The Last Mortal Bond

60

Morning’s blue ax split the Valley of Eternal Repose. At the land’s crease, white-gray and lazy, the thin, indifferent river traced its ancient course. Years earlier, Adare had labored through a treatise on hydraulics. Mostly it focused on the building of canals, but there was an entire section on the natural history of rivers, on the way that even a small stream could carve a canyon through the land, given enough time. She tried to imagine the valley before it was a valley, before the current had cut down through the topsoil, exposing the low limestone walls that would serve as tombs to her people. How long had the water toiled through that stretch of ground? Tens of millennia? Hundreds?

And it’s not finished.

Even now, while the Annurians who had gathered in the valley stood still, silent, waiting for her to speak, the current was moving, going about its patient work, chiseling away at its bed, digging deeper, deeper. One day, the stone tombs along the valley’s walls would be too high to reach. Some traveler would stand at the bottom of the gorge and stare up, baffled, at the monuments of Malkeenian emperors-the weathered lumps that had been Alial the Great’s stone lions, Olanon’s martial bas-relief, the rising sun carved around her own father’s tomb-and wonder who had built so far up the wall of the cliff, and why, and where they had gone.

They might not notice Kaden’s grave at all. The huge cedar doors would have rotted away by then, leaving a simple aperture into the cliff’s darkness. Even if that future traveler climbed the limestone cliff to look inside, the body would be gone, ground to dust beneath time’s silent hammer. Even if people remembered, so many millennia hence, names like Annur or Malkeenian, there would be no proof left of the lie Adare was about to tell, no corpse to gaze upon, no evidence to suggest that the Malkeenian laid in that last tomb was no Malkeenian at all.

She had burned Kaden’s body ten days earlier, the night after the fire inside Intarra’s Spear. She could have asked Gwenna to carry the corpse down. The Kettral had already made two trips-the first, to lift the Flea and Sigrid to the palace infirmary; the second, to bring the bodies of Nira, and Oshi, and Ran il Tornja.

“I’ll get your brother next,” Gwenna announced gruffly. “Him and Triste.”

Adare shook her head. “We will burn them here.”

Below her, the tower glowed with still-smoldering fire. Overhead, the smoke-smudged stars carved their slow arcs through the dark. Valyn was watching her with his scarred eyes.

“Here?” Gwenna asked.

Adare nodded. “Here.” Her own conviction surprised her. “This is the place they fought so hard to reach. It is the place they made their stand. It is here that they won our war. Why take them down? Why cover them with dirt?”

And so she had labored half the night alongside Gwenna, and Annick, and Talal, and Valyn to build a rough pyre from the wreckage of the staircase below. When they were finally finished, her hands bled. Her back screamed.

“You’re limping,” Gwenna pointed out quietly. As though that were worth worrying about, as though, compared to everything else that had happened that day, it constituted some kind of sacrifice.

“I’ll survive.”

They laid the two bodies atop the pyre just before dawn. The leach kindled a spark. It wavered, then caught. The flame’s blades made smoke of the dead. The Kettral stood their vigil silently. Even Valyn just stared into the flame as though hoping to go blind. Adare opened her mouth, then shut it. What did she know of Kaden or Triste? Anything she said might be a lie. Silence was the truest eulogy, and it was a relief to remain silent. There would be time in the weeks to come, too much time, for speeches, ample need for noble-sounding lies.

And now, she thought, gazing out over the throng assembled in the valley, that time has come.

She took a deep breath, steadied herself, and then began.

“Some of you who have gathered here will see the splendor of this funeral and whisper, ‘Waste.’”

She gestured to the columns of soldiers-bull-thick Aedolians, legionaries, Sons of Flame in their flashing bronze-that had marched all the way from Annur, through the wreckage north of the wall, over the low hills, then into the long, winding valley, halting, finally, before her to stand motionless as stone men. The steel heads of a thousand spears blazed like torches in the morning light.

“You will look at these warriors and you will see men who could be laboring, even now, in the service of the living rather than standing pointless vigil for the dead.

“You will look at the horns of these oxen, gilded with gold, and you will think, What need have the dead for gold?”

The oxen-eight huge black beasts, their coats oiled and groomed to a glistening sheen-had drawn the bier all the way from the Dawn Palace. They stared west now, motionless in their harnesses, round, dark eyes inscrutable as stones. Soon, the Aedolians would take up that slab of sweet-smelling cedar, bear the silk-wrapped corpse into that chilly passage carved into the cliff, set it gently down on the stone plinth, file out, put their shoulders to the massive doors that would block up all access to the tomb, and it would be done. After so long, it would finally be done.

Adare would have come sooner, but in the days after the Spear burned, it was impossible to reach the Valley of Eternal Repose-the Urghul were still north of the wall in all their thousands. Without Long Fist or Balendin to cleave a path through the wreckage, the horsemen had no viable way to attack, no path by which to bring their horses to bear, and yet they came on, day after day, hurling themselves through the burned-out ruin of Annur’s northern quarter, screaming in their strange tongue, brandishing spears from the improvised barricades even as Annurian archers cut them down.

Adare had watched most of the carnage from her tower atop the northern wall. “It’s madness,” she muttered halfway through the second day.

Valyn stood a pace away, his scarred eyes fixed on the slaughter. After a long time, he shook his head. “Not madness. Sacrifice.”

“Dying in an insane attack that can’t possibly succeed?”

“Not the dying, the fighting. The Hardening.”

Adare watched as a sun-haired warrior, chest stitched with arrow shafts, began singing in the street below. More arrows. The song turned to blood in his mouth.

Only after a full week, when the ruined streets north of the wall were choked with Urghul bodies, did the horsemen finally stop. It was hard to say why they broke off their attack. Through the long lens, Adare had spotted a woman-blond and scarred as the rest of them, middle-aged but hard as carved wood-standing barefoot on her horse’s back, arms spread as though inviting a spear to the chest, bellowing some inexplicable exhortation.

“Huutsuu,” Valyn said. An unreadable expression tugged like a hook at the corner of his mouth.

Adare stared at him. “Is that a name?”

He nodded slowly.

“You know her?”

Another nod.

“What in ’Shael’s name is she doing?”

He cocked his head, as though he could hear the words from almost a mile away. “She is telling them to go home.”

Adare studied the woman, studied the thousands of howling horsemen circling her like wolves. “They’re going to kill her.”

“It is possible. I do not think so.”

Then, to Adare’s shock, Valyn stepped up onto the low tower wall.

“What are you doing?”

He gestured north. “Going.”

“Going where?”

“Huutsuu helped me once. I will help her now, if I can.”

“The Urghul will fucking murder you, Valyn.”

He stared at her, through her, considering the possibility. It seemed impossible that this stranger, this creature of sinew, scar, and darkness, could somehow be her brother.

“Maybe.”

Then, before Adare could respond, he jumped. It was thirty-five feet to the street below, but Valyn landed like a cat, rose to his feet, dreadful as any unkillable thing from nightmare, then disappeared into the wreckage. Somehow Adare had understood, even then, that he would not be coming back.

She could have skipped the funeral. No one in Annur aside from Gwenna and her Kettral knew how Kaden had died. Besides, Kaden had, by his own choice, abdicated the Unhewn Throne. Funerals, however, were not for the dead, and after the Urghul disappeared over the northern horizon, riding back to their steppe, Annur needed something-a ceremony, a shared moment-to mark a turning point.

The tomb was there already. Stonemasons had hollowed the hole from the cliff the day after her father was laid to rest. There were no carvings, however, no statuary or reliefs to decorate the stone face. Those were chosen, traditionally, by the Emperor before his death, but Kaden had given no instructions, and all those who truly knew him-Rampuri Tan, Triste, the Shin monks among whom he had lived so long-were dead. Perhaps it didn’t matter-he was already so much ash and bone-but the people would expect carvings, and so Adare went to Kiel, the Csestriim.

“What would he want? Have wanted?”

Death’s grammar was slippery.

The historian looked at her with unreadable eyes.

“Are you speaking of your brother? Or of the one who will take his place in the tomb?”

Adare blinked. She had told no one but Valyn and Gwenna, had wrapped the body herself, winding the water-smooth cloth around the naked figure, circling the feet first, then the legs, all the way up to the face, pausing for a long moment before winding it tight around those open eyes. The lie was easy: His wounds were too gruesome. The people should not see a Malkeenian so defiled.

“How…”

“Rest easy, Your Radiance,” the Csestriim said. “I have been studying this world a long time. No one else is likely to notice.” He moved the planes of his face into a smile. “Your brother needs no stone for his monument. But then, you know this. Kaden’s monument, and Triste’s, is carved into the minds of all your kind.”

Adare hesitated, then gestured to the silk-wrapped figure. “And for him?”

The historian closed his eyes, cocked his head, as though listening to some music she could not hear.

“We do not want. Not in any way that you could understand.”

“I have to do something.”

“No, you do not. The tomb’s emptiness is all.”

And so Adare found herself standing before a doorway unadorned by any carving, a perfect rectangle cut into the cliff. She would have preferred to remain silent, as she had been silent while Kaden burned atop the Spear, but the time for silence was over, and there was no one else to speak.

“Perhaps you will look at me,” she continued, raising her voice above the breeze, “and wonder, Why is she here? If she would rule Annur, let her rule. Let her see to the millions left alive. The dead have no need of her ministrations.”

She nodded.

“And it is true. The dead are dust.”

The crowd stirred at that, as though all those thousands of bodies formed one creature and the creature had grown uneasy. The men and women might have made the long walk from Annur for any of a dozen reasons, but after the madness of the past year, after the unreasoning fury of the weeklong Urghul assault and the blood-drenched fact of the final Urghul collapse, most would be looking for reassurance, certitude, a trotting out of the old phrases, all of them docile as sheep: died a hero … for the glory of Annur … in our memories forever.

They expected an emperor who would stand before the tombs of her fathers and conjure up the old imperial theater. They wanted a prophet to open her mouth, and to see, instead of words, Intarra’s light sluicing forth, scouring away the darkness lodged inside their hearts.

But I’m not a prophet, Adare thought.

The miracle of Intarra’s Spear was not a miracle at all, but an act of calculated arson. The Malkeenian fire burned in her eyes, but the script of scar laid into her skin remained illegible. She remembered the lightning strike at the Everburning Well. That single syllable-Win-remained carved into her mind, but whether it had been a voice of the divine or something else, something less, Adare had no idea. Of the will of the goddess, she understood no more than the blank-eyed oxen standing on the churned-up dirt.

For a moment she imagined telling everything: “I am no prophet. The goddess does not speak, either through me or to me. My scars are only scars. My blessings were lies.”

And then? The righteous would rise up to kill her. Others would kill the killers, declare her a martyr. It was an old story, told over and over in the histories: bodies dragged from homes, butchered in the streets, burned alive, faith pitted against faith, belief against belief. The only way out was to stay alive, to keep wearing her bright mantle of lies. She had a lifetime to find a way to abdicate, to dismantle the broken apparatus of empire, to find a way to avoid passing the horror of her position on to her only son, that tiny child who was, even now, being carried down to her from the chilly fortress in Aergad.

“The dead are dust,” she said again, “but you know this already. You have seen it.”

She gestured to the bier.

“My brother, Kaden hui’Malkeenian, died to save our city, to defeat a traitor at its very heart-but he is gone. Gone beyond all human reach, gone certainly beyond any meager language I might muster.

“So are the loggers of the Thousand Lakes hacked apart by the Urghul. So are the soldiers sacrificed on bloody altars across the north. So are the Channarians who starved during Dombang’s blockade, the warriors of the Waist who rose up to be slaughtered by our legions, and the legionaries slaughtered in their turn. So are the unnumbered Urghul buried, nameless, in their twin mounds north of Annur itself.

“My brother lies right here, at my feet”-the lie was easier this time-“but he will not hear the words I speak today, nor will the rest of the dead spread across Vash and Eridroa, whom we will never fully tally.”

Nira, laid to rest beside her brother in a tiny cemetery by the sea …

The fallen Kettral, whom Gwenna had carried back to the Islands in the claws of a giant bird …

Fulton, buried with pomp in the northern forests; Mailly, dragged from her hanging cell and burned without remark …

“The dead are beyond all speech and hearing, so why speak at all? Why have we come here today?

“I will tell you. Forget the dead. A funeral is the time for the living to speak with the living.”

She thought again of Valyn walking away, of the Urghul finally riding north, disappearing like a storm over the horizon.

“And what should we say, those of us who have survived? Should we drag out the old platitudes?

“The dead will never be forgotten.…

“They fell that we might live.…

“The living will rebuild.…”

She shook her head.

“No.

“Each death is a smashed glass, a burned pyre, a broken bow. Nothing can be put back.”

Two dozen paces off, silent in his tomb, her father lay. In front of Adare, almost at her feet, wrapped in Liran silk, waited the corpse of the creature who had killed him.

He will be the last, Adare decided. She gazed the length of the valley, the final resting place of so many Malkeenians. It was his, anyway, this empire we called Annur. He made it, and he is dead.

She raised her chin.

The sun was cold on her face.

When she spoke, her words sounded like something written down long ago, as though she were listening to herself from some inexplicable distance.

“What remains is the oldest work, the only labor, that endless task from which the dead have been absolved at last: to go into this smoldering, splintered world, and to make from the wreckage something strange and new, something unknown to us until now.”