The Last Mortal Bond (5 page)

The two of them—the First Speaker of the fledgling Annurian Republic and the deathless Csestriim historian—had been sitting cross-legged in the shadow of a bleeding willow, at the edge of a small pond in the Dowager's Garden. A breeze rucked the green-brown water; light winked from the tiny waves. The willow's trailing branches splattered shadows. Kaden waited.

“The tower is,” the historian continued, “at its very top, an altar, a sacred space, a place where this world touches that of the gods.”

Kaden shook his head. “I have stood on the tower's top a dozen times. There is air, cloud, nothing more.”

Kiel gestured to a narrow insect striding the water's surface. The pond's water dimpled beneath the creature's meager weight. It twitched long, eyelash-thin legs, skimming from darkness to light, then back into darkness.

“To the strider,” he said, “that water is unbreakable. She will never puncture the surface. She will never know the truth.”

“Truth?”

“That there is another world—dark, vast, incomprehensible—sliding beneath the skin of the world she knows. Her mind is not built to understand this truth.
Depth
means nothing to her.
Wet
means nothing. Most of the time, when she looks at the water, she sees the trees reflected back, or the sun, or the sky. She knows nothing of the pond's weight, the way it presses on whatever slips beneath that surface.”

The insect moved across the reflection of Intarra's Spear.

“The reflection of the tower is not the tower,” Kiel continued, then turned away from the pond and the water strider both. Kaden followed his gaze. For a long time, the two of them studied the gleaming mystery at the heart of the Dawn Palace. “This tower, too,” Kiel said at last, gesturing to the sun-bright lance dividing the sky above them, “is only a reflection.”

Kaden shook his head. “A reflection of what?”

“The world beneath our world. Or above it. Beside it. Prepositions were not built to carry this truth. Language is a tool, like a hammer or an ax. There are tasks for which it is ill suited.”

Kaden turned back to the water. The water strider was gone. “And the gods can pass beneath the surface inside the tower?”

Kiel nodded. “We learned this too late in the long war against your people. Two of our warriors stumbled across the ritual, but by the time they had climbed to the tower's top, the gods were gone. Only the human carcasses remained.”

“The human vessels of the young gods,” Kaden said after a moment's thought.

Kiel nodded.

“How?”

“The
obviate
. The ritual Ciena demanded when Triste put the knife to her own chest.”

Kaden frowned. “How does it work?”

“This,” the historian replied, “my people were unable to learn. The tower is a gate, this much we know, but it seems that only the gods hold the keys.”

A gate for the gods,
Kaden thought grimly as he climbed the stairs behind Maut Amut, his own breath hot and snarled in his chest. There was nothing to say that whoever had broken into the Spear earlier in the day understood that truth. Then again, there was nothing to say they didn't.

Carefully, deliberately, he stepped clear of that avenue of thought. He could hear Scial Nin speaking, the old abbot's voice calm and quiet:
Consider the task at hand, Kaden. The more you try to see, the less you will notice.

“The attackers could have posed as slaves or ministers,” Amut was saying. “Visiting diplomats, almost anything…”

It made sense. Most of the Spear was empty—an unbreakable gleaming shell—but the earliest Annurian emperors had built inside that shell, constructing thirty wooden floors—thirty floors inside a tower that could have accommodated ten times that number—before giving up, leaving the thousands of feet above them vacant and echoing. The lowest of those human levels were given over to pedestrian concerns: ministerial offices and audience chambers, a great circular dining room affording views over the entire palace. Three whole floors were devoted to suites for visiting dignitaries, men and women who would return home to boast of their nights spent in the tallest structure in the world, a tower surely built by the gods. And then, of course, there was all the necessary service apparatus and the cooks, slaves, and servants such service entailed.

If anything, Amut had understated the case—there was constant traffic in and out of the Spear, and no way for the Aedolians to search everyone on every floor. The attackers, however, hadn't been skulking around in the kitchens. Somehow, they had gained the thirtieth floor, a place that was supposed to be secure.

“What happened at my study?” Kaden asked.

Amut's voice was tight when he responded. “They took down the three men I had posted there.”

Kaden looked over at the First Shield. “Killed them?”

Amut shook his head curtly. “Incapacitated. They were knocked unconscious, but otherwise unharmed.”

“Who,” Kaden wondered, slowing on the stairs, “could get past three Aedolians at their post?”

“I don't know,” Amut replied, his jaw rigid, as though trying to hold back the words. “That is what I intend to find out.”

“I'm starting to see,” Kaden said, glancing down the stairs behind them, “why you think they're dangerous.”

When they finally reached the study, it was aswarm with Aedolians. Kaden glanced through the doorway. The guardsmen seemed to be cleaning up, mostly, putting codices back on the shelves, furling maps, rolling out the massive Si'ite rug.

“It's clear?” Kaden asked.

His shoulders were tight, he realized, and his back, as though he were expecting some assassin's knife at the base of the neck, some snare to cinch closed around his ankles. He took a moment to ease the tension.

See the fact
,
not the fear
.

The study was the same as it always had been—a huge, semicircular room filling half the floor. The curving ironglass wall offered an unparalleled view of Annur, and for the most part Sanlitun had done nothing to obscure that view. Bookshelves lined the interior wall, and massive tables stood in the center of the space, but along the smooth arc of that unbreakable wall there was almost nothing: just a table with two chairs and an antique
ko
board, a simple plinth holding a fossil, a dwarf blackpine in a pot, trunk withered and twisted.

“I've had my men go over it a dozen times,” Amut said, following him inside as the Aedolians filed silently out. “I checked for every trap I know how to set, then had the dogs here all afternoon sniffing for poisons. We went through every drawer, scroll, and codex looking for munitions.” He shook his head. “There's nothing. It's clear.”

“Too clear.”

Kaden turned at the voice to find Kiel standing by a far bookshelf, running a finger over the wooden frame.

“In your search for traps, you have obliterated any sign of the intruders.”

Amut's fingers tightened on the pommel of his sword. “There
was
no sign. They were good. Better than good.”

Kiel considered the Aedolian a moment, then nodded. There was no concern on his face, only curiosity. It had been that way even in the Dead Heart, when the historian was still caged deep in the bedrock of a forgotten fortress by madmen bent on exterminating the last members of his kind. Kiel had learned to feign emotion well enough, but most of the time he didn't bother. People considered him an eccentric genius, but then, Annur was filled with eccentrics and geniuses.

Kaden watched the historian as he crossed the room, his stride marred by a slight hitch, where something broken inside him had mended imperfectly. Kiel had walked the world for millennia, but his face, sober and barely lined, might have belonged to a man in his fourth or fifth decade. Eventually, he would need to leave the council and the palace, probably need to leave Annur altogether before someone noticed that he never changed, never aged.

Provided we're not all dead before that happens,
Kaden amended silently.

“So why did they come?” the historian asked.

“Theft,” Amut replied. “It has to be.”

Kaden raised his eyebrows. “Is anything missing?”

“I wouldn't know, First Speaker. Aedolians are guards. We stand outside the door. Now that we are sure the study is clear, I hoped you might shed some light on what was
inside
. Something missing?”

“All right,” Kaden replied. He crossed to the middle of the room, turned in a slow circle. “Seems safe enough. Nothing's killed me yet.”

“It is the safest room in the Dawn Palace right now,” Amut said. “I would stake my life on it.”

Kaden shook his head. “And just how safe,” he asked quietly, “is the Dawn Palace?”

*   *   *

Only when Maut Amut left the room did Kaden turn to Kiel once more.

“What do you think?”

The Csestriim considered the closed bloodwood door. “It was by observing men like that Aedolian that I learned the meaning of your human word
pride
.”

“I meant about the study. You think Amut was right? That it was all some sort of elaborate theft?”

The historian shook his head. “It is impossible to say. The guardsmen moved everything.”

Kaden nodded. He visited the study nearly every day, could, with a moment of thought, call up a reasonable image of the half-round room, but he'd never bothered with a formal
saama'an
. The spines on the codices in his memory were hazy, the arrangement of the scrolls imperfect. Still, it would have been a decent place to start if the Aedolians hadn't been at the chamber for the better part of the morning. Kaden considered the mental image for a few heartbeats, then let it go, focusing on the room itself.

The sun was setting, sagging down the western sky until it hung just above Annur's rooftops. No one had yet bothered to light the room's lamps, but enough daylight remained for a cursory inspection. Instead of turning to the tables or the shelves, however, Kaden crossed to the wall overlooking the city, to a small section of the bloodwood floor that was polished to higher shine than the rest. It wasn't hard to imagine Sanlitun sitting there, the last true emperor of Annur, cross-legged in the way of the monks who had trained him. Kaden let his own thoughts go, trying to slide into the mind of his murdered father.

Annur was the largest city in the world's largest empire, home to more than two million men, women, and children; their homes and shops, temples and taverns all built shoulder to shoulder. People ate and fought there, loved, lied, and died—all within a few paces of their neighbors, no more than a cracked teak wall between the pain of a laboring mother and the lovers locked in a hot embrace. After the emptiness of Ashk'lan, the space and the silence, it was all … too much, even inside the Dawn Palace. Kaden could inhabit his father's desire to climb out of the wash of humanity, above it, could imagine Sanlitun ignoring the heavy wooden chairs to sit on the bare floor, eyes closed, blind to the city that surged and hummed beyond those clear, unbreakable walls.…

He let the
beshra'an
go.

Maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe that particular patch of floor had been worn smooth by something else, something irrelevant—one of the silver smoke cats that prowled the palace, or a small table shifted a thousand times in cleaning. Kaden could see his father sitting there still and silent as a Shin monk perched on a granite ledge above Ashk'lan. He could see it, but he'd never actually
seen
it. Sanlitun was a shadow, a dim shape cast on the present by the things he'd left behind.

Kaden turned from the memories of his father and the sight of the sprawling city he had ruled to consider the room once more. The Aedolians had been neat in their search, stacking the loose papers in piles on the tables, returning the codices to the shelves with the spines perfectly aligned. The soldiers did not, however, have Kiel's memory or Kaden's. He sighed as he crossed to the nearest table, flipped through a few pages, then let them fall.

“I'm not sure I kept anything here worth stealing,” he said.

“There were pages detailing troop movements,” Kiel replied. “Supply lists.”

Kaden shook his head. “There are easier places to find those papers. No need to infiltrate the Spear itself. No need to subdue three Aedolians.” He paused, trying to make sense of it. “This was something different. Something … more.” He glanced at the heavy door—three inches of banded bloodwood with Aedolian guardsmen just beyond it. Only a madman would try to get past that. A madman, or someone very, very determined. “It was il Tornja, wasn't it?”

“We have reliable reports of your sister's
kenarang
in the north, but his reach is long.”

Kaden nodded slowly. “He knew this study. He's been here. If he needed something, he would know where to look, and he knows the kind of people who could manage something like this.” Kaden hesitated before saying the rest. “And, like you, he knows the truth about the Spear. What it is for.”

Kiel inclined his head slowly. “He does.”

A cold weight settled in Kaden's chest. He glanced up, as though he could see through the ceiling, through thousands of feet of empty air that waited in the tower above, through the steel floor of the cage dangling there, to where a young woman with black hair and violet eyes, a woman of impossible beauty, a priestess and a murderer, a human with a goddess trapped inside her flesh, waited in chains to meet her fate.

“We have to get Triste out,” he said finally. “We have to find a way to do it now and do it safely. If il Tornja can get into this study, he can get into the prison.”

“And yet it is only atop this tower that the girl can do what must be done,” Kiel replied.