Leviathan's Blood

by Ben Peek

  ‘Why blame the dead?’ He pushed back the bedcovers, the hits against the window continuing as he pulled the chamber pot out from beneath the bed. ‘I’m going to find us a pair of horses this morning.’

  ‘Are we in a rush?’

  After a moment, he nudged the chamber pot back and began to lace his breeches. ‘Tawain has surely sold our whereabouts to the Eyes of the Queen by now,’ he said, reaching for his jerkin, and his sword.

  ‘You truly have nothing to fear in relation to that.’

  Bueralan grunted in reply, pushed open the door, and left.

  Out on the street, the humidity was already starting to rise. Butterflies scattered around him, bursting into the air with each step he took. They were reds and oranges, greens and blues, black and white, and with so many patterns that no two seemed alike. It was impossible to count. Bueralan suspected that thousands upon thousands were around him, but not all were in the air. Many rested on the walls of buildings, lying against glass and wood and brick without distinction, while others already lay on the muddy road, their colour nought but brown in death.

  He had seen more, deeper into Ooila, but it was only around the volcanoes that one had to be careful of their mass. The faint outline of Karaanas lurked on the horizon, the biggest peak in the range of mountains that divided the First and Third Provinces. There the sky would remain dark until the midday’s sun reached its zenith and the clouds of sulphur lifted free.

  You could die in the morning there, if you were not careful.

  The horses he bought were both grey, speckled with black. The merchant – a middle-aged woman whose head had been shaved – said that they were military mounts, at nine and ten too old for service, but still strong. Both were scarred from front to end from bit and whip and sword, and the taller of the two had a mean eye that Bueralan responded to. The merchant said that they were a deal: ‘They came together, they leave together,’ she said. For that inconvenience, she had given new shoes to both and offered saddles cheap.

  ‘You don’t want them that much?’

  She already knew that she had made a sale. ‘The tall one tried to take a chunk out of a little girl the other day,’ she said. ‘The smaller has kicked two stable boys.’

  He dropped two of Mireea’s circular, hole-punched essr gold coins into her hand.

  ‘I’ll have to melt these down.’ One of the Ooilan golden raqs held the weight of two essr. ‘But we’re good. I hope they serve you well.’

  He led the horses back to the inn without incident, but at the narrow entrance, his stomach tightened. The stable boy was nowhere to be seen and, inside, many of the stalls had been filled with hay and saddles, leaving only one empty pair of stalls in the middle. With a rub on the nose of the smaller horse, he led them both in, his boots sounding a lonely beat as he did.

  He had tied both horses in the stalls when new steps sounded. Heavy, booted steps, coming from opposite ends of the stable, slow and cautious.

  Dropping his hand to his sword, Bueralan stepped into the middle of the stable and looked to his left, then his right.

  Three: two first, one last.

  He did not recognize any of the shaven men, but there was no mistaking their intent. From the left, the two men held short swords, while the one on the right had a heavy staff. They were not soldiers, he knew: the rust on their blades was old, and the way they held them in both hands was similar to an axe. The man with the staff was different in that respect: he held his weapon lightly, the balance of it letting Bueralan know that it had not been simply picked up off the road.

  ‘Lice really made you all very ugly.’ He drew his sword, felt his stomach settle. ‘I say that as a man who is bald by choice.’

  He met the left pair first.

  He stepped into them quickly, catching the man with the staff off-guard and leaving him a handful of steps behind. The two men in front of him stepped back, and Bueralan parried a clumsy thrust from one, using his momentum to carry him past the other. Then, with a quick slash that pushed them back, he spun around, placing the pair neatly before the man with the staff.

  One of the sword-wielders spat. Steel-clad hooves lashed out.

  The hooves caught the two men with swords first, the back legs of both horses crashing out, uncaring of blade or armour, catching each man in chest and shoulder, before a second kick caught both in the skull. Only the man with the staff escaped the sudden burst, but his step back – the start of a run – did not have a second as Bueralan shouldered forwards, his sword plunging into the chest of the man, punching through to the other side. Placing his foot on the man’s chest to withdraw his sword, the saboteur turned back to the two other men, one still alive, but struggling to rise – a desire never fulfilled, as Bueralan’s sword struck down.

  Their bodies had a few coins, little more, but it didn’t matter. Bueralan knew how they had found him – and if Tawain was not responsible, then it was merely someone else who had noticed him last night – and he dragged the corpses into one of the stalls and hid them behind the hay. He tossed some sawdust down over the blood outside the stalls. It would not fool anyone who looked hard, but it would do for the time that he needed.

  Upstairs, he found Orlan packing. ‘How did it go?’ the cartographer asked, as the door fell shut.

  ‘Just how I thought it would,’ he replied.

  Stone Divisions

  Yet, what of its contents?

  You cannot hold The Eternal Kingdom unless you have pledged yourself to this new, nameless god. But you can hear it spoken – in parts, though, and never whole. The entirety of the book is kept for those who are faithful.

  What is read aloud is curious, for it is not so much a religious treaty as a treaty on history. It claims to clarify the events that led to the War of the Gods and, like a cheap stage magician, it raises the curtain of a show that insists that the gods killed each other in an act of love. That what they did for thousands of years was, in fact, a form of ritual suicide that blessed their only child. That what they were doing was making the world a better place.

  —Tinh Tu, Private Diary

  1.

  Zaifyr had left a trail of books that Faise and Zineer had attempted to consolidate. They succeeded with the books he had read and did not want, but failed with those he had not and those he had and wanted to keep. Those remained throughout the estate, lying like a line of his thoughts, left near the front door, or on the table, in the wine rack, on stairs – all of them seemingly dropped at random. They lay face-down, or on their spines, open at a page he had stopped at, at times with a second book laid over the top. They were old, made from cracked leather, thin parchment; and they were new, made in clean, straight lines from heavy paper produced in Yeflam. They were originals, copies of originals, translations of originals, written in languages he knew well, in others he struggled with. Faise had asked him – as she picked up one that looked as if it had fallen beneath a chair – if he remembered any of the ones he still needed and he said that he knew what they all were.

  Most had come from the Enclave’s library. Kaqua borrowed some for him and so did Ayae. But he had gone outside the library as well. An elderly woman who owned an antique bookstore in Nale had received a number of orders from him, orders that sent her deep into her stacks of books, into narrow heavy-titled lanes that her cane tapped against, where he, gazing through the eyes of a dead scholar, had isolated a hidden set of expensive treasures.

  ‘I borrowed the money off Faise to buy them,’ Zaifyr said. He led Jae’le deep into the dark house, letting the shadows of the stacks guide him. ‘They have given me a couple of names that I can use in the trial, but none is a witness to the War of the Gods. I’m still struggling to find those.’

  ‘Our own fault.’ The storm petrel drifted from stack to stack, shifting from half-read, to read, to unread titles. ‘We left the mountains after imprisoning you and returned to riots and revolutions.’

  ‘The real damage was done before that.’ He entered the ba
ck room and struck a match. ‘We burnt much of what was lost.’

  ‘I know. For our crimes, Tinh Tu spends her days trying to recreate what we destroyed. She may well ask you again to help her recreate those lost books after all this is finished.’

  He remembered the day she had asked in person: a sticky, warm day in the twisting limbs of Jae’le’s house. ‘It is a cruel thing to do to the dead,’ Zaifyr had said to her. He repeated the same words to his brother now. ‘It is still cruel,’ he added as the wick on the first candle caught light.

  ‘Is it any less cruel than what you are doing now?’

  ‘It is for them that I do it.’

  ‘I have heard those words before.’ The flame reflected in the bird’s dark eyes. ‘They remind me of old times in Asila, brother.’

  ‘Then do not listen.’

  ‘I already have that regret.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to help me, not lecture me.’ He smothered the match’s flame with his thumb, felt the sharp pain. ‘It was you who sent me to Mireea.’

  The petrel’s wings fluttered in irritation. ‘I am only concerned for you.’

  ‘There is plenty to be concerned with.’ Zaifyr picked up the candle, placed its flame next to a second. ‘That is why there are so many books.’

  ‘What do you search for, exactly?’

  ‘Mentions of the child, of the gods’ division, of Linae’s death.’ Another candle lit. ‘The latter is proving the hardest, simply because most of it is rereading. We searched for why the gods went to war a long time ago, but there was no specific evidence for it then, and there is none now. We put it down to the fact that they were alien to us and that we would never know. Whatever divisions lay between each god we thought would never be known. But what if it was? What if a story that we thought was about someone like you or me was really a story about the child?’ He shrugged. ‘The rereading hasn’t amounted to much.’

  ‘Have you considered using recent evidence?’ the storm petrel said. ‘You could argue Ger’s reaction to you.’

  ‘Using a god as the base of my argument will not make it strong.’

  ‘All your evidence will be argued against.’

  ‘Not if I find the right dead.’

  ‘They will still question, brother.’

  ‘I watched her destroy a soul.’ Zaifyr finished lighting the last candle, the seventh in the room. ‘I could not do that. Flesh and bone has its limitation, it is true, but there is more to it. The power she had, the casual cruelty of it. The way it meant nothing to her. She viewed the soul as an object she owned. Once that is shown, no one will question it.’

  ‘We were no different at one stage,’ Jae’le said quietly. ‘Souls, minds, flesh, land and air, we once believed that it was all ours. How did we respond to those who argued against us?’

  He met the bird’s gaze. ‘No one spoke against us.’

  ‘Not until your book, that is.’

  Zaifyr did not respond to the barb. With Jae’le’s inhuman gaze on him, he approached one of the unread piles before him and began to flip through the books. ‘Do you plan to help?’ he asked, pulling a large volume from the bottom. Against Darkness: a biography of Sir Alric Caloise, the religious knight, written by his squire.

  ‘Birds cannot read.’ The petrel shifted to the back of the chair. ‘It’s difficult for me to read more than a title like this.’

  ‘That is not what I meant.’

  ‘I will, but I am in Enilr. It will take me a day to reach you. I may even stop to enjoy this country our brother and sister made.’

  The joke – even from a bird – fell flat on Zaifyr. His brother had not left the huge branches of his home since the construction of the tower where Zaifyr had been held captive. He had hidden his flesh away, put his body into exile and travelled only by animal, speaking to his brothers and sisters through the voices of others. It was a sign of how worried he was that he had come to Yeflam himself.

  ‘You followed the child to Leera,’ Zaifyr said. ‘She told me that.’

  ‘I did.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘But I simply thought that she was one like us. I did not suspect what she was. Not once.’

  Zaifyr had felt it immediately, a quality like him, yet not. He found it hard to believe that Jae’le could not have known, not even suspected.

  ‘I will speak to Aelyn before I get here,’ the storm petrel said. ‘It would be respectful to do so, but it will also let me ask about our brother. After Asila, Eidan became a vagabond of sorts. He would travel to ruins and rebuild them, then leave them empty. But he would always send letters to Aelyn each week. She will know more than she admits.’

  Zaifyr touched the charm beneath his wrist. ‘She may not tell you.’

  ‘She may not.’ A ragged noise – a sigh, perhaps – escaped Jae’le. ‘Our meetings are always difficult. This used to be my land. I do not lay claim to it now, but it has always been between us that she took it. We were meant to disappear, to slide into history, and let everyone forget what we had done so terribly. She was not meant to build a city as the surviving ruler of the Five Kingdoms, yet she did.’

  ‘Why did people not drive her away?’

  ‘There had been dark years after us, and new tyrants,’ he said. ‘And there were some who wanted to worship us, still. The call was difficult for her to deny.’

  ‘I do not miss it,’ Zaifyr said. ‘Not at all.’

  The storm petrel ruffled its feathers and flicked its wings, but said nothing.

  2.

  The ride back from Nale to Mesi was long, even longer when Ayae, Faise and Zineer arrived at their small house and found the front yard plastered with caricatures of Muriel Wagan and Aned Heast. Yet, even after little rest the night before, after the cleaning of the yard, Ayae could only sleep for five hours. Like most nights, her dreams were terrible: images of her fight along the Spine of Ger lingered on in the visions of men and women she killed. She saw Illaan in his hospital bed, saw Fo and Bau again and again. She dreamed of the fight in the tower. Of Queila Meina’s frail hand on her shoulder as she died, followed by her rise as a ghost. And she dreamed of the tents on Wila, of how they merged into the rough walls of a nameless camp in Sooia. Each night she awoke to find herself twisted in her sheets, so hot to the touch when she awoke that she was afraid she would set the bedding alight.

  Most nights, she would read by pale candlelight until the morning’s sun rose. Occasionally, she would practise with the warmth in her, trying to draw it out, but without reward. No matter how much she tried, she was unable to recreate much of what she had done in Mireea. Her dreams may show her swords alight with flames, but she could cause nothing to move along steel. She could heat herself and boil water and move faster than she would normally be able to do so, but that was all. Ayae had begun to suspect that to do more she needed to give way to her emotions – an idea that she was not comfortable with.

  Caught up in her thoughts, Ayae did not realize that there was a light downstairs until she was in the kitchen. At the table sat Faise. She wore a dark-orange robe, loosely belted. At the sight of Ayae, she offered a faint, tired smile. ‘I did not mean to wake you,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t.’ On the table were the papers and pamphlets that had been in the yard when they returned. ‘And don’t apologize. It is not your fault.’

  ‘Would you like something to drink?’ Faise asked. ‘I was trying to tell myself it was okay to drink alone. Now you’re here, I don’t have to lie about that.’

  She smiled faintly. ‘Sure.’

  A squat amber bottle of waer and two glasses dropped onto the table. The cheap spirit smelt horrible when the wooden lid came off, but Ayae took a glass and settled into the chair across from her friend.

  ‘One day I will have to give up this awful drink,’ Faise said. ‘But I’ll start another day.’

  ‘Regrets?’

  ‘Once we finish this, yes.’

  ‘I meant for what you’re doing.’

  ‘I know.’
Faise lifted the glass. ‘There are more every day, I guess. I don’t know if I’ll have the nerve for it much longer.’

  ‘You won’t be hurt.’ Ayae swallowed the sour drink of her teenage years. ‘I will make sure of that.’

  ‘I should have said no to Lady Wagan.’ She poured for both of them again. ‘But we had lost so much. Zineer was right. It was a chance for us to rebuild. We could get everything back that we had lost. We could help everyone on Wila get back what they lost.’

  ‘And you could get revenge.’

  ‘And I could get revenge.’ Her smile was stained orange in the candlelight. ‘That was icing. To think that I could show that fat bastard what I thought of him. That I could hurt him like he hurt Zineer and me.’

  ‘Is Zineer not concerned?’

  ‘Only when I’m awake.’ Wearing loose trousers, Zineer reached for the chair beside Faise, his hand lingering on her arm. ‘When I am asleep, my dreams think for me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ayae said softly.

  ‘For what?’ He leant across for the drink. ‘For Benan Le’ta? He was born long before any of us, and the Traders movement before him.’

  ‘I’m sorry for all of it.’

  ‘We’re not children,’ Faise said. ‘Sometimes, I wish I was. I could claim that I did not know what would happen when we agreed to Lady Wagan’s plan. I could say that you convinced me to do something that I did not want to do. I could say that Zineer did not know, either. That we were completely innocent. But we’re not children. We have to take responsibility for everything we have done. We made choices. Adult choices. We can’t come home and pretend that we did not.’

  ‘I wish I could go home and pretend.’ The remains of Ayae’s drink caught the dim light as she swirled the glass. ‘I miss my home. I knew who I was inside that house. I could close the doors and shut everything out. Now, it feels so far away. In the morning, I look up and see—’

  ‘—the mountain crumbling,’ the other woman finished. ‘Do you draw any more?’