Leviathan's Blood

by Ben Peek

  The rising tide had washed the catgut lines and butterfly corpses into the rock pool between the poles, tangling the lines of both rods. The pool – twice his size in length and easily his height in depth – had been cut by hand before a net was settled into its base. It was there that the men and women of the village would pull what they caught from the ocean and hold them for examination. There, the caught beast would be marked and, occasionally, transported elsewhere. The last thing Ja needed was for the lines and rope to be entangled by the morning, so he bent down to free the lines and carefully pull it out of the pool.

  It was when he stood that he saw the ship.

  A single ship, far out on the black waves, yet so large, so imposing, that in the fading light of the afternoon’s sun, he could see the red of its sails.

  Glafanr. He did not speak the word aloud. Aela Ren. He would not say the name of its captain, either. He— ‘The Innocent,’ he said in a voice that was not yet a whisper.

  Ja’s daughter, Iz, had been the first to tell him the rumours about the ship. Her dark, sharp eyes had pierced him to his chair when, two weeks earlier, she had burst into his hut, trailing dirt and bright midday sun through the door. She stood in the middle of the room and spoke rapidly, but quietly, like his mother had. There was little other resemblance: Iz was tall and lean, her skin a deep dark black, not the dark brown, heavy woman his mother had been. In his mid-forties, Ja had more in common with his mother than with his daughter. She took after her mother, his wife, who had died a dozen years ago.

  ‘The wreckage of a ship has washed up on shore,’ she had said. ‘The crew had been nailed to parts of the ship: to the hull, to the deck, to the mast, to the chairs. Nothing had been stolen: they wore their jewellery and their payrolls had been left intact. They were returning from Gogair—’

  ‘Some people,’ he said to her, ‘do not like slavers. They think their money is tainted.’

  ‘The deaths – they are his.’

  He told her that every wreckage, every lost ship, was attributed to Aela Ren. If it was not the man himself, it was Glafanr, his huge, stationary ship that had been moored on the coast of Sooia for seven hundred years. She knew that, just as he did. She knew better than to repeat the stories she heard. He had been pleased when she had nodded, when she had agreed with him and had promised not to repeat it in the village.

  The next morning, two young families, nine people in total, left the village. It was nine that he could not afford to lose, but he had not been surprised by who left. Both families had come down to the coast, lured by the gold in his work, by the Fifth Queen’s financial support for what he did; but neither had believed in the task. They had not understood why the witches did not do the work, why they did not work with the blood in the ocean, why they did not accelerate the process of breeding out the poison and disease in fish. He had told them the stories of what had happened to the witches and warlocks who had tried just that, but he did not believe that they accepted what he said. They had never stopped asking him why it was necessary to breed the fish the way they did, why they needed to breed both the large and the small, the dangerous and the sedate, and why all must have the poison of the ocean removed from their flesh.

  But they had not left because of the work.

  ‘It is him.’ The oldest of the women, Un Daleem, had been the one to tell him. A large, raw-boned woman with black skin, she wore a small dark stone around her neck like a blind third eye. ‘Aela Ren. He is coming here, to the Fifth Province. To Ooila.’

  ‘You do not know that,’ he said.

  ‘I hear the stories.’

  ‘There are always stories.’

  ‘It is different this time.’

  Her gaze never left the empty black waves and the long lines of sunlight that ran towards the village like blades made from the morning’s sun.

  ‘I have never believed the rumours of his arrival,’ she said, after a moment. ‘Not before this. My mother told them to me the day I was born and every day until her death. Aela Ren will come. The Innocent is coming. But I would tell her that Aela Ren has had his war on Sooia for seven hundred years. He will not leave that land. That is why no other country ever invaded. Why no one has gone to help the poor people there. But now . . . now is different, Ja. Glafanr has been seen. More than one sailor, more than one ship – you have heard that as well as I have. And now that wreckage washes up half a day’s ride from here? That was not the work of a raider, or a mercenary, or another country. That was him. That was the Innocent and his army and Leviathan’s Blood has brought the dead crew as warning to us.’

  That had been a week ago, and he recalled Un Daleem’s words with a chill as he stood on the wet rocks, staring at Glafanr.

  It is not the Innocent’s ship, he told himself. Red sails are used by more than one ship on the black ocean. And besides . . . besides, as he strained his fading eyesight, he could not see movement on deck.

  The ship was abandoned, surely. It was derelict and nothing more.

  The words felt more like hope than truth, but he repeated them. Ships struck bad weather. Ships tore their sails. Ships broke their keel. Ships were abandoned for many reasons, and Ja Nuural ran through the list as he made his way back along the beach, the afternoon’s sun setting in a dark orange light behind him.

  In the village he nodded to the few people he passed on the streets, but he did not tell them about the ship. If they noted that there was something strange about him – a tension, perhaps – they did not comment. The empty houses that stared at all of them with blank eyes gave them more than enough reason to think he was troubled.

  Three years ago, he had petitioned the Fifth Queen for funding, not just for his work with the fish, but for the village. The old Queen had died and it was said that the new one was sympathetic to what he was doing, so he wrote to her. Originally, he had named the village Stone River, but the name had never taken, and the people who lived in it, and those in the area, simply referred to it as the village. No capitalization, no title. He had used the name Stone River when he had petitioned the Fifth Queen, but when she had approved the funding for more buildings and new wells, she had signed it to Ja Nuural, ‘of the village’. Yet, despite her support, he had never been able to grow the village as he wanted, had never been able to attract enough people. Many of the new houses sat like the dark husks of the butterflies, waiting to be crushed and reborn. It was widely believed that the Fifth Queen would not fund him for another year once she found out how little her gold had bought.

  The thought entwined with the image of the ship – not Glafanr, but the ship, he repeated – and he thought of how much he had worked to build the village, how much he had sacrificed of his life, of his youth. He considered that as he walked out the other side of the village.

  The woods began shortly past the beach, and it was there that a series of large wide rock pools awaited. There were over twenty, including two large enough to hold five creatures that were twice the size of him. These large beasts had long, ugly teeth. Their grey skin shimmered beneath the surface when they were close, but the light disappeared when they went deeper – and they were often in the depths for days at a time. In the old books, fishermen had called them sharks, but Leviathan’s Blood had changed them. Their fins were made from hard bone and their dark eyes wept a black mucus at times of great anger and hunger. They had lost two villagers to the sharks over the last five years, but he still regarded the work as a success: three of the five had only known the clean water of the pool.

  In another year, perhaps, they would be able to pull out the original sharks and butcher their bodies for research.

  He passed the sharks’ placid pool, moving to the others. Each was still and silent. In the last of the pools he stopped at, a soft phosphorescent light had begun to emerge as the afternoon’s sun finally disappeared. Pausing, he watched tiny minnows dart back and forth, the light becoming a bloom that lit up the area. They were Ja’s favourite – caught not with rods, but long
nets they threw out into the ocean from a boat. He would often spend the early hours of the evening watching them, enjoying their delight in the clean water, but he could not do it this night. Seeing the light, he thought of it as a beacon that would lead a single, awful man and his army up the beach from where they landed.

  The thought followed him to bed, but the sight of the faceless soldiers did not linger in his dreams. No, his dreams were of the deck of the ship he would not call Glafanr, and of its gentle sway and its silence.

  He dreamed that he was standing on it.

  Slowly, Ja approached the railing of the ship and looked into the ocean. The water’s surface was like smoke and he thought he saw shapes beneath it. Tiny shadows at first, like the minnows he had seen earlier. They flickered and flickered until, without any warning, a shape rushed beneath the ship, a beast so huge and of such monstrous, unprecedented, size that Ja could not take it in as a single creature. His mind worked furiously to piece together the shape, the mountain-like head, the sharp ridges of its back, the long, long tail that curved up as the beast turned in a spiral and began to descend into the water. It was like a country, a kingdom spreading out around him and, with a sudden onset of panic, Ja realized that the creature was plunging downwards only in preparation to rise. In his mind he saw it bursting out of the black water, its open mouth a huge, horrific cavern capable of swallowing entire nations in a single bite and plunging him into a world where his very being would be broken down, where it would be consumed by the acid of the beast’s stomach as if he were nothing.

  A hand touched his shoulder.

  ‘Father.’

  His daughter.

  ‘Father, you must wake,’ she whispered. ‘There is a boat approaching.’

  He wanted her words to be another part of the dream, but her hand shook him again, and he groggily opened his eyes.

  Outside his house, the light came from the stars and the moon, but by the time Ja had made his way to the beach, lamps had been lit, and the people of the village had begun to form a line that he had to push through. ‘I am sorry,’ Iz said softly, standing beside him on the start of the beach. ‘I saw it just before the two guards did.’

  Out in the dark water, a single boat approached, a single figure in it.

  A single man, he knew.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, finally.

  ‘What—’ His daughter hesitated, aware of the crowd listening to their words. ‘The children should be sent away.’

  ‘We do not know it is him,’ he said, not believing his words.

  ‘It is a survivor from a ship, that is all. A survivor.’

  On Leviathan’s Blood, a wave rose, and the small boat rose with it.

  ‘We will greet him,’ he said, as the boat rode the wave down, as the oars in it rose and fell in unison. ‘We will send three people down to help him pull his boat ashore, to help if the man needs help. We will tell him what we do here. We will be proud. We will tell him that we are trying to change the world. That we are fixing the damage that was done by the gods. We will tell him that, but we will be cautious. We will give crossbows and bows to others. We will make sure that everyone is armed. We will send the young children into the forest with the older children. We will not flee. We will not be ashamed of what we are doing here.’

  ‘Father,’ his daughter said softly. ‘We need not approach at all.’

  ‘We will not be afraid,’ he said.

  The Floating Cities of Yeflam

  In Leera, she is known as ‘our god’ or simply ‘the god’; but abroad she is called ‘the Leeran God’, or ‘the child’.

  The gods of the past were best described as a belief defined by function, but the child is not like that. The first descriptions of her to emerge were of a blonde-haired white girl, no older than seven; but after Mireea fell and the Spine of Ger began to crumble, other visions of her became known. In some, she was a baby, or a toddler; in others, a young woman, a teenager. While each may have been different, they were linked by her youth, defined by it, in fact, for it is from her youth that she crafts her identity.

  —Tinh Tu, Private Diary

  1.

  A thousand years ago, Zaifyr’s sister tried to kill him.

  She had not been alone. Aelyn had been one of four who had come into his kingdom, drawn by the reports of massacres, by the reports of madness.

  By his madness.

  In the ruins of Asila, in the city that shared the name of the country he ruled, Zaifyr and his family fought. They fought a day and a night. Yet, he could not remember how it had started. He could remember his family asking him to come with them. Could recall them telling him that they did not want to hurt him. But he could not remember who spoke those words. The dead had been so strong and vocal beside him that it was their words he heard before any others. They stood beside him – a new family, a family forever growing – and for the first time in his life he knew that he had made the dead happy. He had given them not just life, but themselves. He had made them as whole as he could. Oh, he knew that he had done that only through a horrific act; even then he knew that, but he was thankful for their happiness. They were no longer hungry. No longer cold. They could remember their names and who they had once been. In their joy, their bodies lit not just the city, but the whole nation in an unearthly blue glow. It remained until his family began to speak to him. Then the light turned bright and hard with their anger. The dead hurled themselves at his brothers and sisters. They tore at them. They burned all the new life that they had in them. And his brothers and sisters met them. Jae’le. Tinh Tu. Eidan. And Aelyn, the youngest. He did not know how she came to be behind him. He had lost track of her towards the end. That is all he knew. When he became aware of her again she was approaching silently between the broken walls and past the corpses of the men and women and children. She was dirty and bloodied, but she was not weak. She was never weak. Her hands flexed strong fingers. With little effort, she could break his neck. He knew that. As she drew closer, he realized that she no longer fought to subdue him. Perhaps she had been right to put that aside. Perhaps she was still right, even now. Beneath him, a series of thick lines began to split open along the ground, and the head of a massive construction began to emerge. It was Eidan’s creation, but it was the moment Aelyn had been waiting for. The rocky head gave way to a body, to thick arms, to huge legs. She rushed forward, she reached out . . . and as she did so, the cold hands of a dozen haunts closed around her, their bodies appearing out of the air as his power flushed through them. Not all the dead had fed on flesh and blood for weeks, not all had become as close to human as they would ever be again, and it was these dead that lifted her, these that wanted her, that needed—

  ‘Zaifyr.’ A thousand years later his sister Aelyn Meah, the Keeper of the Divine, the Head of the Enclave of Yeflam, stood before him. ‘Brother.’

  And it did not matter that she thought herself a god.

  He offered her half a smile. ‘Sister.’

  The two stood on a road, the Southern Gate of Yeflam behind her, and the Mountains of Ger behind him. He had not seen her in decades, but now he stood before her, his hands chained, a prisoner for killing two men who had been sent to Mireea on her word.

  ‘There is still time to turn away,’ she said quietly. She wore a pale robe of blue and her dark hair ran to her shoulders, grown out since he had last seen her. ‘Time to stop this.’

  ‘There isn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t bring this war to Yeflam.’

  ‘I already have.’ He raised his manacled hands. ‘I killed Fo and Bau.’

  From behind her, voices rose. They did not come from the twenty-three men and women who stood near Aelyn and himself. In the centuries after Asila, his sister had remade herself and remade her empire. She drew to herself immortal men and women like herself – like him – and had taken the title Keeper of the Divine. She convinced each of them that they would one day be gods. She allowed them to stand beside her as she created an art
ificial stone continent across Leviathan’s Throat. Of the men and women who stood before him now, Zaifyr knew six. They had been alive before he had been placed in his crooked prison after Asila had crumbled. Before the hungry haunts had lifted Aelyn into the sky and begun to tear at her skin. Before the stone giant had reared to its full height. Before he had been forced to release her to stop the heavy hand coming crashing down on him.

  No, the sound of voices did not come from them. To him, the Keepers had nothing to say. But the long, tangled mass of people who lined the bridge into Yeflam, the people who called the artificial nation home, did. They had not liked Fo the Healer and Bau the Disease: the voices that they raised were not for them. The sounds of disapproval were aimed at the men and women who stretched behind Zaifyr, the Mireean people who had fled their home and come here for sanctuary. Most of all they were objecting to the woman who now left the head of the Mireean people and came to stand beside him as he lifted his chained hands.

  ‘Lady Wagan.’ Aelyn did not look at the woman who had led the people down the Mountains of Ger to Yeflam. ‘You have done me a service,’ she said. ‘You have done Yeflam a service.’

  Muriel Wagan, the Lady of the Spine, replied that she had only been respecting Yeflam law.

  Zaifyr smiled at her words.

  ‘I will offer you sanctuary for bringing my brother to me,’ his sister replied. ‘For bringing him to stand trial for the murder of Fo and Bau.’

  ‘We ask for no more,’ Lady Wagan said.

  Zaifyr had watched Aelyn try to prevent his arrival during the three-week march down the trembling Mountains of Ger.

  She had tried through her representative, Faje – a tall, soft-spoken man whose brown skin disintegrated across his body, leaving blotches of pale pink. He had attempted to convince not just Muriel Wagan and her people that they should not come to Yeflam, but Zaifyr as well. He had spoken to them about the need for Yeflam to remain neutral in the war between Mireea and Leera. He did not want war to spread over both sides of the Spine of Ger, he said. He tried to warn Lady Wagan away with dire predictions of how the presses of Yeflam would treat her and her people. He told her that the ‘free’ presses would be without mercy, that factions within Yeflam would seek to exploit both her and the situation. Those words, Zaifyr knew, were also meant for him. He had smiled when Faje had turned to address him with similar concerns. He had not needed to say a word to the mortal man. Faje’s dark eyes had reflected the knowledge that his words were falling flat before the charm-laced man, just as they did before Muriel Wagan.