The Last Mortal Bond (47 page)

“Anjin Serrata,” he called out, moving too slowly through the low branches, shielding his face with his hands. It was the first time he'd ever used the Flea's real name. He couldn't say why he thought to speak it now. “Anjin Serrata!” he shouted again, pitching his voice to carry above the screams of the injured and the dying. The starshatter had done its vicious work, shredding limbs as it had broken apart the silence, leaving those Urghul who had gathered too close to the dying embers of the fire broken, burning, or both. The Flea's Wing was already moving among them, cutting hamstrings and slitting throats before anyone had a chance to regroup or recover.

Valyn couldn't see them, of course, but he could hear steel parting flesh, the grinding of blade against bone, the reluctant sucking sound when the weapon was wrenched free. He could smell the Flea, his leather and determination, and Sigrid sa'Karnya, his leach, who might have bathed in lavender and jasmine that very day. Newt was there, too—pitch, and lice, and nitre. Valyn could hear him muttering to himself, quiet but insistent, as he went about his work. All of the Flea's people were quiet.

Huutsuu, on the other hand, was bellowing orders in her strange, musical tongue. Like Valyn and a dozen others, she had made her bed outside the range of the fire. The decision had spared her the ravages of the starshatter, but she wasn't likely to stay alive if she kept shouting.

Valyn tried to redouble his pace, stepped into a hole—some sort of burrow, maybe—cursed as he twisted his knee, half fell, caught himself on an outstretched hand, and forced himself up again, lunging forward in spite of the branches stabbing at his face and arms.

“Anjin Serrata,” he called out again. “Sigrid sa'Karnya.”

He started to say more, then stopped himself. Any plea or demand would only muddy the message. Either the names would be enough, or nothing would. This time, if only for a moment, the sounds of violence paused.

“Valyn,” the Flea said finally. “Newt said he smelled you. I didn't believe him.”

Nearly half of Huutsuu's Urghul were dead or dying, and the man didn't even sound winded.

“We need your help,” Valyn said.

He was still a dozen paces from the guttering fire; close enough to take an arrow in the chest, but not close enough to fight. It would have to do. Unless the Flea had gone horribly soft, one of the three Kettral would have taken up a position just outside the fray, would be picking shots with a shortbow while the other two managed the close work. Even as Valyn spoke, someone—probably Newt—would be training an arrow on his chest. His flesh felt hot beneath his blacks. It itched, as though eager for the steel to strike, to punch past his breastbone and into his heart.

The memory of that night in Assare burned. Seared across his mind's unblinded eye, the whole disaster played out again: the dead city of stone, acrid smoke filling the air, Gwenna's deafening explosives, the Flea's Wing surrounding them, and Blackfeather Finn, the best sniper on the Islands, stumbling into the crumbling chamber with a Skullsworn knife in his chest.

That was the moment,
Valyn thought again.
That was the moment I lost it
.

He had thought he was finally ready to face the Flea again, to put right what had gone wrong in Assare. Now, though, locked inside his own private darkness, one arm outstretched helplessly before him, the whole notion seemed so desperately stupid. He hadn't known the right words then, and, for all he had rehearsed this moment over and over, he didn't know them now. Worse, the stench of blood on the air had woken something inside him, something vicious and bestial, the same creature that Huutsuu dragged from him each night, an animal eagerness indifferent to all negotiation, whispering over and over the same silent syllable:
Kill. Kill. Kill them all.

“Listen,” he said again, choking back his own savagery. “Just listen.”

The Flea's voice was hard in the darkness. “You have five heartbeats.”

Valyn counted two before he found his voice. “They want to kill Balendin. These warriors want to kill Balendin.”

Over by the fire, someone was groaning, the same incomprehensible Urghul word over and over. The sick crack of steel against skull cut it abruptly short. Piss mingled with the blood and smoke and hemlock.

“If they want to kill the leach,” the Flea asked quietly, “what are they doing here? He's three days to the north, or he was three days ago.”

“They are looking for you.”

The silence was cold as winter's first ice; at any moment it would break, and people would start dying all over again. Valyn ached to reach for the axes hanging from his belt. His empty hands hungered for their weight. Some part of him buried deep inside his brain was thirsty for the blood; it hardly mattered whose. The last time he'd fought the Flea, he'd lost, but he was stronger now, and faster, so much faster. For a moment the scene around the fire resolved in his mind's darkness: the other Wing leader back-to-back with Sigrid, all four of their blades drawn and dripping, the Urghul scattered like dolls. One of the nomads had fallen into the fire's last embers. Valyn's stomach moved at the scent of the burning flesh; he couldn't say if he was nauseated or hungry. Then the vision was gone, scrubbed away.

In the vertigo of darkness, he could hear his body's song, keening to the drumming of his blood:
Kill. Kill. Kill.
He started to reach for his axes, then, hands twisted into fists, he checked himself again.

“Looking for us why?” the Flea asked warily.

“An alliance. They can't kill Balendin alone. They need Kettral.”

“Looks like they've got you.”

Valyn's pulse flared. Fire raged beneath his skin. “I'm not Kettral.”

“It's not always up to a man,” the Flea replied quietly, “what he is, and what he's not. Some things you don't get to choose.” Valyn could hear him shift, could imagine him scanning the darkness between the trees. “Who leads here?”

Huutsuu was somewhere off to Valyn's right, still hidden. She smelled wary but ready.

“I do,” she replied after a moment.

“Drop your bow and blades. Tell your warriors to do the same.”

“You are the ones surrounded,” Huutsuu observed. “In the open.”

It was true enough. The Flea's entire attack was predicated on speed, surprise. To succeed, even to
survive,
he needed to be out of that tiny clearing before the Urghul fully awoke, before they could bring their numbers to bear. The Wing leader had taken a grave risk in pausing halfway through the assault. Even as they spoke, Valyn could hear the Urghul—those who had slept farther off from the fire—moving in darkness, readying their bows.

“I wouldn't quite say surrounded,” the Flea replied. “There's a hole in your net there, and there, and there. We killed your guards to the north, so that's a way out as well.” He paused to let the point sink in. “But you can't see that, can you? It's a new moon. You can't see anything at all.”

And that was the crux of the matter. The stars splattered across the northern sky would be plenty of light for the Flea and his Wing. They could move through the trees as though it were full day, killing Urghul who were almost as blind as Valyn himself.

“I can hear you,” Huutsuu replied. “So can my warriors. If we put enough arrows in the air, you'll die.”

“Not much of a way to open a parley,” the Flea replied wearily. “But you're welcome to try it.”

It seemed a foolish taunt, an insane gambit, until Valyn realized that what he'd seen in that moment of darksight didn't coincide with the voice. He inhaled deeply. Sigrid and the Flea were at the far side of the clearing now, well wide of the source of the Wing leader's voice when he spoke.
A kenning,
Valyn realized.
The leach is throwing his voice
. He could hear Huutsuu moving forward, searching for better light maybe, or just a better position if it all went to shit. She was being quiet, but not nearly quiet enough.

“Huutsuu,” he said. “Stand down. I know this man and his team. I've seen what they can do. If you want to make peace, do as he says.”

“I would have a peace between partners, not between masters and unarmed slaves.”

“Don't have much interest in slaves,” the Flea replied. “I came to kill, so the fact that I'm not killing is a pretty good hint I'm willing to talk. I'm getting tired of arguing, though, and my back's getting itchy between the shoulder blades, so I'll say it one more time: drop your bows, drop your blades, and then we can decide who else needs to die and who maybe ought to stay alive.”

Huutsuu's shame and rage were so thick Valyn could taste them. The Flea's casual demands, his obvious indifference to whatever threat she posed, cut more deeply than any knife. Her blade slid from its sheath, steel whispering against leather. She reeked of readiness.

“Do you want Balendin dead, Huutsuu?” Valyn demanded. “Or do you want to destroy that chance right now, here, for the sake of a meaningless fight in the forest?”

In truth, his own hands were still trembling to grasp the hafts of his axes. His body ached to attack, to let out a roar, then come out of the trees swinging. Whether he took the side of the Urghul or the Kettral hardly seemed to matter. Fighting brought that awful sight, and he had lived inside the darkness for so long. He started speaking, then kept going, because his own words were the only wall he could build to hold back the violence clawing inside of him.

“Even if you win, you lose. You came here to find the Flea. What are you going to do if you actually manage to kill him? Go back to the front? Try to take down Balendin, fail, spend your last day screaming as he opens your chest and holds up your beating heart?”

“I have no fear of that leach,” Huutsuu replied, voice tight. “Not of him or of his pain.”

Valyn ground his teeth. “I don't know what they say on the steppe when a woman dies in a hopeless, pointless fight, but back on the Islands we called it stupid. Useless. You don't need to go looking for pain; the pain finds you.”

Huutsuu didn't respond. The other Urghul were moving carefully in the woods beyond the clearing. None of them would have understood the exchange, but that hardly mattered. The challenge in Huutsuu's voice was obvious. The bodies of the dead scattered around the fire were fucking obvious. Even cloaked in the darkness, even with Sigrid throwing his voice, the Flea was taking a risk by waiting, by listening, by letting the Urghul wake up fully, get their bearings.

Then a naked blade clattered against gnarled roots in the clearing—Huutsuu's weapon, Valyn realized. A moment later, her belt knife followed, then her bow. She barked something curt in her own language.

There was a long, tense pause. Then, from the far side of the clearing, one of the Urghul—a man—responded angrily, defiantly, a string of quick syllables rising with his rage. Before Huutsuu could respond, the words twisted into a long, guttural moan.

“Sorry,” the Flea said, not sounding sorry at all. “I don't understand your language, but he didn't seem eager to talk.”

“He was a fool,” Huutsuu replied curtly.

“How many more fools are there?”

As though they'd heard the taunt, two
ksaabe
launched themselves howling from the trees, charging blindly at the spot where the Flea wasn't. Newt's bowstring hummed once, and then, after a pause, twice. He wasn't anywhere near as fast as Annick, but he was fast enough. The bodies tumbled to the dirt, a dozen paces apart by the sound of it.

Then Huutsuu stepped into the clearing.
“Piat!”
she spat. Valyn didn't know the word, but the intent was plenty clear. “Enough!” she went on, switching languages, turning slowly in place, making her body an offering to the hidden Kettral. “This quarrel can do nothing but brighten the heart of the leach we hope to kill. We will sheathe our swords and speak as equals.”

“Great,” the Flea replied. “We'll talk when your swords are sheathed and you're all out here in the light. That means you, too, Valyn.”

“There is no light,” Huutsuu said. “The fire is long dead.”

Before she had finished speaking, however, there was a great inrushing of air, a roar like a house-high wave crashing on a rocky shore miles distant, and then the heat of a large blaze played over Valyn's face and chest, warm even through the layers of wool and leather.

“There's the fire,” the Flea said. “Get warm. See to your dead. When you're ready, we'll talk.”

“And you?” Huutsuu asked warily.

“I'm here,” the Flea said. Valyn could hear him approaching the newly kindled blaze.

“And the others? Your sniper? Your leach?”

“I think they'll stay in the trees,” the Flea replied. “Just in case the talking doesn't go so well.”

*   *   *

It took the better part of the night for the surviving Urghul to collect the bodies, wash them in the small stream winding through the trees off east, then carry them back to the fire's verge. When they were laid out on the ground, Huutsuu spoke over them, her voice low and hypnotic, halfway between chanting and prayer. When she was finally finished, Valyn could smell the wet wind that always gusted up just before dawn. Rather than letting the fire burn down, the Urghul heaped it higher. There were no graveyards on the steppe; scavengers would just dig up the buried bodies. Instead, the Urghul dead were given to the flame.

The scent of burning flesh was thick, cloying, foul as the smoke that had filled the air of Andt-Kyl for days after the battle. Valyn stood a few paces from the fire, trying to keep his face still, his hands from shaking at the memory. Hundreds had burned alive in the small town, loggers and Urghul alike, trapped inside log buildings or pinned beneath flaming barricades. The hissing and steaming of the green branches blazing in front of him sounded like screaming.