The Last Mortal Bond (51 page)

“He's going to relax your body…,” Adare began. Before she could finish, Mailly collapsed at her side, shaking her head in the slow cadence of terror or regret. “I can't do it. I'm sorry, Your Radiance. I'm so sorry. But I can't do it.”

Adare took a deep breath, knelt on the hard iron slab, then draped her arm over Mailly's shoulders. She could feel the girl's thin frame shaking, racked with terror and disease.

“It's not so far,” Adare said, forcing a calm she did not feel into her voice. If Mailly refused her role, the whole thing was finished. They might still escape with Kaden's leach, but the guards would know within the day—the very next time they descended to force the adamanth on Triste—that she was gone, and Adare had little doubt that Simit would make the obvious connection. Everything hung on Mailly's cooperation, and yet, it was an awful thing to coax a young girl to her death.

“Dhati will take you over,” Adare said, gesturing.

Even as she spoke, the tiny priest had removed the grapple and tied the far end of the silk to the chains supporting Triste's cell. With the steel hooks in his teeth, he made his way back hand over hand, swung up atop the basket railing once more, then dropped down next to Mailly.

“Be quicker,” he hissed, lifting her robe over her head. “Speed is safety.”

The girl, still half dazed, raised her arms. She wore only a light linen shift beneath the robe; the cloth had been washed so many times it was nearly sheer, and Adare winced at the gaunt angles of the girl's body. Once she was in the cell, she would exchange garments with Triste. At least, that had been the plan before Mailly's courage faltered.

Dhati, oblivious or indifferent to the girl's terror, tossed the robe aside, then began work on a harness. He had an extra length of silk, one he'd untied from the longer swath, and as Mailly stared at the far cell, he wove it deftly into a kind of saddle around her bare legs. In moments it was finished, tied off to the grapple hook.

“Climb,” Dhati said, leaping up onto the railing once more, taking the long rope in his hands. “Hook over this. I will pull you.”

“Not yet,” Adare protested, pulling the glass bottle from the pocket of her robe. “She has to drink this first.”

“I can't,” Mailly protested, shifting her gaze from the gap between the cells to the bottle in Adare's hand. “Oh, Sweet Intarra, no. I
can't
.”

The words were desperate, panicked, but almost inaudible, as though there were no air left in the girl's lungs for speech.

You have to,
Adare wanted to scream.
You said you'd do it, and now you have to!

Instead she hauled in a slow breath of her own, then forced herself to meet Mailly's terrified eyes. “Tell me why you're afraid.”

Mailly stared at her. “I'm afraid to die.”

“So am I,” Adare replied quietly.

The words just tumbled out, but they weren't quite the truth. It wasn't Adare's own death that terrified her, but her son's. When she closed her eyes to shut out Mailly's face, Sanlitun filled her mind, the tiny child with his small hands grasping for her hair, her face. If she failed here, he was gone. Il Tornja would learn she had defied him, and he would kill her son with the indifference of a fisherman hacking the heads from his catch. The simple fact felt like a knife nestled right beside her beating heart. She opened her eyes to Mailly's tear-streaked face, so different from Sanlitun's and yet bathed in the same bafflement, twisted by the same helpless need.

And where is
her
mother?

Living in some squalid hovel, no doubt—a rat-infested basement or a leaking garret in the Perfumed Quarter. Wherever it was, it couldn't be good, not if Mailly was willing to drink poison to save her from it. Adare imagined the woman for a moment, imagined her in the cramped room as the sun's last light flamed on the sill, then died. She would be confused about her daughter's absence at first, then concerned, then sick with worry. Adare couldn't picture her face, but she could see the hands, skin rough with a lifetime of scrubbing, clenched in the woman's lap, the knuckles pale, bloodless.

“You don't have to do it,” Adare said. She glanced down at the bottle in her hand, suddenly tempted to toss it over the railing of the basket, to watch it disappear in the dusty light.

“But the money,” Mailly moaned. “Five thousand suns…”

“I'll make sure your mother gets it. And your brother.”

“You would do that?” the girl asked, shaking her head in disbelief, then dropping to her knees, clutching at Adare's legs in gratitude or supplication.

Adare nodded mutely. It was ruined. The whole fucking thing was ruined. She wanted to scream, but screaming wouldn't do any good.
I can delay,
she thought, mind racing,
tell il Tornja that I need more time. He won't kill Sanlitun until he knows I've turned on him.…

“Why are you crying?” Mailly asked.

Adare stared at the girl, confused, then touched her own face with her fingertips. It was wet, soaked with tears.

“It's fine,” she said, scrubbing them roughly away. “We need to get out of here.”

From his perch atop the railing, Vasta Dhati frowned.

“You would stop now?”

“Things have changed,” Adare snapped. “Take down the silk. Quickly.”

The Manjari narrowed his eyes. “And my ships? This failure is nothing of my doing.”

“I'm aware of that,” Adare snapped. “You make your own way out, as we arranged before, and you'll have your ships.”

“A weak people,” Dhati muttered, shaking his head. “What about the leach?” he asked, tossing his bald head toward Triste's cell.

Adare shook her head. “Leave her.”

“She's seen me. She could talk.”

“Who would believe her?”

Mailly changed her grip on Adare's knees. She was still kneeling, but had shifted her gaze from Adare's face to the far cage.

“Who is she?” she asked, voice weak, as though it had been broken somewhere deep inside her throat.

“It doesn't matter,” Adare said, reaching down to grab the girl by the elbow, pulling her roughly to her feet. “We need to get out of here.
Now
.”

Horror propelled her, horror at abandoning the plan, at what it would mean. Despair darkened her vision, pressed down on her heart. If she paused, it seemed, if she hesitated even a moment, it would crush her.

“Put your robe back on,” she said, dragging Mailly toward her. To her shock, the girl pulled away.

“Who is she?” she asked again, voice stronger this time.

Adare met her gaze. “She is a leach. She killed over a hundred people here, in this palace.”

Mailly blanched. “And you want to get her
out
? Why?”

“We need her.”

“But she's a
leach
.”

“She is a weapon,” Adare said wearily.

“But you're the Emperor,” Mailly protested. “You're Intarra's prophet. You have whole armies to fight for you.”

“Those armies,” Adare said tersely, “are losing. We are losing.”

She wasn't sure whether she meant losing to the Urghul, or to her own
kenarang
. Of course, there was more than one war, more than one kind of defeat. A woman could lose over and over, could fail in a thousand different ways.

Mailly shook her head. “I didn't know,” she whispered finally.

“How would you know? It's all happening in the north, or along the coast, or down in the Waist. Everywhere but here. The whole fucking empire could collapse, and Annur would only notice when there were no more boats, no more wagons piled high with food and supplies.”

“And this leach,” Mailly asked, nodding toward Triste's cage, “can stop it? Can save Annur?”

“I have no idea,” Adare said. She could feel the long climb up the tower stairs like lead in her legs. She wondered if she would be able to descend from the Spear without collapsing. It didn't seem to matter. “Maybe not. I had hoped so. Maybe there's another way.”

Mailly looked at Triste's cage, tears in her wide eyes, then turned her gaze beyond it, past the hanging cells, through the clear walls of the Spear, out and away, to where Annur lay sprawled thousands of feet below. The towers glittered with their miniature beauty. The canals caught the noon light, throwing it back. From this height, even the slums looked beautiful, a collection of tiny dwellings stripped of the stench, the sobbing, the disease.

“I'll do it,” Mailly said at last. She was crying again, but the shaking was gone.

Adare stared.

“I'm dying anyway,” the girl whispered. “And what good are five thousand suns to my mother and brother if there's no food to buy? If there are Urghul riding through the streets?”

Hope bloomed in Adare like a sick-sweet flower. She hated herself for it, but she'd hated herself for a lot of things for a long time now. She could live with a little more hatred. She glanced up at the trapdoor twenty feet above. It was still closed. How long had they been hanging in the basket? She'd told Simit that she needed time, but how long would the man wait? Not all day, certainly. Was there still time to make the switch?

“Are you certain about this?” she demanded, gripping the girl by the elbow more firmly than she'd intended.

Mailly flinched, but she nodded, dragging her gaze from Adare's eyes to the brown bottle in her hands. Kegellen had mixed the
ayamaya
with strong Breatan spirits.
It might dull the poor child's pain,
she had suggested, studying the bottle as she handed it over. Adare didn't believe that for a moment.

Mailly stared at the glass as though it were a viper, then grabbed for it, clawing at the cork with shaking hands like a drunk desperate to get at whatever was inside. The glass, slick with her tears, half slipped from her grasp. Adare lurched forward, catching it before it could tumble through the basket railing. When she raised her eyes, Mailly was staring at her.

It seemed like there should be something to say. Emperors were always making speeches, after all, extended declamations on patriotism and sacrifice. Generals addressed the men before sending them into battle, and the fate that Mailly faced was at least as awful as an Urghul spear to the stomach. Surely there was something to say, something both comforting and ennobling, but Adare found the words would not come. She was gambling away the girl's life, and for what? The shadow of a shot at Ran il Tornja. There was no nobility in the sacrifice, only desperation.

Adare studied the bottle in her hands. Then, with a nudge of the thumb, popped free the cork.

Mailly gave a little gasp, like the sound a girl makes when she steps into the ocean for the first swim of late spring—a small sound, almost the start of a laugh. Adare could imagine her standing knee-deep in the waves, eyes wide with the excitement and the cold, ready to dive in, but waiting, maybe, for her friends. Only Mailly had no friends, not here. There was only Vasta Dhati, perched impatiently on the railing, and Adare herself, the woman who had brought her here, not to brave those bright spring waves, but to die alone, her awful pain utterly unwitnessed.

“Mailly…,” Adare began, but before she could think what to say next, the girl seized the bottle in both hands and raised it to her lips, drinking desperately, almost greedily, the brown spirit trickling down her bare neck. Adare stared at the girl's throat as she swallowed, and swallowed, and swallowed again, then suddenly convulsed. Mailly grimaced, lips twisted back, eyes squeezed shut. It seemed for a few heartbeats that she would vomit it all up.

Does it work so fast?
Adare wondered.
Is the poison so violent?

But after a heartbeat more, Mailly trembled herself free of the liquor's grip, fixed her eyes on the bottle's rim, and began drinking again, more slowly this time, but with a quiet determination, pausing between each sip.

“How much?” she gasped when she'd had a third of the bottle.

“No more,” Adare said, reaching out to stop the girl, to take the poison back.

According to Kegellen, a single swig would do the necessary work, but only if Mailly held the liquor down. For a moment the two just stared at each other, both frozen. Mailly's eyes were wide, as though she'd just now realized what she'd done, was only now understanding that she could not take it back.

But she can,
Adare thought grimly, some cold part of her own mind, a part she loathed, working through the logistics of the girl's death.
'Shael only knows what might happen if she gets sick now.
She had a vision of Mailly in Triste's cage, vomiting but not dying, her skin spared the worst of the coming blisters, her eyes unbloodied by the poison's violence. The next time the guards descended with the adamanth, they would find her, would know that Triste had escaped somehow, and Simit, with those careful eyes of his, would put the pieces together easily.

“Are you all right?” Adare asked.

Mailly's mouth moved, framing the shapes of silent words.

“Mailly?”

The girl locked eyes with her. “I'm really going to die.”

Adare nodded gravely. “You are. But you saved your family. Your mother and little brother and…” She hesitated, uncertain how to phrase the rest. “And maybe more. Maybe, in some strange way, all Annur.”

“She's that important?” Mailly asked, staring at Triste's cell. “The leach?”

I don't know,
Adare almost said. It was the honest truth.
I don't know who she is. I don't know why my own general wants her dead. I don't know what threat she poses or to whom. I have no play in mind, nothing even resembling a plan. All I can do is deny him his demands, and even that might prove pointless.