The Last Mortal Bond

55

The days Kaden spent with Triste in the small white house at the edge of Rassambur’s sunbaked mesa waiting to learn if he would be murdered by the Skullsworn or set free were unlike any others in his life. His life, until then, had been split between luxury and struggle: a childhood sleeping in the feathered beds of the Dawn Palace, eating fresh fruit all winter, finding warm clothes delivered by a slave each morning. Then, an adolescence of stone and snow and suffering.

He had known siblings, friends, and mentors, periods of relative peace and even beauty. After eighteen years, he had seen the Bone Mountains and the Rift, Intarra’s Spear and the cold cliff dwellings of Assare, the Csestriim fortress in the Dead Heart and the islands that served as the kenta hubs, scraps of green lost in a world of tossing sea. It seemed like a lot to pack into a single life, a short life. He had thought, when Meshkent retreated into his mind, when he realized what that meant, what had to happen, that he could die feeling that he’d seen the world, that he could let Ananshael unknit his soul knowing that he’d experienced the full range of what life had to offer.

And he had been wrong.

None of it, not the brotherly love of his childhood or the bawdy camaraderie he’d shared with Akiil, not his mother’s kisses or his father’s distant regard, had prepared him for what he shared with Triste during those warm, sunbright days at the mesa’s edge.

The sex-tender and explosive, wrenching and soft and raw-was the least of it. It was all the rest, what happened when they stopped, when they were just lying on the rough blankets, the only light the one lantern the Skullsworn had given them, that Kaden realized how narrow the scope of his life had been. He felt like a child who had spent his years running through the chambers of a vast mansion over and over. He had seen every room, every corridor, every crawlspace and pantry. Then one day, someone opened a door, he stepped outside, and for the first time saw the sky.

“I didn’t realize…,” he murmured one night, Triste tucked tight up against him, her body rising and falling with her breath.

“Didn’t realize what?” she asked sleepily.

He shook his head. “Any of it.”

She laughed at that. In all their time together, he’d never heard her laugh. Then she kissed him on the chest, moved on top of him, and he quit bothering with words. That part the Shin had right-the words were useless.

They made no effort to escape, partly because it was obviously impossible, partly because if they did somehow manage to get past the Skullsworn, they would only be delivering themselves into il Tornja’s arms. They’d escaped him once, but he still had his ak’hanath, still had that crazed, ancient leach at his side, and though no one had seen the kenarang on the far rim of the canyon, he was there-Kaden was certain of it-laying his careful traps.

“What will we do?” Triste finally asked. They were lying in bed. It was late, and the stars had already scraped through most of their nightly course. Kaden didn’t realize she had awoken until she spoke, then rose up on one elbow, tracing a finger along his ribs, down to his hip.

“I’m not sure we can do anything,” Kaden replied. “Not until the Skullsworn decide if they’re going to kill us or help us.”

“We could tell them,” she suggested hesitantly. “Tell them the truth.”

Kaden shook his head. He’d been pondering that exact course since they first arrived; it seemed like madness. If they knew one thing for certain, it was that the priesthood of Ananshael loathed Meshkent and all his minions. The Skullsworn had already sacrificed a dozen of their number in a botched attempt to find Long Fist, and that was when they’d believed that he was merely an Urghul shaman, merely a minister of the god’s misery. If Gerra knew he had the Lord of Pain himself in Rassambur, beneath his blade, they were as good as dead.

“They haven’t killed us yet,” Kaden said, “which is good.”

Triste chuckled at the understatement.

“The Csestriim are an affront to everything the Skullsworn believe,” Kaden went on. “Gerra seemed shocked to learn that they still walk the earth.”

“And if Gerra helps us?”

Kaden closed his eyes, tried to remember the world beyond the mesa. “If we manage to get clear, free, we could start running again. Try to get to a kenta, go somewhere il Tornja can’t go.”

“There’s nowhere he can’t go,” Triste replied quietly.

They fell silent. There was nothing to say. Half of Kaden’s life had been given over to the stamping out of desire. It had almost worked. When Pyrre first brought them to Rassambur, he’d been ready to give up his life, to step outside himself once and for all. It would have been easy, then, to do what needed doing, and yet he’d seen no point in the obviate then. Now, finally, he understood what was at stake. The only way to understand it was to feel the love, and the pain that came with that love.

“I want to be with you,” Triste said, pulling him close, so tight it was a struggle to breathe. “When we do it, I want to be right beside you.”

It. She didn’t say the word. She didn’t need to.

Kaden nodded. For the first time since his childhood, he was crying.

* * *

In the small, quiet hour before dawn, Kaden woke to find Pyrre standing at the foot of the bed. He wrapped an arm tighter around Triste, who murmured something in her sleep, shifted beneath the blanket to press her body against his, but did not wake. How long the assassin had been standing there, Kaden had no idea. She was smiling-not the habitual wry smile that she usually wore, but something older, more honest.

“It is a truth most people refuse,” she said quietly, “but there is peace in Ananshael’s shadow.” She nodded to Triste’s sleeping form. “Joy.”

Kaden started to object, but found he had no objection. The assassin was right. Rassambur, his imprisonment, the daily threat of death, had led to this: the long softness of the blue-black nights, shared warmth beneath old blankets, his breath and Triste’s intermingled, even as they slept. Even Meshkent had fallen almost silent, as though the god himself understood the uselessness of all struggle here, in the heart of Ananshael’s dominion.

“Has Gerra decided?” Kaden asked.

Pyrre nodded thoughtfully. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Meaning?”

“You will see.”

“I would have thought we were past the games.”

The assassin’s smile widened. “And I would have thought you understood by now that without the games, there is no life.” She gestured toward Triste. “Wake her slowly, if you like, in your own way.…” She cocked her head at that, arched an eyebrow, ran her tongue over her teeth. “But be at Ananshael’s Scale as the sun rises.”

When they reached the rim of the mesa, Gerra was still on the scale, still lying down, much as he had been when they first arrived. The last of the stars spangled the western sky, but though Triste shivered at his side, Kaden could already feel the air warming behind them. He glanced over his shoulder, squinting against the watery glow. In moments, the hot rim of the sun would crest the eastern peaks, but for now, the air was a smear of pink light, something ripening, but not yet ripe.

“I have prayed,” Gerra said without opening his eyes. “I vowed to the god that I would remain on his scale for a week after your arrival, and I have remained on it for the full week, fasting, praying.”

Triste shook her head. “Why?”

Gerra sat up slowly, stretched his neck, rolled his shoulders forward, then back. “If the god gathered me to himself,” he said finally, looking from Kaden to Triste, “it would have been a sign.”

“A sign of what?” Kaden asked.

“Of the way forward. I opened my heart to Ananshael, showed the god my intention to offer you into his hands. If he didn’t want my offering”-he jerked a thumb over his shoulder-“all he needed to do was drop me off the cliff.” The priest glanced around himself, raised his brows as though just now noticing he was still alive. “This, he has not done.”

Kaden’s gut tightened.

“That’s insane,” Triste hissed. “You would be dead.”

Gerra shrugged. “Sometimes it falls to others to interpret signs.”

“And now?” Kaden asked carefully, studying the man’s face.

Gerra stood, bent at the waist, exhaled his slow satisfaction as he stretched his back and legs, then straightened once more.

“The god has spoken in a way I did not expect.” He waved the prisoners forward, waiting until Kaden and Triste stood at the verge of the cliff, then pointed to the barrel on the far platform. It was leaking, Kaden realized, the wood beneath the plug soaked with water. He glanced up at the crosspiece of the scale, which tilted slightly toward the priest. Soon, maybe in moments, the plug of rock salt would dissolve, the water would drain from the barrel, and the platform on which the priest stood would plummet to the canyon floor. Gerra seemed utterly unconcerned. “The week is done, and the god did not claim me, but this”-he gestured toward the leaking water-“it makes me think. I will not give you to the god myself. Instead, you will weight the scale, both of you, from the sun’s rising until it sets-ample time, I should think, for Ananshael to do whatever it is he wants to do with you.”

* * *

The first hour was the hardest. It was one thing to live beneath the vague threat of Skullsworn violence, another to sit on creaking boards hundreds of feet above the canyon floor, to wait while the wind tangled in the fraying ropes, water dripped from the barrel opposite, and slowly, horribly, by interminable degrees, the whole scale tipped toward the abyss. Kaden’s body screamed at him to flee, but there was nowhere to go. Gerra and Pyrre sat a few dozen paces away, on the solid ground of the mesa. Neither had so much as drawn a knife, but Gerra had been clear: if either Kaden or Triste tried to escape the scale before sunset, it would mean death for both.

And so they sat, waited, watching the water draining slowly away.

It seemed important, at first, to remain at the platform’s very center, to stay perfectly still, and for a long time they remained like that, like statuary, not speaking, barely daring to breathe. It wasn’t until noon that Triste finally shook her head.

“To ’Shael with this,” she said. Her voice was dry, dusty, angry.

Kaden raised his brow.

“We can’t leave,” he murmured. “We can’t fight them.”

“I know that. It doesn’t mean we need to wait like terrified sheep.”

“Is there another way to wait?”

“I don’t know,” she said, twisting away, “but if these are going to be our last moments, I’d like to live them.”

To his surprise, Kaden found himself nodding.

“Look,” Triste said, shifting her weight until she sat at the very edge of the wooden planks, legs dangling out over the void. “There are worse places to die.”

Kaden joined her at the edge. It felt like sitting atop the Talon as the wind tugged at his robe, threatening to dash him from his perch. He’d spent so many days on cliffsides and the tops of spires. At the monastery, however, he had always been alone, sitting or laboring in solitude. He couldn’t say why having a body beside him mattered so much. According to everything the Shin had told him, it shouldn’t have. It shouldn’t have, but it did. He wrapped an arm around Triste’s waist, then glanced back over his shoulder.

“Can we have some rocks?”

Pyrre blinked. “Rocks? You are suddenly so eager to meet the god?”

“Not big rocks,” Kaden said, gesturing to the gravel at the mesa’s edge. “Just some of that.”

When the assassin had deposited a large pile at the edge of the scale, Kaden turned back to Triste. “I used to do this as a novice,” he said, hefting one of the stones in his hand, testing the weight. “We were supposed to be meditating, but I got bored of that. Throwing stones helped pass the time.”

The platform lurched as he launched the stone out into space. He ignored the motion, watching the rock trace its slow arc down through the warm, empty air of the canyon. Triste stared at it, then pulled herself free of his embrace. “You think you can throw?” she asked, turning to take up a stone of her own. “Watch this.”

All afternoon they hurled stones, traded taunts and jokes. All afternoon the barrel’s water drained silently away. When the sun dropped behind the mountains to the west, when he stepped from the swaying scale to solid ground, Kaden almost felt regret. Triste was right, it would have been a good place to die, better than whatever faced them.

Just as she joined him, stepping from the platform onto the rocky rim, a wooden thwock snapped the evening stillness, followed heartbeats later by a great shuddering. Kaden turned to find the barrel’s plug gone, dissolved finally, the water, which had drained so slowly, gushing from the spout, the whole of Ananshael’s Scale suddenly lurching out of balance. Then it collapsed. Triste wrapped an arm around his waist as the structure fell away, tumbling over and over, falling silently into the void. The crash, when it finally came, was so quiet it might have been nothing but the wind.

Triste laughed, a light, bright sound, and moments later Kaden found himself joining her.

When they turned, Gerra was studying them with open interest. “The ways of the god can be strange, hard to understand,” he said. “Today is not one of those days. Clearly, Ananshael wants the names of these Csestriim. You will give them to me. What will we give you in return?”

The weight of what had to happen settled on Kaden like a stone, crushing the laughter.

“You will give us a path,” he said finally, “a clear path, all the way from here, through il Tornja’s gathering army, to the kenta.”

Pyrre smiled, patted the knives at her belt. “Clearer of Paths. It sounds so much better than Assassin.”

* * *

Skullsworn, Assassins, or Clearers of Paths, the priests of Ananshael tore into their vicious work with a strange, almost joyful veneration. Three dozen of Pyrre’s brothers and sisters crossed the bridge first, drawing the Annurian soldiers from their hiding places between the stones. It seemed, at first, that the battle would be over before it truly began, but il Tornja had fortified his position. Instead of two dozen legionaries-the force that had first confronted Kaden in the canyons-there were hundreds, rank upon rank upon rank, so many that the dry dirt was slippery with their blood by the time Pyrre and Gerra herded Kaden and Triste through the swirling, screaming madness of the fight.

The two Skullsworn flanked them, Gerra’s short, quick stride somehow matching Pyrre’s lope. The man fought with a long spear, nicking throats and taking eyes as delicately as a gardener pruning back spring’s most eager shoots. Pyrre wielded her customary knives, throwing them sometimes, sometimes lashing out to cut those who came too close. It seemed like she should run out-one woman could only carry so much steel-but she plucked the weapons from the falling bodies of the dead and when those flashed from her fingers, she dipped into her flowing robes for another blade, and another, and another.

It took them only moments to cross the narrow open ledge. Half a dozen Annurians, a rear guard of sorts, blocked the trail where it dropped out of sunlight into the maze of canyons beyond. They hefted their weapons. Their commander managed half of a bellowed exhortation, and then Pyrre and Gerra were on them, among them, moving delicately as dancers through the thicket of sword and spear, leaving only corpses in their wake.

Pyrre slipped behind the last of the living, caught him around the chest with one hand, slit his throat with the other. The soldier sagged against her as though suddenly weary, and she lowered his weight to the thirsty stone, gentle as any lover, brushed his forehead with a kiss, then straightened up.

“Did someone say to stop running?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow at Kaden. “Gerra and I are making this look easy, but I’m sure you noticed that there is still a small, angry army behind us, and just because we cleared a path through them doesn’t mean they can’t chase us.”

Kaden glanced over his shoulder. The ledge was awash in blood and struggling bodies. Blinding sunlight shattered off steel. All human language was lost in a discordant chorus of screams.

Pyrre tapped the flat of her bloody knife against her thigh. “I understand. It’s a gorgeous day to give men to the god, and a shame to be leaving. Still, I promised to take you to your secret gate.…”

Triste lurched into a run before the assassin could finish, and a moment later, Kaden followed, hurling himself from the sun’s bronze hammer into the cool shadows of the canyon. For a long time, the four of them raced the rocky path in silence, scrambling over boulders, splashing through the gurgling streams, slipping down the more treacherous ledges, falling, gashing their knees and palms, getting up, fleeing again.

“Il Tornja,” Kaden said, the first time they paused.

“He is one of those you named Csestriim,” Gerra said. The Skullsworn priest was doubled over panting, hands on his knees, but his green eyes were bright, focused.

“He is,” Kaden replied, “and he wasn’t back there. Neither was his leach.”

Gerra frowned. Pyrre just laughed.

“If it were easy to give these undying to the god,” she said, “we would have given them long ago.”

“At the kenta,” Triste managed. She had dropped to her knees, was scooping water from a small pool between the rocks, dribbling it down her chin in her haste. “He’ll be waiting at the kenta,” she gasped, “like last time.”

Kaden nodded. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Behind them, farther up the canyon, boots clattered over stone. Soldiers called out to one another, fierce, urgent shouts.

“Afraid?” Pyrre asked. “I put on my boots this morning just so I’d have the chance to face this undying general of yours. If he’s not waiting somewhere between here and the hidden gate, I will be very, very put out.”

* * *

“I am put out,” Pyrre said, shaking her head as she eyed the pile of hastily thrown-up rubble.

Of il Tornja, there was still no sign. They had reached the ancient village-guided by Kaden’s memory of the route-without encountering a single soldier. The flight had seemed easy, far too easy, and now he could see why.

“They blocked the gate,” Triste said, staring at the huge stones where the kenta had been, some of which were almost as large as she was.

“A lot of work,” Gerra observed. “Why didn’t they just tear it down?”

“I don’t think they can be torn down,” Kaden said. “Not by any normal means, at least.”

Pyrre ducked into one of the crumbling buildings, emerged a moment later shaking her head. “No leach. No invincible Csestriim warrior. Quite a disappointment.”

Triste was turning in slow circles, as though trying to watch the whole town at the same time. “Where is he?” she whispered. “What’s he doing?”

Kaden frowned. “I have no idea. I’ve never really known.”

“Well,” Gerra said, “it’d take the four of us all day to excavate your gate.” He cupped a hand behind his ear, turned back toward the canyon from which they’d just emerged, “And I don’t think we have all day.”

Kaden could hear it, too, the racket of their pursuit. The way the sound echoed off the canyon walls, it was impossible to know how close the soldiers were. Maybe half a mile, maybe less. He turned back to study the heap of stone. It was almost twice as high as he was, thousands of pounds of rock, but haphazardly constructed. Clearly, the soldiers had dragged it together in a rush. Not that that mattered. Gerra was right; moving the whole thing, moving enough of it, even, for them to slip through the top of the kenta, would take the better part of the day. Maybe, though …

He stared at the pile a moment longer, then closed his eyes.

The stones were there, all of them, some the size of a man’s chest, others not much larger than his head, some balanced on a single corner, others bedded so deeply a team of oxen would have struggled to pull them free. Still, there were gaps in the pile, some almost wide enough that Triste might fit inside. And suddenly, Rampuri Tan’s words tolled in his mind, so strong it almost seemed the monk was still alive, standing just behind him, shaking his head: You need to see what is not there.

All at once, Kaden was back at Ashk’lan, a novice whose bowl had been replaced by a block of rock, licking soup off the unforgiving stone, listening to the laughter of Huy Heng, his first umial, as he learned the value of emptiness.

It’s not the stones that matter, Kaden thought, staring at his private vision of that massive pile. It’s the space between them.

And slowly, carefully, tracing the invisible lines of force and support, he shifted a single block, filling one empty hole, but leaving another in its place. The work was purely mental. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t even opened his eyes, but he found himself sweating with the effort, trying to hold that whole structure in his head, to see the entire thing at once, to find those hidden places that had been spared the weight, to parse the layers of emptiness, to find a way to move the stones that could be moved without disturbing the looming mass.

“Kaden?” Triste asked, her voice wary.

He shook his head, worked faster, shifting the rocks inside his mind, moving them back, stacking them, sliding them, searching for a way past, a way through, searching for the emptiness buried in all that unfathomable weight.

“There,” he said finally, exhaling as he opened his eyes. He pointed. “We need to start with that block. Then move that…”

“Fascinated as I am by the mechanics of stonemasonry,” Pyrre said, “I’m not sure this is the perfect venue.”

“We can get through,” Kaden said. “I can see it.”

The assassin raised her brows, then gestured back up the canyon with her knife. The clatter of boots over stone was closer now, closing, undeniable.

“You’re just in time to explain it to our friends.”

“I just need time. Maybe a thousand heartbeats.”

“We don’t have time,” Triste exploded, hauling him by the arm. “We need to get out of here, now.”

Pyrre, however, was looking at Gerra, her eyes raised in a silent question. The priest ran a thumb along the point of his spear, as though testing the edge, then nodded.

“We’ll give you your heartbeats,” Pyrre said, turning away. “There is a place just around the bend, a narrowing of the canyon where the water drops off a small shelf. It is a good place.”

Triste stared at her. “They’ll kill you.”

Pyrre smiled. “Why do you think we came?”

“No,” Triste said, shaking her head. “No. There’s another way. Around them or past them. A better way.”

Pyrre’s grin just widened. “Perhaps you are confusing us with another order of priests. I’m sure you would have preferred to go somewhere else, but you came to Rassambur, and this, you sweet, blood-shy children, the fighting and the dying-it is our way.”