Leviathan's Blood

by Ben Peek

  ‘I don’t even live here.’

  She wore a dark-green cloak, soaked black by the rain, and she pushed it back to reveal a young, beautiful face.

  A face he knew.

  ‘Could we continue to stand in the rain and talk?’ The Queen’s Voice held little tolerance in its dry sarcasm. ‘I do so prefer to admire warmth from a distance.’

  He stepped aside.

  Like much of the court since his return, the Queen’s Voice had been created during his exile, another part of the First Queen’s reclamation of her body from her illness. Bueralan had first heard of the appointment over a decade ago, sitting in on a bar conversation between two other men who discussed the First Queen’s decline, her children, and the woman who walked before him now. She had been little more than a child then, just ten full seasons old, beautiful and beautifully voiced, a girl destined for the operas.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me, I don’t usually do this.’ Before the fire, she slipped the wet cloak from her shoulders. Beneath it she wore dark-orange leather trousers and matching riding boots, and a light shirt of red-and-yellow silk that left her slender arms free. ‘Late-night meetings are usually the work of the Eyes of the Queen.’

  ‘And for a moment I thought it was a social call.’

  ‘Still looking for a mother, I take it?’ She lay her cloak on the stones before facing him. ‘Will I be wined and dined in the ruins of your youth?’

  ‘Are the ruins of yours better?’ He approached the fire. ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her hands were long-fingered, with a single gold ring on her right pinky from where a chain ran to her wrist. The low flames reflected off them as she leant towards the fire’s warmth. ‘But to you, I am the Queen’s Voice.’

  ‘What does the Queen say, then?’

  ‘She would like you to accompany her to a party a fortnight from now.’

  ‘You rode out here for that?’

  ‘Your control is most admirable, Bueralan.’ The Queen’s Voice was unchanged in its dryness, but the chill beneath it was a disdain not disguised. ‘I did not do nearly as well at controlling my face when the First Queen informed me I would make the journey out here tonight. She told me that her guards were instructed to wait at the front gate while I rode up to deliver you your invitation. She even told me that the guards would expect me back within half an hour.’

  In his youth, well-placed mothers had kept spiralled candle holders to watch the time that he was allowed to spend privately with their daughters. A stone was placed into the spirals, and it was wound up and down beneath a candle, each spiral worth ten minutes of time. He wondered if the guards of the Voice had found a shelter beneath the rain for such a candle. ‘Whose party?’ he asked.

  ‘The Queen’s youngest daughter, Yoala.’

  Bueralan grunted sourly.

  ‘I see you know of her,’ the Queen’s Voice said. ‘I do not envy either of us this night. You are also to know that the Queen has not been invited to this party.’

  ‘Could I say no?’

  She raised a fine eyebrow at that.

  ‘Yeah.’ He walked around the fire, picking up some of the branches he had brought in and began to feed them into the simmering flames. ‘How have Yoala’s ambitions been of late?’

  ‘She still has two sisters.’

  ‘Because she still has a mother.’ The First Queen’s daughters had, in the opinion of much of Ooila, been born in the wrong order, the spirits of the Queen’s aunts and mother swallowed on the wrong nights, the wombs of the right children given the wrong lineage. Safeen Re, the witch who had performed the Gifts, had denied it strongly, and there was some suggestion, in the darkest part of the court, that the bottles had not been used at all. ‘Tell me, what is this party for?’

  ‘Officially, I do not know.’ Elegantly, the Queen’s Voice reached down for her sodden cloak. ‘But I have heard rumours of a marriage.’

  Bueralan fed another stick into the fire. ‘Is this rumour similar to the Innocent being on the shore?’

  ‘I was told you were a spy, a saboteur.’ She held her cloak to the fire, water running into the broken tiles. ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It will be apparent to you, if it is not already, that the First Queen’s eyesight is not good, her voice frail and her hearing a struggle around loud noises. Her physical strength vanishes quickly,’ she continued, ‘and you will have to help her from her carriage. She will not take any of her guards with her so that her arrival is not viewed as an act of aggression, but I will be there. However, the position of helping her physically will fall to you. Once out of the carriage, the First Queen has a chair that you will have to push, and it is heavy and awkward. But do not think of this physical weakness as one of her mind, Bueralan. There is no flaw there, except the flaws that are reported to her – and I will know, should you be the voice of those.’

  ‘I have no desire to do that,’ he said.

  ‘I would hope so.’ She turned the cloak around to warm the inside. ‘I would hate to tell my guards that you were anything but a gentleman.’

  8.

  Inside Bnid Gaerl’s house, soldiers waited for Ayae.

  They waited in a large wooden-floored room, the high ceiling pooled with smoke above, obscuring much of the first-floor gallery. The flames came from walls lined with paintings, the oils of which had caught alight as she stepped into the centre of the room. She had seen, before the flames distorted her vision, scenes of military action, of huge battles where foes lay fallen in the horrors of war, the reconstructions events of one man’s valour, a man who appeared both youthful and middle-aged in the art, and whose hair in the former was a russet, a colour that repeated itself later in the shine of his sword as he raised it above his vanquished foes.

  The same sword that he now held behind a kneeling Zineer and Faise on the first floor.

  ‘Ayae!’

  The day the matron had died, a five-year old Ayae had run into the streets of Mireea.

  She had fled after the children had been taken out of the orphanage, after they had been turned to face the building that had been their home, the middle floor seething a broken, burning smile in their direction. Later, the Mireean Guard would tell the older children how lucky they had been. The flames that had consumed the matron had struggled to spread after they poured free of her broken lamp. Oh, the flames had settled into the bed’s linen and occupant with easy violence, the result of which had been a smoking blanket wrapped around the matron’s ample frame, carried out of the ruined smile by three men – and the sight of which finally forced her to slip away into the early morning dark, intent on fleeing what she viewed as her responsibility.

  ‘Ayae!’

  She met the soldiers on the ground floor without words.

  They had wrapped wet cloths of dark blue around their faces and they fought in companion to each other. For every cut of her burning sword, one would parry and the second thrust back in response. Even with the moves coming slowly, she found herself pressed, found her burning feet moving backwards, not forwards, found herself turned towards other men and women who fought with a similar, terrible unison. Like the long, uninterrupted peel of an apple, the soldiers took away her space, cutting her freedom further and further back until, in an act of frustration, she stamped one soldier’s blade down with her foot and used the blade to push herself up into the solidifying air and land outside the ring. And then plunged her burning sword back into the group.

  ‘You are Cursed,’ the matron had said. ‘You listen to my words, child. Through no fault of your own, you were born wrong.’ Around her, the dining room was silent, the eyes of the other children in the orphanage wide, frightened, not so much by the words, but by the matron’s tone, the fury in her face and voice. ‘Rooms warm when you step into them. Skin begins to sweat. Clothes begin to stick. If I were to cut you open, I would find flames inside.’

  Ayae emerged in the clump of soldiers as a figure of flame, her s
word slicing a long, burnt arc through one man, parting chain, skin and bone.

  She was aware that she had lost all sense of her body as a mortal fixture that held her in the world. She remained cognizant of her sense of self by only the faintest strands, by only the most primal recognition of herself and her actions. Her senses remained slippery, incorporeal, twisted through her mind by a rage that focused itself on the private soldiers before her. She blocked and parried the attacks that attempted to reel her in as before, but her blade hammered out to kill those in front of her with brutal disregard for their skill.

  It was from one of the last that her sword came back with its straight form lost. The metal had yielded beneath the heat inside her, the heat that had begun to pulse with the beat of her heart.

  ‘Ayae!’

  All those years ago, it had been Faise who had found her after the matron’s death, who had drawn her out of hiding by walking down the streets, screaming her name when no one else would look for her.

  ‘Ayae!’

  But it was not Faise who shouted now.

  ‘Look at me, girl, and know that I will not bow to you!’

  Bnid Gaerl lifted his fire-stained sword—

  —and for all her speed, all her power, she could do nothing to stop the blade’s heavy cut that went cleanly through Zineer’s neck.

  He lifted his sword again, over Faise’s head, and Ayae felt her final strands of consciousness break apart. Her anguish emerged in a scream of such raw emotion that the last thread of control that she had over her body, over the fire inside her, broke. It rushed from her in such a torrent that she felt herself rise off the ground, the centre of an emerging nova. Her gaze found Faise’s and she saw the terror in her, the fear of the blade rising above her, the blade that the heat would melt before it came down; she saw the blood from Zineer that had splattered across her right cheek; and she saw Faise’s devastation at having seen her husband so cruelly cut down. Ayae wanted desperately to reach out to her, to draw her into her grasp, to hold her safe in the centre of the burning storm that was consuming the room, but she could not. She was not in control. She had lost control. The threat of her bones splitting, her skin bursting, her body erupting in fire had come true and she could do nothing as the fire tore upwards, as it melted the sword of Bnid Gaerl and flesh of his arm, as the wave of fire tore over him and over Faise, the horror announcing itself in the catching of her hair, the splitting of her skin. The scream that emerged from Faise was the only sound that Ayae could hear over her own terrible loss.

  9.

  From the tower, Zaifyr watched as fire rose in a massive pillar of devastation and loss, the scream in its centre so raw that it pained him to hear it.

  As the pillar rose, he stepped back from the edge of the tower. He steadied himself as it tore apart in the sky, reaching higher and higher, carried by Ayae’s loss – he knew it was her, knew that it could be no one else – and then watched as the fire broke apart. It fell over Yeflam, raining over the buildings of industry and domesticity, over the streets that ran wide and narrow, over a population of men and women who had looked up to gaze into the storm that they were unprepared for.

  He was in the streets of Nale a moment later.

  His awareness fell into an old man, a man who had fallen to his knees in the streets, his heart stuttering and shuddering in an attack he would not rise from; a young woman was next, a suicide near the bridge to the north; he slipped into the haunt of a dog next, her body crushed by one of the long carriages pulled by nine horses on the bridge.

  In the tower, next to his physical body, he was aware of Jae’le approaching him.

  He did not have to explain to his brother what had happened. He could not, at any rate: the further he pushed his consciousness away from himself, the further he stretched the connection with his own body, the less he could do with the part of him that was anchored in reality. Yet that part of him was surprised when his brother did not turn around and return to the books that lay below. He liked Ayae, Zaifyr knew that, but for Jae’le, the divide between being friendly to someone and being family with them was not insubstantial. It grew even wider the closer the child came to Yeflam. As she approached, Jae’le became obsessed with finding names that Zaifyr could call upon. He had explained the reason for it a week ago, when he said, ‘The Keepers have created an elaborate trial for you, brother. It will be unlike anything that you have seen before. Unlike anything that the world has seen. You will find it difficult to defend yourself from claims of madness.’

  Zaifyr pushed himself into an old man who had died in his home from a knife thrust into his throat. A young boy, the first of his victims, buried beneath the house where the old man died, led him further across Fiys. A thread between the boy and an elderly woman, his mother who had died years later, years after she had found the old man, helped Zaifyr reach the bridge that led to Ghaam.

  On Ghaam Zaifyr moved into the haunt of a Yeflam Guard who had been killed by a hammer to the back of his head. An unrelated man followed, a gambler who had run out of luck before he ran out of liquor. His life, like the lives of all the haunts Zaifyr pushed his consciousness through, flickered like the first strike of a match. It flared in his consciousness, a sudden illumination of the dead’s final moments, before it faded to the dull sense of loss that the long-term dead shared.

  On Xeq, however, it changed dramatically. The recent dead appeared before him as slivers of light, as if the falling rain had been stilled. He pushed his consciousness into an old dead, a boy who had slipped off the edge of the bridge while walking across it years earlier, and as he did, he saw the new dead turn to him. His presence called to them in their pain and confusion, just it called the dead wherever he walked. But the emotions were rawer, more intense, and they forced him to settle into the boy’s haunt further. He felt his desperation as he tried to rise above the waves of Leviathan’s Blood and felt the pain as the water stung against his flesh. Zaifyr rode the fear until he could move it to one side. Once he had done that, he concentrated on focusing on the drowned boy, and the new dead faded before him. With them gone, he could see the fires that ran throughout Xeq. Fuelled by loss and by grief, they rose unnaturally high and ran from roof to roof and onto the ground, finding life in the stone as he had seen no other fire do. From there, the fire reached for the people around it, as if its limbs were the extremities of a huge submerged animal. It even reached for the haunt that Zaifyr guided down the road, to where the centre of the destruction lay.

  The walls of the estate were made of stone and metal, but they had melted beneath such heat that he doubted he would have been able to approach it if he were in his flesh. Yet, once he stepped past it, he realized the walls were in fact acting as a warped barrier that offered a faint protection from a much worse heat, from a furnace in the centre of a once-lavish house. There, parts of the frame were gone, as if it had simply disintegrated. Another part of the frame had been blown clear into the air and the blackened wood and stone lay in a hideous parody of confetti across the ground.

  In the centre of it lay Ayae.

  She lay curled into a foetal ball, her clothes smouldering, but otherwise unhurt.

  Above her stood a familiar haunt.

  ‘Cold,’ Faise whispered. ‘I’m cold.’

  The woman revealed the horror of being caught in the explosion. Her skin had peeled back, had revealed her organs, had allowed them to be melted, to be destroyed as the very bones of her body had been turned brittle and black. The injuries flickered before Zaifyr as she struggled to reform herself in the wake of her trauma.

  A part of Zaifyr, the part that was on the tower in Nale, felt tears seep from him.

  In the ruins, the haunt he controlled gently lifted Ayae. He was delicate with her touch, careful that the haunt’s desire to be warm and to be fed did not overcome his simple actions. He had to exert a stronger control over the drowned boy when the fabric of Ayae’s clothes flaked beneath his touch and both he and the haunt’s touch sa
w dried blood and cuts on her.

  Outside the destroyed wall, an ox and cart waited. The huge, brown beast was unconcerned by the fires around it, even as they threatened both it and the cart.

  ‘Thank you, brother,’ Zaifyr said through the haunt, said to the man who stood beside him.

  The ox grunted and, moments later, it set out for Nale, guided by an invisible hand.

  10.

  A day, years ago, a single day, with the midday’s sun high in the clear sky, a single hot day, she had helped Faise load her belongings on to the back of a small cart. It was drawn by an ox Zineer had bought. He was silent that day, a man of slight smiles, of kind but quiet gestures. He took the boxes she carried with a thank you each time, no matter if it held plates or clothes, ornaments or soft toys. Inside the house, her house that she shared with Faise, the other woman asked her if she was sure. ‘You need knives. You need forks. You need chairs.’ But she had shaken her head and said no, no she did not need them. She said it bravely, though a part of her did want to keep them, keep them all, souvenirs of Faise, talismans she could line her rooms with as the days turned into weeks and months and the journey from Mireea to Yeflam became a difficult one to make due to work and relationships. She would visit, yes, but it would not be the same, it could not be, and the thought was in her mind when she hugged Faise, when she held her tightly.

  It was only later that she realized how wrong she had been.

  11.

  The fire had stopped falling from the sky, but the ash-black clouds still remained, a series of circles that threatened to reignite at any moment.

  The scream that tore over Yeflam with the explosion had pierced the people standing on the bridge and island, breaking the heavy silence. Heast, no less affected by the sound than the others, had felt chilled when he lifted his head to the sky and saw the first droplets of fire fall. If the burning rain reached Wila, he knew that the Mireeans would have no shelter from it. The men and women on Wila would have little choice but to run into the black ocean, to use the shallows of the poisoned water as protection, unable to hide in the tents that lined the island. Yet, before he could react, he had seen the figure of Lieutenant Mills giving orders. A dozen of the Mireean Guard raced to the closest tents and began to strip the fabric off their poles, before they ran to the ocean to soak it as a shelter.