Leviathan's Blood

by Ben Peek

  LEVIATHAN’S

  BLOOD

  Book Two of the Children Trilogy

  BEN PEEK

  MACMILLAN

  For my mother who, like a spy, keeps two first names, Karen and Elaine Peek

  Acknowledgements

  My partner, Nikilyn Nevins, was the first reader of Leviathan’s Blood, but more importantly, she was the first listener and the first sufferer. No book is made in silence, sadly.

  Tessa Kum and Kyla Ward were, once again, the fabulous first readers who took me to task for all the things I should have done but didn’t. Thanks also to Jessica Cuthbert-Smith and Joy Chamberlain who helped its final shape emerge.

  My agent, John Jarrold, is a fine human, generous with both his time and experience.

  A whole lot of thanks must go to Julie Crisp, primarily. She is the ghost in the machine that makes a book a book. In particular, she is the ghost of this particular book. In the USA, Pete Wolverton is the ghost that haunts his empire – and this book – similarly. Thanks to Sam Eades for organizing me and the publicity stuff. Huge thanks to David Atkinson from Handmade Maps for the superb maps in The Godless. And to Irene Holickit who translated The Godless into German. It was my first piece of work ever translated. Similarly, thanks must go to Laura Carr and Louise Buckley for their work on the book. And to Bella Pagan who, if for nothing else, was willing to give up a table to an Irishman and an Australian because they had beer.

  To everyone else who supported the book – to the readers, reviewers, bloggers – a huge thanks as well.

  Contents

  The White Tree Daily

  Prologue

  The Floating Cities of Yeflam

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  The White Trees of Leviathan’s End

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  A Bird Preceded Him

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  Stone Divisions

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  Your Brother, Your Sister

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  A Fear Whispered in Your Heart and Mind is a Real Fear

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  A Cracked Jar

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  What the Leviathan Saw

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  Three Stories of an Innocent Man

  1.

  2.

  3.

  A Gravedigger’s Name

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  The Eyes of the Queen

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  The Cold Soul Against Your Heart

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  The Inevitability of Responsibility

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  Epilogue

  1.

  2.

  3.

  The White Tree Daily

  • Speaking to You Since 1032 •

  On the Fiftieth Anniversary

  of the Siege of Mireea

  by VYRA RIEMAL

  Once, the gods lived among us.

  My mother told me that. My father, as well. Both were born thousands of years after the War of the Gods took place, and neither would see a living god, not before their deaths in 1023, the year the Leerans laid siege to Mireea.

  They lived their lives in the aftermath of the War of the Gods. The remains of the gods lay around them, as familiar as the tree in their yard, as the bedsheets they slept beneath. Just as we do, my parents awoke in a world that was lit by the first part of the shattered sun rising. Throughout the day they would watch another two parts rise and fall. Outside the doors of their house, they lived on a mountain range that had been built around a god’s corpse. It was normal to them, as normal as the coast that turned all living creatures mad, as normal as the ocean that smelt of blood. They lived – as we all still do – among the remains of the divine beings who created our world. Beings who were dead, but also alive. Beings who were so alien to us that we can only theorize how they saw the world that they created. We suggest, now, that the gods experienced time as a whole, that their consciousness was so complex and large that none of them experienced time in the linear way that we mortal beings do. We believe that their holy bodies are being torn apart by time, by the collapse of their sense of self, so that the past, the present and the future have an effect on them. It is why their very essence and power seeps into our world and changes it.

  Neither my mother nor my father could explain to me why the gods went to war. In the same way, they could not explain to me why the Leerans laid siege to Mireea.

  My parents did not have the chance to understand it. They died, not by sword or arrow, not from any violent act by the Leerans, but from the plague that came to the city. It was through the kindness of others that I was cared for, but even those survivors of the siege did not understand, either, why they had been attacked. That understanding was months away, while a complete understanding would not be available for years, not until the diaries of those who were principal figures were found, or until they themselves spoke about what happened.

  From them, we (and by we, I mean historians like myself) have been able to make great strides into the lives of those who were important in the days before and after the siege. The work is not complete, of course: there are years that are poorly documented, months that are not spoken of, and days that have, strangely, ceased to exist in any recorded form. But we have made great advances in regards to our knowledge of Ayae and Zaifyr, two ‘cursed’ individuals, and the mercenary Bueralan Le.

  Ayae was one of the many children displaced during the Innocent’s seven-hundred-year war in Sooia.

  She arrived at the Mother’s Orphanage in Mireea at the age of five. Like others who grew up in state-run care, she did not speak in depth about her childhood. Many who met her noted that she did not refer to the name of the orphanage itself,
or the matron who died, tragically, in a fire shortly after her arrival. (Her name was Germaine Tislr and she was, it seems, an unpleasant woman, but that is neither here nor there.) Still, conditions were not oppressive within the orphanage, and Ayae and the other children who were cared for within it were given an education. Shortly after completing it, she won a cartographer’s apprenticeship with the eighty-second Samuel Orlan. She was, by all accounts, an excellent apprentice, but there is no suggestion that Orlan considered her a successor to his name – though we do not know if he would have changed his mind, for history intervened before she finished her apprenticeship.

  Shortly before the Leerans laid siege to Mireea, Ayae was attacked in Samuel Orlan’s shop. A fire started while she was inside, but afterwards it was revealed that Ayae suffered not a single burn. Within days, she was identified by the Keepers of the Divine as a child of the gods; or, to use the more common term in Mireea at the time, Ayae was ‘cursed’. She was infected by the power of a god, by Ger, who lay beneath her feet. Many believed that the power would soon take hold of her and consume her, as it had done to others in the past, but it did not. Instead, the two Keepers, Fo and Bau, who had been sent to Mireea by the ‘cursed’ who ruled Yeflam, took it upon themselves to educate her. During that time, Ayae discovered that the two immortals planned to release a plague in Mireea, which would result in the deaths of thousands. This went against the orders that Fo and Bau had been given in Yeflam, and the deaths of the two Keepers allowed for Ayae and the survivors of the siege of Mireea to flee to Yeflam.

  Bueralan Le was originally born in Ooila, into a family of privilege and wealth. When he arrived in Mireea in 1023, however, he was the Captain of Dark, a small mercenary unit of saboteurs. He had been exiled from his homeland seventeen years earlier after taking part in a failed revolution.

  Bueralan and Dark came to Mireea upon the request of the Captain of the Spine, Aned Heast. They arrived on the day that Ayae was revealed to be ‘cursed’ and, indeed, the two met before she was attacked. Bueralan and Dark, however, would not remain in Mireea. The ruler of Mireea, the Lady of the Spine, Muriel Wagan, ordered Dark into Leera, to learn as much about the force that was approaching her as possible. In a last-minute addition, the famous cartographer Samuel Orlan joined them on the journey.

  Orlan had his own motivations for joining Dark, but it was not until they had entered Leera that his intentions were revealed. Orlan betrayed Bueralan in a town called Dirtwater, and the saboteur was taken captive. Shortly after, he was delivered to the Leeran general Ekar Waalstan.

  It was there that Bueralan learned that the Leerans had discovered a new god. Or, that she had discovered them. It is more likely the latter than the former, in truth. The new god had no name, but she inspired a fanaticism in her soldiers that Bueralan had not seen before. While imprisoned, he witnessed a number of blood rituals. During one such ritual, he discovered that Samuel Orlan had returned to Dark and had convinced his soldiers that they should continue with him to Ranan, the capital of Leera. He wanted them to help him kill the new god.

  Unable to free himself, Bueralan found himself back on the Mountain of Ger as the Leerans laid siege to Mireea. He was forced to lead the head of the Leeran priests into the lost city beneath Mireea, to a temple that had been built over the body of the god Ger. The priests planned to take the last essence of the god’s power and put it into Bueralan’s body to return it to their god. In a series of events that is not yet fully understood, a part of Ger intervened. Bueralan killed his captors and then rode to Ranan, only to discover that he was too late to save Dark. The child god within the temple had already killed his soldiers. However, she did not kill him, and neither did she kill the cartographer Samuel Orlan. Instead, she declared both ‘god-touched’, and released them with a terrible gift.

  In the long, complicated history of our world since the War of the Gods, readers will be familiar with Zaifyr by another name, that of Qian.

  Qian was one of the first ‘children of the gods’, one of five men and women who believed that they were gods. History would reveal that all five were simply ‘cursed’, as Ayae would be called, ten thousand years later. Yet, with the four other men and women, whom he called his brothers and sisters, he would conquer much of the world and begin the age known to us as the Five Kingdoms. That age would end with the publication of a book by Qian entitled The Godless. In it, he said that he was not a god. It is a difficult book to find now – it suffered, as did so much in terms of books and art, in the wars that followed after the Five Kingdoms ended – but The Godless laid much of the base from which we form our current understanding of the gods, and the men and women who are infected by their essence. Unfortunately, at the time of his writing the book, Qian had reportedly succumbed to madness, a result of having heard and seen the dead for so long. His brothers and sisters were forced to imprison him for a thousand years in a tower that they built in Eakar.

  Upon his release from his prison, Qian took the new name Zaifyr. He became something of a wanderer in that time. There are stories of him appearing in Gogair, Faer, even as far away as the White Empire. It is said that he came to Mireea at the behest of his brother Jae’le, who had been watching the Leerans’ god for years. It was here that Zaifyr met Ayae and helped her better understand her own powers. In doing so, however, he came into conflict with the two Keepers, Fo and Bau. When the former released a plague in Mireea, Zaifyr was brought to death’s door. In such a state, he met the Leeran god in the soul of a dead soldier. She offered Zaifyr the opportunity to join her. However, in doing so, she revealed that she was responsible for the purgatory in which the dead found themselves. She said that the dead, and the living, were hers to do with as she pleased. Furious, Zaifyr vowed to destroy her and, when he awoke, he killed Fo and Bau to set into motion the events that led the Mireeans to Yeflam.

  Imagine yourself there. As we pause to remember the Siege of Mireea this weekend, imagine how it felt to stand beside these three people. As you sit down to eat beside your family, or to walk through the displays, or read the histories that will be published, imagine yourself beside these three people who carried so many of our hopes unknowingly.

  Imagine:

  It is the year 1023. The calendar – a relatively new one, considering the world’s long history – is edging towards a new year.

  Mireea has fallen. Time has acknowledged Ger’s death. The mountain that he lay beneath is crumbling as his divine body rots. Lady Muriel Wagan and her captain, Aned Heast, have taken the survivors of their city to Yeflam, where they now must enter the deadly game of politics between the Keepers of the Enclave and the Traders’ Union. On the other side of the Spine of Ger, the Leeran forces are preparing to invade the Kingdoms of Faaisha. Betrayal awaits there. And in Leera, two men leave a cathedral, a terrible item in their grasp.

  The world I knew is being unmade; the world you know is awakening.

  Vyra Riemal is the noted historian and author of the Chronicles of Refuge. Originally born in the city of Mireea, she now makes her home in the city of Lumu in Yeflam and has done so for the last thirty-two years. She is the owner of the famous bookshop Surfacing at the End of the World, the only bookstore to have seen two sword fights, one knife fight, a friendly ghost, and an inordinate amount of romance. (Which was possibly the reason for both sword fights, but, she assures you, not the knife fight.) She shares the space with her husband, her granddaughter, and a pair of black cats who are ‘cursed’. Well. Most likely.

  She began with the words,

  ‘Do you know who is lying to you?’

  —Tinh Tu, Private Diary

  Prologue

  Leviathan’s Blood was what Ja Nuural’s mother had always called the ocean.

  He grew up a day’s walk from the coast and, in the early years of his life, his mother and he would make a pilgrimage to the empty beach each summer. They would leave in the evening, after the bright, broken shard of the afternoon’s sun had sunk, but the heat remained. I
n the dark his mother would hold his hand as she walked silently beside her brothers and sisters to the beach. In the morning’s light, his extended family would build a bonfire on the sand – often in the remains of the previous year’s – and they would eat and drink through the day and the next night. They would tell the story of how, on the day the Leviathan died, the blood from her body filled the ocean, raising the sea-level and turning the ocean black. For her part, his mother would tell the story of what happened to everything that had lived in the ocean. All the creatures in its depths, she said, were changed. Some were deformed. Some were turned violent when they had not previously been. But all had become poisonous to the men and women who ate them.

  The stories were laments from the ancestors of fishermen. The Nuural family had nurtured the words for generations and, on those long nights, Ja had lain beneath the smeared stars and dull shape of the moon and seen visions of men and women striding beneath the waves. He tried to hold his breath as they had – to hold it longer than any other person – and he imagined holding a spear made from the bones of a creature that had died in the intricate coral reefs of red and gold that had been the Leviathan’s shrines.

  He could still hear his mother’s stories, two decades after her death, when he walked across the sand as the father of his own adult child. He could still hear her voice clearly on the afternoon that he saw the ship Glafanr.

  He had come to check the rods that leant out into the black ocean. The remains of the day’s butterflies were beneath his feet, their corpses cracking in the sand and on the stone as he reached the rods and the nets that lay between. The lines had been set in the morning, shortly before the first of the broken suns rose, but the day had yielded little. The heavy lines were slack in the water; he was not terribly surprised. The night was a better time to catch and he hoped that by the morning the lines would be taut with an inedible creature.

  The heavy wooden rods had been attached to steel settings sunk deep into the rocks at the end of the beach. The coloured corpses of butterflies lay in wet circles at the ends of the poles but were mostly clustered around the spools of the catgut lines. The lines had enough length for most of the black ocean’s large creatures to tire themselves out on, but he knew that in the depths of Leviathan’s Blood were creatures that could break the line, even tear the rod from its setting and drag it away as if it were a twig.