Leviathan's Blood

by Ben Peek

  The tents lay now on the edge of the beach, not needed now but days, if not weeks, away from being used as shelter again.

  Further up, following the stone ramp, up into Yeflam itself and the bridge, were a handful of sky-blue armoured guards. The child – the Leeran god, Heast corrected himself – had arrived and gone. In the moments before the fire ripped into the sky, Heast had been able to make out a figure on the stone path . . . a vision that had all but disappeared when the woman’s scream had sounded and the crowds had burst into panic, a panic that the Yeflam Guard had reacted quickly to by herding everyone on the bridge off it and onto the roads the other side of it.

  But the rain had not reached them. It had fallen on one city in Yeflam, on Xeq if Heast was right, and now it smouldered on the horizon.

  ‘Does the sky not remind you of the Keep?’ Reila stood beside him and Muriel, the age that had crept onto her face during the battle in Mireea still apparent. Yet she had emerged swiftly from the tent when the scream sounded, leaving the tribesman Kye Taaira behind her. ‘You could see ash in it for weeks after Fo and Bau were killed.’

  ‘It is gone now,’ he said. ‘I watched the last of it fade away months ago.’

  ‘Yes, but I fear that Ayae and her friends are in the heart of this.’

  Heast had already reached a certain fatalism about both Faise and Zineer. He did not believe that Ayae was dead, a sentiment that Muriel and Reila shared. Once it became clear that the fire would not rain down upon Wila, the Lady of the Ghosts had said, ‘Poor girl,’ softly. He was not surprised to see Reila nod in agreement. Both left him shortly after. They headed into the crowds of Mireean people, where Muriel would take their hands, would talk to them and ensure that they were safe.

  Left alone, Heast contemplated his role in their deaths. He thought about the failure of Sinae Al’tor to take them to safety, about the failure of the Soldier to alert Ayae properly, but the thoughts did not linger. Heast was not a man who blamed others for his faults and he was not a man who lingered upon death.

  Ahead of him, the tribesman stood alone on the beach. He had turned away from Leviathan’s Blood, watching the Mireean people gathering around Muriel Wagan.

  ‘We will leave tonight,’ Heast said to Kye Taaira once he reached him, once he made his way awkwardly through the sand. ‘Kal Essa, myself, and you, if you wish.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly. ‘Will your mercenary captain and his men come with you over the mountain?’

  ‘No.’ Kal Essa and the Brotherhood have important work here. Essa will offer, though. ‘I will not hold you in bond as a guide. You have a duty of your own.’

  ‘No, Captain, I will bring you to Faaisha.’

  ‘I appreciate it.’

  The tribesman continued to stare at the crowds. Those closest to him stood around the tents that had been stripped. The bare wooden frames exposed the flat beds and meagre belongings of the inhabitants, leaving none with illusions. ‘It is horrible to be without a home,’ he said, quite suddenly. ‘It was a truth that I learned at a young age. The shamans choose you to be Hollow at birth, and you are taken from your parents once you are weaned. It is a great responsibility you are placed under and it turns you into a nomad on the Plateau. For my entire life, I have lived in tents similar to this. I imagine that, if I took each tent that I had pitched and slept in, I would fill this island just as your people have filled it in their loss.’

  ‘I would not have thought you a man given to such thoughts, if it is all you have known.’

  ‘A man knows envy.’

  ‘And you are an envious man?’

  ‘A fault I do not enjoy.’ He turned to Heast. ‘Do you not value home as well?’

  ‘I have slept in too many tents.’

  ‘Baeh Lok said the same thing to me on one of our nights together.’

  ‘It is the life of a mercenary.’

  ‘Indeed.’ The tribesman nodded, thoughtfully. ‘You will make an interesting companion, Captain.’

  After he had gone, Heast remained on the beach. He watched not the tents, nor the sky with its dark, ashed lines, nor the black water that tasted of blood and salt. Rather, he watched the men, the women, the children. Watched those around Muriel and those who were not. He watched them going through the motions of keeping a community, of ensuring that it still existed, even on a small piece of land that they had been sentenced to for no reason other than survival.

  He watched because, by morning, he would no longer be able to.

  12.

  At the end of the beach, they found thirty-seven crucifixes.

  The air was still, as if the wind off Leviathan’s Blood knew the horror that it blew towards, that it knew the foul deed that had been done, and held itself guilty for the aid it had given to the men responsible. Pueral slid off her horse without correcting herself. She could not believe that the rough wooden pieces had been constructed while men and women waited beneath the gaze of one man. She would not believe that one man had such power that he could make men and women wait, with patience, for their death.

  Yet they had.

  The bloated bodies had been nailed with thick iron spikes through their wrists and shins to the crosses. No one was spared, not even children. With her soldiers, Pueral led her horse to stand in front of the empty gazes of eleven children. The youngest would have been no older than five, she estimated. The black-and-red armour felt heavier than before and, beneath their eyes, Pueral told herself that she would pull the children down first, once her soldiers had finished with the area. She promised that she would bury all of them, that she would pull the spikes from each, starting with the children, granting as much mercy as she could to the dead.

  Closer to the crucifixes, she saw that the heads of all thirty-seven men and women had been tied in place with wire. There were two thin strips, one across the forehead, one across the jaw, both ensuring that the scavenger-picked faces of the dead were directed out to the sea, a direction that Pueral’s gaze followed.

  Nothing.

  But—

  She released the reins of her horse and walked closer to the black water’s edge. She had seen something, just. It had caught on the reflection of the ocean, but it was gone, just as quickly, and she could not see—

  There.

  A speck of light.

  A flash, then gone, then back.

  A lamp, no more, she decided. But it was a lamp deep in the darkness of the ocean, a single, swaying, half-lidded eye watching her from the deck of a ship. A solitary ship far out in the waves – a massive ship.

  Glafanr.

  Down the beach to her left, not far from her, sat a dinghy. It had been pushed on to the sand and inside were two oars, the wood pitted and scarred.

  ‘Lady Pueral.’

  The tracker, Ae Lanos, emerged from the night beside her.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said softly, ‘that it was not one man who did this.’

  ‘I wish that I could,’ the old man replied, his voice equally low, as if to raise it would signal a reality that neither were prepared, as yet, to accept. ‘The light on the ocean must be from the ship that brought him here, but the last part of the journey was made on this. He arrived alone and I can find no other tracks, or boats, that lead from Leviathan’s Blood. He was greeted by a man. That man was struck down, almost instantly.

  ‘The man from the boat then walked to the village, carrying the man he had struck down.’ As the tracker turned, Pueral saw a flash of the image he had drawn – an unconscious Ja Nuural being slung over a shoulder and carried up the beach. There, a series of wooden huts sat, a line of portly guards who had been stripped of their armour to reveal dark holes in their flesh. ‘He was challenged twice – here and here. The fights were quick, brutal, and none of the blood comes from him. It is important, also, to note that he killed both his attackers while still holding the man who greeted him. Then he reached the village. He was not fought here. Instead, he placed the man on the ground and tore out his tongu
e. It was after that that he had crucifixes built. He ordered the wood taken off the houses and carried out onto the beach.’

  ‘Did you . . .’ Around Pueral, her soldiers had gathered, stern and silent. She cleared her throat and said, again, ‘Did you find the man’s tongue?’

  Lanos wordlessly unwrapped a rotting piece of flesh, covered in sand.

  ‘Where did he go, after?’ she asked.

  ‘To the north,’ the tracker replied. ‘He went on foot, with no food or water.’

  She nodded and, after a moment, turned to head back to the crucifixes, to where her horse waited.

  ‘My Lady,’ Lanos said again.

  ‘If it is him,’ she said, not just to him, but to all of her soldiers. ‘If it is him, then now is not the time to be afraid. The trail is cold, but it is not dead. We can and we will follow it to scenes that I only imagine will be worse than this.’ Going back to her horse, she ran her hand along the neck of the beast, and then began to untie the folded shovel that lay over her saddle bags, bundled in with her tent, her pots, her pans. ‘But we will not turn away. We will ride this man down, no matter his history, nor his name. We will kill him, and if we cannot kill him, then we will give an account of ourselves in such a nature that when he speaks of us to his soldiers he is given pause.’

  She unfolded the shovel, tightening the bolts to screw it into place. ‘First, we will bury our dead,’ the Eyes of the Queen said. ‘Then we will begin.’

  A Cracked Jar

  No one had heard of General Waalstan before he laid siege to Mireea. Before the child called upon him, it is said that the General was nothing more than a teacher of linguistics, a man for whom the words on a page, rather than the people before him, battled for dominance. If it is true, Ekar Waalstan has put aside his quill for a heavier weapon, and marked it by going to battle against the infamous Captain of the Spine, Aned Heast. He did not win that battle, but he did not lose either, and for many, that spoke quite forcefully of him.

  After Mireea, Waalstan surged into the Kingdoms of Faaisha. After a large, initial success at Celp, he put aside the traditional forms of combat and scattered his Faithful across the Kingdoms. As if he was courting the approval of the man he had just fought, Waalstan began a campaign of savage guerrilla tactics, striking towns and cities suddenly, taking men and women hostage, and leaving behind only devastation. One such survivor, a young woman by the name of Jiqana, was taken into the Leeran camps and, in particular, Waalstan’s base, before she was sold into slavery in Gogair.

  She had been blinded before she was sold. ‘It happened,’ she said, ‘after I rejected their god a third time.’

  —Tinh Tu, Private Diary

  1.

  When Ayae awoke after three days, Zaifyr was waiting beside her.

  She was lying on a large square bed in a room that smelt of dust and ash. He was sitting across from her on a sun-faded red-cushioned chair, books lined around his feet, but none in his hands. His eyes were closed, as if he were asleep, or in deep thought. A pitcher of warm water sat in the middle of the room, a glass next to it. Her body was naked and sweaty and stale and heavy and a blanket had been drawn over her. It tangled and twisted in her legs and she could feel the roughness of it against her skin, as well as the soot and dirt and the stitches that had been sewn roughly into her wounds. The sensations were so magnified that, later, when she thought of Faise and Zineer, she would remember the feeling of her body, the used weariness she felt, and the taste of ash, and how her first urge had been to reach for the pitcher of water on the ground, to hurl it or to drink from it, she was not sure. Yet, when she had sat up, Ayae had thought that she would break. Her back was so stiff it felt as if her joints had solidified, and for a moment, in panic, she thought exactly that – that the fire in her had turned her spine liquid and it had cooled into a solid length, but with a series of loud cracks, Ayae rose from the bed, her bare feet touching the ground numbly before failing her.

  Zaifyr caught her as she stumbled, returned her to the edge of the bed. Wordlessly, he poured her a glass of water and brought it to her.

  She could only taste ash. ‘You saw her?’ she asked. ‘You saw Faise?’

  He nodded.

  ‘It was my fault.’

  ‘I know.’

  You could have lied to me.

  ‘It will be hard.’ He lowered himself into a crouch. His left hand touched her naked knee and she could feel the edge of a silver charm against her skin – but it felt dull, as if someone other than herself was feeling it. He said, ‘It will be hard for the next month, the next year, maybe the next decade.’

  ‘What about the next hour?’

  ‘It will be unbearable.’

  She had no reply.

  ‘If I could hold the burden for you, I would,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No.’ Ayae met the fractured green of his gaze and felt, for the first time, that she understood how it had become broken, why within it was disciplined cynicism. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘It is – this is mine alone.’

  ‘It is.’

  Soon, Zaifyr left her. He returned to collect his books, to bring her food and water and to speak to her, but for the most part, he gave her space. Jae’le was similar. He came into her room quietly, spoke softly, but was a reluctant and poor carer, his attention always outside the door that he came through. Ayae understood that. Though she did not leave her room for the first days after she awoke, she was aware of both men in the house below her, aware of their presences as they prepared for Zaifyr’s trial, though neither spoke directly of it to her. She was thankful for that. She heard their voices through the floorboards and, in her dreams, Zaifyr’s upcoming trial and her guilt would entwine, blending Faise and Zineer with Fo and Bau. She would awake believing that she should be subject to judgement, to the punishment Zaifyr was not seeking.

  The thoughts might have lingered had not Aelyn Meah visited Ayae on the fifth day after the death of Faise and Zineer.

  Ayae was not in her room when Aelyn arrived, but on the top of the tower. She had made the walk in the early hours of the morning to gaze at the smouldering ruins of Xeq, a walk she had envisaged since she awoke, a vision that had been conjured in her dreams. When she took the final steps onto the top of the tower, the first thing that struck Ayae was that it looked nothing like her dream. No smoke rose from Xeq, and the black sea lay still around Yeflam, as if it had been stilled by the violence she had created, as if it had been cowed by the cold destruction that rose above it.

  ‘There will be no charges laid against you for Xeq.’ Aelyn Meah spoke as she stepped out of the stairwell. She offered no greeting. She wore a gown of blue and white, the latter a thick fabric woven into the waist and hem to give the impression of layers and depth. ‘Perhaps you are lucky in the timing of it, but politics is mostly responsible.’

  ‘Politics.’ Ayae said the word as if it was an insult. ‘What I did was terrible.’

  ‘It was exactly what Bnid Gaerl deserved.’

  ‘I did not mean him.’

  ‘I know.’ Aelyn did not meet her gaze, but stared out across Yeflam. ‘There was little to discuss in the Enclave, but outside it, I thought there might be a call for justice. Lian Alahn has seen to it that no such call has emerged. He argued the righteousness of your defence to the Traders’ Union and the survivors of Xeq.’

  Ayae was surprised, but she did not feel relieved by it. Illaan’s father would not have done it for her, or for the memory of his son.

  ‘He asked me to convey to you that he wishes to meet,’ Aelyn continued. ‘He told me that he wants to offer his sympathies. It may be, however, that he desires to thank you for weakening the Empty Sky. Without them, Le’ta’s supporters have returned to their old friendships with Lian Alahn, and Le’ta himself has been driven underground. No one has seen the fat man for days, though many have looked. It has given more evidence to the theory that Le’ta has sided with the Leeran god. That he has been publishing The Eternal Kingdom. Le’ta’s sup
porters have gone back to Alahn just as quickly for fear of being painted with the same brush.’

  ‘I feel as if I’m being pulled at,’ Ayae murmured. ‘As if a part of me is trying to break off.’

  ‘All of us feel the same,’ the other woman said. ‘It is worse when you are near her.’

  ‘You met her?’

  ‘Yes.’ Aelyn finally met her gaze. ‘She is not the child that Qian spoke about. She is nearly an adult and quite beautiful. When she walks down a street, crowds flood around her.’

  ‘Maybe she is not the same person?’ Ayae suggested.

  ‘She can alter her appearance. That may be why, for the Leerans, and for my brother, she appeared as a child. A child is unable to protect itself and empowers those around it to do so. But beyond the borders of Leera, the image of a child is not what she needs. She will not inspire devotion or adoration as an infant. To be that, she needs to be more. The appearance she has taken leaves behind her need for protection, though not completely. For some, she will still need to be protected; for others, she will be an object of purity, of lust, and of obsession.’

  ‘What is she to you?’

  ‘I am undecided.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I have said that one day I will be a god.’ Aelyn laid her hands on the stone before her, on the house she did not live in. ‘It may be that such a path does not exist for me, or for you, or the others who live in Yeflam. It could be that the path is only available to the child who has come to Yeflam – but what I feel around this girl is different to what I feel beside the remains of a god. Yet, whatever she may or may not be, the truth is that the responsibility of how to react to her is mine. I have said to the people of Yeflam that I have a wisdom and knowledge that they do not. I have said that to the Enclave as well. When I say to both that I will go to war or I will know peace, the I that I use is we and the repercussions are ours.’