by Ben Peek
‘Is he why you let her priests in here?’
‘They are no threat to us. They allow Eidan to continue at her side. It is a scheme that you have endangered from the moment you arrived at our gates.’
‘The child is not to be negotiated with.’
‘We cannot make those judgements any more,’ she said. ‘We are not gods. We are not yet allowed that privilege.’
He did not reply.
‘Qian.’ The calm broke and defeat entered her voice. ‘Consider what is at stake here. Yeflam is not Asila. The people here are my responsibility. They are my world.’
‘What has Eidan told you?’ There was no sympathy in his voice, no give. ‘What is it that you know about her that frightens you?’
‘It is not her.’ A sigh broke through the defeated threads in her voice. ‘It is you. You threaten the very thing which you rage against. You will trap us all in the horror that you see.’
When the afternoon’s sun sank at the end of the day, the Yeflam Guard had been deployed throughout all twenty-three Floating Cities of Yeflam. Jae’le, who arrived at first by storm petrel after Aelyn left, later came in person once the night had set. He told Zaifyr that a curfew had been put in place. He said that there had been panic in the streets. A group of people on Neela had tried to storm Wila, believing that the Mireeans were responsible. The Soldier himself had quelled that, Jae’le said. By morning, the Yeflam Guard had dispersed the crowd that had gathered at the front of Aelyn’s estate. They returned and they were driven away. When Ayae, Faise and Zineer visited, he heard that the papers had begun to call the day the haunts appeared over Yeflam ‘the Day of a Million Ghosts’. He was shown some of the pictures that were printed of him, and read half of one of the stories, but he had little time for the description of himself as a madman who needed to be brought to justice. He tore up the papers and used them as bookmarks in his research.
Then, after a fortnight, the trial was announced.
It was Jae’le who told him. His brother returned from the Enclave in the early hours one morning with the news.
‘Six days,’ Zaifyr repeated after he spoke. ‘It is not enough time. I need more time. One of the dead I want is in the caves that lead to the Saan. Six days is not enough to get him.’
‘It is what you have. In six days the child will be here.’
‘She will have the child attend the trial?’
‘It is what you wanted, is it not?’ Outside the window, the world stretched darkly, filled with the smell of salt and blood. ‘But you should know, there was a condition attached to that. A condition I agreed with.’
‘Why was I not asked about this?’
‘Because it is about you,’ he said. ‘If at the end of the trial you are found guilty, you will be returned to the tower in Eakar.’
He saw that small space again. Saw it closing around him. ‘I will not return there,’ he said.
‘Not willingly,’ Jae’le agreed. ‘But nonetheless, it will be your punishment. I will stand by Aelyn and her Keepers of the Divine to enact it, if I am required to do so.’
‘I’ll not fail,’ Zaifyr insisted. ‘You know I won’t. You can feel the child approach as well as I can. You can feel the pull at your skin, as if she could consume you.’
‘I feel it,’ his brother said. ‘Like the first row of teeth in a giant maw.’
‘She cannot be allowed to exist.’ There was no doubt in his voice. ‘No matter what else is said, she must be destroyed. You must be able to see that, at least.’
The shadows of the night had left his brother gaunt, more so than in reality. The light of the lamps faltered around the edges of him, alternately revealing and hiding his expression. ‘Yes,’ he said, finally, ‘I believe I do.’
2.
With the afternoon’s sun behind his back, Bueralan led the tall grey through the stone entrance to his mother’s estate. The top of it resembled broken teeth and the rusted gate no longer locked. His boots and the horse’s hooves trod rock, weed and the hollow corpses of butterflies in slow discord to the main house and no one appeared in greeting or warning. The once well-kept gardens stretched on either side of him, a thick, tangled mess of green shot through with bright wild-flowers muted by ash.
‘Why was it not sold?’
He had asked the question of Ce Pueral two weeks ago. She was no longer a captain, he knew, and her visit to Samuel Orlan’s shop the morning after his appearance in court had not been unexpected. She appeared in her black-and-red armour, her long sword comfortable at her side, a group of men and women out on the street waiting for her.
‘The Queen was close friends with your mother.’ Pueral was coldly indifferent to him. ‘She spent time out there when she was younger.’
‘She kept it out of sentimentality?’
‘Occasionally, Mister Le, the answer is a simple one.’ His title did not go unnoticed. ‘Since your exile, no one has lived there. Not officially, anyway. No caretakers were given the land but I imagine there have been squatters. You may find that you have to clean out more than weeds.’
The main house was huge. It had been made from heavy blocks dug out of the ground years before the Five Queens came to rule. His mother had extended the house carefully, drawing up plans, consulting with builders and expending a fortune to have similar stone dug out of the ground. Much of his childhood had been spent listening to her plans for the house, which was the main reason why he considered the sprawling building his mother’s, and not his parents’.
‘Why am I being offered this?’ he asked Pueral.
‘It is a gift from the First Queen.’ Her gloved hand finally left her sword, her fingers flexing. ‘Another one. What you won yesterday is something few have.’
‘I am grateful.’
‘No, you are not,’ she said, no trace of malice or bitterness apparent in her voice. ‘You were a rash man in your youth, Bueralan. You wielded your blade with considerable skill, held your own in politics and took risks. In the case of the Hundredth Prince, you made a poor choice. Others had previously done you well and I always viewed that as a mistake of youth, I believe. You must have understood that on a certain level as well. After your exile, you kept your confidence, your ability to take risks, your flair. I haven’t paid too much attention to what you have done in the last decade, but for a while I watched you closely. You wore your exiled title openly and you worked for rich and connected men and women – so of course I watched you. I even admire some of what you have done.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Don’t thank me.’ She had turned to the door, to the soldiers waiting for her outside, and her hand closed into a fist. ‘I am not flattering you. I am warning you. The man I remember and the man in my reports is not standing before me. Instead, there is a man without confidence, a man for whom risk is played out. You have the eyes of a dead man, yet you come here to play politics, to stand in the First Queen’s court and talk about the Mother’s Gift for a dead slave. You will not get what you want with eyes like that. Instead, you will make a mistake. A mistake that will cost you your life – and that of your blood brother as well.’
The lock on the door of his mother’s house was broken, the inside littered with the husks of butterflies, glass and animal remains.
Bueralan made his way through the entrance, the afternoon’s sun a splotched pattern across the walls showing destruction by shadow and light. In the main room, he found shattered furniture and the ashes of a fire against the far wall. Bueralan’s boot nudged the solid cinders, scattered a handful of spiders and animal bones. Nothing suggested that it had been used recently. No tracks had crushed the dead butterflies spread across the tiles. From the main room, the halls were scattered with them and other bugs, with ashes lingering in the corners, while the walls were bare of family paintings. Burnt on the fire, no doubt.
‘I like her,’ Samuel Orlan had said, after Pueral left.
‘You would.’ The cartographer had come downstairs, dressed i
n old paint- and ink-stained clothes, a large magnifying glass in his hands. He had spent much of the morning at his work table since they had returned from the court and had not bothered to come down until Pueral had left. Bueralan did not doubt that he had heard every word, though. He asked, ‘Did you have anything to do with the estate?’
‘I had not even considered it.’ Orlan shrugged. ‘Was the First Queen that good a friend of your mother?’
‘They were childhood friends.’
‘I had wondered why she did not ask for more of me.’
Bueralan did not reply. Pueral’s words returned to him: her judgement and summation of his life. He had not smiled in response, as he might have once. He had not thought that she had made a mistake in relation to him. Wordlessly, he had watched her ride down the road. Around her, Cynama was awakening, and butterflies scattered in colours while people moved out of her way. He remembered the child’s words – call only when what is at stake is innocence – and thought, once again, of her name, the name that he did not know.
‘Do you plan to go out there today?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘You shouldn’t delay too long,’ the cartographer said, walking back upstairs. ‘We must all return to the homes of our childhood eventually.’
3.
Before the morning’s sun rose, Lord Elan Wagan began to scream.
Heast lay in the tent he shared with the young baker’s apprentice, Jaerc, and awaited the start of it. He had been awoken by the shrieks on the first nights – loud, piercing sounds that had come down the mountain with them – but his body soon remembered the pattern and, like the others on Wila, he awoke before Lord Wagan began to scream. He would lie in the salted dark until the noise turned into a whimper, the ending brought by the healer, Reila. Then, he would listen to the silence that followed with a certain pride in the men and women around him. Not once had he heard any complaint, not once had he stepped from his tent to find anger, or resentment, though he could well have understood it if it did appear. But those around him had nothing but patience for a man driven mad and for whom not even death would provide a release.
That was ultimately why they had that patience, Heast knew. When Lord Wagan had returned from Leera, his face a bloody ruin, his mind clearly lost, and his body held to the back of his horse only by ropes, Heast’s nature had urged him to free the man: a simple thrust of his dagger, a human kindness, an end to the cruelty Lord Wagan had endured. He would not have regretted the death: he had provided such kindness to other soldiers, to men and women who clung by a thread to a destroyed life.
Yet he had not done so. Quietly pushing up the flap of the tent he shared, he made his way beside a cold wind through the narrow lane of shadowed tents, unsure if his inaction had proved to be the kindest choice. He had owed Muriel Wagan more than the knowledge that the ghost of her mad husband haunted the ruins of Mireea, yet she deserved better than the sad responsibility she had now. Among the thousands of tents packed tightly across Wila, his sympathy was not isolated, and her plight not singular. Not one man or woman had left Mireea without a member of their family rising from the ruins, without a friend returning whom they had already mourned. Not one person on Wila was spared the awful realization that, for all of them, such a fate awaited. For most, though, that burden was shared. It was shared among themselves and in their families, if they still had them. They were not isolated by leadership and familial estrangement as Muriel was with her position and her daughter.
At the soggy edge of Wila, Heast stared out across the dark ocean and urinated. Far out in it, he could see small dots of light. Navy ships out in the ocean, perhaps, or one of the keeps that sat on islands around Nale and which doubled as lighthouses and barracks. But it was far enough that he could not be sure about either, which pleased him. He had worried originally that the navy would set ships around the island after the mobs had appeared on the day the ghosts did; if he had been the Soldier, he might have done that for safety; and he might have done it because he feared that Gaerl would arrive. But in the weeks that followed, nothing had happened beyond the extra postings of the guards. He learned also – through the few papers and pamphlets that fell to the island, now that the deliberate dropping had ended – that curfews had been enacted on Yeflam and that Zaifyr’s trial was going ahead. None of it, though, had anything to do with the Mireeans. It appeared that they had become much like the long ropes next to him, leading out into the water, where heavy bags of waste bobbed.
It was there that he heard the oar, the soft splash of it, and saw the outline of a boat a moment later.
It was a small boat, no more than a dinghy, and it held two figures, one large and one small, to judge by their silhouettes. They came directly from the northern shore, using the night’s dark to hide their approach from the guards on the bridge above, and the screams of Lord Wagan had covered the sound of the oars – all except the last few strokes, which were done in nude silence. As the two men became clearer, Heast made out the scarred serious face of Kal Essa from the smaller shadow, and a dust-stained man he did not know as the second.
Splashes echoed as he stepped into the fetid water, raising a hand to grab the edge of the boat and help guide it to the shore.
‘Turn it over, lift it,’ he whispered. ‘We cannot leave it on the beach.’
‘Aye,’ Essa responded quietly.
It would have looked ridiculous, had any guard glanced down onto Wila and seen an overturned boat moving quickly and quietly through the packed tents.
‘Captain Essa,’ he said softly, the front seat against his shoulders. ‘I trust that there is a good reason for this risk?’
‘The tribesman insisted. I held out against it, but he told us that there would be movement down the mountain. It’s been priests, mostly, though some look like soldiers.’ Essa had thrust his arms up to the centre seat, unable to carry it on his shoulders. ‘The tribesman told us that the Leeran leaders would be with them. I held him until it sure looked like that.’
Heast grunted, unsurprised. ‘Do you have a name, tribesman?’
The third man, who was both taller and heavier than Heast and Essa, looked like a brawler, a man who fought with his fists as well as an axe, though the Captain of the Ghosts knew that he did neither. Stained in dirt, he wore heavy brown breeches, a long dark-green tunic and, in the folds around his neck, layers of a black-and-brown scarf that could be wound around his tanned face and heavy brown-red beard and hair. He would do that when he stepped onto the empty plains of the plateau, against the strong winds that circulated the grasslands that the pacifist tribes had lived upon since the War of the Gods.
‘My name is Kye Taaira,’ the man said. ‘And I have come to deliver you a message, Captain Heast.’
4.
Ayae could not sleep.
In the last week, after she and Faise and Zineer had returned to their house, after they had left Zaifyr, her five hours of regular slumber had been drained from her, taken in fitful hours, in twisted minutes, and in the counting of seconds. Now, for the third night in a row, she sat alone long after Faise and Zineer had gone to bed, her hands clasped around a cup and a heated copper kettle beside her while she tried to read. The thin book before her was poetry, written by one of the women who had built the first City of Ger. It focused on the elements and described them as wilful, childish, demure and stubborn. It was awful, but neither it, fatigue nor tea could free her from the strange sensation of teeth pulling at her skin, as if something was trying to consume her.
‘It is the Leeran god. She approaches,’ Zaifyr had said to her on the day she left. ‘The sensation is different to what you will feel before the remains of the gods.’
She frowned. ‘Why would she be different?’
‘Because we have something she believes is her own.’ The two were standing on the right tower of Aelyn’s house, the afternoon’s sun high above the shifting mass of Leviathan’s Blood and a cold wind she barely felt rising from it. The charms in
Zaifyr’s hair and on his wrists caught the light. ‘In that way, she is like all the gods. She feels entitled to the world.’
Ayae did not want to believe that, but after the haunts had filled the city, after she had seen the fear in the eyes of men and women, she had felt the seeds of doubts about Zaifyr’s plan to return. When she had heard from Jae’le that, at the end of the trial, Zaifyr could be sent back to his prison, she had begun even to fear for him. What surprised her, however, was Jae’le himself. Since the ghosts had filled the city, Zaifyr’s brother had sat in the rooms below, surrounded by books, helping with the research. His long thin fingers turned pages slowly, carefully, as if he was dissecting an animal.
Pushing away the thought, she had said, ‘Why doesn’t the child have a name?’
‘A god’s name is chosen by mortals.’ Zaifyr shrugged, his charms glinting. ‘It is said that when the name is spoken, she will go to that man or woman and bestow on them a gift. At least, that is what was always said.’
Before her, the ocean heaved, its black waves crashing against the pillars that held Yeflam. ‘What will happen when she gets here?’
‘We will be offered a chance to end this war without building armies and without slaughter.’ He did not hesitate in his reply.
‘What happens if they don’t see the threat you do?’
‘I will not go back to the tower.’ There was no give in his voice. ‘How are Faise and Zineer?’
‘It has been quiet since the ghosts,’ she said, allowing him to change the topic. ‘I think – well, I think everything changed. I haven’t seen anyone follow us for a week now. The papers are full of stories about you, but there are a few stories about Illaan’s father and an internal fight within the Traders’ Union. Still, they have a passage to Zoum at the end of the week that has been organized for them. They’re taking that, at least.’