by Ben Peek
“I do not know.” A ripple in the water passed beneath the haunt’s body, distorting her for but a moment. “She did not say so, if she did. My first awareness of you was when I lay on the pyre, trying to remove myself strand by strand from that body. I felt you and the Keepers, then, as well as her.”
“You were fractured,” he explained. “Your awareness was drifting between two states of being—”
“I could sense Ger, as well.”
“You would have, yes.”
He had begun to tell her that it was the transcendence of flesh to spirit that had done it, that she had glimpsed the part of the world that had been made in the War of the Gods, but he stopped. She would struggle to understand him. It was difficult to convey that in absence there existed the definable sense of the world, the universe and them. But she would not retain what he said. He would tell her the same words again an hour later, and the hour after that.
Instead, he asked, “Why did you attack the girl in Orlan’s shop?”
“She said I could defeat the girl.” She was uncomfortable, shifting from foot to foot in the water, her tread without mark. “She said that she did not even know about her power.”
“That does not explain why.”
She did not reply.
“Oyia.”
“I do not know,” she whispered.
“Oyia,” Zaifyr replied softly. “A name does have power.”
Her mouth twisted, firmly shut.
“Oyia.” Persuasive, a hint of pressure on her being. “Oyia, tell me, what did you plan to do with the girl?”
“She wanted me to bring her back!” she snarled. “She said there were many like her, many who just didn’t know—and she wanted to know if I had the power to take her!”
Zaifyr’s hand touched the part of his wrist where a charm had rested only hours before. He went to press another question—to ask why she wanted her back (and where back was, exactly)—but the words did not emerge. As quickly as Oyia’s anger had risen, it had gone, drained from her frail form and lost in the dark water beneath her feet. She turned and began to circle the placid lake, her words faint whispers of hunger and cold, her mind taken by the need inside her, a need that would consume her, unless he wanted to use his own power—power he was already uncomfortable with having used.
Lifting the hammer, Zaifyr returned to work.
6.
Heast wanted to speak to her. Before she had left her house, before she had parted ways with the healer, and in an attempt to divert the conversation away from Zaifyr, Ayae had asked Reila who the captain had sent to her, though she knew the answer. Deep in her stomach, she knew it. “It was a mistake,” the elderly woman said. “Heast makes them rarely, and this one was a man’s mistake. Do not hold it against him.”
She replayed the words as she approached Illaan, two blocks from her house.
He sat behind a wooden table in the middle of a cobbled road, surrounded by ration booklets and boxes of canned and dried food. He had not shaved since she had last seen him, but the stubble on his jaw did not lend him the air of a veteran soldier. Rather, she thought him the parody of one. He was too tall, his facial features too neat. Ayae had always thought of him as a man with an air of culture about him, a soldier who did not draw his sword but fought with laws and politics and economics. But seeing him now, she realized that the opposite was true: that Illaan did not fight with knowledge or intelligence, but with fear and with force.
She had always thought well of him, from the first time she had met him, in Mireea’s large, sprawling Saturday market. She had been standing with Faise, listening to her friend haggle over a brown- and gold-flecked dress. Lost in people watching, Ayae saw Illaan emerge onto the narrow path that weaved between the stalls, but it was not until he greeted the merchant by name and, with a few words, cut in half the price Faise had been bargaining over that she gave him more attention than she had anyone else. Later, he told her that he had made up the price with the merchant, had used it only to meet her.
He knew everything and everyone within Mireea and within months his knowledge of her was just as complete. He knew not to ask about the memories of her parents, about if she had seen the Innocent, about the orphanage or Samuel Orlan; but he knew how to spell her name, how to pronounce it and how to make her laugh. It was his own background that taught him that: he was the third son from a family of wine merchants in Yeflam, the son whose father had purchased him a commission in the trade capital of the world on his sixteenth birthday, to educate him and prepare him a place in the family business a decade later.
He saw her now, as she approached his table, but did not rise. He held her gaze, then turned to the two guards behind him, the first tall and young, the second older, solid, gray going to fat. She did not hear his words, but they were about her. The latter man shook his head. To that, Illaan said, “You’ll do as I say.”
“He’ll do what?” she asked.
He did not turn.
“I don’t want to fight, Illaan.” The words surprised her, the ease of them suggesting a truth. “I was told you were meant to find me.”
He kept his back to her.
Finally, the older guard said, “Sergeant, the girl—”
“You’re wrong, Corporal. She’s not a girl.”
“Look at me when you say that,” Ayae said.
“She is cursed.” He turned and, for a moment, she did not recognize the man before her. But just for a moment. “And we need not help those who defy the natural laws of the world.”
“I didn’t know that you had begun defining what was natural and what was not.”
“The world is not unknown to me.”
Despite herself, she laughed.
He spat.
Her hand, when she lifted it to her face, when her index finger caught the spittle that ran down her cheek, was warm.
“Sergeant—”
“I am really,” Illaan said in a quiet, controlled voice, “really not interested in what you have to say, Corporal. Look into her eyes. Look and you will see what she is.”
“Can I do the same for you, Sergeant?”
The voice came from a newcomer. A woman stepped past Ayae, tall, strikingly pale with short black hair. She wore a mix of boiled leather and chain mail, the dye a faded black. At her side she wore a long sword, the scabbard one of simple, aged leather. Behind her came two men, both of a similar age to the corporal, but where he had begun to run to fat, these men, twice his size, were as much muscle and graying beard as they were leather and chain. Over their backs they held large weapons, the one on the left a huge two-handed sword, the one on the right an equally large axe.
“It is amazing what comes out of the son of a Traders Union official from Yeflam,” she continued. “You would almost think that fear had become a political currency to be used against a ruling class.”
“This is none of your concern, Meina,” Illaan growled. “It’s no concern to any mercenary.”
“I outrank you considerably, Sergeant,” the woman said. “You would do well to remember that when addressing me.”
He spat on the ground.
Ayae’s flat palm connected with his chest.
Illaan hit the wall behind him.
The mercenary crossed to where Illaan lay and crouched over the smoldering remains of his leather chest piece. The imprint of Ayae’s palm was deeply burned into the armor. Meeting her gaze, the tall woman said, “I think I like you.”
Beneath her, Illaan groaned. Meina’s hand slapped his bruised chest. “I would stay down, if I were you, Sergeant,” she said pleasantly. “In fact, I wouldn’t get up until myself and your girl are gone. Even then I might consider staying down. I can only imagine what your captain will say after he hears about this.”
7.
“Just a mercenary,” the exiled Baron of Kein said. “That’s all.”
He had not given up his weapons, but he had not been asked to do so. Nor was he chained or guarded, though the eight s
oldiers circled both Orlan and himself. But they did so loosely, informally.
Bueralan understood why. Unlike the raiders, the five men and three women around him had armor made from polished chain mail and oiled leather, all of it well cared for and sitting with a seasoned ease on each. And, while there were no bars of rank on any of them, it was clear that the seven took their orders from a brown-haired man of indeterminate age, whose tanned face could be at any point past his youth, but who moved with a swiftness and ease that suggested that the activities of those in the summer of the strength were not beyond him.
He called himself Dural and offered no rank and no affiliation. “A mercenary with Samuel Orlan?” He was the only one of the eight to have dismounted and he stood before the saboteur, a full head shorter. “For ransom.”
The way the word ransom emerged from his thin lips did not sit well with the saboteur. “I was hired in Mireea.” However, he could not change his lie now. “I didn’t think much of the work, but there is not a lot for men like me in Mireea.”
“Men like you?”
“I don’t know how to fight in a siege.” He shrugged nonchalantly. “I don’t want no trouble. This is just a simple transaction to me.”
“Do you always betray your employers so quickly?”
“I am always honest to myself, first.”
That was a mercenary’s answer, an answer Dural could accept with a grunt. Glancing around the saboteur’s shoulder to the cartographer, he said, “Not your day, old man.”
Orlan was silent.
“Will I need irons?”
“No,” he said, finally.
The soldier nodded. “Both of you on your horses, then. We’ll take you to the general.”
It was not right. Bueralan pulled himself into the saddle, glanced at Orlan, but the old man did not meet his gaze. He knew as well, the saboteur was sure of that. He knew there was something wrong with this, a gut-level reaction, but he knew that the die were cast now. Bueralan’s horse moved slowly along the road, Orlan and his old pony behind him, the silence of Dirtwater lingering until they rode through the dismantled fence, and the swamp crows lifted into the air in a series of screeching calls.
The soldiers did not react to the sound. They followed the trail as it narrowed into single file and became overgrown, two hours of a solid pace until the trail ballooned and the sound of people began to emerge. It was a growing susurration of voices and pots being packed, of the stamps of horses and the bark of dogs, of pigs and cows and more.
The Leeran Army soon appeared as he was led through low, green-gray trees, and it defied his gaze. He could not take the size of it in easily: it was too much for a single man, too large, too complex to make a quick appraisal of. It was much larger, much more diverse than what he had seen in the morning, but riding through it there was no sense of disorganization. There was a sense of everything being where it should. A hundred horses greeted him first, lightly armored soldiers feeding and rubbing them down. Lean, young, eager. They saluted Dural as he passed and he greeted them by name, with nods and smiles. Wagons followed, more than Bueralan could clearly identify in the density that grew around him. The livestock was similar, but here the saboteur could count the stockhands easily, since they numbered three. Two men and one woman, each with whips and dogs.
More soldiers followed.
Bueralan’s hand tightened on his reins. Around him, the cannibalized building materials were clear: long fence palings, thatches from roofs, doors, and more. But for all that the siege towers and wagons and catapults were an uneven collection, the men and women he passed were not. Not one was of a skin color other than white, and in most the saboteur saw a commonality that suggested a nationalism—surely they were bonded by more than military organization? They were, he was sure, a civilian army and more. As he was led deeper and deeper into the press, he thought it possible that they may well be a nation, but the organization and discipline that defined them did not sit well with him. He had not yet seen anyone who, through armor or insignia, revealed themselves to be part of the chain of command.
Until he was led into a small opening. It was dominated by a large, solid-oak map table, the size of it suggesting that it would take four or more people to move it, and not the tall, middle-aged man who stood over it.
In appearance, he was not a distinctive man. Much like Dural, the man at the table was a white man with brown eyes and brown hair; his face was neither blessed nor cursed with a trait that left it memorable in either grace or ugliness. There was no sense, either, that the man was a warlock, that blood had ever stained his hands. There was a quality about the men and women who used such power, a blemish in their gaze, as if each had seen a part of the world that those who did not draw from the dying could not possibly begin to understand, and there was no such look in the eyes of the man before him. If anything, his was the face of a clear and honest man.
Dural stepped from his mount. “My General.”
“Lieutenant.” The man wore a white shirt and brown leather trousers, with no weapon in sight. “What do you have there?”
“A mercenary—” Bueralan’s hands refused to release the reins “—who has bought us Samuel Orlan.”
The general’s smile was faint. “Is that true, Samuel?”
Behind him, Bueralan heard Orlan slide from his saddle. On either side of him, the horses of Dural’s soldiers shifted and the weight of their riders, followed by their steel grasps, closed in on his still limbs. “I am afraid my hand has been played early,” the cartographer said, walking up to the man before him. “For that I do apologize.”
“You are unharmed?”
“But for my pride.” Orlan turned, his cold blue eyes meeting Bueralan’s. “The cost of it does present a small gift though. Perhaps you have heard of Captain Bueralan Le, of the saboteur group Dark?”
8.
He pushed the stone, felt it give and heard it hit the water. A cascade of smaller stones followed, sounding in hollow splashes that tore a jagged line down the side of the Temple of Ger.
The building was rotten, both in appearance and smell. Made from brick and wood, the latter having turned black, decay leaving its grasp like a handprint on the stone where the two met. In a crack not wide enough for him to drop through, Zaifyr saw that the tall windows had broken inward, the discolored glass shattering across the ground on impact.
“You are about to violate something very holy, Qian.”
“A haunt does not learn.” Zaifyr settled his gaze on her. “Once, I wanted to explain to the dead what was happening to them. I thought it would be easier to do so. But the truth is your kind will take in no more after you have died. Every idea, every belief, every moral is trapped in you, like a bug caught in amber. You will not remember this conversation, just as you will not remember the one before.”
“I remember all that is important.”
He hooked his hand around a sharp edge of stone. “Look inside and tell me that Ger is alive.”
She did not move. “Your kind has always lied.”
“If you were capable of learning you would ask why it is that you barely felt Ger, why he was so faint, here in his mountain.” The stone broke, fell into the water. “You have more ability now to know that than you ever did in life.”
“I have faith.”
“Faith is a very subjective emotion.”
Standing, Zaifyr picked up the hammer. It felt heavy in his hands. He was tired, but he brought the end down on the weakening edge of the stone. After another two blows enough of the rotting window was revealed that he could carefully drop into the building, a prospect that did not excite him. He felt no threat from within, either from Ger or from anything else that might live within the darkness, and it was exactly that absence which troubled him.
He lowered himself from the ledge slowly, using his wedges as handholds as his bare feet searched for a perch on the window and finding none until his toes touched glass-covered stone. Wet, slippery. He dislodged the s
hards before letting it take his weight, his tired arms trembling from the effort.
The haunt drew closer to him, the red from her chest rising and diminishing as she stepped out of the ceiling’s crude light. She did not make a move to speak and Zaifyr, his hands searching for holds that were not crumbling, did not try. Once he had secured himself, he used her light to stare into the darkness of the temple.
There were rotting pews and, to the left, a broken dais. He could make out only the edges of other items, shapes hinted at in the dark that teased the imagination.
Pushing himself forward, Zaifyr dropped to the ground, the momentum carrying him to his knees. His hands pressed deep into cold, slippery mud.
There was glass beneath his feet and he tried to avoid it, but did not succeed. Within two steps, his left foot had two shallow cuts. Ignoring the wounds he stared ahead at the dark that, with the faint light of the haunt no longer being blocked by his body, revealed more to him than it had previously done.
“You are not welcome.”
From the dark: guttural, barely understandable.
“You are not welcome.”
He approached the voice, the mud sliding between his toes, the edges of glass threatening to cut him again. He passed the outline of a rotting pew. Before him, a figure began to take shape. He saw a bestial head that could have once belonged to any canine creature, but which was defined by the length of a wolf’s nose and the dull, bared teeth of the same animal. It was made from steel, however, a suit of armor cast for a figure much larger than human.
“You are not—”
Zaifyr’s hand touch the cold metal mid-sentence and the helmet toppled, landing to his left with a clatter. The suit followed, sprawling across the ground. Whoever—whatever—had owned the ancient armor was gone, dead. Perhaps. Perhaps it had fled, leaving once it realized that Ger had no power over it, that the binds that once held it in place as a guardian were broken, that after servitude for millions of years it was free.