by Ben Peek
A haunt waited there, pointing upwards, indicating the direction the priests had taken. As he put his foot on the first step, a guard appeared before him. Even as she reached for her sword, the haunt that had directed him leapt forward and snatched the blade from her scabbard in a small burst of Zaifyr’s power. It was enough to give a glimpse of the child that appeared and disappeared and no more.
In the narrow hall of the next floor, a pair of haunts waited. Both directed him down the hall, where the doorway at the end slammed.
Inside – the door had not been locked – the two priests stood on opposite ends of the room. The male was by the window, the glass punched out by his robe-covered arm, while the female was at the other side with two leather packs in her hands. Neither bag looked particularly full, but Zaifyr’s glance at both packs was enough to cause the man to punch out the remaining glass and step towards the window. At the same time, the woman shouted, ‘Go!’ and hurled one of the bags at him. Her arm was halfway through the motion before the haunt of a middle-aged man wrapped his arms around her, and his lover, a younger man, took hold of the other priest in the window.
‘You two.’ Zaifyr closed the door gently behind him. ‘You two are in trouble.’
‘We know who you are,’ spat the woman. ‘I saw you earlier, Madman! We are not afraid of you!’
The pack she had attempted to throw had landed on the floor. He picked it up and upturned it onto the first of the two beds in the room.
A few coins, a knife and a book fell out.
‘Those are not for you!’ the man cried. ‘She will not allow it.’
‘She is not here.’ It was a mid-sized book, the cover made from leather, but without a title or author printed on it. With the tips of his fingers, Zaifyr reached for it, intending to flip it open to see if it was The Eternal Kingdom, but as he touched it—
—it broke apart and disintegrated.
The male priest laughed. ‘She will not allow it,’ he repeated. ‘She will not allow you to read her words.’
‘You wanted to go out of the window, didn’t you?’ The man’s shout was lost as the haunt thrust him through the broken glass and out onto the street below. It was not a long enough fall to kill him, but it was enough that he landed painfully, that he broke his leg, that he could not rise quickly – certainly not quickly enough to outrun the haunt that Zaifyr had left on the street.
‘Do you have one in your bag?’ he asked the other priest, after the screams began. ‘Do you both have a book?’
‘You—’ The screams ended suddenly, causing her voice to stop. ‘You’re a monster,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to kill him.’
‘What is it that you think you did outside?’ Zaifyr asked, approaching her. ‘Do you think that your blood has power? That you take from yourself? Do you not know that you use it to steal from the souls of the dead?’ The haunt that held her tightened his grip and whispered to Zaifyr that he was hungry. ‘No, you know. You know what you do. For nearly three thousand years, I outlawed blood magic because of what you do. I made witches and warlocks the rarest of creatures. I did to them what I did to your friend. But they at least did not hide what they did. They admitted that it was born in pain and suffering and that they themselves would share that fate.’
‘We will not,’ the priest hissed. ‘We are hers. She is the last god, the only god. She owns us. If you believed, you would understand that.’
‘I do.’ The second pack lay at her feet. He picked it up as a white light filled the room, as it caught the edges of his charms. ‘Of all the people in Yeflam, I am probably the only one who knows as you do.’
The white light of the haunt from the street fell over the priest’s face. ‘You are not Faithful,’ she whispered. ‘To know is not enough.’ The haunt was stained in blood and horrific to look at, but at least her screams had stopped.
‘Take the book out for me,’ Zaifyr said.
The priest shook her head.
‘The blood on her face is not yours,’ Zaifyr said. ‘Not yet.’
Slowly, her terror of the cold, dead woman settled through her and the priest reached into the pack and took out the book.
He tossed the bag aside. ‘Open it for me.’
She hesitated, then flipped it open. The pages were blank.
‘You cannot read it, you cannot touch it,’ she whispered. ‘But my god knows that I hold it. She knows that my life is hers. She knows that I give it freely.’
And, without sound, without evident injury, the Leeran priest slumped to the ground.
He reached out for her, intent on grabbing her haunt, on pushing into her mind; but as he reached for her, as his power took hold, the priest was drawn away from him. He felt her – then, suddenly, he did not.
In her place, he saw for a moment a large dark shape, a shadow that was so huge and encompassing that it left him powerless.
6.
Another two articles about Heast and Refuge were printed during the week and he read both while still in his room in The Engorged Whale. The authors wrote about how Refuge broke in Illate: they related how two hundred soldiers died in a battle that ran through two villages, but the details of individuals were never clear and never consistent with the day itself. There were hints of betrayals that hadn’t happened, cowardice that never eventuated. It left Heast unmoved, but he kept reading. He read the descriptions of the Ooilan armies and knew they were twice the size of those mentioned; neither author discussed the slave trade that had ruined generations in Illate; nor did they mention the desire of Illate to be free; the destruction of the Illate armies was barely touched upon, the mass graves no more than a couple of sentences. But both pieces mentioned that it was in these battles that Heast lost his leg. They said that, because of it, he had been spirited away in the final days of the battle. He had heard that before: it was one of the strongest rumours in the months after Refuge’s defeat. It meant nothing to him compared to the other lies in the articles, but he knew that the point of both was not Refuge, Illate or Ooila, but to circle back to Mireea. The authors wanted further to reason that the retreat from the Spine of Ger and the arrival of the Mireeans on Wila were failures of his. More than that: it was a portent of worse to come. Neither article did it well, but the combination of Gaerl’s disinformation and the memories of Refuge’s final days succeeded in returning Heast to his memory of Leviathan’s End, to the judgement that Onaedo delivered to Bnid Gaerl upon the smooth deck of the ship that she made her home.
Onaedo had ruled Leviathan’s End since the first mercenary had climbed the rope bridges, long before Heast was born. It was said that she had raised the ship out of the ocean herself, and that on that day, as she pulled the chains that would lift it to its place in Leviathan’s End, the ship had had a name upon its hull. The name, when repeated nowadays, bled with the name of other ships – with the infamous like Glafanr and the famous like Cilea – but it was never repeated by Onaedo. To her, the ship’s name was long gone. Now it was her home, now it was Leviathan’s End. In its depths she had built cells for those who disobeyed her rule and it was there that she told Bnid Gaerl he would go if he did not accept her judgement.
‘I have been patient while I waited. I have gone through our formal channels.’ Gaerl turned to the crowd that lined the deck, turned away from her to appeal to others. ‘My request is a simple one.’
‘And it has been denied,’ she said.
‘Denied.’ He repeated the word to the crowd lit by the morning’s sun, their heads crowned with bright light. ‘Denied a word. A word! We are soldiers. Warriors. It is we who give words their strength, their meaning. It is we who dictate what they mean. But you hear what is being said. You hear as I do. Ask yourself, how can she deny any warrior a single word?’
The mercenaries on the deck did not reply, but it was clear to Heast that they did not support him. Gaerl had his supporters, of course. Every man did. But the new mercenary unit that he wanted to make would be his third, and the previous two had
been notorious for their cruelty and their brutality. Gaerl took easy jobs and he had earned a reputation for taking contracts that allowed him to run roughshod over other units that were trying to make their mark. That had caused the end of his last unit – Beaz, if Heast remembered right. Gaerl’s own soldiers, when faced with the prospect of marching against young, poorly trained troops, had instead removed him from command. It was said that even his hardened veterans had been unable to stomach the battle against what Gaerl had called ‘kids with rusted knives’.
‘When did we become a weak nation?’ He had thrown his hand out in disgust. ‘A nation of killers. That is us! We take what we want! We leave nothing that we do not want! We should not follow a Queen of Words.’
‘Captain Gaerl.’ Onaedo’s voice rang out. Its authority spun the man back to her. ‘I make the rules in Leviathan’s End because it is I who saw Baar, the God of War, fall. It is I who saw the folly in his actions, who saw the magnitude of his failure. It is I who have given us a code so that we do not repeat his acts.’
He screwed his long face into a snarl but said nothing.
‘If you wish to challenge my decision,’ she said, her voice conjuring the images of swords and battlefields that were in her eyes, ‘then by all means, draw your sword.’
‘I would not challenge you.’ Gaerl would not raise a sword against her. Both he and Heast had seen what happened to young mercenaries who rose to her challenge. ‘But I would challenge for the name Refuge. I would challenge the infirm –’ he waved his hand at Heast – ‘and the old –’ and then at Baeh Lok, a stocky, olive-skinned man in his sixties on Heast’s left – ‘though both are clearly not capable of meeting it.’
‘Anemone answers all the challenges for Refuge,’ Onaedo said.
‘You would give a witch that privilege?’ he asked angrily.
‘Yes.’
‘Why am I to be treated so poorly? What conspiracy is this? No witch has ever had that right!’
‘The witch of Refuge has always had the privilege,’ Anemone said, standing on the right side of Heast, ‘as she has for each incarnation of Refuge.’
She was old, but Anemone had always been old. When Heast had first met her, when he was no older than ten, she had been small and fat and old. Her iron-grey hair was cut short and her olive skin, when not lost beneath the folds of her black and white robes and beneath the discoloured strips of white linen she wrapped around her hands, was mapped with lines, as if half a dozen lives had left their mark. But it was her voice that people often remembered, for when she spoke, she did so with a tone that left you in no doubt that she considered you a fool.
‘You stand here before us and ask to become the custodian of Refuge’s reputation and name but you do not even know what is entailed in that,’ the witch said. ‘You think it is about money and fame, but that is only because you are a greedy fool. No one in Refuge has ever made money. Why do you think that our Captain moves from job to job working for people who are beneath him? Why do you think Baeh Lok is a sergeant for a Faaishan marshal who has seen fewer battles than Lok has teeth? Refuge does not work for money. Refuge provides safety where there is none. Refuge goes where no other soldier will. Refuge provides a sword for those who do not have one.’
‘I’ve heard you, in the bars, in the inns,’ Baeh Lok said. His heavy hand rubbed at his nose. ‘I’ve heard you say that we were wasted in Illate. That we should have never gone into there. But they wanted freedom. They wanted to be slaves no longer.’
‘That is why the name is not yours,’ Heast said, speaking for the first time. ‘Because you are not a man who understands that simple principle.’
Gaerl spat on the deck. ‘Only a fool dies for free.’
‘Enough!’ Onaedo said. She seemed to grow, then, though of course she did not; but a part of her filled the deck, and the town. Before her, Bnid Gaerl fell to his knees, pushed down by a force that was raw and primal. ‘You are no longer welcome in Leviathan’s End,’ she said, her voice the only sound to be heard. ‘You are stripped of your rank, stripped of your connections, and you are banished from my sight. Make your new unit your last, and fill it with the disgraced soldiers of our world, for no mercenary who wishes to grace Leviathan’s End will ever serve you.’
Like smoke, the words followed Heast now as he left The Engorged Whale. Gaerl’s passage from the deck to the docks wisped around Heast in the streets of Zanan, each moment a prologue to the articles he had read. Not that ‘Commander’ Gaerl needed to explain himself in Yeflam. Onaedo did not police her proclamations outside Leviathan’s End and, indeed, was not well known beyond the bone borders.
It was later in the day that Heast first noticed a change in the way people around him acted.
He was at a street stall on Zanan. He had ordered a meal that never came and when he questioned it, the young man behind the counter shrugged in a surly manner. He had served it eventually, but while Heast waited, he felt the eyes of everyone on him. It was not until he returned to his small room that he understood. There, pushed under the door, was an article about him. A single sheet, it had text on one side and a caricature on the other. The drawing exposed his steel leg and elongated it, leaving it ugly and violent. From it ran a chain of bone that led to the ankles of faceless soldiers who had served under him. The chains ran into a background sketch of the Mountains of Ger, where the title ‘Captain of the Ghosts’ was written.
The ease with which he was noticed after that publication was the final mental affirmation that he had overstayed his time in Yeflam. Two nights later, he picked up the pack he had carried into Yeflam and went into the streets, intent on being beyond Yeflam before the morning’s sun rose. He planned to make his way to Ghaam, and to a brothel called Sin’s Hand, from where he would slip out of Yeflam in the carriage of a well-known prostitute.
But before he left, Heast visited the house of Faise and Zineer Kanar in Mesi.
7.
He arrived in the late hours of the evening. He had made the journey in one of the long, and at this time of the night, near-empty carriages that were pulled by four horses. His company for the length of it was a pair of drunk young soldiers and a member of the Empty Sky. The latter had enough sense to look embarrassed at being so exposed, sitting resolutely a handful of seats behind Heast. The carriage stopped in Ghaam and there he slipped away from her and boarded a new carriage to Mesi, alone.
At the door of Faise and Zineer’s house, he was greeted by Ayae. She offered him half a smile when she recognized him – a smile he had seen in Zaifyr – before she let him inside.
‘Has it come to that?’ he asked, once he saw the sword she held in her hand. ‘You answer the door armed?’
‘Just recently,’ she said. ‘Someone splashed red paint out at the front this morning.’
He hadn’t seen it in the dark, but he acknowledged the threat and her need for caution. ‘How are they holding up?’
‘Better than I am,’ she said. ‘You can see for yourself.’
Faise and Zineer sat at a small table in the kitchen. It was lit by a series of candles and both had drinks in front of them. They rose to greet Heast. If he had not seen Ayae and her sword at the door, he would not have thought that anything was wrong. They were polite, friendly, and at times, drily funny. ‘There is less and less I can do in Yeflam,’ he said, after he had sat, declining a glass of wine, having chatted for a few minutes. ‘It’s time to check on the farms we’ve bought. I want to see what they have in terms of produce and seeds. There are a few people I can contact from there as well. But mostly, I figure it is time to let Le’ta and Gaerl spend some time chasing me.’
‘We still have a lot we can do,’ Zineer said. ‘It’s not enough to just own land and buildings. You have to use them wisely in the markets.’
‘I have been trying to convince them,’ Ayae said, ‘to step back a bit.’
‘Might be a good idea,’ Heast agreed. ‘Muriel has enough for the leverage she wants. The goal was to allo
w her to begin gaining sway and control in the Traders’ Union – or at least to threaten that she could. Once she has that, she is more than capable of getting what she wants, with a little help from Ayae. The two of you should remember what Essa and I told you about Gaerl.’
‘We haven’t been found,’ Faise said. She smiled at the other woman. ‘Ayae just brought it up because she thinks every bit of paint is a knife in disguise.’
‘You have to ask yourself why it was done.’
‘Lian Alahn returned to Yeflam this week,’ Zineer said. ‘It was done because of that. Le’ta is afraid that we’ll work with him again.’
‘Alahn really has returned?’ Heast had thought that the fat merchant was lying to him. ‘Have you been in contact with him?’
The accountant began to answer, but he swallowed his words when he realized that they had not been addressed to him.
‘Alahn and I have nothing to discuss,’ Ayae said flatly. ‘All the bile that was ever said by Illaan came from his father.’
Heast was not surprised by her tone. In truth, he thought Illaan deserved it, for the way that he had treated her. ‘Don’t get over-confident,’ he said, turning his attention back to Zineer and Faise. ‘You want to be alive at the end of this. We all want to be alive at the end of this. If you need me, if things get bad, however, you can reach me through Sinae Al’tor.’
‘Of Sin’s Hand?’ Faise asked. ‘The infamous brothel in Ghaam?’
‘Where everything has a price but Al’tor himself.’ Heast rose and, with a brief nod, made his way to the door with Ayae beside him. ‘You’re right to be careful,’ he said quietly. ‘If it reaches a point where both of them have to leave Yeflam, Al’tor can help you with that. I’ll make sure he knows that when I see him tonight.’
She thanked him and, when he shook her hand, it was warm, but not painful to touch her.
Ayae stayed in Heast’s thoughts as he rode a carriage back to Ghaam. The lamps along the roads and along the bridge burned as if in a procession, and he saw a lonely lamplighter making his rounds through the streets to keep them lit. As he passed the man, Heast reflected on how Ayae had grown since he had first seen her in Samuel Orlan’s shop. He did not mean as a woman, but rather in confidence. When he had first met her, she had smiled nervously, unsure how to react to the people around her. Her apprenticeship had caused a small squall of gossip in Mireea and beyond, because she had no family, but Orlan, for all that he was a difficult man to read, had shielded her from most of the storm. After the fire in the shop, and after her power – Heast did not call it a curse – revealed itself, Orlan had, however, left Ayae to the mercy of those around her. After Illaan had rejected her, Heast had thought it likely that Ayae would retreat within herself, though Muriel had argued that it needn’t happen, and assured him that she would make sure it didn’t. In this, he had thought she would fail. He had seen that retreat before in stronger women: Onaedo had built walls around her, for example. She had retreated from the failure of the gods, of her god, and when her own power emerged, she had isolated herself and fortified her world. Since then, she had never left the bone walls of Leviathan’s End. But in Ayae’s case, Heast had been wrong. She had not retreated in the same way and Muriel had been right, no matter what part she had played.