by Ben Peek
THE DEAD
I will demand that my brothers and sisters admit that they are not gods …
—Qian, The Godless
1.
After two days of fighting, a sense of loss had grown in Ayae.
It was difficult to explain. In the lull between attacks on the Spine, she tried to reason it through. She stared across the broken ground from the stone wall, the shattered soil littered with bodies and, at the end, three huge catapults, half sunk into the ground. It was not a scene she felt was familiar with her home: it felt like an obscenity, an artist’s work intended to frighten and a horrifying warning for a choice she had to make in life. Every day a new element emerged. On the first day, unable to bring their remaining siege engines onto the field, the Leeran general had ordered boulders thrown to litter the approach and provide solid cover for his soldiers. It had proved a mixed success, and those who made it to the stone wall did so with heavy casualties, only to be driven back into the field.
The general and his soldiers must have expected that, and today green-and-white the Leeran flag had begun to emerge in the killing field, planted by those who had begun to establish small defensive positions behind stone.
None of that explained Ayae’s sense of loss.
Nor was it drawn from any person around her. The grief that she felt from Illaan’s death was different, personal, and as others died around her, abstract.
She had seen his corpse once, out the back of the tent hospital, and she had barely been able to recognize him. It was not just damage that had been done to his body, but the stillness, the emptiness of his remains. The man she had loved was, now, truly gone, an acknowledgment that struck her deeply when she walked back into the hospital, where the sick and dying lay. Though the real hospital had been cleared no injured soldier had felt comfortable entering it, so Reila had ordered makeshift series of tents strung up outside. The block itself looked like a series of giant, white sails, and she had heard a man say that if a strong wind came along, it would lift the city from the ground and allow them all to float to Yeflam in safety.
Zaifyr had been laid in a private corner of Reila’s makeshift office. When Ayae first visited him, she had found the elderly healer sitting by his side, her narrow fingers tracing his left arm.
“I cannot explain why he does not wake up,” she said quietly as Ayae slipped into the fabric chair across from her. “He has no signs of illness. There are no breaks, no welts, no burns, nothing. In comparison, a man and a woman who came in today show signs of rot in their bones. It is similar to the rot that was in those who died in the hospital. A rot that he is without any sign of. Yet here he lies.”
She had said nothing.
“I need to work on a serum. An antidote. On something to help those people.” Next to her hand was a syringe and three vials. “Do you think he would let me take his blood to help with that?”
“I do not know.”
“Do you agree?”
She was taken aback by the question. “Me?”
“Who else can speak for him at this moment?”
She said yes, he would agree, even though she was not sure. She had no idea what would come from it, but she could see little else that could be done and rightly feared that if an outbreak spread, such as was in the hospital, they would all be in a dire situation. As the afternoon’s sun began to set on the second day of fighting, her gaze drifted over the standards on the field, letting her sight settle on the movements around, a glint of steel. Tonight, tomorrow, any one of the people out there could die. It would happen easily. It could happen as it had done so earlier today, with archers picking the movements first, their arrows hitting shields and limbs, until the ladders hit the stone blocks and the Leeran soldiers began to climb. To climb into a wall of shields and swords. To be thrust back to the dirt at the base of the Spine, blood soaking into—
“Bring back memories?”
Meina.
“Not as much as it did before. I see less of Sooia every hour, and more of Mireea,” Ayae said. “You?”
The mercenary leaned against the wall. “I never believed that idea that all battlefields were the same. Some of it is all familiar. The smell of the dead. The flies. The crying. None of that is new. But each city has its own scars that make it unique.”
She pointed to the killing field, to the siege engines. “Especially with Heast’s plan.”
“It certainly will make sure the Leerans remember him, if not the rest of us.”
In contrast to her words, Steel had performed well over the last two days. They had held their section of the Spine with the lowest losses of any company along its length. Word had it that the Mireean Guards in Meina’s charge had already asked Heast if they could work under her command until the end of the siege.
It was easy to see why. The shields the mercenaries had used to escape the mill had also come to the wall and created a second terrifying and mobile defense that parted to reveal swords and pikes. So far it had broken only once, during the morning’s surge over the wall: a dozen soldiers had thrown themselves at the shields, using their combined weight to crash through, though it had cost all their lives. Ayae—further down—had heard Bael’s shout and turned to see the collapse just as he charged into the break, three soldiers behind him. For a moment the line of shields looked as if it threatened to break: it flexed and curled, soldiers shuffling, stringing the line out while they adjusted their position, but it quickly strengthened to cover where it had been broken. Bael formed the new center, bloody and roaring, his huge axe in one hand and the fallen shield in the other—the latter as deadly as the former.
Once the breach was driven back, it was revealed that only one of Steel had died. Meina’s uncle had saved the others who had fallen beneath the push, though two had gone to the hospital.
“It sounds melancholy considering our current state,” Meina said, as if guessing the other woman’s thoughts. “I don’t mean it quite that way, though. You become very matter-of-fact about the dead after a while. You start to treat them like a sword, in that you have favorites that you keep close and you try your best not to get too attached when one breaks.”
“Try to rationalize it when it does?”
“No, don’t do that. Don’t make excuses. My father always said that justification always made a mercenary weak. If it breaks, if you lose it, accept it. Take responsibility for it.”
“Do you believe that?”
“Some days.” She shrugged. “We have been requested by Lady Wagan, the two of us.”
“What for?”
“I was not told, but since more people are showing up sick at the hospital and neither Keeper has been seen attending, we can let our imaginations go wild.”
2.
There was a terrible calm. It lay across the haunt-infested killing ground, familiar in some emotions, unfamiliar in others.
Zaifyr had drifted across the torn-up ground for an indeterminate amount of time. He was no longer aware of day or night and the living were becoming difficult to see. He knew they were there, lurking around the boulders, beneath the flags and behind the sunken siege engines. To him they were like the bones on a dig site, the unseen promise of horror. Even though he could not see them, he was unable to forget them entirely because of the suppressed Leeran soldier he was in. She wanted him to follow the living, to walk through the barricades that her army had built and rejoin them there. Drawn by duty and faith: the urge was easy to resist, but he was without an alternative. He could not return to his body. He feared that when he took hold of the thread to lead him back to himself, the haunts would see their chance to live and swarm him again.
Or so he assumed. It was difficult to know what would happen, since Ger’s death.
The awareness of the god’s death came to him in a wave. It washed over him, invisible yet tangible. It had lifted the incorporeal body of the soldier upward before dropping both to the ground and leaving him caught in a calm that settled around him uncomfortably. T
here was an expectancy to it, as if he was waiting for something important to begin—a calm born unnaturally and dangerously.
He had felt the same in Asila over a thousand years ago, the night before the fires had been lit, three days before his brothers and sisters had arrived.
That night he walked down the twisting path from his castle, the long, dark road to the city below him. He remembered being struck by how much of a metaphor it was, how the physical form of his home and kingdom had become an apt representation of how he felt about his life, the lives of those around him and the dead. It was an author’s thought, a conceit that if it had come to him before he finished his book—that book—before he had sent it to be printed and carried to those important to him, he would have written the words down. But it had not.
It was a month since he had laid his quill down.
A month since he had sent it to his brothers and sisters and heard nothing. Had he expected them to reply? To acknowledge his demands? He had, but he had not been surprised by their silence. Their voices did not matter, anyway: those around him that spoke endlessly, constantly, they were who mattered, they were who he owed.
They asked for food and warmth. For simple desires, denied to them. They asked for the comforts of the living.
Their want was all they knew, all he knew, now.
At the end of his path, looking over the darkly lit city, he had flushed his power through them, granting them their desire.
A thousand years later, standing in the haunt of a woman who had those same demands, the man who had been known as Qian did not know why he had done it. He was aware of walking down the road, but by then his mind had fractured. He had lost track of the years, lost track of the writing. He remembered nothing of the final chapters and had not recognized the end when he read one of the surviving versions at Jae’le’s.
The book had begun as a private history, a map of his inner thoughts in relation to those he had claimed to be his parents. He could remember clearly the anticipation he felt and the rush of ideas, but it faded as the years he spent working on it grew and research took him around the world, to the bodies of those he could reach and to the new gods. By the end of the book he had lost hold of who he was. He had given himself into the suffering of those around him. He had given into their demands and, in turn, issued his own.
He still did not know why, beneath the stone arc that ended his decline into the city of Asila, he had given the dead life. Oh, it was not a real life, but rather a violent corporeality by which their shattered minds could grasp their desires. Afterward, he remembered that uncomfortable quiet of having done what he believed was right.
He had walked the streets, his bare feet navigating the fallen and lost, while his mind was quiet for the first time he could remember. He could see the haunts everywhere, their usually sketched forms solid, filled with color, with the flush of life that they had consumed and the warmth and the satisfaction they felt.
It had remained so the whole day, and then the next; and did so for three more mornings as the morning’s sun rose over the quiet, empty city, until his brothers and sisters arrived.
And then—
Well, then they had fought.
Sitting on the killing field, Zaifyr knew that he should return to his body. Though the calm of Ger’s death was disconcerting, it had soothed the haunts around him. Whatever the wave of force had been—energy or life or something other, a concentration he could not explain but which was linked to Ger’s divine life—it had sated the cold and hunger that the haunts felt. Zaifyr was certain that if he took hold of the line back to his body now, he would be able to follow it, to return himself with none of the threat he had previously felt.
When he prepared to pull himself from the Leeran soldier, prepared himself for that, he felt a new presence. It was akin to the wave that had lifted him after Ger’s death, but not directly so. It lacked the perfection the god had, the completeness. This new presence, this new being with its flaws and failures that were so apparent, reminded him—
Hello, it said.
It reminded him of himself.
3.
The Pale House was quiet when Ayae stepped into it, a contrast to the noise that characterized the city outside. Like the streets, the lobby held only soldiers—and while she doubted that the Mireean Guards inside had once been waiters and bellboys, their presence by the doors and flights of stairwells were a reminder of how militarized the city had become. There were no more citizens in Mireea. There were only soldiers.
Meina led her up the stairs to a narrow hall, two silent guards at the end. Behind them was a suite the size of the floor.
It was furnished in a light, modern touch, dominated by whites and blacks, with steel-framed furniture throughout. In the middle of the room was a large glass table filled with food and drink, the untouched excess of which sprawled obscenely before the occupants. Gazing at the table with a faint look of distaste was Lady Wagan, her clothing somber browns and greens. She was joined by a tired, white-clad Reila, while at the edge of the table, a short, scarred and armored man stood in mix chain and plate. Captain Essa, she assumed. Heast stood away from the center at the large, curtained windows; beside him was the sleeping Lord Wagan. At the side of the latter was Caeli, who stared quietly over the city, mirroring her captain’s gaze.
“Take a seat,” the Lady of the Spine said. “Both of you, help yourself to what is here. If only so I do not feel some crime has happened in my name. How has Steel fared, Captain Meina?”
“Fair.” The mercenary took an orange from the table. “We’ve been able to hold our part of the Spine without any real threat, but we haven’t been tested, yet. Not since the first night. We will be soon enough, however: the Leerans have been slowly making their way through the killing field.”
“Captain Essa?”
“Aye.” His reply was more a sigh than a word. “It’s fairly obvious their strategy is to make a series of paths, but with no easy way up the Spine if we go down, we can do little but watch.”
Meina began peeling the skin. “By tomorrow, I would expect to see bigger pushes.”
“Not tonight?”
“A night attack is a risk, especially for an attacking force who aren’t familiar with the Spine. The Leeran general pushed it once and it cost him. I doubt he would do it again.”
“It will be at dusk, tomorrow.” The Captain of the Spine did not turn from his window. “As the afternoon’s sun sets. It will be our first real test.”
No one disagreed, though Ayae wanted to do so: to her, all the attacks had been strong, all had been very real threats. She had watched men and women in both forces die. Yes, the Mireean losses had been easy to count, far smaller than the Leerans’; but the deaths had been real. Real people had died. They were not numbers, not a way to measure the intent of the enemy or a source for those in charge to support their theories.
But she did not speak. It was her first battle, her first war, even if the horror felt familiar.
“What about the talk of sickness in the city?” Essa asked. “I’ve had a few soldiers go to the hospital feeling ill, but I’ve yet to hear much.”
“That we are addressing now,” Lady Wagan said. “Reila?”
“There is a plague in the city.” The elderly woman’s white robe, so similar to Bau’s, was old and stained by blood and chemicals. “If anyone beneath you—or you yourself—begins to feel a pain in their bones, they need to come to the hospital immediately. There is a vaccine. Last night’s outbreak need not happen again.”
Ayae had not heard of any outbreak. She glanced at Meina, and the mercenary captain gave a faint nod.
“Word of this cure will get out soon enough to ease the panic,” Reila continued. “However, it is a difficult subject for two reasons. The first is the origin of the cure. When people learn where it comes from—and people will learn, as they always do—there will be resistance to it. It will especially be resisted by the Mireeans under your command. They will vi
ew it as a witch’s brew. A warlock’s blood pact. It is not, but—”
“Where does it come from?” Meina asked.
“Zaifyr,” Ayae said, quietly. “From his blood.”
“Yes. You all met him once, though you perhaps did not fully understand who he was.” The Captain of Steel snorted and the healer smiled in response. “Perhaps you understood some, then. He was once a man named Qian, one of the men and women who created the Five Kingdoms. He was also the man, historians argue, who began the destruction of those kingdoms. It is in the remains of Kakar that his capital was based. Because of him, libraries were burned, histories were lost and wars swept our world as those he called brother and sister were hunted, unsuccessfully.
“His reaction to the disease that infects him is unique, a testimony to the power within him. If you watch the blood when it is outside the body—and to do that, you will need a little magic—you can literally watch his cells divide and recombine and alter themselves, rapidly breaking down the infection within him. I do not know if it is unique to him, or if all those cursed (forgive me, Ayae) are similar. All I know is that I have never seen anything like it. However, the making of a cure from it is relatively simple. Due to the nature of his blood when it comes into contact with the infection, it is readily available. For reasons I don’t understand, the cells will cure nothing else within a man or woman, and react to nothing but this disease. For a lot of the people in Mireea, the idea of being injected with a serum that was made from the blood of a cursed man is going to be very difficult to accept.”
And for others, as well, Ayae noticed. While both Lady Wagan and Meina were unmoved, Kal Essa grunted unpleasantly and frowned. At the window, Caeli turned, mirroring the mercenary’s facial expression, a rare break in her discipline.