The Last Mortal Bond (62 page)

He nodded slowly. “All right then. Let's make it a fight. Where is Triste?”

Adare looked up at him then. Horror burned in her eyes.

“She's gone,” his sister whispered. “She escaped. I lost her.”

For a long time, Kaden didn't respond. Instead of following a logical train of thought, his mind probed that one word:
lost
. Strange that a single syllable, such a small sound, could bear so many meanings.
Lost:
it might indicate a person who, journeying through a dark wood, had stumbled from the path; it could point to a defeat, either in battle, with thousands dead, or on a game board, the stones lying in some final, silent, inevitable configuration; or it could mean, simply, something gone—gone only for the moment, or utterly, beyond all retrieval.

“How?” he asked finally.

Adare shook her head. “Her well. I had her in Kegellen's mansion. She threw up the adamanth.…”

“No,” Kaden said. “That wouldn't be enough. Triste isn't a leach. It's
Ciena's
power, and Ciena only comes out when their shared body is in mortal danger.”

“It was,” Adare said wearily. “Triste
told
the guards she'd thrown up the adamanth. Showed them. They panicked, came after her. Kegellen had six men on that door, and only one survived.”

Kaden studied his sister. She was telling the truth.

“I have to go,” he said.

“Where?”

For a heartbeat, he considered telling her everything—about the
kenta,
the island lost in the thundering sea, the god inside the body of a man who waited for him there. The barrier between them, so insurmountable when she first returned to Annur, looked feeble now. He could crush it with a handful of words. They could fight the
kenarang
together, brother and sister, as he had thought to do with Valyn once.…

Valyn
.

Slowly, he shook his head.

Adare watched him. “You were going to tell me.”

“I was.”

“But you think you still can't trust me.”

“It is not something I think. It is something I know.”

Adare covered her burning eyes with her palms. The gesture kindled some old memory inside Kaden, a vision of his childhood, of playing hide-and-find with his brother, how they had believed somehow as tiny little boys, believed foolishly, madly, that by covering your own eyes you might disappear, as though if you could not see the seeker, then you could not, in turn, be seen.

What is it, Adare,
he wondered silently,
that you don't want me to see?

When she finally dropped her hands, her gaze was like the fire's heart.

“I killed Valyn.”

The words might have been uttered in some foreign tongue for all the sense Kaden could make of them at first. Even when his mind had translated, linked the three together, they made no sense, as though she'd claimed to have doused the sun. He started to respond, then stilled himself, falling back, baffled, into the old Shin discipline of listening and observation.

“He was waiting on the tower in Andt-Kyl,” Adare went on. She stared at the empty space between them, as though she'd forgotten Kaden entirely, as though she were talking only to herself. “He surprised me, murdered Fulton, and then he tried to kill il Tornja. I thought we needed the
kenarang,
thought we needed him to save Annur, and I panicked. I picked up a knife, and I slid it between his ribs. I killed him. I saw him fall.…”

She fell silent.

Kaden scrambled to build the scene as it had been, to populate the tower with the necessary bodies, to put them all in motion, then to see inside their minds, inside Adare's mind most of all, to understand what she had done, and how, and why. At first it would not come. His brain was like a bright bird squawking out the same pointless syllables:
brother, murder, why.
He silenced it, studied that tower's top, and at the same time, his sister's eyes as she stared into the awful chambers of her memory.

She had none of Kaden's training, no ability to set aside grief, no ability to smooth the cruel edges of confusion. She had lived with this memory as though it were a rusted blade lodged inside her, hiding it even as it bit deeper. Kaden himself might betray a whole world of brothers and never feel the same pain. The Shin had trained it out of him. Whether that was good or not, he could not say.

“What are you going to do?” Adare asked finally. Her eyes were on him once again, so hot it seemed impossible they should not burn out.

“I'm going to try to stop il Tornja,” he said quietly. “And so are you.”

He told her then, explained the
kenta
and his training, the Dead Heart and the Ishien, Long Fist's hatred of Annur and the strange alliance Kaden himself had managed to strike up with the shaman. Adare had given him the truth, finally, and so he gave her his own truth in return.

It was strange the way that people venerated truth. Everyone seemed to strive for it, as though it were some unalloyed good, a perfect gem of glittering rectitude. Women and men might disagree about its definition, but priests and prostitutes, mothers and monks all mouthed the word with respect, even reverence. No one seemed to realize how stooped the truth could be, how twisted and how ugly.

 

33

There was a passage buried in the middle of Hendran that Gwenna had always thought deserved more attention. Not really a passage, actually—just a couple of sentences:
Change is dangerous. The change of guard on a fortress wall. A change of a prisoner from one cell to another. A change of command in the middle of the battle. In every case, there will be a moment—sometimes no longer than a single heartbeat—when everything goes slack, when no one is in control. Strike then.

Gwenna was waiting for that moment.

It hadn't taken long for Rallen's thugs to return to the warehouse pushing the barrel with Talal inside. Gwenna couldn't see it. She was still pinned against the empty air by Rallen's kenning, and the leach hadn't allowed her the freedom to turn her head. She could hear the barrel rumbling over the stone outside, however, the staves protesting each crunch and jolt. She could hear it hit the ramp into the warehouse, then bump the threshold, then roll smoothly over the level floor before coming to rest somewhere off to her right.

Close now,
she thought, trying to keep half a dozen possible scenarios in her mind at the same time. The kenning didn't allow her to move, but she could flex her muscles against the invisible bonds, tensing, testing.
Readiness is everything
.

If they were going to crack out of Rallen's trap, it would have to be in the next few moments, and Gwenna was the only one in a position to start the cracking. Talal didn't know what was going on, not yet, and Quick Jak … She could hear his breathing behind her. The last glimpse she'd had of the flier he'd been kneeling, frozen, a knife against his neck. He'd appeared more ready to die than to fight. Even now, she could smell the panic pouring off him. The rank scent made her want to spit.

Another mistake to add to the growing list.

If she survived, she'd be able to write her own text, a rival to Hendran's. She'd call it
Error and Improvisation: How to Learn From a Total Goat Fuck.
It was starting to look like she'd need an entire chapter for her idiocy when it came to Quick Jak. Handling him would be crucial when everyone started swinging steel.…

No,
she told herself, pulling her focus back to her bonds, to the three guards readying their weapons. Jak was a problem for
after
she was free.

“Right there,” Rallen said, licking his lips warily, looking past Gwenna to the new arrivals. “Bows on the barrel. The leach inside has nothing like my power, but until he's drugged, he's dangerous.”

That was what Gwenna was counting on. Rallen might be strong, but he wasn't invincible; he couldn't look at everything at once. Standard Kettral protocol would have split the prisoners up from the very start, but Rallen couldn't do that. Or wouldn't. He didn't trust his soldiers, certainly didn't trust them to go toe-to-toe with real Kettral, and so here they were, all packed into the same space, and if Rallen was going to handle Talal, there would be at least a few moments when he couldn't handle Gwenna herself.

“You three,” the leach said, waving his hand toward the soldiers ringing her. “Close in, but be wary. I'm going to put her down.”

As he spoke, the air around Gwenna slackened, as though some invisible rope had been cut. Then slowly, slowly, she began to sink toward the floor. The nearest of the three soldiers took an eager step forward, raising his sword.

“Not too close!” Rallen snapped. “You're not here to fight her. You're here to just
watch
the miserable bitch while I deal with the leach.”

That's right,
Gwenna thought, suppressing a smile as her feet touched the floor.
Just watch this miserable bitch
.

And then, as Rallen was shifting his attention and his kenning to Talal's barrel, as the guards were still raising their blades, uncertain how to configure themselves, Gwenna hurled herself into motion. She smashed aside the nearest blade, aiming for the sword's flat with the palm of her hand, hitting it slightly wrong, feeling the steel slice across her skin. The pain didn't matter. She was inside the bastard's guard, and she crushed his windpipe with a fist.

She turned into the collapsing body, shrugging the corpse over her shoulder with one arm as though he were a heavy coat, turning, heaving him around so that the desperate blows of the other two sank into dead flesh, lodging against the bone. When Gwenna dropped the body, it pulled the blades down with it, wrenching them from the hands of the baffled soldiers. She put two stiffened fingers into the eyes of the nearest man, pulled away as he screamed, then lashed out, shattering the kneecap of the other with her boot. As he lurched toward her, she stepped aside, stripping his belt knife from the sheath, cocking her arm, then throwing, watching the blade tumble over and over toward Rallen's throat.

It had taken her only heartbeats to destroy her guards, but heartbeats should have been plenty of time for Rallen to hurl another kenning at her—to tie her in invisible chains all over again, to shatter her skull. Even as that blade hung in the air, as his glassy eyes widened, Gwenna was half waiting for his own killing blow, for that attack she had no way of stopping, the one that would smash the life out of her.

Only the yellowbloom saved her—those few extra swallows she had taunted him into taking. The tea might have given the leach power, but it had dulled his reflexes, and, sluggish with drug, his reaction was the most basic of any man facing his own death. Instead of attacking, or striking back, he flung up a desperate hand in the oldest motion of self-preservation. The knife careened off an invisible wall just feet from his face, then skittered off across the floor.

“Four men standing,” Gwenna shouted, turning toward Talal's barrel and the stunned soldiers beside it, stooping to snatch one of the short blades from a fallen body. “Bows and blades…”

Before she could finish the warning, the roof fell on her. That's how it felt, anyway—as though a crushing weight had been dropped onto her head and shoulders from a great height. Her knees buckled, then she caved, head smashing against the floor, darkness gnawing the fringes of her vision.

Rallen's bellow, slurred and furious, filled her ears. “… kill you, Sharpe. I'm going to feed your blood to Hull's twisted tree.…”

She fought the pain and nausea, tried to twist free of the leach's grip, to find some break in whatever held her. There was nothing but air above, but she might have been lying under a pile of rubble. Breathing was almost impossible.

She'd fallen facing the doorway, toward Quick Jak. The flier was still on his knees, hands bound behind him, the knife still at his throat. The soldier guarding him was obviously shocked, distracted, so stunned by the sudden violence that it would have been a simple matter for the flier to roll free, kick the knife away, get on his feet, and start fucking fighting. Jak didn't even try. Instead, his eyes fixed on Gwenna, wide and horrified, and though his shoulders strained against the bonds, it was just some animal impulse. He wasn't actually trying to break away.

Gwenna tried to shout at him to
go,
but she could barely draw enough breath for a moan. Out of the corner of her eye she could see motion; Rallen, she realized, approaching her, his cup of yellowbloom discarded in favor of a naked blade.

“You thought you could defy me, Sharpe?”

She tried to growl something vicious and defiant. All she managed was a groan mixed with drool, and so she clamped her mouth shut.

“I was going to hurt you,” Rallen went on, “in order to learn what I needed to learn.” He waved the knife in the air between them in satisfied admonition. “Now, though? Now I'm going to hurt you for that, and then I'm going to keep hurting you just for the sheer—”

Before he could finish, the steel hoops ringing Talal's barrel snapped. The sound echoed in the closed space of the warehouse, crisp as a series of cracked skulls, and then, a moment later, the staves split. Wood shattered, splintered, tore into jagged fragments along the grain, pushing up, and out, and away as Talal, sweating, bleeding, eyes wide, teeth bared, like something awful hatching from its massive shell, shoved his way clear, then stumbled to his feet.

The soldiers facing him reeled. One tried to back up too quickly, tripped, then fell, losing his sword, crab-crawling away from the leach, struggling to find his feet or his freedom or both. Talal took a step after him, belt knife half raised, then noticed the other threat, the woman in his blind spot who was also backing up, but raising her flatbow as she retreated, sighting hastily along the quarrel. He tried to turn.…