The Last Mortal Bond

50

Chilten, whose missing top front tooth caused him to whistle when he spoke.

Jal, whose voice was high as a little girl’s, but who took his ribbing from the other men and sang the songs of his hillside village anyway each evening before they slept.

Yemmer, who fought with two swords.

Sander, who could throw a head-sized chunk of rubble farther than any of the others.

Fent, who laughed in the middle of each day’s battle, but sobbed all night in his sleep.

Dumb Tom, who could work any numbers in his head, who tallied up the dead each night, figured the odds, ran the betting books.

Ho Chan, who knew how to set traps in the crumbling fort for the rats that they roasted every night.

Belton, whose voice broke after two straight days of shouting orders.

Brynt, who pissed himself each morning at the first Urghul horns.

Ariq, who couldn’t stop talking about the town where he grew up, the palms around the tiny lake, the way the moon looked closer there somehow.

Kel, who cut the ears from the Urghul dead, then threaded them on a leather thong that he wore around his neck.

Gruin the Brick, who was as wide as he was tall and knew three hundred Kreshkan poems by heart.

After four days fighting the Urghul from the top of Mierten’s crumbling wall, these were the last of the legionaries left.

Four days. It seemed too little time to know a man, but Valyn found, as the sun’s bloody rim dipped beneath the western hills, that he did know these twelve. Not all the little facts of their lives, obviously, but what use were those facts? Maybe somewhere else, hundreds of miles from any war, knowing a person might mean something different. Among other people-farmers, say, or merchants, or fishermen-all those tiny details accrued over a lifetime-the names of parents and pets, stories of drunken antics and earnest grief, tales of broken bones and broken hearts-they might actually matter. Not here atop the wall. Not with Ananshael sitting silently in the darkness beyond their fires, patient, inescapable.

The warrior had a different way of knowing. Death was always coming, always ready to obliterate the piles of facts that elsewhere in the world might constitute a life. What mattered wasn’t a record of the days lived, but something more immediate and fleeting: the pitch of a scream, the shape of a bloody grin, the timbre of a prayer. It was as though, if you paid attention, if you looked at the person just right, you could see an entire life in the smallest detail, could find everything that mattered in a single act.

Had they been somewhere else, Valyn would have loathed some of the soldiers, liked others. Here, atop the wall, those words-loathed, liked-seemed stupid, pointless. Could you really hate a man who stood at your side, his face bathed in sweat, his spear bloody from having saved you over and over? Could you like him? The words just didn’t apply. They were for another world, one where women and men could afford to choose their friends, where you could walk away because of something someone said or did. By the end of the fourth day on the wall, they were, all of them, beyond any walking away, beyond running or fleeing, beyond any judgment that was not uttered in blood.

It was amazing they had lived that long.

It was one thing to hear the Urghul army, to smell it on the northern wind, another thing entirely to see it flowing over the churned-up earth, thousands upon thousands of riders, lances stabbed up into the sky, hair flowing out behind them as they charged the wall again, and again, and again. All during that first day, Valyn expected his sight to fail, to go suddenly dark as it always had before. It remained; in fact, it sharpened, until he could see every scar on the faces of the charging horsemen. In the long months of his blindness, Valyn had forgotten what it was to see, how the world was full to bursting with shape and movement, packed from dirt to sky the long length of the horizon. It was dizzying watching the horsemen wheel and turn with each attack, all those riders shifting like the tide.

The Urghul would have finished the battle instantly but for one simple fact: Balendin was gone. After the botched attack on the hill, he had vanished utterly from the field of battle. When the leach remained absent for a second day, a few of the legionaries ventured to suggest that he might have been killed by the explosion after all, a notion the Flea flatly dismissed: He’s alive, the Wing commander said, and we’ll have to fight him again. Just be glad the fight’s even for now.

Even wasn’t the word Valyn would have chosen.

Leach or no leach, the Urghul numbered in the tens of thousands, taabe and ksaabe, the women every bit as hard, as vicious as the men, each with a bow and spear, each with a handful of remounts. They came against the wall from before dawn until after dusk every day, retiring only when the sky was so dark that any charge would risk the horses’ legs. There was no nuance to the attacks, no scheming or subtlety. They galloped along the wall, stood on the backs of their mounts, and then leapt screaming onto the battlements where the legionaries scrambled to cut them down.

“It makes no sense,” Valyn said to Huutsuu after the Urghul had retreated for the second day. “They could be building siege engines.” He gestured to the forest. “There’s enough trees to build a thousand catapults, trebuchets, ballistae. Instead of dying on the wall, they could be lounging a hundred paces away and pounding us into oblivion.”

Huutsuu watched the retreating riders in silence. When she finally turned to face him, her eyes blazed with reflected starlight. When she spoke, every word was stitched with scorn.

“Whatever hardening you have had, you still think like an Annurian.”

“If your people thought more like Annurians, they would have taken the wall already, and less of them would be dead.”

“War is not a matter of the taking of walls.”

“They’ve been trying hard enough to get on top of this one.”

“What matters is the way it is claimed.”

Valyn glanced over the edge of the wall at the carnage below. Some of the corpses-those that had fallen near the day’s end-were almost undisturbed. There might be an arm missing, or a gash across the collar, but they still looked like people, men and women who, but for a rent in their flesh, might still stand up, stumble away. The other bodies, the older ones, were worse. Days of battle had ground them into the mud. Hundreds of hooves had shattered skulls, pulped flesh, annihilated almost all that had been human. Crows were at these older carcasses, finishing the work. Valyn shook his head. “You want to claim it’s good to lose a thousand riders in the fight? Two thousand?”

“Better that,” Huutsuu replied, “than to sit a hundred paces distant, to hide behind machines, to risk nothing while the enemy dies. This is not war; it is killing.”

“As though the Urghul have respect for human life. I’ve been among your people, Huutsuu. I’ve seen what you do.”

She raised her brows. Valyn studied her; he had not had the opportunity to watch a human face, to really see one for so long. “And what is it, Malkeenian, that you have seen?”

“The men and women you’ve murdered, torn apart. The blood.”

“And you,” she pressed, cocking her head to one side, “have not done this? You have not spilled blood?”

“Of course I have,” he said. The memory of the day’s fighting coursed through his mind, the perfect clarity of it, the life burning in his veins as he raised the ax and brought it down. “That doesn’t make it right.”

“There is a sacred way of war,” Huutsuu said, “and a profane. I turned against my people, turned against the leach, because there is no struggle in the blood he spills. Like your generals with their engines, he risks nothing with his slaughter.” She raised an eyebrow. “Is this not the way you were raised? The way you were trained?”

“It’s what makes sense,” Valyn ground out. “War’s plenty dangerous even without the idiotic stunts.”

The Urghul woman shook her head. “Your way of war is a pale, ugly thing. A perversion. You call yourselves civilized, and yet look at the things you fight for: borders, power, wealth…”

“As opposed to what?”

“As opposed to nothing. The war itself is worship.”

“A sick sort of worship.”

“Sicker than killing a woman because she stepped across an invisible line you have drawn across the dirt? Sicker than burning a man because he took some gem, some brick of gold, from another man?”

“Justice,” Valyn said. The word felt brittle as a dead bird’s bone. “The law…”

Huutsuu waved his objection away. “There is only the struggle. You know this, Malkeenian. You have seen it, lived it. Forget your justice and your law; what is real is the struggle between person and person. The struggle that takes place inside a bloody heart.” Her smile was sharp as an ax’s edge. “This is why you can see, Malkeenian. You may deny this truth, but you have understood its sanctity.”

And so the Urghul did not scheme or build siege engines. For four days they came at the wall, bathed it in their screams and their blood, and for four days the wall held. The Flea’s orders to Valyn, Newt, and Sigrid were simple: Go where the shit’s worst. When the men start to break, don’t let them.

It seemed like a ludicrous command, so reductive it was almost glib. As the battle raged on, however, as the Urghul threw themselves howling at the wall over and over and over, Valyn started to see the wisdom in it. The Kettral spent years studying tactics back on the Islands, poring over hundreds of battles from dozens of wars, learning the intricate dance of advance and retreat. Victory, those lessons seemed to say, was something hammered out in a general’s head, a matter of maps and strategies.

Not here.

Atop the wall, any attempt at convoluted tactics could only obscure a series of simple, brutal truths: the wall was all that stood between the Urghul and the south. If the wall fell, the Urghul won. The wall could not fall.

“Go where the shit’s worst,” Valyn muttered to himself on the morning of the first day, chopped his way through two Urghul who had managed to get their feet beneath them. He buried an ax in the first, shoved the body into the second, then smashed them both back over the wall with his second ax.

Go where the shit’s worst. When the men start to break, don’t let them.

The first half of the orders were easy. The second, less so. All Valyn’s training had been in small-team tactics, teams built of meticulously trained specialists. He had no doubt that the legionaries beside him on the wall were excellent at marching, at holding a formation, at stabbing with their spears and hacking over and over with their swords, but they were hardly Kettral. Valyn could smell the terror on them, ranker and thicker each time the Urghul came. Each time the riders attacked, a few more gained the walkway. Three or four, the men could throw back. More than that, and there would be panic.

All that first morning, Valyn searched in vain for something to say to the soldiers, a few words that might make a crucial difference. The history books were filled with noble exhortations from commanders, but Valyn had no exhortations. He’d told the truth when the legionaries first arrived: they were dead men, all of them-either that day, or the next, or the one following. There was no escaping the Urghul army, no way to hold the wall forever. Sooner or later, the riders would break through, and then Ananshael would wade among them, unmaking men and women alike, his fingers, terribly nimble, unbinding the tangled knots that were their lives.

The best that Valyn could do was to keep the men grounded in the fight. Rather than giving them time to think about what had to happen in an hour or a day, Valyn hurled the brute fact of the battle over and over again in their faces. Midway through the day, while the sun burned through the clouds overhead, Brynt took an arrow to the shoulder. It wasn’t a killing wound, at least not right away, but it would have hurt, and the man collapsed to the battlements, pale face even more blanched with the pain.

Valyn had knelt beside the soldier for a moment, exploring the wound. Then he took the arrow in both hands, broke it off, slapped the man when he began to faint, then dragged the jagged shaft through the wound.

Brynt screamed. Blood flowed, hot and quick. The legionaries near them turned to stare, eyes wide, fear boiling off them. Brynt was a distraction, that was clear enough, and there was no room for a distraction. With a curse, Valyn hauled the man back to his feet, stabbed a finger at the mass of horsemen as they wheeled.

“There,” Valyn bellowed, choosing one of the Urghul archers at random, a woman with fire-gold hair streaming out behind her. “Kill her. She’s the one who shot you, so fucking kill her.”

For a moment, he thought the young soldier was too lost in his pain and panic to understand. Then Brynt pulled free of his grip. He wobbled for a moment, leaning against the ramparts, then steadied himself, raising his spear with his good arm. When the woman galloped within range, he bellowed and let the shaft fly. It lagged her slightly, burying itself in the horse’s flank, but that was good enough. The poor beast bellowed, buckled, and went down, throwing the woman, then crushing her. Brynt didn’t have his spear anymore, but each wave of Urghul brought fresh weapons, and more importantly, Brynt was standing again, shouting, ignoring the blood on his shoulder, bellowing taunts at the riders below. And just like that, the men around him, soldiers close to buckling moments before, were yelling too.

They made it through the afternoon that way, and another day, and another, Valyn choosing targets, the men focusing their fear and rage on one particular face, fighting a single foe at a time. Valyn lost himself so thoroughly in the battle, in the rhythm of attack, hold, and regroup, that when twilight finally crept into the sky on that fourth day, he almost didn’t notice. One moment the Urghul were hurling themselves at the wall, dying by the dozen, and the next they were pulling back. The thunder of hooves, the clash of steel against stone, the thousand-voiced chorus of battle-it was gone, replaced by the whimpers and sobs of the dying, the breathless, desperate gasps of those left alive atop the wall.

Valyn glanced west to where the sun had set beneath the low Nishan hills. Already, night was lowering over the old fort like an iron bowl. The soldiers’ pupils dilated in the growing gloom. They moved over the bloody walkway atop the wall more hesitantly, uncertain of their fading footing.

“Sir?” someone asked.

Valyn turned to find Brynt facing him. The legionary’s shoulder wound was wrapped in a rough bandage. Somehow he’d made it through four days of fighting with just one hand.

“What is it?” Valyn asked.

“The Urghul,” Brynt replied, gesturing over the lip of the wall.

Valyn didn’t bother to look. Today, as on every other day, there would be hundreds of Urghul dead, and among them, the wounded. The riders never made an effort to come for them. According to Huutsuu, this, too, was their way, their sacrifice to Kwihna. Even now, Valyn could hear the living crawling, limping, scrabbling across the churned-up no-man’s-land between the wall and the Urghul camp. Those who managed to drag themselves back to the roaring fires would be honored with song and dance. Those who didn’t … would not.

“The wounded…,” Brynt said, gesturing wordlessly over the wall.

Valyn turned back to the soldier. “What about them?”

The young man stared at him. “I don’t know. It’s just … shouldn’t we do something? Put arrows in them … or send someone out with an ax.…”

Valyn shook his head. “Leave them. This is what they chose, and we have our own to care for.”

Few enough, as it turned out-barely twenty, when you counted Huutsuu’s surviving Urghul and the Flea’s Kettral. There was a makeshift infirmary set up in the shadow of the wall, little more than a scrap of canvas to keep off the worst of the wind and cold. Each night, Valyn and the other Kettral labored by the shifting light of two lanterns to stitch the gashes that could be stitched, to scrub, then cauterize the wounds. They weren’t trying to save anyone. That wasn’t the point. The point was to find a way to keep each man who had survived the day’s madness on the wall for another day, to keep the dying, for just a little longer, from joining the dead.

That night, when they were finished, the Flea beckoned to Valyn. The legionaries, exhausted from the vicious battle, had mostly collapsed at their posts atop the wall, each man falling into his own stunned sleep. Later, woken by hunger or pain, they would rise, cook the last of their remaining rations over low fires, stare silently into the blaze or exchange the day’s grim tales. For now, however, they slept.

“Inside the fort,” the Wing leader murmured, gesturing.

Valyn raised his brows.

“We need to talk about the next steps.”

No one had bothered to light a lantern inside the stone chamber at the heart of Mierten’s Fort; the wan starlight lancing through the crumbling roof was more than enough for Kettral eyes. Valyn glanced over his companions as he entered. None of them had escaped the battle unscathed. The Flea’s right eye was almost swollen shut, Newt had acquired a limp, and an Urghul sword had taken off the two smallest fingers on Sigrid’s left hand. The bandage seeped blood, but the woman ignored it. For the first time Valyn remembered, she didn’t smell of delicate perfume. Her blacks were filthy and wrinkled. Like the rest of them, she reeked of blood.

“Just us?” Valyn asked, glancing over his shoulder toward the door.

“Just us,” the Flea agreed. “Kettral business.”

“I’m not sure I’m Kettral anymore.”

“Neither am I,” the Flea agreed, “but you might be important in what has to happen next.” He looked around the room, studying each of them in turn. “We can’t hold another day. We don’t have the soldiers left. Tomorrow, probably well before noon, the Urghul will take the wall and the fight will be over.”

Newt pursed his lips. “No man can stand against the tide. So what do you want to do?”

To Valyn’s surprise, the Flea laughed. “What I want to do is to take off these ’Shael-spawned boots, dig up a barrel of ale, sit down somewhere with a view of the river, drink ’til I’m numb, then fall asleep for a week.”

The admission seemed uncharacteristic, but Newt chortled, and even Sigrid’s lips twitched incrementally upward. It was more spasm than smile, gone before it began.

“Wrong question,” Newt agreed, still grinning. “What I meant was, ‘What are we going to do?’”

“Ah,” the Flea said, scrubbing his face with a hand. “That. That’s less pleasant.”

Sigrid licked her chapped lips, then hacked out a series of mangled syllables.

“My lovely and talented companion,” the Aphorist began, “points out that this is as good as any other place to die.”

The Flea shook his head slowly. “I disagree. For one thing, it’s dark and cold and we’re out of food. More importantly, we can still do some good if we survive.”

Valyn stared. “You want to abandon them.”

“As I said,” the Wing leader replied, meeting his gaze, “what I want doesn’t really come into it.”

“When?” Newt asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tonight is better,” the Aphorist pointed out. He seemed to have no qualms about leaving behind the men beside whom they had fought so desperately and for so long. “A lot more hours to get out, get clear.”

The Flea nodded. “I thought about that. I’m still hoping, though, that Balendin shows himself one final time. We stay until the last moment, and then we bolt.”

Sigrid laughed, then shook her head.

“As the lady points out,” Newt said, “we are well past our best running.”

“We’re not running,” the Flea said. He nodded west, toward where the river’s roar echoed between the banks. “We stay here, we fight, we hope for one more shot at Balendin. If we don’t get it, we swim.”

The Aphorist raised his bushy brows. “With that current? I believe the word you’re searching for isn’t swim. It is drown.”

The Flea shrugged. “Maybe. I scouted it last night. I give us even odds.” He turned to Valyn. “That’s why you’re here.”

Valyn shook his head slowly. “I haven’t swam in better than a year.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re half our age, almost uninjured, and stronger than anyone I’ve seen. I might ride out the current and get free. You definitely will.”

Unbidden, the thought of Huutsuu filled Valyn’s mind. She was probably asleep atop the wall somewhere, or curled up in the lee of the wall. The Annurian way of war, she would call it. Escaping just when the struggle peaked.

“I won’t go,” he said.

The Flea just watched him for a long time. “You think it’s bravery to die here on this wall.”

“I think we owe it to the men.”

“What about them?” the Flea asked, jerking a thumb to the south.

Valyn narrowed his eyes. “Who?”

“Everyone else. The kids. The farmers in their fields. The grandfathers sitting on porches. What do you owe them?”

Valyn gritted his teeth.

“Dying is easy,” the Flea said. The words were hard, but his voice was gentle. “When the time comes, we’ll do it. It’s just not time.”

“It is for those poor bastards standing on the wall tomorrow.”

The Flea nodded. “Yes. For those poor bastards, it is almost time.”

* * *

Chilten, a sword.

Jal, an ax.

Yemmer, who fought with two swords, another sword.

Sander, a spear.

Fent, an arrow to the throat.

Dumb Tom, an arrow to the gut.

Ho Chan, who killed the rats, a spear in the eye.

Belton, four arrows before he dropped.

Brynt, a spear, and Ariq, a spear.

Kel, a fall from the wall’s top, then hooves.

Gruin the Brick, who knew so many poems by heart, a slender Urghul knife.

These were the ways they would die the next day while Valyn and the others slipped silently away, making for the river while there was still time.