Leviathan's Blood

by Ben Peek

  ‘They did not come looking for slaves, did they?’ Muriel Wagan asked. ‘They did not come to take prisoners when they marched up the Mountain of Ger.’

  ‘No, they did not,’ Kye Taaira agreed. ‘However, they did take the Entia with them after they left. We believe they were taken to be sold, an opportunity that presented itself, not design. The design of the Leerans was quite different, their intent dictated by the young woman at their head. From a distance, it was clear that the soldiers followed her in a fashion akin to worship, for though beautiful, she wore no armour and carried no sword.’ He dipped the torn bread into salted water and ate a piece. Once he had swallowed, he said, ‘Of the forty soldiers with her, only one was but worthy of note, and that was the man who stood by her side, always. In appearance, he was no older than I, but he was much stronger. Across his back he carried iron spears of such a weight that no ordinary man could hold them all as he did. Our shamans said that he was a powerful ancient being, a man our oldest ancestors knew and feared.

  ‘Soon, the man staked forty members of the Entia to the ground with his spears. He did it with ease, even when, in panic, members of the tribe forgot their vows and fought him. But no blow they struck caused the breaking of skin, or the stopping of his actions. He drove spears into the chests of the Entia, plunged the iron through their bodies and into the ground, to carry their life to the spirits of our ancestors.’

  In the silence that followed, Heast watched the tribesman dip more torn bread, eat more. He observed the man and his movements, and after a while, he said, ‘Your ancestors rose, did they not? They became ghosts, as in Mireea.’

  ‘They did, but it was not as in Mireea, Captain,’ Kye Taaira said. ‘The beautiful girl led her soldiers to each of the spears. Then, one by one, she tore open the chest of the Entia. She let their blood flow into the land, to awaken our ancestors’ spirits, and then drew them out and held them in her hands. The power she wielded made the shamans tremble. According to the oldest and wisest of us, she then had her soldiers consume the parts of the body she held, to bond the ancestor to her soldier. Over the days that followed, after she left the site of her forbidden act, we watched her soldiers change. Some bloated, others shrank, but the melding of our ancestors to flesh could not be denied. Her act was of such horror that, for the first time in a thousand years, all our shamans gathered in one place to discuss how all the tribes would respond. You must understand: our ancestors were not kind men and women. They were warriors when Ger stood tall, when he kept the elements chained, and when an approach to him was one met with steel. They did not take kindly to his death, did not agree with what our wisest knew, that the violence of the world could not mirror the violence of the gods. In life, they were led by a man named Zilt; in death, they are still led by him. They have struggled for life ever since their deaths. They have howled for thousands of years. They are furious because our blood is kept from them, because we cremate our dead. They are furious and they lust for a life they once had, and before our eyes, the girl took forty of the worst, took General Zilt himself and those who served beneath him, and led them from the Plateau.’

  ‘And you’ve been sent to get them back?’ Lady Wagan asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Quietly, Reila said, ‘You are Hollow?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Heast regarded the man thoughtfully. The Hollow were rare figures on the Plateau, rumoured to be drained of their own blood at birth by shamans, the fluid stored in a totem. He had heard it described as an animal, a jar, a twin, and more, but had never met a man or woman who claimed to be Hollow to ask them. They were hidden, feared figures, the only defence in a pacifist land against enemies that came to the Plateau. They rarely left to pursue those enemies.

  ‘You did not come here first, did you?’ Muriel Wagan asked. ‘You would have gone to the Kingdoms of Faaisha. They are closer, and the fighting has moved there.’

  ‘You are correct.’ The tribesman placed the bread upon the table, reached into the folds of his clothes, and pulled out a letter. ‘After I left the Plateau, I made contact with the Lords of Faaisha. The Leeran Army had made its way over the border, routing Marshal Faet Cohn. The land was torn apart in ways that I could not understand and I was told that the Leeran soldiers were responsible. They had taken full measure of Marshal Cohn’s forces, I am afraid to say. Those men who were caught were crucified. Parts of their bodies were eaten, as well. As you might imagine, panic is quite prevalent in the other parts of the country.’

  ‘So they sent you here?’ A sharpness entered Muriel’s voice. ‘Do the Lords of Faaisha truly think I would be sympathetic to their plight?’

  ‘I imagine not.’ He passed the letter across the table. ‘It was why I was instructed to hand this letter to the captain and not you.’

  Heast took the envelope and, across from him, the tribesman returned to the soggy salted bread.

  The seal of the letter broke easily. The single page inside unfolded to reveal a simple image, sketched in the middle of the page. It was a square split into two colours, the top red, the bottom black. Over it was the uncoloured image of a planet, with the continents sketched in black.

  Wordlessly, Heast passed the letter to Muriel.

  ‘Do you know what this image is?’ she asked the tribesman.

  ‘I am told that it is the insignia of Refuge.’ Taaira dipped another piece of bread. ‘A man by the name of Baeh Lok told me this. He said that he had drawn it for Lord Tuael.’

  ‘Where is Lok now?’ Heast asked.

  ‘He is dead.’

  8.

  In the dark corners of his mother’s rundown estate, Bueralan’s childhood still remained.

  Earlier, the saboteur had stepped into the overgrown gardens around the house. Beneath the frail cloud-broken light of the afternoon’s setting sun, he searched for dried wood, leaves, anything that he could use to restart the fire inside the house. He would need it during the evening to cook and to keep warm, especially once the rain returned. Yet, despite the honest need and the two and more decades that separated him and his mother’s death, he felt her disapproval follow him around the yard and back inside, where he placed the pile of kindling on the stone floor. She would have demanded the servants take it outside once she found it and her displeasure when she found him would have been filtered through her resignation that the house, the grounds, and her only son would all be nothing without her.

  ‘You.’ The fire at her deathbed had been strong – stronger than the one he built now. She had lifted her frail hand when she spoke, pointing to the shadowed doorway, to where Zean stood. ‘You make sure he does not do something stupid in sight of the Queen.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  The relationship between his mother and Zean had always been formal. She had shown him little kindness after he had been purchased. Bueralan had no memory of her using his name, not even the night that the two were introduced. He had been no older than four then, and Zean six. His father, whose only defining memory to his grown son now was of a largeness that verged on fat, had spoken the ritual to bind them. It wasn’t until years later, after his father’s death, that Bueralan learned that his mother was against slavery, against the blood bonding of boys and girls from Ilatte to noble-born Ooilan children.

  What his father had said to her to allow the ritual to take place, Bueralan could not imagine. In his first days in the court from which his mother had exiled herself, he had been told by many how much she had loved her husband, and he had puzzled over the grudging respect strangers gave the words and the bitterness with which her friends said them. She had loved him was how the sentence began before it tailed off in an awkward silence. Only now did he understand the sacrifice implied, if not the reason for it.

  He recalled her face the night that he and Zean were introduced. In the ceiling of the room where he sat now, the lamps had shone, the shadows cast against it by those on the ground a hideous puppetry. The huge form of his father was before him,
a small table with a stone bowl and knife on it. But it was his mother’s face that he remembered most, as if the flicker of the fire he had built recast it for him: the still mask she wore, the constructed facial features, the downcast eyes: the face of a woman who hated everything taking place before her.

  ‘Until he dies, Bueralan, this boy will be your brother.’ He had asked later if his father had had a blood brother, but his mother had told him no. ‘You have a great responsibility to him,’ his father continued, ‘for he will bear your ills and your shame, and suffer where you will not. What happens to him will be your responsibility.’

  Before the fire, Bueralan’s hand touched the pouch around his neck.

  He should have saved them all, he knew. Not just Zean. Kae, Ruk, Liaya and Aerala: they had all been his responsibility.

  His mother would disagree with him, if she was here. She would tell him that life is not the responsibility of another. You cannot decide who lives and who dies. She had said that more times than he could remember. She would say it to him now: she would reach out for the cold stone that lay against his chest. She would roll it around in her hand. She would ask him why he thought Zean was his responsibility. He would tell her simply that he had failed him. That he had failed all of his soldiers and if he could bring them all back, he would.

  Bueralan picked up a branch and fed it into the fire. His mother would not be moved by the argument. She would tell him that he had lost soldiers before. That he had lost friends as well. She would be right: death was a part of the work he might never return to, a truth that could not be denied.

  ‘What happened to your family?’

  He said the words to Zean a week after the ritual, the stitched scar over the palm of his hand leaving it stiff and all but useless, as it would be for another month. Before him sat the older boy, holding his own left hand. Before them, spread out, were toys. He did not remember what they were. Horses, probably. Or soldiers, the wooden figures parents gave their children. Yet he could remember clearly how Zean had waited very carefully for him to pick first from the toys, how he had followed Bueralan’s lead.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, after a moment. ‘They gave me up when I was young.’

  Both had been too young to understand how parents on Illate gave up their children, but the young Bueralan had said, ‘I could help you return home.’

  Zean had shrugged, uncomfortable, but unable to say no.

  Bueralan had tried to be true to his words, though. With the other’s help, he had stolen food from the kitchen, prepared a bag to carry while he sneaked him into the back of his father’s carriage, only to be horrified when Zean returned, still hidden. He did not know where to go, he said, and so the pair had made maps, copied them from books in his mother’s library and stolen more food. On the third attempt, Bueralan had packed a change of clothes – ‘It was cold,’ Zean had said after the second failure – and had given him gold, neither stolen, but rather his own.

  ‘Where was I to go?’ an older Zean asked him, after they had fled Ooila. ‘I had no family outside that carriage, no one to help me. You were the only one I had.’

  9.

  Zaifyr watched the white raven drift into the morning’s sun, quietly, and without a reply attached to its leg. Both Jae’le and himself had tried to compose one, but could not.

  Zaifyr had a few names of dead men and women he could call up, but he had yet to bring the remains of one into Yeflam. None was close enough. They were lost, in mountains, or in towns that no longer existed, or in another continent simply too far away. He had to find others, he had to find men and women close to him, though the calm he needed to search both books and the dead for them was difficult to find. When he closed his eyes, he saw the tower where he had been kept, saw the walls that closed in and the dirt that was beneath his feet. The threat of being sent back to that prison had lodged in him a fear, not of what he was doing – he knew that Jae’le had agreed to it because he was afraid that Yeflam would become Asila again – but because he feared that he might not be able to convince the Keepers and his family about the child. Tinh Tu’s reply felt like a prophecy, an echo from a future where his trial had finished and he had already been found lacking. Yet, he knew that he had to push beyond that, that he had to continue his search. He must not fail to show Yeflam that the child was responsible for pain and suffering on a scale that they could not imagine.

  At the top of the tower stairs, Zaifyr breathed deeply from the cold air and tried to control the frustration he felt. Around him, a splash of haunts drifted: men, women, children, all of them faint silver sketches. Animals blended in: mice, cats, birds and insects, their forms at first a flutter of light that slowly began to meld together as the generations of the dead collaged over each other, threatening to slowly explode into an endless mirror of light and reflection.

  He had failed as a brother. He had planned too much around the reliability of his siblings, yet had given them no reason why they should help him. Oh, he could point to the fact that they had made no effort to contact him after he had stepped, half blind, from the crooked tower: he could point to that and note the failure of all of them but Jae’le on a familial level, but he had not tried to correct it. He had listened with less than half an ear to their conversations as the years drifted by, passed less than that in an eye over their letters, a quiet and solitary figure behind Jae’le. He thought little of Aelyn’s Yeflam, less of her Keepers. He had not seen Tinh Tu’s new library. He had said no to her requests repeatedly, even the one time she left her fortress to speak to him face to face. He kept little track of Eidan and his projects, could not begin to fathom what his plans were now.

  He rubbed at his face. He had not slept since Ayae and he had last stood here in the tower, but he was not alone. All who felt the child’s approach would be lying awake.

  Zaifyr gazed across Yeflam, tracing the bridges and the circular stone continents, seeing all the roads that led to Nale and nothing beyond it. Only after a moment did he notice the figure on the stone edge of the tower’s wall.

  It was black, but not in the sense that its skin was like a man or woman’s pigmentation. It was, instead, a smooth black, dark as the ocean around him, covering the being so densely that it appeared to have been created without light and formed by the absence of it. It was not tall, or large, and no bigger than his hand, nor wider than his palm. Its eyes were tightly shut and showed no sign of ever being open.

  From it came a chill that Zaifyr was familiar with.

  ‘Qian.’ Its voice was that of a male, deep and adult. ‘I greet you.’

  ‘That’s not my name,’ he replied. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘My apologies.’

  ‘Your apologies? I don’t even know what you are to accept that.’

  ‘Perhaps it is I who should ask for an apology, then.’ Its smile was a sardonic, inky curl. ‘Will you be quick? I have not much time.’

  Zaifyr stepped closer to the black figure, a sharp cold biting against his skin. ‘Why does a dead man have to worry about time?’

  ‘Ah, but that is how you know me.’ Its smile widened. ‘I am only sorry that I made such a poor impression in our first meeting.’

  ‘I have never seen you before.’

  ‘You have.’

  He reached out his hand, closing in on the still black figure, the cold seeping into his fingers as he touched it. ‘No, this I have—’ He released his cold hand, suddenly. ‘You are the soldier from Mireea. The one the child was in.’

  ‘Yes,’ it – no, he – whispered.

  ‘She destroyed you.’

  ‘She remade me.’

  The implication was not lost on Zaifyr.

  ‘She will be here soon,’ the small man continued. ‘Once she is here, I will not have the independence to speak to you, so I urge you to listen to me, please.’

  A Fear Whispered in Your Heart and Mind is a Real Fear

  On the continent that Leera, Mireea, the Kingdoms of Faaisha and the P
lateau share, there are three gods: Ger, the Warden of the Elements, Maika, the God of Ascension, and Taane, the Goddess of Memory. The final two lie in Leera. Two hundred years ago, the Kingdoms of Faaisha sought to take the land under which the god Taane lies, but that army turned mad, as all do who travel to the end of the northern marshes, and no other attempt was ever made. It has remained in Leeran hands since.

  On the Plateau, however, the lack of gods is balanced by what else lies there. It is best to view the whole part of that land as a prison, if you will, one that is maintained by the people who live on it. Yet it is here, I think, that we begin to a see a more honest depiction of this new god.

  —Tinh Tu, Private Diary

  1.

  Before Pueral, the coastline lay under the bone-white light of the moon, the black ocean an empty promise that the shore wound around.

  She had arrived at Oetalia, the capital of the Fifth Queen’s Province, eight days earlier. Her guard of twenty seasoned soldiers, a tracker and a witch followed her from the dirt trails to the stone streets of the capital, a silent ribbon of unannounced black and red. Oetalia was larger than Cynama: spread across an uneven, rocky ground that turned into a ruined mountain, it was broken by half a dozen huge stone canals, the bottoms of which dropped into a darkness that, even when the fractured suns sat directly above, no end could be seen. Elaborate steel bridges stitched the city together over those fractures and, from the rise of the first, Pueral could see a rocky horizon stretched on either side of her. Originally, Oetalia had been the capital of the First Province, and a certain grandeur haunted its narrow streets, a nobility lingering in its steep roads, its long stairways and tall stone buildings.