by Ben Peek
Zaifyr stopped her. “That’s probably what infected him.”
Her hand balled into a fist.
“You see the money?” He pointed to what lay on the floor beside the bed, beneath a pair of the birds.
“He wouldn’t leave money like that.”
“No.” Zaifyr approached the bed, pulled off the second case. “We must have interrupted her before she could get it properly stashed away.”
“Her?”
“The perfume.”
It was there, a faint, delicate fragrance already disintegrating. Zaifyr bent down and, using the case, picked up one of the birds. “Should you do that?” she asked.
“It should be fine.” He glanced up, looking at something that she could not see. “They are looking for him.”
The birds. She realized with a chill that he was looking at the dead birds.
“Here.” Holding the bird, he approached the bookshelf against the wall. Books had tumbled from it, scattered across the floor, but the debris was only half complete. A pair lay open, their pages ripped, as if something had been held inside. “Did he keep treats for the birds here?”
“They had liked to perch there.”
His hand reached out, and he turned, revealing a small piece of twine. “Something for their legs, perhaps.”
“We can take the bird to Reila,” she said, quietly. The implication that Illaan was using his birds to send messages was not surprising. He had always been proud of his training of the green creatures. But the fact that someone had killed them, that someone had come in search of the messages that they carried, and that they had seemingly found them, even as Zaifyr and Ayae entered his house, left her strangely empty. “Maybe their bodies will tell her more.”
8.
He watched the sprawling Leeran Army stop from his perch on the back of the cart:
It began in hand signals, the general lifting his right fist after the afternoon’s sun had peaked. Two young boys and one girl began running back through the lines from beside him. As they did, others in position raised their hands and silently the army ground to a halt. It left the saboteur with a strange feeling in his stomach not estranged from awe, watching as picket lines were struck, horses and cattle watered and rubbed down, tents and camps unrolled. He had never seen an army of its size move with such synchronization, such cohesion.
He had not been spoken to after Waalstan left him, neither by the general or others, but he had been fed twice as his cell warmed. Warm water and cold food, both delivered by silent soldiers, neither of them offering him conversation. That did not bother him, but he knew it would in time. Samuel Orlan would have reached Dark and, while Bueralan believed that they would find him and sight him from a distance before they agreed to go anywhere with him, he knew that they would eventually agree to his plan. The old cartographer held the key that would unlock his cage, allow him to step out of it.
At least, that was what he would tell Zean and the others.
Bueralan had to free himself, and right now it looked impossible. There was no weak link in the guards, no immediate chink in their armor that he could exploit, but patience would be a virtue in relation to that. However, the longer he remained in the cage, the less likely he would be to keep his patience. That, he knew, was his immediate danger.
As the afternoon’s sun sank behind the dense treetops and the humidity began to recede, poles were erected around an empty patch of muddy grass. They were lit, but differently to the fires that had begun to emerge through the camp, the fire burning brighter, cleaner, fueled by oil rather than wood, Bueralan assumed. As they burned, soldiers approached the cart that he was in and, stepping past him, lifted the podium out. He watched them wordlessly position it in the middle of the grass.
Later, a shadow emerged beside him, pushing a plate of food through the bottom of the cage. “You look like a man with urges to stand upright, saboteur.”
Bueralan took the plate. “Let me out for a walk, Lieutenant?”
“I don’t have a leash.” Dural, still in his leather and chain, pulled himself onto the back of the cart and eased himself down before the map table, his legs stretched out. “If I let you out now, I would just have to kill you.”
The old leather boots were within reach. “We couldn’t have that,” he said, picking a piece of barely cooked meat from the plate. “I don’t suppose this is one of your men?”
Dural’s smile twisted one side of his face. “One of our cattle, freshly slaughtered for tonight. The general wants your strength to remain.”
“So kind of him.” Beneath the meat there was mashed potato, awash with blood and fat. “How does he plan to talk to the entire army from here?”
“Patience, saboteur. All will be revealed soon enough. When he speaks, you will be the first foreigner to hear him. I hope you appreciate that.”
Bueralan scooped a piece of meat through the mash. “That why you’re here?”
“Everyone must be attentive.”
The saboteur smiled and shook his head. Both he and Dural knew that he would not interrupt the speech, just as both knew that the presence of the soldier had nothing to do with security and everything to do with gauging his response. Dural lifted a canteen of water and took a drink, his feet crossing before the cage.
The lieutenant was a career soldier, a man Bueralan suspected had volunteered at a young age, leaving the farm, or the son of five children with no family future available to him. His unassuming, easy bearing, the chain mail old but well cared for and the speech with its slight roughness told the saboteur that he was not a man who had purchased his position. In Bueralan’s experience, Dural as he was now was a soldier who would not want to progress further, a man who believed he had enough responsibility one step up from sergeant, and did not seek to add to his burdens with rank and privilege.
Soon, a silence fell over the camp, amplifying the snap of fire and the movement of animals around him as the general stepped up to his podium.
At first, Bueralan did not recognize Waalstan. Whereas before he had appeared as an affluent man with a sword purchased by or gifted to him, he now appeared in a heavy suit of ceremonial plate armor. Polished until it shone, the steel verged on being liquid white beneath the fires that surrounded him, while the fine sword he had worn earlier hung at his side by a clean, but well-worn leather strap that held both the weight of it and the bright, heavy gauntlet hands that rested upon its hilt.
“My friends.” His voice was clear, carried easily. “My friends, we are drawing closer to our destination, to the start of our crusade.
“I have said before that when you look beside you, when you look at the brother and sister who stands beside you, who will fight with you, that you must cherish them now. There is a sad truth about war, whether it be for the noblest of intentions such as ours, or the basest, and that truth is that no man or woman is safe from death. When we are done, your brothers, your sisters, your family, could very well be gone.”
The audience was attentive, solemn. In the back of his throat, the greasy taste of the bloody meat grew, but when Bueralan spat to the ground, his spittle was clean.
“It is a risk we take. We are faithful. The Faithful. That is how we will be known soon, not as Leeran, not as men and women who worked this land, who toiled, who struggled, no. We will be known as those who have faith. Those who do not enter battles to take, or to steal, but to bring a truth. To bring the truth.
“Tomorrow, we will cross the border and march on the trails that lead to Mireea, to the city beneath which Ger lies entombed, a city of capital and greed. Tomorrow, we will leave our homeland. Our true tests will begin there—for we will be tempted, first by our own fear, by the threat of battle, and then by our bodies as we endure what has been asked of us, as we embark on making not just an empire but on saving the divine and freeing it from the shackles about it.
“Our enemy anticipates us. They have sent spies into our forces. One, as no doubt you have heard, is kept in a cage besi
de me.” Uncomfortably, Bueralan lowered his plate as the gaze of all those around him turned. Infamy as a symbol, as a representation of what they fought, a grounding for the new recruits. The saboteur had a grudging admiration for Waalstan. “He is a man who works for money, whose loyalty is bought, who can be your friend one day, your enemy another. He is a symbol of those that you must be vigilant against, brothers and sisters. Do not underestimate him and do not mistake him for the men and women you march against. Yes, he is hired by those who perch above us, but as we approach their majestic wall, know that at their core they are not purchased men and women.
“They are people who have made their homes on the back of a god and that god will soon die. Without us, without our faith, all of him will be lost. The people on that mountain will allow that to happen. They will continue in this world that we find ourselves, never truly aware of what has been lost.
“But we will know what has been lost.
“We are the Faithful.”
Behind General Waalstan, a white stallion emerged. It was drawn out of the shadows by a soldier, but the animal moved slowly and majestically, as if it knew that every eye had turned to it, that it was now the center of all attention.
The taste of blood in the back of Bueralan’s mouth grew as Waalstan drew his sword.
“Brothers and sisters, we make a sacrifice now, on the eve of our war. It is a sacrifice not to her, not to She who has given us so much, but a sacrifice to us from Her. We make it with the eight stallions that she sent with us, that she blessed for this moment, that she gave, to reinforce the faith that moves us.”
With one swift move, he drove his sword into the neck of the horse.
Bueralan expected it to cry out, but it was silent, even when the Faithful’s general withdrew his sword and drove it into the ground. Even then, the horse did not fall. The killing blow bled profusely and, after a moment, the greasy taste of blood in Bueralan’s mouth grew stronger, as if his own blood threatened to spill out of his mouth. Yet he knew immediately that what he was not tasting was either the meat, or his own blood, but the magic in the air, the display of power that was unlike anything the saboteur had ever felt. Raw, and without finesse, it washed over him, over the camp around him, and over the entire army as General Ekar Waalstan sank to his knees before the still standing horse.
There, he cupped his hands, and drank.
As all the Faithful did.
BLOOD TIES
There were five of us, five to form a family, five to fight and squabble, to love and hate. Jae’le and myself were the oldest, and Aelyn and Eidan, the youngest. The middle sibling was Tinh Tu, quiet, dangerous Tinh Tu. She was the connective tissue for us, the bridge for generations, the mediator for our arguments, our fights. We required her to be that, for we were the children of the gods. We had come to claim what our parents had left. We came to claim land, to claim people, to claim minds—and, like so many children of a worthy inheritance, we did not plan to take what was ours in terms of equity.
—Qian, The Godless
1.
From the roof of The Pale House, Heast’s view of Mireea was of that of a misshapen scar connected to the stone line of Ger’s Spine. Throughout it, the streets, houses and markets were divided by the tissue of heavy wooden gates. After months of work, the gates rose across the skyline in blocks of shadow, complete with a busy network of builders and soldiers. Secured into place, they tightened, checked and rechecked, before reporting to him.
And it was in one of those reports, closest to the Spine itself, that he learned that the Leeran Army had begun to make its way up the mountain.
2.
Feeling ill, and pressed against the black bars of his cage in an attempt to stretch out as much as he could, Bueralan watched the Leeran Army as if he had not seen it before.
After the ritual with the white horse, the soldiers who had drunk from it—who had drunk more blood than he believed could be in a beast—had butchered the remains of the animal, mincing it in the remaining blood before putting it into the feed of their animals. The power of the ritual had continued to hang over the long, sprawling camp of the army. The beasts had eaten the meal in eerie silence, watched by their silent owners, their hands stroking their necks, holding the bags for the most part, but at times bringing it to the mouths much like a parent to a child. The camp’s silence kept until the morning, when the buzz of insects announced the return of a sense of normality, but just the sense of it. The morning’s sun rose and a strangeness—connected, he knew, with the blood magic he had been witness to—gripped Bueralan as he gazed at the soldiers around him, seeing the discipline that was at their core, but now with a darker edge. He watched dogs vomit blood only to lick it up, horses shift awkwardly, pigs lie panting, and soldiers offer food and items to each other without words, their understanding and knowledge of each other an intangible part of their world, reaching such an extent that he watched a young man and woman begin to file each other’s teeth, a damaged courtship ritual. He’d been left to his own devices once the ritual had begun, Dural had left him, and since then it had been as if he did not exist. Even his greasy, bloodstained plate remained on the wooden slats of the wagon.
It was that plate that moved first when the cart lurched, lodging itself in one of Waalstan’s blank books.
Bueralan was not a man who avoided blood magic philosophically, though he had no talent for it himself. The witches of his homeland promised much when a mother came to them with a new pregnancy, and though he had little time for the politics of rebirth, the women who held tiny bottles of kept souls were not without power. At a young age he had broken his arm—he had, like most children, been adventurous when he should not have been—and his mother had taken him to a witch who had cut open her thumb and, after smearing blood across his arm, mended the bone in one of the most painful moments of his young life. It was not until he was older that he realized his mother had allowed the pain to be caused deliberately, to instill in him a sense of personal self-preservation.
Yet, he had never seen blood magic on the scale that he had seen it the night before. He had never seen it so raw, as if it were a child’s fist, smashing across an arrangement of toys. If he had been able to step outside his cage, to follow Dural to the white horse, Bueralan knew that he would have. The knowledge that he would have drunk the horse’s blood appalled him, yet, he did not believe that General Waalstan was the originator of the power. It would be easy to fall back upon the assertion that the unknown man was a warlock, that he held the Leeran Army—and indeed, the Leeran nation—in his thrall, but Bueralan believed that the man had no more power other than the one he exerted from rank. Waalstan was as much a victim of last night’s magic as he was, though admittedly a much more willing one. As Bueralan’s stomach began to rebel beneath the hot day and rough journey, he remembered how he had seen Waalstan rise at first light, his body coated in a thin sheen of sweat; for a moment, Bueralan had thought he was confused by what he saw before him, that as he stood before thousands of men and women, he did not recognize a single one of them, nor the land he stood upon, and the direction he was marching. It did not last long, for the hunch of Waalstan’s shoulders had straightened as he took a second and third step, and the ease he held himself returned, but Bueralan thought he had glimpsed an important revelation in regards to the general.
It was the She of Waalstan’s speech that Bueralan returned to as the cart made its rough way across the ground, drawing closer to the Spine of Ger, his body uncomfortable against the warming bars, the meal from the night before sitting worse and worse in his stomach. Pushing it aside, he focused on the nameless figure who was the cause of such inspiration, who had sent the white horses to be slaughtered. She could be a witch, perhaps, or one of the men and women who had woken to find that what had been contained within the bodies of the gods had found its way into her own. Both would be rare, but neither would be unheard of, especially the latter. No “cursed” figure intent on violence and conquest
had emerged in Bueralan’s lifetime, but he had grown up in Ooila, where the Five Queens modeled their power after the Five Kingdoms, after the men and women who had conquered much of this part of the world, believing they were gods.
Before him, the cart hit a ditch. His stomach heaved and he reached for the bars on either side of him, hearing a voice as he did.
“I am afraid, mother.”
A man’s voice, but a voice he did not recognize, a voice that did not come from around him. The cart pulled itself slowly out of the ditch, rocking his cage as it did.
“You have no need to be afraid.” It was a woman’s voice, strong and confident. “We are not people who fear death, for whom the unknown is but darkness. We are watched and cared for, soldier. We are known and held. We are loved, like no other human has been loved. You must never forget this as you approach battle. You must wear it proudly. You must wear it without doubt.”
There was no reply and, in an attempt to still his protesting stomach, Bueralan lowered his head between his knees and breathed deeply and slowly.
3.
After taking the birds to Reila, Ayae and Zaifyr had returned to Illaan’s house to wait and watch for whoever had been in it. They did the same the next day, but after picking up the cages, cleaning the bedroom and watching Zaifyr read from various books, it became clear to Ayae that no one would. Uncomfortable in the house and with Zaifyr—the sight of him reading blended with her memory of better times with Illaan—she suggested that they leave. With nothing new to report to Heast, they returned to the beer garden of Red Moon and sat in the empty, hot square, listening to the sound of the city and discussing what they had seen distractedly. It was, she thought, as if her discomfort had spread to all around her, and she left early.