The Last Mortal Bond (66 page)

 

34

Long Fist stood beyond the ring of
kenta,
at the very edge of the island, half a pace from where the cliffs dropped away into the surrounding sea. He was looking west over the waves, his back to Kaden, as though he could stare straight through the miles, around the curvature of the world, all the way to Annur—if, indeed, Annur lay in that direction—into the Dawn Palace itself and the events unfolding there. Gusts of hot wind tore at him, snarling his long blond hair, threatening to hurl him into the surf. He paid them no mind. Legs spread, arms crossed over his chest, he looked as much a part of the island as the ancient gates flanking him—rooted, immovable.

Kaden made no noise as he approached, but the shaman turned anyway, fixing him with that glaciated stare. The salt wind howled between them.

“You failed,” Long Fist said after a long pause.

Outside the
vaniate,
the words might have carried some vague sting. Kaden had held on to the trance since passing through the gate, however, and inside the chapel of emptiness, Long Fist's accusation was a simple statement of fact.

“Yes,” he replied.

The shaman studied him a moment longer, then turned away, back toward the sea.

“I will go myself.”

“There is no point. Adare isn't hiding anything. She broke Triste out of the prison.”

“So where is she?”

“Escaped,” Kaden replied.

Long Fist shook his head. The bones on the leather thongs around his neck clacked quietly against his chest.

“Then we will do this the other way.”

“What is the other way?” Kaden asked.

“I will kill the Csestriim before he finds her.”

It was a reckless plan—if
plan
was even the right word. Il Tornja didn't care about the Urghul or Annur, didn't care about Kaden, or Adare, or the Unhewn Throne. All he wanted was the gods, to have them within the compass of his sword, and now Long Fist was talking about giving him precisely that. Maybe the shaman had enough power to get to the Csestriim general, to kill him … and maybe it was all part of the trap.

“You can't kill him,” Kaden said.

The shaman turned to Kaden once again, lips drawn back in a snarl or a sneer. “You would dictate to me the limits of my own strength?”

“It's not a matter of strength, it is a matter of planning. Whatever you feel about the Csestriim, you know the scope of il Tornja's mind. You know how thorough he is. If killing him were a simple matter of walking into his camp, you would have killed him months ago and seen your Urghul trample all Annur.”

Long Fist bared his teeth, but he did not reply.

“You know this for the truth,” Kaden went on quietly. “If you go after il Tornja now, on his own ground, you will lose. He will destroy this body you have taken and sever your touch from this world.”

“You claim to know the mind of a creature you have never met?”

“There are many ways to know another mind,” Kaden replied.

And what about your mind, Triste?
he thought.
What are you thinking? Where have you gone to hide?

He closed his eyes, then slowly, almost delicately, shed the infinite skin of the
vaniate,
moving from unbounded emptiness into a model of the young woman's mind. For a time, the space of her thoughts remained inchoate, unknowable. Kaden set aside his impatience, resigned himself to the long effort of imagination, ignored Long Fist's massive, silent presence at his side, and then, slowly, slowly, like the spring's first warm, blind bud, Triste's mind began to grow inside his own.

For a long time, the
beshra'an
was just a matter of emotion, huge swaths of rage and pain binding and confining. Kaden knew little of Triste's childhood, but her most recent years had been built from suffering and betrayal. The world had brutalized or abandoned her. Her goddess had betrayed her, as had her father, and most cruelly, her mother. Triste couldn't even confront them: Ciena was buried too deep, and Ananshael's strong hands had delivered her parents beyond all human reach forever.

That's where I want to go
. The thought was Triste's, blooming inside Kaden's mind.
Beyond all human reach. Somewhere I am no one, at the edge of the world …

And then, strange as a leach's kenning, the words,
her
words, took form. The imagined became the real, the
remembered,
Triste's voice, speaking weeks earlier from the shadows of her cell, drugged past wariness, drugged into something like honesty:
I'd go somewhere. Somewhere as far from your 'Kent-kissing palace as possible. There's a place my mother used to talk about, a little village by an oasis in the shadow of the Ancaz Mountains, just at the edge of the Dead Salts. As far from the rest of the world as you can get, she used to say. I'd go there. That village. That's where I'd go.

Kaden's eyes snapped open.

It wasn't much to go on. Less than a hunch, really—a few drugged phrases spoken in regret and rage. And yet, when he let himself settle back into the currents of the girl's emotion, it made
sense
. The wastes of western Mo'ir were about as far from Annur as she could get; and more, going there would be a way of reaching out, reaching back, trying to grasp some fragment of her mother, of something Morjeta had told her in a moment of intimacy before all the betrayal began.

Kaden turned to Long Fist.

“She's going to the Ancaz,” he said, surprised at the certainty in his own voice. “To an oasis there, on the edge of the Dead Salts.”

The shaman's gaze was a hammer.

“How do you know this?”

Kaden shook his head, unable to explain it all. “She told me.”

“She told you where she was going, and you
forgot
?” The words were low, dangerous. “Or is this some mortal folly. Do you believe you can lie to me and survive?”

“This is no lie,” Kaden replied. “Nor is it folly or forgetting. A human mind holds more than we can know. Her words were there, lying silently inside me, like a closed codex in some forgotten attic. I did not know what I had. It took time to find it. To open it.”

Above them, gulls circled, gyring higher on the damp ocean air. The island might have stood at the center of the world, or it might have been severed from that world entirely. It was easy to believe, staring out over the sea, that those waves stretched on forever in all directions, that there was no Annur, no empire, no Urghul … only the slow swells of the ocean, the ragged island sward, and the tall, pale figure at Kaden's side, a man hollowed out to hold a god.

“Why would she go to the Ancaz?” Long Fist asked.

“Because she wants to go somewhere empty and beautiful, somewhere no one will ever find her.” It seemed as sane a wish as any other. “We need to get there first.”

“You would play all of your stones on this hunch?”

“It is not a hunch.”

Long Fist turned to him, placed a finger beneath Kaden's chin, then lifted, hooking the sharp nail just behind the jaw, lifting slowly, smoothly, with awful strength, until Kaden's feet were dangling above the ground. The pain was a bright fire. The pressure threatened to choke him. Kaden's hands ached to reach up, to claw at the scarred arm that held him aloft, but he forced down the impulse, waiting for the Lord of Pain to say what he would say.

“If you are lying to me,” Long Fist ground out at last, “or if you are wrong, I will open you like a fish. I will hold your lungs in my hands. I will work them like bellows as you scream.”

“If I am lying,” Kaden managed, each word an agony, “or wrong, then I am dead. We all are.”

Those blue eyes held him a heartbeat longer, then Kaden was falling. He hit the stony ground, lurched seaward, managed to stop himself just inches from the cliff's brink. Long Fist watched him, as though wondering if he would fall. When he did not, the shaman nodded slowly.

“We will go to the Ancaz, then.”

With an effort, Kaden shook his head. “Not yet.”

The Urghul's eyes narrowed to slits.

“We are two men,” Kaden said, shaking his head, “and the world is large. We need more.”

“The Ishien,” Long Fist said after a pause.

Kaden nodded. “They can pass the gates—some of them, at least.”

“And if the Csestriim is hunting the girl with his soldiers, we may need soldiers of our own.”

Kaden blinked. “If il Tornja has heard anything by now it will be that Triste is dead. Only Kiel knows the truth. Kiel and Adare.”

The shaman's eyes bored into him. “Are you willing to bet so much on the
kenarang
's ignorance? Were you not just lecturing me, moments ago, on his formidable mind?”

“All right,” Kaden said. “That's another reason. It might be useful to have men who trained to kill the Csestriim. That's why you joined them in the first place, right?”

“One of the reasons.” The shaman nodded curtly. “We will bring the Hunters.”

Kaden took a deep breath. “And one more,” he said quietly, steadily. “Rampuri Tan.”

The shaman's face hardened. “The monk is an apostate. He killed his brothers.”

“He was helping me escape.”

“Indeed. And for this he has been imprisoned.”

“Then get him out.”

*   *   *

The Dead Heart stank of salt and spoiled fish, stale breath and stone, smoke and blood and urine. The stench didn't stop at the nose. It coated the skin and tongue, chafed the lungs, soaked into the pores, until it felt as though no scrubbing could ever scour it all away. Kaden remembered the smell, of course, from his long weeks locked inside the Ishien fortress, but memory, even for a Shin monk, was imperfect, a leaky vessel, a smudged mirror. The fact of the place, its presence—cold, ancient, and implacable—weighed down in a way no memory ever could.

And then there were the Ishien themselves. Their hate was palpable. Long Fist's orders kept them in check, but Long Fist had disappeared down some side corridor almost as soon as he and Kaden arrived, leaving Kaden in the hands of two men that he recognized, men who had been on the
kenta
island the day that Tan was taken, the day Triste had slaughtered Ekhard Matol, using his sudden lust as a blade to hack the man apart. Whatever Long Fist's orders, the Ishien had been honing their hate for a long time, and as they escorted Kaden down the corridor to the prison levels, one man before him, one behind, it was hard not to feel as though he had made a grave error in coming back. Hard not to feel that he was descending through the stone throat of the fortress, not to save Tan, but to become a prisoner himself.

When the Ishien finally stopped before a heavy wooden door, Kaden wondered if the cell was to be his own. Fear scratched at the edges of his calm, and he was tempted to slide back into the
vaniate
. With an effort, he pushed back the temptation, Kiel's warning echoing in his memory.

“Be quick,” snapped the taller of the two men. “Horm wants to be gone before night.”

How the Ishien could divide day from darkness while buried inside the Dead Heart, Kaden had no idea. He nodded, though, and after a pause, the two men retreated, leaving him to find his own way back to levels above.

Despite their admonition, Kaden remained still for a long time. The lantern hissed angrily in his hand, the impure oil burning grudgingly, fitfully. Kaden set it on the stone, but made no effort to lift the steel bars blocking the door. The whole thing all seemed suddenly too simple. If he could free his old
umial
simply by asking, why had he not asked before? Why had he left the monk who covered his escape to languish in the chilly dark, or worse, to writhe beneath the knives of the broken men he had once called brothers?

It was strange, in a way, to dwell on this regret. The world was filled with people Kaden had failed—thousands of them, tens of thousands, who had starved or suffered or died because of decisions he had made. Unlike those tens of thousands, though, Rampuri Tan was not some abstract figure inked on a page by an overtired scribe. Whatever Kaden had become, the fact that he'd survived at all, survived Ashk'lan's burning, and the Dead Heart, and everything that followed—he owed it to Rampuri Tan. It was an unpaid debt.

And yet, if Tan had taught him anything, it was that such sentiment was meaningless.

The fact that Kaden could set aside his own guilt, sequester it in a dim, unfrequented corner of his mind—that, too, was a legacy of the monk's brutal tutelage, and when Kaden finally lifted aside the bars and hauled open the door, he felt nothing—no guilt, no fear, nothing—having let the feeling go after all, sliding into the
vaniate
despite Kiel's warning, armoring himself in emptiness as he stepped into the darkness to face the man who had trained him.

At first, Kaden thought he had the wrong cell. The figure seated cross-legged at the chamber's center looked tall enough to be Rampuri Tan, but was far too thin, almost emaciated, dark skin pulled tight around muscle and bone. He was naked, completely naked, and Kaden could see the scars carved into that skin, puckering the flesh of the chest and arms—Meshkent's ancient script etched in the body's imperfect palimpsest. Rampuri Tan, in keeping with Shin tradition, had always kept his hair shaved to the scalp. This creature's hair, however, a greasy, tangled mess of gray and black, hung almost to his shoulders, obscuring his bearded face. The boulder of a man that Kaden remembered was gone, replaced by this withered thing. The voice, though, when the prisoner finally spoke, was Tan's voice, rough and rock-hard.

“You were a fool to come back.”

Kaden considered the words from inside the
vaniate
.

“The world has changed,” he replied finally.