The Last Mortal Bond (38 page)

“You're right,” she went on, more hotly than she'd intended. “I mind that you're here, not because I don't like you, but because I can't
rely
on you.”

“You don't know anything about me, Gwenna.”

“I know that you washed out during the Trial,” she said, holding up a finger. “I know that you froze in the alleyway over on Hook, that you were about to let your partner die because you were too scared to make a play.”

“Two moments,” he replied quietly, “out of twenty-four years.”

“The moments are all that
matter,
Jak. People talk about lifetimes, but lifetimes are built out of moments. The decisions we make, the ones that matter, the ones that get people killed or keep them alive…” She snapped her fingers. “They're that fast.”

The memory of that first Annurian legionary she'd killed flooded through her, hot and awful and undimmed even after nearly a year. How long had it taken to decide she needed to kill him, to decide how and then to do it, to plunge that ridiculous stick through his eye as thousands and thousands of Urghul roared all around her? A heartbeat. Maybe two.

“It doesn't
matter
what you do in between those moments,” she said, pressing ahead despite the hard wall of his silence. “It doesn't matter if you swim all day, or if you're kind to your aging mother, or any of the rest of that shit. What
matters,
when you're Kettral, is what you do”—she stabbed a stiffened finger straight down into the stone—“right now. Right now. Right now.”

He watched her a moment, then rolled onto his back, staring up through the leaves.

“You think I don't know that?”

“Well, do you?”

“Of course I do. It's why I'm not Kettral.”

Gwenna had clenched her hands into fists. With an effort, she relaxed them, then let her head drop back against a root.

“Fine,” she said. “It's fine. Unless I've fucked up, and bad, we're not going to be fighting anyone today. We're just here to look at the birds, to learn what we can about what they've got and how we can take it.”

That was why Jak had come in the first place. He knew about kettral, understood them better than anyone else left on the Islands. Gwenna could count the 'Kent-kissing things, could probably come up with a tally of the healthy and the badly injured, but that was about it. Before arriving at any plan worth the name, she'd need to know more: Which birds were the fastest? Which were the older and more experienced? If it came to a fight between the kettral, which were the strongest, the most likely to triumph?

According to everyone, Quick Jak was a genius with birds. Laith had said the man was the finest flier he'd ever seen, and Laith hadn't thought
anyone
was a finer flier than Laith. Maybe it was true, and even if it wasn't, Jak was what she had. Everyone could contribute something. That was the point of working in a team. The washout flier might still prove useful, even crucial. Gwenna just had to be careful to keep him out of a fight, to keep him well clear of any situation where he might lose his tenuous cool and get someone killed.

By the time the sun finally climbed high enough to use the long lens without signaling everyone on Rallen's island, Jak had been quiet for hours, lying silently on his back, staring open-eyed into the thick-leaved canopy above. Gwenna had failed to fall asleep. Usually she could shut her eyes and be out in a few heartbeats. Certainly, the swim over had left her plenty tired. The morning's conversation, though, had irritated her. She kept going over and over what Jak had said, trying to understand how someone with a strong body and keen mind could be so useless, so resigned to his failures. That she wanted to like him only made it worse. She felt betrayed without even knowing the man, and it was with a long sigh of relief that she finally rolled onto her stomach, extended the wooden tube of the long lens, and began the scouting she'd come to do.

The main Eyrie compound—the command buildings, the barracks, the various training rings, the harbor, docks, and associated storehouses, the mess hall, Lucky Fucks' Row—almost everything that mattered to the day-to-day operation of the Kettral was on Qarsh, miles to the southwest. Rallen, however, had opted to move his base of operations off the island. It wasn't that hard to understand why. Qarsh was the largest island in the archipelago—nearly three miles across at the widest—and also the gentlest. Instead of crenellated limestone dropping straight into the sea, Qarsh had plenty of coves and beaches, mangrove stands and offshore reefs to break the worst of the swells. It was a great place to live but a nightmare to defend. Before the Eyrie ripped out its own guts, of course, defense hadn't been much of an issue. Anyone attacking would be attacking from somewhere else, and the regular Kettral patrols could see them at least two days out.

Rallen, however, was fighting a different sort of war. His enemies were already
on
the Qirins, hidden away in cellars on Hook, secreted in the tangles of jungle vines, lurking undiscovered in the endless warren of Hull's Hole. And then there was the question of numbers. On the day Gwenna fled the Islands with Valyn and the Wing, there had been hundreds of active-duty Kettral, half as many cadets, and at least that many retired vets living out their last years down by the harbor—more than enough for the minimal guard duty required. If Manthe and Hobb were right, however, Rallen didn't have more than thirty or forty soldiers at his disposal, not nearly enough to guard the whole perimeter of Qarsh.

And so he was here. Gwenna twisted the long lens, focusing it on the island half a mile to the east.
Skarn
. No linguistic relation, she hoped, to the beasts living down in the Hole, but the name put her on edge all the same. So did the 'Kent-kissing terrain.

“Well, this is unfortunate,” she said, eyeing the cliffs that climbed straight out of the water on every side.

“You've never seen it before?” Jak asked.

“Of course I've seen it. I just never thought I'd have to
attack
it.”

The truth was, she'd never paid the island much mind. It lay well clear of Qarsh and Hook, off the usual swimming and smallboat circuits, and while she'd sailed around it dozens of times, flown over it twice that many, the only people who spent any time on the island were the fliers, both active and retired. The fliers, and the birds themselves.

The kettral built their nests and raised their young over on the eastern end of Qarsh, where the ground was relatively flat. Once they matured, however, following some animal instinct no one at the Eyrie fully understood, they spread their wings and left the gentle island, searching, evidently, for something more … vertical. There wasn't anywhere in the Islands more vertical than Skarn.

“Are there
any
harbors or beaches?” Gwenna asked, sweeping the lens back and forth over the overhanging limestone.

Jak shook his head. “Not really. The only thing you can reach from the water is a little rocky shoulder on the far side. It's underwater at high tide, though.”

“Can you get from there to the top of the cliffs?”

“No.”

“So how did Rallen get in the supplies to build the 'Kent-kissing thing?”

She studied the fortress, or what she could see of it, at least. On level ground, Rallen's fort wouldn't have been much of a fort. It looked more like a series of stables strung along behind a large stone barn, the various structures connected by a wall no more than twice Gwenna's height. The trouble was, the fort wasn't set on level ground. The whole compound perched at the very brink of the cliff. The limestone crag on which it stood was so steep and high—at least forty paces, overhung for the bottom third—as to render the miserable walls at the top pointless, even ludicrous. It was as though the builders, having thrown together the hall and outbuildings, felt compelled to put up
some
sort of wall, all the time understanding the pointlessness of the gesture.

“Most of it's rock,” Jak replied. “Quarried right there on the island. There was a crane to haul up the heavy supplies, the mast from an old ship anchored in the stone with a block and tackle at the end. That's how they hoisted up the timber for roof beams and the rest. Rallen had it torn down when the building was done.”

“Why in Hull's name,” Gwenna wondered aloud, “would you rip out your only means of resupply?”

“Because he's careful. The crane was a weakness. A potential entry point.”

Gwenna put down the lens, then turned to stare at him. “Not if you remember to pull up the rope when you're done with it!”

Even as she was saying the words, however, she was thinking of ways she could have used that recommissioned mast. Annick could have shot an arrow over it, for one thing. Attach a light enough cord to that arrow—an unbraided thread of Liran rope, maybe—and you could use it as a pilot to drag up something more substantial. Then it was a simple matter of—

“Whatever else he is, Rallen's Kettral,” Jak said, as though reading her thoughts. “He's lived on these islands at least forty years, and he knows what the Kettral can do.”

“But there aren't any Kettral left.”

Jak met her gaze. “Even the washouts have some training. We're not the real thing, Rallen knows that, but we're not completely useless.”

Gwenna nodded slowly, then turned the long lens back to the fort.

“So the small buildings are storage and barracks, the large thing, that lopsided pile that looks like some farmer's first attempt at a barn, is mess and command?”

Jak shook his head. “I don't know. I've never been up there. This is the first time I've seen it.”

“Who
has
seen it?”

“None of us. Not from the inside. When Rallen came for us on Arim, when he offered us all a second chance, we took boats over to Qarsh. Set up in the barracks there.”

“You must have known he was building something out here.”

“We did. He said it was the first in a series of fortifications to make the Islands safer, more defensible, more secure. Flew in a couple dozen craftsmen from over on Hook to build the place.”

“Craftsmen,” Gwenna snorted, peering through the long lens once more. “That's a generous term for anyone living over on Hook. Where are they now? Can we talk to them?”

“They're dead,” Jak replied quietly. “When construction was finished, Rallen had them tied, ankles and elbows, and threw them off the cliff.”

Gwenna shook her head slowly. “That sick fuck.”

“You see why we have to stop him?” Jak asked.

“What I
don't
see is why you kept following him in the first place.”

“He was Kettral.…”

Gwenna waved away the explanation. “I know. He showed up. He offered you a second chance. Fine. But when he started throwing civilians off cliffs? That didn't clue you all in to the fact that he was aiming at something other than the preservation of Annurian justice?”

“Of
course
it did.” A new note in Jak's voice made her put down the lens again. She looked over to find his hands clenched into fists, knuckles gone bone-white, as though he were trying to throttle something.

I finally made him angry,
she realized.
About fucking time
.

“Of course we knew it,” Jak said again. “A lot of us were already planning to stop him, to stop helping, at least. That's why we refused his personal pledge of fealty the next day.”

Gwenna watched the anger wither. The flier's eyes had gone wide and distant as he relived the slaughter.

“And that's when he killed you.”

Jak nodded. “We didn't know it, but he'd already stocked this place. The munitions were here, his most trusted lieutenants were here…”

“And the birds were here,” she finished quietly.

Jak nodded again, staring, rapt, into the past. That obsession, in its own way, was just as dangerous as what they faced atop the cliff. The flier was brittle enough when he wasn't reliving the blood and screaming of Rallen's purge. If he was going to survive, he needed to look forward, not back, and Gwenna needed him to survive.

“So where are they?” she asked, waving a hand at the cliffs. “The birds?”

For a few heartbeats he didn't respond. Then, slowly, his eyes refocused, found hers. She could still smell the fear on him, but there was something else there, too, something in those clenched knuckles, in the set of his jaw.
Stubbornness,
she thought. Not the same thing as courage, not by a long shot, but it would have to do.

“There,” Jak said, pointing. “And there. And there. In those shallow caves, mostly.”

Gwenna studied the cliff for a moment. She could make out the hollows in the rock, huge holes carved from the stone by age after age of rain and prying wind. With the sun so bright overhead, however, she could barely make out anything inside. She put the long lens to her eye, studying the most obvious of the features. She could see the blocky shapes of the limestone wall in back, but no sign of a bird.

“It's empty.”

“It's daytime,” Jak replied. “They'll all be out, flying missions or hunting.”

Hunting. That was a sight you weren't likely to forget. Early in their training, each class of cadets was hauled over to Qel, one of the only islands in the chain capable of supporting livestock. Sheep, goats, and cows grazed on the stiff, thick-bladed island grass—hundreds of animals scattered over a few square miles. It was a pleasant enough scene, a warmer, more tropical version of the kind of pastoral landscape you could find anywhere from Sia to north of the Neck. Until the kettral showed up.

It was impossible to understand the birds, to really appreciate what they could do, without seeing them stoop from a few hundred paces up, fall on a full-grown cow like a boulder of avian feathers and flesh. Gwenna had almost puked on her blacks the first time she saw it. She'd grown up around hawks and falcons, of course, had seen them take field mice and squirrels caught out between the trees. The sight of kettral savaging entire cows, however, the vision of them rending to bloody ribbons beasts that weighed ten times what she did herself … that was a vision she'd been trying to put out of her mind during every flight for the past ten years.