The Last Mortal Bond

53

For a full week, the Skullsworn ignored them almost entirely. A young man or woman arrived each morning with a basket of food-vegetables and cheese, sometimes a piece of smoked meat-and every evening someone came to take the empty basket away. Aside from that, the legendarily vicious priests of Ananshael left Kaden and Triste alone.

No one had told them to stay in the house, and so, on the second day, after a long, exhausted sleep, Kaden had started limping around the mesa, tentatively at first, then more boldly, wandering the open spaces between the white buildings, exploring the bounds of his open-air prison. The only time anyone stopped him was when he approached the bridge, that one path leading back to the rest of the world. A young woman was on her hands and knees-rag in hand, bucket of soapy water beside her-scouring the stone. She stood up as he drew close, met his eyes, then shook her head.

“You can’t go over.”

“Why not?” He knew why, but wanted to hear what she would say.

“Too dangerous.”

“I grew up in mountains like these.”

“Not the mountains. The soldiers. Annurians just beyond our sentries. Dozens of them, and more coming.”

Kaden looked past her to the rim of the far cliff, a wide ledge backed by a maze of red sandstone glowing with the morning light. He couldn’t see anyone, assassin or soldier, but the crazed rock of the Ancaz, riven with cracks and fissures, offered a thousand places to hide. An entire army could be over there, a few men in this hollow, half a dozen behind the boulder.…

“Il Tornja’s men are massing?”

The woman just shrugged, then knelt, returning to her work.

It didn’t take long for Kaden to find Pyrre. The assassin was leaning against the open doorframe of a large stone barn, enjoying the shade as she watched something inside. As Kaden approached, he realized that there was a fight going on, or something like a fight. A man and a woman circled each other warily, feinting and darting, testing the empty space between them, gazes locked firmly as horns. Both were naked from the waist up, their skin slick with sweat. Neither one, however, seemed to be wielding a weapon. There were no axes, no swords. Their hands weren’t even balled into fists.

“What are they doing?” Kaden asked quietly.

Pyrre glanced over at him. “Painting.”

Kaden squinted in the gloom. As his eyes adjusted, he realized that the hands of the sparring Skullsworn weren’t empty after all. Each seemed to be holding something delicately between the thumb and index finger. Sunlight pouring through the open windows flashed off steel. Needles, slender enough to draw thread through a torn hem.

“Painting?”

Pyrre nodded. “We’re short on paper here, but there’s plenty of skin.” She smiled at his confusion, then flipped open the front of her own robe. Tattooed into the sun-dark skin between her breasts was a shape about the length of his thumb, the shading mottled, imperfect. It looked like someone had tried to build an image out of hundreds of tiny dots, then stopped short. Away from the ink’s dense center, those dots splashed out haphazardly, as though the tattoo were dissolving across her skin. He couldn’t quite make out the central shape, but something about the edges and angles tugged at his memory.

“A desert sparrow,” Pyrre said, reading his confusion. “Similar to some of the birds I saw when I visited your monastery.”

The words snapped the image into focus. It was a sparrow indeed, although the wings were more hinted at than fully inked.

“Why?” Kaden asked.

Pyrre shrugged her robe closed, then cinched the rope belt tighter around her waist. “Ananshael loves their song.” She whistled a long, lilting call, a string of notes that reached toward music but never quite resolved into a tune. “We each have one.” She gestured toward the sparring partners just as the woman feinted, then lunged, pricking the man’s chest with exquisite delicacy. He fell still, smiled, nodded to his opponent. They both crossed to a stone bowl balanced on a window’s sill, dipped their needles into dark ink, then returned to the center of the open floor. Another nod, and they were at it again, circling and testing, lunging and recovering. “It takes years,” Pyrre went on, “to ink the full bird. Longer, for those who are quicker.”

“And when it’s finished?”

“We celebrate. There is music and food. At the end of the night, the one with the songbird goes to the god.”

“You kill the loser?”

“There are no losers. There are only those who go earlier or later to the god’s embrace.”

Kaden shook his head. “If the god’s embrace is so sweet, then why all this? Why go through the years of sparring at all?”

“It’s a way of seeing who has the gift,” Pyrre replied. “The slow or unskilled, those who have grown too old to fight-their priesthood quickly becomes personal.”

“Meaning you kill them.”

“Meaning they give willingly of their own lives.”

“And those of you who are quicker?”

The assassin winked at him. “We’re around longer. To spread the god’s truth and his justice.”

Kaden stared at the unfolding fight, but Pyrre had already turned away, stepping from the barn’s cool darkness into the bright sun as though she’d lost all interest in the contest.

“Il Tornja knows we are here,” Kaden said, following her.

“Of course he does.”

“And he’s coming.”

Pyrre grinned her most wolfish grin. “Of course he is.”

“He can’t have more than a few dozen men with him.…”

“There are more coming. Many more. My brothers and sisters killed most of his messengers, but a couple got away.” She stared eastward, as though she could make out those soldiers fleeing over the Dead Salts, toward Mo’ir and whatever reinforcements waited. “I’m looking forward to it, actually. Thousands of sweating young men camped out on the canyon rim just across the bridge. The Annurians aren’t great soldiers, but there’s no denying that all that marching and hauling and drilling-it makes a man fit. Just a shame that your empire won’t allow women in the ranks. A woman’s leg, well toned, is shapelier than a man’s. Still, one makes do.…” She closed her eyes, savored some imagination of the besieging army, then hummed contentedly.

“Have you forgotten the leach?” Kaden asked. “The one who pulled lightning straight out of the sky? Il Tornja doesn’t need his army. One powerful leach could level Rassambur without stepping foot on the bridge.”

Pyrre shrugged. “If he has his well. And that’s assuming your brilliant general…”

“He’s not my general.”

“… is willing to risk bringing that leach close enough to mount a serious attack. He might be handy with lightning, but he’ll die if someone puts an arrow in his eye. And we spend a lot of time here in Rassambur learning to put arrows in eyes.”

Kaden exhaled slowly, trying to order his thoughts. “Even if that’s true, we’re trapped as long as we stay here, and the trap is only going to get tighter. If we’re going to get out, we need to get out now. Have you talked to Gerra?”

“Gerra will decide what he decides in his own time,” Pyrre said, then cocked her head to one side, studying him. “I don’t remember you being so afraid, Kaden. The last time, back in those miserably frigid mountains of yours, there were moments when you seemed almost … calm. Where did that go?”

“Last time, there wasn’t as much to be afraid of.”

It was a weak response, and it did next to nothing to quench the question in the assassin’s eyes. And yet, what else could he say? There was no explaining the god locked inside of him, raging and thrashing by day and night, no explaining the nihilistic temptations of the vaniate, no explaining that the trance had become more dangerous than the panic it replaced. Revealing any corner of the truth to Pyrre would see him dead-that much was clear. If she knew he bore the god she loathed inside his flesh, she’d cut him and the god to bloody shreds.

Maybe that would be best.

All over again he felt the doubt, a thick tide rising inside him. He turned away before the assassin could see it in his eyes.

* * *

It was night, and Meshkent was awake, raging in the back of Kaden’s mind. More and more, he was learning to keep the god kenneled, to mute the endless demands for freedom and power, tamping them down until the voice was almost as incoherent as the wind over stone-constant and cold, but meaningless. Even when Kaden could ignore those words, however, he could feel the god there, a blight, a rabid creature that needed to be put down. All that fight, the clawing and the biting, it was the opposite of what il Tornja had described, and once again the kenarang’s words drifted across Kaden’s thoughts: The beauty of a life lived free, unenslaved by brutish passions …

“Can’t sleep?”

Kaden turned to find Triste’s slender shadow framed inside the door to the stone house. After a heartbeat’s hesitation, she stepped out onto the ledge. Moonlight glinted off her eyes, off a belt knife she held before her, clutching it tentatively in one hand. For just a moment, he had the ridiculous notion that she had come outside to kill him, to plunge that meager weapon into his heart. The thought aroused more curiosity than fear.

All human life ends somehow, he thought.

As Triste crossed the stone to sit beside him, however, he realized she carried a lobe of sugar cactus in her other hand. The knife was a tool, not a weapon, and for a while the only sound was the wet slice of the steel through the vegetable’s flesh.

“Here,” she said finally, offering him a slice.

Give yourself to me, Meshkent hissed silently, something inside the god responding to another human voice, and I will tear this hovel down.

Be silent, Kaden replied. You are a sickness. A plague.

These priests have fattened you on lies.…

BE SILENT!

The god went suddenly, utterly still. Kaden stared down into the pit he had built to pen in the divine, tried to keep his balance as he studied the mind inside his mind.

There was a knife-edge ridge back in the Bone Mountains, a mile-long razor of stone connecting two peaks. From time to time, the monks ordered their older acolytes to traverse the ridge-it was an exercise, among other things, about holding fear in check. There was no easy way to move over the rock; in most places it was almost impossible simply to walk along it. One gust of wind could tumble you into the abyss on either side. Kaden remembered it all in perfect frozen detail, holding the cold granite of the ridgetop, moving hand over hand as he searched for footholds in the steep walls. Sometimes the easiest passage was on the west side of the ridge, sometimes on the east. To get to the end, you had to keep switching, climbing back and forth over that jagged knife-edge, knowing that a slip on either side would mean the end.

Yes, it was an exercise about the controlling of fear, but Kaden had begun to suspect that, like most tasks the monks assigned their pupils, it was more than that. There was no safe place on that ridgeline. No flat ground where a boy could stop and rest. The only hope was in constant movement, constant change, climbing back and forth over that frigid stone, the fathoms of unforgiving air spread out below.

His own mind felt like that ridgeline now. If he stumbled too far to one side, Meshkent would seize him; if he slipped to the other, he would fall into the vaniate. The mind of the god and the emptiness of the Csestriim trance were each an abyss: enormous, endless, stretching to the very edge of thought. His self, on the other hand, the part of him that still felt like him, was no more than that narrow ridge, the stone rough in his hands, and crumbling.

Submit to me, Meshkent growled, his voice somehow impossibly distant and right inside the ear at the same time.

No.

Grimly, Kaden shifted across the ridgeline away from the god. The vaniate beckoned beneath his feet. It seemed impossible that he had ever not known how to enter that emptiness. It was as easy as falling.

“What does it feel like?”

Triste’s words jerked him free of his mind’s vertiginous ridge. Kaden turned to find her staring at him, eyes wide but hard in the darkness.

“The god?” he asked.

She nodded.

“It feels…,” he searched for the words, “like a great weight, a madness heavy as lead.” He hesitated. “I can hear him.”

Triste leaned forward slightly, as though Meshkent’s commands might carry on the air, as though his words were something she might hear if she drew close enough. “What does it sound like?”

Kaden shook his head, trying to find the right language. Failing. After a while he shifted to face Triste-he couldn’t say why-mirroring her cross-legged pose with his own. He felt carved out, hollowed by the running and the fighting and the lying. Suddenly, it was all he could do to sit upright.

“It sounds like Long Fist,” he said at last. “Not the actual timbre of the voice…,” he struggled for the words, “but the force.”

Tears slicked Triste’s eyes, as though someone had smeared moonlight across her cheeks. “At least you can hear him. Talk to him.”

Kaden shook his head. “He thought he would inhabit me the way he had that Urghul. He almost succeeded.…”

Triste watched him in silence for a long time.

“And…,” she prodded finally.

“And he couldn’t. The Shin taught me just enough.”

“Enough what?”

“Enough to control my mind. Divide it. Evacuate a space, seal it off.”

“But I don’t know any of that,” Triste protested. “And Ciena’s trapped inside me just the same way.”

Kaden shook his head again. “I don’t know, Triste. I don’t understand it. I can barely articulate what’s happening to me.”

“Did he tell you…,” Triste asked tentatively. “The obviate…”

Kaden just shook his head.

For a while they sat in silence. Voices rose in the center of the mesa, laughing, then falling away. Kaden glanced over at the house, the cottage of two dead men that had become their prison. There was a time when he would have been thinking, scheming, trying to find some way out. He remembered that old, animal urgency. Remembered it-but couldn’t feel it. For the first time, the old Shin expression made sense: You live in your mind. The two of them might be trapped inside Rassambur, but they would have no more freedom, no true freedom, even if they wandered alone through the most remote valleys of the Bone Mountains. The mind was the cage, and there was no escaping it. Not without dying.

“Why haven’t you killed her?” he asked, looking over at Triste again.

The girl raised a hand to her chest, as though she felt something moving there, something she didn’t recognize. The Skullsworn had provided them with desert robes not unlike those worn by the Shin, but Triste hadn’t changed out of the simple pants and tunic she’d been wearing when he found her days earlier. He could see the scars running the length of her arm; they looked silver in the moonlight, almost beautiful. Her fingernails had grown back-the ones that Ekhard Matol had torn away-but they were ridged and ragged. Some things, once broken, could never be fully fixed.

Her face hardened at the question. “I won’t…”

“I don’t mean the obviate,” Kaden said, raising a hand to forestall her. “That would save her, not hurt her. But if you don’t go back to the Spear, if you don’t perform the ritual, you can destroy Ciena, or damage her so badly she will never touch this world again.”

“Only by killing myself.”

Kaden shrugged. It seemed a trivial objection. “You’re going to die anyway. We all are. If you hate the goddess so much, you can take her with you.” He paused, turning the next proposition over in his mind before he made it. “We could kill them both.”

Triste stared at him, lips parted. “What happened to saving everyone? To defeating the Csestriim and preserving humanity? That’s why you kept me locked up in your Spear in the first place, right? That’s why you came after me when I escaped. All you cared about was the obviate, to get your goddess out, let her free, to rescue her, and to Hull with the carcass you left behind.…”

She trailed off, breathless, chest heaving.

“Maybe I cared about the wrong thing,” Kaden replied quietly. “I keep thinking about what we’ve seen-the Annurians slaughtering the monks back in Ashk’lan; the Ishien in the Dead Heart; Adiv and your mother; the conspirators that helped to overthrow the empire; Adare, who murdered Valyn, then lied to me about it.… Why would we want to preserve that? Why would we want to save any of it?”

“I don’t,” Triste said. “I’m not trying to save the goddess or your ’Kent-kissing empire. It can all burn. I’ll set fire to it myself.…”

“We can do that,” Kaden said.

Meshkent roared in the chasm of his mind. Kaden stared down into the bottomless emptiness of the vaniate. It would be so easy to fall. He gestured from Triste toward the real cliff’s edge, the verge of Rassambur’s sheer-walled mesa, just a dozen paces away. “We can end it right here.”

When Triste finally replied, her voice was small, lost. “I don’t want to die.”

Kaden stared at her. She had come so close so many times already. “Why not?”

She shook her head helplessly. “I don’t know.”

“There is only more of this, Triste. More hiding, more hunger, more torture.”

“We might get out. We might escape.”

Kaden shook his head wearily. “It doesn’t matter. Rassambur isn’t the prison.” He tapped a finger against the side of his skull. “This is.”

Her lips twisted back. She looked as though she were getting ready to leap on him, to rip out his throat with her teeth, only she didn’t move. The sound, when it came, wasn’t a scream, but a hopeless sob. He watched her, watched her shoulders heave, studied her perfect, mutilated body as it convulsed with grief.

“This is what I mean,” he said quietly.

She didn’t reply. Just shielded her face with her hands.

“How can this,” he gestured to her with one hand, “be right? Long Fist told me, before we came after you, that this is what we are for, but how can that be true?” He cocked his head to the side. “You are like a fish pulled from the water. This struggle, this suffering-you can’t breathe it. None of us can.”

Slowly Triste raised her head. Tangles of black hair fell across her face, but her eyes were fixed on him, steady, even as that unnamed grief continued to wrack her body. Meshkent shifted inside Kaden’s mind as though he felt the girl’s suffering, as though he were feeding off it.

“There is more,” Triste said quietly, her voice like something torn apart. The tears still coursed down her cheeks, but she made no move to scrub them away.

“More what?”

“More to…” She gestured helplessly to him, to herself. “To this. To us. To life.”

“That’s the cruelest part of it,” Kaden replied. “That belief. That hope. It’s worse than all Meshkent’s agonies. That’s what keeps us here; it’s what makes us accept our suffering. The young gods aren’t just the children of Ciena and Meshkent; they are their generals, the keepers of their jails.” He shook his head at the memory of Long Fist sitting across the fire from him in a hide tent in the Waist. “He said we were instruments. We are slaves.”

He rose slowly to his feet, muscles and bones protesting. More of Meshkent’s work there. He scrutinized that pain a moment, then set it aside. They lived in a world twisted by the god, but now the god himself was trapped. Kaden lifted Triste’s belt knife from the stone. The blade was barely three inches long, and somewhat dull, but it would do. Bedisa wove the souls of living beings so weakly into their bodies.…

He placed the point against the inside of his arm, dragged the notched steel over his skin. Meshkent hissed and twisted. Kaden turned away from the god, studying the dark blood welling up behind the blade. Pain came with the blood, bright and hot.

That pain is there to stop me, he thought. That, and the hope, and the fear.

All his human feelings, just a fence, a wall built by the gods to keep their precious chattel penned.

Such a meager fence.

Meshkent was raging now, bellowing, his demands all tangled up with his defiance. It didn’t matter, the god was on the far side of the ridge, caught deep in a chasm he could not escape. If Kaden dropped into the vaniate once more there would be no climbing free, not this time. Kiel had been warning him about that for months, but Kiel was wrong. How could the Csestriim understand how badly humanity was broken, how desperately in need of salvation?

The walking away. That was what the monks called that passage, the departure from the world of human need into a more perfect world of sky, and snow, and stone. They were wrong, too. The walking was secondary, unnecessary. All that was necessary was the letting go. Kaden considered the shape of his mind, that narrow knife of stone stretching on endlessly into the clouds. He felt his grip slipping. He smiled, and let go.

The vaniate closed around him, endless and unsullied. It seemed impossible, inside that emptiness, that he had ever considered the haphazard construction of flesh and blood his self. He looked at the knife, at where the blade’s point opened the skin of his arm. He’d fought so hard to preserve his carcass, and for what? The Shin had thrown open the door to his cage, and he had slammed it closed again, had hung against the bars, refusing to be set free.

It’s so easy. Easier than breathing.

Meshkent roared. The sound meant nothing.

Then Triste closed her hand over his wrist, pulling the knife away.

“What are you doing?”

Kaden turned to her, confused. “I’m leaving.…” He gestured to the slash along his skin.

“You can’t,” she snarled, face a rictus of fear and confusion.

“Triste,” he said quietly. “You don’t understand. Everything you’re feeling now-you don’t have to feel it. You’re not supposed to. You’re a sick woman insisting on the beauty of your sickness.” He smiled at her. “We can be well. Whole.”

He tried to go back to his work, but she had him by the wrist. Her fingers felt like steel.

“Let me go, Triste.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“All of this, everything wrong in my fucking life, happened because of you, and you are not leaving me here alone.”

He smiled. “I won’t leave you. We can both be done with this.” With his free hand, he ran a finger along her neck. Her skin was smooth as cream. Something stirred inside him, some spasm of the beast he had been. He crushed it. “You’re trapped,” he said, tracing a line down to her heart. He could feel it slamming against her chest. “You don’t have to be.”

“Stop saying that.”

Kaden shook his head. Blood slicked his arm, but it wasn’t enough. He needed to cut deeper, further.

“Let me go, Triste.”

“I already told you-you are not fucking leaving me, you bastard.”

She pivoted as she spoke, twisted his wrist so viciously that the knife fell free and then, he, too, was falling.

So strong, he thought vaguely. Even on that first night in Ashk’lan, when she was waiting for him naked in his bed, Triste had always been so strong.

He landed hard, the stone bruising his hip, then jarring his skull as it struck. For a few heartbeats, he reeled, dizzy, confused, the vaniate swaying around him. Pain blazed outside the trance, in his arm, in the back of his head, but he was free of the pain, if only …

“Stop it!” Triste screamed. She hit him across the face. “Don’t you fucking retreat into your private trance. You’re not leaving me here.” She hit him again. “YOU ARE NOT LEAVING ME.” Her breath was ripped and ragged. Her body shuddered with the terror and the strain. “I won’t let you. I won’t let you.” Tears soaked her face, matting her hair to her brow and cheeks in scribbled tangles. She was a vision of suffering, of madness, of everything that was wrong with what they had become.

The Csestriim were right, Kaden thought.

And then she stopped shouting. Stopped moving entirely. He could feel her weight on top of him, suddenly still and steady. Only her chest rose and fell as her lungs struggled to drag in more air. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper, quiet, composed, but hard as carved stone.

“I won’t let you leave me alone with this.”

“Triste…,” he began again.

She shook her head. She was still crying, but her eyes were defiant, the way he remembered them. Strong. She leaned in, down, and pressed her lips to his.

It was harder than he expected to pull away. “You hate me, Triste.”

“I do,” she whispered.

“I betrayed you.”

“You betrayed me, and you gave me away. And do you think that absolves you now? It doesn’t. Just this one time, Kaden, this last time, I’m not begging you, I’m telling you, I’m demanding this of you: don’t.”

Her eyes were wide as moons, bright, violent, violet, shifting with the light reflected from his own burning gaze. Her weight was like the whole warm night laid on top of him.

“Every choice that you have made was wrong,” she whispered. “I am finished doing things your way.”

The second kiss didn’t pull him from the vaniate, not right away, but if the trance was a bottomless well into which he had been falling, Triste’s touch was a hook lodged in his mind, arresting his fall, holding him spinning in the emptiness. And then, with a horrible, ineluctable slowness, pulling him up.

The monks had trained Kaden to be hit. They had trained him to sit in the snow for hours on end. They had trained him to haul stones until his hands bled, to starve, to suffer, and then to step outside that suffering. They had trained him for every manner of austerity to which the flesh could be subjected. They had not trained him for this.

He managed to pull away for a half a heartbeat.

“Triste…” The word scraped out. There were no others.

Her hands were cradling the back of his head, her chest pressed against his chest, her tongue running over his teeth. It was how she’d killed Ekhard Matol, pinning him against the kenta with her meager weight, then breaking him apart limb by limb. Only that hadn’t been Triste. That had been Ciena.

When Kaden looked into the eyes of the woman who held him now, there was no sign of the goddess. There was only the woman, strong, furious, determined, pressing herself into him, tearing at his shirt, sliding her hands over his chest. He opened his arms, pulled her toward him, and woke from the vaniate.

The beast brain. That was what the monks called all the myriad impulses of the flesh: rage and hunger, fear and eagerness and lust. For all their warnings, Kaden had never really known its strength.

He slid his hands up Triste’s back, over the ridges of her scarred skin, then pulled her light shirt up over her head. She twisted to help, hurled the shirt free, then was on him again, skin sliding over skin, firm and smooth.

Triste’s breath came hot through her parted lips. “Suffering is not everything.”

Kaden kissed her, then kissed her again. Then again.

“The monks were wrong,” he whispered finally, his own words a revelation. “Il Tornja was wrong.”

“Of course they were, you idiot. Of course they were fucking wrong.”

They spent the night discovering just how wrong, clutching each other, whispering things they barely understood, finding something painful and perfect in the places where their skin touched, something old and undeniable, a truth that both had heard a hundred times but neither one had known, all while the desert moon slid down the sky, and the million stars, shivering and indifferent, burned their holes into the night.