The Last Mortal Bond

30

Gray deepened into green as the eastern sky brightened with the watery light of the still-unrisen sun. Unseen frogs along the river’s bank began their monophonic chorus. Fish rose to the water’s surface, took flies, then disappeared, the silent ripples of their passage growing, spreading, fading. Kaden could make out flashes of color between the trees and vines-red and cerulean, sky-white and green-bright-plumed birds swooping down from their night’s roost.

A part of his mind-the part that remained unmoved by Kiel’s sudden arrival and dire news-catalogued the creatures, their songs and cries. The life of the jungle was so different from the life of the Bone Mountains-bolder, louder-but it was life all the same, millions of creatures moving through the stations of hunger and fear, lust and confusion, pleasure and pain.

“It will all go away,” Long Fist said, as though reading his thoughts, “if my consort’s host is killed.”

“Triste is not Ciena’s host,” Kaden replied without looking up from the river. “She didn’t invite the goddess into her mind. She doesn’t want her there.”

“The girl’s invitations and desires are irrelevant. The world you know is fragile as glass. Her death will shatter it.”

Kaden turned to study the man. They sat-Long Fist, Kiel, and Kaden himself-on a large boulder at the river’s edge. Dawn Rock, the local tribes called it, for the fact that it was there, from the top of the rock, looking east down the river’s course, that you could first see the morning sun. Kaden would have preferred to be already on the way back to the kenta, but Long Fist’s hieratic duties required him to be at the river just before dawn, to spill the blood of a small, black-haired monkey down the stone and into the swirling current as the sun rose. Unlike the sacrifice of the night before, this was a private ceremony, but a necessary one, evidently, and so the three of them sat on the rock as wide-mouthed fish rose for blood from the river’s unseen bottom, and the morning’s hot light ignited the white mist.

“Triste is not dead yet,” Kiel said. “She is simply missing. Gone from the dungeon.”

The Csestriim had arrived unexpectedly late the night before, escorted into the jungle camp by a pair of wary Ishien, just as Kaden had been.

Kaden shook his head. “The dungeon was the last thing keeping her safe.”

The Csestriim nodded. “She is at greater risk now. Grave risk.”

Whatever that risk, Kiel’s voice was calm. He seemed indifferent to Triste’s fate or that of the goddess trapped inside her. The girl’s disappearance was a fact, no more or less than the other myriad facts of the world. Like Long Fist, Kiel sat cross-legged, gazing down into the current, but unlike the Urghul shaman, whose stillness spoke of coiled might, of strength gathering for an attack, Kiel might have grown from the stone itself. He might have planned to sit there forever.

“How did you know it wasn’t her in the cell?” Kaden asked.

“I looked at the body,” the historian replied simply. “It was not her.”

“And no one else noticed? None of the jailors?”

“Your kind has always struggled to see clearly, and the girl’s face was disfigured by the poison that killed her. There were blisters and sores everywhere. Discoloration. Bleeding and black pus obscuring the sclera-”

“Sclera?”

“Her eyes. They were unrecognizable.”

Kaden could remember perfectly his first encounter with Triste. Her eyes had been sharp and clear, bright as the jungle flowers unfolding to the sun all around him now. She’d been younger then, younger in more than years, and terrified, trussed up in Tarik Adiv’s ostentatious bonds as though she weren’t a woman so much as a gift, an object, a beautiful bauble for the new Emperor. It was her eyes-those layers of violet laid one over the next-that had first jarred Kaden from his speechless stare. He tried to imagine them blackened, tarred over with poison, but of course, they weren’t. It wasn’t Triste that Kiel had seen inside the cell, but someone else.

“Who?” Kaden asked. “Who was she?”

“The dead are nothing,” Long Fist cut in. “We must find the living girl, the one whose flesh conceals her goddess.”

“And our best chance of finding her,” Kaden replied, “is discovering who broke her free, and why.”

Kiel nodded. “The body in the cell is an obvious place to start. I was unable to learn her name.…”

“But?” Kaden asked, hearing the pause in the historian’s voice.

“Your sister visited the dungeon the day that Triste disappeared, the day this strange girl’s corpse appeared inside the cell.”

Surprise knocked faintly against the bronze of Kaden’s calm, and then, a heartbeat after the surprise, anger, scratching with almost-silent claws. He held both feelings in his mind a moment, then put them away. There was no time for surprise, no room for the error that waited on human anger. What he needed was the bottomless calm of the Csestriim, but even as he reached for it, Long Fist was standing. “We will go to Annur then, and take the girl from your sister.”

As though it were that simple. As though the problems of the world could be solved just by going, by taking.

Instead of following the shaman to his feet, Kaden stared down into the river’s slow eddy. The current had carried away the monkey’s blood. There was only the water, muddy and dark, carried down from some distant hillside, traveling all the way to an unseen sea.

“How did Adare do it?” he asked. “Get her out?”

“I can’t be certain that she did,” Kiel replied. “It is only an inference.”

Long Fist let out something that might have been a growl. Kaden glanced up to see the shaman’s lips drawn back from his sharpened teeth. “She visited the girl the day she disappeared-”

“No,” Kaden said, cutting him off. “Kiel said she visited the dungeon.”

The Csestriim nodded. “She was there to see a man named Vasta Dhati, a Manjari prisoner.”

“Imprisoned for what?”

“The attack on your study.”

“That was Gwenna.”

“Indeed.”

Kaden took a breath, held it for a dozen heartbeats, then let it out.

What does my sister want? What is she trying to accomplish?

Answering the questions was like trying to find shape in the shifting clouds, but then, Adare’s mind was smaller than the sky, more ordered. Understanding was no more than a matter of seeing through her eyes. Kaden closed his own, let his own thoughts go, and tried to slip inside Adare’s conception of the world. She’d planned Triste’s extraction well. Brilliantly, in fact. Had it not been for Kiel’s perfect memory, no one would have realized Triste was missing at all.

“There is no time for talk,” Long Fist said. “Your sister has bound herself to this Csestriim, Ran il Tornja. She will deliver the girl into his hands, and he will destroy her.”

Kaden considered the claim. “No,” he said slowly. “That doesn’t work.”

The shaman’s gaze settled on him, hard and sharp enough to cut. “He twisted your sister to his purposes months ago. This was known, even on the steppe.”

“Maybe,” Kaden agreed, “but things change.”

“How are you certain?”

“Il Tornja wants Triste dead,” Kiel said.

Kaden nodded. “It is easier to kill a woman than to smuggle her out of the most closely guarded prison in the world. If Adare was taking orders from il Tornja, the jailors would have found Triste’s body in that cell. We would have already lost. Adare went to great trouble, great risk, to take the girl out alive.”

Long Fist’s hand had clenched into a fist at his side. His jaw was tight as he spoke. “Why?”

Kaden frowned. “That is what I will have to ask her.”