“It’s Valyn,” he said, his voice hollow. “It’s my brother.” He set the long lens down wearily and lay back against the rough stone. It seemed, suddenly, that the assassin was right, that lying down and getting some rest before the end was all they could hope to do. “At least now we know who’s behind this whole mess.”
“Your brother?” Pyrre asked, suddenly interested, propping herself up on one elbow. “Are you sure?”
Kaden nodded wearily. “I spent half my life racing around the Dawn Palace with him. He’s bigger now and there’s something … more dangerous about him, but it’s him.”
The assassin picked up the long lens and peered through it for quite a while, pursing her lips as she watched.
“Well,” she said finally, a grin spreading over her face. “If the reception he just received is any indication, it looks like he’s on our side.”
Kaden shook his head. “Why would you say that?”
“Once again, I find myself underwhelmed by the Shin powers of observation. Micijah Ut, may Ananshael gnaw the flesh from his overlarge bones, has just stripped your brother’s Wing of their weapons. His men are currently trussing them up. The woman with the red hair and the beguiling figure just took a bite out of one of their ears, and, if your brother’s face is anything to go by, he’d like to go quite a bit beyond ears.”
A sudden, fierce hope leapt in Kaden’s chest. “They’re fighting?”
“Well, they tried, but it was a pretty one-sided fight. Teeth against steel doesn’t make for a great matchup.”
“But they’re not with the rest of them,” Kaden said. “They’re not part of it.”
“The good news is,” Pyrre continued, as though she hadn’t heard the question, “a bird like that should be able to fly us all out of here.”
“The bird is there,” Rampuri Tan said. His eyes were sharp, focused. He had left whatever trance he entered far behind. “We are here. A valley and over a dozen armed men separate us.”
“Well,” Pyrre said, “I was still on the good news. You’ve jumped ahead.”
“That’s the end of it?” Triste demanded, anger creasing her brow. “That’s all you have to say?”
“Oh, no,” the assassin replied, turning to her. “There’s more good news: I have a plan.”
Kaden narrowed his eyes. There was a barb in this bait—he just couldn’t see it.
“Your plan?” Tan ground out.
“Now we come to bad news.” Pyrre put down the glass, drew one of those long, cruel knives of hers, and turned to Triste. “The bad news is that the plan involves sacrifice, and in this unfair world, some of us will be called upon to sacrifice more than others.”
Kaden lunged for the woman’s wrist at the last moment, trying desperately to stop the knife, but he was only a monk, not even a monk, while Pyrre Lakatur was a priestess of Ananshael, assassin, Skullsworn, trained to follow the ways of her bloody god in the unholy halls of Rassambur, so quick, so precise, that Triste barely had time to scream before the blade bit down.
48
Valyn had rubbed his wrists bloody and just about torn his shoulder from its socket trying to wrench a hand free from the ropes binding his wrists behind his back. He knew all the tricks for escaping a slaughter-knot, but then, so did the people who trussed him up in the first place—that was the problem with fighting other Kettral.
His body ached from the strain, but the physical pain was nothing beside the searing, lacerating guilt. In his eagerness to save his brother, he had led his Wing directly into harm’s way, had ignored the signs, spurned sensible caution, and now, unless he figured some way to cut them all loose, they were going to die here in the shadow of an unnamed mountain at the end of the world. It would have been bad enough to fall with a blade in each hand and a ready curse on the tongue, but this … trussed up like a pig for the butcher. The shame was far, far worse than the pain.
Keep working, he told himself. Keep thinking. As long as you’re alive, the fight isn’t truly over.
Escape, however, seemed unlikely. The Aedolians had halted for the night in the notch of a long, serrated ridge, hundreds of paces above the land before or behind. It was a good place with excellent lines of sight, easily defended from either direction, although difficult to retreat from if a fight went against them. That seemed unlikely. The only other people for a hundred leagues in any direction had been the monks, and, if Micijah Ut was to be believed, his men had killed all of them. Kaden was out there somewhere, scrambling through the darkness, but Kaden was fleeing. That left Valyn and his Wing, and they were thoroughly incapacitated, trussed up and then dumped in a rough jumble of scree right at the center of the notch. Even if they managed to cut their way loose, they were still trapped between the rock to the north and south, and the men guarding the pass to the east and west. A few boulders offered some meager cover, but they would be easy to flank, and …
And before you start thinking tactics you’ve got to get out of these ’Kent-kissing ropes.
The task seemed next to impossible. Yurl and Ut both knew their business. They’d taken down Valyn’s crew by the book, seeing to Talal first. None of them knew the leach’s well, but they didn’t take chances: Yurl put a knife to his throat, and then Hern Emmandrake, his master of demolitions, handed him a cloth soaked with adamanth. Talal tried to jerk away when they pressed the sodden material to his nose and mouth, but within moments he slumped into a limp heap, the cloth draped over his face, while Yurl looked on, grinning smugly.
“Now,” he said, “we can see to making the rest of you comfortable.”
It didn’t take long for his Wing to truss them up like livestock for the slaughter, binding them hand and foot, with an extra loop around the throat to discourage struggling. Gwenna managed to take a chunk out of the ear of one of the Aedolians, but all it gained her was a cuff across the face that split open both lips and half closed one of her eyes. The hurt did nothing to tame her, but once they’d stuffed a dirty rag in her mouth, she could neither curse them nor snap off their faces, and after a few minutes of futile struggle, she sagged back against the ground, green eyes blazing with silent rage. Despite the bleakness of their situation, however, Valyn felt a moment of relief at being shoved to the sharp gravel of the pass rather than killed outright. It’s a mistake. Yurl’s got no reason to keep us alive except to gloat. Then, in a sickening surge of anger and disgust, he realized why they had been spared.
Balendin.
The leach approached, sauntering into the light of the fire as though he were a provincial nobleman strolling into his manicured grounds. He paused in mock surprise when he saw the prisoners, tsked at them disapprovingly while waggling a raised finger, then dropped into a squat a few paces away, satisfaction shining in his eyes. His dogs were nowhere to be seen, but that falcon rode on his shoulder; it cocked its head to one side and fixed Valyn with a hungry glare.
“So flattering,” Balendin began, winking at Valyn as he spoke, “for all of you to care so very much about me.”
“I’m going to kill you, leach,” Annick said. It was an unlikely threat. Valyn’s whole Wing was incapacitated, but Annick looked particularly vulnerable in the flickering firelight. The rough bonds emphasized the slenderness of her arms, her child’s figure; she might have been some lost girl tied for a slaver’s ship, except for her eyes, sharp and malevolent. “I’m going to put two arrows in your gut,” she went on, ignoring the blood seeping from the gash on her forehead, “and another one in that filthy, lying mouth of yours.” The threat shouldn’t have been credible, coming from someone in her position, yet it made Balendin hesitate.
The leach actually seemed to consider the risk, then waved a dismissive hand. “I don’t think so, although you have no idea how much I appreciate the sentiment.” He closed his eyes and tilted back his head, as though letting a warm rain wash over his face. “All that hatred, that rage, that beautiful … feeling!” He licked his lips and smiled. “It’s a gift, you know—this human capacity for feeling. Some animals have it, but only faintly, faintly. The shadow of a shadow. That delicious hatred of yours—” He licked his lips. “—as I said, you have no idea what it means to me.”
We’re helping him, Valyn realized grimly. All our rage just makes him more powerful. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and tried to calm his feelings. Without a well, Balendin was just like them, just another Kettral-trained soldier, and considerably worse with either a bow or a blade than most. If Valyn could just find some sort of calm.…
“She tried not to squeal, you know,” the leach continued, his tone casual, conversational, while the corners of his mouth twisted up in a slight grin as he turned to Valyn. “Your friend Ha Lin, I mean. The one with the whore’s ass.” He whistled a low appreciative whistle and shook his head. “Wish I could have done more with it, that day on the West Bluffs, but I was busy. Besides, you know Yurl,” he added, jerking his head toward where the Wing commander stood, a dozen paces away, engrossed in conversation with Micijah Ut. “He wanted to do most of the beating himself. Spent a good half hour with his knee on her throat, prodding her with the tip of his belt knife. Barely let me get in a few punches.” He shrugged. “Must be something about growing up the child of privilege.”
“You ’Shael-spawned son of a whore,” Valyn ground out, twisting helplessly against his bonds. “You fucking pig, you’d better hope Annick kills you before I get there.”
“Aaah,” Balendin said, closing his eyes in contentment. “That’s more like it.” He leaned closer to Valyn. “You know,” he continued, “it’s amazing. I think you feel more powerfully about your friend’s suffering than she did.”
“Balendin,” Yurl barked, turning from the Aedolian and gesturing urgently. “Get over here, there’s something—” He squinted into the darkness. “There’s someone coming.”
The leach straightened, a momentary look of irritation flashing across his face.
“Who?”
Yurl shook his head. “How the fuck do I know? The sun set an hour ago. Just one person, but I want you over here, ready.”
Valyn tensed against his bonds. The makeshift camp was good, but it wasn’t invulnerable: one Wing of Kettral, a score of Aedolians under Ut’s command. A small force—fifty men, say—could probably overwhelm them. Fifty men or one veteran Wing of Kettral. Valyn’s mind spun out a dozen scenarios—the Flea and Adaman Fane had caught up to them finally, a contingent of loyal Aedolains had tracked them through the mountains, a mob of monks from another local order … Fool, he hissed to himself. Quit dreaming and focus on what’s here, what’s real. The approaching figure was more likely to be one of Ut’s men than anything else, a returning scout or a messenger from the main body of his force.
The Aedolian commander, however, didn’t seem to think so. With a few barked orders, he set men on either side of the pass, bows trained on the darkness below, while Yurl and Balendin set themselves directly in the path of whoever approached. Yurl drew one of his two blades and dropped into a half guard. Balendin spun a dagger between his fingers, affecting calm. Valyn wasn’t fooled—most of the soldiers were wound tight as bowstrings, ready for Ananshael himself to stride into their camp.
The person who walked out of the darkness, however, was not Ananshael, not an Aedolian, not a monk, not a Kettral with bared blades. She was a vision, a dream of perfection—some kind of goddess who had lost her way through the heavens to stride into the slender compass of the flickering fire. Her gossamer robe was torn to tatters, but even that served to accentuate her beauty, the rent cloth exposing the hint of a hip, the silken line of her thigh. Valyn stared. He should have been thinking about Balendin, about his Wing, about how to use the slight distraction to engineer an escape, and yet, for a few long breaths all he could do was marvel, caught up in the spell of those violet eyes, that cascading black hair, the scent of jasmine mingled with fresh blood.
She’s been hurt, he realized, the thought stirring a deep, unexpected anger in him. Someone had carved a long, slender slice down her cheek, narrowly missing her eye. The wound would heal up fine—he’d seen worse in standard training—but there was something about this girl that made any injury seem like desecration, a sacrilege, as though someone had chiseled a gouge across a priceless statue.