by Ben Peek
The silence that fell around the table surprised Ayae. Many, she saw, glanced at the chair with apprehension, as if, suddenly, a terrible fear had been made real.
‘I want you all to listen to me,’ Aelyn said, her voice without pity. ‘I want to be very clear to all of you. You must all accept that we are not equal. I want there to be no misunderstanding in this regard. Jae’le is here. He is in Yeflam. You know the names he has. You have heard the stories about what he has done in his life. Not a single one of them is a lie. Not a single one is an exaggeration. And neither is this: Jae’le will never allow you to execute Qian.’
3.
‘Who wrote this one?’ Faise asked as he entered the room. ‘I can’t read the name – I don’t know the language.’
Zaifyr paused in the doorway and stared at the old, thin book she had picked up. It had been sitting on the pile near the windows at the back of Aelyn’s estate and the afternoon’s sun fell strongly over it. For a moment, the glare hid the title of the book, the print on its leather cover faded even more than usual beneath the glare. ‘Sister Meliana,’ he said, when he could make it out. ‘She was a priestess for the goddess Linae before the War of the Gods. This is an Ooilan translation of her diary.’
‘Do you want to keep it?’
‘No.’ He indicated the pile by the door he had just passed, the pile of books that had failed to provide him with useful names. ‘The diary was damaged when it was originally found,’ he said to her, picking up another book. ‘It was just weather damage, but the villages in the Broken Mountains were considered cursed after Linae’s death and it was centuries before someone entered the area. I thought maybe a name I could use would be there, but it is mostly a list of births and deaths and the number of eggs that the chickens laid.’
‘Meliana herself is not useful?’
‘No, she died before the Wanderer fell.’
‘She could have been reborn,’ Faise said, returning the book to the pile. ‘Could you not look for her, then?’
‘If she was reborn, it would not be identically. She would be shaped by what she was born into in a new life – and it would be that life that her spirit remembered, nothing else.’
He continued towards the piles by the walls, on the other side of Faise. Since he had killed the priests, Zaifyr had not left Aelyn’s house. Instead, he had spent the weeks gathering books from libraries and stores and focusing on his search, which had so far, he admitted, revealed little. He relied on Ayae and her friends – and to a lesser extent Kaqua – to tell him what was happening outside, a task that only Ayae took to the most. She looked at the piles he had made, the research he had sunk into, and he knew she saw the search as a retreat because of what had happened with the priests. He had not been surprised yesterday when she suggested cleaning up the books, a task that Faise and Zineer had taken to after Ayae had left earlier.
‘By the way,’ Faise said, taking another book. ‘Do you have children of your own?’
‘No.’ It was not the first question she had asked like that. Indeed, before he entered the back room where Faise was, Zaifyr had been upstairs in the piles he kept strewn through the room he slept in. There, Zineer had asked how many wives he had had. He took both of their questions good humouredly, for he enjoyed Faise and Zineer’s company. He found them sharp and capable and, in the days after he had killed the priests, he found them, more than anyone else, to be the antidote to what he was feeling. ‘I have never heard of any of us having children,’ he said. ‘Even gods didn’t have children. When they had a child, it was just an aspect that split from themselves, a metaphor from the original, I suppose. Most of us assume that we can’t.’
‘Does everything still work? You’re not, y’know—’ she made a dangling finger motion.
He looked up at the ceiling. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be more modest or something?’
‘No. In fact, I am writing a book on the juiciest details of immortality,’ she said blandly. ‘Zin and I plan to sell it at the trial.’
‘We’ll make our fortune out of you,’ Zineer said, entering the room. He carried a stack of books and on his shoulder was a bird. ‘This ugly little guy knocked on the window to come in, if you can believe that.’
It was a storm petrel, a small grey-and-black seabird found throughout Yeflam. It was one of the few seabirds that had adapted to the poisoned flesh of fish in the ocean, but just as its diet had changed, so had its form. Its beak had sharpened to a pair of hard blades and its black eyes were rimmed with blood. To eat it was just as fatal as eating the fish from the ocean.
They were not considered tame birds, but at the sight of Zaifyr, it left its perch on Zineer and glided casually around the room before drifting lazily to the table in front of him.
‘Cute,’ Faise said, after it landed. ‘Do you think it does tricks?’
‘Well?’ Zaifyr asked the bird. ‘Can a distrustful bird do tricks to amuse us?’
‘One or two.’ Jae’le’s voice sounded inhumane and cruel when it emerged. ‘I greet you, brother.’
‘This is Faise.’ The charms on his wrist flashed as he indicated. ‘You have already met her husband, Zineer. For both of you, this is Jae’le, my oldest brother. He sent me to Mireea without once warning me that there was a god there.’
The bird’s dark eyes ignored the silver. ‘You are angry at me?’
Zaifyr crossed his arms. ‘You could have warned me.’
‘You would have ignored me. After the tower, you had no time for these mysteries. What did you call them? Childish puzzle boxes.’ The bird fluttered onto the leather cover of Sister Meliana’s diary, near Faise. Involuntarily, she took a step back. ‘Disaffected. That’s how you were, brother. You agreed to come to Mireea because you had nothing else to do. You agreed to anything because it gave you something to do, something to pass the time. You did not care for the reasons.’
‘I hope you don’t plan to have him defend you in your trial,’ Faise said. ‘They would have a gallows ready before he’d finished.’
‘Yes, your trial.’ The bird’s vocal cords stretched out the end of the word painfully. ‘Did you really need to kill Fo and Bau?’
‘I told you I did,’ Zaifyr said. ‘I was left with little choice in the matter. It was either them or Ayae and me. If you want to lecture me, you’ll have to come here in person. I know you are sitting on a bench, somewhere in Yeflam. You don’t have to hide. Besides, a trial will draw all of you here and I will be able to explain what this child god is responsible for. I will be able to show all of you – even Aelyn’s Keepers – the horror she has created.’
‘I am in Yeflam, as you said.’ A silence stretched out between all three, long and taut. ‘But you should understand, it will not be as you think. A trial—’
‘—is the only way.’
‘Brother.’ He could hear the concern, the pain in the bird’s voice. ‘Brother, you have made a mistake. A trial will not draw all of us here. It cannot. Aelyn and myself are here, true, and Tinh Tu may come. But Eidan . . .’
The pause stretched out before the bird spoke again.
‘Brother, Eidan is with the child.’
4.
Zaifyr took a breath. For the first time in months, it tasted of salt and blood, of Leviathan’s Blood. ‘When—’ The ocean taste was not a portent; he could not think of it as that. ‘When did you learn this?’
‘When I was in Mireea.’ The storm petrel’s inhuman voice struggled with the name, drawing out the centre of the word in a screech. ‘I found him when I went in search of the priests. He was in Ranan. I remember that I was not surprised when I felt him. Ranan was in ruins. You could see that from high up – and you know as I do that our brother has always been drawn to ruins. But these were not the ruins that a battle made. The destruction of it was much more deliberate, much more studied. To my eye, it had been stripped. Stripped by the army to build siege machines and fuel their war, I imagine. But they had left one building, a huge cathedral. It was unlike
any I had seen before. None of the priests I saw could have possibly dreamed of it, nor could they have begun its construction. Yet I was wary of going down to the city. There was a presence there that I could not contend with, but I tempted it. I circled, lower and lower until I saw a man. A single, solitary man, who cut blocks of stone from the earth and dragged them into the city.’
‘Eidan,’ he whispered.
‘That is why I am here. Our brother—’
‘Sided with her.’
‘—needs us,’ Jae’le finished. ‘He will know what she is, just as you and I do. He may very well be trapped there.’
‘Aelyn must know,’ he said.
‘She must,’ he agreed. ‘They never hid from each other.’
Zaifyr thought about the things she had said, about the treaties with the Leerans, about the need for peace. He thought about the priests in the streets. Aelyn knew about the child before he arrived. She would not have been surprised by what he said. ‘Do you . . .’ he began, then stopped. He was not sure what he had meant to say. Was Eidan a prisoner? Was this the reason that Aelyn had been so intent on peace? What if Eidan was not? Zaifyr was arguing for war. He had no army, but he meant to make one. He intended to gather his family, to gather everyone with any power, and he meant to march them on the child. His cause was just. The ruined haunts that followed him were an endless parade of victims who gave him the right to seek a bloody end. Zaifyr did not believe that anyone would deny him that in the face of the tragedy that the dead found themselves in. Yet if his family was compromised – if Eidan was a prisoner, or if he had sided with the child – then their unity would be broken. His ability to form an army would be lost. Aelyn would not side against Eidan. The Keepers of the Divine would not follow his plan. They would instead be guided by their own desires, their own needs, their own loves.
‘You okay?’
Ayae’s warm hand fell to his shoulder.
‘Faise tells me you’ve been sitting here all day.’ The afternoon’s sun had set. Zaifyr was surprised to realize that he was alone in a dark room. ‘You had a bird that visited, she said.’
‘Jae’le.’ He touched a charm beneath his left wrist. ‘When did he leave?’
‘He wasn’t here when I arrived.’ She knelt before him, her hands on his legs. ‘The Enclave knows he is in Yeflam, though. Aelyn has told them that he will not let them find you guilty of killing Fo and Bau. They seemed genuinely frightened of him.’
‘They should.’ He took a breath, but could taste nothing. ‘Ayae,’ he said, after a moment, ‘Eidan is with the child.’
She frowned. ‘Your brother?’
After Asila, Eidan had carried him to the crooked tower. Zaifyr had learned of it from haunts who had watched his brothers and sisters arrive, who had lingered as they built the tower. Eidan was a large man, stronger than any of the others. He had held Zaifyr while he instructed the others in the mix of the bricks and the laying of them. Jae’le had, years later, told him that Eidan had despaired at the design of the tower. He had been an engineer, before, a builder of bridges and siege equipment, and the tower had been an offence to his cold, methodical mind.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He is Aelyn’s lover.’
‘But—’
‘He has always been. A hundred years may part them, but only in the flesh. In the mind, in the soul, they are never separated.’
Her hand tightened on his leg. ‘Talk to her.’
‘I can’t step back,’ he said, aware that a note of desperation had settled into his voice. ‘I can’t step back. I can’t let this new god continue to exist. I will not tell her that I will do that.’
He felt as if the ground he had been standing on had shifted. The pillar that held Nale had, in his mind, cracked, and he could not bring himself to stand straight. Ayae repeated that he should go to the Enclave, but he shook his head. ‘If I go there,’ he said, ‘if I walk up all those floors and I knock on the door of her office, what will we say? She might say that Eidan is with the child. She might say that he is a prisoner. She might say that he is an envoy. She might say that, on his advice, she sent Fo and Bau to Mireea to see what kind of force General Waalstan led. But in the end, she would say to me, “This is why we need peace.” She would say to me, “We are not going to war now because we are planning, we are learning.” She would ask me to leave, then. She would tell me that I have made things difficult. That I continue to do so.’ He took Ayae’s hand into his. ‘And I would not say to her, “You are right.” I would not say to her that the dead did not matter. I would not say to her that we could wait. I would not say that I would go away and plan from afar and return with an army later. I would tell her that I can stare at the dead, knowing what has kept them here, what has trapped them in our world, and she would not expect me to say that.’
She tried to talk to him some more, but he would return to the same point again and again; eventually she left him alone. He heard her and Faise and Zineer in other parts of Aelyn’s estate, but each time he heard them, his mind returned to Eidan, to Aelyn, to the child.
They left in the early hours of the morning and, after he had seen them to a carriage pulled by a pair of oxen, he walked back to Aelyn’s estate. The cool, salt-stained streets unravelled around him. They plunged into a momentary darkness as the morning’s sun had not risen, but the flickering lamps that populated the Floating Cities began to die in expectation that it would.
A block from the estate, a shadow shifted in the sky and a storm petrel settled lightly onto his shoulder.
‘Where have you been?’ Zaifyr asked.
‘This body was hungry and you were not talking,’ his brother replied. ‘Now, are you ready to begin?’
‘Begin?’
‘Explaining how you will win your trial.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, staring out into the darkness, able to see only the outline of the estate gates and the solid shapes of the guards made from wind. ‘Maybe it is a mistake.’
‘It is.’
He gave a hollow laugh.
‘But if we are to save Eidan,’ Jae’le said, ‘we must also win it.’
5.
Bounty faded behind Bueralan, lost in the deepening dark of the night and the hardening of the rain.
Both he and Samuel Orlan were soaked before they left the docks of Dyanos and entered its dimly lit tumble of streets. The cartographer led the way sourly, muttering complaints about the weight of his coat and the fact that it did little to protect him from the elements. He did not appear to expect a reply from Bueralan, and the saboteur, who held both their long duffel bags, made no attempt to engage him. If he had replied, he would have said that he was glad for the poor visibility to hide them.
If he had been able, Bueralan would have entered Ooila much as he had left it, crossing over the border between it and Qaaina. Covering nearly all the northern quarter of the continent, Qaaina had been conquered eight years ago by the Five Queens, and the deep mines that lay at its heart had been divided up among the five provinces. When he had heard the news years before, he had felt a touch of sadness for the memory of him and Zean making their way along the highway on slavers’ horses, riding to freedom. They had had very little money or food and had sold the horses at a port to buy a ticket to anywhere. Beyond the fleeting emotion of memory, however, Bueralan had not been surprised. The Five Queens had long looked to their neighbour with an eye of expansion, and the quick peace that Qaaina sued for revealed that it, too, had been but waiting.
Neither helped him now, though.
‘There is an inn a block to our left, if I remember correctly,’ Orlan said. ‘It will be adequate for us.’
‘How long ago were you last here?’
‘Eight years.’ As if he knew Bueralan’s thoughts, he elaborated. ‘The First Queen invited me after the conquest of Qaaina.’
He grunted, but said nothing else.
The Mocking Quarrel was a block and a half through rain that came down so hard that the dista
nce felt twice that. It was a two-storey inn with a jester’s hat pierced by an arrow on the board outside. Inside, it was well lit, warm and with a good-sized crowd. The owner, a large middle-aged woman whose hair had been shaved down to the scalp, recognized Orlan almost instantly. As she rose from behind the bar, the eyes of men and women turned to them, and Bueralan, his hands digging into the sodden bags he held, waited for the cartographer to introduce him. Stupid, he thought. I’ve not thought this right . . . but Orlan, after a few words, begged off from much conversation due to being wet and cold, and soon Bueralan found himself upstairs in a room with two beds and a square table with two chairs.
‘You’ll have me in chains before I even reach Cynama,’ he said, closing the door. ‘There must have been thirty people there.’
‘It has been . . .’ Orlan hesitated. ‘What? Fifteen years?’
‘Seventeen.’
‘Did you even have those tattoos seventeen years ago?’ The small man peeled his jacket off. ‘You should have more trust, Baron.’
In myself, Bueralan thought. ‘Orlan—’
A knock at the door interrupted him.
Bueralan’s hand dropped to the wet leather hilt of his sword.
‘It will be for me,’ Orlan said disapprovingly. ‘In all parts of the world, there are men and women whom I pay to listen for me. They listen for politics, for news, for gossip, anything that might be interesting. You may find this hard to believe, but a good map is not the work of one man, or one woman, but many. The lines in the world are made by us all.’
Wordlessly, he cracked the door open: in the hallway stood a thin, elderly man. He would have been taller than Bueralan if not for his stoop and the long, yellowed cane he leant heavily upon. Yet his gaze did not show any of the age that afflicted his body. Among crow’s feet and a silvered stubble, his awareness and intelligence was clear, and Bueralan’s hand tightened.