The Last Mortal Bond

58

For a long time, Kaden just watched his brother, trying to decide if Valyn believed this story of gods and goddesses trapped in human flesh, of a Csestriim genius whose whole horrible purpose was to find those gods, to flush them out and hunt them down, to destroy them, of how close il Tornja had already come, of how little time remained.

Studying Valyn’s face, it was hard to say. Those ruined eyes betrayed nothing. Kaden tried to find the brother he had known in the figure that stood before him now, prowling back and forth along the wall of Kegellen’s wine cellar like some caged animal. The boy was gone, carved away by the long years of training and privation, and even the man Kaden remembered from their brief time together in the Bone Mountains, the Kettral Wing leader, seemed to have vanished. Kaden struggled to put a name to this lean, scarred, hungry creature that stood before him now.

Valyn had arrived barely an hour earlier, appearing with Adare just after the noon gong, escorted by Kegellen herself into the mansion’s labyrinthine depths, where Kaden and Triste had been trying to figure a way around il Tornja’s soldiers and into Intarra’s Spear.

“How heartwarming,” the Queen of the Streets had said as she threw open the door, then clasped her broad hands in front of her chest. “A reunion of siblings. Is there any love like the love of a brother or sister?”

Love was not the word Kaden would have used.

The tension in Valyn’s shoulders and neck, the way his hands kept drifting to those vicious axes at his belt, the way he kept his broad back always to the wall as Kaden talked-it all spoke of loathing, wariness, distrust. Anything but love.

“And you have this god inside you now?” Valyn asked finally, his voice like rusted steel.

Kaden nodded. He could feel Meshkent pressing, testing against the boundaries of his prison.

“Why do you need to get into the Spear?” Valyn asked. “Why can’t you perform this ceremony here?”

“That’s not how it works,” Kaden replied. “The Spear is some sort of … sacred place. A conduit between our world and the gods’. An altar.”

Valyn grunted. “People die on altars.”

“It’s a risk,” Kaden said quietly, leaving out the rest: Death is necessary. Death is the goal.

The trouble was, Kaden had no idea how that death was supposed to be accomplished. Meshkent had moved from fury to silence and back again a hundred times since Kaden had penned him inside his mind. The god had cursed, bellowed, cajoled, but refused to reveal the least detail of the obviate. According to Kiel, the Csestriim had found the human vessels of the gods dead at the tower’s top all those thousands of years earlier, but how they had died, the historian had no idea. Was it enough simply to go to the tower’s top, to stand there, to wait for the divine to unchain itself, for the human flesh to fail? Or were there words to speak, genuflections to make, paces of some arcane path to tread? Kaden had no idea.

In other circumstances, it might have made sense to wait, to try to pry the details of the ritual from the god’s mind, but there was no more time for waiting. Il Tornja was too close, and his trap was drawing tight.

Triste shifted at Kaden’s side, moving closer to him. She’d barely spoken a word since Valyn and Adare arrived, watching them warily, her shoulders tense, as though she were getting ready to fight or to flee.

“You can’t get into the Spear,” Adare said. “Il Tornja’s men have it locked down.”

Kaden shook his head. “We have to. There is no other way.”

“I’ll tell you another way,” Valyn said grimly. “We find il Tornja and put an ax between his eyes. How’s that?”

“Inadequate,” Kaden replied. “Even if you manage to kill il Tornja, the gods are still trapped inside us. I’m battling Meshkent all the time, even when I sleep. I’m fighting against him now, fighting to keep control.”

Adare studied his eyes, as though she could see the god behind his irises somehow. “Why not let him out? If he’s really a god, he can save himself, right?”

“You don’t understand,” Kaden replied quietly. “This is the Lord of Pain I carry inside myself. He came here, to this world, to spread an empire of misery over the earth, to set up altars in every field and forest, to soak the earth with blood and make the air shake with screams. If I free him, if I give him this flesh, he will succeed or be destroyed. We can’t allow either to happen. The fact that we are fighting against il Tornja does not make an ally of Meshkent. There is only one way to walk this path, and that is the obviate.”

He realized, as he fell silent, that Valyn had stopped moving. He stood perfectly, preternaturally still at the far end of the narrow room, scarred eyes fixed on Kaden.

“Are you tempted?” he asked quietly.

Kaden studied his brother. “Tempted by what?”

“The other paths. The pain or the annihilation.”

Triste wound an arm around Kaden’s waist. Such a fragile link, binding him to the world.

He nodded in response to Valyn’s question, remembering how it felt to stand on the mesa’s edge at Rassambur, to feel the knife bite into his skin. “I was tempted once. Not anymore.”

“Why not?” To his surprise, it wasn’t Valyn asking this time, but Adare. Her eyes were flooded with flame, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “Where did you find the faith?”

“Is it faith?” Kaden asked. He searched inside himself, but in the thin ridge between Meshkent’s fury and the emptiness of the vaniate, he found only memory and anticipation. Hope that with the Kettral’s help they might reach the Spear’s summit mingled with despair at the thought that il Tornja’s soldiers might be already there. Joy at the fierce strength in Triste’s touch, and sorrow at what had to happen next. In all of it, there was nothing he could identify as faith. “I don’t think that’s the word.”

“His blades,” Adare said quietly, angrily.

Kaden shook his head, confused.

“That’s what he called us,” she went on. “Our father. In his last letter. He said we were his last blades.” She bared her teeth, as though the memory caused her physical pain. “It’s a good thing, in a way, that he died before he realized just how broken we are.”

To Kaden’s surprise, Valyn laughed. It was an ugly, busted sound, but there was, Kaden realized, a rough sort of hope woven through it. Adare rounded on him.

“Annur’s about to be destroyed. Kaden and Triste might kill themselves. Everything we are is hanging in the balance, and you’re laughing?”

Valyn ignored her rage. “It’s just funny, that word: broken. A better man than I’ll ever be told me something recently: Sometimes you need to break a thing to find out what’s inside.”

Kaden stared at his brother.

“And just what the fuck,” Adare asked quietly, “do you think is inside us?”

“I have no idea,” Valyn replied, “but I’ll tell you this: whatever it is, it doesn’t quit. It might be ugly, backstabbing, stubborn, but no one-not the Kettral or the Skullsworn, the Csestriim or the slarn or whole armies of Urghul-has been able to kill it yet.”

Adare’s mouth had just quirked into a ragged smile when the door to the wine cellar slammed open. Kegellen stood in the doorway. Valyn’s axes were out of his belt before Kaden could blink. He crossed the floor in two strides, to lay a sharp edge against the woman’s neck. The Queen of the Streets’ broad chest was heaving, but her eyes were hard.

“Don’t waste your steel on me, soldier,” she said.

“What’s going on?” Adare demanded.

“The Army of the North is here.”

“They’ve been here for days,” Adare replied.

“I’m not talking about the city,” Kegellen said. “They are here in this house. Now. And they are coming for you.”