The Last Mortal Bond

9

Blood still wept from the gashes to her face and scalp as Adare slammed open the doors to the council chamber. At least, she had intended to slam them open. The great bloodwood slabs-each one twice her height and thick as her arm-proved heavy as oxen, and though she threw her whole weight against them, grunting with the effort, they swung only grudgingly on their huge oiled hinges, gliding silently through their arcs, coming so gently to rest that most of the men and women assembled in the chamber failed to notice their opening.

For a moment, Adare just stared. She had heard about the council’s famous map chamber, of course. While their republic disintegrated at every border, while the citizens of Annur fought and starved and died, the newly appointed rulers of Annur had embarked on their construction project, diverting funds that could have fed tens of thousands into their glittering hall. Adare had heard more than her fill of the fucking map, but hearing was not the same as seeing. Standing inside the huge doors, perched on the edge of this wooden walkway suspended above the world, watching the oceans slosh in their basins, the rivers tumble through their carefully crafted courses, she found herself hesitating.

It wasn’t the council, not the aristocrats seated around the circular catwalk at the hall’s center, that gave her pause. She’d been handling aristocrats since she was a child, and judging from the idiocy of the past months, this lot was even less capable than most. No, it was the sight of Annur itself that brought her up short. She had her own maps, of course, dozens of maps, scores of them. Maps of Vash and Eridroa, of every city on the two continents, of strategic passes and likely battlegrounds. Her maps were the best available, meticulously inked records of coastlines and tax zones, watersheds and disputed boundaries. She had thought that those maps captured all that needed knowing about her crumbling empire. In this, as in so many things, she erred.

It was the scope of the empire that had escaped her. She stared at it. Some recent violence had marred the work, but it hardly mattered. The cities were miniature marvels of glass, and stone, and jewel, every palace, every house, the work of a hundred hours for a master craftsman. Forests of dwarf pine skirted the base of the Romsdals while tangled vines snaked across the choked terrain of the Waist. She looked north, to Aergad. There was the ancient castle that had served as her imperial seat these past nine months, standing proudly on the stone promontory overlooking the Haag. Her son was there in that squat, northeastern tower, probably crying for his dinner, crying for her. She forced the thought from her mind.

It was too much. The whole thing was too much.

She had thought she knew the magnitude of her task when she returned to Annur the first time, when she decided to take on the imperial mantle of her father. She had thought she’d seen the scope of the land after her forced march from Olon to Andt-Kyl. She’d thought she understood the responsibility after watching the battered men and women fleeing south, refugees from the Urghul assault. She’d thought she had plumbed the depths of the sacrifices required after witnessing the battle at the northern end of Scar Lake, after seeing Fulton cut down, after burying the knife in her own brother’s ribs.

A map, after all that, even a huge map, should not have come as a shock. And yet there was something about seeing the land spread out before her, the whole huge ambit of her rule in a single room, the unbroken extent of the territory she had taken it upon herself to guard and protect, that made her stop, hands balled in fists at her sides, blood hot and wet on her face, dumb heart pumping more and quickly, horrified at how much depended on her, at how fully she could fail.

“… if she is harmed, the treaty is lost…”

She had stumbled, still unseen, into some ongoing argument at the center of the room.

“Some of us did not want this treaty in the first place.”

“Then you were a fool. We need unity.”

“And if the mob kills her, we have it. Let us not forget that it was Adare who decided to enter the city unannounced, unescorted, without warning the council or asking our permission. Her death can hardly be laid at our feet.”

“We don’t know she is dead.” A quieter voice, this one. Vaguely familiar. “We ordered the soldiers out as soon as we had word of her arrival. They could have reached her in time. We don’t know anything.”

Adare gritted her teeth, tore her gaze from the great map spread out beneath her, and advanced down the catwalk, a graceful curve of cedar and steel suspended by thick cables from the ceiling far above. She passed over the crescent of the Manjari Empire, over the Vena, then the gold-red sand of the Darvi Desert, passed beneath the lamps, glass blown into great globes meant, evidently, to echo the moon and stars. Most were unlit, wide cloth wicks floating silently in the clear oil. The council continued to bicker.

“The patrol said she was alone.”

“Precisely, which means the idiotic woman is probably dead. Which means-”

Adare cut through the words with her own.

“She is not. Idiotic, I’ll grant you, but not dead.”

She ignored the exclamations of confusion and surprise, the scraping of chairs hastily shoved back, the arms and hands thrown about in postures of shock and alarm. A dozen more steps took her over the peaks of the Ancaz, bloodred sandstone thrusting up as high as the catwalk. Her face burned. That, too, she ignored.

“I’m sure my survival is a disappointment,” she went on, pausing just to the west of the earthen walls and low domes of Mo’ir, “but life is filled with disappointments. I would imagine, given the miserable state of your so-called republic, that you’ve grown accustomed to them by now. I certainly have. The relevant question is what we intend to do about them.”

She raised an eyebrow, studying the men and women of the council for the first time. She had learned all forty-five names, of course, had studied their families and histories, tried to ferret out, wherever possible, their reasons for joining Kaden’s doomed cause. Most just wanted power; they would have leapt at any chance to see the Malkeenians brought low. Bouraa Bouree was one of these-she picked him out easily, all sweat and silk and sullen anger-as were Ziav Moss and Onu An. There were a handful of idealists in the mix, most notably Gabril the Red. He sat almost directly across from her, his dark eyes hawklike, sharp and predatory. In the past, the kenneled intensity of his gaze had made her look away. Not anymore. She met his eyes, nodded once, then turned her attention to the Annurian delegation.

If Sweet Kegellen was surprised at Adare’s sudden entrance, she didn’t show it. Annur’s most dangerous criminal raised a fat hand, waggling her fingers in an incongruously girlish greeting, then smiled from behind her paper fan. Adare nodded, the same nod she had given Gabril. Kegellen hadn’t earned her various names-The Queen of the Streets, That Unkillable Bitch-by sitting demurely behind her fan. The woman was at least as deadly as anyone else in the room, fans and waggling fingers or no.

Another time, Adare might have studied her further, or the lean figure seated beside her who could only be Kiel. Now, however, her gaze slid past them to the third member of the Annurian delegation, Kaden, her brother. The one she hadn’t killed.

“Your Radiance,” he said quietly, rising as she met his eyes, then bowing low.

There was no meekness in the movement, no submission.

“I understand,” she replied grimly, “that you’ve acquired a title of your own. First Speaker.” She inclined her head a fraction of an inch.

He didn’t look like a holder of titles. His robe was simpler in both cut and cloth than those of the other council members. In a room full of flashing gems, he had scorned all ornament. He was taller than she had expected, taller than Valyn, and leaner. His shaved scalp reminded her of the legions she commanded, and there was something, too, of a soldier’s discipline in the way he held himself. Unlike those men she had seen at the front, however, there was no bluster to Kaden, no swagger. His strength was in his stillness, his silence. And in those burning eyes.

My brother, she thought, staring at those fires with unexpected wonder. Then, remembering their surroundings, she erased all expression from her face.

After the confusion and consternation caused by her entrance, the assembly had fallen abruptly quiet. It was a quiet that Adare remembered well, a quiet she had first heard when she stood in the palace infirmary with her dying mother. A team of useless surgeons and physicians had attended the Emperor’s wife through the final days of her illness, bickering in scholarly whispers as she coughed blood into meticulously boiled cloths. When Adare stepped into that bright, white room, however, the greatest medical minds of the empire had fallen suddenly silent, as though she might forget they were there, might believe she had been given a moment of privacy with her mother.

It hadn’t worked then, and it didn’t work now. Whatever exchange she was about to have with Kaden, it would be public, political. The angles of this particular silence afforded no space for intimacy. Not that she had any intimacy to offer.

“So this is the heart of your republic,” she said, not bothering to keep the scorn from her voice, letting her anger boil through the words. It wouldn’t hurt for him to see her anger, for them all to see it.

He shook his head. “Not mine. Ours.”

Adare could hear her father in that response, in the cool deliberation of it. There was no shock in his eyes, no dismay, only the steady burning of those twin fires, cold, and bright, and distant. In this, too, he was like her father. Adare couldn’t remember ever seeing Sanlitun surprised.

“How inclusive,” she replied grimly.

Kaden spread his hands. “If you had warned us of your approach, we could have given you safe passage through the city. I will call a surgeon to see to your wounds.”

She shook her head curtly. The motion sent pain up her neck. She ignored it.

“There’s no need for a surgeon, and no time for one either. What were you thinking ordering armed men into the streets, ordering them to raise weapons against your own people?”

Kaden blinked. That, at least, was something new. Sanlitun would not have blinked.

“We heard that a mob was forming. An angry mob.”

“And so you sent out a few hundred brick-brained fools to murder them?”

“Murder?” Gabril demanded sharply.

“Yes,” Adare said, rounding on the man. “Murder. People trampled by horses, their skulls shattered by the flats of swords, their bodies scattered across the Godsway like offal. I think I’d call that murder.”

“The guards were ordered to protect you,” Kaden said. “At all costs.”

“At the cost of dead Annurians?”

This time he did not flinch. “If necessary, yes. Without you, we would have nothing. No alliance. No peace. None of the unity necessary to hold Annur together.”

“And how much unity do you think you’re going to have with a few dozen bodies sprawled out on the stones of the Godsway? How much ’Kent-kissing peace?”

Her anger, so useful just moments before, was getting the better of her now. She could hear it; she was too loud. Nira had counseled her again and again on the importance of holding her tongue and her peace. Ironic, given the source, but good advice all the same. Adare could hardly rule an empire if she let herself be goaded into fury by one insane decision by the council. An emperor listened, waited, judged men and women in the silent chambers of her mind, and only spoke when it was necessary, when she was ready to wed the words to action. Adare knew it all well enough, but there was no holding her rage in check. In fact, the more rein she gave it, the greater it grew.

“I understood the risks,” she said, turning to confront the other members of the council, “when I rode my horse into the city alone.”

“Evidently not,” Ziav Moss cut in. The Kreshkan touched his cheek with a fingertip as though to remind her of her wounds. The gesture was gentle, understated. From another man it might even have been deferential, but Moss was not built for deference. The man came from one of the oldest families in the empire; he was all dark, oiled hair and urbanity. His words were soft, but pillows were soft, too, and Adare had read of rulers being suffocated in their sleep with them.

“I accepted the risk,” she said. “After all your slander, it was necessary for the people to see me alone and unarmed, coming back to this city not as a conqueror with a hundred guardsmen at my back, but as an emperor walking among her people.”

“Looks like they didn’t like what they saw.”

Adare rounded on the newest speaker, a salt-haired, sun-browned woman well into her sixth decade.

Randi Helti. Of course. The boat lady. Aside from Kegellen, Helti had the only self-made fortune in the room, and no reverence for royalty.

“The crucial thing, Captain Helti, is not the liking, but the fucking seeing.” Adare gestured to the ceiling high above their heads, huge windows set into it like gems, glass gold with the afternoon light. She swept a hand over the catwalks, the chairs, the grand, ridiculous map, all the way to the huge bloodwood doors through which she had entered. Those had swung shut again as silently as they had opened. “You think you can do all your work from this room?” She turned to confront the others. “You think you can sit in your impeccably crafted chairs and rule an empire?”

“You dare…,” Bouree sputtered, leaning forward in his seat until Moss waved him down.

“We have ruled this republic,” the Kreshkan said mildly, “for nearly a year now. And we will continue to do so. The only question is whether or not your … theatrics will prove useful to the task.” He frowned, as though genuinely disappointed. “I suspect not. You’ve been out there, scuttling all over the north, rubbing elbows with your precious people, and what has it gained you? Hmm?”

Adare stared. “What has it gained me?” Her pulse pounded in her temple. Blood was running down her face again. “What has it fucking gained me?”

“Do you intend to answer the question,” Moss asked, brows raised, “or would you prefer to simply repeat it with foul language added for flavor?”

“What it has gained,” Adare snarled, “is our survival. Mine. Yours. All Annur’s.”

“While we all appreciate your enthusiasm, surely that is overstating the case. While the common soldier may respond to this type of hyperbole, it is not necessary here. The men and women of this council are learned and worldly. You need not rant, nor throw your hands about in this ludicrous manner, nor overstate the situation to the north.”

Adare clenched her hands into fists at her sides. “I am not overstating it,” she hissed. “The situation to the north is nothing short of desperate. Long Fist is killing people. He is cooking them. He is taking them apart piece by piece and making sculptures from those pieces. And then there’s Balendin, a Kettral-trained leach. He grows more powerful every day, and he’s every bit as vicious as the man he obeys.”

Most of the faces around the table had closed-tight lips, narrowed eyes, clenched jaws. They didn’t like hearing the truth, and they certainly didn’t like being lectured about it. Kaden was watching her intently, hands flat and still on the table before him. She couldn’t read his face, but he looked as though he wanted to tell her something, to warn her, but it was too late for that. The moment for conciliation, if it had existed at all, was past.

Another emperor would have found a way to avoid this situation. Her father would never have screamed at the council, would never have shoved their faces so directly in their failures. Kaden seemed cut from the same cloth-calm, deliberative, measured. Another emperor would have seen a way to make peace with the council, but then again, there were no other fucking emperors. Sanlitun was dead, and Kaden was … whatever he was-cowardly, or complacent, or gelded. She wasn’t doing the greatest job, but at least she was trying to do her ’Kent-kissing job.

“We have received the reports,” Bouree was saying. He seized a long pole from the table before him, gesturing with it toward the north of the map, toward the hundreds of small lakes obscured between the tiny pines. “You need not lecture us about your … difficulties.”

“My difficulties?” Adare spat. “My difficulties? If you plan to rule all Annur, if you plan to pass laws and enact policy as our treaty stipulates, you might want to start thinking about events beyond the walls of this very beautiful chamber as your problems, too.”

Moss raised a hand, calling for calm as though he were the only adult in a room of petulant toddlers.

“A semantic slip, young lady.”

“Your Radiance,” she growled.

He pursed his lips, as though the very thought of the words was sour.

“If you intend to heal the breach,” she went on, “as you claim. If you intend to abide by the treaty we have both signed, then I am the Emperor, Annur’s Emperor, and your Emperor, and you will address me properly.”

“I’ve always found that those most insistent on their titles,” Moss replied, “are those least deserving of them.” He shook his head, an understated performance of urbane regret.

A few seats away, Kegellen smiled. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said brightly. “I suggest we all relinquish our titles, emperors and aristocrats alike. At once, if possible.” She raised a hand, fluttering it in the air. “I make the motion.”

People shifted uncomfortably. This was a group, after all, who relied on their names and titles for life and livelihood, for the privileges and prerogatives they had enjoyed from childhood, from birth. It was one thing to challenge Adare’s imperial claim; another to see the foundation of their own positions suddenly vulnerable to assault.

Moss frowned. “We will, of course, adhere to the forms of the treaty. Your Radiance. But to return to the matter at hand, I believe my Channarian colleague was simply observing that all these dire tidings that you present with such … shrillness are already known to us.”

“We have read the reports,” Bouree bellowed again. “Every day.”

Adare stared at them, looking from face to face. Many were nodding. One man with a square head and a crooked nose was gesturing to a sheaf of papers spread out before him, as though the mere existence of those papers would prove his commitment to Annur. Moss had steepled his fingers before his face, watching from behind them. Kaden’s blazing eyes never left Adare. She considered going toward him, for a moment, then turned the other way, circling the table slowly.

“Perhaps the reports have failed to convey the necessary gravity,” she said, managing to lower her voice for the first time. She kept walking. People twisted in their chairs as she passed behind them, trying to keep her in view. As though they think I’m going to stab them one by one, when they’re not looking, she thought grimly. And they didn’t even know about Valyn.

“Perhaps,” she went on, “the elegant phrases of your reports lack the urgency required by the situation.” The gashes to her face burned. The scar laid into her skin by the lightning burned. The blood covering her face scalded. “Perhaps you are confused about the nature of your nation, about the scope of your commitment. Perhaps you don’t understand the price of failure.”

She was approaching Bouraa Bouree now. His face was screwed into a scowl.

“You presume too much,” he snapped. “We convene here every day, all day, in the governance of the republic.” He waved his long pole at the map below. Even that pole was a work of fine craftsmanship, rings of precious metal laid into the polished shaft. The length of wood with its inlaid gold and silver was worth a farmstead, worth what a large, hardworking family might earn in ten years. All to point out places on a map. Bouree gestured with it vaguely to the borders of the empire. “While you’ve been pleasuring your general up in the north, we have been ruling Annur.”

Adare ignored the gibe. “How can you rule Annur,” she asked quietly, “when you don’t even understand it?”

“And what,” asked Ziav Moss from across the width of the table, voice languid, almost bored, “would you have us understand? Your Radiance?”

She glanced over at him, then turned back to Bouree, seized the long pole in both hands, then wrenched it from the Channarian’s grasp. He shouted, tried to rise to his feet, to take it back, but she was already twisting away, swinging it in a broad, vicious arc overhead.

“This.”

The wood connected with one of the huge globes overhead, shattering the glass. She didn’t wince as the shards crashed down around her. A few more slices to her face would hardly make anything worse. Lamp oil spilled over the catwalk, acrid and glistening, slicking the planks and pouring over onto the land below. She took two steps forward and shattered another globe.

“This,” she said again. “And this…” Smash. “And this…” Smash, smash, smash.

People were on their feet, shouting their objections, waving their hands or wringing them pointlessly. Probably no different from what they did when their precious reports rolled in. A scarred, bearded man tried to take the pole from her. Adare broke it over his head, knocking him half over the railing. She continued swinging the jagged end, breaking the glass lamps over and over and over until she came to one, finally, that was lit.

“What I want you to understand…” She was screaming now. She didn’t care. “What I want you to fucking understand, you ’Kent-kissing assholes, is that this…” She stabbed the shattered pole at the perfect landscape laid out below. You almost couldn’t even see the oil slicking the rivers, dousing the trees. “This is not Annur. It has nothing to do with what is going on out there. Nothing to do with what is happening in your republic right fucking now.”

“All right.” Kaden’s voice. Still calm, but carrying. “All right, Adare.”

She extended the pole out toward the lamp, almost gently this time. It took only a moment for the oil-soaked wood to catch. She held it before her like a torch, watching the fire twist, writhe.

“No,” she said, turning to face her brother, speaking more quietly now, channeling his calm. “It is not all right. That is what I’m trying to tell you.”

She threw the burning brand over the catwalk railing.

There was a great whoosh of wind, like the last, terrible breath of the earth, then the flame.

Everywhere, the flame.