a foot away from his face, his whole attention fixed so fully on that point he seemed to have forgotten his own body, which was bent to breaking beneath the load, forgotten the point of his awful labors, forgotten everything but that one goal, as though his entire life had been aiming at this single moment, this task beside which there was no other and after which nothing else mattered, this moving of the stone.

He failed.

He staggered, exhausted, reset his boots, tried to find new purchase. Newt shook his head.

“No good,” he gasped. “One man can’t … lift the world.”

“Fuck that,” the Flea growled as he threw his shoulder against the block.

Valyn was there in a single stride, hitting the rock from the same side, hitting it so hard he felt his shoulder lurch horribly in the socket. The stone didn’t budge.

“Get out,” the Aphorist said.

“When I die,” the Flea replied, his voice level, quiet despite the strain, “then you can start giving the orders.” He turned to the leach. “What can you do, Sig?”

She kept her hand on Newt’s forehead, but closed her eyes. The plinth shuddered, raining down gravel from where it leaned against the doorframe above. It shifted a few degrees, then fell still. Sigrid made an awful broken sound, some hacked-apart kind of howl.

“She cannot raise the whole weight,” Newt translated. “Not even … with my pain. All men must die, but this is … not your time. Get out.”

The Flea let go of the stone, crossed to kneel beside Sigrid.

“How much more?” he asked.

She looked up from the Aphorist. Tears stood in her blue eyes.

“No,” Newt groaned.

The Flea ignored him. “How much more?”

At their backs, fifty paces away but obscured by the fort’s crumbling buildings, the Urghul were howling. Valyn could hear the cracking of wood hauled aside, the crash of barricades thrown down. They were opening Balendin’s gap in the wall, finishing the work they’d begun almost a week earlier. It wouldn’t be long before the horses were able to pour through that gap, wouldn’t be long before they’d come hunting for survivors.

“This…,” Newt began.

“Is not your choice,” the Flea said. He kept his eyes on the leach. “Sig, I need you to tell me.”

She made a strange, mute gesture, a sort of slice across her arm.

The Flea’s face tightened. He nodded, slid his belt knife from the sheath, closed his eyes, then, in a decisive motion, scored the skin, notching a shallow V into the flesh. With the practiced motion of a cook in the kitchen, he flipped the knife, slid the steel beneath his own skin, then started peeling. Valyn stared. There had been a couple of classes on flaying back on the Islands. The accepted wisdom was that it wasn’t much use as torture-it hurt too much. Instead of saying useful things, flayed soldiers passed out or went mad. According to the Kettral trainers, no one could take the pain.

Evidently, the phrase no one did not include the Flea.

He tore free the ribbon of bloody skin, yanked it off the way he might have pulled a recalcitrant peel from an apple, then went at it again, carving away another strip quickly, but carefully, refusing to let the knife bite so deep it might sever a tendon or artery. Valyn understood it all at once: Sigrid needed pain-that was her well-and the Flea was giving it to her without gutting his own ability to fight. He might die later from gangrene or wet rot, but not today, not until they had escaped. Blood washed his arm. Valyn could see the red cords of twisted muscle laid bare, the filaments of veins.

“Is that enough?” the Flea asked.

Sigrid took the mutilated limb in her hand, then closed her eyes again. This time, when she put her free hand against the stone, it lurched. The leach groaned, a horrifying, broken sound deep in her chest. When she bared her teeth, they were bloody, as though she’d bitten open the inside of her cheek. The stone shifted up another inch, and Valyn lunged forward, seized the Aphorist beneath the armpits, pulling him from the wreckage.

“Clear,” he said. “He’s out.”

Sigrid didn’t seem to hear him. Her eyes were still closed, her pale face bathed with sweat. She might have been bearing the weight of that massive stone on her own body, letting it crush her slowly into the dirt.

The Flea pulled his arm from her grip, her eyes snapped open, the slab dropped, and the whole wall shuddered with the weight.

“Go,” the Wing leader said, jerking his head toward the river as he hacked a length of cloth from the hem of his blacks, then began to bind the bloody arm. “Go.”

Valyn heaved the Aphorist onto his back, ignored the man’s stifled cry as his broken leg jolted, and began to move over the uneven ground, his eyes fixed on the spot a hundred paces distant where the grassy bank sloped down to the Haag. This far north, the river was barely fifty paces wide. There was a quiet eddy directly ahead, at the base of the bank, but beyond those calm shallows the current surged into a brown-white froth, churning through head-high standing waves and grinding over massive boulders.

The notion that any of them would be swimming that thing was ridiculous. The best that they could hope for was to stay afloat somehow, to keep from being sucked under, pinned beneath the river’s weight, and killed. There was no way the legionaries they’d left behind could have survived it. The Kettral spent their whole lives swimming, and Valyn wasn’t sure he could make it. Not that there was any choice.

He glanced over his shoulder. Sigrid stumbled forward as though in a daze. The Flea had her by an elbow, guiding her on, but he was losing blood despite his hastily bandaged arm, the rich dark skin of his face going gray, ashen.

“Problems for later,” Valyn muttered to himself.

He hitched Newt higher on his shoulder, turned back toward the river, then staggered to a halt. Urghul riders were pouring out of another gap in the southern wall, massing up between the Kettral and the river. They’d found a way through Mierten’s Fort, around it, over it-it didn’t matter-they were here, half a dozen of them, then a dozen, and more coming, lances leveled, faces alight at the sight of their cornered quarry. Valyn slid an ax free of his belt, started to shift the Aphorist around to give himself more room.

“Down,” Newt groaned. “Put me down. In a fight like this … a man needs all his arms.”

Valyn hesitated, then lowered the demolitions master. As he was drawing his second ax, Newt forced himself to his knees, grimaced, almost passed out, steadied himself against the ground with a hand, straightened again, then slipped two knives from the belt at his waist. Knives against mounted riders with spears. It seemed almost pointless, but the worst of the soldier’s pain seemed to have passed, and the Aphorist’s eyes were sharp and bright as he watched the riders form up for their attack.

The Flea reached them a moment later. He was carrying Sigrid now, cradling the tall woman in his arms as though she were a child. Her lids were open, but her eyes lolled back inside her skull. Gently, patiently, despite the horsemen bearing down upon them, the Wing leader laid her on the dirt, then straightened with a wince.

“We get one chance at this,” he said. “They’ll come at us in a wave. There will be a moment when the wave breaks, then another when it is past. That’s when we run for the river.”

Before Valyn could reply, however, before he could even nod, before the Urghul could kick their horses to a full gallop, a new sound carved the noon sky, slicing through the river’s roar and the cries of the horsemen, paring away the rumble of hooves and the hammering of Valyn’s own heart in his ears, a dagger of scream opening the world’s soft belly. Valyn stiffened, some animal panic older than all conscious thought striking through him, bellowing at him to run, to hide, to find some place where that bright, awful cry could never reach. It was the instinct of mouse and hare, of all small creatures naked beneath the sky, helpless and fleeing, the instinct of all prey when the predator finally arrives. And then, a heartbeat later, over that first instinct, a slower, greater thought: Kettral.

The Urghul horses pawed at the dirt, shifting unsteadily beneath their riders as the horsemen tried to bring them back under control. Valyn spun, axes in hand, scanning the horizon to the south, searching, searching, and then … there: screaming up the river valley, talons skimming just inches above the frothing water, wings almost wide enough to stretch from bank to bank, a bird, golden as the setting sun, black-eyed, wide-beaked, furious as vengeance itself.

This, too, the Flea took in stride.

“Change of plan. Ready for a smash and grab. Valyn, you’re with Newt-use the corpse-carry. Signal we’ve got wounded, need to run the grab at half speed.”

Valyn didn’t move. The bird was still a mile off, but he could see the figures on the talons, tiny silhouettes against the gray sky behind. Even with his sight, he couldn’t make out the faces, not at that distance, and so, for just a moment, he closed his eyes, found the darkness he had lived inside for so long, and listened. Behind the panicking horses and the cries of their riders, beneath the hiss of the wind and the river’s roar, laid beneath all the sounds of the world, or over them, a voice:

“… just ignore the fact that the whole fucking Urghul nation came out to play. We make the grab, and we’re gone.…”

“Holy Hull,” he breathed, eyes shattering open. “Holy fucking Hull. It’s Gwenna.”

“I told you,” the Flea murmured, bending to lift Sigrid into his arms once more.

Valyn shook his head. “Told me what?”

“Back on the Islands, when you were still botching your barrel drops. I told you they’d make a good Wing.”

* * *

The Urghul horses were trained for steel and fire, trained to charge a line of infantrymen with pikes, but no one had trained them to face Kettral. At the bird’s deafening approach most reared up so violently that even the Urghul riders struggled to keep their seats.

“Now!” the Flea growled. “Get to the river. We make the grab there, where the horses can’t follow.”

Valyn slammed his axes back into his belt, hurled the Aphorist over his shoulder, and ran.

Only when he’d reached the water, wading out as far into the eddy as he dared go, only when he’d shifted Newt from his back into the corpse-carry position and checked the bird’s angle of attack, did he realize that the Flea and Sigrid hadn’t made it. The horror stuck like a bone in his throat as he spun to find them still halfway up the bank, pinned down, surrounded by riders who had wrestled their mounts back under control. The Flea’s blade was a blur, hacking at the legs of the horses, chopping heads from the thicket of spears. Somehow, impossibly, he was holding the Urghul back, but he only had one hand, he was carrying a soldier who weighed as much as he did, and he was surrounded. Gwenna was coming, coming with the bird, but she was too late.

Quickly, gently, Valyn lowered the Aphorist into the current.

“What…,” Newt gasped. He had passed out during the run, come to only when the cold water reached his chest.

“I’m going back.”

Even as Valyn started moving toward the bank, slowed by the water as though lost in the depth of nightmare, he knew that he was dead. There were too many Urghul between him and the other Kettral, too many lances and swords. Regardless of the slarn’s strength running through his blood, regardless of his own uncanny speed, there was a weight of steel and horseflesh opposed to which no single soldier could ever hope to stand.

He felt no fear at the realization. No sorrow. There was only a bright bronze eagerness that tasted strangely like relief. After surviving Adare’s knife and the fall from the tower in Andt-Kyl, he’d gone to the woods, partly because he could see no role for himself in the war, and partly because he was horrified; horrified of what he’d become, of what he’d learned to do, of what he’d done. His blindness had awoken something in the slarn’s poison, something dark and vicious, and he felt certain that if he moved again among men and women he would commit some terrible, irreversible act for which there could be no forgiveness.

The most recent days with Huutsuu and the Flea had done nothing to diminish that feeling. Valyn could remember his hands wrapped around the Urghul woman’s neck, their naked skin washed in their own blood. In those burning, freezing nights, he’d almost killed her half a dozen times. And then there were the people he had killed, the dozens and dozens of Urghul. That was what he’d trained for. That was war. It wasn’t the killing that frightened him, but the fact that it felt so good.

It’s time, he thought, breath afire in his throat as he struggled through the shallows. Time to finish all this.

Maybe he could save Sigrid and the Flea, make just enough of a distraction that Gwenna could lift them free. Maybe he couldn’t. It didn’t seem to matter either way. A roar erupted in his throat, a cry that had been surging up through all the fabric of his flesh since Ha Lin died, rising and growing until it seemed too large for the body that contained it, as though that body had dissolved beneath the pain and the rage, leaving behind a man that was not a man at all, but a scream in the shape of a man, a sob of fury dying to shake free its last mortal bond.

Then something yanked him back.

An arm wrapped around his chest, a little weaker than his own but steadier, threaded through with some conviction he had long ago forgotten.

“Knock it off, you asshole.”

Gwenna’s voice at his ear, her whole body bent to the simple task of holding him back.

He strained against her weight, eyes fixed on Sigrid and the Flea. The Urghul were closing around them closer and closer. Of the golden bird, there was no sign. Valyn twisted in Gwenna’s grip, tried to bring his axes to bear, but she just pulled him nearer, her arms so tight around his chest he could barely breathe. Valyn raged against the embrace, but could not break it.

She was hissing in his ear, snarling the same words over and over. “… another bird. There’s another fucking bird coming, Valyn. Four of them. They’ll save the Flea. We have to go.”

Of the grab itself he remembered almost nothing, just one barren fact: that when they finally rose into the air, Gwenna’s arm still wrapped around his shoulders, when the hammering of the bird’s great golden wings lifted them up, away from the battle, away from all the danger, it didn’t feel like flight. It felt like dying.