The Last Mortal Bond (73 page)

“If there'd a' been hints, you'd a' known 'em. Now, you want ta keep up with the dumb questions, or you want ta do something about this?” Nira waved her cane toward the madness, almost taking out the eye of the senior delegate from Aragat. The man was saved by the endless slope of his nose, but he blundered backward all the same, rounded on Nira in a rage, recognized her belatedly, then turned to Adare, lips pulled back as though he were ready to bite.

When he finally found his words, they came out loud and all at once.

“Your 'Kent-kissing general has betrayed us!”

Nira did hit him then, swinging her cane up in a clean arc that took the man square across the throat. It was impossible to tell if he'd been about to say something more because he dropped to one knee, hacking up an awful cough, clutching at his neck.

“When you speak to the Emperor,” Nira said, standing over the Aragatan, “you will use her proper title.”

“Nira…,” Adare began, then let it drop. There was no restraining the old woman, and besides, the people standing nearest had already turned. They stared at her for one heartbeat, two, three, then the questions began—demands, really—crashing over her like waves. It was impossible, in the shouted chaos, to make out more than a few words at a time—
why did you let … if he's a traitor … not warned … a betrayal of the greatest proportion—
but the gist was clear enough.

Time to be Emperor,
Adare thought bleakly.

Ignoring the cries, she stepped up onto the massive wooden table. There was something to be said for being above everyone else, and when you didn't have a throne handy, well, you just had to improvise. Usually, she wore thin silk slippers inside the palace, but after learning the dire news, some part of her had wanted to dress, not for debate, but for war. In addition to a severe tunic and split pants, she'd thrown on riding boots, and now, as she strode to the center of the table, the heels punched out a grim rhythm against the wood.

It was tempting to try to raise her voice above the chaos, but Adare was no battlefield commander. There was nothing to be gained by entering a screaming match she was sure to lose, and so she waited, turning in a slow circle until she was sure she'd caught every eye. Then she started talking in her normal voice, exaggerating the movement of her lips slightly, but making no effort to compete with the general din.

“Early this morning,” she began, “I received grim tidings of events taking place to the north.” The opening words weren't important. No one could hear her anyway. The important thing was to be seen talking. “I came here in all haste,” she went on, “because this is obviously a matter of the greatest import.”

One by one, then in small groups, the assembled legislators fell silent. A few of the councillors were still rattling on—Adare could make out Bouraa Bouree baying his displeasure somewhere toward the back of the room—but for most of the delegates, the desire to hear what she was saying had, at least for the moment, overcome the desire to be heard. Adare paused, shook her head, fixed in place her imperial visage, felt her eyes blaze.

All an act, of course. Her legs felt weak beneath her. Aside from half a cup of
ta
gulped down as she dressed, she had put nothing in her stomach, and her guts twisted viciously.
Don't puke,
she growled silently to herself.
And don't shake.
They were all silent now, even Bouree, and when she finally raised her voice, it came out clear, carved from the stone of some confidence that was not her own.

“This is a disgrace,” she said, gesturing to the chamber with a hand.

“It's not your place—” someone began.

“Not my place to
what
?” Adare demanded. “To come into the council chamber? To berate you all for behavior that would shame a group of children?”

Ziav Moss stepped forward, his face grave. “According to the treaty that you signed, Your Radiance, the Emperor, bright be the days of her life, has no place in the affairs of the council. This body decides policy. It is your part only to put it into action.”

“And what policy is it that you have decided?” Adare demanded. She held Moss's cold gaze for a moment, then slowly shifted her eyes over the other women and men. “Please tell me, because evidently our general has disappeared, the Urghul are south of the Thousand Lakes, and I am eager, as the one responsible for taking action, to
take action.
”

“These tidings are fresh even to us,” Moss replied. “We must sort fact from hearsay. We must take the necessary time to consider all available options. The work required here is nuanced, Your Radiance, sophisticated in ways few would understand. Rushing headlong into a battle we don't fully understand will look like bravery in these early days, but I fear it will seem like folly later.”

A few heads had started nodding along with Moss.
They play nice with each other only when the monster has arrived,
Adare thought.
And I get to be the monster.

“Far be it from me,” she said, raising her hands in mock surrender, “to stand in the way of deliberation. When I arrived, however, the scene looked more like a screaming melee.”

“We are, all of us, understandably upset—” Moss said.

Adare cut him off before he could finish. “You cannot
afford
to be upset.
Annur
cannot afford it.” She shook her head. “Let me tell you something. You are the legislators of an empire, the lawmakers who will decide the fate of millions. Fishwives can scream when they are upset, loggers can brawl in their northern camps, merchants can rail at one another over brimming cups of wine, but you are not fishwives, nor loggers, nor merchants.”

She shook her head, letting that point sink in. It was a delicate dance, chastising them while also appealing to their pride. “The reason you sit around this table,
you
instead of any of the other millions of souls whose asses would fit those seats as well, is precisely this: you are
better
.

“This, at least, is what I had hoped. I had hoped you would be better than drunken sailors in a crisis, that you would keep your heads where others would run mad. I had hoped to come here, to this room, to find the leaders of Annur already assembled, already seated, already well on the way to the formulation of a plan. I had hoped you would be impatient with
me,
chafing at my absence, ready and eager to share the outlines of a response to this disaster.” She raised her brows. “Did I hope for too much?”

For a moment, there was only silence in the room. Then Bouraa Bouree bulled his way forward, lips twisted in a snarl as he leveled his finger at Adare.

“I will not … will not …
stand
here,” he barked, his words tangling in his anger. “I will not stand and listen to a … to this …
chastisement
from a woman who has sat upon the throne barely a month.” It was clear that he wanted to say more, and worse, but whatever the full fury of his thoughts, Adare was still the Emperor, and the man had retained at least a modicum of caution. “I suggest you tend to your work, Your Radiance, and we will tend to ours.”

“By all means,” Adare said, gesturing to the empty chairs, inviting them all to sit. “Start tending. We might start with the messengers. Where are they?”

“Here, Your Radiance,” said a new voice, weary but firm, off to the side of the room.

As the members of the council grudgingly sat, the two men who had carried the word stepped forward. They were both obviously legionaries, and older than Adare had expected, well into their early forties, creased and hard as riding leather, lean from lives lived in the saddle, quartering whole continents on horseback bearing messages of death: battles lost or won, armies marching, towns lost. Someone had chosen these older men, the most experienced, to deliver the most dire tidings.

“Your names?” Adare asked.

They stiffened, raising knuckles to brows in the type of military salute rarely encountered inside the Dawn Palace. “I am Jia Chem, Your Radiance,” replied the shorter of the two, “and this is Ulli, who men call the Coyote.”

Both men kept their eyes fixed straight ahead.

“Who is your commanding officer?”

“Jan Belton, with the Seventeenth.”

“Where is the Seventeenth stationed?”

“We've been northeast of Aergad since the winter, Your Radiance.”

Aergad
. Where she had left her son, thinking him sheltered behind the crumbling walls. If the Urghul broke through, it would be the first place they razed. Brutally, she shoved the thought aside.

“What was the state of that city when you left?”

For the first time, Chem hesitated, glancing over at Ulli.

“Speak,” Adare said impatiently. “We are not in the habit, here in Annur, of hurting those who tell a painful truth.”

“Of course, Your Radiance,” the rider replied, bowing his head. “Of course. Aergad survives, but the bridge over the Haag is destroyed.”

Aergad survives.
Relief flooded Adare, then disgust at herself that she had felt such relief. There were other lives than her son's at stake.

“And your legion?” she pressed. “And the rest of the Army of the North?”

The man grimaced. “Alive, but west of the river. On the wrong side.”

At that, the whole chamber erupted into shouts and cries. Adare started to raise her own voice, then shook her head and just waited for the furor to subside. It moved on finally, violent as a summer squall, then faded to hissed whispers and shaking heads, as though everyone in the room had collectively rejected the messenger's words.

Silence finally settled back over the room, glassy and fragile.

Adare spoke into that silence, trying not to shatter it. “Deliver your full report.”

Jia Chem bowed again, then began.

“All winter, we were able to hold the Urghul with help from the snow—”

“We don't need a three-volume history,” Adare cut in. “Start with what matters, with what's happening now.”

Chem nodded, reframing his message, then began again. “The
kenarang
is gone. No one's sure where. He left orders with his generals to hold the Urghul in the foothills as long as possible, then to fall back on Aergad. Our men fought, but without the
kenarang,
it was hopeless. We were forced back almost immediately. No one knows how to stand against the Priest.”

“The Priest?” Randi Helti demanded, teeth clamped on the stem of her unlit pipe.

“Meaning the leach,” Chem replied, his weathered face grim. “The Kettral traitor. His name's Balendin, but the men just call him the Priest. Short for the Priest of Pain. Supposedly it was Long Fist, an Urghul chief, who united the blood-loving savages, but no one's seen him in half a year. The Priest, though…” He shook his head. “He's everywhere. For a while, he was with the nomads east of Scar Lake, then he disappeared briefly, then turned up in the west, where he's been trying to force a way through in the foothills of the Romsdals. There's a little strip of land up there between the mountains and the forest, an east-west passage high and dry enough to ride horses over, and that's where the worst of the fighting's been since late winter. We've got legions upon legions plugging that tiny gap, and men are still dying by the hundreds and the thousands.

“No one can stop the Priest—no one can even get near him—and somehow it seems that each week, he's stronger. The Urghul are little better than beasts, but when he's leading them, they're mad, almost rabid, insane in their eagerness to get at us. I've watched their warriors, their weapons gone, climb over piles of bodies, then hurl themselves on our soldiers, biting, snarling, clawing, fighting like animals until we put them down.

“And sometimes it seems that the horsemen are the least of it. The Priest…” He paused, eyes bleak with some remembered horror. “He can make the rivers burn. He can flick a finger and send rocks the size of cattle crashing through our lines. He can turn the sky to ice, shatter it, so that chunks the size of stones come crashing down into our army. I saw a sergeant's skull crushed inside his steel helmet. His face was … pulp.”

The soldier seemed to have forgotten his audience. His gaze was fixed on empty air, his hand opening and closing convulsively at his side, as though reaching for something he could never quite find.

“You can usually see the Priest. He finds a knoll with a vantage of the field—just laughs at our archers—and he has a dozen captives dragged up after him. Sometimes they're just loggers, but more and more he has Annurian troops, our men still in their own armor, and he … does things to them.”

“Things?” Adare asked. She could have spared herself the account. During her months in the north, she'd heard in horrific detail of Balendin's depredations. The other members of the council, however, were staring at the soldier, shocked. After almost a year prowling the borders of the empire, the war was suddenly close. Jia Chem's tales—tales that might have met with disbelief or indifference a month earlier—were suddenly, awfully relevant.
They need to hear this,
Adare thought.
And maybe I do, too
. Since Nira's unexpected arrival in the city, she'd been too wrapped up in her own private terrors and hopes. While plotting to free Triste, to find a way to save her son, she'd all but ignored the larger war. And now, suddenly, she was losing it.

“I watched him once,” Jia Chem went on, driven somehow to tell it all. “I watched him take a man, a soldier about my size, and just … turn him inside out. That poor fucking bastard—he was still
alive
. I could see his lungs heaving, pink-white, strong at first, then weaker, and weaker. The Priest held the beating heart awhile, held it the way you or I might hold an apple, then he handed it to the soldier, made him hold his own heart.… It took forever for him to die, and all the time our men were fighting, trying not to look up, but
knowing
what was happening up there on that hill. Another time the Priest held a man's head in his hands while his pet falcon pecked out the tongue, the cheeks, the eyes.…”